On Carlos Alberto Sánchez, A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture

By Alberto Toscano

TERESA MARGOLLES
Muro Baleado (Shot-Up Wall)
2009
Concrete blocks and gun holes, result of a vengeful shooting linked to organized crime in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico
182 x 396 x 15.25 cm
Collection of the Museo Tamayo, Mexico
Exhibition view: "Teresa Margolles: Frontera", Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2010
Photo: Nils Klinger
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

Teresa Margolles' Muro Baleado is a found object: a cinder-block façade relocated from the artist's home city of Culiacán, Mexico, to Governors Island. It is also a record of a violent act, a deadly shooting linked to organized crime. It is pockmarked with bullet holes and bears specks of what seem to be dried blood. Culiacán, known as "Narco City" and the birthplace of the narcocorrido (drug ballad), has harbored an active underground economy base on the trafficking of illicit drugs since the late 1950s. On its streets, shootings like these are commonplace. The artist removed the wall from its foundation there and arranged to have it transported across the US-Mexico border. In a performance over the course of the exhibition's opening weekend, a Mexican masonry crew reassembled the wall in Nolan Park.

* * *

Among the many challenges to our philosophical common sense about violence raised by Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s compelling phenomenological investigation into narco-culture is the suggestion that – notwithstanding, or even as an effect of, periodic spectacles of violation – the violence plaguing Mexico is not primarily to be addressed in terms of its visibility. In reading A Sense of Brutality, I was reminded of a 2009 visit to the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

There, the artist Teresa Margolles employed a variety of aesthetic tactics of absence and distancing to haunt the exhibition with the morbid and visceral traces of the brutal drug wars which lie behind the thousands of yearly assassinations, decapitations and massacres in Mexico – from the construction of the gallery desk with cement mixed with the blood of victims to the hiding, in the vaults of the Venetian palace that hosted the show, of elaborate jewelry made from the glass detritus of shootouts, from the washing of the floor by relatives of the murdered with water mixed with their blood to the hanging of seemingly minimalist canvases incrusted with blood and mud mopped up after massacres. ‘What Else Could We Talk About?’, the exhibition’s title, bluntly linked the base minimalism of Margolles’s gathering and transference of the grisly aftermath of death (lo que queda, ‘what remains’) to a social phenomenon of systematic cruelty and seeming anomie, which the critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina has referred to in terms of ‘sacrificial sovereignty’. Unlike other artists that have employed iconoclasm or not-showing to cope with extreme violence (I am thinking among others of Alfredo Jaar or Oliver Lutz), Margolles’s tactic is not dictated by a rhetoric of restraint, reflection and respect when it comes regarding the pain of others. Her earlier and shocking self-portraits with corpses in Mexican morgues testifies to this, as does the distribution accompanying the Venice show of cocaine-cutting invitation cards featuring the logo of the Biennale on the one hand and the gruesome head shot of a victim of a narco-cartel on the other. The aim rather seems that of a kind of contagion or infection of the exhibition space by the material traces (or the idea of the material traces) of extreme bodily violence.

This ‘sinister doubling of a social phase’, in which ‘the universal triumph of capitalism and electoral democracy bears an intimate relationship with the laissez faire of violence’, as Medina recognizes in his catalogue essay, steps back from the cognitive and prescriptive moments – in other words, from ‘What Else Could We Inquire Into?’ and ‘What Else Could We React To / Try to Stop?’ For Medina, Margolles ‘has nothing to teach, her aim is to perturb epistemologies and practices’, ‘the value of her work as an index is exiguous. Violence transposed only indicates that over there violence continues’. Here then lies perhaps the aesthetic and ethical limit of this particular tactic of iconoclasm, as well as of some related ones, for iconoclasm here relates to the fact of violence but not necessarily to the system or the causes of violence. And while the fact is something we may decide, for ethical and political reasons, not to show, or to show by hiding it, the system of violence – the conjunction between capitalism, democracy and cruelty, to return to Medina’s point – is unrepresentable, or ‘sublime’ in a different sense, one that is both really abstract and painfully concrete. It is this tension between the intolerable but in a sense always representable fact of violence and the often-invisible character of what Bourdieu called ‘the inert violence of the order of things’, which, to my mind, poses some of the most difficult representational and ethical problems today. Not so much the voyeurism of horror and abjection, but the ability to give some figure to their ‘supersensible’ social correlates is the problem, especially in a world where the mechanisms of social, political and economic violence are often cloaked by regimes of invisibility.

