Los campos de la desolación

El sudeste de la provincia de Salta en torno a Las Lajitas es el epicentro del boom sojero en el norte argentino y el escenario de una de las más dramáticas transformaciones espaciales que se han dado en las últimas décadas en el Cono Sur. El pueblo está rodeado de vastos campos similares a los de la llanura pampeana y trabajados por maquinarias agrícolas de última generación, muchas de ellas automatizadas. Las camionetas doble cabina último modelo son una presencia recurrente en las rutas y estaciones de servicio. Los enormes silos manejados por Bunge, Olmedo Agropecuaria o Noble Argentina en Las Lajitas y Piquete Cabado son las estructuras más grandes de toda la región y la materialización del modelo de agricultura industrial que ha colonizado su espacio. Para los apologistas de la soja en la zona, la mayoría de ellos venidos “del sur” (Rosario, Buenos Aires), éste es el tipo de espacio que define al desarrollo y al progreso.

            Pero éste es un paisaje que esconde los escombros de una geografía destruida a fuerza de desalojos, topadoras y quemazones. La gente criolla que ha vivido en la región por generaciones en base a una ganadería de monte conoce mejor que nadie el proceso de expropiación y devastación que creó a esos campos. Si bien los desmontes alrededor de Las Lajitas comenzaron en la década de 1970, se intensificaron con la introducción de la soja transgénica de Monsanto en 1996 y sobre todo con la devaluación de 2002, que creó condiciones favorables para la exportación de soja. La aceleración de los desmontes por topadoras que trituraban millones de árboles a los que luego se les prendía fuego hizo que el umbral al Chaco salteño pareciera por momentos, como recordaba un amigo activista, “una zona de guerra”. Columnas de humo se elevaban en varios lugares en el horizonte, marcando que la creación de campos de soja requería la reducción a cenizas de los densos montes que cubrían la región, de sus abigarradas formas de vida animal y vegetal, y de los hogares y corrales de familias criollas que había definido a esta región como uno de los bastiones de la “cultura gaucha” de Salta.

            Hace unos días, me reencontré en Joaquín V. González, al sur de Las Lajitas, con una familia con la que entablé amistad en mis previas visitas a la región, gente criolla que se crió cuidando ganado en el monte. Estábamos hablando sobre los campos que hoy dominan el paisaje entre González y Las Lajitas y Juan, un hombre de 35 años, me dijo: “Es todo campo. Es una desolación”. La contundencia de su descripción de lo que para él significan esos campos me impresionó. Poco después, mencioné nuestra visita, años atrás, a un lugar conocido como “Los Indiecitos” y que los criollos de la zona veneraban como fuente de poderes milagrosos, en una zona entonces resguardada de desmontes. El lugar consistía en dos tumbas muy modestas, donde descansaban los restos de niños indígenas muertos en un pasado distante, ubicadas en un pequeño monte donde la gente dejaba ofrendas de velas y botellas de agua para pedirles milagros. Cuando mencioné a “Los Indiecitos”, la madre de Juan, que estaba con nosotros, suspiró un “uh” que sonó como un lamento. “Ya no queda nada”, me dijo con un dejo de tristeza mientras sacudía la cabeza. “Han desmontado todo”. Las topadoras habían arrasado con las tumbas al igual que lo han hecho con pequeños cementerios rurales cuyos escombros de huesos son hoy parte de los campos de soja. Los desmontes, en otras palabras, han destruido además de bosques y hogares una infinidad de otros lugares cargados de afectos y significados. El padre de Juan agregó, indignado: “Los desmontes van a dejar un desierto”.

           “El desierto” ha sido uno de los tópicos favoritos de las elites argentinas desde Sarmiento, que han repetido hasta el cansancio que su objetivo ha sido colonizar y modernizar “el desierto” del Chaco y la Patagonia. A principios del siglo XXI, el desierto a conquistar por los agronegocios es el de los últimos lugares criollos e indígenas del Chaco argentino. A los empresarios que hacen fortunas con la soja les gusta repetir que ellos han traído desarrollo donde antes “no había nada”: la “nada” de bosques rebosantes de vida vegetal y animal y de formas subalternas de vida colectiva que no registran como valiosas en la sensibilidad burguesa, que ve al espacio como algo abstracto, cuantificable y apropiable. La gente criolla del sudeste de Salta revierte estos imaginarios de clase para resaltar que “la conquista del desierto” hecha en nombre de la soja ha creado un nuevo tipo de desierto. Y este “desierto” es más que una alegoría de la desolación social creada por los desmontes. En días de viento, el cielo de la zona sojera salteña se tiñe de un tono marrón, el resultado de las miles de toneladas de tierra barridas y esparcidas por el viento. Los trastornos respiratorios y las alergias son hoy en día parte de la vida cotidiana en la región. La gente concuerda que estas polvaredas y los fuertes vientos no existían cuando la zona estaba cubierta de monte. En General Pizarro al norte de Las Lajitas, donde los desmontes masivos han sido más recientes, las calles están permanente cubiertas de una arenilla rojiza que crea la sensación de que el pueblo está rodeado, efectivamente, de un desierto.

            La desolación de los campos de soja se expresa también en el tipo de vida que crece en su seno. Un rasgo definitorio de los agronegocios es que su alta mecanización requiere muy poca mano de obra. El manejar por la ruta provincial 5 al norte y al sur de Las Lajitas es encontrarse con campos que se sienten socialmente vacíos, pues en ellos vive muy poca gente y casi no hay viviendas. Estos campos son regularmente rociados del veneno fabricado por Monsanto para matar cualquier tipo de forma viviente que atente contra el crecimiento de las plantas de soja, modificadas genéticamente por Monsanto para resistir sus herbicidas y pesticidas. Los agronegocios son por ello un proyecto de administración geográfica que buscan limitar a través de la saturación química del espacio que lo único que crezca en vastas extensiones sea una sola forma de vida: en este caso, la soja patentada por Monsanto. Al igual que en el resto de la Argentina sojera, en la zona se escuchan historias, en general contadas en voz baja, sobre el aumento de casos de cáncer, sobre personas fumigadas por aviones “como si fueran moscas” y de la “deriva” del veneno hacia los pueblos debido a los vientos.

