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SCHOLIUM
Notes about power, culture and political development
NORBERTO
DE LA TORRE GONZÁLEZ
Index
Introduction
--------------------------------------------
Scholium
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Bibliographical
notes ---------------------------------
Recommended
readings --- --------------------------
When everything is told, the
rest for telling is a disaster, the fragmentary.
Maurice
Blanchot
When someone listens a speech, when someone reads a treatise, when
someone remembers a conversation, is deducing the audition, the reading or the
memory just to a little phrase, unique and finally: the aphorism. Any knowledge is aphoristic.
Benjamín Valdivia
The limits will stop any chaos and stand up very majestic in front of the fallen fragments.
Mauricio Beuchot
Introduction
1.- The dictionary defines “scholium” like: note which is placed in the text for explaining it. It defines aphorism like: little and
doctrinal sentence. Then, the next readings are “scholiums” because they want
be looked at over I read; don’t matter if they are written texts or the reality
used like text. But the truth is they
are so far of being doctrinal documents.
2.- The word “scholium” come
from Greek scholion: commentary, or
Greek scholé: school. It is used
like a noun for singing to the notes inside a text for explaining it. It is written and pronounced same to the
prefix that comes from Greek skoliós: tortuous, for example scoliosis is a
deviation or appearance tortuous of the vertebral column. If we give, to the next paragraphs, both
senses, then they are at the same time, notes trying to explain the text, but
too circumlocutions, reiterations, tortuosity of the speech some times explain
and some times hide the senses and the events.
Each speech is a scholiumspeech, there is nothing inside it about right
and transparent and always ends for showing its tortuous way and deviations.
3.- I use the numbered paragraphs format of great thinkers, who have used
it, like Cioran, this is not for imitation; it is because of I am agree with
their conviction about life and thought have not an inexorable continuity; it
intervenes at random, the speech as water, runs over an interruption and
collision endless succession, it bifurcates, or it is better that it increases,
it disappears in order to come back for growing up with other force and other
sense. The only thing that give unity
to these fragments are all of them talk about human being inside its community,
of the social fact, of the trouble that generate coexistence. The items about next fragments are very
different, but they can group at four general points: power, culture, political
and democracy.
4.- I write these fragments
for trying to give an order to everything, facts and relationships. With them I want to organize my perception
and my experience and too, to invent time, to find a sense when happen it, to
specify the directions and destinies. I
write just for conversing, for showing me to the other and discover it, that
other who define myself and without it, I am an animal without house, an
inaudible voice and to fall on deaf ears.
However, I know words lie, entangle, they are light which became reality
to a darkness dance. Language reveals, discovers, dissolves the grisaille, and
then, itself becomes to veil and hides the universe about all of these have not
named, about all of these have been repressed and forgotten about all of these
which live at silence. I write some
notes and give them to you, or to him, to echo which weave a mesh with
voices. You will ask what relation have
all of this just thinking about political or culture: the point is power, which slither between shades, the grammar
determines a way of join signs and that obliges us to building nets which we
are catch inside. By that, I have
sometimes the temptation of building absurd, something so like: trees combing,
throwing old leaves and searching a tomb to the other side; or too, turtles
write a slow and long laughter about desert yellow page. Power is a trap where everyone is caught and
speech, the chain that tie us. However,
sometimes we can become that speech just to a chat a conversation, to an
interchange of signs for inventing eternity and then kill it.
5.- Present text joined express my ordered reflections about political,
they are attempts at the proof and mistake sense, I risk with them some
hypothesis that sometimes they look like be sure and sometimes I end
rejecting. I am conscious about real creation and the
capacity for discovering a new horizon
or revelations, because they are
qualities of very few thinkers, the other ones, according to Richar
Rortry, we carry out the task of
communicating the knowledge and support teachings with our writings. I do not try to take a correct reading about reality and there is not an objective
form to determine when a reading is correct, any reading is the historical and
social personal circumstances, contingencies, context result . Of such way my
approaches say more on my form to see the world that on the same world. The reality that I fell is elusive changing,
movable, obstinate and it is boxing and the theoretical subject. I have learned that the truths apparently
more solid finish collapsing and that
in the end only remain what works, and only while works. I recognize the risk of a fall in the liberal
pragmatism in my affirmation, nevertheless, I believe that it is better to run
if the searched aims about equality, justice and coexistence stay clear to
avoid the cruelty and the exploitation of the other one, my fellow man.
6.- I write impelled by the
interest to understand the relation between event and speech, to unravel its
dialectic and construct a vision about reality that is constituted in effective
instrument to operate on her. My
speech, like the one of others, is determined by my biography and my tastes,
that every time they incline more by the fragmentary thing, the ephemeral
thing, the opened thing. My left
intention to make poetry it ended at the brief prose, in the attempt to use the
words to make devices that can, possibly, to serve a reader to understand a
little better the world in than we lived.
.
Those
are never the forts that aspire to the power and they reach by means of the
combined effect of the cleverness and the delirium, but the weak ones.
E. M. Cioran
With the transition from a society to another
one, personal desires change the model about their instincts and thoughts.
Norbert Elías
Not to know to the others,
to ignore them is an act of self pleasure cognitive that it prevents that the
paradigms renew, systematically reformulate by way of manifold small changes
that finish being the great change.
Federico Reyes Heroles
Scholium
7.- To meditate on the culture is, at the same time, to
meditate from the culture, language of a language, to face a mirror another
mirror, inside and outside. Who writes
this responds to a assembly of psychological and historical conditions and,
from this perspective, it only contributes a point of view, another one, to
intervene where the products of the creativity are analyzed and discussed which
they give sense to the individual and social conduct.
