VYTAUTO DIDŢIOJO UNIVERSITETAS POLITIKOS MOKSLŲ IR DIPOLOMATIJOS FAKULTETAS SOCIALINĖS IR POLITINĖS TEORIJOS KATEDRA

Arnoldas Stramskas

PASIPRIEŠINIMAS DABARČIAI: ROBERTO BOLAÑO IR SOCIALINĖS DEKOMPOZICIJOS LITERATŪRINĖ DIAGNOZĖ

Magistro baigiamasis darbas

Socialinės ir politinės kritikos programa, valstybinis kodas 621L20008 Politikos mokslų studijų kryptis

Vadovas Doc.dr. J.D. Mininger______(Moksl. laipsnis, vardas, pavardė) (parašas) (data)

Apginta_Prof. dr. Šarūnas Liekis______(PMDF dekanas) (parašas) (data)

Kaunas, 2013

Contents

Santrauka (lietuvių ir anglų k)...... 0 Introduction...... 1 1. Approaching literature with Deleuze and Guattari……………………….…………….5 2. Situating post-Boom Latin American literature and political economy……………….....11 3. Literature is not made of words alone: A very brief biography of Roberto Bolaño…..…18 4. Lines of flight and revolutionary hopes in ………………………21 4.1 ―The true poet is the one that is always abandoning himself‖………………...….....22 4.2 ―We dreamed of utopia and we woke up screaming‖...... 26 4.3 ―The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved in betrayal or pathetic survivals‖...... 29 5. Archeology of the social in 2666...... 36 5.1 Decomposition or the end of the social ...... 38 5.2 Imperceptibility, anonymity, and striving for singularity...... 47 5.3 Violence as a state form...... 54 6. Rethinking the social through literature...... 63 6. Conclusion……………………………...... 69 Works cited...... 70

Santrauka

Šis magistro darbas gilinasi į produktyvias sąsajas tarp sociopolitinės kritikos ir literatūros. Sekant Gilles‘iu Deleuze‘u ir Félixu Guattari, šiame darbe naudojama klinikinė prieiga prie literatūros, teigiant, jog literatūra turi diagnozuojančią funkciją. Darbe yra priešinamasi poţiūriui, kad literatūra yra nepilnavertė ar maţiau efektyvi socialinės ir politinės kritikos tyrimų ir išraiškos forma. Darbe yra teigiama, kad dėl fundamentalaus neapibrėţtumo ir prasmių įvairovės literatūra nepateikia teiginiais grįstų, aiškiai suformuluotų atsakymų į keliamas problemas, tačiau tai nėra jos silpnoji pusė, o greičiau atvirkščiai. Šis magistrinis darbas pritaria Deleuze‘ui ir Guattari, teigiant, jog literatūra yra tapsmo ir vengimo linijų erdvė. Tapsmas ir vengimo linijos priešinasi tvarkai ir subjekto uţdarymui, bei uţsidarymui savyje. Šiame darbe literatūra yra analizuojama ne semiotiniais prinicipais, bandančiais iššifruoti po literatūros darbais slypinčias reikšmes, bet jos poveikius. Deleuze‘as ir Guattari klausia ne ką literatūra reiškia, bet kaip ji veikia? Taikant šią literatūrinę-klinikinę prakitiką yra naudojamasi dviems Roberto Bolaño literatūriniais darbais, iliustruojant kokias jungtis jie kuria ir kokią kritiką formuoja dabarčiai. Viena pagrindinių temų, kuri jungia šį darbą, t. y. literatūrą ir socialinę kritiką, yra termino „socialinis‖, kaip valstybinės formos, permastymas ir įţvalga, kad literatūra gali turėti įrankių alternatyvių socialumo formų paieškose.

Raktiniai ţodţiai: vengimo linijos, tapsmas, socialinis, valstybės forma, Deleuze, Guattari.

Summary

This thesis explores productive linkages between social and political criticism and literature. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this thesis takes a clinical approach, suggesting that literature reflects a kind of diagnosis of the state of the world. Complementary to this clinical approach, the perspective here resists prevailing notions that literature is inferior to or less effective than other fields of social and political critical inquiry and expression. The thesis argues that if, because of the fundamental ambiguities and pluralities of meaning animating it, literature does not offer propositional, well-defined answers to overtly posed or covertly insinuated problems, this is not therefore a weakness, but a strength. This thesis concurs with Deleuze and Guattari in asserting that literature is a site of becoming and of lines of flight. Lines of flight and becoming are resistant practices against imposed order and (self)closure of the subject. The method here eschews a semiotic approach to literature, which begs facile answers by simplistically answering: what does the work mean? Instead, the clinical approach taken here asks ―how does the text work?‖ Using this approach, the central literary object in this thesis is author Roberto Bolaño, whose two novels––The Savage Detectives and 2666––serve to illustrate literature‘s vast potential as valuable critique and resistance to the social and political ills of the present. The thesis calls for, and acts upon, an attempt to rethink the concept of ―the social‖ otherwise than as a state-form, and to explore possibilities where literature may offer insights for alternative forms of sociality.

Key words: lines of flight, becoming, the social, state-form, Deleuze, Guattari.

0

Introduction

―We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.‖1

―And if you want to live, then live! Dance, sing, scream until your lungs bleed! And if you want to die, die then! Plunge deep into hell, with me clasped tight in your embrace, and we'll make an end to all this. But you don't want to live or die, do you?‖2

In an interview Gilles Deleuze once expressed his idea of writing about authors of literature as follows: ―My ideal, when I write about the author, would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he knew how to give and invent‖. 3To write neither scholarly nor familiarly but rather affectively about literature is most definitely not an easy task. Neither is it entirely convincing that it is a proper approach (if there would be such thing as proper). The work that follows is a modest attempt to show how literature can express ―the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics‖ of the author; this thesis is also an exercise in giving back to the author, in Deleuze‘s sense, and yet being fully conscious of the entirely probable and real possibility of failing to do so. The consolation is that Roberto Bolaño, the centerpiece of this thesis, had a sense of humor too sophisticated to weep over these lines, even if they are far from his intentions. However, Deleuze and Guattari–

1 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Tomlinson, H. and Burchell, G. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. P. 108. 2 Catharsis, ―The Witch‘s Heart‖, Passion, Crimethinc., 1999, CD/LP. 3 Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. Dialogues. Trans. Tomlinson, H. and Habbeerjam, B. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. P. 119. 1 the other central figures in this thesis––are quite explicit in stating that the beauty and potentiality of literary works, in part, are constituted by the dissolution of the personified author, his or her intentions, his ―public‖ persona. It is the works themselves that are either productively working for us, or not at all. The immediate question for the reader of this thesis within the confines of methodology and academic concerns is: what does literature have to do with social and political critique? My aim is to demonstrate that literature not only shares common elements and possible intentions with sophisticated social and political critique, but that literature can be a—perhaps surprisingly, yet uniquely and perhaps even strangely—effective form of social and political criticism, if it is allowed to be itself—i.e. to be literature and function as literature. This thesis demonstrates several points in support of thesis methodological claim to literature‘s critical value. In order for such a critical project to work, long-lasting hierarchical relations which assign science a privileged role over fiction, literature, and art in general, must be suspended, overturned, or still better: displaced. This is even more relevant for the social sciences and humanities than for the natural sciences. Deleuze and Guattari teach that ―Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos.‖4 That is something significantly different from the role assigned to activities that typically refer to explanatory, unifying, and systematizing actions. This is not to claim that these activities are identical, but that their differences do not merit the imposition of hierarchy. Secondly, and this may be more difficult, Deleuze and Guattari advise not to try to decipher the meaning that a work of literature is supposed to (re)present; instead, they urge the pursuit of the kinds of effects and affects it creates in our experience of that literature: i.e. how it connects and produces intensities; how it dislocates us from our sense of subjecthood and individuality; and, how it allows us to experience radical openness and the immanence of events, turning away from static identity into an experience of dynamic becoming. Thus, this thesis begins by briefly situating Deleuze‘s and Guattari‘s work with respect to literary texts and the act of writing literature. While not an exhaustive survey, this opening section follows Deleuze‘s own mode of operation, offering a selective inquiry into conceptual tools that are best suited within the framework of this thesis project. Although Deleuze and Guattari are given pride of place in this initially more methodologically minded section, other thinkers, works, and concepts are applied throughout this thesis that may or may not directly use literature in terms of their own efforts and concerns. This approach also constitutes part of the ―method‖ that I am taking from Deleuze and Guattari, namely, seeking productive connections without the strict restraints of discipline or genre—a kind of inter-disciplinarity.

4 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1994. Op. cit. P. 202 2 Prior to launching into rigorous, detailed readings of texts by Roberto Bolaño, the thesis provides some context covering the historical status of literature in Latin America, starting with a description of the so-called ―literary boom‖ of the 1960s. I situate this literary breakthrough within a particular set of social, economic, and political coordinates that are rather starkly different from the situation of the past few decades, when Bolaño has emerged more prominently as a more celebrated author. This act of contextualization also serves as a larger background for the analysis of two key novels by Bolaño, providing a perspective in terms of temporal and sociopolitical configurations. The context of Bolaño‘s life and works are presented in the short section, followed by the analysis of The Savage Detectives, one of his most important works. This novel put him on the literary map beyond Latin America. The reading here argues that The Savage Detectives aligns itself in some directions that preoccupy Deleuze‘s and Guattari‘s work, following revolutionary impulses that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s. Bolaño portrays more traditional political engagements, but even more so the politically motivated literary avant-gardes. This section strives to bridge the gap between politics and aesthetics, particularly in terms of poetry and the avant-gardism of ―visceral realism‖. This leads to a treatment of the well-trodden, but still absolutely relevant debates about the state of poetry and its apparent decline as holding a socially important function, and ensuing implications of such a development. The subsequent part of this section draws from its literary-critical reading a discussion of how Bolaño attempts to work through issues of aesthetic and political concerns in the context of failed revolutionary and utopian projects. What practices are utilized to resist the melancholy of defeat? How to balance on a tight rope strung between on the one hand turning to the cynicism and the opportunism of accepting the present, and on the other turning towards self-destruction? ―Lines of flight‖ become an important concept for showing potential strategies of resistance. The last part of this section deals with humor, community, silence, and desire, and how each in their own ways create breaks and fissures in the consistency of imposed forms required by modern life. In the next section entitled ―Archeology of the Social‖, I argue that Bolaño‘s work, especially his 2666—now often trumpeted by critics as a contemporary literary masterpiece— illuminates and helps develop a thesis that ―the social‖ as such has reached an end or critical threshold of some sort. The novel spans almost the entire century, bleeding into the early years of this current millennium, and offers a very wide scope, depth, and geography. But where it especially stands out is in terms of capturing a decomposition of the social – a sphere that for a few centuries was a domain of the state. The argument here is that, while the picture of the social that the novel draws is bleak, there are also some possible pathways if not out than at least moving at the extreme edges of and perhaps beyond the present state. This end of the

3 social, or social decomposition, is also quite consistent, following Deleuze and Guattari, in terms of seeing advanced stages of capitalism as increasingly deterritorializing and reterritorializing older forms of social organization. The challenge is how not to succumb to one of the two positions––either in attempts to preserve tradition or to espouse sweeping forces as mere expressions of desire without taking into account the real destructiveness of real lives. Among the central strategies explored in the reading of 2666, the concept of anonymity is deployed in conversation with Deleuze‘s and Guattari‘s term of imperceptibility. Bolaño‘s novel is also preoccupied with violence. I argue that the phenomenon of violence needs to be rethought in terms of distinguishing violence as a state-form and violence as part of forms-of- life, as proposed by Tiqqun. The thesis concludes with considerations about the ―usage‖ of literature and what it might offer in attempts to rethink not only ―the social‖ as a strategy of state-form, but sociality in general. This search for alternative sociality is among the central concerns of the thesis. Additionally I argue that Bolaño‘s work, although not offering pre- packaged solutions to the present impasse, in its own literary ways calls for paying closer attention on the one hand to the internalization of oppressive structures that cease to be external and on the other hand to the hasty invention of solutions, especially if they are on a large scale. Bolaño‘s portrayal of the social is performed with a surgeon‘s precision, at the same time pointing out the limits of knowledge that this kind of operation inevitably comes to. In the double-movement of this literary gesture, it turns out that the limitations of an aesthetic, art- based approach to social and political criticism may just but its greatest advantage—at least for those not hastily seeking facile solutions.

4

1. Approaching Literature with Deleuze and Guattari

Towards the very end of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari list some of the major revolutionary eruptions in the second part of the twentieth century that were defeated, co-opted, and pacified, and they ask ―where will the new irruption of desire come from?―5 The answer, disappointing to a leftist militant, perhaps, is that it will come from art (and science). Or at least that art and science ―have a revolutionary potential‖; it distributes decoded and deteritorialized flows throughout the increasingly complex socius, making it more and more difficult to encode and control its particles according to the old schemes of State inscriptions.6 The role of literature, as inherently artistic practice, is part-and-parcel of this process. Reading and writing are constitutive parts of the literary machine––an assemblage of enunciation or expression7––which is fleeing the laws of representations, even if, at the same time, are entangled in them. ―Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force‖.8 Writing, similarly, goes outside the subject, which produces the object (literary work):

To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete <…>. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.9

Becoming is among central concerns which creates opposition to being. Being, as an important category in philosophy, although accounts for change and transformation, but still assigns a role, fixes the subject, provides it with unity, whereas becoming deindividualizes, calls for a constant movement, a movement of intensities, not a goal of transformation into some final product, no ultimate horizon. Thus it is Life instead of being that preoccupies Deleuze‘s thought. Becoming ―escapes its own formalization‖10. It is a particular, reversible, contingent situation within any

5 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Hurley, R., Seem, R. and Lane, H. R. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. P. 378. 6 Ibid, p. 379. 7 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Polan, D.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. P. 88. 8 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 106 9 Deleuze, G. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Smith, D. W. and Greco, M. A.London and New York: Verso, 1997. P. 1. 10 ―Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. <…> Becoming does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man, insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression 5 given assemblage. ―An assemblage, the perfect object for the novel, has two sides: it is a collective assemblage of enunciation; it is a machinic assemblage of desire‖.11 For Deleuze, literature has an almost medical function to at least attempt to ―liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man‖.12 Gregg Lambert, for example, claims that ―a clinical usage may radically alter the conditions of the practice of literature and emerge as a kind of ‗war machine‘ against how the uses of literature have been determined by the dominance of institutional criticism in the modern period‖.13 It is an attempt to diagnose and articulate––but not to capture––experiences and things that are too big and inarticulable for any one single being/writer. ―The writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The work is set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health‖.14 The constant reminder in Deleuze and Guattari in terms of literary work, as well as desire, is not to ask ―what does it mean?‖ but ―how does it work?‖––what kind of affects, intensities, connections, becomings does it create:

We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.15

Literature is a rich and fertile field because it always exceeds––exceeds the author, authorial intentions, authorial experiences. Literature is never located in isolation. It is continuum with the social field, other literary works, experiences, percepts and affects. It is not a fixed object governed by the rigid rules of signification. Thus it is meaningless to assign literature a distinct, or, even worse, an inferior, place outside the social, political, environmental, or any other concerns. Literature is immanent to these processes. Each case of literary work is a singularity, but a singularity that is not containable within itself. It connects, creates flows that connect with other flows, machines that connect with other machines. Machine is ―neither structure nor phantasm‖, it is rather a desire.16 Thus, as an example, the Kafka-machine is:

that claims to impose itself on all matter, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight‖ (Ibid, 1). 11 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1986. Op. cit., p. 81. 12 Ibid, p. 3. 13 Lambert, G. On Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life. In Deleuze and Literature. Eds. Buchanan, I. and Marks, J. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. P. 136. 14 Ibid, p. 3. 15 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, B. London: Continuum, 2004. P. 4 16 ―the machine is desire – but not because desire is desire of the machine but because desire never stops making a machine in the machine and creates a new gear alongside the preceding gear, indefinitely, even if the gears 6

constituted by contents and expressions that have been formalized to diverse degrees by unformed materials that enter into it, and leave by passing through all possible states. To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine.17

How does this line of escape work? And what does literature have to do with it? ―The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people's concern‖.18 On the one hand the literary machine expresses and diagnoses, on the other, it anticipates––anticipates ―people to come‖, ―inventing a people that is missing‖.19 One element of this procedure is deterritiorialization of language, the function of minor language. The main example provided is Kafka‘s language and his position as Jew in Prague, who writes in bastardized (mixed with Czech and Yiddish), simplified, poor German. The minor aspect of this language is not only to dominant Czech, but also to ―cultured‖ German. It becomes a foreign language within language, Kafka becoming ―stranger within his own language‖.20 However, it should not be seen as a mere practice of dialect and expression of identity that diverges from the normative rules of language (migrants, national minorities, etc.) but some more fundamental operation that deterritorializes not only a particular language but language in general:

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope.21

This insistence on minoritarian should not be confused with simple espousal of identity politics as- we-know-it of late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Doubtless, in Deleuze and Guattari there are flirtations and occasional over-romanticism towards the minorities, but these minorities are important as long as they are in the process of becoming, fleeing, resisting, but are not solidified as a normative ideal, which is often the case within the liberal political order. ―A minority never exists ready-made, it is only formed on lines of flight, which are also its way of advancing and

seem to be in opposition or seem to be functioning in a discordant fashion. That which makes a machine, to be precise, are connections, all the connections that operate the disassembly‖ (Ibid, p. 82). 17 Ibid, p. 7. 18 Ibid, p. 18. 19 Deleuze, G., 1997. Op. cit., p. 4. 20 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1986. Op. cit., p. 26. 21 Ibid, p. 19. 7 attacking‖.22 Lines of flight refer not to a mere act of fleeing or passive resistance that it may imply, it is an active process which combines the actual and the virtual of deterritorialization: ―Writing weds a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State apparatus‖.23 However, writing as such is not a panacea, since it can be active or reactive, reinforcing or shattering world order. There is another story to literary apparatus:

History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State's pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's relation to an outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).24

Even if there are reactionary traits to literary history there are also revolutionary ones. But the old vocabulary of reaction/reform and revolution should not be taken too literary. Literature is productive in the sense that it has capacity to invent and make unexpected connections. Deleuze was always interested in creating new concepts and literature is the field where these new concepts (and new symptoms) may emerge. Thus it is not a coincidence that literature is deeply intertwined throughout Deleuze‘s (along with Guattari) thought. Quite a few works are dedicated specifically to literature: Proust and Signs, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Essays Critical and Clinical, and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. But the literary traits and analyses are utilized in many other works. Among literature‘s greatest potentialities is working in-between, networking not to necessarily connect the dots, but to see what happens between the dots, aiming not for the root, but for rhizome. ―A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo .The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‗to be,‘ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‗and. . . and.. . and. . .‘‖.25 The tendency to impose the whole, to generalize, to create concepts that would need to fit predetermined schema has all been too often evoked with often disastrous consequences. The whole has a role in Deleuze‘s and Guattari‘s thought,26 but for them the whole (concept, for example) ―is a

22 Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C., 1987. Op. cit., p. 43. 23 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 2. 24 Ibid, p. 2. 25 Ibid, p. 25. 26 “Maurice Blanchot has found a way to pose the problem in the most rigorous terms, at the level of the literary machine: how to produce, how to think about fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference—fragments that are related to one another only in that each of them is different—without having recourse either to any sort of original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about? It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity‖. (Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 6.) 8 fragmentary whole‖.27 Literature strives to point to singularity of events, generate conjunctions that do not constitute overbearing unity. ―Selecting singular cases and minor scenes is more important than any consideration of the whole‖.28 Such is the approach for the analysis of two select works of Roberto Bolaño and rhizomatic conjunctions with other fields, texts, and thoughts throughout this text. Deleuze and Guattari does not constitute ―literary theory‖ proper, with its well defined concepts. They utilize literature at its most basic level––whether ―it works‖ or not for the reader. Although ―affect‖ is of great of importance to their thought, affect is not a mere sensation disconnected from ―rational faculties‖. In terms of art and philosophy and their separate operations (art creating affects and percepts, philosophy concepts) they claim: ―[It] does not mean that the two entities do not often pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity which co-determines them‖.29 The conception of power (or rather desire) in Deleuze is preoccupied with force. Force is the ability to affect and be affected. Here there are similarities with Foucault‘s idea about the productivity of power. It is not a mere power over, power stemming from above, but power as a dispersion. It is inherently productive. Everyone has ability to affect and be affected. That is not to say that institutions, structures, traditions have no power, but simply that they are not sole source of power (and powerlessness). Affect at its most basic level is becoming and becoming relates to all possible faculties and transformations of the ―subject‖. What Deleuze does with philosophers such as Kant, similar operation is performed in respect to literature: it is a particular, singular exercise to make things work, to select, assemble connections, to produce something new out of the encounter, to create bastard children, that take lives of their own. It is not a correct reading, the right meaning, the solid interpretation that is at stake. In fact, none of these things are constitutive of their absent ―literary theory‖. It is not a method proper. It is rather experimental, positive, multiplying force that ―does‖ literature and is being ―done‖ by literature; it is personal and impersonal simultaneously. What are the shortcomings of this approach? For one, there are perhaps as many opponents as those who find use-value in Deleuze and Guattari‘s project. Most criticisms concern their larger philosophical project which relies heavily on Spinoza‘s idea of immanence and rejects traditional metaphysics and idealism. Among the prominent voices on the left spectrum of academic disciplines, their project is accused to be too closely aligned with the neoliberal project. The critics claim that capitalism cannot be countered by spontaneous unleashings of desire, fluidity, speeds, and so on––in fact it is the logic of capitalism itself. Thus more, not less, organization and self-

27 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1994. Op. cit., p. 16 28 Deleuze, G., 1997. Op. cit., p. 57. 29 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1994. Op. cit., p. 66.

