Diana Taylor Disappearing Acts

one of the archival photos she analyzes as part of the spectacle of disappearing.


In this book Taylor analyzes the role of performance in and after the Argentina “dirty war” as a both a form of creating the effect of terror and submission of the population and as way of diverging or processing its effects, and act that she will show many times falls into some of the structures they are trying to avoid. The way the military did this is through the making of the disappearing of political opponents visible while making the torture and killings invisible. With this simultaneous move they were both letting the population know/see that the enemies of the regime were abducted with no possibility of escape, as they were keeping the torture in the shadow as a form of enhancing its violent effect. This is what she calls a politics of looking that forced people to look without responding, act to paralyze a society, break its social capacity to react as a whole. The fact that the military actions were visible indicates that “the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of that spectacle.” (123) People are positioned as witnesses and betrayals, if they talk they are likely to be on the stage as victims of the abduction the next time, if they do not talk they are kept with the responsibility of having watched a neighbor be taken away. This dynamic generated a growing depolitizing and traumatizing effect that quickly made social ties reduced to minimum.

At the same time this is an act of producing gendered identities, a gendered nation and operating on the actual bodies of the women. The military produce the nation as a women, a feminine mother, and attribute “her” the quality of vulnerability to “bad influences” that very easily threaten her, the incapacity to protect herself and the need of a masculine figure strong and determined to save her. This masculine figure is the military. It is them who are capable of cleaning the nation form the impurities that attempt to contaminate her, form the forces that attempt to take control of her. The advertising regimes as well as the public displays of masculinist power generated the framework making state terror possible, not as terror but as an action over the body of the nation in order to save her. This produces not just the nation as gendered but also the feminine as the site of constitution of the nation, and the making of national subjectivities as caught in this gender binarism.

In this play the body of the enemy is produced as a feminine body. Living no place for the actual bodies of women. Women are a dangerous matter, bodies are to be worked upon, exposed and over which to work the desired nation. It is this type of movement that Taylor sees even critical intellectuals producing theatre plays that attempt resist the dirty war, falling back into the “bad scripts” of the dictatorship play. Thus for example Pavlosky in his intention to immerse into the psychological world of a torturer he presents a tango dance that is both sensual and violent that ends up with a dead naked body. With this he exposes, subjects and ends up in a symbolic destruction of the feminine body, an act that is not only a representation, but that for Taylor reproduces and recreates this masculinist emptying of the female body meaning and force, and this masculinist appropriation of it. This is also something she examines in the plays of Teeatro Abierto, a counter dictatorship theratrical event.

Mothers of plaza de mayo occupy an ambivalent position as they make a political space out of the dominant principle of being a good mother and taking care of their children, but they are also caught in the bad scripts of assigning a dominant meaning to being a women. In this they cannot fully reapropiate their possibility of being women political actors.

Joseph and Nugent - Everyday forms of state formation

The authors compile a series of articles that reconsider the rol of the mexican revolution in the constitution of conetmporary mexican state. Scott introduces the main question of the book as: "to what extent has the state's hegemonic project influenced by the force of popular experience and mobilized popular expecations of the revolution ? (viii)

They oppose to three lines of analysis: 1) the dominant discourses analyzing the Mexican revolution as the constitution of a popular state of the people end for the people, 2) revisionists approaches pointing to the betrayals of the revolutionary leaders conforming the Mexican state to the popular peasant sectors supporting and making the revolution in order to create a new regime of privilege, 3) the neopopulist approaches that claim that populist movements necesarilly influenced the revolution adn the concequent events but do not question exactly what they understand and how diverse and complex is the popular itself. They claim to take a relational, procesual perspective that considers difference within the popular, they propose to closely analayze what is that makes a popular culture into a revolutionary consciousness to understand how it acted upon the revolution and the state and how this constuitutes a form of negotiation form below.

