A meeting

Gilberto Gil - Professor Milton, I didn’t prepare any special agenda, especially because I don’t feel qualified to speculate on your area of knowledge and work, but as it interests me that your thoughts, your ideas be made known on our site, I wanted to talk to you and get to know some things. Firstly, I’d like you to give us an idea of your education, the beginning in Bahia, as an intellectual and in your university subjects.

Milton Santos - I studied Law and as a law student I gave geography lessons, which I discovered to be my real great interest. It was this that led me to do a doctorate in geography at the Strasbourg University, France, and from then on I began a research career in Bahia and other countries which led me to have many intellectual adventures which expanded after 1964, for known reasons, when I had to leave Brazil. I believe my career starts with empirical studies, that is, simply trying to describe the territorial and social reality here and there, especially in Bahia, but also elsewhere in Brazil and abroad. Later, I began having more theoretical interests, more epistemological interests. This coincides with my distancing myself from Brazil, when the concrete work-object wasn’t present, the possibility of information was reduced. Man has two shelters, one is the Earth and the other the infinite. So I took shelter in this area of thinking about the world, of thinking about places and tried for a more comprehensive geography, more of a meta-geography rather than just geography.

GG - Did this new context for your geographical interest occur to you in Strasbourg, or had it already come up in Bahia, or maybe whilst teaching here in Brazil?

MS - Bahia is always the center, but I think this break occurred at the end of the seventies. Until the 70s I was in France. It wasn’t my country but in a way it was, a little. I then had to work in the USA, in Canada, in Tanzania, in Latin America. It is a form of separation and the wish to avoid separation, this retaking of the unity of Man, threw me in philosophy’s way, together with my increasing ignorance of Brazil. Above all, I think it was this.

GG - On this route, these places you mentioned, France, USA, Tanzania, Brazil including Bahia and São Paulo, were you always in these places as apprentice and master, professor and student? Where were you as a professor, and where were you studying?

MS - It was only in Strasbourg that I was a student, in the 50s. From 1964 on, in France, I was always a professor, which practically became my only central activity.

GG - As a whole always thinking and writing also?

MS - Oh yes, all the time..

GG - How many books?

MS - I think around 40. And some 300 scientific articles.

GG - I would like you to tell me a little about a concept, that I know is in your books, I haven’t read it, but you mentioned it in a speech you gave at the Salvador Council House, where I was a councilman some years back, which is the concept of history’s popular phase. Where did this concept come from? Why would we be, following your feeling, your idea, in History’s Popular Phase, what does this mean in relation to other phases that the history of mankind has undergone?

MS - I believe western man has gotten used to thinking of history as a process, which is sometimes said to be revolutionary, but that is linear, because western man thinks of history from a technical point of view, whose changes have been over all quantitative and only apparently qualitative. It’s the quantity of reasoning included in the objects that permits man the so-called progress, another vision of the world, another way of attacking nature and in so doing produce relationships etc. I believe we are entering a different phase, because there will be an extremely strong qualitative change where everything will be submitted to man and not to technique, this last commanded by production as it has been to this day. Well, this new theory is difficult to accept because on the one hand it seems to go against the way of thinking taught us by the Europeans, before whom we have a tendency to be reverent, but, on the other hand, this new theory results not only in a will for hope and a belief in the future, but of a different understanding of the technical phenomenon, a more philosophical rather than pragmatic understanding. The technical phenomenon is, by definition, also a form of production of the intelligence of mankind...

GG - It is like an extension of the mind.

MS - Exactly.

GG - Of the body and of the mind. Mechanisms and thoughts…

MS - …linked to a way of life that changes as the way of doing things affects it. In this manner, I believe that urbanization and accelerated urbanization, devastating urbanization and above all in our country, the way in which our cities have grown, as have the African and Asian cities, are explosions, brought about by new technology and full of unexpected consequences. New technology pushes man to the big cities, because the country is being modernized...

GG - The country itself practically becomes an extension of the city.

MS - The country is emptied and it’s the city that has many and diverse jobs and the country gravitates around one or a few activities, so it pushes people out, who then come to the cities. They come to the city to be poor. Some better their life, but the great majority remains poor and nowadays this phenomenon of poverty in the city is also present in the cities of the northern hemisphere. Every day I am more convinced that the poor are stronger than us of the middle classes and than the rich, because they have the possibility of feeling and thinking. Our thoughts are framed, firstly by our interests, but also by the way in which we instrumentalize everything, even our neighborhoods, our houses. All this is a prison for our thoughts. And then we enter another philosophical/epistemological discussion: the necessity that I am now feeling of refusing the Enlightenment epistemology that taught us the weakness of the poor.