9 discipline are needed to turn things around. These positive espousals of micro-politics are fully accommodating to the present order. Although such topics could be debated in length, my intention is not to do so for a simple reason that these kinds of debates tend to end up in geometrically opposed camps similar to the leftist discussions on merits of reform and revolution. I hope that throughout this thesis it will become evident that if taking Deleuze and Guattari are taken seriously there are intriguing and refreshing possibilities to be considered. Their focus on productivity means that any social system cannot be contained for long: it always threatens to explode through deterritorializations and implies that there is always change and possibility of change. If anything, their cautionary tale is that the rushed revolutionary (but normative and normalizing) impulses unable or unwilling to take on difficult task of examining the workings of power and desire are frequently doomed to reproduce what was worst about the earlier regime. It is not that Deleuze and Guattari are not concerned with revolutions, rather they are cautious and skeptical about the totalizing projects that display desire to displace order with order.30

30 ―We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them‖. (Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 42) 10 2. Situating Latin American literary boom and political economy

―death is the staff of Latin America and Latin America cannot walk without its staff‖31

―There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism‖, Walter Benjamin once (famously) proclaimed.32 The tropes of civilization and barbarism are prominent in the literature on, and of, Latin America.33 It remains utterly other, frequently abject, at the same exotic and erotic, desirable and despicable––ultimately a playground for fantasy. The New World, although clearly linguistically and historically divided, served not only as a terra incognita for colonial and imperial expansion of Europe34 but also as a constitutive part of the European modernity.35 Revolutions and national liberation struggles achieved formal independence but often remained subsumed under European and later under American influence, not only in terms of economic and social development but also in the sphere of knowledge production. Walter D. Mignolo succinctly summarizes the importance of Western Hemisphere in world historical terms as follows:

The ―Americas‖ are the consequence of early European commercial expansion and the motor of capitalism, as we know it today. The ―discovery‖ of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundation of ―modernity,‖ more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden face of modernity, ―coloniality.‖ Thus, to excavate the ―idea of Latin America‖ is, really, to understand how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded.36

Navigating this postcolonial or neocolonial context became a difficult task not only for the political regimes that were weak within the framework of this modern world order but also for emerging strata of writers and intellectuals who wanted to have ―authentic‖ voice (and say) in the new sociopolitical formations. After revolutionary period which fended off Spanish and Portuguese domination, the main power player in the region became the United States with its military and economic power. Among

31 Bolaño, R. . Trans. Andrews, C. New York: New Directions, 2006. P. 75. 32 Walter Benjamin. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Zohn, H. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. P. 256. 33 Most famously in seminal Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, a book written in 1845 by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento 34 According to Qujano and Wallerstein, proponents of Marxist world-system theory : ―The modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century. The Americas as a geo-social construct were born in the long sixteenth century. The creation of the geo-social entity, the Americas, was the constitutive act of the modern world system. The Americas were not incorporated into an already capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas‖ (Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I. Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System. International Social Sciences Journal, 1992, 134. P. 549. 35 ―To excavate coloniality <...> one must always include and analyze the project of modernity, although the reverse is not true, because coloniality points to the absences that the narrative of modernity produces‖ (Mignolo, W.D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. P. xii). 36 Ibid, p. xiii. 11 the influential policy documents was Monroe Doctrine dating back to 1823, which was designed to prevent further interventions from European powers in the hemisphere. However, within Latin America it came to be seen as a tool of domination over the national developments, especially with the Roosevelt‘s corollary to the doctrine in 1904, which made plain willfulness to intervene in Latin America if American interests would be perceived as in jeopardy. In any case, there were periods, especially immediately after WWII that looked promising for the continent.37 But the 20th century, overall, was a century of intense geopolitical shaping––or attempts to shape––of Latin America by the United States in variety of forms. The Cold War only sharpened this trajectory, the US being fearful of the ―domino effect‖ of communist influence. The peak was reached, of course, with Cuban revolution and subsequent Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which culminated in a near-nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the same time, Cuban Revolution was among the most influential events in Latin America of the 20th century, providing with the unprecedented impetus for cultural exchange, artistic and political interventions and innovations, criticism, and heightened feeling of revolutionary hopes and possibilities for a largely left-leaning Latin American intelligentsia (this, however, was not the case with the official political establishment in the continent which kept Cuba isolated38). It was dream realized on a tiny island that provoked imagination into what may be achievable in other parts of the continent, thus ending de facto centuries-long domination and exploitation. If a small country could resist such a powerful neighbor a mere hundred miles up north, larger countries could follow the lead and pursue similar paths. Cuba and its cultural institutions, such as Casa de las Américas, became a rite of passage for whole generation of Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals, who flooded the island in order to experience Revolution first hand and participate in the vibrant environment of cultural exchange. For almost a decade Cuba was among the prime concerns for intellectuals of Latin America, who became unofficial cultural attaches in their respective home countries and only after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was supported by Castro, that almost unanimous support started to diminish and bifurcate.39

37 ―During this dizzying period of expansion, the Southern Cone began to look more like and North America than the rest of Latin America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salaries, and their children were sent off to study at newly built public universities. The yawning gap between the region's polo-club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and next door Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95 percent and offered free health care for all citizens. Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed.― (Naomi Klein, The Schock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. P. 55) 38 For this argument see Castaneda, J. G. Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. P. 184 39 Ibid, p. 185. 12 The time of Cuban Revolution is approximately the time of what became known as in literature. The insider account of the boom, especially in its less glorious, is provided by José Donoso, who states that the boom itself was constructed by the critical establishment, whether through flattery or envy, endless boundary drawings of who is in and who is out that became self-perpetuating system in its own right, but it never consisted of a single formation.40 Whether it was porous formation or not, whether it had a single trajectory and project is beside the point, since the boom came to be perceived as real and remains such till this day. If it was discursive formation, it had material counterpart to it, namely the shifts in the marketization and expansion of Latin American novel though integration into larger flows of mainstream publishing apparatus within Latin America and globally, where these too spaces operated synergistically since pan-Latin American book market was in part fueled by the global prestige of the boom writers.41 Although Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Year of Solitude was published in 1967, perhaps most famous novel of the boom, the movement, if it can be called that, is often dated to the early 1960s. The reasons for the emergence of the boom were numerous. According to Idelber Avelar, such (diverse) authors as Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, , Carlos Fuentes and Alejo Carpentier

converged <...> in presenting Latin American literature‘s extraordinary achievements not only as detached from the continent‘s social backwardness but also as effective surrogate for it. The boomer‘s notorious disavowal of any links with the tradition and their insistence on the foundational, almost Adamic role played by their generation <...>. The discarding of the past was part of the portrayal of their own writing as a resolute catching up with history, an Oedipal assassination of the European father that finally integrated Latin America into the universal movement of modern literature.42

The novelty of this new literary tradition, however, did not emerge in an empty space, but rather was a discursive formation, which attempted to conceal its origins not only in European modernist works but also in works of Latin American literary production of the first part of the 20th century.43 Part of this new emergence was backlash against the novela de la tierra (novel of the land) which, not unlike in the pre- and Socialist Lithuania, was searching for innocence, social and environmental harmony set in agrarian countryside, as opposed to alienation and corrupting influence of urbanization and industrialization, for ontological roots of Latin American identity.44

40 See Donoso, J. The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History. Trans. Kolovakos, G. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 41 De Castro, J. E. The Spaces of Latin American Literature: Tradition, Globalization, and Cultural Production. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. P. 100. 42 Avelar, I. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. P. 11-12. 43 Meter, A. Before and After the Boom: Recent Scholarship on Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. Latin American Research Review, 2004, 39(2). P. 155. 44 The views, of course, remain conflicting. Dissenting voice in that regard, Carlos J. Alonso argues that there was no radical break between the novela de la tierra and the novels of the boom: ―It is now a customary attitude to 13 Additionally, according to Roberto González Echevarría, ―The Latin American novel <...> was straitjacketed by the constraints of nineteenth-century realism: a third-person, omniscient narrator who views reality from the perspective of bourgeois common sense, a prose that tries not to be dissonant or call attention to itself; a plot that follows consecutively without interruptions toward an end that is consistent with the preceding action‖.45 The writers of the boom, however, did not abandon the rural trope as such, but this time it served to resolve the contradictions by favoring modernity/universality of the city against tradition of the countryside.46 In short, the boom‘s writers saw themselves as a vanguard ahead of their own time, embodying the consciousness of the continent, as Cortázar overly optimistically asserted: ―What is the boom if not the Latin American people‘s most extraordinary achievement of consciousness of its own identity?‖47 Against this self- congratulating bravado, Avelar, contrary to the near-universal espousal of magical realism, as a fresh blood in a stale, Western-dominated literary world, makes a claim that

<…> the magical effect <…> stemmed from some instance irreducible to the rationalization of modern capitalism […]. Magical <…> realism thus depended, for its effect, on the conflict between the two irreconcilable logics. [It] was always inseparable from the demonization of a subaltern culture <…> carried out from the standpoint of modern capitalist forms ready to subsume them, the prototypical example being the submission of the circular, mythic time of the anecdote to the linear , onward-flowing time in García Márquez novel. This dynamic should be kept in mind as one works through critical bibliography that still reads magical realism as magical realism read itself, celebrating the genre‘s ―subversion‖ of ―Western‖ ―rationalism‖ and its ―openness to diversity,‖ when not outright proposing it as the sum of Latin American identity.48

Two problems emerged, or can be articulated retroactively. The first problem was that the ―alternative‖ vision expressed by aesthetic means was not that different from the ongoing Western project which boom writers critiqued as in part responsible for the backwardness of their part of the continent. In sum, it was the same modernity project pursued by other means but having the same goal. The second problem, for left-leaning theorists in particular, is that aesthetics and politics were taken to be seen as one––or rather aesthetics became substituted for politics––even if the social, political, and economic conditions were attesting to the contrary.49 While the boom writers experienced unseen popularity there was no corresponding explosion in other spheres of social life.

extol the merits of modern Latin American literary works by measuring them against the works that preceded. But if our reading of these texts has established anything, it should be that the literature of the ‗Boom‘ can no longer define itself in contradistinction to the novela de la tierra except in a superficial and uncritical fashion. In fact, the condescension with which these novels are alluded to masks a continuity between them and the novels of the "Boom" that we are only now beginning to understand from the perspective offered us by the post- ‗Boom‘‖. See Carlos J. Alonso. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochtony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. P. 165 45 Echevarría, R. G. Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. P. 90. 46 Ibid, p. 26-27. 47 Quoted in Avelar. Op. cit., p. 28. 48 Ibid, p. 73-74. 49 Ibid, p. 29. 14 According to Jorge G. Castañeda, the intellectuals of 1960s occupied certain void which was left by absence of what he calls ―civil society‖. Intellectuals were listened to and exerted discursive power, but, perhaps paradoxically, they were at the same time powerless to influence the larger structures governing their societies. In that sense, they were tolerated by the governments, they operated as spokespersons for the larger international sphere, they felt that they represented the poor and the oppressed, but most often they did not have any real contact with those who they claimed to represent.50 Their prestigious position opened the doors to the economic and political elite circles and they were frequently seduced (and then disillusioned) by power. Gabriel García Márquez, who himself maintained very close friendship with Fidel Castro, described the position of intellectuals as follows: There is a curious relationship between intellectuals and political power in Latin America. The State and the powers-that-be both needs us and fear us. They need us because we give them prestige they lack; they fear us because our sentiments and views can damage them. In the history of power in Latin America, there are only military dictatorships or intellectuals. No wonder then – and it is a fascinating thing – that there was so much coddling of the intellectuals by the State. Under these circumstances, one cannot be always completely independent.51

However, this alliance typically was exercised in a relatively ―democratic‖ setting.52 Once the military dictatorships, for example Brazil (1964-1985), Argentina (1966-1973, 1976-1983), (1973-1990), and Uruguay (1973-1985) were installed, the intellectuals often had to flee or face the consequences. The military regimes tried to clear out all opposition, cultural milieus among them, in order for the transition to a truly free market to be achieved. Avelar, following John Beverly, proposes the date of September 11th, 1973 (the date of Chilean coup and beginning of Pinochet‘s rule) as the ―allegorical date of the decline of the boom‖.53 In some sense, it was also the end of the developmentalist modernization project that at least tried to present itself as democratic. The new paradigm now was to create change via authoritarian grip on the economy and avoid all the semi- socialist precautions (welfare, redistribution, agrarian reforms etc.) that were perceived as obstacles to the swift reorganization of society at large. Although so much ink has been spilled discussing the evil nature of military dictatorships in Latin America as barbarous and evil manifestations that are intrinsic to the continent with lack of democratic tradition, Roberto Arlt in his novel Los Siete Locos already in 1929 was able to articulate the essence of the problem within the literary work: ―Do you believe that future dictatorships will be military? No, sir. The military is worth nothing next to the industrialist. They

50 Ibid, p. 186-9. 51 Quoted in Castañeda. Op. cit., p.196. 52 Castaneda mentions not only García Márquez, but also Carlos Fuentes, befriending President Luis Echeverria and becoming ambassador to France, supporter of Sandinistas in Nicaragua; Octavio Paz being a member of Mexican foreign service and late in his life becoming staunch supporter of the PRI; Mario Vargas Llosa running for president in Peru in 1990 (Ibid, p. 196). 53 Ibid, p. 13. 15 can be his instrument, that‘s all. Future dictators will be the kings of oil, steel, wheat‖54. That the first truly neoliberal experiment was instituted in Chile may not be incidental. Although Salvador Allende‘s short lived government was nowhere close to Cuban experiment, it was closest attempt throughout the Latin America and perceived as an enormous threat by the ruling class at home and the United States abroad. After the coup and after long decades of Keynesian economics, Milton Friedman and The Chicago School of Economics finally had an opportunity to test and implement their theories of free-market radicalism. Naomi Klein provides the genealogy in the following passage:

Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the midseventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy— tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a ―Chicago School‖ revolution, since so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago. Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ―facilitate the adjustment.‖ He coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic ―shock treatment.‖ In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy," has been the method of choice. Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments; these were performed in the regime's many torture cells, inflicted on the writhing bodies of those deemed most likely to stand in the way of the capitalist transformation. Many in Latin America saw a direct connection between the economic shocks that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people who believed in a different kind of society. As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano asked, ―How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?‖55

Thus the utopian impulse started to vanish not only from the political horizon but from the literary and artistic one as well. Néstor García Canclini divides the position of arts in terms of their temporalities or ―social time‖ into three stages:

In the 1960s, art worked as a herald of utopia, trying to include in the present a future that seemed feasible. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a memory of the defeat—seeing to it that the future that could never be would continue to have a place in the present, albeit by evoking the dead and the losses, the exiles and the hopelessness. Since the 1990s, a large number of artists speak of the instant: instead of works that portray long-term possible or historic scenes from history or long-term possibilities, they put forward installations and performances to be seen right now.56

In a somewhat melancholic essay García Canclini seems to evoke the first two moments in order to critique the present art practices ―If you want to live in the hyperpresent, you have no time for memory or for utopia―,57 however, for the purpose of this work, the attention should be paid

54 Quoted in Avelar. Ibid, p. 91-92. 55 Klein., N. Op. cit., p. 7. 56 Canclini, N. G. Aesthetic Moments of Latin Americanism. Radical History Review, 2004, 89. P. 13. 57 Ibid, p. 19. 16 precisely to the periods of utopia and defeat, as well as the present. With the decline of the boom new literary voices emerged and the intellectuals, once again, played a certain role in the ―transition‖ period to ―democracy‖. Their role, however, was variegated. Some strove towards the reconciliation, which became the tactic of choice in many countries with pardons or merely symbolical acts against the enactors and executioners of the military regimes, which often orchestrated transition on their own terms. The new literary genre of testimonio, testimonial novel served to commemorate and remember tortures, deaths, and disappearances, but even this genre often was conservative and reconciliatory, unable to articulate what happened or what consequences it bears to the present. At the same time, the role of the intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s became less important for various reasons. There were market forces and the culture industry that was now in advanced stages. There were many voices and many actors that did not look up to a few distinct literary figures for guidance, since many of them were started to be seen as a merely complicit part of the socioeconomic elite. For intellectuals in Latin America the state was always a frame of reference whether taming it, reforming, or overthrowing, the state was politics proper.58 With a postdicatorial neoliberal turn59, the movements that emerged often treated the state with suspicion, since the state, in whatever form, was the manager of all affairs with dubious results. Culture, trade unions, and other forms of ―civil society‖ were for too long directly or overtly micro-managed by the state.60 The multiplication of middle-class had something to do with the student population increases, in some places as much as fifteen times from the 1960s to 1980s; various social movements were articulating visions that were not aligned with the modernist views of the 1960s literary boom.61 Roughly similar period (mid-1970s to 1990s) is the background of Roberto Bolaño‘s novel The Savage Detectives, which will be analyzed below. But it should be seen as a background, relation and not determination, the notion that I share here with Juan E. De Castro, who states that ―The correlation between social, economic, and literary <…> should not be taken as implying a vulgar Marxist perspective in which modifications in the economic infrastructure—the full establishment of colonial economic relations, capitalist modernization, globalization, and so on—directly

