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That December....Two years from the 19th and 20th.What remains in us of that commotion that we have called the 19th and 20th, making reference, in this way, to the insurrectional phenomenon of the end of December 2001? First of all, there is an evidence: we are no longer the same. But perhaps it is not convenient to start from here, maybe this evidence is too worn. And yet, to ask in the first person plural can throw us once again into the language of politics: who were “we” before those events? A “dispersed” we, or a we “in formation”? Maybe not even that. Disconnected points, dumb resistances, both growing and voiceless. However, the “we” that arose during those days unfolded, sustained by a rarely exercised neighborliness. And even so it does not make possible the configuration of a clear, linear, and definitive we. Rather, the we it configures is a more sinuous one, sometimes proud of itself, but other times immersed in resignation and fear of dissolution. Let’s continue along this path. We are not the same, things changed. And this change does not possess a clear, single message. The changes are multidirectional, as multiple as the current spatiality in which we exercise our practices and thoughts. "A 'NO' was issued, new inquiries were opened, struggles were empowered, discussions were incited, relations/linkages were formed, questions were deepened, this was doing politics." In a few words: there were ideas and practices, refusals and constructions. The territory multiplied as it was inhabited in different ways. But also, people say, “all that came to nothing.” They say that there was desolation, disillusion, that the bonds that were assembled were also dismantled, and, after the long summer of 2001, there came the ebb and even the resentment toward the autonomous modes of doing. The contradiction here is not necessarily an obstacle. To corroborate the saddening of the forces that pursued a linear advance of the modes of popular self-organization should imply neither a mystification of this decline nor a minimization of the relevance of those events: in fact, there is no way to understand Argentina today without considering these modifications, as much as their persistences. Could things have worked out differently? Should they have done so? Perhaps the good intentions deserved to prevail. Or the good reasons of the brainy prophets. In the end, the becoming of the events should have happened according to different laws, and not under the complex sign of reality. But things are just like that and we do not have today significant keys to give a retroactive sense to the events of those days. We do not have this ultimate corollary of what happened that would allow us to definitively refute the intimate, anguished impression that all was in vain: an unfinished work, a wealth of energy that dissipates, a bunch of false ideas, a collective mirage that did not know how to seriously take on its challenges. Reality plays hard against the credulous, but also against the sage. And, still, we are absolutely certain about the rebellious contemporaneity of those events, to the point that following the track of its power (potencia) we can access the most profound nucleuses of intelligibility of current dilemmas. As it happens at any point of inflection, the urgency is not rooted as much--or even only--in analyzing meticulously its causes (which perhaps do not exist in a mode separated from the rupture itself), but rather in exploring the new practical possibilities, tracing the necessary links and questioning the new limits of what can be thought. Now, the grammar of the changes (and not only their possible orientations) once again reaffirms its complex character. To the point that it becomes pertinent to ask whether so many continuities (political, social and economic) speak to us of the inexhaustible capacity to persist of that which for the sake of convenience we call “reality”. Indeed, it could be the case that the events of December were nothing other than an outburst that is relatively loose for the lack of a needle that could baste it to other pieces of cloth. Only that the seam exists and leaves its marks. One way to verify the mark lies in the most immediate: the discourses that tirelessly insist in maintaining that “nothing has happened here.” There are many of them, too many—that is suspicious. Why negate so emphatically something that does not exist anyway? More still: isn’t this very negative energy indicative of a certain modification in the field of the discussible, the thinkable, the imaginable? Indeed, we have the “method of suspicion,” the most immediate. And we also have firm realities: the level of dignity attained by radical social movements. Without going too far, all the discursivity of the current government does nothing but to work at the interior of that legitimacy, of that dignity, in order to announce from there that those movements “were” very important, but are no longer necessary. Politics returns and we are told that this is reason to celebrate. In the name of this return of politics the persons that have entered into processes of radical politicization are treated as the troops of a demobilized victorious army: “thanks for the services rendered,” now go home. Demobilized and dangerous: those who articulated their demands to the organization of the struggle and contributed to the opening of an unprecedented social protagonism, are now subsumed in the greatest factory of subjectivity of contemporary capitalism: “in-security.” The paradox is set out: politics comes back to depoliticize. Now it is a matter of extinguishing the fires spread throughout the country. Politics is politics again: the social should depoliticize itself... anything that has autonomous life must immobilize itself and wait for the signal that authorizes it to be a legitimate actor. The offensive of “politics” becomes particularly shrewd when it seeks to appropriate the meaning of the events of that December. Then, undoubtedly far from not having existed, those days are reclaimed now as essential raw material with which to constitute a new legitimacy. A renewed set of languages and legalities has been activated on the basis of a strong desire for normalization. This system of transactions between the “new” and the “old” feeds a rejuvenated aspiration over the advantages that can be obtained from the recomposition of the power of command. To the extent that the forces that have taken the articulation of the social in their hands, confident in their capacity to co-opt the most novel elements of the social movement, can not avoid being continually overwhelmed by an openly reactionary tonality. And it is probably this lack of connection (between the dominant political narrative of the current processes and the disciplinary tonality that attaches to it) what makes possible to dress the present circumstances in a pathetic “seventish” cloak. Hope thus becomes waiting: the concrete struggles should subordinate themselves to the more abstract lucubrations over some relations of forces completely detached from the everyday, and rebelliousnesses (the experiences of self-organization of radical social movements) ought to adjust themselves to the new “political schedule.” Thus, the map of present-day Argentina is crossed by a normalizing vertical line made from a reinforced and paradoxical tendency toward social fragmentation (all the more paradoxical because its force lies in the promise of integration founded on a hyper-precarious laboral inclusion) and from certain features of political recomposition. But it is also crossed by a diagonal line, of multiplicity, that works on a countless variety of sites of thought. A polarization crossed through by a transversal of resistance. The cartography of a socioeconomic and cultural polarity, boycotted by a de facto resistence, and founded in precarious diffuse networks capable of becoming explicit time and again. A form of governability, then, and a strategy of assimilation of some elements of self-government--under the opposite sign; or a new managment of the work force employed and unemployed under the promise of jobs for all: from the social plans to pittance wages; or the conversion of the social plans into the meager wage base of a laughable “neo-keynesianism.” An invitation, in the end, to political and social organization that oscilate between self-government and co-management, to manage the precariousness of lives. Purely political exploitation of the work force conducted by a victimizing humanism that subordinates (sacrifices) life by denying it any capacity for autonomous creativity. Of course, this same formulation could be thought about without much problem at a continental level, because this is the current scale of the processes of subsumption of labor and natural resourses under the global market. The fourth world war intensifies. That is why it is worthwhile to consider transversality and popular self-organization as lines of defense of maximum relevance. In the end, the 19th and 20th are dates of commemoration. What politics of memory is at stake in these days? What is forgotten in this remembering? What are these memories made from? What does the present struggle over the commemoration consist of, other than a dispute over the elaboration of new legitimacies, which work from the perspective of an infinitely emptying thematization? But the initial question was different: what remains in us--or of us--two years after that December? Who are “we” today? In what practices do we articulate ourselves? What ideas make us strong if, as happens to us, we are not interested in the discourses that “come down” clean searching for realities (things and lives) to format? Where do practices, as path of verification, lead? After all, maybe there is a “we” from a certain perspective of that December. Perhaps we can discover what “we are” if we are capable of perceiving what has probably been the most radical revelation of those events: the inexistence of any a priori guarantee--as well as of any presumed privileged site--of thinking and doing.
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