The Open Invitation

Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect

Freya Schiwy

• Editorial: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780822986676
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

The Open Invitation explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and activist video. Schiwy analyzes activist videos from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, the Zapatista's Other Campaign, as well as collaborative and community video from the Yucatán. Schiwy argues that transnational activist videos and community videos in indigenous languages reveal collaborations and that their political impact cannot be grasped through the concept of the public sphere. Instead, she places these videos in dialogue with recent efforts to understand the political with communality, a mode of governance articulated in indigenous struggles for autonomy, and with cinematic politics of affect.

Chapter One

SUBJECTIFICATION BEYOND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Video Networks and Un poquito de tanta verdad (2007)

To intervene in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim.

Judith Butler

In the spring of 2006, media activists from across Latin America were gathered for the Eighth International Indigenous Film and Video Festival “Raíz de la imagen” in Oaxaca (May 27–June 12, 2006), a state in southern Mexico bordering on Chiapas and coincidentally also a popular tourist destination.¹ Many film and video makers and other visitors were still in town on June 14 when the governor of Oaxaca cracked down on an annual tradition: the strike of Sección 22, the Oaxacan chapter of the SNTE (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación/ National Union of Workers in Education). The teachers had once again established camps in downtown Oaxaca, demanded raises and supplies, and called attention to the state’s neglect of public education, particularly in rural communities. The repression left ninety-two unarmed union activists and supporters severely injured and the union’s radio station destroyed.² Ulises Ruiz Ortiz’s violent response led to a public outcry and snowballed into a widespread uprising that brought together feminists, anarchists, Marxists, housewives, taxi drivers, union members, students, and eventually Zapotec, Mixe, Triqui, and other indigenous groups. The plantón resurrected as a broad social movement that demanded the governor’s resignation, and on June 16, formed the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO; Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). Over the course of six months APPO held the city center. APPO members organized the removal of garbage, created a security force, held lengthy assembly meetings modeled on self-governance in Oaxaca’s indigenous communities, and took over radio and television stations.³ Un poquito suggests that movement-run radio and television were key for the duration and resilience of the social movement.

The events spawned at once a feverish effort to record what was happening in the streets. As photos and videos were posted to websites and blogs, protestors and independent video makers created an activist media archive housed in the offices of Ojo de Agua Comunicación, the same media collective that had coordinated CLACPI’s International Indigenous Film and Video festival in May. The repository provided material for at least thirty-five activist videos ranging from television spots less than one minute to feature-length documentaries.⁴ Some videos, such as Compromiso cumplido, were compiled carefully and after the events; others, like Ya cayó, were composed hurriedly in the heat of the protests. Pesadilla azul (The Blue Nightmare) was still in rough cut in 2010.⁵ While the ad hoc videos were intended to be uploaded on the Independent Media Center (IMC) Oaxaca website or to be distributed to rural areas in Oaxaca as DVDs, some were also shown on occupied State Television Canal 9 (COR-TV).⁶ The Chiapas Media Project distributed La rebelión de las oaxaqueñas and the compilation Imágenes de la represión in the United States. Tami Gold, Gerardo Rénique, and Amilca Palmer made Land, Rain, and Fire: Report from Oaxaca at the end of 2006, and released the documentary short through Third World Newsreel. Although Mal de Ojo TV productions are not commercially marketed, the material is available for purchase from Ojo de Agua Comunicación. In the informal market in Oaxaca, vendors who also sell pirated Hollywood productions still offered videos by Mal de Ojo TV along with a range of other activist documentaries in the summer of 2010 when I visited there.⁷ Some of these videos are credited to particular producers, others are anonymous or contain no final credits. A street vendor told me in August of 2010 that copies of these activist videos are also readily available in Mexico City from organizations sympathetic to the Oaxaca uprising and the EZLN’s Other Campaign.

What insights into the nature of the political might a focus on the tight relationship between social movements and their independent media offer? What light can activist video shed on the link between media and the state? What understanding of militancy does the layering of onscreen and offscreen space in activist video put forth? I begin with a critical discussion of the public sphere concept in light of the APPO’s radical politics, mainstream media’s relation to the Mexican state, and activist video’s networks. I then consider Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics, which, at first sight, seems to offer a more adequate entry point for understanding the political potential of media activism in Southern Mexico, but suggest that in light of Un poquito’s representation of the uprising, such a Rancièrian reading also finds its limits.

