students

This is courtesy of Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography group...


Via Andre Malan.

Barack

Stuff White People Like.

While you're there, read through the rest of the blog and comments... it's hilarious. (Via phronesisaical.)

See also The Pinocchio Theory on "magical negroes".

breakfast

I don't normally do these quizzes, but quite liked the results of this one. It said of me:

You are breakfasty, like a pile of pancakes on a Sunday morning that have just the right amount of syrup, so every bite is sweet perfection and not a soppy mess. You are a glass of orange juice that's cool, refreshing, and not overly pulpy. You are the time of day that's just right for turning the pages of a newspaper, flipping through channels, or clicking around online to get a sense of how the world changed during the night. You don't want to stumble sleepily through life, so you make a real effort to wake your brain up and get it thinking. You feel inspired to accomplish things (whether it's checking something off your to-do list or changing the world), but there's plenty of time for making things happen later in the day. First, pancakes.

Note, however, the timestamp of this post. In fact I'm not always up by 10:02am...

dreams

Fabián Bielinsky's second and (given the director's untimely death) final feature film, El aura, manages to combine various different kinds of suspense. As a thriller, that revolves around a scheme to rob a casino in a remote part of Argentine Patagonia, it draws us in to the intricacies of the criminal plot and its likely success. But the bigger mystery entails its central character, an anonymous Buenos Aires taxidermist played by the excellent Ricardo Darín (who also starred in Bielinsky's previous movie, Nueve reinas).

Darín's character wanders into the casino heist by accident, but soon finds himself trying to convince the other members of the gang that he is an integral part of the plan. So a double deception is at work: the thieves' bid to deceive the casino, and the taxidermists' bid to pull the wool over the criminals' eyes. And if one plot fails, then so will the other. The interloper from the capital has to be always thinking on his feet, relying on his powers of observation, recall, and improvisation. He has often dreamed of being part of a caper like this; now thrust into one that is not of his own devising, yet cast as the unlikely ringleader, he has to prove that he can live up to the cool and calculated persona he plays in his dreams.

But as the movie continues, its haunting and even spooky quality, its slow lingering camerawork and plaintive musical soundtrack, give the impression of a dreamlike quality cast over the entire operation. Perhaps the fantasy lived out by this otherwise unassuming craftsman is indeed only that: another of his fantasies.

A commentator on the movie's IMDB message board notes that El aura is strangely reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's acclaimed short story "El Sur". (There's added weight to this notion in that Bielinsky's first film, a short entitled La espera, was an adaption of a Borges story.) In "El Sur" ("The South"), a Buenos Aires librarian finds himself in the midst of a violent escapade, complete with gauchos and knife-fights, in a godforsaken town somewhere far to the South. His journey to the provinces is also a trip to the rough-hewn frontier life that characterized Argentine society in the semi-mythical past in texts from Sarmiento's Facundo onwards. It is a voyage to his country's cultural unconscious that also, the reader gradually comes to suspect, is played out in the character's own unconscious as he lies, unheroically dying of an infected scratch on his forehead, on a hospital operating table.

El aura's protagonist, likewise, has a relatively minor medical condition: he suffers from epileptic fits, petits mals, in which he blacks out for a few minutes or seconds. As a fit comes on him, moreover, he briefly enters a state of altered consciousness that (he tells us) is termed "the aura." As he describes the experience, "It's horrible and it's perfect. Because during those few seconds, you're free. There's no choice; there's no alternative; nothing for you to decide. Everything tightens up, gets narrower...and you surrender yourself." Is it possible that the entire trip to the Patagonian South, and the rich panoply of shady villains and victims that we see there, are conjured up in this penumbra between consciousness and unconsciousness, between freedom and necessity? That the taxidermist, who works with dead objects but seeks to give them the sense of life, a dramatic placement in vivid museum-bound dioramas, has also animated the movie's suspenseful plot from the moribund elements that surround him in his workshop?

The film's final shot shows us a dog who is initially as still as the stuffed animals that surround him before finally the blink of a canine eye (not unlike the similar movement in Chris Marker's La jetée) seems to confirm the reality of all we have just seen. Or perhaps it just reinforces the power of the fantasy that spins its narrative web in the aura between dreaming and waking.


