A Short Andean History of Photography: Yawar fiesta

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Notes

 1 José María Arguedas, Yawar fiesta (1941), Editorial Horizonte, Lima, 2010. All references to the novel will be to this edition and included in parenthesis in the text.

 2 Gamonalismo and the struggle against gamonalismo is fundamental to Arguedas's literary production. What is it? According to Mariátegui: ‘[e]l término “gamonalismo” no designa solo una categoría social y económica: la de los latifundistas o grandes propietarios agrarios. Designa todo un fenómeno. El gamonalismo no está representado sólo por los gamonales propiamente dichos. Comprende una larga jerarquía de funcionarios, intermediarios, agentes, parásitos, etc. El indio alfabeto se transforma en un explotador de su propia raza porque se pone al servicio del gamonalismo. El factor central del fenómeno es la hegemonía de la gran propiedad semifeudal en la política y el mecanismo del Estado.’ Mariátegui, 1978, p. 37.

 3 See Lauer (1997: 25–9).

 4 ‘Enigmatic’ in the sense that, apart from what it may say about reality, this is also the site of the text's own demand to be interpreted.

 5 If we take note of Mariátegui's use of the notion of ‘hegemonía’ to describe gamonal rule, gamonalismo might best be thought of as a hybridized state, reproducing and subordinating underdeveloped forms of rural capitalism to the localized personal rule of the landowner (or misti) class. Emerging from the collapse of the colonial state, according to Alberto Flores Galindo (1988: 290–1), it constitutes a postcolonial form in which ‘la privatización de la política, la fragmentación del dominio y su ejercicio a escala de un pueblo o de una provincia’ – that is, ‘poder local’ – is paradoxically institutionalized as dominant. This is why Mariátegui insisted that capitalism in Peru was the work of the ‘feudo’ rather than the ‘burgo’. From this perspective, Leguía's Patria Nueva government represents something like a belated revenge of the ‘burgo’, a US – capital and government loan – sponsored programme of state modernization aimed at the economic and political power of the landowning ‘feudo’. The character of Leguía's government is thus best understood as a statist modernization programme – involving the simultaneous expansion and centralization of both repressive and ideological state apparatus: strengthening the armed forces and the civil guard, as well as creating and expanding state education. See Flindell Klarén (2000: 241–88).

 6 Indeed, Yawar fiesta is a novel that dramatizes the constitutive tension between (developmentalist) positivism and (mythic) romanticism in Mariátegui's thought. See Kraniauskas (2005).

 7 See Elmore (1993: 99–144) and Paoli (1985: 165–87).

 8 ‘En teoría eran blancos, o por lo menos se consideraban como tales; lo más frecuente es que en términos socioeconómicos se tratara de propietarios o terratenientes, dueños de un fundo, una hacienda o un complejo de propiedades … ejercían su poder en dos espacios complementarios: dentro de la hacienda, sustentados en las relaciones de dependencia personal, en una suerte de reciprocidad asimétrica; fuera de ella, en un territorio variable que en ocasiones podia comprender … la capital de un departamento, a partir de la tolerancia del poder central. El Estado requería de los gamonales para poder controlar a esas masa indígenas excuidas del voto y de los rituales de la democracia liberal ….’ Galindo (1988: 290–1. This describes the social relations of Yawar fiesta quite well.

 9 See the important essays contained in Rowe (1996).

10 For example, see Paoli (1985) – although this does not exhaust the interest of his account.

11 Deleuze and Guattari's use of the idea of ‘the body without organs’ is notoriously difficult and slippery, whilst also developing over time. Here I will refer to it in the sense suggested by the following passage: ‘Its one purpose is to point out the fact that the form of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered non-productive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition.… It falls back on … all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be “miraculated” … by it.’ See Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 11). What is up for grabs in Yawar fiesta is the ‘earth’ before and after being capitalized (that is, ‘miraculated’ by capital).

