On the 41st anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion (June 28, 2011), I was invited to participate in a roundtable debate on the LGBT movement in Brazil—what we could learn from the past and what future challenges might be. It had, indeed, been a high-energy time for activists, who had mobilized several marches in São Paulo over a five month period, some of them reaching five thousand people. In addition to talking about the various problems facing LGBT people in São Paulo, several activists claimed that, contrary to a common sense opinion of progress, the movement was in a retrograde moment (um momento de retrocesso). Motivating several people to make this analysis was President Dilma Rousself’s declaration six weeks prior (mid-May 2011) that she was pulling a program to include an anti-homophobic education. The program “Education without Homophobia,” was the only program from a much larger agenda called “Brazil without Homophobia” to be put into action. Its veto from the president (and the politically suspect circumstances around that veto), left many LGBT activists disillusioned.
I had been hearing the politically fatalist talk in reaction to the veto of "Education without Homophobia" for quite some time. As an outside observer, I found it fascinating (and extremely relevant) that these same activists two weeks before the veto had been celebrating the unqualified success of the movement after the Supreme Court unanimously voted in favor of same-sex civil unions (May 4, 2011). As one activist told me during the spontaneous celebrations that followed the decisions, he felt that “anything was possible” and that we were embarking on a new phase of the movement. At the roundtable, I reminded people about this very short timeline between political elation and depression. I argued that the future is wildly unpredictable, and that we can hardly know whether we are in a moment of progress or retrograde. (Indeed, privately, I wondered about the validity of the terms).
How was it that peoples' collective understanding of the political present, of the historical moment in which the they were taking part, change so radically in such a short period of calendar time?
Some considerations (under the fold):
First, Brazilian political thought strikes me as highly teological in general. Of course, this is the land that de Gaulle once called "The land of the future, and it always will be." Both rightwing and leftwing readings of politics are very invested in discussing decadence or progress (depending on what side one is on).
Second, another way to read the progress/retrograde conundrum is that politics don't work in a unilateral direction. The pressure put on conservatives on the president to kill the Education kit were surely a reaction to the Supreme Court decision. That is, actions court reactions. Just as a series of violent attacks against LGBT people prompted historic protests in São Paulo, the opposition gathered force around their own scandal.
Third, the pull to read the present in any way--progress, setback, action, counteraction--is often a coping strategy for dealing with the fundamental ambiguity and uncertainty of the present.
Speaking of reading the present....Zizek (2010)* says that the present has a funny way of reorienting the past. This is not just to say that we interpret the past through the present (although it means this too). Rather, the present, its affects and its energies, reorients the past in order to create its own possibilities. That is, the conditions of possibility of the present don't predate the present. Such a reading of the reading of the present goes against both intellectual (Kantian, Nietzchian, Foucaultian) and everyday impulses towards the identifying the genealogy of our current moment. Such a reading of the spontaneous past complicates a concept like Foucault's "history of the present." That is, we have a historical present, but our historical present is actually ahistorical, floating above past events rather than grounded in them. Such a view is much more in line with Hume's, Bergson's, and Deleuze's ideas about the radical discontinuity of moments, from one to the next.
So, what does this imply about reading our fragile present as a critical political act? And of our commitments to political change or historical memory, or any other number of acts that carry with them an implicit theory of time and of continuity? Let's briefly return to Zizek, who argues that the grand continuity between modernism and postmodernism is the radical separation (and reunification really) of interpretation and interpretation's object. But he also implies that this separation is specious. That makes sense in our case, if we are arguing that event and possibility emerge together. If this is the case, then interpretation always exists within the act of living the event. That is, reading the present is always a critical act, but one that needs to be done constantly as an act of engagement rather than an act of reflection.
*Guilty- I just read this today in Zizek's second forward to Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock.
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