See also: El aura official site.
See also: "El Sur" in Spanish (.pdf).

YouTube Link: the movie trailer.

friendship

Gus Van Sant's Gerry is an homage to the power of landscape: the camera endlessly pans slowly over deserts and mountains in a series of long takes (the film averages a staggering sixty seconds between cuts) that emphasize the vastness and imperturbability of the environment in which the movie's two protagonists find themselves lost. Stitching together scenes shot in California, Utah, and Argentina, with a range of different terrains from scrubland to canyons to saltpan, Gerry unfolds an almost mythical panorama of inhospitable (perhaps better, indifferent) grandeur. The two would-be adventurers who traipse through the frame are doubly lost: not only do they have not the slightest idea of where they are and where they are headed; also they have increasingly to recognize their insignificance against this magnificent natural backdrop.

And yet the film is also touchingly human. For it is equally, and perhaps even more importantly, the depiction of a friendship.

We first meet the two young men (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) in a long opening sequence in which they are driving through what looks to be the US Southwest. Arvo Pärt's sparse piano music sets a stately, unhurried mood. Inside the car, neither occupant talks to the other. It's only later that we realize that they don't talk because they don't need to talk: nothing needs to be said. Theirs is a silence of long mutual familiarity.

When the couple do speak, it is in a short-hand born of what is evidently a history of in-jokes that have created something like a private language. They both call each other "Gerry," but also use "gerry" as a verb with multiple meanings. It's as though English had too many superfluous words, and they feel they can get by with a pared-down version of the language. Yet their idiolect hardly lacks creativity and humor: they happily come up with neologisms such as "dirt blanket" and "shirt basket" as they try to figure a way out of a predicament in which one of them finds himself stuck on a prominent rock.

They refer to their initial objective, for which they've set out on this journey in the first place, as "the thing." But the point of their jaunt in the country seems to be more mutual silent companionship than any well-defined telos: soon enough they abandon their half-hearted quest, because the thing is just a "thing" after all. It's not then as though they see more importance to the objects to which words are rather precariously attached. What's important is a shared affect that lies somewhere between words and things, between their deliberately curtailed discourse and the thing itself.


It's on the return from their soon-abandoned mission to find the thing that they gradually realize that they are lost, and increasingly so with every attempt to extricate themselves from their predicament. But this realization doesn't bring with it any reminiscence, confession, or reflection on their lives together or alone. They exchange anecdotes about TV shows or video games. And at the one point at which recrimination or blame seems about to surface, it's defused with the simplest of ironic denunciations: "Fuck you," says one Gerry to the other. "Fuck you," the other replies. And then they walk on, still together.

Even at the last, they maintain an understated humour. The two are lying side by side in the middle of a salt desert whose featureless whiteness carries echoes of polar ice. This could be a contemporary reworking of the last moments of Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition. And one says to the other: "How do you think the hike's going so far?" "Very good," the other replies. What follows shortly thereafter is a final embrace whose very finality, we know without (now) needing to be told, is going to haunt the one Gerry who survives the experience for as long as he lives.

See also Thomas Clolus, "Gerry, ou le corps Deleuzien de Gus Van Sant".

YouTube link: the film's trailer.

limited

Further to previous discussions of the neoliberal university...

This is a very dodgy enterprise. It is a limited company established by four local academic institutions, all of which (like almost all Canadian universities) are in the public sector. Its goal seems to be to profit from the local real estate market and what it itself calls "the City’s rapidly growing high-technology precinct". Yet it is masquerading as itself an educational institution, wrapped up in visions of high-tech cyber-utopia and "digital villages" and the like. This is no doubt to the advantage of its sponsors and investors, both public and corporate. The gaming industry (et al.) gains prestige (as well as human capital) from its association with higher education; the university hopes to rake in the cash (not that it necessarily will) while spouting the requisite terms of art about cutting edge interdisciplinary research.


The gall of it, as far as I can see, is that its corporate name, Great Northern Way Campus Ltd, is easily enough shortened to "Great Northern Way Campus" which on first sight (I was fooled for a long time) seems to imply that it is indeed the campus of some other educational institutional, i.e. an integral part of that institution. In no way is this the case.

