‘The Space of Appearance’
Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere1
“We are all Ayotzinapa”
– protest banner, November 2014
On 26 September, 2014, a group of students from a rural teacher-training school in Aytozinapa, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was attacked by local and federal police while en route to the neighboring town of Iguala to protest state discrimination in educational resources. Several students were killed outright, and the police rounded up 43 others at gunpoint, handing them over to a local drug cartel who purportedly assassinated them and burned their bodies.2 Although just one incident among many in the rampant violence unleashed in recent years by Mexico’s drug wars, for vast swaths of the Mexican citizenry the disappearances have proven to be the final straw that broke the camel’s back.3 Continued state refusal to accept responsibility regarding the Ayotzinapa tragedy, along with government failure to implement effective rule of law, has sparked massive popular demonstrations condemning the Mexican state’s rampant corruption and impunity, unchecked drug war carnage, and skyrocketing levels of social inequality.4 In the months following the 26 September, hundreds of thousands of protestors, organized through social media sites such as #Ayotzinapa, #FueraPeña [#OustPeña] and #YaMeCansé [#I’mFedUp], have repeatedly taken to the streets across the country and the world to demand justice and adherence to rule of law in Mexico. Led by university students and the families of the Ayotzinapa disappeared, protesters have deployed a “synergetic relationship” between their canny use of digital media and their collective bodily presence in the streets and plazas of Mexico that exploits a model of the public sphere anchored simultaneously in the territorial spaces of the nation and in the virtual spaces of global information technologies (Fuentes 2015, 26; Castells 2008, 90).5
In response, President Enrique Peña Nieto has characterized the protesters as an ‘organized plot’ to ‘generate instability, social disorder and above all attacks against the national project’ of his government, and protests have met with harsh police repression (cited in Rodríguez García 2014). This reckless reversion to the increasingly outmoded tactics of media control, brute repression and continued impunity for state crimes remains blind to the massive crisis of legitimacy now afflicting not simply Peña Nieto’s government but the whole of Mexico’s political class.6
With regard to the politicization of public venues for debate in Mexico, two things are striking about this action: first, we have a set of manoeuvres around the idea of ‘sabotage’ ranging from the government’s (false) claim that the agitators were ‘anarchist’ thugs obstructing a legitimate political process, to, on the other end of the scale, the students’ rejection of that assertion via another act of sabotage – the combined use of social media and public protest to rupture the state’s hegemonic control of information and public space. The protesters effectively co-opted the definition of sabotage, turning it from the state’s characterization of it as an unlawful threat against public order and the established political system, to one of legitimate subversion of an authoritarian and exclusionary regime. Sabotage can therefore be a starting point for confronting entrenched power, especially as it turns around contestations over the nation as a space of public order, versus the nation as a space of free expression and inclusionary citizenship.7 But we also see an immediate recognition that, in order for such acts of rupture to be politically effective, they must be affiliated with a further act of collective mobilization.8 This, I think, is a crucial point to be made about sabotage. And what I will be tracing here is how – and to what degree – aesthetics can catalyze that move from a politics of rupture to a politics of collectivity mobilized in the service of an operational public sphere.
Thus the second thing to point out regarding the Ayotzinapa protests is the nature of those collective mobilizations. We have congregations of people coming together to claim the streets and plazas of the city as public space, as arenas in which to congregate and speak freely, apart from and against hegemonic control of those material spaces. But while it is tempting to say that the Ayotzinapa demonstrations made their claim in public spaces such as the Zócalo (the historical seat of public, religious and political power in Mexico City), that explication assumes that public space is already a given, is already designated as public. As Judith Butler has argued, however, ‘We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed, and even fought over, when these crowds gather’:
Though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square, and have often enough gathered in squares […] whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. (2012, 117)
My interest, therefore, is to explore how performative aesthetics might underwrite a politics of collectivity that insists on the interaction between the collective performative claim to public space and the materiality of that space in the service of building an inclusive participatory politics. I will look specifically at one space, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Tlatelolco neighbourhood of Mexico City, as a space that has formed – and been formed by – a long series of performative disputes over its public character. I traverse the history of those conflicts from the 1968 student movement, through the aftermath of its infamous repression by the state in what is known as the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, up to the current Ayotzinapa actions. I examine one response in particular – artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s performance-installation project, Voz Alta, commissioned in 2008 on the fortieth anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre – for what it can tell us about the intersections between performative aesthetics, contemporary civil collectivities such as the Ayotzinapa movement and how they might be politically activated in the public realm (see Figures 51–53).9
My analysis moves along two principal axes: first is Hannah Arendt’s theory of political action as necessitating what she calls the ‘space of appearance’ (1958, 199). This well-known model posits the collective interaction of bodies as that which defines the space of political citizenship. For Arendt, therefore, it is not material location that brings about political alliances but the reverse: political association between individuals engenders its own locality. This is a powerful argument about collective action creating its own, self-determined space of political operation and effect. Yet as Judith Butler has noted, Arendt’s view ignores the way in which such actions are always materially supported, are always fundamentally intertwined with the materiality of the space in which they physically occur (2012, 117).
