Author Archives: mariapaz

mariapaz

This week’s readings made me reflect a lot about different strategies of resistance and the smaller actions that can serve to intervene upon what often seem to be impossibly complex and oppressive systems of power. I was struck by the account of the “geographies of power” and the concept of disturbance spaces featured in Jill Lane and Ricardo Dominguez’s essay “Digital Zapatistas”. They discuss the Critical Art Ensemble’s reversal of “the familiar Deluzian figuration which sees the nomad as the site of the Other” and its insistence that “it is now power which is nomadic, rendering our social condition ‘liquesce’” (134). Certainly nomadic power would demand different strategies than those familiar images of past Revolutions. The symbolic figure of Subcomandante Marcos, “dead, not dead, not not dead” (Taylor), as well as the stories of Mayan technologies and the action of “bombarding” military bases with paper planes give resistance and revolution a new poetic logic.  

The lineage of hacktivist interventions, and its inspiration on Zapatista strategies, seems like an important point of reflection in this contemporary moment. Thinking of the recent shutdown by the Iranian state of all internet connectivity, it is impossible to discount the significant force of traditional (relatively) immobile state power despite networked frameworks and transnational model of the internet. The readings on the Zapatistas this week seem like a great place to start (and, in some cases, continue) to think through how to challenge the particular kind of power which brutally governs today.

Maria Paz Almenara

Machiavelli’s The Prince develops an account of the way power is acquired and retained. Through a careful examination of distinct historical cases, the book presents key tactics for leaders to manage populations and keep control. In particular, Machiavelli focuses on Principalities, sovereign states run by monarchs, as opposed to Republics. Even though this form of government is now relatively rare, it is almost impossible not to think of the contemporary cases that continue to reflect these dynamics today.

In Chapter 3, titled “On Mixed Princedoms”, Machiavelli discusses the significant difference between the conquest by States “of the same Province and tongue as the people of these dominions” and the conquering of areas by more foreign States. He argues that it is easy to retain dominion over populations that share the same language and customs, while it is much more difficult to dominate culturally distinct populations. The continuity in the cultural life of those conquered means that people may “live peaceably with one another” still. This recognition of the need for cultural considerations in governance might help us understand the rise of anti-immigrant discourses within Western democratic states and the right-wing anxiety that surrounds migration discourse. The threat to the dominance of particular cultural practices is given significant political force.

I was also struck by the significance that Machiavelli assigns to affect in monarchic governance. He discusses the “love” that subjects must feel for their ruler – a love that should not be distributed among a multitude of nobles but that should instead be concentrated in the singular figure of the Prince. “Hate” is also theorized as a powerful force that threatens the rule of a monarch. I wonder how these emotions are reorganized in a democratic model – do modern institutions and procedures for governance redistribute (or diffuse) affect? How can these observations be applied to contemporary cases of populism?

Maria Paz Almenara

In her essay “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic”, Cristina Beltrán discusses the strategies of visibility deployed by DREAMers in their claims to political recognition. In particular, she considers the appropriation of “coming out” as a strategy originated during the gay rights movement to present the “opening up of new possibilities to imagine political membership and political claim making”, what she calls the “queering of the politics of immigrations” (88). Throughout the text, digital platforms are highlighted for their potential to produce new (and more democratic) spaces of appearance for undocumented people. Transcripts of cyber-testimonios, videos of undocumented youth declaring their legal status and claiming their right to be in the United States, clearly articulate the potential of these new of resistance to the dominant discourses which surround immigration today.

The two other readings for this week can provide valuable insight for the interpretation of the case of cyber-testimonios. In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay develops a new account of citizenship based on the practices of looking associated with photography following the “conquest of the world as picture” (137). This form of citizenship is distinct as it is mapped onto models the deterritorialized spectatorship, where the witnesses of injustice might be located in distant places and yet remain accountable for this differential governance and responsible for restorative action towards the photographed subjects. In“The Intolerable Image”, Jacques Rancière seeks to collapse the distinction between the testimony and the image. In response to the critique of the circulation of photographs taken in gas chambers during the Holocaust, Rancière asks “What distinguishes the virtue of testimony from the indignity of proof?” He argues that the tensions between “having to” speak and being unable to is only possible to capture in photographs, in the expressions of those sharing their testimony.

