Constitution of 1988 and 2021
by Vinícius Alves Scherch
Edited and reviewed by Giovanna Imbernon
In 1988, Brazil had a formal break with the military dictatorship regime but has not yet achieved full democracy. It is true to say that the Constitution of 1988 (CF88) is a paradigm, as it establishes a new legal order conformed to the political thought forcing a normative transition from a Constitution to a more adequate one. If we consider the constituent power as being the source of the new Constitution, we may say that it was unlimited, autonomous, and unconditional (Sieyès: 1973), finding its limits in natural law, and belonging to the people – creator of the State and founder of the constituted power (limited and conditioned).
Carl Schmitt (1996), in turn, points out that the constituent power is the result of a political decision and component of this political will, expressed in and as the State, and in its actions, giving rise to the Constitution.
This constituent power belongs to the people, who, incidentally, is also part of the State, and will be responsible for inaugurating a new constitutional order. Therefore, it is noticeable that a Constitution is born from the constituent power; something much more complex than just a rupture, a revolution, or an exchange. Antonio Negri, when wrote about the constituent power, stated that it is a process that “accumulates to be qualitatively and quantitatively; it always occupies new spaces, builds” (Negri, 1993: 350) and that “the time that is proper to the constituent power, a time endowed with a formidable capacity for acceleration, time of emergence and generalization of singularity, should be closed, detained, reduced in the legal categories, restricted in the administrative routine” (Negri, 1994: 18). Based on that, constituent power and democracy are correlated, not reduced to the qualification or recognition of constitutional norms and organization of constituted powers, but implies an integrated understanding, i. e., it is an ambiguous source identity and the subject of the Constitution (Alves, 2013: 269-270).
The constituent power has no place within the normative order, except after the Constitution, but this power assumes a passive or limited position since its controlling source is the political charter itself. Therefore, the derived constituent power needs to respect the dictates of the Constitution, precisely in terms of possible reforming and amendments to the primary text. Although the Constitution intended to be eternal, is not immutable (Araujo & Nunes Jr, 2016: 43). We need to understand that the Constitution needs to be both safe and up-to-date – under penalty of not serving the social purpose intended – and how those changes need to be rigid to ensure constitutional awareness (Loewenstein, 1979) and curb its anti-democratic attacks in its reformulations. Strong mechanisms were designed for the amendment process (art. 60 of the CF88), with a qualified quorum, circumstantial and procedural prohibitions, ensuring alterations are minimally qualitative, engendering substantial limits to the Power of Amendment:
“Limitation to the constitutional reform represents the very idea of constitutional supremacy and the resulting duality of democratic politics, as this tool enables to identify the constitutional norm and its differentiation from infra-constitutional political acts. Despite their importance for the structure of a dualist constitutional order, procedural restrictions are not the only ones to exert some kind of influence on the derived constituent power, as the substantial contents, when elected by the original constituent power, also seek to perform the same functions. By providing protective clauses, the original constituent power determines that the initial constitutional project is not open to any changes. Such limits, therefore, seek conciliation between the antagonism of the impulses of permanence and change in the constitution, through the provision of conditioned freedom (Lima, 2018: 132-133).”
One way to update the text of the Constitution without changing its structure is open writing, through which one can understand contexts and keep the rules contemporary. As pointed out by Konrad Hesse: “from the perspective of the Constitution over time, the Constitution can only fulfill its tasks where it can, under changed circumstances, preserve its normative force, that is, where it can guarantee its continuity without prejudice to historical transformations, which presupposes the conservation of their identity” (Hesse, 2009: 10). That’s why it can be said that:
“The Constitution is an unfinished project of society. It is an open text and is always open to changes – a result of the community’s social and cultural movement for which it is intended, producing and instructing the norms. Within this framework, the Constitution remains contemporary by changing the text and the interpretive activity that aims to adapt the norm to the facts of life. (Scherch, 2020: 19).”
In this way, it is not only through amendments that the Constitution is altered but also through the interpretation of its terms, having the interpretation a major role – mostly performed by the Judiciary and with more strength, authority by the Supreme Court.
Some more questions come up, either because a Constitutional Court cannot do everything or because “even if the Court is competent to fix the content of the Constitution, with binding effectiveness, it is not above the Constitution to which it owes its existence” (Hesse, 1983: 36), either because everyone in society is a potential interpreter of the Constitution and cannot have this role relegated (Häberle, 1997: 12-13). Therefore, the interpretation also stands as a possibility to update the Constitution, since “it is possible to talk about creating a solution to a certain case, without necessarily implying the creation of the Law – or a new one. It is important to observe the controllable creation criterion, since the Constitution reveals itself above interpretation and, therefore, the will of interpreters” (Alves; Scherch, 2020: 150).
There is room to address the mutation and transmutation of the Constitution. First, observing the mutation, it can be said that it is a process by which the meaning of the constitutional text is changed without changing its form. No changes in what is written, but in its meaning. In turn, “constitutional transmutation has as its main form of assessment the excessive use of means of exception and coercion, bringing about a situation of elimination of multiple conceptions, implicitly causing the erosion of fundamental rights and access to the policy” (Martinez & Scherch, 2020: 183).
