"I propose that we think again about what we understand by effectiveness, about what the strength of 15M was, and why that strength was not seen or valued as it ought to have been. We only see politics and effectiveness where there is a traditional format, with a leader who fights for power. 15M was undervalued and turned into something else, something very different if not the opposite of what it was; and it was then that it lost its strength, it lost the energy that was inherent to it."
Amador Fernández-Savater (Madrid, 1974) is an editor, writer, activist and, above all, a critical thinker. His two latest essays, La Fuerza de los Débiles (The Strength of the Weak - Akal, 2021) and Habitar y Gobernar. Inspiraciones para una nueva concepción política (Inhabit and Govern. Inspirations for a New Conception of Politics - Ned, 2020) are both artefacts to stimulate thought as well as antidotes to intellectual sloth and despair.
The Strength of the Weak emerges as we reach the tenth anniversary of 15M – the movement that revolutionised the plazas and political life in the Spanish state – as an attempt to take stock of the potency of that anomalous and acephalous movement, and to reconstruct what happened to deactivate that force. It is also a continuation of the reflections in Inhabit and Govern that invite us to question our notion of politics. We spoke to Amador by telephone to try to understand what lessons still have to be learned from the indignation that erupted on public squares on 15 May 2011.
Why did you deem it necessary to take stock of 15M?
I lived through the 15M experience with great intensity, as one of the crowd, because there we were all just “one of the crowd”, and everything I experienced had a great impact on me. It was about inventing another way of thinking about politics and therefore about life, another language, another relationship with space, with time, with the other. It was an important experience for me, a very joyful experience, an encounter with new friends, a rediscovery of the city, the global connection, the constant sense that the impossible was happening, one miracle after another, new ideas and new actions were being invented non-stop; it was an exhilarating time. And it was equally traumatic to witness the anomalous thing that was 15M being transformed into the “assault on the institutions” channelled through [the political formation] Podemos.
And it’s not that Podemos co-opted the movement, nor was it repressed; it was the people themselves who had taken part who began to call for a change in how we think about politics. It was painful, and it’s not surprising that it has taken ten years to reflect on all that; the anniversary provided me with the opportunity to revisit it and to share some thoughts.
What I try to reflect on in the text, without blaming any specific person or organisation, is related to the persistence of a vision of politics that led people to think that what we were doing in the squares and neighbourhoods wasn’t having any impact, and that to be effective we had to organise ourselves within a more conventional and hierarchical structure, that of a political party. I propose that we think again about what we understand by effectiveness, about what the strength of 15M was, and why that strength was not seen or valued as it ought to have been. [The French philosopher] Alain Badiou says that if we reflect on failure it is no longer such a failure, in that it becomes part of a learning process. Not that this means we will necessarily get it right the next time, but, as [the Irish writer] Samuel Beckett said, it will help us to “fail better”.
In The Strength of the Weak you explain that 15M was seen as “pre-politics”, as something preceding politics, and you suggest there was a translation issue. Why?
There is no doubt that 15M needed an energy transformation. It began in the squares but grew too big for them and so it shifted to the neighbourhoods and the various mareas or ‘tides’ [green tide for public education, white tide for public health], or to the PAH [Platform for Mortgage Victims], which already existed but was invigorated and expanded by the energy of 15M.
There was a succession of energy transformations that managed to preserve a certain way of doing and thinking about politics: a translation took place, because 15M could not remain tied to that first experience of the squares. But it was a translation that kept the rhythm and intensity. In 2013, however, when the need for an “assault on the institutions” was raised, for a move towards more conventional politics, I detected a translation issue: some of the contents and concepts were still there, but the way of doing and thinking about politics that was typical of 15M was lost. It was lost because, during this translation exercise, the 15M was being devalued by considering it “pre-political”: an affective phenomenon, an expression of pure indignation, which was not producing effects in terms of social transformation, but which served as a breeding ground to be superseded by a strictly political force, which was Podemos. I think there is a problem of social imaginary here: we only see politics and effectiveness where there is a traditional format, with a leader who fights for power. 15M was undervalued and turned into something else, something very different if not the opposite of what it was; and it was then that it lost its strength, it lost the energy that was inherent to it.
You see 15M as a political event that allows us to engage in a broader memory exercise, to go from the present to the past, to understand the connections between Franco’s dictatorship and what you refer to as “deterred democracy”. Why?
I suggest the image of the “Spanish labyrinth” to think about the continuities between dictatorship and democracy. I think that there are events, such as 15M, that allow us to recover a stronger relationship with the past and to understand the tendency we have to constantly flee from conflict because it would in some way be like going back to that civil war we’re supposed to have overcome with the transition. It is as if conflict would take us back to chaos, to war; and that prevents us from seeing conflict as a democratic force. And the eruption of 15M, its radical demand for democracy, allows us to question where this restricted, limited, deterred democracy stems from, a democracy that imposes unquestionable limits because, if we try to go beyond those limits, war and chaos may return. 15M is a vantage point from which we can take a better look at the transition from dictatorship to democracy and help us understand, for example, that every time an eviction takes place, there is something from the dictatorial past that is updated, certain economic privileges that enjoy continuity.
