Wright la colonizacion del espacio, la palabra y el cuerpo en el chaco

imagen de una articulo sobre lituratura de los desiertos


this commentary goes with some of my own added ideas. probably this essay could be turned into a much longer work, but guides what i could be doing with archival work and what type of events i can be looking for.


The brief but densely interesting paper explores the effect of the colonization of the chaco in the constitution of new types of order for chaquenian indigenous societies. Specifically the constitution of a new space, regime of language and body. The transition to a new spatiality only happened after the highly aggressive military campaigns that took control of the territories of the last indigenous society with a political and social autonomy. The military invasion demonstrated the defeat of previous the missionary and state attempts that combined both military "entradas" (advances) and the settlement of mission stations. Both were attempts of domesticating the savage nature of both indigenous and space.

With the consolidation of the state there was a new interest in gaining control over the land and territories in order to turn the chaco into a productive region for capitalist economy. The transformation of the space started by a delimitation of the spaces of colonization form the space of "the bush" a generic category implying a moral geography (my words) of savagism. The colonization efforts was then the transformation of this inhuman space into civilization and humanity as he quotes form the prefect of the Chaco -franciscan- Misions (fray Pedro María Pelichi) "no bautizaba sino a los que se hallaban en peligro de muerte, por que bien sabía que es preciso esperar que los salvages se hagan primero hombres para que sean despues verdaderos cristianos". It is though toil,that the Franciscans considered this can be achieved. The bush however remains as a space that is constantly threatening missionary efforts to fail.

The space of the missions and state reductions functioned as civilizatory islands, beyond which savagism and unruliness still prevailed. (as other authors show) Every time the indigenous live the missions, the habits that the priest were able to inculcate among them were lost, the missionaries complain that when returning form the bush the indigenous kept on behaving in their usual uncivilized manner still living "desnudos y de la caza" (naked and hunting and gathering) . (In other work Wright analyzes the contemporary contrasts among the indigenous of Tacaglé Mission between labour and hunting-gathering as a result of the incorporation of the missionary logic. In my ba thesis i analyze how this category is reappropriated among the Tobas of the lote who collapses the terms and claim that "marisca es trabajo") Thus space and body were connected in both its unruliness and as "site of operation" of the civilizatory power. Work more than the producton of economic goods was in this case the production of the human, a mean of inscribing a human habit to this non yet humans.

Finally even he does not quote Mignolo, he makes a point very close to his, by pointing to how the indigenous were also subjugated by the legitimation of a single regime of representation, which is spanish and the written language of bureaucracy. Interestingly he brings as an example the need of indigenous of carrying the documents of good conduct while traveling (generally to or form temporary work locations). This papers were written by any authority, from priests to state officials, to employers in the rural industries. This papers were thus showed to any white person meeting in their way as a proof of being good indians, already civilized and with no intention of attack. The indians were otherwise "always already" dangerous, something that legitimated killing non identified ones. (gordillo calls this part of what constituted a id paper fetishism among he analyzes in a recent article, he show how even with the papers some indigenous groups circulating were killed). this case is interesting for me as shows the early need of control over movement as another dimension of the colonization of chaco.

Mawani, Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregations

The article is structured around the relation between space and race, and specifically spatial segregation, in the 19th
Century as a central aspect in the consolidation of modernity and of colonial domination. If separation of white and native populations was a pattern in different colonial contexts, the author points to the difference between the practices of exclusion in dependent nations in which the extraction of natural resources was the main point of operation of power relations, from thesocio -spatial relations established in settler colonies, in which the emphasis is on the expansion of white residency. In this last cases therelation between practices of isolation, tha formation of racialized identities and the law appear to be directly connected in constituting white dominance. This is what she explores in the formation of the city of Victoria (BC) as a site of white supremacy that implied the creation of the Songhee reservation as a means of spatializing difference in a
distant place. The production of race is central in this analysis as it produces colonial power and has as effects theconstitution of white and indigenous subjectivities. This was made possible through the use of law, and not through military occupation, in a disputed process between indigenous, white settlers and indigenous people. It s the frame of legality that makes it difficult to critique violence implicated in this process. If initially the population of Victoria was an intermingled group of a majority of indigenous people and a few white fur traders, the creation of theSonghee reserve is an initial strategy for outcasting indigenous out of the city, (in the opposite shore and across a bridge) but still in some proximity. The discourse legitimating segregation points to hygienic and moral reasons for racial separation. Indigenous were thus confined to a reduced space
they had to share with a diversity of other indigenous groups, and their life gets subjected to disciplinarian measurements such as having to avoid the city as much astehy can and being baned to be there at all at night (because of alluded alcoholism and prostitution problems), in sum excluding difference form colonizers spaces. This techniques were then producing racially homogeneous population that turned to be a spatial categorization that were part of the bureaucratic rationalization of the city, by a process of creation of the "empty" spaces the colonizers imagined to be occupying [cfr argentina y los desiertos].
Latter the white settlers considered the reserve to be too close to the city and a source of problems so there was an intensified pressure to remove it. An anxiety that not only made visible the racial distinction but also produced it. It took 60 years to the colonial administrators to do this as their concern with the rightfulness of this eviction prevented them to make it effective. The space of the reserve becomes then a signifier of racial disorder, a place of corrupt and savage indians in constant danger of violent explosion against the civilized whites. In regards to this images the space of the reserve becomes a material reality of
segregation of all indigenous "Space are not fixed, dead or undialectical, as Edward Soja Explains, but on the contrary have an important relationship with the people seen as interior and exterior to that space" (182) In sum the constition of Victoria and its citizenship was made through projecting all that hites were not, to the Songhee peole and to the space of he reserve . Again this negation was unfolded in the matreiality of the daly forms of colonial intervensions, tehnologies of degregation, and in the end the enforced removal. In this dinamic "officials used the law to envison and constitute theri own whiteness and civility" (???), however this was not uncontestedbut took several years of debate. The songhees both resited eviction and ignored the presures to make them leave the area. Official were determined to get Songhee agreement in order to justify their embrace of liberal ideals. But agreement does not imply there was consent , rather the ideals of justice and equality raced by the discourse of law were produced on the base of racialized notions and thus was a form of producing unequal relations between colonizers and colonized. Eviction was justified by this -supposedly- consensus, and was thought as a necessary step in the civilizatory process. "Eurocanadians colonists envisioned their own subjectivities and their civic imagineries against the bodies and spaces of the indigenous inhabitants. The contradiction between the forced exclusion of natives and the liberal values of fairness and rationality was reconciliated by the legitimation of the law, and by framing it as the indigenous best interest, while letting white authorities and residents constitute their subjectivities as free, rational, fair." (page??) This of course neglected the violence of land dispossession, destruction of possibilities of mantaining a cultural habit, and teh ongoing social, political and economic marginality effected.


