Grimson bolivianos en Buenos aires

mas foto de fiestas, esta en el barrio



Grimson analizes the identity construction among Bolivian migrants to Buenos Aires as constituted within intra and intercultural frames of communication. This migratory process is not only seen as problematic by the Argentinean society, both by the state and by a public sphere, but is also falsely connect migration with unemployment. Communication for Grimson is not just the instance of the interpellation of migrants as others made by dominant discourses nor is an analysis of the interpretations of the immigrants readings of the dominant cultures but rather works over multiple dimensions of the communicative process. To do this he reconstructs the self construction of identities among the Bolivian immigrants, living in the charrua neighborhood (inhabited by a majority of immigrant and second generation of Bolivians) in the symbolic interaction that put into play multiple systems of meaning both in the everyday production of meaning that include the interpretation and appropriation of technological mean of communication (the radio). In this sense he carefully follows the interpretations of the actors of the social relations in which identity is recreated. He therefore analyzes the intercultural encounters in the spaces of everyday life: from the public transportation to the factory and interaction with the police. Even though he does not engage in a racial critique, he recognizes the force of the stigma carried in the body. He claims that “the inequality proclaimed by vast sector of the receiving society associate a symbolic difference with a sociobiological one.” (50 my translation). Its extreme construction associates a body fisionomy to poverty, lack of “education”, criminality and amorality. The body is thus a marker of difference read by the “porteños” who react in different ways as they recognize them as others, mostly in either direct verbalizations of stereotypes (among working class and “provincial” porteños) or by bodily signs of demarcations of difference, such as looking down, or showing fear of a projected criminality, among the “educated” middle class. In this sense for Grimson communication is also about proxemics and body communication. To this situations Grimson show how people react by either letting the stigma be manifested, by pushing the stigma to a limit through reinforcing it with exaggeration and by inverting the stigma and “giving it back” to the producer. This is what he call counterstigmatization strategies He uses the notion of hibridity to give account of the way identity is recreated in Buenos Aires in the intersections of nationality, religiosity, indigeneity, profession, and generational lines that converge in it. In his book he unpacks four dimensions of the communicative process: a) the every day situations of intercultural communication in the city especially in their interactions with different social groups defined by them as: educated and provincials porteños, Koreans, Paraguayan, Peruvian and chilenian; b) the analysis of the festivities in the charrua neighborhood as a site of community building and of negotiation of tensions with the “receiving” society ; c) the appropriation of technological media for a self construction of identity and a self generated space for bolivianness; and d) the use of the television as educational political and position taking tool in diverse reception practices. A great quote by one of the “informants” : mira la sociedad argentina quiere aparentar ser mas mala de lo que es, quiere aparentar ser mas linda de los que es, quiere aparentar ser mas inteligente de lo que es. Pero si vos tratás con ellos te das cuenta que no son tan malos como parecen, no son tan lindos como parecen ni son tan inteligentes como parecen.” (49) He finally points to the fact that even though that form hegemonic position there is a tendency to attribute a social homogeneity the field of the popular is trasversed by forms of fragmentation of the practice that restricts a unified mobilization and the articulation of common interest.

briones 2007 parte 2

Por algun motivo me fue imposible ser sintetica con este texto y el de grossberg, un poco por la densidad, por estudiarlo mas de cerca, y otro poco por que estan trayendo todas las lineas de la lista que estoy cerrando a una discusion que me ayuda a aclarar. Me quedo sin duda con un nivel amplio de discusion como este, quizas algoq ue no me cierre tanto es montar un andamiaje, que si bien flexible y que es mas que nada para pensar, en intuitivamente atravesaria mas. Me quedo pensando en las cosas que lei que critican a los estudios culturales, algunas sin ser tan elaboradas, otras que en la critica caen a un nivel muy subjetivista si bien dicen no hacerlo, y fianlmente otras que en el proyecto de crear conceptos como herramientas para pensar flujos, y contenidos y formas en devenir, no me dan muchas pistas metodologicas para pensar como poner esas herramientas a trabajar. el desafio seria entonces seguir a briones / grossberg en las dimensiones que abren, ver cuales me faltan, y pensar formas de ponerlos a dialogar para no usarlos como andamio. eso creo.



