By LUIS EUSTAQUIO SOARES
Author introduction to newly released book
A clarification on the genesis of this book This book is the result of intense analytical-critical activism regarding the versions of Western corporate media about the events that shook humanity, considering the period at the end of George Bush's second term, the beginning and almost the end from the time when the unipolar hegemon, with Barack Obama, tried by all means to impose itself against the people and humanity.
It consists of articles that were published on the website Press Observatory, between 2007 and 2015, written from a transdisciplinary perspective, using national and international fictional literary production as a reference, especially considering works such as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), by Machado de Assis, the sertões (1902), by Euclides da Cunha, Dried lives (1938), by Graciliano Ramos. Great Sertão: veredas (1956), by Guimarães Rosa, The process (1925), by Franz Kafka and The Karamazov Brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The period referred to is of unique importance, because, in the face of the American hegemon's attempt to impose itself by all means, and in a unipolar way, with wars of plunder and coups d'état, with color revolutions, such as the cynically called Spring Arabs, the emergence of the multipolar perspective was observed at the same time and in a dialectical process, with China and Russia at the forefront.
It is, therefore, a book that is the result of militancy in real time, critically concentrated against the manipulation of the media system in the service of Western-North American domination, considering above all its Brazilian oligopolic dimension, ventriloquizing the imperialist system based on dollar supremacy.
It is also a period of articulation of the legal-media coups d'état of the Obama era in Latin America, starting in Honduras in 2009, passing through Paraguay in 2012, until reaching Brazil, with the fall of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, facilitated by the color revolution of the days of June 2013, still romanticized today by the Brazilian left, unconscious and culturally referenced in the United States, culminating in the mediatization of Operation Lava Jato and the consequent arrest of Lula — with Obama in the background, cynically, whispering: “This is the guy!"
There is a letter from Friedrich Engels, sent to the English writer Miss Harkness, dated 1888, with the following observation about the great literary work of aesthetic realism: “it presupposes, in addition to the accuracy of details, the exact representation of typical characters in typical circumstances ( ENGELS, 1971,196). Without the pretension that this is a “great theoretical book”, the decision to publish it still comes from the need (I hope not only that of the author) to make public a historical-materialist look at the events, their versions shaped by corporations media, focusing on “characters (public figures, fictional characters) typical of typical historical-social circumstances, whether of the (epigonal) unipolar arrogance of the USA, or of the beginning of its end, with the first sketches of alternative responses led by the main leaders of the emerging multipolar world, including the Latin American context, with the formation of ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance for the peoples of Our America, CELAC, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and UNASUR, Union of South American Nations.
They are, therefore, circumstantial texts... that were written with the principle of immanent, materialist and secular hope, dialectically based on the radical denial of what exists, towards a paradoxical synthesis open to the plurisocialism of peoples.
And speaking of enlightenment, that of the North American imperialist system is…
The argument that a text, whatever it may be, is always made up of a mosaic of explicit and hidden voices, without us often being able to know whether the former are more relevant than the latter, constitutes (but never only) a pretext for recognizing the importance of two works for this book, namely: Culture and imperialism (2011), by Edward Said (1935-2003), and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
the first of them, Culture and imperialism, constitutes an absent presence that motivated in one way or another the writing of all the texts in this collection, since in all of them the relationship between culture and imperialism is fundamental to the production of critical analyzes of cultural and informative artifacts such as literary and cinematographic works, television news, soap operas, talk shows, as well as relevant contemporary facts, such as the “popular rebellions” in Brazil and the Middle East, in the reference period explained above. If what is usually called subjectivity can be interpreted as an embodied metonymy (the part for the whole) of the culture of a given time, in integrated global capitalism, which also produces globally connected goods, the cultural industry constitutes a kind of holding of subjectivities human rights meticulously administered by imperialism, in this case, North American — this hegemon in decadence.
Its colonizing objective is one: the production of cultural artifacts that function as a true Trojan horse, especially for the condemned of today's Earth, to make a reference to Franz Fanon's book of the same name, The Damned of the Earth (1961), in which the author of Black skin, white masks (1952) produced precise arguments to demonstrate some tragic effects, including psychiatric ones, of the imperialist enterprise on the people of the world, relentlessly condemned to abandonment, hunger, despair and death, also in the form of genocide.