No wonder it calls itself "a unique, collaborative university campus environment". What's "unique" is that in fact it is not a university, nor is it a campus, however much it may provide an environment. This is the language of set-dressing and interior furnishings. "Not alchemy, but close," they say. No, it's just the usual sleight of hand of corporate shenanigans, attempts to ensure rapid conversion of cultural into financial capital, and shed-loads of PR spin.

Of course, there's nothing too "unique" about this... the Great Northern Way Campus Ltd is a commercial venture like any other, simply one that has managed to wangle an awful lot of money out of public funds for its business ventures (a least $40.5 million, it seems), not to mention the fact of benefiting from an initial real estate donation that one hopes was originally destined for educational purposes. (OK, let's be real, it was a tax write-off or similar, no doubt.)

Anyhow, I ran into all this by accident. Looking for examples to show my students as to how to edit wikipedia, I discovered that the article on this firm was plagiarized from the place's own website. I blanked the page (note at this point I mistakenly thought that this was a university campus). But the deleted text was shortly replaced in similarly glowing terms, if now no longer word-for-word copied from other online promotional materials, but more cunningly crafted, by a wikipedian who apparently is paid by GNWC Ltd to write encyclopedia articles about them, sometimes in the name of Gnwc, at other times anonymously.

Ah, the university of excellence!

Perhaps the only redeeming feature is that university bureaucrats still fortunately make such poor technocrats that they managed to lose c. $1.4 million a year over the first four years since the initial donation. This at the same time as the city was undergoing rampant property inflation! Anyhow, no wonder that despite all the investment, both public and private, those few students enrolled at the "Campus" (21 to date) still have to pay, and at rates far above those paid by their colleagues who are studying in honest-to-goodness Canadian universities.

And what's with the transparent people?

voice

Whereas the Peruvian Alonso Cueto’s previous novel, with its title Grandes miradas (which could translate as something like “Broad Gazes”), suggested an interest in the visible, La hora azul (“The Blue Hour,” winner of the 2005 Herralde Prize) is all about the voice. Almost every character is identified by their distinctive voices; there is even one who has structured his entire wardrobe and habits around his voice, believing it to be “the best and most significant demonstration of his qualities as a Lima gentleman” (214).

It’s true that the story opens with a visual image: the photograph of an apparently enviably successful couple, published in the society pages of a glossy magazine. And moreover that the plot is put into motion by a written text, a letter that the novel’s protagonist, a Lima lawyer by the name of Adrián Ormache, finds among his recently dead mother’s effects. But the illusion created by the photograph is unreliable: the gloss of success conceals a sinister family secret. And the letter takes us back to the last words spoken by Adrián’s father, whose “hoarse voice,” a “voice of curt exclamations” (23), had spoken to him of a woman in the highland province of Ayacucho, a woman the son should try to find.

Adrián had taken little account of his father’s dying words, thinking them to be just another symptom of a final delirium. But then his brother, a brother who had “inherited the hoarse voice” of his father (22), tells the story of his father’s activities as military commander in Ayacucho during the war against Sendero Luminoso. Apparently, he used to round up women suspected of being Senderistas, bring them back to base and have sex with them, then pass them on to his junior officers who would also rape them, before delivering the coup de grace with a bullet in their brains. But there was one victim whom he kept to himself, locked up in his room. And this woman somehow escaped from her living hell of enforced servitude and torture. Was this living testament to his father’s brutality, the woman that Adrián was now to track down?

The plot, then, consists in the son’s attempt to locate the one who got away from his father. In part the quest is driven by the need to maintain her silence, to preserve family honour and professional decorum by ensuring that she doesn’t talk to the press. But Ormache’s investigation is also a journey into the bleak secrets of Peruvian society, the gap that separates rich and poor, coast and highlands, light-skinned and dark-skinned. To inform himself about the atrocities committed during the war, he reads a book entitled Las voces de los desaparecidos: “The Voices of the Disappeared.” There is an increasingly testimonial quality to the lawyer’s obsession and also therefore to the novelist’s design. La hora azul aims in part to give voice back to the subaltern voiceless.