58 Castañeda. Op. cit., p. 198. 59 Among the major features of this turn was relations of debt that less developed countries were increasingly incapable of managing, which lead into more severe ―structural adjustment policies‖, which became a hegemonic economic policy model known as Washington Consensus in mid-1990s. David Harvey states: ―Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, ‗over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center‘. ‗What a peculiar world‘, sighs Stiglitz, ‗in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest.‘ What neoliberals call ‗confiscatory deflation‘ is, furthermore, nothing other than accumulation by dispossession‖. (Harvey, D. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2005. P.162). 60 Castañeda. Op. cit., 198. 61 Ibid, p. 191. 17 determine the evolution of literary styles—American baroque, modernismo, and post-boom. Nor does the fact that Latin America has been economically subordinated to Europe and North American capital necessarily imply that the region‘s literary and cultural production is unoriginal, backward, or merely reactive‖.62

3. Literature is not made of words alone63: A Very Brief Biography of Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño (born in Santiago, Chile, 1953, died in Blanes, , 2003) was a son of a truck driver father and a teacher mother. After living in various towns in Chile, the family moved to City in 1968. Shortly afterwards Bolaño dropped out of school and plunged himself into literature (mostly poetry)––writing ―masochistically‖ and taking ―a sadistic pleasure in his reading‖ ––and bohemian youth street culture. Together with Mario Santagio (a.k.a. Ulises Lima in The Savage Detectives) they conceived a poetic movement-of-sorts known as , ―a kind of Dada a la Mexicana‖,64 which drew on various avant-garde literary and artistic traditions and was set, apparently, in stark contrast to prevailing literary and cultural establishment in Mexico at the time. Among the favorite pastimes were the group‘s rowdy disturbances of poetry readings by state- funded poets, who were perceived as too closely linked with PRI government. Although it is still contested fact, according to his own account, he went to participate in Allende‘s ―building socialism‖ experiment in 1973 shortly before the Pinochet‘s coup. On the night of the coup, he was assigned to guard desolate street with no incidents. Six weeks later, when he was leaving the country he was detained and remained in an improvised prison, but eventually released by the two ex-classmates who worked as a prison guards. Much of this intense youthful rebellion in the 1970s is portrayed in The Savage Detectives, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In 1977, Bolaño and Santagio left for Europe (Santiago eventually returned to Mexico, where he died in an accident in 1998). Bolaño travelled and worked at casual jobs, still reading and writing poetry. Endlessly repeating that reading was more important (and pleasurable) than writing. Still trying to be non-compromising and true to his ideals––avoiding literary establishment, following the path of poet maudit. ―Rejecting a career in poetry was in fact a way of taking poetry as seriously as life itself––and vice versa‖.65 It is rumored that at some point he developed heroin

62 De Castro, J. E. Op. cit., p. xix. 63 Bolaño, R. The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Trans. Perez, S. New York: Melville House, 2009a. P. 50. 64 Ibid, p. 66 65 Wimmer, N. Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives. In Bolaño, R. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Wimmer, N. New York: Picador, 2012. P. 583) 18 addiction, although the fact remains disputed. In either case, in the early 1990s he was diagnosed with a heavy form of liver disease. At that time, having a family, he started to write short stories of prose and submit them for literary competitions throughout Spain, aiming at the prize money. His first short experimental novel Nazi Literature in the Americas,66 a work of fictional encyclopedia tracing lives and works of literary figures with extreme-right sympathies in the continent, as well as The Distant Start, brought him some recognition, but it was award-winning The Savage Detectives that brought him something close to fame, some critics making statements that it was first time since Gabriel García Márquez that Latin American was the cause of literary sensation. Among the epithets one can encounter are ―an exemplary literary rebel‖ and ―literary genius‖. This newly acquired recognition, however, was at the same time the period of decline in physical––but not in literary––terms. Having understood that the illness he developed was deadly and there is no time to waste, Bolaño set himself up to the task to write as much as possible. He became a literary contributor to newspapers‘ arts sections in Europe and Latin America, produced over dozen shorter novels, few collections of poetry and prose, and two seminal, large-scale works The Savage Detectives and 2666. In some ways, he fell clearly into the post-Boom topology, blending fictional narratives with historical events, concerned with memory and Latin American defeats. Among his recognized novels—and, for some, more explicitly political ones— stands out The Distant Start67, which deals with the elusive fascist-leaning young poet/pilot Carlos Wieder, who is engaged in literature on paper and in plane-writings in the sky, just as much as he is engaged with post-coup regime, serving the Air Force, but also materializing fantasies of eroticized torture and murder. By Night in Chile68 is another somewhat similar work, tracing regime-friendly priest, who is also the literary critic. Among the most notable (and frequently analyzed) scenes is the party at the house of influential patron of the arts and letters, the house that at the same time serves as torture cell for dissidents in its cellar. Amulet is another fictionalized, although claimed to be based on real event, account of Auxilio Lacouture, who locked herself at UNAM‘s69 bathroom during the student repression by the military and in in 1968, which although never came to conclusive account is believed to claim several hundreds of lives. Auxilio Lacouture, self-proclaimed ―mother of Mexican poets‖, in fact an undocumented Uruguayan immigrant doing odd jobs at the Department of Literature and Philosophy and associated with younger generation of street poets is retelling a story of her entrapment, which is among the most notable of Bolaño‘s works, for its

66 Bolaño, R. Nazi Literature in the Americas. New York: New Directions, 2009b. 67 Bolaño, R. . New York: New Directions, 2004. 68 Bolaño, R. by Night in Chile. New York: New Directions, 2003. 69 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 19 inventive and intentionally delirious treatment of history and memory.70 It is also one brief but memorable character in The Savage Detectives. What all these works share (including The Savage Detectives and 2666), as has been pointed by several critics, is that they expose and point out to a thin line separating culture/civilization and violence/barbarism: ―It all begins with poetry and literary workshops, and ends with murders, torture, and violence, whether in the Northern desert of Mexico or in the forests in the South of Chile.‖71 However, this should not be perceived as some simple predetermined teleology or some epic battle of good and evil (literature or culture representing the good, of course). Rather it calls to investigate, often through literary intertextuality and constant references to real or imagined writers, what good and evil is constituted of, to suspend judgment, avoid simple opposition. In Deleuzean terms, Bolaño works as a physician, diagnosing the condition of the world, the self, and literature as such. Thus his apparent dislike or references to fascist-leaning cultural figures is not a simple political stance––a stance firmly on the left, one would suppose––but rather one among multiplicity of stances that investigate and question the political in general, at some more fundamental level. In the acceptance speech for Rómulo Gallegos Award, among the most prestigious ones in Latin America, Bolaño offers a glimpse at the complicated––if somewhat sentimental and dramatic–– engagement with political militancy and its literary intersections:

[T]o a great extent everything I‘ve written is a love letter or farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s and who at a certain moment chose military service, though in this case it would be more accurate to say militancy, and we gave the little we had – the great deal that we had, which was our youth – to a cause that we thought was the most generous cause in the world and in a certain way it was, but in reality it wasn‘t. It goes without saying that we fought our hardest, but we had corrupt leaders, cowardly leaders with propaganda apparatus that was worse than a leper colony, we fought for parties that if they had won would have sent us straight to labor camps, we fought for and put all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for more than fifty years, and some of us knew it, and how could we not know when we‘d read Trotsky or were Trotskyites, but we did it anyway, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return, and now those young people are gone, because those who didn‘t die in Bolivia died in Argentina or Peru, and those who weren‘t killed there were killed later in Nicaragua, Colombia, or El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of those forgotten youths. And that‘s what moves Cervantes to choose military service over poetry. His companions were dead too.72

―Literature is a dangerous game‖, he claimed.73 To live dangerously was to live up to poetic standards that he set for himself. Although his bohemian and nomadic life was now over and he was settled in a small coastal and touristy town in Costa Brava, he pushed himself to the limits, often

70 For an argument about ―becoming-memory‖ in Amulet, see Bogue, R. Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. P. 108-131. 71 See, for example, López-Vicuña, I. The Violence of Writing: Literature and Discontent in Roberto Bolaño's ―Chilean‖ Novels. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 2009, 18(2-3). P. 156. 72 Bolaño, R. Between Parenthses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003. Trans. Wimmer, N. New York: New Directions, 2011. P. 35. 73 Ibid, p. 36. 20 writing to the point of exhaustion, sometimes for days without sleep, chain-smoking, often forgetting his doctor‘s appointments. He was strong-willed and opinioned and his opinions sometimes appeared to be set in contrast of black and white, but his literature always worked in the grey, fascinated by contrasts, but at the same time exposing contingency and reversibility, clear cut linguistic simplicity and ontological unheimlich-ness74.

4. Lines of flight and revolutionary hopes in The Savage Detectives

―we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.‖75

―Poetry, today, has perhaps more to teach us than the economic and human sciences put together.‖76

The Savage Detectives is many things. It is a literary machine par excellence: it is productive, connective, fleeing, desubjectivizing. It is a multiplicity that exceeds itself; enters into other machines for the purposes of fleeing and becoming. It spans two decades and several continents. The main shadowy heroes of the story are Ulises Lima and , two poets and leaders of Visceral Realism––avant-garde artistic movement. But they never speak through their own voices; they are spoken about, allowing the world and not themselves to present their becomings. The bulk of the novel––the largest middle part entitled ―The Savage Detectives‖––is a story told through voices of 52 characters, which provides testimonies and interpretations of Lima‘s and Belano‘s lives and encounters with them. But to say that they are really at the center of the novel would be a mistake. It is the world, the particular sections of the world, poetic world that is explored, in all its contradictory, contaminated, and fragmentary forms. The first and third parts (―Mexicans Lost in Mexico‖ and ―The Sonora Desert‖) are told in the form of diary by a teenage poet Juan García Madero, starting in 1975. The Savage Detectives undoubtedly has autobiographical component to it77, but it would be gross oversimplification to categorize it as such: ―To write is not to recount one's memories and voyages, one's loves and griefs, one's dreams and

74 For analysis of one of Bolano‘s works in terms of ―uncanniness‖ see Rodriguez, F. Unsettledness and Doublings in Roberto Bolaño‘s Estrella distante. Revista Hispanica Moderna, 2010, 63(2). 75 Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Jolas, M. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. P. 6. 76 Guattari, F. The Guattari Reader. Ed. Genosko, G. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. P. 202. 77 Asked how much of his work is a self-portrait, Bolaño answers: ―A self-portrait? Not much. A self-portrait requires a certain kind of ego, a willingness to look at yourself over and over again, a manifest interest in what you are or have been. Literature is full of autobiographies, some very good, but self-portraits tend to be very bad, including self-portraits in poetry, which at first would seem to be more suitable genre for self-portraiture than prose. Is my work autobiographical? In a sense, how could it not be?‖ (Bolaño, 2009a. Op. cit., p. 65). 21 phantasms. It is the same thing to sin through an excess of reality as through an excess of the imagination‖.78 Bolaño does strike a balance––it is richly imaginative and daring work, at the same time it is a recollection of a bygone era, with all its social, political, and cultural manifestations. Bolaño at some point described it as a love letter to his generation. But as with all love, it is not only sentimental and romantic aspects of it, but also the dirt, pain, and struggle. It is not a sentimental tale of nostalgia, youth, and rebellion that one remembers with the bittersweet sense of once lived naivety. Instead, while containing some aspects of it, it asks how to live whenever: without succumbing to identity, norm, and architecture of the subjecthood. A difficult, perhaps impossible and doomed, but still noteworthy task.

4.1 ―The true poet is the one that is always abandoning himself‖79

Abandoning oneself is one of the preoccupations in The Savage Detectives. Perhaps it is paradoxical position, but asserting individuality comes precisely by abandoning oneself, one‘s investment in subjecthood, in imposed forms and structures. Becoming-poet is inseparable from the lines of flight; otherwise poetry remains in the prison of being and cancels the possibility of poetry. One of the characters, Manuel Maples Arce, in The Savage Detectives referring to the mostly teenager gang of poets––the visceral realists––proclaims: ―All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans‖.80 In some ways, the statement succinctly describes the realities and desires of the group‘s position within the Mexico City‘s literary scene, as well, as to literature as a whole. It clearly hints at the Oedipal configuration, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a major structuring principle in the Western tradition with its authoritarian implications and apparatus of self––and other––repression. However, this motif of orphanage is an only partial assessment, since among the major threads throughout the novel, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano are also in search of Cesárea Tinajero––if not for a father, than for a mother of visceral realism and Stridentism––who has vanished in the 1920s shortly after the Mexican Revolution and who was part of a literary avant-garde in the early 20th century. This gendered inversion is not a mere substitution of masculine father with a feminine mother as alternative. This quest is ambiguous and motivated by the fact of vanishing, the choice made to become poetically ―silent‖, searching not for the roots of any particular poetic avant-garde, but for the traces of its disappearance, even its impossibility.81 It would also be a mistake to see it as avant-garde in the

78 Deleuze, G., 1997. Op. cit., p. 2). 79 Quote from the Infrarealists‘ manifesto ―Leave Everything, Again‖ in Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit. Subsequent section tittles are also from the same source. 80 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 160. 81 It could also, in another place, be explored in terms of becoming-woman, which foe Deleuze and Guattari is always the first act for any new becoming. 22 sense of newness. Visceral realists, as portrayed in the novel, were just as much interested in the new, distinguishing themselves from the prevailing, as paying tributes to their literary and artistic inspirations. Thus in that sense, it isn‘t merely a newness as such that is important––rather it is past, present, and future merging to assemble social and aesthetic knot of intensities, with whatever raw materials available. It is an attempt at poetic reinvention, at the new beginning, which at the same time can never be genuinely new. It is not some poetic origins that motivate the novel. Rather it is a larger question of poetry itself and its social function that preoccupies much of Lima‘s and Belano‘s lives. Social function here should not be understood as a mere relation of ―art‖ to the external ―world‖, the utilitarian concerns that preoccupied much of the aesthetic theory. It might also be a rather individual concern, questions such as ―what does it mean to write poetry today?‖ or ―to read it?‖ Or connecting to larger collective concerns––after Auschwitz, after centuries‘ long exploitation, massacres, military dictatorships throughout the Latin America? Auxilio Lacouture entrapped in occupied UNAM brings out this point: I took the toilet paper that I'd written on and I threw it in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water startled me, and I thought I was lost. I thought: despite my cleverness and all my sacrifices, I'm lost. I thought: what a poetic act to destroy my writings. I thought: I should have swallowed them instead, because now I'm lost. I thought: the vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought: because I wrote, I stood my ground. I thought: because I destroyed what I wrote they're going to find me, beat me, rape me, kill me. I thought: the two acts are related, writing and destruction, hiding and being found.82

Writing is equated with hiding. But this hiding should not be understood as a passive act; rather it is an active line of flight, avoiding being written ―into their script‖.83 Literature is not the last resort where subject feels safe, but on the contrary, where singularity is expressed without constraints of scripted scenarios of the subject. Thus it is not surprising, that there is a certain mourning or melancholy about the state of poetry, but it is never completely paralyzing and incapacitating. On the contrary, it is often motivating force, a Don Quixotean task against all odds. ―It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist‖84––this statement by Adorno is taken seriously throughout The Savage Detectives. Another statement from Horkheimer and Adorno––"To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature"85––as well. It is not only this resistance to treat art, poetry, literature as inferior to reason, science, and philosophy but also the separation of spheres that is brought to question in The Savage Detectives.

82 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 181. 83 Ibid, p. 176. 84 Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Hullor-Kentor, R. New York: Continuum, 1997. P. 1. 85 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Cumming, J. New York: Continuum, 1972. P. 7. 23 Aimé Césaire, discussing differences between scientific knowledge and poetic knowledge, states that André Breton‘s description of surrealist goals is a summary of the ―ambition of poetry itself‖: "Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain mental point from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily‖.86 Going even further, Blanchot proclaims that: poetry has nothing to do with the world in which we live, which is, at least in appearance, a world of things completely made. Thence the primacy of the imaginary, the call for the marvelous, the invocation of the surreal. Poetry and life are ‗elsewhere‘, but ‗elsewhere‘ does not designate a spiritual or temporal region: elsewhere is nowhere; it signifies that existence is never where it is.87

Poetry, of course, remains problematic for its debt to its pre-modernist pretenses to universality, truth, and the unity of the subject, a singular, authentic voice, whereas the novel works with multiplicity and frequently de-centers the subject, which is the case in The Savage Detectives. That is the premise of novel‘s architecture, which builds protagonists‘ portrait through multiplicity of voices. While we know that there is a single author behind the work, the authorial voice becomes secondary and the impression is created that these multiplicities of accounts are primary movers of the plot, providing various, often contradictory, accounts and interpretations. Although The Savage Detectives weaves in an extreme amount of literary references and is primarily concerned with poetry, at the same time the language of its prose is surprisingly un- literary. It is devoid of allegories and metaphors, for the most part, it is written in simple, basic, realist language, but the effect, paradoxically perhaps, is nevertheless literary and aesthetic. It clearly goes beyond descriptive. The novel, like most of Bolaño‘s other work, avoids, or lacks completely, extensive citations of writers and poets, real or imagined – ―the poets of the novel are poetically silent‖.88 Throughout the novel only three poems are included89: ―El Vampiro‖ by Efren Rebolledo, ―The Tortured Heart‖ by Rimbaud, and ―Sión‖ by Cesárea Tinajero, which serve very particular goals. Rebolledo‘s poem, discovered by young Juan Garcia Madero, impresses him so much that he masturbates to it while reading numerous times. Aesthetic pleasure merges with sexual pleasure to enunciate poetic intensity. Yet, it also points out to certain solitariness. But the solitariness is conditioned upon connectivity to the poetic work itself. The poem by Rimbaud is recited in French by Lima and posed as a question. It is followed by the story about Rimbaud‘s walk on foot to join the Commune and his raping by French soldiers, who consequently been raped in Mexico. Poetry and violence, history and geography

86 Césaire, A. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. Trans. by Eshleman, C. and Smith, A Charlottesville: The University of Virginia, 1990. P. xlvii. 87 Blanchot, M. The Work of Fire. Mandell, C. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. P. 92. 88 Derbyshire, P. Los detectives salvajes: Line, loss and the political. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 2009, 18(2-3). P. 168. 89 This point comes from Derbyshire, ibid. However, my interpretation of these poems and their role differs. 24 merge here and point out to interconnectedness, once again, of barbarism and civilization, rebellion and defeat, revolution and betrayal. The poem itself is recited in the rowdy club, full of aggression (the fight breaks out) and eroticism, noise and drunkenness. It enunciates these conceptually separate spheres without losing singularity of the poem itself. The third poem is in fact a mere three lines (one straight, one wavy, and one jigged) in the magazine ―Caborca, the magazine Cesárea had edited with so much secrecy and excitement‖90 entitled ―Sión‖ by the ―mother‖ of visceral realists. That except the title there is no single word and that it is the only document, the only poem they are able to locate, the poet herself vanished somewhere in the desert of Northern Mexico, is a telling fact. It hints at the state of poetry, or rather retreat into silence, reflecting the impossibility of poetry, even more contingent in the present times. Nevertheless, Lima and Belano, after several bottles of mezcal and tequila with Cesárea‘s old friend, enthusiastically take on the task at deciphering the poem. What becomes paradoxical is that cognitive apparatus needs to be utilized for this task, going against the idea of sublime. The poem may also hint at the disillusionment with language as such, or, at least, questioning, if not impossibility of language in terms of poetry. It may be some attempted return to a graphism which was submerged by the supremacy of voice in the new civilizational regime91. On the other, Cesárea‘s poem may be one of the many attempts to arrive at the new experience through expression––the aim of most artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century. This aim of experience is a driving force in The Savage Detectives. At the same time, the experience sought is not achieved through poetry alone. Poetry may be an overarching theme, inaccessible ideal, the object of anxiety and aspiration, melancholy and hope, but living poetically is even more important. At its basis, poetic life, like poetry and literature in general, aims for not a mere newness––of experience, knowledge, insight––but also of different qualities of experience, provocations to doubt, experiences that come without intent. Blanchot states that ―the poem does not belong to the easy world of used things, of word already spoken‖.92 ―Lately I've noticed a disturbing tendency in myself to accept things the way they are‖, proclaims one character in The Savage Detectives.93 There is hope, uncertain hope, perhaps, that poetry and poetic living will serve as antidotes to rigidity of proper life, the entrapment within concepts, normalizing and disciplining ―common sense‖. As one, old by now, ex-poet declares:

Like so many Mexicans, I too gave up poetry. Like so many thousands of Mexicans, I too turned my back on poetry. Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too when the moment came,

90 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 184. 91 For a discussion of graphism and voice, see Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2011). Op. cit., p. 202-205. 92 Blanchot, M. Op. cit., p. 102. 93 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 239. 25 stopped writing and reading poetry. From then on, my life proceeded along the drabbest course you can imagine.94

4.2 ―We dreamed of utopia and we woke up screaming‖

These aims or resistance and escape, inevitably, cannot be achieved through aesthetic means alone. ―Literature isn‘t innocent‖95 and it is not omnipotent. Thus, like in other avant-gardes of the earlier era, within The Savage Detectives, there is a component of political militancy. Aesthetic and political need to merge in order to achieve temporal break, which is a revolution, for the ideals to materialize. Thus, various degrees of involvement and references to Latin American insurrections are inserted within the text. However, this thread does not constitute major explications in the novel, but is situated in the background. One of the ambiguous, simultaneously sad and humorous, descriptions of the visceral realists‘ (and their families) political contexts are found in Juan García Madero‘s diary entry of November 20th, 1975: Political affiliations: Moctezuma Rodríguez is a Trotskyite. Jacinto Requena and Arturo Belano used to be Trotskyites. María Font, Angélica Font, and Laura Jáuregui (Belano's ex-girlfriend) used to belong to a radical feminist movement called Mexican Women on the Warpath. That's where they supposedly met Simone Darrieux, friend of Belano and promoter of some kind of sadomasochism. Ernesto San Epifanio started the first Homosexual Communist Party of Mexico and the first Mexican Homosexual Proletarian Commune. Ulises Lima and Laura Damián once planned to start an anarchist group: the draft of a founding manifesto still exists. Before that, at the age of fifteen, Ulises Lima tried to join what remained of Lucio Cabañas's guerrilla group. Quim Font's father, also called Quim Font, was born in and died in the Battle of the Ebro. Rafael Barrios's father was active in the illegal railroad workers' union. He died of cirrhosis. Luscious Skin's father and mother were born in Oaxaca and, according to Luscious Skin himself, they starved to death.96

What is of interest in this passage is that politics and history overlap generationally, but the younger generation, namely visceral realists, are portrayed as searching for new forms––feminism as relatively new phenomenon with quite absurd name of the group, homosexual communist party, anarchism and guerilla group, even Trotskyism, which had a long history in Mexico, in part, for obvious reasons. One character, Luis Sebastián Rosado, unaffiliated with visceral realism explains groups literary-political position within the Mexican milieu as follows: ―the visceral realists weren't part of any camp, not the neo-PRI-ists or the champions of otherness, the neo-Stalinists or the aesthetes, those who drew a government salary or those who lived off the university, the sellers or

94 Ibid, p. 520-521. 95 Ibid, p. 137. 96 Ibid, p. 66-67. 26 the buyers, those who clung to tradition or those who masked ignorance with arrogance, the whites or the blacks, the Latin Americanists or the cosmopolites‖.97 ―There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists‖.98 But there is an impression that throughout the novel Bolaño‘s preoccupation with poetics and politics tends to privilege the poetic over political. Both are interrelated, both have failed, but the failure politically is more sharp, more devastating, beyond repair. Whether this position is installed retroactively or already present at the time of novel‘s setting is difficult to determine, but it is quite plausible, that by the mid-seventies, there were too many failures politically to plunge into it wholeheartedly. Life, the last resort, becomes political through unruliness, through rejection of circulation within established cultural domain, through disturbances of poetry readings, through sowing seeds of real or perceived threat to established figures, through borderline madness. The self, fragmented and contradictory, through poetry and the everyday life, becomes the political weapon. One of the telling episodes is the fates of two revolutionaries, acquaintances of Belano, as told by Felipe Muller: ―the Peruvian wrote poems and the Cuban wrote stories. Both believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin American writer born in the fifties‖.99 Both lives ended somewhat tragically. The Peruvian Marxist poet gained recognition, travelled the world, but upon the return to his homeland encountered hostility by the state and the extreme right wing. He adjusts his believes, but remains treated with suspicion. He is incapable to appeal to anyone, lives in poverty and isolation, and eventually drifts into madness.

The Cuban was a different story. He was gay and the revolutionary authorities weren't prepared to tolerate homosexuals, so after a brief moment of glory during which he wrote two excellent novels (also brief), it wasn't long before he was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution. Gradually, they began to take away what little he had. He lost his job, no one would publish him, he was pressured to become a police informer, he was followed, his mail was intercepted, in the end they threw him in jail. It seems the revolutionaries had two aims: to cure the Cuban of his homosexuality and, once he was cured, to persuade him to work for his country. Both were a joke. The Cuban held out. Like all good (or bad) Latin Americans, he wasn't afraid of the police or poverty or not being published.100

The Cuban eventually is able to escape the island, lives in Miami and New York, publishes quite successfully, but eventually contracts AIDS: ―His last days were days of loneliness, suffering, and rage at what he had lost forever‖.101 Several, admittedly in no way original, questions may be formulated from these and previous examples. Is Bolaño hinting that the political, even in its revolutionary aims, is doomed to failure? Is political, or revolution for that matter, inevitably leads to ―the shit and madness‖? Are these failures bound to particular times and geography (Latin

97 Ibid, p. 330. 98 Ibid, p. 6). 99 Ibid, p. 468. 100 Ibid, p. 470. 101 Ibid, p. 471. 27 America)? He does not provide the answers––not that he should––but the questions are felt, if not directly posed, throughout the novel. And here is that Bolaño comes to starker contrast with the writers of literary boom of previous generation. What preoccupied writers of Latin American literary world, preoccupies Bolaño as well, albeit in different forms, namely the meaning and faith of modernity. Whereas boom writers have hoped to accelerate processes of modernity in aesthetic as well as developmentalist ways, Bolaño takes on much more ambiguous position. It is possible to extract that the degree of freedom, especially in its aesthetic manifestations, is made possible by the modernism. The drawback, clearly, is that at the same time there is a sweeping wave of rationalization, institutionalization, law, control, and discipline. These, however, should not be seen as competing modernities, one liberating, based on desire and free association and the other oppressing and authoritarian, based in the controlling power of sovereign state, as argued by Hardt and Negri in their Empire102––but integral parts of the same process. Even what is called rationalization, in modernity needs to undergo moments of crisis and restructuring. According to Gerald L. Bruns, ―modernism in Heidegger‘s sense—conceptual self-questioning—is more of an unruly, open-ended process than he thought it was, namely an anarchic process that <...> dispenses with the concept of foundations, whether old or new‖.103 Flux, complexity, instability, absence of all-knowing and all-dictating center come to define the new age. But is it really the case? Deleuze and Guattari claim that, ―Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other‖.104 This tension plays out prominently in The Savage Detectives as well. The State, which increasingly plays the role of supporting staff for capital, is not defined by a mere controlling role. It allows for a certain degree of spontaneity and movement, even if at the same tries to channel newly decoded flows of sociality into a particular, appropriate, normative ways and forms of being. However, the process is dynamic and infinite and the role of resistance, evasion, imperceptibility becomes crucial in this hide-and-seek game. The Savage Detectives appears to express these tensions rather well, utilizing variety of formal, content and context scenarios. The frequent statement––or sentiment––by various characters in the novel, understanding, anticipating, or feeling without articulation, is to express inevitable outcome of this scenario negatively. Ontological and sociopolitical concerns seem to collapse into each other. But even this negativity with teleological underpinnings, I would argue, is taken humorously, lightly,

102 See Hardt, M. and Negri, A. Empire. Cambridge and London: Harward University Press, 2000. Especially pages 69-92 for this argument. 103 Bruns, G. L. On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. P. 4. 104 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 257. 28 and indeterminately. If nothing else, it serves as a provocation. Few examples below to illustrate this claim:

At certain point during the night, Maria said to me: disaster is imminent.105 (Juan Garcia Madero)

The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispin, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.106 (Juan García Madero)

There's no such thing as purity, boys, don't fool yourselves, life is shit.107 (Amadeo Salvatierra)

And when she left I began to think about Álvaro Damián and the Laura Damián prize, which was finished, and the madmen of El Reposo, where no one has a place to lay his head, and about the month of April, not so much cruel as disastrous, and that's when I knew beyond a doubt that everything was about to go from bad to worse.108 (Joaquín Font)

4.3 ―The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved in betrayal or pathetic survivals‖

What are the dangers of this ethico-aesthetical consistency and what are the tools to prevent from it? For one, humor and playfulness in Bolaño play a particular role. Simon Critchley talking about the social function of humor, says that ―jokes tear holes in our usual predictions about the empirical world. <…> Humour defeats our expectations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which we find ourselves‖.109 There is death and disaster on the horizon, or even right here, breathing to one‘s ear, but as if reiterating Beckett‘s formula ―I can‘t go on, I‘ll go on‖, Bolaño annuls and complicates too readily available oppositions of order and disaster, life and death. This is precisely the space of literature, it does not merely immortalize or provide with an afterlife, but point out, according to Blanchot, to the impossibility of dying, to the fact, that, contrary to the Christian tradition, ―afterlife is our actual life‖.110 In some ways, Bolaño‘s writing frequently borders on nihilism, but at least in The Savage Detectives, the meaninglessness of life constantly meets affirmation of life. And this affirmation frequently expressed through humor.111 Negativity serves as a stimulus, background, material, force. There is quite a bit of hope, but this

105 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 71 106 Ibid, p. 102 107 Ibid, p. 332 108 Ibid, p. 281 109 Critchley, S. On Humour. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. P. 1. 110 Blanchot, M. Op. cit., p. 8. (Emphasis added). 111 Retelling of an anecdote might not be the best example of humor in The Savage Detectives but it may serve as an illustration: ―A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who're walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they're crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we're all alone and we're lost‖ (Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 401) 29 this hope is not placed upon resolution or any happy, even less inevitable, end, but that practice, the practice of life, is of importance. It is not meaning or meaningfulness of life that is sought after, but life itself, doing life, understanding that there is no choice, the choice is unavailable. ―While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure‖.112 This sums up Bolaño‘s impossible quest––we must continue if even if we cannot continue. Community becomes one of those impossible quests and spheres of tension. Bolaño does not create binary oppositions of community versus individual or community versus society. Community portrayed is contingent, casual, telos-less. It is a constant flux based on loyalties, intensities, desires, alliances of love, literature, and friendships. The visceral realists are portrayed as a sect reminiscent of avant-gardists of the earlier part of the century, except without the seriousness which came to define those earlier formations. Purges of members do occur, but they are so informal, so unmotivated, without warning or argument, that nobody even knows whether they really took place or is it some kind of ongoing in-joke. Community is found elsewhere. It is not a formation that has clear-cut boundaries, rites of passage, norms and forms of behavior. It is rather Jean Luc-Nancy‘s being-in-common, which does not create opposition of individual and community and neither it calls for an individual which defined and bounded in its selfhood:

The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader ... ) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being. Community is made of what retreats from it.113

In Bolaño community or rather being-in-common occurs without predictable reasons, without set patterns. It simply exists. Community is not some longing for the secular paradise set against the coldness and cruelty of industrial state. It is also not something that is unavailable for the modern individual who finds no meaning in his or her existence. Being-in-common is immanent. How exactly any given configuration occurs is a matter of intentions just as much as it is a matter of pure chance, luck, coincidence. This somewhat delirious and humorous passage––a work of memory – could serve to illustrate the contingent nature of being-in-common in The Savage Detectives:

little by little the group began to dwindle, and meanwhile we kept talking, and we talked and talked, or now that I think about it, maybe we didn't talk much, I would say instead that we thought and

112 Bolaño, R. The Insufferable Gaucho. Trans. Andrews, C. New York: New Directions, 2010. P. 142. 113 Nancy, J. L. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. P. xxxix. 30 thought, but I can't believe it, at that time of night no one thinks much, the body is begging for rest.114

And then there is literature––that mediated space of being-in-common, crossing spatial and geographic, linguistic and cultural, present and past, life and death. It would not be incorrect to state that Bolaño values greatly this literary community which consists not so much of writers and poets but of works itself. This literary space is another dimension that creates intangible, intertextual, virtual world where one draws, adjusts, and readjusts lines of alliance, seeks oneself and loses oneself. Literary references may appear excessive and unnecessary, as empty significations, encyclopedic trivia, but for Bolaño real and virtual collapse precisely in this register. He refuses to privilege the real and material over the virtual. Literature does not constitute inferior realm, secondary, supporting role for life. Life is literature and literature is life. It is not the case that one seeks refuge and escape in literature when life becomes unlivable and inhospitable. Literature may be that as well. Literature is also a space of intensities, desires, hopes, dangers, and betrayals. There is no purity in literature like there is no purity in life. Literary community, like any community, is not something that is achieved, something that becomes a bounded and final structure. Nancy‘s point is that ―a community of literature <...> is a community of articulation and not of organization―.115 It is articulation of singularities, which differs from individuals with connotations of indivisibility. For Deleuze and Guattari it is a practice of becoming, of infinite potential to merge, connect, disconnect, transform, assemble and disassemble. In other words, it is a tool of desubjectivization, deindividualization. This literary community is like ―infinite conversation‖, communication that does not communicate direct messages, but rather provides structures for expression. It is community that is boundless and always resistant to its own closure. This being-in-common should not be perceived as antithetical to singularity with its ever expanding horizons of expression. Lines of flight occur against and within the structures of domination (society, politics, state, capital, identity, etc.) but they remain within being-in-common. In fact, this singular expressivity is made possible by being-in-common. ―Lines of flight <…> never consist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic, about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals or humans‖.116 In that sense, singularity is not in the position of exteriority. Once again, humorous illustration might serve to exemplify the point. Joaquín Font, placed in the asylum for mentally ill, describes the visit of his friend:

114 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 181 115 Nancy, J. L. Op. cit., p. 77. 116 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 204 31

Álvaro Damián said: I had to tell you. And I said: what did you have to tell me, Álvaro? And he said: that the Laura Damián prize was finished. I would've liked to ask him why, why he felt the need to tell me in particular, but then I thought that many people, especially here, had many things to tell me, and although the urge to share was something I couldn't quite understand, I accepted it completely, since there was no harm in listening.117 Community and communication, in this case a bit delirious, point out to the contingency.

There is something basic and in-common (speaking and listening) but it is not structured to the extent that the meaning needs to be passed and received as ordinance or command. Sometimes speech, writing, and language become a force in mutual transfiguration, other times they do not. Sometimes its silence, quite frequent in Bolaño, that speaks and acts, and not language. ―Silence and nothingness are the essence of literature‖,118 says Blanchot, but he also states that silence, being an expression like any other, also points to language, which is located in proximity to language.119 In Bolaño, this silence, knowing that it is not a shelter from language and structure, is utilized for variety of purposes. It is evoked strikingly frequently, evoked by words, nevertheless. For one, silence is constitutive of the abyss, which is frequently induced by Bolaño as much as existential bottomless pit, but also as sheer physicality – ―It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear‖.120 Silences are variegated, performative, intensive, qualifying. Among the dozens and dozens of examples of sitting in silence or falling into silence, such adjectives to silence can be found: prolonged, special, helpless, nocturnal, deep, fertile, enormous, deathly, perfectly orchestrated, sullen, languid, sudden, and awkward. There is also Poundian silence (most likely referring to Ezra Pound); silence that creates dangerous situations, temporal and logical breaks, and suspense. Silence is not necessarily attached to the potentially speaking subject. Silence is performed and exerted by material objects: houses, rivers, lakes, cities, cemeteries. There is also silence in and of sex: Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked. I explored María's naked body, María's glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered.121

This passage is unusual for its juxtaposition of action, no less than in the vocabulary of grammar, with silence of the enactor. It calls attention to the impossibility of capturing experience, or, even more, transmitting it. It points out to the limits of language and writing. Silence is as much a

117 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 280-281. 118 Blanchot, M. Op. cit., p. 309. 119 Ibid, p. 62. 120 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 111-112. 121 Ibid, 52-53. 32 material as any other in literature but it calls for a pause and reflection upon what literature can do it and how it creates its effects. According to Simon During, somewhat unexpectedly Michel Foucault located the birth of modern novel in two literary developments. One was a Gothic novel, which worked with dread, fear, horror; another one was novels of Marquise de Sade, which portrayed sex and violence. Both these genres concentrated on creating intense experience, affective states in the reader, thus departing from a mere logical, structured narrative that used to––or in some cases still does––define novel as literary genre. These new developments‘ effect was as if ―language begins to pass itself off as the manifestation of sheer desire‖.122 Madness and deliriousness may also be constitutive of lines of flight. ―From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to a ‗change in values,‘ the youth, women, the mad, etc.‖123 It points to limitations of structured discourses and it evades the confines of reason. In The Savage Detectives the trope of madness plays that role as well. Those who become mad or border on madness are portrayed not insane in the clinical sense, but as those who strive, willingly or not, for another kind of experience, insight, transgression. Thus they are able to articulate, or the articulation is possible to extract, something that is otherwise unavailable through rigidity of rational language. Bolaño, like with many other spheres, attempts to question, if not to collapse entirely, the oppositions of sanity and madness, health and illness. ―In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of super-lucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives‖.124 Madness, or presumed madness, serves to interfere into the overcoded flows, which channel actions and desires into acceptable forms within the apparatus of social production. But desire should not be understood as unqualified good in itself, positive and active force. Desires can have much darker side to them. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, following Wilhelm Reich, we need to also attempt to account for desire that desires its own repression. This darker side of desire is also constitutes a component within The Savage Detectives. Although unleashing of desire, most appropriately without consistency or proper object, is among the major tropes in The Savage Detectives, thus being largely attuned to Deleuzean lines of flight and impulses of deterritorialization, at the same time, it attempts to grasp desire that is repressed. This repression occurs throughout the novel on various levels. Sometimes it is what could be called exterior factors

122 Simon During, S. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Geneology of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. P. 84. 123 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 216. 124 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 454. 33 (economic concerns, state interference, rigid organizations, social norms), but just as often, or more, it is self-repression. These two forms of repression, of course, should not be seen as completely separate, rather they form intricate architecture of mutual dependence, it feeds on one another, becomes synthetic and interconnected. Or: ―Desire produces reality, or stated another way: desiring- production is one and the same thing as social production. It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production‖.125 Thus self-repression of desire takes places in The Savage Detectives in often banal and predictable ways. Deterritorializing impulses are substituted with territorializing ones. What drive it are ―human, all too human‖ concerns. For some it is safety, whether in economic or mental terms, for others stability, since uncertainty is too costly. Still, for others, it is appeal of the structure that offers status and various rewards. In other words, switching into regime of self-governance within the expected and acceptable confines of sociality and economic rationality, which becomes increasingly prevalent towards the end of 20th century. Exhaustion. Disillusionment. Cynicism. Realization of failure and attempt to leave behind, to forget naïve belief for even trying. This perception of failure, I would suggest, is intricately tied to self-repression of desire in The Savage Detectives. It would not be accurate to claim that those who become delirious, self-marginalized, some would even go so far as calling them ―anti-social‖, are the only ones resisting repression, while others, those who accept any respectable position within the world order, accept it. The initial impression might be correct along these lines, but upon closer reading, Bolaño articulates vision that is much more microscopically nuanced. The grey areas occur everywhere, no one is ever set in their position. Of course initial impulse is the strive for purity expressed through poetry, intensities of doing and being, rebellion, belief in revolution, but as the time passes, nuances become more pronounced. Figures of establishment might unexpectedly display complete disregard for established order through delirious drifts, marginal figures preoccupied with disavowal of ―power‖ might suddenly display aberrant fascist-like features of their in-tact egos. Thus, although overall the narrative is very much concerned with ways of resistance it does not succumb to providing clear-cut patterns of heroic resistance and consistency nor of top-down, external power which could be identified and battled. One character, Abel Romero, remembering the small gathering by Chilean exiles commemorating 10th anniversary of Chile‘s coup attempts to clarify this position: Then I said what had been going around in my head. Belano, I said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same

125 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 39. 34 weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.126

Of course, the statement above contains a hint of irony. What Bolaño seems to tackle is precisely the difficulty, or, perhaps, even impossibility, in distinguishing purposeful from random. Amadeo Silvatierra: ―life makes us so fragile and anesthetizes us too (almost without our noticing it, gentlemen)‖.127 This ability to notice, to distinguish, to resist anesthetization are not portrayed as easy, easily accomplishable tasks. Agamben says that ―the art of living <…> is the capacity to keep ourselves in a harmonious relationship with that which escapes us‖.128 And that is one of the features of this novel that is simultaneously productive and unsettling. It is not a simple morality tale or example of ―committed literature‖ that would lead into mimetic re-enactments for those who are seeking new or improved ways of resistance. Neither is it hopeless, resentful, disillusioned tale of failure, reminiscing youthful rebellion that was doomed to die off. It surly contains these elements, but at its best, it remains deeply concerned with the world, or rather with life, with all its layers, contradictions, riddles. In other, words it remains relevant and political precisely for its lack of closure and resistance to answers. As Agamben states: ―The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps even more important) as the ways in which we know them‖.129 It works as a literary desiring machine because so many of its elements are up for flexible assembling and disassembling. Perhaps it may connect with melancholy- or defeatist-machines, but it does not have to, it is not inscribed in its form, content, and structure. And here lays its strength.