If imperialism constitutes the moment in which the colonizing expansion of centers of power acquires a systemic dimension, it is predictable, therefore, that such expansion occurs as a full spectrum, occupying, exploiting and colonizing not only primary resources, but also cultural artifacts, knowledge, gender, ethnic, class alterities, as well as desires, including those of emancipation and justice, and for this book, its convergence with the proposal to use the concept of imperialism elaborated by Said, who expressed himself in this way, is not circumstantial. respect: “I will use the term imperialism to designate the practice, theory and attitudes of a dominant metropolitan center governing a distant territory; colonialism, almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the establishment of colonies in distant territories” (SAID, 2011, p. 42).
Another fundamental work for this book is Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), by Adorno and Horkheimer, through which the concept of enlightenment is developed based on the argument that, throughout its history, humanity has produced masterful knowledge committed to the submission of nature (unpaid work) and working class through various forms of exploitation, slavery, feudal, capitalist. Both nature and the working class are enlightened by progress that can be defined as progress in oligarchic enlightenment about nature and labor.
Both nature and work, in the era of enlightenment of bourgeois civilization or of this as a monumental form of enlightenment, are vulnerable to the same lethal risk: the total advance of the enlightenment of capital or capital as enlightenment throughout the Earth.
Bearing in mind the overwhelming force of the enlightenment of and in capital in the era of reproducibility of technological utopianism and in the context in which multinationals and the international financial system subject the cultural industry and institutional politics, equally on a planetary scale, Adorno and Horkheimer defined it as follows the place of resistance and alternative of thought, also valid for creation: “Contrary to its administrators (of enlightenment), philosophy represents, among other things, thought, insofar as it does not capitulate to the dominant division of labor and he does not accept that it prescribes his tasks” (ADORNO & HORKEHEIMER, 1985, p227).
If enlightenment today manages itself through the international division of labor and knowledge, segmenting and capturing everything and everyone through the false universality of monetary abstraction, the work Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkeheimer, constitutes the indirect discourse of the essays in this book in its methodological dimension because the question of method present here is: not capitulating to the dominant international division of labor and not allowing it to prescribe the tasks for thought, for criticism and praxis.
And it is also because of this that historical materialism and dialectics are always necessary; the dialectic of the unity of contradiction, of the transformation of quantity into quality and of the negation of negation, which means, denying enlightenment in the terms of Adorno and Horkeheimer, endowing it with a qualitative dimension, in the unity of contradiction of the imperialist phase (north -American) of capital.
What is meant by this is that it is necessary to pull another thread from the category of enlightenment, which began with Immanuel Kant, in the short essay “What is clarification”, dated 1783, a text that is a fundamental reference in the Marxian theoretical tradition for its position: “Enlightenment [enlightenment] is man's emergence from minority, of which he himself is guilty. Minority is the inability to make use of one's understanding without the direction of another individual” (KANT, 1985, p. 100).
Thus, another theoretical tradition is seen with regard to the category of enlightenment, different in every way from that of Adorno and Horkheimer, because it is not endorsed by the relationship (dear to Michel Foucault) between knowledge and power, knowledge and power over, but in the dimension of knowledge/liberation, of knowledge/emancipation.
There are, therefore, two types of clarification, which is why they need to be equally clarified. The da Dialectic of Enlightenment it is that of knowledge, simultaneous domination over nature and the working class; Kant's is knowledge/emancipation which, with Marxism, becomes knowledge/emancipation of the working class and thus of nature, with the constitution of socialist society, an immanent process for achieving the society of freely associated producers; that of communism.
Adorno and Horkheimer's category of clarification therefore needs to be objectified, especially with regard to the history of the West, with an oligarchic tradition, based on the private appropriation of land, family and the State. This is a version of enlightenment that is inseparable from Western oligarchic domination and that in the capitalist mode of production leads to the knowledge/power of the owners of capital against the working class and against nature; and in the North American imperialist phase it concerns the knowledge/power of the cultural industry (which is theoretical, which is economic, which is aesthetic, which is biopolitical, which is political, which is technological) masterfully clarifying itself with the objective of dominating and subject more and more to the nature and general process of social work.
In dialogue with joint indirect speech, what comes first, from Imperialism and culture, by Edward Said, and Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer, the two lines of force of this book are the lack of discipline in relation to the discipline of and in discursive units, as a matter of method, and the incessant investigation of the relationship between culture and imperialism, within the horizon of the cultural industry, as a matter theme without which, this is the main argument, it is not possible to think about the challenge of a humanity that is truly protagonist of its destiny, clarifying itself no longer in a lordly way, but through a deep respect for what dignifies it; collective work, thought and created in the double aspect of human work and the work of nature.
