visible

The Saturday photo, part XIV: Alcatraz with its various clearly visible overlapping inscriptions, from the strident disciplinary to the militant indigenous to (below, rather more subdued) the museal sanctification as National Park:

Alcatraz is definitely a ruin that bears the multiple traces of its repeated reinscriptions. Even what might otherwise have been a rather sober audio tour has to take note repeatedly of the way in which the rock and its prison have been figured by Hollywood. Much is made of the escape attempts, which threatened drama but ultimately failed to disturb the penitentiary regime. In the end, it was a combination of banal economics (the place was too expensive to run) and the slow 1960s move towards different philosophies of incarceration that did for the showpiece of America's disciplinary regime.

The prison's internal architecture does not follow the panopticon model: it has but a single cellblock, with the cells laid out in parallel thoroughfares rather than radiating from a central core. But the rock itself, in full view from the shores of the bay, offers a literally spectacular fable of the price of criminality. Much is made of the fact that prisoners could see the city, and occasionally hear (for instance) the sounds of New Year's festivities at the Yacht Club. But nothing was said about the effect that having a prison in such plain view must have had on the psychic life of San Francisco itself.

destruction

[From my prologue to Rodrigo Naranjo, Para desarmar la narrative maestra: Un ensayo sobre la Guerra del Pacífico.]

“Creative Destruction: Ruins, Narrative, and Commonality”

Marx and Engels long ago noted that capitalist productivity entails unceasing destruction and destitution. As they put it in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” (38). Destruction is not a mere by-product of capitalist development; it is its fundamental pre-requisite as the formal subsumption of labor, whereby older technologies are maintained even as they are assimilated into capitalist relations, is replaced by real subsumption, which demands the fundamental transformation of all aspects of the productive process. But as a result, capitalism is also truly revolutionary: it abruptly does away with the hierarchies and injustices of earlier social formations, if only to replace them with a regime that is even more insidiously unequal and unjust. Ruins of the past may persist: more or less mute reminders of what has gone before, but these too are often enough caught up in the revolutionary whirlwind. If capital can profit from the ruins it creates, it does so, turning them for instance into historical theme-parks, sites for leisure or aesthetic contemplation. Ruined places and peoples can be treated with a certain exoticizing sympathy, at the same time as they are held up as object (and objectified) lesson in what happens to those who do not adapt fast enough to changing times. In short, they can be resignified as part of a master narrative of progress. More often, however, capital moves swiftly on, brutally unsentimental about the devastation it leaves in its wake. Still, there is something strangely creative about the destruction wrought by capitalist modernity, a fact analyzed by theorists from Werner Sombart to Joseph Schumpeter.

Some have celebrated capital’s tendency to build on ruins, seeing it in Darwinian terms as an instance of the survival of the fittest. As Schumpeter argues, “the essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process” (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy 82). Others have been more ambivalent or even downright critical. Recently, Naomi Klein has revived the notion of creative destruction with her observations in The Shock Doctrine, but with a twist. For Klein, catastrophe is not so much endemic to capitalism as a necessary supplement for the particular hyper-capitalist ethos that goes by the name of neoliberalism. What she terms “disaster capitalism” arises in the twentieth century with the Pinochet dictatorship, only then to spread around the world. Klein argues that the successful implementation of neoliberal “reforms” depends upon a catastrophic “shock,” whether that be imposed from above (as in Chile) or whether it be an apparent “Act of God” (such as Hurricane Katrina) from which capital can opportunistically profit. In this version, it is not capitalism on its own that engineers the destruction upon which its creativity depends: some external force or sovereign violence intervenes to pave the way for economic restructuring, which is in turn devastating in its own way. But the shock comes first: the political has priority, and contemporary capitalism is rather more Leninist that its proponents would like to believe.

For Marx and Engels, the effects of capitalism’s creative destruction are epistemological as much as they are social, political, or economic. “All that is solid melts into air,” as they famously observe, “all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind” (38-39). Intrinsic or extrinsic to capitalist production, it is crisis that allows us to see the truth of bourgeois society--and perhaps the preconditions of any society--clearly for the first time. The continual catastrophes that mark modernity allow an opening to capital’s posthegemonic kernel: every trace of ideology is swept away. Indeed, all narratives are briefly disrupted and we are left with a glimpse of what Giorgio Agamben would call bare life. Not only therefore does creative destruction do away with the oppressive social structures of the past: for all the neoliberal dictum that in the face of disaster “there is no alternative” to free-market deregulation, it also suggests that capitalism may not be the only beneficiary of the very crises that it lives and breathes. Catastrophe offers a turning point. It provides space for the rearticulation of well-worn mantras, which may gain renewed purchase when our defenses have been downed. It may also subsequently provide a mythic origin for new narratives and new articulations, perhaps more sinister than hitherto. But further, crisis has the potential to allow something genuinely unheralded (if perhaps long felt) to emerge: in laying bare what Marx and Engels term man’s “relations with his kind,” it reveals what we have in common. However much it hits some more than others, the propensity to be touched by calamity is ultimately a condition that we have in common with others. Moreover, disaster tends to exert a brute levelling, to provoke shared affects and induce fellowship. So as Rebecca Solnit argues, “extraordinary communities” are built on the very ordinary experience of common practices and habits that emerge out of destruction.

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Mogadishu

The Saturday photo, part XIII: I've been browsing some of the photos of Mogadishu on Flickr. It is, of course, a quite spectacularly ruined city. But, as with (almost?) all ruins, not without its beauty. This is the old port:


Recently I ordered my own copy of Robert Ginsberg's strange book, The Aesthetics of Ruins. It's strange for many reason, and that strangeness is no doubt enhanced by the fact that it's apparently a self-published labor of love. But it is to my mind the most interesting book on ruins yet written.

blind

Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind started life as the catalogue for an exhibition curated at the Louvre, and it was certainly provocative for the philosopher to take blindness as his theme at this institution so devoted to the powers of sight. Indeed, Derrida includes within the text the moment in which he first came up with the idea for the show. It is of course a scene of writing, but also of blindness and (potential) accident as, driving home from his first meeting at the museum:

the theme of the exhibition hits me. All of a sudden, in an instant. I scribble at the wheel a provisional title for my own use, to organize my notes: L'ouvre où ne pas voir. (32-33)

This title translates as "The Open Where Not to See" but also plays on the homophony between "L'ouvre" and "Louvre": the Louvre as a place where one does not see. The most renowned temple to the visual arts as a place of blindness.

So Derrida wants to draw a (self-)portrait of Western representation in which blindness is a central concern or even enabling possibility. All drawing, indeed, he claims to be the representation of the blind by the blind. Among other things, this means that the draftsman is inevitably either looking at the object of representation (and so cannot see what he is drawing on the page) or is looking at the representation as he makes it come into being (and so cannot see what he is drawing in life). Drawing is therefore necessarily mediated by memory: no portrait is ever a picture of the thing itself, but rather of something that has always already been worked on by the mind and experience.