            En los comedores de las estaciones de servicio de la región, muchas veces almuerzo o tomo un café al lado de mesas llenas de hombres que se acaban de bajar de camionetas doble cabina. La mayoría tiene acento rosarino o porteño; por lo general no hablan de otra cosa, entre ellos o en sus teléfonos celulares, que de las vicisitudes del cultivo y el mercado de la soja. En Las Lajitas he conversado con varios de ellos. Si hay algo que los define es su indiferencia por esos paisajes desolados donde para ellos antes no había nada.

El Tranquerazo y la defensa de los bienes comunes

             Hoy participé junto con unas 300 otras personas de una protesta contra la instalación de una fábrica de nitrato de amonio en el sudeste de Salta, entre las localidades de El Galpón y El Tunal, en la zona en donde las últimas colinas de los Andes se deslizan hacia la llanura del Gran Chaco. La marcha comenzó en la plaza de El Galpón y después generó una caravana en la ruta 16 hacia la carpa que los vecinos instalaron hace varios meses para bloquear el acceso al predio donde la Austin Powder (basada en Ohio, Estados Unidos) planea construir la fábrica. El bloqueo a la tranquera hizo que este movimiento sea conocido como “El Tranquerazo,” organizado a pulmón por vecinos que se han organizado desde 2012 como Vecinos Autoconvocados del Río Juramento. Hoy el bloqueo ha sido levantado por una orden judicial, pero la carpa junto a la tranquera continúa. Hoy tuve el gran gusto de conocer a muchos de los protagonistas de este movimiento, y de reencontrarme con amigos de El Galpón que conocí en años previos, cuando hice el trabajo de campo para el libro Rubble.

            Este conflicto es un microcosmos del modelo extractivista que se ha impuesto en la geografía argentina. La fábrica busca enviar, hacia el oeste, explosivos para las minas a cielo abierto que destruyen montañas y contaminan ríos en los Andes y, hacia el este, fertilizantes para los agronegocios que han devastado centenares de miles de hectáreas de bosques alrededor de Las Lajitas y Joaquín V. González. Y el gasoducto de Anta que pasa por la zona la proveerá de la principal materia primera para hacer nitrario de amonio (el gas natural). La instalación de este nodo químico-industrial al servicio de prácticas altamente destructivas del espacio generará, inevitablemente, la contaminación de la cuenca del río Juramento. Esta es la principal preocupación que ha guiado a las protestas, que han enfrentado a los vecinos con la municipalidad de El Galpón, el gobierno salteño y el modelo fomentado por el gobierno nacional. Lo que se suele trivializar como “ambientalismo” es, en este y otros casos, una protesta contra la destrucción del espacio.

           La protesta en el Tranquerazo contó con la presencia de dirigentes de la CTA de Salta, Jujuy y Tucumán, que se refirieron a las múltiples protestas que la CTA organizó también hoy en otros lugares del país donde se lucha contra las mineras y los agronegocios. Y varios de ellos enfatizaron que lo que unen a estas luchas es la defensa de “los bienes comunes”. Este es un viejo concepto que está ganando fuerza y que autores como Hardt y Negri rescatan como una forma de escapar a la dicotomía entre propiedad privada y estatal, pues los bienes comunes son aquellos espacios y recursos que son de todos y no son de nadie. Y son justamente esos bienes comunes los que están siendo sometidos a un creciente proceso de privatización y degradación ante el avance de las mineras, los agronegocios, y las empresas como Austin Powder que fabrican suministros básicos para ambos. El Tranquerazo, al igual que las protestas contra la planta de Monsanto en Córdoba, es la irrupción de la política en su más pura expresión: como la aparición de algo colectivo que no existía y que interrumpe localmente, en este caso, el ritmo de una maquinaria transnacional de reconfiguración geográfica.

Bringing the Paris Commune Back to Life

Aux morts de la Commune, Mai 21-28, 1871

Laughter alone, the eternal prerogative of man, survives, splendid, invincible, in a world in ruins.

Villiers de I’Isle-Adam, Paris, May 1871

A day like yesterday in Paris a hundred and forty two-years ago, the French state was finishing off the massacre of 30,000 men, women, and children who had dared to challenge the hierarchies of the global order. When the people of Paris rose up demanding equality and took control of the city for over two months, the state responded with swift ferocity and turned the city into a field of rubble and mass graves. All the global elites from the United States to Argentina had demanded the massacre in the press, and cheered at the slaughter of those "feral" creatures. The corpses were buried, the city was rebuilt, and Paris became, once again, the global capital of bourgeois splendor, as it is still seen today. The difference is that today Paris competes in glamour with the hyper-vertical, aggressive masculinity of Dubai’s skyscrapers, the new material pinnacle of what Walter Benjamin aptly called the capitalist phantasmagoria. These new neoliberal "evil paradises" in the petro-states of the Gulf, as Mike Davis calls them, are also built, like Paris, upon the disregard for destruction, clear in that those fetishized totems of capitalism are built by the quasi-slave labor of South Asian workers.

Next May, now that my book Rubble is coming to an end (it enters production with Duke in a week), I hope to begin an ethnographic research on the afterlife of the Paris Commune in today's Paris. I want to explore what the Paris commune created in the texture of the city and to what degree Paris is haunted by the revolutionary event that once destroyed it. But the Paris Commune also reveals, in a totally different context, some of the main arguments I have tried to make in Rubble about ruins, destruction, affect, and the ways in which destruction is disregarded through forms of ruin-fetishization that make massive piles of rubble and mass graves invisible. This essay draws from a section of the conclusions of Rubble that reflects on the intimate relation between revolution, rubble, and the elite fear of ruins.

The Commune took place not just anywhere but in Paris. It cannot be overemphasized what a radical political rupture the appearance of a powerful insurrection in the heart of Paris was at the time. This was the place that Benjamin saw as the phantasmagoric world capital of the bourgeois dream-world, today constellationally entangled with the verticality cultivated in Dubai or New York. This is a phantasmagoria that fears the broken objects and cracks that may erode the impression that these are full, positive objects. In tacit response to the elite fear of their own ruptured places, Spanish Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti said in 1936 in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, before he was killed in Madrid by a Stalinist sniper: We aren’t afraid of ruins. His disregard for ruins was an assertion of the defence of the life of those who were already living amid rubble. "We are not afraid of ruins" was the implicit cry of the Paris Commune, as it was slaughtered by the class that fears ruins the most.

