Monthly Archives: February 2021

La adición, la serie y la suspensión de la acumulación. Notas sobre La cadena del desánimo (2013) de Pablo Karchadjian

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El libro La cadena del desánimo (2013), de Pablo Karchadjian, invitaría a leerlo a la manera en que se leen los sueños. Esto es, como dice una nota que antecede la sección principal del libro, si “el contenido del sueño está armado de restos de la vida diurna y el sueño mismo podría ser un epifenómeno del trabajo nocturno del cerebro organizando lo vivido” (7), entonces las cerca de 150 páginas que uno lee de La cadena del desánimo no sólo serían recortes o restos agrupados de la lectura de Karchadjian entre el lunes 12 de marzo y el jueves 6 de diciembre de 2012 de las primeras páginas de los diaros La Nación, Clarín, Página/12 y Perfil, ni tampoco un mero epifenómeno de lectura, sino que serían “el trabajo nocturno de la escritura organizando lo social”. No obstante, el libro sólo tiene un orden: el que se anuncia que sigue la lectura de Karchadjian, del 12 de marzo al 6 de diciembre de 2012. 

No se trata, entonces, de que para poder “comprender” La cadena del desánimo uno tenga que saber todo, de antemano, todo lo que sucedió entre los días que se recuperan en el libro. Ni tampoco se trata de que uno siga como sabueso las referencias que se mencionan en la nota ya mencionada. De hecho, Karchadjian lo deja claro, su libro, en contraste con los álgidos momentos del 2012 en Argentina (como en otras partes), “no está hecho para convencer a nadie de nada” (7). Un libro que hable de nada, casi el sueño de Flaubert. No obstante, se nos dice igual que tal vez el libro, de una u otra manera, “podría resultar útil” (7). No hay significados ocultos en el libro, todo ocurre luego de que un lector recolectara notas y simplemente las copiara en un orden “en general […] de recolección, y el nivel de composición es mínimo” (7). Todo se lee una vez más, pero también todo se lee fuera del tabloide, leemos ahora sabiendo que alguien dijo la cita escrita que otras manos leyeron y luego copiaron. 

Si en realidad no hay nada que leer o interpretar sobre los sueños, tampoco habría gastar mucho tiempo interpretando La cadena. Lo único, entonces, que habría que hacer es seguir la serie, el propio encadenamiento y los eslabones de cada parte de la prosa del libro. Sin embargo, de una u otra manera, cada recorte pareciera estar asociado con la propia razón de escritura que ordena el libro “‘Es un sistema caótico, pero no totalmente caótico’, dijo Celeste Saulo, Doctora en Ciencias de la Atmosfera e investigadora del Conicet” (24). El orden de esa escritura no es eso que diría que “ ‘Gran parte de nuestras conductas están conducidas por procesos cerebrales que operan por debajo de nuestra conciencia’ dijo Gemma Calvert, neurocientífica de la Universidad de Warwick” (76), sino que la escritura de La cadena del desánimo se escribe desde un lugar infra, pues escribir, antes que leer, es poner las cosas abajo (“to write down”), de la mano al papel, de los dedos al teclado; y en el papel, o en la pantalla, lo que mueve la conciencia no es sino unos dedos que teclean, unas manos que escriben: que lo infra son los afectos de los dedos, los hábitos de las manos. Lo que está en juego en el libro de Karchadjian es la sucesión, la serie, la cuenta (que no contabiliza) pero adiciona fragmentos que a veces suspenden una acumulación incesante de gestos que afirman que “ ‘Queríamos una prueba de amor, y no la hubo”, dijo un barrio nuevista de la primera hora” (153). Y es que del neoliberalismo, tema tocado muchas veces en el libro, no nos queda sino una acumulación desempoderada de las cosas, tal vez todo siempre fue así antes, pero si el gesto de amor precedía la acumulación, entonces las suspensiones en ésta son más latidos que paros. De esos latidos, lo que queda es su adición, su serie y su paso (tiempo), como de los signos y los trazos, de las palabras y de las cosas.

Acumulaciones en la playa: efervescencia y memoria. Notas sobre Otra vez el mar (1982) de Reinaldo Arenas II

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El narrador de la segunda parte de Otra vez el mar (1982) de Reinaldo Arenas poco, parece, tiene que ver con la narradora de la primera parte. Hay, en la novela, dos formas de escribir, pero también dos formas de leer. En la primera parte, cuando los esposos desempacan, ante los libros de su esposa, Héctor comenta que “esos libros no solamente son falsos, sino ridículos […] yo te conseguiré otras novelas que te entretengan sin que pierdas el tiempo” (22). Mientras que la narradora busca encontrar un tiempo fuera de la rutina en toda la primera parte, en la segunda parte, Héctor sucumbe ante la inutilidad de su vida y asume un tono nihilista. Si la vida no puede encontrar nada que la sostenga, y si su voluntad de poder carece de propósito, todos los afectos del cuerpo se decantan hacia la muerte. 

Los seis cantos que componen la segunda parte son, desde cierta perspectiva, los textos que Héctor no le muestra a su esposa, eso que finge leer en la primera parte como excusa para escaparse de su vida. En un mundo donde todo está censurado, donde cada rebeldía es capturada, incluso las llamadas empresas nobles, como las artes o la literatura, son actos de cobardía. Escribir es carecer del valor para expresar lo que se siente. Desde esta perspectiva el ser humano, “si tuviese la valentía de expresar sus desgracias como expresa la necesidad de tomarse un refresco, no hubiese tenido que refugiarse, ampararse, justificarse, tras la confesión secreta, desgarradora y falsa que es siempre un libro” (231). La literatura, así, es una empresa que fetichiza la expresión de las necesidades y de los deseos. Escribir es saber que el texto debe circunscribirse a ciertas relaciones, sólo así, el circuito del libro (y de la empresa literaria) estará completo, sólo así el libro, “puede publicarse o censurarse, que puede quemarse o venderse, catalogarse, clasificarse o postergarse” (231). De ahí, entonces, que si hay una necesidad y un(os) deseo(s) de escritura estos tengan que ver con la fuerza de quien escribe de “dejar testimonio de que no fuera una sombra más que asfixió con sus suspiros, parloteos o sensaciones elementales su antigua inquietud y su sensibilidad” (231). El arte es una estafa, sí, pero es donde los “desconsolados de siempre/ intentaron justificar su desconcierto”, o en otras palabras, “el acogedor, inexistente sitio inventado siempre por los que aborrecen el sitio existente” (232). 

