Fin de Archivo Hache / Heriberto Yépez

The End of Archivo Hache

                        [Image: Ulises Carrión]

A week ago I was notified this would be my final column. At first, I wanted to say goodbye to my readers with a longer text. But I realized it would be a mistake to close in a manner different from the one in which readers gave me a couple minutes each week.

Journalism means seeking the truth behind the lies other journalists call news. Everything else is marketing.

During the years this column lasted, from week to week I sought to dissect a cultural system ruled by corruption and farce.

Describing all the types of mechanisms of High Cultural Fraud (its uses and customs) was the main theme of Archivo Hache.

I’m the first one to be surprised I lasted so many years pointing out this pseudo-mafia.

Being a literary writer, I wanted each column to be an aphoristic, gunslinging (like my grandfather) micro-essay.

Being critical won me enemies. Almost all of them writers and functionaries.

It also brought me a few readers. Starting in mid-2012, we opened a space to republish the columns (www.archivohache.blogspot.com). As I write these lines, the blog had 230,927 visits from all of you and the same number of thank yous on my part.

In 1997 I began to collaborate in a Baja California weekly and since then I haven’t stopped writing cultural journalism. Next week, for the first time in nearly two decades, I won’t have the obligation of sitting down to write my weekly piece for some media outlet.

I’ll listen to the same songs but this time I won’t have to type anything. It’ll be a strange afternoon in Tijuana.

Combining journalism and literature today means combining activism and performance. Creating an ethics out of aesthetics, in other words, wanting verbal beauty to dance with analytical truth, without us having any merit beyond playing one part of the music, and knowing that, since we’re in Mexico, we shouldn’t be surprised the dance includes gunshots.

Because this is the end of a series, I want to register that on the date of the closing of this failed archive, Mexico was in a narcopit, dug, once again, by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in alliance with the cartel of transnational corporations.

And whose cultural apparatus (governmental institutions and affiliated companies) wanted to retake the remote control of opinions and networks, keyboards and screens, because, in reality, the president himself was a selfie in crisis within an infomercial full of manipulated voters.

We are passing through a sinister cultural tunnel. North American-Mexican control and the society of the spectacle have ruined the fabric of the critical imagination, and they design artists and writers in charge of providing an image of “civility,” “tradition,” and “novelty,” and of dismissing, silencing and attacking dissidents (and changing the topic).

I was critical in all directions. If I didn’t criticize someone, I beg your forgiveness for the oversight.

Archivo Hache has closed. Over and out.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 12 September 2015 }

La vida después del Buda punk / Heriberto Yépez

Life After the Punk Buddha

                        [Mario Vargas Llosa, Venezuela, 2014. Via @shirleyvarnagy]

If Disney banned the selfie-stick it’s because it put too much distance between the I and the I. For the system to clone itself, the I cannot put any distance between the Vile I and Vile I. Any distance threatens to become critical.

This era consists of hiding the truths of Buddha. Although Buddhism is a high point of earthling thought, we would like to allege that arrow never wounded us.

Contemporary literature is an amusement park tour. In experimental literatures, the veteran North American one, for instance, Burroughs and Acker would no longer be possible today. Punk is prohibited. Being a writer in the Facebook Era means Behaving Well: Like! Like! Like!

Nearly everything related to Millenials is detestable: they were designed by the media. Their reaction to everything that happens is a reference to the world of show business. Each thing they encounter in the world reminds them of a movie or a video.

In North American literature they call it “Post-Conceptualism.” In Latin America and Spain, “Return of the Chronicle” or “Autofiction.” In one case after another, they are escapes from what truly followed: writing as a destruction of the I, I and I.

Selfie, Networking, Retro and Hipster are the keywords of today’s globcult.

They used to follow forms of writing that went beyond the author. But the Death of the Author was replaced by the Writer As Celebrity-Zombie.

20th century literatures reached a point of no return and the initial literatures of the 21st century decided to return. Mario Vargas Llosa is its best avatar. He was once an author of the Latin American Boom and today he’s on the cover of ¡Hola!.

Gabriel García Márquez’s black eye prefigured it: thanks to the confessionalism of social media we would all become Varguitas.

There’s not a single social media account that doesn’t want to be ¡Hola!. The notion of an “oeuvre” has died from spontaneous combustion.

The literary product is now of tertiary importance. What’s important is the “author.” And the author is now his own pure image.

The most important aspect of writers today is their photographs. The book is only a pretext. They key is their names, in other words, their place within networking. Click: the photo is total.

We’re now in the first moment in the history of literature when it doesn’t matter if a writer produces works. What’s essential is that his image be popular or, at least, pivotal in some virtual literary network.

What’s relevant is that it can be sold well on Amazon or in chain bookstores or, in the case of writers without success protected by some cultural institution or clique, that their posts have a certain relevance in their network of Privileged Losers.

