Abstract
Much cutting-edge social science aims to approximate the destructive forces sweeping the planet in order to interrupt them. In Rubble, an erudite and peripatetic journey through debris in the Argentine Chaco, Gastón Gordillo makes a major contribution to this planetary imperative. How, Gordillo asks, do people inhabit, remake, and remain accountable to what lingers in the wake of destruction? There are few more timely questions. To formulate a response, Gordillo introduces rubble as a figure of thought no less than a specific complex of affectively charged detritus. He argues that constellations of rubble are ubiquitous and far from passive, whether they are encountered in the Chaco, Paris, Oklahoma, the Sahel, or Gaza. This underfooted debris is imbued with a peculiar and significant force. Through its very occlusion, such ruptured matter is constantly pushing and pulling at the raw edges of imperial formations, collective memory, and extractive frontiers. What is at stake in accounting for rubble is nothing less than the futures chartered by historical understanding. By charting such overlooked dynamics of materiality, space, and power, Gordillo rethinks the politics of ruination. In doing so, he also uncovers a startling topography within the present.
To navigate this topography, Gordillo develops an innovative critical lexicon. Like rubble itself, this lexicon accretes in layers. It begins by positing a fundamental distinction between rubble and ruins. As Gordillo notes, the category of “ruin” draws from a modernist genealogy wherein selecting certain forms for preservation serves to monumentalize the ideal orders of a purified past and to maintain the chartering fiction of its separation from the messiness of a precarious present. Rubble, in contrast, often defies categorization. It is at once act, condition, and effect. It is the mess against which such authorized ruins are objectified. Yet, the point is that rubble is not lacking its own definitive energies and typical forms. What is significant about such forms is how their negatively charged multiplicity confounds expectations about formal consistency and the analytics these presume. Rather, rubble instantiates and renews the contradictory afterlives of sedimentary violence. It is inextricable from the logics of disintegration. In this serious attention to rubble’s protracted effects and diffuse presences, the book crafts an ethnographic response to Ann Stoler’s (2008, 2013) call for deeper attention to “imperial tangibilities” and the slowly unfolding consequences of the “cumulative debris which is so often less available to scrutiny” (p. 5, 7).
The relationship between scrutiny and the potent banality of rubble is a driving theme of the book. Through careful ethnographic excavation, Gordillo exposes traces of empire and industry where there appear to be none. At the same time, he foregrounds a delicate symbiosis between the creation and erasure of rubble, the promise of revelation and the way certain lives remain contingent upon surprisingly durable imperial schemes that linger subjacent to current sociopolitical orders. Through rubble, these seemingly defunct imperial designs may continue to reverberate within the naturalized present in ways that we are collectively urged to ignore. Gordillo takes direct aim at how these blind-spots actively structure the hierarchies of liberalism and their attendant bio-inequalities (see also Fassin, 2012; Wacquant, 2012). In doing so, the distribution of rubble becomes a key question for critique and justice. If most of us now dwell amidst one or many kinds of rubble, we are not equally affected by or held accountable to it. Rubble and its responsibilities are unevenly spread, vertically ranked, and impossible to pin down. One of the book’s most important revelations is that it shows how constellations of rubble and constellations of disregard are mutually constitutive.
Yet, this account of rubble also emphatically resists the nostalgic pathos of loss often associated with ruination. In fact, it outlines a distinct political project based on inverting the ways rubble is explicitly classed and silenced. If ruins articulate elite sensibilities, the book shows how rubble may resonate instead with certain subaltern responses to abandonment. Elite disregard for those exposed to political violence and imperial debris may generate subaltern affirmations of what this disregard ostensibly negates, namely, their humanity and lives. This all-too-often circumscribed affirmation, in turn, can take the form of a principled and widespread indifference to the fetish power of the monumental or the cordoned off. In the Chaco, what appears to some analysts and experts as ignorant collusion by peasants in their own self-degradation is actually a sophisticated critique of a biopolitical schema that allows some people to privilege the preservation of ruins over the maintenance of less valued people’s lives and livelihoods. Put another way, rubbled matter is a medium for the ways one material-affective register of disregard may shift into another and back again. One hallmark of this oscillative and nervous “politics of rubble” are growing tensions between the privileged few at the top of socioeconomic class hierarchies and those multitudes at the bottom assigned the trebled stigmas of race, place, and class. Charting rubble as noun and verb may provide clues to how such polarized regimes of perception may be challenged or overcome.
This means acknowledging that the force of rubble is often given new trajectories through struggles over its afterlives. These struggles are creative as well as destructive. Subaltern groups regularly requisition rubble as the material and means of unauthorized vital experiments, and Gordillo shows how requisitioned fields of rubble may mobilize unexpected projects of regeneration, or not. Readers catch glimpses of people making do amidst crumbling Jesuit shrines, piles of broken bones, half-remembered pilgrimage routes, raucous parties in the brush, rusting ships in dry riverbeds, and visitations by the ghosts of massacred Natives—all under the looming shadow of industrial soy and its ceaseless bulldozers. While rubble may radiate with the contradictory half-lives of empire, it also forms a key material reservoir against which subaltern peoples reflexively reify and remake themselves and their social worlds, no matter how precarious or tenuous these may appear. Rubbling, then, implies a closer alignment of violence and vitalism than has been identified in other processes of ruination or in philosophies of negativity, more generally. As Gordillo elegantly argues, rubble-as-vital-technique reveals why negation and immanence should not be considered in opposition to one another. Rather, they are often inextricably linked and causally related. This is especially acute for those ostensibly ruined peoples, like Gordillo’s impoverished criollo and “ex-primitive” interlocutors, who have little choice but to become through rupture and destruction. What kind of theory and what kind of politics can account for the unruly kinds of humanity that arise through decomposition, degradation, and dehumanizing violence which never gains the status of an event?
