The Chilean mainstream of polytology does not end up shaking in the same ways in which it analyses reality several decades ago: political parties as the only place where politics takes place, governments analyzed on a Cartesian plane from left to right, the voter as a rational being who always chooses based on objective and clear principles and power as a thing that monopolizes in the state and is exercised through law enforcement. Anyway, a series of study objects that look like behind a display case and analyze how fluids move in a specimen. It is the polytology of bipartisanship and the eternal transition, of the past that will not return, a trend faithfully represented in Patricio Navia. At most, on television they would see one thing they analyze through cheesy concepts like “cultural governance.”
Machiavelli would shatter the opinology of Navi Duck. The Florentine adviser was the first to consider that power is basically a social relationship and a set of instruments for producing ideological hegemony from one group to another. He’s the father of antagonism politics. On television, therefore, I would see imaginary and collective consensuses created. In the mornings, now that politicians line up to appear, convince and colonize people’s imaginary, he would analyze how certain political truths are given and even see them as a source of theoretical eating.
Perhaps, in Julius Caesar I would see a variant in the sense of a phenomenon that breaks into public discussion and is difficult to catalog. The Julius Caesar variant is the representation of a transition and a feeling. Underneath political transitions, such as chile’s living transitions, there are also social transitions. Julius Caesar is the icon of a new way of relating to power. Let us remember that a form of power is given and exercised from the state structure, but it always depends on the consensus of those who accept it. There is, therefore, an intimate relationship between a social regime and the anthropological subject necessary to make it work. The system needs people to internalize and make their own concepts as progress or common good.
By influencing imaginaries and building consensus, the Julius Caesar variant influences public power and idearium, because there is also politics in media culture as a space where imaginaries and common senses are created that, after all, determine the consensuses of that thing we call power. The JC variant does just that: It moves in the soft realm of power and creates collective consensuses. Move common sense the other way. People repeat what they say, sometimes “with respect” and sometimes they don’t. The JC variant produces hegemony, influences, creates new meanings. Count and force the other journalists to count as well. Not only that, it forces the rest of the canals to hire animators who say something, not those unmoved statues that nothing moves them and that of such objectivity were transformed into objects.
The JC variant unbalances the opinology of Navi Duck that looks at the observed object from supposed objective neutrality. Donna Haraway recounted how women did not serve as spectators for Boyle’s experiments in which she killed birds because they were moved by the pain of birds, which European, white, and Western scientists did not feel. Pato Navia is the Boyle of political opinology and Julius Caesar is the one who moves and cries for the bird. Why not cry if we all cry, why live in that eternal package of Chile’s eternal transition where everyone, in one way or another, was a Christian democrat means, always saying poquitas (the diminutive is intentional) things so as not to offend or disturb anyone?
The Julius Caesar variant represents the subject he observes and feels. He says doodle like we do everything and thinks of figures like the president, when he calls the wrong phone for example, just as friends who talk to us on Whatsapp do. It’s close and breaks with the mold.
The JC variant even influences subjectivity: if there is someone there who says things in front of the whole country, because I do not, then, say them also in my realm of personal action. The Julius Caesar variant goes beyond a morning cheerleader. It is the representation of a collective consensus. A feeling. It is one of the symbols, perhaps the most mediatic therefore the most responsible, of the new Chile that began to be created from October 2019.
It beats me that, as much as the owners of the chile that dies call for youlephone to accuse those who represent the Chile that is born, this came to stay. And he doesn’t stay because he’s having a coup d’or so, people are tortured and forced into the bad, he stays because he settles into common sense, in the conversation of the street, in the heart of the majority.
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