126 Bolaño, R., 2012. Op. cit., p. 372. 127 Ibid,183. 128 Agamben, G. Nudities. Trans. Kishik, D. and Pedatella, S. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. P. 114. 129 Ibid, p. 113. 35

5. The Archeology of the Social in 2666

MM: What is your idea of paradise? RB: Venice MM.: And hell? RB.: It‘s like Ciudad Juárez130, our curse and mirror, a disturbing reflection of our frustrations, and our infamous interpretation of liberty and of our desires.131

The clerk said cable was only for rich people or faggots. Real life was on the free channels, and that was where you have to look for it.132

In Bolaño‘s novel Amulet, which is expansion of short story within The Savage Detectives, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, describes Avenida Guerrero in Mexico City as ―more like a cemetery than an avenue not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968 or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else‖.133 This chilling passage is the only hint to a possible choice of the title of this massive novel––2666. Even if the title‘s significance should not be overestimated and speculation about this connection not exaggerated, one thing could be claimed as self-evident: 2666 has a lot to do with space, time, memory, and death. But what is more significant, is that it resists any kind of thematic and analysis along few tropes or plot lines. It is a paradoxical in the sense that it is saturated with meanings but avoids the meaning. In this lays its strength, the novel‘s novelty. It is a riddle without answer, a labyrinth without way out, a night journey without dawn. It could be described as anti-tribute to the 20th century, a meta-reflection on extremities of rationality and irrationality––but not different sides of the coin––of our age. 2666 is the last novel of Bolaño and by many considered his magnum opus. Like many of his works it is dispersed geographically, although the locus point where all stories merge is the fictional city of Santa Teresa – burgeoning, transitive, and borderland place in the North of Mexico, surrounded by Sonora desert. The novel is divided into five parts: ―The Part About Critics‖, ―The

130 Ciudad Juárez is a real city on the Mexican border with the United States, in 2666 called Santa Teresa. 131 Bolaño, R., 2009a. Op. cit., p. 114. 132 Bolaño, R., 2008. 2666. Trans. Wimmer, N. New York: Picador. P. 339. 133 Bolaño, R., 2006. Op. cit., 86. 36 Part About Amalfitano‖, ―The Part About Fate‖, ―The Part About Crimes‖, and ―The Part About Archimboldi‖. Bolaño, for financial reasons, intended to publish five separate novels, but after his death, the editor convinced inheritors to publish it as a single volume, of about 1000 pages in length, depending on the edition. The publication received several awards and almost unanimously was appraised for its inventiveness and literary achievements. 2666 starts off with somewhat similar premise as one of the motivating plot lines in The Savage Detectives. There are four university-based literary critics who meet and become friends through their shared personal and professional interest in––at the time still obscure––German writer under the pen name Beno von Archimboldi. Literary analyses, conferences, publications become a daily routine and Archimboldi serves as a career building case four these four academics. But it also becomes a quest to find out as much as possible about the author himself or, even better, to find him as a really existing person and to even walk him by his hand to receive a Nobel award134, in case he would be receiving one. But years of attempts yield no results, except for a few uncertain leads. This obsession to find traces of realness, of face, of materiality of this vanished, anonymous writer preoccupies much of the first part in 2666. Although the first part reads smoothly and almost innocently, with all its petty academic intrigues and romantic ménage à trois, it starts to set the stage and already encapsulates numerous questions that are later posed in the novel with increasing sophistication, denseness, and grimness. The four European academics (French, Italian, Spanish, and British) live comfortable lives. All they have achieved comes from hard work, years of study, goal-oriented mindsets. They are middle-class, culturally sophisticated, relatively young people, who teach classes in their German departments, publish papers in scholarly journals, attend and organize conferences, are well versed in various theories and the world of literature, art, politics, etc. In short, they embody vanishing, but still persistent ideal of European modernity and enlightenment. They are cosmopolitan, worldly, and sophisticated. However, this bright picture has other side. For one, there is an incident with Pakistani cabbie in London, who engages in dialogue with three of them by questioning their values and moral premises, which sets them off for a violent reprisal, which almost kills the driver. They are kicking him until he is ―unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head except the eyes‖. The three of them (Norton, who is female does not take part in the beating) are surprised for such a violent reaction, which is completely uncharacteristic for their ―nature‖, but at the same time all three of them experience sexual climax throughout the course of this violent act. Thus the stage

134 ―according to Schwarz, Archimboldi was on the short list, so the Nobel was within the realm of possibility. And maybe the Swedish academicians wanted a change. A veteran, a World War II deserter still on the run, a reminder of the past for Europe in troubled times. A writer on the Left whom even the situationists respected. A person who didn‘t pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable, as was the fashion these days. Imagine, said Pelletier, Archimboldi wins the Nobel and at that very moment we appear, leading him by the hand‖ (Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p.105). 37 is set for violence that lurking from all corners, even those that are least suspected. What is more, and this could be identified as one of Bolaño‘s ―themes‖, literature and violence, or literature and the violence-saturated world, fiction and reality, starts to merge, or at least those connections become more pronounced.

5.1 Decomposition or the End of the Social

let us tenderly recall the unbelievable naivety of social and socialist thinking, for thus having been able to reify as universal and to elevate as ideal of transparency such a totally ambiguous and contradictory – worse, such a residual or imaginary – worse, such an already abolished in its very simulation –"reality": the social.135

My starting and main premise here is that Bolaño‘s 2666 yields tremendous insight and value when approached within the context of if not the death of the social than at least ―the end of the social‖, as proposed by Jean Baudrillard. 2666 is not a mere ―postmodern‖ hodgepodge of extremely intertwined historical, philosophical, technological, geographical, identitarian, and genre-mixing qualities. It is not a mere fragmentation, fluidity, multiplicity of identities and small groups that now characterize the social as opposed to real or perceived oneness of the earlier eras. Rather there is something qualitatively different about the social that persists within various discourses but without the content that the term is supposed to represent.136 The social, as totality within the territorial boundaries, as a population to care for and govern, for a few centuries was a main preoccupation of the state. However, the governmental sophistication and reach was achieved to its fullest around the middle of the 20th century, the end of the WWII marking some of the universalization of forms of social democracy at least within the highly industrialized world, the welfare state took on such functions as social security, medicine, and education. However, it was not only the Western world that took on this path. In its own more openly politicized ways, the ―communist block‖ has also experienced very similar trajectory: the social(ist) guarantees— biopolitical regime—applied to population as a whole was the same expression, it constituted a body. This social body was the primary reason for justification and existence of the state power, economy, and justice. All human spheres were to be socialized, that is integrated and mediated through some form of state intervention, creating the totality where social, political, and cultural can

135 Baudrillard, J. In The Shadow of Silent Majorities or the End of the Social and Other Essays. Trans. Foss, P., Patton, P., and Johnston, J. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. P. 86. 136 Consulting three authoritative dictionaries of sociology (Sage (2006), Cambridge (2006), and Penguin (1994)) not a single one of them have an entry on the ―social‖. Although this might not be a particularly telling fact, it does provoke to ask the question what exactly it is referring to and what does the foundations of such a science as sociology is based on. 38 be said to constitute certain unity, even if individual spheres may exert certain amount of autonomy.

Alain Touraine in his essay ―The Decline of the Social‖, for example, argues that the social, as well as his own field––sociology––were appropriate for industrial society. The social, socialism, social democracy, sociology – all these areas were connected to construction of particular subjectivity (worker citizen), particular territory (nation state), particular method of management–– technological mechanization. Economy was not completely autonomous sphere but integrated to fit the social needs, if not voluntary then through state intervention and collective bargaining, unionism and labor politics. ―Industrial society was a complete historical construction, defined by an individual morality, a philosophy of history and various forms of solidarity. It sought, above all, to be a society rather than an economy, state or even a nation.‖137 The worker citizen category has also if not become obsolete then diminished. Although the amount work has not decreased, quite the contrary, it is not the political category any longer and the work-related representation mechanisms have vanished or are in decline. Social phenomena should no longer be analyzed in the light of only one image of social life. The failure of social democracy is inseparable from that expressed in Durkheim‘s work, which sought to explain the social purely by reference to the social. We no longer live our political life––and, more broadly, our collective life––in purely ―social‖ terms. Society is a notion which slips through our fingers like sand, when we thought it was as solid as concrete! We no longer expect primarily social answers to our problems, because they are not only social but equally often technological, economic, military or cultural.138

While Tourain diagnoses some of the processes quite convincingly, his position is that of mourning over the social. Solutions should come in readjusting the role of the state, which should take more active role, from the social movements, which should increase the social decomposition asserting their difference, but also creating discursive space where the concept of the social becomes meaningful again. The time has come for ―the attempts by individual and collective players to reconstruct the space in which their quality as subjects can avoid disaster and reconstitute a fabric of consensus, compromise and conflict‖.139 The economy and globalization are diagnosed as main factors for this social decomposition and they need to be addressed accordingly, namely through some form of social engagement. Nicolas Rose position in terms of diagnosis follows similar line of argumentation: While the social has no doubt been seen as a zone of failure since its birth, the solution to these failures is no longer automatically seen to be reinvention of the social. While our political, professional, moral and cultural authorities still speak happily of ―society‖, the very meaning and ethical salience of this term is under question as ―society‖ is perceived as dissociated into a variety

137 Touraine, A. The Decline of the Social. Comparative Sociology, 2003, 2(3). P. 468. 138 Ibid, p. 470 139 Ibid, p. 473 39 of ethical and cultural communities with incompatible allegiances and incommensurable obligations.140

However, he expands the argument by pointing out that ―the social‖ was geographic and temporal construction.

―The social‖ <…> does not represent an eternal existential sphere of human sociality. Rather, within a limited geographical and temporal field, it set the terms for the way in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities, in certain places and contexts, thought about and acted upon their collective experience. This novel plane of territorialization existed within, across, in tension with other spatializations: blood and territory; race and religion; town, region and nation. A host of lines of organization and intervention cast across most European nations and in North America over the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth intersected, connected and entangled in this hybrid zone of ―the social‖. Social statistics, then sociology, and all the social sciences, would play their part in stabilizing the social as a domain sui generis, whose reality could no longer be ignored. Simultaneously, political forces would now articulate their demand upon the State in the name of the social: the nation must be governed in the interests of social protection, social justice, social rights and social solidarity.141

If ―the social was an order of collective being and collective responsibilities and obligations‖,142 today that is no longer the case. The emphasis switches and the state action is directed not towards the whole of the social but at particular territorial, regional, communal agents who engage in self- management in terms of social, economic, environmental, security problems. Individuals and their communities are encouraged to govern their conduct and maximize efficiency. The shift in governmentality is first of all also a spacial shift – whereas previously it was a whole national territory as subject of control, now it is dispersed communities, which may be geographically located (various neighborhood, city, region initiatives, for example), but more often they are virtual, based on subcultures, ethnic, religious, and other affiliations. On the other hand, while the emphasis is placed on micro-(self)management, there are also macro-management strategies as seen through the emergence of globalized, supranational organizations (various branches of UN, for example) that attempt to intervene in the name of the social. Thus, for Rose, it is premature to declare the death of the social. Baudrillard, however, insists that this maintenance of the social, even if it does exist within state policies, as external structure placed on the society is decomposing not only as a side effect of economic and political restructurings, but first of all as a resistance from the social to the social, to the idea of unity that the social represents. In In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, he states that the ―resistance to the social in all its forms has progressed even more rapidly than the social‖143

140 Rose, N. The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government. Economy and Society, 1996, 25(3). P. 353. 141 Ibid, p. 329. 142 Ibid, p. 333. 143 Baudrillard. Op. cit., p. 41. 40 How does this resistance manifest itself? First of all, contrary to most left leaning intellectuals and revolutionaries, who perceive that it is the state (in the service of economy or not) that is attempting de-socialize the social for variety of their own reasons. But the opposite is the case, the state, which used to be a sole promoter of the social increasingly became just one among a plethora of players which by any means available attempts to keep the idea of the social alive. The social is its object proper, its reason for existence, its playing field. Even if the signs of disintegration, as seen through restructurings of the welfare state, are visibly intact, nevertheless its preoccupation remains within the confines of the social. The style and means of its control are shifting and being placed on the social itself, for example, via the greater emphasis on the self- governance, as was pointed out earlier.144 This shift is one of the defining features of the neoliberal turn. It is not a mere decentralization of economy, global expansion, unleashing of financial markets to take over the older forms of industrial production, but it is also something that places the individual as entrepreneur of the self. Workfare replaces welfare, private food banks – state-funded food stamps, entrepreneurial ―empowerment‖ collectively oriented ―social justice‖, practices once considered subversive strive for recognition and normalization, what becomes to be known as identity politics.145 But the resistance to the social comes from ―the social‖ itself. It is not merely an alienation, economic conditions, passivity, the spectacle, commodification, loss of community and meaning, or any other reasons that the believers in the social search for to justify inoperativeness of the social and, consequently, place their ideals cracking the enigma of its passivity to finally revitalize and reactivate them as true agents of history and their own destinies. It is resistance to the social coming from the social—the masses, the silent majorities, according to Baudrillard—that needs to be accounted for and reconceptualized. These silent majorities or ―the social‖ is the source of political power: ―all power silently flounders on this silent majority, which is neither an entity nor a sociological reality, but the shadow cast by power, its sinking vortex, its form of absorption. A nebulous fluid, shifting, conforming, far too conforming to every solicitation and with a hyperreal conformity which is the extreme form of non-participation‖.146 Contrary to any intuitive preconceived notions, Baudrillard‘s suggestion is that this ―passivity‖ is not something to be overcome with activity, or

144 ‖it seems as if we are seeing the emergence of a range of rationalities and techniques that seek to govern without governing society―. For the overview of this shift see Rose, N. Op. cit., p. 328. 145 ―the identity politics camps are increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism. Some organizations and groups creep into the neoliberal fold, shedding downwardly redistributing goals for a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality‖. (Duggan, L. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. P. xx). Duggan‘s critique in The Twilight of Equality, while still within a parameters of Marxist/‖progressive‖ milieu, nevertless has numberg significant insights, especially in terms of sexual idenity politics, as something that had ―revolutionary‖ intentions and broad critique of the social order only to become a narrow interest group concerned with identity and carving a comfortable space within that order, few decades later. 146 Baudrillard, J. Op. cit., p. 48. 41 that the social needs to be made by certain sociological, political, philosophical tools relevant again. Rather it this ―silence‖ is the greatest tool, most forceful action that ―the masses‖ are taking against the social and all its negative implications. It is implosion––and not some explosion of ―civil society‖ whether though desiring subjectivities and multiplicities or older forms of dialectical class struggle––of the social that creates possibility of resistance to the present state of things, as well as to the idealism of society as manageable, predictable, coherent sum of all its parts. Baudrillard might be, and often is, accused of certain kind of nihilism and dark visions, hopeless denouncements, individualistic provocateur, but in terms of the analysis of Bolaño‘s 2666 he is more relevant than those who cast hope all too easily. Bolaño‘s and Baudrillard‘s visions are not identical, neither they are fully developed, but what they both approximate are, I will argue, of utmost importance and at least need to be engaged vigorously. Theirs are cautionary tales not to fall easily for simple solutions, no matter what their philosophical or scientific origins are, because simple and practical solutions, it could be argued, is what brought us to the present state of things. Santa Teresa, as a city, in some ways, is the center stage in 2666, but this centrality should not create the impression of its exceptionality as opposed to, or as above from, other centers, which are numerous in the novel, not in the sense of mere geography but of sheer scope of narratives, instances, and insights. It would not be difficult, if need be, to turn Santa Teresa into a hyperbole of the ―developing‖ world, a noir representation of hypermodernity intermixed with the most barbaric archaisms, as a sociological case-study of the sweaty and bloody workshop of global commodities. There is that element, certainly, and it may even be Bolaño‘s intention, but, once again, following Deleuze and Guattari, we should attempt to resist urge to decipher the meaning and turn too easily into a shallow work of metaphors, signs and signification. Instead, to look for productive (which can be destructive) connections and affections. Consider the passage from the perspective of the above described four critics and their neo-colonial encounter with Oscar Amalfitano, the main character in the subsequent part: The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border.147

Even with the darkest matters Bolaño‘s prose may be surprising and humorous, as in this apparently arbitrary reference to Heidegger. But it becomes apparent that living—or existence—in this city is, in fact, not a simple task. It is the ultimately liberated zone, a transitional space, where drugs and

147 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 114. 42 human trafficking are a daily routine in supplying the Northern neighbor with cheap labor and substances to relieve stress. It is a free-trade industrial zone producing variety of commodities for the global markets, staffed by the young workers‘ bodies, that arrive from even poorer states in Mexico or Central American countries, which live in colonias, an improvised shack neighborhoods, without necessary infrastructure. But it is also a city of university, of endless entertainment, of safe and clean middle-class neighborhoods, reminiscent of the suburban towns across the border, of ultra-rich narcotraficantes and their allies in all sectors of society. Until the extraordinarily violent drug wars of 2000s,148 which Bolaño did not live long enough to see, the city was growing, in large part because of the extensive network of maquiladoras––export oriented factories––and was priding itself for the lowest unemployment in Mexico, at least for a female workers. Santa Teresa is also infamous for female homicides and they are the main topic of the longest part––―The Part About the Crimes‖. Bolaño chooses to represent them in a cold, journalistic or forensic expert‘s style, after the fact. Typical subsection starts such as this:

In October the next victim was found at the new city dump, a festering heap a mile and a half long and half a mile wide in a gully south of the El Ojito ravine, off the Casas Negras highway, where a fleet of more than one hundred trucks came each day to drop their loads. <...>. The dead girl was between fifteen and seventeen years old, according to the medical examiner, although the final word was left to the pathologist, who examined her three days later and concurred with his colleague. She had been anally and vaginally raped and then strangled. She was four foot seven. The scavengers who found her said she was dressed in a bra, denim skirt, and Reebok sneakers. By the time the police got there the bra and denim skirt were gone. On the ring finger of her right hand she was wearing a gold ring with a black stone, inscribed with the name of an English academy in the center of the city. She was photographed and later the police visited the language academy, but no one recognized the dead girl. <…> The photograph was published in El Heraldo del Norte and La Voz de Sonora, with the same lack of results. Two weeks later the body of the unidentified girl was sent to swell the supply of corpses for medical school students at the University of Santa Teresa.149

This kind of reporting is interwoven throughout the part‘s narrative for over hundred victims and spanning the years 1993-1997. It creates repetitive style and gruesome atmosphere, without falling into more typical solution to offer imaginative detailed description of any victim‘s particular situation leading up to her death. Victim-based perspective is excluded, but it is not excluded as to make them voiceless and turn them into mere objects. It is rather a choice; some would call it an ethical choice, not to speculate on the experience––the very last experience, in fact––and not to turn it into additional spectacle. Although these dead women and girls do serve artistic aims and occupy central stage in the multiplicity of narratives, they are also left with a certain dignity by refusing to

148 What became one the bloodiest drug wars in history, Ciudad Juarez became a murder capital of the world, accounting for thousands of yearly deaths, federal government intervention, and situation of almost all-out civil war. As a result, for the first time the population of Ciudad Juarez started to decline, with over 100,000 homes abandoned and part of the city‘s population migrating over the border to the US or other parts of Mexico. See Campbell, H. No End to Violence: Violence in Ciudad Juarez. NACLA Report on the Americas, 2011, May/June. 149 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 423. 43 represent them. Thus this matter-of-factness of reporting puts a certain filter, which ensures, that if they cannot speak, no one will speak for them. Something can, and should, be done about these killings, that is no question among Bolaño‘s concerns, but perhaps even greater concern is the attempt to capture the complexity of situation, life, existence, history, where these killings take place. In other words, neither to turn them into an insignificant background nor to make this a detective story with resolution and capture of the villain via the help of author-decipherer. Bolaño‘s descriptions of these murders are very direct and unsentimental, but the larger human (and natural) landscape is of enormous scope. Here, intersections become essential, but weaving together various threads are not predetermined. Bolaño‘s authority over the material leaves plenty of space for the reader to engage in this work. The connections are not made explicit and can be rearranged according to each individual reader‘s points of emphasis. There is a strand by various characters in the novel that approach the interpretative. The prominent criminologist is invited from the US to help solve the killings. His hypotheses are laid out as following: I‘ll tell you three things I‘m sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus; (b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border.150

The director of psychiatric hospital in her long list of phobias includes one potential source of the killings:

gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn‘t that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women.151

Another hypothesis coming from the media about potentially mediated and commercialized nature of the murders. Also a commentary from an ex-general:

At the end of 1996, it was reported or hinted at in some Mexican media that films of real murders, snuff films, were being shot in the north, and that the capital of snuff was Santa Teresa.152

According to Macario Lopez, the situation in Mexico had changed. On the one hand there had never been so much corruption. To this you had to add the problem of the drug trade and the heaps of money revolving around it. The snuff industry, in this context, was just a symptom. A virulent symptom in the case of Santa Teresa, but ultimately just a symptom.153

All these descriptions might stand out as reasonable explanations, whether alone or in combination, but Bolaño refuses to provide definite answer. His attempt is to grasp the known and the unknown

150 Ibid, p. 267. 151 Ibid, p. 382. 152 Ibid, p. 535. 153 Ibid, p. 536. 44 in all of its intricacies, unforeseen probabilities, untested and untestable hypotheses. It is not insistence to make a point that things are impossible to know or understand, but that when it is, literature can nevertheless try to do it acknowledging the possibility of failure. Or to put in other words, failure may be its success, its advantage over ―science‖ that places too much hope in results and not enough in possibility of failure. Literary criticism uses literature's essential ambiguity for the cause of precision––by seeing the ambiguity most clearly for what it is: ambiguous and multifaceted and irreducible. ―As they were leaving the locker room, the inspector told him he shouldn‘t try to find a logical explanation for the crimes. It‘s fucked up, that‘s the only explanation, said Marquez‖.154 Bolaño, of course, goes deeper and wider than that. Even if meta-explanation is not provided certain diagnosis, or rather Deleuzian symptomatology, is carefully crafted. Among the constitutive elements of this diagnosis, history, with all its temporal and geographic dispersions, occupies a prominent place. ―Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven‘t happened yet‖.155 That is one way to describe the immanence of historical and geographical interconnections. There are four aforementioned European academics, there is a Chilean, university professor Amalfitano who resides in Santa Teresa, after he loses position in Spain, there is Black journalist from Harlem, Quincey ―Fate‖ Williams, there are detectives, politicians, policemen, prison inmates, boxers, and German writer . But there are also numerous historical references and subplots of slavery and transatlantic trade, of mestizaje (miscegenation) of Latin America, Barry Seaman as thinly disguised Bobby Seale, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers Party, identity and urban politics of the US, Holocaust and WWII, crucified Romanian general, discussion of intellectuals and power, the politics of literature and literary production, post-WWII German life and so on. All these themes merge powerfully into a picture of the world over the centuries and it is one attempt to account for what some, perhaps too easily and simply, would like to put into a concept of globalization. Bolaño‘s insinuation is that these extraordinary events of ―historical significance‖ are not always explanatory or determinate. Micro and macro levels do interact, but any one individual is not a simple cog in the machine (in negative, not Deleuzean terms). There are, often, certain choices for bravery and cowardice, aligning and fleeing structural impositions and social inscriptions. There is will and then there is coincidence, there is order and then there is a coincidence and chaos. The three critics go to visit Edwin Johns, a contemporary painter, who self-mutilated himself and installed his amputated arm for public display at the exhibition in London, now living in ―rest clinic‖ in Switzerland:

―Coincidence isn‘t a luxury, it‘s the flip side of fate, and something else besides,‖ said

154 Ibid, p. 561. 155 Ibid, p. 339. 45 Johns. ―What else?‖ asked Morini. ―Something my friend couldn‘t grasp, for a reason that‘s simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don‘t know what they are. Coincidence, if you‘ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us‖.156

This is where literature is walking a tight rope––coincidence and chaos on the one side of it, predictability and order on the other. Clearly, order is at the same time the precondition for disorder, for terrorizing and totalizing unity that captures, inscribes, punishes, and controls. Chaos and coincidence might have terrorizing effects as well, but it is, perhaps, a precondition if not for ―total freedom‖, than at least for a possibility of nomadic subjectivity, spontaneity and play. There is no telos in this scenario. No happy ending. No arrival at the harmonious co-existence within ―chaotic order‖. It radically questions the unity of ―the social‖ just as much as it questions the unity of the subject. It calls for permanent exile, that is not necessarily defined by geographic movement. Illustrious example is Amalfitano being questioned by the critics about his exile:

―Exile must be a terrible thing, ― said Norton sympathetically. ―Actually,‖ said Amalfitano, ―now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.‖ ―But exile,‖ said Pelletier, ―is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that‘s important.‖ ―That‘s just what I mean by abolishing fate,‖ said Amalfitano.157

Exile in this sense ties to Deleuzean concept of ―becoming‖, and more precisely becoming- minoritarian; it is the opposite of becoming-man, since ―man is majoritarian par excellence―.158 Majoritarian, for Deleuze and Guattari, always implies domination and territory, whereas becomings imply deterritorialization, imperceptibility, molecularity. The objection could be raised: isn‗t it the case, that the most horrific violence is performed upon those who are in exile, deterritorialized, imperceptible, as the hundreds of killed, raped, mutilated, faceless women in Santa Teresa, that Bolaño makes his central axis in 2666? This I argue is among the central concerns in the novel. ―Some people can talk, hide nothing, not lie: they are secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water, in truth incomprehensible. Whereas the others have a secret that is always breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it to an infinite form‖.159 This extreme ambiguity points out that there is no simple recipe of fleeing. Becoming-imperceptible is

156 Ibid, p. 90. 157 Ibid, p. 117. 158 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 291. 159 Ibid, p. 290. 46 not necessarily related to physical hiding, withdrawal, non-participation. The opposite might be the case. However, not only in 2666 but also throughout his oeuvre, Bolaño is deeply concerned with the question of imperceptibility, of not being known, or being known on your own terms. The following discussion should serve as a detour only to come back to violence in Santa Teresa. It will mainly focus on Benno von Archimboldi, the imperceptible German writer, which is the focus of the last part—―The Part About Archimboldi‖—in 2666.

5.2 Imperceptibility, anonymity, and striving for singularity

―[W]hen the face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean becomings-animal occur, becomings-molecular, nocturnal deterritorializations over-spilling the limits of the signifying system.‖160 The last part of 2666, which on the surface appears as most traditional in its linear narrative, subverts conservativeness of the form with the content largely preoccupied with becomings and becoming-imperceptible in particular. Hans Reiter a.k.a. Benno von Archimboldi, born two years after World War I, to a one-legged veteran father of the recent war and to one-eyed mother, both poor villagers somewhere in Prussia. Early in his childhood little Hans discovers the underwater world, into which he delves wholeheartedly, obsessively studying sea plant varieties from the only book he possesses (by theft)––Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. The first becomings occur underwater, where he spends as much time as possible, swimming and diving with his eyes wide open, examining plant varieties and the bottom of the sea. It becomes more than just experience, it becomes an altered state, becoming-seaweed, becoming- sea, an alternative, a heterotopia to materially and mentally poverty-ridden post-war reality of his family. But it is not a mere, conscious escape, it is rather fluid merging with the environment, with objects of his study and obsessions, melting into other worlds and other beings. Young Archimboldi‘s imperceptibility is slowly unfolding through variety of encounters and developments. For example, his height is extremely disproportionate in comparison to his age group; he loses his interest in school at the age of eight and drops out completely at thirteen; his Prussian language is almost incomprehensible to dominant German ear; in the encounters with the representative from the nearby estate he shows complete ignorance of literature and written world, into which he is slowly initiated. His intuitions tell him that there is something intricately related with misery that he is observing all around in the social world and identity in all its forms (nation,

160 Ibid, p. 115. 47 gender, etc.), as he is given long rant about the all nations of the world being swine, except, perhaps, the Prussians. Thus, then the National Socialism emerges in 1933, young Hans is already in some ways immune to the appeals of oneness and strength of the collective identity. His loyalty instead rests on the baron‘s nephew, who is systematically stealing away his uncle estate‘s valuables to support his bohemian lifestyle in Berlin but at the same introduces him to the world of letters and ―culture‖. Once again it is not a simple tale of class struggle, of the poor either despising or envying the rich, but an attempt to point out much more nuanced microcosm of the social, where lines of flight occur irrespective of social inscriptions and positions. With the help of his noble friend, Hans moves to Berlin, finds a job, as well as the cultural circles to which his friends introduces him. But Hans remains inassimilable, fascinated by elements of such life, but overall distant and singular. He finds certain satisfaction in the mundane, minimalistic, everyday, unsophisticated world, including the barely intersecting living with his diseased, death-approaching roommate: Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man‘s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.161

This unraveling relation with the diseased, constantly expanding train of thought, even if told in the third person voice, shows Reiter‘s tendency in becomings, the minoritarian intuition, if not articulation, certain sensitivity towards the other, but not the other as in binary opposition, but other as already there, as presence, as immanence. This becoming-other, becoming-Jewish is vividly described when after being injured in combat, Reiter, temporary mute, is dispatched in the deserted Ukrainian village of Kostekino. Various accounts circulate how village became deserted but most convincing appears to be that Jewish population was recently eliminated by Einsatzgruppe C. Reiter occupies one of the houses where he finds a small hiding place and diaries of Boris Abramovich Ansky, a local Jew some ten years older than Reiter. Reading of his diaries becomes not merely a literary journey, an intimate snapshot of someone‘s self-representation, an encounter with the other, but turns into becoming-other. Reading turns out to be extremely informative about Ansky‘s life and about life in the Soviet Union in general. He learns what it means to be Jewish in the military, about bizarre stories from Siberia, about literary establishment with its initially overly eager revolutionary writers who keep faith in their valuable contribution building socialism, various literary movements and

161 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 661. 48 personalities, his initiation into Communist party, which was sponsored by science-fiction writer Efraim Ivanov, who in relatively short time reaches zenith of popularity and just as shortly falls of grace with books withdrawn and himself becoming a victim of Stalin‘s purges. Ansky plunges into a vibrant, but at the same time dangerous cultural life in his own right. It appears that Ivanov‘s resurgence of popularity is achieved by three novels written by Ansky, which are published under Ivanov‘s name. Towards the end of his notebooks, He talks about the young Russian Jews who made the revolution and who now (this is probably written in 1939) are dropping like flies. He talks about Yuri Piatakov, assassinated in 1937, after the second Moscow Trial. He mentions names Reiter has never heard before. Then, a few pages on, he mentions them again. As if he were afraid of forgetting them. Names, names, names. Those who made revolution and those who were devoured by that same revolution, though it wasn‘t the same but another, not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.162

After the various public names come numerically encoded names163 to protect the identities of his friends and acquaintances. Danger is stemming from all corners. For young Reiter this gives first hints about the dangers of writing and the importance of avoiding proper names. Thus it is not incidental that he takes his nom de plume also from Ansky‘s notebooks, from the 16th century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted surreal and grotesque faces, constituted of various objects (fruit, animals, fish, etc.). The painted faces appear to be a metaphor for the multiplicity of self. Literature, that space for unrestrained expression, is threatening. Even if discursively it is always given inferior place in comparison to science, politics, ―reality‖. Fiction is a dangerous weapon or at least it is considered dangerous by the apparatuses of power. Anonymity emerges as a strategy. It narrows the gap between singular authority and collective enunciation. Anyone can be hiding behind the pseudonym. But clearly, there is something more than a mere practicality of increasing personal safety. There is something properly political about such a practice. Historically, according to Foucault in ―What is an Author?‖, authorial attribution was a guarantee to keep dominant discourse functioning. Those that had any intentions for transgressive, blasphemous, or unlawful activity would find themselves punished. Thus this penal function precedes books as property. Copyright laws are only introduced in the 17th and 18th centuries; up until that point there was a long tradition of anonymous writing that often was considered folk expression (fairy tales, tragedies, epics), but often the anonymity was ―allowed‖ when they were considered aged enough. This changes with the modern era, when author attribution becomes imperative and in cases when they are anonymous they are taken as a task of deciphering who is behind the anonymous work. But even when the author is not anonymous it poses various difficulties since the author is not a mere proper name, there is always a specific discursive

162 Ibid, p. 728. 163 E.g.: ―today I saw 9, he talked to me about 7 <...>. Or: this afternoon I saw 13 in the metro, though he didn‘t notice me, I was sitting there half asleep and I let the train go by, and 13 was reading a book on a bench nearby― (Ibid, p. 729) 49 formation which varies according to historical era, genre, creativity, consistency of the works etc.164 In well-known passage, Foucault also articulates the function of writing and dissolution of the subject, attempts at losing the face, if not a proper name of the author:

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand —a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.165

Thus we can see two strategies, which perhaps are related. One suggests that writing exceeds any attempts to make identical the written work and its author, so even the attributed proper name escapes processes of signification, psychologization, rationalization, that are often invoked in pairing up the ―really existing‖ individual and his or her work. Another one, I would argue, goes even further. It also does similar operation of dissolving ―face‖ through writing, but in addition it also escapes the proper name. The danger of that that it creates zealous reaction, as in the case of Archimboldi in 2666, and it seems only a matter of time until ―identity‖ is revealed. But my point is here that it is a position that needs to be vigorously interrogated, today in the ―democratic‖ world just as much as in monarchical, Soviet or Nazi regimes when the dangers were more pronounced. Archimboldi‘s strategy comes from a variety of sources. It is not necessarily elaborately articulated. It might be a mere intuition. Clearly, and perhaps, too obviously, the lessons are drawn from Ansky and his uncertain but foreseeable fate. His notebooks appear to be stimulus and a lesson. What Archimboldi slowly starts to learn through experiences and observations is that there is something unbearably cruel about the world constituted in oppositions, proper names, identities, hierarchies. The systems in place, the systems replacing other systems––what they share in common is order. But the price for this order is too high, it is ―not the dream but the nightmare‖. Writing then can become an activity of fleeing, resistance to the present, construction of the world, which does not have to fall into rigidity of resolution, of friend and enemy dichotomy. But art should not be considered as the escape either: ―art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the a-signifying, a-subjective, and faceless‖.166 Anonymity, I argue, could

164 Foucault, M. Language, Counter-Memory and Practice. Ed. Bouchard, D. F. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. P. 124-127. 165 Foucault, M. Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Sheridan, A. M.. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. P. 17. 166 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 187 50 become one of the strategies for this a-subjectivizing facelessness, with its own dangers and rewards.167 Although Deleuze and Guattari are somewhat skeptical towards the anonymous and relate it too much to secrecy, which in turn calls for deciphering and counterespionage (which is the case in 2666, to some extent), my aim here is to show that anonymity and becoming-imperceptible are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can be mutually co-productive. Anonymous writing allows for extra space. While it does not avoid personification which is inevitably attached to literature, anonymously written texts avoid personifying the author of the work. If all writing is desubjectivizing, anonymous writing could be seen as extra-desubjectivizing. It is not a mere opposition of imposing social (state, censorship, ―public morality‖) on the one hand and resisting individual on the other. Writing is at its best when it attempts to reconcile these oppositions, to carve space for an individual expression, but when it attempts to challenge, or even destroy individual as much as the social, since both of them are conceptual and functional impositions from the start. When Archimboldi publishes his first novel under pseudonym, his girlfriend questions his choice not to use his real name and appeals to possibility of fame. To which Archimboldi gives a thought: Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Göring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren‘t famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Döblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister, about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame‘s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.168

Anonymity is a stance, an active position, but anonymity is not of value in itself. What terrifies Archimboldi is the passivity, anonymous passivity of a citizen, a bureaucrat, an ordinary man who passionately follows the orders. Brutalizing passivity of propriety and order is even more terrifying than articulated, personified, intentional evil. After the end of the WWII Archimboldi is detained in prisoner of war camp, where he develops a relationship with Leo Sammer, a bureaucrat disguising himself under pseudonym, who tells his story in the Polish village, where trainload of Jews, on the last days of war are dispatched. His attempts to rescue change into a slow process of elimination, with his humanist sensibilities combined with technical efficiency. Archimboldi strangles the man in the act of vigilante justice, in some ways demonstrating the contingent nature of anonymity and the dangerous nature of speech. Becoming anonymous himself, in part for this act and the fear of repercussions, plays out the tension even further. Sammer once proclaimed: ―I was a fair administrator. I did good things, guided by my instincts, and bad things, driven by the vicissitudes

167 Danger, for Deleuze and Guattari, consists of madness as possible result of facelesness, since the subject is so invested in the face. On the other hand, ―if the face is politics, dismantling the face is also politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine‖. (Ibid, p. 188). 168 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 802.

51 of the war‖.169 Archimboldi does not succumb to the notion of personal heroism within the context of the war. He is himself implicated in it deeply. What triggers him, perhaps, is this notion of fairness in administration, which he is deeply suspect of. Anonymity becomes one tool among others to be as far as possible from the mechanisms of administration, from of control, hierarchy, and crushing obedience. Baroness von Zumpe, the figure from Archimboldi‘s childhood, who used to visit the estate, married to his publisher and after the death of her husband runs the publishing house, at some point proclaims that she ―never believed in ghosts or ideologies, only in her body and the bodies of others‖.170 The statement has Deleuzean connotations:

How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co- option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this ―form of the content‖ that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet <…> an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style—asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode—desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression.171

What Deleuze and Guattari are hinting at constitute few important moments. First of all, literature as outside, as outside of itself, something that flows, connects, tunes in and out various discourses, lost and rediscovered. They stand on their own, in some sense they are uncontainable, even by the most advanced forms of deciphering, cataloging, canonizing, analyzing, attempting to freeze them in the dead chains of meaning and value. The author, on the other hand, is someone who is (potentially) co-opted, pacified, seduced, neutralized, or glorified––it does not matter as much whether he is assigned positive or negative role. He is containable, or at least prone to containment. Although they pose these two moves as separate, Deleuze and Guattari are definitely aware of the dangers of proper names and potentiality of anonymity. Nicholas Thoburn, for example, argues that when they proclaim that they are keeping their proper names out of pure habit and that their aim is to dissolve and to multiply the subject behind the writing172, it is difficult to counteract such

169 Ibid, p. 767. 170 Ibid, p. 840. 171 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 133. 172 ―The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the 52 position, especially since anonymity does not serve as a guarantee that the ―I‖ is dissolved. However, he also points out that there is a danger in accentuating the author as opposed to diminishing it. Another telling fact is that a few Deleuze‘s and Guattari‘s attempts to engage with anonymous, collective writing resulted in attempted persecutions and bans from the state, which although should not count as the only criteria, points out the possibilities of writing that might not be available under the proper names. Thoburn also offers excerpt from Guattari‘s diaries, which are written upon completion of his two books, Anti-Oedipus and Psychanalyse et transversalité:

Both books are finished. Which fascinates and irritates me. I will have to account for them. I will have to say things, answer questions. … I feel like scrunching myself up into a little ball, becoming tiny, putting an end to this whole politics of presence and prestige. … To such an extent that I almost blame Gilles for having dragged me into this mess. Until now I could talk, then turn my back on whatever I was saying. I was never really engaged. Now, everything has to be accounted for and people will hold me up to what I‘m saying. The field is unified. The plane of consistency of writing doesn‘t let anything go, every blow is counted. It‘s something that fucking sends death right up my spine.173

Does it have anything to do with Archimboldi‘s concerns? Certainly it does in a sense that although authored works circulate in the economy of meanings and values, the anonymous circulation has its own advantages. When so much value is placed upon the face, about the lives of ―famous‖ people, when the bodies are scrutinized and psychologized, when referentiality thrives on proper names, and individual, while in fact dehumanized to unforeseen length, at the same it is also elevated to the centrality of discourse of the social, through image, reference, appeal, ideal, in that setting anonymity, facelessness comes as a form of resistance. Although all signs point out to the tendency that the more of the experience is lost, the more it is brought back through mediation, not least of all through faces and bodies of the ―human‖ with pornographic ―realness‖ and instrumentality. In fact, this tendency to circulate within, to make an intervention, to work from within, to establish oneself as expert and authority has as its prerequisite ―realness‖ of that who utters statements, otherwise it is considered an anonymous––valueless, insignificant––chatter. These concerns maybe were ahead of Archimboldi‘s times, but his path proves only the correctness of the approach and certain anticipation. The regimes of biopolitical governmentality are chimerically changing over time from directness to increasing sophistication and participation, but in essence, it accomplishes same things by other means. Today names are used not only for quantifying, analyzing, and controlling of the population within a given territory. Names serve as a commodity which can generate surplus value through constant participation in the symbolic circulation, it is inseparable from the neoliberal

point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied‖ (Ibid, 3). 173 Quoted by Thoburn, N. Kodėl Mes Išlaikėme Savuosius Vardus? Anoniminė Autorystė ir Daugialypis Vienis. In Intenstyvumai ir Tėkmės: Gilles’io Deleuz’o Filosofija Šiuolaikinio Meno ir Politikos Kontekste. Ed. Audronė Ţukauskaitė. Vilnius: Lietuvos tyrimų institutas, 2011. P. 212. 53 technologies of self-valorization. It works as a double edged-sword: on the one side, it is what allows social and financial mobility, while on the other side, it is what entraps within a particular contours, effectively preventing lines of flight beyond what‘s permissive socially. Lines of flight with the proper name can only occur when they are calculated to yield the result, end up in surplus value, but that automatically disqualifies them from being such. ―My name! My reputation is at stake!‖ Name and face is the insurance that everything remains the same. ―To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine‖.174

5.3 On Violence as a State-Form

―The fucking killings are like a strike, amigo, a brutal fucking strike.‖ The comparison of the killings to a strike was odd. But Fate nodded his head and didn‘t say anything. ―This is a big city, a real city,‖ said Chucho Flores. ―We have everything. Factories, maquiladoras, one of the lowest unemployment rates in Mexico, a cocaine cartel, a constant flow of workers from other cities, Central American immigrants, an urban infrastructure that can‘t support the level of demographic growth. We have plenty of money and poverty, we have imagination and bureaucracy, we have violence and the desire to work in peace. There‘s just one thing we haven‘t got,‖ said Chucho Flores. Oil, thought Fate, but he didn‘t say it. ―What don‘t you have?‖ he asked. ―Time,‖ said Chucho Flores. ―We haven‘t got any fucking time.‖ Time for what? Thought Fate. Time for this shithole, equal parts lost cemetery and garbage dump, to turn into a kind of Detroit?175

After this strange conversation, Chucho Flores starts drawing women‘s faces. Fate compliments him for his skills and continues his inquiries into the killings that occur in Santa Teresa. There is discussion about numbers, about the probability of single serial killer and about how they ―vanish into a thin air, one minute here, gone the next. And after a while their bodies turn up in the desert‖.176 There are certainly numerous analyses, some of them in passing were mentioned earlier of how to account for what it is happening. But this thesis of strike and lack of time is worth further investigation. A strike is the suspension of production. It is interruption in the smooth functioning of operation. If it is a demand oriented strike, which is most often the case, it calls for certain adjustments, change. Ultimately, it is a search for solution via conflict. That is not to suggest that a strike is not inherently conservative in that it simultaneously challenges and preserves the status quo. But there are also strikes that do not demand. They make a statement that is about irruption or even destruction. It is a non-verbal commentary at the configuration of any given reality and in that sense, the killings described in 2666 certainly can be described as a strike.

174 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2004. Op. cit., p. 171. 175 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 286. 176 Ibid, p. 287. 54 What makes that city so violence-struck? Mellisa W. Wright offers a convincing genealogy of Ciudad Juárez, on which the events of 2666 are based. Her thesis is that there is a myth about disposable third world women, who are particularly suited for just-in-time, globalized networks of production. The myth is globally dispersed and encompasses not only various strata related directly with production but also directly unrelated sectors. This myth ―is widely believed to be a factual account of a woman worker whose disposability is naturally and culturally scripted‖.177 It says that these young women have a sort of expiration date. They are good and attentive for the time being but eventually they lose their skills and become disposable, that is replaced by other young women. They function purely as a labor-commodity, and their value-creating useful time is conditioned on the availability of the same labor-commodities in their prime time. ―In other words, over time, this woman turns into a form of industrial waste, at which point she is discarded and replaced‖.178 Although their durability is limited at the same their skills are essential for the production processes and are highly valued in commodity production. Thus among her field studies Ciudad Juárez is not accidental choice, since it was the first official export-processing zone, or maquiladora, established in 1965 for its convenient location next to the US border for logistical purposes, for its influx of migrants from the South: ―Over the next four decades, Ciudad Juárez became an internationally recognized leader in low-cost, high-quality, labor-intensive manufacturing processes‖.179 Although the main interest for Wright is how a female (disposable) body becomes a site of capitalist accumulation, she also takes the killings in Ciudad Juárez into consideration. What she observes, is that among the media and everyday people‘s concerns are the questions which ―try to determine if the murder victims were prostitutes, dutiful daughters, dedicated mothers, women leading ‗double lives,‘ or responsible workers‖.180 There is, once again, value attached to female bodies according to moral concerns. If she is a prostitute she is unworthy of concern, if she was a good and dutiful woman––she is. It created atmosphere of moral panic, with variety of experts and state officials directly or indirectly implying that the parents need to be more protective of their daughters, impose night curfews, and dissuade from the shady world of leisure and entertainment, which might lead into potential rapes and killings. Female sexuality itself needed to be restrained and reconditioned, for some, it was a liberal and corrupting influence coming from the northern neighbor that was to be blame for devaluation of traditional norms.181 There are also speculations about the uncertainty and crisis of masculinity, which, through jealousy and control, fires back violently at female independence and much greater employability. But

177 Wright, M. W. Disposable Woman and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. P. 1. 178 Ibid, p. 2. 179 Ibid, p. 7. 180 Ibid, p. 74. 181 Ibid, p. 75. 55 Wright does not buy into the tales of cultural essentialism, instead she makes a link that the sexualized killings and disposability in the factories operate according to the same logic: ―Mexican woman [becomes] a figure whose value can be extracted from her, whether it be in the form of her virtue, her organs, or her efficiency on the production floor. And once ‗they,‘ her murderers or her supervisors, ‗get what they want from‘ her, she is discarded‖.182 Wright elaborates on the idea of disposability: the young women create worth/value simultaneously becoming worthless. Depreciating like machinery, expiring like durable commodity. But there is certainly something more, something extra that is taking place. This disposability evidently has moral connotations. It critiques commodity-like value placed upon human life, short span, constant fluxus, lack of stability. But what Wright refers to in her book and extensively analyzes is the practice of turnover rates that are of extreme importance to managers and theoreticians of industrial production. The high turnover rate, it seems, is not primarily because of the quickly depreciating labor capacity of these young women. On the contrary, it is an active fleeing from discipline and stability that these not greatly remunerating jobs have to offer. It is perceived as a result stemming from personal qualities based on dubious moral foundations. These young workers want something else besides the drudgery of daily routine involved in work. Work does not define them any longer. Thus the shadow economy becomes the alternative, even if it is based on ultimately misleading consumerist fantasies of pleasure and liberation. Thus low-life of high-life fantasy, clearly, is not something that any dogmatic Marxist would espouse as a strategy of resistance. This is in no way a respectable proletarian position; rather it is a reactionary lumpenproletariat that fails to be collectively engaged historical agent. Bolaño is not shying away in pointing out the intricacies of similar arguments in 2666. That it has something to do with the maquiladora‘s is evident: many of the victims presently work or used to be employed in the factories, many are kidnapped going to or from work, the maquila managers, once inquired about the victims often turn them away by bribes, not necessarily for being implicated in the crimes, but avoiding any publicity or simply seeing at as a waste of time. Some women victims have been active in trying to organize unions within factories, but the links are never clear, and it is treated rather as a weak, but suggestive, link. Gender-based violence is pervasive, police including, where there is mass rape occurs of detained prostitutes in the police station or the most brutal sexists anecdotes are told in the bar frequented by police. Clearly gender plays role in all spheres, but this thesis will pursue lines of argumentation that are beyond gendered nature of killings and notions of femicide. For one reason is that these kinds of analyses have

182 Ibid, p. 87. 56 occurred elsewhere.183 Another one is that it is easy to slip into rhetoric of difference and culture, a sort of humanist liberalism, which places hope in partially structural adjustments of law and consciousness. What identitarian approach frequently overlooks is that ―Every attempt to grasp a ‗people‘ as a form-of-life—as race, class, ethnicity, or nation—has been undermined by the fact that the ethical differences within each ‗people‘ have always been greater than the ethical differences between ‗peoples‘ themselves.‖184 Furthermore, although statistically the female murders increased dramatically, so did overall male murders. The gendered aspect is not playing a small role, but the violence in general is what has been proliferating up until recently and has been approaching situation of civil war. There are few ways to approach this idea of civil war. First of all, according to Foucault, the formation of the nation and the state were intricately tied to claims of monopoly over violence. The state became a sole administrator of violence. No more feuding wars between groups, matters of life and death were responsibility of the monarch and later of the state. Although the emphasis have shifted historically from ―to take life or let live‖ into ―to make live or let die‖, the monopoly over violence does not wither away. In that sense, the present condition of violence, although not completely disassociated from state-form can be pointing out to the crisis of sovereignty and the end of monopoly of violence. The state is no longer capable of control to the same extent. Santa Teresa might be just one representation of this occurring shift. The brutality of it of course is overwhelming, thus it would be difficult to see it as some form of positivity. But perhaps suspension of materiality of it and attempting to look at it theoretically (or in literary terms) perhaps could point to some direction that would be drawing different diagrammatic. In fact, this is the direction that Tiqqun is pointing out. Their conception of ―global civil war‖ calls to investigate and act upon new contours of shifting state monopoly over violence: "Violence" is something new in history. We decadents are the first to know this curious thing: violence. Traditional societies knew of theft, blasphemy, parricide, abduction, sacrifice, insults and revenge. Modern States, beyond the dilemma of adjudicating facts, recognized only infractions of the Law and the penalties administered to rectify them. But they certainly knew plenty about foreign wars and, within their borders, the authoritarian disciplining of bodies. In fact, only the timid atom of imperial society – Bloom185 – thinks of "violence" as a radical and unique evil lurking behind countless masks, an evil which it is so vitally important to identify, in order to eradicate it all the more thoroughly. For us, ultimately, violence is what has been taken from us, and today we need to

183 For example above discussed Melissa W. Wright, who wrote on this subject extensively in other places. Also Staudt, K. Gender, Fear, and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juarez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 184 Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. : Semiotext(e), 2010a. P. 31 185 The figure of Bloom is taken from James Joyce. For Tiqqun it is a symbolic manifestation of radical disengagment from the world that describes the modern subject: ―Because Bloom is one who can no longer extract himself distinctly from the immediate context that contains him, his gaze is that of a man who fails to recognize. Everything slips away under its effect and gets lost in the inconsequential flux of objective relations where life is experienced negatively, indifferently, impersonally, as something without quality.‖ Tiqqun sees this figure as a radical negativity, but at the same time as a pure figure of potentiality. See Tiqqun. Theory of the Bloom. 2010b. Accessed at http://translationcollective.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/bloom-en.pdf on September 23rd, 2012. 57 take it back.186

Thus the difficult problem becomes in distinguishing violence as a state-form and violence as one of the expressions of forms-of-life, that Tiqqun is advocating. ―‗My‘ form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I am‖.187 It is not an individual body but a singularity. It is incompatible to the state-form of identity that are necessarily attached to the subject and its sociological, biopolitical constitution. Tiqqun argues that it is a false choice to see violence as either that which is inherent and necessary (―human nature‖) or that which is possible to eradicate through instruments of the state or any other structure or ethics. Rather there is always a chance that violence occurs as a result of play between forms-of-life. The state still claims a concern over matters of life and death, but is not capable preventing the civil war. Instead it manages and normalizes it. Whereas in the advanced Western societies it is more successful in his management, for time being, what Bolaño is describing in the interstices, the liminal spaces and borderlands of these societies is perhaps an advancement of war machines that are increasingly uncontrollable and that inevitably will spill over. It is not a question of mere geography any longer. Nothing is sufficiently local, everything is becoming increasingly interconnected. The question remains to what extent the capabilities of management will be able to deal with nomadic forms of civil war that are sweeping old confines of law, morality, and territory. Security and risk management—the highest priorities of the state— simultaneously becoming more sophisticated and more vulnerable. Returning to violence in Santa Teresa, one could ask: what if the condition for killings in 2666 is made possible by the social, the public sphere, in which those who have face are within a particular space of safety, while those who are not are a prey, a side effect, and bare life of sorts? In other words, instead of espousing the social, the society, the public as a guarantor of safety, we see the social as a structural framework which can only operate by having its underside in that which falls short of the social? What if the strategy to seek life in whatever form one finds desirable is precisely not to search for ever increasing sociability through visibility but through nomadism, invisibility, even destruction of the concept of the social? ―We‘re all potential illegals here‖, says one character.188 One can ask how much of what constitutes ―asocial‖ is generated as a flipside of the ―social‖. Security is what traditional political theory was preoccupied with. The (one-sided) social contract was set in such a way that it would seem only natural to compromise some of the ―freedoms‖ in the name of security against the enemies, nature, even against the individual himself or herself. However, as it is well known, this social composition was violently instituted and, arguably, even more violently maintained. The socially constructed particular individuals and those

186 Tiqqun, 2010a. Op. cit., p. 34. 187 Ibid., p. 22. 188 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 463.

58 all that fell off the social (unruly, mad, asocial, criminal, etc.) were to be reformed or eliminated. Foucault, for example, makes a case of certain form of power that merges in a particular arrangement of forceful top-down and interiorizing bottom-up to constitute modern political order:

Of all civilizations, the Christian West has undoubtedly been, at the same time, the most creative, the most conquering, the most arrogant, and doubtless the most bloody. At any rate, it has certainly been one of the civilizations that has deployed the greatest violence. But, at the same time, and this is the paradox I would like to stress, over millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock, something that assuredly no Greek would have been prepared to accept. Over millennia he has learned to ask for his salvation from a shepherd (pasteur) who sacrifices himself for him. The strangest form of power, the form of power that is most typical of the West, and that will also have the greatest and most durable fortune, was not born in the steppe or in the towns. This form of power so typical of the West, and unique, I think, in the entire history of civilizations, was born, or at least took its model from the fold, from politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold.189

Where Bolaño‘s 2666 intervenes is precisely at the moment when the backlash against the social is becoming more pronounced. The individual particles refuse to be folded into a social fabric under any rubric of citizen, worker, and subject. Sometimes it may be articulated quite directly, other times it may be only hinted at, but the overall picture is that belief in the social is quickly disintegrating and where it is evoked it refers to nakedness of manipulative and cynical power and brute force. But by no means, it is a portrayal of dialectical struggle of the normative ideals of society with its economic rationalities, cultural establishments, and political map-drawings on the one hand, and black market, drug economies and fleeing realities of the unruly subjects, alternative cultures on the other hand. Official discourse of socioeconomics and culture are clearly portrayed in the negative light, but it is not at all the case that the other side is portrayed as a romanticized antagonist. Rather it is the interaction, the mutual co-dependence and co-existence of these divergent points that is at play in 2666. Clear boundaries are difficult to draw and they cannot be easily established. It is not an occasion of interior and exterior. But what Bolaño is hinting at, is that we need to take this shadow of modernity seriously without affixing a stable role or conceptual apparatus. It is not that modernity=barbarism-in-disguise=gulags=Auschwitz, some form of Adornian diagnosis, but neither is it a simple certainty placed upon the fleeing, the illegal, the shadowy, and precarious. However, once we allow imagination to engage with this shadowy asociality without prescribing it recipes for a simple reformation and recomposition into social, something might emerge from it that does away with totalizing logic of the social. If it comes at the price of loss of security, ontological stability, and boundary-bound politicization––then so be it: ―Of course, if you lose you die and if you win sometimes you die too, which makes it hard to keep up a sporting

189 Foucault, M. Security, Territory, Population. : Lectures at the College de France 1977--1978. Trans. Burchell, G. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. P. 130. 59 attitude, but still, the general reflected, some of us try to fight the good fight‖.190 This is one position that leaves ambiguity plenty of room. This skepticism towards the social does not call for Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes since that position is nothing more than socially produced concept in order to justify omnipotence of the social and omnipresence of the state-form. By the state-form here I do not mean only institutional settings of the state, but also interiorized state-forms that are dispersed throughout the social field. If the state is ―vanishing‖, if slightly, the state-form, perhaps, is more deeply embedded within the individual psyches and habits. Capitalism, being a nominally deteritorializing force does not eradicate the state-form. It requires some of it for its functions and for its processes of reteritorializations. Thus if we can speak of capitalism as a social relation, we can also speak of the state-form as a social relation as well. What becomes essential to distinguish, and here Bolaño is instrumental, is the state-form which frequently countered with another state-form and the state-form countered with other-form, perhaps, with what Deleuze and Guattari call a (nomadic) war machine: From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumezil analyzes the three "sins" of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State […]. The warrior is in the position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing.191

