badiou Archives - Forum Nepantla

We often hear the expression “you need to face reality”! What happens when reality faces you? What happens when reality hits you – literaly – in the face? I have had my share fair of encounters with reality. Fortunately, I have also been privileged enough to take a step back and reflect in peace. This article is about the facticity of reality and its impossibility of negation when it “faces” you. I will start with some anecdotes and then navigate my way to an analysis of facticity in music via Koran Streets’ songs.

The anecdotes

I was playing hide and seek. I was hidden behind a car and was enjoying the immortality of childhood. I was caught up in a magic reality that smelled of grandour and destinal heroism. Somebody grabbed me from behind, immobilizing me – a 10 year old kid – while two others were hitting me repeatedly, with no purpose, with no result. They left and I was left behind, behind the car and behind my questions. My friends saw me and told my parents. I wasn’t able, I couldn’t really do anything. My enraged father went on to find my agressors. He asked me if I know who they were. I knew, but at the same time I knew that I don’t want him to face them, so I said nothing.

Certain realities punched my innocent face. I suddenly felt time in my bones and the absurdity of contingent violence. Gratuitous violence. They didn’t steal anything, they just punched, laughed and left. No more destinal heroism, just a feeling of exposure. At the time I thought the gratuitous violence was monstruous and spectacular. It took me a lot of time to understand its banality, its contingency, its facticity.

Such realities confronted me more times than I would like to admit. But let’s fast forward to its banality.

I was visiting Mexico, where my wife’s family lives. We were there for one of her conferences. A lecture on evil in Aristotle. Mexico City is impressive and sleeping beauty out of all its pores. Especially beautiful is the UNAM campus, where the conference was. After the succesful lecture, we went for some beers. We were laughing on the way and I was completely involved in the succulent beauty of Mexico. A kind of beauty that flows like juice from agave leaves. You can’t resist it. We came to a bus station. There, my eyesight was gravitating towards a certain point. I wasn’t aware of this at first, until it hit me. A missing person poster with stamps on some of the photos: “dead”. I was struck by it, I couldn’t communicate anymore – even though nobody noticed. The others were not affected in the least. The poster was supurating violence just as the beauty of Mexico was flowing like a thick juice out of an agave leaf. It was then and there that I understood the banality of violence, present in every pore, errupting from time to time like unforeseeable spurts of lava. It was there when I understood the gratuity of violence, nothing spectacular to it.

Just as agave juice, reality and violence can get transformed. They can be isolated and shiped away. Reality doesn’t hit the same way in Tepito as it does in Lomas de Chapultepec. In Tepito it has few places to hide. In las Lomas it has too many. It hides in big houses and private security. It hides from sight, far away from the pristine hills of the rich. In Tepito and other similar places around the world it supurates continuously, as mundane as the taco places present at every corner. This happens in philosophy as well.

Rejecting the real

Philosophy often neglects the violent. It tucks it away in a corner to save face, to save continuity and systemity. It transforms it into concepts and conceptual networks. It gives it a framework that cannot fully encompass it and generalizez it as a contingent, negligent aspect of coherent thought. As Badiou or Nancy put it, philosophy cannot resist the tempation to think everthing under one unifying principle. It should though. It should look at the continuously rearranging multiplicities that often spark violence in the attempt to assert their unity, their identity. I do not wish to advocate for violence here. I wish to show that ignoring it, wrapping it up in nicely presented, conceptual abstractions repeats violence and let’s it perpetuate itself. Violence is like a trauma. It gets repeated infinitely when resisted to with artificial tools. Violence should not be tucked away in neetly ordered logical systems. It should be heard.

Let me expand with a somewhat surprising philosopher in this context – Jean-Luc Marion. Jean Luc Marion’s Phenomenology has either been associated with theology, fine art or major historical events. Many have accused him of not accounting for a great deal of phenomena and thus not respecting the universality principle of phenomenology. Christina Gschwandtner has already dealt with these issues in analysing the range of givenness – one of his central concepts – in Marion’s phenomenology. She states that, even though Marion seldomly speaks of common phenomena in terms of givenness, he does account for them. She however points out that Marion describes powerful, overwhelming phenomena, called saturated, by refering mostly to one type of phenomenon, in this case the historical event. Gschwandtner further argues that such an understanding of phenomenality can be applied to other phenomena as well, such as nature or climate change for example. Marion does indeed seem to restrict his descriptions of saturated phenomena to works of art, which are not accessible to all, to religious experiences, which most do not experience, to historical events, which do not affect us all in the same degree, or to generally liminal experiences, which do fail to support the commonality of saturation. Marion does however bring his concept of givenness and saturation into actuality by applying it to the events of September 11 and showing, how such an event forces us to seek new perspectives on reality. How? by saturating our concepts, by making them idle.

A violent, powerful, shaking event shows the limits of our ability to hide it conceptually, to empoverish it via representational defense mechanisms. It continues to face our conceptual resistance and saturate it, just like a thick juice saturating an agave until eventually it pours out. This forces us to reevaluate our concepts, to re-design our frameworks and see them from a new perspective. It forces us to accept its facticity and not ignore it as a negligible accident.