But this mediation is inevitably problematic, imperfect, and so in some sense ruined or ruining. As Derrida the driver scribbles blindly while he keeps his eyes on the road, or looks down at his pad and so is distracted from his driving, in either case he risks ruin or accident: a meaningless scrawl on the one hand, that fails to record the idea that had suddenly struck him; or the possibility of suddenly striking a pedestrian or another vehicle while trying to make sense of the exhibition to come.

Yet the ruin is not simply accident or potential disaster; it is fundamental to the project of (self-)representation: "In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is what happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze" (68).

Hence a necessary hesitation. At best, perhaps, at such times the multitasking driver, blind either to the road or to the representation of his or her own thoughts, may start to veer from side to side, or miss his or her turning. And blindness is after all associated with wandering or getting lost, just as wandering can in turn induce blindness both literal (snow blindness, for instance) and figurative.


And so it is also that Derrida's own text rather wanders through the historical tradition as he makes his way through the Louvre's immense archive. In what is imagined to be some kind of dialogue (with whom, it is never specified; perhaps some other, rather more skeptical self), Derrida roams between readings of specific works to general theories of drawing to speculations on the imagination of blindness from Homer or the Cyclops to St. Paul on the road to Damascus and on to the nineteenth-century realist self-portrait (but strangely, not very much further).

This is not an argument as such, more a tour d'horizon in which the horizon is very much closer than we may like, and is indeed more often an interior horizon than an exterior one: as Derrida notes, we are repeatedly reminded that physical, external sight must be extinguished for spiritual, internal vision to flourish. Along the way in this intimate journey there is plenty of insight, if much that is also naturally blurred and hard to make out.

Finally, then, Derrida ends not so much with a bang but a whimper, with the suggestion that eyes are less for seeing than for weeping, that "tears and not sight are the essence of the eye" (126), and that it is when our vision is clouded with tears, most ruined or ruinous, that we are closest to "the very truth of the eyes" (127).

Haiti

[This is the text of a talk I gave at Haiti benefit at the University of British Columbia last week.]

"Haiti in Ruins"

As the TV footage and images circulated in newspapers and on the Internet attest, Haiti is in ruins. In towns near the epicenter of last week's earthquake, up to 90% of the buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The capital, Port-au-Prince, has been devastated, and where homes, offices, hospitals, and schools (and so on) have not actually collapsed, they are very often now structurally unsound. It is relatively poor consolation to observe that this has been something of an equal-opportunities disaster. The national palace was reduced to a single storey, half the UN Mission's compound was destroyed, and victims have included senators and the country's Catholic archbishop. Still, as always, it is the poor who bear the brunt, and who face the greatest challenges in the earthquake's aftermath. Hundreds of thousands are sleeping and living outside, fearful that aftershocks will bring down what precariously remains. Meanwhile, rescuers and rapid-response teams from abroad are returning home; it is very unlikely that any more survivors will emerge from the rubble. The air is filled with the stench of corpses that are buried under the debris. Ruination and decay are everywhere; the living are forced to cohabit with the dead, in a physical and social landscape scarred by destruction and haunted by the reminders of recent catastrophe.


Haitians are used to living within ruins. This is a land that has known more than its share of death and destruction. In the sixteenth century, Hispaniola's indigenous inhabitants were decimated and ultimately wiped out by the disease, malnutrition, and violence unleashed by the arrival of Spanish imperialism. As the so-called "Pearl of the Antilles" the subsequent French colony of Saint Domingue was insatiable in its demand for slaves to work in the plantations that supplied sweet sugar for European tastes: over 800,000 Africans were imported from places such as the Ivory Coast, the Congo, and what is now Ghana, Nigeria, and even Mozambique from 1680 to 1776; more had continually to be transported because the rigors of the slave system meant that over half died within eight years of arrival in the colony. More recently, for a over quarter of a century, from 1957 to 1986, Haitians had to endure the dynastic dictatorship of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude or "Baby Doc," whose feared paramilitary militia, the so-called "Tonton Macoutes," anchored a reign of terror, brutality, and corruption. The name "Tonton Macoute" is borrowed from a folkloric bogeyman, a ghostly figure said to prowl the streets after dark looking to kidnap unwary children. It is no wonder that Haitian popular beliefs and religious practices (not least the African-inspired hybrid "voodoo" or vodou) are so concerned with the presence of death in life and life in death. It is easy to believe in zombies in Haiti, surrounded by the reminders of a violent past, a ruined present, and a precarious future.

Yet to view Haitian history in this light is all too often to imagine a land defined by its perpetual victimhood. Hence the constant references today to the commonplace that this is the poorest country in the hemisphere, and the appeal for compassion, to come to its citizens' aid. Yes, we should certainly do all we can to help Haiti, and now more than ever. But not out of some kind of sympathy towards the weak and helpless at the fringes or margins of Western modernity. If anything, our relations with Haiti need to be transformed by a recognition of the country's centrality and its people's capacity and agency. For the truth is that, if we are to talk of responsibility or debt, we owe Haiti much more than Haiti can ever owe us. The country's ruins are an indication of stubborn persistence and strength, as much as they also testify to the brutality and violence that the Haitians have had to suffer.

In February last year I traveled to Cap Haitien, the country's former capital, to see some of the most extraordinary structures in the Americas, found near the now small and rather sleepy town of Milot, where the northern plain meets the mountainous interior. The Palace of Sans Souci was once the residence of Henri Christophe, who ruled as Henri I, sovereign of the independent kingdom of Northern Haiti from 1811 to 1820. It was then and still remains (even in ruins, product in part of an 1842 earthquake) a remarkable construction: built in a hybrid style influenced by a variety of European architectural traditions, it had sculptures, immense gardens, and an innovative and complex system of waterworks that functioned as a form of air conditioning. Sans Souci bears comparison with any palace or mansion in Europe or elsewhere. But the true marvel is a few miles further along. This is the building that inspired the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier to conceive the concept of the "marvelous real" that has since (in the form of "magical realism") come to define Latin America as a whole: the immense Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortification in the Americas, which sits atop the 3,000 ft Bonnet a L’Eveque mountain that rises behind Milot to look out towards the Caribbean Sea. The Citadelle is Haiti's iconic ruin, a mainstay of national iconography and source of fascination not only for Carpentier but also for instance for the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire who would declare that Haiti was the fount of what he called négritude, which we might loosely translate as "black pride." For the Citadelle is a ruin that indicates not helplessness and victimhood, but freedom and self-reliance.