The photograph is form a "Residential school group photograph, Regina, Saskatchewan" taken form http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.6.LouieLawless.htm is not the same as what the text's case, but gives (me) a picture of other related institution.

Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts

23) Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Wacquant makes a critic o media characterization of spaces of urban marginality as lawless and dangerous. He argues that this discourse is indeed part of what fabricates this marginalization. “Advanced marginality is a novel regime of socio-spatial relegation” (2) he argues. Instead of analyzing contemporary marginalization as a common phenomenon that can be characterized as a “ghettification” of major cities worldwide, and the emergence for an “underclass” (as the media and main stream urbanists have argued) he proposes that marginality is not the same everywhere. He wants to delineate “Social morphology, organizational makeup and functions that neighbourhoods of relegation fulfil for their respective metropolises” (4) For this he takes both the Chicago black ghetto and the Parisian banlieue. The first part of the book offers an alternative to the Chicago School analysis of poverty as a disorganizing force, to follow the connections between racial domination, class inequality, state (in)action, and spatial enclosures. He also critizises the model of the consolidation of the “dual city“ to argue that has been a process of fragmentation of the marginal and unification among dominant groups. He understand this “social fragmentation from below” as the condition of impossibility of articulationg political claims in terms of shared identity, and rather the proliferation of a variety of fragmented strategies of subsistence socialization. The second part is a comparison made on the base of structure, experience and political economy of urban marginality in the US and France. He combines quantitative and ethnographic analysis in order to historize how both formations have changed over time as result of external causes and what are the implications of this for people living in places of exclusion. He relates the creation of the North American hyper-ghetto with: 1) the deepening inequalities generated by capital concentration, and 2) the withdrawal of state policies of welfare, generating the decay of institutions of the ghetto and a state of social abandonment,3) the strengthening of policies of racial segregation among which there is a growing , 4) of policing and criminalization of the ghettos. The European balineues contrarily rather than being space of racial segregation are constituted from the chronic unemployment and employment precarization, in the ethnically heterogeneous former working-class neighbourhoods. He analyzes how in both cases there is territorial stigmatization that enhances process of de-solidarization, operating in different dimensions in each case: exclusion in France is based in terms of class while in the US is based in racial terms. The general critique we can make is that he follows a too schematic logic of cause- effect and flattens the complexities of He is very about state role in the configuration of space (he does not quote Lefebvre nor acknowledges most of of the theoretical debates over social dimension of space except for some of Bourdieu’s considerations taken form a systemicist perspective) “effects of space turn out to be effects of state projected on to the city”. (6) He emphasises that violence is more a consequence of all these historical processes rather than any sudden “explosion” of ethnic rage, and that ultimately erodes any possibility of citizenship as a category that would even up capitalism’s inequalities.

O si Lefebvre reloaded

La estrategia fue no abrir el libro de nuevo para no ser deborada, pero algo asi paso leyendo las hojas de notas. al menos sirve para darse cuenta que Lefebvre es mucho mas refinado que los usos que le di hasta ahora. La anotation fue inundada luego por parte de las notas.

Lefebvre, H. 1991 [1974] The Production of Space. Trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell: London.
1. Lefebvre considers that place is social: each social formation (each society and mode of production in his terms) produces space in a particular way in which contradictory relations and social hierarchies unfold; but is also produced: not only as a result-means of economic production, but in the generation of social relations, which means to consider their relevance in the reproduction of social relations (form biological reproduction, workforce reproduction and reproduction of social relations of production which include the visible and invisible representations). He is against economicistic explanations of space which regard space as an object, and thus generates a space fetishism, by erasing social relations (see p88-93).
Lefebvre incorporates the propositions of phenomenological perspective (he is in dialogue with Bachelard, Heidegger who consider are only focusing in two dimensions of space: abstract conceptions and the lived representational): “Being has a history and a history is nothing but the history of being” (p121), thus he also takes historical dimensions and the social contradictions into the understanding of any place production.
He regards space as a concrete abstaction (p 100 –for space time p 118). His analysis of the production of an abstract space as a necessary condition for capitalism and the violence that this process demands, echoes in the historical incorporation of the Chaco to the Argentinean state.