No one will be Vargas Llosa anymore. Vargas Llosa himself wasn’t able to do it. But everyone can aspire to be a semi-star in some corner of the Web.

And literature? Literature became a branch of fantastic photography. Photography has colonized all media.

The Punk Buddha was merely an X Dream. Take a selfie.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 11 July 2015 }

La conferencia de poesía en Berkeley / Heriberto Yépez

The Berkeley Poetry Conference

North American experimental poetry is undergoing an unprecedented crisis this year and last week an historic shift occurred.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference was originally scheduled for June 15-19. It was going to bring together innovative poets (at mid-career) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the gathering of writers like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, among others.

The 1965 conference was a defining and historic moment. And the new Berkeley conference was likewise set to become a reference point.

The participants included (to mention only five) Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Juliana Spahr, Fred Moten and Vanessa Place, in other words, representatives of the best of North American poetry today.

But prior to the conference the scandal against the racist works of Vanessa Place erupted. There was talk of disinviting Vanessa Place, who would surely have taken advantage of the event to present a racist or polemical performance.

The organizers, however, reiterated their invitation to Place. And in a matter of days, three-quarters of the invited writers (myself included) pulled out of the event. The conference collapsed.

The mere fact of this boycott already marks an historic moment, a symbol of new poetic times, of the sociopolitical crisis and the explosiveness of our current literary period.

But the organizers came up with a masterful counter-move. They agreed to cancel the original conference but organized another one in its place, “Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference.”

Along with poets who didn’t cancel and new poets of color, the second conference gathered CA Conrad, Hugo García Manríquez, Judith Goldman, Craig Santos Perez, Ronaldo Wilson, among others.

The conference took place and the expectations, as well as the technical dexterity in the readings and discussion panels, made it memorable.

The discussions to follow, of course, will continue for a long time.

But the key point is that everything that happened, from the memory of that 1965 conference up until the collapse of the original 2015 conference and the celebration of the new one, established a new moment in North American poetry and, because of its influence, in global poetry.

This is all happening amidst the crisis of police violence (from Ferguson to Ayotzinapa); the new conference took place on the very same week of the massacre in Charleston and Donald Trump’s racist comments about Mexicans.

The consequences of everything taking place in North American poetry and the event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Poetry Conference have sealed two undeniable facts: 1) a cycle of North American poetry officially ended in 2015 and 2) the new North American poetry will be more and more dominated by non-white poets.

The struggle between literary white (matriarchical-patriarchical) supremacy and the poetics of minorities will determine the path of poetry in this new century.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 27 June 2015 }

La crisis de la poesía gringa se expande / Heriberto Yépez

The Crisis of North American Poetry Expands

               [Tweets by the poet Cassandra Gillig to Kenneth Goldsmith, March 2015]


What’s been happening in North American poetry these last few months?

Unlike national poetries like Chilean or Mexican (which are unitary, grouped in a single polemical field), North American poetry is segmented, primarily, into “mainstream” poetry, poetics tied to cultural identity and experimental poetry (which is relatively multicultural but dominated by white poets).

This experimental current, because it continues the avant-garde and postmodernism of the 20th century, influences other “innovative” national literatures today.

And this is the sector that’s suffering a great crisis.

Up until this year, conceptualism was its most well-known current, imitated and respected (inside and beyond the United States). But in a matter of weeks its two leaders (Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place) fell from grace in scandals related to racism and a great portion of the experimental field withdrew its support for them.

It’s pretty obvious that the rise of conceptualism ended in 2015.

But the crisis isn’t limited to conceptualism and instead, different agents (semi-anonymous groups, women writers and social media) extended the questioning, for example, to institutions such as Naropa and Berkeley and to writers such as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the now canonical avant-garde (post and anti-Beat). They have been called out for being complicit with the white-patriarchal domination (and “demon”) of experimentalism.

This great crisis is serious because of its critique of racism and the fact that it doesn’t involve just one group but the entire structure in intense (electronic) battles that are unprecedented. And this happens within the context of the strong social movements now taking place in the United States; it’s the crisis of the streets entering North American literature.

The collapse isn’t merely aesthetic (one avant-garde attacking another in order to replace it, as is usually the case internationally) but rather it is an ethical crisis, one of credibility.

Through social media fights, links and rumors, old allegiances and friendships have been broken. The experimental network is being fragmented by these discussions.

As the history of the avant-gardes has taught us, the effects of this crisis in North American experimental literature will soon be felt, in an invisible manner or simply in forms of restructuring, in other literatures, especially in Latin America and Europe, where the influence of North American experimentalism hasn’t stopped growing.

But suddenly, North American experimentalism went from being considered cool to being racist; from being a network with high levels of internal agreement to being divided into guerrilla groups.

Everything indicates the crisis has only just begun.

No one knows what will be left standing and what will be swept away, buried, damaged, replaced or made impossible.

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of North American experimentalism? Maybe.