GG - The so-called bourgeois comforts.

MS - The great bourgeois comforts bring about intellectual laziness.

GG - It’s the renunciation of that, the renunciation of the pulsing activity of the mind and the body in the strictest sense.

MS - Exactly. And comfort presupposes pragmatism, presupposes an ever bigger investment in pragmatism. Those who think the new ideas are the men of the people and their philosophers, who are the musicians, singers, poets, the great artists and some intellectuals.

GG - The bards.

MS - The bards and some intellectuals, in a world that is killing its intellectuals. It is very difficult to be an intellectual today because they want to be establishment. In so doing they lose the possibility of interpreting the movement, they lose the possibility of merging with the people and the future. However, I do believe that despite this, despite the weight of science, we are heading towards a new era in the entire world, largely because of new technology. A small example: there is no miracle bigger than the way in which popular culture is having its revenge on mass culture. 20, 30 years ago we would worry about the idea that mass culture would annihilate pop culture. Nothing doing, we are now seeing...

GG - popular culture appropriating the possible tools…

MS - …that is the subject of an interview of yours I recently read.

GG - Yes, now and then I touch on the subject because it’s a type of thought, of reflection that comes to me, not with the rigor that you have, not with the same persistence, the perseverance as you.

MS - I’m paid to do it. (laughter)

GG - It also interests me. And without a doubt I mention these outbursts here and there. Which would be the basic consequences that you foresee for this phase, this appropriation?

MS - I think there will be a big political change, but we have no idea of this possibility, this enormous political change, because of the violence of the information which is a characteristic trace of our time. The brutality with which information invents myths, imposes myths and suppresses what we used to call the truth, this violence of the information and of the finances created such a strong idea of the world today that we become listless before the possibility of another future. But if we stop and think about the way the world works, the way the poor appropriate technology... That the poor and the oppressed are using, in their work and their robberies, for example, and are finding and defending ideas around the world which we seldom mention...

GG - The many forms of piracy. (laughter)

MS - The city is the ideal place, because it’s where everyone communicates. In any case you communicate more than anywhere else. The presence of these masses that arose with a strength not known in any other phase of history, this mobility, this daily rubbing together that constitutes a daily debate, disguised or ostensive...

GG - A box of matches, there where we strike – sparks at any moment! (laughter)

MS - And like a manifestation that we are not yet conscious… But I believe this will all be channeled, because the horror cannot be permanent, the barbarism that we live in cannot last forever.

GG - Do you see signs of this channeling? The future perspective is clearly placed as you say, and the signs? You say: information still covers everything, still pushes away the clearer vision of this springing up, give us some examples, two or three signs.

MS - I think one of them is the form of solidarity, very numerous among the poor, which we don’t see because the university is more interested in the scandal than in the fact itself. The university has itself become subordinated to the media and to fashion, because careers are largely secondary to fashion. As the university stimulates careers instead of stimulating in-depth studies, most researches carried out aren’t for this kind of thing.

GG - What is coming. To try and maintain what already is.

MS - Or to mess up certain manifestations.

GG - In the sense of neutralizing them as an emergence.

MS - I also think that there are new forms of economic production in the city. That 16 million people in São Paulo subsist. But all you hear about is rapes and robberies. What I want to say is that there is an economic production that comes from the co-prescence and the solidarity between men and, on the other hand, there are forms of autonomous production, as I believe your work to be, as I believe the greater part of these 500 thousand - there are 500 thousand people that go out in São Paulo every weekend! - half a million people that go to bars and parties, all these are forms of economic organization, a product of adaptation to the new conditions. What I want to say is that all this is a sub-product of information. Information is controlled from the top, but other forms slip out and what is called the periphery benefits by them, it is called periphery but is in fact the great majority of society. The drama is that all this comes with the death of politics, because the parties refuse to be political, they want to be only electoral, even the left-wing parties refuse to discuss society from the viewpoint of what it really is.

GG - And when you say the death of politics, it follows the death of the State, that is submitted to the political game. The State is run, nurtured, created , processed by politics. It’s the politicians that get themselves elected to government offices, it’s presidents that have been voted in that nominate their ministers, the deputies legislate what is proposed by the executive etc.... This big organism called the State that has been historically charged with arbitrating and even running much of the social life, establish the fluxes, open the channels of interaction possibilities between the various social groups, produce the distribution of wealth, produce the elements that will support the production, to the making of man in the social modern sense. With the death of politics this State obviously also ...

