In Entre La Luz y la Sombra unx camarada from the EZLN claims: Su mirada se había detenido en el único mestizo que vieron con pasamontañas, es decir que no miraron. Growing in the south of Mexico City, the window I had into the Zapatista thought, labor, and aesthetics was the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at UNAM. As the daughter of two Pumas, I spent many days walking the triangle between la Facultad de Economía, la Facultad de Derecho, la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras and most importantly, Las Islas. As a young girl I would stop to listen young universitarios talk about Marcos, or adopt Zapatista communal practices of resistance within the university. The figure of the indigenous Zapatista woman was, and will always be, the most important symbol of resistance in Mexico. However, I quickly noticed that even in its purposeful and tactical ambiguity, the figure of El Subcomandante, would often cloud the essence of la lucha. Visually, the image most often circulated of the Zapatista movement is the one of this mestizo man, front and center. Which is why, in spite of the ways the Zapatistas used and co-opted their own narratives in the media, I personally appreciated the performative gesture Prof. Taylor mentions in this weeks text in which el Subcomandante performs the death of el Subcomandante Marcos and the birth of Subcomandante Galeano. This metamorphosis invites us to ask what Chris Hedges wonders via Taylors text: What do the Zapatistas need us to be?
As Ricardo Dominguez highlights the aesthetic avant- garde practices of the Zapatista movement, I wonder if we can position the guerilla practice of naming, and renaming as a fundamental performative tool which not only functions as an act of remembrance, or rather a re-living of a fallen comrade, but also as an aesthetic manifestation of reinvention which fights against the narrative which always positions indigeneous communities as windows into our origins, and our past, rather than as a contemporary and futuristic form of existence with endless potential of revolution, reinvention, and rebirth. Thus, I turn to Jill Lane’s and Ricardo Dominguez’ re-telling of the “discursive missile” from Zapatista Air Force to describe the Zapatistas body: (it is) a difficult thing to stop and arrest, it’s like a poem.
Author Archives: Camila AR
netizenship
The morning after Donald Trump got elected as the new POTUS, my close friend and roommate Juan Manuel told me: “Por primera vez los gringos entenderán lo que es tener un payaso ridículo al mando.” Juan Manuel, a Venezuelan exile, was right. As a Venezuelan and a Mexican we were used to extremely cartoonish political figures. Presidents of the United States, no matter how evil, racist, or ridiculous they were, always had a ring of protection which manifested itself as experts in political PR and communications. In a strange manipulation of his own image, Trump appears to shed that ring of protection for his own handling of his presentation, which is mostly distributed via television and social media. This week’s readings highlight the way new media shapes our social and cultural political landscape. From Trump’s tweets to his theatrical expressions, to online social mobilizations, to the reconceptualization of citizenship via selfies into what Poster defines as netizenship.
In many ways I was moved by Taylor’s text, given that my own politics of passion are deeply entangled with the subject matter. As a fourteen-year old at the time of AMLO’s mobilization, I mostly observed the “animatives” that were activated in the city as an external actor. Animatives are described by taylor as “part movement as in animation, part identity, being, or soul as in anima or life. The term captures the fundamental movement that is life (breathe life into) or that animates embodied practice. Its affective dimensions include being lively, engaged, and ‘moved.’” (Taylor) For me, it wasn’t until the following election in 2012 (my first time ever voting), that those animatives interpolated my own body. Seeing how the media had protected and enhanced the image of then political candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, which included the attempt to de-legitimize a student protest against him which happened in Universidad Iberoamericana. The protest had happened when EPN visited the private university to give a conference. Students protested his presence and questioned him on the murders and rapes that happened in Atenco, a massacre he authored in 2006. Frightened EPN hid in the bathroom. The following day the media claimed the protestors were not students but pawns from other parties. Thus, the students who were present began circulating a video in which each one of them presented their student ID on camera. Asserting their presence and their actions against the candidate of the PRI party. One hundred and thirty one students showed up in the video, unleashing the student movement #YoSoy132. Echoing previous movements we marched amongst many routes from Tlatelolco to el Zócalo.
