“Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego”

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Cross-posted to Virtual Koerner’s.

enriquez_last-cosas-que-perdimosFemininity is all too often defined by the image (and so by the male gaze). Women are reduced to appearance, and judged in terms of the extent to which they measure up to some mythical ideal. Mariana Enríquez’s short story, “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (“Things We Lost in the Fire”), presents a surreal and disturbing counter-mythology that explores what happens when that image is subject to attack, not least by women themselves.

It all starts with a woman who is compelled to support herself by begging on the Buenos Aires subway, after a jealous husband inflicts on her horrific burns that destroy her arms and face, leaving her with only one eye and a slit for a mouth, her lips burnt off. As she seeks contributions from subway passengers, she tells her story: that her husband threw alcohol on her face while she was asleep, setting her alight to “ruin” her, so she wouldn’t belong to anybody else. In the hospital, when everyone expected her to die and she couldn’t speak for herself, he said that she had done this to herself, a tragic accident after a fight. Now that she has recovered her voice, the woman on the subway reclaims her narrative and names the perpetrator. She knows, however, that she will never recover her appearance; her image was lost in the fire.

But perhaps it doesn’t all start there. As another character comments later, referring to a history of witch-hunts but also much more, “They’ve always burned women, they’ve been burning us for four centuries!” No doubt this is why the woman on the subway’s story starts to resonate so much with others.

First, it inspires copy-cat crimes: a model, who seems truly to incarnate that idealized image of femininity, is burnt by her footballer boyfriend in much the same way that the woman on the subway had been attacked. And he, too, blames her for what happened. As if it is only in death (the model does not survive her injuries) that women are granted agency, much like the famous if perhaps apocryphal witch-trials by water, in which only the drowned were presumed innocent.

Then, as Enríquez’s story progresses, small groups of Argentine women start to reclaim their agency while still alive, albeit by anticipating the torture inflicted on them by men. They begin to set light to themselves. Some do so alone, perhaps intending suicide. But, in the face of official disapproval, others form shadowy networks of “Burning Women” to aid and abet ritual ceremonies of self-immolation, complete with clandestine hospitals to ensure recovery thereafter. Because the point is to survive, and to put that survival on display. As one woman puts it: “They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die: we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

The notion here is a kind of immunization: if women burn themselves, then they also rid themselves of the idealized image, the fetish that justifies men burning them. Moreover, they show that they cannot be reduced to appearances, albeit by paradoxically revelling in the way in which their new, “monstrous” appearance repels the male gaze. As the woman from the subway puts it, “Men are going to have to get used to us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don’t die. And wouldn’t that be nice? A new kind of beauty.” Laying claim to deformity, they challenge the gendered scopic regime of representation and power.

Yet this sacrificial logic is disturbing, and not only to men. The story is told from the perspective of a young woman, Silvina, whose mother is one of the first to throw herself into the campaign. It ends as she overhears her mother and a friend talking about her as a possible candidate for a burning: “Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire.” Here, the vision is (almost literally) of the Revolution eating its children, of a new image that ends up as horrific and coercive as the old one. The “ideal world of men and monsters” is no more (or perhaps no less) ideal than our own.

There are obvious resonances here with debates over the tactics of militant groups during Argentina’s Dirty War. There is also an explicit comparison to anorexia, which is also as much a self-destructive as a subversive mode of (re)claiming female agency. Perhaps, too, we might think of our contemporary immunological paradigm, and the price we are called upon to pay to confront all manner of diseases (metaphorical and otherwise). Fire both purifies and corrupts. Without nostalgia, and without any easy judgements, Enríquez compels us to think in new ways about what gets lost when we turn the tools that oppress us into weapons for liberation.

Pre-Prison Writings II

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gramsci_pre-prison-writingsThe Gramsci of these pre-prison writings would probably surprise readers whose acquaintance with Gramsci’s thought is only casual, however much they may quote one of two of his bon mots (“pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will”; “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”) or even however much they deploy the concepts associated with him, from “hegemony” to the “subaltern” or the notion of “organic intellectuals” and so on. In fact, it may well turn out that the vast majority of those who quote Gramsci are casual acquaintances at best, who might be unpleasantly surprised if they were ever to read a little more. This in itself need not of course damn either Gramsci or even those concepts. As I suggested previously, it is hard to see Gramsci as a particularly systematic thinker (which is not to say that he didn’t see himself as such), and maybe that’s a good thing, too. We could take what we want from him, without having to buy into everything else that might come with it. Indeed, at this point perhaps that’s the only way to read Gramsci productively: selectively, unfaithfully, even treacherously. Rather than trying to reconstruct “what Gramsci thought” by careful attention to history or philology (this is the approach of many of the faithful few careful readers of his work), he merits rather something of a smash and grab raid. Or, as Deleuze famously said of his critiques of the philosophical tradition (Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, etc.), it would be a matter of taking him “from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.”

The biggest surprise in this early Gramsci is, I think, his emphatic economic determinism. It may be that this shouldn’t surprise us… he is a Marxist, after all! But given especially that our Gramsci is so much shaped by cultural studies and particularly by Laclau and Mouffe, who explicitly champion him for going the farthest (if not, for them, far enough) in renouncing all determinisms–this, they tell us in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is the basis of their theorization of hegemony, whose history they chart in terms of a tendency to renounce the priority of the economic–the bluntness here of Gramsci’s economism is surely a bit of a shock.

