Encuadernación de la Experiencia Personal como Construcción de la Memoria Histórica

In pursuit of the elusive mastery of a foreign language, I've been writing small texts mosts days. It just occurred to me that I could share them here. The following is about the work of Cecilia Vicuña and this piece in particular: https://vimeo.com/153046632 

---

Tenemos el mal hábito de pensar la historia desde arriba y tratarla como un obra de teatro, llena de personajes importantes y acontecimientos singulares. Lo que perdemos con esta concepción de la historia son los afectos y perspectivas de la mayoría de las personas -- las formas distribuidas de interpretar, percibir y sentir los cambios en el mundo que forman la textura, el material y trasfondo de la memoria histórica. Son estos actividades cotidianas las que dan significado a la Historia en mayúsculas. Sin estas formas de atención, de sensación y de interpretación, los eventos singulares que componen la Historia -- acontecimientos como el golpe de estado en Chile -- en lugar de ocupar un lugar privilegiado en la memoria colectiva no le importarían a nadie.

Los libros de la artista chilena Cecilia Vicuña son un archivo de esta experiencia personal de la historia. Hecho de objetos cotidianos -- una caja de cigarros, un periódico, el papel pintado de su casa --, la materialidad de los libros contiene su experiencia de vivir en Londres después del golpe de estado. Sus libros muestran que la experiencia de eventos singular y significante no sólo ocurre en la gran línea temporal de la Historia o en la mente, sino en la vida diaria, donde los afectos y sentimientos son provocados e inscritos en los objetos del día a día.  Encuadernados en libros, estos objetos se transforman en un archivo cotidiano de la rabia, tristeza y soledad que provocó este golpe de estado y, en esta manera, muestran la construcción a través de la experiencia personal de memoria colectiva. En su particularidad y cotidianidad, la singularidad de la experiencia de Cecilia Vicuña, es tambien, de manera paradójica, una manifestación física de una experiencia histórica compartida y generalizada. 

Territory, Autonomy and Politics for the 21st Century

For a while, I have been thinking about the epochal shift that radical political struggle is currently undergoing. The concept of revolution that was dominant in the 20th century was one in which a political movement seized control of the state apparatus of a nation and sought to remake society. The concern was fundamentally one about representation –– who could speak for the general interest, who understood it, who could enact a national program to do so. 

The conception of power was thus abstracted from the conditions of reproducing life -- the land and labor from which the activity of living springs. Exceptions certainly existed along side this dominant strain: syndicalists in Spain sought to immediately transform the organization of work, numerous popular councils and assemblies sought to reimagine the terms of political participation and a vibrant sense of anti-imperialist struggle united guerrilla movements in a struggle that transcended the boundaries of nation-states.  

Despite this, the end of struggle tended to be oriented around the revolutionary event -- equated with the seizure and establishment of a new nation state. It was the storming of the palace, the symbols of power, that were the object of revolutionary struggle. 

It is my hypothesis that this was a distinctly "modern" form of revolutionary activity and is being supplanted in the 21st century by a return to what has variously been called the "subsistence perspective" or the cries of "Land and Freedom". With the betrayal of political parties, the rise of para- and non-state actors and the increasing importance of transnational logistical networks (extraction & transportation of resources & labor) in governing particular areas, the nation has lost its central importance in struggles.

Instead, we see movements that are primarily oriented towards taking and holding territory, whether it is a city square, an area in the path of a pipeline or an entire region. Here, the goal of taking land does not primarily invoke juridical claims to rule over a particular region but serves a practical purpose: to seize the space necessary to open up other political and ethical possibilities. 

First and foremost, the insight of these movements is one that power stems from the earth and that the object of struggle is not to seize the symbols of power but to regain the capacity to reproduce life -- whether literal spaces of agricultural production or to open spaces for other forms of communal life (the camp, the general assembly). Going by different names (struggles for Autonomy, democratic confederalism, occupations, "the square" etc.) these movements all display an increasingly unified logic, suggesting the territorial and local nature of struggle in our epoch. 

Mirroring this struggle in the academy are an increased attention to "world building" and the ontological activity. On one hand, this reflects the sort of ecological concerns brought about by the anthropocene (a turning to face the conditions of life after so long disavowing them) but it also reflects a certain failure of a modernist project  and a global reorganization of labor (post-fordist, precarious). 

My suspicion is that this is not something novel but really a return to something that was experienced at the advent of capitalism -- struggles against dispossession in both its european and colonial forms. Two areas of historical investigation suggest themselves: one being an exploration of the conditions of what I would call the "modern" form of revolutionary struggle. (These conditions being a certain organization of labor in national economies, a promised growth and development of the middle class, a faith in technological progress to solve social problems). The second would be an investigation of the peasant and decolonial forms of struggle that, grounded not in an imaginary of representative power but struggles for the immediate conditions of life, bear strong relation to the struggles of today. 
 