MS - Weakens.

GG - If it weakens, it disappears.

MS - It becomes the instrument of the strongest as in social neo-darwinism which we are now watching. The present process of globalization aggravates this problem. This globalization won’t last. Firstly, it’s not the only possible way. Secondly, it won’t last as it is because as it is it’s monstrous, perverse. It won’t last because it has no purpose. What are we globalizing for, to compete more? What for? The global market, what is that? Who’s seen this global market? It’s a dog chasing its own tail. And there’s what those that work with technique call a technical malfunction. All technological processes produce their malfunctions and invite a new advance, in technology and in organization. Now we are presently having all the dis-advances of technology. In the organization what is happening is the advance of the unified command because the number of businesses has decreased and the part of central organizations has strengthened, the part of finances…

GG - Of economic politics, of production politics…

MS - And as these politics are ever more global, and therefore ever more vertical..

GG - They are therefore no longer political.

MS - They are no longer political and they aren't worried as to what will be their end. And that’s one of the reasons why we again believe in popular time.

GG - I’d like you to insist on that point: why the word popular?

MS - I didn’t want to use democratic because it’s a word that …(laughter)

GG - Has been and is appropriated, has been disappropriated. (laughter)

MS - Popular because, at each time the collectives are less called to take the stand. It’s not possible! Because the way in which technology is used by ever smaller groups to look for only profit and gain, there is no purpose. What is the purpose of one big banking business breaking another? Today we are in a total global nonsense kingdom. The masses are in some way being restrained by information, they are also being restrained by the abstract production of the universities. It’s not that we don’t go see the people, just that the thinking doesn’t start from them because our way of starting to think is inadequate. I believe everything depends on how you start to think. But returning to the question, the fact is that the middle classes in the whole world have also begun to discover that they don’t command anything. This could be important.

GG - They’ve definitely become proletariatized in the political sense, if not yet in the economic (they are also starting to be), but in the political, without doubt.

MS - Even in Europe the middle classes are losing power…

GG - Especially because in Europe, I think what is called people is basically all middle class.

MS - Exactly. Only they are now losing their social advantages, losing their jobs.

GG - And are therefore becoming ‘people’ in the simple sense.

MS - I believe that this very thick smoke screen that established itself over the last 30 years, through what I’m calling the violence of information, is coming to its limit. And so there is a search for something else, a search that is confused as yet. I think that what we call people has enormous sensibility but cannot have the understanding, because the world is too complex.

GG - Professor, a question in the middle of this. Don’t you think that this whole process of the system, the relations of corporation to corporation, the trading of vested interests, the absolute alienation of what the collective interest is, the death of politics, the death of the State, etc., before being discharged into this ocean of novelty, popular, of creation, of breath, of anxiety, of the desire for the popular survival, through the creation of whatever novelty, of a new State, new institutions, whatever, don’t you think that before all this the old system, the "ancien régime", will go through a final hypertrophy, the hypertrophied phase of the system, like a sort of "world government" for example?

MS - This search exists and is, in some way, happening in finances.

GG - No doubt it exists in finances. In the field of organizations, with the growth and strengthening of such organizations like the UNO, or even others; the founding of international congresses, the European Parliament, first the regional configuration, planetary-regional of this process and later a final configuration, truly global through a world government, with congresses where national economic and political corporations have representations, nations with Senates and Houses of Representatives globally, internationally to manage ecological questions, problems like ecological reserves that are of international concern, problems such as drug trafficking, which are problems that cannot be solved even partially by any action nor even by small groups of States. What do you think?

MS - In reality they are two tendencies that will end up coming into conflict. On the one side this government that wants to verticalize everything, like the International Bank of Bern, that disciplines bank work worldwide and on the other hand a certain need for international morality that would be man’s natural attribute once more. The difficulty is that we still confuse the Right of Man with Human Rights. Human Rights are doing fine, but as to Man’s Rights we are behind.

GG - Tell us more about the difference.

MS - Human Rights are linked to the showing of some people’s suffering, well-placed so as to optimize the show and then there is a spectacular mobilization which doesn’t solve every individual’s case.

GG - It doesn’t quite get there.