At the outset of his essay “The Factory Council” (of June, 1920), for instance, Gramsci gives us what is essentially a version of Marxism 101, which is worth quoting at length:

The proletarian revolution is not the arbitrary act of an organization that declares itself to be revolutionary, or of a system of organizations that declare themselves to be revolutionary. The proletarian revolution is an extremely long-term historical process that manifests itself in the emergence and development of certain productive forces (which we may sum up by the term “proletariat”) within a certain historical context (which we may sum up by the terms “regime of private property, capitalist mode of production, factory system, organization of society in a democratic-parliamentary State”). At a certain point in this process, the new productive forces are no longer able to develop or organize themselves in an autonomous fashion within the official framework of the human community of the time. It is in this phase that the revolutionary act occurs. This consists in a violent effort to smash apart this existing framework and to destroy the entire apparatus of economic and political power within which the revolutionary productive forces had been trapped. It consists in a violent effort to shatter the machinery of the bourgeois State and to construct a new kind of State within whose framework the newly liberated productive forces can develop and expand; whose organization provides them with strong defences and the necessary and sufficient arms to eliminate their enemies. (163)

There is not much of the “war of position” or the struggle for “hegemony” on the terrain of “civil society” to be found here! And again, I wonder how many of today’s “Gramscians” would happily sign up to this description of the revolutionary process (if indeed they would sign up to any notion of revolution), which Gramsci simply presents as established fact.

As for politics, Gramsci similarly gives us what he himself describes as a “fundamental (and elementary) canon of historical materialism,” that “Any form of political power can only be historically conceived and justified as the juridical apparatus of a real economic power” (168). “Real” power is always and only economic. It is, to use Marx’s famous formula in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the base or “real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” The economic is primary; the political is very much secondary. Hence (back to Gramsci) “the revolutionary process takes place on the terrain of production, in the factory” (164). The revolution will not come about by political decree: “Communism as a system of new social relations [. . .] cannot be introduced by legislative or administrative means” (177). There is little if any room for any autonomy of the political.

Indeed, any political organization may call itself Communist or revolutionary all it likes, but so long as its activity is not premised on the economic base, specifically what is going on in the factory (as the most advanced expression of material forces), it hinders rather than furthers the goal of real social change. This, then, is the point at which Gramsci breaks from the Italian Socialist Party, as he criticizes all such organizations–even “revolutionary” organizations–that “have grown up on the terrain of bourgeois democracy and political liberty, as affirmation and developments of this political liberty” (164). Here, “the traditional structure of the Socialist Party is no different from that of any other party which has grown up on the terrain of liberal democracy” (174). It is, as such, overly invested in politics, in that its “lifeblood” is “the desire to win a majority in the popular assemblies [. . .] and to win this majority by the method that is proper to democracy–by reeling off generic and muddled policies to the electorate (and swearing to put them in practice at all costs)” (174-5). Politics, in short, is part of the problem; the effort to win over an electorate is a distraction from the real matter at hand. It is retrograde and even barbaric: “The Assembly[,] the form of political association that corresponds to the State based on territorial boundaries [. . .] is a continuation of the arrangements of the barbaric peoples who expressed their sovereignty by beating their pikes on the ground and howling” (175). If anything, any true revolution will be a revolution against politics, certainly against any politics that is not immediately rooted in the economic and material base.

Gramsci’s position thus far seems far from what is usually taken to be the struggle for what will become known as “hegemony” (a term that Gramsci is still not using at this stage), which tends to be identified not only in practice with the construction of electoral coalitions but also in theory with political autonomy and what Louis Althusser will come to describe (in part, following what he saw as Gramsci’s lead) as “overdetermination.”

In fact, the revolutionary process that Gramsci describes here often (if intermittently) has more in common with posthegemony than hegemony. Beneath consciousness and evading representation, it develops “in the darkness of the factory and in the darkness of the minds of the countless multitudes [delle moltitudini sterminate] that capitalism subjects to its laws. The process is not something that can be controlled or documented at this stage” (164). It comprises, moreover, “feelings, desires, habits, the stirrings of initiative and a new way of life [i sentimenti, le velleità, le abitudini, i germi di iniziativa e di costume]” (164). Affect, habit, multitude. Almost all the elements are here. Moreover, “initiative” in the essays of this period tends to replace the notion of “spirit” that, in his earlier writings, indicated the expansive movement of something like constituent power.

In fact, Gramsci refers explicitly to a constituent impulse in an article on “Two Revolutions” that is perhaps the most interesting piece in the collection so far, and which also contains the germ of what will come to be a theory of hegemony. For it is here that the Communist Party is described as something more than an appendage to forms of organization that arise, quasi-organically, within the factory. Here, indeed, the party’s role is to bind together the “two revolutions” of this article’s title. The first of these revolutions is political, or even anti-political in that its energies are directly primarily against political institutions. It “tends to be prevalently anarchic and destructive in character: to take the form of a blind explosion of rage, a tremendous outpouring of furious undirected passions” (169). But it is not solely destructive: it may lead to a “constituent assembly”; “it may go so far as to create soviets, the autonomous political organization of the proletariat and the other oppressed classes” (169). Yet this is not enough. For this merely political revolution is not yet the Communist revolution, whose shape is determined by the relations and conditions of production. It is this second revolution that establishes the factory (not the assembly) as “the basic unit of the new State” and “build[s] the new State in a way that reflects the industrial relations of the factory system” (170). And it is then the Party’s role to articulate these two revolutionary impulses, the political and the economic: to “create the conditions in which the revolution as destruction of the bourgeois State can be identified with the proletarian revolution, the revolution that is to expropriate the expropriators and initiate the development of a new order in the relations of production and distribution” (171). And surely this then is the struggle for what will become known as hegemony, the project to “create the conditions in which the proletarian revolution may be identified with the popular revolt against the bourgeois State” (171). Neither strictly speaking political, nor the direct emanation of economic forces, it is the role of the Party as would-be hegemonic power to bind economics to politics.