At the core of A Sense of Brutality is the claim that for the philosopher to do justice to the violence that pervades narco-culture as a veritable form-of-life she must go beyond the designation of this violence as cruelty, and, following a phenomenological demarcation first proposed by Max Scheler, understand its character as brutality. In this note, I would like to interrogate this pivotal claim at three levels. First, I want to ask what is at stake in the differentiation between cruelty and brutality as modalities of extreme violence. Second, I want to explore the place of the notion or operation of dehumanization in identifying brutality as the differentia specifica of narco-violence. Third, and following on from my comments on Margolles above, I want to signal the entanglement of this brutal and ultimately unspectacular violence with the unrepresentable systematicity of capitalist violence.

The imperative to name transpires from the pages of A Sense of Brutality as at once epistemological, ethical and political. To misname the phenomenon of narco-violence, to mix it up with contiguous but phenomenologically and culturally distinct modalities, would mean to remain in a state of philosophical speechlessness. The avowed aim of Sánchez’s intervention is thus ‘to make those distinctions that may allow us better to describe those violent experiences that otherwise seem indescribable’ (p. 92). To advance his argument for brutality as the name for the surplus violence specific to narco-culture, Sánchez – while broadly appreciative of the French philosopher’s cartography of extreme violence – takes issue with Étienne Balibar’s designation of ‘cruelty’ as the foremost name of extreme violence. Leaning on Scheler, he argues that, inasmuch as subjective enjoyment inheres in the concept of cruelty, it is inappropriate to name practices and experiences in which any subjectivity is subsumed by ‘cultural regulae’, by the objectively dehumanizing demands of narco-culture. While Sánchez’s intention – to stress the culturally systematic rather than pathologically psychological character of this violence – is warranted, I think this is a point where the phenomenological approach demonstrates its pitfalls vis-à-vis a more dialectical framing.[1] Where Sánchez wants to follow Scheler and categorize (name) ultra-objective violence, in Balibar’s parlance, as brutality, and ultra-subjective violence as cruelty, I think it is more fruitful – including for the greater intelligibility of narco-violence – to treat these not as separable phenomena which we could then hierarchize (such that cruel enjoyment is subordinated to a brutal culture, for instance), but in terms of mutually implicated polarities or possibilities of experience. In his conclusion to the volume of essays Violence et civilité, Balibar return to this problematic and without thematizing or indeed naming ‘cruelty’ speaks of ‘a “structure” founded on the intersection of two modalities of the destruction of action: the one that I call “ultra-objective”, reducing human being to the status of deliberately eliminable and instrumentalisable things in the world of commodities, and the one I call “ultra-subjective”, turning individuals and communities possessed by the delirium of sovereign power into the executors of a plan for the liquidation of the forces of “evil”.’[2] To my mind, it is possible – following Sánchez – to avoid the potentially misleading subjectivism (and aestheticism) that attaches to cruelty while not losing the imbrication or dialectic of the ultra-objective and ultra-subjective limned by Balibar – a dialectic that can indeed be glimpsed through Sánchez’s own anatomy of narco-culture, in the co-existence (but I would also say co-implication) of communicative cruelty (the narco-mantas, the disfiguration of corpses as a whole semiotic of horror) and ‘invisible’ brutality (the furtive liquefaction of bodies), but also in the polarity between the epic or heroic style of the narco-corridos and the cartels’ flamboyant necropolises, on the one hand, and the anonymous, systemic compulsion of narco-culture, on the other. What Balibar’s articulation of extreme violence challenges us to think is how fantasies of omnipotence, both individual and collective, emerge from and accompany systems of objective compulsion, domination and exploitation (‘cultures of violence’ like fascism and narco-culture, but also the most abstracts determinants of capitalism itself). What Balibar was trying to identify under the heading of cruelty (and which stretches our very conception of phenomenology, requiring its supplementation by psychoanalysis as well as historical materialism) was the generation, from practices of brutalization, of transindividual fantasies of violence; as evidenced, for instance, by the way in which impersonal institutions (e.g. the law) are driven by practices of vengeance largely irrespective of their personnel, the phantasmatic scenario can itself be systemic and institutional.[3] It is perhaps proof of the excess of violence vis-à-vis philosophy that while speaking of an ‘ultra-objective cruelty’ ‘does not make much sense’ (p. 106) to our everyday understanding it is a paradoxical formula that gets at the way in which anonymous, systemic violence always generates its accompanying forms of subjectivity, in a manner irreducible to psychology or mere individual experience. Brutality is indeed experienced ‘as outside the subject – as belonging to the situation, to the form of life’ (p. 115), but this is precisely an experience, a form of subjectivation. In becoming the conduits of this cultural form, in ‘carrying out’ the regulae of narco-culture, ultra-objectivity is assumed by the agents of narco-culture at the subjective level, which is inextricable from its own fantasy and ideology (as we know from the transfiguration of Kantian duty in Eichmann’s perverse imaginary of service, inter alia).

