The readings this week are all about disrupting the network. Problematizing the network. Occupying the network. The Zapatista movement blew a hole in the hegemonic hierarchical capitalistic structure of thought and transaction, making the invisible visible. The movement became a lateral network among the people instead of dangling a leader or figurehead above the crowd. It encouraged new ways of thinking about indigenous rights and responses; the spectacle spread like wildfire and manifested itself in aesthetic practices, artistic practices and new forms of activism. The subversive politics of using indigenous aesthetics and technologies in a “modern” world or distributing those within a modern network is significant. Jill Lane writes, “…the Electronic Disturbance Theater had designed the flight plans for a companion digital Zapatista Air Force: the code for its “Zapatista Tribal Port Scan” (ZTPS) was released for public use on 3 January 200I. With this software, artists and activists could mount their own aerial attack on any web site-the U.S. government, or the Mexican military-sending thousands of messages through the “barbed wire” of ports open to the cyber network.’ The messages sent by the digital activists were drawn from a fragmented, bilingual poem about the Zapatista struggle for peace with dignity in Chiapas” (Lane 130).
Not only does the EDT vigorously question the idea of space and embodiment in the cyber network, but this narrative elevates the fragmented, the bilingual, the forgotten (Lane 131). It illuminates the invisible and intangible “space-betweenness” that the protesters – the indigenous population negotiating citizenship and human rights violations – aesthetically and (perhaps) geographically occupy. Even the title, “entre la luz y la sombra” is a call to that in between-ness. The nonviolent nature of the movement also is a direct rejection of violent colonization practices. It furthermore appropriates and subverts “power” in a hierarchical, manipulative sense. By this I mean, the word is the weapon, as the Subcomandante says. There was always the “illusion” of the weapon, but that weapon was the word – it was the will of the people, the movement. The Zapatistas used this illusion, the word ultimately, to manipulate and mobilize the capitalist, neo-liberal hierarchy; I see this as subverting the way “illusion” has been weaponized to marginalize, control, regulate and erase bodies. This movement leaves me with more ideas about the potentiality and futurity of bodies and lives in translation; of the way that activism can employ bilingual narratives and the fragment to mobilize and subvert hierarchies.