The point of discussion of the authors is the dynamics within the long period of the revolution. The want to recover the proc3ess over the understanding of the revolution as event. In this they position their work in the lines of inquiry opened by Scott and MArtin-Barbero, in regards to popular culture, Abrams and Corrigan and Sayer in relation to the formation of the state. In regards to the concept of popular the consider it "to designate the day to day practices of subordinated groups" (17) that both denies the folkloristic approaches pointing to an atemporal and untouched patern of cultural practice and the approaches claiming for its massification as a result of the overlapping of popular culture media and the market. Popular cualture is a multilocal space in which subjects, different form the dominant groups are constituted.

They follow Currigan and Sayer in their understanding of the state as a cultural phenomena rather than as the constitution of an institutional "thing" with an entity and power outside social relations. For the authors the state is about how power effects are generated in society, of making sense of the world, unfolded in the state activities, rituals and habit and constituted in the experience of its subjects. One of the fundamental state dimensions is its embodiment of the habits of rule. For the authors a feature of modern state is both its totalizing power over population's identity and its simultaneous individualizing effects that find individuals as its point of operation rather than communities. [escribo esto como sentido comun arrollador, si estas ideas siguen siendo un punto de partida, cuanto mas hay para problematizar? probablemente foucault me resulta como un paso mas alla ahora]

In this they intend to focus in the relational nature of state and subject formation as well as the dimension of practice in this constitution. The state involvement with "grass root" society is one of the focuse of their interest not as space of necessary tension, but also where opening and collaboration may happen. For them the revolution opens a space in which new habits as well as institutional and power structures continuity took place and in which multiple tensions unfolded in the localities and particular conjunctures of what is understood as revolution. The perspective takes both the dominant projects and the popular cultures as arenas of diversity and struggle in themselves and not as coherent, unidirectional and organized blocks. How is this project translated into practice is other diemnsion the authors are interested in understanding [ojo con esto de traducir un proyecto a la practica, bastante problematico como piensan la acci'on politica en una cadena racional de planificacion, proposito y accion]
They join the critique to the subaltern studies group in their supposedly reification of that popular as a site of autonomy and as a consciousness never fully incorporated to hegemony. They claim the popular is nor autonomous nor a fabrication of the state rule. [bueno conozco esa critica, lo que si defiendo de Guha y cia ahora es que la idea de grupos contraditorios no permite entender lo generativo, no permite entender lo que queda por fuera de la sintesis, si bien esos grupos no estan por fuera de las relaciones, si quedan siempre sin condificar, si bien el significado les corre atraz nunca se captura totalmente, creo que a eso no puedo ir, aunque claro que sin saberlo estaba parada en la subalternidad de lo indigena no representado siempre]

To synthesize they quote of Nungent and Alonso "Popular culture is contradictory since it embodies and elaborates dominant symbols and meanings but also contests, challenges, rejects and revualues and presents alternatives to them" (22) tro do this they propose to engage in different and simultaneous time scales of the revolution.