We may notice that when building the Constitution, Brazilian constitutionalism did not give people the opportunity to participate in and assess the satisfaction to a democratic rule of law; popular participation is limited by the complications of popular initiative regarding the laws and demonstrations in public hearings, and also in – underused – referendums and plebiscites. The people do no participate in the constitutional amendment process, neither in a more direct interpretive activity. We may say that:
The meaning of the Constitution must be collectively constructed and defined by the people and the institutions of their society. Therefore, it is true that the Judiciary has a fundamental role in defining the constitutional legal interpretation and enforcement, but the constitution cannot be only implemented based on judge’s and court’s interpretations. On the contrary, the constitution can only be fully apprehended through democratic politics. The Constitutional State was achieved through the fight against the lack of the rule of law. This fight continues with democracy, which must be fulfilled daily in the realization of fundamental rights because it, together with popular sovereignty, presupposes the ownership of the power of the State, which, in the final analysis, resides in the people. (Godoy, 2017: 110)
In the 21st century, no Constitution is perfect, but one must defend its text and axiology not only for the sake of principles but for considering that the complexity of society broadens and people’s politics tend to be forgotten:
“The price that constitutionalism imposes on a perfect Constitution is its immutability and consequently, the same rigidity that keeps it as a higher law is what puts it out of step with people’s will. Here lies the question of radicality: in the recognition that the Constitution is the people’s expression, otherwise it would not be a Constitution (Scherch, 2019: 112).”
The fact of having a rigid and difficult-to-change Constitution – beneficial which in times of peace than in times of war – does not guarantee its loyalty to social concerns. The opposite is also true because, in a flexible constitutional scenario, the people are subject to the will of those in power and any change can be imposed. By the way, this is why provisional measures should not be used to govern and the judicialization of politics should not replace judicial activism and the politicization of justice.
In sum, we cannot say that in 2021 the Constitution of 1988 remains the same. Amendments and different interpretations eroded both its text and conscience. For example, the Constitutional Amendment (EC) 16/1997 allowing re-election, the EC 109/2021 promoting the constitutionalization of the state of emergency, bringing over rules for a state of exception in the Constitution. Likewise, it cannot be said that the 1988 Constitution was superseded by an informal constitution during the process of changes that culminate in the Constitutional State that is observed in 2021, that is, traces of the original identity managed to remain preserved, in which although they are not applied by the Public Power for reasons of merit that the myriads try to justify the popular distancing.
It is necessary to think about criteria and not interests, the Constitution only exists and resists if in the legal-political-cultural process it is understood in its values and respected by people. Complying with and defending the Constitution is not a result of fear of a sanctioning precept, but it is an act of respect that drives the civilizing process.
References
Alves, Fernando de Brito & Scherch, Vinicius (2020). Considerações acerca da interpretação e primeiras ideias sobre uma teoria da decisão. Revista Direito em Debate, [S.L.], v. 29, n. 53, p. 141-152, 26 maio 2020. Editora Unijui. http://dx.doi.org/10.21527/2176-6622.2020.53.141-152.
Alves, Fernando de Brito (2013). Constituição e participação popular: a construção histórico-discursiva do conteúdo jurídico-político da democracia como direito fundamental. Curitiba: Juruá.
Godoy, Miguel Gualano (2017). Devolver a constituição ao povo: crítica à supremacia judicial e diálogos institucionais. Belo Horizonte.
Häberle, Peter (1997). Hermenêutica constitucional – a sociedade aberta dos intérpretes da constituição: contribuição para a interpretação pluralista e “procedimental” da Constituição. Porto Alegre: Sergio Antonio Fabris Editor. Translation by Gilmar Ferreira Mendes.
Hesse, Konrad (1983). Escritos de derecho constitucional. Introducción y traducción Pedro Cruz Villalón. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales.
Hesse, Konrad (2009). Temas fundamentais do Direito Constitucional. Textos selecionados e traduzidos por Carlos dos Santos Almeida, Gilmar Ferreira Mendes e Inocêncio Mártires Coelho. São Paulo: Saraiva.
Lima, Jairo (2018). Emendas constitucionais inconstitucionais: democracia e supermaioria. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris.
Loewenstein, Karl (1979). Teoria de la constituición.. Barcelona: Editora Ariel. Translation by Eduardo Espin.
Martinez, Vinício Carrilho & Scherch, Vinícius Alves (2020). Mutação ou Transmutação Constitucional, o tendencionismo à opinião pública como obstáculo aos Direitos Fundamentais. Revista Juris Poiesis, [S.L.], v. 31, n. 23, p. 174-196, abril.
Negri, Antonio (1993). La anomalía salvaje. Ensayo sobre poder y potencia en B. Spinoza. Anthropos. Mexico, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana: Editorial del Hombre.
Negri, Antonio (1994). El poder constituyente: Ensayo sobre las alternativas de la modernidad. Madrid: Libertarias Prodhufi.
Scherch, Vinícius Alves (2019). As pessoas e a Constituição: Crítica ao direito positivado e à justiça simbólica no processo político-judicial. In: Alvim, E. A.; Cachichi, R. C. D.; Pugliesi, R. C. M.; Silva, F. Q. da. (Eds.) Direitos humanos e processo: estudos em homenagem ao Prof. Dr. Gilberto Giacoia. Curitiba: Instituto Memória, p. 106-121.
Scherch, Vinícius Alves (2020). Teoria da decisão judicial: influências das posições jusfilosóficas no cenário jurídico-político brasileiro. Londrina, PR: Thoth.
Schmitt, Carl (1996). Teoría de la Constitución. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Translation by Francisco Ayala
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph (1973). ¿Qué és el tercer Estado? Madrid: Aguilar.
Vinícius Alves Scherch is a Ph.D. candidate in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and a member of BRaS’s Constitutional Studies RG.
