"conciliatory ambiguity"
The strategy of managing the transition from a pure Revelation to its practical implementation in a society of common commitment like the American one, through the use of ancient institutions and ancient imagery, but depriving them of the old vertical authority—this strategy did not prevail. As things developed, the imposition of a certain discontinuity in the realm of external trade relations proved necessary. Since they found no clear faith to replace their former faith in usury, many trading partners had their tariffs increased or revised, or because they did not even seek a calm justification, they began to seek a kind of "conciliatory ambiguity" on a planetary scale that, at least for now, does not seem an insoluble problem.
The ambiguity of risk lies in the need for decision-making it implies: weighing opportunities and losses. An entire science of risk developed, and probabilistic calculus was born, the first attempt to control the uncontrollable. Risk has an experimental dimension: it cannot be theorized about; it belongs to the order of probability.
ResponderExcluirThe category of risk generates a world that transcends the clear separation between knowledge and ignorance, true and false, good and bad. This does not mean that it leaves the horizon of knowledge, but it is a probabilistic knowledge, which involves dealing with uncertainties, which currently cannot be resolved with more knowledge; on the contrary, it is the result of greater knowledge. "Risk is a mediating issue that demands a new division of labor between science, politics, and economics" (BECK, 2007, p. 23).
In risk societies, the consequences of the success of modernization are thematized: risks become riskier, as the conditions for their calculation and management partially fail, and, correspondingly, the role of science and technology changes. Under these circumstances, a new moral climate for politics is created, in which cultural values play a central role.
ResponderExcluirThe history of political institutions in modern society in the 19th and 20th centuries can be understood as the conflicting creation of a legal system to deal with industrially manufactured uncertainties and risks—that is, the result of decisions. Risk calculation, the insurance principle, and the welfare state enable state-sanctioned risk contracts—that is, they institutionalize promises of security in the face of an unknown future.
"The category of risk society thematizes the process of questioning the central ideas of the risk contract: the possibility of control and the possibility of compensating for industrially manufactured uncertainties and dangers" (BECK, 2007, p. 26). Its dynamics lie in the success of modernity, whose effects are no longer subject to control, hence the self-created uncertainty.
Sense of War, Sense of Peace: The Staging of Violence. In this book, the author develops the argument that the definitions of war and peace reveal global relations of domination and the models of staging and legitimation. Thus, wars and peace interventions are conducted so as not to disrupt the sense of peace of those who decide to intervene in other countries. The author develops two main themes. The first is the antagonism of risks and the difference between decision-makers and affected parties, revisiting a conceptual distinction central to Niklas Luhmann's sociology of risk (2008). Beck's argument is that this difference between positions and perceptions of risk depends on staging. The second theme is the significance of international definitional power relations for the real and global staging of violence, exemplified by high-risk wars, such as the "preventive war" on Iraq led by the US administration of George W. Bush.
ResponderExcluirSomething I've been wondering since Trump's turbulent Liberation Day is to what extent the president applies the modern concept of perspectivism to his trade modulations, and what kind of retractable elasticity subsumes his "bets."
ResponderExcluirPresident Trump does not consider himself a world emperor as the PT criticizes, but he has an absolutely predatory vision of international trade.
ResponderExcluirPresident Trump does not consider himself a world emperor as the PT criticizes, but he has an absolutely predatory vision of international trade.
ResponderExcluirWHAT IS PERSPECTIVISM?
ResponderExcluirIt's like this. In our prevailing mythology, we were all animals at first. Then came the missing link and the human species emerged, possessing something others don't. The pineal gland, the soul, morality, language, reason, the symbolic, Dasein… you name it. We may no longer be at the center of the universe, but among animals, we are special. Yes, we are animals too, but not only animals. Beyond our animal nature, we are endowed with a second nature on top of that: culture. Of which there are many. There are those who think all cultures say the same thing in different guises. These are the universalists, usually Eurocentric. And there are those who believe that cultures are autonomous, that they should be respected according to their own values and norms. These are the multiculturalists, usually cool. In any case, what makes us special is culture. Because of it, we are superior to animals, plants, and minerals. On the cultural side are the human sciences: sociology, psychology, law, political science, etc. On the side of nature, the natural sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Humankind can be studied on the one hand, as a social being; or on the other, as an animal being. In the 19th century, a transitional science, anthropology, was consolidated, mediating between culture and nature. Symptomatically, it took as its object of study primitive groups, closest to nature. The subtext here, obviously, is that we needed to find a way to bring them into culture, civilizing them (under capitalism), in a context of colonial empires where the sun never sets.
ExcluirFrom the Amerindian perspective, everything changes. It doesn't just turn upside down, as Marx turned into Hegel, it truly changes everything. These are not two systems with the same conceptual structure, analogous. As the anthropologist said when he began interacting with the Indigenous people: "The way they didn't understand me wasn't the same way I didn't understand them."
They have not only a different point of view on things, but a different point of view on the point of view.
The traditional viewpoint of our sciences creates its own object. Let's say, the sociologist assumes social facts, social relations and structures, the systematic functioning of societies as objects. The biologist will objectively scrutinize animal physiology, the evolution of species, ecosystems, populations, and so on. For the Indigenous people, this makes no sense. The point of view constitutes a subject. Perspectivism is subjective, while traditional science is objective. The Indigenous person's other is never an object they consider external to themselves, which they can then dominate and subjugate to their ordering reason. The Indigenous person's other—be it another Indigenous person, a white person, a spirit, an animal, an artifact, an atmospheric phenomenon, a celestial body—is always in relation to themselves, a social relationship between subjects. The forest has nothing natural about it; it is entirely socialized from end to end.