THE QUESTION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The ninety-minute documentary Un poquito, released in 2007, is one of the many activist videos treating the events unfolding in Oaxaca in 2006. A brief look at its credits offers a glimpse of the plethora of independent media collectives active in Oaxaca at the time. The film is directed by Jill Irene Freidberg and coproduced by the New York–based independent producer Corrugated Films and the Oaxaca-based media collective Mal de Ojo TV. Footage for Un poquito is crowdsourced and attributed to Ojo de Agua Comunicación, Canalseisdejulio, Universidad de la Tierra, Gringoyo Production, Indymedia Oaxaca, Mario Viveros, Cooper Bates, Chiapas Media Project in Oaxaca, and Narco News, among others; photographs are credited to eighteen individuals. The contributors have different origins and relations with militant cinema, the Super 8 video movement, and collaborative and community video in indigenous languages; but all certainly “fit comfortably into the categories of alternative media, radical media, or citizen’s media”⁸—categories familiar from scholarship in critical communication studies.⁹

What to name grassroots community and collaborative media is an issue of considerable debate and reflects the difficulty in naming the political potential associated with media activism, especially in the context of social uprising.¹⁰ In Making Our Media, Dorothy Kidd and Clemencia Rodríguez argue that the proliferation of community media on a global level has transformed what began as local initiatives into complex networks of social change that entail the rearticulation of all aspects of communication and information.¹¹ The work’s subtitle, Global Initiatives Toward a Democratic Public Sphere, and the title of volume two, Creating New Communication Spaces, condense the idea that the media constitute a public sphere that requires democratization, or better, that thanks to independent media, this democratization is well under way.¹² At the same time that Kidd and Rodriguez invoke a necessary democratization of the public sphere, they also speak of “new communication spaces,” a concept that points beyond liberal democracy and the nation-state. The power of the mass media consists of not only their ability to gain consent for the neoliberal visions of global corporations; rather, “if the shift to neoliberalism drastically skewed global communication, it also created conditions of radical possibility.”¹³

Others find shared anarchist principles across a global diversity of movements and organizations in “the priority given to movements over institutions, the attention given to prefigurative political activity, and the place allocated to direct action.”¹⁴ Chris Atton argues that “alternative media . . . are crucially about offering the means of democratic communication to people that are normally excluded from media production” but he recognizes that at the same time “they . . . enable participation and reflexivity” including “collage” and “anti-copyright” practices.¹⁵ Atton characterizes the “infoshop ‘movement’” in the United States and the United Kingdom as a “counter-hegemonic strategy . . . to demarcate ‘free spaces’ within which anarchist-revolutionary aims and strategies may be formulated and enacted, and tactics developed to act as mechanisms for struggles against capitalism.” Even as he invokes Grasmsci, Atton at once also understands this alternative media movement in a “Habermasian perspective . . . [as] the center of a counter public sphere within which revolutionary political discourse is nurtured, consequently to be taken into the ‘dominant’ public sphere in the form of intellectual arguments and physical protests.”¹⁶

These assessments attest to a broad diversity of independent media activisms, but they also imply some conceptual confusion. Gramsci’s is a revolutionary perspective that builds hegemony in view of the state; anarchism by and large eschews the state. The public sphere, understood in the terms laid out by Jürgen Habermas, imagines a space of rational communication among citizens who form political opinions and exercise influence on democratically elected governments so they will, in turn, pass legislation to regulate national economies.¹⁷ In other words, the public sphere is an idealized theoretical construct that presupposes the equality of the participants in social communication, a society composed of legal citizens who act within the limits of the law and the nation. It also assumes the existence of efficient legislation capable of governing the economy instead of the other way around.¹⁸

Due to their commercial, for-profit orientation—what Habermas would consider private, economic interests—the mass media in the Americas, even when dedicated to news and information, certainly do not form part of the public sphere ideal.¹⁹ Instead, as McQuail maintains, the mass media are at least in part responsible for Habermas’s public sphere ideal failing to become realized. McQuail writes that “in nominally free and democratic societies of the mid-to-later 20th century, the mass media were expected to play a supportive but somewhat subordinate role in the political process by informing and advising citizens about electoral choice and providing a two-way channel of communication between citizens and government.”²⁰ Instead, media industries are now widely recognized as offering little in terms of public service. For McQuail, they are powerful economic forces in their own right and should be studied in terms of the political economy of the media rather than normative theoretical traditions.²¹

