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Alarms
Jorge Lovisolo
to
Natalia
The statue of Liberty is held captive in a
cage made up by the blue and yellow pipes that hold the scaffold,
on which stand the restorers with their sand pistols. She looks
straight at the camera, in that distinctive pose of her well-known
portraits. A quiet face, thick, sensual lips and flint eyes splashed
with sea salt, lime and mica sparks, that look on as silently
and harshly as cold lava. A beauty spot on the left cheekbone.
It could also be a manure stain. As all the women by Lola Mora,
she is clad in a Roman peplum. The forearms and shoulders thrown
back highlight the contour of her pointed breasts, the folds of
the tulle marble cannot disguise the turgid nipples and a forward
muscle defines the pubis of a female in heat. The links of broken
chains hang from her hands. Her breakwater gaze moves on firmly
like a figurehead towards the seat of provincial power. Liberty
or Libertine?…, Catullus would have asked, after tearing
from her, in passing, the briefest nothing: et nunc in quadriviis
et angiportis/ glubit... (1)
Among the trinkets peddled by vendors who add colour to the streets
with their embalmed birds, paper fish, lacquer boxes, sweets,
rag dolls, erotic lace lingerie for a down at heel seamstress,
shoe polish, clothes racks…, there is one that alerts the
passers by: alarm clocks. The peddlers mount guard in their temporary
small markets or stroll with their smuggled goods of tell tale
rattles and synchronized bells. The flâneur goes by unnoticed
by the crowd of pedestrians that walk about in the pitiful mood
of video zombies acting by yawning retro pulsing. Since post modernism
has also arrived here in its local version; lack of passion, monotony
and the monoculture of boredom are practiced as favourite forms
of entertainment, as in those listless citadels visited by Baudrillard.
A unanimous bip, bip, bip, and one is under the impression that
in this city daybreaks all the time. The pedestal of the statue
has been fenced in by a wall made of brass panels. A poster that
still shows the marks of fresh glue repeats itself on every panel
and shamelessly discloses the arched hips of a circus contortionist,
a sort of Follies Bergère Aphrodite in a bikini,
feathers and a marabou stole. The street vendors have placed their
collapsible tables at the foot of the fence. No doubt, they draw
people's attention. Besides the occasional pedestrian, who crosses
the Independencia de Tucumán square diagonally shaking
his attaché case, the foreigner actively amazed, the tramp
who sleeps on a bench under the balsamic shade of a linden or
the tightly hugged couple of lovers, the knife grinders come with
their flutes and their sparks, together with cardboard scavengers,
fire eaters, fag scavengers, bootblacks, drunkards, porters, the
begging look of a pauper and, on the graded concrete half moon,
perhaps and old amphitheatre project, the foundlings, divided
in two rival gangs trained in street fighting, improvise barricade
scenes. The pimps, who are not at all sad on this occasion, come,
attracted perhaps by the figure of the Libertine. One of them,
looking dissipated and already old, looks like a leader on holiday.
He rides a shiny sire that strikes sparks out of the pavement
that twinkle to the colonial lampposts. (He reminds me of an apocryphal
Garibaldi). Relaxed now, followed by the unfailing camel troupe,
they go about without their prostitutes à la carte,
as they are not pressed to get customers or to promise them a
thousand and one delights in only one night.
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Perhaps they believe they can do without them.
After all, there is Lesbia, shamelessly licentious in gratuitous
surrender. Sometimes she is lyrical. I forbid you to be seen
(2), is Marcial's threat. Finally, all the urban fauna that inhabits
the city landscape. La rue... seul champ d'expérience
valable , according to Breton. (3)
I was always drawn to the statues in public
spaces. Especially to the vacant gestures of mutilated statues.
Their stumps look like suspensions marks made of stones. There
is one in bronze, memorable, the equestrian figure of Garibaldi.
A gaucho with the character of a quarrelsome Calabrian,
an Italian with colt boots, spurs, a sabre and a hat that had
seen better days, riding a stubborn weakling of a horse with a
striking tail, ready to race. It is difficult to decide if it
is the Italian adventurer, Santos Vega, Martín Fierro,
or Juan Moreira about to face the military squadron. Or simply
a spirited cattle herder who pushes them forward to La Rural
(4). Borges, with understandable insolence said ironically, according
to Joaquín Giannuzzi, the poet, Cada plaza tiene su
guarango de bronce (5) . Was he thinking of that statue in
Plaza Italia, on the threshold of Palermo, a quarrelsome
Buenos Aires neighbourhood, allá por los años
bravos del 890 ?(6). A scenery to set a milonga malicious
character, such as Don Nicanor Paredes and his whip, who calls
to order in the fights between show offs and false dandies.
Well, this is not the case. There is only a nymph in the Plaza
Independencia, very like the Nereidas of the sculpture
group in Costanera Sur. Fresh, as if on leaving the fountain
behind her the wet peplum clung to her body.
