Ann Stoler: Ruin | To Ruin | Ruination

Ann Stoler at JWTC

I.

Ann Stoler’s presentation was a provocative and inspiring invitation to open the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism for 2011. She addressed the problem of the tangible as an aesthetical and political possibility to activate postcolonial thinking in the present.

The dialectical structure between materiality and the psychic condition, which Benjamin sets on the ruin, allows Stoler to re-think the conditions of possibility of temporality and spatiality of the colony and the imperial forms of domination.

If the ruin stands as a tangible form that activates the past in the present, to open the question of potential futures, maybe the ruin, as a remain of the past, can be a setting to locate the relationship between the colonial past and the imperial present in a way that it re-activates postcolonial thought in the blind spots that resist thought.

Stoler shifts the benjaminian argument of the ruin as a form of the critique of modernity - the object that condenses the promise and the failure in a dialectical image - to the possibility for a present critique of the colonial past. The vocabulary that Stoler proposes seeks to generate other articulations between persons and objects to explore the different folds that systems of domination create and that, most of the time, remain hidden. If domination is not always tangible or visible (as visibility is also a political condition), we must search elsewhere, and the ruin opens a wide spectre of possibilities.

Beyond the benjaminian vocabulary, in Stoler’s invitation, the ruin becomes more than a noun and takes the role of a violent verb – to ruin— that creates other temporalities that allow us to think of history as a process that remains on time and where the effects and affects still create the configuration of the sensible. Ruination becomes then a possibility and an invitation to re-think the past in the present as a rotten materiality that needs to be explored in order to activate a potential future.

Perhaps, in order to activate postcolonial critical thought, going beyond disciplines is needed and searching in the tangible, in the specific form that emerges in the surface, as a trace or a witness, to collapse temporality and opens up the possibility of time and the creation of other subjectivities.

Stoler’s talk resonates in very different fields. It is interesting to think how this question of the ruin, as tangible materiality, has been working as a critical device to dislocate historical discourses. Art practice is one form of experience that has been working around this site of temporalities, allowing the sensible to emerge as a political form. Some contemporary art practices, which follow the radical avant-garde traditions, keep searching for those blind spots to create a tension between visibility and invisibility in the form of the aesthetical experience.

II.

This is an exploration that does not pretend to be an example or a case but only a specific site to locate potential lines that might create a constellation with Stoler’s invitation. The ruin can be addressed, not as a monumentm but as a site where the uncanny emerges in the surface and collapse time, experimentations that, in the form of the work of art, allows us to have an experience of the tangible. Teatro Ojo is a Mexican collective that has been working on activate this uncanny spaces to dislocate official narratives and temporalities.

III.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. Walter Benjamin, On the concept of History.

Teatro Ojo is an artistic exercise that overflows disciplines, contaminating public spaces with a practice that seems to go against the current of artistic tendencies in Mexico. In a circle that privileges the modern tradition of artistic disciplines, still searching for autonomy and the fetish, Teatro Ojo comes out of the theatre and works in terms of the stage, like narrative unities with a spatial character that dislocate temporality to make way for the past to come. They also renounce artistic practice that intervenes as a relational exercise in order to conjure and create nonexistent relationships to invoke some kind of reconciliation. Rather, they approach art in a poetics of chance and contingency, they intervene without having any ultimate goal and without looking for an object that would materialize their process in a work of art. A theater-less theater and an objectless art, Teatro Ojo renews artistic practice by an experimentation that allows for a search for those fissures through which the instant slips in, hitting us like a profane enlightenment and letting a sort of estrangement surge forth, wherein daydreams begin to collapse. As actions devoid of spectacle, their work is almost imperceptible. They work in uncanny spaces, hidden or forgotten by the passer by, to seek out the dialectical image that allows promise and failure to emerge so as to collapse any sense of progress as a political construction of time that justifies domination. They know that the only way to crumple the promise of progress is on the ruin that stands, as Benjamin says, as the production of a time in which each epoch dreams the one that follows.

