After the Great Celebration

This text is a translation of the article “Después de la gran celebración”, originally published in 2024.

What does fascism have to offer our country today? This paper explores the affinity between some forms of nihilism contained in manifestations of collective joy—such as Argentina’s victory celebrations in the last FIFA World Cup—and an unprecedented surge of right-wing radicalism, by analyzing the film People’s Cup: A Street Symphony (2023).

Who called it life? — Juana Bignozzi

The ideas of neo-fascism have an ironic beginning. Firstly, the 2010s revealed a desire for transformation at a planetary scale. Aside from the late 1960s, the world has rarely witnessed such an intense and massive contestation of the ruling order as the one we observed following 2010. From the Sidi Bouzid uprisings in Tunisia, the 2013 transport fare protests in São Paulo, and Euromaidan in Ukraine, to the insurgent phenomena in Santiago de Chile and Hong Kong, social struggles and street protests accelerated the perception of time, compressing the present into a “now” filled with possibilities. Against the dictum of positivist realism, the state of affairs immediately following the 2008 financial crisis required a more profound reflection in search of an alternative to capitalism.^[1] Simultaneously, this century’s second decade ended with the public emergence of a massive will to submission. The inert assemblages and instrumentalized seriality of a new right-wing radicalism brought about a form of politics that more resembles the post-utopian fascism described by Walter Benjamin than the asynchronicity Ernst Bloch might have diagnosed.^[2] Fifteen years after the greatest financial collapse we can remember, the scenario is bent both ways. If we accept that the crisis was followed by a longing for total change, the new fascisms become unthinkable. However, if we rush to associate the growth of right-wing extremism with the “age of disorder,”^[3] we risk constructing a false image of the emancipatory goals that drove the revolts, that is, we risk betraying those goals.^[4]

The irony that characterizes the origin of the ideas of this new fascism connects the aforementioned opposite sides: it articulates the opposition between both poles of the decade in terms of an internal contradiction or self-subversion. This irony reveals itself when we consider the return of fascism not so much as a phenomenon exogenous to the new forms of protest but rather as an inseparable corollary of their very tensions. Are we dealing with an inevitable inversion of these movements that aim at liberation? Recent fascism thus manifests itself as a cipher for a world of “estranged things,” a world that “cannot be decoded.”^[5] How to think correctly? That is, how can we be true to this journey in our attempt to understand it?

Closely following Adorno’s instruction to read the facticity of history as the “passion of the world,”^[6] I will discuss this issue by drawing attention to a phenomenon that may seem, at first sight, unrelated to the processes that explain the counterattack of capital that runs through us. Even though I could have chosen any phenomenon expressing the great rejection, I have decided rather to study a contrary movement: the popular celebration with which Argentina reacted to its 2022 World Cup victory. This uncovered—in a massive way, unprecedented in our recent history—a form of socialization ultimately aimed at nothing other than being with others. During the time of the celebration, joy arranged itself into a public choreography of mobile bodies in contact with each other. The collective feeling of happiness touched a nerve that brought it nearer to the interruption of the ruling order. However, rebellion against the establishment inaugurated by street celebrations reverberates intermittently. The history of our last great celebration is the history of a fall whose consequences we have not yet fully understood.

1. A camera flies high over a human ocean. One can spot the tip of an obelisk from the sky. Beside it, a piece of cloth in the national colors is being held by hundreds of hands. The motions of those participating in the celebration generate the oceanic effect of a flag coming and going like the waves of the sea. After a cut, the camera drone overflies lower, this time faster, like a car driving through the widest avenue in the world. Now, the camera approaches a multitude of people wearing the Argentinian national shirt in all of its different versions. And then, the image connects with the sound of a voice: the story begins. The narrating voice is easy to recognize. It is the voice of an actor who has starred in Argentinian television series and commercial films since the Menem era. This repertoire of folklore has forged a partition of the sensible in the Argentinian cultural industry. The familiar voice accompanies the camera drone’s motion over the bodies and pronounces its message.