But this could go further. Or be interrupted. Or extend to other literatures.

The networks will define it.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 6 June 2015 }

* * *

For Internet readers I’ve elaborated this

CHRONOLOGY FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT CRISIS OF NORTH AMERICAN POETRY

Social antecedents: 2014 and 2015 have been marked in the United States by protests against police brutality and racism. The most famous case has been that of Michael Brown, the young African-American murdered by the Ferguson police. But the protests and the discontent are generalized because North American racism is truly delirious.

Literary antecedents: Cathy Park Hong publishes an essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” where she argues that the (North American) avant-garde has been constructed from a base of white supremacy. This essay generated a great deal of debate and support. I recommend reading it; a key essay.

13 March 2015: At a literary event at Brown University, the leader of conceptual writing Kenneth Goldsmith (the most recognized experimental North American writer of the 21st century) read an ironic poem (a malicious appropriation) elaborated from the autopsy of Michael Brown (the young African American man murdered by the police). Immediately the literary social media condemned the act as racist and from then on Goldsmith has kept a low profile and has been marked as clear evidence of the white supremacist values that have silently built the scene of North American experimental poetry.

26 March 2015: At the poetry festival @Now 2015 the panel “Mongrel Poetiks” is presented, made up of Lara Glenum, Bhanu Kapil, Eunsong Kim, Lucas de Lima and Jennifer Tamayo (http://andnow2015a.sched.org/event/f270323bb038f9f76be6f186a5ba05bb#.VXLBuKY_7-N). It’s important to note that these poets don’t claim to be members of the Mongrel Coalition. But their decision to present themselves as “Mongrel Poetiks” inevitably associates them with that group.

3 May 2015: Through their Twitter account, the Mongrel Coalition appears, a semi-anonymous collective (they call themselves anonymous but they actually reveal some of their members at different levels of the organization). The Mongrel Coalition is a collective with a pro-minority agenda, focused on defending this cause within North American (experimental) poetry. They are radical, violent, equivocal and, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting movements of North American poetic activism, despite their mistakes and authoritarianism. I recommend following their activism.

18 May 2015: After an Internet petition asking for Vanessa Place to be removed from her position on a subcommittee to chose tables to present at the 2016 conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), the AWP decides to remove her from her position (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/05/awp-removes-vanessa-place-from-2016-conference-subcommittee/). The reasons behind the petition are the racist projects of Vanessa Place, that are added to the Kenneth Goldsmith scandal for the same reasons, although, strictly speaking, Place’s projects began several years before Goldsmith’s.

29 May 2015: The Berkeley Poetry Conference that had been planned is cancelled due to many of the invited speakers pulling out in protest of the presence of Vanessa Place (although others cancelled for various reasons). This congress sought to celebrate the 50 years of the 1965 Berkeley conference where poets such as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, among others, presented, and which became a (polemical) symbol of that decisive period in North American poetry. The fact that the 2015 conference, organized to update the discussions that took place at the first one, has been cancelled adds to the general crisis of experimentalism. However, the organizers have announced they will restructure the conference so it centers on the question of race, and they’re inviting poets of color. At this date, it’s not clear who the new speakers will be and what the substitute conference’s definitive program will be (scheduled to take place between June 15-19).

Polemics: This crisis can’t be understood without the polemics centered around canonical poets of experimentalism, for example, the ones that emerged in response to texts by Ron Silliman and the sour comments by Barrett Watten on Facebook and his website. They are two of the main targets of criticism because many poets consider that Language poets, along with conceptualists, have collaborated with maintaining white hegemony within innovative North American poetry.

The Present: As I’ve said in my column today: the networks will determine what will happen. Inertia means dominant white groups will try to prevent the crisis from growing (for it not to “escalate”) and that elements of discontent be co-opted so as to go back to business as usual; the white tendency seems to point towards turning the crisis into a (genealogical) moment in which a few movements (Language poetry, conceptualism) are replaced by other movements and names. But the crisis is strong and something more substantial could happen.

Vanessa Place Inc. y la Poética Mongrel-Nafta / Heriberto Yépez

Vanessa Place Inc. and Mongrel-NAFTA Poetics

North American experimental poetry is going through a serious crisis. First, in March, Kenneth Goldsmith gave a racist performance and since then the Internet is destroying Conceptualism (and worse things will follow).

In May, Vanessa Place, a Conceptualist co-star, plagiarized the scene with another performance, and now we find her body where Goldsmith’s once lay. 2015 will go down in history as the year when Conceptualism committed suicide by lynching.

Place operates by means of in your face copy-paste, scandal and an identity-avatar even more cynical and capitalist than Goldsmith’s.

This is how she defines herself: “VanessaPlace Inc. is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form.” (http://vanessaplace.biz)

For Place, “poetry is a kind of money.”

She was recently designated as part of a committee for the influential congress of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Los Angeles in 2016.