Whereas Arendt disregards the material setting of politics, post-colonial writer-activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o explicitly focuses on it in his model of public space as the physical site of contestation between state and non-state collectivities. It is the ‘definition, delimitation, and regulation’ of public space, he argues, that is a principle ‘arena of struggle’ between the state and civil society (Ngugi 1997, 12). Thus my second axis relies on Ngugi’s model of performative determinations of public space to examine how the very ‘publicness’ of that material location is contested when people congregate. Voz Alta, it seems to me, brings together Ngugi’s attention to the materiality of public space with Arendt’s model of the ‘space of appearance’ to redefine the nature of the political. In so doing, it opens profound questions regarding: the nature of collectivity (for instance, the relationship between public and private, or the role of memory); how collective actions create the space of politics; and the material effects of space and architecture on how those collective political identities are continually constructed and reconstructed. This opens further queries about how to translate collective civil society to the public sphere, how the social conditions of memory are linked to generating political communities, and how the enactment in public space of those political communities creates in turn the potential for transforming civil identities.
The Ayotzinapa protests have regularly been compared to Mexico’s 1968 student movement which, as many have argued, marked an irreversible turning point in the political climate of the country (Talavera 2014).10 Like their 1968 counterparts, student-led groups such as #Ayotzinapa, #YaMeCansé and #AyotzinapaSomosTodos [#WeAreAllAyotzinapa] have mounted a powerful anti-systemic call for a renewed politics from below, to counteract the long-standing autocratic cronyism and corruption of the nation’s political leadership. The Ayotzinapa protesters have done this by conceptually unhinging the idea of the “state,” a political system, from that of the “nation,” a collective socio-cultural entity. Whereas Peña Nieto’s government has insisted on equating “state” with “nation” (a long-standing habit in Mexican political life), thus positioning the Ayotzinapa demonstrators as a threat to the latter, the protesters have been able to seize the concept of “nation,” reformulating it not around issues of public order, but around the rights of citizenship and justice: “Por el Rescate de la Nación” [“For the Rescue of the Nation”] read one huge banner; another read: “México no está de luto. ¡¡México está encabronado!!” [“Mexico isn’t in mourning. Mexico is enraged!!]. In this definition, it is not the dissidents but the corruption-riddled, authoritarian state, which is the threat to the nation.11 “Fue el estado!!” [“It was the state!!” i.e. a state crime against the Mexican citizenry] has become the protesters’ battle cry.12 Yet while the Ayotzinapa protest marchers have been able to out-manoeuvre the state’s attempts at drastic repression, their 1968 predecessors experienced violent government attacks ending in tragedy.13
On 2 October, just ten days before the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a large student demonstration had gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to demand a democratization of Mexico’s political system that would match the country’s rapid industrialization under the so-called ‘Mexican Miracle’.14 On orders from Interior Minister Luis Echeverría and President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, government troops opened fire on the rally, killing several hundred people and wounding many more.15 The government instituted an immediate information blackout, and mobilized its corporatized support networks to reassert very effective control over the public sphere, characterizing the student movement as a treasonous act of sabotage against the nation (see Figures 54–55). This act of state terrorism marked an abrupt end to the 1968 movement’s powerful challenge to the political order imposed by the Mexican state, and initiated a level of political polarization not seen since the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Under the subsequent guerra sucia [dirty war] imposed by the state, hundreds ‘disappeared’ or were forced into clandestinity and exile.