8.- It is undeniable that in the Eighties had
changes that in the nineties are constituted in ruptures, in shocks and
contradictions and they will serve as
crucible for a new culture. The
technological revolution transformed the processes of artistic production, in
such away that they influence in the market of the art and the spreading of the
culture. The responsibility by the
education and the national identity is had displaced from the State to the
private initiative and the great economic partnerships that produce an
ideological culture of masses and spread it through massive means of
communication. The art producers
struggle between the commerce and the depression by effect of the defeat,
apparent, of the socialist project.
Before this panorama it is required of a calm attitude that rescues the
human values and it opposes to the increasing wave of the enlarged right and
the disguised neofascism of modernity.
The art is important in this fight, is the mechanism of rescue of the
most desirable values.
9.- The reality appears to us like a
paradox. Nature and culture interact to
modify the universe. The creation is
incomplete still, the contradictions in human happening and natural they take
to step to a death and resurrection process, about creation and recreation.
10.-
To chat about culture is to send us of head that vast one and complex world in
which it has arrangement from a screw to a poem, sickness is inevitable. The panorama of the culture admits manifold
readings and is a personal obligation to extend our capacity like readers, to
enrich our reference codes and marks to
constitute to
us in
effective interpreters of the reality.
11.- The reader recreates and animates history
and the culture, without him, history is a collection of dead dates.
12.- In
the course of the production and reproduction of the symbolic universe the
human being generates works, products that finish losing themselves, to be
semi-concealed in museums, libraries, attics.
They change the contexts, the meanings, which yesterday has been
affected today leaves us indifferent.
Nevertheless, they are there, in the corners of the memory, to be
rescued someday: the paintings, the
buildings and the books.
13.-
The forgetfulness plays a role important in history to write history. The forgetfulness erodes, flock the borders,
installs valleys where there were mountains, it specially becomes fierce with
the solemnity and pride, it is the tutelary God of the culture, the
ephemeral successes and vanities and successes. We forgot the pain, our own stupidity, the
enjoyment which we had a long time ago,
the wars, the failures. To
forget protects to us and it hurts to us. History must less to the memory than to the forgetfulness. The
humans, everybody, we suffer a constant
amnesia selective that equips with meaning the few elements that the
memory keeps. The forgetfulness act at
silence in the poem or the loving dialogue:
they suggest. The final
resultant is that the reality, which we create the reality, is constructed,
like a text, to crossings out and blotches.
14.- The lie is inherent to the culture. It is lied when the nature happens in work,
when the reality fragments to become phrase.
The Aztecs talked about the artist, to the potter, like whom she makes
lie to the mud. The falsification is
strained in the speech, is present like possibility and fact. Lie and truth connect like opposed poles of
the same game, they are contradicted to finish mixed and thus to construct
truths with lies.
15.- It is difficult to delineate a cultural
political when we are submerged in a assembly of cultures that coexist, they
hit, they are contradicted, they refused.
It is only possible to gather a catalogue and to show it, to offer the
different manifestations from the art so that he is the public who, when
educating its taste and interpreting according to its social project of life,
accepts or discards the manifestations that respond to their expectations.
16.- The reality concept is object of frequent
overhaul, philosophers, scientists, writers, take it like subject from its
search. The reality, the objective
world, is an artificial construction that form from sensations, perceptions and
judgments that outline the nature to return it
understandable. In the base of
the reality concept is the concept about me.
The subject, me, it is a place frequented to last dates by thinkers who
try a new way to understand the human phenomenon. The traditional conception about me of science in the West is a
hindrance, a limit. The division
between subject and object responds more to a necessity of the thought and the
language that to the demands of the reality.
Nevertheless, the problem is not only of scientific and philosophical
order. The world construction
method from the pronouns, the
dichotomies between me and another one, is translated in behavior problems in
where the individual acquires a hierarchy of privilege with respect to the
world, to not me. The object receives
presence and validity as opposed to the subject that apprehends it and knows
it, from this form the subject becomes the measurement about things. Inherent
pride to this vision is obvious: the man becomes the center computer that
modifies the surroundings in accordance with its own necessities, without
taking into account the consequences of its acts and without showing respect
about nature and its resemblance. To
conceive to me like separated being, forced to modify the world and to the
others in agreement with my own perspective,
it is a mistake that emanates to grant too much importance to myself, to
my individuality, to take me in serious too much; the inescapable consequence will be the solitude and the
conflict. The categorization and
outline of the traditional linear thought only can be broken allowing the
access to a state of more elastic conscience, less schizophrenic, in where me,
and myself, are diluted with the others ones.
I am not important, it is the truth, nothing of me is important, not
even this that I write, because it will die still before with me or before.
17.- As far as the cultural promotion one talks
about, almost everything is the responsibility of the State, at least in San
Luis Potosí. The private initiative has
been disoriented in the relative thing to the support to the culture, when it
gives to work to some artists contracting them like bottom for commercial
events and conventions. The serious
promotion: support to artistic-cultural
projects; editing; formation and stimulus to creators and
interpreters, are a land ignored by the industrialists and retailers. Perhaps the potosina private initiative has
a visible project cultural, neither good nor bad, gets along, with some
projects and national foundations like Televisa, Domeq or Banamex, but do not
manage to leave their position of embarrassed and misinformed spectator, whom
it prevents him to adopt a paper the more active and responsible in the
cultural life for the organization.
18.- History is written to pauses
with the arbitrary intervention of that recognizes cycles, beginnings, endings. The historian fixes the data and the sense
to help us to walk in the memory.
