The Democracy Development Machine by Nicholas Copeland

Author:Nicholas Copeland [Copeland, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Latin America, Central America, Developing & Emerging Countries
ISBN: 9781501736070
Google: GMCIDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-05-15T04:27:57+00:00

The Radical Organization of Pessimism

In an essay on the politics of poetry, Walter Benjamin (1999 [1929]) distinguishes the “absolute” pessimism informed by the surrealist profane illumination of bourgeois freedom and everyday life from the optimistic imagery that unites bourgeois and socialist poetics. He calls for an “organization of pessimism,” with pessimism defined as follows:

Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in … the peaceful perfection of the air force. (217–18)

Only pure pessimism, he wrote, could “expel moral metaphor from politics” and replace contemplation and “metaphysical materialism” with direct “contact with the proletarian masses,” an encounter that changes circumstances rather than attitudes. He imagined surrealist art as a technology designed to make “body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge” (56). He continues:

The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us.

Rural Mayas do not lack for “innervation” or profane illumination; mistrust of powerful and interlinked forces is a deeply engrained habit of social and political perception rooted in countless experiences of abjection. Rather than incite revolt, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, this profane illumination is more often suffocated by repressive violence that generates pessimism about the very possibility of liberatory collective action. The affective force of violence overwhelms reactions against suffering and injustice by insisting that resistance only brings worse pain. But these reactions do not simply disappear; they remain a source of tension and conflict, and they continue to build, even though some individuals have found relief through market advancement. Many bottle up their frustrations in stress and worry; others prey on those more vulnerable. Systematic targeted violence clamps down the lid on the pressure cooker that is Guatemalan society, but it is not enough on its own to stop the eruptions, signs of which are everywhere.

Authoritarian organizations of pessimism through neoliberal democracy and development channel frustration with everyday violence and defeat into movements for the continuation of the political order.32 In the following chapters I describe how electoral politics and authoritarian populism achieve this outcome. By contrast, the radical organization of pessimism channels frustration with suffering and exclusion into political movements to dismantle the structures that produce them and to create more-just and more-inclusive social arrangements. In Guatemala these structures are the liberal (and now neoliberal) economy and the Ladino state, the former systematically dispossessing and exploiting indigenous and poor people, the latter gracing this misery with the stamp of legality and excluding Mayas from positions of power (Cojtí 2007). Both were founded on violence and require violence to persist. Many Mayan Sampedranos, like many other poor and indigenous Guatemalans, fought for redistributive social democracy and suffered the consequences.

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