In the aftermath of 1968, the combined use of repressive and ideological state apparatuses proved remarkably effective in the state’s reassertion of control over the public sphere. Despite state pledges to prosecute those responsible for the massacre, no convictions have ever been handed down.16 But the state’s open use of brute force in 1968 plunged what has famously been called ‘the perfect dictatorship’ into a crisis of legitimacy that even the election in the year 2000 of the first non-PRI president in more than seven decades could not overcome.17 More than any other event in the twentieth century, the Tlatelolco massacre ruptured the state’s claim to be the self-declared heir to the Mexican Revolution’s promise of social justice and political inclusion, to represent the nation’s citizenry. Since 1968, the Tlatelolco killings have festered as an unhealed trauma in Mexico’s public psyche.18 But they have also prompted numerous responses from civil society aimed at consolidating an operative democratic public sphere, including the Ayotzinapa demonstrations and Voz Alta. It was through the latter that the artist Lozano-Hemmer sought to bring together these public assertions into a concentrated articulation that could set in motion a further democratic expansion of Mexico’s public sphere.
A simple proposal: for several hours over the course of ten nights in 2008, to transform the uncensored voice of the public into powerful light beams that would shine across the vast metropolis of Mexico City (see Figures 51–53). Installed in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site of the Tlatelolco massacre, Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive light-sound project invited anyone to speak into a microphone on any topic, completely free of monitoring or censorship. The voices of participants stimulated a searchlight which flashed in response to their frequency and volume, beaming those illuminated voice patterns to the top of the former Ministry of Foreign affairs building (now Centro Cultural Tlatelolco). Further anti-aircraft searchlights relayed the flashing light beams to three other significant public locations, vastly increasing the project’s visibility to the scale of the entire city: the Zócalo, the traditional political and social heart of the city and nation, the Basilica of the Guadalupe Virgin, patron saint of Mexico, and the Monument to the Revolution, commemorating the violent upheaval that launched the nation into twentieth-century modernity. The light flashes were then retransformed into sound, transmitted live by radio waves to a listening public via the National University’s radio station. In the pauses between live presentations were transmitted archival recordings of 1968 music, as well as archival testimonials from 1968 survivors, intellectuals and public figures. Thousands from all ranks of society participated, commenting on everything from their memories of the massacre, to calls for political action in the name of freedom and democracy, to poetry and sound art, to marriage proposals. Many called for the prosecution of those responsible for the massacre; many also spoke on the relationship between everyday life and politics. Others pointed to the long-term and consistent state censorship and repression, and to the collusion between the news media and the government in controlling access to information.19
Voz Alta’s use of Tlatelolco’s plaza as the site of an unscripted performative appropriation of public space – a locale deeply imbued with centuries of historical memory from the pre-conquest and colonial periods to the present – conjures up Arendt and Ngugi regarding the relationship between the public sphere, collective political action and performative aesthetics.20 By defining political action as occurring in the space between bodies, Arendt articulates the political as fluid and contingent rather than regimented and policed. Political power necessitates not only entering into a space of appearance, she argues, but actively actualizing that space through action and speech: ‘The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action’, she writes, but the power of those politicized spaces ‘exist only in its actualization’, disappearing once that activity subsides (Arendt 1958, 199–200). It is for this reason that Arendt leans to the side of performance over specific material locality as that which produces politics: ‘action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere and anytime’ (1958, 198).