Is the contemporary crisis beyond hegemony? A Brazilian hypothesis drawn from Francisco de Oliveira
by Camila Góes*
Reviewed by Giovanna Imbernon and Anna Paula Bennech
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been present in Francisco de Oliveira’s work since the mid-1970s as a way of incorporating the political dimension into his sociological and economic studies on social classes, bourgeois domination, and the regional issue in Brazil. The specific problem I seek to highlight, however, arose from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the sociologist began to draw a real enigma about what the consequences would be, in hegemonic terms, of the new times inaugurated by neoliberalism. In an attempt to decipher it, Oliveira oscillated between recognizing a hegemonic vocation to the neoliberal project and abandoning the very notion of hegemony, signaling a shift to the concepts of “totalitarianism” and “apartheid.” It is worth noting that, in the late 1980s, the author had already warned that neoliberalism, as a reaction by the right to the crisis of the Welfare State, would put the foundations of modern democracy at risk.[i] Deprived of public controls, the capitalist system would run the risk of “transforming itself into a savage storm in which democracy and the sense of equality inscribed in it since modern times would succumb together.” [ii]
The unfolding of this process, throughout the 1990s, led Oliveira to outline a theoretical and political question of ample proportions. It would no longer be a question of an impossibility of hegemony, typical of cases of passive revolution, or even of its possibility, given the widespread dissemination of dominant values, such as monetary stability.[iii] A crucial difference from that conjuncture risked making the concept of hegemony inappropriate: neoliberalism would have renounced the project of universalizing bourgeois values.[iv] In Brazil, this renunciation meant nothing less than the dismantling of the field of meanings created by the contradictory process of “passive revolution,” openly assuming a “totalitarian face.”[v] In his view, the new form of bourgeois domination would present a radical incompatibility with democracy throughout the world. However, the author highlighted the accelerated cadence that the public privatization movement reached in Brazilian society, formed by a complex process of violence and incomplete efforts at democratization.[vi]
If the period between 1964 and 1990 had been seen as a time of political invention, the subsequent period would show that such inventions had not been powerful enough to make a qualitative leap.[vii] Hence, an “Era of indeterminacy” would have been inaugurated with the “financialization of capital,” in parallel with the “explosion of the external debt” and the “loss of centrality of work” that occurred due to the Third Industrial Revolution. This would have generated and continued to generate the very unpredictability of politics. “Instead of a bourgeois hegemony that fed on the civic ‘virtues’ of the market, state coercion is permanently required, without which the whole edifice collapses.”[viii] Oliveira translated the problem in Gramsci’s terms: “in the formula of consensus plus coercion, the coercion portion remains the most important and therefore there is no possibility of a Tocquevillian ‘well-understood interests’, and the republic is not born out of ‘virtue’ from the market.”[ix]
In 2002, the enigma of hegemony would gain enormous complexity in Brazil with the arrival of Lula and the Workers’ Party (PT) to the federal government. What is unusual is that Oliveira, who had founded the PT in the early 1980s, oscillated as to the attribution of a hegemonic vocation to the governments of the right, but in the Lula period he never considered the possibility of understanding it as a “counter-hegemony.” Counterintuitively, the sociologist would no longer hesitate, abandoning the concept. In the first year of Lula’s government, in 2003, Oliveira would leave the party and publish a remarkable essay on the interpretation of Brazil, proposing a new name for the particular mode of capitalist development in the country: O Ornitorrinco [the platybus]. The Brazilian reality was translated from the metaphor of the platypus, a bizarre figure in which underdevelopment would have been overcome, allowing the country’s arrival fully into the modern world, but without this having allowed leaving behind the enormous social inequalities existing in the country. [x] Regarding the hegemonic enigma, Oliveira was categorical: “hegemony, in the Gramscian formula, is elaborated in the superstructure, and in its specific conditions the platypus has no “consciousness,” but only superstructural replication.”
A few years later, he would be once again incisive. In his view, an “epistemological revolution” was underway, for which an adequate theoretical tool would not yet be available. According to the sociologist, the “strength” element would have disappeared from the “force + consent” equation. His hypothesis was that a new form of social domination would have emerged, which would invert the Gramscian terms, being proper and functional to globalized capitalism. We would be facing a “reverse hegemony.” In this context, the “Marxist-Gramscian heritage could be the starting point,” but it would no longer be “the endpoint.”
Scholars of politics worldwide would contradict this diagnosis, constantly resorting to the Gramscian conceptual apparatus. Chantal Mouffe, Nancy Fraser, Wolfgang Streeck, and Boaventura de Souza Santos are some of those who have animated the debate based on the Gramscian hypothesis of “interregnum.” For them, we would be facing a crisis in which the organic balance between consensus and coercion, direction and domination, would have been dissolved: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, the most varied morbid phenomena are verified.”[xi]
Talking about the crisis in the European Union, Mouffe would note that it was not a project that could offer an identification among European citizens and that could mobilize their political passions in a democratic direction.[xii] In her view, the European Union would have been made up of consumers and not citizens. In times of economic crisis and austerity policy, it was reasonable, therefore, that some would question its usefulness. The neoliberal model would be in crisis, but no other would be available. It was in this sense that Mouffe recalled Gramsci’s famous phrase: “the old is dying, but the new is not yet born.” [xiii] This hypothesis would be taken up five years later, in 2018, to refer to the economic crisis of 2008 and the global recession that followed, especially on the European continent.[xiv] According to Mouffe, “at the time of the economic crisis, a series of contradictions condensed, leading to what Gramsci calls “interregnum: a period of crisis during which a series of consensual premises established around a hegemonic project is challenged.” The solution to the crisis was not yet in sight, and this is what would characterize, in theoretical terms, the “populist moment.”