Nevertheless there is another history, the one that does not recognize
boards nor tributes because it moves like the water: he undermines, he erodes, he produces landslides, he disarms the
data to demonstrate them false. Around the dates one unties the controversy,
clocks and calendars soon let see the
artifice. The history of San Luis, like
all, establishes its borders in the time, indicates its days: birth, celebration, death. In an act one is based like birth of the
city the 3 of November of 1592, but we founded the city every day and whenever
the sun warms up stones of the street. Everyday
a city dies and another one is founded on the morning when the ladies dampen
the sidewalks and the dogs draw up routes on asphalt. This city is the sum of superposed cities, a quiet dead
collection. The three of November, four
hundred years later, it is a pretext to remember plains, the nomads barking in
the desert, a way of missions and metals, a bloody fight with the sand, a
hungry hill of natives and mules, to discuss of thorns that age. It would be good perhaps, to found another
city taking advantage of the hollow the bell towers or the closing of a spotted
street; a city that is shown, discreet
and humble, by all the windows.
19.- People reproduce to interior of themselves
contradictions of system in that lives, in such a way that although it is
possible to identify to who preferably defends a particular vision, also is
probable that, under certain circumstances, a person promotes antagonistic
positions to which usually adheres being, naturally, blinds to the internal
contradiction that it implies. Actually
daily of the critic one tends in the opinion, to the prejudice, the label;
groups, Mafia, trajectories detect themselves;
relations and supports are invented.
It is not possible to be scorned to the importance of the friendships
and ideological definitions during the process of accommodation of the
bureaucratic, administrative structures and overall, power, but it is necessary
to seat that, in the personal profits, the appointments, in the political
decisions, it has much of circumstantial and risky.
20.- The centralism is one of the factors that
more importantly affect the development of the national policy. The process of consolidation of the State
forced to centralize the power and to the establishment of control structures
that allowed to plan in accordance with a specific project of organization of
the country. The monopoly of the
political and administrative decisions allowed, by the hand, the unification and the development of
Mexico, but by another one increased to the voltage between the regions and the
center. One of the things that more
annoying to the inhabitants of the province are the authoritarian intervention
of the country in the subjects that, theoretically, belong to the sovereignty
of the States. This interference
explains the resistance from the regions to the centralist decisions, the
attitude suffered towards "chilling", the rejection of a system and a
party that the sacrifice of the States allowed satisfying the necessities with
the center. The centralist
authoritarianism clarifies all the relation of the federal power with the
province, in all the lines: education,
work, health, justice, culture.
21.- In the matter of cultural political, the
projection and the success of the artist are only possible if the acceptance is
obtained, the recognition of the metropolis.
Any creator who moves in the scope of his State, is considered only
smaller and local an artist. The center
imposes its aesthetic criteria, decides on the value of the work of the
provincial artist, describes and disqualifies, sometimes tries to write
regional history from the optics of the great research centers but without
knowing about life, region inhibition routine of the inhabitants whom they describe.
22.- A glance from the periphery can promote the
reflection on the value of the regional task, the formation of a clear identity,
the acceptance of which he is and which is possible to be, the defense of the
privacy and the autonomy, these are, perhaps, the ways to obtain cultural
political, nor authoritarian.
23.- About art and political, people can be
said very many things, but perhaps it
turns out more useful to listen to the drops of rain striking the windows or to
imagine the night, invaded of shades and
silence.
24.- The categories and mechanisms of the formal
reasoning are full of traps, of contradictions and darkness that take to us
frequently to the marsh of the vague thing, of the truth by halves, of the
common place. It is sufficient with
reviewing some between the article infinity and note critics, to give account
us of which in them they are strained, like an inexorable contamination: the qualifying adjectives instead of the
solid and sustained argumentation; the
hidden or manifest personal interests;
loyalties and commitments; the authoritarian ideological positions; the bitterness, the
frustration and the
resentment.
25.- The critic is a risky activity in which the
magician does not know if he will remove from the hat a rabbit or a tiger. The culture is the broth of culture in which
a word and a gesture triggers a reaction that becomes independent soon from the
transmitter, to summon up own life in the complex of contradictions and
adjustments that determine the development of the community. To receive conscience of the previous thing
does not stop and, at least to me, it impels me to leave all pretension of
critic, to meditate on the emptiness, the absurd thing of myself and pride, on
the impossible battle with the death.
26.- In fact the art would have to be the
critical mechanism par excellence, an instrument without ideas and breach of
camouflage discipline of all those aspects of the culture and proposals of
social organization that overlap the authoritarianism, the power under anyone
of its forms. The ideal culture
dominant is full of traps, distorts, darkens the senses by means of apparently
innocent speeches, favors the mechanisms of subjection, those that look for the
reproduction of the conditions that make the persistence possible of
slapdash authoritarian, and unjust a
state of things.
27. - The workers have been victims of multiple
aggressions throughout their history like class and like sector of the society,
exploded from the colony in the incipient manufacturing organizations they have
later supported the weight of the development of Mexican Capitalism, he was
sacrificed to them and he continues sacrificing for the construction of an abstract country that you don't
understand and that it is they other people's. The process of consolidation of
the centralized state power, required of the control of the labor power
stations and unions almost from its birth. The committed leaders with their
bases were quickly substituted, alliance or repression, for leaders that made a
pact with the power of the State to defer the satisfaction of the labor demands
and to allow the quick growth of the national bourgeoisie. During long time the union cupolas remained
obstinate and employees of the authoritarian and centralist State. Between the many resources that are used to
favor the control of the work force, is the creation of simple, nationalistic
culture that reproduces and spreads
through massive means of
communication and a poor educative system, bureaucratic dedicated more to the certificate expedition
in series that to the integral formation of educating. The resultant is a disappointed, frustrated, working class, that creates more in the lottery than in its representatives,
passive, without group conscience nor of class, who worry about the destiny of
the t.v. personages and not about their own social situation, evades the
reality through the celebration, the alcohol, soccer or " t.v. ", if
it protests does by means of heterogeneous civil manifestations, rather
rebellious that revolutionary, that fulfills cathartic and without free an
effect.