Aunque son claras las diferencias entre la primera y segunda parte (la primera escrita completamente en prosa y la segunda mezclando formas de verso libre y metro), ambas partes se preocupan por la insospechada pero persistente labor del tiempo. Ahí mismo es donde, también, las dos partes se diferencian: la primera parte en la búsqueda de un tiempo que suspenda el conteo incesante de la vida que se acumula, la segunda parte en la construcción de una válvula de escape. 

Para Héctor las salidas se van reduciendo, no van quedando muchas opciones. No obstante, al final del sexto canto ya no es la historia la que irremediablemente se acumula y ominosamente oprime a la desempoderada voz narrativa que la registra. En un momento, los personajes del sexto canto “salen del papel” y se le revela al narrador el “secreto” de su figura. Los personajes le dicen, “Pobre diablo. Él perecerá y nosotros permaneceremos. Enloquecerá y nosotros continuaremos. Dentro de muy poco habrá desaparecido y nosotros seguiremos. Con el tiempo ni siquiera se sabrá qué tuvo que ver con nosotros” (397). Como la vida que pasa y las palabras también se le pasan al narrador. A Héctor se le escapa aquello que ordenaba y acumulaba su relato, su poema y sus cantos. Si el escritor piensa que los signos lo obedecen, esto no es más que un truco, pues son los múltiples fragmentos los que le dan ritmo a la prosa y, en cierto sentido, a la vida. La vida puede ser una broma, “una inmensa cantidad de palabras palabreadas” (248), cúmulos dispersos, que se agregan a eso que somos, “un terror pasajero, una importancia airada/ una llama insaciable y efímera” (259). Sin embargo, como los personajes salidos del papel, y como el mismo Héctor, devorado por su propio texto, si una “descomunal impotencia amordaza tu vital rebeldía” (417), en la sumatoria de los signos, cada pasiva línea remecanografiada resquebraja la mordaza para dejarnos como Héctor frente al mar, “desatado, furioso y estallado” (418). 

Acumulaciones en la playa: efervescencia y memoria. Notas sobre Otra vez el mar (1982) de Reinaldo Arenas I

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La primera parte de Otra vez el mar (1982), de Reinaldo Arenas, cuenta la historia de una pareja y su bebé en un viaje vacacional a una playa aledaña a La Habana en los años de la histórica Zafra de los diez millones en Cuba. La narradora y su esposo, Héctor, han dejado atrás los bríos del amor joven, y ahora, a pesar de que sus cuerpos aún no se encaran con las arrugas de la madurez, ambos viven en el tedio. Como el mar, el relato de la narradora va en ondas, ciclos, corrientes, marejadas y olas. Es decir, durante toda la primera parte, la narradora superpone el recuerdo de su viaje a la playa —una semana de vacaciones para después volver a los trabajos en el campo— con recuerdos de su infancia, de su embarazo, de las colas para conseguir víveres, de sus discusiones con Héctor, de los trabajos en el campo, sus sueños y sus lecturas de ocio. Mientras que el texto pudiera sugerir una crítica al gobierno castrista, el asunto no es tanto criticar, sino saber ¿cómo es que las cosas llegaron a ser lo que son? Para la narradora, entonces, es obvio que, como su matrimonio, los joviales primeros años de la Revolución Cubana fueron euforia efervescente, olas eufóricas que se volvieron espuma en la arena, “los días que no necesitábamos de las promesas para creer, de las palabras para esperar” (77). Lo peor de la revolución fue que la rutina se volvió eso “que tanto despreciábamos […] vemos ahora las mismas humillaciones” (71). 

El hombre nuevo, a la Guevara, no tendría nada de nuevo sin hábitos nuevos. El hombre nuevo tiene casa nueva, tiene ropa nueva, sabe que “los problemas, digamos fundamentales, están resueltos” (78), pero sin afectos nuevos, sin hábitos nuevos, sin el amor que se renueve, la narradora sabe que el matrimonio está para “dedicarnos plenamente a hacernos la vida intolerable” (78). Las grandes metas del gobierno en nada impactan a los esposos, pues “¿qué habremos resuelto nosotros cuando se hayan cumplido —si es que se cumplen algún día — todas las metas? ¿En qué proporción aumenta nuestra felicidad porque nos hayan aumentado la cuota de arroz?” (100-101). Mientras la producción crece, las sonrisas no, pero las hambres sí, y las enfermedades también. Todo el dolor se acumula, pero el miedo reina, y es que “¿qué se puede esperar de un pueblo que siempre ha vivido en la esclavitud y el chanchullo? ¿Qué puedes hacer tú para sobrevivir, para no señalarte, sino imitar a los otros? Tomar sus lenguajes, sus maneras, exagerarlo todo aún más para que no te descubran. ¿Qué puedes hacer? ¿Qué se puede hacer” (109). Con la vida dominada, pocos espacios quedan para la existencia.

Entre el “¿qué se puede hacer” y el “¿cómo es que las cosas llegaron a ser así?”, la narradora describe un espacio convulso. Los escapes están, de esta forma, en la retirada del pensamiento, en la acogida de la sinestesia, de ahí que la narradora pase horas frente al mar, adivinando sus formas, sus colores. En otro momento, al verse al espejo, la narradora escapa al ruido de las calles ella está “suspendida, en otro tiempo, al margen” (150). Desde esa suspensión se abre un espacio hacia otra parte, un espacio que sabe que la crítica, o la política, no están en la acumulación de desgracias y su enumeración, como obstinadamente Héctor hace. Contar las desgracias en “el tono resignado de quien clasifica, enumera o menciona mecánicamente una variedad de objetos insignificantes e impersonales” (176), es como contar toneladas de caña. Unas acumulaciones se regresan en ganancias y creces, otras en miedos acumulados y docilidad de las masas. 