What political consequences does the absence of collective memory regarding the civil war and the dictatorship hold for thinking about 15M and the current political moment?
In her book Desenterrar las Palabras (Unearthing Words - Icaria, 2014), Clara Valverde explains how when memory is buried, the result is not oblivion but, rather, the transfer of the wound to the unconscious mind; it is what psychoanalysis calls repression, sweeping something under the carpet. When parents do not talk to their children about what happened to their grandparents, a mark is left on those children: the marks of fear and anger and resentment, which are very strong, affective tones in Spain. And because it is unconscious, it is stronger, because you don’t control it, it controls you. Plato said that knowing is remembering, but he gave it a rational slant. To remember, however, means to go back through the heart, to awaken the affects of that which was. To know 15M is to awaken the affect that was there. To know what happened a century ago is also to allow it to affect us. Knowledge is linked to affect and to the body, not to disaffection.
What you raise here, and you deal with in your essays, is a very fundamental question linked to the root of Western civilisation: the separation between mind and body.
In Western tradition, there is a deep scission between thinking, doing and feeling. It is the idea that there is no thought in affect, that it is a disordered impulse. For Plato, to think, one must tear out one’s eyes, because what is sensible [or sensory], the body, can only cause error; to think is to detach oneself.
But 15M, as a being mobilised by affects, contained thought, it was a way of thinking about the political realm, of valuing, of activating the knowledge in our bodies. It implies another paradigm: that it is possible for thought to come from matter, from the body, from affect; and, instead of detaching ourselves, it is possible to start out on the basis of what is there. It is what I call ‘inhabiting’.
The paradigm of governing is the effectiveness of the strong, it is the reification of the world in order to govern it; and of course it is effective when it comes to a specific aspect, but it disregards all the rest, as conventional medicine often does. But there is another paradigm, which is that of inhabiting, and what I call the strength of the weak: here the fight stems from the care of what is there, from the knowledge of the body, as with feminisms. And that strength of the weak also has its effectiveness. But we lose it if we fall into the inertia of the ‘mirror war’, that is, if we try to win on the gameboard proposed by the strong, as seen with the translation of the strength deployed in the squares into an assault on the institutions.
Do you think we are likely to see an eruption like 15M in the current context?
I see a kind of contradiction in the midst of the pandemic. Everything is much clearer now: the virus demonstrates that we are connected and we cannot save ourselves on our own; it also highlights the link with aggressive agribusiness practices and how the loss of biodiversity affects us too, because we are interdependent. When we distinguish between jobs and activities that are essential and those that are not, we develop a clearer picture of who and what sustains life. Inequalities are also made more visible, as it becomes clear that not everyone can stay home and keep themselves safe, and that the crisis is a disaster for ordinary people, whereas for pharmaceutical companies, the vaccine is a huge business. We are going through a catastrophic situation in which inequalities are worsening, control measures are being stepped up and fascism is looking for its scapegoats. And yet, even though everything is much clearer now, nothing is happening.
Nothing is happening for now, that is. We are not seeing anything like a pandemic-driven 15M, which would allow us to think differently, to organise mutual support differently, to create spaces for autonomous thinking that would allow us to pull ourselves away from the gameboard and build autonomy. A catastrophe is always a revelation; that is the etymological meaning of apocalypse. But today we seem to be going through a catastrophe without politics, save a few micro-experiences here and there. Perhaps it is too soon: 15M appeared in 2011, whilst the crisis erupted in 2008. But this moment enables us to ask ourselves what happens when there is a catastrophe and there is no politics; and what happens is that all the worst things worsen: fascism rises, we see an increase in inequalities, repression, obedience, an everybody-for-themselves mindset.
You talk about the importance of thinking about politics from the perspective of affectivity and connectedness; from the perspective of putting one’s body on the line, in the sense of taking risks, connecting and allowing ourselves to be affected. But, in times of pandemic, it is difficult even to come together. How can we approach political action now?
What I miss is the imaginative capacity to devise ways of being together when we can’t come together like we used to. What of loving each other, taking care of each other, supporting each other, now that such things need a change of form and senses? When I talk about putting one’s body on the line, letting one’s self be affected, I’m not thinking about the body solely from a physical perspective: a book can stimulate an affect, as can social media. Those making their voices heard through digital platforms such as #MeToo or similar movements, such as #cuéntalo, in Spain, are putting their bodies on the line, they are taking a risk. Perhaps there is a lack of experimentation in this area. Or perhaps it is still too early. But what I do think is that we have to keep thinking from the perspective of what is happening to us, from the perspective of this sense of dislocation, and not to act as if nothing were happening but to continue to think about the meaning behind the fact that ‘we feel strange’, that ‘this is strange’.