And last week a campaign was launched against Place, due to a project of hers that revives racial offenses. Faced with the pressure, AWP decided to remove her from the position.

The main beneficiary of this coup against Place was the semi-anonymous Mongrel Coalition, which led the petition drive.

The Mongrel Coalition is a new experimental movement, that could have been innovative, had it not plagiarized the very same capitalist violence it attacks.

The coalition claims to arise from minorities who are proud to employ hegemonic means and ends: to force consensus through coercion. Either you support them or you shut up, or they seek to eliminate you.

One tragicomic element of the anti-Place triumph of this self-declared “decolonialism” via bullying (?) is that they launched their intense campaign against Place a few days after publishing xenophobic stereotypes about Mexico.

And then, faced with complaints, they threatened to “disappear” those who might be opposed (to their methods of appropriating a decolonial discourse for North American purposes) and reiterated their right to say whatever they feel and want.

Since the networks of white experimental writers (consolidated or aspiring) don’t want to be attacked by the Mongrel Coalition they purposely overlooked their xenophobic violence.

The Mongrels, knowing their xenophobia and threats could affect their careers, used the campaign against Place in order to finish burying their anti-Mexican episode.

Maybe this was redundant: in the United States, Mexican lives don’t matter. They are subhuman immigrants, neighbors or raw material.

To insult, make invisible, threaten, to spit on the Mexican is a privilege that all North Americans have, regardless of their color or position.

For them, the Mexican is one of two things: Nothing or Nobody.

This week the Mongrel Coalition beat Vanessa Place Inc. in impeccable NAFTA style. Their Stocks are Going Up.

{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 23 May 2015 }

Nafta y poesía: El Anti-Humboldt de Hugo García Manríquez / Heriberto Yépez

NAFTA and Poetry: Hugo García Manríquez’s Anti-Humboldt

New books of poetry that include a crucial search are rare. Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Aldus/Litmus Press, 2015) by Hugo García Manríquez is perhaps the most interesting poetry collection by a Mexican at the beginning of this century.

García Manríquez, additionally, is a systematic translator, as evidenced by his versions of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld, along with his participation in an anthology of poetics by Charles Bernstein.

Just for his work as a translator alone, García Manríquez should be more well-known. But we already know how contemporary Mexican literature works: it does everything to cover up reality.

Besides, does García Manríquez belong to the Mexican literary tradition? As I’ve said on another occasion, the first part of his oeuvre does. But Anti-Humboldt is in another orbit.

García Manríquez migrated to the United States and his work is closer to North American experimentalism than to the Mexican “tradition of rupture” (Octavio Paz).

And if someone thinks that one does not exclude the other it’s because they belong to the Tradition of Rupture, which is to say to the PRI political party (the Institutionalized-Revolution).

In Anti-Humboldt, García Manríquez took the text of the NAFTA and chose words and phrases, a few per page, to make a constellation of poems. The technique combines appropriation and erasure. His selection is read in bold and the rest of the text in faint grey letters. He does it with the Spanish and English texts of the NAFTA.

Its first dimension is to offer a form of reading the Agreement; a dangerous form but one that neither defends it nor demonizes it. He makes it speak and stutter, opening fissures in it.

In its other dimension, a writing occurs in which the Agreement becomes a stage to name beings and describe relationships; a screen of interweaving.

The lexicon of commerce, fragmentation and García Manríquez’s vision achieve something that would normally seem difficult: to make poetry by quoting articles from NAFTA.

A paratactical poetry, which at times seems hermetic; as if by highlighting them pieces of NAFTA were shouting something in segments.

It’s not a coincidence that the epigraph is by George Oppen: one can hear him in this book, as is also the case in Language Poetry and appropriationism. (The epilogue provides reading clues and directions.)

Its verbal material escapes Spanish-language lyricism; starting with the cold vocabulary of neoliberal commerce and his editorial technique, García Manríquez makes the transborder agreement itself provide a testimony of the damage.

With Anti-Humboldt, García Manríquez opens a path towards a cruel ecopoetics, a bilingual experimentalism and a new prosody.

There’s something merciless in this work: it instantly makes nearly all of Mexican poetry anachronistic; that it does this by means of the specter of NAFTA makes it doubly macabre.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 18 April 2015 }

Aullido a los 60 años / Heriberto Yépez

“Howl” at 60

Sixty years ago Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” one of the great poems of the 20th century. How can I commemorate it in the minimal space of a Mexican newspaper?

When he wrote it, Ginsberg was a desperate and prophetic young writer. “Howl” captures those poles.

I can’t comment on it extensively. I’ll limit myself to a detail from his first verse that I think tells us a great deal about the entire poem, its form and meaning.

The first line says: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...”

In an earlier version, the verse said “mystical” instead of “hysterical.”