The cyber-testimonio of Georgina Perez can be read through both Rancière and Azoulay’s accounts of citizenship and spectatorship. Georgina’s tearful expression of love, respect and gratitude for her mother directly confronts and dismisses the impulse within political discourse to criminalize the parents of DREAMers while emphasizing the innocence of their kids. The words in her testimony and the emotion we can perceive in her face during the video both clearly convey the personal depth and significance of the politics of immigration. In making herself visible, Georgina is also claiming the kind of citizenship of photography that Azoulay proposes. She is introducing herself as a political actor within an alternative space of appearance, and making us (as spectators) responsible for the differential ways in which we are governed based on formal “citizenship” status. She finally asks us “Are you going to be on our side?” (92). As witnesses to her testimony, we have to be.

Maria Paz Almenara

In her account of the distinction between public and private, Hannah Arendt claims that “the experience of great bodily pain is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all” (50). For her, the site of the body is firmly situated within the private as its experiences cannot be transferred or shared. Pain, in particular, prevents the victim for speaking or acting, removing an individual’s potential from participating in the public realm. The readings assigned for this week develop a very different account of pain and torture. Both Foucault and Taylor consider the nuanced ways in which violence, pain and visibility can interact to sustain political regimes and to produce a particular sense of terror or control among its subjects.

In her chapter “Percepticide”, Diana Taylor advances the idea that torture carries a distinct intention, not merely for the victim, but for the spectator. While Taylor makes reference to make performances, plays and images throughout, the text is primarily structured around an analysis of Griselda Gambaro’s 1973 play Information for Foreigners. This allows for the author to draw parallels between theatre’s conventions and its demand of the gaze with the particular ways in which terror and torture operated in Argentina in the 1970s. The way the audience followed the guide through graphic and violent performances in Gambaro’s play is also the complicit way in which the Argentinian people lived through a regime of terror. In the same way as the victim of torture is rendered powerless, so is the spectator. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault sets up the body as a concrete site for the exertion of power. For him, the body is “directly involved in the political field; power relations have an intimate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25). Foucault develops a genealogy of practices of punishment to ultimately present the mechanics of power as operating within a ‘political economy’ or ‘political technology’ of the body.

Despite dealing with similar themes, the two texts diverge in several significant ways. I am interested in particular in the ways in which they might account for a critical position or some kind of resistance to the exertion of power through direct corporal violence. While Foucault’s account seems to exclude any exteriority to the discursive constructions of the body through punishment, by centering her analysis on the analysis of a particular theatre piece, Taylor might point us towards a potential site of critique and struggle.  

Although these two texts operate very differently, I was struck by the account of invisibility and secrecy that each presents as a necessary complement to the hypervisible spectacles of violence. The parallel between the terror of a violent regime (especially one characterized by regular disappearances) and theatre is also significant in this respect. Taylor tells us that “dealing in disappearance and making the visible invisible are also profoundly theatrical. Only in the theatre can the audience believe that those who walk offstage have vanished into limbo” (132). Foucault, on the other hand, discusses the ways in which the criminal procedures in much of Europe were completely secret up until the moment of sentencing. Neither the accused nor the public had access to the identity of the accuser, to the evidence presented, or to other information which might point to the legitimacy of the case. Both Taylor and Foucault are accounting for the role of what is not known, the opaque processes that rule violence, as key ways of exerting power and developing an environment of terror.

René Girard’s “Stereotypes of Persecution” develops a slightly separate account of the ways in which extreme and visible violence becomes legitimized socially in times of crisis. This text particularly seeks to identify the key elements that consistently leads to the persecution of particular groups. His account of the patterns of collective violence is striking because of its lack of differentiation between those enactments that are widely considered to be broadly emancipatory (like the French Revolution) from those associated with tyranny and genocide. Given our previous class conversations on the power of assembly and the mobilization of individuals in the context of resistance, I was struck by Girard’s account of assembled masses as “mobs”. Is there some substantive difference between a group collectively claiming rights against power and a mob mobilizing against a scapegoated group? Can we account for the mechanics of political persecution (and, in the case of our project, the mechanics of political spectacle) without distinguishing between cases of resistance and those of authority? Just some questions to keep in mind as we move forward in our project together.