The narrative is presented from the perspective of the first-person plural. It speaks not only of an “us,” but speaks also to us: voice and hearing, image and gaze must coincide. The acceptance of the demand contained within the sounding appeal can be easily explained. Indeed, the spectator has been here. They have been part of these mass celebrations without exclusion. In the voice that we recognize, we recognize ourselves. This explains the film’s symbolic efficiency, as well as its box office record: “2023’s most seen film.”^[7] By presupposing the audience’s complicity, the film guarantees the acceptability of the demand. However, if the film’s massive appeal is explained by a prehistory of shared experiences, then the question concerning the acceptability of the demand can be redirected to those experiences that forged the great celebration.

2. The feature film superposes a set of images that are, at the start, presented as foreign to the film, from different sources. People’s Cup uses an audiovisual archive including fragments of different World Cup matches, cameos of fans in stadiums, TV interviews with players, and extensive material taken from social networks—for example, Instagram live feeds and mobile-phone videos. The film seeks to immediately reflect the authenticity of popular emotion. To do this, it takes the audience away from their role as mere spectators and places them as active protagonists of a national feat. This is why the film transversally mixes scenes of households during the tournament: family encounters, friendly reunions, and neighborhood gatherings, all located within a private universe to which we gain access thanks to the register of a small camera that someone has hidden in a corner of the home.

A Street Symphony, the people’s film, merely exploits the mythic naturalization that takes place in all media images. Only by turning on the television and finding ourselves in this flux of images monitoring the world are we able to know that we are, that we exist. The television image realizes what it represents by mere duplication. It only confirms to the extent that it repeats. As Adorno claims, its “lie” consists “precisely in confirming and consolidating by dint of repetition mere existence as such, what human beings have been made into by the way of the world.” The image “grins: Become what you are.”^[8] The media image is a duplication that neither represents nor interprets nor legitimizes, but produces facticity (or nature). In the mythical naturalization of the collective, any notion transcending the irreducible unity of the “I” and the “we” is depoliticized. As a fact of nature, the integration of the  “I” and the  “we” predates any determination, any historical mediation, or any political, class, or cultural division. The depoliticization of the audiovisual device consists in the erasure of any trace of rebelliousness in the transmission of the images of a joyous people. By erasing the flags that were present, the images hide the possibility that the streets express redemptory promises. However, the film not only distorts the outcry of the real, but, in its appearance, it expresses an impossibility lying within reality itself. This impossibility will reveal itself as fatal to the party’s post-history.

Attempting to sketch a procedure of dialectical-materialist interpretation, Adorno suggests the idea of natural history as a key to interpreting social contradictions. Natural history does not represent a negotiated equilibrium between naturalism and constructivism but a “change of perspective.”^[9] This modification of the method implies a conception in which the mythical—“that which has always been there”—and history—the becoming of what is singular and new—cease to be seen in terms of dualisms. Instead, they are conceived under the guise of an “insuperable interwovenness.”^[10] Unlike the alternatives of “bad spiritualism” or “false absolutization” proposed by all kinds of ideologies, materialism must articulate constellations that reveal what is archaic in difference and what is new in repetition. Only by unfolding the internal contradiction of each one of the opposites, that is, by revealing the non-identity of each one of them with respect to themselves, will thinking be capable of interpreting its materials beyond the point of view subordinated to the subjectivist principle of identity.

3. The naturalization produced by film representation, what is apparent in it, also expresses its historical background. Between Hölderlin and Bakhtin, Jankélévitch and Lukács, Lorenzo Serra has characterized this background as the miracle of a communion. Observed from the other side of the Atlantic, the image of such an experience can only fascinate. Indeed, Serra claims that in the popular celebrations of late 2022, life outside of Europe has taught a historical lesson on what seemed impossible: the configuration of living in a just form.

