“She. Has no military rank, no uniform, no weapon. Only she knows she is a Zapatista. Much like the Zapatistas, she has no face or name. She struggles for democracy, liberty, and justice, just like the Zapatistas. She is part of what the EZLN calls “civil society”—a people without a political party, who do not belong to “political society,” made up of leaders of political parties. Rather, she is a part of that amorphous yet solid part of society that says, day after day, “Enough is enough!”
Subcomandante Marcos
Twelve Women in the Twelfth Year
The Moment of War
MARCH 11, 1996
In this passage, dead, not dead, not not dead Subcomandante lays out the aesthetics of a Zapatista woman. Much like the Zapatistas, she is amorphous since he “takes away” all her physical attributes like uniform, weapon, face or name, yet solid as she knows who she is. In fact, only she knows who she is and her knowledge of herself comes from comparison with the Zapatistas like the knowledge of the Zapatistas comes from her understanding of herself. I think this paragraph illustrates the way the Zapatistas get built and aware of themselves and evolve through the members. So, as Subcomandante said he no longer exists when he is not necessary to those who constitute the Zapatistas.
I guess the ability to change a form and a medium is what makes the Zapatistas special and “durational” as Domínguez described them. Taylor said that the decision to “kill” the hologram of “the recognizable leader” in favor of the collective was made within “the undergoing change” in the style of political performance.” But what makes the Zapatistas so sensitive to those changes?
I find the answer in the perception of the Zapatistas time. Subcomandante wrote that when they had “erupted and interrupted in 1994 with blood and fire, it was not the beginning of war for [them] as Zapatistas”: “We had been enduring for centuries.” So there is no starting or ending point: even dead Subcomandante is reborn as a collective. The political spectacle for the group does not follow the linearity of the past, present or future since the concept of time is erased under oppression when they were not present in time. The transition to the cyberspace was easy and natural for the Zapatistas in comparison to inflexible political parties because they didn’t have a presence in the physical space that they could lose. Lane wrote that “for EDT, as for the Zapatistas, cyberspace can be practiced as a new public sphere, a runway for the staging of more productive “lines of fight” for those struggling for social change.” But the communal efficiency of the work done by the Zapatistas cannot be explained only through common struggle. I’m in favor of what Domínguez called “that aura” “that somehow there could be a possibility of interconnecting real bodies embedded outside of the grid as a direct manifestation of the ethics and aesthetics of how networks and tactical media should really respond.” No matter whether we call it hope, aura or belief, it is what outlives sub/comandantes and their memes, creating new forms of collectivity.