If the term imperialism does not appear in the chapter titles of this book, the reason is simple and is part of the following argument: the cultural industry, surrendered to economic-financial power, is, to dialogue with a well-known work by Fredric Jameson (1991), the cultural logic of imperialism in and in bourgeois civilization, constituting itself as the front line of a spectacular global enterprise of enlightened subjectivities, the more subjugated the more they see themselves as free within the dominant order of the social division of labor, which is also the dominated order of what can be called the social division of subjectivities clarifying themselves, enlightened.
Bourgeois civilization not only produces commodities on a global scale, but also transforms us into commodities to the extent that we assert ourselves as gender, ethnic, class subjectivities, as long as we accept the tasks prescribed by the dominant social division of labor, whose main word order is: more division, which inevitably occurs on the horizon of the segmented affirmation of oneself outside of a radical secular consciousness of life in society, since any affirmation of oneself that is not challenged to transcend bourgeois civilization, understanding it equally as historical (unnatural and not necessary, therefore) becomes inevitably vulnerable to the totalizing and lordly embrace of imperialism, especially in its current phase, that of editing and re-editing (an integral machine of fake news) of everything that exists, including at the molecular and genetic level, taking into account the enlightening productive forces (in the sense of Adorno and Horkheimer) of Artificial Intelligence and biological and physical sciences, within the scope of biogenetics and nanotechnology.
The specific form of enlightenment of the cultural industry of North American imperialism, in itself an enlightened form and clarifying itself, without ceasing (in the sense of seigneurial knowledge) is what receives the generic name of mass culture, which captures and incorporates tendencies to everything, in process, including the left, feminist, black, homoaffective identitarianism, the ecological crisis, today called woke culture, manipulated by the American Democratic Party and the World Economic Forum.
The New Information and Communication Technologies of Silicon Valley, the so-called GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) can be interpreted, in this context, as new supports for endless editing of mass culture, increasing on an infinitesimal scale the production of lies and manipulation in relation to the working class and nature.
All of humanity becomes increasingly similar to itself as a way of compensating for the intense concentration of wealth on the one hand and the immense misery of the overwhelming majority on the other. This is, therefore, the role of the cultural industry (with Silicon Valley at the forefront): to make us all similar to each other, in a context of extreme planetary inequality. The overwhelming majority liking the same films, the same music, the same books, the same dances, the same narratives, even though the genres are presented to us qualitatively as different, even though different cultural goods are directed to different profiles of people, in contexts in which some tend to think they are better informed, more intelligent, more refined, more selective than the others.
However, the “even though” of the differences, which actually exist, what is at stake in the production of cultural industry merchandise unfolds into two variables: (i) The variable of the international division of cultural goods, segmenting tastes, ideologies and profiles as the immanent place of enlightenment in the contemporary world, for the simple reason that segmentation, no matter how proud we are of our differences in relation to the majority, is itself a commodity form that, as such, tends to universalize (always a false universalization) the typical values of bourgeois society, its dominant order or disorder.
(ii) The variable that generalizes the miniaturization of cultural artifacts as a form of displacement and even censorship in relation to creative works that affirm other possible worlds, outside bourgeois civilization and, therefore, the enlightened dynamics of its dominant social division of labor .
The most evident aspect of the miniaturization of creative artifacts produced by the cultural industry, and here I dialogue with Terry Eagleton (2005), concerns its reduction to the field of civil rights, still understood within the scope of American neoliberalism. The miniaturization/reification of cultural artifacts under the sign of civil expression of gender, ethnicity, age, behavior and even class (a category that tends to be aestheticized as reified civil law) has the deplorable consequence of unacceptable censorship, although never openly declared, to economic and social rights, which, strictly speaking, only appear as a matter of creation if they are equally reified and aestheticized; if they are, finally, captured by the liberal dominance of civil rights, led by the American westernization of the planet, in such a way that it would not be so absurd to say that the United States has been the seismic epicenter of the imperialist enlightenment of and in the cultural industry.
And it is precisely in the face of this global project of American westernization of the planet that it is possible to find the necessary gap to resume the discussion on the approach of integral criticism of imperialism assumed by this book.