12 In Deleuze and Guattari's periodization of history, the idea of a ‘savage’ territoriality principally refers to nomadic societies. Here I am using it – that is, the idea of ‘earth’ – to refer to the non-capitalist and non-feudal territoriality of the ‘ayllu’ as deployed by Arguedas in Yawar fiesta. It would be important to see to what extent it is a fictional construction made out of materials produced both by his experience and by his anthropological and historical studies – all subordinated here, however, to his own literary-political project. Laclau discusses ‘dislocation’ in Laclau (1990: 39–59).

13 Arguedas thus uses the novel form to expand, firstly, the archive, as a counter-history, to include other voices (‘air-writing’, in Cornejo Polar's sense) excluded by established history-writing, and secondly, the idea of legitimated reading, to include non-literary patterning (dance) and surfaces (land, buildings, sky). See Rowe (1996) and Cornejo Polar (1994).

14 Arguedas has evidently learned from the avant-gardes and the experience of mechanical reproduction. On ‘distraction’, see Walter Benjamin (1979), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

15 This inclusion of documents of reality into literary space – like in conceptual art – prefigures the compositional practices of writers like Rodolfo Walsh, Augusto Roa Bastos and Ricardo Piglia: the artistic use of the non-artistic and the non-artistic use of the artistic.

16 For the mysterious identity of the third-person narrator who says and sees everything, but from an inaccessible point of view, see Jameson (2007: 380–419).

17 It is important here to note the difference between the exclamation of the author-narrator of Yawar fiesta and the colonial institution ‘pueblo de indios’ – the product of the colonial ‘reduction’ of the Indian population. A discussion of these as well as of their postcolonial republican transformation can be found in Thurner (1997).

18 See Theodor W. Adorno's discussion of the contradiction between expression and construction in art as developed in Adorno (2004).

19 For the ideas of ‘structured place’, ‘out-of-place’ and ethical ‘torsion’, I have freely adopted from Badiou (2009) and Rama (1982).

20 For the different positions adopted by Arguedas with regard to ‘mestizaje’ from the beginning of the 1950s on (that is, after the publication of Yawar fiesta), and which range from optimism to disappointment, see Manrique (1993: 85–98).

21 For the notion of ‘anti-production’, see note 11 above. For an account of the social contents of the novel see Rodrigo Montoya, ‘Yawar fiesta: una lectura antropológica’, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Año 6, No. 12, 1980, pp. 55–68; and for the significance of the urban design of Puquio, see François Bourricaud (1958), reproduced in Carmen María Pinilla (2011: 87–99) as well as Arguedas's ‘The Novel and the Problem of Literary Expression in Peru’ in the English-language translation of Yawar fiesta, translated by Frances H. Barraclough, Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, pp. xiii–xxi (this edition also contains Arguedas's study of the town, ‘Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change’).

22 Cornejo Polar (1978: 7–8) and (1980).

23 According to Laclau, the ‘constitutive outside’ is constitutive of social antagonism, ‘an “outside” which blocks the identity of the “inside” (and is, nonetheless, the prerequisite for its constiution at the same time)’ (Laclau: 1990: 17).

24 ‘… the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.… This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation.…’ ‘However,’ continues Rancière, ‘another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in governement: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community….’ See Rancière (2004: 12). Rancière goes on to describe and periodize a number of ‘aesthetic regimes’. In this regard, one might say that what could be called the ‘indigenist regime’ described by Cornejo Polar from the point of view of literature traces a diagram of the foundational ‘disagreement’ of post-colonial Peru. See Rancière (1999: 9).

25 See Lauer (1997); Poole (1997).

26 As Marx says of capital: it ‘strives… to annihilate this space [the ‘whole earth’] with time… ’ – its time. Marx (1977: 539).

27 See Oscar Terán (1985) and, for the subalternizing aspects of the concept of ‘development’, my ‘Difference Against Development: Spiritual Accumulation and the Politics of Freedom’, Boundary 2, 32, 2, 2005, 53–80.