MS - But one thing about our area that I’ve been thinking of recently: the number of football stadiums that have been built in the world in the past few years, this joined to the enormous number of clubs…

GG - These are indicative of the other way, the reaction, like the human organism reacts.

MS - In these amusement houses in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro etc., where I unfortunately don’t go any more, how many people are there? Thousands.

GG - A new synergy, a critical mass in the formation. And in this sense, doesn’t the paradox again install itself in a dramatic form in the system? The more vertical the system becomes, the more horizontally it potentially promotes itself?

MS - Horizontality, there is another problem for epistemology, because they taught and continue to teach us that we think with the thought, - "I think therefore I am". It’s not like that. Verticality exacerbates this idea of calculating, rational thought.

GG - The control.

MS - And the emotion? And that’s what I think is making a come-back, the power of emotion that happens on the horizontal, because it’s men that meet, it’s a world of surprises and surprise is a synonym of the future. The problem is that the codification of this situation is difficult.

GG - But having a vertical, which ever, the one that remained, it will have to fall. (laughter)

MS - I think it’s starting to fall, but it will restore itself…

GG - Does it restore itself at the same height or does it lose height? It’s as if this globalization is managed from the cryptocratic sense of small groups ever smaller and more powerful, is it not possible that they too are not living an illusion and what is in fact happening is the spreading of the horizontal sheet which is our society?

MS - I think the crucial question is work, because it’s through work that we‘ll get there. Because each one of us is two, we are therefore the man who has to feed the family, pay the rent, educate the children etc., and then we submit ourselves to the command of whoever produces the job. As the job ceases to exist, stops being permanent, stops being sufficient and as I discover the world and see that things happen more or less equally everywhere...

GG - Here on Earth.

MS - I think something is being created from this difficulty, on the one hand of a sum, of codified understanding, because it goes against all theories and practices in force all these centuries, which we love, and on the other hand the difficulty of transcribing this to politics, which has ceased to exist.

GG - How does this system which works to maintain these instruments of verticality control etc. etc., how is it going to maintain the fact that the system itself increasingly provokes the adherence of the opposing thought? This is the modern paradox which greatly interests me, the system needs bettering, it increasingly needs the market, it needs more and more enlargement, it needs to grant to the masses, to the people, conditions: be it citizenship, income, access to knowledge, technology etc, etc, etc.. So how does it maintain itself, if what it really does is feed the enemy?

MS - And there’s something else I’d like to include in our talk, it’s that for the first time in the history of modernity, man is master of technique, something he has never was during the time of the so-called nature which was always hostile to man. Man didn’t rule anything because his discoveries were subordinated to environmental conditions, only now is man beginning to be more autonomous.

GG - He created his second, third and fourth natures. Close to him but untouched by them.

MS - Today, "nature" retires more and more, this disenchantment of the world which globalization has accelerated, creating more and more diversities based on the artifice that cities are an example and allowing a fluidity based on points of the planet duly equipped and producing vertical relationships... Only that parallel to this you would have to find out how to make use of this diversity: ecologists talk of biodiversity and I am saying that big cities are the places for sociodiversity, what I mean is the more sociodiversity, the more wealth.

GG - Sociodiversity, many interactive micro-organisms.

MS - In professions, in forms of work.

GG - Social, operational, technical, modes of life etc..

MS - The day we discover the formula of how to better the relations, because it’s this that creates wealth. The great wealth of today is people, is man. From the moment new technologies appeared the power of mankind increased, only today newer technology is always privileged, which is not necessary for the greater part of the population. Therefore access becomes even more limited.

GG - I’m going to jump a little, but keeping to the matter in hand -- and what about land reform? You said somewhere of the tendency to union, on the contrary to the goals of the reform, in the idyllic sense of land reform, which is the peaceful, impartial division of land etc, etc.. How do you see this today?

MS - I find it something very difficult to talk about in Brazil.

GG - Because the politically correct demand it on the one hand…

MS - But, a say cold analysis, not uncompromising, leads us to think that land reform is a romantic inheritance. It corresponds to a world that doesn’t exist any more, which in Brazil is still justifiable because there are a large number of illiterate people in the country.

GG - When you say it’s still justifiable, does that mean that in Brazil it is still possible to think of some way of land reform for some sectors, in a partial sense, on a smaller scale, that lasts however long?

MS - Exactly. But part of the left-wing and some among my colleagues and my students, became angry because there is a whole mode of thought obedient to the politically correct, the necessity for slogans...

GG - So this land reform myth, such as it has been maintained so far, has no future.