Political subjectivities are thus the result of social action, yet the effects of material space on that action are discounted in Arendt’s model. By contrast, Voz Alta was staged as a direct and profound engagement with the physical fabric of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, mobilizing that substantive space for its ability to disgorge a set of memories that had been forced out of the public realm by state repression in the aftermath of 1968; in the process, these private memories were reinstantiated in the collective popular memory in newly politicized form. Participants’ repeated focus in Voz Alta on the nexus of art, politics, public space and the state therefore also recalls Ngugi’s arguments regarding the artist and the state as rivals over public space. Analysing Plato’s characterization of the agora, Ngugi invokes this conflict in terms of stagings of power: ‘the war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance in the arts and the performance of power by the state – in short, enactments of power’ (1997, 12). Central to the idea of performance understood in these terms are issues of time, content and especially place. Struggles over the control of access to spaces of performance, argues Ngugi, must be seen in relationship to time – what precedes (i.e. history) and what could potentially follow (i.e. the future). ‘What memories does the space carry?’, he asks, ‘and what longings might it generate?’ (1997, 13). Crucially, whoever controls spatialized memory also controls how political and social discourses are framed in the present and how those discourses shape a collective future.
Voz Alta clearly sought to reappropriate Tlatelolco, turning it from a site whose history had been carefully managed by a single voice of authoritative power – the Mexican state – into a public space whose history was the result of a multitude of citizen voices.21 Against the state’s production of Tlatelolco as a space of spectacle and truncated historical memory aimed at bolstering its own power, Lozano-Hemmer’s sound-light piece provided an expanding sensorial forum specifically aimed at bridging temporally and spatially between disparate private thoughts and a collective public discourse that would activate historical memory in the present in all its complexity. As person after person spoke into the microphone, individual soliloquies interwove with each other to produce an ever-thickening web of collective testimonial – a collective witnessing in the public sphere that shattered hegemonic state narratives blaming others – the students, ‘communists’, foreign terrorists, rogue political elements – for the Tlatelolco massacre. Individual memories lost their isolated, idiosyncratic character, to become nodal points for drawing the past into the present and for marking experiential connections across previously segregated arenas of civil society. Historical memory became a collective affair, such that even children could testify as community witnesses to events long past.
Voz Alta’s performative address to the question of spatialized memory grew out of both the history of 1968 and its effects on cultural production. The Mexican state’s violent repression of the 1968 democratic movement prompted a sudden and total redefinition of the relationship between culture and the hegemonic political order, turning cultural production sharply from being primarily a state monopoly aimed at institutionalizing official ideologies, to being a form of resistance.23 This returns us to our model of sabotage as a legitimate confrontation with entrenched power over definitions of the nation. As Cuauhtémoc Medina has argued, the state’s attack against the intellectual and middle classes – classes that had previously remained relatively immune to its systematic repression of peasants, indigenous peoples and workers – induced a wide range of aesthetic productions aimed at turning ‘the violent imposition of power [into] a cultural defeat’ for the government (2009). Aesthetics became the means of sabotaging the state’s ‘propaganda machine’ that equated state with nation, and public order with public citizenship (Medina 2009). Post-’68 responses, from intellectuals such as Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis and José Revueltas, to renegade exhibition practices such as the Salón Independiente, to oppositional artistic actions by collectives such as Fotógrafos Independientes and the Grupos movement, managed to wrest the idea of culture away from restrictive official notions of citizenship and to begin the arduous process of separating the cultural concept of ‘nation’ from the political concept of ‘state’, even as they largely could not do so on any other terms except the extremely local and marginalized.24 Artworks such as Victor Muñoz’s 1973 installation, 2 de octubre, contravened Mexico’s long-standing tradition of figurative political art, to evoke the aftermath of the 1968 massacre.25 Using black cloth curtains and screens, Muñoz fabricated an enclosed, darkened space within the state-sponsored Galería José María Velasco. Upon entering the space through a rip in the cloth, the viewer encountered a white floor completely encrusted with cast-off personal artefacts, reimagining the detritus left by the panic-stricken Tlatelolco crowds through a conceptual paradigm that dismantled Mexico’s conventional categories of both sculpture and political art. The shock of this aesthetic confrontation forcibly ruptured the veneer of social inclusion proffered by the urbane institutional spaces of the gallery – a rupture that Muñoz carried over to a subsequent installation in the hallowed icon of Mexican high culture, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Both installations, linking Mexico’s guerra sucia to other Latin American incidents of state terrorism, registered a violent attack on important symbolic spaces of national identity controlled by the state, and a breach of the state’s production of a nationalist discourse that for decades had positioned the state as the ‘caretaker’ of Mexico’s citizens.