28 For ‘minor literature’, see Deleuze and Guattari (1993: 16–20). In their view, minor literature has three characteristics: the deterritorialization of language (of both the Spanish and the Quechua in Yawar fiesta – like Kafka, Arguedas is a bilingual writer), the political immediacy of every individual act and utterance (the political overdetermination of the actions of all in the novel's story), and the collective assemblage of enunciation (on the one hand, the dissonant mixing of languages dramatized in Yawar fiesta – there is no attempt to create a ‘mestizo’ language that would reconcile the conflicts in and between the languages, or to search for equivalence in their translation – and, on the other, their dramatization from the perspective of the ‘abra’ and ayllu). In this sense, the dissonance of the languages reduplicates the dislocation of the novel's form.

29 In this sense, the ayllu – or community – subject of Arguedian literary history emerges from the ‘abra’ as a kind of ‘open’ and ‘exposed’ subject, as it is set out, for example, by Jean-Luc Nancy in his reflections on Roberto Esposito's idea of ‘communitas-immunitas’. See Nancy (2003: 9–19). This topic is addressed in a set of further essays on the work of Arguedas and Augusto Roa Bastos in development.

30 Marx (1976: 874).

31 Flores Galindo (1988: 295). See also my essay on Guillermo del Toro's vampire film Cronos: ‘Cronos and the political economy of vampirism: notes on a historical constellation’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme & Margaret Iverson (eds.) (1998: 142–57).

32 ‘And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.’ Marx (1976: 875) (my emphasis).

33 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in (1979) One-Way Street, New Left Books. London, 243.

34 In truth, as François Bourricaud points out, the modernizing plan to which the students are allied involves substituting the Indian tutupukllay with a ‘civilized’ bullfight (or ‘corrida’): Bourricaud (1991), included in Carmen María Pinilla (2011: 103–21). And, to resist this transformation is to insist in the ‘savage’ domestication of the bulls, including the mythical Misitu: ¡Indian cattle!

35 ‘Only the standpoint of bodies and their power can challenge the discipline and control wielded by the republic of property’, write Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their recent book; Hardt and Negri (2009: 27). In this sense, Arguedas's insistence – like that of another exemplary writer in this regard, José Revueltas – is similar to the rhetorical and theoretical insistence of Antonio Negri, whose Ideas on the common I am adapting here. For a negative review of Commonwealth, see Kraniauskas (2010: 39–42).

36 This is what Néstor García Canclini calls a ‘hybrid’ conjunctural formation: a fragmented unity of a variety of historical temporalities, such as those represented by misti gamonalismo, the Lima-mediated cattle economy, the state, and the ayllus (amongst others) – and the figure of Misitu articulates them all. See García Canclini (1989).

37 Antonio Cornejo Polar (1973: 79, 93) and Horacio Legrás (2008: 207–11).

38 The story of the building of the road is told in the context of the law pertaining to the conscripción vial imposed by the Leguía government in 1920: all men between eighteen and sixty years of age had to work for six to twelve days a year on the building of roads. In the novel, this becomes a kind of neo-mita that the Indians of the provincial towns invert in local competitions (Elmore, 1993). For its social consequences (such as migration and the creation of clubs of migrants in Lima), see Flindell Klarén (2000: 250–1).

39 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Illuminations, Fontana, London, 1979, p. 257. Benjamin is quoting Ranke.

40 As is well known, Arguedas also insisted that ‘el socialismo no mató en mi lo mágico’, ‘No soy un aculturado…’; Arguedas (1975: 281–3). See also Mariátegui (1979: 23–8). The key question here would be whether, for Mariátegui, the mythical quality of the ‘social revolution’ needs to be historically mediated by the cultural experience of secular disenchantment or de-mythification for its own political efficacy. For François Bourricaud (1991) the deaths of the bull and of the K'ayua ‘capeadores’ are ‘auto-destructivos’, and symptoms of Arguedas's own melancholy (Bourricaud is writing after the author's suicide). From the point of view of the ‘abra’, however, sacred destruction can also be productive: it dislocates and reveals.

41 For the latter, see William Rowe (1975: 117–28) and Jon Beasely-Murray, ‘Arguedasmachine: Modernity and Affect in the Andes’, Iberoamericana, 30, 2008, 113–28.

42 Walter Benjamin (1979: 250), ‘A Small History of Photography’.