MS - It has to be revised if we want to treat the question seriously, because the world today is a world of circulation, not of production. Formerly production made use of circulation, today it’s the other way around: it’s circulation that decides the production. It is therefore not enough to give land. This fixation on land is an illusion because it doesn’t really solve the problem. The co-operatives still find solutions, and they are a tendency of conservation. Land reform is also a modernization factor, and so it will speed up several other modernizing processes that will also lead to its separation. What do we want in the country, on a middle term basis? Give everybody food, give everybody jobs, better the quality of life for every one. Not necessarily land reform.

GG - With the obligatory binding of the family to that piece of land and to certain technologies that must remain lifelong and such like. Because a small piece of land, in a way, in this classic sense, ends up leading to that.

MS - It is an obstacle in the insertion of technical progress and even in organizational progress.

GG - Now how do you explain, for example, the phenomenon of the landless, the wandering phenomenon, the political phenomenon in this sense. This circulation of the landless, that appear from various places, that multiply, that organize themselves, that submit themselves, here and there, to manipulations by other interests; what is this landless phenomenon?

MS - I haven’t really studied them closely.

GG - I know, but your view from a distance...

MS - It’s a form of this mobility we have nowadays in the world, favored by political will, legitimate, because I think that the landless make up a good thing in Brazil, they are the only ones who can still protest, other Brazilians have difficulties in protesting because of the job relation.

GG - Patronal. (laughter)

MS - It is as if they have a proxy from the rest of the country to protest. That’s why they have the sympathy they do. I see a lot of people who don’t necessarily agree with them but are sympathetic because they do us the job of protesting. But I don’t think that land reform romantically seen has much of a future because...

GG - The object of the question behind all this, land, the piece of land that is the object of the battle, is also something with no future.

MS - What is curious is that in Europe the present day mode is the concentration of land or the invitation to plant less, or even not to plant at all. But the States, worried about national security, stimulate the permanence of a certain quantity of production. Each country wants to have its strategic national production. In Brazil, where the idea of a nation is rapidly being murdered by the State apparatus, from where it appears extremely contradictory, because we produce to sell and peacefully accept massively buying when the occasion presents itself; therefore the idea of an obligatory relation between a given man and a given piece of land, seems to me not to have much hope. It all emerges in the cities. There are cities that are called swollen, I don’t really know to what point they are swollen, I don’t know at what point there is a real saturation or not, but these cities appear as a problem. Also the lowest salaries today tend to be urban, not rural. Therefore the myth of the city is no longer considered the eldorado it was before...

GG - 30, 50 years ago.

MS - 50 years ago. The agricultural tendency is to quickly mechanize itself, capitalize itself. The country accepts new capital more readily than the city. The country is more receptive, permeable to big capital, so families will rapidly establish themselves and will discover that they don’t have much chance. Except if they include themselves in a centralizing process, as in the case of raising chickens etc., where the small producer is there but is vertically obedient even in the processes, the day to day of production.

GG - City planning, capital industry planning.

MS - Of the big capital. So keeping the illusion of land reform as a solution seems inadequate to me.

GG - I had that feeling.

MS - Thinking more of today rather than the future. Think today of hundreds and thousands of people.

GG - That is why I placed the question of the landless. The land and the landless, but the landless are the circulation. There is a certain repressed demand that must be satisfied. It is necessary to give a little land reform.

MS - And it became a political phrase, even respected by the right-wing.

GG -More by them than anyone else. (laughter)

MS - Only the extreme right …

GG - Rejects it.

MS - But every one wants land reform, so there’s no harm done. You divide the land but don’t have to give it just yet. The politically correct way.

GG - Professor, one last thing, within this set of variables; population is a theme of recent popularity, what with the International Summit that just took place promoted by the great international organizations, this demographic explosion thing.

MS - Demographic explosion doesn’t frighten me.

GG - You used to doubt the growth in cities.

MS - It doesn’t frighten me. São Paulo grew enriching every one.

GG - So you think that the future’s capital is people?

MS - I think that’s it: people.

GG - History’s popular phase also affirms that.

MS - More people. There will be an accommodation process.

GG - The population growth in Brazil has fallen.

MS - By a lot.

GG - It is a given fact in history’s popular phase, you have to have people.

MS - You have to have people, it’s what brings about the possibility of effervescence.

GG -It fills the football stadiums. (laughter)

MS - And also the show houses. The fuller the better.

GG - Thank-you very much, professor.