PRESENTATION
April 11, 1998
COLLAGE. 1520 N. Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60622
NEW WORLD DISORDERS:
PART A.
MUSICA (1 minuto, baja la musica)
MARTA: Globalización--transnacionalización. Y con ellas--la imposición, internalización y configuración de la cultura postmoderna como expresión de la primera fase de la nueva etapa de la globalización y de las resistencias locales, regionales y globales en su contra.
ED (as MARTA recites): NEW WORLD DISORDERS
MARC:(as Marta recites): ¿Collage --o pastiche?: Forma predominante de la postmodernidad latinoamericana dice Nelly Richard, la chilena postmoderna.
MARTA: Collage en contra de la linealidad y las macro-narrativas de la modernidad. En vez del racionalismo europeo la multiplicidad nómada-híbrida de la postmodernidad.
ED: PERIPHERAL STRAINS
MARTA: Ay ay como me duelen los tiempos. ¡Necesito una curandera!
MARC: la transculturación, la rearticulación de modos pre-coloniales y pre-capitalistas al servicio de luchas contra la fragmentación y pasividad, contra la construcción contraria de identidades y proyectos contra-culturales.
MARTA: Collage: forma híbrida--forma de desafío postcolonial, de rescate de elementos del pasado y el presente en la articulación de poderes y contra-poderes. No se puede descomer la manzana de la historia.
ED: SPECIFYING CULTURAL DIMENSIONS
MARTA: Hay que barajear las cartas de nuevo en el nuevo orden que nos desordena y nos deconstruya. Hay que cambiar el juego (pero si hay que jugar) y el juego es peligroso--es un collage y el collage es lúdico pero si una lucha.
ED: DIMENSIONS IN LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO STUDIES
MARC: Y la lucha si nos jode pero sigue,
MARTA: Siguimos luchando aun en este mundo tan lejos de si mismo
ED : For those who resisted
--fought, were killed,
disappeared or locked away,
were battered, brutalized
and sometimes forgotten,
sometimes remembered
MARC: as the world
went its way
and all things solid
melted into
--something else.
MUSICA SUBE, BAJA
PART B.
MARTA: Las cosas han cambiado y vivimos ya en el nuevo siglo y milenio que nos espera.
MARC: This book is a "second wave" of discussion of Latin American postmodernity in the wake of increasing debates about transnational and globalizing trends.
MARTA: Las utopías desarmadas, las luchas y movimientos sociales rearticulados en relación a un mundo capitalista ya super-tardío y sin la aparencia de oposiciones decisivas.
ED: The texts are about the Latin American periphery from a particular site of enunciation--one of the key centers of U.S. capital, postmodern culture and U.S. Latino cultural struggle.
MARTA: Nos enfrentamos con estados también rearticulados, con procesos económicos y culturales que en los juegos de modernización y globalización...
MARC: Chicago, more and more Latin Americanized--the site for a different look at the questions posed by our world.
MARTA: ya demandan una articulación teórica que siempre nos acerca/siempre nos fascina y que siempre parece estar más allá de nuestros planteamientos.
ED: The "cool neutralizing gaze" of postmodernism has taken over previous discourses now smashed and scattered across the theoretical terrain. Older constructs no longer explain our world, and theory seems unable to engage oppositions.
MARC: Revolutionary hopes turned to blood and ashes, Latin America ever all the more experiences its relegation to periphery status.
MARTA: And where does that leave us "peripherals"? "when the center is in 'privileged disintegration?"
MARC: Speaking from the U.S./Mexican border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña (point to picture)::
ED: Here's to Carlos Cortez!
MARTA This is the age of "la desmadernidad" (eso from the Spanish noun desmadre-- meaning both being without a mother and living in chaos), the great fiction of a state-sponsored order melts in the air, leaving us in a state of meta-orphanhood. We are all finally citizens of a borderless society...
ED: "hijos de la chingada."
MARTA: Y nosotras las hijas?
MARC: We're left with an essentialist universal humanism while Latin America's left struggling in a globalized economy where the area's place remains ever problematic.
ED: And Latin America's left?
MARTA: Yeah, what's left of the left? Que nos queda??
ED: Che dead in 67...
