Adrián Cangi y Ariel Pennisi*

1.

In the new landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic, slogans are agitated and advertisements of private or state companies, of national or provincial shares, which seek to construct new «heroes» and «heroines» of society, while trying to point out the catalogue of public «friends» and «enemies» are aired. These are advertisements that have become vectors because they indicate the growth or decrease of happiness or sadness, while modulating by scalar signs the social mood through their affections, sensations and perceptions. Some audiovisual examples are worth mentioning, such as those of YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales) or the City Police (Policía de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires) -beyond their obvious differences- that circulate in the present of the democratic metropolis as we usually call it, although its name hides the old sense of polis, a true agonizing term that brings together free rivals in «discrepancy» against the athleticism of advertising and politics as a police force. On TV and on the networks advertisements and propaganda such as those mentioned above are played, although it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish these terms, which is why it seems better to call them by their «design» name, as pastiches belonging equally to the era of science and democracy of large numbers and algorithmic curves. Good examples of this visual scenario are the messages of YPF or the City Police, with overlapping or explicit slogans that stingour memory.

In view of the present event, in the era of the multiplication of formulas and images, history seems to need moves with literary claim for a new scientific, narrative and political contract, populated by seductive stories and excessive words. These actions of diffusion were never innocent or empty of meaning in the history of the West, but even less so in the memory of the recent archives of the dictatorship of the disappearance of people. We recall didactic advertisements from the period of the state of emergency during the dictatorship, in which the figure of the «virus» and the «strange organisms» is used to explain «the action of the forces of order» against the so-called «subversion». At present, these advertisements are carried out in a context called «war» against the «invisible enemy» although they make visible the senses of unity, conquest, and health, with which they confront the «unwanted» organisms. Voices of specialists in science are invoked, memories of the names of the history of national independence are recovered, sensitive sediments are evoked that aspire to reunite the common identity that is still disintegrated in the social sphere. Once again, the desire of the epic and the hero in the face of the last tragic enemy is expressed. The enemy in this case is not extraterrestrial, but biological, but the enthusiasm of the catastrophe argument seems to be the same: to save the Earth in the unity of humanity. As in those films, democracy and freedom unite to fight for survival, or as YPF’s publicity says, in the glory of the supreme combat: ‘Health to the Argentinian people!’*1]

Facing the great threat, domestic virtues are prized, parental care is valued, moral pacts are regularized, but something more powerful corrodes democratic political ideals, a binary logic deprived of its other, organizes the whole of mental images. It is about the search for victory over the invisible totalitarian enemy, although today scientists are trying to give us an image of the virus, with the pretension of a radical refoundation of the community. The prolonged catastrophe encourages a consensus of private virtues and an edifying spirit of good national or regional government. «To fight», «to divide» and «to take possession» are old military terms from the theology-politics that are spreading among us like the emotions of government advertisements, of a population that lives in reality the fiction of a catastrophe film. It seems to be the only exit declared between total boredom and absolute threat, where the figure of the enemy and the struggle for survival find the promise, in the past or in the present, of desired heroism. As in the myths of the great battles, the unity of the People and the state of mind of the values are set ablaze by words that are intended to be prophetic.

The epic of the good scientist, the good doctor, the good essential activities, call for «heroes» of society, because they live on the thin red line of battle. They claim, to the right and to the left of the intellectual field, the word «hero», the one we do not stop hearing in this time of domestic confinement. The word «hero» only seems comparable in its resonance in this social moment, with the sad unity forced by the media and the networks in the preliminaries of the World Cups in which a glory and joy shines far away. Of course, it is about ensuring the leadership of the good intentions of common sense and good moral sense: «one more step, Argentines, to be Republicans in the unity of an epic!». But the reverse side of common sense and good moral sense hides desired revisionist stories and returns of a foresighted order which appeals for heroes as saviors. It should be considered that, when politicians call for civilian heroes from a secluded population who can exercise good conscience over themselves for the care of themselves and others, when virologists and doctors look for moral epics of heroes and heroine saviors among the population who can donate blood for fortified plasma, when the media chicanes from their stands for the common sense of the iron control of the neighbors under the power of social denunciation in the name of a just cause, the glory of «heroes» and «heroines», with their own names or anonymous, on which the acrobatic balance of the common and moral sense of our societies rests, has triumphed among us.