In México mi amor, nunca mires atrás (Proyecto Estado Fallido 2. Multifamiliar Juárez) (Mexico my love, never look back [Failed State Project 2. Juárez Housing Project]) Teatro Ojo worked on the soccer fields of the Juárez Housing Project in order to explore reality not as a representation but as a confrontation. The group held a soccer match between two of the teams whose league plays on those fields with the aim of intervening in their game. The match was played on the dirt fields while a general audio track narrated the 1966 World Cup match between England and Mexico, creating a dislocation between the present and the past, the visible and the invisible, the future and the time to come. The game was halted every so often and the audience could approach the players, who, paralyzed in a dust cloud that transformed their sweat into a thin film of clay, held small speakers that played back audio recordings of political speeches of the ancient regime that ruled the country for more than 70 years, presidents justifying the implementation of neo-liberalism, public declarations about NAFTA, radio slogans from political campaigns from the 60’s to 2000’s, advertising campaigns with the promise of a better future and voices of intellectuals and common people full of anger and despair. Voices from recent Mexican history that invoked a nation made up of the ruins of a project of modernization we have seen fall again and again...

For the second half of the nineteenth century, the plot on which this soccer field was built used to be the La Piedad civil cemetery. Later, in 1924, it was home to the National Stadium – promoted by José Vasconcelos, one of the architects of Mexico's post-revolutionary institutions – where presidents like Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas took oath. Twenty-six years later it was the site of one of the architectural works characteristic of Mario Pani, an architect who attempted to implement Le Corbusier's ideas in Mexico, in a development project aimed at the modernization of Mexico: namely, the Juárez Housing Project.

Two of the buildings in this housing unit collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, burying hundreds of people beneath them. The only thing that could be done with the rubble was to put up some dirt soccer fields where the residents of the area now play their neighbourhood leagues, beneath a Nike poster promoting commodities and the spirit of competition so needed for capitalism which declares: "Never look back."

México mi amor, nunca mires atrás is an historical intervention that breaks with the modern enchantment of time as a continuum, where the juxtaposition of temporalities gives way what has failed or been annulled. With this action, Teatro Ojo does not just attempt to activate memory, but to seek out through repetition those moments that produced this epoch, where the promise has been betrayed and we inhabited it as deception. The work of history is not to commemorate or to celebrate, but to assume that history is never a matter of the future but of the past, that justice will only be able to emerge from there.

The Juárez Housing Project soccer fields are presented as the witness to a space that denounces the failure of the utopia of the modernization project in Mexico and that assumes the complex fabric of heterotopias as paradoxical layers that are superimposed in urban space and that annul any hegemonic project. Heterotopia is concentrated in space, but this juxtaposition also generates another uneven and disjointed time that annuls all social projects based on progress as promises of a better future to come. Here there is a series of folds and layers superimposed atop one another, and Teatro Ojo intervenes in their unfolding and in their activation, where everything happens at the same time, to reassemble the political structures of a nation whose modernizing project attempted to consolidate a utopia while ruins were accumulating beneath our feet.

Teatro Ojo is theater without a theater, for which the world itself is a stage. Here the attempt is not to dramatize reality but rather to intervene in each fold and each layer, to dislocate time and to let the past spill out its effects. It is a political project that knows that history is our battlefield and that art is the device that lets us stir up space and time and produce affects to create another stage upon which the only way to move forward is by looking back.

By Helena Chávez Mac Gregor (UNAM).

The workshop begins!

The Last Ditch

In 2008, the JWTC series opened with a Symposium on Ernst Bloch. Here, Rafael Sánchez and Patricia Spyer write the third and last peice from that conversation.

When all has been said, talk of utopia and of the utopian impulse quite often alludes to the ability humans have - under certain circumstances - of imagining the world whole, that is, as a place where all the frustrations, incompletion and longings of the present will finally be overcome through the realization of some fully present, seamlessly organic community.