MARC: Peripheral struggles peaked in the early seventies....
MARTA: ¡El pueblo Unido!
MARC: Then the 80s
ED: Patria libre o morir.
MARTA: Nicaragua 89and then the PAZ AMERICANA
ED: Meanwhile the poor pour into the cities.
MARC: Latin American transnational processes haunt us. So do "first world" catchalls :
ED: "poststructuralism," "post-Marxism," "postcolonialism" --above all, "postmodernsm," ...
MARTA (over MARC): Globalización-- transnacionalización. La imposición, internalización y configuración de la cultura postmoderna...
ED (over MARTA): The question is one of metaphors, especially biological ones ...
MARC:(over MARTA): Development and evolution but also tensions, discomforts, and even threats of rupture, chaos or disorder...
MARTA: La cultura postmoderna como expresión de la primera fase de la nueva etapa de la globalización y las resistencias...
ED (pointing to Diana's photos): We trace possible routes in new world geographical space.
MARTA: Here's to Diana Solis's photoswith her maps charting our bodies. ... Pero que chingados es eso de modernidad/postmodernidad?
ED: Yeah, and all this transnational stuffthe old struggles continue.
MARTA: And aren't you forgetting a little problem just north of Guatemala?
MARC: (stepping forward, putting on Viejito Mask-giving a lecture to a freshmen class). Students, Modernity is a project of realization by which society implements a design of making efficiency and technique the basis of "functional rationality." Within Latin America, this meant the attack on indigenous peoples and their culturesand on those peoples who were brought with or without chains, to build their world.
ED (getting up, as if reading from the book). But modernity didn't arrive to the most remote and marginalized places and people in the periphery. It's in the peripheries of our peripheral countries (in the mountains, in the shantytown favelas—among the ethnics, the gays, the new social movements of all kinds) where new responses to modernity may point to new resistance.
MARTA: Ayer el che y Allende,
ED: And Albizu.
MARTA: Hoy Rigoberta y el subcomandante.
ED: And Albizu.
MARTA: Says Ileana Rodriguez in her essay:
ED: Any cultural statement today must begin by acknowledging the victory of capitalism, which produced a theoretical and political surge/ overflow/ meltdown/glut/ which hardened and confused all our systems.
MARTA: The question is how to represent what's beyond our capacity of representation, to represent those structured out in the very making of our perception and discoursethe subaltern.
MARC: (puts on old man's viejito mask-german accent): But we don't just want to interpret history
ED: (pointing to pictures by Elizam's); Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar from his POW prison cell:
MARTA: We seek a praxis which will "pierce through" our predicament, in hopes of liberation.
ED: ¡Viva PuertoRico!
MARC:(with mask coming off): But all this without the illusion that we can find much hope in older formulations.
MARTA (holding up Che mask). Ay Che Che Che.
MARC: Ay, Cha cha cha
ED: (Holding up or going to The Method) These are the hands of Che. :
MARTA: Pero hoy es tiempo de Rigoberta Menchu....
MARC:(holding up the book): She's the real thing.
MARTA: La cosa es que todos somos Marcos.
ED: We're all Marcos.
MARC: I certainly am. How about you?
ED: For Nestor Garcia Canclini, the question is:
MARTA: Como ser radical sin ser fundamentalista.
MARC: "how to be radical without being fundamentalist"
ALL: HMMM.
MARC:(OLD MAN MASK): We study the "specters of Marx" now freed from twentieth century illusions and false sightings, pointing toward a living future.
MARTA: Las cosas han cambiado y vivimos ya en el nuevo siglo que nos espera.
ED: But what about the visuals?
MARC:(with old man's mask): All the different images answer the collapse of utopian thinking Instead of being supplements or adornments of verbal-centered texts, the visuals initiate their own theoretical terrain and add critical weight, stress and, yes, strain to prevailing visions ...
MARTA: Ay Dios que rollo.
MARC:(putting on mask) Marta, Religion is the opium of the people.
ED. Happy Passover, Marc.
MARC:(holding his arms out as if crucified) This is one helluva a way to spend passover.... Do you think they ate matzah at the last supper?