The continued relevance of the notion of the public sphere as indicating a space for political dissent is indebted in part to the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser. In 1990 Fraser advanced a more complex understanding of the public sphere concept, one that would account for the heterogeneity of persons and conflicts of interests within the social realm and would create conceptual space for social action.²² She critiques, in other words, Habermas’s strict separation of opinion and decision-making. According to Fraser, “the bourgeois conception of the public sphere supposes the desirability of a sharp separation of (associational) civil society and the state. As a result, it promotes what I shall call weak publics, publics whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion-formation and does not also encompass decision-making.”²³ In her view strong publics could become opinion as well as decision-makers “in self-managed workplaces, child care centers, or residential communities, for example.”²⁴ Remaining nevertheless well within a liberal democratic, reformist framework, Fraser concludes that “any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, inter-public coordination, and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society.”²⁵

More recently, Fraser guards against the indiscriminate use of the concept of the public sphere. Directly addressing those who research new media and communication technologies, she warns that the concept falls short in the face of globalization and the vanishing power of nation-states and democratic institutions. According to Fraser, and with clear reference to Habermas, the public sphere has two fundamental implications. The first is normative; that is, the public sphere is conceptualized as a space for generating public opinion in a way that this opinion acquires a certain moral-political value. The second implication is that this sphere mobilizes public opinion as a political force that pressures the sovereign nation-state so that it in turn will limit and regulate private interests. Fraser maintains that for both of these precepts—“the validity of public opinion and citizen empowerment vis-à-vis the state—are essential to the concept of the public sphere in democratic theory. Without them, the concept loses its critical force and its political point.”²⁶

Can the media activism celebrated in Un poquito be understood as a form of citizen empowerment and strengthening of public opinion? Lynn Stephen’s rich and detailed account of the Oaxaca uprising suggests that this might be the case. Stephen’s analysis centers on the emotional importance of giving and hearing testimony, and she characterizes the uprising and the occupation of COR-TV as a demand for rights by lower-class, mostly indigenous women.²⁷ Her focus on rights implies understanding of the occupation as a demand for recognition within a liberal democratic framework.²⁸ Stephen emphasizes that these women have commonly been silenced and made invisible—at home, in the media, and in the leadership of the teachers’ union. Referring to the lasting impact of the movement and the women’s experiences during the media occupation, she writes that “what appears to be harder to destroy [than the uprising itself], however, is the right to speak, the right to be heard, and the right to decide who governs. These rights are being articulated in ever-wider circles and have become vernacularized in many corners of Oaxaca as basic human rights and critical conceptions of citizenship.”²⁹ Stephen articulates the ability to “speak and be heard” as a claim justified in terms of the international human rights discourse and directed at a nation-state in violation of human and citizen rights. Yet she also shows that the women assumed their right to speak, asumido in Spanish; that is, it was a right not given but rather taken. Therefore, we can say that through this process the women went beyond simple claims on the state. They also thereby went beyond the public sphere, understood as a realm where citizens can articulate demands on the state or begin to empower themselves as citizens within a given democratic framework.

My argument derives in part from the link between the women and the Oaxacan Peoples Assembly. When the APPO was formed—two days after the plantón was broken up and the striking teachers and their families driven out of the city—it announced itself as the “‘legitimate’ governing body of Oaxaca State, declaring that it would form a ‘parallel’ government.” As Louis Nevaer explains, “the first order of business was to demand the immediate and unconditional resignation of Governor Ruiz. The second order of business was to call for acts of civil disobedience. . . ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Subjectification beyond the Public Sphere: Video Networks and Un poquito de tanta verdad (2007)
• Chapter Two: Visions of Commune and Comunalidad: Resolutivos del Foro Indígena (2006) and Caracoles: New Paths of Resistance (2003)
• Chapter Three: Thresholds of the Visible: Activist Video and the Question of Aesthetics
• Chapter Four: Rage, Joy, and Decolonial Affect: ¡VivaMéxico! (2010) and Un tren muy grande que se llama la Otra Campaña (2006)
• Coda: Open Endings, or, Who’s Laughing Now? Humor and Collaborative Video in Indigenous Languages
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index