But the task facing non-official culture after 1968 was not simply the sabotage of state discourse. It was also that of constructing a national subjectivity along non-hegemonic lines, a citizen-subject outside and against an entrenched state rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism. After 1968, to be an intellectual or cultural producer meant recognizing culture as a category of resistance, even as Echeverría, during his presidency (1970–76), sought to woo leftist intellectuals back into the fold of state patronage; it had become ethically inconceivable to endorse the state while engaging in artistic production (Medina 2009).26 Yet while literature, graphics and photography were able productively to grapple with the crisis in the hegemonic cultural order, for the visual arts more generally this proved to be a very difficult, slow and often very negative process (Medina 2009).27 In the immediate aftermath of the killings, the state instantly and effectively moved to incorporate the massacre into its own national historical teleology, presenting it as a ‘communist’ or ‘terrorist plot’ against the nation, and repressing all other versions (see Figure 55).28 Precisely because of the repressive bases of that national teleology, implemented through a long history of state cooptation of the visual arts, it proved impossible for contemporary artists to rely on those discourses or institutions that had once given the visual arts their representative authority. In rejecting that teleology, contemporary artists found that until the late 1990s alternative models of national subjectivity could not be articulated through official channels at the level of the nation.29 Although artists were occasionally able to insert works such as 2 de octubre into official institutions, their critical purchase was limited at the time by the lack of a developed basis from which to oppose the institutionalized rhetoric of cultural nationalism. Thus at this historical moment in the aftermath of 1968, ‘sabotage’ was the only way to move forward, but it could not yet be linked to the second stage of collective mobilizations around public space that is the necessary step for transforming the negative energies of rupture inherent in sabotage into the positive energies of a radically democratic citizenship. Nevertheless, it provided crucial historical grounding for future projects, such as Voz Alta and the Ayotzinapa protests, which would articulate a collective, non-hierarchical assertion over public space.
This long schism after 1968, between official culture and artistic production that placed itself in opposition to the state, forms the context out of which Lozano-Hemmer produced Voz Alta. Indeed, this divide has circled for decades around what Medina has called ‘a failure of monumentality’ (2009).30 Tlatelolco is full of failed monumentalities: its plaza is delineated by works of great ambition that have singularly failed to live up to their aspirations. On the one hand, Voz Alta stands in deliberate contrast to the square’s sole monument to the 1968 massacre: a stone slab erected in 1993 carrying the few names of those officially confirmed dead. Whereas Voz Alta mobilized sound, ephemeral luminosity and the active involvement of the spectator, the 1993 memorial clings to heavy sculptural anachronisms and a rigid separation of object and viewer (see Figure 56). An inert monolith reiterating the outmoded tenets of commemorative statues and plaques, it has proved unable to rejuvenate the plaza as a symbolic public space. A much more spectacular failure of monumentality, however, is that embodied architecturally in the Corbusier-inspired housing complexes of Tlatelolco designed by Mario Pani and built in the early 1960s as shining examples of the Mexican Miracle’s purported economic transformation of Mexico into a fully modernized nation. Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco urban development reads as an architectural icon to the Mexican regime’s ever more threadbare claim to being the official guardian of the Mexican Revolution’s promise of social justice and democratic integration into modernity. A deliberate mix of massive functionalist modernism and architectonic references to the monumental imperial architecture of the Aztec, it spectacularized the glories of Mexico’s past as part of a nationalist mythology used to underwrite the state’s own grasp on political culture.31 As sociologist Roger Bartra has argued, ‘government bureaucracy gives the seal of approval to artistic and literary creation, so as to restructure [that creation] in accordance with established canons’ of national cultural identity (1993, 32 and 102). Generated principally from state mandates, cultural productions such as Pani’s thereby served ‘an enormously important function in regulating the [national] consensus on which the state is based’. This was sharply evident when, during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the military used the high-rise housing complexes that border three sides of the plaza to trap the students and carry out their wholesale killing (Figures 54–55). The sleek modernist buildings designed by Pani instantly dropped any semblance of being architecture for the masses to reveal their coercive role in authoritarian modernization.32
By contrast, Voz Alta presented a deliberately anti-monumental ‘architecture’ that countered the authoritarian spectacle of Pani’s complex with a deliberately impermanent play of light and sound generated by popular participation.33 Against Pani’s use of monumental architecture to underwrite a state-sponsored social order aimed at channelling and neutralizing popular power, Voz Alta offered an egalitarian model of civic association structured through unscripted collective engagement in public space that articulated the conditions of contemporary civic engagement in the public sphere without monumentalizing them. Light and sound formed a principle measure and structure of that engagement, displacing the tectonic solidity of Pani’s architecture of containment in favour of a spatial demarcation that turned spectacle into ephemeral critique. Voz Alta revealed the surreptitious investment in the semiotics of state-sponsored nationalist spectacle upon which the value of the Tlatelolco housing project was based. It undid, if only momentarily, the authoritarian nature of that state nationalism through postulating a reversal of the state’s conception of Mexico’s civic masses as passive receivers of the state’s wisdom.