This is the scenery so far. Skin, curves, folds, lightning and
the row raised by alarm clocks…
Action.The performers enter the scene. One of them, elbows on
the edge of the rubbish bin in the corner, rests his chin on his
hand and strikes his cheek with his index finger. A snapshot of
The thinker by Rodin. He is standing on one leg and he rubs the
other one back and forth on the calf of his leg, as someone who
is discreetly shining his shoes with his pants. The upper part
of his body is bent as he looks fixedly inside. He appears to
be patiently awaiting a revelation. He deciphers indications and
signs in the garbage over which fly green blowflies ready to lay
their eggs. To stir that breeding ground for worms provide a few
surprises. What is to be expected from this boiler in operation
and of the meticulous routine of the industrious larvae? Filth
also affords promises of happiness. Marx trusted: In History
as in Nature, putrefaction is the laboratory of life (7)-he
would say. I hope we are lucky! Bip, bip, bip… The man's
obstinate attention leads one to think that the rubbish bin hides
a mystery and nothing stops one from believing that the performer
is the legitimate repository. At first, the passers by observe,
a little disturbed, this unusual conduct, though it is not extravagant.
As they pass him they affect indifference. But then, after two
or three unsteady steps, they turn their faces towards him and
look inquiringly, insistently, as the Tadzio in Death in Venice.
The more outgoing go close to the rubbish bin and take a look.
Held by that behaviour, absent minded, they cross the pavement
without minding the corridor outlined for pedestrians. This brings
about circulation chaos. Impatient auto drivers, with their foot
on the clutch, advance, go back, their engines roaring, blowing
their horns in a manner that, momentarily, breaks the charm and
causes a Chaplin like crossing. Across the road a perplexed and
intrigued audience has assembled. Some use their hands to shelter
their eyes; others cup them to use them as megaphones and utter
lose words. One of them makes faces that go from laughing to crying,
as he squeezes a cap between his hands, strikes absent minded
passers by on their back catching them unawares, breaks away from
the procession and holds on to the seat of his pants. Life is
full of surprises… It is understandable, since, after all,
it has happened to all of us this feeling alive. Un uproar of
megaphones celebrates the episode. The prattle is confusing. A
placard from the Universal Church calls for tranquility:
"STOP SUFFERING!" discloses on thresholds without
doormen (8) . And yet once you cross the threshold of this
cinema converted into a temple -a curious variation of philanthropists
in times of need- behind the back of every seat one reads this
inscription on a bronze plaque: "SACRIFICE. It is the price
of conquest".
Sham papier maché precious stones, as in an opera set:
an atmosphere of scenic unreality takes hold of the square.
Another performer strolls down
the wide parametrical sidewalk of the square, a corridor lined
by several lines of benches and orange trees, lit by the hint
of small suns in their branches. As the people sitting on the
benches can only see his profile, with a still eye in his orbit,
one can surmise that, to them, it could possibly be a Cyclops
with ocular paralysis. He moves forward, stiff-necked, stepping
daintily as if he were counting the tiles without looking, His
behaviour is that of the main character of a novel written by
a conductist god. Those pedestrians who walk towards him step
aside when they see him coming, reactivating apparently the atavistic
terror of interfering in the straight path of a sleep walker.
His arms slightly folded and his closed, almost menacing fists,
do not follow the usual movement of his walk. The stiffness of
the neck and the absence of all muscular visible activity, as
if he were an inarticulate being in one piece, just like one of
those larva like characters in Becket's novels, confer to him
the aspect of a rusty robot or of a flâneur with
arthritis, or with torticollis. Everything seems to point to the
fact that he wants to talk about himself, but he refuses, he does
not recognize himself in the language the others have stuck on
him to incorporate him to the tribe. He would have to speak a
language not his own, that distorts and takes away from him the
last bit of presentable identity, to say things that do not concern
him and that, besides, he does not believe in. How can he speak
about himself in their language? But the others have also been
overcome by silence. If he used that language, it would be to
curse them, the only way to acknowledge them, there is no way
out. A manner of testifying against them, till he explodes. He
will only talk about himself when he does not talk any more. He
is a walking version of The man looking South East. A visionary
in a trance, in direct communication with the beyond.
A woman performer dressed as a bishop crosses the square diagonally.
She tries to avoid space and time pretending to be ubiquitous.
A sort of angry compass card, vertebrally centered in the statue.
With her comings and goings she draws a circular space of multiple
vanishing points. Though within this circulation disorder there
are stable references: four monoliths in the corner. She stops
a few minutes in each one. The observer may grasp that insane
idea of infinite space that Giordano Bruno vainly suspected to
deceive the Inquisition: a sphere the circumference of which coincides
with the tangent and the center of which is everywhere and nowhere.
The bishop walks through the draughtboard like a geisha stranded
in the thicket. The standard student's outfit (jeans, blouse,
rucksack and half boots) multiplies the misunderstanding. To try
to agree on a meeting with her would have been like making an
appointment where eternity meets with a void. I cannot say why
these comings and goings remind me of Kafka's allegory in The
closest village.