As such, the imagination of utopia has been a formidable source of energy from which people have consistently drawn in their attempts to subvert ongoing circumstances by referring these to some alternative condition. On analysis, this alternative condition often turns out to be these circumstances’ simple, point-by-point negation - happy islands, lands overflowing with rivers of milk and honey, holy grails, or communist wonderlands where people play music or read poetry at night after having touched on the full specter of human occupations throughout the day. To put it in Bloch’s terms, what else are the no-places of utopia but proverbial “figures in the carpet,” sites of intelligibility where, transcending “our quasiphenomenal form of existence,” the “well-fabricated but otherwise unverifiable idea” finds realization with all that this entails of the coming into being of “intelligible characters” to which we give “form” in the hope of once-and-for-all eluding our contingent, ever so incomplete predicaments?

It is precisely this sense of “utopia” understood as the ability to “imagine the world whole” that is nowadays in crisis. It is, so to speak, placed under erasure by a host of globalizing circumstances. In this respect, the very fact that the word utopia has all but disappeared from our vocabularies, increasingly replaced by terms such as “fantasy,” as in “fantasy of wholeness,” is symptomatic of such a crisis.

While the term utopia alludes to the imagination as an active force, capable in its very protean virtuality of giving shape to a world by bringing it into being, the term “fantasy” is not at all pregnant with such demiurgic possibilities. Instead, fantasy, as it is often understood, alludes to a reactive formation, a somewhat gaseous mirage taking shape in the gap separating the subject from an ungraspable, unsymbolizable “real.” In sum, not a good thing at all as witnessed by the prescription to “traverse the (social) fantasy” uttered insistently nowadays in some quarters. Come to think of it the same probably may be said of other fashionable expressions such as “point de caption,” “empty signifiers,” and the like.

Amounting to so many failures of the imagination, what seems to be implied by these and other related expressions is something like the last ditch, ultimately doomed attempt to “retroactively” contain the irrepressible dispersal of things by presenting them with some projecting mirror where such things may momentarily catch their fleeting reflection, thus temporarily achieving wholeness. Nothing, in any case, like the generous impulse inherent in a “spirit of utopia” that, whatever else one may say of it, aspires in its intellectual reach and imaginative, world-making capabilities to something considerably more expansive and supple than just ‘reflecting’ or ‘tying up’ the flow of reality.

What if, instead of insisting on such fraught attempts to conjure an otherwise admittedly “impossible society,” one just went ahead and “philosophically” assumed the order/disorder of things in all of their sheer metonymic, horizontal sliding? Minimally, this would amount to taking stock of one’s own lateral exposure to a “being with” where, to put it in Sánchez’s terms, the “touch among stones, stars, generals, and multicolored panties” or, in Spyer’s formulation, the “possession in the midst of war of a Christian subject by a Muslim enemy-neighbor,” discloses one’s own irremediable incompleteness within a horizontal drift that does not easily lend itself to be apprehended by any overarching figure or totality.

Perhaps in the wake of such a “philosophical” move, one would then be able to recover the actual “ethnographic” sites, the various locales where the possibility of “enacting a utopian gesture without content, without program, perhaps in the name of the ‘emergent’, perhaps in the name of ‘critique’” opens up. Indeed, in order for it to come about, any such “philosophical” possibility must necessarily connect to, and rely on, those “ethnographic” situations and locales where, in whatever form, “the “utopian” is “already found in many social forms of everyday life.”

As a “force that cannot be ignored,” in Spyer’s own work it is a “Muslim spirit” overtaking her Christian neighbor through the “inhabitation of possession” that harbors “possibilities for the cohabitation or future living together in the postwar Indonesian city of Ambon of both Christians and Muslims.” In Sánchez’s writings, such a utopian possibility emerges here and there for example when, in the wake of the serial televisual possession by a potentially infinite series of mediatized spirits, from Vikings and Barbarians, to Egyptian pharaohs, heroes from the Venezuelan Wars of Independence and Mexican movie stars, the mediums wax lyrical about the comraderie and pleasure of sharing a few tequilas in some cool, faraway Mexican bar with that fabled actor from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Pedro Almendáriz himself. As one of these mediums once put it, “you know, for us poor, this is one way in which we get to travel.”