Luminosity translated from sound and beamed across the city’s sky became the means through which citizens activated their participation in social space. Lozano-Hemmer, in speaking about his consistent use of light, has invoked scientific models, particularly contemporary quantum physics, that have a ‘flexible understanding of the phenomenon of light’ in which ‘observation is complicit with what is observed’. He correlates this with Duchamp’s maxim, ‘le regard fait le tableau’ [the look makes the picture], to posit an explicitly interactive art that foregrounds the ‘performative role of the observer’ (Lozano-Hemmer cited in Lovink 2002, 305).34 This sets his work in sharp contrast to precedents such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, who focuses purely on deconstructing the authoritative power narratives of specific monuments and buildings, or to the ‘cathartic intimidation’ of coercive political spectacle embodied in Albert Speer’s Nuremberg ‘cathedral of light’, even as Lozano-Hemmer uses similar technologies such as powerful anti-aircraft searchlights. Rather, argues Lozano-Hemmer, ‘personal interactivity [transforms] intimidation into “intimacy”: the possibility for people to constitute new relationships with the urban landscape and therefore to reestablish a context for a building’s social performance’ (cited in Lovink 2002, 306). Spaces of social control historically engineered through the aestheticization of scientific technological regimes are inverted in Voz Alta: opened outward versus closed-in; fragile, ephemeral pulses of light and sound versus monumental concrete, glass and steel; performative versus static; anti-hierarchical, inclusive and collective versus coercive models of mass society.
The choice to situate Voz Alta in Tlatelolco while simultaneously transforming that situatedness into waves of light and sound that transcendentally enveloped the whole of Mexico City, positions the work within what Lozano-Hemmer calls his ‘relational architecture’ series. In contrast to Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ (2002), however, which focuses principally on interpersonal relations, Lozano-Hemmer underscores the effects of place on interpersonal interactions – and vice versa – arguing that his works serve as ‘platforms for participation where the relationship to the political history of the site is as important as the microrelational event between two people who meet in the space’ (Lozano-Hemmer, with Boucher and Harrop 2012, 150).35 Voz Alta thus links the material transformation of physical space to the political transformation of social space. ‘In relational architecture’, Lozano-Hemmer continues, ‘buildings are activated so that the input of the people in the street can provide narrative implications apart from those envisioned by the architects, developers, or dwellers’ (150). In the case of Voz Alta, this ‘technological actualization of buildings with alien memory’ positioned it in unmistakable opposition to Pani’s architecture, to generate public engagements that differed dramatically from the encounters traditionally authorized within the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Lovink 2002, 306). Recalling such utopian aesthetic gestures as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) or Gustav Klucis’s Radio-Announcer (1922), Voz Alta nevertheless separates those gestures from the propaganda apparatus of the centralized state, precisely in order to reassert the collective access to technologies of mass communication so fundamental to democracy (Medina 2008). Medina has called Voz Alta the ‘belated realization of a constructivist utopia: the transference of the publicity apparatus to the citizen, and the production of an industrial-age agora’ (2008).