28.- The potosina culture is born and it is
developed in the western culture, that is generated during the conquest and the
colony. The city of San Luis Potosí is
based by will of the conqueror, in accordance with its necessities and forms of
accumulation of the wealth. The process
of configuration of the potosino cultural profile starts from the foundation,
participates in the vicissitudes and conflicts of the historical development of
Mexico. The fights of the Creoles
against the imposition of the peninsular ones, the demands of the half-bred,
the pressures of the
Indians, the uses and customs of all of them daily, gave rise to the
establishment of an organization system, relations of production and a culture
that has more points of coincidence with the national culture that regional in
particular.
29. - The society of San Luis
Potosí has fixed enough good to them to maintain a preservative, afraid and
dominant culture model, with high level of resistance to the change, strongly
influenced by the religious ideas. We
cannot, nevertheless, describe this model as monolithic, divergences and
paradoxes are shaken to the interior. Although the dominant culture is of
traditional cut, they occurred, and they occur in her, movements that challenge
and contradict of manners. In order to design suitable cultural political in
the State it is necessary to remember some important characteristics: the dominant culture is of western, new
spanish and preservative type; the
assembly of potosinas beliefs and customs
tend to reproduce the conditions of growth of the capitalist system of
production; the potosina society is
preferably traditionalistic, wild like its geography, with resistance to the
change and the innovation. To define or
to delimit the potosinidad is a vain effort because although the dominant
cultural tendency is liberal, the inherent contradictions to the system impose
to the culture a dynamics that puts under it constant transformation. The potosino of today will not be, surely,
the potosino of morning.
30. - Very few certainties orient
our life and one of them, frightful one, she is the one of the death. As soon as we acquired conscience of the
solitude, of our position of subjects in front of the world, as soon as the
speech creates the categories with which we organized our perception, the subject
of the interrogative death and the manifold that raises appears to us like of
great importance, of him our terrors and all our hopes are born all. The human beings we faced the knowledge of
our time, of our ephemeral step by this planet that contains to us and have
there it is born the horror and the myth, the anguish and the art. First the
funeral rituals like a manifestation arise mainly from the pain before the loss
and, like a manifestation of the impact that causes seeing to us our own death
in the death of the other. The belief
in a life out of earth, in a life that deceives the chains of the time, is a
belief that saves to us, that gives sense him to the love and to the heroism,
to loyalty, to the today conduct that has the possibility of extending the
space-temporary barriers that tie to us.
For that reason we are prone, from always, to transform to the death in
myth and rite, in such a way that the funeral act, the practice of the duel, is
at the same time a balsam to the pain and a key for the hope.
31. - The societies of century
ending face many problems: the great
clumsy of the great large cities; more and more the unjust distribution of the
wealth; with hungry the religious,
racial and political wars; the
difficulty to equip with the most elementary satisfactory to most of the
population; the marginality, the
authoritarianism and the violence. The
production system in that we lived has been able to generate a wealth
unimaginable, to take us to the deep space, to scientific and technological
knowledge highly falsified, but their costs are, also, terrible, such as the
deterioration of environment, the exhaustion of the nonrenewable resources, the
dehumanization that blossoming as the most destructive plague of all whatever
has knocked down the humanity. The
reason and the progress demonstrate incapable as wires towards the profit of
the most desirable values like justice, solidarity, the respect. The accent in
the technical aspects of the production, the social organization who puts in front
the reason of State to the interests and human necessities, the bureaucratic
and authoritarian complex of the control apparatuses, the idea of the speeches
in accordance with the interests of dominant groups, all this produced in the
contemporary man, in the great mass, apathy and disinterestedness, automatism,
resentment; characteristics that explode in destructive and self destructive
violence. Very few things are shown
like logs to take hold in the sea of the anonymity and the disappointment, the man
returns their face today towards the religion and the faith, towards the magic
thing. In this sense the art has a
mission that to fulfill, is in charge to indicate the traps of the alienate and
authoritarian speech, it puts sensitivity afloat and a disposition to approach
the beauty, humanize sand it favors the understanding and the positive
affection towards oneself, towards the other one and the nature.
32. - " In the measurement in which the
culture is expression of the social conditions of production... to try the
preservation of the indigenous cultures is anachronistic and at heart
reactionary ". Rodolfo Stavenhagen the previous phrase makes us meditate
on the validity on the attempt to preserve the popular traditions if with it we
maintain the conditions cultural that they allow the reproduction of an
authoritarian system of operation, if encourages to the myth of the capitalist
democracy under the ideological disguise of the defense of a tradition forged
in the feudalism and breath, by its nationalistic dyes, to the light of a
system that requires of the submission and the control. The manifestations of the popular culture
and the tradition are valuable, whereas instruments of meaning and resign of
the reality, when they point towards the enrichment of the life and the
experience of those who produce it and use.
But as soon as an official and myopic use to the point of view that represents, the risk is run of draining
the sense to them and of transforming them in merchandise or simple spectacle for tourists.