The central fact about Haiti, the reason that this is perhaps the most significant country in the Americas, even the key site for Western modernity as a whole, is not its history of disaster and suffering, but its tradition of resistance and self-affirmation. Haiti's protracted and violent revolution of 1791 to 1803 is the world's only successful slave revolt and, more importantly still, its first truly modern revolution. It was in Haiti that the principle of universal emancipation was proclaimed and won. For while the framers of the American Declaration of Independence were prepared to live, more or less uneasily, with the continued practice of slavery, and while the French defenders of the so-called rights of "man" were still debating as to whether blacks could or should count as either men or citizens, Haitian slaves took matters into their own hands and fought for the notion that freedom, if it meant anything, had to be freedom for all. Emancipation had to be universal, or it was not truly emancipation. It is for this idea, and the stubborn insistence on defending it at all costs, that we owe Haiti.

Henri Christophe's Citadelle Laferrière, then, is a reminder of the tenacity with which Haitians held on to their revolutionary achievement. Built, not without controversy (it was perhaps not the only or the best way to go about things) and at immense sacrificial labor (every stone, every cannon, every cannon ball had to be hauled up the mountain), the castle was to be the ultimate redoubt and defence should the French return once more to attempt to re-establish slavery. For Napoleon had indeed in 1801 already sent out an expedition in the charge of his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, determined to recapture what had been by far the richest of all of France's colonial possessions. It was then that Christophe had shown he was prepared to set Cap Haitien on fire (by way of example, he torched his own home first) rather than give the French any satisfaction or allow any return to the status quo ante. Sometimes, Christophe seemed to suggest, a ruin or two was the price one paid for a greater principle. So ruination does not always mean defeat: it can also invoke resistance (what is a ruin after all but what persists, despite everything?); it can be the positive product of a people taking history into their own hands, rather than simply the negative sign of yet another historic defeat.

None of this is to say that we should somehow perversely celebrate the latest ruins that litter Port-au-Prince and southern Haiti. Nor, far from it, that we should take Haitians' historic self-reliance as an excuse not to help out now in their time of need. Haiti has been forced to go it alone too often, for instance during the nineteenth century when the United States and European powers long refused to recognize its independence, and France eventually did so only at the price of a massive indemnity that crippled the country's economy with effects that continue into the present. Even worse have been the forms of intervention premised on either condescension or fear: the last thing that Haiti needs is yet another military occupation, and it is simply shocking how in recent days the situation of the masses in the devastated slums of Port-au-Prince has been framed as a security issue first and a humanitarian crisis only secondarily. To turn our backs on Haiti or to view it as a problem is to repeat the age-old ideology that can acknowledge only in distorted form the fact that Haiti poses a radical alternative within modernity: the novel but surely incontrovertible notion that a benefit for some should also be a benefit for all. Indeed, Haiti and its ruins teach us that if we refuse to share a benefit universally, without prejudice of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation (and so on), then it is not a benefit but a privilege whose raison d'être is exclusion. We should help Haitians now not because they need us, but because we need them.

finitude

The Wednesday quotation, part XIII: Jacques Derrida on ruination and love:

Ruin is not a negative thing. First, it is obviously not a thing. One could write [. . .] a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one's own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one's own ruin--which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? ("Force of Law," Acts of Religion [London: Routledge, 2002], 278)

Mike Johnduff quotes the same passage and has some interesting things to say about Derrida, ruins, and love (mainly riffing off Memoirs of the Blind) at Working Notes. The image above comes from Zingology. And there are some further thoughts about ruins at borrowed city, not least "Love Among the Ruin Porn" parts one (Highland Park) and two (the Heidelberg project).

environment

There is almost always something reticent about a ruin: a ruin is a retreat, a fading away. What was once foreground starts to melt into the background as the built environment cedes to the natural environment. Nature takes the place of culture as weeds start to push through cracked stones, wood rots away, or solid rock sinks into the sand. There may come a point at which it is hard to discern the ruin from the jungle or the desert. At some point the ruin may disappear altogether as it becomes one with its surroundings.

The disconcerting thing about Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO-designated site in southern Alberta, is that from the outset it was already fully part of its surroundings. Figure was already ground. For the ruin is simply a cliff (and a relatively slight one to boot) that briefly interrupts the long descent from the Rockies to the Great Plains. It was here that, for several millennia, native Americans enticed buffalo to their death, again precisely by blurring or dissimulating the distinction between human activity and natural environment.


Indeed, it is hard to locate the site of the Buffalo Jump itself. You have to be told or shown. Head-Smashed-In depends upon the pedagogical work of demonstration, explanation, and interpretation without which it would hardly even come to light. Or more precisely, Head-Smashed-In highlights the role of imagination in the construction of the ruin: it's no accident that archaeologist Jack Brink's book about the site is entitled Imagining Head-Smashed-In. As he puts it, "capturing people and events that disappeared from our world centuries ago requires a judicious helping of imagination." But never is this more true than with those "many ancient cultures that [. . .] managed to survive in demanding environments for extraordinary lengths of time without leaving towering monuments to themselves." Brink's task is "to show how simple lines of rocks stretching across the prairies are every bit as inspirational as rocks piled up in the shape of a pyramid" (xii). He has to sell us the idea that this is a ruin.

Hence at Head-Smashed-In it is the interpretive center that is the focus of the visit experience. Many ruins have some kind of signage or attached museum, but usually they can be appreciated well enough without resort to such ancillary explanation. Here, however, the interpretation overwhelms the ruin itself. The museum is built into the cliff alongside the Jump, and it is impossible to see the archaeological site from within its galleries. Though you can access a gallery from which to view the cliff-face at the top of the building, the majority of a visitor's time is necessarily spent in the enclosed space of the museum through which you have to pass twice, both on the way up and on the way down. And this interpretive center, while dedicated to explaining what is just outside, in fact looks in on itself and the multiple reconstructions of the site that it contains. For all intents and purposes, this museum could be any place whatever.

The reconstructions of the site within the museum include scale models, images, and video. Three full-size replica of buffalo at the top of a fiberglass cliff dominate much of the interior space. Staff direct you to a fifteen-minute filmed reconstruction of the indigenous buffalo hunt (made by a company called "Myth Merchant Films") in which computer-generated imagery aids a spectacle that aims at considerable realism. In helping us imagine the buffalo jump, the interpretive center leaves little to the imagination.


But whose imagination is at work here? The museum's problem is that it has to negotiate between multiple modes of interpretation: deductions based on archaeological evidence, readings of historical texts left by European travelers, and memories passed down through oral history among the First Nations. Often there is a tension between these different narrative strategies, and the museum tries to maintain a counterpoint between some fairly standard displays and, for instance, the text of indigenous legends that is projected upon those displays.