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They also remind me of the invisible
plane used in the Gulf War (barbarism consented by the UN: first
imperialist war with backing from a macro organism of decision.
A season novelty in the legitimating market of the New Neo Liberal
World Disorder). The strategic aim of that plane is paradoxical:
it is invisible, but it is real. While the simulated plane is
visible, but unreal. If there should be an air combat between
the two invisible planes and the missile of one hit the other
one bringing it down, its disappearance would go unheeded. That
is why it is not convenient to be invisible to that point. If
it had a rendez-vous with the bishop, it would also pass
unnoticed. What a shame! Everything becomes accidental. Couples
are chosen through chance zapping. The surrealist rencontre
fortuite (9)
has become digitalized. Today, women are not picked up, they are
lowered from the Internet which, apparently, glorifies the procedure.
We live in a bulimic social consuming system of technological
virtues. Computer undoing, market economy conjunction and democratic
consensus. End of story.
At this point mutual distrust in the square grows; everybody lives
in a sort of fragile identity and induced secrecy: the performers
believe that the passers by are also performers. And this reciprocal
appreciation of groundless beliefs regulates equivocal behavior.
I believe you believe that I believe and you believe that I believe
that you believe. But nobody believes in anything or in anybody.
Adorno said in one of his brilliant characterizations of damaged
life: nobody believes in anybody, they all know. (10)
Another performer, lying on a bench, pretends to sleep. As she
rests her neck on the anatomic back of the bench, her fair falls
in waves. Her heavy locks, set apart, look wet. Like sleepy serpents
of a Medusa at rest. She holds her rucksack tight against her
body. A Rotarian traveler passes her by. He looks at her obliquely
and then stops without turning his face, like someone who senses
is being watched from behind. He thinks. After a certain hesitation
that one can only grasp from the uncertain movements of his feet,
as in Belle du Jour , he walks back to this Bohémienne
Endormi moonless, dune less, without a a lute, a walking stick
or an amphora. OH! And without the seagulls' double scissors to
cut Calder's mobiles in a cobalt sky Bip,bip, bip… The traveler
stretches a shaky hand that does not touch the sleeping woman.
He thinks of drugs, heart ache and even death: he puts his watch
close to her half open mouth to see if her breath mists the glass.
After doing this, he feels at ease for a while. In the words of
Foucault, for lack of inspiration he indulges in the frugal lyricism
of a quotation, a poem by Pavese: He who sleeps in the street
trusts the world (11). He gathers strength to shake her, but
does not dare. Worried, he asks for help from an indifferent and
inconsiderate passer by, who goes on her way without paying attention:
she is another performer. He goes back to the sleeper´s
bench and sees the Punto de Vista team of photographers
and cameras that, placed at different angles, are filming. In
despair, the traveler shouts at them "How callous! What lack
of solidarity in this world!" Members of the team approach
to clear the misunderstanding and stop in time a possible incident.
A woman journalist jots down the incident and assures me that
she will write an article or a story about it. She tells me this
at the foot of the Caged Liberty with the bip, bip, bip as background
noise. Are the vendors waking her up? Benjamin says Should
wakefulness be the synthesis of: the thesis of the consciousness
of dreams and the antithesis of the consciousness of being awake?
Then, the moment of awakening would be identical to the 'now of
recognition', in which everything puts on its own true, surreal,
expression. Thus, with Proust, the insertion of the whole life
in life's highest grade dialectic fracture, the awakening, is
important (12). As it is known, the Benjaminian waking is
not only the cognitive moment, it can also be an insignificant
episode initiated by a festive pyrotechnics recital and, this
unexpected turn of events in mass celebrations, may end in popular
insurrection: there panic and party acknowledged each other
after a long fraternal separation, they embrace in a revolutionary
upraising (13).
So far, a few scenes of the performance. There are others, as
important or more than the ones described, but it is not my aim
to write out a catalogue. I donate it to the complete enumeration
maniacs. It is impossible to tell everything. Life is etcetera.
The curtain falls.
***
After these bright small stars that, as Cortazar
says, are equal to the words the end, the reader may do
without the rest. Now I shall try to reason, without allowing
stiff theoretical concepts to fence me in. To try to explain something
is self-defeating, because I find that a mystery starts with an
explanation. I share Adorno's conviction that aesthetic theories
are art obituaries. This was best put into words by a musician:
nobody knows the secrets of the making of a work of art.
"A work in which there are theories (to explain it) is
like an object on which one has left the prize tag on"(14).,"
- said Proust. When an idea can be coined into an aphorism, it
may reach the speed of a missile that has no doubt hit its target.