What are the examples from 2666 that advance this thesis of the state-form? In some sense, they are too numerous and several of them already have been pointed out. To name a few, consider the four European academics are displaying certain traits of state-form in their attempts to capture Archimboldi. The university itself becomes one of the manifestations of the state-form. The need to know, to surveil, to be accounted to give it shape and form that it is comparable within any particular taxonomy––all these are exhibitions of state-form. Oscar Fate wanting to make an investigative report about the killings in Santa Teresa being refused to do so on the basis that it is not involve Black people – the reading constituency of the newspaper point out to identitarian enclosure that is associated with the state-form. Writing itself and the question of language and death is questioned along the lines of state-form and the social. The long passage perhaps can be justified here for its enormously evocative historical trajectory it draws that is immediately relevant for the purpose of this argument:

―We‘ve gotten used to death,‖ he heard the young man say. ―It‘s always been that way,‖ said the white-haired man, ―always.‖ In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white- haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn‘t want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and

190 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p., 537. 191 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 353-354. 60 yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he‘s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he‘s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren‘t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it‘s because polite society was so small back then. I‘m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn‘t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn‘t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren‘t part of society, the dark- skinned people who died on the ship weren‘t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn‘t tell you.192

The lines of argumentation coming from the prominent criminologist are deeply ambiguous here. It begs the question, once again, whether violence (or prevention) of violence is the question of ever greater social integration or, on the contrary, the greater social integration is the cause of ever widening scope of social exclusion and consequently violence. It would be a great mistake to state that modern societies with their respect for differences and identities have ensured the ―peace‖. For one, every social difference that becomes acknowledged and respectable is constituted through internal logics of exclusion. It is not a violence of integration (such as the Civil Rights Movement in the US) which becomes violent through resistance of the state or the social, it is also violence of the group itself that draws clear boundaries for those who are in and those who are out. One of the illustrative examples/tendencies comes from sexual identity politics in the United States. For every gay man who after a few decades of recognition became respectable citizen, with extra-disposable income, niche markets catering to his special needs, his ―struggle‖ to prove capable to serve in the military, his political lobbying, his ―family values‖, there is also a man with non-normative sexuality, who is perhaps poor, engages in social and sexual practices that are now fall outside what ―gay‖ is supposed to signify, he is shamed, blamed for irresponsibility, he is nobody. Worse, he is

192 Ibid, p. 265-266 61 an enemy. The enemy also (traditionally, perhaps) comes not only from inside the territorial state (those are always plenty––criminal, mad, welfare-abuser, etc.), but also from the outside (terrorist, illegal immigrant, religious fanatic, etc.). So what is this belonging, community, being part of society? Bolaño keeps it in ambiguity, but layer upon layer builds up complex structure of questions or, better, insinuations. Tiqqun is clearly more direct:

The modern State is therefore first of all the constitution of each body into a molecular State, imbued with bodily integrity by way of territorial integrity, molded into a closed entity within a self, as much in opposition to the "exterior world" as to the tumultuous associations of its own penchants – which it must contain – and in the end required to comport itself with its peers as a good law-abiding subject, to be dealt with, along with other bodies according to the universal proviso of a sort of private international law of "civilized" habits. In this way the more societies constitute themselves in States, the more their subjects embody the economy. They monitor themselves and each other, they control their emotions, their movements, their inclinations, and believe that they can expect the same self-control from others.193

Since the state-form cannot be distinguished or located easily as residing in power centers, thus the attack cannot be perceived in purely military terms. Other forms of resistance, subversion, evasion, fleeing are conceivable without articulation. It is means and not ends that becomes of importance. It does not need to be directed at the enemy, since the enemy can be the external force just as much as it can be the interiority of the self, through which that externality is constituted. Non-participation, desertion, deliriousness, anonymity––they all can become ―legitimate‖ activity, in the sense of actively reshaping, advancing the stages of decomposition of sociopolitical entropy. Bolaño does not suggest that explicitly; that is not the point of writing literature. Literature rather creates landscape where ―every hundred feet the world changes‖.194 Everything can be scrutinized to molecular level, but things can also be left in silence and avoid entrapment of concepts and explanations. But desperate soul could ask, of course, does literature leads us anywhere? Does it offer a solution? Does it give us anything tangible to fight the evil? Or does it leave us in the state of passivity that we all love to hate? And the answer is that these are inherently wrong questions. Literature is not a pill to swallow and to reemerge from the disease rejuvenated and healthy. It is by writing and reading, by suspending the presence that we create literature with all its potentialities: ―to bring into existence and not to judge‖.195 Literature can take the thought outside the confines of judgment, ―inventing new possibilities of life. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art‖.196

193 Tiqqun, 2010a. Op. cit., p. 84-85. 194 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 430. 195 ―Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come? It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization‖ (Deleuze, G., 1997. Op. cit., 135). 196 Deleuze, G. Negotiations. Trans. Joughin, M. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. P. 95.

62 6. Rethinking the social through literature

―The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honor to think of it entirely as a system‖197

Still, the question remains, does literature offers us something that we could consider a model, a method, or even an ethics? If there is a lot to complain about the state of literature (commodification, marketization, reemergence of conservative narrative forms, loss of poetics, primacy of other media over literature) at the same time the state of the social and political is self- evidently in even worse position. The political became the arena of the most superficial and inherently manipulative consensus that avoids, or rather neutralizes, conflict and employs the most sophisticated technologies of governance (including those of ―self-management‖). Democracy is still clung on to as something to be saved and preserved while all signs point out to its bankruptcy. Derrida has commented on Fukuyama‘s pronouncement about the triumphant end of history and glorious victory of liberal democracy: ―It must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the world and of humanity‖.198 This dramatic pronouncement is still very much concerned with the democratic deficit in material terms. Surely those concerns are of utmost importance, but there is another dimension that is perhaps just as important and it is more of a conceptual nature. Democracy is a formality without content. It lacks its demos. It is not even the question, as already posed over a century ago by Marx and others, about the ―formal‖ and ―real‖ democracy, one in which the state is dominated by the economy, and the other a utopian one, dominating the state in the name of those who are dominated. There is a much deeper crisis that cannot be resolved easily. Rancière points out two paradoxes of democracy: there is a form of democracy as rule and there is democracy as social and political life. But the problem is not only that one imposes itself on the other, but that democracy is inherently anarchic: ―the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all‖.199 But the formal democracy cannot allow the real democracy to exist, since it would mean the dissolution of the democracy-as-we-know-it. Rancière reminds us that the boundary between the social and the political are based on dubious notions of those who are capable of participating in the larger affairs

197 Adorno, T. W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Trans. Jephcott, E. F. N. London: Verso, 1978. P. 113. 198 Quoted in Rancière, J. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. Corcoran, S. London and New York: Continuum, 2010a. P. 58. 199 Ibid, p. 50 63 of the political community on the one hand and on the other hand those who are not, namely, those who are ―unable to think beyond private and immediate concerns‖.200 ―The whole democratic process is about the displacement of that boundary‖.201 The political aims at the universalization (through laws, institutions, etc.) while the social strives for particularity.202 But the problem is, as was indicated in the previous part, that the social and the political have already collapsed. The social is undermining not only the political but also the social through militant passivity, imperceptibility, unresponsiveness, and retreat. This passivity diagnoses the collapse of the idealism of the social and political. It diagnoses the condition of the desert. There are surely oases of creativity, but also oases of horror, terror, and boredom within the social desert. But is it sufficient reason for despair? Does coming to terms with such a diagnosis provide reasons to act, to flee, to move nomadically? Or is it rather about acceptance? It becomes a situation of choice but not in individualistic market terms. Literature has quite a few things to say at this point. It contributes to, according to Rancière, to partition—or redistribution—of the sensible: humans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things. Humans are political animals, then, for two reasons: first, because we have the power to put into circulation more words, "useless" and unnecessary words, words that exceed the function of rigid designation; secondly, because this fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to "speak correctly"—that is, by the masters of designation and classification who, by virtue of wanting to retain their status and power, flat-out deny this capacity to speak. <…>. Political subjectivity thus refers to an enunciative and demonstrative capacity to reconfigure the relation between the visible and the sayable, the relation between words and bodies: namely, what I refer to as "the partition of the sensible."203 When it is at its best, Bolaño‘s work would certainly qualify for this bridging and redistibutive effect, even if it often works with the negative wholeheartedly. This means: it does not shy away from all shades of the negative (under or over-exposing what is wrong with the world). This approach contrasts with other spheres of inquiry and representation that too often attempt to balance the parameters of dominating discourse, not to lean to overly optimistic or overly pessimistic, present facts and counteract facts with other facts. Politics and academia are among the best in these kinds of exercises. Their existence is to take the middle ground, the zero degree of intensity, in other words to preserve the present, since the present ––in all its desert-like emptiness and vastness– –is their cause and their effect.

Is literature immune from these effects? Most certainly it is not:

Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit—that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package,

200 Ibid, p. 58. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Rancière, J. and Panagia, D. Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière. Diacritics, 2010b, 30(2). P. 115. 64 fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode.204

What is wrong with the present sociopolitical configuration was too often the case with the alternative ones as well. All sorts of socialisms, communisms, fascisms were too deeply invested in oedipal civilizational models that insisted on the primacy of particular identity and the self. Reconciliations of the individual and the collective in the utopian formations were too deeply reliant on the concept of order. What was to be eliminated was precisely the lumpen, the unpredictable, the other, the different. Chaos, it was argued, stemmed from savage inequalities which were producing savage anomalies within the social. Capitalism in that sense is more flexible than any coherent political order. It allows degrees of deterritorialization, only to reterritorialize them into its operation at the later date. In one way, this flexibility, this ability to deal with contradictions and chaos provides it with strength and longevity (other areas, too obvious to mention, have to do with the apparatuses of force which ensures its existence as well). Thus, in order to move beyond the present constellation, these questions need to be engaged with. Present politics, whether in its shoestring welfare or nakedly neoliberal varieties, strives by any means to oedipalize its subjects, whether through appeals to the socially dependent, corporatist ―commoner‖ that must fall into a laundry list of identity categories (which at any particular time are attached to citizenship) or through appeals to a self-sufficient and self-governing entrepreneur of the self. Concepts of social justice, freedom, equality, and individuality have all undergone co- optation and desertification of their contents. Do they need to be reinvented and re-actualized? The problem with these, like most concepts, is that they themselves become technologies of social repression. They become inseparable from the demand politics. They appeal to ―power‖ by legitimating that power. And once that power learns that the subject is subserviently appealing to it, it grants some of it so the vicious circle can go on indefinitely. But this is by no means what some would refer to as progress, a slow process of increasing liberties and communal co-existence achieved through struggle. Rather it is the oedipalization process of ever increasing subjection, neo- serfdom, of evacuation of what is left of the political, the construction of an eternal desert. Benjamin would ask, who are the Surrealists of today, and are they willing to ―liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom‖?205 Or Deleuze asks: ―Who are our nomads today, our real Nietzscheans?‖206

204 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p.134 205 ―Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that ―freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.‖ (Benjamin, W. One Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Jephcott, E. and Shorter, K. London: NLB, 1979. P. 236) 206 ―We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche‘s thought and 65 Among the poetically insurrectionary attempts to redefine the present condition come the writings of the anonymous collective Tiqqun. It warrants quoting at some length:

We say that these times are a desert, and that this desert incessantly deepens. This is no poetic device, it is evident. An evident which harbours many others. Notably the rupture with all that protests, all that denounces, and all that glosses over the disaster. Whoever denounces exempts themselves. Everything appears as if leftists were accumulating reasons to revolt the same way a manager accumulates the means to dominate. That is to say with the same delight. The desert is the progressive depopulation of worlds – the habit we have adopted to live as if we were not of this world. The desert is present in the continuous, massive and programmed proletarianisation of populations, just as it is present in the suburban sprawl of Florida, where the misery lies precisely in the fact that no one seems to feel it. That the desert of our time is not perceived only makes it harsher. Some have tried to name the desert. To point out what has to be fought not as the action of a foreign agent but as a sum of relations. They talked about spectacle, biopower or empire. But this also added to the current confusion. The spectacle is not an easy abbreviation for the massmedia. It lies as much in the cruelty with which everything endlessly throws us back to our own image. Biopower is not a synonym for social security, the welfare state or the pharmaceutical industry, but it pleasantly lodges itself in the care that we take of our pretty bodies, in a certain physical estrangement to oneself as well as to others. Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a worldwide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational corporations. Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. Everywhere things are working. Wherever the normal situation prevails.207

The two works of Bolaño discussed here might not necessarily share the same rhetoric, but they share certain affinity all the same. They diagnose, each in their own way, something that it is too terrifying, too dark, and too vast to engage without suspending the present political vocabulary and imagination that is conditioned not to exceed what it is allowed to imagine. But what if NOT pushing into the negative, maintaining belief that it all fixes itself up, that there is no need to exaggerate, that there are plenty signs of ―progress‖ and so on, is part and parcel of the present desert-like condition? It is not even a matter of recognition and instant action upon this condition. Instant action might just as well be part of the problem. Doing something for the sake of doing something ends up in simulated circulation and recycling of old and new slogans, new bureaucracies, new forms of management. The left, the new left, the anti-globalization movements ––Bolaño and Tiqqun call to suspend and to reflect upon emptied out discourse of leftist struggle. But theirs is not a position of passivity: ―From every side we oppose the blackmail of having to choose between the offensive and the constructive, negativity and positivity, life and survival, war

marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. And even if the journey is a motionless one, even if it occurs on the spot, imperceptible, unexpected, and subterranean, we must ask ourselves, ―Who are our nomads today, our real Nietzscheans‘?‖ (Deleuze, G., 1985, p. 149). 207 Tiqqun. The Call. N. d. Accessed at http://www.bloom0101.org/call.pdf on April 11th, 2013. P. 7-8. 66 and the everyday‖208 Each creates its own political and affective lines of flight. Clearly, it is not Bolaño that is taking a position. It is his works that start to live lives of their own. And Tiqqun is not a group of French intellectuals in need of more edgy experiences. These kinds of collisions, connections, productive linkages are what matters at this point. Literature thus becomes a site—a construction site of resistance and potentiality. It not only diagnoses the world as it is, but also resists that world, multiplies it. There is no graver mistake than to reduce literature to fiction. If anything, it is the ―real‖ world that is more fictitious in the present state than any literature. Politics is one of those fictions that operates by abstractions: ―That is how the classical definition of politics spreads the desert: by abstracting humans from their worlds, by disconnecting them from the network of things, habits, words, fetishes, affects, places, solidarities that make up their world, their sensible world, and that gives them their specific substance‖.209 Literature can help being in touch with this sensible world. It is by no means a retreat from the world. Perhaps what is increasingly needed, among other things, is the solitariness of reading and reflecting, experiencing, and imagining without enormous speeds of interactiveness, sound-bites or image-bites which over- saturate the mentalscape of the digitalized, cyber world. The neocolonialism of the social and psychic spheres is based on circulation and attention; but, as Adorno perhaps would say, it is a pseudo-experience. While it creates the appearance of experience and action, knowledge and pleasure, at the same time it is a guarantee that ―nothing is happening‖. The participatory nature of new digital technologies makes it harder to see that it is a mechanism of control (as opposed to older strategies of first sovereignty and then discipline, as proposed by Foucault).

Barry Seaman in 2666 articulates some aspects of this attention for attentions sake:

Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a smile. Or to put it another way, we don‘t trust anybody, least of all people who smile, since we know they want something from us. Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they‘re good people, that they‘d never hurt a fly? No again. The truth is they don‘t want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they ask for in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that‘s all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshipped.210

Bolaño does try to suspend this hyperreal and hyperpresentist charade of a perfectly smiling world of simulacra and expose what is hiding behind it. It is not necessarily that something or someone is hiding behind it. That is left open. It is not necessarily some totalizing system that employs the language and imagery of positivity to constantly generate desires of participation, reform, and improvement. It is a self-perpetuating system with power certain in finance, administration,

208 Ibid, p. 69. 209 Ibid, p. 18. 210 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 254-255. 67 production; but, as Adorno points out, it would be too much honour to give it the name of ―system‖. Forces of action and reaction, liberation and enslavement compete. The more the system is oversaturated, the more it is prone to crisis, since the apparatus of management becomes increasingly complex and large. Deleuze, in his ―Postscript to Societies of Control‖, states that contrary to the old models of containment in the disciplinary societies, the present form of control is ―like a spirit, a gas‖.211 If the corporation, the financial system, the mechanisms of control are gaseous and fluid, then the resistance should also display similar traits. Old models of party, movement, or avant-garde are ineffective. ―There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons‖212 Literature may not be the best weapon, but there is something anarchic about literature that escapes rigid rules of formalization, normativization, and overdetermination. It grasps the world in its own unique ways—through ambiguity and irreducible plurality. If anything, it is a space that ―creates chains of decoding and deterritorialization that serve as the foundation for desiring-machines, and make them function‖.213 If the social is a content-less concept utilized for quantification, ―dividualization‖, marketization, literature is an anarchic space that resists signification and interpretation, it is a place to imagine a world beyond this world. If the picture is bleak, like in Kafka or Bolaño, it is not to make us desperate. On the contrary, it might be a trigger to flee the desperation and create affective lines of flight, new solidarities, and new imageries of the world to come.

211 Deleuze, G. Postcript on the Societies of Control. October, 1992, 59. P. 4. 212 Ibid, p. 4. 213 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 2011. Op. cit., p. 368.

68 Conclusion

This thesis argues that literature can be an important tool for social and political critique, but that it is also not irreducible to that, or to any other singular function (e.g. entertainment) for that matter. Literature functions most successfully as social and political critique when it is approached as desubjectivizing, a-signifying, fragmentary, and a contradictory space of expression that refuses to be put into categories of either ―pure‖ art (implying apoliticism) or the political (implying that it should be directly applicable to advance a particular political agenda). Rather––and here I would follow the insights from Rancière––it should continuously work in tension with each extreme pole, without attempting to collapse one into the other. We should not expect from literature simple answers to our problems. Too many other fields are already doing that (with very modest results). Literature is the space where problems, conditions of our (or past, or future) times are approached in ways that are indirect, indefinite, ambiguous. When we feel that it has failed to provide us with sufficient answers, then that might be the hint that literature has succeeded. Our questions and emotions, which multiply when literature takes us into its labyrinths, become directly productive. Literature‘s productivity stems from its potential for new becomings as writers and readers. It expands, overspills into the world and thus it can no longer be seen as a contained object, a mere book. Another central aim of this thesis is the investigation of the social and what literature can offer in order to rethink its parameters. The reading(s) of Bolaño served to engage in that task. I claim that literature as a space in which boundaries are unsettled in terms of forms and contents of expression, where the writer is producing under the condition that he or she is becoming someone else in the process (and their reader in turn), is something that could be further explored as a model of sociality that would be in stark contrast to prevailing (although collapsing) notions of the social, which is based on the unity of the group as well as the unity of the subject. Bolaño‘s works questions deeply these assumptions of unities and rationalities. ―The words of diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy‖.214 If someone finds too much negativity in Bolaño, it is, perhaps, by underappreciating healing power of the sick and the value of the negative to invent new realities.

214 Bolaño, R., 2008. Op. cit., p. 661.

69 Works cited:

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