Edward’s understanding of “The selfie determination of nations” (Edwards, 28) resonates in a very particular way with how this movement started. As it began with an assertion of singularity within a collective practice, and it happened via each of the students action of self-taping and sharing of another form of individual identification which was their student ID. As borders, media, technology, neo-liberal economies shift so does the concept of the citizen. Consumption thus has transformed into a form that quantifies and qualifies our relation to the state and to the body politic. Particularly helpful perhaps is Poster’s invitation to call into question the term citizen in and of itself, as well as the way this term has come to denote a “sign of the democratizing subject”: “Does the term citizen carry with it a baggage of connotations from Western history that render it parochial in the globalized present? (Poster, 76).
These readings invite us to disrupt, question, and imagine, even if there ́s an impending threat of failure. For “even in failure, if we measure failure by the absence of a plan for a future society, insurgencies will have had a measure of success (Arditi)” We must find, in this disruption the potential where new digital economies can open up new political landscapes. Potential is not in the way they subscribe to a specific future but in their demand for a change, a transition, in the way the present demands the potential of a future, even if that future is not specifically outlined.
Fighting a Fiction
This week’s readings alerted me to the importance of highlighting the difference Prof. Schechner highlights between make believe and make belief to citizens. It seems that as politics have been shaped over time, the conception of power has long been shaped in between the tensions that are held in the narrow moments that separate (or join) the make believe from the make belief. Power, as Machiavelli shows us, has become a key tool of the political leader. How to obtain it, maintain it, reproduce it, and expand it is the key concern of the leader figure Machiavelli speaks to. A prince who understands that manipulation, specifically the manipulation of love and fear, is one of his greatest allies: “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” This prince, has unfortunately not changed much as in 2019 we still endure leaders who have constructed a fiction of themselves. A fiction so strong that it shapes unbreakable ideals. Elizabeth Kolbert wonders how can we open the eyes of people, when the line of fact and fiction is blurred when it comes to the way belief is shaped: “Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science.” It is here where art must intervene. If “appealing to the emotions” may be better, and there is no better way of understanding emotion and affect than via art, then perhaps it is now more urgent than ever that we look to art as a political tool. Otherwise, I echo Charles M. Blow in wondering: “How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy?”
Systems of Visibility
Living in a time when the production, distribution, and consumption of images happens at an extremely fast and constant rate, reflecting upon the ontological nature of an image, and the contemporary ways images can and should be used for political change is of utter importance. A crucial point that the authors of this week’s readings touch upon is the responsibility we have as spectators of an image. This very Brechtian calling, invites us to understand that the translation of the image from it’s two-dimensional realm unto the realm of knowledge depends upon what Rancère understands as a Dispositif of visibility–the understanding an image as an element within a network of conceptions of realities, perceptions, symbols, meanings, and other data: “An image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit. The issue is knowing the kind of attention prompted by some particular system (Rancière, 93).” Reading Azoulay alongside Rancière, the reader, and also the spectator of photography, is prompted to re-think of their own role in the creation of meaning and knowledge by understanding this role within a body-politic. Thus, the spectator is positioned as a citizen, a political subject that must act and think responsibly. Personally, this understanding of political responsibility via our relationship to an image is perhaps the most urgent subject touched upon the authors. Particularly as we live in a time when our connection and understanding of the world is mediated by images. Thinking not only of revolutions, and reconstructed monuments (Protests in Chile, the defaced Ángel de la Independencia in Mexico City), but also of how contemporary atrocities and violent social injustice such as police brutality against black citizens gets recorded, and shared with such ease that one must always question our role as mediators, as spectators, as consumers, and distributors of such images. “Becoming a citizen means replacing these impartial positions with a position that is partial to the civil contract of photography, a contract without which modern citizenship is invalid, insofar as it is the contract that made the conquest of the world as picture possible (Azoulay, 157).”
Last but not least, Beltrán touches upon a very specific example of how citizenship and political belonging is reconfigured not only via images, but via the platforms that today are responsible for holding and sharing various forms of media. Via social media interactions and cyber-testimonios DREAMers have re-arranged and “queered” immigration politics by claiming their right to visibility. Refusing secrecy, and challenging surveillance, DREAMErs are organizing, questioning, and archiving their existence in a way that for me, is the perfect embodiment of Azoulay’s citizen of photography: “The act of prolonged observation by the observer as spectator has the power to turn a still photograph into a theater stage upon which what has been frozen in the photograph comes to life.”