The foundation of one of the great myths of modern political philosophy is the threat of absolute war, which demands the alienation of the rights of each individual. From Hobbes to Schmitt, the threat of death that comes from every man is insisted upon and points to another man. And always another people or another political system, lent itself to representing the enemy with its threat of slavery or death. Figures of this «absolute enemy» turn problematic. As in catastrophe films of an apocalyptic nature, the only real war is the war against absolute death. Today we face a strange game between faced death and denied death, between absolute fear and calm confidence. The task of ancient tragedy was to purge or purify fear in order to transform disturbance into knowledge. But since then, the epic has generated an absolute mobilization against imaginary death. In the great democratic peace proclaimed by failed modernity and followed by the supermodernity of the «virtual sixth continent», the war against the invisible makes it possible to evoke once again the heroes who will seek our identity and survival. However, all the senses turn out to be more fragile when in one move, from pastoral power to reason of state, the arts of government make the police «heroes». It is worth remembering that the police had as its function between the 16th and 17th centuries the «vigilance of all that is visible», as part of a nascent science of administration in the service of the State and as a control of the abuses of the rationality of power. Since the genesis of capitalism, the reason of State and the theory of the police have been intertwined in the progressive formation of modern States. But we must not forget that the police are not only a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. No government is only wisdom and prudence without displaying the power and «vigor» of the State.

2.

A propaganda video of the Police of the City of Buenos Aires is circulating on the networks and on television. The gesture is strange in a democratic context, since it is not a communication piece of a government promoting new officers or equipping its security force or – less frequently – training it. What is its institutional status, if the security forces are supposed to fulfill the civilian mandate under its strict control, before advertising themselves? What kind of «piece» is this? A brief description is in order, not without a minimum of critical exercise. A female voice is heard, almost a carbon copy of the voice of María Eugenia Vidal, the former governor of the province of Buenos Aires, who has a better image in the city than «there», where her government left more debt, more poverty, less work, less infrastructure and… less public safety. The solemn tone, but measured by a listening that is rather refractory to conventional political solemnity, is confused with a musical background that is typical of a certain advertising epic that sustains the escalation of images: a well-dressed and well-equipped police officer helping an elderly woman to put sanitizer on her hands, others rescuing a lady from a collapse, attending a traffic accident, and so on. It highlights a central aspect of the police, their community tasks, while highlighting the one thing the police share with the firefighters: risk.

Some meanings from the past return to the scene described. As in the 17th century in Europe, the local police would be a technique of self-government of the State that carries with it the virtue of «friendly cooperation» with a view to an equal and honest exchange between citizens. That is why in the audiovisual piece the tone asks for recognition, it shows in the request the reversibility of the proximity: now it is your turn, «you are a citizen» who has to come closer to greet them, support them and congratulate them on their task of administration. At some point, the most realistic aspect of the design of the audiovisual piece, the only concrete thing that it ‘makes use of’ to build credibility, is physical proximity. Even in the ambivalence of its visibility, since, on the one hand, the excessive police presence is a sign of control for some and of security for others, it is in itself an aesthetic – and boy, is the City infested with police (to borrow a word from the pandemic) – while, on the other hand, the damned habit makes the vigilant presence of the «forces» invisible -does that make them more or less effective?- even an everyday gesture, something as small as asking for the time or asking for a street, restores their visibility, this time more friendly. An imaginary neighborhood in extinction, inhabited by grocers, newsagents, elegant street vendors, among others, urban mythology, where the policeman on the corner appeared as a charitable reference.

But that is not the Buenos Aires of the expensive exclusive lanes sold as «metrobuses», of cement on cement, of «intelligent» garbage cans, of proselytizing public works, the make-up city, the city that sells pots as tree, a sort of masonry theme park that makes the real estate business and debt in dollars its main forms of money circulation. There is no neighborhood imaginary that is enough to restore the image of the «good cop». Because if the city is that comfort of ‘fraudsters’, cipayos of a false Europe, «colonized machine to chop boludos» *2] (as Tato Bores laughingly repeated); the new City Police was born old. Both in its composition (plagued by former federal agents and those of other forces), as well as in the discourse of its commanders (military and authoritarian), in its repressive actions and in its corrupt behavior.