In a version that followed, Ginsberg described those “best minds” as “starving, hysterical, mystical, naked.” But he finally eliminated the commas and “mystical,” leaving “hysterical” in its place.

“Mystical” had to go because the minds, bodies, images and relationships that Ginsberg noted, even though they seek God and the sacred, suffer their separation; their crisis is based on being cut off from God and not being able to join Him.

As the poem advances, Ginsberg seeks to sing about and to them as a praise that sanctifies and leads to the divine, but the civilizing and metaphysical catastrophe the poem describes prevents the mystical union from being achieved.

Ginsberg knew this and that’s why the “mystical” was eliminated and replaced by “hysterical,” that is, by the unease and inner division characterized by hysteria (less clinical than postmodern), fragmentary, disorganized, exposed.

It couldn’t be a theological, mystical poem, but rather a poem whose parts are trembling from a narco-literary, psycho-political nervous breakdown.

Losing the connection to the divine (the mystical connection), however, couldn’t merely be replaced with disconnected pieces, a total hysterical fragmentation. This is why the commas were also taken out, because when they disappeared they built a great protective block for those minds: “starving hysterical naked.”

The hysterical substituted the mystical but, at the same time, it joined everything surrounding it in the world, since it couldn’t join God transcendentally, while it could fuse with the immediate here and now, regardless of how wounded, crazed and threatened those in solidarity might be at its side.

The title itself “Howl” —as a noun or as a verb— contrasts with another final word —“Who”— that provides order to a great deal of the poem, and with the word “Holy” that serves as a conclusion and that together are the anaphoras (expressions that are repeated at the beginning of verses) marking the poem.

What howls, then, is the hysterical, that which has lost its mystical-religious connection. What howls is the destroyed body that keeps calling the divine.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Milenio (México D.F.), 4 April 2015 }

El escándalo del sujeto-concepto: Kenneth Goldsmith / Heriberto Yépez

The Subject-Concept Scandal: Kenneth Goldsmith

On March 13th, the well-known writer Kenneth Goldsmith read a poem titled “The Body of Michael Brown” at Brown University. It was an appropriation of the autopsy report for the African American young man murdered by a police officer in Ferguson in 2014; this lynching has provoked huge protests against persistent racism in the United States. As soon as news of Goldsmith’s poem circulated, the polemic exploded on the Internet.

On his Facebook page Goldsmith justified that the poem gives continuity to his work, based on the appropriation of texts. Then he asked the university to not make the video available.

I’ve already written about my political disagreement with Goldsmith. Now I’d like to make note his conceptual inconsistency.

Goldsmith advocates for an uncreative writing derived from textual appropriation in the era of electronic distribution. But his work is actually a re-creative writing of the manner in which the gravity of reports is destroyed by the neoliberal system.

Goldsmith has transformed into art the kind of appropriations usually conducted by media, corporations and the U.S. government.

A key tactic of this conceptualism is to deny the geopolitics that make this re-creative aesthetic possible; applauded, literally, by the White House.

In the face of the indignation provoked by his re-creation of a report about the cadaver of a victim of racial ultra-violence, Goldsmith tried to allege there were no bad intentions.

This is an inconsistency because Goldsmith himself has insisted for years that his works are derived from concepts removed from the Romantic subject. But by defending himself morally, Goldsmith recurs to the poetic subject he claims to have left behind.

In order for Goldsmith to be consistent with his art he should stop feigning innocence or justifying his re-creations.

If Goldsmith wants to be consistent he should let him himself be completely appropriated by the logic of the U.S. government. He should become a subject-concept ruled by neoliberalism and rigorously embrace the brutality, the looting and the total program of capital.

The legacy of Goldsmith will be to have emptied North American literary experimentalism of any anti-capitalist critique. If he doesn’t want to undermine that legacy, he should take it to its final consequences instead of appealing to personal motivations or retreating into alleged misunderstandings or good intentions.

Goldsmith will make a contribution to the history of poetry if he finishes the job of burying the last remnants of the lyrical I and transforms it into a conceptual-subject predetermined by capital.

Kenneth: you shouldn’t abandon the inner logic of your work. On the contrary, you should allow capitalism to completely appropriate your literary-persona, instead of trying to justify it by means of your moral-persona. You’re a neo-imperial artist. Don’t sabotage that function with a retro-romantic artist’s discourse.

Besides, that literary work and persona already incarnate the desire for beautifying the Capital Concept.

And don’t forget, the crisis will be transnational —or will not be at all.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 21 March 2015 }

La foto como policía del arte / Heriberto Yépez

The Photo as Art Police

The relationship between the writer and photography tended to be retrospective; we knew of a consecrated or dead author through his old photographs; the Internet drastically modified that relationship and today we know the photographs first and then (perhaps) the literary work of writers.

Serious problem: photography is the Great Normalizer, and being photogenic is proof that everything is OK: you love, enjoy, work, consume, rest, exist, wear, sell obeying each clause of the social contract.

