Abstract
Gastón Gordillo’s Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction takes the reader by car, foot, and horseback through the gaucho country of Argentina’s Gran Chaco. This is an area flattened against the Andes that served as an early frontier of Spanish conquest efforts—ones that often failed due to indigenous resistance, earthquakes, and the stubbornness of the terrain. Today, it continues to be a frontier of the latest chapter of settler colonialism (or perhaps better, absentee capitalism) in the form of bulldozers grinding up El Monte for Chinese soy consumption. Gordillo does a moving and often brilliant job of walking us through the rubble and ruins of centuries and the manifold ways in which old forts, churches, lost cities, and mass graves are disregarded, sanctified, resurrected, and re-used by the people of the Chaco. We meet indigenous descendants of the Wichí people, Criollo workers who acknowledge their mestizo roots among the survivors of genocide to a few looming landlords who are pushing a new wave of enclosure of usufruct cattle country.
The terms rubble and ruin lie in tension throughout the text, although they are often used interchangeably within the same paragraph. One of the important points of refocusing on rubble is that it can help us overcome an anxiety about romanticism that Ann Laura Stoler (2013), for one, worries will whitewash the continuing ruination wrought by the structural violence of imperialism. Gordillo faithfully heeds her call and re-names the material of the immanent past “rubble,” which at best has a neutral cast and at worse is a type of hueserío, or field of bones—the forensic evidence of past horrors. Stoler’s call is important, shaming those who might indulge in “ruin porn” and insisting instead that we should sit down and watch something more like the Trümmerfilm (Rubble Films) of post-war Germany that used destroyed cityscapes as the backdrop for political critiques of the Third Reich (Rentschler, 2010). Perhaps inadvertently, these films ensured Albert Speer’s failure to produce future ruins that would impress future generations with Nazi grandeur.
This anti-ruin move has the effect of refocusing us on the destructive forces of colonialism and capitalism. It also emphasizes the possibility, often (but not always) encountered among Gordillo’s Chaco interlocutors to ignore, shrug at, or even denigrate imperial remains. They do not sacralize it. Or at least not in the same way, Gordillo says, as “modern” “elites” would. And the “subaltern”—a frequent character invoked, can themselves be depicted as “human rubble” (pp. 116, 225, 233, 257, 260–261).
It is on this dyad that I would like to pause and open a conversation. For while the materiality of the Chaco is alive and dynamic with multiple possible meanings and futures this does not seem to be as much the case for the human beings portrayed. So, my question is, “Shouldn’t we also perform the ruins-to-rubble operation on our anthropological frames?” The simple, dualistic essentialism of elites and subalterns (which all too easily slides into the dubious dyad of moderns and pre-moderns, p. 258) reflects the classic self-other dichotomy of capitalism and colonialism—and of their critics. Marxian and post-colonial critiques repetitiously demand an abjectivication that, I suggest, is no less insulting than decrepit depictions of the “primitivism” of non-Western people. By abjectivication, I do not mean to invoke Kristeva’s (1982) Lacanian self-horror based upon taboos, but rather I am making up my own term (I think) to mean the way in which present-day critiques of capitalism and colonialism insist on an abject subject. A basic task for the critical anthropologist has become to document suffering and defeat and to embrace a pessimistic view of agency. What I am voicing here is my own growing discontent with the field in this regard (despite my own Marxian, feminist and post-colonial leanings), and a gut feeling that we are once again “denying co-evalness” to paraphrase Fabian (2002 [1983]). But now, rather than doing it on evolutionary terms, we are doing it on affective and phenomenological terms—some people are abject and miserable and some people are free and privileged. Why must we choose between romanticizing our interlocutors or pitying them?