As Benjamin documented, in the nineteenth century Paris was made, destroyed, and remade by a violent duel between barricades built by the working-class and boulevards built by the bourgeoisie. The number of barricades peaked in the 1848 insurrection, when 3,000 saturated the medieval, narrow, and winding streets of working-class Paris and made state repression slow and costly. In the 1850s, the Second French Empire responded to this spatial-political threat with Baron Haussmann and the most ambitious project of counter-revolutionary spatial engineering ever sought. Haussmann’s goal was to radically change the form of the whole city. Hundreds of urban blocks were demolished to create an urban space that was easier to police: smooth space without major obstacles built on straight and wide strips that facilitated the movement of troops and expanded the range of artillery. This was a military gesture: an attempt to master the terrain of future combat by changing its form. This also reveals that the terrain is a material plastic, whose form is permanently modified. The boulevards were born. Benjamin wrote, “The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades impossible for all time” (Paris, capital of the 19th century). But the boulevards also played a key affective function: these were to be the positive places that would impress and dazzle. The places of bourgeois spectacle were formally made. This rendered the in-doors arcades obsolete. Commodities were now displayed in the flow of the streets. The World Exhibition of 1867 turned Paris into the world capital of the booming, dazzling capitalist-imperial spectacle: the cultural, ideological, and affective core of global capitalism and European imperialism.

The appearance of the Paris Commune shattered the phantasmagoria of the commodity-fetishism that Haussmann had rendered in stone. It was an abrupt awakening from the bourgeois dream triggered by the humiliating French defeat in the hands of the Prussian army at Sedan in September 1870 and the subsequent collapse of the Second Empire. With Paris under siege by German troops and most of the population feeling betrayed, the French national guards protecting the city rebelled against the state in alliance with the local population, especially after the failed attempt by the French government, led by Thiers, to capture the canons held by national guards on the hill of Montmartre on March 18, 1871. While Thiers fled to Versailles, the Commune made itself as constituent power through elections held a few days later. Marx wrote, “The great social measure of the commune was its own working existence” (The Civil War in France, p. 65). This was sovereignty that asserted itself from the bottom-up: through universal suffrage and a military force made up of working men, the national guards.

Under control of an armed insurgency, the form of Paris changed. Multitudes permanently claimed and occupied the streets and saturated them with red flags, the new symbol of universal emancipation and anti-imperialism. Witnesses described that a non-hierarchical effervescence took over the city, “the carnival of the oppressed.” Barricades went up all over Paris as federal troops began surrounding the city in collaboration with German troops. As a communard put it, the barricades were not shelters but intentional striations of space: material obstacles “to prevent the enemy forces from circulating, to bring them to a halt” (Edwards, The Communards of Paris, p. 167). These barricades were not just numerous: they were the largest ever built in the history of Paris. Benjamin wrote, “The barricade is resurrected during the Commune. It is stronger and better secured than ever. It stretches across the great boulevards, often reaching a height of two stories” (The Arcades Project, p. 12). The form of the barricades adopted and colonized the form of the boulevards.  The members of the Commune also altered the form of the city by destroying monuments that celebrated bourgeois-imperial oppression. The Vendome Column, built by Napoleon I to celebrate imperial conquest overseas, was brought down to the cheers of large multitudes. Claiming continuity with the French Revolution, communards tore down the Chapel of Atonement built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI. Yet they also negated Jacobin terror by publicly destroying the guillotine. The communards did not see the guillotine as a tool of revolutionary justice but for what it really was: an instrument of terror and state oppression.

Benjamin made clear why the Commune was key to this investigation of nineteenth-century Paris: it was a collective awakening from the nightmare of the dream-world. The people of Paris reduced the bourgeois phantasmagoria to rubble. Lefebvre and The Situationist International went further: what made the Paris Commune an extraordinary historical event is that it created a radically new, previously-unseen type of urban space: an egalitarian, participatory, and resonant “carnival of the oppressed.” Class and gender hierarchies collapsed, women asserted a powerful leadership role in the organization of space, and the very idea of “public space” was dissolved because the streets were democratized and turned festive. All observers noted the festive resonance that dominated Paris during the Commune. “Our laughter comes easily. We feel quite at home in our childish and dangerous world of make-believe” (Edwards, p. 14). The effervescence did not subdue even when, by early May, people knew that the Commune was besieged, doomed, and about to be crushed by the federal army. Villiers de I’Isle-Adam published the following lines in one of the papers of the Commune, Le Tribune du People, right before the slaughter was unleashed on Paris: “Would you believe it? Paris is fighting and singing! Paris is about to be attacked by a ruthless and furious army and she laughs!” Villiers concluded, “Laughter alone, the eternal prerogative of man, survives, splendid, invincible, in a world in ruins” (Edwards, p. 141-142). This is a Nietzschean laughter: celebrating the joyful and “invincible” power of life even amid the negativity of widespread destruction.

On May 21, troops began to enter the western areas of Paris. Many communards put up a fierce resistance. But many others preferred to engage in acts of self-immolation rather than killing or surrendering. There were many cases of national guards killed when they were trying to speak to soldiers and convince them to join them. Women took a leading role in performing self-less assertions of control over their life. Many federal soldiers were shocked in facing the same sight in many parts of the city: women who calmly climbed to the top of the barricades to make themselves killed. Marx wrote, “The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequal in any other battle known to history. … The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution” (p. 76). Self-destruction, Deleuze wrote in his book on Nietzsche, is the most affirmative form of negation: the moment when the negative illuminates and “shoots out like lightning.”