Life is “chaos, mixture, becoming.” It requires forms to realize itself. Without them, some part of life remains unfinished, incomplete, foul. However, these forms cannot fulfill this task without mutilating that which characterizes life: its intense duration, its flux without separations, the motion of its full temporality, foreign to any external finality. This is precisely what pains the Roman writer, who only possesses his own language to describe that which, according to Truffaut, “lacks all words.” What makes this “ending of the World Cup” a historical experience is the actualization in the present of what was believed lost, which makes the “decadent Western/European point of view” feel nostalgic.

What has been presentified in “Argentina’s journey” is the unification of the opposites that divide our times: the fatherland and the world, the national and the popular, philosophy and existence, the prophet and their people, freedom and necessity, the hero and their destiny. At the end of this journey, in which the national team’s campaign expresses the path of a people, the “lived and experienced” has been elevated to a “work of art” with “symbolic possibilities.” Precisely because this work of art has not been built artificially and externally like a watch, but as the organic and immanent result of a community feeling that determines itself autonomously, “unified by its own strength,” as Serra claims, it is possible to see this experience as the “incarnation of a utopia.”^[11]

4. Far from any nostalgic temptation, Furio Jesi places the festival in a problematic position for modernity. By analyzing different gnoseological figures and interpretative models of the festive event, Jesi demonstrates the impossibility of accessing experiences of communion and sociability in the era of bourgeois individuality. When speaking with those who consider that the power of the festival can be immediately accessed, Jesi turns to the words of his mentor Kerényi, who describes the modern festival as “the movements of dancers for those who have gone deaf and can no longer hear music. And those who cannot hear music cannot dance.”^[12]

The inaccessibility of the festive sentiment in modernity transforms all positive affirmation of the festival into an apology for the existent. This is so both for those who spy on the pleasure of others in their festivals, as well as for those who try to become the protagonists of their own festivals. According to Jesi, by presenting the festival in its facies hippocratica—whether as an internal experience or as a mere collective practice of cruelty—the writings of Baudelaire, Proust, and Thomas Mann have taught us bitter lessons that have healed us of any illusion concerning the present. It is precisely these writings that allow Jesi to reconstruct as ideologies the attempts of modern humanities to present an alleged knowability of the festival. In light of this, which for Jesi acquires the political meaning of a commination to transformative political action, these apologetics become as grotesque as the image of someone who keeps dancing once the music has stopped:

The impossibility of the festival as a true collective moment derives, at present, from the peculiar features of bourgeois society; the non-knowability of the festival derives, at present, from the features of the culture matured and expressed by that society (precisely, and not by chance, the same society and culture that appear to have taken great care to preserve the tradition of festivities).^[13]

For the same reasons that the festival has become impossible in bourgeois modernity, the action that seeks to build a  “we” oriented towards the idea of justice faces major challenges. In this sense, Jesi distinguishes two experiences of time: one that characterizes revolt and one that characterizes revolution. While revolution can only be thought of in terms of a chain of different but coordinated dissidences oriented by long-term aims, revolt presents itself as a “sudden insurrectional explosion.”^[14] Revolution implies acting in historical time according to the difficult balance between tactical plans and strategic orientations. For the time of revolution, middle-term aims miss the final objective but prefigure it and bring it nearer with a sequential cause-and-effect logic. In the case of revolt, time condenses itself in an instant, and events follow each other at an extreme pace.

The Spartacist uprising that took place in January 1919 in Germany illustrates the sudden character of revolt. While the war period established a temporal horizon characterized by waiting—waiting for an imminent enemy attack or an even greater awaiting of victory—the decision voted by the majority of the Spartacus League’s assembly in December 1918 was accompanied by the deployment of a fighting plan aimed at overthrowing the social-democratic government of Ebert-Scheidemann. According to the calculations of the Spartacist delegates, the superiority of their military, organizational, and economic forces implied that, in the case of an immediate and direct confrontation with power, their victory was certain. Based on this confidence, which contradicted the directives to  “do groundwork,” the impatience of the assembly that would give birth to the German Communist Party implied the urgency of those who feel themselves to be “in agreement with time.”^[15]