(I am sure that this maxim was a permanent guide during the discussions
of the team while preparing Punto de Vista, specially during the
debates and the work shops, in which , trying to avoid premeditation,
a cooperative strategy was being developed in the setting up or
the framing- I am not to be blamed because the square obeys the
Roman urban grid- vague indications, at bevel square, to be followed
in the street staging of the performance). In surrealist works
(over read Nadja), what is more apparent, with due respect
and in spite of the effort involved, "is the prize tag",
Norberto Chaves told me with true intuition, after a heated epistolary
discussion that goes back to adolescence. Besides, Chaves added,
"with surrealism…that band of decadent and drug addicts…
nominalism (aesthetic) reaches it most extreme version. To stress
his statement, which I found of singular value, with the exception
to the challenge to a leaning for narcotics, I drew up proofs
in his favour, but they did not go further than the factual verification
of temporal contiguity: the Vienna Circle, I used to tell him,
were contemporary to the "drug addicts". That is why,
with vicious conceptual care, I asked him to do a meticulous research
on "the referential strategy of surrealist poetry. Before
making a statement on your intuition -I told him- I think it wise
to carry out a meticulous enquiry of the background , philosophical,
in my case, police, in yours…" ¡Enough! In aggravating
circumstances, that may not be forgiven, but that add to the punishment,
I fall back on the concept. And here it is only an experience.
E tout le reste est literature, -said Paul Verlaine, in
unsurpassable literature.
In art one has to be careful not to ignore the exact moment, always
indescribable, when it is necessary to stop to allow the work
to happen. That was Bacon's, the Beckett of painting, dilemma:
An accident proposes, suggests the work - he would say. One
more shy brush stroke and everything is spoilt. An accident is
singular because it cannot be repeated. It is impossible to plan.
That is why he despised the premeditation of sketching. Game,
accident, chance, roulette: to him the best studio was the
Monte Carlo Casino(15 .
I think that this performance is a sort of elaborate accident
reached through applied leisure I do not feel obliged to apologize
for the oxymoron: it is the embryonic form of dialectics, a revolutionary
style of thought suffocated on time by the collaborator Linguistic
Turn , in the social division of work headed by the white
positivism (16), of Neo Liberal Social Democracy, well mannered
argumentative fascism. In short, a stratagem to sooth the good
socialist's bad conscience.
Aesthetic theory is always outside art. It approaches it with
the objective look of an expert or the militant awe of the tourist.
I have never found the most penetrating reflections on artistic
work in theories but in the artists: Proust, Bacon, Durero, Klee,
the Stendhal in Voyages en Italie or Flaubert's Correspondance.
In front of art manuals it is necessary to adopt Courbet's
attitude in L'Atelier du peintre, stack the coactive academic
torsos at the back of the canvas, trust the easel, that barricade
in progress that stops the advances of the "conservatory",
and give in to the feeling of the fine end of the brush. As Cézanne
used to say: Sometimes, as I paint, I start thinking. I put
down the brush immediately and wait for the moment to pass. The
body's mobility, always faithful to life and to the world, works
in the painting. And it is successful when, after the evasive
vanishing points, one can grasp the muscular energy that made
it possible. Art, Klee said, does not reproduce the
visible, it makes it visible (17) . Clear sighted, he redefined
mimesis: which does not hold what is real as its model but what
is possible. It does not plagiarize what there is, it is a meticulous
verification of possible worlds: Utopia, it challenges what is
known as the real world. To look at a painting is to become an
accomplice to a stranger or a contemporary of another visible
time, of somebody who winks at me from the back of a fresco or
a canvas to give me the possible, which implies that I adopt as
my own a second hand vision, that invites me, helpfully, to participate
in aUtopia. "It is difficult for me to face a painting that
has enchanted me"- I said in a lecture at the Joan Miró
Foundation in Barcelona. "without allowing in my confusion
that the imperative eye of the painter is at the back of the canvas,
the stubborn certainty of one point of view, a concentrated coordination
of efforts, the contagious muscular gaiety of a body at work,
with all its hesitations, in front of the choice whether to assume
its own movement or impose on the canvas the topological space
or, on the contrary, to renounce and accept being an automat programmed
by a geometric conscience " (18).
I have insisted on the discussion of art and body because in the
performance the latter held a major role: looks, magnetic fields
designed by equivocal gestures, unusual postures, rituals for
non believing pilgrims, bodies at rest in the disquieting stillness
of inanimate objects, absent or hardly insinuated words, stammering
that the passers by may have attributed to the silence of the
performers, in the manner of comic who blow small
balloons or soap bubbles with their messages that explode before
signifying. Traces of stellar catastrophes. Monuments to reticence…
One day, as we were rehearsing the scenic movements of the performers
fifty kilometers away from Government House, we realized that,
without meaning to, we were adopting the typical behaviour of
professional conspirators: Revolution alchemists (19) ,
according to Marx. We assembled, we moved apart in one or other
direction, we talked the ciphered language of passwords and with
open arms and an imperative index pointed at strategic places
as in a war fighting for positions. It was possible to imagine
that we were preparing an urban guerrilla commando operation.