2. Hence, Lefebvre proposes a three-dimensional process in the production of places: 1) conceived: the planning of places from positions of power, 2) lived: the representations of places by its users that may challenge those ideological dimensions, and 3) perceived: the practices over places that effectively produce and reproduce them, following both the lines set by power positions and alternative constructions. (p 33-38)

3. After this definition he dedicates the rest of the book to define the transition form absolute space (form middle ages to absolutists state especially ch. 4 p 229-262) to the production of the abstract space of capitalism (p 262- . Space as a product and a means of capitalist (national and bourgeoise) domination embodies its contradictions which prefigure the possibility of a new space. He has a chapter analyzing the contradictions of abstract space (p 352-) “Contradiction of space make contradictions of social relations operative” (365). He states that difference arrises in the peripheries: which contradicts the universality of the abstract space. (373) If labour is abstracted space of capitalism need is abstract too, spatial practices are related to production and reproduction, knowledge crates an homogeneous space measurable (ie. geometry which he criticizes form the beginning of the book), and the lived space is limited to work, and the visual.

Abstract space is based on the city predominance over the country, in architecture is marked by the division inside/outside, the façade and the perspective. Abstract space is not just an empty or natural or homogeneous, it is also complex and obscure: creates differential hierarchically structured spaces; it is obscure, send aspects of the social to the obscene by negating them (for obscene p 99). In sum he defines it as predominantly visual (p282), geometric and phallic (p285). For the first there is a need of making transparent spaces for control, the space of capitalism as one in which “there is nothing to hide”, for the second the making of an isomorphic space the space for the commodity and the commodification of space, and the phallic as its masculinist preponderance, and ojectual absolut verticality of buildings (ie see 40, 166). He exemplifies the fracture of space with the female body as without organs (Lacan) (p 355).
State. Capitalism is the result of the expansion of the space of accumulation and the rise of forces of production, but is the link violence and the economic which gives place to the constitution of the State. The establishment of the state as an abstraction veils the class struggle, by establishing an ideology of sovereignty. It is state what produces territory as a result of its dominion of space (279-280) “Every space s born of violence… state power endures only by virtue of violence directed toward space” (280). Violence directed over nature and population, creates unity, creates the rationality of accumulation, bureaucracy an reassured by monopoly of force by arm. Space is fragmented, hierachized, submitted to sovereign power of state.

4. His analysis includes a long reflection on how the soviet revolution’s project failed as a result (he argues) of the failure of inaugurating a new spatiality, in this he shares the ideas of situationists in the need of motorizing revolution form the everyday life, but rather than arguing for the way this would be done through artistic movements (Lefebvre will say “ representations of the relations of production which subsume power relations, these two occur in space: space contains tehm in the form of buildings, movements and works of art” p 33), he sees the importance of liberating space. Space can be appropriated for new uses, new practices (p 165). It is for this that his book is ultimately a political project of a differential space which need the establishment of new knowledge, new relations, possibility of difference.

5. Lefbvre’s unending book can be re-read in search of different topics (ie. knowledge, language, visuality, ), one of the tangential topics I’ve been interested in is his understanding of body-space. For Lefebvre, the body is the agent of the social production of space, and then it is part of each dimension through its productive energy. The body is separated from objects and the world, language is put as a mediation in te production of a knowledge which is “over” the world. But also body’s sexual drive is repressed, it is thus a castrated body. (p 40) To reestablish practice and sensorial qualities of the body is also a way of producing a new type of knowledge by decentering (esto resuena a Nietzsche, creo). A new type of knowledge should overcome dichotomies. In this way competence and performance within spaces are embodied activities and a way of knowledge, bodies are the motor of practice and what enables perception. Therefore the lived body is the base of experience. An experience shaped by power relations but also that can be contested from the body. The body has the potential of inaugurating a new type of space. This brings to another contradiction: the abstraction of space from social relations can only be achieved through violence that is reproduced by dominant knowledge of the space . Again it is through the body that this contradiction can be recognized and then overcome. Synthesizing his conception of the body as a potential for political transformation he states that: “The restoration of the body means the restoration of the sensory-sensual, of speech, of the voice, of the smell, of hearing. In short the non-visual. And of the sexual…” (363) “The social space contains potentialities (of work and re-appropriation) (…) that correspond to demands of a body “transported” outside itself in space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates a project of a different space.” (349).


6. Space and Language (131-166): space has meaning and may imply a message, but space is cannot be understood as language, rather discourse is in – about – of space. He critiques Jackobson, Barthes, Pierce, Nietzsche.
“No space ever vanishes utterly living no trace” (p 164). Every new addition reinterprets the past.” (P 164) But also “ Nothing disappears completely, however, nor can what subsist be defined solely in terms of traces memories o relics.” (229)

Varios contradictions:
Quanity vs Quality
Exchange valu vs use vale
Violence vs knowledge
Savoir vs connnaissance
Domination vs appropiation
Repetition vs differece

“A space in which each individual and or collective subject would become aquainted with use and enjoyment is at present only at infancy” (p 381) Cantrak power can be challenged by local powers in which the machine of the state is replaced by machines managed form below. This questo of counter space overwhelms the division between reform and revolution
“The enigma of the body is its tendency to produce difference unconsciously” (395)

The end of my notes just say What is the subject? A momentary centre. The object? Likewise. The body? A focusing, active and productive energy.

Grosz Architecture From the Outside y notas varias

Grosz, E. 2001. Architecture form the outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press
Elizabeth Grosz presents a series of essays she wrote in dialogue with architecture, and to do so she proposes to create a third space, nor architecture nor philosophy form which to look at both.