La narradora deja ver que en la retirada del pensamiento, las revoluciones, como la poesía, o el amor de la narradora por su esposo e hijo parecen estar en una delgada franja de indecibilidad porque “lo que realmente [la narradora] quisiera conservar, tener, es precisamente lo que desaparece, el breve violeta del oscurecer sobre las aguas” (147). Por otra parte, si la experiencia queda supeditada a la indecibilidad, cuando pasen las cosas felices, o las revoluciones eufóricas, el placer sólo será de uno, pues los buenos recuerdos, como el amor y la sed de oscuridades a la que se entregan los esposos al final de la primera parte, “después será” para la narradora “aún mejor, después, cuando lo recuerde, será absolutamente mío todo el placer” (188). Si la felicidad de las grandes metas, como las 10 toneladas de caña de la zafra, no incrementan la felicidad de los brazos que se aman y las bocas que se besan, ¿cómo hacer para que el sentido de la producción deje de lado los campos de caña sin trastocar los recuerdos del placer de los que se aman? ¿Cómo reordenar las olas que se acumulan en la arena?

Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects

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Why do we work? The obvious answer, for most of us, is that we do it for the money. Yet in acknowledgement of the fact that structural unemployment is (apparently) taken for granted, and that not everyone can work, at least not all the time, Western democracies provide economic assistance to the unemployed. But the level at which such benefits are set is designed to ensure that they are not to be seen as more than a fallback option. Still, these days recipients often have to show that they are actively seeking employment, and that they are not too fussy about the kinds of employment they may be offered, all of which perhaps betrays an anxiety that money is not motivation enough. Indeed, the jobless are regularly stigmatized, and there is a whole public discourse surrounding “benefits cheats” or “welfare queens” and the like, a more or less mythical (under)class of people who supposedly prefer not to work, or who (allegedly) put almost as much effort into not working as others put into negotiating the rat-race of paid employment. Though proposals for a “universal basic income” are increasingly popular, for diverse reasons, both on the Left and on the Right, one of the major obstacles that they face is the fear that a living wage paid to all would reward, and perhaps even encourage, laziness. Why would anyone work if they did not have to?

People work, or persuade themselves that they work, for many other reasons beyond the purely economic. Compensation comes in many forms. Some feel a sense of vocation or a desire to be of service, others pursue status, and many find–or at least seek–pride in whatever they happen to be doing. There can no doubt be satisfaction in a job well done, whether it be a wall well built, a meal well cooked, or a class well taught. There is surely something unbearable about seeing the world in unblinkingly Marxist terms, about agreeing that wage labour is simply exploitation and alienation, which is why most of us are hesitant to believe that, as workers of the world, we have “nothing to lose” but our chains. It is less a question of ideology than (more viscerally) a matter of affect, habit, and even our sense of self. Many of us spend so much time at work, or more fundamentally and unconsciously have invested so much in molding ourselves and our sensibilities to fit in with and progress within the workplace, that it is not clear who or what we would be without our job titles and all the routines that accompany them. Hence, however much we may complain about our conditions of labour, our bosses or colleagues or lack of perks, unemployment (and even retirement) can be felt as an almost existential crisis.

Yet this link between employment and identity is breaking down, and the crisis is upon us, imminently at hand. The assumption of a job for life is, for all but a tiny minority, no more than a distant memory. In place of long-term specialization and the accumulation of entrenched habits and embedded knowledges in durable institutions, we are now enjoined to be flexible and prepared to endlessly retrain for ever-new opportunities in increasingly transient and precarious conditions. The ideal type in the “new economy” is the “start-up” firm or the “pop-up” shop, and we are sold as a form of freedom the uncertain hours and unpredictable pay the go with becoming self-employed contractors dependent on Internet platforms such as Uber and the daily battle for “likes” and positive endorsements. As such, a new relationship between employment and identity arises, but one that has constantly to be renewed as we become, in Michel Foucault’s words, “entrepreneurs of the self,” free-wheeling mini-enterprises or incarnations of human capital whose stock prize is always in flux. YouTube influencers and the like may be the purest instances of the ways in which work has become permanent social performance, but we are all increasingly affected by the new forms of assessment and valuation are now all-pervasive: a wall should not simply be well built, but it must be built with a smile; a meal is only well cooked if the ratings on Yelp agree; and student evaluations are the test of whether a class is well taught.

The crisis that ensues is not simply individual, but also social. In his new book, Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France, Jeremy Lane traces what he describes as the breakdown of the Republican contract in contemporary France as a result of transformations in the world of work and the meanings attached to it. Lane argues that this crisis is especially acute in France, given the specific contours of that country’s welfare state and the centrality of work to the conception of French national identity. “The French Fordist post-war compromise,” he tells us, “institutionalized a particularly close interrelationship between salaried employment, rights to social protection, and, through that, access to full republican citizenship” (8). Hence, he argues, the transformations brought by post-Fordism, increasing precarity, Uberization, and so on have led not only to sporadic but intense social protest, as for instance with the “gilets jaunes,” but also to widespread anxiety manifest in much recent cinema and literature. So although the changing status and meaning of work may well not be unique to France–on the contrary, they are part and parcel of a globalized neoliberal order–the symptoms of these changes are perhaps particularly legible in French cultural production, played out in many different political valences.

