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 

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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.