MARTA: Pasar pesach o pascuas-pendiente y pendejando... Pero yo no estoy hablando de la religion. Y claro estoy en contra del PAN And I DON'T MEAN TO BE TOO PARTICULAR BUT WHY ARE YOU SO OBSCURE WHEN YOU WANT TO BE SPECIFIC? (No entiendo lo que estoy leyendo. No soy pendeja-pero MARC:y Michael Piazza si parecen pendejos. Porque hablan asi? El libro vale o es una pendejada?
MARC:(MASK ON-pompously) Marta, it should be perfectly clear. Arturo Arias tells us that the full onslaught of Latin American post-modernity can be dated not with the end of the Cold War, but with the Central American peace process itself, as symptomatic of the close of one historical phase of Latin America's conflictive relations with world capitalism.
ED (With zapatista doll-pompously) The continuing Chiapas and Mexican struggle as a part of a larger Meso-American drama bridging modern/postmodern, pre and full globalization phases of Latin American development remains a matter open to a full debate in postmodernist studies.
MARTA. And here I thought CHIAPAS was about Indians getting ripped off by the rich. Que los ricos siguen robando y el pais se va a la chingada...
MARC: That's right, Marta. That's very specifically what we're saying. That's why they rose the first day of NAFTA and wrote a new book on popular resistance movements.
MARTA Well why didn't you just say so?
MARC: Marta please stick to the script.
MARTA This is the script. Pero no entiendo nada.
MARC:& ED: We don't either.
MUSICA SUBE, BAJA.
PART C. Empieza CORTEZ, que sigue y repita, hasta CODA. Sube, baja...
MARC: (WITH GONG): THEORIZING SPECIFICITIES
ED: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BIG BANG (Gong). Then came the dinasaurs, then another bang (gong blow) in Tehuantepec. The dinasours die. And then humankind and its tale. History.
MARTA: And her story
MARC: And then the New World....
ED: New World order (repeat)
Marc: Disorder (repeat) Marta: Border (repeat, crescendoing)
MARTA (flashing Cortez image of Gomez Pena-screaming) Please! Don't discover me!
ALL: Ah!!!!
ED (pointing to picture) We start with Esther Parada's Native Fruit/ We end with Kartik Vora's essay on Latino Border Performance:
MARTA: While lying at anchor in la cruz, Columbus was visited by many natives... It was not til the last quarter of the 18th century that England surrendered to its own. Then it was that the new world opened wide its golden gates...
MARC: Later it was Bill Gates.
MARTA: What?
ED: Golden Gates/Bill Gates-Microsoft!
ALL 3: Ah! AH!
MARC: Then came the intents at modernity, the struggles over nation states, the buying up of indian lands, the railroads, dictatorships. All that was necessary to maintain the powerful in power... Then came more modern modernities, the Marxist rebellion...
MARTA: y Desmadredad.
Marc: la postmodernidad.... GONG.
All: Ah!-GONG.
MARTA. Kartik Vora writes of how, in 1993, Coco Fusco and Gómez-Peña set up their showcage of "New World" conquest and colonization in front of the Field Museum:
MARTA: Like Colon when he brought "his Indios" to court.
MARC: Performative jesters of postmodern non-sense, Fusco and Gómez-Peña seek to elude the epistemological border patrols who would like to settle once and for all what and who belong where and when, here or there, now and then. In their enactment of colonial othering, they create their own charged, ambiguous, multivocal and unstable language to represent the unsettled and unsettling turbulence which is the spirit of our times: the mobility of relations, the nomadic schizophrenia of social being and knowing, the persistent instability of naming--and of language itself. These are the performance poets of our borders.
ED: And let's throw in Scott Curry, who wants us to see the world "from a position in which external domination is not a given, regardless whether we're talking about, from or in Pakistan or Peru, Guatemala or the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles."
MARTA: Ah, por fin cruzamos la frontera y ya estamos en Aztlan.
MARC: Que locura. MARTA: Quien nos cura?
ED: New World order (repeat)
Marc: Disorder (repeat) Marta: Border (repeat, crescendoing)
ALL: STRAINS
MARTA: No los cura!
MARC: Necesitan un curao rabino.
MARTA (flashing Cortezimage of Gomez Penascreaming) Please! Don't discover me!