By the way, when reading the book The globalized law of value, by Samir Amin, what is observed as a rule is that the US imperialist system extracts income from work (it always includes that of enslaved nature) on a planetary scale, which is why it is possible to deduce that the main class struggle of today takes place in the level of the relationship between imperialism and national-popular sovereignty. There is, therefore, no way out for thinking and political projects such as Brics +, for example, if the following reality is not taken into account literally on the ground: actually existing capitalism is the image and similarity of the enlightenment of the northern cultural industry -American, which is why the struggle for the emancipation of peoples in relation to the Western-Yankee unipolar global dictatorship necessarily passes through the field of culture and especially the cultural industry, the epicenter of production of lifestyles and subjectivities, at the level of concrete life.
However, the question of imperialism, in the essays in this book, is not reduced to American-Western imperialism. As powerful warlike forces vying for control of the planet's human and natural resources, imperialism can equally be defined as the superior phase of enlightenment, when it reaches all dimensions of life on Earth, reason enough to support the argument that enlightenment not only the world bourgeois civilization itself, but also the set of forces in action in the world-terrain, from the most powerful to the most everyday and immanent, experienced by all of us, for example, in the apparently innocent relations of buying and selling as a minimum unit of capitalism, hence imperialism itself, in its final, North American, global phase.
This reading, however, cannot serve to produce nihilist generalities of the type: “Well, if this is so, if we are imperialism, then there is nothing we can do because anything we propose or think will come out From this evidence, it is authoritarianism, simplism, anachronism.” Always against nihilism, as an adaptation to what exists, the essays presented here are marked by an affirmatively historical perspective, which is why they start from the argument that human and non-human forces (animal, vegetable, mineral, energetic, technological, scientific , epistemological, labor, theoretical, cultural), despite having been captured by the uninterrupted civilizational production of enlightenment, they are equally historical, which is why they can assume or lead collective, liberating, non-lordly perspectives.
On the other hand, if imperialism can be defined as the pragmatic global administrator of local, regional and international forces in the service of the enlightenment of and in bourgeois civilization, its main financial, ideological and geographical actors are neither one-dimensional nor consensual nor substantially the same. There are actors who are more aggressive, or even more genocidal, than others.
If one observes the world today, it is not difficult to see, for obvious statistical reasons, that its Western, European-American side has been and is actively present in practically all the wars and conflicts of recent decades, if not recent centuries. . With hundreds and perhaps thousands of military bases in geostrategic points on the planet, it would not be inaccurate to say that the United States invaded the world, not to mention the technological-communicative side of this invasion, whose virtual-electronic ubiquity was heroically (always partially) revealed to us, recently, by outsourced former CIA agent, Edward Snowden.
Although it is clear that it does not act holy in the field of technological espionage and that this is also a new scenario of war or tactical and strategic disputes between the great powers of the world imperialist system, it is not unreasonable to say that, in this particular, the United States occupies an almost unipolar position, and it is not circumstantial, by the way, that the Internet was created militarily, for military use, by the American military.
As leader, for example, of the Five Eyes Club, made up of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States is at the forefront of a molecular and at the same time monumental process of panoptic enlightenment of all humanity, by practically archiving all electronic communications in the world, classifying them ideologically, commercially and militarily.
If, on the other hand, the essays presented here have as their critical interlocutor, with regard to imperialism, its Western-American version, the main motive is tactical and has the following horizon of strategic reference: within bourgeois civilization, a A multipolar world is better than a unipolar one, as it allows not only the emergence of contradictions within the world-system, but also (because it is history in motion) the emergence of non-imperialist forces, with explicitly post-capitalist tendencies, as occurs, for example, For example, with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, ALBA, a bloc of countries (composed of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) whose objective is the social well-being of their respective populations, prioritizing, to this end, a supportive exchange of energy, educational, medicinal and cultural resources, in order to, as a whole, compensate or equate the natural and historical deficiencies and deficits of isolated national realities.
For all this, because they have the cultural industry as an object of critical analysis, because they were written with the aim of deconstructing the metaphysics of the presence of technique in our lives, the essays presented here will question, in many and diverse ways, in dialogue with Jacques Derrida Plato's pharmacy, the “Unity of metaphysics, technique, ordering binarism. This philosophical and dialectical domain of phármaka which should be transmitted from legitimate father to well-born son, a family scene continually puts it into question, constituting and fissuring at the same time the passage that reconnects the pharmacy to the house. Platonism is at the same time the general repetition of this family scene and the most powerful effort to dominate it, to muffle its noise, to conceal it by lowering the curtains on the morning of the West (DERRIDA, 2005, p.121)” .