So in some ways the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is peculiarly detached from its ostensible object, both because it reproduces that object within a space that is literally to one side, and because the multiple interpretations that the object generates are allowed more or less free reign. The visit experience becomes all about the creative vagaries of imagination. And yet the notion that this is a physical site is also clearly of vital importance, in that it is to anchor these otherwise drifting narratives, to help us re-read the natural environment as shaped by cultural and historical processes. In the end both the scientific and the mythic narratives come together in the indigenist claim that native Americans have a particular relationship to the landscape, and indeed to the land itself.

Citadelle

The Saturday photo, part IX: the Citadelle Laferrière, Haiti.


OK, I know it's not actually Saturday, but I hope to say more about this in the next couple of days. I have, however, much to do in the meantime...

silencing

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "The Three Faces of Sans Souci" takes the Haitian ruins of Sans Souci as a case study for his investigation into historiography and the "silencing of the past." What's interesting is that he regards the ruins themselves as both complicit in this silencing and as a form of resistance against it.

Sans Souci refers, in the first instance, to the lavish palace built by Henry Christophe, self-styled post-revolutionary King of Haiti (or rather, the north of the country) in the early nineteenth century. In the second instance, it refers to another palace of the same name, built a few years earlier by Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great in Potsdam, near Berlin. Finally, Sans Souci was also the name of a now almost forgotten Haitian revolutionary who had, in fact, been put to death on Christophe's orders.

Trouillot's argument is that the Haitian palace is named for Christophe's former rival, in order both to establish and to extirpate his memory. On the one hand, "Henry killed Sans Souci twice: first, literally, during their last meeting; second, symbolically, by naming his most famous palace Sans Souci . . . [which] erased Sans Souci from Christophe's own past, and it erased him from his future." On the other hand, "Christophe may even have wanted to perpetuate the memory of his enemy as the most formidable one he defeated" (59). However, now that it is generally assumed that the source of the name was its German precursor, even that original silencing is itself silenced and the revolutionary Sans Souci effectively disappears from history. The final result is "an erasure more effective than the absence or failure of memory, whether faked or genuine" (60).


Yet Trouillot also suggests that acts of erasure such as Henry Christophe's are "silences of resistance, silences thrown against a superior silence," specifically here the silence "which Western historiography has produced around the revolution of Saint Domingue / Haiti." In this context the now "crumbling walls" of the former palace "still stand as a last defense against oblivion" (69). They recall at least one move in the internecine strategies played out among those who led the Haitian revolution, disrupting both the heroic narrative preferred by Haitians themselves, and also the broader attempt to portray the revolution as some kind of non-event.

Finally, Trouillot further argues that history is necessarily incomplete, and so warns against the hyper-empiricist fantasy that "an enlargement of the empirical base" will necessarily lead to "the production of a 'better' history." No: "Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing" (49). As such, history is always a collection of ruins; it is history itself that is, at root, ruined in advance.

skyscraper

I wonder if this will prove to be the neoliberal counterpart of Santiago's Ochagavía hospital: enduring testimony to a failed spatio-political project?

Vilcas

I mentioned this paper some time ago, but I realize that I never uploaded it. Here goes...


Having some time to spare in Vilcashuamán, Ayacucho, highland Peru, I climbed the pyramid that looms over the small town. Vilcashuamán (also known simply as Vilcas) was once a significant Inca cultural and administrative center, occupying a strategic location at the crossroads of the various trade routes that crisscrossed the Inca empire: it was the point at which the road from Cuzco to the Pacific met the Empire’s main North-South highway. Moreover, according to Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León’s reports of native accounts, the town was at the geographical midpoint of the Tawantisuyu, the Inca Empire: “for they state that it is the same distance from Quito to Vilcas as from Vilcas to Chile, the limits of their empire” (126). But Vilcas is now a town full of ruins--though one might also say that the place is a set of ruins that enclose a town, as it can be hard to say where the ruins end and the town starts, and vice versa. Houses and shops nestle up against or are perched upon Inca walls and stones, and are themselves made of this same recycled material. As a result, the site is, in Gasparini and Margolies’s words, in an “advanced state of destruction and deformation” (112). It remains, however, undeniably impressive, in part because here you are everywhere up against and on top of the ruins, like it or not. There is no measured distance between contemporary life and sacrosanct historical artifact: no ropes, no fences marking off the museal from the everyday. The ruins of Vilcashuamán are fully if sparsely inhabited; they show no signs of their exceptionality. In John Hemming’s words, conjuring up a scene of desolation, “Vilcashuamán is now a small village, remote on its hill-top, perched on the ruins of the great Inca city whose temples have been pillaged for building blocks, and surrounded by rolling, hilly country with few trees and little population” (Monuments of the Incas 187). History seems to have passed it by, to have set it free from whatever stories it once inspired. Certainly, when I had been taken to Vilcas for the day, with a group of anthropologists and aid workers, I had had no idea I would end up climbing a pyramid.


Indeed, these are in no way the most famous ruins in Peru, and are far from being the most visited, meriting at best a couple of lines in the guidebooks. Rather, that honor goes to Machu Picchu, now perhaps South America’s foremost tourist attraction, which attracts around 450,000 visitors a year, up to 2,000 a day. Machu Picchu stands synecdochically for Peru, and often enough for Latin America as a whole. Arguably, Machu Picchu is a more “modern” set of ruins, being “discovered” (better, invented) only in the early twentieth century, with Hiram Bingham’s Yale-sponsored expedition of 1911. Bingham was fêted for having discovered the “lost city of the Incas.” That claim, however, rings rather hollow when it is realized not only that it was a local tavern proprietor and landlord, Melchor Arteaga, who led him to the site “with the promise of a whole silver dollar,” but also that Bingham himself noted graffiti on the stones: “the name, ‘Lizarraga,’ and the year, ‘1902’” (Alfred Bingham 6, 13). Bingham gave this Lizarraga credit for the “discoveries” in his first book about the expedition, Inca Land; yet by the time of his later account, Lost City of the Incas, Lizarraga’s name disappears (Alfred Bingham 26). Meanwhile, Bingham’s opinion of indigenous knowledge can be inferred from his own comment that “readers of Inca Land will remember that Professor Harry W. Foote and I had often been obliged to add, when discussing reports of ‘noteworthy and important ruins’--‘but he may have been lying’” (Hiram Bingham 10). He observes that the local campesinos do not mark the ruins in any particular way: “Presumably, to him and his kind, Inca ruins of temples and palaces built by their remote kindred are not in themselves interesting but merely evidence that the latter found the land worth occupying and cultivating” (10). In this sense, Bingham’s achievement was to put Machu Picchu into discourse: to articulate its stones, to make them speak in the recognizably modern idiom of ruination.