This outside is her positioning for the dialogue but it is also a question, what is the outside of architecture and philosophy. If the inside has always been in relation to the outside, as outside is “active in the production of the inside” in disjunction of series rather than in the conjunction. (69).
Some interesting points in relation to the inside-ouside (p 67-69):
P 68 Deleuze describes three characteristics of a relation between two series as: (p67) 1)A relation can only be thought if tehe series are separate and a zone of proximity with its own ways of functioning is created. 2) “the outside is capable of asserting itself form the inside… this frunctionn as the unsaid and the unseen within discoure and representation.” 3) Insofar as both series are modified with the encounter of each with the other, with the drawings of lines to link them, they ar capable of interactions or becomings… (for Deleuze Foucaut), the inside is an effect of the outside: this inside is a fold or doubling of the outside, a contortion o the exterior surface: “It resembles exactly to the invagination of a tissue in embryology, or the act o doubling in sewing: twist fold stop and so on.” (Deleuze) (68)
“this outside must be thought itself or perhaps even life itself” She goes on asking what is thinking and she follows Del. : to think is to problematize, knowledge, power and thought are atriple root of problematization, thinking is the space between seeing [or listening or touching or…] and speaking [or writing, or running, or painting, or..]. In this “the middle is always the privileged point to begin, why though is best captured in between” … The interiority of these series is of less interest than the way these two series are capable of being aligned to connect to create their plane of consistence or coexistence, which is made possible through the operations of this outside (69).
“Becoming is what enables th trait, a line, an orientation, an event to be released form the system, series, organism or object that may have the effect of transforming the whole, making it no longer function singularly: it is an encounter of bodies that releases something form each and in the process, releases or makes real a virtuality a series of enabling and transforming possibilities.” Thought, life is that space outside the actual hich is is filled with virtualities, movements, trajectories that need release [not so sure about the verb release] It is what a body is capable of doing without necessity and without being captured in what habitually does, a sea of (possible) desires and machines waiting to their chance, their moment of actualization”(70)
Deleuze can be understood as the philosopher who evacuates the inside (whether of a subject and organism or a text) forcing it to confront its outside, evacuating it and thereby unloosing its systematicity or organization, it is usual or habitual functioning, allowing a part, function or feature to spin, off or tu mutateinto a new organization or system, to endelessly deflect, become, make. (p 72 -73)
In her work she has a strong interest in the body, one o her main critiques to philosopher that have considered this topic is that they all talk about a general human body, but there is not one body but at least two. In this gender and sexuality generates different spatialities and temporalities, but also different genders access space differently. She question how could architecture start considering the construction of gendered specific spaces. In regards to this topic she discusses with Butler in that changing sexual identity is not as easy as sliding away form the repeated interpellations, one can perform a different identity which is not the same as becoming.
If architecture can take concepts form philosophy as tools, philosophy can do likewise, not just by taking architectural concepts as metaphors, but also by considering the dimension of concrete building as part of the practice of philosophy.
She argues that emerging forms (ie life) should be considered as part of spatial concerns, this genesis is the emergence of new forms of assemblage in which there is no clear distinction between animated- inanimate but what new possibilities the configuration opens up (ie the internet, which she analyzes forma genre perspective). In this she shows and interest in time as an undetachable form space, as emergence and genesis unfold in space but in emergence time is constituted.
She is also interested in technology not just as a body interface but as also something that gets internalized in the body. She uses psychoanalytic ideas of the phantom body in order to understand the way body parts can be replaced by technological devices, but also how the city becomes a part of the (sexualized) body the body in the city as well as the city in the body.


Bueno a ver. Empece leyendo los textos mas pos- (estructuralistas, bue que se yo con las definiciones) , por que me interezaba despegarme un poco de Lefebvre -aunque esta bueno y siempre se le puede a volver a entrar por otro lado, pero deciamos crea un poco de adiccion-. Esta bueno me parece importante correr un poco de pensar al espacio como proceso, que si bien dinamico tiene cierta linealidad y resolucion dialectica, y contradicciones que si bien multiples y con limites inciertos, quizas fomentan pensar en lugares con cierta sedimentacion. (el otro dia recorde que Raffles dice algo importante sobre esto de la sedimentacion y es como los lugares no solo se transforman en espacios de confluencia sino que tambien se diluyen y dejan de ser visitados para transformarse en un trazo, aunque no me acuerdo si usa esta palabras). Me faltan algunos pero Thrift desde la geografia habla de vectores, velocidades, imágenes, efectos, afectos, microbiopolitica y por lo tanto de devenires constantes. Todo esto me parecio interesante, pero cuando volvi a la etnografia me dio cierto alivo pensar que las trayectorias no estan en un espacio trasparente (que necesitan las imágenes para trasmitirse en en los microsegundos que obsesionan a Thrift) sino que aun vale la pena pensar moviemientos mas lentos que van encontrado cosas por el camino y que justamente son detenidos por distintas fuerzas, como las peregrinaciones o los viajes por la selva o visitas a para multiplicar relaciones. No es que una perspectiva impute a la otra pero si esta bueno pensar las escalas.

