Mankind is merely the
experimental material, the tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.
Fredric
Nietzsche, Will to Power
Only in traces and ruins… is
there ever hope of coming across genuine and just reality.
Theodor
Adorno, The Actuality of Philosophy
What, exactly, is a ruin?
Can the material, historical, and affective ruptures congealed in the countless
ruins strewn all over the world help us look at space differently? In this book,
I argue that answering these questions requires, first, undoing the fetishism
that dominates mainstream and elite views of ruins, which celebrate historic
ruins as objects whose form should be revered while, at the same time, erasing
the experience of the people living around them as well as much vaster and ongoing
spatial destruction created by capitalist and state forces. The book analyzes
how people at the foot of the Andes view ruins through what was to me an
illuminating lens that, as Adorno and Benjamin would put it, revealed the
historical constellations congealed in those objects and the tense processes
that created them.
This book argues that the
afterlife of ruins can only be understood through an affective view of space
sensitive to the power of certain objects to affect living social actors, both
through their presence in the materiality of the terrain and through the
absences and generative ruptures they evoke. On the western edge of the Chaco,
the constellations of debris I analyze have different levels of visibility and
affective force. Some are famous throughout the region while others are only
known locally; some generate apprehension, while others are disregarded. Yet most
of these sites are haunted by past presence of the indigenous insurgencies that
over several centuries were powerful enough to turn four Spanish cities and
multiple missions and forts into ruins. And these ruins are also haunted by the
violence unleashed by the state, which was so widespread that today this is the
only region in the western edge of the Argentinean Chaco without a rural
population that identifies as indigenous. This is why the state and the Church
have sought to erase the memory of that violence through the topographic and
affective modulation of what some of these ruins are supposed to mean, often involving
massive religious processions and ceremonies. Yet the book also shows that the
meaning of a peculiar type of ruin, human bones assembled in mass graves, is
harder to control by the state because its material form exudes the violence
that created it.
In short, this book seeks to critically examine one of the major tropes of modernity, “the ruin,” in order to reflect on a number of interrelated themes: the destruction of space, the sedimentation of processes of violence in the material and affective texture of contemporary geographies, and the ways in which ordinary people and institutional actors are attracted to and haunted by the presence of ruins. More broadly, the book is a call to look at space through a lens that is more attentive to the material and affective immanence of the ruptures that define it, seeking to translate into spatial terms Nietzsche’s observation that humanity is “merely the experimental material, the tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.
In short, this book seeks to critically examine one of the major tropes of modernity, “the ruin,” in order to reflect on a number of interrelated themes: the destruction of space, the sedimentation of processes of violence in the material and affective texture of contemporary geographies, and the ways in which ordinary people and institutional actors are attracted to and haunted by the presence of ruins. More broadly, the book is a call to look at space through a lens that is more attentive to the material and affective immanence of the ruptures that define it, seeking to translate into spatial terms Nietzsche’s observation that humanity is “merely the experimental material, the tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.
Table Of Contents
Constellations
Part I: Ghosts of Indians
1. Old Walls in Gaucho Spaces
2. On the Edge of the Void
Part II: Lost Cities
The Destruction of Space
3. Land of Curses and Miracles
4. The Ruins of Ruins
Part III: Residues of a Dream World
Treks Across Fields of Ruins
5. Ships Stranded in the Forest
6. Bringing a Destroyed Place Back to Life
7. Railroads to Nowhere
Part IV: The Debris of Violence
Bright Objects
8. Topographies of Oblivion
9. Piles of Bones
10. The Return of the Indians
We Aren’t Afraid of Ruins
Overview of
Chapters
This book is an ethnography that regularly delves into history in order
to illustrate the processes through which particular places were destroyed to
become ruins. Yet my analysis also draws on the historical and cultural specificity
of these places to analyze conceptual themes about space, destruction, form, materiality,
affect, negativity, haunting, violence, fetishism, memory, the void, and
oblivion.
The book is divided up in ten chapters assembled in four parts, and
preceded by an introduction (Constellations)
that presents the main places and ruins to be analyzed in the book as they are
entangled in “constellations” of objects (drawing from Benjamin’s and Adorno’s
use of this concept) that reveal the processes that created them.
Three of the book’s four parts are preceded by brief intermezzos that examine
conceptual problems central to my analysis and to anthropology, human geography,
and critical theory: the destruction of space as central to understanding the
production of space (The Destruction of
Space), a re-reading of the dialectic through the ruin and what I propose
to call an object-oriented negativity (Treks
Across Fields of Ruins), and a discussion of the ways in which philosophies
of negativity (such as Adorno’s, Benjamin’s, and Žižek’s) can learn from philosophies of affirmation
(such as Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s), and vice versa, in order to examine processes
of becoming through rupture, in
particular to understand the affective force of the material and bodily debris
created by violence (Bright Objects).