Starting from the same concepts, Nancy Fraser would give the name of “progressive neoliberalism” to the hegemonic bloc that would have entered into crisis. In her view, neoliberalism would not be a vision of the total world, being able to ally itself with different and even antagonistic projects.[xv] In alliance with progressive movements, the neoliberalism of this type would have carried out, at best, a “change of conscience” but would not, in fact, have transformed “structures, institutions, and practices.” [xvi] Fraser is well established in the North American debate, but it is not difficult to see in her concept of “progressive neoliberalism,” understood as a hegemonic bloc that withdraws the intellectual and moral direction of society from social movements, but which together promotes an attack on workers’ rights, similarities with what Oliveira called “reverse hegemony.” “Progressive neoliberalism” would have enjoyed hegemony for several decades, but it would be falling apart at present.[xvii]
According to Fraser, both on the right and on the left, neoliberal narratives would no longer have credibility – which, together with the “desire for the new,” would configure a crisis of hegemony. The “morbid” solutions found, such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016, would have failed to adopt policies different from neoliberal ones. This would show a situation that combined two things in a “tense amalgamation”: “First, a dramatic weakening of the authority of neoliberalism – a lesser confidence in its ideas, policies and the institutional order underlying them; secondly, the inability, at least so far, to generate a plausible alternative, both at the political and institutional levels.”[xviii] Therefore, the idea of the “interregnum” proposed by Gramsci would be so useful. For her, it would be necessary to organize a new hegemonic bloc whose leading force was concentrated in the working classes, recovering the place of unions, as well as political parties and social movements. The question would remain as to whether this would be possible within capitalism or if only with a project that proposed to surpass it.[xix]
If Fraser still admitted this doubt, Streeck, for his part, would be much more pessimistic. In his view, confluent with the hypotheses launched by Oliveira regarding the Brazilian case, politics would have become a minefield: “whatever politics do to solve a problem, it creates another – in the short or long term. What ends one crisis aggravates another; the Hydra’s head that is cut, grows two new heads.” [xx] The understanding of the crisis of “democratic capitalism,” in the view of the theorist, would only be possible if it were extended “as the high point (so far) of a development that began at the end of the long 1960s, that is, around 1975”.[xxi] The political and economic crisis would have started, therefore, in the mid-1970s and continued until 2008, through the buying of time. For Streeck, since then, the crisis could no longer be suspended or postponed. For the author, what would follow capitalism, in its final form, would not be socialism or another hegemonic bloc. For him, we would also be beyond hegemony, in a lasting interregnum, understood as “a prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder (and precisely for this reason a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy).” [xxii] I draw attention to the similarity with what Oliveira had pointed out about the “Age of indeterminacy.” Contemporary “morbid phenomena” would have to do with a society without reasonably coherent and minimally stable institutions, capable of normalizing the lives of its members and protecting them from accidents, and “monstrosities” of all kinds. [xxiii]
Boaventura de Sousa Santos would be the theorist who, starting from the same concepts, would extend his diagnosis to Brazil and Latin America. For him, the world created by neoliberalism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, would have come to an end with the financial crisis (2008-2011). [xxiv] The problem would have been, precisely, that no other world had come to the fore. The alternative, posed by universal rights, which would have had its most advanced form in the post-war social democracy – the “democratic capitalism” of which Streeck spoke, or, we might think, capitalism with hegemony – would have been once and for all surpassed by neoliberalism.
As for Oliveira, the turn of the 1980s to the 1990s is taken by Santos as a moment of fundamental inflection. From then on, neoliberalism would have found the “appropriate political climate to impose the market principle, contrasting its logic with the logic of the State principle, until then protected.” [xxv] The erosion of the state would have been silently accompanied by a “radical denaturalization of democracy.” [xxvi] With this in mind, Souza Santos concluded, as did Mouffe, Fraser, and Streeck, that we would be living in “a period of interregnum.” Among the characteristics of this interregnum, the theorist highlighted two as being decisive. The first had to do with the universalization of liberal democracy and its limits vis-à-vis neoliberalism. Besides the inability of liberal democracy to defend itself, what would be most surprising today would not be this, “but rather the processes of incapacitation driven by a highly powerful and intrinsically anti-democratic transnational force: neoliberalism”. [xxvii] The second characteristic, in turn, had to do with the widespread attack against wage income, workers’ organizations, and forms of social consultation, with the consecutive transformation of social demands into a police issue. According to Santos, all these characteristics would point “to a condition of irreversible contradiction between capitalism and democracy, including the low-intensity democracy that liberal democracy has always been.” [xxviii]
Even though Mouffe, Fraser, Streeck, and Santos contradict Oliveira, persisting in resorting to the classic Gramscian formula, these authors seem to outline a problem common to the Brazilian sociologist. The hypothesis to be investigated, more directly confronting Santos’ interpretation that extends to Brazil, is whether the main inflection of the current global crisis would be posed, in the country, by the advent of neoliberalism at the turn of the 1980s to the 1990s, and not with the 2008 crisis. Although both authors seem to agree with this diagnosis, Sousa Santos’ analyzes do not point to the kidnapping of politics, as is the case with Streeck. From the confrontation of these organized concepts of hegemony, crisis of hegemony, and interregnum, we intend to theoretically develop a Brazilian hypothesis based on the work of Francisco de Oliveira.
_____
[i] Oliveira, Francisco (1998) [1988]. “O surgimento do antivalor”. Os direitos do antivalor: a economia política da hegemonia imperfeita. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes
[ii] Oliveira, 1998 [1988], op. Cit., p. 47.
[iii] Oliveira, Francisco (1998) [1997]. “Além da hegemonia, aquém da democracia”. Os direitos do antivalor: a economia política da hegemonia imperfeita. São Paulo: Vozes, p. 201.
[iv] Oliveira, 1998 [1997], op. Cit., p. 202.
[v] Oliveira, 1998 [1997], op. Cit., p. 202 e p.203.