We were surprised that the police had not caught on. Specially,
as that day a numerous mass of demonstrators marched around the
square, headed by a body of chained blue-collar workers, in the
manner of Queimada slaves. This surprising form of protest
reminded me with astonishment of the voluntary servitude,
by Etienne de la Boetie. I could not help looking at the statue
of Liberty out of the corner of my eye. Lesbia, does the looker-on
give you more pleasure? When are you going to turn licentious?
Will you gallop furiously? March! valkirias, maenads! will
the plural shout, Evohé! (20) Be able to silence the tender
song of the dahlias (21)? Evohé! Evohé! Evohé!
Bip,bip,bip..
And here I cannot deprive the reader of listening to the sound
of the memorable slap Adorno gave, for the first time, to the
slaves of well to do masters, the docile proletariat: Society
on its way to putrefaction lives the immature life of those under
control. Finally, not everything is lost, radical art -as
Adorno says - denounces the abundance of poverty (22). In
the end, poetry recovers its prophetic gift and the lost aura
when it speaks to us like this:
She has broken with the genealogical tree.
Early this morning she poisoned
the gentleman in a top hat who lived in his conservative memory
and she has locked in the basement
the grandmother in curls
who hides behind a fan in the picture.
She has raised to the clouds so that he does not come back,
the uncle who could tell with his huge nose
who were the bastards in noble families.
In Winter she feeds the stove
with pages from Roman Law.
She applauds stock-exchange disasters
and trusts in future earthquakes.
Which of the owners of the stables of the West
Will be able to hunt
the horse woman who rides furiously
drawing the map of the countries of the future(23) ?
Woman drawing the countries of the
future
Teresa Leonardi, unpublished, 2001.
As we wrote above, the work of art is not forethought. It happens
if one is lucky. It may be Borges who has best put it into words,
inspired, perhaps, in the Jewish mysticism of rabbinic Lurianism,
as discussed by Gershom Scholem: music, the states of happiness,
mythology, faces on which time has worked, certain sunsets and
certain places, want to tell us something, or said something that
we should not have missed, or are about to say something: this
imminent revelation that does not occur, is, perhaps, the aesthetic
deed(24) .
 |
Adventures, stated Sartre (experience
in my case, but the distinction is futile), are not lived, they
arte told. It is true, wrightly or wrongly, I yielded to the literary
temptation, but I tried to be columnist, prompter and accomplice.
What is left behind of the constituent impressions pf an experience
after putting them into words? I am not sure I was up to it in
my account. To talk is to generalize. How does one save the unyielding
peculiarity of the work? Interpreting the translator (who interprets
other translators, and readers, who in turn interpret other readers,
and so on…) of a work uncomfortably question (25) How
does one do things with words? ,,I can say:chronicles, like
women, when they are beautiful they may not faithful, and when
they are faithful they may not be beautiful. This chronicle is
neither faithful nor beautiful.
Art is a superior joke -assured Thomas Mann. I do not know
if we succeeded, but the performance tried to live up to this
statement. Bip, Bip, Bip...
Jorge Lovisolo
San Lorenzo, October, 2002.
I am grateful to the research team that collaborated
in the text for their infinite patience and growing affection,
for the seriousness and competence in the work achieved, for understanding,
discussing and criticizing, for their enthusiasm, and for speaking
about the links between philosophy and literature, art and politics,
at a time when fashion has it that to do so is a socially reprehensible
misdemeanor. I am also grateful to Teresa Leonardi for her sensibility
and for letting me have her unpublished poem, a act that stresses
her generosity without limits.
Footnotes and references
Natalia Ruiz de los Llanos, Alejandro
Ruidrejo and Damián Hoyos are responsible for the careful
edition of the text -footnotes, commentaries and translation of
quotations into Spanish of foreign quotations.
(1) ..now
in the street corners and in the back alleys / she peels the bark
of Catulo, Carmen LVIII. Alarmas, echoes Benjamin's reception
of Baudelaire. This is why we feel justified to include the whole
of Carmen LVIII by Catulo, quoted in the text, as Baudelaire was
particularly attracted by Catulo and Marcial, the lyrical Latin
poets, who introduce for the first time the urban phenomenon in
lyrical poetry. According to Benjamín, "what linked
Baudelaire in an exclusive manner to Latin literature and specially
to late Latin literature, could be, in part, the alegorical use,
rather than the abstract use, of the names of the gods in literature.Baudelaire
recognized in it a method he used himself. . ("Was Baudelaire
so ausschliessend an die lateinische, zumal spätlateinische,
Literatur fesselte, dürfte zum Teil der nicht sowohl abstrakte
als allegorische Gebrauch sein, den die spätlateinische Literatur
von den Götternamen macht. Baudelaire konnte da ein dem seinem
verwandtes Vorgehen erkennen." In W. Benjamin, Zentralpark,
Gesammelte Schriften Band I · 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a/M,
1978, p. 675). This would have us reconsider Benjamin's strong
thesis that modern aesthetics related to the large city is first
considered in lyrical poetry by Baudelaire. The antecedents are
found in Marcia, but also in Catulo:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes
nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.