All Three: Ah!!!!GONG
PART D. MUSICA SUBE, BAJA
ED: MARC:Zimmerman, Latin America, Latinos and postmodernity
MARTA: Ejemplos:
MARC: Brunner: Postmodernity is for some the exhaustion of Marxism and the necessity of a new social and economic pact which achieves a certain version of modernization
ED: Hugo Achugar: The postmodern debate can help Latin Americans reconsider our most contemporary theme: modernity in peripheral conditions, the international market, the crisis of the populist state, cultures in process of massification, emergent democracies...
MARC: We're not at the end of history, but we've been assigned our place of enunciation by neo-liberalism and post-Keynesian society.... This is no immense cornucopia with a McDonald's logo. We have to forge our own modernity from our mixed pre and post-modern trends in a game where the rule and positions are unclear.
ED: Before it was workers revolution led by the vanguard, now its new social movements and radical democracy with women, ethnics, marginals.
MARC: We can remember our praises for the Cuban Revolution.
MARTA: Que viva el che.
MARC: Que viva la cultura de Caliban.
ED: But we're in another time.
MARC: In the century that awaits us
MARTA: Las cosas han cambiado y vivimos ya en el nuevo milenio que nos espera.
MARC: Even in the early 70s Carlos Fuentes predicted what would happen:
MARTA: "In proportion to the widening of the abyss between the geometric expansion of the technocratic world and the arithmetic expansion of our own ancillary societies, Latin America is being transformed into a world that is superfluous.
MARC: "Traditionally, we have been exploited countries. Soon we will not even be that. It will no longer be necessary to exploit us, for technology will have succeeded in--manufacturing substitutes for our single-product offerings."
MARTA: Pues si no me explotan como voy a comer?
ED: But now we have maquilas,
MARTA: Las zonas francas.
MARC: We've worked it out.
MARTA: Que viva el Tratado de libre comercio y que se chinga el pueblo.
MARC: Libre what? Didn't Bill sign that bill?
MARTA: Bill Gates?
ED: No, Our boy Bill. You know... Bill number 1.
MARC: This have anything to do with Monica?
MARTA: Ni con Santa Monica
ED: Santa, a huh.
MARC: Her rabbi should have told her to respect our dietary laws.
ED. This stuff is way out of bounds.
MARTA: It's sure isn't kosher. Pero claro, tiene que ver con fronteras y con el chisme en un tiempo supuestamente post-historia...
ED: Latin America and the U.S. come together in the border areas, where new cultural trends affecting both sides are said to be in a state of dynamic transformation. Here the new themes:
MARC: Displacement, decentering, hybridization, deterritorialization
ED: Here class/gender--all forms and transformations of identity shift, slide, collide and divide; and new combinations, new collective and individual subjects, emerge.
MARTA: Immigration surveillance and English-only movements, Proposition 187, Welfare reform, attacks on Affirmative Action, bilingual education--the reintensification of anti-Mexican and anti-Latino feelings, splits in Latino communities. The possibility of a Latinized U.S., of a reconquest by the older peoples of America looms before us.
ED: That's really scary. Think I'll join the clan.
MARC: (Getting on soap box, putting on viejito mask, as if in a campaign rally): The world of gangs and drugs, of informal economy and drug-running enclaves, of continuing and extending anomie, of dropouts and growing parental absenteeism, growing and deepening racial conflicts, and intensifying gender conflicts, class differentiation and the like have prevented Chicanos, Chicanos and Latinos, Latinos and Blacks, Latinos, Blacks and others, from forming a bloc, from struggling in the most meaningful ways.
MARTA: Hijole que rollo... ¡Cuidado con la expancion sur de la UIC!
MARC: Long live Danny Solis...
ED: And what about what's happening at Clemente?
MARTA: Mientras tanto, los levantamientos en Chiapas, la rebeldia anti-priista, la victoria de Cuahuatemoc Cardenas. El crecimiento de movimientos sociales y democraticos!
MARC: We have to look for small openings--options: what other choice do we have?
MARTA: Como yo lo veo: O te mojas o terminas bien seca. Yo no soy mojada, pero mucho menos secada ni sonsa soy yo, y eso es la purita verdad.