This, then, is where Vilcashuamán is different. For the ruins of Vilcas have, without entering the narratives of international tourism, and despite not being excavated until the 1980s, a much longer history of being repeatedly articulated and rearticulated to competing stories about Peruvian modernity, from almost the very moment of Spanish conquest and so their initial fall into ruin. We might therefore say that Vilcas is more eloquent about Peru’s modernity than Machu Picchu, especially now that the latter has assumed the status of a brand, a signifier almost without content--like the Nike swoosh or McDonalds’ golden arches. Machu Picchu says “Peru,” or says “Latin America,” but says almost nothing about these places. By contrast, in the to and fro of the conflicting versions of what Vilcas’s ruins might be made to say, a whole series of narratives have been advanced about historicity and hegemony, modernity and, more to the point, the (still essentially modern) lament that Peru has failed to become modern. Mario Vargas Llosa notoriously opens his monumental novel Conversation in the Cathedral with the question “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” (3). We might not know when; but it would not be far-fetched to argue that Vilcashuamán is a contender for a precise place where Peru fucked itself up. It is a place marked by the series of interruptions that, for a writer such as Vargas Llosa, indicate the fuck-ups that have (he would claim) stalled progress towards modernity. Interruptions, symbolized or, better, materialized in the strewn stones of the former Inca edifices, that have served as fissures within which variously confident, wistful, and messianic narratives have sought firm footing, like weeds in the dirt. Yet these interruptions have also, in almost the same moment, brought these stories to their own ruination, their disarticulation.

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theatrics

Juan Carlos Torrico's rather strange film Asia, el culo del mundo is not, despite its title ("Asia, Asshole of the World"), some kind of Orientalist diatribe. Rather it's more of a Peruvian version of Paris, Texas. For it turns out that somewhere in the dusty desert about 100km south of Lima is a Godforsaken place that rejoices in the name of "Asia."

And it's in Asia that the movie's protagonists end up when their car breaks down in the midst of an ill-advised short cut. The motley retinue of maroons comprises: Manuel, a young ne'er-do-well who is fleeing south to escape some unspecified trouble in Lima that has left him with a bullet wound in his arm; his (step)father Fortunato, a retired soldier who still sees and describes the world through military terminology and outdated nationalist rhetoric; and Beatriz, a young woman along for the ride who has dreamed of a place called Asia where there might be ancient ruins and a staircase to heaven.

So Beatriz at least is content enough with the trio's plight, as she has found literally herself in the place of her dreams. She soon embarks on the construction of a giant geometrical design in the desert ground, something like a set of Nazca lines to attract passing deities. Fortunato falls in with the plan, happy to have some kind of mission. And Manuel perks up from his initial gloom and frustration as he's gradually attracted to the sole occupant of this desolate waste, a young woman by the name of Dora who has a penchant for transparent blouses and mudbaths in a nearby lake.

Trouble is brewing, however, as it turns out that Dora does not live here alone: her partner Santiago is due back at any moment, and Manuel recognizes from a discarded uniform that the master of the house must be a cop or an ex-cop. But it's worse than Manuel can imagine. For Santiago proves to be a somewhat crazed individual, prone to violent rages, loud harangues, cutting the tails off goats and covering himself in their blood. He's brought his beloved here to Asia in order to keep her safe from prying eyes or potential competitors. Alas, Manuel's intervention has therefore spoilt his vision of rural tranquility, and in recompense Santiago covers his torso with dark black mud, ties his rival to a tree in the middle of nowhere, starts inflicting on him something like a death from a thousand cuts, while all the time lecturing him on fatherhood and the perils of military service.

For in some strange way, this is actually a film about the Sendero war, and war in general. Santiago is in fact an ex-Sinchi, a member of one of the feared battalions who were on the front line of the war against the Maoist insurgency. However, he was accused (he tells Manuel) of violations of human rights, even though all he ever did was for the fatherland and against terrorism, and was left out to dry by the service. This (alongside, it should be added, various other misfortunes such as the loss of his father and the fact that he's unable to have children) is what seems to have turned his mind.

But in his crazed manner, Santiago is also a good sport. It's all part of the code of machismo that he's busy teaching his Limeñan adversary, whom he constantly calls "gringo." So not only does he untie Manuel, he also passes him his knife, daring him to use it. Which the young man duly does, and so that's the end of Santiago.

Meanwhile, no deities see fit to drop in on Beatriz's ancient-style landing strip, though right at the end Fortunato comes to believe that the group are under attack, orders a military reveille, and then falls down dead in mid-charge against his imaginary adversaries. He's then buried in the precincts of some nearby ruins. But the ending is happy in any case: we discover that the entire film has been narrated by Fortunato himself from his new position as sentinel guarding the gateway between life and death. And Manuel is left with two women to himself, one of whom he has managed successfully to impregnate.

It really would be hard to understate the strangeness of this movie, but its import is clear enough. Ravaged by war, Peru is now a desert in which only madmen and nostalgics thrive. The drive to recover ancient traditions may not bring back the powers of old, but it seems to be a step in the right direction towards accommodating oneself to life in this barren and deceptive outpost in the South. Whether we should really take heart in this message, I'm not so sure. Still less as to how much we should applaud this grandiose but ultimate failed attempt to lodge avant-garde theatrics within a national cinematic tradition whose forte has been either social realism or urban comedy. But oddly I find myself glad that they tried.

YouTube Link: brief cellphone footage from contemporary Asia, Peru. Mildly diverting for its final dialogue.

library

Main Library, originally uploaded by eyeye.

Soon to be reborn as a "learning center."

derealization

It was Marx's 188th birthday yesterday, as s0metim3s, carlos rojas, and Steven Shaviro, among others, note. I hope to write up something apropos before long.

But it is Freud's today. And old Sigismund would be 150 were he still alive, which is quite a milestone by anybody's standards.

Moreover, I have returned to thinking about ruins, one of Freud's many obsessions. Freud took a keen interest in archaeology, and his home in Hampstead was filled with a collection of over 2,000 curios that had been excavated from the Ancient World: no wonder the London Freud Museum should comment that, surrounded by his antiquities, Freud "worked in a museum of his own creation". (See also The Vienna Freud Museum.)

As the museum further indicates, these curios were prized for more than their aesthetic value alone. Freud believed they told something of the truth of pyschoanalysis and its theories of the unconscious:

One example of this is Freud's explanation to a patient that conscious material "wears away" while what is unconscious is relatively unchanging: "I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antique objects about my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation."

Freud often compared the unconscious to buried ruins, and the task of the analyst to that of the archaeologist, uncovering ever deeper strata for the prizes hidden in the depths, clues to the ways of life only dimly discerned from mere surface inspection.

But in a late essay, Freud turns this metaphor on its head. In "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," ruins stand for what is clearly in view, in front of the analyst's face. And the issue here is why what is so straightforwardly visible, uncompromisingly material, should be strangely denied or disavowed.