But it’s not that Ayacuchan peasants have no voice; just that the Lima elite fail to recognize them. Indeed Miriam, Adrián’s father’s former prisoner, made good her escape from the military barracks by imitating the voice of one of her torturers. And on the other hand, the objects of the lawyer’s investigation manage to retain some sense of autonomy and control only by refusing to speak: for much of the novel they maintain a guarded silence, frustrating his attempts to reach out, to play the liberal who only wants to hear their stories. For when finally he does hear something of the violence and suffering that his father, amongst others, had inflicted on the highland population, the best that Adrián can come out with are the most banal of platitudes that leave even him feeling “insuperably ridiculous” (251).

Hence this mystery novel ends with silence on some of its main points. Miriam dies, we know not whether from an unexpected heart attack or by her own hand. Before her death, she had equivocated when asked whether or not her child was Ormache’s son, and so Adrián’s brother. Her uncle refuses to clarify things, saying only “with a velvety voice” that “she told me various things, but that is between her and me” (284, 282). And finally, the son himself, Miguel, is unnaturally silent. Adrián diagnoses this as a problem, and has him sent to a psychologist who promises to teach him to find his voice. But even so, and however much the protagonist declares that the poor, the people of Ayacucho, “are like us,” he remains unnerved and disconcerted by “their silence faced with the brutal repartition of death in which they have been born.” No wonder that he also concludes that “the line that separates us from them is marked by the blade of an enormous knife” (274).

It is the violence of hundreds of years of colonial and postcolonial oppression that ensures that the liberal project of “giving voice” is doomed to failure.

heights

The following is a draft of something shortly to be published in Radical Philosophy...

La Paz is the world’s highest capital city, at 3,636 meters above sea level. So it is all the more surprising that to get there, you have to descend: it is located is what the locals call a hueco, a hole or a hollow. When I visited in December, I arrived from across the Altiplano, a broad almost perfectly flat plain that stretches out towards Lake Titicaca in the Northwest. Snow-capped mountains loom up on the horizon. The plain itself is dotted with small subsistence farms and apparently run-down huts and houses that gradually coalesce as you approach the city, to form the sprawling shantytown of El Alto.

With almost a million inhabitants, almost all of whom are migrants from the countryside, El Alto is now a city in its own right and comprises the largest concentration of indigenous people in the Americas. It is here, where the ground is still level, that the international airport is located. And then suddenly, the ground drops away and you find yourself looking down into the hueco itself, a cliff-lined bowl packed with buildings of every type. Five hundred meters beneath you are the sky-scrapers of La Paz city center.

Hunkered down in its hollow, the Bolivian capital shelters from the cold, the wind, and the oxygen-starved air of the high Altiplano. But this relative comfort is won at a price. The motorway that winds down the side of the cliff from El Alto is a precarious affair. And yet almost everything that goes in and out of the city has to pass along it. During the disturbances of October 2004 that ultimately gave rise to the current government of Evo Morales, indigenous protestors took a leaf out of the Argentine piqueteros’ book: they blocked the road, turning their marginal location, perched on the edge of the precipice, into a significant geopolitical advantage. In the narrow and winding city streets far below, it is relatively rare that you get a glimpse of the heights that surround you. But in the tumult leading up to the 2005 presidential elections, the periphery decisively made its presence felt.

Since 2005, and especially in recent months, another periphery has been flexing its muscles. For heading East other routes, among them one labeled the most dangerous road in the world because of the perils of its descent, drop down towards the lowland plains. At well under 3,000 meters, temperate Sucre has long been a counterweight to the constituted power otherwise concentrated in La Paz; a historic colonial center and nineteenth-century capital, it is still the location of the Supreme Court among other government institutions. Further and lower down still, in the sweltering heat where the Andes finally give out and between Amazon basin and Paraguayan desert Chaco, Santa Cruz is now the country’s largest city, a boomtown product of the oil and gas exploration that is the latest key to Bolivia’s dreams of wealth and development, and so also the focus of foreign capital, political machination, and social struggle. If the protests of 2004 and earlier, such as the so-called water war in Cochabamba of 2000 and 2001, almost all took place in the highlands, now it is Sucre and Santa Cruz that are the site of disturbances. At stake is the constitution of the country itself.

Read more... (.pdf document)

Cross-posted to Left Turns?.

presidente

The trailer for El señor Presidente, a film released late last year in Venezuela, based on the novel by Miguel Angel Asturias...