Amid the generalized wave of massacres known as “the bloody week,” the flames engulfed Paris for several days. The federal troops led by Thiers executed close to 30,000 men, women, and children. Dozens of thousands were sent to prisoner camps and 7,000 were deported to the Pacific. Marx noted that in order to find a massacre of similar proportions in a large European city one needs to go back to the times of the Second Triumvirates in the Roman Empire. The main difference, he said, is that the massacres in Paris, unlike those in Rome, were done “in the name of civilization” (1998:75). The Argentine ruling classes were greatly inspired by the civilizing violence that the French elites unleashed on those feral savages. Their goal would soon afterwards be to turn Buenos Aires into “the Paris of South America,” looking up to the city built upon the rubble of the Commune. In those days, President Sarmiento was dealing with the feral creatures of the deserts of the Gran Chaco and Patagonia with equal savagery.

The smoldering ruins of Paris in late May 1871 marked, first, the destruction of a revolutionary city that for over two months had created a qualitatively novel type of place. This destruction added to the destructive production of a bourgeois city begun two decades earlier by Haussmann’s boulevards. Benjamin aptly wrote, “The burning of Paris is the worthy conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction”. The rubble and mass graves of the Commune were thereby the ruins that the French and global elites celebrated. Marx noted that Bismarck, who defeated the French army in 1870 only to collaborate with it to crush the Commune, “gloats over the ruins of Paris” (p. 79). Shortly before the Commune was obliterated, The New York Herald pleaded, “Make Paris a heap of ruins if necessary, let its streets be made to run rivers of blood, let all within it perish…” (Gluckstein 2011:158). Thiers complied and said after the slaughter, “The ground is strewn with their corpses. May this terrible sight serve as a lesson.” 

Yet the ruins of Paris were also the ruins of two cities folded into one and thereby also the rubble of bourgeois Paris. The elite that disregarded the blood-drenched rubble of the Commune was thereby horrified by the destruction of the positive architecture of its city, the capital of the nineteenth century. Marx was quick to point out this hypocrisy, and emphasized that the bourgeois veneration of the integrity of objects is directly proportional to the bourgeois contempt for life: “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, it convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!” (1988:77). Notably, Marx identified the profoundly affective and bodily nature of the bourgeois reaction at the sight of its own ruins, which triggered a horror that made elite bodies “convulse” at their fear of the void.

The prompt reconstruction of the bourgeois city and its boulevards was thereby founded upon the erasure of the fact that Paris was once reduced to rubble amid a powerful anti-capitalist revolution that was brutally destroyed. This elite fear of ruins demanded making the mass graves invisible. It also required treating the Commune, as Trouillot said of the Haitian Revolution, as a “non-event”: as something that never took place. Some of the largest mass graves are currently underneath splendid areas of Paris like Notre Dame or the Luxembourg Gardens; others are at the cemeteries of Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, where the last 147 communards were executed against a wall. This wall holds a plaque “To the Dead of the Commune, May 21-28, 1871.” On the last Saturday of May, every year the plaque becomes a bright object that attracts a multitude of several thousands who come to pay tribute to the human debris of the Commune buried underneath. The foot of the plaque is showered with flowers and messages of thankfulness to those executed in the streets of Paris.

In May 2012, I talked in Paris with activists from The Association of Friends of the Paris Commune. Their actions and voice resonated with my experience at the foot of the Argentine Andes. They highlighted, first, that the Commune was not dead but alive. And not unlike the Wichí leaders of Santa Rosa in the heart of the Argentine Chaco, they were trying to mark the ghostly presence of invisible mass graves in space, attracted by a material brightness of vast fields of bones that official narratives had turned dim and dark. For now, activists in Paris are placing plaques to bring the negativity hidden in the petrified architecture back to life. The plaque they placed behind the Hôtel de Ville, steps away from Notre Dame, now informs the largely indifferent passerby that underneath those placid sidewalks the materiality of the city is made up of mass graves that contain between 2,000 and 3,000 bodies. Back in May 1871, those bodies had helped turn Paris into a city that resonated to an assertive, life-affirming disregard for rubble.

Los árboles de La Argentina Blanca

En la década kirchnerista se ha consumado la mayor devastación de árboles de la historia argentina. Sólo en el año 2012, más de cuarenta millones de árboles han sido destrozados por topadoras y sus restos quemados para crear campos de soja con el apoyo entusiasta del gobierno nacional y los sectores más conservadores de la oposición anti-K. Esta hecatombe se suma a los restos de cientos de millones de árboles carbonizados en años previos. En el Chaco salteño, en el norte de Santiago del Estero y en las tierras bajas de Jujuy he visto cómo opera la destrucción del espacio de los agronegocios: mandando topadoras y matones con la actitud que Hollywood presenta como ficción en la película Avatar, donde topadoras seguidas de hombres armados destruyen árboles gigantescos y remueven a sus habitantes originarios a la fuerza por ser obstáculos para el maximización del lucro.

A pesar de ser la responsable política de no poner coto a la inmolación de millones de árboles, Cristina Kirchner declamó hace poco, con tono épico, que “no vamos a tirar un sólo árbol”. Y agregó: “Los árboles no se tocan, son sagrados”. Los árboles sólo podrán ser cortados “sobre mi cadáver”, remató, en la afirmación más surrealista que haya hecho en todo su mandato. Después de todo, Cristina ha sido todo este tiempo la conductora de una topadora gigantesca que arrasa con multitudes de árboles tan vastas que su inmolación deja columnas de fuego y humo que se pierden en el horizonte. También fue surrealista pero también emotivo el ensayo cargado de afecto por los árboles que Ricardo Foster, talentoso filósofo oficialista y miembro activo de Carta Abierta, escribió en estos días en Página/12. Allí Foster proclamó su "amor" incondicional por los árboles por su "bondad y lealtad" así como su "odio" hacia quienes los destruyen. Foster agregó: "Siento en ellos cómo brota lo esencial, lo que perdura, aquello que sortea la frivolidad de los portadores de falsa eternidad". 