Written in 1936, "A Disturbance of Memory" is in fact a kind of birthday present, dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland "on the occasion of his seventieth birthday." And age, old age, is a constant theme. Freud notes that he himself is "ten years older" than Rolland, and that his "powers of production are at an end" (On Metapsychology 447). There is, therefore, from the outset a melancholy note sounded, a lament for times past and fading strength.

The essay's topic is a recollection from 1904 ("a generation ago" [447]) that has "kept on recurring to [his] mind." It concerns a trip Freud took with his brother, a holiday south to the Mediterranean, first to Trieste, with the intention of continuing on to Corfu. In Trieste, however, the brothers' plans changed. A business acquaintance advises against Corfu and strongly suggests that the two sail for Athens, instead. For some reason, this suggestion provokes in the two travellers "a discontented and irresolute state of mind" (448). Yet, almost unconsciously ("as though it were a matter of course") they book a passage for Athens, and soon enough set out to see the sights.

Freud's reaction to the ancient ruins of which he has heard so much is, he admits, decidedly curious:

When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: "So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!" To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. [. . .] The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression of delight or admiration. (449)

The ruins are an instance of what is incontrovertible, plainly in front of Freud's face, but whose reality for some reason some part of him chooses to doubt. What should be a source of affirmation ("delight or admiration") becomes instead the occasion for a deep scission within the self. And Freud goes on to describe this as "a 'feeling of derealization' ['Entfremdungsgefühl']" (453).

This derealization is itself, of course, another mode of denial, of repression. And Freud notes that it is the mirror image of the fantasy, or the "hallucinations," more readily associated with psychic disturbance, and indeed with Freudian theory. Where a fantasy conjures up the unreal, the delusion, its counterpart derealization conjures away what is plainly real. And if fantasies are always images of possession, of incorporation, "in the derealizations we are anxious to keep something out of us" (453); "they aim at keeping something away from the ego, at disavowing it" (454).

Interestingly, Freud takes as a prime example of derealization the famous "moor's last sigh," when the last ruler of Muslim Andalucía, Boabdil, reacted to news of the fall of Alhama:

He feels that this loss means the end of his rule. But he will not "let it be true," he determines to treat the news as non arrivé. The verse runs:

"Cartas le fueron venidas
que Alhama era ganada:
las cartas echó en el fuego,
y al mensajero matara"

["Letters had reached him telling that Alhama was taken. He threw the letter in the fire and killed the messenger."] (454-455)

But Freud observes that what is "truly paradoxical" about his own behaviour on the Acropolis is that, far from denying or repressing a trauma or displeasure, his defence mechanism serves to ward off "something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high degree of pleasure." At last, a dream attained: why deny it, as though it were "too good to be true" (450)?

And Freud's explanation takes recourse in the concept of the super ego. Rather than warding off an external threat, derealization is symptom of an internal frustration, which "commands [the sufferer] to cling to the external one"; and the internal frustration itself is "a residue of the punitive agency of our childhood" (451).

So back further in time Freud goes: beyond the scene of writing as an eighty year old in 1936; beyond his recollections of a trip undertaken at the age of forty-eight, in 1904; back to his childhood, to his schooldays in the 1860s, and back (but of course) to the familial scene, to the figure he refers to, refracted through an anecdote in which he compares himself to Napoleon, in the strangely distanced, formal and foreign, turn of phrase "Monsieur nôtre Père" (456).

It is not, then--and this at last is the "disturbance of memory" signalled in the essay's title--that at school the young Freud had doubted the Acropolis's existence. Rather:

It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far--that I should "go such a long way." This was linked up with the limitations and poverty of our conditions of life in my youth.

[. . .]

But here we come upon the solution of the little problem of why it was that already at Trieste we interfered with our enjoyment of the voyage to Athens. It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having gone such a long way; there was something about it that was wrong, that from earliest times had been forbidden. It was something to do with a child's criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood. It seems as though the essence of success was to have got further than one's father, and as though to excel one's father was still something forbidden. (455, 456)

No surprises here, then. In a caricature of pop cult images of pyschoanalysis, the whole incident with the ruins comes to revolve around an Oedipal anxiety: the desire to supersede the father, and the attendant feelings of guilt. The short-cut to interpretation, as always, being to intone in heavily accented English: "Tell me about your father."

Fortunately, and this is the great delight with Freud, he leaves himself open to another interpretation altogether: one that is right in front of his face, if only he'd see it.

For again, the essay ends as it had started, with a lament as to the analyst's own declining powers, a nostalgic sigh from one old man to another, on the occasion of the somewhat younger man's birthday:

And now you will no longer wonder that the recollection of this incident on the Acropolis should have troubled me so often since I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and can travel no longer. (456)

Freud admits that he himself is now needy and dependent. He lacks the mobility of his youth. He can easily be overtaken. Is not the issue then less his own father, than his position as father, literal and metaphorical, of the movement that he started but can no longer keep up with?

Literal in that ("Tell me about your daughter"?) Freud has already referred to his daughter, Anna, precisely at the moment that he introduced the theme of ego defences:

An investigation is at this moment being carried on close at hand which is devoted to the study of these methods of defence: my daughter, the child analyst, is writing a book upon them. (454)

Surely there are some revealing turns of phrase here, though one would have also to examine the original German text.

The "child analyst," in English at least, might suggest both that she analyzes children, and that she is herself still (to Freud) but a child, if only in terms of analysis. But is there not some anxiety in the assurance that Anna remains "close at hand": close because he now needs her close by, to continue his legacy; too close to comfort because it is she who is the future author, catching up on Freud while his own "powers of production are at an end"; perhaps too likely to stray, close now but soon distant, superseding or betraying her father?

And metaphorical in that... Well, can we not read this whole tale, and the birthday essay that has accreted around it, as a metaphor for the fate of psychoanalysis itself? Is not the split subject that gazes at the old, split rocks of the Parthenon the split subject of pyschoanalysis?

Though Freud starts to discuss "the extraordinary condition of 'double conscience'" as a means to understand this condition (453), all too soon he disavows this very concept: "But all of this is so obscure and has been so little mastered scientifically that I must refrain from talking about it any more to you" (454). Freud the little Napoleon chooses silence, repression, because of an anxiety patently about the possibility of losing mastery, about the limits of a method he would like to convince us is in some way scientific.

And yet it is precisely this double consciousness that is most startling, most plainly in view in the entire anecdote! Indeed, the entire story would be impossible were it not for the "second person," whose astonishment at the "first person"'s derealization functions to insist that his denial is indeed in some way pathological. This second person is on the side of reality, of affirmation, of a literal reading of what stares the analyst straight in the face.