Let’s go back to Las Lomas to understand this better. The rich live in Las Lomas. If you were to visit Las Lomas alone you would think you are walking on the streets of an exotic part of Barcelona. You would think that paradise is achievable and violence has no place there. You would think that the wealth concentrated there and the nicely arranged aesthetics have squashed violence. Until you see all the security requirements, the high walls defending the individual paradises. Then you understand violence was not squashed, it was just hidden down in the lower parts of the city. It still looms over wealth as an evergrowing danger. The concentration of wealth in Las Lomas, and other parts, resolves nothing. Instead it deepens the divide between nicely wrapped realities and violent ones. It condemns some to realistic ignorance and others to everlasting confrontations with violent reality. And the divide keeps on growing as Las Lomas never faces reality and reality never faces it – just accidentally and then gets swept away under some nicely trimmed grass. The realities of the two are so different that is seems unlikely they will ever meet, unlikely that violent reality will ever face Las Lomas and invite them to accept other perspectives, to change, to reasses their isolating strategies.

Here is where the genius of hip hop comes in, and in the sea of hip hop the genius of Koran Streets.

Right in front of mama’s house

Just like the missing person posters that shook me, Koran Streets breaks away your neatly painted reality and forces you to face a powerful image. The all-enduring, refugeless violence.

Violence is not spectacular, it is not heroic overcoming of hardship. It is instead an invasion of reality extending itself to the deepest regions of safety. Power struggles, illegal activity, raw violence, all take place “right in front of mama’s house”. The maternal or paternal environment is something that most of us associate with safety, with refuge and support. The presence of violence in this nest of comfort confronts us with the privilege of calling maternal enviroment safe. It digs deep into the ideality of reality and replaces it with sheer stress, with raw, unalterated struggle for survival.

An invasion of maternal space is not something we all have in common, but it is something that we all can imagine as a most intimate and violent attack on the ideality of our reality. Koran Streets takes his reality and shoves it into our face, forcing us to accept it, or at least inviting us to accept it. Its delivering simplicity is non-negociable and undeniable. Accepting its point of view forces us to change the statical nature of our divisive conceptual frameworks and work on opening them up to change. Hip hop is for this reason not a mere expression of triviality, but a political platform for neglected realities.

Let me detail this a bit more. Violence is often marginalized and when it happens in those marginalized regions it is easily dismissable. Think of violence in poor neighbourhoods. Reporting of acts of violence in such a neighbourhood is often accompanied by justifications for such acts: the people were involved in illegal activity, the victims are suspected of having connections with illegal activity, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Koran Streets choses to have the hook of his song desplay in a factual manner that everything happens right in front of his mother’s house, right in the middle of what one would imagine to be a safe space, he perfectly describes that for some there is no wrong place, no wrong time, no consensual or planned involvement.

By using this simple imagery he invites (forcefully) others to assume his perspective of non-choice, of factual involvement and non-consensual violence. When we assume this perspective and see that there is no one divergent individual to blame but a whole system that gives no space for refuge, we are also invited to entertain new perspectives. We are at least given the opportunity to reflect: how is this possible? how can one deal with such constant stress? what can I do?

Furthermore, assuming this perspective, where the maternal space is in no way the picture perfect lawn on which children peacefully play, we recognize the non-statistical dimension of violence. We recognize the experience described as an actual suffering, as actual stress, as deep personal experiencing.

The sad irony

Me writing this article is the irony. Even though songs or depictions of violence such as that of Koran Streets invite or force us to acknowledge the authenticity, the facticity, and the personal suffering of violence, it also has the disadvantage of being perceived as a momentarily emphatic moment that serves to relieve our consciousness. Like a picture of starving children on social media, or a painting in a museum of refugees fleeing, Koran Streets’ song can impact us. The impact however often remains isolated to that fleeting experience we had in a museum looking at the above painting, or at a concert hearing Koran Streets. This is perfectly described in Boogie’s “n**** needs” video.

Boogie sings of the struggle, the doubts, the plans, the awarness of change, all while being depicted as a bleeding show piece. Personal suffering, the fight to overcome challenges and indeed the search for one’s identity are objectified as “occasions to reflect”, and then unfortunately to move on. They are consumed as short visits to new realities. A sort of moral, political tourism.

This article is in many ways just that. A short incursion into a reality of violence, that gets read, but does not necessarily do it justice. It consumes it and covers it in concepts. Realizing this cruel irony is however a first step in elliciting not just empathy but awareness. The awareness is not enough. Here is where I think Jean-Luc Marion comes in handy – even though he does not have a straight forward political or societal view, even though he has been accused of conservatism.

Assuming other perspectives, such as that of a person living in constant fear, stress, or violence, is for Marion not a momentarily excurion to a different perception of reality. It is more the necessary step in changing one’s own reality in such a way that the conceptual dismissal of the foreign reality does not get shut down. This experience of another perspective, another way of experiencing is for Marion a responsibility of changing ourselves, of accepting responsibility for the other and building new conceptual frameworks that do not continue to marginalize the marginalized. The fist of reality should not ellicit mere feelings, but active work on one’s own philosophies, in order to build new, inclusive, aware, responsible systems.