The meaning proposed by the image of the «good policeman» is only restored to a more or less «illustrated» world, aware of the instrumental violence of culture and capable of remembering the past from their condition as owners. In that world it is known that for the «happy life» of a few to exist, the police had to become those in charge of monitoring population statistics, the circulation of people and goods, public health in plague seasons, accidents in public life and the discipline of pushing out the poor, beggars and vagabonds. The police, from the eighteenth century to the present, is an enlightened urban invention that deals with the art of the splendor of the State, the ornament of the city and the productive man, while its concern is to cover everything «visible» and to deal with that which is diluted in the shadows. That is why the police is the great imaginary and literary vector of the police genre in the nascent modern State, because it is going to watch over the «good», proprietary and productive citizenship. The «life management science» is interested, since then, in the indispensable, useful and superfluous of individuals, strengthening the image of the «good policeman» dedicated to mercy, connection, communication and health as his task of «friendly cooperation». «Policing» and «urbanizing» are then the same thing. But where is the instrumental and physical violence, the one that does not evoke this diplomatic image and of power of rational intervention with noble, solidary, and benevolent objectives? What sense does this valuation of the good use of the force contain, more regulatory than despotic, where the police would take care of the «details» of the good government?

Under what circumstances does this audiovisual piece emerges? An «institutional piece» in times of pandemic? Does the emergency situation legitimize an institutional material that is also an emergency? Or is it the political exploitation of a situation in which, it seems, authority reconnects with its modern foundation: fear? The «principle of authority» seems to be in a good moment thanks to a public discourse that is composed by a mixture of sanitary purposes, fear and security disguised as care. It seems to be a tactical moment to take advantage of the pandemic and the implementation of an unprecedented quarantine, which capitalizes on a benevolent attitude of a good part of the population (the majority?) towards authority. Sounds like a scoundrel, and it is.

What is proposed? If heroism is a remote possibility of human experience that, when it appears, seems to test the very meaning of historical life, the advertising slogan of the Police institution empties it of its dramatic core: «Heroes for life!». Because in advertising there is no conflict, but a harmonious city disturbed only by statistical accounting accidents. It is the height of the denial of conflict, to eliminate it just in the reference to heroism, that is, where the conflict speaks to us most strongly about ourselves, where it tells us about our powers at the moment when we ‘can’ everything we can at the risk of this not being enough. Heroism sleeps on the edge of the tragic when someone -who knows how or why- takes that place.

Every hero tells of the tragic, because deep down, he accepts beforehand the possibility of perishing, of not reaching his goal or what will inevitably happen: the feat that seems eternal comes to an end, its scope is as limited as the happiness in Tom Jobim’s song («sadness has no end, happiness does»). *3] It is in the scheme of heroism, so often used by tyrannical regimes (from dictatorships to the entertainment industry), that the tragic lives as an acceptance of irreducible conflicts that, despite anguish, generate discord and unrest, are an expression of the very vitality of the social. There is nothing more dramatic in its consequences than denying the underlying drama of modern societies. This everyday heroism, as our false Maria Eugenia Vidal says in the video (as if the usual imposition of the «real» Maria Eugenia Vidal were not enough), tastes like a pat on the back, a mere exaltation of gestures of an everyday life without greater conflict than the «accidents» of life in the metropolis, almost at the antipodes of tragic heroism. In fact, the institution that advertises itself in this video is the same one that alerts about the heroes… «that nobody wants to play the hero!» (no one who doesn’t belong to the police).

In that sense, everyday heroes would not only maintain a close relationship with «neighbors» – the inhabitants of «each day» – but also a certain kinship. To put it bluntly, the informer or «snitch» is a pusillanimous cousin of the cop. But some affiliation could also be found in the fearful man, in the individualistic boy, in the woman who puts «her own thing» over any situation, in the «lynch mob» that rages against a little boy and afterwards asks if it was true that he stole a cell phone… For the authority, for the point of view of the authority, there should be no conflict, since it only sees conflictive «individuals». Isn’t that a form of authoritarianism? At the moment in which the clip enumerates the names by which the «conflictive» ones usually refer to the police: «vigilante», «cana», «gorra», «botón» (and it falls short), he closes the sentence with the typical stop call: «stop there!» Does it address neighbors proposing a common language? Does it victimize the police? Does it speak to the rest of the security forces, seeking their complicity? Does it warn the ‘guachines’ or ‘piberío’ *4] that once the clip is broadcasted, these terms will be the cause – now justified by a video that appears on TV and circulates on the networks – of reprimands like those they already know (which, of course, could never be shown in an institutional video)?

 By sanctioning the street language that has emerged to criticize or circumvent police authority, that is, by exposing the grammar invented by those who suffer «every day» from siege, execution and violence of all kinds on the part of the police, in a propaganda piece made with State resources, certain sectors are singled out as being in conflict. And… what do you do with the «conflictive» in a city without conflict? A city that, at most, suffers from the «Aristotelian accident», inherent to its good functioning, a city that sounds as good as that advertising jingle, that looks as clean as the digital image, a city that claims to be aseptic and has already shown itself to be willing to do anything to maintain its cleanliness. -It is enough to remember the vehicles without license plates with which the Macri and Larreta government, from the beginning, removed the belongings of beggars and improvised shacks, hitting them and applying violence as illegal as those white vans. Paradoxes of asepsis, methodical filth for a foolproof cleaning. UCEP, Unidad de Control del Espacio Público, is a name we should not forget because it encompasses the long list of edicts, ordinances and measures between the moral function and the art of war.