And is not this second person, found within the analyst, and enabling his melancholy remembrance, his sad intepretations, the hint of a psychoanalysis that would not be bound to the super ego, to the childhood traumas imposed by a fading father figure? Doesn't this second person, the other side of Freud's double consciousness, hold the keys to a schizoanalysis? A schizoanalysis that begins with the "split personality" (453-454) that so shakes Freud and his illusion of scientific mastery that he has to guard his silence and return (oh, once again) to the old mournful tale of fathers and sons, itself only a cover for a still more pathetic anxiety over fathers and daughters?

It is double consciousness, which includes the wild, unscientific analysis so feared by Freud, that makes the entire procedure productive, that gives the lie to Freud's own self-pitying complaint that production is "at an end." If only it were at an end, thinks Freud; if only he could put a stop to it. It's so evidently in his face. And yet it is this other side to pyschoanalysis that he is most anxious to disavow.

Despite himself, Freud let a genii out of the bottle that still, 150 years after his birth, returns to enliven but also (affirmatively, joyfully, impiously, youthfully playing among the ruins) traduce and betray, supersede and go beyond, the psychoanalytic enterprise that our birthday boy set in motion. Why deny it?

Cross-posted to Long Sunday.

For more, check out the naked gaze's "Obscene Images (1)".

And for other birthday tributes, see Harold Bloom's "Why Freud Matters", Paul Broks's "The Ego Trip", Will Hutton's "A time to celebrate, not denigrate, Freud", or Christina Patterson's "A Freud for all seasons". MotherPie offers some feminist commentary and a whole series of links. And here's Freud's last living patient.

Plus a site dedicated to the anniversary.

american

I have discussed ruins before, and one of my side projects is a book on what I call "American Ruins." The idea is to analyze a number of exemplary but rather different ruins from this hemisphere: Vilcashuamán, Peru; Sans Souci, Haiti (which is the image to the right); the Michigan Theater, Detroit (at the bottom of this post); Pino Suárez metro station, Mexico; and the Ochagavía hospital, Chile.

Just now I'm finishing up a paper that focusses on the first of these, Vilcashuamán. Here are the first couple of paragraphs of that paper, outlining the conjunction between American-ness and ruination. (Post-9/11 there are others, of course.) Sadly, Scott won't like the last line. But there we go...

There is no such thing as an ancient ruin, for the ruin is always a modern concept. Ruination and modernity go hand in hand, as the modern displaces the ancient, marks it as irredeemably part of the past precisely by construing it as ruined. Ruins are the site of what has been put behind us. But at the same time they remain front and center: for modernity occasions a sometimes anxious reflection on the conditions and effects of “progress,” on this process of temporal displacement for which the ruin serves as a memento mori. Modernity creates the ruin as something both to be discarded and also to be read, obsessively. We moderns construct and interpret ruins as judgment on the past and warning for the future. “Men moralize among ruins,” observed Benjamin Disraeli, “or, in the throng and tumult of successful cities, recall past visions of urban desolation for prophetic warning. London is a modern Babylon; Paris has aped imperial Rome, and may share its catastrophe” (138). A sign of modernity’s success and vitality is that past civilizations are in ruins all around; but they remind us that there can be no guarantee that today’s proud edifices will not, in turn, fall to rack and ruin. Ruins demonstrate that whole cultures, just like the lives of mortals, are transient. Hence they are invented by cultures that feel their own transience. And no culture feels more transient than the American.

Though the Americas have long been envisaged as the “New World,” and despite Goethe’s assertion that “America, you have it better / Than our old continent; / You have no ruined castles / And no primordial stones” (qtd. Lowenthal 110), in fact the hemisphere has more than its share of ruins. This should be no surprise: modernity was after all abruptly conceived in the encounter between Old and New Worlds, and built upon the ruins of the civilizations first encountered by the Spanish conquistadors. The traces of imperial grandeur are now themselves ruined, and where there are no ruins easily to hand, they have often enough been built from scratch or substitutes have rapidly been found. From Hearst Castle or campus gothic to the dinosaur bones patronized by tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie, as the US became the dominant world power at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth, it increasingly sought out its own ruins. Frequently, those ruins were south of the border: this was also the heyday of a burgeoning archaeology, and the discovery of “lost” cities in rainforests and remote valleys the length and breadth of the continent. Today, ruins are big business (Tikal, Tenochtitlan), even as big business leaves its own ruins behind (from the Rust Belt to reclaimed factories).

The Michigan Theater, Detroit, photograph by Stan Douglas

recolonization

Monday Arguediana

More ruins... But in Todas las sangres Arguedas is less interested in physical ruins than in the fragmentation and ruination of a social order, and particularly of the dying order's dominant class.

The story concerns the transition from a feudal economy based upon agriculture to a modern, capitalist economy of mineral extraction. Such a transition is not an instance of modernization in any simple sense: mineral extraction had always been at the heart of Spanish Imperial ambitions in Peru--above all, of course, Upper Peru, now Bolivia, which contained the "cerro rico" of Potosí. So mining might also be seen as a recolonization, and what's at issue here is the competition between national and international capital, between local landowner Fermín Aragón on the one hand and the foreign corporation Wisther-Bozart on the other.

From Loïc Venance's photo series on Potosí
Among those caught up in the ensuing struggle are Fermín's brother, Bruno, who is the very model of an old-style landowner; Fermín's mining engineer, Cabrejos, a "faithful disciple of the North American school" (77) who is in fact in the pay of Wisther-Bozart; and Demetrio Rendón Willka, an "ex indian" whose task is to harness Don Bruno's indigenous peons in the name of the mining operation.

Cast aside, meanwhile, is the former governing class of this mining village, the "ruined notables" who have been gradually bought out by the Aragóns (81). Their houses have slowly decayed as though in sympathy with their fate:

the doors now losing their paint or varnish began to be covered in dust, and to take on the ruinousness of the walls, of the roofs, of the large courtyards and dirty arcades. The whole town started to take on an air of irredeemable age. The Aragón de Peraltas flourished by remaining on top of the desperate rival bands, untouchable. (69)

But Fermín still needs the last pieces of land to which this declining aristocracy maintains its title--and Cabrejos aims to ensure that these landowners don't sell up.

At stake is a conflict not only between old capital and new, national and international, but also between the ruination suffered by the old, and the corruption embraced by the ambitious. Fermín, we are told, can no longer hear the birds that belong to a nature he views only extractively: "he has lost the gift of hearing them thanks to corrupt capital"; his wife is asked to "ensure that ambition does not continue to corrupt him" (76).

But the whole town is soon swept into a web of deceit and corruption, in which old grudges or desires are rekindled and stoked by the various competing forces: Rendón Willka's traumatic bullying at the hands of his schoolmates, or the chauffeur Gregorio's fancy for shopkeeper Doña Asusta.

Moreover, the discourse of corruption is also retranslated into meditations on cleanliness and fanaticism, both of which have premonitory resonances for the subsequent history of Sendero Luminoso in highland Peru.