Rubble makes this question a central concern. Such entanglements of negation and immanence are an uneasy fit within most current scholarship on the posthuman or the Anthropocenic, and Gordillo opens an alternate set of conceptual possibilities. To be clear, this work on the politics of rubble and ruination offers a distinct approach to the active materialisms of the present. It complements and challenges the analytic frames often brought to bear on what Bennett (2009) calls “vibrant matters” by foregrounding the strange durabilities of empire, states, and markets. Taking rubbled materiality seriously means accounting for its rough critical edges as well as its evocative poetics. At the same time, this rubbling defies the horizons most commonly invoked by new materialist approaches to present conundrums: extinction, hybridity, and redemption. Indeed, such dynamics gain in rubble a texture and affect that may oppose those presumed by some influential analyses of human–nonhuman relations or multispecies intertwinements. Gordillo’s work, instead, invites further clarification about what precisely distinguishes varied approaches to so-called new materialisms and the posthuman across the humanities and social sciences. How, for instance, does rubble challenge or complement the ways that forests supposedly think in the Ecuadorian lowlands (Kohn, 2013), or that Amazonian multinaturalist ontologies are presumed to charter alter-modernities (Viveiros de Castro, 2004), or that the emergent ecologies of post-industrialism are said to propagate emancipatory hybridities and speculative prompts (Kirksey, 2015; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010)?
Perhaps one place to start is with the relationship of rubble and difference. Rubble’s occluded power emanates in part from how it subverts inside–outside binaries. That is, an analysis of rubble must resist the common (and ironic) trend to conflate exteriority and vital potential or interiorizability and its loss. To put it bluntly, the rubble of political violence simply cannot hold the allure of a constitutive outside and its promise of elitist escape. Instead, constellations of rubble exude a non-exteriorizable incipience that confounds some basic metanarratives of capitalist expansion and imperialist nostalgia, as well as their recent recapitulations in theoretical formulations of radical alterity. The Chaco, as this book amply shows, is a zone where alterity is never singular or pure. Rather, it comes in and out of focus because of the ways contradictory modes of negative immanence overlap and fuse. No stable outside is possible when an analysis of rubble suggests the figure of exteriority itself is delimited by remainders of Spanish conquest, an Indigenous “war machine,” nationalist genocide, Christian proselytization, mobile ethnicities, the pursuit of cosmological exteriority, cyclical expansions of extractive industry, wholesale ecological transformation, activist interventions, and cumulative toxic exposures. Rubble instantiates these oppositions. The affirmative negativity of rubble emerges from the strange synergies between the incoherent negativity of colonial violence manifest through oppositional schema for objectifying and governing subaltern life, and various subaltern projects of immanence premised on gaining mastery over this insoluble negativity by claiming, in various ways, the power of negation as a meaningful technique for fashioning selves and reproducing moral collectives. Far from undermining the real status of difference, the cartographic approach to rubble allows for a more expansive proximity to it and its stakes.
Ethnography is uniquely suited to this approximation, even while rubble is also a particularly challenging ethnographic field. Indeed, charting constellations of rubble effectively disintegrates the notion of a spatially bounded fieldsite or temporally confined analytic. To attend to these complexities of space and time, Gordillo turns to montage instead of portraiture, glimpsing rather than the gaze, fragmentary genealogies in place of linear patterns of descent. Such methodological techniques are well suited to fields that are defined primarily by their multiplicity, formlessness, and excess, and by embracing them, Gordillo’s account is able to open new terrain for theory and politics. The risk is that people and the immediacy of their existential dilemmas may get lost or minimized. Yet throughout the book, Gordillo works to avoid this pitfall and to subvert the conceit of an omniscient ethnographic apparatus. Instead, he demonstrates how the book’s substantive theoretical exposition is inspired in the first place by the critical insights and reflexive positionality of those who inhabit Chacoan rubble. Constantly returning to ethnographic details and moments of embodied realization as crucial philosophical prompts, this account builds a soaring conceptual apparatus from the perspectives of people whose positions are frequently mocked, dismissed, or erased, especially in scholarship on the Chaco. Instead, Gordillo takes subaltern reflections seriously and elevates them to the level of academic expertise. The result, to paraphrase Biehl (2013), is a kind of conceptual ethnography that is able to intervene in esoteric philosophical debates by invoking the ways that subaltern knowledge may always stand “in the way of theory” through the terms of its dismissal and denigration. Gordillo re-peoples theories of negativity and new materialism. In doing so, the book democratizes the terms of rubble and unsettles some common scholarly presumptions about ruin, decay, and preservation. This means it also comments on ethnography as a technique to redistribute theory and pose as a genre for unexpected affinities.
Today, these questions of destruction, disregard, and immanence are matters of urgent public concern no less than scholarly inquiry. If we do not already inhabit rubble of some kind, it is likely we all soon will. Yet all too often, scholars and citizens alike choose to ignore our collusion with imperial legacies rather than trying to take responsibility for their perplexing durabilities and lingering capacities for harm. Instead of retooling our personal rubble into the building blocks of anti-authoritarian collectives, we are increasingly reduced to the basest essences of race, gender, and class and then convinced that we cannot find common ground with others. Yet, in this moment of irrational expenditure, violent divisions, and unknowing inequality, hope for society lies in precisely the opposite direction. We need new idioms to help us locate kinship within exile, commonality within difference, and alliance within disregard. Today, rubble may be one of the few universals readily at hand. Our challenge is how to turn rubble into a material and means of radical solidarity. This book illuminates several places that such a project may begin.