“If I don’t sing what I feel/ I’m going to die inside/ I have to scream at the winds until I burst/ Even if there’s only time left in my place/ I’m already loving it/ I’m already becoming a song/ Maybe mud” (Luis Alberto Spinetta)
Each event produces its own symbol, which contains a message to be deciphered: a warning, a question, an indication of the future.
The symbols are stuck to the things themselvesthe artist and friend Rafael Sánchez-Mateos Paniagua always tells me. Without a doubt, the symbol of the dana catastrophe in Valencia is the mud: a symbol made of the thing itself, of the materiality of the event itself, of what the floods brought, the warnings that never arrived, the protocols that did not work, the incompetence of the politicians who were on the other side.
The mud It floods everything, from the streets and houses to the kings’ own faces. It is a symbol that comes into contact and dialogue with other symbols, marks them and gives meaning to them. So for example, the muddy Catarroja senyera: A family found it rolled up and full of mud in their house during the first day’s cleaning and decided to put it in a clearly visible place. Social networks immediately went viral. Or the Recumbent Christ of Paiportarecovered with a face full of mud in a parish of San Jorge after hours of community cleaning. “The church is no different from the people who live and suffer this great tragedy,” said the Argentine parish priest Gustavo Riveiro.
Mud then as a mobile symbol, thrown as a projectile into the faces of the authorities, carried by the volunteers in their clothes, embedded in the shoes that the Valencia protesters placed in front of the headquarters of public power as a warning and reminder. Notice and reminder of what? What message does that symbol, that clay contain?
I feel it and read it like this: To speak, to act these days, the first thing is to allow yourself to be affected by the situation you are experiencing.. Get involved, that is, let yourself be affected, that is, feel-with.
To speak, to act these days, the first thing is to allow yourself to be affected by the situation you are experiencing.. Get muddy, that is, let yourself be affected
Embarrassing politicians is then a way of telling them: share our luck, do not look the other way, do not continue speaking with a snake’s tongue, think and act from the common destiny. Getting muddy as an exhortation, as a demand to get out of oneself and feel with the other.
Is this a dismissal gesture? What is removed is the indifference, the impassivity, the insensitivity of those who, acting “as if” they were getting muddy, continue functioning on autopilot, thinking first of all of themselves, of their own power, of their own benefit. Is it an anti-political gesture? What is rejected is not politics in general, the care of the common thing, but precisely this self-referential politics, encapsulated, shielded and incapable of all listening, of all feeling-with.
Ah, but how much fear of mud we see these days! Politicians, intellectuals and commentators of very different stripes come to tell us the same thing over and over again: the mud of affection takes us directly to fascism, anti-politics, desperation, hatred and resentment.
Politicians, intellectuals and commentators come to tell us the same thing: the mud of affection takes us directly to fascism, to anti-politics.
Always the same clichés when talking about affects: they “blind” us, “obfuscate” us, “disturb” us, as if affects did not have enormous cognitive potential, as if a book or a situation were not understood. also from what they give us to feel, as if what we feel were something fixed and could not be elaborated, refined, given shapes, transformed.
Affecting and being affected, said the philosopher Spinoza, is the virtuous way of inhabiting the world. Affectation is a power that is both passive and active, a quality that is both receptive and creative. Being able to listen and capture something about the situation we live in is what will allow us to “respond” with an action and a word that corresponds to it, that resonates with it and transforms it, an action effective.
Why would a clean and aseptic democracy, purified from the mud of affection, work better than a muddy and affected democracy? Isn’t it precisely the inability to feel-with (in the first place with nature itself) the true catastrophe that is today behind all the others?
The technicalization of existence, the protocolization of everything, the delegation of our sensitivity to automatisms that are supposed to think and act for us, better than us, makes us incapable of listening to the other, to the others, to the unknown other. Perceive the uncodified, respond to the unforeseen, create something new, take charge and be responsible for common life.
Does the manipulator feel-with? Do you let yourself be affected? What is intended rather is instrumentalize what happens and what it feels to achieve a prior goal
But how to distinguish between the activation and manipulation of affects? Between putting your hands in the mud and splashing in the mud? Instead of dismissing what is difficult to think about, you have to get into it.
Does the manipulator feel-with? Do you let yourself be affected? What is intended rather is instrumentalize what happens and what is felt to achieve a prior goal, external to the situation, private and self-referential. It is never related to clay as a living and active matter that can give rise to new questions, new ideas and new possibilities, it does not allow itself to be touched or moved, interrogated or displaced because he always knows in advance where you want to go. Clay is an object to be taken over, never a subject to dialogue with.
The alternative to the opacity of affections is not the purity of objective understanding and the purely rational and technical action of experts, but rather learning to orient ourselves in the midst of impure mud, to move in it and develop it autonomously, a new sentimental education. In the absence of that, the left that today speaks of “politicizing the unrest” runs the risk of acting in symmetry and mirror to the right that fights. Not listening, accompanying, feeling and doing-with, but imposing meanings, trying to direct, instrumentalizing the pain for their own purposes. The “cultural battle” then is a mere dispute for power, with affections as prey, loot and trophy.
In a single week, as Carmen Montalbo Ocaña has pointed out, the volunteers managed to create complex coordination structures
There is another action and another possible effectiveness. The volunteers show it these days. In a single week, as Carmen Montalbo Ocaña has pointed out, the volunteers managed to create complex coordination structures, developing websites and applications that made it possible to map needs and put the capabilities of each person (electricians, transporters, cooks) at the service of the common. They activated the knowledge of the body and the territory from their affections.
And not only that. This activation of volunteers made possible something that no technical management can provide, no matter how well it works. Solidarity, social embrace, human warmth. It is the warmth of that embrace that can allow fear, pain and anger not to crystallize into despondency, racism or destructiveness. Only one affect can displace another, Spinoza also said.
In any case, it is not about opposing the action of volunteers to public action, the people to politics, technology to naked effort, but rather muddy everything. Opinion, democracy, ourselves. So that they stop, so that we stop, being automatic, imperturbable, impermeable, self-referential, supposedly disinterested and objective but in reality subject to the dominant values of profit and power.
Let ourselves be affected. Dare to be like the senyera of Catarroja and the Christ of Paiporta. Nothing different from the people who live and suffer this great tragedy. Because only when we are muddy can we save the mud that we are.
#muddy #muddy #muddy