[vi] Oliveira, Francisco (2000) [1997]. “Privatização do público, destituição da fala e anulação da política: o totalitarismo neoliberal”. In: Oliveira, Francisco; Paoli, Maria Célia (orgs.). Os sentidos da democracia: políticas do dissenso e hegemonia global. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes.
[vii] Santos, Laymert Garcia dos (2007). “Brasil contemporâneo: estado de exceção?”. In: Oliveira, Francisco; Rizek, Cibele (orgs). A Era Da Indeterminação. São Paulo: Boitempo. p. 292.
[viii] Oliveira, Francisco (2007). “Política numa era de indeterminação: opacidade e reencantamento”. In: Oliveira, Francisco; Rizek, Cibele (orgs.). A era da indeterminação. São Paulo: Boitempo, p. 35.
[ix] Oliveira, 2007, op. Cit., grifos nossos.
[x] Oliveira, Francisco (2003). A crítica da razão dualista/ O Ornitorrinco, São Paulo: Boitempo, p.143. In English, see Oliveira, Francisco de (2003). The duckbilled platypus. New Left Review, London, v. no/dez. 2003, n. 24, p. 40-57.
[xi] Gramsci, Antonio (1975). Quaderni del Carcere. Turim: Einaudi. [Quaderno 3, § 34, p. 52], grifos nossos.
[xii] Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: thinking the world politically. Londres, Nova Iorque: Verso [Kindle Edition].
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Mouffe, Chantal (2018). “Introdução”, Por um populismo de esquerda. São Paulo: Autonomia Literária, iBooks.
[xv] Fraser, Nancy (2020) [2019]. “O rei populista está nu”. Entrevista dada a Bhaskar Sunkara. In: O velho está morrendo e o novo não pode nascer. São Paulo: Autonomia Literária, iBooks.
[xvi] Fraser, 2020 [2019], op. Cit.
[xvii] Fraser, 2020 [2019], op. Cit.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Fraser, 2020 [2019], op. Cit.
[xx] Streeck, Wolfgang (2018). Tempo comprado: a crise adiada do capitalismo democrático. São Paulo: Boitempo, p. 58.
[xxi] Streeck, 2018, op. Cit., p. 51.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid.
[xxiv] Santos, Boaventura de Souza (2020a). “El nuevo interregno”, In: Izquierdas del mundo, ¡únanse! y otros ensayos. 1a ed. – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO, p. 27.
[xxv] Ibid., p. 29.
[xxvi] Ibid., p. 30.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 37, grifos nossos.
[xxviii] Ibid., p. 36, grifos nossos.
* Camila Góes holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Campinas (Unicamp), working especially in intellectual history. As a researcher, she has worked at Pepol “Laboratório de Pensamento Político” (Unicamp) since 2009 and, since 2013, in the research group “Pensamento e Política no Brasil” (USP).
Interview: Prof. Dr. Rafael Estrada Mejía
I strongly believe in collaborative work and this interview is a wonderful example of interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. I would like to thank both Prof. Rafael for the insightful answers and Mariah for conducting the interview. I also dearly thank Luísa Turbino and Tiago Leme for being amazing “networkers,” without whom this interview wouldn’t be possible. Last but not least, I thank Giovanna Imbernon for being the best team player. Enjoy!
Anna Paula Bennech
Edited and reviewed by Anna Paula Bennech, Giovanna Imbernon
Interviewee: Prof. Dr. Rafael Estrada Mejía*
Interviewer: M.A. Mariah Torres Aleixo**
Rafael’s Bio
Rafael Estrada Mejía (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, University; M.Sc. Regional Planning and Regional Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) is a socio-cultural and applied anthropologist trained in Europe and Latin America and specialized in the ethnography of knowledge and biographical methods, urban resettlements, social ecology, and migration and transnationalism in Colombia, Brazil, and Spain. For almost a decade, he worked as a practicing anthropologist on numerous projects working with indigenous peoples on food security, indigenous development, legal advice, health, inter-ethnic relations, and ethno-education in the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina (Colombia) and the broader Amazonian region (Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil). He is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware (Newark, Delaware). He has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil), University of São Paulo (USP, Brazil), and University of Delaware (United States). In addition, he has taught courses on democracy and citizenship at the University of Los Llanos (Villavicencio, Colombia). He has published several book chapters and articles in edited books and professional peer-reviewed journals in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Interview
According to some of your texts, cities are “existential territories” where subjectivities and heterotopias proliferate in micro-politics, and those [heterotopias] can be understood as a challenge to the ordinary spaces of cities, giving them utopian dimensions (MEJÍA, 2012). Could you explain in detail your view on urban space and cities as “existential territories”, considering confinement as a sanitary order amidst the new Coronavirus pandemic? How could we think about the micropolitics in/of cities pervaded by a virus?
I start by noting that, in 1992, the French psychotherapist Félix Guattari argued that cities had become immense machines – ‘mega machines according to the U.S. historian Lewis Mumford –, producers of individual and collective subjectivities through collective mechanisms, such as education, health, social control, culture, and mass media. Guattari stated that it was impossible to separate the city’s material and communication and service infrastructure from functions considered existential (Guattari 1992: 104). He also proposed that human beings are primordially deterritorialized and called for the restoration of the subjective city. In other words, humans’ original existential territories – the body, the domestic space, the clan, the cult, and certainly, the city – are no longer disposed as an immutable land; they are latched to a world of precarious representations in perpetual movement (Guattari 1992: 95).