Crisis Time, written double fast

We are already in it and its moving. I once wrote that crisis is the moment of indistinction between diagnosis and decision, observation and intervention. What’s key here is that it’s a moment, a temporal state bound to a certain form of intervention which is only possible because of what its urgency pushes from the frame. In crisis time the world suddenly appears flat, everything totally determined and necessity crowds out possibility and makes all things totally governed by seemingly intractable laws. You gotta act fast, or rather, step back and let the experts act because otherwise it will be too late and you’ll be sorry then. 

Crisis time isn’t entirely flat though because it depends on the projection of a sense of threat onto a body, a body that has depth, that requires an intervention, an operation, and must suddenly become open before the experts. Everything is up for grabs and nothing is stable. Cutting, opening and all revealing the innards and how things work, that slow and tedious labor of critique is performed by an unwavering hand with an urgency that never allows a cautious evaluation of that operation’s necessity, which is already a foregone conclusion. 

Crisis time is thus linked to the future anterior to justify its urgent necessity but then banishes past and history in the name of an imperiled future which is summoned with such urgency that no one can doubt the sincerity and severity required. 

The sovereignty of things, be they states or people or other fictive objects, is always ever fleetingly realized but that realization always takes place in crisis time. This is because crisis time banishes the indecision which haunts the necessary with the double inflection of the contingent. In other words, crisis time is an operation even as it performs an operation. This operation is a sovereign action without an actor but the action always is retroactively marshaled to focus to the efficacy of the cause, a metonymic substitution which reaffirms the fiction of presence which remains absent until the next crisis summons it to act again. 

The Operational Aesthetic in our Post-Truth Age

This blog really got going last year when I received of it's purpose as a sort of critical attempt to disaggregate my feed from that of Facebook, to archive my ephemeral writing from different platforms and give it a hyperlink. As such, there were a series of critical engagements and thoughts I was having about the distortions of the attention economy that unfortunately never really were completed (this blog is sort of an ongoing meditation on incompleteness) but that have sort of entered public discussion in a way they hadn't a year ago. Anyway, here is an article I shared on facebook that addresses some of this:

I read this piece in class this quarter and I think it is required reading for all those who want to assert the novelty of the post-truth age. It turns out that there have been people hijacking the attention economy with their hoaxes and people deeply concerned with the corrosive effects on truth for a long time in this country. Indeed, something about the ever-allusive "national character" may not just be susceptible but also delight in the Hoax. This isn't new, it goes deeper than Colbert's truthiness, the lies about aluminum literally ripped from Nick Cage movies used to sell the Iraq war, climate denial and even the CIA's perfection of propaganda and misinformation. Gullibility is nothing other than the flip side the skepticism that corresponds to a popular enlightenment rationality that empowers every single person to be their own critic of what is real and what isn't.

And here is the article, a chapter called The Operational Aesthetic about P.T. Barnum and the history of the hoax. 

Militarized Racial Cartographies in the Wake

There is a park I walk past pretty regularly. It's a block away from a friends house and is on the way to the best bar near here. Today at 3 pm, someone was sitting in this park when a green car pulled up, someone wearing a ski-mask got out and shot them in the head. Or at least that's what the security update I got sent said. Someone in one of my classes who lives near by wrote in a post that the person was shot four times with an assault rifle. Either way, the graphic technical details of this targeted murder -- details know one should have to know about -- are ones that I found myself confronted with. This is of course despite the fact that Hyde Park is dramatically insulated from the violence on the South Side

This fatal shooting brings to mind a statement I read this week from the People's Response team about another recent set of fatal shootings in Chicago. Between last January and October, the chicago police murdered 6 people. In the last month, they murdered five more people, all of them black. The People's Response Team's analysis is clear: This dramatic rise in police murders is directly related to Trump's election. The police are an institution built on the surveillance and destruction of black lives and this election has given them some sort of license to use even more violence. 