Gordillo’s engagement with Adorno around negative dialectics is significant here (e.g. see pp. 119–121, 187, 248–249, 252) but it may suffer from the same fault. Adorno (1973 [1966]) wrote at a profoundly disheartening time, amid the human and material rubble of World War II. It is in no way surprising that, out of this experience, he wrote a pessimistic work that attacked the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among others. Adorno could be projected onto the screen of a Trümmerfilm as a shell-shocked character wandering through the rubble of Western philosophy, yet the directors of these films also offered, “new designs for living (that) responded to otherwise grim outlooks of demoralized and homeless people” (Rentschler, 2010: 10). In his lifetime, it was surely questionable that the world was making any advance through the dialectical process or that it was guided by a transcendental rationality. It might not be incorrect to read this late work of Adorno’s as a precursor to deconstructionism, in the sense that he calls on us to question the unity of the identities we draw between ideas and things. Not only (like rubble) can they be multiple and shifting, but they are created by historically specific subjects who, along with contingent events, can unsettle knowledge. And unsettling knowledge—or as is common to exhort these days—decolonizing it, is an important political move. Gordillo is right to read Adorno’s negativity as against the positive possibilities of social change, which may reinforce his siding with critics of Deleuze who perceive a naive vitalism. Is vitalism rejected because it is thought of here as another kind of romance?
What is unclear in both Adorno and Gordillo is where the future might lead. Gordillo’s abject Chacoans are left, like Adorno, to react to the immediate necessities of living. To move when the farmer bullies, to block the bulldozers when they come, to resentfully go along with the priests’ new rules. Although the text provides many accounts of creative reworking of ideas and practices facilitated by the materiality of the past (e.g. the residents of Rivadavia who resurrected the boiler of an old steamship and made it the centerpiece of their town; and the pilgrims and celebrants of Huachana, Chalicán, and other saintly sites), the actors come across as reactants, not world-making agents. They are haunted, walking like ghosts through the “afterlife of destruction” while their creative responses come across as limited survival tactics, and ultimately doomed. We do not get any idea of what utopian ideas Chacoans might have about human possibility or the future of this region. Do they share Adorno’s famous cynicism about the illusion of freedom between ordained choices? We do not really know because the common Marxian set-up is to make it difficult to understand anything about the proletariat—the subaltern—other than their oppressed state. As Spivak (1988) famously declared, the subaltern cannot speak, except by uttering false consciousness.
What rises up in this ethnographically luminous account of rubble is the romantic monument of Marxism. Ontological categories, such as the subaltern, the working people, elites, and the bourgeoisie jut out of the desert dust with more concrete certainty than a Spanish fort. When can the Other become something other than the abject subject? Does a critique of too-late capitalism still require that we cling to simple social classifications which, after-all, define people primarily in terms of their relationships to property? What if we could see humans as mobile and multivariant as the rubble that Gordillo’s tracks? We get individuals (such as Alfredo who is at once irreverent and nostalgic about the church of la Manga, Diego who sings songs about the accursed Esteco, or Miguel who found its bulldozed facelift “beautiful,” and the Ezcurra sisters of El Piquete who appear to be the forgotten widows of the latifundia system), but they seem to fall, in the final analysis, into the predictable trenches of class and race. Many academics these days are calling for a “theory from the south.” Rubble is an ethnography of the south, but it does not offer a theory from the south. Every chapter opens with a reverent, authorizing exergue from a Northern/Western writer to provide the intellectual frame. What if, instead, they opened with quotes from guachos and grandmas? What could a sequel to Rubble look like that both opens up possible futures and creatively posits new theories of being and doing?
Adorno fell into an abyss of his own brand of nihilism. Unfortunately, he rather too quickly dismissed Sartre, who went through a very similar epistemological and moral crisis (Sherman, 2007). But Sartre (and De Beauvoir and Fanon) emerged on the other side, striving to imagine not only a post-war world in a way that Adorno refused (he said he preferred to align with the losers of history) but a post-Nietzschean one. For Sartre, freedom is possible once you undertake the significant work of deconstructing the social roles handed to you. Anything else he calls living in “bad faith.” Can we critique capitalism without replicating the social classifications we have inherited from previous generations that ram us into dead-end dualities—the authorial “we” (modern and elite academics) and the abject “them” (indigenous, subaltern and working people)? If we start to think like some of the local philosophers of the Gran Chaco, how might the rubble of Marxism shift?