Undoubtedly, the city exists in many forms. On the one hand, it is a socially constructed material reality, which we inhabit and establish a sensorial relationship. On the other hand, the city is also an imaginary representation, a symbolic and discursive construction, a product of our imagination and, especially, of language. Nonetheless, we inhabit a city, and a city inhabits us. We build cities, and the cities build us. But the city is not restricted to houses, buildings, plazas, churches, bars, businesses… It is also made of imaginaries, legends, neighborhoods of abstraction, intangible streets, corners of subjectivity. Every city is plural. It contains many other cities in it. It contains infinite unfoldings of the same space, sometimes dispersed, sometimes in communication. Like everything human, a city is, more than anything, a reinvention.
Living in a city implies, simultaneously, localizing oneself in a place that is part of a larger scheme of things: a region, a country, a hemisphere, the world. Our daily experience is informed by sensorial and perceptual experiences but also other less tangible experiences, not visible, estranged, but which in some way are part of our lives and our world. In other words, a city is an existential territory.
For the last ten years, my professional concerns have been laid on what Michel Foucault calls biopolitics. This concept refers to the managing of territories and populations in the most general sense. My research has taken me to the two extremes of urban models in today’s world: refugee camps and Brazilian Elitist Closed Condominiums (BECCs) in the state of São Paulo. They are both contemporary heterotopias – that is, real or localized utopias. On the one hand, there are elite gated communities or closed condominiums: “self-confined communities” protected by walls, wire fences, and a forceful security apparatus that prevents any physical manifestation of difference. On the other hand, there are “camps” in their many expressions: refugee camps, detention centers, slums, ghettos. Camps for the stateless people, the undesirable. Refugee camps also represent “confined identities,” and similarly to gated communities, they are characterized by walls, wire fences, and a forceful security apparatus.
Heterotopia is a concept reinvented by Foucault in the 1960s and has at least two characteristics: illusion and compensation. As the US anthropologist Setha Low (2008) noted, gated communities are an example of contemporary heterotopias because people have the illusion of living in eternal thematic vacations of daily life and ordered spaces in contrast with a chaotic city outside the walls. Living in gated communities implies experiencing an illusion and compensation heterotopia while life goes by outside the walls. Two aspects are highlighted in these spaces: the eternal thematic vacations of daily life and the escape from its regular dimension. These aspects transform gated communities into paradises, refuges, safe ports, and sanctuaries for a few, in contrast with possible urban solutions for many (Estrada Mejía and Guerrón Montero 2020).
Micropolitics is one of the key important concepts used in my research, which was first presented in the 1970s by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It derives from the ethnological concept of segmentation used for stateless societies; Deleuze and Guattari applied it to state societies. In practical terms, micropolitics refers to the measure of the coefficient of transversality, that is, how open one is to diversity.
What is our coefficient of transversality in today’s global pandemic? What is the role of fear in the politics of managing territories and populations, especially in terms of the undesirable (such as the infected, the potential super-spreaders, the poor, the migrants, the homeless)? Without denying the need for physical distancing and other basic sanitary measures, how to understand the disciplinary mechanisms of confinement and quarantine in connection with the multiple coercive and punitive measures that facilitate abuse of power and authority?
We are not going through a pandemic that can only be understood and explained through medical, sanitary, or biological perspectives. The truth is that what has happened is an inherently compounded event in the phenomenological and epistemological sense. Therefore, the medical, sanitary, or biological perspectives represent only one vector in a complex system composed of multiple agents. These perspectives do not fully explain what is happening worldwide nor the role of deforestation or ecological disasters in the current crisis.
Miguel Benasayag argues that the disciplinary mechanism of confinement has forced thousands of millions of people to recognize a lack of regularization in the capitalist system. We have ignored that, in complex systems, information is necessary but not sufficient and that decisions cannot be based on simplicity. The unparalleled side of this global pandemic is that, in contrast with other global pandemics, the world suddenly recognized its complexity, both in terms of its materiality and ontological nature. Our relationship with the world and everything that surrounds us has changed. This world, this period, cannot be explained through the duality subject-object anymore, through causes that precede effects, because, in this world of complexities, both can coexist.
My current personal situation might serve as an illustration. Presently, I am in Bogotá, and on January 16, I was diagnosed with COVID 19/22, as I prefer to call this virus. Suddenly, I have had to live the complexity of this pandemic up and close. One of the publicity slogans used by the District Secretary of Health of Bogotá is called DAR in Spanish: Detecto, Aíslo y Reporto (Detect, Isolate, and Report). This acronym clearly expresses the objectives of a government used to manage the undesirable. Undoubtedly, the lockdown is the present health order worldwide, but we cannot forget that it is a privilege of certain social classes and peoples both in the Global South and North. Here, I connect this experience with my research on BECCs: traditionally, the elites have been prone to self-confinement. The present contingency only reveals a lifestyle that has been perpetuated throughout history. I argue this point in my most recent work about Brazil illustrated through the lifestyle of the BECCs (Mejía and Guerrón Montero, 2020).
The 2020 report of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (OXFAM) calls the current global pandemic the pandemic of economic, racial, and gender inequality. However, I believe that the virus’s appearance has only intensified a state of affairs that has been consolidating historically. More than two million people have died, and hundreds of millions become poorer every day, while most billionaires and the wealthiest corporations in the world are becoming richer. According to this report, the 1,000 largest fortunes on the planet were able to recover from the losses caused by the pandemic in only nine months, while the poor will have to wait at least a decade to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Let us also not forget that the situation of indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent in the Global South is even more difficult.
