Week 7 –consequences Michael Dale Testimonio `on the politics of truth by John Beverley Beverley essay contextualizes the “factual” criticism leveled against Rigoberta Mench ú by Stoll and others. The concluding paragraph sum up Beverley’s argument and characterizes Stoll process as casting Menchú as a “narrative informant”. “Grant[ing] a narrator such as Rigoberta Menchú only the possibility of being a witness but not the power to create his or her own narrative authority and negotiate its conditions of truth and representativity. This would amount to saying that the subaltern can of course speak, but only through us, though our instructionally sanctioned authority and pretended objectivity as journalist or social scientists, which gives us the power to decide what counts as relent and true in the narrators “raw material”’ (Beverly 92) In some ways David Stoll criticism is warranted, the book should not be approached as a western eyewitness account of events. But beyond such observations I Beverley clearly identifies the issue at hand. Stoll says the narrative presented by Menchú is not a “reliable” representation of the interest and beliefs of the people she claims to be speaking for. Beverly points out how this falsely assumes that western forms of objective anthropological representation are free from these same issues of power relations dictating objectivity. Reading though some commentary and self descriptions of Stoll helps contextualize the project he is undertaking. It seems that a big part of the project is deconstructing and tearing down “left” academia. Cited in Beverley’s text as well as in online discourse around Stoll, the passage that critiques the postmodern scholarship is telling because as Beverley points out this is also inline with Spivak in critiquing the privileging and alignment with a text such as I, Rigoberta Menchú. “….books like I Rigoberta Menchu will be exalted because they tell many academics what they want to hear. Such works provide rebels in far-off places, into whom careerists can project their fantasies of rebellion. The simplistic images of innocence, oppression, and defiance can be used to construct mythologies of purity for academic factions claiming moral authority on the grounds that they identify with the oppressed. But icons have their cost. What makes I, Rigoberta Menchu so attractive in universities is what makes it misleading about the struggle for survival in Guatemala. We think we are getting closer to understanding Guatemalan peasants when actually we are being borne away by the mystifications wrapped up in an iconic figure.” [Stoll, p. 247] In terms of art works or campaigns that challenged representational authority, there are many. The Zapatistas online presence global campaigns which established solidarity with their cause is one such example. It is appropriate that resistance moments shifted to global campaign to confront the corporate globalization campaigns and neoliberal policies being enacted. I was interested Taussig’s discussion of masking and unmasking as it related to the Zapatistas and their confrontation with the Mexican government. While Taussig praises the Zapatistats or Marcos for incorporating tribal myth into their language of resistance its is also interesting to note Taussig use of such nahual to enhance his discussion of masking. In terms of interesting media for these readings, I will point to two pieces. One piece damasks the US cool fascism imperialist aesthetic and the other that damasks and then re-masks the Latin America revolutionary commercial fetish. My very loaded intro of US demasking: A transformation of assumed agency and authority. This Allgezera clip flips the gaze upside-down. US soldiers are now the scattered bodies for which no one is rushing to attend. It flattens monolithic expressions such as “we leave no man behind” and de-glorifies the sacrifice in the way that unworthy opponents are objectified in US embed footage. [al_jazeera_pow.avi] you may need VLC to play this file As Tassig says: “the state is always masked” and the state has always appropriated the powers of the nahual, and sorcery, too, attempting to therewith to control transformation and appropriate becomings…”( pg 248) The power or masking of the state is central to its mental space hegemony. This music video by chemical brothers is very interpretation rich. It features a repressive state aesthetic along side a feminized and counter product revolution, which manifest in a female form attacking the oppressive state by objectifying her body and then throwing a branded soda can filled with explosives at the representatives of the oppressive state. Here the video is “demasked” and we find we are simply watching a commercial for the cola that has appropriated the revolutionary ora. The video finishes with the framing of that revolutionary image in a Television being destroyed by a masked individual followed by more authentic looking documentary footage which is also staged but remasks the revolutionaries, at least in the context of the music video. |
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