Celio, ourLesbia, the Lesbia,
That Lesbia, who Catulo alone
Loved more than himself and his kin
Now in the street corners and in the back alleys
She takes the grandchildrend of the magnanimous Remo.
This nuga - common poem - written by
Catulo in vulgar language appears to lay so much stress on the
most obscene words that the result is not vulgar. It is necessary
to point out that glubit means"remove the bark from the tree",
to strip the leaves of the tree. And when Catulo applies this
term to Lesbia´s condut, his lover, then a whore social
climbing in search for prestigious phaluses, the sene of the word
becomes: to "deflower" , to "peal", to "take".
We are int he last years of Republican Rome, decadent, promiscuous
and corrupt. Curiously, Marcial, poet of Imperial Rome, in the
epigram 34, Book 1, mentions a Lesbia On open thresholds without
doormen, Lesbia, always / dissolute, you do not hide your furtive
pleasures: / you derive more pleasure from he who looks on than
from the whore lover / and you do not enjoy pleasure if it is
hidden. / But a whore drives the witness away with curtains and
locks; / and rarely opens a crack in Sumemio's brothel. / Learn
at least Quione and Yade's modesty: / tombs hide the dirty and
the whores. / Do you think this too cruel a verdict? I forbid
you to be seen / not to be caught. It is the love of entrance
halls, the big city, the brothel, prostitution. As one can see,
it is again criticism to erotic exhibitionism in the urban landscape.
But this time the reprocha apparently is not the hurt complaint
of the jilted lover, but the testimony of the acid, but impartial
observer. Could Marcial´s Lesbia, unredeemed whore, be a
hyperbolic evocation of the one mentioned by Catulo, a Veronese
poet for whom he felt such deep admiration. (It is appropiate
to remember that Imperial Rome was a population settlement that
like the Paris of the Second Empire reached the one million two
hundred inhabitants). The allegory of the statue of Liberty/Libertine
(a pagan divinity in the sculpture presentation of Lola Mora)
- combine -in our interpretation- throughtout Alarmas, similar
echoes to the poems by Catulo and by Marcial. She suffers the
same transformations as Lesbia in the works by the poets: she
fluctuates from divinisation to the lowest level held by the feminine
figure: a corner whore driven by her ambitions for power and by
her whims rather than by a pimp. As in the Roman pantheon Libertas
is an abstract divinity, non-figurative, without mythological
backing and with less consistency than a vaporours political social
representation, it is not unfair to assume that in Alarmas one
has tried to give her, at the wrong time, a certain kind of figuration…
(2) See footnote 1, epigram 34 by Marcial.
(3) The street...the only valid field of experience.
A. Breton, Nadja, en Oeuvres Completes I, Paris, Gallimard, 1988,
p. 716. As it is known, this sentence summarizes bluntly, one
of the subjects of surrealist poetry. We come across it again
in L'amour fou by Breton, but particularly in Le paysan de Paris,
by Louis Aragon.
(4) Traditional cattle exhibition premises
in Buenos Aires.
(5) Each square has its bronze rude character.
(6) Then, at the time of the rough (1)890s.
Jorge Luis Borges in Milonga de Don Nicanor Paredes , Para las
seis cuerdas, Obras Completas II, Buenos Aires, Emecé,
1989, page 339.
(7) Dans l´histoire, comme dans la nature, la pourriture
est le laboratoire de la vie. Marx, Le Capital I, París,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1965, page
995. Translation by Maximilien Rubel. As it is known, Marx worked
with the translator of the first volume of The Capital, Joseph
Roy, through a sustained epistolary exchange from February 1871
to the end of 1874. The sentence quoted is not found in the German
original version. It is a later addition singularly relevant,
as it helps to define, in a particularly brutal way, his philosophical
history.
(8) See footnote 1, epigram 34 by Marcial
(9) encuentro furtivo (N de T).
(10) Keiner glaubt keinem, alle wissen Beschied. Th.W.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, 1985,
page 28.
(11) Chi dorme per la strada ha fiducia
nel mondo. C. Pavese, Lavorare stanca, Torino, Einaudi,
1943.
(12) Sollte Erwachen die Sinthesis sein
aus der Thesis des Traumbewusstseins und der Antithesis des Wachbewusstsein?
Dann wäre der Moment des Erwachens identisch mit dem "Jetzt
der Erkennbarkeit", in dem die Dinge ihre wahre -surrealistische-
Miene aufsetzen. So ist bei Proust wichtig der Einsatz des ganzen
Lebens an der im höchsten Grade dialektischen Bruchstelle
des Lebens, dem Erwachen. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk,
en Gesammelte Schriften, Band V-1, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp,1982,
page 579. Think of the startling echoes that the term Einsatz
carries. So the phrase unter Einsatz des Lebens (to
risk one's life) expresses the Benjaminian intention already manifest
in Alarms as it relates awakening and inserruction.