Bueno en tercer lugar volver a la bibliografía sobre el cuerpo, y ahí tengo prominencia de feministas, me dio otro especie de alivio en dar cierto volumen al movimiento. Creo que esta bueno pensar en que vectores se van abriendo, y que cambios implican las velocidades altas, pero a la vez pensar todo esto se actualiza o no en un movimiento desde cuerpos enmarañados de maneras diversas con otras cosas- personas- maquinas (bueno thrift cita los estudios en neurciancia, es parte del cuerpo si le interesa). Bueno Young, si bien muy criticada por hacer tipologías, ayuda a pensar que los vectores que se abren guardan alguna relacion con la forma en que esos cuerpos estan diferenciados –en generos- y jerarquizados. Aca Grosz tambien hace notar que los filosofos que hablan del cuerpo lo toman de modo generico, y apuntan evidentemente al cuerpo masculino y propone que al menos deberiamos hablar de dos cuerpos. (Disgresion: mmm esto estaría problematizado por buttler y la repetición perfomativa y tambien por las antropologas lanzadas a ver “otras” construcciones de genero, y encuentran cuerpos “bisexuales” con proceso de distinción solo momentáneas (aaa no me acuerdo quien), cuerpos imperfectos que tienen que ser sometidos a cirugías que cierran el cuerpo para devenir sexuales (Boddy), y cuerpos que solo tienen genero en tanto repiten ciertas practicas (Astuti), y es intersante que todos estos trabajo hacen tambalear discusiones de genero desde perspectivas teoricas que quizas ni se planteaban hacer criticas tan profundas.) Grosz tambien habla de lo dominantemente masculino del espacio de las ciudades y de las tecnologías y se pregunta que implica esto para los otros cuerpos en la ciudad. Su idea del cuerpo en la ciudad y a ciudad en el cuerpo es interesante para pensar corporizaciones diferenciales.

Pero lo que mas me hizo pensar (mientras caminaba de un café a otro) fue que probablemente el tema interioridad-exterioridad es algo que atraviesa los distintos temas que quisiera conjugar en el trabajo (también los que me quedan afuera y no se como incluir). Bueno por un lado tenía este tema en mi trabajo anterior cuando me preguntaba si el barrio esta o no esta en la ciudad y por supuesto que está pero bien corrido al margen, sin continuidad con el resto de la ciudad, claro también que con el crecimiento de los suburbios es menos un campo abierto y mas un continuado de barrios que se van formando con otras migraciones. Como sea esa tension de estar y no estar es un poco lo que define al barrio, lleno de gente que quería estar en la ciudad y el estar en el barrio les implica una mejora por estar “mas cerca de” un centro de progreso, y estar medio claustrofobicamente fijados, donde cada vez hay menos espacio. Notas de campo:
[Una mañana de junio de 2002 tomábamos mate con Esteban y su hermano Pablo, ambos de unos 26 años. Esteban comentó que cuando él vio lo que estaba pasando en Buenos Aires (19-20) pensó que dentro de poco tiempo los indigenas se pueden volver a levantar, que puede ser que haya guerra como antes, porque cada vez les sacan más y ellos hace años que aguantan. Mientras señalaba el lugar que ocupa la vivienda, expresó que están apresados, explicó que ahora están en ese lugar chiquito, que apenas les alcanza para vivir. Antes tenían más lugar y ahora cada vez están más encimados. Continuó explicando que no solamente les reducen su territorio sino que envenenan el agua de la que viven. Por eso piensa que si no llegan a un acuerdo con las mineras va a haber Guerra entre los paises involucrados. Pablo asiente y agrega que no hay otra alternativa. Le pregunto si los aborígenes van a pelear y me dice que no sabe porque están muy débiles, ya cada vez tienen menos fuerza para pelear y no hay guerreros como antes. Pero igual afirman que si los quieren echar, si los quieren matar, van a pelear.]
En todo esteo el barrio esta “entremedio”, en las relaciones con el adentro social y en la espacialidad de adentro-afuera de la ciudad.

Mi otro pregunta tenía que ver con lo indígena que también tiene que ver con otras lineas de interioridad exterioridad, que se espacializa en el barrio, pero también se encarna. La gente se presenta omo indígena en relacion a una trayectoria (venir del campo, ser pobre, memoria de peleas con el ejercito, no ser claramente ciudadanos, ser objeto de “desarrollo”) y en relacion a practicas, (hablar idioma, relaciones familiares, formas de trabajo, comida que se reconocen indígenas).

Bueno esto sigue estando en mi trabajo ahora pero seguramente si el eje va a ser el movimiento, como dice Grosz (creo) el adentro y el afuera se generan al atravezar lugares, entonces algo intersante sería ver el modo en que estos adentros afueras se van definiendo (como en el relato de barring de gente andina en la ciudad que solo empieza a hablar quechua cuando llega a un punto de su viaje en colectivo de visita a su pueblo). Y de vuelta la interioridad – exterioridad del cuerpo y la ciudad pero en el movimiento mas que en el “habitar”. Si la interioridad – exterioridad se van definiendo en el trayecto, se define también por lo que deja de estar y lo que se va dejando atrás, puede pensarse en movimientos de “escape” pero también de búsqueda, aunque claro las dos cosas estan juntas y cada vez que hay escape se encuentran cosas, pero quizás sin buscarlas. Y de vuelta la interioridad – exterioridad del cuerpo y la ciudad pero en el movimiento mas que en el “habitar”. Bueno esto de lo que no esta, (se puede sumar lo que no se dice, lo que no se hace, etc? Sider) necesitaría un poco mas de trabajo.

Y seguramente tiene algo que ver con mi trabajo fallido del año pasado sobre las imágenes de cuerpos desmembrados, mirados desde lo quirúrgico y el saber medico -como algo que tiene que cortar y abrir-, la escenificación de lo político -ensangrentado-, y la necropolitica.

Termino de escribir esto y me parece demaciado general y seguramente forzado, que va ser.