Medina’s comparison of Voz Alta to the utopian production of the Russian constructivists brings us back to the issue with which I began this essay and with which I want to conclude: that is, the relationship between aesthetic sabotage and the building of an emancipatory collective public sphere. If we think of sabotage as a high-volatility term for ideology critique, and of emancipatory collectivity as a utopian enterprise aimed at producing new, egalitarian forms of subjectivity, then what we have in their relationship is in many ways a reformulation of the twin trajectories of the historical avant-garde. The question faced by the avant-garde then remains urgent now: how do we relate the attack model of ideology critique performed by many artworks to the utopian program of a radically democratic politics? What is the relationship between the intent to incapacitate, destroy, disrupt – in a word ‘sabotage’ – existing structures of hegemonic power, and the effort to imagine and implement new, non-hierarchical forms of sociality? Too often, the ‘sabotage’ side of this equation is uncritically presumed to lead directly and transparently to the emancipatory politics side. The mechanisms through which the critical purchase of the former might be supported, nurtured and translated into the latter, the way in which those critical gestures might open paths that can effectively generate an operative public sphere out of civil society, are too often left uncharted by both artists and critics.
Let us return to Ngugi and Arendt once more to think through this problem. Both take issue with the classic model of the polis that defines the space of political appearance through exclusion. Those excluded – slaves, women, foreigners – exist by definition outside the given structures of the political. Arendt and Ngugi, by contrast, propose models in which the right to politics is not contingent on political institutions for its legitimacy.38 ‘The polis’, writes Arendt, ‘is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’ (1958, 198). The space of the political emerges wherever people come together in ‘speech and action’, and as such does not depend on the authority of the state but in fact precedes it. ‘The space of appearance’, argues Arendt, ‘predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (1958, 199). Yet lacking here is a theory of how such actions depend on the prior existence of specific spaces and material infrastructure: the street and public square (or, if virtual, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and, importantly, how those material spaces are transformed in turn through action. For Ngugi, however, city streets and plazas are not simply the physical props for political action; rather, they are foundational to any proposal for public mobilization that might be advanced. Regulating public space is, for Ngugi, fundamentally a question of power, and he cites Plato’s dialogue, The Laws, to make his point: ‘Do not suppose that we [the Athenian state] shall […] allow you [the tragic poet] to erect your stage in the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own’. Ngugi contends that rival ‘enactments of power’ struggle over the performance space of politics, over its character, demarcation and control; he points to the aesthetically determined, performative activation of language, and to the spatialization of historical memory, as key to this struggle over the nature of those material spaces of public discourse (Ngugi 1997, 12). The contest over definitions of the national polity and politicized space, therefore, depends intimately on the spatialization and materialities of those tactics of rupture used by those confronting entrenched power (1997, 13).39 All this is evident in Voz Alta, which specifically deployed the space of Tlatelolco – extended across Mexico City through light and sound – to bring disparate fields of social existence together. In particular, private spaces of experience and memory were brought into the plaza, reshaping the nature of that public space in the process. Voz Alta thus transformed what for decades had been a clandestine political memory, and more recently the open subject of journalistic exposés and academic interpretations (but not of legal declarations of guilt), into a larger interrogation of the struggle between state and non-state actors over Mexico’s public sphere.