(13) …da Panik und Fest, nach langer
Brudertrennung sich erkennend, im revolutionären Aufstand
einander umarmen. W. Benjamin, "Schönes Entsetzen"
en Denkbilder, Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV·1,
Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, 1981, page 435.
(14) Une oeuvre où il y a des théories
est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix. M.
Proust, À la Recherche du temps perdu, Tome IV, París,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1989, page
461. (Nouvelle édition).
(15) Look up F. Bacon, L'Art de l'impossible,
Vol. I, Genève, Skira, 1976, pages. 100-107. In painting
Bacon says. he does does "...ce que l'accident a proposé"
("...what the accident proposed").
(16) See note 22.
(17) P. Klee. We are sorry that we have not
been able place the textual passage attributed to Klee. Nevertheless,
we have found other passages that support or agree with this statement:
a) Klee´s non "representational" concept that
he exacts for painting and b) "the meticulous verification
of the possible worlds: Utopia" For a), the following passage:
"... je n'ai nullement l'intention de représenter
l'homme tel comme il est mais tel comme el pourrait être".
Klee, Conférence de Jena, 1924, in Ecrits sur
l'art I, , París, Dessain et Tolra, 1973, page 93.
Bur also this passage seems to us decisive: "Ces curiosités
(provided byr "dreams, ideas, imagination":this
elliptical quotation is ours) deviendront alors des réalités,
des réalités de l'art, qui donneront à la
vie une dimension plus large que celle que est la sienne d'ordinaire.
Non pas simplement parce qu'elles reflètent ce qui a été
vu avec plus ou moins de vie, mais parce que elles rendent visible
(the emphasys is ours) la parcelle de secret qui a pu être
entrevue". Ib. pages 93-94. We think this is the passage
in the author of Alarms quotes by memory, withouth checking is
with the Jena Conference. As to b) to confirm the complaint against
what exists and to vindicate aesthetic Utopia, we thought it appropiate
to transcribe the following passage by Klee: the artist: "....pour
un part, il est sans doute philosophe sans le savoir. Tout en
considérant pas que ce monde est le meilleur des mondes
comme le pensent les optimistes et tout en niant que le monde
que nos entoure soit si mauvais qu'il est préférable
de ne pas le prendre en exemple, il se dit toutefois que, sous
cette apparence de la nature qui résulte de la création,
ce monde n'est pourtant pas le seul." Ib. page 92. We
have taken long to define this quotation as Benajamin's admiration
for Klee is well-known and the multiple affinities that the painting
of the artists has with the reflections of the philosopher and,
furthermore, because of the repeated statements on "n o premeditation",
arte and Utopia, that take place in Alarms. Benjamin's
criticism to positivist progressiveness in Social democracy, this
progressive politicized old fashioned ideology, reaches it is
most heated formulation in a ghostly allegory of the painting
Angelus Novus, by Klee. W. Benjamin, Über den Begriff
der Geschichte, thesis IX, in Gesammelte Schriften I ·
2, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, page 697.
(18) J. Lovisolo, "Presencia y ausencia
del cuerpo en la construcción de lo visible" en Disseny
Gràfic i Comunicació Visual Nº 2 ADGFAD,
International Council of Graphic Design Associations, Barcelona,
1979, page 13.
(19) Alchimistes de la révolution.
This expresión is found in the review Marx wrote on the
work by A. Chenu Les Conspirateurs, in K. Marx, Oeuvres
IV, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, París,
1994, page 361.
(20) War shout given by the maenads. Eurípides,
Las Bacantes, pages 155-160.
(21) Mention to the poem by Joaquín
Giannuzzi, Invitación a la dalia (unpublished, 2001):
Querida mía: te propongo/ una visión oblicua con
relación al universo,/ que tu egoísmo y el mío
sean uno/ y hagan el amor sin necesitar/ que restauren el mundo
para nosotros/ ¿Es demasiado soberbio/ dar la espalda a
la calle/ donde rugen los automóviles terroristas/ y la
policía rebosa de actualidad?/ Tanto mejor volvernos/ con
huesos desconocidos. Clausurados/ macho y hembra en época
de crisis,/ hacia el fondo de la casa/ donde hay un jardín
creciendo fuera de la historia,/ capaz de borrar la sombra contaminada/
entre el deseo y la carne./ He descubierto allí/ una planta
de dalias con el tallo surcado/ por una vena roja/ que asciende
hasta engendrar/ estallidos fríos y violáceos en
lo alto./ Que tengamos comunión y bodas/ con esa certidumbre
vegetal.
(22) Von der Unreife der Beherrschten
lebt die Überreife der Gesellschaft. Adorno-Horkheimer, Dialektik
der Aufklärung, Gesammelte Schriften,
, Band 3, Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp, 1984, page 53. We translate
the term Überreife with the phrase "on its
way to putrefaction"if it is true that we miss the syntactic
structure of the sentence we gain in meaning. This is why we do
not keep to H. Murena's translation (Dialéctica del
Iluminismo, Bs. As., Sudamericana, 1987, page 52). The term
Überreife means "ripening" -progression to maturity
- and not "decadent" - as Murena translates - which
implies regression: a fruit exceeded in its ripeness that rots
and falls. In this manner we keep the double semantic source of
the Adornian expression.