La repentina pasión y amor por los árboles de Cristina y su vocero filosófico, claro está, fue generada por una coyuntura política particular: las protestas que generó en Buenos Aires la tala de algo más de cien árboles en la ciudad por parte de líder máximo del anti-kirchnerismo nacional, Mauricio Macri. Pero lo que define a estas intervenciones fuertemente emocionales en contra de la destrucción de los árboles no es tanto su obvio oportunismo sino la forma en que su notable selectividad por defender ciertos árboles, y no otros, expresa una geografía afectiva particular, definitoria de lo que propongo llamar La Argentina Blanca. Esta es una categoría compleja, evasiva, que es importante analizar justamente porque la blanquitud y sobre todo su naturalización en percepciones afectivas del espacio es uno de los grandes temas hechos invisibles y tabú en las narrativas dominantes de la Argentina. El viejo argumento, que ya no convence a nadie, de que “acá no hay problemas de racismo” es el mejor ejemplo de que La Argentina Blanca tiende a tener una actitud negadora de su propia existencia y de su racismo constituyente. Pero valga aclarar que no concibo a La Argentina Blanca como un objeto acotado reducible a la gente argentina que es “blanca” o descendiente de europeos. De la misma manera que hay argentinos rubios y de ojos celestes como Osvaldo Bayer que siempre han luchado contra La Argentina Blanca, hay argentinos con sangre indígena como el ex-gobernador de Salta Juan Carlos Romero que siempre han sido sus grandes defensores. La Argentina Blanca es un proyecto político-espacial y una postura espacial y afectiva que han sido definitorios de la historia nacional: el intento de hacer del país un lugar blanco y libre de indios-mestizos-negros, o por lo menos un lugar donde no se note demasiado que la mayoría de la nación es morocha. Este es un proyecto utópico y acosado por el vértigo (y sobre todo el asco) que le genera la imposibilidad de su realización ante la realidad de las multitudes con rasgos indígenas (“esos negros de mierda”), pero que ha definido a las elites nacionales desde las masacres de gauchos lideradas por Sarmiento en Cuyo y las masacres de indios lideradas por Roca y Victorica en Pampa-Patagonia y el Gran Chaco hace ya más de un siglo.

 La gran paradoja es que el kirchnerismo, montado del contra-poder popular constituido en las calles por la insurrección de 2001, ha sido el primer proyecto político desde Perón que le disputa poder, de igual a igual, al ala más reaccionaria y racista de La Argentina Blanca. De allí el profundo odio que el núcleo duro de La Argentina Blanca expresa por el “populismo zurdo” de La Yegua y por esos "negros de mierda" que la votan "por un plan y zapatillas". Ese es, sin duda, el gran mérito histórico del kirchnerismo: haber desafiado a los viejos dueños de la Argentina, que crearon su riqueza sobre el saqueo capitalista del "desierto". Pero la voluntad de Cristina de desafiar tiene claros límites. Aliándose con lo peor de los feudalismos provinciales, el kirchnerismo ha apretado el acelerador de la maquinaria destructiva con la que La Argentina Blanca, la misma que lideró las protestas de "el campo”, está arrasando con espacios mestizos-criollos-indígenas en zonas rurales. El que Cristina y Foster digan sentirse afectados y emocionados por la destrucción de árboles como si millones de árboles nunca hubieran sido destruidos por el modelo sojero que ambos promueven confirma algo importante, y que el ala izquierda del kirchnerismo (o lo que queda de ella) sólo puede seguir tolerando a su propio riesgo. Lo que el silenciamiento de la incineración de los árboles del norte hace transparente es cómo el gobierno ha abrazado como propio, con su retórica progre y sus planes sociales financiados con el saqueo rural, el proyecto espacial y afectivo de La Argentina Blanca: el hecho que no los afecte la devastación de millones y millones de árboles igualmente vivos y e igualmente nobles en nombre del progreso (siempre el progreso), pues esos árboles son sentidos como que no cuentan por ser parte de una geografía lejana al ideal europeo de La Agentina Blanca. Esas zonas pobres de árboles sin valor que alimentan, como hace un siglo, formas aceleradas de despojo.

Pero es necesario hurgar más detenidamente en los parámetros raciales y espaciales que se esconden detrás de los recientes llamados a inculcar un afecto con los árboles como seres nobles que son parte viva de nuestra tierra. Foster aclara de entrada que su “elogio y defensa de los árboles” está geográficamente delimitado. Su ensayo es un homenaje a “los árboles de Buenos Aires”: esto es, los árboles de La Argentina Blanca. Esta localización hace invisible esos otros árboles: los sacrificados en el altar del modelo extractivo kircherista. Macri, desde ya, cultiva exactamente la misma geografía afectiva y con la misma selectividad. El líder del PRO, puesto contra las cuerdas por meter motosierras en plena Avenida 9 de Julio, replicó que el gobierno nacional había destruido más árboles que él. Los árboles se volvieron, de repente, armas políticas incluso para un miembro de la elite de La Argentina Blanca. Siendo justamente la Gran Esperanza Blanca de la vieja guardia de La Argentina Blanca, claro está que Macri no se refería a esos millones de árboles devastados en tierras mestizas cuya destrucción él también apoya con entusiasmo (después de todo, el delfín del PRO en Salta es el “Rey de la Soja” Alfredo Olmedo, destructor de cientos de miles de hectáreas de árboles y feroz expropiador de tierras criollas e indígenas). Al igual que los árboles de Foster y Cristina, los ejemplares vegetales cuya destrucción Macri denunció están en la gran urbe de La Argentina Blanca: los que, según él, tiró abajo el gobierno nacional para hacer la exposición de Tecnópolis. Abanderada de una nueva causa, Cristina respondió con un gran despliegue, mostrando fotos satelitales del predio de Tecnópolis antes y después de la feria que “demostraban” que tal destrucción de árboles no había existido. Estos cruces verbales en defensa de los árboles están marcados por una misma mirada que está sesgada en su espacialidad. Esto nos muestra que Macri, Cristina y Foster comparten, a pesar de sus peleas, el mismo paradigma espacial y afectivo de una nación que está tan racializada que ni los árboles escapan a la obsesión no del todo conciente de hacer invisibles a los espacios indios-mestizos, como espacios que cuentan menos que aquellos celebrados por La Argentina Blanca. Dime qué tipos de árboles te preocupan y cuáles ignoras, y dónde está cada uno, y te diré quién eres.