How, precisely, the “philosophical” and the “ethnographic” necessarily come together in any current realization of the utopian impulse, so that, for example, beyond the overarching designs of the past, any utopian re-figuration of current predicaments is inextricably linked to the situations, locales, and social forms where any such possibility already insinuates itself? What is the precise network within which “the utopian” in the past subsisted entangled with notions of “the city,” “sovereignty,” “subjectivity,” and the “theologico-political” which, if not rendered obsolete, nowadays at least seem seriously compromised?

Such examination is necessary if, in its redemptive, political possibilities, “the utopian” is to be at all resurrected in terms that are relevant to our current predicament.

Rafael Sánchez (New York University) and Patricia Spyer (University of Leiden)

Life in the Bubble

In 2008, the JWTC series opened with a Symposium on Ernst Bloch. Here, Josh Comaroff from UCLA writes the second of three pieces from that conversation.

In a recent issue of Harper’s magazine, and in the wake of the widening sub-prime crisis, Eric Janszen made a disturbing assertion:

“There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.”

With striking clarity, Janszen identifies three moments of hyperinflation, two of which have already imploded. The first was the famous Internet Economy of the late 1990s. The second was the sale of suspect mortgages to buyers who could not afford them. The third, currently in the first blush of youth, is already being termed the “NewNew New Economy”: alternative energy.

Each of these bubbles, it should be noted, involves a “predatory present” and a complexly calculated future. But they also rely upon a powerful “instinct for utopia.” The Internet Economy was, we will remember, to democratize the world through common access to information. Risky mortgages—and, more importantly, the financial instruments that made them possible—were realizing the dream of universal home-ownership. And renewable energy, even in the dubious form of Ethanol fuels, is perhaps the most utopian of the trio. It promises to deliver the clean, green future. It is perverse, indeed, to observe the language of 1968, of utopias connecting Ernst Bloch to Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord to Ian McHarg, smuggled under the mantle of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.

It is interesting to note, moreover, the way in which utopian expectations occupy the very heart of this most crepuscular neo-liberal phenomenon, the speculative cycle. While it is now clearly understood that peripatetic capital enters and (rather dramatically) evacuates, the expectations of the bubble are quite the opposite. Seemingly out of step with their post-Modern moment, these hearken back to older myths of continual economic expansion. The Internet is not an economic boom, we are told, but “a new paradigm,” one to reset all the rules. A week before the big sell-off, an article appeared on CNN’s website asserting “Dow at 30,000? It’s looking more and more real!” The bubble is ever dependent upon claims that the current moment is utterly revolutionary, resistant to history. The “new thing” is so sui generis, and so fecund, that there is no reason to expect an end. The outputs dwarf the inputs; normative rules of capital (or nature) no longer apply.

But this is not only the story of three bubbles at global scale; rather, there is an illogic at work here that extends to more humble circumstances. Pyramid schemes, 419 scams, and the promises of Prosperity Gospels likewise offer means without end, rewards in striking disproportion to investments. These involve mysterious factors of multiplication (genius, faith, or courage). Their influence is limited neither to the so-called “First World” or to the “Global South.”

Rather than rehearse the threadbare utopias of political theory, then, we might wish to engage the possibility of utopia as a negative impulse: that which makes us rubes for old wine in newbottles. As always, the future provides the pretext for the present, and projected outcomes and anxieties perform elaborate work in the now. Is it possible that two complimentary poles—crisis and utopian rupture, disaster and the better tomorrow—are the operative ideologies for an emergent economic order, and specifically for that which trades at the intersection of volatility and confidence? That is, we may wish to ask: what exactly is utopia up to, out there?

Josh Comaroff (University of California-Los Angeles)