Indeed, what is at stake, according to Lane’s persuasive analysis, is a new set of relations between the particular and the general, the individual and the state, the national and the global, and so on. His book is interested in the uneven distribution of the effects of post-Fordism, or rather how they entail a redistribution of hierarchies between (for instance) masculine and feminine, white and immigrant, the metropolitan centre and the regions, and so on. Lane repeatedly enjoins us to refuse easy binaries, such that for instance he warns against nostalgia for the republican tradition, not only because it had its own exclusions and injustices, but also because (and contra a vein of Gallic complaint that imported Anglo American ideas are all to blame) within it were already implanted the seeds of the current crisis.

After a lengthy theoretical section, in which Lane tackles sociological and political theoretical debates about post-Fordism and draws not only on Foucault but also on Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” to consider the links between work and different forms of subjectification, we get a series of readings of texts ranging from Michel Houellebecq’s novel La Carte et le territoire to Kim Chapiron’s movie La Crème de la crème or Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, and many others. He covers themes such as the perceived feminization of the new forms of labour, as well as the rise of portrayals of so-called “femme fortes” (strong women), whether as executives with a mandate to introduce corporate changes or as working-class activists pledged to combat them. His chapter on “doomed youth” and the changing role of education is perhaps particularly interesting, as it shows how the sense of crisis not only affects those who might easily be identified as “losers” within the new (anti)social compact, such as second-generation immigrant young men in the (para)urban banlieues, but also it is represented as troubling the apparent winners, such as the business-school graduates who have lost any sense of public vocation. Paired with an account of the changing national frameworks of economic policy, employment law, and welfare brought in by governments of the Left and the Right alike, the book suggests that these cultural representations perhaps stand in for a public debate that has never quite got off the ground, or for which conventional political distinctions are no longer of much use. Indeed, despite (or because of) the fact that Lane draws on a wealth of French social and political theory, what emerges is a sense of disarray within the country’s fabled left-leaning intellectual field. As Lane notes, there has been “a proliferation of proposals emanating from left-wing thinkers and activists,” but little clear consensus or agreement among them (251).

Not that we are that much better off elsewhere. Lane’s perceptive analyses prompt reconsiderations of similar cultural symptoms in the UK and the USA: films such as The Full Monty or Made in Dagenham, say, also seem to address similar concerns about gender roles amid deindustrialization in Britain, for instance, though the latter movie projects them back into a somewhat nostalgic re-envisaging of what had been a high point of union organization. And the United States may at first sight seem to lack the republican tradition whose crisis is the focus of Republican Citizens, but we can perhaps see there must once have been some sense of social solidarity, sufficient to give Trump and Trumpism something to destroy. Moreover, both sides of the Atlantic, intellectuals are not simply in disarray, they are stigmatized as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, no doubt in part because they (we) have allowed the university to be so thoroughly infected by, and indeed encouraging of, the kinds of “entrepreneurship of the self” that have provoked such anxiety and discontent.  

So why do we work, even those of us fortunate enough to be employed in relatively durable institutions (though we will see about that) and especially those of us who have that rarity that is a “job for life” (though who know how long tenure will truly last), when we find that those institutions have betrayed the compact that we assumed they held to when we first entered them, and when job security can feel like golden manacles, binding us to the wheel of a ship that has long since been set adrift? Perhaps because we still hope that there are parts of the job, the unsung and slightly subversive aspects that never enter the false calculus of merit and are if anything penalized by the powers that be, that still make things worthwhile. Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves, and it is only ever about the money.

Notes about Accumulation(s)

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More (disorganized) notes (and some comments to the process of writing)

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Accumulation(s) IIII

These entries have been very messy. Yet, I do believe it is becoming clearer where I want to get with all this (or at least, I have that small certainty…)

1. With the first post I tried to open a possibility of rethinking the relationship between history, politics and literature in Latin America and its “integration” into capitalism as an economic system. This, of course, is nothing new, many have formulated this (I don’t know any names in particular. I can think about the “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America” by Ernesto Laclau [an article in which Laclau discusses some ideas about Andrew Gunder Frank, who believed that Latin America triggered capitalist expansion and rule in the years to come. Consequently, L.A was/is a place where the passage from capitalism to socialism is possible without mediation. While Laclau criticizes Frank very wide idea of capitalism, he also recognizes that some of what Frank says is right. Here, perhaps, the departing point from where Laclau will later formulate his further thoughts about radical democracy]). My purpose with the first post was to show how similar (somehow) the idea of the literary “Boom”, from the mid 20th century, is to the Chronicles of Indies. I see the Chronicles of Indies as texts that mix testimony, fiction, non-fiction and also some figures that could be closer to “modern” ideas of the literary. In a way, many other “medieval” texts —as many medievalists would argue (specially texts about mystics)— have already mixed testimony with “fiction”, storytelling and “high arts” (namely poetry, and so on). However, the Chronicles of Indies were the first ones to spread efficiently, motivate other “writers” (explorers, lettered conquerors, or anyone that could go in a ship to the “new land”) and also open the possibility for the writing of “fantasy”. In a way, then, the further Boom and later the so-called post-boom is a repetition of that initial “literary movement”.  

With this first post, I also was trying to formulate a concept (not that I achieved it, far from it) —namely, accumulation— that could connect the literary, the historical, and (somehow) politics. Departing from Marx’s famous “so-called” primitive accumulation, I suggest that what is at stake in any process of accumulation is the (necessary) production of systematic violence that changes the pattern of “cumulation”. That is, that “accumulation” is a process of ordering, changing, transforming and creating second nature: only after terror can bodies be reordered via habits (this is, I believe, close to what Jon Beasley-Murray’s posthegemony theory argues). From this perspective, capitalism always requires, as John Kraniauskas suggests, a process of so-called primitive accumulation. The thing is that, or at least from our current situation, things have changed, not for much, but the small changes in the last 30-40 years have reached a point where what is (was) accumulated cannot be perpetuated in a single regime. There is, overall, uncertainty. Now we see that what was accumulated (pollution for instance) is in “una ofensiva de lo sensible” as Diego Stzulwark argues. 

The first post is very limited. But I think it opens some minimal possibilities. There is, I think, a connection with the third post: if stories have, in a way, displaced history, wouldn’t it be because our ways of historizing, and of writing stories have been “novellized”? 