I will leave to one side how faithfully this is later transcribed or translated in the early work of Laclau (in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory) into an articulation between the “people-power bloc contradiction” and the more properly economic contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. But suffice it to say that the necessity for this articulation reveals a problem in the basic assumptions of the base-superstructure model that Gramsci otherwise never questions. For the Party, and its hegemonic project, appears as a supplement that does not derive fully from the economic processes inherent to the new forms of organization within the factory system. Gramsci can neither live with determinism nor can he relinquish it. Ultimately, Laclau’s path will be to drop any priority of the economic, to usher in a vision of the world in which everything is politics (and all politics is one modality or other of popular revolt). But surely there are other options.

If we are to recover a posthegemonic Gramsci, perhaps a first step would be to refuse the dichotomy that he asserts between politics and economics. After all, it is only because he sees such a stark distinction between the “two revolutions” he describes that he feels the need to call upon the Party to suture that gap. But it may be even more to the point to observe that the “feelings, desires, habits, the stirrings of initiative and a new way of life” are neither fully political nor fully economic, though they may be both the consequence and condition of politics and economics alike.

The Plague

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camus_the-plagueIn Albert Camus’s celebrated novel of a plague outbreak, he tells us that at a certain point, the citizens of the afflicted North African town of Oran turn to reading. Specifically, they show a “remarkable interest” in “prophecies of all descriptions. [. . .] The local printing firms were quick to realize the profit to be made by pandering to this new craze and printed large numbers of the prophecies that had been going round in manuscript.” But there is not enough material to satisfy demand, and so after searching “in the municipal archives for all the mental pabulum of the kind available in old chronicles,” they turn to “journalists to write up forecasts” that are devoured eagerly to find literary clues to their personal fates.

Some predictions were based on far-fetched arithmetical calculations [. . .] Others made comparisons with the great pestilences of former times [. . .] and claimed to deduce conclusions bearing on the present calamity. But our most popular prophets were undoubtedly those who in an apocalyptic jargon had announced sequences of events, any one of which might be construed as applicable to the present state of affairs and was abstruse enough to admit of almost any interpretation. (221-222)

Much the same could perhaps be said of The Plague itself, which surely admits of many possible interpretations and is often enough read as an allegory of the German Occupation of France. Plague does, after all, make for a fine metaphor. Even in Camus’s own text, we see how pestilence is made to signify by those affected by it, not least in the fiery sermon delivered by a Jesuit priest, Father Paneloux, as the fever begins to take hold. “Plague,” the priest tells his congregation, “is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor” (95). Yet as the disease progresses, Paneloux somewhat backs down from his certainty as to what it all means. A second sermon, we are told, “display[s] more uneasiness than power” (229). Perhaps sometimes a plague is simply a plague, and brings with it no great moral lessons or truths.

Indeed, by the end of the novel the narrator’s main worry is how fleeting any such lessons may be, as he observes a population, finally liberated from the epidemic, now prepared to

den[y], in the teeth of the evidence, that we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies [. . .]. In short, they denied that we had ever been that hag-ridden populace a part of which was daily fed into a furnace and went up in oily fumes, while the rest, in shackled impotence, waited their turn. (297-298)

The real problem, in other words, is that the trauma is all too easily forgotten, that it is a text that frays or is soon invisible. Hence the narrator’s impulse to write everything down, to draw on his experience as well as the documents left him by others, “so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” (308). Yet it is not clear whether people’s propensity to amnesia, to forgetting what they have been through, is one of these admirable qualities (a sign of resilience?) or a fault that the text has therefore to rectify.

A similar ambivalence shrouds then the main characteristic imputed to the citizens of Oran, and perhaps to humans more generally: the fact that they are creatures of habit. For it is part and parcel of the way in which the town is described from the outset as unremarkable, ordinary, and frankly mediocre in every way (“a thoroughly negative place” [3]), that in it “everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits” (4). Such routines both hide and are a symptom of “the banality of the town’s appearance and of life in it. But you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits” (5). People don’t think, perhaps they do not even really fully live, dedicated as they are to “fritter[ing] away at card-tables, in cafés and in small talk what time is left for living” (4). So a plague, whose first consequence is to disrupt those habits, might even be welcomed (in theory at least) as an opportunity for reflection, for awakening and seeing what life could be about when faced with the possibility of its extinction. Indeed, for Camus (but surely not only Camus) the question raised by pestilence is precisely the question of existence, of what it means to be human in the here and now when the promise, or threat, of transcendence wavers in the face of calamity.