Sánchez himself explicitly recognizes this excess of violence over the concept, its interminable frustration of philosophical self-sufficiency, at different junctures in his book, but perhaps especially so in his formulation of the ‘paradox of brutality’, according to which ‘When the person disappears behind her objectification, the harm done against her is no longer against a person but against an object, so it is no longer brutality. Therefore, in contexts of rampant objectification, we cannot speak of brutality against persons’ (p. 111). I wonder if this paradox is more conceptual (having to do with the limits of our understanding, Verstand, when it comes to the excessive or extreme character of violence) than properly phenomenological in kind. What’s more, I think the paradox is transmuted into a dialectic if objectification as product is rethought in terms of objectification as process, and specifically if we think of the ‘dehumanizing objectifications that brutality … creates and on which it depends’ (p. 90) as ones that largely depend on the residual humanity of the dehumanized. The chilling chronicle and diagrams of the life of a cartel kidnapper and assassin captured in Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary El Sicario: Room 164 (2010), speak of a whole quotidian calculus of bodily suffering, fear and humiliation in which the subjectivity of the brutalized is by no means merely disregarded (as in Scheler’s definition of brutality) but manipulated, ‘weaponized’ even. The idea of dehumanization as a process that enlists the subjectivity of the brutalized emerges from some the most incisive philosophical interrogations of violence – for instance, from Simone Weil’s unsparing reading of the Iliad, where, writing about force, she says:

From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet-he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done. A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.[4] 

The living corpse is indeed one of the most abiding fantasies of power, and one that cannot be contained by the idea of animalization or objectification. While Sánchez is right to query Sartre’s contribution to the conceptualization of instrumental political violence, in the latter’s writings on torture (in the context of the Algerian War of Independence) we encounter a fruitful phenomenological extension of Weil’s insight. As Sartre writes, commenting on Henri Alleg’s La Question, the communist militant’s first-person account of the French army’s practice of torture in its settler-colonial counter-insurgency:

The aim of torture is not simply to force someone to talk, to betray: the victim must designate himself, by his cries and his submission, as a human animal. In everyone’s eyes and in his own eyes. His betrayal must break and dispose of the victim forever. The intention is not just to force those who yield to torture to talk; they have had a status imposed upon them forever: that of a subhuman.[5]

This requirement to extort subjectivity at the limit of objectification is accompanied in Sartre both by a fantasy of omnipotence (‘that they would like to convince themselves and their victims of their total dominance’) and an ultimate futility (torture is a ‘vain fury’).

         In a historical register, Walter Johnson, one of the foremost contemporary historians of slavery, has forcefully challenged the use of ‘dehumanization’ as a frame through which to think the extreme violence of the slavocracy, and the problem of the resistant ‘agency’ of enslaved peoples. As he observes:

Historians sometimes argue that some aspects of slavery were so violent, so obscene, so “inhuman” that, in order to live with themselves, the perpetrators had to somehow “dehumanize” their victims. While that “somehow” remains a problem—for it is never really specified what combination of unconscious, cultural, and social factors make a “somehow”—I want to question the assumption that slaveholders had to first “dehumanize” their slaves before they could swing a baby by the feet into a post to silence its cries, or jam the broken handle of a hoe down the throat of a field hand, or refer to their property as “darkies” or “hands” or “wool.”[6]

Moreover:

Imagining that perpetrators must “dehumanize” their victims in order to justify their actions, inserting a normative version of “humanity” into a conversation about the justification of historical violence, lets them—and us—off the hook. History suggests again and again that this is how human beings treat one another. … the satisfaction [slaveholders] got from violence—threatening, separating, torturing, degrading, raping—depended on the fact that their victims were human beings capable of registering slaveholding power in their pain, terror, grief, submission, and even resistance. A better way to think about slavery might be as a concerted effort to dis-humanize enslaved people. Slaveholders were fully cognizant of slaves’ humanity—indeed, they were completely dependent upon it. But they continually attempted to conscript—simplify, channel, limit, and control—the forms that humanity could take in slavery.[7] 

To the extent that narco-culture is, notwithstanding the bewildering intensity and extension of its violence, a system of power and not simply of killing, it too requires a dis-humanization (to employ Johnson’s terminology) that (brutally) conscripts the subjectivity of those who are encompassed in its dominion. This is not to discount the forms of derealization that Sánchez tracks in dialogue with, among others, Judith Butler, but to suggest they cannot be the last word on narco-culture even when they are its ultimate, ‘unspeakable’ limit, ‘the very fullness of barbarity’.