33. - I believe that the poetry is the ideal place
to misarticulate the ideological mechanisms of the language. If " All revolution begins like a
revolution in the language " (Or Peace), all about traditional also
affects the language impoverishing it.
The culture of the marketing research simplifies the language, reduces
it to the slang of the supply and the demand, replaces its capacity of
symbolization with the advertising image.
The dominant culture reduces the vocabulary considerably, replaces the
expressive wealth with the technical term or the simple language, gypsy
dialect, makes the most apt individuals to fall in the control mechanisms of
the market culture. If the language is
the vehicle for the processing of the ideologies, the language can be the tool
to loosen the distraction and the authoritarianism. In this sense, the poetry is the space of the contradiction and
the demystification, even of the same poetry.
It is the mechanism to meet again the lost meanings, for the design of
alternative models of human coexistence that they look for plus the well being
that the sale.
34.- Few times we do a
reflection about responsibility by the own writing. To write implies a discipline, an alert attitude, the development
of ability of hunter to capture the subjects.
Nevertheless, the routine erodes and all the texts do not have the same
quality, is very easy that it strains in them the vanity and the rhetoric. The opinion, the commentary, and the critic,
run the risk of becoming cliche, of becoming stiff. It is necessary to warn the reader, to have him against the
alienation mechanisms a critical attitude taken to the rigidity and the
intolerance, mechanisms that, in some occasions, happen unnoticed for the same
author of texts. A text is a piece
really, a point of view, a proposal, leaves from a speech that hides its own
traps. The reality is always more
complex than the writing. To write
requires to have a feeling what there is in one same one of lie, but is worth
the trouble once in a while an error, to omit one comma, to affirm two or three
silly things to say, this returns to the most human reading, warmer.
35. - Umberto Echo says that all text appears its
ideal reader, the one that is able to enter which the hidden author behind the
paragraphs. I want to think then that I
write for you, who my readers are my equal or those who can be it, my
mirrors: those that go by the street
with a teeth pain and a little
resentment in the stomach, those that they count the time per fortnights, those
that are scratched, those that find a little pleasing in the reading and other little in the table and the bed, those
that know that we are done of lies, rituals, masks. I am a chained local author to a city of sand, a writer who
measures to steps his bedroom and its block and whose texts die of thirst in
the desert that begins when finishing the street.
36.
- The attempts to discover and to
apprehend the general mechanisms that print quality and permanence to the
writing are insolvent. The dynamics of
the culture conspires against the theoretical discoveries, returns them
ephemeral, are old very fast. When the
writer writes on which he writes, its reasons and their profits, it is the just
one thing that he can aspire in order to break a little the veil that hides to
its own fears and their anguish, the place in that a tomb waits it under earth.
37.
- The posterity is an absurd ghost
about which some think. The posterity
is an assembly of human beings almost
blind who raise tombs on tombs, that construct a false memory with
objects: a bed, an empty pen, some
yellowish and fragile sheets of paper, and many tablets.
38. - Between the duties that the State has is the
one to spread and to foment the education and the art in accordance with its
own objectives of permanence and control, in agreement with a general political
that favors a specific project of nation.
The writer, like any other person, lives within the legal limits and
regulations that the State marks, plays with the factors in struggle, takes
advantage of the game to manage its aims and aspirations such as an honest way
to live, participation of the material and cultural goods, health,
security. Thus, all person makes
political, presses and molds the community in which she lives. To live in
community implies to be related to others, to establish nexuses, alliances,
friendships that, in the course of personal history favor or obstruct the
access to the spaces in where satisfaction to the interests and necessities is
obtained. As far as cultural political,
the mechanisms that are used for their form and exercise, are such that they
allow the handling of any other policy.
These mechanisms are varied and include: the strategic conduct, the alliances, the definitions, the community
of interests, the coincidence or divergence with the projects in struggle, the
simulation and at the random
39. - The political persecutes the power as
objective and it uses to obtain it the most effective methods: the alliance, the ideology, the
simulation; Sun Tzu, Maquiavelo and
other ones, offer detailed studies of these techniques. Literature persecutes the knowledge and the
beauty, is used the language, the observation, sensitivity. When it is written to look for the power, it
is not literature but political. When the politic looks for the truth, the
beauty, is failed generally in the profit of the power.
40. - The market culture remains blind before some
facts like the operation, the envy, the lack of affection, the routine, facts
that are there, maintaining an unjust, anxious social organization of being
able.
41. - To explain the reasons
that take us to the writing is to embroider in the fabric of the imaginary
thing, of the mutable. I believe that
my texts are the same from the agreement that of the conflict, of the finding
and the loss, of the shock of my scheme of interpretation of the world with the
reality. Nevertheless, the reality is
evasive, is always placed beyond the sign, hides between lines. We try to use the language as a knife way to
tear the veils that cover the truth;
the problem is that the truth remains hidden in spite of the attempts
and we are only able to construct representations, hypothesis, visions that as
soon as they allow us to operate at least in the assembly of physical-social
relations that surround to us, until the contradiction, our scheme becomes
insufficient and we intuited the enormous weight of silence.
42.
- Sometimes it is perceived to the city
as an unmistakable zone of the disaster, as to a purulent sore in the desert. When thus it happens, one knows a
survivor, an almost inaudible voices between so many that the secret city. It is not possible to be walked for a long
time between the streets without listening to the bells and the singsong song
of the won ones.
