Post-Gore "Talachas" (Reparations)

Raza Sosa on Andy Medina’s work and post-gore capitalism

A pack of desirous and disposable jackals drool over the greenish stench of paper. They are true jackal endriagos^[1] of Gore Capitalism,^[2] jackals that will kill to sniff the scent of a dollar bill and will eat the leader with the same fangs as the previous leader. They are rebellious jackals and slaves, contradictory packs of jackal endriagos.^[3] This is, perhaps, the dialectic between the endriago subjects and the national states in third world territories.

I write from the dangerous ghetto of Tepito/Tepitón/Tequipeuhcan or the place where slavery began, a slum territory embellished with white paint on the walls and black bows on the doors. In a world in which the fabrication of subjectivities, desires, and affections is crossed by the money/death binomial (moneyoverdeath), there are those of us who still ask our dead loved ones how to escape. Oaxacan artist Andy Medina, who perceives his work as an extension of himself which allows him to explore his sensitive and cognitive concerns about race, language, education, and gender, is my escape partner from the white, cisteherocapitalist, and necropolitical regime.

Rendir Tributo [Pay Tribute] (2017)shows us a sultry office crying out for mercy, where body and territory are the tribute to be paid to the institutions that administer economic capital and death capital. The patchwork of sad fabric airs the feelings of the bodies, what they feel after spending sixteen hours of slave time working in a mine or in a white polyethylene chair to achieve the promises that cisheterocapitalism [gore] sold to the third world. The murmurs dissolve within the humidity and soundscape of the office. Money and blessings are the prayers. Could it be that the tribute to the institutions that administer economic capital is always intersected by tributary relations towards the institutions that administer death? To this question we will always answer yes, adding that the moneyoverdeath binomial is one of the anchors that sink Abya Yala under a regime where the sacrifice of bodies, diversity and life is the means to preserve economic-emotional tranquility in the nodes of whiteness.

Contemporary capitalism produces subjectivities that the Tijuana philosopher Sayak Valencia calls endriago subjects,^[4] understood as those third-world subjects that dispute the authority and means of the states to execute necropolitics and necropractices on bodies/territories, under a ritualistic relationship with death, hegemonic masculinity, and the rationally economic logics of Western thought. All gore subjectivation is a subjectivation mediated by the economy and the implantation of desire by the evolution of economic, capitalist, and macho rationality. In this sense we can shout along with Valencia that gore capitalism is the product of the devastating collision between cisheterocapitalism, epistemes of violence, and an arsenal of necro-empowering practices perfected in subjectivity.

This approach to the critical apparatus that Andy Medina proposes to us dialogues with Suely Rolnik and Valencia on the Cistem as a factory of advanced technologies for cognitive subjectivation and bodily orthopedization.^[5] These technologies are especially indispensable for the implantation and glocalization of capitalism in its diverse somatogeographic contexts. The psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik tells us that “economic domination and exploitation find one of their main weapons, if not ‘the’ weapon, in the manipulation of subjectivity.”^[6] In other words, the introjection of economic rationality in our fields of sentimental, desiring, affective, and ideological agency functions as a mechanism of administration and production of whiteness in third-world bodies/territories. Thus, hand in hand with Andy Medina’s critical apparatus, we say that a gore subjectivation is always an americanexpress subjectivation, in which the means to obtain capital are executed by systematically violating the constitutive parts of third bodies, be they human bodies or environmental bodies.

Looking at subjectivity from its factory product quality, we believe that sensitivities have been twisted to the point of becoming a double-edged sword. We have been cut off. Sensitivity is both a weapon of anti-patriarchal resistance and a salve that molds the flesh through the fear produced by seeing how close the body is to the death and vulnerability of the spectacular.^[7] In this sense, within prefabricated subjectivities there is an identity configuration characterized by remaining in a state of shock.