Back with the novel, we'll see what plays out: whether either Bruno or Fermín can overcome the taint of the curses their father throws down at them from the church tower in the powerful scene that opens the novel; whether Cabrejos has met his match in either Fermín or Willka; and whether Willka himself can maintain his mediating role, slipping in and out of indigeneity or mestizaje as circumstances change. (My guesses: no; yes; no.)

Update: In answer to my questions... arguably Bruno does redeem himself, and perhaps so does Fermín, too; then it turns out that Cabrejos meets his match in the woman whose suitor he killed, rather than in any of the men; and at the end, mediation of any kind proves impossible, I think.

yawar mayu

To return to ruins... In the Americas, the Spaniards habitually built on ruins. Recoding or overcoding indigenous space, and with it also the geography of power, they would build churches on the sites of temples that they had (only partially) destroyed, or on top of pyramids, using the existing stones in their construction, the indigenous ruin as foundation. The colonial church lording it over the remains of the native temple served as a history lesson, a constant reminder of indigenous defeat and Spanish dominance.

But in this appropriation the invaders also thereby fixed those ruins: keeping them in place, confirming not only the fact of colonization, but the durability and strength of what had it purported to displace. So the church perched on indigenous ruins enabled a counter-history that could appeal to the ongoing presence of those pre-colonial foundations beneath the precarious veneer of Spanish cultural imposition. This would be a reading emphasizing transculturation and hybridity, and the subterranean persistence of alternative traditions (alternative modernities?) within and beneath imposed cultural forms.

A classic statement of (in this case) the Inca walls' continued vivacity and power is found in José María Arguedas's novel Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos), which opens with its child narrator's arrival in Cuzco, where he is entranced by the indigenous stonework on which the town's Spanish churches and mansions are built: "The lines of the wall frolicked in the sun; the stones had neither angles nor straight lines; each one was like a beast that moved in the sunlight, making me want to rejoice, to run shouting with joy" (18-19 / 164). The stonework is explicitly compared to a river, "undulating and unpredictable [. . .]. The wall was stationary but all its lines were seething and its surface was as changeable as that of the flooding summer rivers" (6, 7 / 143, 144). Implicitly, the contrast between the vibrant indigenous foundations and the sterile colonial structures (whitewashed and windowless, silent and regimented) built over them, is also compared to the colonial and neocolonial elite's dependency on indigenous labor power.

Even the cathedral, towering incarnation of Spanish force and inculcator of European custom, is built "with the Inca stones and the hands of the Indians" (10 / 149), for as the father observes "what other stones would the Spaniards have used in Cuzco, son?" (11 / 152). The Spaniards imposed form upon these indigenous raw materials, chiseling them to remove their "enchantment." But that neutralization could never be fully successful. The power contained in these remnants of Inca civilization might still one day threaten those who appropriate its strength: the image of the ruins as "flooding summer rivers," as "yawar mayu" or "bloody river" (7 / 144), anticipates the social uprising described at the novel's conclusion, which is described in a chapter entitled, precisely, "Yawar Mayu." No wonder the narrator asks of these structures' inhabitants: "Aren't the people who live in there afraid?" (9 / 147).

For in Arguedas's vision, far from indicating a judgment already pronounced, these vibrant residues of an inextinguishable cultural power foretell a reckoning still to come. As the narrator and his father leave Cuzco, fleeing their humiliation at the hands of a heartless, landowning uncle, they contemplate the remains of Sascayhuamán, the ancient fortress overlooking the town. At first sight these walls seem to blend into their natural surroundings:

In broken ranks the walls settled into the gray, grassy slope. [. . .] My father saw me contemplating the ruins and did not speak to me. Farther up, when Sacsayhuaman appeared, encircling the mountains, and I could distinguish the rounded, blunt profile of the angles of the walls, he said to me, "They are like the Inca Roca's stones. They say they will last until Judgment Day, and that the archangel will blow his trumpet here." (21 / 169)

In this reading, what we might term a postmodern celebration of hybridity is conjoined with what we might more tentatively describe as a premodern Andean messianism. Modernity is an interruption, but only temporarily so; the persistence of the Inca ruins, the fact that they are never fully obliterated, indicates the possibility of their future fulfilment, and so (re-)completion.

ruins

"Allegories," Walter Benjamin famously tells us, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (178). And, to turn the comparison around, it's no surprise that ruins have long been viewed as allegories: as always pointing beyond themselves, to some absent totality. Moreover that, at another level of abstraction, the gap itself between ruin and totality has itself been insistently conceived as some kind of second-order allegory. Allegory upon allegory, ruin upon ruin.

Benjamin's interest here is in the Baroque--though, more abstractly still, he is reading modernity through the Baroque, and the Baroque work of art as an allegory for the work of art in general. But it is with Romanticism that the ruin really comes into its own.

Or rather, the point of a ruin is the extent to which it falls short of "its own," the extent to which it is non-coincident with the structure that it implies. And Romanticism takes particular note of that discrepancy between the absent presence of the material trace and the present absence of the sublime that it invokes in its very default.

In invoking totality and sublimity, ruins have been read as particularly vivid allegories of power and sovereignty--and their vicissitudes. Take, for instance, Shelley's "Ozymandias." Here the poet relates the tale of a traveller coming across a desert ruin, the toppled remains of a vast sculpture of power. On its pedestal

            these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (11)

The levels of allegory and irony are complex. The inscription, for instance, with its injunction to despair, was presumably first intended to be interpreted in terms of the king's transcendent and overarching authority. Yet the mighty could now be tempted to despair for quite another reason: because in the fallen desolation of the broken monument they can perceive the temporary nature of even the most overweening despotism. But, in yet another twist, the fact that this missive, however ruined, endures even as all around the civilization over which Ozymandias presided has faded without trace, could also be seen to bear out the truth of the sentiment: that the signs of transcendence prevail over the most calamitous of social and natural catastrophes.

In other words, long after all memory of his kingdom has disappeared, long after all detail of the social order that he secured has faded into the real of this desert, we still remember the name of Ozymandias. The ruin ensures (to paraphrase Benjamin again) that his legacy has transcended history, by becoming immanent with nature itself. "In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting" (177-178). This is Ozymandias's final triumph.

And this is thanks to the power of narrative, which again here is multilayered. We have not only the inscription--which itself implies a prior order, the imperative of temporal power. We also have the fact that Shelley's poem consists almost entirely (all bar the first line) of the reported speech of an un-named "traveller from an antique land." Whose account is then repeated, recorded and enshrined, in published verse.

So here's the challenge: is there any way to resist the lure of narrative? To undo the symmetry between ruin and allegory? To see, in short, the ruin in itself, rather than as sign of an uninterrupted idea of sovereignty?