43. - San Luis Potosí is a city in which hatred
whips as much as an obstinate plague,
that it is not stopped in its eagerness
to corrode the buds of grass between the sand. Acute social contradictions and one aggravated fight by the
power, transform to this valley of quarry into a battlefield, in cradle of
fires and landslides. Here there is no
peace, only one truce; the sword
against the enemy, the suspect, the innocent, the brother, the stranger, the
shade, the disabled person is used. The
desert marks to us with a fire cross, returns us solitary, wild and obstinate
to the few provisions that offer the dryness and the drought to us. We defend a handful of sand and another one
of ash like cats in fervor. We wander
on dunes and under a sky without clouds thinking us one more of the chosen
towns, without knowledge that we are only a blinking, a fleeting shade, a hair
that is shaken to the wind.
44. - The prophetic vision is absurd in the scene
in which the Apocalypse takes place, at the moment in which the future it
reaches to us under the form of a moralistic and vindictive dragoon. For that reason the prophets miss without
course between the ruins, bleeding useless rivers from the wounded language.
45. - I would like to tell you my opinion about
war: to indicate the wounds, without
feeling of the white, the terrible emptiness of the speeches, the lie. But I do not know, I am half-bred and guilty
of passivity and blindness. I do not
want to fall in the trap to discover the obvious thing, which all of us know
and we try to see nothing, I do not
want to throw more words to the speech,
nor to begin to say absurd like that to prohibit him the alcohol to the natives, as if into the hands of
whites and half bred, that was innocuous. The subject is complicated, full of
paradoxes and disguises, it is an absurd weave of intrigued falsification by the demon of the power. For that reason, I just tell you about afternoon
which is enough on the kiosk and the sun that burns other placard, a new
demand that will finish at silence. The
palace of Government remains shut up with its blind windows. The band of the State and the men which sale
balloons help to form the scene in which ten beggars ask for alms to the
walkers. Some old ones go into in
battles of paper in the newspaper. The
activity of the snack bar is listened very
tenuous. Outside, in the level one, the wind drags thistles on sand and
brings a braised smell indicating
fires.
47. - In the cities many cultures proliferate,
they hybridize, hit, mix and destroy.
The commercial centers and shops of quarter compete in the same way that
the executive young people with the worker, or the high society children with
the gangs. The cities are mortars in
which the traditional values are crushed and new scales are constructed: the norm of gang, of the district, of the drug addict. The families add themselves in a vortex in which they integrate
and disintegrate themselves and the new forms of coexistence and the laws are
those which order and legitimize them.
48 - The main subjects of almost all the debates
are the following: The democracy,
understood like a relative freedom to choose, by means of the vote, some of the
options that the dominant classes propose the voter; the necessity to limit the power of the State, to allow this way
the acceleration in implants of a model of free market that can act without
more restriction than the supply and the demand; the increase of the public security, that will result in protection
and security for the private property and the legal operation by a liberal Constitution; the combat to the poverty, more as the good
desire and with a traditional Christian attitude near the charity and the
benevolent affection, that like a commitment of justice, or an option by the
poor men that goes further on, even to the possibility of modifying and of
subvert the social order that allows to the existence of the misery and the
marginal; the attack to the corruption,
defined as all conduct that violates the principles of the Christian moral and
the reason of State. It is peculiar
that the mentioned debates are carried out by elite. The written, wireless or
t.v. press, gathers and spreads the opinion of intellectuals, political
leaders, initiative private leaders or who play the double critical role and
instructors of the art of the deceit that is the political activity. Those are the members of the cupolas that
organize and promote the round tables, opinion programs, the discussions. Thus, successively public scenes
are taken place by groups San Ángel and without angel, famous writers,
the presidents of supervisory organisms, the politicians eager for image. Of this form the concepts like democracy,
security and justice, happen pieces of the game in the great board of the
political. If we put the eyes in the board and not in the pieces, it seems
evident that what is in game in fact they are the rules to obtain, to conserve
and to distribute the power, subject this one that always has been faculty of
elite, activity of privileged groups which representatives of the elements in
struggle say themselves and they are assumed, without modesty, like the
carriers of the voice of the town, when the word: “town” is another concept
of the political jargon that is only useful in the battle in order to get
power.
49. - To ignore the reason of State simply or the
reason, implies to release the different reasons, the plurality, the underlying
irrationality in the human nature.
Reason, progress, popular sovereignty, are concepts that have had three
centuries to demonstrate themselves more inefficient in the profit of a
balanced social organization more equal and health. The Greek culture saw the birth of the political, perhaps it is
called on to the culture of the century XXI, to be present at his death or at
least his abandonment. To participate
in political, in the speech of the power, from the side that is, means after
all to integrate itself to the simulator game.
To think that it is possible to be arrived at any place or the truth happening through the power is an
aspiration that finishes failing, in political a nail does not remove another
nail, only makes holes in the wall.
50.
- The policy is an activity that
intends the profit or the conservation of the power. Whatever it is the flag or the assembly of beliefs that animate
to a political organization, whereas political its real intention is the power,
the access to the control tools which they allow to impose a particular project
of social order. A political party
processes a social project, a platform of principles and later it tries to
reduce the reality to his model and to become of the coercive, legal and
ideological means, that seem to him but useful in their reduction and alienated
task.
51. - The power infests everything, introduces its
dark interests until in the intimate relations or in chats after dinner, it is
an indefinable and multiform beast, it
is able in the deceit, it is in our way
to dream and to move to us. The power
does not have friends nor loyalties, serves to the interest of the strongest
ones, has as a function to grow and to concentrate itself, transforms into ways
fortifying to values like the beauty or the goodness. The motor of the power is desire, aspiration of the absolute reason and the progress. The best form to overcome the beast is with
the emptiness, without desire, the loosening and the calm of that does not look
for because it knows that the intellect and the reason produce monsters. By all this it better turns out to enjoy
rain, the weeping of a crystal in the middle of the afternoon, a deployment of
an overcast sky under desert, the useless activity to imprison with red the
unspeakable thing.