A portrait is always the certification of an obedience to control; the police embedded in the retina. The change in the relationship between literature and photography has turned out to be one more factor in the normalization of the writer that characterizes this age of verbal arts.

Note, for example, the function of the photo in experimentalism: writing can desire to be non-communicative, to elude realism and passive-reading; but the person who writes experimentally, on the other hand, wants to be recognizable, real, transparent, present, communicable, familiar thanks to his/her photos.

This is the great inconsistency of experimentalism and all literature today. Its addiction to photography reveals its surrender to capital.

Photography has made commercial literature more commercial and experimental literature more acceptable.

Being a writer today means appearing in photographs. If there’s an announcement for a reading, book or event we’ll see a photo of the writer. Participating in the literary means appearing in a photo.

The book matters less; the main genres are album and pic.

Photography is the most reactionary art of our time; it’s at least 100 years behind contemporary art. However, contemporary art depends on the patronage of the portrait.

The writer becomes a “personality”; the text is merely the product sold by the “celebrity.”

While the book is in crisis, the figure of the writer, on the other hand, has become more relevant.

It’s no coincidence we now have writers who don’t write and are famous in the spectacle of the Humanities.

We’ve arrived at the moment when no radical innovation of artistic form will happen without a radical critique of the spectacle.

The absence of radicalism in the present literary, theoretical and artistic moment, in general, is evidenced by the naturalization of the photo as the author’s calling card.

Photography is the pillar of the spectacle. But through his use of the portrait, the writer undermines the distance, the estrangement of art.

The photo is the writer’s signature with the classes in power and with consumptive taste. The portrait expresses his affinity with those who dominate and his attractiveness and accessibility for consumption.

If the writer refuses to break the photographic contract, writing, nonetheless, will break its contract with the writer.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 14 March 2015 }

Escribir en el siglo XXI / Heriberto Yépez

Writing in the 21st Century

The 21st century writer faces the danger of seeing his aesthetic critique vanish because of the common laws of government, market, readers, academia and Internet.

The order of these powers varies according to country. But all of them control the literary writer in this new century.

Literary writing distinguishes itself from others by taking control of the art of heterodox form, of aesthetic verbal pleasure, of the difficult link between tradition and innovation in the ludic word.

The writer who’s at the pinnacle of the art belongs to the present, is a contemporary of his era and, simultaneously, belongs to other times.

When a writer belongs only to the past he doesn’t offer anything to literature; when he only belongs to the present, he almost doesn’t belong to literature.

The writer should be unfaithful to yesterday and unfaithful to today. But, above all, he should love the art, which is the sensual project of inhabiting a more intense temporality.

Facing the dead, the artist would seem frivolous; facing his contemporaries, a solemn figure. The artist, in any case, is a traitor to tradition and a traitor to the now.

A writer who agrees with his society is failing.

The writer is a critical innovator. He artistically proposes more complex and less repressive forms —a two-sided impertinence— than those of the social present. A writer always ends up revealing how consensus is mistaken.

For art, even the truth is insufficient.

The writer used to distance himself by means of the book or, at least, the text; but today the artistic book and text are felt to be anachronistic or they’re not identified as being different from any other media or text.

The (e)reader doesn’t care about the aesthetic particularity. For him, everything is text, everything is opinion, everything is media.

On the screen, everything is judged by the same criteria. News, posts or PDFs are consumed by the same set of rules.

Literature is now merely a branch of Publishing.

This uniformity of judgment has impoverished the senses.

But the greatest challenge for the writer happens when he faces himself. On the one hand, to speak of a challenge against oneself implies a paradox in the Telephysical Era of the selfie so that others might see you (as you see yourself... for them). On the other hand, the challenge is to overcome the consensus without falling into ego-morphism (thinking that everything takes on the form of the I) and believing that all form is a signature.

Being in solidarity with the 99 percent from the radical dissent of a 1 percent.

And the writer should know that everything he does will be 100 percent processed by spectacular reactions. Writing in the 21st century is writing within the spectacle.

Everything a writer does today is “read” by the criteria of the world of the spectacle, exercised from the labor market, social media, publishing houses or institutions.

The 21st century is the first century in which literature is a zone within the spectacle.

Starting now, leaving the spectacle is the writer’s greatest challenge.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 7 February 2015 }

La teoría y Ayotzinapa / Heriberto Yépez

Theory and Ayotzinapa

Events like those in Ayotzinapa test our concepts. The elite commentariat of the dominated territories use ideas from the social sciences and humanities of a previous era. This gap has been evident in the case of Ayotzinapa.

I will enunciate three understandings that theory today already judges as obsolete. But that govern the interpretation of Ayotzinapa.

Foucault or Snowden aren’t necessary to understand there is no such thing as “personal life.” But people insist Ayotzinapa was a loss of the “personal” lives of “young students.”