Mbembe Provisional notes on the Post Colony

His ppurpose is to analyze bureocratic banality ofpower in the postcolony, meaning not just bureocratic formalities or arbitrary rules nor the habit of daily forms of power. Rather he is interested in those elements of the obsene and the grotesque that, what Bakhtin locates in the field of the popular and as a mean of critique to power. He points that these elements are part of any regime of domination, to the way they operate and are deconstructed.
The post colony is chaotically pluralistic, but has some internal coherence related to the violence implicated in the colonial experience: it is a particular way of creating simulacra. In this the grotesque is not just a mirror reflection of power, is also a style of political improvisation, an excess, a multiplication transformation and circulation of identities. But even more the postcolony is made of a series of corporate institutions and political machineries which together constitute a particular regime of violence, that produces subjectification as a dramatical effect. He is interested in two diemnsions of this: 1) How, in creating the central code of society, state power governs the various logics that underlie all other meanings. 2) How in its attempts to institutionalize this meanings as real the state creates a common sense and attempts to integrate it into the consciousness of the period. Thus the state legitimates itslef in the form of a fetish. He thus proposes to invert Bakhtin claim of the obsene as a popular way of resisting from dominant culture. Rather he proposes that grotesque is: used as a means of creating time and location, through specific material means, and operates creating a spectacular performative display of manificence for its subjects.
Post colonial power is then an "illicit cohabitation" in which "commandmentn and subjects share the same living space" what has generated a "mutual zombification" (rather than an energic domination/resistance) in which each robbed the other vitality and has left both impotent."(4) He proposes to focus on "the logic of the conviviality, on the dynamics of domesticity thta inscribe the dominant and the dominated with te same episteme". The postcolony does not have a one public space but several entangled ones, each with a particular logic. The postcolonial subject is visible as he navigates these spaces and is able to mange several identities (what he calls "homo ludens"), but also when he is subjected in the daily rituals of reatification of comandment's power. The emphasis on the fluids, genitals, eschatological of the commandment's body "contribute integrally to the making of political culture of te postcolony", to joke on the commandment's body generates a participation in the system of signs, ritual displays, and makes it possible to "follow the trail of violence", by "taking the official world seriously" (7), it also breaks the boundaries between the boy of the despot and the that of its subjects. The conflict is then not inverting the systems of meanings but unifying the chaotically pluralistic systems into a single one.
But also because of this plurality and constant change the commandment needs to constantly project its image (of himself and the world) into its subbjects to even start habits of obedience, it needs to tire out the bodies of the subordinated to ensure docility rather than productivity. There is not opposition between official and popular culture but a lot of commonality which generates the need of foficial grand displays of prestige to signal sovereignty and to "ensure the maxim docility" (one of the central pillars of a phallocentric system is the subordination of women to the princple of male pleasure). It is not very clear were conflict or tension emerges, not of course between two entities but what is the site to evade power. He states for example people's "laughter kidnaps power and force it to examine its own vulgarity" (8), so instead of Bakhtin inversion there is forced appropriation to undermine magnificence. But laughter is not resistance, in its desire for majesty the popular borrow the power's repertoire, while the official world mimics the popular vulgarity. What is particular about post colonial violence is the way even there is this shared identity with the dictator there is also violent mobilization against the regime. This violence takes the language of the dictator and re-mythologize the conceptual universe, disempowering both.
If the ruled fail to put together an identity to adul the dictator, the dictator sees this as blasphemy, as the creation of other mindscape. It is also understood as a "theophagy" a cannibal like praxis in which the body of the god is devoured by its worshippers. This practice is only a continuity with colonial power, the violence over the body to subject it rather than make it produce. Theopagy is then a continuity of colonial economy of death, death as a display of power and as a site of spectacular enjoyment, a line in which obscenity has to be understood too. So he proposes to see how exactly the economy of pleasure is made into a site of death, how access to pleasure is part of the economy of power. If food and sexual pleasure are a value creating power, then famine and death are the counterpart of the disposed. The mouth, the belie, and the sexualized parts of the body function as sites of power in this regime.
Power shaped in conviviality and coersive power should not be dismissed however as part of this other dynamic. The colonial subject thus engages in barroque and ambiguous practices that mimics and eats power while internalizing dominant epistemology. This disempowering is what defines colonial situation.
I think Membe brings to attention a multiplicity of interesting points, however I can't follow him in his emphasis in power as mostly a system of meaning that is effective as long as is internalized. I find his notion of power as created in cohabitation more interesting, and interesting as something created in the repeated practice. Also the economy of pleasure and death are suggestive, again i would focus it more as a series of actions that regulation of practice and not so much as the mantainance of a regime of spectacular and visual adulation to incorporate a system of meaning. The question on difference and otherness remains unanswered, how dispossesion is related with subjection as one different for m the dictator (he mentions women as other that are totally available to his pleasure but no more than that).