Barcelona Metropolis

There is a debate within the left that I find not only intellectually misleading but also politically ineffective. It involves a form of Marxism that questions the need to engage in the “cultural battle” amid material injustice and inequality. Furthermore, it suggests that only data can resolve the “narratives”, which are deemed either fraudulent or, at best, distractions.

The natural habitat of human beings, let’s not forget, is language and the economy operates with words just as much as poetry does. This doesn’t mean that the economy is spiritual (although it can be abstract at times), but rather that poetry (and, by extension, propaganda) is as tangible as bread itself. In fact, no modern revolution has ever demanded only bread or simply asked for bread. One might be pushed to the extreme of begging for food, but when one does so, they know they are being treated like an animal rather than a human being. When bread is missing, it is either stolen or, at the very least, claimed; and claiming bread places the word “bread” into a semantic realm where it quickly intersects with other material concepts: the French Revolution, which emerged largely from the hunger of the sans-culottes, demanded equality, liberty and fraternity.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 never mentioned or wrote the word bread without also mentioning or writing freedom and dignity. No crisis is merely an economic crisis wrapped in the cryptic language of ideological delusion or religious alienation, those murky spectres that might obscure the truth of the world. Human beings (and the systems that control them) do not only vie for territories or material resources; they also compete for the words with which they define their bodies and the relationships they have with each other. In essence, every crisis is always a crisis of meaning, or, if you prefer, a crisis of naming. During crises, names become battlefields, field hospitals, maternal laps and burning nails.

This has always been the case, but especially since the concept of crisis shifted from the realm of nosology (where it referred to the critical moment in an illness when its outcome was determined) to become, in the 19th century, the very measure of capitalist “progress”. Crisis is no longer a “moment” in which we can gain or lose our lives, nor merely a dangerous recurrence; it has become the internal logic of a “civilisation” in which, for better or worse, “God is dead” and “all that is solid melts into air”.

It wasn’t Marx and Engels who disrupted the more or less stable world of our ancestors, nor was it Nietzsche who killed God. Rather, it was the convergence of three autonomous forces that today’s reactionary fears confuse with the rampant right-wing populisms and neofascisms spreading across the globe: capitalism, science and liberation movements.

Capitalism, especially in its neoliberal form, is a syndemic, to use Merrill Singer’s term, or a polycrisis, according to Adam Tooze. In other words, it is a dynamic cluster of increasingly accelerated entropies that are relatively detached from politics. Science, for its part, tied to its technological applications, appears to have fulfilled the prediction made by physicist Von Neumann in 1957: “the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”.

As for liberation struggles, in recent decades they have created new rights-bearing subjects who sometimes seek a name in which to recognise themselves and from which to claim a place in the old world. This isn’t a narrative, except in the sense that any description is also a form of narrative. Crisis implies complexity; and this complexity, both objective and material, is associated with an unprecedented difficulty in answering those three questions that every era has asked and answered in its own way: Who holds the power? What can I believe in? What do words mean?

Dostoevsky – let’s remember – wrote that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted”. However, the issue is far more serious: if God does not exist, everything can be renamed. In a well-known dialogue by Plato, Hermogenes and Cratylus debated who the Namer was – whether it was an arbitrary god or a god who would let things speak for themselves. What troubled Socrates was the possibility of falsehood, embedded at the heart of language as its most intimate and impregnable freedom. This potential for deception made man free but did not make the world deceitful.

For centuries, humans have indeed lied, deceived, exaggerated and changed the names of things. Yet, these actions took place under conditions where common sense could still believe in the idea of a Namer who had given a single, true name to things. Those conditions no longer exist. Today, it is the world itself that deceives.

To be able to name things

The so-called cultural battle is, indeed, the most material of battles because it revolves around the names of things, which have ceased to be stable (just as the Earth itself has). In other words, they have stopped being our shared home. We cannot live exposed to the elements. We need to be able to name things, especially when we sense that things themselves are dissolving into thin air or becoming tangled and merging into amorphous flows of molten lava.

Amidst a complexity that is only comprehensible to artificial intelligence (AI), we urgently need to understand at least what names things have, what words mean, and what the “true” connection is between signifiers and meanings. We should not take the disquiet of right-wing populist voters lightly, nor should we dismiss it as merely a mystifying reinterpretation of deeper economic discontent. Protest is subjective; malaise is not.

In this context of a nominalist crisis, the temptation is twofold: either to revert to the names given to things by God, the Church or our ancestors, as the most reactionary demand, or to distrust all Nominators, as conspiracy theorists of every kind do. Who holds the power? Soros, the gay lobby, the feminazi conspiracy, immigrants. What do words mean? Woman means vagina, man means penis. What can we believe in? Nothing that an institution, an image, or a news story says; anything that a madman claims.

The Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, who died in 1965, described periods of “cultural apocalypse” as times when an “excess of meaning” (which I refer to as pansemia) is met with a strict and puritanical “oligosemy”. Just as religious fanaticism is fundamentally oligosemic, so is neofascism. We are indeed facing a severe crisis of names, or an apocalyptic era – not because of climate change or the spread of deadly wars, but due to the proliferation of names and the violent attempt to condense them into a pair of irreconcilable antonyms.

The names have dissolved, he said, due to three converging forces, each with different origins: neoliberal capitalism, applied sciences and liberation movements. Take feminism, for example – its progress is inextricably linked to all three. Neoliberalism has desacralised female sexuality through market contracts; science has separated reproduction from motherhood, and even further, motherhood from gestation, opening up new possibilities for female desire while also introducing difficult ethical and legal dilemmas; and feminist movements have driven significant anthropological and legal shifts. Distinguishing between these three factors is necessary but challenging. This is why, as Clara Ramas points out in her excellent book El tiempo perdido [Lost Time], feminism has become the bête noire of reactionary malaise: “Gender”, Ramas writes, “is the last stronghold of identity. Gender is, therefore, the final trench in the cultural war of melancholy. Gender, in the eyes of the melancholics, is the last anchor to cling to in a world where the creative destruction of capitalism has upended everything”. In response to pansemia, defensive oligosemy fixates on immigration, universalism and feminism.