Maria Paz Almenara

In The Distribution of the Sensible, Rancière claims that “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004, 13). It is through a metaphor of visibility, what is “seen”, that he defines the realm of the political. In Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler considers and extends Arendt’s idea of the space/field of appearance as the political realm where humans recognize one another as such and take action. She significantly emphasizes the fact that not all human subjects are equally recognizable and, hence, the differential conditions of appearance which govern the political. For both theorists, the space of appearance or the realm of the political is exclusive (for Ranciére because of the particular demands on the working class and for Butler given the historical systems of colonial and patriarchal power that govern it) but their aspirations are ultimately oriented towards their expansion not their dissolution.

The benefits of visibility, of recognition, of representation can easily be taken for granted. Social justice discourses regularly deploy these terms as a way to expand the “protection” of the State (i.e. the legal system) or to alter the political sphere through the introduction of new actors. Many of the established discourses and conventional practices of resistance within neoliberal democracies today rely on the visible intervention onto “public space”. While theorists consider the significance of a space of appearance and recognition, activists consistently rely on protests, occupations, strikes, boycotts, or other interventions on public space to act and intervene on unjust social/legal formations. The current dynamics surrounding migration, particularly the precarious conditions faced by undocumented immigrants in the US, however, might force us towards alternative theorizations of the visible and its politics.

The legal charging document that initiates the removal proceedings against undocumented immigrants in the United States is called a “Notice to Appear” (NTA). The document specifies one of three reasons for the initiation of deportation proceedings: being an “arriving alien” stopped at a port of entry, an immigrant already in the US who has not been formally admitted or an immigrant who was formally admitted but is now deemed deportable. Receiving an NTA means that one must appear at Immigration Court on the date specified, it represents the enactment of “due process” where migrants have the right to have their cases heard before a decision is made. This appearance, or making visible, of the undocumented migrant before the legal system might be considered an instance of recognition (or misrecognition) within the public sphere. It can be considered in terms of potential for action or an otherwise political encounter, but would those migrants not be better served by a claim to the right not to appear? While being undocumented clearly represents a precarious existence, isn’t it so partly because of the persistent threat of exposure, the threat of being forced to “appear”?

In March 1997, Balibar delivered a speech in solidarity with the Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard, a group of around 300 African migrants who in June 1996 occupied the Saint-Bernard Church in Paris to demand legal residency. He begins by saying that the French are “greatly indebted to the ‘sans-papiers’ who, refusing the ‘clandestineness’ ascribed to them, have forcefully posed the question of the right to stay”. Through the organization of the movement and their appearance within the political sphere, the sans-papiers were able to make the claim to the right to legal residency as well as the right to have rights. Balibar further emphasizes that this is revealing of the nature of democracy as “an institution of collective debate, whose conditions are never imposed from above” where “people must always conquer the right to speak, their visibility and credibility, running the risk of repression.” The risk of repression, however, proved to be a significant one given the turn of events for the sans-papier movement and the occupation of the church. Towards the end of August 1996, the French police brutally evicted the sans-papiers from the church. Many of them were subsequently deported from France.

What, then, does visibility actually do?

These examples do not seek to discount the political potential of resistance based on visibility. They do, however, raise questions about the necessity for alternative conceptualizations of resistance through “clandestineness”, deliberate invisibility or a rejection of appearance. Considering the contemporary conditions of state (and corporate) surveillance, as well as the history of policing which defines their logic, how can we consider the limits of visibility as emancipatory? How can visibility itself produce precarity? Can performances of resistance be fragmented? Can they resist their own impulse to monopolize the gaze?

While I question Balibar’s premise of an absolute democratic benefit to visibility (Were the sans-papiers not already forced into a kind of new legal visibility by the enactment of Pasqua laws in 1993?), his speech further gives us a foundation for alternatively conceptualizing resistance. From these events, Balibar theorizes the concept of citizenship, not as an institution or as a status, but rather as “collective practice”. This concept is also briefly pointed to in his essay Three Concepts of Politics in an account of the concept of equal liberty:

[Rights] cannot be granted, they have to be won, and they can only be won collectively. It is of their essence to be rights individuals confer upon each other, guarantee to one another…There is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source of ultimate reference of emancipation for each other. (Balibar 2002, 4)

I am interested particularly in the latter part of this claim – the recognition of rights between individuals. Subjects as the reference of emancipation for each other. Rather than performing resistance through action in public space, through protests or strikes which reinforce the State as the entity capable of granting or recognizing rights, how can we resist differential governance by protecting, shielding or hiding our neighbours from the threat of visibility, of a necessarily exclusive (legal) public sphere? How do we reimagine solidarity so that precarity is not further reproduced and intensified towards those most vulnerable? What tactics of resistance should we adopt to face a State which demands formal appearance and visibility?