Rural Cosmopolitanism

Vinay Gidwani Gidwani and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2003 Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 37; 339
The authors focus on what they call rural cosmopolitanism, by examining the circular migration between country and the city, as a movement that disrupts the traditional divisions of rural and urban spaces. It also reexamines the notion of globalization and point to the fact that rurality has rarely been included as being involved in this type of analysis when they are also intertwined in globalizing movements as well as being important nodes in the flows of capital, populations, technologies and ideas. For this they base on Lefebvre by understanding the way the lived (representational) and the perceived (practice) dimensions of space are reproduced in the movements form country to city. They propose to expand the notion of the cosmopolitan, by retaining the aspect of the concept that refers to the coexistence of capacities of a person to adapt to and have social competence in multiple socio-cultural formations, but deny the specificity of being a process only linked to big metropolis which function as centres for global capital flow. The circular migrant does not only transmit ideas when they move form one place to the other, but also techniques and material forces which transform the spaces of their circulation. Recent process of industrial regionalization and demands for specific types of labour force are the types of new phenomenon enhancing these types of movements (which have probably always existed). Restricting the cosmopolitan only to trans-national, transcontinental flows limits the analysis to only one of its dimensions and scales, by preventing us see how other social subjects, by moving transform the conception, inhabitation and perception of spaces. Examining these invisible movements can be relevant to nation formation, social movilization and modernity in India, and also in a more general way in other postcolonial contexts.

Bueno breve, nada que me parta la cabeza, pero muy en linea con el "caso" que voy a pensar. Esta bueno el poner atencion en que los movimientos son circulares y los polos de atraccion van variando, aca mas que nada por movimento de capital -en el ciclo D-M-D y la movilizacion de fuerza de trabajo-. Esta bueno tambien pensar un concepto asociado a la globalizacion desde lo mas supuestamente "anti-global" que son campesinos moviendose. Tamben esta bueno que la proponen como diemnsion necesaria para entender al modenidad, nacionalismo, movilización. Bueno algo obvio pero que no me habia detenido a pensar ultimamente en que el capitalismo necesito las grandes relocalizaciones de campesinas con los enclosures, otra dimension espacial de la politica. Bueno tambien recuerda que esta bueno tener el panorama en clave economica.

Benjamin "The Flaneur"

Benjamin, Walter (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. New Left Books: London.

Benjamin presents the context in which Baudelaire is writing, that of the rise of life in the cities and the consequent appearance of a city life style. He points how at the opening of the 19th C literary movements shifted form panoramas, which elaborated descriptions of the new urban settings, to physiologists, that presented the movement of progress through descriptions of the functioning of machines. Baudelaire slides form these genres, as he understands that there is a different demand from modernity. The figure of the flaneur is both a character that condenses some of these newness of living in a modern city, and a perspective form where to observe the space of the city and the new social formation of the multitude form within but at some distance. Is a point form which to be and to give account of the tension between the extreme closeness of being in the multitude and the great anonymity and the ephemera of the encounter, (an immersion in a constant “good by”). The flaneur is a complement of the city architecture, he wanders at night thanks to the new gas-lights (that allow night life and also permits the clarity surveillance), it is also an inhabitant of the arcades, shopping streets roofed by the shop owners. The flaneur thus gives subjective descriptions in the city and its instantaneous moments, fragments of the life in the city (as the passing by a street and all the small fragments of scenes one passes by –he refers to Poe) rather than the totality of actions in a community that are recognized by everybody. The flaneur is in constant movement and has no concrete direction, the trajectory can only be understood ones finished and never recreated (as the woman cleaning the street when passing by won’t be there again if ones returning). Both this movement and anonymity trigger the need for new forms of social control and surveillance. Benjamin discusses the tensions around house numbering by the police and which were resisted both in working class neighbourhoods, and by Baudelair himself who avoided paying rent by moving constantly and changing addresses (buena idea).

Mmm probablemnete debería leer bastante mas para redondear los aportes (y leer la a buck morss tb), me queda como deuda. Este texto me lleva de nuevo al problema de la perspectiva que voy a tomar y desde donde mirar las trayectorias y que es exactamente lo que voy a reconstruir. Si no me convense de De Certeau que hable de reconstruir trayectorias desde historias, tampoco quiero tomar una perspectiva en la que percepciones subjetivas de los viajes sean lo que los define. Si bien me intereza saber que “ven cuando ven” distintas personas durante los viajes, probablemnte me intereza pensar efeco de que es el movimiento y que trabajo hace el movimiento sobre sujetos y re-configuarciones de los espcaios-trayectorias. Bssss no se si esto tiene algun sentido. Bueno volvamos, hay algo de estilo en el que escribe que esta que no es ni socilogico, ni de critica, ni literario del todo, calculo que eso es en parte lo que hace que tanta gente se lo apropie de distintas formas, pero no creo que se le pueda hacer decir cualquiercosa, da imagenes bastante potentes que sugieren ser usadas no de cualquierforma.
Me resulta interesante como flaneur – luz artificial- noche - arcadas –cigarrillo se conectan y hacen a la ciudad-y lo nuevo de la ciudad (“yo paso fumando” dijo mi pequeño hermano una vez). No es la arcada sola o el flaneur solo lo que hace el “trabajo”, sino la connexion, que se puede expandir a la connexion ciudad-muchedumbres. Me resulta interesante la irreversibilidad de las trayectorias (algo que tiene que ver con lo anterior sobre perspectiva-metodo). También es interesante la secuencia muchedumbre en movimiento… nuevas formas de control, que marca que formas en que canalizando el movimeninto se construye poder.

Pfffff probablemnte este comentario no hace el honor necesario, me recordo lo mucho que nos afecto cuando lo leimos en el cbc, y no me acuerdo si tiene algo que ver o no con el free-walking nocturno, todo hace mucho. A bueno y el dibujito de mafalda me hace pensar los limites del flaneur, quizas como decia massey haya que distinguir niveles de trayectorias las mas o menos validas, pero tambien trayectorias con mas o menos posibilidad de "deriva". Por ahi aca tenemos dos extremos, la posicion desde la que hay mas posibilidades de deriva son o de mucho "excedente" en posibilidades de movimiento y ocio, pero tambien posiciones desde las que no queda mas que moverse, en la que el movimiento es escaparse constantemente o buscar algo todo el tiempo.