MUSICA SUBE.... Baja....
PART D.
MARC: Let's go down to the Southern cone and then some art worlds.
SPECIFYING SOUTH First Nora Bonnin
MARTA: In the 50s, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico launched a new relationship in response to the new post World War II order as wealthy peripheral countries sought semi-peripheral status.
MARC: In Argentina, the industriales matured slowly up until mid-century. From then on, they became the legitimizers of the new ordertheir most representative institution, the Di Tella.
ED: In the 60s, Di Tella emerged to propose the New York aesthetic code in porteño garb.
MARTA: Here, this code is cool leftist-chic. But outside the U.S., this same code came from the world's powerhouse, backed by World War II's victorious army
MARC: (announcing a wresting match): FROM THE MID-CENTURY'S BIG WINNER.
MARC: Wiener?
MARTA: The rural barrons sucked up to Europe, while the new hotshots were hot for
MARC:(as SINATRA): New YAWK NEW YAWK
ED: In post-Peron Argentina, Di Tella institutionalized the propositions, producers, sponsors and spaces created by Argentina's internal changes and evolving global role.
MARTA: Ahma sa mos appi fella cause I worka for di tela. Porque Peron era bien cabron. Y Evita? Evitala. Y Madona? Que doña! Y.donde entra ella? Como entrar y salir de la madonidad.
MARC: Jackson Pollack, John Cage Andy WarholDiTella's New York imports pushed Buenos Aires to the postmodern edge.
ED: La post-desmadonidad.
MARTA: Pues ya que es madre, es bien padre, no?
MARC: (singing): Not where Eduardo comes from.
MARTA: MODERNIZATION AND AUTHORITARIAN CULTURE IN CHILE
ED: Chile's incorporación a la modernidad began in the 1920s. Authoritarian culture hegemony began with the military dictatorship in 1973.
MARTA: Modernity/Authoritarian culture. Is one subject to the other? Which changes result from the arrival of modernity and what from Pinochet's authoritarian ways? Will authoritarian changes survive the recent democratization?
ED: The Chilean military dictatorship was institutional and not individual.
MARTA: Como El PRIo como el segundo Daley?
MARC: That makes Harold our Allende?
MARTA: Allende no escribio Afrodita?
ED: As the military grew so did Chile's culture of resistance grew through small groups, alliances, networking. Clandestine grassroots opposition defended Allende period values, maintained a culture young people never knew but now reshaped.
MARTA: Allende Allende el pueblo te defiende.
MARC: El pueblo unido jamas sera ... jodido
ED: August 1992, resurgence of Allende and pre-Allende icons.
MARTA: Neruda, Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Miguel Enríquez...
MARC: 1992 was their year.
MARTA: : Quinientos años antes in La cruz, Columbus ... as the new world
MARC: And its disorders
MARTA: opened wide its golden gates...
MARC: Bill Gates. ED: Wie Gehts. MARTA: Heil Augusto!
Our Senator Vitalicio!
ALL: Sig heil!
MUSICA Sube, baja...
ED: Marquesa Macadar: POSTMODERNITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN MONTEVIDEO
MARTA: Montivideo 1992. In Uruguay as in any other corner of the world, we can sense the fin-de-siglo--the end of the millennium.
MARC: Changes are rapid and the rate of change accelerating. The syncronicity of events overwhelms us. The flow of information drugs us. You can't synthesize all the information and knowledge that reach us in just a couple of hours.
MARTA: We go to bed invaded with information. Day breaks, and in a flash, torrents of info and urban headaches overwhelm us like a whirlpool where we frantically struggle.
ED: Montevideo's invaded on the streets by new images unrecognizable in the 60s, 70s or early 80sin a world of pintadas where the threatened personal replaces the directly political.
MARTA: "I shit on the politics and religion of old people,"
ED "Take care of your boyfriend.... Do you know where he is right now?";
MARC: Pintadas, yes and murgas.
ED: All together let's cry.
I'll cry, and they'll cry
they've let the country die.
Uruguay's gone to pot,
beliveable it's really not--
MARTA: socialism's a bullet
gone awry,
it's better to lie down
and die.
ALL THREE: BUAA! GONG GONG GONG.