(23) Teresa Leonardi, Mujer dibujando
los países por venir, unpublished , 2001.
(24) Jorge Luis Borges, "La Muralla y
los Libros", in Otras Inquisiciones, Obras Completas,
tome II, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1989, paage 13.
(25) With irony ("uncomfortable question"),
the autor of Alarms hints at an undercover criticism of
language pragmatism - collaborator of the "white positivism
of the Neoliberal Socialdemocracy", which is at the root
of the Theory of Consensus and parliamentary liberal democracy.
At the same time, he stresses some allusions spread out in the
text. In efect, Austin Searle, the second Wittgenstein and the
theoricians of argumentation- whose most recent and enthusiastic
expresión we find in Ralws and Habermas- would like to
replace the Aufhebung ("excelling") for the
Kritik as it was understood by a Aufkläre of the
XVIII c., whose example could web be Condorcet. (To Habermas,
who differs from the Frankfurt School in its heroic phase, "modernism
is an unfinished project")..., nothing further from Benjamín,
Adorno, Horkheimer. Specially Benjamín, who, according
to us, exercised the most radical critique to liberal parliamentary
democracy. In effect, the matrix of all liberal institutions is
the salary type free contract relationship and at the heart of
salary contract there is violence. The prehistory of the contract
is confiscation and the theft to independent producers. Cf. Benjamin:
Zur Kritik der Gewalt, in Gesammelte Schriften II ·
1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a/M, 1977, pages 179 and the following).
"With strong perlocutory messages standard barbarism of unique
thought is dissiminted through instant global production and reproduction
in real time: Internet". The author, opposes the Aufhebung,
understood as a negation of existing reality, not only through
discoursive means but because of the negative action of struggle
and work to the argumentative critique, directed towards an agreement
but always outside the thing itself "If in the oratory republic
(beredsame Republik, cf. Th. Mann, Der Zauberberg, Fischer , Frankfurt
a/M, 1982, p. 487) the conflict derived from normative structures
that regulate a diferential access to social product are settled
through a discoursive means it is because the managers of the
Socialdemocrat Association and Northamerican neoliberalism (is
there a difference?) mobilize the following strategic devices
to achieve that aim: 1st. Defferred distribution (in Derrida's
sense "delay" and "deviation"), at the heatr
of the Association, of the five centuries of capitalist accumulated
material and symbolic goods in the Perifery. 2nd The defferred
distribution and the generalized access to the consuming it affords,
achieves a (temporary) pacification of class conflict and delays
insurrection". Cf. Jorge Lovisolo, Relevamiento de las
concepciones de razón disponibles en los siglos XIX y XX,
Cuadernos de Humnidades, nº 13, Salta, 2001. Marx
, in a passage of Critique to Hegel's Law Filosophy, combines
Kritik with Aufhebung , but as it may be observed, the historical
subject is the protagonist of overcoming and not precisely through
a discoursive means: "...critique is not a head pasión,
but heads the pasión. It is not the anatomical scalpel,
if not its weapon. Its object is the enemy, whom one does not
try to refute, but to destroy. " (...die Kritik keine
Leidenschaft des Kopfs, sie ist der Kopf der Leidenschaft. Sie
ist kein anatomisches Messer, sie ist eine Waffe. Ihr Gegenstand
ist ihr Feind, den sie nicht widerlegen, sondern vernichten will.
Cf. K. Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,
in Marx-Engels Werke, Band 1, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1981, page
380). We do not face here the sophisticated disposition of "conjectures
and refutations".". To dialectic reasoning ,substantial
reasoning, argumentative deliberation based on the superstition
of the formal unimpeachability of the arguments sustained by the
learned is, according to Hegel, vanity's ingenious verbosity (geistreichen
Geschwätze der Eitelkeit. Cf. Werke 3, , Phänomenologie
des Geistes, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a/M, 1986, page 400).The argument
is no more than an insipid ingenuity exercise to show off in the
evenings in the parlour or in the coffee houses, enclaves where
the conspirators in their dinner jackets prepared their master
piece: a careful reading of the Encyclopedie that still afforded
muted echoes of the colloquial tone of their gatherings. Specially
ein the articles by Diderot and D'Alembert, not so much in Voltaire,
who conspirated from his exile. (…) The argumentative procedure
tends to mistake the thruth for a contest, with the rhetorical
defeat of the other one: procedure astuteness to succeed in dialogue
is to ask questions and to convince the person one is taling to,
and if one cannot persuade him, one confuses him. As it is known,
for Hegel, as well as for Marx, one does not refute the opponent
in a Popperian manner, one destroys him. Cf. Jorge Lovisolo,
Metateoría, Autonomía, Crítica, Superación,
page 8, (unpublished, 2001).
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