Cristina agregó un detalle no menor sobre cuáles son las geografías del país donde los árboles sí tienen valor. Cuando dijo que los árboles son “sagrados”, aclaró “por lo menos aquí en El Calafate”. La Patagonia ha sido un espacio neurálgico en el proyecto de blanquear y por ende de-indianizar el espacio de la nación. Las elites nacionales siempre han hecho grandes esfuerzos por europeizar la Patagonia y hacerla parecer física y arquitectónicamente a los Alpes suizos o alemanes, como lo demuestra cualquier visita al centro de Bariloche, donde la estatua de Roca está rodeada de una arquitectura que remite a los Alpes. Y ello ha significado presentar a la numerosa población mapuche originaria de la Patagonia como “extranjeros chilenos”, como lo hace regularmente en La Nación Rolando Hanglin, uno de los voceros más desinhibidos del racismo de La Argentina Blanca. La inclusión de Cristina de los árboles patagónicos dentro de aquellos a los que sólo se podría talar “sobre mi cadáver” confirma cuál es, y dónde está, el tipo de árboles que ella nunca destruirá.   

Los centenares de millones de árboles igualmente argentinos que han sido hechos pedazos y siguen siendo devorados por la voracidad despiadada de “boom sojero” no cuentan para Cristina o Macri como realmente existentes porque no están en Buenos Aires o en la Patagonia sino en los espacios más mestizos e indígenas del territorio argentino: Santiago del Estero, Salta, Chaco, Formosa. Estos son reductos de las poblaciones rurales que descienden de aquellas personas que ocupaban el país antes de que llegaran los barcos huyendo de la miseria de Europa, y que ahora están siendo sometidas a un acelerado proceso de saqueo y expropiación. En la escala de valores de La Argentina Blanca, en estos lugares de calor, polvo y pieles oscuras el valor degradado de sus árboles es equivalente al valor degradado de sus gentes . Esos son árboles y personas que, como diría Jacques Ranciere, no cuentan: un conglomerado de maderas de algarrobos, quebrachos, palos borrachos y de carne de seres humanos wichí, criollos, tobas que conviven bajo una misma geografía desgarrada. Este amalgama humano-vegetal siempre ha sido mirado con desprecio y de reojo desde Buenos Aires, Rosario o El Calafate como esa zona exótica, extraña, distante, no-blanca de la Argentina.

Mientras en los centros de poder se cantan loas contra la destrucción de los árboles de La Argentina Blanca, todos los días miles de árboles en Santiago del Estero o Salta caen bajo las topadoras de quienes promulgan, como diría Foster, "la frivolidad de los portadores de falsa eternidad". Si estos árboles de piel oscura que son despojados de valor, nobleza y bondad sobrevivirán en el futuro, en espacios cada vez más reducidos, no será por la sensibilidad de las elites urbanas sino porque la gente que vive a su alrededor le pone el cuerpo, desde hace años y con crecientes formas de organización y solidaridad, a las topadoras y a los matones armados que los acechan. Y ellos saben mejor que nadie de qué lado está Cristina: defendiendo en público a los gobernadores de las provincias donde campesinos e indígenas son asesinados cada vez con mayor frecuencia, como si estuviéramos en esa Argentina despiadada de hace un siglo donde (como escribió Sarmiento) la sangre de gauchos e indios era barata y desechable: la época dorada del “granero del mundo” a la que La Argentina Blanca, esta vez de la mano de la soja, siempre sueña con volver.

The Destruction of Space

This is the first of the excerpts from my forthcoming book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction  that I'll be posting on the blog. This is the theoretical intermezzo that opens up Part II of the book (Lost Cities). In the previous chapter, I examined how state violence defeated the indigenous insurgencies that had for centuries kept the state at bay from the Gran Chaco, and had created an anti-state spatial void in the heart of South America. After briefly making reference to the aftermath of that historically-specific destruction by state power, this section explores the concept of "the destruction of space." 

Abstraction’s modus operandis is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction heralds creation).

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

          The violent destruction of the void of the Gran Chaco by the state marked the disruption not only of particular forms of sociality free from state control but also of a terrain defined by physical striations that had slowed down state mobility for centuries. Military conquest, therefore, was followed by the smoothing out of forests and swamps, carried out over several decades in order to build roads, railroads, telegraph lines, bridges, towns, airfields, ports, agricultural fields and cattle ranches. The clearest sign that military victory had been complete was that the labor of defeated multitudes armed with shovels, axes, pickaxes and machetes was used to destroy older striations, change the form of the terrain, and produce a territory under state control.

The destruction of space inaugurated in the Gran Chaco in the late nineteenth century has continued unabated. The technologies of destruction have nonetheless changed. At the turn of the twenty-first century, waves of bulldozers are smoothing out the striations of the last areas of thick forests and destroying the homes of whoever happened to live there to make abstract space for agribusiness and capital-intensive cattle ranching. The western edge of the Gran Chaco is going through one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. In the borderlands of Paraguay and Bolivia in the northern Chaco, a handful of highly mobile Ayoreo people still committed to avoiding living under state power are the very last remnants of the multitudes that once formed the war machine of the Chaco. They are no more than two dozen men and women and are permanently on the move, evading the myriad actors and the bulldozers that are rapidly obliterating the once thick forests of the northern Chaco. Far from being un-contacted, these people are fleeing. As Lucas Bessire has analyzed in gripping ethnographic detail, Ayoreo people who left the bush only a few years ago told him they thought those bulldozers regularly haunting them were monsters of steel. These people know what the bulldozers are: machines of spatial destruction. Bulldozers are the main machines for the destruction of space that capitalist globalization relies on. The Ayoreo people aptly call them, “the attackers of the world” (Bessire 2011).

Hundreds of kilometers to the south on the western edge of the Chaco in Argentina,  bulldozers are also on the move to create soybean fields to satisfy the booming global demand for soy; and these machines are destroying places inhabited not by nomadic Indians but by the criollo people who had taken their place in the name of civilization. It was the ordinary people I met in my fieldwork who first prompted me to think about the destruction of space. A ese lugar lo han destruido, “They have destroyed that place,” was a common phrase I heard throughout the region in reference to places disrupted both recently or in a distant past by powerful people alien to the region.