It was in this context that I read my friend Nathan Eisenberg's essay "Chiraq in the Naqab" posted to day in the Hypocrite Reader. In it, he maps how the Isreali Military, US Police and US Military all participate in imaginative exercises that collectively produce urban spaces of racialized exclusion that become subject to a highly militarized form of control. Chicago is a crucial link in this story, the imaginary terrain that connects counter-insurgency in Iraq, the settler-colonial operations of the Israeli military and the domestic urban spaces. For the military and police urban planners, it's all flattened into one terrain and one population, part of a "global archipelago" of militarized operation that target a racialized other. It's a great essay and I hope that reading it and engaging with it we can start to clarify which side we are on and recognize the urgency of rejecting narratives that seek to normalize the operation of the police and disrupt in ever more of these nightmarish racist cartographies of violence, cartographies that every so often penetrate the militarized enclave of Hyde Park with their grim realities.

caution and ambivalence

I went to a poetry reading yesterday and the themes raised there reminded me of this space I had made for myself to write more, to think through writing, to explore ideas and to try and practice some sort of friendship through writing. It also raised some of the concerns that started this blog.

They were writing in the genre of New Narrative or a radical autobiography. Friends, enemies and abusers all had names. It wasn't about the self as a brand but experience as the grounds of theory, the way in which nothing is more relevant or true as the way you narrate and make sense of your dreams, your histories and futures with friends.

I started this blog as a pseudonymous project in part because I wanted to write about how to evade determination, to become imperceptible in the age of compulsory digital visibility. Against the profile, the cross-platform strategy of the public writer, I wanted to mark a space that where my writing could evade the determinations of that digital genre. 

The problem however, is that I fundamentally believe that the sort of grounded practice of world-building and counter-narration that occurs among friends, that is friendship, is also one such technique of becoming ungovernable, illegible, of building a form of life that through a sort of use becomes something other than intended.  

Beyond the paradox of seeking a sort of writing that begins from the auto-biographical and yet remains beyond the project of building a personal brand, I was also reminded of the cast of characters -- of friendships -- that inhabit my world, who make world-building possible. 

In the year I have moved twice, took flight from worlds I was in to start again somewhere else. Both times, I did so without friends. First was the impulsive move to Mexico, the desire to learn spanish and chase the possibility of feeling a certain type of love that I felt like I felt while I was in Chiapas that summer, visiting Zapatista communities. In retrospect, that fleeting relationship was nothing more than a relationship with the possibility of travel, of finding accomplices in strange places, of feeling young and beautiful and overcoming difference to establish what was common. It didn't matter because when I arrived in Mexico, she wasn't there and instead I struggled to track the traces of what I thought the sorts of communities I was looking for had left. For much of the time, I was very lonely  -- dreams of writing every day were replaced by a crippling doubt that I would be able to even communicate with those who I hoped to find if I indeed found them. 

And just as I felt like I was making some sort of a world, of settling into a set of relationships that were premised on an ongoing process of articulating a shared experience, I had to move, to Chicago for graduate school. Here, there is the coop I live in and the monastic discipline around which I have structured my life. I feel like I have entered into a sort of elaborate and ongoing conversation that I had sort of left aside but then the problem is that those who are the best to have it with, my friends, the people who want to think about forms-of-life and the ungovernable and then gossip about past relationships, aren't here (and maybe where never there) but either way I have sort of embraced some sort of ridiculous solitude, that isn't loneliness and is productive, not bad at all but still isn't the sort of worldbuilding I want. I have submitted to the institution so that it might allow me to learn but I want to learn with friends and so that is a sort of limit I'm running up against. 

By way of closing, I think I'll turn to the workshop I went to today, a continuation of the poetry reading yesterday, where a certain theorist brought an particular affect that I think I'd like to call kind pessimism, which also might be called care or at least one of its pathologies. There were candles everywhere, an atmosphere of transgression created by the heavy occult and sensuous symbolism that we, as people of electricity, have placed on fire and flickering light. And then this theorist was there and she wanted us to put out the candles because maybe the building would burn down. And suddenly I remembered being 14 and telling my aunt that I didn't care if she thought swimming wasn't safe because I wouldn't want to trade safety for fun and she just told me she was trying to care for me. And so somehow there is a way that caring flows into being careful and constructing the sort of negative imagined future that must be guarded against. It's not the hope that makes you endure a negative situation but the pessimism that finds the possibility of future danger that must, out of kindness (for the janitors? the university? the potential burn victims?), lead to the present situation being extinguished. 

Thinking about this sort of excess caution, the claim to speak for a devastated future that demands control in the present, I feel sympathy for the climate skeptics who just want to watch and see if the world really does burn. But then there is the fact that they really aren't the people living where the crops are failing and the water is carrying away their house and the summers are too hot to endure and all they can really do is endure and care for eachother because no one cares about them, at least not the ones who are watching the world burn. 

So I guess i am sort of ambivalent, about pseudonyms, moving, writing, thinking, discipline, friendship and care. And I am hoping that I can eek out some more time to practice this ambivalence in this form.