A social group and any person who likes that grammar is punished for their way of speaking and it is done in a piece of state communication. They are identified without the need to require an ID card, they are segregated, they are separated from the rest of society and they are pointed out to those who live a life considered legitimate above that other, the usual bad life. The history of the undesirables in our country wrote part of our literature, of our historiographic essays and of the available research of the vituperative social sciences. But, fundamentally, it was written about the bodies themselves. On the other hand, it is notorious that the police do not speak as in the video in question. Hardly that word of order at the end («stop!») resonates as something known from their real language. The police have other codes – some are mafia codes – their rigid, harsh dialectics, even their reckless silences. Gregorio Kaminsky, who dedicated a good part of his life to instructing members of different police forces, called attention to the closed nature of the military language and the limits that this meant in terms of subjectivity. He said that a policeman «has degraded, restricted and even ‘forbidden’the terminological use». In this sense, the street, the town, the slums, are more inventive, owners of a vitality that springs up again and again from elusive days, from the sensation that nothing is enough, from the adversity that sometimes wears a uniform… burgundy, black and blue. Is this vitality what, in the end, the ‘cops’ and the ‘sneakers’ and the ‘pusillanimous’ who like to call themselves «neighbors» punish?  

3.

A fresh resonance of simultaneous repression and victimization: stones where thrown at a mixed group of city police by one of the fronts of the December 2017 march protesting pension adjustment in a context of permanent economic adjustment. The government at the time also tried to move forward with the idea heroism of adjustment. What followed was labor reform. But the street prevented it. However, on that day, the Larreta government exposed that ‘little group of police’ to a situation of risk, just like simple workers who receive orders. At that point, for an instant, one could perceive the real closeness of these police officers to the demonstrators: we were all workers! But the order was to provoke and repress. Beyond the infiltrators of the case – we saw them clearly breaking some windows without any sense – the scene was perfectly prepared: the police had to be transformed into victims of the «conflicting», and they did it at the expense of the integrity of their own workers. As long as there are police, there will always be that threshold where some demonstrators, in the fervor of wage, legal, libertarian, and other bidding, urge the uniformed laborers who look from behind a fence or a transparent shield to take that short step as an abyss, undoing an entire symbolism with a gesture. There are honorable examples that are never enough. Will they be the last heroes or the last enemies?   

*1] «¡Al Gran Pueblo Argentino, Salud!», line from the Argentinean National Anthem

*2] «máquina colonizada de cortar boludos», Tato Bores, comedían

*3] Tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim. Tom Jobim

*4] term for young people, often dismissive

* Adrian Cangi: * Essayist. Doctor in Philosophy and Literature  (Universidade de São Paulo). He teaches at the University of Buenos Aires, at the National University of La Plata and at the National University of Avellaneda, where he directs the Master in Latin American Contemporary Aesthetics. Author of Gilles Deleuze. Una filosofía de lo ilimitado en la naturaleza singular (Quadrata-Biblioteca Nacional, Red Editorial 2010, 2014);

  • Ariel Pennisi: Essayist, editor, teacher (UNDAV, UNPAZ), author of Papa Negra (EL) and Globalización. Sacralización del mercado (Errepar). Co-editor of Revista Ignorantes (with Rubén Mira), host and co-producer of Pensando la Cosa (Canal Abierto).

Published jointly:  Filosofía para perros perdidos. Variaciones sobre Max Stirner (Autonomía, Red Editorial, 2018) and compiledLinchamientos. La policía que llevamos dentro (Autonomía-Pie de los Hechos, Red Editorial, 2014)

Translation: Johanna Bock

To see the video mentioned in the text…

Horacio González

A note on heroism

It is clear that military metaphors have largely taken over the description of actions linked to quarantine. Many comrades have published very sharp articles pointing …

Rubén Mira

Pig Shooting (ten notes on the birth of a healthy sport)

I When I was talking about the revolution of 1893, my old man said that after the central events a collective revenge was triggered. As …

Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta

Working without telling stories: police, sacrifices and violence

1. A policeman is not just a policeman or, rather, a policeman is much more than a policeman. A police officer can be a father, …