Yet unlike Arendt, Ngugi’s actors in the public sphere appear into the agora preformed, fully constituted, even as they transform that agora through their actions. That is, they appear free to shape that space, but are not themselves shaped by it. Ngugi tends to ascribe established, fixed identities to the various protagonists in these state/non-state conflicts over public space – identities that position state and non-state actors as implacable ‘rivals in articulating the laws, moral or formal, that regulate life in society’ (Ngugi 1997, 11).40 In this characterization, Ngugi harks more to his well-known, fiercely combative, anti-elitist post-colonial analysis of politics and power than to Arendt’s insistence that politics is lodged, not in predetermined subjectivities, but in the flexible, shifting interactions between individuals.41 Voz Alta, by contrast, lodged the formation of political identities precisely in the fluid, contingent nature of interchanges between people in specific material surroundings, as these material interactions underpinned the development of new subjectivities. And while ‘implacable rivals’ sounds like an appropriate characterization of the 1968 clashes between state and students, Voz Alta approached the space of Tlateoloco’s plaza differently, refusing to posit the identities of protagonists as entrenched. The work also interrogated the larger issue of the private/public divide itself. This is the importance, for instance, of the marriage proposals made by a number of participants. Ostensibly they had nothing to do with revitalizing the memory of the Tlatelolco massacre, but they did effectively contradict (if only temporarily) hegemonic exclusions of the private and domestic from the public-political.42
In this way, by linking Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’ with Ngugi’s ‘enactments of power’, Voz Alta was also, perhaps even primarily, an investigation into how to translate civil society into what sociologist Craig Calhoun calls an ‘operative public sphere’ (1993, 278), how the social conditions of memory are linked to generating political communities, and how the enactment in the public sphere of those political communities creates in turn the potential for transforming civil identities. Lozano-Hemmer’s work assumed neither the existence of civil society groups with predetermined identities nor a direct equivalence between civil society and the public sphere. Rather, it tapped into latent potential communities, unlocking possibilities for those communities to articulate themselves in public space, transforming that space in turn. By opening the microphone to anyone and refusing to script who could speak on what topics, Voz Alta posited a non-hierarchical enactment of political community in the public sphere ‘not simply [as] a precondition’, of action in the public sphere, but also as a ‘product’ of that action (Calhoun 1993, 280). Political identities, in this model, are created out of the performative action between bodies and in relation to material environments that allowed Voz Alta to hypothesize systemic questions concerning the definition, formation, and correspondence between civil society and the public sphere, embodying the potential for civil groups to transform their own identities and conditions of existence (Calhoun 1993, 279). Therefore, on the one hand, Medina’s characterization of Voz Alta as a ‘belated’ transference of the publicity apparatus to the citizen is appropriate, in the sense of an engagement with the past through a long-awaited productive memorializing of the particular history of the Tlatelolco massacre. But on the other hand, Voz Alta was not simply a recuperative enactment of older utopian models of public intervention; it also overtly positioned itself precisely at the crux of current transformations in the notion of the public sphere both in Mexico and more generally, from a ‘public sphere anchored around the national institutions of territorially bounded societies to a public sphere constituted around the media system’ (Castells 2008, 90).43 As Manuel Castells has argued, this points us towards a new concept of the public sphere generated out of the fraught emergence of a global civil society in relation to profound changes in the nature of the nation-state prompted by our unprecedented planetary unification (2008). Voz Alta thus recognized the critical role of culture in providing an arena for the formation, deformation and reformation of civil society’s imaginaries vis-à-vis such new contexts, even as the arts often produce those imaginaries and subjectivities at a different pace than other types of intervention in the public sphere. Although Voz Alta did not in itself prompt radical changes in Mexico’s existing political structures, it nevertheless sharply framed the terms of the debate over public space and representational politics so as to provide groundwork for further endeavours such as the Ayotzinapa protests.
Actions such as Voz Alta thus not only ‘produce a space of appearance, they also seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relation between the public space […] and the existing regime’, writes Judith Butler (2012, 119). In this way, ‘the limits of the political are exposed, and the link between the theatre of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theatre is no longer unproblematically housed in public space, since public space now occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects’ (119–120).44 In this regard, all the performative interventions in Tlatelolco’s plaza, from the 1968 student demonstrations to Voz Alta and the Ayotzinapa movement, tapped into the energies of popular unrest in the face of government manipulation, providing those energies with a conduit to a generative presence in the public sphere. And as much as this process is about popular voices struggling against the state to enact a public political identity, so too is it about the changes the state must undergo. Like civil society, the state is neither monolithic nor conflict-free, despite all its efforts to present itself as such. Nor is its hegemony ever fully or irrevocably consolidated. Even as Peña Nieto’s regime signals a triumphantly resurgent PRI that shows every sign of reinstituting its form of ‘politics as usual’ with a vengeance, movements like the Ayotzinapa protests have opened new – if fragile – parameters for contemporary civic engagement in public space. Voz Alta, in plumbing such on-going dilemmas around social justice and political democratization, reveals the dialectical conditions of performative social engagement as an imperative for mounting a non-spectacularized citizen reclamation of public space.
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