Jesi characterizes the time of revolt as a suspension of all those differences that divide life in capitalism into individual and community, into the thing and the symbol, into means and ends, into action and knowledge. “In the hour of revolt, one is no longer alone.”^[16] The suspension produced by revolt condenses present time in the thick of an instant in which all opposites reconnect in a skein in which all elements are equally near the center. Revolt interrupts the fateful continuum in which “the battle between good and evil, between survival and death, between success and failure” succeed each other over and over again. Revolt illuminates retrospectively the life preceding it as inauthentic, strange, alien. In the living death that precedes revolt, the acts carried out by the I only acquire their meaning in terms of certain aims to which they are subordinated. The revolt takes root in a time and space that liberates the  “I” of “one’s personal symbols,”^[17] of socially imposed identity, to wrap it in a totality that transcends them: “The instant of revolt determines one’s sudden self-realization and self-objectification as part of a collectivity.”^[18]

However, the time of revolt remains a prisoner of its own temporal limitation. Since its liberating efficacy is reduced to the role of “shelter,” its transformative force is unmasked by a conservative and reproductivist efficacy. This is its greatest contradiction: the suspension of the historical continuum leaves everything as it was, and once the revolt is over, no matter the outcome, everyone goes back to being an individual. The lack of reflection regarding this contradiction explains the failure of the Spartacist uprising. At the same time as they turned away from participation in the elections for the National Assembly, which Rosa Luxemburg proposed to “use as a stage” for a rising struggle of the masses, they bet on a fight aimed at the “conquest of the symbols of power—especially the conquest of Berlin.”^[19]

The Spartacist defeat was not only a result of the casualties they endured on account of their decisions, of the dead activists, and of the devastation of their direction, but also of the fact that they achieved the opposite effect than the one they sought in the uprising. The brief intensification of time produced by the revolt acted like a “discharge” in which the high tension accumulated over the waiting time of the war would end up being released. During the war, time had been suspended due to total mobilization. The rhythm of the workday had been entirely dismantled on account of the time required by military organization and the situation at the battlefront: “In the factories one works for war, at home one lives in accordance with the rhythm of war.”^[20] The perception of time during the period of war had been propelled towards the future, extending the waiting attitude forward indefinitely. Such relief enabled the reestablishment of the continuum of “normal time,” which had been frozen for four years during the war: “Normal time is not just a bourgeois concept but the outcome of a bourgeois manipulation of time.”^[21] Retrospectively, the Spartacist defeat did not consist strictly in the crushing of the insurrectionists but rather in their being newly functionalized to serve “the very power [they] attacked.”^[22]

5. “What kind of defeat is this?” Javier Trímboli asked himself in 2017. He posed this question amidst a long journey, “full of stumbles,” through the lives of those who, “between loyalty to a past era and acceptance of the one they have been dealt,”^[23] did not assess their trajectories with resignation, either in the form of strategic resignation—leading to a complacent adjustment to order—or a form of melancholic resignation—leading to dejection. Trímboli poses his question after analyzing the meaning of the transition from December 2001 to May 2003. For “only by accepting defeat (…) awkwardly and unwillingly, could one appreciate the transition from revolution to reparation not as a maneuver aimed at diverting from what is really important, nor as a treason.”^[24] When Trímboli wonders about this other defeat, the one of late 2015, the context of this appreciation has changed, pushing the question to a different time. What kind of defeat is this? The question is insidious for anyone reading it today, years later, since, when considering the unfolding of historical dialectics, one is left with a feeling of loss, a loss that becomes more irrevocable with each dialectical advancement, with each new “recovery,” with each new beginning.