Massey 2005 For space. o el sabor del encuentro

Ok this was also a key text for my work. El cambio de diseño es puro credito de Rafa.

Chapters 11-14

Chapter 11
Space is not a map. As long as map presents the space form above it constructs it as a surface rather than depths, this is not inherently bad, but is partial. Maps try to establish determinacy into what is indeterminate, but because of chance space is not representable (quoting Letch). for which she proposes the metaphor of the palimpsest of multiple erasures and overwirtings This is not solved by presenting the hidden transcripts of sedimented mapping, which would be imaging space " as superimposed horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming" (110), it fails to let us think the flow of juxtaposition of multiple trajectories shaping space. She takes the example of the flaneur as a trajectory that has no origin and no end, it has no identity but is rather and entity of contingency. To travel in between places is to move between collections of trajectories and to reinsert yourself in the ones to which you relate.

Some quotations form chapter 11:
p 118: " The presentness of the horizontality of space is a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force unawarness.... is not just buried histories but histories still being made now." "So take the train... You are not just travelling throgh space, you are altering it a little. space and place emerge form active material practices. Moreover this movement... is also temporal. The London you left is not the London of now. It has already moved on." (mmmm habia un griego que decia algo sobre el tiempo y que uno no se baña dos veces en el mismo rio... parmnides? ahora lo googleo)

p 119 "at the end of the journey, then a town or a city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle of trajectories.... You are, on that train, travelling not across space-as-a-surface you are travelling across trajectories.... Thisnking space as a multiplicity of trajectories , imagining a train journey as a speeding across on going stories, means brining the woman [you see through the window] to life, acknowledging her as another ongoing life."
p 120 Acknowledging all the different trajectories implied in space is impossible, yet we can still "retain some sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings."

p 124-5 "you can never simply go back to home or to anywhere else... the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this is the point. For to open up space is to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as a the products of interrelations...
Finale p125 "You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to now, but where that now is itself constituted by nothing more than -precisely- that meeting-up (again)."

Chapter 12 She has a very long analysis of how nature, that what we tend to see as a fixed and stable entity over which culture acts upon as a transforming force, has a deep history of transformation and change. She uses this image to point to a kind of always already unstable nature of spatiality. She is arguing against the fixity of place as a location in space. All essences are events, no fix “place” really exists but a flow of movement. Space is more a constellation of stories as a temporary point of encounter of multiple and conjunctural trajectories. The scope processes are in relation to the scales of spatial and temporal dynamics . (She takes a definition of the political form Laclau, Mouffe and a bit of Derrida.)
To overcome the distinction space and time, we can think of space as a series of encounters in an ever changing flow of spacio-temporal events. Space “If space is simultaneity of stories-so-far, then place are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”(130) Force of narrative in shaping reality. But still materiality of forces, not just discourse. Non human forces, not rationality but are forces non the less.

Chapter 13 The political is the moment of when the tension between the different unspoken alternatives bought by the different trajectories encountering in space become antagonism. The resolution of this antagonism entails the visibility of power relations (I add in their reconfiguration).
Spatiality as a condition of the socio-political, what she call the through-togetherness, is two fold: it is inherently unstable, all spatial politics are attempts to put order into the chaotic, to control juxtapositions in space. "Place does change us, not through some visceral belonging but through the practising of space, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories, place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us." (154) The spatialization of the social, has at least two dimensions, 1) it is in space time that the social and the political unfold and specifically is the sphere of multiplicity, and 2) much of the political practice is constituted through the negotiation of places, in which the imaginations of space are both means and "object" of this negotiation. She takes cities as particularly dense places in the respect of the political, she understands this because of the lack of rooted identities which makes them a site of negotiation of multiple constellations of identities, within hierarchies of spatial geographies. "negotiations of place are on the move between identities that are on the move. It also means that any politics catches trajectories at diferent points, is attempting to articulate rythms that which pulse at different beats. It is other aspect of the elusivness of space that render politics so difficult."

h 14
There are no rules for the spatiality, no valid statement ca be made as: openness is good vs closeness is bad. To mantain a generality is a way of maintaning an imagination of universality in relation to space , and a type of spatial fetishism ("spaces should always be open to new comers" says the left but then the newcomers are yuppie gentrifying a neighbourhood and thus they defend localism.) There is no good or bad politics in locality or openess, but socio-political relations of power and place in which each case is ntangled (this echoes in Lacalau and Mouffe there is no universal politics of topographic categories ie the state is not bad per se) . There is not an a priori on whether or not one should argue for or against openess but is a consecuence o regarding the power relations involved.
p 172-6 She make a critique to post modern theory in the dangers of being to enthusiastic about openness and nomadity. Nomadity and the notions of the periphery, escape (the desert as a space of pure intensities) can be linked to a modernist vision of space a bourgeoisie identity of the analyst, but ultimately an imperial imagination. She draws on citique by Kaplan Hansen and Pratt to Deleuze and Guatari. Lines of flight may be individualistic and be in sharp contrast to mass migration or escape. Also “Europeans in the name of mobility and unboundedness, casually and symptomatically invade half of the world of the desert.” (172). In that the “others” inhabiting the “deserts” would not have the same possibilities of fleeing o the desert as they are already there “the others are not allowed a life of their own” (173) (she points to Miller critique form an anthropological perspective). She argues that following a deconstructionist perspective does not necessarily avoid being he instability of meaning can also be part of forms of oppression. In this line she also replies to Hardt and Negri their critique thst if places are open then the concept is useless altogether. She points that this is based on binaries openness-enclosure as universal that further reproduces the problems of the romance of free flow.
“The closed geographical imagination of openness, just as much as that of closure, is itself irretrievably unstable. The real political necessities are an insistence on the recognition of their specific and an address to the particularity of the questions they pose.” (175) She ends up with Derrida, proposing that the only way to operate politically in the face o openness or enclosure is through experience and experimentation.