The politics of confinement in Colombia, for example, has crossed the threshold of respect toward civility, citizenship, democracy, and liberty. The state has demonstrated its condition of authoritarianism and lack of sovereignty. In my perspective, the Colombian state is currently facing, once again, a fascist drift. Its elites recurrently challenge the 2016 peace accords while social and environmental leaders are massacred weekly, and where femicides occur daily. Its capital, Bogotá, is ruled by a progressive mayor who has established lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews while police abuse, misery, and inequality run rampant. This situation happens in a city confronting domestic migration and the staggering migration of Venezuelans (more than two million by the latest count), forced displacement, and structural institutional and molecular violence.
You emphasize that the anthropologist’s task, or rather of the ethnographer and ethnography, is to experiment, take risks instead of understanding or interpreting (MEJÍA, 2012; 2015). Could you explain this difference? To what extent is this proposal close to Favret-Saada’s (2005) idea of “being affected,” or even to ethnography as experience, present in Marcio Goldman’s proposal in “Tambores dos mortos e tambores dos vivos” (2003)?
When I wrote about this topic, I was interested in highlighting the processual aspect of the ethnographic method and how to present results; that is, elaborating written or audiovisual work. I used parallelisms with writing, poetry, and literature. Experimentation has to do specifically with the notion of “adequate ideas” proposed by the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, but also with the resignification that Deleuze and Guattari, Suely Rolnik, Janice Caiafa, among others, have proposed. The idea is to conceive the ethnographic encounter in Spinoza’s sense to the concept “encounter” (occursus): with the other, with alterity; that is, being able to affect and be affected, even to self-affect. This, added to the collaborative nature of ethnographic work, generates a written or audiovisual outcome.
In pragmatic, operative terms, I consider the scholarship of Joanne Rappaport (2007) an iconic example of collaborative work. In Latin America and particularly in Colombia, the Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP) or Participatory Action Research (PAR) has been used and refined for decades. I have used this methodology and find it extremely useful. Regarding the ethnographic outcome, I recommend the excellent results attained by Janice Caiafa (2007), who uses the concepts of polyphony and sympathy in very successful ways. Finally, I stress that these works require a powerful exercise of decolonization. As the Bolivian sociologist, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, asserts, “the idea is to practice decolonization through the body – and that is not said, it is done” (Barber 2019).
You have worked with “applied anthropology” as a civil servant in Colombian government offices and national and international NGOs. This seems to be quite characteristic of a professional anthropologist in Colombia, whose work differs from this practice in Brazil, where it is mainly an academic profession. Therefore, how would you compare the work of anthropologists in Brazil and Colombia? Based on this and your practical and academic experience, how do you think anthropologists can work in Brazil beyond academia? Do we need to change anthropology training in Brazil?
One of the peculiarities of Latin American anthropology is the transit of anthropologists between academic reflections, university life, and applied institutional projects, particularly in countries such as Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. There has been great fluidity between academic functions and applied anthropology in these countries, even today, despite the consolidation of a strong academic sector distanced from applied anthropology and centered on basic research. However, it is essential to highlight that alterity (“the Other”) in Latin America has been an arena plagued with tensions evidenced in social movements and their effects in the cultural sphere. The revindication of Latin American anthropology towards difference, mediated through a rhetoric of identity, would eventually become what we now call the politics of identity, inundating these young and fragile democracies with cultural concerns (Jimeno 2005). Politics has always been present in anthropological endeavors even though some professionals do not realize it or externalize it as practice.
The case of Brazil is different in some ways because, despite a long history of engagement with politically minoritized populations, anthropological work in Brazil has been somewhat limited to university life. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of Brazilian anthropology historically has been its consecration to the nation-state building. For decades, being an anthropologist represented an act of citizenship and a pact denoted or connoted, with the project of national construction. This is evidenced in the work of several generations of anthropologists, e.g., Florestan Fernandes, Darcy Ribeiro, Antonio Candido, Roberto DaMatta and Otávio Velho.
Until the mid-1980s, alterity in Brazil meant “indigenous societies.” Between the 1960s and 1980s, Brazilian ethnology focused on the contact between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and its consequences. On the contrary, anthropologists from other parts of the world who conducted researches in Brazil focused on culture and social organization. Here we find a clear parallel with Colombia. In both countries, in the mid-1960s, anthropologists centered their analysis on the mechanisms of resistance to social change and the asymmetry of power relations between indigenous societies and the so-called national society, focusing on the confrontation of assimilationist policies carried out by the state (Jimeno and Triana 1985; Jimeno 2011). Likewise, the study of inter-ethnic contact became a predominant area of concern for Brazilian ethnologists. From the 1980s on, anthropologists expanded their scope of interest to include other alterities, such as rural societies (quilombolas, caiçaras), as well as research topics that had been the purview of social sciences (particularly in urban areas).
In Brazil, there is a certain negative stereotype surrounding applied anthropology and the work of applied anthropologists. Some consider the work of “anthropologists of NGOs” as less scholarly (Tavares et al. 2010). I believe that these ideas need to be revisited. As noted earlier, Brazilian anthropologists have been fully committed to supporting the lives of marginalized populations through academic and engaged work outside academia. Therefore, educational programs should reflect this reality in their curriculum offerings.
In your Ph.D. dissertation, you investigated Colombian forced travelers in São Paulo and Barcelona (MEJÍA, 2010). Forced travelers, refugees, asylum seekers, and international migration, in general, have been gaining notoriety in social sciences and anthropology, in particular, due to the proliferation of the phenomenon. How do you understand “forced travelers” nowadays? Why has this kind of migration increased? What are the challenges they impose on migrants and, also, the state?
Migratory flows and population movements are as old as humanity. Likewise, the interest in these flows in the social sciences is not recent; by the 1950s, scholars worldwide were interested in these topics. Anthropology witnessed a turning point in the 1980s, when the study of migratory flows took front and center, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin American migrations to the United States, and was known as transnationalism. Today, migration studies, refuge studies, and climate change studies are common worldwide, and new categories have emerged, such as environmental refugees and environmental migrants.