3. It is in this context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of performance. She presents Butler as bridging the gap Foucault leaves open between conscious everyday practice over the self and the psychoanalytic unconscious. She does this by getting away from narratives that propose to generate knowledge about the self, as these narratives veil the underlying dichotomy of self/other, and focus on the practices of signification. This position open the possibility of showing how for instance theories of a fragmented subject, reproduce the forms of oppression is trying to get away from. Butler thus gets away from any proposition implying identities precede practice, and proposes that it is in the act that the subject is constituted. In other words, the practices constitute the phenomena they seem to be expressing. This is different to existentialism that recognizes a pre discursive subject and of acts. Contrarily Butler’s subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. In this way she distances form Althusser’s foundational acts, in signifying chains to propose that each time is a re-foundation, and that the norms define intelligibility, this rules have substancialyzing effects and thus deflect themselves. It is only in the necessary repetition that any subversion is possible, in the sliding of meaning, accentuations and tone while repeating. This displacement is less the effect of strategic movements than of the multiple lines that transverse any disposition, (the superpositions are themselves what make any disposition unstable). But it is the emphasis in the performance as only practice, as a general “doing” that conducts to a “cliché performativity”. One problem is to equate performance with act, and with this the concepts looses the specificity of the emphasis in form and in the staging itself, it also looses the sense of Austin performative verbs, those that “do” instead of naming. If any action is preformative, we cannot see the non discursive dispotifs that also inscribe the rules. She then summarizes the implications of thinking identities following Hall and Grossberg, to set the base for a critique to notions of flexible identities. She criticizes the association between flexibility of identities as a form of articulation based on future rather than past, as future is not necessary more flexible. Mostly flexibility is problematic as it is not a quality equally distributed, to have more possibilities of movement and choice is something restricted to small sector of the world. There is a tension then between sedimentation and invention. Invention has the limit of : 1) the incapacity to transform or revert some processes (ie colonization), thus identities may be contesting power but also spaces of consent and frustration; 2) there are norms of what it is and is not debatable about the past , identities are exposed to “strategic forms of authentication”, that shapes the terms of articulation and the effectivity for gaining recognition; 3) the way of representing subaltern memories always implies the incorporation of dominant perspectives and logics. Tradition is then a complex result of practices of signification and simbolization in which continuity and change are ideas used to get recognized as a “contemporaneous different”.
4. Her final questions are what is the relation between subjectivation and subjectivity, and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she takes the notion of fold of Deleuze in Grossberg, the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an “inside” that is only a second moment that creates a epistemological dimension not an ontological genesis. In sum there is no essential or pre given interiority. If this is combined with he notion of machineries what it is folded is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries, what is folded are the “mandates advice, techniques, norms to be human, the means through which self is constituted in different practices and relations” (Grossberg 2003 in Briones 70-71). She claims then that if the subjection operates through the inscription of the dispositif, subjectivity is linked to the fact that some parts of the fold are unstable part to be linked through a biography. Identification is a process in which some aspects of the fold are visualized as biography and the way these aspects are selected to make sense of the particular subject position. Subjectivity is thus the way this positions are inhabited and then made visible as social identities.
In this context performativity is the capacity of people to stabilize or generate lines of flight form social identities as they embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. This limits to performativity, are the limits to constructivism as a theoretical approach. In other words, are the tension between the triple movement of the constitution of the subject, representation and act of theorization and the real, between capacities of agency and the performative realization of the real.
She points to the fact that most studies of identity come into being in a context of a politization of identities, in this she criticizes that this studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards to desirable notions of subversion. In this she considers that the real would be a better starting point than the otherness that operates as “an excess, as a constitutive exteriority”.
What are then the effects of a cliché constructivism or performativity? The author warns against the tendency to analyze the processe of identification with the narrative force of theories we are using. Constructivism generally fails when it tries to generalize characteristics, rather than understanding conditions and machineries and its effects. It fails when it confuses contingency whit fluidity, necessary non correspondence as a critic to necessary correspondence, hybridity as emergent aspect of social interaction with hybrid identities. Hybrid identities confuses the multiple subject positions with the (necessary) fragmentation of identities, and because it postpones the discussion of why some subjectivations define hierarchies in the different folds, while other show more messy surfaces. Other problem is to read strategic essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to recognize a more dynamic political field rather than a strategies that swallows the subject (almost like Vonnegut’s epigraph of “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”). Talking about installations let us understand the contrastive presentations of identities (with hard divisions between an us and other) as a non necessary discursive turn rather than as epistemological distinctions. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of understading different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity resulting form different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective containing multiple subject positions. The theoretical emphasis in contrastivity then tends to find “problems” of identities something that is more a limitation of the theories, is more our limitations as users of those theories. Many analysis claim that indigenous identity politics of identity are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other groups, when it would be a better question to think which are the conditions and contexts making identities to emerge in those terms. Ultimately this theories frame the claims and are able to put into question the bases for the political claims.