MARTA: Rather than die, we would like to remember and move on. Remember, but go beyond...
MUSICA SUBE, BAJA
....SILENCIO
(Gallery lights go down to focus on Silvia Malagrino's installation)
MUSICA SUBE, BAJA
MARC: And so we seek our way out of the postmodern landscape through word and images.
MARTA: Elizam Escobar ECHO-NARCISSISM OR TRANSFIXION
ED: We live in a new historical moment with "Postmodernism" as the ambiguous reification-of-confusion of the new economic-cultural international order....
MARC: My own experience of adversity leads me to propose three imperatives:
MARTA: resist critically by continuing the "political art" tradition within existent and experimentational practices.
ED: intervene critically, using "postmodern" devices to "undo" "postmodernism" itself.
MARC: pierce through these two.
MARTA: Michael Piazza would seem to agree:
ED: The Western modern hero has been shattering for some time now) and may spend forever telling us about it over and over like a broken record, summer reruns, or a glitch in the software.
MARTA: Euphoria and numbness replace what was left of any real emotion. Affectations come by means of thrills and spills--a giddiness coupled with "blind and uncritical enthusiasm condemned with a new remoteness and contempt". Pastiche replaces parody, which can no longer find a subject to parody; hence, the "implosion of the real" and the end of history. "And how long will this 'no future' last?"
MARC: The arena of resistance is an occupied zone, so how rearticulate a radical aesthetic?
ED: By taking advantage of the space opened in postmodernity, and nurturing the voices previously silenced. Within the terrain of a multiplicity of discourses, there may be points of convergence allowing for new articulations and new possibilities for change.
CodaCUT 2 Sube, baja...
MARTA: Globalización--transnacionalización. La imposición, internalización y configuración de la cultura postmoderna y la expresión de las resistencias locales, regionales...
ED: NEW WORLD DISORDERS
MARC: Collage --o pastiche?: Forma predominante de la postmodernidad latinoamericana...
ED: PERIPHERAL STRAINS
MARC: The new spatialities of postmodern thought traverse and deny the very borders between theory and application, the linguistic and visual. In this post-postmodernist moment of effaced borders and nomadic logistics, in this new order with its new world strains...
MARTA: The new disorders spill over and generate new oppositions, new social movements. ED: Globalization doesn't lead to any narrow homogenization of culture.
MARC: Otherness and difference are necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital, which can only thrive on the commodification of varied use values.
ED: Latin America needs to reproduce otherness for tourist and export dollars.
MARTA Collage en contra de la linealidad y las macro-narrativas de la modernidad. En vez del racionalismo europeo la multiplicidad nómada-híbrida de la postmodernidad.
ED: SPECIFYING CULTURAL DIMENSIONS
MARTA: Hay que barajear las cartas en el nuevo orden que nos desordena y nos deconstruya.
MARC: Hay que cambiar el juego y el juego es un collage; es lúdico pero si una lucha.
ED: CULTURAL DIMENSIONS IN LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO STUDIES
MARC: Y la lucha si nos jode pero sigue...
MARTA: Siguimos luchando aun en este mundo tan lejos de si mismo
MARC: "Hybridization," "deterritorialization,"such terms are not innocent of existing power relations, no matter how transformed they may be by new post-Cold War contexts. Those new contexts may well imply that the commodification of otherness however dangerous, offers a space for oppositional articulation.
MARTA: Globalización--transnacionalización. (Sigue en voz baja) Y con ellas--la imposición, internalización y configuración de la cultura postmoderna.... Siguimos luchando
MARC: "Transnationalization, Globalization" increase, and so do the spaces for new crises in civil society and citizenship, in governability and, yes, hegemony.
MARTA: Chiapas registers the first post-NAFTA note of discord in the new world disorder. And what of the rest of Latin America and the hemisphere?
MARC: COLLAGE... (Leading cheer) Collage Collage!...
ED: New World orders (repeat) .... Marc: Disorders (repeat)
MARTA: Borders (repeat, crescendoing) ALL: Strains... Ay! Ay! Ay!
MARTA (flashing Cortez image of Gomez Pena-screaming) Please! Don't discover US!
All Three: AHHHH!!!!