“The destruction of space” may sound like a counter-intuitive concept. The idea that space can be “destroyed” challenges the common sense, first articulated by Newton, that space is the absolute extension upon which objects are located as points in a measurable matrix (see Casey 2007). This is, in fact, the same common sense disturbed by the notion of “the production of space,” which as Lefebvre noted, is often imagined as a timeless substratum that “cannot be produced.” But the production of space is always predicated on spatial destruction, and this intermezzo explores this intersection.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre revolutionized critical theory by emphasizing that space should be examined through the lens of production. He forced us to think about space as the materially created conditions of all forms of sociality, oppression, struggle, and emancipation. And he demonstrated that production is not restricted to the making of objects but that it is a force that generates space. Yet space, Lefebvre emphasized, is a product unlike any other; it is the very condition for sociality: a product that pervades society in its entirety. It is through space and its production that the contradictions, tensions, and struggles that shape any social formation become tangible. This is why Lefebvre viewed the production of space as a profoundly disruptive and tension-ridden process. Space, he wrote, is ruptured and unstable, “devastated and devastating” as well as “utterly dislocated” (1991:97). This spatial destructiveness is apparent under capitalism and its tendency to generalize abstract space. Lefebvre emphasized that abstract space is inherently violent and destructive, a “lethal” space that “destroys the historical conditions that gave rise to it.” “The negativity that Hegelianism attributed to historical temporality alone is in fact characteristic of abstract space” (1991:370).

 The destructive nature of capitalism lies upon its universalizing abstractions, the product of a state of generalized commodification that reduces sensuous bodies and spaces to available and quantifiable slots: things to be bought and sold and turned into a source of profit. “There is a violence intrinsic to abstraction, and to abstraction’s practical (social) use,” Lefebvre insisted. This abstraction, he noted, passes for “an absence” as if capitalist quantifying abstractions were separate from “concrete” objects. “Nothing could be more false. For abstraction’s modus operandi is devastation, destruction (even if that destruction may sometimes herald creation)” (Lefebvre 1991: 289, emphasis in original).

Lefebvre, in other words, was well aware that the production of space is profoundly violent and destructive; but he stopped short of examining the destruction of space as a concept in its own terms. In this intermezzo, I examine the destruction of space by drawing on Lefebvre and also by spatializing Marx’s emphasis that production is inseparable from destruction. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously wrote that capitalism’s fabulous productivity is founded upon equally fabulous levels of destruction. Under bourgeois society, they wrote, “all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.” Further, what capitalism produces is regularly obliterated in crises of over-production, which lead to the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces.” And whereas previous systems were based on the conservation of their modes of production, they argued that capitalism is founded on a constant revolutionizing of production. And this dynamism has a dissolving force, through which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations” are “swept away” and “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1992 [1848]:4-9). In Grundrisse, Marx (1993 [1858]) elaborated on the theoretical foundations of this principle by arguing that production requires the destruction of raw materials. In this cycle, consumption and production are different moments of the same process that begins anew with production.

The production of space under capitalism creates vast levels of spatial destruction. Production and destruction work in tandem permanently giving new forms to the terrain, revealing the terrain's material plasticity, changing its layout in this or another way, redefining the political regimes under which these disruptions are organized and contested. These negative and positive moments in the transformation of the form of the terrain are inseparable but not identical. The same way that the production of space is not the same as the production of ordinary commodities, the destruction of space is not simply the physical obliteration of objects and spatial forms; it is, primarily, the shattering of the conditions of sociality that define a particular constellations of human and living nodes in the terrain. And the main measure of spatial destruction is its impact on human bodies as well as all forms of life. When Lefebvre wrote that space is devastated and devastating he was pointing to its effects on human bodies, not on “space” in the abstract. In Appalachia and the Andes, mining corporations are destroying spaces not only because they are obliterating rock formations but also because they saturate local places and streams with rubble and poison that negatively affect people and all living forms. A political understanding of the destruction of space cannot but be founded on an affective view of space.

The rise of capitalism represented in this regard not only a new mode of production of space —of an abstract space at the service of commoditization and state power— but also a whole new mode of spatial destruction. The capitalist destruction of space shatters or disrupts all obstacles to its striving for profit maximization. The traces of this destruction are constitutive of all existing terrains, and are more than apparent in the massive environmental devastation unleashed all over the planet in the past century.

David Harvey is one of the leading authors who has highlighted the spatially destructive nature of capitalist production, through his emphasis on the impact of speed on distance (the famous, if misleading, “annihilation of space by time”) and the disruption of spatial forms created by “uneven geographic development.” And he rightly identifies an important tension between stasis and motion in these disruptions, for while capital strives for mobility “capital invested in the land cannot be moved without being destroyed” (Harvey 2010:190). Yet Harvey has consistently examined this process with a concept with peculiarly bourgeois baggage: “creative destruction.”

Coined and popularized by Joseph Schumpeter (1950) during the New Deal, the idea of capitalism's "creative destruction" appropriates the negativity of Marx’s view of capitalist destruction yet rephrases it as creative, thereby depoliticizing it. Through a subtle yet decisive ideological sleight of hand, destruction is redefined as innovative, positive, desirable: the unavoidable side-effect of the thriving dynamism of capitalism. It is therefore not surprising that neoliberal economists and apologists of corporate power are particularly fond of praising capitalism’s “creative destruction,” for in this usage the positive element, creation, subsumes and neutralizes its destructiveness.

The concept of the destruction of space follows a different path, which acknowledges the affirmative outcomes of destruction but does not subsume this negativity to a creative affirmation. I prefer to conceptualize this process as destructive production, for what defines production in its capitalist-imperial form is what Ann Stoler (2008) calls the ruination of spaces, bodies, and social relations and the creation of social suffering. This destruction is, indeed, as David Harvey and Neil Smith emphasize, spatially uneven. And this spatial destruction creates what Chris Hedges and others aptly call sacrifice zones: "areas destroyed for quarterly profit." “We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed.”

Capitalist destruction can only come across as “creative,” in other words, among those who (like Schumpeter) are secluded from the debris it generates, and are keen to erase it. “The truth of the matter,” Marshall Berman (1982:99-100) points out, “is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down” and that the bourgeoisie “would tear down the world if it paid.” And he added, “Their secret —a secret that they have managed to keep even from themselves— is that, behind their facades, they are the most violently destructive ruling class in history.” By the same token, the destruction of space under capitalism is the most devastating ever created, as the rapidly shifting patterns of climate and extreme weather we are currently witnessing make it clear.