I highlight that refugees are not migrants. The official definition of refugee invites us to imagine being forced to flee our country to escape towards safety. If you were lucky, you would have had time to pack a bag. If not, you simply dropped everything and ran. Refugees are people fleeing conflict or persecution. They are protected by international law, and theoretically, must not be expelled or returned to situations where their life and freedom are at risk. The category of “internally displaced” person (IDP) was created in the 1990s by the UN Refugee Agency to contain the number of asylum seekers to Europe. IDPs have left their place of origin due to violence or internal wars but remain inside their nation’s borders. Since the creation of this category, the number of IDPs has not ceased to grow.
We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. In 2015, there were 8.6 million new displacements associated with conflict and violence in 28 countries. In 2016, 6.3 million people were forced away from their homes. Among them, there are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under 18 years old. There are also 10 million stateless people who have been denied nationality and access to basic rights, such as education, healthcare, employment, and freedom of movement. Outside the Middle East, the countries with the highest numbers of people fleeing are Ukraine, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Sudan. These displacements occur because of conflict, geophysical hazards, criminal violence, development projects, and drought and environmental change crises.
Depending on the source reviewed, the number of refugees changes. According to the UN Refugee Agency, Colombia is the second country in the world with IDPs. In Colombia, 6.7 million people are internally displaced, around 13% of the entire population. In Latin America nowadays, the most pressing flow of migrants and refugees comes from Venezuela. In 2019, 4.5 million Venezuelans left their country (IOM) to settle elsewhere.
My objective with my research on refugee and migratory flows was not to justify the institutional existence of a polemic concept: one becomes a refugee because an institution decides to classify him or her as such, after having gone through categories such as clandestine, asylum seeker, internally displaced person, or resettled. My objective was not to validate the numbers created by institutions such as the UN and other international organizations, which have the power to produce inventories, count, recalculate, assign, and rename. I also was not interested in denouncing scandals or ‘revealing’ hidden intentions of the humanitarian government. I aimed to question these categories and numbers through ethnographic work.
References
Barber, Kattalin. “Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: ‘Tenemos que producir pensamiento a partir de lo cotidiano.’” El Salto, February 17, 2019. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/feminismo-poscolonial/silvia-rivera-cusicanqui-producir-pensamiento-cotidiano-pensamiento-indigena.
Caiafa, Janice. Aventura das cidades: ensaios e etnografias. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2007.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. “Ser Afetado.” Cadernos de Campo, no. 13 (2005): 155–61.
Goldman, Marcio. “Os Tambores Dos Mortos e Os Tambores Dos Vivos. Etnografia, Antropologia e Política Em Ilhéus, Bahia.” Revista de Antropologia 46, no. 2 (2003): 445–76. https://www.scielo.br/j/ra/a/ZbLf7Zpb9rXF7bqdnd56GPd/?lang=pt&format=pdf.
Guattari, Felix. “Pratiques écosophiques et restauration de la Cité subjective. ” Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses 17, (1992): 95-115.
Jimeno, Myriam, and Adolfo Triana. Estado y Minorías Étnicas en Colombia. Bogotá: FUNCOL, 1985.
Jimeno, Myriam, and David Arias. “La Enseñanza de Antropólogos en Colombia: Una Antropología Ciudadana.” Alteridades 21, no. 41 (2011): 27-44.
Jimeno, Myriam. “La Vocación Crítica de la Antropología en Latinoamérica.” Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 1, (2005): 43-65.
Low, Setha. “The gated community as heterotopia.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter. Routledge: London & New York, 2008. 153-164.
MEJÍA, Rafael Estrada. “Etnografia, cartografia e devir: potencialidades da escritura nas pesquisas antropológicas contemporâneas.” In: KOFES, Suely; MANICA, Daniela. (Org.). Vida & Grafias. Narrativas antropológicas entre biografia e etnografia. 1ed. Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina editora, 2015, v. 1, pp. 90-110.
MEJÍA, Rafael Estrada. “Micropolíticas, cartografias e heterotopias urbanas: Derivas teórico-metodológicas sobre a aventura das (nas) cidades contemporâneas.” Revista Espaço Acadêmico (UEM) 11, (2021): 01-09.
Mejía, Rafael Estrada; Carla Guerrón Montero. “Home, Sweet Home: Negotiating Intimacy in Brazilian Elitist Closed Condominiums.” Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies, v. 9(1), pp. 374-392
MEJÍA, Rafael Ignacio Estrada. DESTERRITORIALIZAÇÃO E RESISTÊNCIAS. Viajantes forçados colombianos em São Paulo e Barcelona. [tese] Campinas: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Unicamp, 2010.
Rappaport,Joanne. Más allá de la escritura: la epistemología de la etnografía en colaboración. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 43, (2007): 197–229.
* I express my deep gratitude to Professor Carla Guerrón Montero, my colleague from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, for discussing, reviewing, and translating my answers.
** Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology (PPGAS/UFRGS). She holds a human rights master’s degree and a law bachelor’s degree from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). She was a professor at the Federal University of Amapá (UNIFAP) between 2015-2017. Currently, her research focuses are anthropology of law; gender violence, sexual and reproductive rights; traditional peoples; anthropology of health. She is a member of the Núcleo of Anthropology and Citizenship (Naci) at UFRGS. E-mail: mariahaleixo@gmail.com.
*** Answers translated by Carla Guerrón Montero. Questions translated, reviewed, and edited by Anna Paula Bennech and Giovanna Imbernon.
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