Yet ultimately, in a book that struggles to shake off the religious vocabulary that it purports to reject, if there is salvation it is to be found in the repetition that constitutes habit. No wonder, as Camus famously argues elsewhere, we should imagine Sisyphus happy, for what is a man endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill but an image of a creature defined by his habits? Likewise, here, the doctor who attends to the plague victims and the others that help him with the task do so not out of any great ideological conviction or faith, least of all out of any illusion that they are making much of an impact against the implacable foe that is the disease. In the end, after all, the plague disappears because it is imagined to have ended of its own accord, “leaving as unaccountably as it had come. [. . .] It had, so to speak, achieved its purpose” (271). Nor, we are told repeatedly, can we regard those who choose to fight it as heroes: “there’s no question of heroism in all this” the doctor says at one point. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is–common decency” (163). As for “those who enrolled in the ‘sanitary squads,’ as they were called, [they] had, indeed, no great merit in doing as they did, since they knew it was the only thing to do” (132). The plague itself, rather than being any great spectacle or event, is also a habit–if it means anything, it is simply “the same thing over and over and over again” (161)–and yet it can and should be confronted by a sort of counter-routine, a sense of obligation that is almost unwilled and unconscious. Hence if there is any “saintliness” (and the novel rather doubts that there is), it can only be “an aggregate of habits” (118).

We are now, of course, in 2020 learning new habits. And let us hope that one day we will have forgotten many of them. One I personally rather like is the custom of applause, of making a noise of some sort, every evening (here in Vancouver) at 7pm, in tribute to the health workers and other key workers, often underpaid and long overlooked, who are going about their jobs in the midst of the pandemic. It is rightly pointed out that that, indeed, is what they are doing: simply what they have to do. And that the applause is ritual without much meaning. But if we learn anything from Camus’s depiction of the plague, it is that such habits may be part of what is quietly admirable, and should not be so readily despised.

Pre-Prison Writings I

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Cross-posted to Infrapolitical Deconstruction.

Antonio Gramsci’s reputation on the Left, the academic Left at least, is surprisingly solid and enduring, especially when compared to other figures within Western Marxism (Lukács? Adorno? Althusser?) who may once have been much cited but who are now marginal tastes at best. Other names that have similarly withstood the vagaries of time and the fickleness of fashion are perhaps Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, and what Gramsci shares with them (Benjamin in particular) is the fact that his writing is quite varied and even fragmentary, permitting a wide range of interpretations and re-readings in different circumstances and for diverse purposes. Indeed, famously this is particularly the case for Gramsci: his most important and influential work by far is the Prison Notebooks, an unfinished textual labyrinth of historical investigation and political creativity produced under the extreme conditions of incarceration and fascist censorship, that was not published until after his death and has still not been fully translated into English. From this cauldron of often ambiguous and sometimes obscure enquiry, many Gramscis or Gramscianisms have subsequently been reconstructed, informing bodies of thought and activism as diverse as the Eurocommunism of the 1970s, Anglo-American Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently a “neo-Communism” that pledges, at times more convincingly than others, to employ philological tools to be more faithful to the supposedly systematic character of Gramsci’s original thought. But it is in the nature of the form in which that thought has come down to us that there is much room for dispute and divergence.

gramsci_pre-prison-writingsSome claim, especially in reaction to the version of Gramsci popular in Cultural Studies (for which a term such as “hegemony” can come to mean both everything and nothing), or to his “post-Marxist” appropriation by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, that turning to his pre-prison writings reveals the truer, more pragmatic and political, essence of an unadulterated Gramscianism. And no doubt Gramsci was at vastly more liberty to speak and write his mind before he was arrested and imprisoned by Mussolini’s police and judicial apparatus. Moreover, for the most part these comprise texts that were published, often in venues over which Gramsci had some measure of editorial control, and that as such appeared in something like finished form. It is here that we can read Gramsci the organizer and agitator, the Leninist Gramsci who threw his support behind both the Russian Revolution and the Turin Factory Council movement that sprung up in its wake.

Yet these early texts hardly resolve the Gramscian enigma. For one thing, it is evident that Gramsci’s restless mind was continually developing, experimenting, and trying out new ideas even (perhaps especially) once it was locked up in a prison cell. We have no reason to assume that he thought the same way about things in 1929 as he did in 1919. For another, this corpus is no less fragmentary than the Prison Notebooks, consisting as it does on the whole of short pieces written to a deadline on topical debates for the socialist press. If anything, prison gave Gramsci the freedom to work more consistently and coherently on the key concepts and underlying concerns that mattered to him. Finally, it is not as though censorship and, perhaps above all, self-censorship did not shape and constrain these articles that he knew would see the light of day, by contrast to the long labour of the notebooks that had no immediate audience. After all, throughout this period from 1914 to 1926, Gramsci was quite self-consciously (and unabashedly) engaged in a project of what he himself would call propaganda.

Take for instance Gramsci’s paean to the Bolshevik state, published as “The Price of History” in June 1919. Here he tells us that “The Russian communists are a first-class ruling elite. [. . .] Lenin has revealed himself as the greatest statesman of contemporary Europe [. . .] a man whose vast brain can dominate all those social energies, throughout the world, which can be turned to the benefit of the revolution” (92). Hence “the State formed by the Soviets has become the State of the entire Russian people” thanks to “the assiduous and never-ending work of propaganda, elucidation and education carried out by the exceptional men of the Russian Communist movement, directed by the lucid and unstoppable will of the master of them, Nikolai Lenin” (93-94). In short, “Russia is where history is; Russia is where life is” (95). Yet for all that this article manifests Gramsci’s undoubtedly heartfelt belief in the priority of state-building (“A revolution is a genuine revolution [. . .] only when it is embodied in some kind of State” [92]), one does not have to be an egregiously suspicious reader to wonder whether the hyperbole understandably directed to praise of the leaders of the first successful workers’ revolution might not extend also to the subsequent affirmation that “Society can only exist in the form of a State” (93). What, after all, has happened here to the Gramsci who is famously the champion of organizations of “civil” society, relatively autonomous from or even hostile to the state apparatus?