At the same time, the question is insidious primarily because, as reflected by Trímboli’s essay, the story of heaven’s assailants carries a complex temporality of oscillation between “the summit and the fall.” This pendulum complicates the possibility of drawing unambiguous conclusions. However, for those who continue to follow “the piled-up sign” of Peronism, the interpretation of this racconto allows them to draw a further consequence, maybe the most relevant one. The defeat that frames this writing is not identical to the defeat experienced during the Macri era, nor to the one suffered following the assassinations of Maximiliano Kosteki and Darío Santillán, nor the one lived through during the post-dictatorship periods with their different historicized phases (the Banelco Act, the Convertibility Plan, the Law of Due Obedience, the Full Stop Law).^[25] If we interpret this series of defeats from the perspective of the lowest point on the curve of this fate, we are encouraged to reconstruct the bases of future emancipations, to once again “read everything,” as Trímboli writes in 2017, in order to recover a path leading back to the summit.

6. Some shreds of the current state of affairs bring forth a politicity in the withdrawal of the existent. As in a political laboratory, these are shared experiences of sociability developed amidst confusion, reshaping forms of active intersubjectivity; they are social and cultural collectives that anticipate an emancipated form of life.

As in Rabelais’ language, as read by Bakhtin, these shreds, signs pointing towards the future, make utopia present by experiencing a “second life of the people,” which is pierced “temporally” in the “suspension of all hierarchical rank.”^[26] The way in which this coming liberation operates—acting in different social and cultural expressions which challenge fascism—is characterized by a special form of contact, free and familiar, between individuals who would normally be separated in everyday life by the insurmountable barriers of their respective conditions. According to Bakhtin, this can only be expressed as an “inside-out world,” that is, through the use of constant permutations, such as those that stress the “numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.”^[27]

The biodrama The Days Out There works in this sense.^[28] This musical documentary stages the life of a group of cis women and trans persons after prison, presenting those days using archival material, letters, photos, audiovisual recordings captured on mobile devices, and intertwines heterogeneous languages: live music, video installation, and dance. However, none of the interactions staged by the play seek to feign anything. Instead, they present the terms of a real contradiction that lacerates us. The suspension of hierarchical rank is present here only as an inquiring premonition through staged reflection, repeated throughout the play, regarding the importance of the determinations that organize it. Neither life outside prison frees people from their chains, nor are class differences between the actors or the theatrical device dissolved by the possibility that the play represents. Due to the staging of the productive process, The Days Out There reveals a “clemency towards the defeated,” which, in its fragility, manages to displace the cruel irony looming over our bodies.

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^[1] Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (London: Wildfire, 2023), 27.

^[2] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023), 28.

^[3] Deutsche Bank, “The Age of Disorder,” 2020, https://flow.db.com/more/macro-and-markets/the-age-of-disorder

^[4] Eva von Redecker, Revolution für das Leben: Philosophie der neuen Protestformen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2020).

^[5] Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos, no. 60 (1984): 111–24, 118.

^[6] Ibid., 120.

^[7] People’s Cup: A Street Symphony [Muchachos, la película de la gente], directed by Jesús Braceras (Orsai and Pampa Films, 2023); based on a short story by Hernán Casciari.

^[8] Theodor W. Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 55.

^[9] Adorno, “The idea of natural history,” 118.

^[10] Ibid., 117.

^[11] Lorenzo Serra, “Messi, il profeta debole,” Centro per la Riforma dello Stato, December 22, 2022.

^[12] Furio Jesi, “Knowability of the Festival,” in Time and Festivity: Essays on Myth and Literature, ed. Andrea Cavalletti (London: Seagull Books, 2021), e-book.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Furio Jesi, Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt (London–New York–Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2014), 46.

^[15] Ibid., 47.

^[16] Ibid., 55.

^[17] Ibid., 53.

^[18] Ibid., 53.

^[19] Ibid., 50.

^[20] Ibid., 63

^[21] Ibid., 61

^[22] Ibid., 60

^[23] Javier Trímboli, Sublunar: Entre el kirchnerismo y la revolución (Buenos Aires: Cuarenta Ríos, 2017), 37–48.

^[24] Ibid., 87.

^[25] These laws are commonly known in Spanish as “Banelco,” “Uno a Uno,” “Obediencia Debida,” and “Punto Final.”

^[26] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.

^[27] Ibid., 11.

^[28] Los días afuera, concept, text, and staging by Lola Arias, season 2024, Presidente Alvear Theater.