Ayotzinapa was an assault against a micropolitical group, composed of dozens of Mexicans of which millions exist, a profile that is anything but “individual.”

Faces, desires, discontent, their lives were the same as those of millions of bodies here and there. Ayotzinapa doesn’t belong to the order of the biographical but to that of the biopolitical.

A second fallacy of the commenters indicates that the Mexican government is the aggressor.

There is a theoretical consensus that we live under a global order. But the commenters cling to the existence of autonomous, identifiable and “national” governments.

They seem to be unaware of NAFTA. To not know we’re part of North America.

Everything that happens here is part of a check list of economic, military and political powers that administrate this transnational zone. Only the naive or desperate can believe in the “national” and when faced by an event such as this complain against their assistant political class.

From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson, all repression in this zone follows the same geopolitics.

That’s why a third outdated understanding (invoked to exhaustion in these weeks) is the most laughable of all: to lament that in “Mexico” there’s no “rule of law,” and, instead, that “barbarism” or “corruption” rules; as if they lived in a century that never existed and didn’t know that “civilization” and the “law” operate to perfection here and, thus, impose violence and inequality.

Ayotzinapa was a civilizing violence, not very different from the one practiced in New Spain to “civilize” indigenous peoples and blacks and very similar to the fast and furious civilizing violence of the United States.

Ayotzinapa was one more police action to impose “civility” today in the transnational region of North America. There’s nothing particularly Mexican about it.

Even more than in 1968, Ayotzinapa is a protective measure for diverse economic interests. We will never know who gave the first and final authorization to protect such interests, always already glocal.

If you think the president is a fool, then the fool is you. National governments don’t exist. This has been known by global theory for a long time already.

We shouldn’t think lucid theory will help us. It is merely the technical confession of civilizing crime.

Commenters and common victims come and go without ever even suspecting the diagnostic laugh of high theory, the latter always a neighbor to those guilty of genocide.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 1 November 2014 }

Perder tu cara, perder tu nombre / Heriberto Yépez

Losing Your Face, Losing Your Name

Exactly twenty years ago I was worker in a factory in Tijuana and I was planning to put bombs in those factories and in the building of the PRI political party facing the wall built by the United States on the border.

I don’t know if due to the most wonderful or to the worst luck, the factory (Verbatim) where I was working that year was located in front of a public university, and I applied and was accepted and decided to cross that bridge, which took me out of the assembly line and the Cartolandia slum of the East of Tijuana where I lived without public utilities and surrounded by drug labs, because those were the years and zone of operation for the cartel.

Many things have happened since then. I sometimes ask myself why I wanted to stop being a maquiloco factory worker, that miserable person who was at war with every single point of the system.

Today I’m a writer (hated by many) but, in contrast to that young Tijuana native who dreamed of being “someone” (escaping misery), today I want to be “nobody.”

In the middle of September of this year I announced I had closed the project of “Heriberto Yépez” because I considered it the dream of a marginalized young man who wanted to save himself by transforming into a writer of “Mexican literature”; there was no shortage of idiots who jumped for joy about the (imaginary) disappearance of an oeuvre, a name or, even worse, a writer.

A few weeks later, the Mexican government decided to organize yet another of its killings of discontent people. Faced with that event I reiterated that my decision to disappear as a “name” wasn’t a “personal” whim but rather an act that is part of something much larger.

One of the students executed in Ayotzinapa had his face ripped off, he was skinned; while that horrifying crime was circulating (like an anti-selfie), I couldn’t help but think that the decision to disappear my name, and practically bury my own career, was congruent with this moment (and others).

That young man dreamed of being someone, because that’s what could be dreamed in a marginalized neighborhood in Northern Mexico, the backyard of the United States.

I used to be a foul proletarian and today I’m a foul intellectual. Today I want to show my solidarity with those who have been executed by all the causes (and all the cartels) and, consequently, dispossess myself of my own name. To not have a face or a personal signature, to be just another disappeared person (in this colonial-capitalist control).

No other book assembled by these hands under that name will ever appear again.

Unfortunately, I have to make a living and I’ll surely have to sign here or there with the name that appears on my birth certificate, which is false (like all names and identities), but as a minimal intellectual gesture and as a minimal sign of congruence with the Mexican history to which I belong I want to make it clear I’m convinced that being ethically Mexican today means abandoning everything, starting with our own (skinned) face and our own name (target of a CIA drone).

The wind says now is the very moment to lose your face, to lose your name.