Finally, A Sense of Brutality enjoins us to think about the relation between the brutality of narco-culture and its integration into (as well as its extreme subjective assumption of) capitalism as the untranscendable horizon of social life. In this regard, I think that, notwithstanding its prima facie plausibility, we cannot rest content with the idea that narco-culture simply takes to the extreme the ‘utilitarian conception of the person’ (p. 131) belonging to the kind of commodity nihilism that has sloughed off all extra-capitalist norms and values. For what makes extreme violence extreme is in many ways its indissociable quotient of disutility. When, having endured accounts of extreme forms of torture to which people are subjected in ‘safe houses’ with no witnesses and in anticipation of certain death (such as we encounter in Rosi’s film) and we ask ‘Why?’ – ‘Capitalism’ is not a sufficient answer. The question (one that largely exceeds the resources of philosophy or phenomenology, to my mind, while remaining a profoundly philosophical and phenomenological question) is how and why a ‘culture’ would accrete around practices of capital accumulation in which the (spectacular or secretive) brutalization of persons has turned into social currency, in which the murderous metaphors that frequently accompany the Social Darwinist ideology of competition (capitalism as the survival of the fittest) have been incarnated with such devastating force.[8] We have Carlos Alberto Sánchez to thank for having confronted this Medusa and drawn boldly on the philosophical and phenomenological tradition to articulate a problem, that of a culture of brutality, that no interrogation of violence can afford to evade.     

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), and La abstracción real. Filosofía, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021). He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others.  

Notes
[1] Note that when Balibar speaks of a phenomenology of violence, he is primarily referring to a Hegelian tradition, rather than to phenomenology in a more post-Husserlian sense.
[2] Etienne Balibar, Violence et civilité. Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2010), p. 406.
[3] Pierre Sauvêtre et Cécile Lavergne, ‘Pour une phénoménologie de la cruauté. Entretien avec Étienne Balibar’, Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines 19 (2010), p. 227.
[4] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill, 1956), pp. 4-5. Balibar reads Weil’s dissection of Homer as illustrating ‘the destruction of the conditions of possibility for politics’, a destruction that consists of an ‘annihilation of all possibility of resistance’. Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 142, 131. This latter theme is magisterially developed in Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: Ed. Amsterdam, 2017).
[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 36.
[6] Walter Johnson, ‘To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice’, Boston Review, 20 February 2018, http://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world
[7] Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 207-8.
[8] For an effort to provide an answer from a feminist and decolonial angle, see Sayak Valencia Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (New York: Semiotext(e), 2018). As Valencia writes: ‘we propose an analysis of gore capitalism, understood as “the systematically uncontrolled and contradictory dimension of the neoliberal project” (Pratt, 2002, 2). It is a product of economic polarization, the excesses of information/advertising that create and support a hyperconsumerist identity and its counterpart: the evershrinking numbers of people with the financial power to satisfy their consumer desires. This process creates radical capitalist subjects we term endriago subjects [the term designates a literary monster that combines man, hydra and dragon] and new discursive figures that make up an episteme of violence, as well as reconfiguring the concept of work through a perverse sense of agency, now rooted in the necropolitical commercialization of murder. All of this is evidence of the dystopias produced through an unconsidered adherence to pacts with (masculinist) neoliberalism and its objectives. Endriago subjectivities are created in the face of this world order, as individuals seek to establish themselves as valid subjects with the possibility of belonging and ascending within society. These subjects create new fields, out of one of the most ferocious, devastating and irreversible processes of capitalist investment. They contradict the logic of what is acceptable and normative because of their new awareness that they have become redundant in the economic order. These subjects confront their situation and their context by means of necroempowerment and the fugitive, dystopian necro-practices of gore, as they convert this process into the only possible reality and attempt to legitimate the processes of underground economies (black market, drug trafficking, weapons, bodies, etc.) through their reign of violence. These actions both create and reinterpret new fields apart from the valid ones and thereby wield influence over political, public, official, social and cultural processes’ (pp. 26-7).