While conceptual, these are explorations that do not see theory as a transcendental
abstraction and, on the contrary, draw from anthropology’s strength: its
everyday immersion in actual places and its engagement with ordinary men and
women in their historical and cultural circumstances.
Part I, “Ghost of Indians,” begins by presenting the main actors I
examine in the book, the criollos of the southeast of the province of Salta, people
of mestizo (racially mixed) background who work mostly as gauchos (cowboys) on
cattle ranches in the Andean foothills at the western edge of the Chaco. In
particular, I analyze how these men and women engage with the ruins that dot
the region through a sensibility shaped by their gaucho habits and their
participation in local expressions of popular Catholicism. And I show how many
of the ruins in the region are for them haunted by the absence of the Indians
those ruins were built to contain, and who also happen to be the ancestors of
criollos (chapter one). I subsequently examine the historical emergence of the
Chaco as an insurgent space that destroyed several Spanish cities and voided
state territoriality over several centuries (chapter two). This section tells
the history of the military conquest of the Chaco through an analysis of the
recurring anxieties, among Spanish and subsequently Argentinean officials,
about the vanishing of imperial ruins. The ghosts of Indians currently haunting
the region, I argue, are the phantom evocations of the anti-imperial forces
that once had the power not only to destroy state spaces but also make their
ruins invisible.
In Part II, “Lost Cities,” I examine the contemporary afterlife of the
ruins of two major imperial nodes of labor exploitation eroded and destroyed by
those insurgencies, the two cities of Esteco. I focus, in particular, on the
ruins of the second city of Esteco north of Metán, whose collapse in 1692 was
so traumatic that it generated a legend that is to this day famous in northern
Argentina and whose ruins have long been considered cursed. This is a curse
that prompts massive ceremonies of conjuring annually organized by the Church
in surrounding towns. Yet I also draw a counterpoint between these ruins and
those of the first, and largely forgotten, city of Esteco a hundred kilometers
to the east in the Chaco, which reveals some of the cultural legacies of the
spatial ruptures generated by conquest (chapter three). The ruins of the cursed
Esteco at the foot of the Andes are also notable because they made apparent, at
a collective level, the ways in which criollo views of ruins challenge the
elite fetishization of their form (chapter four).
Part III, “Residues of a Dream World,” examines some of the ruins of the
project of progress imposed on the Chaco once this region was conquered by the
state. These are the ruins of the promises of prosperity that the national
elites claimed would pour into the Chaco after indigenous resistance was
defeated. Drawing on Benjamin’s view of progress as a bourgeois dream world
that mystifies the “wreckage upon wreckage” it leaves on its wake, these three
chapters show that the dream elements of progress in this region coalesce in
the physical residues of its recurring failures, often the product of new waves
of progress equally presented as dreamlike —like the agribusinesses currently destroying forests and gaucho spaces.
The first chapter of part III narrates my journey to the heart of the Chaco to examine
the ghostly detritus of the steamships that failed to conquer the Bermejo River
in the 1860s and 1870s (chapter five). I subsequently analyze the ruins of the
first town that blossomed on the western Chaco frontier after Argentina’s
independence and that annually attracts multitudes in pilgrimage that briefly bring
it back to life (chapter six). The last chapter of Part III examines the now
derelict railroads that, only a few decades ago, seemed to have brought to
southeast Salta the prosperity of industrial modernity (chapter seven).
In Part IV, “The Debris of
Violence,” I examine the material detritus left behind in space by the
centuries of violence required to submit the Chaco to state control. These are
traces that because of their potential political repercussions have tended to
generate myriad attempts by the state and the Catholic Church to modulate their
meaning and significance, especially to conjure away the memory of state
violence and the power of indigenous insurgencies (chapter eight). But the
constellations formed by the debris of violence in rural areas, I show next,
also elude affective capture by the state, particularly because the very form
of the human bones and mass graves that dot the region have long made criollos
and indigenous people aware of the extent of state terror (chapter nine). The
last chapter focuses on another, qualitatively different debris of violence:
first, the urban neighborhoods created by people of Wichí background who, in
different waves throughout the 1900s, arrived in southeast Salta fleeing
violence and destruction elsewhere and, second, the ways in which criollos seek
to come to terms with and pay homage to, through repetitive performances, the
fact that they descend from Indians.
As way of conclusion (We Aren’t
Afraid of Ruins), I draw from some of the main analytic and ethnographic threads
woven through the book to highlight why, as Adorno once wrote inspired by
Benjamin, conceiving of a more just society requires confronting the ruins that
surround us, and also the myriad places that are daily destroyed anew.
