DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Ileana Diéguez

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

Ileana Diéguez begins by recovering the concept of situated knowledge, making us recognize the condition of experience in the production of any practice, including knowledge. From the perspective of Donna Haraway, the defense of “the embodied nature of all vision” implies taking a position against the disembodied sensory system that has wished to equate vision with the power to dominate in scientific, technological, military and masculinized societies.

Other theorists who help to theorize theatricality as an expanded device include Victor Turner (liminality, social dramas, communitas), Rosalind Krauss (expanded field), F. Lordon (economies of visibility), Achille Mbembe (necropower), Hannah Arendt (instrumentality of violence), Nicolas Evreinov (theatercracy), Georges Balandier (theatercracy), Michael Taussing (physiological and social state), Michel Foucault (punitive theater), Bauman (diffused, liquid terror), Elsa Blair (violence in Colombia), María Victoria Uribe (anthropology of violence in Colombia), Didi-Huberman (turning the work of death into the work of seeing) and Iuri Lotman (semiotics of fear).

Totalitarian regimes produce subjectivities modeled on territories of fear. The scenarios of violence reveal representational behaviors. Ileana believes that we need to dismantle their accepted uses and deploy them as strategies that help us in the dismantling of any power that claims possession of the truth and the eternal promise of idyllic worlds. The totalitarian machinery is a scenario where authority maximizes its pedagogical functions to guarantee submission to the supreme mandate dramatically coded as tied to the exercise and dissemination of terror by all means possible gauranteeing a space of death and fear. The political takes on a tragic form when the accusation of those who threaten the so-called “supreme values” is utilized to legitimate physical or moral death.

Through the rhetorical use of bodies and words, the political spectacularity organizes to publicly sanction the transgression of the injunctions. To terrorize is part of the objectives that guide necropolitical practices. In a society that has been mythologized as the model of Latin American socialism, this installation of necro theater manifests, among other actions, the necropolitical configuration of the regime that governs.

The theatralities of the state transit between persuasive forms and extreme disciplinary disposition, above all when situations are sheathed in the discourses of enmity. In these circumstances all must collaborate against the threat of the “terrorist” or become a “traitor to your country”. While the government works to maintain security, the country depends on the eyes and ears of the citizens on alert who must patrol the neighborhood borders to detect suspects. The policing function of the citizenry is justified in the name of love of community and defense of the common good.

Under totalitarianism any public manifestation of dissent is immediately disqualified and attacked. Cuba is today the scene of a tragic theater that works for the production of the moral and physical death of hundreds of young people. From the implementation of their politics of imprisonment, repression, and the annulment of civic subjects with capacity to dissent, in diverse ways, Ileana has affirmed in other texts that Cuba operates a regime that can be interpreted using Achille Mbembe´s concept of necropolitics.

In Cuba people live under the forms of totalitarian control–in economic, social and political terms–in the sense of the Soviet model; we were educated under panoptic devices disguised as collective neighborhood forms. As a consequence, the apparatus of the secret police is the most efficient institute on the island; the most feared, but also the most undesirable. The totalitarian theatricality deploys a panoptic device capable of producing zones of sociopolitical surveillance that turn everyone into a possible enemy. And those enemies must be dispossessed and robbed when necessary: the landlord is convinced to evict you, your artwork and personal effects are confiscated, you are fined, robbed or they confiscate your communication devices (phones, and if you have one, tablets or computers), they cut off your electricity and internet, they organize acts of repudiation in your neighborhood, they assign you police that stake out your house to stop you from leaving, they interrogate you, you are beat up by supposed civilians that are undercover military, you are stopped, you are stripped, you are humiliated, you are temporarily disappeared or held incommunicado for days without anyone in your family knowing where you are or if you´re ok, you are given summary trials without a right to defense, they make you their prisoner. There are many ways of killing, not necessarily physical death, but social, political death, until they reduce you to what men in power call “marginal,” “mercenaries”. To give death is to attempt to reduce the other to being “illegal” in their own country, without rights, or to be exiled. Ileana succinctly describes the tragic scenario lived in Cuba through images. The problem of violence and politics has been amply visibilized in different areas of Latin America, but when it comes to the violence and violations towards life that take place in Cuba there is complicit silence.

Through the “theater of publishment” a sensitive relationship is established that seeks to affect perception. Often subtle interventions to bodies are part of a representational system directed towards focusing alert and distributing and dosifying fear. A policy of fear implies a system of representations and a set of performativities directed towards producing social fear under the belief that everything is under control.

Bio:

Ileana Diéguez currently lives and works in Mexico City. She writes about artistic and aesthetic/ethical practices, bodies, violences, theatralities and performativities, using the word as a way of taking action that antagonizes power, any type of power and in particular necropowers.

The author of various texts on the topic, she is a research professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, Mexico City.

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Totalitarian Theatricality

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