Mauss Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in social morphology

Mauss, Marcel 1979 [c1950] Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in social morphology, Translated, by James J. Fox. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mauss is interested in societies seasonal variations in order to think the intensity of social interactions can be maintained equally at all times. To do this he proposes to study the seasonal variations and make a detailed analysis of a case a study that manifests this in an extreme way (following the idea of Mills that a good case analysis can point to a better understanding of general processes than a repetition of superficial observations). He analyses inuit seasonal variation not as a result of the environmental conditions (in thie he is critiquing environmental determinism) and even he takes this into account as an affecting factor. He shows how the social life of inuit, even though it has some general social patterns that are maintained through the year, changes dramatically form one season to the other. Not just the economic structure and the demographic organization of groups in space changes in the seasons but mostly the social activities involved in each period, if winter is a time of gathering of different groups in long houses it is also a time of intense religious activity, of interaction among family units. This also implies that winter has particular social regulations, kinship reorganization, that differ form the one in the summer when family units disperse in order to hunt, intergroup contact is rare and ritual activity declines. In a way that seems even more modern than structuralism, Mauss recognizes that this society has no one single pattern of organization and not an homogeneous set of interactions in which each person has a stable role throughout time, but rather that the groups as a collective have moments of intensity and moments of dispersion. In this the territory of the unit cannot be simply mapped in space but has to be temporalyzed in two overlapping forms of disposition.This corresponds no just to environmental patterns but to use contemporary concepts, with the way social space is differently produced here is not one single organization of space neither complementary uses, but rather a social recreation of space in different moments. There is something of a structural organization at each moment, and some functionalism in the way each season is a particular social organization responding to environmental constraints. There is also a tension between economic determinism and the complexity and multicausality of particular social configurations, however the very question about sociality intensity poses very contemporary problematic in which social activity could be regarded more of a constant becoming than of something stable.

In this model movement is not a centre of interest, of course the shift form one type of organization to the other implies translation and also hunting trips make people travel around very long distances. He mentions the impressive knowledge people have of the vast extension of territory that can go beyond the limits of the places where a person has personally traveled. He also mentions works that have concentrated in the traveling technology of the inuits.

De Certeau

Michel De Certeau (1990) plantea que existe una dimensión doble de la espacialidad, lo que el llama lugares, es la disposición de elementos y sus posición en tanto a sus relaciones de contigüidad – distancia. Por otro lado el espacio es aquella dimensión en la que los lugares son atravesados por movilidades diversas, prácticas que establecen vectores de movimiento, demarcan temporalidades, circunstancias, orientaciones e intensidades. Si bien estas definiciones no coinciden con el uso que en este trabajo le damos a “espacio” y “lugar”, sin duda es de interés el entrecruce entre las definiciones de hegemónicas de “lugares” y la definición del “espacio” de los tobas. En este sentido en este apartado hago un acercamiento inicial, en base a relatos y ciertas experiencias en el campo sobre los modos en que si bien
“que un orden espacial organiza un conjunto de posibilidades (por ejemplo un sitio donde se puede circular) y de prohibiciones (por ejemplo, a consecuencia del muro que impide avanzar), el caminante actualiza alguna de ellas. De ese modo, las hace ser tanto como parecer. Pero también las desplaza e inventa otras pues los atajos, desviaciones o improvisaciones de andar, privilegian, cambian o abandonan elementos espaciales.” (De Certeau 1990 : 110).

Esto es lo que De Certeau llamaría la construcción de un espacio a partir de vectores de movimiento con direccionalidades e intensidades variables que actualizan la disposición de elementos en el espacio y la funcionalidad asignada, desde el poder.
Tácticas “consumen” el espacio, no poseen un espacio desde el cual desplegarse, son invenciones del momento, mas ligadas a lo inconsciente que a la planificación y la improvisación coyntural que hace uso de lo que “está a mano” .

Las estrategias son movimientos planificados desde un lugar de poder que busca explícitamente mantener o incrementar el dominio. Tienen que ver con modos dominantes de apropiación y producción del espacio, y con una serie de tecnologías para el control dirección de los movimientos espaciales.

Naval y carcelario: este capítulo corto y que parece anecdótico hace una serie de reflexiones interesantes sobre el viaje en tren. Señala al menos dos aspectos interesantes: 1) el modo en que el movimiento del tren contrasta con la fuerte disciplina del cuerpo que uno debe seguir para estar allí, (asientos numerados, guardas, decorado); 2) el modo en que le movimiento del tren genera otra espacialidad, una distancia con los lugares que atraviesa con los que no hay contacto sino un mirar por la ventanilla, y que se abstraen por la velocidad del movimiento, pierden particularidad.


Falta Traducir

Falta tambien:

- Aretxaga: redondear, con dirty protest pero tambien espacios en irlando, viajes de las mujeres a la carcel como momeno de construccion de agencia politica en charlas con otras meujers en desesperacion a la vulta depes de ver a familiares heho merda.

- Tsing: buscar algunas citas mas sobre movilidad en 1993

- Massey 1994: pasar

- Ingold cita

A dormir