Wednesday, June 29, 2005
(2:03 PM) | Anonymous:
Zapatistas, Once Again
The Zapatistas are exemplary for a number of reasons, not all of which could be immediately noted. But they are a contemporary experiment in autonomous government, their practice of delegation offers an alternative to the "representation" of captialist parliamentarianism, and they have involved their revolutionary moment in a kind of imaginative and literary production that, so far from agitprop, has its provenance in Pessoa and Garcia Marquez. It is a virtual revolution in the sense that they have made use of communicativity for radical politics, but also in the sense that they live a virtual time - one only has to read certain communiques to find this. And it is, really, a virtual revolution. Unlike the state-takers, who live and die by the calendar (1789, 1917, 1989, whatever), the Zapatistas are everywhere, and they are not going away. Additionally, they understand the role of masking (see Michael Taussig's Defacement). Which is to say, their tendency and power is not localizable, not just visible. They might be our tick on the clock, the one where we can, according to Benjamin's citation, turn our weapons on the clock itself.Owing to this virtuality, we might think of what it means to "be a Zapatista where you are," as the saying goes. Intergalactic, as the latest communique has it. (This is nothing new, see Huey Newton's "Speech at Boston College".)
The Zapatistas are beginning to release description of the new stage they are entering. You can find it at: http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=113973
There is obviously a something new happening, and my hunch is that it will lead a core group of the EZLN outside the boundaries of Chiapas. If you are in Mexico, the time may be ripe. If you are in the USA, there are new reasons to tear down the borders.