Adapting the excerpt above from Plato's pharmacy, from philosophy to the mass media (including those in Silicon Valley), the militancy of the texts in this book is related to an analytical effort to describe the way in which the unity of the technique of the cultural industry is transmitted from “legitimate father for the well-born children” of Brazilian society, in a context in which the former, the legitimate father, can be translated as the colonizer on duty, and these, the well-born children, as the guardians of the tasks prescribed by the father, namely : to drown out, via the cultural industry, the noises of hope, justice, creation, freedom of the people of Brazil, Latin America and the world, lowering the curtains on what in the West, before being colonization, enlightenment, domination, always it was and is tomorrow, the promise of a secular world, in equality, in freedom, in fraternity — a promise not only aborted but also “clarified” to better deceive, deceive, submit.
the chapters
In the first chapter, the interface with literature, in this book, occurred as an experimentation with the concept of post-autonomous literatures, developed by Josefina Ludmer in the following terms: “The post-autonomous literatures of the present would leave “literature”, cross the border and they would enter a real-virtual environment (a matter), without an exterior, which is the public imagination; in everything that is produced and circulates and invades us and is social and private and public and real.
In other words, they would enter a type of subject and a type of social work, where there is no “index of reality” or “fiction”, constructing the present. They would enter the reality factory, which is the public imagination, to narrate some everyday stories on some Latin American urban island” (LUDMER, 2013, p.133). Seeking to literarily dialectize the manipulation of public imagination carried out by the Western-North American media system, the texts of the First Chapter were chosen with the aim of showing how the Brazilian cultural industry, in its television version, uses its technical unity/convergence with the imperialist system, in order to decisively contribute to the enlightened domestication of the Brazilian, Latin American and global public imagination.
In the second chapter, “Society of integrated control, captured revolutions”, always in a militant way, the essays presented here analyze the street demonstrations that took place in Brazil during and before the Confederations Cup and also in the Middle East, taking into account the argument that Western-American imperialism has reached such a great degree of technical sophistication and colonizing plasticity that not even street demonstrations or even the idea of revolution escape its dynamics of and for seigneurial enlightenment.
Although against the grain of sectors of the national and international left, the fundamental question of the essays in the second chapter is simple and is part of the following question: if we have reached the time of seigneurial enlightenment about street demonstrations and, therefore, about revolutions, how, against all nihilism, to become revolutionary, on the streets and beyond, without running the risk of becoming, even if you don't know it and don't want it, an object of manipulation by forces that don't dare show their face, either because they hold information that don't we, either because, through the cultural industry, they seek to transform the world into a factory of the reality of their relentless domination?
In turn, although in a different context, considering what Josefina Ludmer called the reality factory, the general objective of the texts present in the third chapter, Telenovelas and Cultural Industry, is to show how teledramaturgy produced by TV Globo seeks, via fiction, to rewrite the history of Brazil, from the lordly point of view of our dominant classes, establishing, as a factory of realities, the “enlightened” profile of the Brazilian poor population and their relationship with the oligarchy that has dominated them for centuries and makes them unfeasible.
In tune with the most sophisticated technical and thematic resources of the Western cultural industry, the soap operas of TV Globo, even taking the place of written literature, seek to fulfill the following role (as civilizing as the one the Portuguese believed they were fulfilling when they began to colonize Brazil): “modernize” the Brazilian population in order to adapt it to the imagination of consumption financed by multinationals that dominate the planet. The objective, for this, is only one: to become contemporary with the new marketing investments of global corporations, which are increasingly advancing in the international division of consumer profiles, incorporating black, indigenous, feminine and homoerotic alterities.
If, on the one hand, this “modernizing” enterprise has contributed to reducing ethnic and gender prejudices, on the other hand, it “clarifies” the forces of emancipation, which are otherness, adapting them to the dominant order as if it were an entire world necessary, one-dimensional, in addition to functioning as an advertisement for the planetary domination of capital, by hiding its genocidal side first and foremost in relation to otherness, increasingly decimated across the planet.
*Luis Eustáquio Soares He is a professor at the Department of Literature at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES). Author, among other books, of The society of integrated control (Edufes).
Reference
Luis Eustaquio Soares. The beginning of the end of the unipolar era: literature and cultural industry. Cheerful. Publisher TerriED, 2024, 236 pages. Available here.
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