Old Maps No Longer Guide Us
This week’s authors posit three fundamental questions: When is a body persecuted? Under what conditions is a body persecuted? What role do we play in the persecution? In respective order, Girard, Foucault, and Taylor’s texts create a triptych where concepts such as abnormality and difference, torture and punishment, and concealment and spectatorship are fleshed out in order to understand what Foucault identifies as the “Political Techonology of the Body (Foucault, 26).” Understood as the knowledge and ability to conquer the forces of the body, these tactics and techniques of power permeate judicial and non-judicial forms of punishing, controlling, and subjecting a body.
As the authors touch on ideas of visibility, or lack thereof my mind quickly travelled to one of the most famous cases of modern torture which has been concealed, but not eliminated: the 2003 Abu Grahib report of torture and prisoner abuse. Deeply intertwined with the United State’s historical use of torture to profit from marginalized bodies, the images released in 2003 showed the choreographies created by the US soldiers in order to punish, humiliate, and dehumanize Iraquí subjects: in one of the most famous released images one can see US solider Lynndie England, a white woman, standing proud wearing her military uniform, while holding a leash, which is attached to the naked, tortured body of a prisoner who is on the floor next to her. : “The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body (Foucault, 26).” This case raises interesting questions which stand in dialogue with Taylor’s reflections on spectatorship and our relationship to seeing, viewing and surveillance. The audience of this photos was meant to be controlled, the photos were meant for the sadistic enjoyment of the US military members only, but how does the scope of “an audience” change in a time when technology rearranges the possibilities of visibility and surveillance? As Taylor says on page 131 of Percepticide, “Old maps no longer correspond to, or guide us through this world.”
Guacharaca Política
Prelude
The backs curve, the knees bend, and the footwork shuffles to the swaying melody of the accordion. The hands twist into sharp and angular signs representing la cruz de sus parroquias: M for Monterrey, I for Colonia Independencia, V for Villanitas. In el baile de gavilán, whether your hands show affiliation to the city, a neighborhood, or a gang, you will be moving to the right, pasito a pasito, following the footsteps of other Colombias, while others follow you. One after the other we shuffle to the right, led by the chik-chika-chik-chika-chik of the guacharaca, creating a large circle of bodies in motion. The dance floor is now an ocean, and at the center, like a school of fish, bodies are gracefully tossing, turning, and shuffling in unison riding the slow tumbado of the cumbia rebajada. If for Hannah Arendt the political realm where power and the space of appearance come into being, rises directly out of the “sharing of words and deeds” for the Colombia’s it rises out of communing in motion, out of the collective pride de ser colombia.
I.
In the 1950’s Colombian cumbia and vallenato music landed in Monterrey, Nuevo León via Mexico City. Due to Monterrey’s geographic position which marks it as a crucial migratory point, mas pa’ allá que pa’ acá, the afro-caribbean rhythm found a home on its way to Houston, Texas, and other U.S. border cities. Rapidly, Sonidero’s popularized hits such as La Cumbia Sampuesana and La Pollera Colorá. The popularity of colombian cumbia and vallenato music led to the formation of a subculture that prevailed for decades and eventually became an essential part of the cultural makeup of the Northeastern of Mexico.
Socio-economic inequality is particularly palpable in the industrial city of Monterrey given that it houses Mexico’s largest multinational companies, as well as the richest neighborhood in Latin America: the luxurious and conservative San Pedro Garza. This stark disparity, combined with the city’s proximity to the United States, its violent history as a Drug War epicenter, and its position as a migration point, has made of Monterrey a place rife with racial and economic disparity, discrimination, and segregation. Given that the Colombia movement is mostly integrated by impoverished and working class people who live in precarious conditions within Monterrey, classist and racist policies and social norms have attacked Colombia culture since its inception. In these conditions of marginalization, Colombia culture has created a social practices and actions that battle isolation: “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act (Arendt, 188).” Thus, the ser Colombia, translated to “being Colombia” became not only a crucial cultural identity formation, but an important source of power for working class regiomontanos.
In the early 2000’s Colombia culture went through a crucial aesthetic transformation. Young Colombia’s created a new form of sartorial expression which mixed Cholo aesthetics, DIY garments, religious accessories, gel-heavy hairstyles, and the Regio-Colombia musical tradition. This aesthetic expression was quickly rejected by the dominant Regio culture, which criminalized and thus further marginalized Colombia youth. Colombias aesthetic and cultural actions have solidified an important cultural political practice within the city of Monterrey. By the late 2010’s, the aesthetic phenomenon within Colombia’s, known by foreign entities as Cholombianos, had been “eradicated” thanks to the lethal combination of criminalization, marginalization, and violence.