The destruction of space involves very different levels of physical disruption, intensity, violence, and different forms of temporality and speed. The most dramatic and abrupt forms are certainly those produced by warfare, which can obliterate whole cities or regions amid devastating violence and loss of life in a matter of days or weeks. This is destruction as sheer negativity, in which the obliteration of a particular space is usually not geared (in the short-term) toward the production of a new place but is an end in itself as part of a military engagement. Eyal Weizman’s gripping analysis of the Israeli 2009 invasion of Gaza is the best account I know of this type of spatial destruction. In Gaza, the destruction of space by the Israeli military operated through unrelenting firepower and physical force that created vast fields of ruins and 1,400 corpses, most of them of unarmed civilians. Weizman highlights a notable fact: most people died crushed by the ruins of the buildings that fell upon them, which means that the built environment “was turned into the very things that killed” (2012:100). This case shows that the terrain is inseparable from the bodies that live in it and that the destruction of space, therefore, often also destroys human bodies.

Yet in being also the negative moment of the capitalist production of space, the destruction of space operates today at an everyday, unrelenting pace whose temporality and intensity are dictated by the shifting pulsations of capitalist productivity. Unlike situations of warfare, this is the spatial destruction whose negativity is geared toward the production of commodities and places. Countless nodes in the global terrain are obliterated on a daily basis either to obtain raw materials (mountain tops blown away to extract minerals) or to create places where more commodities can be produced (forests bulldozed to create soybean fields). This means that spatial destruction increases amid waves of economic acceleration and operates ideologically through the expansive logic of abstract space: that is, the idea that the whole planet is a blank surface to be exploited for profit regardless of whoever lives there and of the qualitative nature of those places. The destruction of space represented on the movie Avatar, with the obliteration of Pandora's huge forests by an imperial mining operation aptly represents what is the situation today all over planet Earth, and not simply in the Global South. The movie also makes it clear that the capitalist destruction of space “in times of peace” is also an eminently violent affair that demands the forced removal of the bodies living there and opposing this destruction.

Yet another crucial dimension of spatial destruction in the capitalist-imperial present is that destruction is not simply a side effect of capitalist dynamism: “collateral damage” created on the sidelines. Destruction itself is a massive source of profits: the explicit purpose of crucial sectors of the global machine. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) shows with clarity that we live in an era of disaster capitalism in which corporations are attracted to recently-destroyed places like a magnet, for they see in the affective shock and social upheaval created by destruction a “business opportunity.” It happened in Iraq amid the rubble created by the 2003 invasion and it happened in Haiti amid the rubble created by the 2010 earthquake: corporations moving in on fields of ruins to profit from them as part of imperial looting operations that are not simply part of the primitive accumulation Marx analyzed in Capital but are constitutive of the capitalist global order.

But the destruction of space is not simply the outcome of capitalist growth; it also accelerates, acquiring a different dynamic, when capitalist production goes through its cyclical periods of crisis. This is spatial destruction created by factories shutting down, jobs disappearing, and people either moving away or living a more degraded existence. This destruction may be gradual and leave behind ghost towns whose physical infrastructure may be initially intact but that reveal over time a place that has been socially devastated. These places are destroyed not because they are physically shattered but because the relations of sociality that gave them life have dissolved. In the huge urban slums where a quarter of humanity lives, the erosion of space adopts a different pace, closer to spatial degradation than destruction: what Stoler (2008) calls the ruination that makes millions of people live in derelict, polluted, debilitating spaces.

What all these different processes of spatial destruction share is the unraveling or erosion of social-spatial configurations and the emergence of new spatial forms punctuated by unwanted material surplus. And this surplus of debris is more often than not superimposed upon older waves of disruption. Lefebvre reflected briefly on these palimpsests of ruins when he wrote that ancient ruins such as Troy or Leptis Magna “enshrine the superimposed spaces of the succession of cities that have occupied them.” He added that “each new addition inherits and reorganizes what has gone before; each period or stratum carries its own preconditions beyond their limits” (1991 [1974]:164). The presence of ruins in the terrain, in other words, affects and conditions the spaces that come next, which in turn reorganize the pre-existing debris that surrounds them.

The constituent force of ruins also means that the point in analyzing the destruction of space is not simply to outline the salience of devastation in the making of terrain, but also to explore the positive spatial and affective reconfigurations that follow, as well as the afterlife of the debris thus created. First, people affected by spatial destruction usually begin to rebuild and to try to remake their lives immediately thereafter. Rebecca Solnit (2009) has examined how places that are devastated often generate remarkable forms of solidarity and creativity among survivors . Not for nothing, as I analyze at the end of the book, ruins can become, as Mark Healey (2011:6) has argued, “an invitation to transformation”: the possibility of building something better.

Yet in the chapters that follow I examine a different afterlife of ruins: their capacity to affect the living spaces and social configurations that surround them because of their ongoing presence and form as ruins. The transformation of the Chaco into a space under state sovereignty took place in a terrain that was already strewn with debris from previous waves of spatial destruction. And the largest and more noticeable were the ruins of Spanish cities destroyed by the war machine. The destruction of space, in this regard, is certainly not restricted to state-capitalist formations; it also defines the negativity of anti-imperial insurgencies aimed at destroying the spaces under the control of the state. At the foot of the Andes, the ruins created by the war machine continue haunting the living, the state, and the Catholic Church centuries after their destruction.

References

Berman, Marshall

            1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin.

Bessire, Lucas

            2011. Apocalipctic Futures: The Violent Transformation of Moral Human Life among the Ayoreo-Sppeaking People of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco. American Ethnologist. 38(4): 743-757.

Casey, Edward

            1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harvey, David

            2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Healey, Mark

            2011. The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake Durham: Duke University Press.

Klein, Naomi

            2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Knoff.

Lefebvre, Henri

            1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.

Marx, Karl

         1977 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. New York: Vintage.
     1993 [1858]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York:Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels

            1992 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Neil

            1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.

Schumpeter, Joseph Alois
         1950. Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York,: Harper.

Solnit, Rebecca

           2009. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin.

Stoler, Ann
         2008."Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination."Cultural Anthropology. 23:191- 219.

Weizman, Eyal
2012. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso.