Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  The murmuring quickly died down. The flies kindly withdrew out into the hallway with the drinks and canapés. The Lacanian woman spoke first:

  –When an interstice is filled, a sistance is chosen.

  The sentence took its typical vestibular voyage, brushing up against the ear drums of the audience members, embedding itself in their earwax.

  –K’s film, the woman continued. She rested her elbows on the formica tabletop, confirmed that her machete was in place beneath her nails. She bent her avian, Lacan–o-maniacal neck forward and intoned:

  –Let us say that K—’kay?—is likewise a Process, the name and protagonist of some other enclosing. What is it that occurs in the course of her unveiling, her demonstration—a word whose very etymology brings the monster into play? For monster comes from demonstration. The monster who menstruates, and here too the question of feminine desire in the postmodern age, the desire to make herself known to herself, face to face with herself, desous and de soi, her I am. How to think—and how to stop thinking—of a writing that comes into existence at the intersection of orality and genitality: in the orar of the daughter, in the genito of the father. An oral progenitor—and here is the paradox—it fills the mouth entirely. In effect it is the boundary itself that dissolves in one’s mouth. In the mouth: the father finishes, and yet does not.

  The horrendous old bird paused to take a sip of water; she had detected Kamtchowsky’s presence.

  –How to bind that sexuality—how to fix it to one’s mouth—to that organ of speaking, and of saying? Your text, your documentary, it is likewise affected by the game present within the act of assisting oneself. Assist: the A-shaped cystitis, the beginning, the letter that opens one’s mouth. Cystitis negates genitality: it forecloses upon it in that place where pleasure ungiven expires—it substitutes a place of pain for squat down and just let it hurt. It is the impossibility of allowing this organ trapped in a desire marked by the Urethra of the Other to function even as a means of escape. At the same time it is a cure, in the sense of care (Sorge), for that which orders you around in your own name. Your father has given you a name, and with the same mouth that pronounces it he forces upon you the knowledge of the truth in (fitting into, beneath, against, of) the very prohibition of the father. Now I lift my gaze and move from my text to the audience: the Law of the Father enters and exits the speaking, the saying of the Daughter—daughter with her silent h, the exhalation, the hollow core—she is emptied out, and symbolically she encloses the h once again inside her through the affirmation-negation of genitality, through that mouth-filling-wholly of the Father’s Daughter.

  The necks of the audience members all craned distinguishedly toward Kamtchowsky. Pabst sunk down into his seat, repressing his vital impulse to run screaming from the auditorium.

  Next, the Kamtchowskyan documentary was shown. She had shot it in digital: carpentry tools in a wood shop, and then a closet full of Papa’s shoes. Blue bathtub, electric razor, an antique shaving brush; a few bottles of expensive cologne, perhaps empty. Papa in front of a refrigerator, the background consisting of a puzzle made of magnets—the human body, black and white, a few words scattered in. Papa pulling a stubborn cork from a bottle of wine; half drunk and telling the same joke twice; Papa stirring the ice cubes in his whisky with his finger, looking up at the fat white moon—but he isn’t alone. A fixed camera filming the bed, the curtains ruffling in the violet light, Father taking his little girl in his arms before lowering her slowly, slowly to his hip, her little pink arms hugging him tightly, she breathes deeply, stretches out her neck, opens her mouth, et cetera. The digital image, given a faint sepia tone, had been transferred to Super 8 to strengthen its evocation of the past. Its main competitor in the Independent Film Festival’s YouthEye-Cinema Level 0 category was thought to be the eclectic color-by-numbers piece TransFormDimensional Gazes; in the end they both lost to Doc[u]mental: Unique Mental Documents.

  During the following debate, Kamtchowsky gritted her teeth and shook out her hair several times; there was talk of “the new sensibility,” of art as social function and of social function as art. A while later those in attendance wandered out to the hallway to score a few mediocre tea sandwiches and inebriate themselves with Fernet Branca Menta, none of which would be likely to survive in the commercial market beyond art films and government-subsidized events. Pabst and Kamtchowsky gathered provisions at the bar that was sponsoring the event; then they wandered around for a bit, recalling for each other’s pleasure every detail of the atavistic dress and behavior of the panel’s participants. It was the high point of the day’s entertainment.

  8

  In the villages of the !Kung people, being welcomed back into the human fold after committing a crime or series of crimes is a mystical event. Amongst the Maori tribes, returning warriors had to undergo the whakahoa ritual, designed to make them human once again: the hearts of their enemies were roasted and given in offering to the warrior gods, and what was left of the bodies was devoured by the priests, who howled out their spells in order to remove the “blood curse” and allow the warriors to recommence their lives. Among the Taulipang, triumphant warriors were seated on anthills, where they whipped one another, and threaded cords thick with poisonous ants in through their noses and out through their mouths.

  I remember very little of what happened. I think I began to follow him, although in my memory it was the sun who was following me.

  I walked for hours across the island. In the scrublands where the river alders grow dense, the ground is slippery, and the pampas grass tears at one’s skin. The willows are enveloped in the insidious aroma of honeysuckle. The air is always still, windless. As I never reached the far coastline, it felt like I’d been walking in circles the whole time. I was thirsty, and wet my hands in a marshy puddle, but didn’t drink. I kept an eye on the horizon, hoping to see the silhouette of a marsh deer, but only ever saw a coati and a few brightly colored birds. At times one’s mind refuses to let go of its own inventions. It is the job of the intellect to guide the mind safely past each trap to the Great Hall, the accursed gulf where mankind dwells. Once another person has thought, acted, existed under our physical and mental control, that other person disappears. It is a beautiful moment, albeit sad; if they fail to cry out when we insert our arm, this means that their heart is dead, and the tiger within as well.

  I still carry with me the incredible sensation of seeing him bent over in reverence, listening to me in spite of himself, vanquished, without even realizing it.

  I let him go.

  Then I walked for another few hours. The fog engulfed the motionless outlines of the trees and their yellowish leaves. And at some point I was no longer nowhere, could see a white sky broken in pieces.

  Deep in the foliage I saw the sunlit profile of an enormous iron structure.

  It was a man of colossal size, standing erect.

  His head reached the treetops. His face was hidden in the dense upper reaches of the elms and eucalyptus; his body leaned slightly forward, a determined figure, at the ready, his hands down near his waist, a dagger tight to the hip. His facial features were hard to make out; the mouth seemed tense, the hair was on the longish side, the eyes stared out into the distance, fearless.

  At his feet was a flagstone with an inscription: “He is a child, but he is also a giant.” This enormous monument had been erected, hidden away on this island, to welcome Perón back, positioned such that he would be able see it from his airplane when he returned from exile. It could be seen from a thousand feet in the air if one was coming into Buenos Aires from the northeast and knew the exact coordinates in advance, but to an enemy patrol plane, it would have looked like nothing more than a black promontory, a shadow amongst the trees. They never saw it.

  The Colossus had been the final dream of the Resistance while Perón was away, but they left the work half-done. Some parts, including the detailing on the shoes, the shirt and the arms
, were barely even roughed out, the coarse stone still unshaped and formless. Weeds had grown tall all around, and lichen nestled in the clothing. Tension wires hung loose from broken limbs. The figure of the Colossus, though damaged and worn, was stunningly beautiful, and sad. Its silhouette was outlined by broken leaves of gray and brown, and beyond it, the sky, completely white. No birds could be seen; there was nothing but empty space above the treetops that swayed ever so slightly. The abandoned statue’s color had changed with time but the incomplete face was still turned toward the same stretch of horizon, the tall thick jungle of the Tigre Delta. My fingers were wet, as if I had dipped them in darkness. I wiped my hands on my clothes, and it startled me to realize that I was no longer holding the gun. Turning, I saw it lying in the dead leaves.

  On my way back, things no longer seemed to be things—it all looked so unreal.

  9

  The program was launched from Mara and Andy’s downtown lair. Logical had hacked the delivery page of a supermarket website, sending twenty cases of beer and champagne to the ghost address next door. The party’s curve had begun its climb toward apogee just as I arrived. There were colored lights—tiny little Christmas bulbs—and music that I’d never heard before. Ilona, Maurits, Raddy and a few others were dancing calmly. Aviv was doing a dance from the U.S., something called the Funky Chicken. Max was applying Martin’s eye shadow, the same evil green I’d given to Ilona, and there was a group of girls over in the corner talking quietly with Logical. Wari, Beto, Gera, the Watas and a few others were having a look at the console, and Pabst was too excited to do any socializing. Etián was talking to someone, I couldn’t see who; Dalia and Terleski were there too. Kamtchowsky was chatting with little Q, drawing closer and closer ever so carefully and slowly, and Mara was dancing with Jony, looking at him with deftly concealed fascination. I stayed off to the side for a while, sipping a Fanta; later I shared a friendly chat with Pola (people in the department sometimes get us confused, which is ridiculous—I’m much taller than she is, and she wears glasses). Then I hung out for a while with Martin, Andy and EK. Everyone seemed euphoric and calm at the same time; the bathtub, up high on its lion feet, brimmed with ice and bottles of bubbly.

  The program worked perfectly. A delicate touch of a finger on the map of Buenos Aires brought up images of the red-drenched Liniers slaughterhouses, or of the Maldonado River flooding across the line that had once been Juan B. Justo Avenue, or of dotted boundaries indicating the smallpox and yellow fever quarantines of 1871. You could see Maciel Island, near La Boca, torched during Carnaval in 1905; the Plaza de Mayo destroyed by a hurricane, and the surrounding buildings ripped apart; the battle lines of the Guerras del Agua, the most powerful districts lifted to reroute the runoff of storms, leaving other districts helpless and drowned. On the hill crowned by the National Library you could see the house that Perón and his wife had shared, and the recently raised statue of John Paul II rearing up over that of Evita. The routes traveled in Adán Buenosayres as mapped by Marechal could be seen traced in blue; those of Arlt were a series of scribbled lines. There was a strange glow emanating from the house of Carlos Argentino Daneri. There were photos of the old Italpark, of children electrocuted inside the ghost train. Farther north, along the river, was the tree that bleeds red in the ESMA courtyard, and the remains of ships once buried beneath land since reclaimed from Río de la Plata. Toward the city center was a Chinese man weeping as his store was pillaged during a riot, and the Mercado Central where Tita Merello wove her seductions and Borges worked as a rabbit inspector; down below were the paths worn by Gombrowicz on the prowl for young fauns in the Constitución district, and the firefights that took place at the intersection of Juan B. Justo and Santa Fe during the Carapintada rebellion. In Schiaffino one could see the cover of Beatriz Guido’s El incendio y las vísperas and a gif of Silvina making love to Alejandra while Adolfito was away. The scattered sites where the Disappeared were first ambushed; Mme. Ocampo locked up with the hookers in the Buen Pastor, and orgies thrown in Olivos by the Union of High School Students, and orgies in Palermo, and in the lost lovers’ lanes of Villa Cariño; the body of a young girl found amongst the rental boats; Perón on his scooter, motoring up Centenario Avenue, trailing a rosary of blondes. The streets destroyed during the riots that marked the 23rd anniversary of Evita’s death in 1975; the Jockey Club burned down; the Sheraton, converted into the Children’s Hospital; the violent pile-up of buses near the Plaza de Mayo in March of 2006; the white and sky-blue ribbons crushed underfoot during the 1910 Catholic celebrations of the country’s first centennial and the ’86 World Cup championship; the official, military-march-style song of the ’78 World Cup; the urban improv theater conducted by the military to make the bodies of the Disappeared reappear; the blueprints of the catacombs that lead to the Real Colegio de San Carlos, that connect the Casa Rosada to its swimming pool where a bleeding pig turns the waters red; Jorge Luis seated comfortably beside the river trying to pick up a girl; a collage of the many crowds that gathered in front of the Casa Rosada in the course of the 20th century—supporters of Yrigoyen, those willing him to fall, the mass demonstrations that filled the Plaza with Peronists, with anti-Peronists, with tanks, tents, fliers, blue-collar workers, grandmothers, transvestites, the anarchist martyrs in their coffins paraded along Avenida de Mayo, the military parades along that same route, the bright red, the black of other flags, the assault vehicles (always the same model) parked in the Plaza de Mayo, the façade of the Naval Hospital morphing into that of a building in Sarajevo. The geological strata of the region’s speech patterns superimposed one on top of another, starting back in the days of the Organización Nacional; blood spilling over in the Matadero (la ciudad circunvalada del Norte al Este por una cintura de agua y barroxiii), the slumbering bodies sinking into the river, the umbrellas of the first crowds to gather before the Cabildo, and the limits between them and the pillaging mobs.

  The city was an utter mess. And yet it was beautiful.

  The juxtaposition of epochs gave definition to the map’s specialized syntax. By abandoning the temporal determinations that assign facts to separate intervals, what emerged was the pure, syntactic relationship between the world on one hand and what took place in the world on the other; to a certain extent, the map sought to isolate the abstract form of the notion of consequence, separating it from the consolation of time understood as a series of stages. Facts, details, architecture, catastrophe, chaos, it all returned to write itself once more into the spatial history of repercussions. This history was neither an archive nor a memoir, but a set of graphic annals, witnesses to the phase of the chronicle that consists of the accumulation of tales void of linkage or hierarchy, and strictly speaking it isn’t history at all; in one sense the program seemed to reclaim liberty from out of an anarchy of recountings, but at the same time it established the absence of history as a studiable phenomenon within which causes and effects could be identified in the name of change and improvement. This was the raw dough, the cyclical history of a country where events occurred and then revolved around one another, merely existing, unable to account for themselves. As an overarching phenomenon, this technological poisoning of the city map broke down a series of precepts all of which Pabst wrote about, at one moment or another, on his blog.

  The program was all but untraceable. Q had designed its access point such that to enter it one had to track it back through a series of servers scattered all over the world. A cyberspy hired by Google or the Argentine government would have to follow the path taken by digital packets of information through Beirut, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Denver, Budapest, Sebastopol, Marseille and Resistencia—it would be possible, but very difficult, and wasn’t likely to occur.

  The work that had begun in Buenos Aires would spread progressively to other parts of the country; this would create a series of non-trivial technical complications for the team, including the limited number of servers available for attack, and the different processes
required for poisoning each one. Those who were interested in the project were welcome to participate by sending in digitally altered jpegs of their favorite street corners and neighborhoods. “Painting your village of course isn’t painting the world,” ran the slogan, “but at least you’ll be painting your village.” At first Pabst and Kamtchowsky received the images via their blogs, and Mara uploaded them into the poisoning program administered by Logical and Q. Later the team opened a public forum where anyone who wanted to could upload images and leave messages.

  At times, the effects produced by the poisoning obey what seem to be strict formal laws: the cobbled streets now purified, melded, parallel lines appearing to unite. The trees look blurred, skeletal; several of the images are shot through with lightning. The team still hadn’t composed its “Notes toward a Theory of Explosions,” where they would compile the comments left by the map’s users, and add notes on the digital effects used to alter the photographs. The text’s main points described a sort of libertarian utopia based on non-visibility, laying out the importance of the establishment and role of anonymity. Its point of origin was undiscoverable. No one could see anyone else’s golden rooftop or glowing marble floor. It becomes impossible to visualize the streets that we so calmly believe belong to us. And they do belong to us, which means, strictly speaking, that for us they are inaccessible.