That other Gramsci, of what we might in shorthand call “society against the state” is indeed visible in these writings. Perhaps most interestingly, he can be found for example in a piece entitled “Socialism and Italy” in which he condemns “liberals, conservatives, clerics, radicals, republicans, nationalists, reformists” (27) as being, precisely, creatures of the state but not of society, or at least not of the Italian nation. Indeed, he offers here a hint of a counter-history of Italian nation formation, not as a process driven by Cavour and the Piedmontese bourgeoisie (who established a relationship to the Italian South that still remained, Gramsci repeats several times, “colonial”), but as the product of Italian socialism: over the course of what he calls a “plebeian Renaissance,” “Italy has become a political unity, because a part of its populace has united around an idea, a single programme. And socialism, socialism alone, was able to provide this idea and this programme” (28, 29). In other words, there is society despite the state, and in the face of the state’s resolute provincialism and particularism. This is “the history of the Italian people [that] has yet to be written–its secret, its spiritual history” (28). And maybe this is the history of the Russian people (and the Russian revolution) that also has yet to be written, even by Gramsci himself.

Again, none of this is to deny the strong statist tendency within Gramsci’s thought. There is no doubt at all that he saw the political objective of the working class movement in terms of the construction of (to borrow the title of the journal he co-founded in 1919) a “new order” premised on a new state guided by the Communist Party that he would also end up co-founding. As he put it even when he was, previously, a member of the Socialist Party of Italy, “The Party is a State in potentia, which is gradually maturing: a rival to the bourgeois State, which is seeking, through its daily struggle with this enemy, and through the development of its own internal dialectic, to create the organs it needs to overcome and absorb its opponent” (4). This is what will later be cast as the struggle for hegemony.

And yet there is also a tension here evident even in the thought of this early, manifestly Leninist, Gramsci. It is a tension perhaps best characterized in terms of two concepts that he continually employs that are both perhaps dissonant to our contemporary ears: “spirit” and “discipline.” As a party man, Gramsci is a great believer in discipline, which is a function of political leadership and education. Italians above all, he tells us in the few pieces that are dedicated to what we would now recognize as “culture” (articles on sport, for instance, and drugs), are a disorderly lot. Their preference for card games, for example, full of “shouting, fists slamming on the table and often in the faces of opponents,” reveals a country that is “backward economically, politically and spiritually” (73, 74). And yet it is precisely this spiritedness that indicates an alternative (and maybe posthegemonic) history, far from the rigidity and farcicalness of the state form. For sure, in Gramsci’s view, these “disorderly and chaotic energies must be given a permanent form and discipline” (97). But without them, without spirit, Italy is nothing.

La identidad y la decepción

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Al acabar de leer esta novela había dos temas que pensaba yo que destacaban. Dos temas entrelazados. La identidad y la decepción. Para mí, la identidad es un concepto bastante complejo que no tiene una definición sencilla. Hay muchas dimensiones que hay que tomar en cuenta cuando uno intenta definir los parámetros de la identidad. Estas dimensiones incluyen etiquetas culturales, raciales y étnicas. También, incluyen identidades ideológicas, identidades físicas e identidades sexuales. Todos estos parámetros contribuyen a la noción de la identidad y por eso, en mi opinión, resulta muy difícil de categorizar a la gente.

La identidad juega un papel muy importante en esta novela. El playground permite que sus usuarios crean sus propias identidades ficticias, en esencia creando una oportunidad de despegarse de la realidad. Este despliegue es reforzado por la ‘directiva principal’ del juego, es decir, no se puede reconocer la falsa realidad que presenta el playground. Pero esta idea de la fragilidad de la identidad se manifiesta más allá del videojuego. Se manifiesta en los personajes mismos. En específico, quiero mencionar a tres; Albert, Ramírez-Graham y a Turing mismo vemos que para ellos la identidad no es algo permanente, sino que es algo bastante flexible que cambia a lo largo de que pase el tiempo, o que el individuo se tope con nuevas experiencias, ideologías o descubra un poco mas de la realidad de su situación, como es el caso con Turing y porqué recibió ese apodo.

Albert para mi es el personaje quien más demuestra la flexibilidad de la identidad. Un alemán que fue ex -CIA y ahora trabajaba para la cámara negra en Bolivia. Está claro que demuestra una identidad bastante fluida, ya que con la identidad provienen las alianzas y la trayectoria de su carrera muestra que no tiene ningún problema cambiando de lado ideológico. Lo mismo se puede decir de Ramírez-Graham. Un americano con padres bolivianos que habla español con un acento americano muy fuerte recibió el pasaporte boliviano tras aceptar el puesto de jefe de la cámara negra. El pasaporte es una indicación legal de identidad y a Ramírez-Graham le dieron esa identidad casi artificialmente. Porque está claro que a lo largo del libro vemos que prefiere ser visto como americano.

Albert también influye la identidad de Miguel Sáenz. Es el que inventa el apodo de Turing, una referencia al famoso Alan Turing. Todos los años que Miguel trabajaba para Albert tenía claro que su apodo estaba basado en el elemento de genio criptógrafo que era Alan Turing. Pero como descubrimos casi al final del libro esto no es el caso: “Me dio la impresión de un ser tan dedicado a su labor. Tan poco afecto a las distracciones… que parecía una computadora universal de Turing… Todo lógica… Todo input… Y todo output… Ahí se me ocurrió bautizarlo como Turing”. El narrador continúa diciendo que Miguel “siempre creyó que el apodo se debía a su talento para el criptoanálisis. La razón era otra”. Esa otra razón es la capacidad de Miguel de ser como una máquina, de hacer su trabajo sin cuestionar órdenes y sin ninguna precaución a las consecuencias de sus acciones. Es en este momento cuando Miguel se da cuenta de que su identidad como Turing no era lo que pensaba. Porque ahora se da cuenta que todos los crímenes de la dictadura eran facilitados por él, que significa que es cómplice con las atrocidades de esa dictadura y ahora con la reinvención Vuelca completamente como se identifica el como una persona.

Me gustó mucho como se enfrentó al tema de la identidad en este libro, especialmente con la involucración de la tecnología que es un parámetro agregado a la que la humanidad nunca se ha tenido que enfrentar antes. Me gustaría explorar como el tema de identidad en este libro se puede comparar con lo que está ocurriendo en Bolivia ahora mismo.

Visto que las identidades no son fijas, como se puede ver a través de algunos de los personajes en su libro ¿Cree usted que la incorporación a la constitución boliviana de la wiphala ha atribuido a la fractura de la identidad boliviana?

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El delirio de Turing (parte 2)

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Hay mucho de hablar en la segunda parte de esta novela. Para empezar, quiero decir que me gustó mucho, me gustan los rompecabezas y las novelas de misterio de asesinatos, así que fue muy interesante para mí.

Un tema del que quiero hablar es la decepción. Muchos de los personajes están traicionando a otros. Por ejemplo, la verdadera razón por la que Albert llama a Miguel “Turing”, Ruth se vuelve contra su esposo, el juez nunca planea ir a juicio, Báez asume la identidad de Kandinsky. Me parece que la primera parte de la novela presentó un código y el resto es el código descifrado y descubrimos lo que realmente está sucediendo detrás de todo.

Quiero volver a una cosa que dije en mi blog anterior sobre esta novela, la idea de paralelos, esta vez entre el juez, Ruth y Ramírez Graham. Una cita sobre Ramírez-Graham, “lo esencial para él es corregir sus errores y actuar de manera correcta, aunque sea en una hora tardía”. Creo que esto se aplica a mucho más que a él. El juez está tratando de vengar la muerte de sus primos y arrepentirse, de alguna manera, por haber sido parte del gobierno de Montenegro.

La idea de la inmortalidad realmente me interesa. Especialmente cuando Albert dice: “Acaso él hubiera sido feliz si le tocaba ser inmortal. Acaso no. Uno nunca sabe… lo cierto es que a mí me toco. Y no soy feliz”. He leído en otras novelas cómo idolatramos la idea de la inmortalidad, pero en la práctica no es lo que realmente queremos. ¿No nos cansaremos de eso en algún momento? ¿No nos aburriríamos? Albert parece estar cansado de su propia inmortalidad, habla de comenzar de nuevo en un nuevo cuerpo. no suena feliz por eso, suena aburrido.

Finalmente, el delirio. Una cita que me gusta, “Acaso el pensamiento no sea mas que otra forma del delirio… Acaso la razón sea el mayor delirio de todos” (147). Nos da mucho en qué pensar, ¿somos como Turing, creemos que hemos sido elegidos por una razón, pero, en realidad, ¿es otra cosa? ¿Alguna vez tenemos el control total de nuestras decisiones? ¿Tenemos libre albedrío o solo somos marionetas tiradas por cuerdas invisibles? He descubierto que esta novela tiende a ser bastante existencial en áreas que son muy similares a nuestras inseguridades como sociedad. Pregunta para Paz-Soldán, ¿Qué opinas sobre la situación en Bolivia hoy después de haber escrito un libro que involucra una situación similar, un golpe de estado

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El delirio de Turing (2)

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Otra Vez, como las otras “novelas andinas” tenemos un escenario a fuera del capital, conectada por varios medios de tecnología, pero que todavía falta acceso: “Qué genio el de Albert: si la Cámara Negra hubiera sido instalada, como quería Montenegro, en La Paz, todo el mundo hubiera dirigido su odio hacia ella. En Río Fugutivo, la Cámara Negra pasa desapercibida y teje con tranquilidad su tela de atrapadora de intrigas” (213). Otra vez, tenemos una comunidad donde la modernidad y el progreso están cerrándose de todos los lados. Pero que también está bastante lejana para ser ignorada o inadvertido por el resto del país. Se describen el centro de Río Fugitivo como: “La batalla continúa: la ciudad nueva, hoy, asedia y ahoga a la vieja, la rodea por todos sus flancos y espera un descuido para lograr la victoria final” (167). Similar a la situación que hemos visto en Rumi, en El mundo es ancho y ajeno, el progreso viene si la gente la quiere o no…pero ¿si no lo quiere, hay otras opciones? Puede decir que aquí, ¿tenemos la primera victoria por la gente marginalizadas? Es verdad que el pueblo tenía una rebelión que resultó en el fin del poder neoliberal de GlobaLux, sin embargo, eso no resuelva la falta de electricidad en Río Fugitivo. A pesar de que la gente ha luchado por no tener “la ayuda” del poder neoliberal, que sí estaba beneficiando de la gente pobre (algo no nuevo en la “novela andina”) aquí, la primera victoria entre esos poderes no resuelta en una solución… Río Fugitivo va a quedar con apagones por los próximos 50 años—“una victoria pírrica” (213).  

Como las otras formas de tecnología que hemos visto en “la novela andina”, como el tren y la carretera, aquí la tecnología es digital, pero todavía no es infalible. Y también, tenemos intervención de a fuera (en este caso, una empresa italiana) que quieren intervenir—como hemos visto en Killac o en Rumi. A pesar de que, en este caso, los marginalizados tienen la ventaja tecnológica, el progreso todavía parece a lo lejos. Aunque, la rebelión aquí, por primera ves, vimos una tecnología donde los marginalizados no son los “underdogs”: “No puede negar que se halla en un país extraño: en los Estados Unidos, sería imposible que a un hacker se le ocurriera aunar fuerzas con los miembros de un sindicato. Fucking weird” (152).

Finalmente, a pesar de que la tecnología digital es el foco en esta novela, me interesa las contradicciones entre la tecnología y el progreso: “Tantos avances digitales y cada vez escribimos más, bien mirado es algo anacrónico” (185). De un lado, la falta de tecnología en la vida de Turing, quien quería hacer su trabajo interrumpido, le llego a ser ciego de los efectos de su trabajo, o la falsedad de lo que él estaba haciendo. También era la tecnología que causó ese “victoria pírrica”, lo que no valía la pena en primer lugar. Sin embargo, la continuación del “cyberhacktivismo” de Kandinsky, con “KandinskyLives”, ¿puede ser un momento de esperanza por el futuro de Río Fugitivo?

Mi pregunta para Edmundo Paz Soldán es: ¿La tecnología digital puede ser una herramienta para resolver las disparidades sociales en Bolivia? O, ¿causa formas de protesta improductivas o aún anacrónicas? (estoy pensando específicamente en los medios de comunicación en la novela—como el sitio web de Flavia, o Lana Nova).

Por ejemplo, el juez Cardona describe a Río Fugitivo como: “Ciudad que ansía tanto la modernidad que al hacerlo sus habitantes no hacen otra cosa que ser tradicionales. En un universo regido por múltiples temporalidades por cable, pero están anclados en el pasado premoderno de huelgas y protestas callejeras” (160).

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El delirio de Turing (2)

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Otra Vez, como las otras “novelas andinas” tenemos un escenario a fuera del capital, conectada por varios medios de tecnología, pero que todavía falta acceso: “Qué genio el de Albert: si la Cámara Negra hubiera sido instalada, como quería Montenegro, en La Paz, todo el mundo hubiera dirigido su odio hacia ella. En Río Fugutivo, la Cámara Negra pasa desapercibida y teje con tranquilidad su tela de atrapadora de intrigas” (213). Otra vez, tenemos una comunidad donde la modernidad y el progreso están cerrándose de todos los lados. Pero que también está bastante lejana para ser ignorada o inadvertido por el resto del país. Se describen el centro de Río Fugitivo como: “La batalla continúa: la ciudad nueva, hoy, asedia y ahoga a la vieja, la rodea por todos sus flancos y espera un descuido para lograr la victoria final” (167). Similar a la situación que hemos visto en Rumi, en El mundo es ancho y ajeno, el progreso viene si la gente la quiere o no…pero ¿si no lo quiere, hay otras opciones? Puede decir que aquí, ¿tenemos la primera victoria por la gente marginalizadas? Es verdad que el pueblo tenía una rebelión que resultó en el fin del poder neoliberal de GlobaLux, sin embargo, eso no resuelva la falta de electricidad en Río Fugitivo. A pesar de que la gente ha luchado por no tener “la ayuda” del poder neoliberal, que sí estaba beneficiando de la gente pobre (algo no nuevo en la “novela andina”) aquí, la primera victoria entre esos poderes no resuelta en una solución… Río Fugitivo va a quedar con apagones por los próximos 50 años—“una victoria pírrica” (213).  

Como las otras formas de tecnología que hemos visto en “la novela andina”, como el tren y la carretera, aquí la tecnología es digital, pero todavía no es infalible. Y también, tenemos intervención de a fuera (en este caso, una empresa italiana) que quieren intervenir—como hemos visto en Killac o en Rumi. A pesar de que, en este caso, los marginalizados tienen la ventaja tecnológica, el progreso todavía parece a lo lejos. Aunque, la rebelión aquí, por primera ves, vimos una tecnología donde los marginalizados no son los “underdogs”: “No puede negar que se halla en un país extraño: en los Estados Unidos, sería imposible que a un hacker se le ocurriera aunar fuerzas con los miembros de un sindicato. Fucking weird” (152).

Finalmente, a pesar de que la tecnología digital es el foco en esta novela, me interesa las contradicciones entre la tecnología y el progreso: “Tantos avances digitales y cada vez escribimos más, bien mirado es algo anacrónico” (185). De un lado, la falta de tecnología en la vida de Turing, quien quería hacer su trabajo interrumpido, le llego a ser ciego de los efectos de su trabajo, o la falsedad de lo que él estaba haciendo. También era la tecnología que causó ese “victoria pírrica”, lo que no valía la pena en primer lugar. Sin embargo, la continuación del “cyberhacktivismo” de Kandinsky, con “KandinskyLives”, ¿puede ser un momento de esperanza por el futuro de Río Fugitivo?

Mi pregunta para Edmundo Paz Soldán es: ¿La tecnología digital puede ser una herramienta para resolver las disparidades sociales en Bolivia? O, ¿causa formas de protesta improductivas o aún anacrónicas? (estoy pensando específicamente en los medios de comunicación en la novela—como el sitio web de Flavia, o Lana Nova).

Por ejemplo, el juez Cardona describe a Río Fugitivo como: “Ciudad que ansía tanto la modernidad que al hacerlo sus habitantes no hacen otra cosa que ser tradicionales. En un universo regido por múltiples temporalidades por cable, pero están anclados en el pasado premoderno de huelgas y protestas callejeras” (160).

II. El Delirio de Turing y el de mi reflexiones

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Nunca he escrito una entrada como ésta.

Es la primera vez que decido subir la catarata de reflexiones (seguramente incompleta) que ha inundado mi cabeza a lo largo de la lectura.

Sin embargo, a pesar de mi gusto personal (que estaría en contra de una entrada múltiple como ésta) y por la presencia del mismo Edmundo Paz-Soldán, me gustaría tocar cada uno de los siguientes pensamientos/temas:

  • Circularidad. La sensación que la temporalidad del libro nos da es la de circularidad. Cada episodio es narrado un vez desde una perspectiva por ser retomado y narrado otra vez por otro personaje. Nada puede resolver (sino la últimas páginas) la sensación de falta que te atrapa en el laberinto de código que es el libro y que te acompaña desde las primeras páginas.
  • Imitatio. El espacio ficticio del videojuego, si seguimos el mismo razonamiento que está detrás del Test de Turing, existe por imitar el espacio real. Es decir, en un primer nivel, se percibe como real justamente por sus características imitatorias, y en un segundo nivel, influye físicamente en el mundo real (por ejemplo en la cuestión política y en la económica). A lo mejor ¿se trata de una narrativa catártica para el lector?
  • Identidad (desde fuera). La identidad no es solo ese vestido social e interior que cada uno de nosotros siente como únicamente suyo; sino también la máscara pirandelliana que los demás nos ponen. Un poco como le pasa a Kandinsky en la novela.  
  • Delirio gris. No solo me he hallado con los fantasmas de los personajes históricos elegidos por el autor, sino también con los ecos teóricos de Levi, Macchiavelli y Agamben entre otros. De hecho, no he podido evitar que mi cabeza se fuera al concepto de zona gris con cada uno de los personajes encontrado capítulo tras capítulo, y ¿si fuera éste el verdadero delirio? Quiero decir, se podría considerar el deliro como una locura-cuerda que lo ve todo y lo explica todo a través de unos razonamientos que no podrían ser más sensibles y ciertos  de lo que son y no podrían ver la realidad más precisamente de como ya la ven. Se trata justamente de ese delirio-cordura que percibe, describe y enseña ese espacio liminal que constituye la esencia de cada personaje. Me refiero a ese espacio conceptual que hay entre víctima y victimario (o mejor dicho entre la parte que dentro de nosotros es víctima y la que es victimario). Todo esto remite al verdadero enigma, al real código que hay que descodificar. De hecho, me gustaría explorar más este concepto en mi proyecto final y por eso querría preguntar a Edmundo ¿Hay realmente víctimas y victimarios? ¿El hecho de que todo el mundo esté caracterizado por esta dualidad no anula cada posible juicio moral? ¿Hay una razón por la cual enseñar a los lectores la doble cara de cada uno de los personajes? ¿Los hace más reales o hay una “moraleja” más profunda?

Combinaciones binarias

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La caracterización y las palabras de Albert están repletas de pequeñas contradicciones. Sus primeras palabras son “Mi nombre es Albert. Mi nombre no es Albert” (31). En varios momentos de que él ve sin ver o que es “capaz…de mantener los ojos abiertos y no mirar nada” (148). Al tomar la forma de Edgar Allen Poe, nos dice que “Tenía gran fe en la razón…Y sin embargo mi narrativa abundaba en lo irracional” (146-147). Dice que “el pensamiento es capaz de pensar lo impensable” (147). Turing lo describe con un cigarrillo en la boca parado detrás de letrero de No Fumar (125). Es un muerto en vida. Una hormiga électrica (una referencia a Philip K Dick), “estoy y no estoy” nos dice (35). Estas contradicciones muchas veces están de dos estados mutuamente excluyentes.

Dos estados mutuamente excluyentes es un principio de la representación binaria. Según Wikipedia, “En informática, un número binario puede ser representado por cualquier secuencia de bits (dígitos binarios), que suelen representar cualquier mecanismo capaz de usar dos estados mutuamente excluyentes”. Puede ser que esta caracterización de Albert tenga que ver con su caracterización poshumano. Sin embargo, creo que la representación binaria y las “combinaciones binarias” forman una parte muy importante de las ideas fundamentales de la novela. Uno de los temas principales de la novela es que “la era de la información produce tanta información que termina por ahogarse a sí misma y tornarse obsoleta” (131-132). Los archivos archivan información para que desaparezca. Se deconstruye el concepto del archivo. Vemos dentro de Albert una deconstrucción en acción. Al “hablar” o pensar, sus combinaciones binarias aparecen en oposición.

Mi preguntas para Edmundo Paz Soldán es: ¿Pensaba en el binario de la informática al conceptualizar Albert u otros personajes o aspectos de la novela?

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