Asturias's novel was set at the turn of the twentieth century, and loosely based on the regime of the Guatemalan dictator, Manuel Estrada Cabrera.

But this film is made by RCTV, the same television channel whose license was not renewed by Hugo Chávez, amid much international controversy. (Here are two takes on the issue: from The Washington Post and from venezuelanalysis.com.) I wonder if they have anything in mind as they release this adaptation of the classic novel by the Guatemalan Nobel laureate?

See also Anna Marie de la Fuente's "Network Tries Topical Title", from Variety.

span312

Student blogs: Aliyah, Amanda, Bessie, Carla, Darja, Elyse, Erica, Erin, Eva, Gareth, Hector, Isabel, Jen, Jenny, Julie McD, Julie R, Katy, Kendal, Laura, Lincoln, Lyn, Maria, Mike P, Mike T, Miriam, Monica, Nathan, Paul, Rebecca, Rose, Sebastian, Sunny, Tommaso...

HNY

The Saturday photo, part IV: dawn on New Year's Day, seen from the Rambla looking out over the Rio de la Plata, Uruguay.


A Happy New Year to all and sundry. I'm back home from travels. More substantive posting will resume shortly.

exodus

Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.

The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole. With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?

But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.

In fact, the referendum's obvious winner was Chávez, as the President himself observed when he termed the wafer-thin margin a "Pyrrhic victory" for the opposition. The escuálidos would have been much happier had the poll gone the other way: they were apparently already handing out t-shirts that declared the result was a "fraud," and even now a week later they continue to propagate conspiracy theories, fuelled for instance by pillars of social democracy such as Jorge Castañeda, alleging that the military had to persuade a reluctant premier to accept the will of the people. Denied the outrage they had counted on, they have had to manufacture it for themselves. As always, the anti-chavistas are such a pitiful sight that, were I Venezuelan, they would almost inspire me to go out and sign up for a PSUV party card out of spite.

In fact, Chávez's dignified response to defeat enabled him to appear statesmanlike (not an adjective usually applied to a mercurial figure who won recent headlines for trying the King of Spain's patience) and, more importantly, sovereign, as Stephanie Blankenburg observes in one of the few decent articles to have appeared in the past few weeks.

For constitutions are all about defining and upholding sovereignty. Any alteration to the constitution is also potentially a threat to constituted power: in the passage between constitutions, the state is temporarily ungrounded. Everything is up for grabs, however briefly. There's no better example of that than the crisis currently affecting Bolivia, where even a hundred-year grievance over the site of the national capital has been thrown into the mix.

Meanwhile, the ongoing deadlock in Belgium, let alone the slow-motion catastrophe that is the process of European integration, both demonstrate that threats to constituted power abound as much in the North as in the South. We're living in an era of global reconstitution.

And so the defeat of Venezuela's proposed constitutional changes could be read as an affirmation of the country's current (hardly any less chavista) constitution and current head of state. Indeed, that's precisely how Chávez's defenders have portrayed the situation: as an endorsement of the institutional mechanisms cemented in place by the 1999 constitution, from the National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral or CNE) to the clauses that regulate constitutional amendment itself.

In other words, at least at first sight, the rejection of the referendum is a victory for constituted power, and a defeat for constituent power.

Chávez concedes, constitution in hand.
But the situation is rather more complicated. For the proposed constitutional reforms were very clearly generated within the state apparatus, rather than from outside and against it. Heinz Dietrich blames an entire "New Political Class" that he argues has sprung up and accreted to an increasingly sclerotic Bolivarian revolution. More revealing still are the complaints from Chávez supporters that the electoral defeat resulted from a failure to explain the proposals clearly and persuasively enough to the movement's base. Not only is this an unrepentant admission that the process was conceived as a top-down campaign to court consent. It also shows that what is at stake is a project for hegemony. And the mass abstention that led to electoral downfall is a sign that Chávez's hegemonic project is seriously frayed around the edges.

That the same result should be a victory for constituted power and at the same time a demonstration of the failure of hegemony should be no surprise. Constituted power has never depended upon hegemony.

What then of constituent power? Perhaps the fact that some three million people failed to vote shows a new development in Venezuela: an Exodus from the mechanisms designed to consolidate the Bolivarian state. Chávez's relationship with this subaltern excess has always been precarious and contingent, as he himself is fully aware. Hence the President is always in campaign mode, endlessly trying to reconstruct the political by insisting on the classical distinction between "friend" and "enemy." If the force of this interpellation is now fading, if people are happy not to vote or to vote "no" even when the choice in terms of the defense of national sovereignty, then chavistas have reason to worry.

But it's the anti-Chávez camp that has most to lose. For if the current president is no longer to keep the forces of constituent power in check, then who can?

Cross-posted to Left Turns? and Long Sunday.

compassion

Halfway through Francisco Lombardi's Sin compasión, one Alejandro Velaochaga drops in unexpectedly on the protagonist, a student by the name of Ramón Romano. Velaochaga is a rather sinister character, and he's made his may into the room while Romano is still asleep. Romano, troubled enough by the notion that he is being persecuted on all sides, wakes up to his visitor's presence with a shock. Part of Velaochaga's creepiness, however, is that he is quite suave and unruffled, in total contrast to his unwilling host.

In response to the question as to how he got in, Velaochaga continues cleaning his pipe, shrugs his shoulders slightly, and responds "Through the door." Leaning in slightly in a gesture of familiarity he add, "My advice would be that you get yourself a bolt. They're not expensive." The irony of Velaochaga's apparent concern for Romano's security and peace of mind is that he represents the greatest danger both to the young man and to his even more defenseless girlfriend. For this sophisticated gentleman in his immaculately tailored suit turns out to be both a lecher and a blackmailer. And it is he who is the first to unearth the guilty secret that has Ramona so on edge: that Ramón has brutally murdered his landlady and her husband.

Leaving Ramona's quarters, Velaochaga extends his hand to the young man, who rather reluctantly shakes it. "It's been a pleasure to meet you," the old man says. "You're quite a character. Really." Then, looking around at his surroundings before finally taking his leave, he adds "And you have a very interesting place. It has the feel of a neorealist film."

Indeed, Sin compasión has more than a touch of neorealism. It's an adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, with Romano for Romanovich Raskolnikov, set in the curiously timeless center of Lima. There is little here of either the city's many barrios and suburbs, or the hustle and bustle that most strikes a visitor to the city. This is a strangely stripped down version of Lima. The color palette is muted browns and creams, full of shadows and crevices. Interiors include some of the city's oldest bars (such as the magnificent Quierolo, in which Romano meets the prostitute Sonia's drunken father), which carry an air of dowdy resistance to time's encroachment, and exteriors are almost all confined to the narrow streets and lanes around the Plaza de Armas. And almost at the end of the film, Velaochaga goes to the Plaza itself to sit on the Cathedral steps, where after a contemplative cigarette he commits suicide. But the square is deserted, and so nobody is there to witness his inglorious end.

Lombardi therefore achieves a sort of universality that gives weight and depth to this Peruvian adaptation of the classic Russian novel. Lima becomes archetype of urbanity in general, and the continuities of the urban experience between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There will always be a measure of poverty, squalor, prostitution, drunkenness, injustice, debt, violence, guilt, and so on. No matter if the city in question is Dostoyevky's St Petersburg or Dickens's London, De Sica's Rome or Lombardi's Peru.

And in the end there will always be a disparity between the law and compassion. Indeed, the film's title is oddly inaccurate. Romano's problem is not that he lacks compassion--the notion that he believes that only the intellectual and moral elite can forge their own laws is mentioned but scarcely developed. In fact, he kills the landlady out of compassion, having seen the way in which they treat their tenants. Romano refuses to accede to any transcendent moral code, so that although the entire story is told in flashback, framed as a conversation with a prison priest, he adamantly denies that he is in fact confessing. He has nothing to confess, only a story to tell. And it's as he expounds that story that it becomes clear that neither the legal code nor organized religion can fully comprehend for his actions.

Romano needs not to confess, but to narrate, and by narrating to understand and allow us too to understand how the most cold-blooded murder can be motivated by the most compassionate of intentions.

Vilcas

I mentioned this paper some time ago, but I realize that I never uploaded it. Here goes...


Having some time to spare in Vilcashuamán, Ayacucho, highland Peru, I climbed the pyramid that looms over the small town. Vilcashuamán (also known simply as Vilcas) was once a significant Inca cultural and administrative center, occupying a strategic location at the crossroads of the various trade routes that crisscrossed the Inca empire: it was the point at which the road from Cuzco to the Pacific met the Empire’s main North-South highway. Moreover, according to Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León’s reports of native accounts, the town was at the geographical midpoint of the Tawantisuyu, the Inca Empire: “for they state that it is the same distance from Quito to Vilcas as from Vilcas to Chile, the limits of their empire” (126). But Vilcas is now a town full of ruins--though one might also say that the place is a set of ruins that enclose a town, as it can be hard to say where the ruins end and the town starts, and vice versa. Houses and shops nestle up against or are perched upon Inca walls and stones, and are themselves made of this same recycled material. As a result, the site is, in Gasparini and Margolies’s words, in an “advanced state of destruction and deformation” (112). It remains, however, undeniably impressive, in part because here you are everywhere up against and on top of the ruins, like it or not. There is no measured distance between contemporary life and sacrosanct historical artifact: no ropes, no fences marking off the museal from the everyday. The ruins of Vilcashuamán are fully if sparsely inhabited; they show no signs of their exceptionality. In John Hemming’s words, conjuring up a scene of desolation, “Vilcashuamán is now a small village, remote on its hill-top, perched on the ruins of the great Inca city whose temples have been pillaged for building blocks, and surrounded by rolling, hilly country with few trees and little population” (Monuments of the Incas 187). History seems to have passed it by, to have set it free from whatever stories it once inspired. Certainly, when I had been taken to Vilcas for the day, with a group of anthropologists and aid workers, I had had no idea I would end up climbing a pyramid.


Indeed, these are in no way the most famous ruins in Peru, and are far from being the most visited, meriting at best a couple of lines in the guidebooks. Rather, that honor goes to Machu Picchu, now perhaps South America’s foremost tourist attraction, which attracts around 450,000 visitors a year, up to 2,000 a day. Machu Picchu stands synecdochically for Peru, and often enough for Latin America as a whole. Arguably, Machu Picchu is a more “modern” set of ruins, being “discovered” (better, invented) only in the early twentieth century, with Hiram Bingham’s Yale-sponsored expedition of 1911. Bingham was fêted for having discovered the “lost city of the Incas.” That claim, however, rings rather hollow when it is realized not only that it was a local tavern proprietor and landlord, Melchor Arteaga, who led him to the site “with the promise of a whole silver dollar,” but also that Bingham himself noted graffiti on the stones: “the name, ‘Lizarraga,’ and the year, ‘1902’” (Alfred Bingham 6, 13). Bingham gave this Lizarraga credit for the “discoveries” in his first book about the expedition, Inca Land; yet by the time of his later account, Lost City of the Incas, Lizarraga’s name disappears (Alfred Bingham 26). Meanwhile, Bingham’s opinion of indigenous knowledge can be inferred from his own comment that “readers of Inca Land will remember that Professor Harry W. Foote and I had often been obliged to add, when discussing reports of ‘noteworthy and important ruins’--‘but he may have been lying’” (Hiram Bingham 10). He observes that the local campesinos do not mark the ruins in any particular way: “Presumably, to him and his kind, Inca ruins of temples and palaces built by their remote kindred are not in themselves interesting but merely evidence that the latter found the land worth occupying and cultivating” (10). In this sense, Bingham’s achievement was to put Machu Picchu into discourse: to articulate its stones, to make them speak in the recognizably modern idiom of ruination.

This, then, is where Vilcashuamán is different. For the ruins of Vilcas have, without entering the narratives of international tourism, and despite not being excavated until the 1980s, a much longer history of being repeatedly articulated and rearticulated to competing stories about Peruvian modernity, from almost the very moment of Spanish conquest and so their initial fall into ruin. We might therefore say that Vilcas is more eloquent about Peru’s modernity than Machu Picchu, especially now that the latter has assumed the status of a brand, a signifier almost without content--like the Nike swoosh or McDonalds’ golden arches. Machu Picchu says “Peru,” or says “Latin America,” but says almost nothing about these places. By contrast, in the to and fro of the conflicting versions of what Vilcas’s ruins might be made to say, a whole series of narratives have been advanced about historicity and hegemony, modernity and, more to the point, the (still essentially modern) lament that Peru has failed to become modern. Mario Vargas Llosa notoriously opens his monumental novel Conversation in the Cathedral with the question “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” (3). We might not know when; but it would not be far-fetched to argue that Vilcashuamán is a contender for a precise place where Peru fucked itself up. It is a place marked by the series of interruptions that, for a writer such as Vargas Llosa, indicate the fuck-ups that have (he would claim) stalled progress towards modernity. Interruptions, symbolized or, better, materialized in the strewn stones of the former Inca edifices, that have served as fissures within which variously confident, wistful, and messianic narratives have sought firm footing, like weeds in the dirt. Yet these interruptions have also, in almost the same moment, brought these stories to their own ruination, their disarticulation.

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betrayal

The current renaissance in Peruvian cinema is unexpected to say the least. It was just a couple of years ago that Sarah Barrow observed that this was “a national cinema in crisis,” pointing to a drastic decline in what was already a pretty minimal level of state funding for film-making, as well as to a dearth of production. As she notes, “between 1993 and 1997, just four films were made and released in Peru” (56), two of which were directed by the country’s one cineaste of international repute, Francisco Lombardi, and that only thanks to the aid of transnational co-production and foreign capital. Not a single Peruvian film was released in 1997. And the turn of the century hardly heralded much improvement: “between 1997 and 2001 just 10 Peruvian feature films [were] produced” (43). At the best of times Peru’s cinematic fortunes had been precarious; now it seemed that the country’s truncated filmic tradition was finally coming to an unheroic end. Even the transplanted B-Movie director, Luis Llosa, appeared to be in the doldrums: he had not made a movie since 1997’s underwhelming disaster flick Anaconda, and had turned instead to TV, producing series with titles such as Cazando a un millonario (“Hunting a Millionaire”) and the soap operas Latin Lover and La mujer de Lorenzo (“Lorenzo’s Woman”). In Peru, it was almost impossible to track down Peruvian movies; video chains were full of Hollywood blockbusters and martial arts or action films. In 2004 Lima’s grubby Filmoteca, housed in a corner of the venerable national Art Museum, in a theater with poor sound and worse sightlines, closed its doors after sixteen years of operation.

Today, however, more films than ever are being produced in Peru. 2006, for instance, saw a dozen or more features made. The Filmoteca’s collection transferred to the smart, modern building of the Catholic University’s Cultural Center. Blockbuster Video closed down, but its disappearance has been more than compensated by a flourishing black market trade: in the “Polvos Azules” market in central Lima, for instance, dozens of small stalls offer Peruvian and international art house cinema (as well, of course, as Hollywood hits and US television series) for less than $2 per DVD. Indeed, more generally the cinematic resurgence of the past few years has been propelled by new technology and its informal networks. Blogs buzz with discussion about national cinema. Trailers and even entire films are uploaded to YouTube. And most importantly, the arrival of high-quality digital videography and editing facilities at relatively affordable prices has spread the means of cinematic production further than ever before. The San Marcos University’s Cultural Center recently (November 2007) organized a “First National Festival of Independent Cinema” that showcased features from across the country: regions represented ranged from Puno in the South to Cajamarca in the North. And while the quality of these films is variable (to say the least), they have generated significant excitement, especially in the provinces where they were made, and are inspiring others to try their hands at film-making in turn.

Precisely because of the regional focus of this new cinema, however, the concept of “Peruvian” cinema has to be revised. Of the twelve movies on show at the San Marcos festival, only two were made in Lima. And so Lima, in this context, becomes simply another Peruvian province: the capital can no longer stand in for the country as a whole. “Peruvian” cinema is now a combination of this new, regional cinema plus the continued, if scarcer, work of directors such as Lombardi who fund larger projects via international co-production. In this sense, Barrow’s prediction has come true: Peruvian cinema has disappeared; it has been replaced by subnational and transnational cinemas that challenge the very notion of a “national” cinema. National cinema has been usurped by a non-national or even anti-national cinema that undoes claims to national hegemony. And this non-national, non-Peruvian cinema is subaltern par excellence. It is subaltern because it comprises a betrayal or flight from the idea of a nation that has never come into its own.

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