PLAYING GUNS: AVANT-GARDE AESTHETICS AND REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE by Mike Strayer A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2014 Abstract Playing Guns theorizes the avant-gardes in relation to the following revolutionary movements from the extended Caribbean: the Mexican Revolution (Stridentism and Antonio Helú), the Cuban Revolution (Julio Cortázar), the Sandinista Revolution (Gioconda Belli), and post-NAFTA Mexico (Roberto Bolaño, Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II). These examples, in turn, help elucidate the following theoretical-historical problems: the Caribbean and Latin America as privileged sites of revolt and revolution; human emancipation in relation to interpellation and agency; and practices of confrontation vis-à-vis practices of resistance. I argue that Latin American avant- garde artists, movements and institutions engage in a radical variant of what Rancière theorizes as aesthetic free play—an egalitarian rearranging of our common sensorium that overturns social hierarchies. By doing so, the avant- gardes “recognize,” in Althusserian terms, the actual interpenetration of life and art and thereby call into question certain caricatures of the avant-gardes as counterrevolutionary and politically vacuous. I then propose that free play propagates radical modes of being that can lead to forms of human emancipation as they confront—not resist as Foucault theorizes—interpellating hierarchies from peripheral positions proper to Latin America. William Egginton and Eduardo González served as advisors for this dissertation. ii Acknowledgments It would be the highest act of ingratitude not to thank my spunky and capable partner Chelsea Shields Strayer for pushing me in everything. I would also like to thank my delightful daughter Eden Jean Shields Strayer for whom some slightly modified lines from José Martí seem particularly apropos: “Hija: / Espantado de todo, me refugio en ti. / Tengo fe en el mejoramiento humano, en la vida futura, / en la utilidad de la virtud, y en ti.” Likewise, I thank my advisor Eduardo González for shepherding this project in all the right directions. And to my advisor William Egginton: thank you for being so generous with your shrinking time and expansive mind. To my colleagues at Hopkins—Julia Baumgardt, Christopher Kozey, Marcos Pérez, Christopher RayAlexander, Amy Sheeran and Amanda Smith—thank you for your mutual aid during coursework, comprehensive exams and the dissertation writing process. Funding from the Program in Latin American Studies and Associate Director Emma Cervone, and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality was essential to the research process. Likewise, Ángel González Abreu at the Hemeroteca of Casa de las Américas, and Lissette Ruiz Contreras, María Auxiliadora Estrada and María Ligia Garay at the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica shared their resources and expertise with great kindness. And finally, thank you to the Departement of Spanish and Portuguese at Brigham Young University for collegially hosting me as I finished this dissertation. iii Table of Contents Title Page…………………………………………………………………………..i Abstract……………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………iv Introduction: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Latin America………………………..1 Chapter 1: CONTRA EL AGUACHIRLISMO………………………………….34 Chapter 2: Blood Quota………………………………………………………….71 Chapter 3: The Ludic Erotic Left……………………………………………….106 Chapter 4: Specters of Hayek…………………………………………………..149 Conclusions: The Avant-Garde Spiral………………………………………….193 Appendix……………………………………………………….……………….200 Works Cited………………………………………………………….…………203 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………….………………………221 iv “What is at stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted by work, cowed by law and the police.” —Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless Introduction: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Latin America In El reino de este mundo, Alejo Carpentier brings to bear a theoretical question that continues to haunt Latin American cultural studies to this very moment. The problem revolves around the positing of the Caribbean—and by extension Latin America—as a privileged site of revolution in the face of colonial and neocolonial domination. In privileging Latin America, Carpentier theorizes the Marvelous Real as a way of being in the world that accounts for the extraordinary, at times even revolutionary, events chronicled from the European Conquest to the Age of Revolutions to modern times: “¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real maravilloso?” (12). It is my claim that this ontology where marvel and magic permeate our historical reality, leading to unexpected states of emancipation says more, however, about the avant-gardes than it does about any sort of essentialist envisioning of Latin America. With Carpentier we have yet another avant-garde rearranging of the sensible world that leads to “un modo de ‘estado límite’” (8). This so-called “limit state” is embodied in the song, dance and revolt of the historical-fictional characters Mackandal and Boukman, and the Haitian Revolution (Carpentier 61). Avant-garde modes of emancipation—like Carpentier’s “limit state” and those of the surrealists who he rebukes ad infinitum in his manifesto-like prologue—are thus what animate the following pages, which chronicle certain particularities of modern Latin American history and culture. 1 More directly, this dissertation theorizes the avant-gardes through various case studies from the extended Caribbean. Each of the four chapters reads the avant-garde in relation to specific revolutionary movements: the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, and Zapatismo in post-NAFTA Mexico. These acute examples of radical art-politics, in turn, help elucidate the following theoretical problems: Latin America as privileged site of revolt and revolution; human emancipation in relation to interpellation and agency; and practices of confrontation vis-à-vis practices of resistance. I argue that Latin American avant-garde artists, movements and institutions engage in an radical variant of what Rancière theorizes as aesthetic free play—an egalitarian rearranging of our common sensorium that overturns social hierarchies. I then propose that free play propagates radical modes of being that can lead to forms of human emancipation as they confront—not resist as Foucault theorizes— interpellating hierarchies from a privileged peripheral position. This introductory chapter therefore begins by outlining the state of the field of estudios vanguardistas in Latin America, then transitions to framing the hypotheses that I have proposed in these introductory paragraphs, and finally concludes with a brief summary of each of the four chapters of my dissertation. VANGUARDIAS Since the early 1970s scholars in Latin American literature and art have revisited las vanguardias with increasing frequency and rigor. This is perhaps due to the valuable anthological and historical work of many scholars like Merlin H. 2 Forster, Nelson Osorio and Luis Mario Schneider who once again made rare or forgotten documents from the 1920s and 30s available to the general, Spanish- speaking public (Manzoni 737). Like most vanguardia scholars I recognize that the avant-gardes in Latin America ought to be historically grounded in the Interbellum period (roughly 1918 – 1939).1 However, since the pathway of periodization is well tread in estudios vanguardistas with all of the immanent scholars mentioned above and many more adding their academic footprints, I will therefore not propose any specific dates or periods. Nor do I consider it the objective of this particular study. In terms of an approximate chronology, however, I claim that the avant-gardes extend historically into the twenty-first century with notable forerunners like Rubén Darío (Nicaragua) and Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Uruguay-France) forming part of an avant-garde genealogy beginning in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These assertions are supported by George Yúdice’s observation that, even after the “decline” of surrealism in the early nineteen-forties, “the continual reelaboration of the projects of the avant- gardes” proliferated throughout Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century in conjunction with an abundance of revolutionary conflicts throughout the region (“Rethinking” 72). With this Yúdice provides us with a justifiable reason for privileging Latin America that does not rely on essentialism or exceptionalism, which I will develop further in the paragraphs that follow. 1 This common heuristic designation is not without its exceptions with futurism and cubism gaining traction as early as 1909, and certain strains of surrealism extending all the way into the 1960s. 3 Extrapolating from Yúdice’s argument, I claim that radical politics and the avant-gardes thrive symbiotically and can therefore not be totally separated out conceptually. By virtue of certain historical and geopolitical contingencies, Latin America is fertile ground for this symbiosis that can be readily observed, in particular, within certain aesthetic-political contexts associated with the Mexican, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions of the twentieth century. These historical and geopolitical contingencies include the conquest and colonization of the western hemisphere and the resulting