Although it is rare to find the youth of Colonia independencia flaunting the looks that brought them together in the early 2000’s, Colombia culture is still thriving. Thus, I wonder, what is the political significance of popular cultural practices? In this particular case, how can we understand the political power within manifestations such as the Colombia’s in Monterrey? What does it mean to gather in motion and in music in a city which is constantly seeking your eradication? Or to echoe Judith Butler, “What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? (Butler, 23).”
According to Etienne Balibar political action must be understood in terms of strategies (Balibar, 16). Thus, I’d like to break down two of the main strategies which conform the political spectacle which makes the Colombia’s phenomenon possible. For the purpose of this short essay I will briefly focus on the aesthetic and the choreographic, which can be understood in terms of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly respectively.
“If we consider why freedom of assembly is separate from freedom of expression, it is precisely because the power that people have to gather together is itself an important political prerogative, quite distinct from the right to say whatever they have to say once people have gathered. The gathering signifies in excess of what is said, and that mode of signification is a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity. (Butler, 8).”
To powerfully assert one’s identity by claiming prideful ownership of aesthetic preferences which have been classified as “tacky”, “poor”, “vulgar” is to appropriate the assertion and delineation of one’s difference. The understanding of identity I posit here aligns with Etienne Balibar’s understanding of identity as a transindividual formation, meaning its construction depends on both the individual and the collective (Balibar, 27). These practices, which are always profoundly bound to practices of resistance and politics of excess, tend to be originated within communities which have historically created culture that is first rejected and then appropriated by hegemonic cultural producers. The aesthetic choices of the Colombia’s, which I understand mainly as their sartorial practice, have facilitated the creation of an alternative polis. “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be (Arendt, 198).” This process of identification and recognition must be understood as a fundamental political practice of marginalized communities which use their self-fashioning as a form of claiming visibility and occupying public space which is often denied from them.
Lastly, and more importantly we must focus on the choreographic assembly of the Colombias. Because as Judith Butler notes, “forms of assembly already signify prior to, and apart from, any particular demands they make. (Butler, 8).” The assembly of marginalized youth which identifies with Colombia culture has a noteworthy choreographic strategy which consists in forming a large circle when they’re dancing. Unlike other forms of popular dance, where the circle is formed in order to provide space for a moving body which will occupy the center, this circle does not prioritize the space at the center. The purpose of the circle is not the centering of an individual but the circumference itself. This choreographic action embodies a collective political practice. It is a choreographic structure which allows everybody to claim individual identification, which is expressed via hand signs and shout-outs, while remaining within a collective structure. This choreographic practice reminds us that: “No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise, happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerges from the “between,” a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates (Butler, 76).”
It is important to conclude with a reminder that the Colombia practice of the early 2000’s which I speak off was quickly eradicated by the lethal combination of local criminalization and the violence of the Drug War that profoundly attacked the social fabric of Monterrey. Today, the Colombia’s have found new forms of expression. Like many cultural practices, its survival has depended on its ability to transform. I end on this note to remind the reader that historically cultural and aesthetic practices which have been targeted in this way present a danger to the state of domination of the status quo. Therefore, it is a civil duty to protect and respect practices like the Colombia’s, as in doing so we will be protecting political practices which are essential to the social fabric. We will be protecting those bodies that “dance on the line.” We will be protecting the Colombia assembly which enacts “by the embodied form of the gathering, a claim to the political (18).”
Key Words
1. Assembly
2. Precarity
3. Choreography
Video:
1. Colombias:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9gXXysH3_Y&list=PL4xdu6yKN6IoJvx2-ToE7kDurK0YQ_6CV&index=8&t=0s
2. Angélica Rivera, Declaración Casa Blanca EPN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4_Tk9wtDQ
Power and The Space of Appearance
Reading Arendt and Butler this week, as bodies of students covered the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in remembrance of the Tlatelolco Massacre, felt particularly fitting. As a daughter of two survivors, the understanding of the relation of power to the space of appearance has been incredibly important in my work both as a thinker and a doer. Arendt’s analysis of power was incredibly helpful as I continue to try and understand in my own work how do popular cultural forms, specifically dance forms, establish collective power within the space of appearance. “Power is that keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. (…) While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanish the moment they disperse (Arendt, 200).” It is this moment of acting together, and furthermore, dancing together, that carries particular importance for me. As Arendt points out early in her text: “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act (Arendt, 188)”. Collective action and collective movement can establish difference without separation while simultaneously asserting a political claim. As Butler points out, the acting and living of the body: “is always conditioned acting.” So if our acting is always conditioned, even within the powerful framework of the collective, how is it that action and movement establish a positioning of the body against, within, and beyond these conditions? This question still rings in my head, however Butler’s analysis and insistence of how bodies are informed by the conditions of precarity is incredibly helpful: “́Precarity ́designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. (Butler, 33).” So, I wonder, how do forms of popular cultural and creative expression oppose precarity? How does dance transform the space of appearance? How is it that the actions of combos reggaetonero in Mexico City, a Colombiano crews in Monterrey, established such a powerful presence within the space of appearance that they were persecuted and eliminated? Even when their lives already existed within a state of precarity, and thus a state of elimination. How does this double extermination of humans that are not eligible for recognition within the sphere of appearance operate and affect a body politic?
