Richard Sennett, 81, was born in the city of Chicago and grew up in a social housing project, Cabrini Green, where humble workers of different races lived together. Son of communist parents, of Russian descent, his first vocation was music. He was going to be a solo cello player when an injury cut short his career. He led to Sociology, becoming one of the most influential and widely read intellectuals of recent decades. He has been a consultant to the United Nations and has written seminal works, such as the classic The decline of the public man (which was released in 2003), about the public sphere, the world of work, social classes or the family. He is also the author of The craftsmanwhere our knowledge and ability to do things well is revealed.
Professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, he now spends more time in the British capital than in the United States, although he closely follows the political and social reality of his homeland. He receives EL PAÍS in an austere apartment, with white walls and sparsely decorated. He offers tea or coffee to his visitors, with exquisite kindness, and immediately begins to talk, leaning on the dining room table, about his new book, The interpreter (Anagrama publishing house), an essay full of data, reflections, stories, anecdotes and wisdom, about the relationship between the performing arts, life and politics. We are all actors who use the tool of interpretation. In some cases, art and civilization emerge. In others, theatricality generates destruction and rejection of the other.
Ask. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. You present them as masters of interpretation, of political theater. Their ideas may be unoriginal, but they seduce with their non-verbal language.
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Answer. People make fun of the fact that Trump repeats the same clichés over and over again. What they don’t understand is that he is a great interpreter, a great performerwhich manages to convey the feeling that everything he says is new, something that just occurred to him. He is a master at turning all those clichés into something that ends up creating a seemingly spontaneous relationship with his audience.
Q. Do all autocrats of our time use this theatricality that appeals to emotions, compared to the rationality of liberal democracies?
R. But the expressive powers that I analyze are simply tools. They are not the cause of authoritarian behavior. This cause must be sought in economic or social reasons. In the case of Putin, for example, his success derives from the failure of neoliberalism. His authoritarianism does not respond to his theatricality.
Q. But we see these performances more on the extreme right…
R. All of this is an expressive tool, but it is true that the extreme right uses it more than the extreme left. The same thing happens with Trump, who has an expressive power that seduces people, but is not at the service of art. That’s why I say they are just tools used to reveal something deeper.
Q. It is frustrating for the political left…
R. We have seen it in France. The left is confused, it is sure that it has won with the best arguments in the battle against the extreme right, but it is the extreme right that triumphs.
Q. What then should be the answer?
R. Changing the framework in which we think to express ourselves. It cannot be a framework of expression dominated by people’s passions. It must be another type of theater. The theater of our behavior on the street, every day, with strangers. That’s why I’m so interested in everything that has to do with courtesy, with civility.
Q. He then proposes a type of direct coexistence with our fellow citizens as an antidote to that political theater.
R. We need to recover the experience of public life, the direct encounter with people who are not like us. It is a social aspect of performancethe idea of exposing yourself, of letting yourself be seen by others. Something that will not solve the current irrational politics that we suffer, but that will give people a different vision from others.
Q. Therefore, he suggests, one should not respond with an ideological discourse to that type of policy…
R. Most political theater focuses on eliminating the rival. The representation, the performanceseeks the rejection of those who are different from us, of any type of solidarity. It is the way in which reality is made to disappear. It all comes down to ourselves and our feelings. The response to an experience like that, which is more social than ideological, consists of going to places and spaces where you are not so much a spectator as a present individual, in contact with others who are different from you.
Q. Where is that alternative space?
R. I have always thought that cities can do what nation-states cannot, which is bring together people who are different from each other. A very clear example is the public schools of a city like London, which are real laboratories where very different people live together.
Q. In your book, you remember an episode from the 1960s in New York: the out-of-work dockworkers, hypnotized by the racist speech on television by southern governor George Wallace.
R. He was able to use the tool of his interpretation to temporarily excite them. The key here is in the word temporal. Because I couldn’t solve the situation of these people at all. The expression of these racist feelings did not get them jobs.
Q. And this is reminiscent, for example, of the violent outbreaks of racism and riots experienced this summer in the United Kingdom.
R. The same. The result of these revolts was not the return of foreigners to their countries of origin. The way in which this power of expression of these citizens is configured is as if it were a liberation, but a liberation that leaves them just as powerless or more than they were before.
Q. Take your idea of performancefrom interpretation, to the world of work. And he believes that that era in which the worker played a role that gave him security has already disappeared.
R. That’s over. Partly because of technology, because the type of skills that workers had acquired and could present in a personal way are now realized on-line. They have dematerialized. And partly because of how the way capitalism works has changed, which no longer depends on the physical presence of workers. Before you could stop an assembly line with a strike. Now, if 100,000 workers of a call center go on strike, they can be replaced by another 100,000 somewhere else. And everything will get even worse with artificial intelligence.
Q. You are the son of two members of the Communist Party, a rarity in the United States. He moved away from communist dogmatism, but over time he claims to have become more left-wing.
R. As the economy has developed and evolved, and I have grown older watching it evolve decade after decade, I have come to understand that this attempt to carry out socialist ideas at the bare minimum is not going to work. We must find another way to do it. I don’t know what it will be, but that has been my political trajectory so far.
Q. The answer will come from some type of collective expression…
R. One of the reasons I moved towards the left was my interest in the union movement. The idea of functioning as an isolated, individual actor/performer, which is what modern capitalism is achieving in people, makes them absolutely powerless. Getting weaker and weaker.
Q. He sees the danger of that individualism in the left’s current tendency to present identity politics.
R. Yes, it happens with issues of race, and also with everything related to sexual identities. They end up being a presentation of what Erving Goffman called “the presentation of oneself.” You dramatize your own identity at the expense of relationships with others.
Q. And in this constant theatrics of politics, would you say that the constant warning of a climate catastrophe could not be interpreted as an affected exaggeration?
R. That could have been true five years ago, when the discourse was very catastrophic, yes, but I don’t think that today you will find someone in Greece, for example, who doesn’t care if the temperature rises to 42 °C, or who says: What does it matter, you have to die of something. People don’t talk like that anymore.
Q. You are Jewish, and you profess your admiration for your teacher, Hannah Arendt. You believe that the German philosopher would have rejected Israel’s attacks on Gaza. What feeling do they make you?
R. An evil act was committed by Hamas [con los ataques del 7 de octubre]but the answer to that cannot be the commission of another evil act. As a Jew, I am horrified at the thought that this second evil act has ended up being committed.
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