52. - All speech, even this, involves traps and
shelters between lines the elements for its own destruction, is for that reason
that the critical, frequently suffers of the impact of the projectiles that she
herself lance. Assuming the risks I
reflect then on a subject which occupies a considerable time and space in the
story that construct the press of masses and that it tries to equip with sense
to any event. Many voices rise to demand, to promote and to weigh the
democracy, nevertheless, whenever I hear or I read that term, something takes
to suspect to me that with that word they hide an endless number of projects
and I interest diverse and contradictory. Democracy is a political concept,
includes in its etymology the word: “power” to be able yet what it
implies: the division of the human
beings in dominant and dominated.
Without mattering as it is the method by which a power is implanted, the
force or the vote, it exists nothing.
53. - The democracy will only fulfill an objective
of desirable humanization, if the voters are able, objective, free of prejudice
and manipulation, if they count on all the elements of necessary judgment, if
dependency loops do not exist among them, if the power of has not influence nor
presses on the vote of others. In other
words, the real democracy only can occur between equal and for the equal ones,
for that reason the practice of the present democracy is cheating in the
measurement in which it preserves the domination relations, favors the ascent
and the control of the power on the part of the dominant class and its servers. Still the best democratic intentions, those
of those politicians of good faith who create possible justice in the
inequality, finish crashing in the traps of
the naivete and the deceit.
54. - The political is an activity that prevents
the democratic fact persistently. The
political looks for the power as objective and it is used the inequality, the
speech and the lie to obtain his aims.
The art of the political is the one of the seduction, the appearance,
the deceit, is sister of the war and they encourage desires to it, the
interests, the ambition. All the
theoreticians of the political, from
Maquiavelo to our days, from Sun Tzu to Weber, define it as an activity
that generates mirages, uses themselves all the resources necessary to distort
the reality and to make believe the contender, and to the voter, who the own
vision of the world is only the desirable one;
thus, power, political and democracy are united in inextricable form. The political rationality persecutes
different aims, to the democratic one.
Democracy and policy maintain to a perennial game of the cat and the
mouse where the second one will fatally finish swallowing to the first one.
55. - Political is a term with an enormous
semantic load, a key that lays way towards an endless number of meanings. The ambivalence, the contradiction, blurred
and the unfinished thing are forced companions of the political activity, this
one clarifies all human conduct, from the erotic to the religious, excluding
the truly mystical one. Who writes
about political makes political and walks by force on slippery floor, she is
introduced in a world in which the things are and they are not what they seem,
is deceived with the truth, the false thing is transformed evidence and common
place. The political is a space without
handles, mutable, nervous, filled with hiding places and traps.
56.- The definition can go
for two different roads: the first one conceives it as all behavior whose end
is the achievement or the conservation of the power, that is to say, all
aspiration to hinder, to take place or to drive the acts of the other ones. The
second have to do with the art of reconciling the diverse thing and the
contradictory thing, subjecting the individual selfish interest for benefit of
the collective. For the first road the goal is the power, the increase and
concentration of the capacity of deciding for the other ones and of imposing a
vision of the physical and social order; the power as guide always takes us to
the authoritarianism and the rigidity. For second o'clock via the end is the
well being of all, the justice and harmony that it allows the healthy
development of the community.
57. - It is said much about political, the press,
the chats at snack bar and informal chats, they invest a lot of hours in
the analysis and judgment of the acts
and public personalities. Nevertheless, when we judge about political
we fall frequently in confusions that produce a vertigo sensation and feels
nauseous, this must to that generally we extract moral categories or judgments
removed from the philosophy and the ethics to
value the political, which is as much as to want to measure the liters
with a metric, the frustration will be inevitable.
58. - For M. Weber (the Political like vocation,
Premiá 1981), politician is the one that makes a pact with the devil, the one
that puts in practice all its capacity of seduction and deceit to satisfy the
Prince, who is not another thing that the incarnated power in the authority; for And G. Pedrero (the loose cord, FCE 1982), political is the
art of conciliating virtue and fortune, the reason and the random. The certain
thing is that political it is a conduct, a assembly of performances in
accordance with a preconceived aim; it is
not spontaneous nor natural, always it hides doubles intentions, like in the
game, is inhaled to deceive on the contrary to overcome it, to prevent that it
prevents our intentions. The
measurement of the political success gives it the fact to obtain dominion objectives, of vision and
perspective imposition. In this sense
the political is an art, the one to process and to put in practice the greater
possible number of strategies, of decoys.
The capacity to deceive, to make prevail a vision over the others, to
impose a direction of the vote and the legitimacy, it is known him like
political office. The best player of
poker and the best politician will be that than better they know to lie.
59. - The art of political acting mounts on desire
and it is constructed with the seduction, the courtesy, the diplomacy, the
ambition, the falsification. The
opposite of the political conduct is the spontaneous one. The passion, the freedom, the love with
emotions that are satisfied to themselves, that they do not hide to interests
nor intentions, are born with naturalness, are essentially out of
political. The free and enthusiastic
spirit who puts surely to make political will fail in the attempt, will leave
the experience with a strong flavor of defeat and bitterness.
60. - With the saying up to here they acquire
knowledge, more or less, the risks of touching to the political subject and the
paradoxes that imply. Who plays with
mirrors is in danger to lose his image.
61. - As far as the concrete political commentary,
it can settle in multiple levels, from the cynical handling of the supposition
and the gadget, to the wise reflections of philosophical order around the human
and social nature, the power, justice.