2. The second post tries to connect some of the ideas of the first post with, more or less, a specific context. What can be said about the way fiction is currently being written? As I tried to show, while it might be said that fiction these days is merely “itemising” the aesthetic, the thing is that “itemising”, as a narrative process/figure, is showing something that comes “naturaly” when producing a work of “fiction”, or writing in general. It isn’t that works like Luiselli’s or Knausgard’s are merely exposing the “phantom threads” that support the whole process of writing (we could say that this is the purpose of Marx after he formulates the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation and then comments the bloody legislations and so on), but that their “itemisation” is an attempt to count (to tell) without accumulating, that is to prepare the terrain for a line of flight, or to simply trigger it. 

What interests me, then, are works of writing (fiction) that exhibit the process of writing as “accumulation” while also they attempt to suspend and/or trigger a line of flight. These works, as I later tried to suggest in the third post, would be connected to the way certain things “crack-up”. I aim to work with “authors” like Reinaldo Arenas, Burgos-Menchú and Moya (here it becomes very obvious that I have a problem with temporalization); Roberto Bolaño [not sure about this one] and Mario Levrero (the space trilogy and La novela luminosa); and César Aira and Valeria Luselli. My intention is to divide the thesis in three. The first part would be dedicated to Arenas and “testimonio” / Menchú-Moya; the second part would be an intermezzo with Bolaño and Levrero, and the third one would be dedicated to Aira and Luiselli. 

This division is motivated by my intention to “connect” works of fiction and “critique” to history and the political. The first part of the project would be guided by the Fitzgeraldian question, “how things came to be like this?”. The third part by the Leninist one, “what is to be done?”. What I pursue with these questions is not to propose a contradiction between them. My intention is neither to show how these two perspectives are to a certain extend closer to each other, as Erin Graff Zivin has pointed out about the “tragic” and “utopian” political left perspectives (Anarchaeologies 31-32), but to point out that these two questions (the Fitzgeraldian and the Leninist one) are part of an assemblage that opens and closes possibilities for the left. These two questions are part of an abstract machine. The intermezzo, in the other hand, seeks for both the suspension and the possibility of a line of flight. Bolaño and Levrero recount the possibility of the machine to move on. 

(This section —from this post— is very loose and not very specific)

3.  With the third post, I tried to connect the first and the second post’s ideas about history and the “literary”. At the same time, I tried to question what is really at stake with “stories”. That is, if the “novellation” of history and of the novel has somehow “mixed and confused” perceptions, what place do stories hold? The question (problem?) of stories is not about differentiating truth from lies. But it is true that fiction is close to lies and once we hear enough lies, we are closer of not recognizing truth at all but still able to enjoy fiction. At the same time if we cannot stop narrativization (fiction, good or bad) or lying in general, what can we do with lies, errors, mistakes, evil? What is to be done? How things have become to be like this without us knowing it? When did we crack-up? All this questions of course demand a political (Lenin) and a pre-political (Fitzgerald) stand. Clearly, stories share things with lies, (errors and so on). But there is also the chance that both stories (and lies too) could open and call for the exodus, to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories (?) —or better to escape while also adding. 

At the end of the third post, I suggested (poorly and confusing [but I think I want to save some of these ideas] that “stories” have a way of “adding”, counting (as EGZ recalls from Rancière). This process of “addition” is similar, or close, to what happens to an addict, a body that persists but is unstable and destabilizing but stable in his repetition of habits. Addiction is, then, a way of hanging to being, but also a path without clear ending, a brief line of flight. I would like to argue that there is a thread that connects Arenas and Luiselli (passing through testimonio [Menchú, Moya], Bolaño and Levrero and Aira). 

(This is too vague, I know)

Comments: 

-It is all too general, and I might be a little lost. At the same time, I think the idea of accumulation could be very productive. Specially if I start developing it more. I would like to work with 3 (ar least) different ways that accumulation happens: in capitalism (addition by subtraction [a.k.a accumulation by dispossession]); as addiction; and then as addition [a form of accelerationism (?).

-I have a (severe) problem with temporalization. Two posts dwell in “colonial” times. I need to work on this. 

-I need to connect the dots with the intended authors that I would like to work with. I also need to clarify the connection between history, literature and politics. 

-Something I’ve been thinking about and, so far, I merely named in the posts, is the idea of literature as a sphere a la Sloterdijk. I think this is an interesting idea, but I haven’t developed it more. 

Notes about Accumulation(s)

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More (disorganized) notes

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Accumulation(s) III [the framing frame, why to relate narrative and accumulation]

How much is is enough? 

Is not a question of enough, pal. 

It’s a zero-sum game. Someday wins, someday loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply, uh, transferred from one perception to another, like magic 

Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, 1987

How many stories are enough? Do we ever get tired of more and more narratives? A story and a narrative hardly are different. In a way, storytelling is our adhesion to the world, or addi(c)tion to each other. Stories add us to one another while accumulate in the individual feelings, emotions and, over all, affects. If stories have always been with us, the question about every narrative is not when did we start telling stories to ourselves, but when did stories started moving us to reach disperse, to expand our spheres, to see limits, to expand them, but also to realize that a limit is an affirmation of existence, in its life as immanence. Myth circulated around the Mediterranean, the Tarot did it as a language and as a storytelling-story. Before the Americas, stories circled, crossed mountains but hardly crossed the exodus of the seas. After the first sailors came back from that misnamed land, some came back sick, some rich, some crazy, some astonished, some just destroyed. They brough animals, gold, bodies of all types, but also, their mouths mumbled nonsense stories. One man (Cabeza de Vaca) even proved with his body that he lived among the others, that he met them, that his poverty was useful for the crown. Of course, he later changed his mind. Something broke when he shipwrecked, something grew afterwards and at the same time another thing became more profitable. Somebody had to lose, domination, unlike money, had to be transferred and made.

If there was a Latin American boom before the boom those were the chronicles from Indies. No other texts moved more people before (?). God without knowing it died slowly, because what crusaders did not cross, now sailors were willing to. And years and years passed, sailors and stories changed slowly, but they changed after all. They all cracked-up and became something else. Among the many things that the stories became, novels somehow captured better what those stories had to say. If the chronicles of Indies moved so many bodies in-between seas, the (new)boom moved affects overall. While bodies are things almost ready to be transferred, administered, accumulated more than cumulated, affects are meant to be created. An affect creates as it moves a body. An emotion (re)distributes the body’s affection. While the chronicles of Indies were an invitation to fly off fancy while trying to avoid the territorialization of extraction, of killing, administering and selling for others, the (new)boom was the intervention on the invitation. For the boom realized that once the world was seen as pure form, a body in all its nudity, all places were good burrows for lines of flight to take off. Yet, something cracked-up the boom. The explosion imploded and then again it exploded again. 

As the boom expanded. Somehow national literary spheres crystalized their own explosion. Literature became a machine, something to be exploited and that exploded. Not that this was completely new at all for literature. Literature has always been a sphere of contradiction since the term always has dealt with the hybrid and contradictory concept of representation. It is as Fredric Jameson puts it, “representation is both some vague bourgeois conception of reality and also a specific sign system” (Postmodernism 123). For once, in literature the lettered individuals had their chance to inaugurate their public sphere. But also, more than single individuals articulating freely their stories, a narrator, a writer, and later an author, became a new vessel where sometimes the murmurs of a multitude of stories would gather. For that thing we called literature, the authors, the champions of the lettered city, became addicts to the dictionary (as G. Steiner puts it) but also hoarders. The new authors of the boom accelerated this process but also something was captured, their work was accumulated. However, as their explosions inaugurated a time of change, acceleration and regression (namely postmodernism) they opened up a possibility for creation, for reposing the narrative problems of all times. A narrative is a way of solving narrative problems, but the narration always exceeds, it counts in other means and ends up affecting other fields. 

However, if stories are not a question of enough, would it be that today (and even before) they were about “a zero-sum game”, where “somebody wins, someday loses” (thus their necessity to always solve narrative problems)?  

Notes about Accumulation(s)

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More notes

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Accumulations II [and literature]

Our times are times of the novella. Isn’t it that day by day we question how is it that things have come to this? At the same time reality is coming closer to the durée of “the novel”, since we lived fascinated by the aesthetic contradiction between past and future. If all of this is true, what place would “the novel” hold? For some, like Fredric Jameson, the postmodern is fading away and in its place is now occupied by writing of “itemisation”, the withdrawal (or renouncement) of the attempt to ‘estrange’ “our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways” (“Itemised”). Karl Ove Knausgaard, Emmanuel Carrère and Valeria Luiselli would be just some items of this list. Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures in a nutshell what the current status of (Latin-American) fiction in early XXI century is. Yet, one should hesitate to simply take Jameson’s ‘itemisation’ of writing for granted. In a long passage in Luiselli, the main narrator of the novel states that “No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation” (Lost Children 103). The narration then enlists all of those things accumulated (months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises). The digression happens after the main narrator is asked by one of her children about what, how and when to take a photograph. The fact that, to explain the kid when to photograph, the narrator has to enlist both the emptiness of life, and the failure, of photographing in general when capturing or depicting our experience of time and life, illustrates an impossibility that the narration is aware of. The latter would be that “our ways of documenting the world have fallen short” (103) and consequently as much as experiences and other things are accumulated, the future seems unimaginable, undecidable. 

This moment could à la lettre describe what Jameson’s sees in Knausgaard’s sixth book of My Struggle (if not in all the books of the series). Itemisation would be the shift from the aesthetic to the ethical, abandoning the first so that one can as Knausgaard or Luiselli contemplate a “solution to the problem of what to do with [oneself] and [oneself’s] life” (“Itemised”). Hence, for Jameson writing of itemisation is, somehow, the end of the duration of the novel. Since the contemporary novel, as a genre, has to renounce to conjugate the past (what has happened) and l’avenir (what is going to happen), the novel now can merely register a list of items that tentatively would become rereadings, returns to duration. Yet, the novel is hardly a renunciation. In Luiselli, the narration bets for an opening to the future, while hoarding the previous items, “You have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time” (103), tells the mother to the kid so that he would start shooting photographs. There is no duration, but a two folded direction that moves forward in the same direction.

It is not that things have not changed for the novel. Neither it is that the “postmodern” is slowly fading away (if it ever was fully holding sway all over the world). For once, it is true that the novel as “all life is a process of breaking down”, would say Fitzgerald. Something broke in the sphere of the novel, and in the one of the literary. The novel was the genre that better held the hybridity of the new subjects that emerged from the process of so-called primitive accumulation at the dawn of capitalism. While the vogelfrei were attached to their necessity to sell their work in the market, their will was always fugitive. In a same manner the novel was (is) a living contradiction, namely between the writer and their context, the original and the translation, the new and the new. Only the novel knew how to pile together a contradiction. If novellas are cartographies of lines of flight, novels are diagrams of spheres whose functioning lie in opposing semiospheres. To this extend, if the emergence and popularization of novellas (ending of XIX century- and early XX century) marked the shift from industrial accumulation in capitalism and its acceleration, switch and cohabitation to and with algorithm accumulation in the current state of capitalism that we live today, we are not only witnessing the novellation of history, but also the novellation of the novel. If this is true, the contradiction, the main mechanism of the novel, is blurring. The itemisation is not a renouncement, neither the re-disjunction or re-conjunction of duration, “but only a line of flight in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation —a new happiness?” (Deleuze and Guattari 207), and yet another process of hoarding, a new redirection of accumulation. And still, an opening for heaping history and the novel anew.

Notes on What is World Literature? (2003) by Daniel Damrosch

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Daniel Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003) departs from J. W. Goethe’s famous formulation about world literature. The term was registered by Johann Peter Eckerman, an author whose entire work is barely know these days. From Eckerman’s works, his conversations with Goethe are an exception since they register the daily live routine of the famous poet and also some moments worth studying, as it is the case of the famous conversation about world literature. As Damrosch registers, Goethe coins the term when discussing poetry as a “universal possession” that is always “revealing itself everywhere” (1). Goethe goes on and states that the “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to haste its approach” (1). The thing, for Damrosch, is not that Goethe seeks to impose an agenda, or to merely point towards the possibility of a canon, rather world literature should be understood less as “a set of works than a network” (3). Then, world literature is more a system that connects than an accumulation of works. Damrosch takes world literature as something that “encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). With this in mind, the task of world literature should be to turn visible how “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4). 

In a way, what Damrosch is looking for is to connect old (and always present) topics in literary studies. Some of these could be the literariness coined by Jakobson —a hundred years ago—, the problem of the canon and, without openly engaging with it, the problem of taste and status championed by Pierre Bourdieau. The book is an ambitious project that is, as it is mentioned later, subject of current studies and reflections. Divided in three parts (circulation, translation and production), each describes three literary works that better exemplifies what is world literature and more importantly how to engage with it. Whether we read about Gilmanesh, Kafka or Rigoberta Menchu, Darmosh displays erudite analysis. Close readings, rhetoric and sociohistorical analysis, biography and philology coexist without any apparent method or problem. Since world literature is only worried about “a mode of circulation and of reading” (5), there is not necessarily a method for reading world literature, but an attitude. This attitude would be that of Goethe himself, namely, “to look about me [oneself] in foreign nations” (1). 

While the readings offered in every chapter are strong and persuasive, one ends with a familiar feeling. This is that reading without the lenses of world literature is basically reading with the lenses of literary criticism in general. However, Damrosch would insist that world literature, as a way of engaging with texts, consists in a particular understanding of what work literature is (281). Irremediably this is a contradiction, for Damrosch himself renounced in the “Introduction” to any definition of the literary since “this is a question that really only has meaning within a given literary system” (14). One can, then, easily say that world literature itself might be “something that really only has meaning within a given literary (or world) system”. 

Despite this contradiction, the three elements that Damrosch depicts as the pillars of world literature, are worth some thought. World literature would be first “an elliptical refraction of national literatures”, secondly, a “writing that gains in translation”, and thirdly “not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (281). In way, then, these three characteristics of world literature go back, and are tied up, irremediably with the so called “ontological gap” in comparative literature proposed by René Wellek. While the latter depicted the gap “between the psychology of the author and a work of art, between life and society on the one hand and the aesthetic object” (136), the elliptical refraction that Damrosch is pursuing is that focus that happens when the two focal points of an ellipsis swerve. Namely, these two points would be the national in one side and the worldliness in the other; the literary source and the host; the original and the translation; one world and the other. World literature, then would be something that “goes in two directions at once” (289). Hence, more than a line, or a gap, (world) literature is yet another of the world’s spheres, another expanding bubble, that, as everything alive someday, sometime, has (had) to crack-up. 

Notes about Accumulation(s) I

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The following notes are merely a series of thoughts without any particular order but that later (hopefully) could be part of my dissertation project (a very [till today] basic and naive ideas about accumulation as a general movement of history and specially modernity)

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Accumulation(s) I

In a way, our times could be described as a series of seriated and seriating accumulations. This, of course, not only testifies for capitalism’s endeavour but also for the way the climate catastrophe has heaped in the horizon of history as our further extinction. Yet, to accumulate does not necessarily means to horde valuable items neither to just let catastrophes pile in the horizon of the coming future. In fact, accumulations are closer to disorganized heaps, piles or bodies amassed (and therefore, somewhat to a weird idea of ecology, meaning that even the smallest tossed or dispensed body, would heap somewhere and eventually return to the place where it was thrown away). Etymologically (if this helps to clarify where I’m going), to accumulate is a verb whose first appearance was in the early XIV (1520) century and is composed by two particles, the preposition “ad” (to) and the substantive “cumulus” (a heap). Hence, in the early years of that period commonly called modernity, at the babbling of what centuries later would become a world ordered for capital through capitalism, a direction was forged, and bodies were constantly directed and redirected to it. 

The coincidence between the origins of the word accumulation and the early period (if not the dawn) of modernity signal that history, somehow, could be understood as a way of directing “cumulus” (heaps). It is not only after the works of Ricardo, Adam Smith and later Marx, that accumulation becomes a direction of wealth, for the first and second, and later, for the third, a production of that “ad” that directs the cumulus. When Marx famously described how the whole economic process worked, with the analysis of commodification, fetishization (another word —as accumulation— that was firstly coined in the context of slave trading in the XV-XVI century), capital circulation, value and surplus value, he still found necessary to unveil what started everything. For Marx, it is not that capital is merely understood as a machine, but as something that is triggered, something that needs to be started. Irremediably when understanding the process of accumulation(s) of capital, as Marx puts it, we “turn in a defective circle, out of which we only get by supposing an “original” [primitive]”, an “accumulation that is not the result of capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point”. That starting point, for Marx, “plays in Political Economy the same role that plays the “original sin in theology”. The result of this ironic comparison (and maybe not so ironic) is the famous formulation of the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation: that is the demystifying of an idyllic process of enrichment. From this perspective, the “so-called” primitive accumulation is the systematic repetition of violence, land dispossession, forced migration, law prosecution and bloody legislations necessary to produce an ambivalent subject that both surrenders to the “ad” of accumulation while also seeks for its “cumulation” in a line of flight: the vogelfrei. 

If the process of “so-called” primitive accumulation is needed at every stage of capitalism, where would the “ad” this time be produced when there won’t be no earth to live? Would it be that at best the feverish science fiction fantasies finally have been conquered (as depicted in movies like Ad Astra [after all, another movie about the possibility of starting a new process of accumulation in space)? As much as these questions are necessary, perhaps it should also be thought the possibility of an accumulation without “ad”, or an accumulation without “ad” or “cumulus” but another form of piling. Even more, perhaps that’s the only cynical comfort we have, that of which today accumulation is collapsing, and we are just hoarding history, as new vogelfrei we are tied to our impossibility towards the future and yet with the possibility of take off in a line of flight.

Infrapolitical Passages

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There is an odd but (perhaps) not unwelcome tension in Gareth Williams’s new book, Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State. On the one hand, as even the title announces, this is a far-ranging survey of our contemporary situation (global turmoil!). Moreover, it hardly confines itself even to this broad critique of the present: it opens with an account, drawn from some words of Greta Thunberg’s, of imminent future apocalypse (“extinction,” in Thunberg’s terms, “perishing” in Williams’s) and then, in search of the origins of this catastrophe, proceeds to take us back to Prometheus, via a reading of Shelley. We are in the “epoch of the end of epochality” (121), Williams repeatedly tells us, of “post-katchontic” or “post-sovereign decontainment” (110), and it is clear that Williams has no wish to be restricted in the scope of his reflections or argument.

In short, this is a hugely ambitious work that, what is more, takes issue with many of the major thinkers of our time (Badiou, Agamben), seeks to demolish plenty of sacred cows (politics, hegemony, the subject), and gives short shrift to others, often via endnotes as if they were not even worthy of being dismissed in the body of the text itself. (Full disclosure: I am one of those whose work is despatched this way in the end matter, for “provid[ing] no evaluation of the place of the negative in any conceptual matrix, including [my] own” [210]. But I do not lack company; elsewhere, for instance, another note summarily condemns “humanists, culturalists, hegemony thinkers, decolonials, populists, Marxists, post-Marxists, neocommunists, and antitheory types of all persuasions” [208].) To put this another way: this is a book that often gives the impression that it is endlessly sure of itself, as it seeks from its opening sentence to “clear a way through some of the dominant conceptual determinations and violent symptoms of globalization” (1). Clearing such a path sometimes requires a machete, and the will to wield it.

And yet. On the other hand, there is something quite modest and reticent about Williams’s project. After all, beyond the image of bushwhacking through conceptual thickets, the other metaphor that the book employs to describe its methodology is that of a retreat, for it is “in retreat” that “infrapolitics strives to clear a way” (26); “now the struggle is to find a way to backtrack [. . .]. This backtracking is the basis for the infrapolitical exodus [. . .]” (27-28). Or as Williams puts it, for all the talk of “passages,” by which he hopes to take us (for instance) “from hegemony to posthegemony” and from there to establish or prepare the way for “a renovation or potential turn in our thinking” (96), at best we are ultimately offered “a timorous step toward the possibility of questioning in such a way as to clear away inherited limitations in the realm of thinking and acting” (106). This is a highly qualified ambition indeed! And even that “timorous step” may not be forthcoming. As Williams admits at the outset: “This is a book that makes no progress, and intentionally so” (29). The passage may well end up being a “nonpassage,” and we may not even be able to tell the difference thanks to “a certain indiscernability” between the two (29). As Williams goes on to concede, “Some might feel that this offers in fact the formalization of very little” (29); “and it could very well lead to absolutely or virtually nothing” (32). Alongside the ambition and self-assuredness, in other words, this text also offers us a striking humility, a sort of pre-emptive bet or hedge that it will all end in something like failure, no progress made, nothing to show. Or at least it is prepared to take that risk, which is indeed (perhaps) quite a risk.

This resolute reticence or self-assured uncertainty is not new in Williams’s work. His first book, The Other Side of the Popular (2002) ends with a sustained meditation on the “perhaps,” a word which also becomes a refrain in its final section and closes (without closing, as it opens up) the text: “perhaps. . .” (The Other Side of the Popular 303). As he puts it there, with the same mix of affirmation and doubt, stating and yet taking back at the same time: “One thing appears to be sure, however: being toward becoming worldwide leaves us with the affirmation of perhaps ringing in our ears and suspended on the tips of our tongues. . . perhaps. . .“ (272). A “perhaps” rings, or perhaps it rings, suspended and so not (yet?) fully articulated. This is the “one thing” that is sure, or (perhaps) only appears to be sure for those who have eyes to see what cannot in fact be seen.

But I say all this not to criticize Williams. This unerring hesitation is not a flaw in his project; if anything, it is the project itself. Moreover, the minimalism of the gesture, and the willingness to take the risk that nothing may result, is perhaps its greatest contribution to our thinking about politics. For let there be no doubt: this is a thoroughly political book, which asks the most important, the most essential of political questions. Which is, precisely: What is the smallest difference that may actually make a difference? This is, after all, Lenin’s question (though I am not at all suggesting that Williams is any kind of Leninist): “What is to be done?” Not, note, “What should we do?”–more properly the question of the subject, and of ethics or morality, with which politics is so often confused these days–but, in the passive, what is to be done for some change to come, for a detour or turn to be effected that will not soon enough (or given enough time) be inevitably assimilated or appropriated or turned back such that we find ourselves merely back where we started, or worse. One step forward, two steps back; rather than one step back, two steps forward.

There is a double irony here. The first is that those who are so intent on “being political” or putting politics first, seeking a program or party line to proclaim or to follow, inevitably end up mired only in false pieties and the spectacle of morality (“virtue signalling” and the like) that we see all too insistently wherever we look. The second is that, as Williams (and elsewhere, Alberto Moreiras) shows at length, the one properly political question, the question of the “perhaps,” only arises when we step back from politics, when we try to withdraw from the turmoil, when we hesitate before entering the fray, when we realize that everything is in doubt, and when we acknowledge that “what is to be done” is far from self-evident, being as it is a matter that politics itself can never resolve. Without it, however, there is no politics at all. The very possibility of politics, in other words, as Williams eloquently tells us, depends upon the infrapolitical.