We know that it is on the body’s hypersensitivity that the Western gaze rests in order to valorize it as an exoticizable and profitable commodity, however, in this fragility also lie the frameworks of fugitive affectivities of the cisheterocapitalist necropolitical regime. To recall our pains and expose that fragility is to defend memory and life, but the persistent dosage of a visual imaginary that glamorizes brutal modes of violence suppresses active sensibilities until creating formations of inactive sensibilities, incapable of responding to the exacerbated violence that overflows in necrophilic techniques of ending bodies/territories.

When we speak of “formations of inactive sensibilities” we are dialoguing with what Valencia calls “tool[s] for the suppression of all dissent—even internal—.”^[8] A formation of suppressed or inactive sensibilities is produced through the hypermediatization of images where the radical vulnerability of the body is exposed through a colonial scopic regime.^[9] In the words of Valencia herself: “The media function as over-expositors of violence, which they naturalize for viewers through a constant bombardment of images to the point where they turn violence itself into a kind of manifest destiny, to which we can only think to resign ourselves.”^[10]

Death drives and questions. Does the image of a body taken to the maximum levels of violation provoke the extinguishing of any form of active and anti-individualistic resistance? Are my body and the world alone in the face of the fragility of my body and the vulnerability of the world? We cannot be reductionist and say that the overexposure of images of bodies stripped of life is the only technology of subjectivation, in fact, Butler seems to warn us that that which is not shown is also part of the imaginary that the neoliberal regime of fascistic democracies^[11] seeks to implant in society. It is a continuum between seconds of light and states of opacity that structures the public’s order, since “the public will be created on the condition that certain images do not appear in the media, certain names of the dead are not utterable, certain losses are not avowed as losses, and violence is derealized and diffused.”^[12]

The romanticization of archetypically violent subjectivities is the product of the historical relation of exoticization that the Western gaze has with respect to those other existences of the “I, human, Euro-white, cisheterosexual.” We know that we are not wasting words when we say that the naturalization of subjectivities leads to the romanticization of the oppressions to which racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies are subjected. We are not talking here about “the art” of dismembering a woman and making her fit into a bag, we are—instead—shouting with and in spite of our own flesh openings and throat cuttings, we are denouncing that we were sold blades and AK-47s as decolonial prostheses and Balenciagas as cosmetic lighteners.

In addition to the gore violence executed by nation-states and endriago subjects, there is a type of racist violence that has to do with language, a central theme of Andy Medina’s work. This work presents to us the linguistic-racial sanitization that has been going on since colonial times, passing through the formation of the Mexican state up to the present. n Zapotec from the Isthmus of Oaxaca, the photo reads Lii qui gannalu’, which translated into English means “you don’t know.” One of the desk’s legs is supported by the Political Constitution of Mexico and Spanish and English dictionaries. Evoking Medina’s words: revenge is presented as a slap in the face that reminds us that an Indigenous language never dies in spite of a colonizing language, but keeps waiting for its revenge.

Emptying the bodies of memory through what is not taught (and what is not spoken) is also part of the social imaginary that results in racist anti-Indigenous nationalisms. What are the differences between a text about death and the death administered on the body that produces the text about death? We feel that the stripping and extraction of life from the body is neither theoretical nor poetic; “You would have to be a moron, or else horribly dishonest, to think one form of oppression insufferable and the other full of charm.”^[13]

Imagining paths of flight is implausible without collective practices for the defense of life and territory. This implies breaking with subjectivities as pacts with whiteness. Waking ourselves up from this state of shock, keeping ourselves current, and running away from the kidnapping of life, escaping from the standards of identity. Creating ethics of post-gore reparations.

I am reminded of the colloquial saying “nortearse” which means to lose the sense and direction of the north. I use this saying in its literal sense: to lose the North as an ethical-political horizon, to extirpate the political fictions implanted by the West, to forget the language of the colonizer, to find untraveled paths and fugitive desires of the technologies of necropolitical subjectivation in third-world territories. Let’s keep navigating the mysteries behind the opacities, let’s keep producing saliva to spit at the images. Let’s stay [current].
Run, run!
Escape!