ExcluirIn Indigenous mythology, everything was human at first. The human condition is present in all things. All animals were human. Some remained human, which is us. Others became dehumanized, animalized, which is the animals. I remain human and animal at the same time, but so do the animals. Ultimately, we all have human forms, in a cosmic transhumanism. What differentiates us from one another? It's the clothing over the human form: the body. Beyond the body, we inhabit the same common dimension: the soul, which was our primordial one. If Europeans see the soul (reason, language, the symbolic, anguish, cigarettes, etc.) as exclusively human, for Indigenous people, the soul belongs to the world. Animism. For Indigenous people, what differentiates us is the body. And this body is not just skin and such, but a heterogeneous and relational mass of folds, orifices, signs, and points of contact, with which I communicate and relate. It's no wonder that so much importance is attached to the operations of inscription, performance, mutation, and transmutation of the body, where everything is at stake. Thus, humankind is not special in terms of its soul. It can relate on the same ontological level to animals, plants, minerals, spirits, the dead, and artifacts.
ExcluirMore than that: animals, plants, minerals, spirits, the dead, and artifacts also interact, they also have a sociality, they are also subjects, and, most importantly, they have a perspective. It's clear that social relations, culture, are everywhere. There's no such thing as multiculturalism, only monoculturalism.
ExcluirA jaguar, then, is a social being and has a perspective. A jaguar sees itself as human. But it doesn't see other things as jaguars. That would be relativism, each point of view constituting its own objects. Nothing of the sort. The jaguar sees other jaguars as humans, but humans, it sees as wild pigs. The jaguar sees and tastes the pig's blood as beer. Wild pigs, in turn, see wild pigs as humans, the fruits they eat as cultivated plants; and the humans who hunt them, the pigs, see them as jaguars. When pigs paint, they don't paint gods with the face of pigs, but of humans. This shouldn't mean that the indigenous person is an idiot who sees the jaguar as a human. He sees the jaguar as a jaguar. But also as human. That's a plus. Or rather, he sees it as having the capacity to transmute itself into a human when it assumes the condition of subject. And so he relates socially to her, which I, operating in the mutilated European metaphysics, cannot do.
ExcluirThe other's perspective challenges me. It triggers things in me that I'm not, and that can be dangerous. If I'm alone in the forest and a jaguar looks at me first, I'm being viewed within the jaguar's nature. The jaguar might speak to me, which is terrible. The recommendation, in this case, is not to respond. Not to accept the terms of reality imposed by the self-empowered subject, its laws and relative positions. If I respond, accept the challenge, and am captured by the jaguar, I'm already lost. Likewise, if I cross paths with a forest spirit, it's because I'm already being captured in its world, subjectivized as a spirit. The technique, then, is to assert myself as a person, as a human being, and then the spirit disappears, because I've returned to my perspective/nature. A bit like in a bad dream, when I realize I'm in another reality and strive to convince myself I'm not a dream-like being, and I manage (hopefully) to wake up before the nightmare gets too serious.
ExcluirIn short, culture is one: the jaguar is human, and I am human, and the spirit is human, but we cannot be both simultaneously. There is a fierce struggle of perspectives, of active and passive affects vying for primacy. Who captures whom in their nature. Therefore, Eduardo argues that Amerindian monoculturalism is also a multinaturalism, because there are as many natures as there are ways of feeling, as there are specific bodies. It's not that I change internally, it's that things change when I pass from one nature to another. In a radical estrangement, very different questions are raised, ones that are not at all equivalent to the sleepy quarrel between universalists and relativists.
ExcluirAnd when is it not just capture? When, from the connection between A and B, can a powerful C emerge? Couldn't there be cases in which, even realizing I'm in this Burroughian interzone, I might want to let myself be carried away by another perspective, to see if it works (a good dream, a utopia…)? Not just seeing through the other's eyes, but mundiver as a global experience, with the other's body? Between the two bodies forming a third? A third C that wasn't implicit in either A or B? That wasn't the common denominator AB either, but a common production? This common production depends on the good encounter between A and B. More than that, on a productive space of sharing, one that allows subjects to exist as subjects, in a desiring production of mutual devouring. There's no point in celebrating hybridization for hybridization's sake, because only anthropophagy unites. Because A and B don't always have a good encounter. There may be fear, sadness, threat, submission. I may relate poorly to other social beings. In the case of the jaguar, it could end in murder. In the case of the spirit, it could afflict the subject with an illness. From grief, for example, or schizophrenia (always with bodily expressions), where the subject would no longer be able to return to the healthy body, trapped as he is in the (corporeal) plane of the spirits.
ExcluirThere are Indigenous people who are experts at traversing nature: the shamans. These are trained to leave the safest social territory, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize, without harming themselves in the process. More than traversing homogeneous planes that correspond to one another, as in some European spiritualism, they connect heterogeneous worlds, a multiverse where there are no equivalent categories. And so they also help heal those who have fallen ill, communicate with spirits, the dead, plants, and animals. Because the forest is a magma of relationships, its environment so entangled with sociality, shamans need to develop a spirit of finesse in order to distinguish, cut, scan, unfold, and unravel. They do all this not with sophisticated theories, but with rites and bodily pragmatics, which is where, after all, transmigration takes place. Transmigration is not of the soul, which is in everything, but of the body. So there is no such thing as spiritual possession among indigenous people, but rather bodily metamorphosis.
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