Key terms: Migration, Law, (In)visibility

Example of political spectacle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8gHreLdgg

Works Cited
Balibar, Etienne. 1996. “What we owe to the Sans-papiers” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0313/balibar/en.html

Balibar, Etienne. 2002. “Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility” In Politics and the Other Scene, 1-39. London: Verso Books.

Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum.

Maria Paz Almenara

Hannah Arendt’s concept of action (as related to the human condition of plurality) delineates a particular space for the enactment of politics. According to Arendt, it is through action and speech that humans distinguish themselves from each other and disclose their agency. It is in this sense that speech and action are revelatory and inherently reliant on the condition of human “togetherness”. Action is described as a beginning, an act that initially discloses its agent. Although this “beginning” is an enactment of agency, its consequences are beyond the subject’s control – they are distinctly boundless and unpredictable. Arendt says that “action has no end” (233), and we can only resort to the faculties of promise (a kind of contract) and forgiveness to gain some semblance of sovereignty over the events set in motion through action. It is in the “space of appearance” (the space for action, as opposed to those for fabrication or labor) that politics emerges – from the spaces in-between actors and out of their respective actions. It is then in the (willful) misinterpretation of this space, the alternative association of the political with the realm of fabrication (associated with control and molding), that Arendt situates the emergence of fascist and otherwise oppressive regimes.

The opening chapters of Judith Butler’s Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly already establish the book’s direct engagement with Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of action, speech and the space of appearance. While these concepts are developed and discussed throughout, Butler also presents a critique of the Arendtian conception of public space and distances herself from what she regards as a masculinist ordering of particular human activities. For Butler, Arendt’s reliance on the distinction between the public and the private “leaves the sphere of politics to men and reproductive labor to women” (75) and restricts the potential political considerations that may surround labor of keeping oneself alive. Arendt’s distinction between action and speech is also questioned in Butler’s text through the ideas of “speech acts” and the performative. Despite these points of divergence and Butler’s more persistent emphasis on the particular conditions that allow for spaces of appearance, Arendt’s elaborate conceptualization of action and her particular account of the relationship between politics and power remain central to Butler’s conceptualization of assembly and resistance.

Maria Paz Almenara

The three readings for this week each outline alternative potentials (and now actualized roles) for theatre and performance within contemporary divisions of labor and structures of power.  Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal each begin with a critique of traditional or Aristotelian theatre, accounting differently for the entanglement of these practices with political interests. Boal interprets Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as a tool for political repression. He says that the catharsis elicited from the spectator in theatre represents “the purgation of all anti-social elements” (47) and provokes a realignment with the ‘moral’ expectations of the State. Brecht similarly critiques the passivity of spectators in traditional theatre: “Seeing and hearing are activities, and can be pleasant ones, but these people seem relieved of activity and like men to whom something is being done” (187). While Boal reimagines theatre’s revolutionary potential by proposing the roles of the “joker” and the “spect-actor”, Brecht instead suggests that theatre and its actors should create a sense of alienation rather than identification from the audience (“I must not simply set myself in his place, but must set myself facing him, to represent us all. That is why the theatre must alienate what it shows” (193)).

I was most struck by the recurrent critique of empathy present throughout the readings. In Performance, Diana Taylor asks “does the performance event have to have happened?” (66) She follows this question with a description of the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) which, despite never fulfilling its intended function, produced political consequences because of its potential and its intentions. The work is significantly not reclaimed because of the empathic outcomes for those who did “experience” it, but for its role in disturbing political discourse. Still, this example of performance could be critiqued from Brecht’s perspective as it is not exactly set “at the disposal of those who live hard and produce much” (Brecht, 186). Taylor is, then, expanding the possibilities for political engagements within performance. She later says “Performance is not judged in terms of true/false; being/pretending. Instead, the affective is the effective.” To what extent does this challenge/extend the positions of Boal and Brecht in their articulations of the political potential of theatre? Is this affective mobilization related to empathy or does it produce some more profound/radical political transformation?

Finally, does the establishment of conventional practices of resistance and the categorization of performance within the realm of “art” limit its transformative political potential? Can these practices of political theatre and performance still be said to participate in Rancière’s “aesthetic regime” of art (if I understand the concept properly)?