A middle point of view is the
best one for the objective analysis, if this can be possible of the daily political fact, its
repercussions, their probability of success or failure, its alliance or its
rupture with the desirable projects of human organization.
62. - To write about political leads to us to
paradoxes, to the place in which the gadget and the reflection, known and the
surprise have capacity. The chronicle
of the power is constructed with smoke and mirrors on steep land. The power is like the water that is present
everywhere, contaminates informal chats of the engagement and the merchants, of
the clerks, the friars, the teachers;
it breaks the reality to form it to his whim again; it counts a history to which continuously it
changes to outcomes and argument.
63. - I can tell you what it is happened to me:
the appointments, the selections, the forest of the statues without head
and laurels, the customs of the chameleons and the nature of the
scorpions. Any thing will have to do
with the hammer of the power that models it.
In another side I said to you that only the destruction of the political
and its multiple disguises would open the doors towards one more a healthier
and respectful life. Nevertheless my
text is a trap, tries to exert a power without it notices. The language lives prisoner in the
conventional jail on its grammar, of such form that is the power also the one
that describes it, imposes course and objective to it, the one that orders
texts to make a false history.
64 - Mexico received the New Year between the
surprise and the lethargy, (Chiapas 1994) the undertow brought the discovery to
us of other realities, the hidden ones, those that run by dark sources, the one
that is beyond the lenses of the cameras and the rotating ones. I believe that the dying year showed the
scars to us, the wounds, taught to us that in Mexico they are plus the ruptures
that the agreements. The dominant culture makes a story sewing it with the
thread that forms the forgetfulness.
Our political develops by means of cheating alliances and real reasons,
of joined conflicts, theoretical and intellectualizes proposals that they do
not try to solve but to dominate.
65. - After the revolution the power struggled to
agglutinate to all the parties in one single one: the one of the State.
Today the power looks for the integration of all the parties in a
political system: the one of the State.
Thus it is written a history in which the reason of State is
contradicted and hit the multiple reasons of the groups and people who coexist
in the national territory. The
fundamental problem is that the vision from and of the State is a clown outfit,
a project to patches, a puzzle in which the doctors, intellectuals and wise
people try to insert the pieces with shoehorn and later to convince to us, by
means of a unintelligible and pedantic speech
that the placed piece is the correct one although boat and disarms the
puzzle in its borders.
66. - In the political
negotiation the speech plays a preponderant paper. The diverse projects of
social organization empty in a mix of concepts that, by force of repeating them
an and another time, they end up loaded without number of senses that return
them confused. The politician exercises an action of having hollowed on the
language and it transforms the sentences in trash, in something similar to a
communication intent but that it ends up in pure abstract representations, in
construction of systems that don't exist but that in the mind of who emits the
speech. After all, the language of the power is a false image of the
phenomenon, its causes and its effects. The power transforms its priests able to exchange deliriums as if they were
realities. For this reason it becomes necessary to subject some concepts that
have incorporated to the jargon common of the politicians, to an analysis that
seeks to restore their sense or at least to discover their distortions.
67. - The main mechanism that it uses the
demagogic language is the one of the generalization, consists of speaking of
fragments as if it was the totality, or of speaking about all absolutely
without recognizing that this one is formed by parts. The politician operates with abstract conceptual tools that
emanate of imaginary liberal and the modern one: the illustration. Its
idea of history and the progress takes it to try that the reality can be reduced
to the precise limits of a concept, they
are incapable to visualize the nations but they speak constantly and
without shame of the Nation, as if this last one existed in fact. When the different personages from the
political system speak of Nation or Country, they talk about, surely to the
country that they have built-in and give by seated which all we understand the
same. Now, with the threat of violence
in Chiapas, the devaluation of the weight in front of the dollar, the evident
impoverishment of wage-earning and unemployed, the increase in the number of
people in conditions of misery; the representatives of the State use arguments
and announce measures that, say, will cause the benefit of the country, the
question is in what country is thinking, in the one of "lacandones"
or "tarahumaras", in the mine
or of yours, in the one of the
inhabitants of the misery belts, in the
one of the narcotic people. The problem
is that Mexico is a palimpsest, a network of different countries, with
different necessities and aspirations, in where the modern nation, the one of
the skyscrapers and the computers, the one of Television, the World Trade
Center and the transnational businesses, is smallest of all.
68. - As well as the term Nation that happens in
political, empty concept, exists other that they induce a schematic, false
vision, for example: town, peace,
development, stability, violence. All
of them try to contain a precise meaning that it only exists in the mind of
that pronounces them but in fact they have many meanings in the same word, talk
about different things, the context alters the sense and, within the political
speech, they serve more to blind than to clarify, to justify more than to
explain. The language is a malleable
and ambiguous instrument that usually is used by the rationality of the power,
to distort the vision of the pressed one and to make think it that the reality
of the dominator is the same one that the one of the dominated one.
69. - Who starts to political - Weber- says makes
a pact with the devil. To participate in policy, for any reason, from the
desire of being able to the pleasure of the experience, introduces in a
minefield, full of traps and paradoxes to us in which the values happen to
second term to let their place to the interests. By this the moral sentence of the great public towards the
politician, for this one the important thing consists of making prevail its
reasons over the reason of the others and uses for it all the arms of the
simulation and the deceit. The social
sentence to the politician is valid and desirable, the political mind,
transforms what touches in a speech. We
would wish that the rationality postmodern decreed the death of the political
if this was not, also, a political act.
70. - We can define to the policy of many forms, but in general we understand like that activity directed it to the solution and ordering of the subjects of public interes