Por um Poder Destituinte

Numa palestra pública recente, Giorgio Agamben, filósofo italiano, defende que a classe dominante, em particular através das estruturas de Estado, tem vindo a mudar o modo como aborda a contestação às medidas que tenta implementar e as crises sistémicas do capitalismo. Aqui podem encontrar a transcrição dessa palestra muito interessante. Segundo Giorgio Agamben, cada vez mais a governação tem substituído o planeamento estratégico, que pretendia evitar crises futuras que pudessem colocar em causa o Poder da classe dominante, pelo desenvolvimento de instrumentos de controlo da contestação ao sistema, que se agudiza em situação de crise (sociais, económicas, ambientais).

"(…)Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is safer and more useful to try to govern the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The ancien regime aimed to rule the causes; modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom applies to every domain, from economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to rule the causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnay’s theorem makes also understandable a fact which seems otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal paradigm in the economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police control. If government aims for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.(…)"

"(…)The state in which we live now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call it the État de contrôle, or control state, because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but rather to manage and to control. Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder.(…)"

Esta mudança resulta da percepção no seio da classe dominante que a frequência e a severidade dessas crises vai aumentar, pouco podendo fazer para o evitar, pelo menos sem abdicar duma fracção muito substancial do seu Poder. As implicações desta mudança de paradigma para a contestação ao sistema ainda não são claras, mas não as podemos deixar de discutir, sob pena de continuarmos a insistir em processos que acabam por reforçar o sistema na vã tentativa de o derrubar.

"(…)The security paradigm implies that each form of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the order, becomes an opportunity to govern these actions into a profitable direction. This is evident in the dialectics that tightly bind together terrorism and state in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French Revolution, the political tradition of modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir constituant, the “constituent power”, of a new institutional order. I think that we have to abandon this paradigm and try to think something as puissance destituant, a purely “destituent power”, that cannot be captured in the spiral of security. (…) While a constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power — insofar as it deposes once for all the law — can open a really new historical epoch. (…) To think such a purely destituent power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. (…) It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these dimensions; it is so hard to think today of something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the governmental security technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life whose memory the security state tries at any price to cancel."

O abandono da primazia (porque continuará a ter a sua utilidade) da oposição espectacular, que interessa antes de mais aos que apenas almejam em herdar ou reconstruir o sistema, será essencial para criar esse "poder destituinte". Cuja essência terá necessariamente de radicar na re-criação do colectivo, da comunidade, da alternativa de vivência que permita o abandono, a sabotagem, dos fluxos sociais e económicos sob controlo da classe dominante, em grande parte através do Estado.