Mouffe and the Monterrey Colombias: Artivism and Social Cultural Practices
In Agonistics Chantal Mouffe claims “If artistic practices can play a decisive role in the construction of new forms of subjectivity, it is because in using resources which induce emotional responses, they are able to reach human beings at the affective level. This is where art’s great power lies–in its capacity to make us see things in a different way, to make us perceive new possibilities (97).” This statement is made after a thorough analysis of Alfredo Jaar’s work, which incites conscious transformation by intelligently affecting people’s sensations and emotions. Mouffe, Bailbar, Taylor, Boal, and Brecht all appeal to political and artistic platforms that activate the subject. The following words keep coming to mind: action, activation, activism. Positioning these authors together is a reminder that political performance, or political art forms, are necessary to highlight our obligations as citizens: as critical, active, political subjects. In insisting upon the role of the “spect-actor”, Boal and Brecht break theatrical and performative power structures located within the forms of the theatre and the rehearsal in a way that functions as a metonym for a larger social system. This action echoes Mouffe: “Envisaged as counter-hegemonic interventions, critical artistic practices can contribute to the creation of a multiplicity of sites where the dominant hegemony can be questioned.” I’d like to interpret those sites as slumbering bodies of subject-citizens and think of the creation of those sites more as an activation, an invitation, an awakening. Furthermore, I’d like to think through these ideas while centering not only artivism or artistic political practices that identify themselves as such, but also practices that may not be classified as political by their creators, or their spectators, but which are still political in nature. I am specifically thinking through movements such as the Colombia’s in Monterrey, Nuevo León. Better known by foreign entities and media as “Cholombianos” a term imposed on this local practice, Colombia’s are groups of marginalized youth who adopt aesthetic practices of Chicano/Cholo communities in Texas and California and marry them with a love for Colombian music and culture. Thus, creating a hybridization which pertains to the urban landscape of the Northern Mexican state of Nuevo León. How can a group of marginalized youth engaging in social dance practices be as powerful or even more powerful than art which is specifically created as political art forms. What changes in the way we receive, perceive, and absorb cultural political practices that are not created with the intention of being “political”? How does this self-awareness change the creation, reception, and perhaps the types of politics each cultural form activates?
Disbelief can Move Mountains
The works of Taylor, Brecht, and Boal converge in their insistence of performance as a tool (or to echo Boal a ‘weapon’) in which knowledge production can be used to destabilize ruling powers and facilitate political transformation. Crucial to this process is the idea of alienation which both Brecht and Boal insist upon in their texts. Brecht insists upon a degree of artifice which is so clear to the audience that it allows reflection and avoids the passiveness the hyper-real theatre expects from their viewers. It seems that in order for the performance to affect the audience (or spect-actor) in a way that encourages them to critically question what they are experiencing, the performance theatrical tools must highlight artifice “…for character and all must not grow on the audience so much as strike it (Brecht, 197).” While in Brecht’s writing this process of disensuss, criticism, and alteration happens during a theatrical performance, and reverberates after the staging is over, in Boal we see tools that prepare the participants to act in staged and non-staged social situations. Boal, in the same way Brecht insists upon artifice, makes a case against empathy: a case against relinquishing power. In both of these theatre theorists, as well as in Taylor, we see an insistence on a mode of performance which trusts that all bodies present have an ability and possibility for action. These authors and their reflections on political performance invite, incite, and insist upon the potentiality of political action. They remind us that “disbelief can move mountains (Brecht, 189)”.