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- Postpandemic perspectives - March 13, 2021
- Posthumanism: Romanian scenery 5 - August 26, 2020
| “Abandonado, y tiene dias que no ha comido desesperado, camina la calle perdido no ha conseguido alimento y lleva dias que no ha dormido” | “abandoned, he hasn’t eaten in days desperate, he walks the streets with no direction he hasn’t found any food and didn’t sleep in days” |
SantaFe doesn’t employ any complicated language here. He sticks to a factual, simple, plain vocabulary to describe a somber image. The description matches nevertheless the overall state of the intended representation. Hunger is simple, hunger is powerful. It is factual and present all too often, unfortunately.
This is not a description of basic needs though. It goes beyond this and packs the force of the simplest, yet most effective morality: that no one should starve, as Adorno rightly notices. Hunger is not a mere physiological need of survival, but is a powerful political and moral phenomenon. Why is the abolishment of hunger the simplest, yet most effective morality for Adorno? In minima moralia Adorno sees hunger as the basic entrapment of individuals in the machinery of progress-society when understood in the logic of basic needs that oppose free acts. He refers here most probably to Kantian morality, that propounds that the subject needs to be its own law-giver, which can only occur when empirical, dirty, impure drives are not a hindrance for our free acts. People can be free, only when not determined by exterior, impure drives such as hunger. The more one purifies themselves* from these impure drives, the more free they are. In a progress society this means that the more one produces, the more wealth one accumulates, the more free one is.
This reading does not do justice to Kant’s work, but it does capture the misreading of Kant in liberal and neo-liberal societies. Production is a means of becoming free, of liberating yourself from hunger so you can indulge in the non-barbaric activities of the enlightened. This logic however promotes oppression of the ones that produce. Hunger and the inherent drive to suppress fuels production. Furthermore it marginalizes completely those who do not produce, who cannot produce, and casts them away at the outskirts of starvation. Produce or be superfluous! This is the imperative of progress society. Be productive and efficient or be invaluable.
In this framework any pleasure, any inactivity, as well as any basic need are defined as trivial and vulgar ” by the commodity character, which consigns the pleasures to idiocy, by the brutality of command, whose terrifying echo resounds in the high spirits of the rulers, finally by their fear of their own superfluousness “. (minima moralia) In contrast to this, to abolish hunger independently of securing production based liberties, means to emancipate society from progress. It means to make place for the vulgarity of inactivity and the irrationality of laziness as non-productivity.
When SantaFe tells the story of hunger, he does not sing of a basic physiological need, but of oppression and marginalization. He talks of a person that does not fit, that makes no sense, that needs to be eliminated by progress as its own self-justification. A starving person is in this logic no person at all, but a wandering ghost of self-asserting individualism. SantaFe’s song says it better:
| “No confía en nadie, tiene triste la mirada Siempre camina solo, conoce la madrugada Acostumbrado al frío, lleva el alma congelada Vagando, sin temor, no le tiene miedo a nada No tiene dueño, ni casa donde vivir Las calles, su refugio, no tiene dónde dormir Él sólo tiene hambre y ganas de sobrevivir Dispuesto a conseguirlo, todo antes de morir Tiene hambre de amor, si te acercas desconoce No sabe querer, el cariño no conoce Pasan de las doce, que nadie lo acose Los sentimientos ya no los reconoce” | He doesn’t trust anybody, his gaze is sad, He always walks alone, he is familiar with midnight, Used to the cold, his soul is frozen Wandering, with no fear, He dreads nothing, He has no owner, nor a home to live in The streets, his refuge, he has nowhere to sleep. He only has his hunger and will to survive, ready to get everything before he dies. He’s hungry for love, if you get close, he mistrusts He doesn’t know how to love, nor does he know care. Already past midnight, let no one harrass him He does not recognize feelings no more |
The person described here identifies themselves with the logic of production. They accept the marginal, solitary, unpopulated region of existence that society has ascribed them. The song acknowledges the crude divide between subsistence and the liberties of production. The one that starves struggles to survive with not access to love, refuge, or recognition. The ones that starve inhabit the solitary existence of anonymity. They embody the cruel judgement of progress-society that strips them of the right to identity.
| “Es un anónimo, nadie sabe su nombre Ha visto de todo, no hay nada que lo asombre Si le hablas no responde, mejor deja que ronde En el día se esconde y nadie sabe dónde” | He is anonymous, nobody knows his name, he’s seen everything, there is nothing that can astound him, If you talk to him, he doesn’t answer. It’s best to let him wander. During the day he hides, and nobody knows where. |
Hunger is the anonymous, hidden face of progress society and production libertarianism. It has no name and hides, so that nobody sees it (hunger). If you were to visit Mexico City – or any other big city for that matter – you would realize that hunger hides in plain sight. It is not hidden from sight, but from consciousness. The sick and starving in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven are not hidden from sight. They are seen, but they are seen as shock for tourists that deal with it with fleeting empathy and a shared photo, as disgrace for locals, as images that have to be dealt with by the government. They have no name, they have no place.
There is no hunger for progress-society. There is only vulgarity and impure drives that eventually will get resolved, as long as we produce enough. This is the promise of progress that oppreses and condemns.
It doesn’t take long to see this. Look at the difficulties of getting tested for Corona in the US and other countries, at the fear the cost of being ill instills, the fear of hunger in the absence of a universal healthcare. Look at those in Europe fleeing to their home-countries because they have no proper insurance in the countries they work in. Romania alone has seen thousands upon thousand returning home in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, look the refugees stuck at the border with Greece, packed together in large masses, with no means of defense, with no means of escape. For us, complaining safely in our houses, they have no proper name, just a general one: refugees. They embody for us a distant universal injustice, but remain anonymous while we remain irresponsible.
“In the abstract representation of universal injustice, every concrete responsibility collapses”
Adorno, minima moralia
* I am using here the plural form of pronouns for a gender neutral language.