Nothing in the previous world is worth anything. Another world is coming.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 25 October 2014 }

Aviso / Heriberto Yépez

Notice

I want to make public a decision I took a while ago but that I now want to communicate to my three or four readers, and that I’ve been communicating to my friends in recent days. 2014 marks 20 years since the beginning of the writing project I’ve created under the signature “Heriberto Yépez.” During these two decades I have published over twenty books and written a few more that remain unpublished, for one or another reason. I have decided to conclude this writing project. It can be said that Heriberto Yépez’s oeuvre has concluded. The signature, provisional and only for the following instances, will continue to appear in two places: the weekly column that I write under this name for the cultural supplement Laberinto of the newspaper Milenio and the co-editing of books by Ulises Carrión, in which I share duties. Once these two responsibilities end, this signature also ends. I want to move on to other things in my life and I need to leave behind my phase as an author. I have enjoyed the work I’ve accomplished, but the moment has come to bring it to a close, because life is short and I don’t want to invest time in all that anymore. For professional reasons I can’t stop producing certain writings, but those will appear under a different name and as part of another professional sphere. The only thing left for me to say is that I’m very grateful to all those who collaborated with my work and career, the young man whom you helped accomplish his dream thanks you very much for your help, he’ll always be indebted to you. But that young man is gone. And I must respect his departure, by not taking his name as if it were mine and I, for one, need to take advantage of this event so I can embark on other avenues and, above all, reiterate my gratitude and farewell. A big hug for everyone.




Translator’s note: Yépez has erased his original text at his blog and replaced it with the following words, “I'm grateful for the attention paid to the notice I posted here. Many thanks!”




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, 16 September 2014 }

Traducir es demasiado / Heriberto Yépez

Translation Is Too Much

Translation can be intriguing work. Here is a minuscule list of what translation can be.

Translation can be pleasant. If you choose a language you know well and pick a book or an authorship that fascinates you, translation will be a pleasure.

Translation can be the perfect crime. The best thing is to read but the biggest temptation is to write. Translation combines both poles. With the pretext of two languages, a translator is someone who writes what he reads.

Translation might be the best contribution a bibliophile can make. Cultures such as ours need to translate many works (from literary to scientific). There should be no more fellowships to create poetry, short stories or novels, but rather fellowships for translation.

Translation could be the best sub-employment given to beginning writers.

Translation can be unpleasant. Translation doesn’t pay well. Besides, save for books that are successful in their original language, translations are almost never reviewed. But if you commit three mistakes in three hundred pages, that can change. If you want your translation to be reviewed, make enough mistakes.

Translation can be deceiving. I know writers who have translated four poems by Baudelaire and call themselves his translator. Translating a few pages and proclaiming yourself a translator is like writing micro fiction and calling yourself a novelist.

Translation can betray. If the transcreator is a writer with many resources, transcreation is a valuable game; if it’s a mediocre transcreator, the experiment shouldn’t happen. It’s more difficult to translate well than to have all types of ideas for transcreation.

Translation should be faithful to a text that’s loved in a polygamist situation.

Translation can have a great advantage: there are thousands of works whose rights now belong to the public domain. Many of them circulate on the Internet. All you need is to know two languages well, to arm yourself with months of patient work and a few more of impatience with yourself to finish it, in order to translate a book and contribute to the education of humanity. Surely no one will thank you for it.

Translation is a direct conduit to criticism. Being careful with each one of your words opens the path to becoming one of the experts on that text. Translation ends with a prologue.

Translation is maniacal. If someone who today dedicates himself to literature knows more than one language but doesn’t translate, he hasn’t gone crazy. When you read foreign authors that fascinate and you know that others can’t read them, a demon appears and forces you to translate.

Translation can be defined as the demon of sharing what isn’t yours but which you think should belong to others. And, in any case, you want to take the credit.

Translation is already being done by machines. But machines still don’t translate well. Translation can still be too human.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 16 November 2013 }

In memori@m Rafadro (1967-2013) / Heriberto Yépez

In Memori@m Rafadro (1967-2013)

“In January 2011, I discovered that my cardiac risk factor was 4.0, the highest. With that condition the only possible exercise was walking.” At the beginning of the month, Rafa Saavedra had a heart attack. Last Tuesday September 17, Rafa didn’t survive his surgery.

His death leaves a tremendous void. Rafa was the writer from Tijuana. His emblematic books are Postscards de ocio y odio (1995); Butten Smileys (1997) and Lejos del noise (2002). Others came later and others will soon appear.

This summer I spoke with him about his books and his research for a Master’s in Cultural Studies at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte regarding the border fanzine culture in the 1980s and 1990s.

(Rafa, among other things, saw fanzines as antecedents of blogs.)

In 2001-2002, Rafa detonated the Tijuana Bloguita Front, a network of bloggers: Internet users, all-nighters, writers, cultural workers, artists, friends and anyone who posted and linked, in order to create a vital chronicle, to read addictively and see each other at parties, bars and endless weekends.

The TJBF was an on & off-line experiment, that alternated Internet, city and writing. It was a fabulous tribe, unrepeatable and plural.

Rafa Saavedra wasn’t the leader —there was none—: he was the electric heart. Rafa was a new type of post-total writer.

His texts exploded genres: neither chronicles nor short stories nor reviews, they were Rafa writing. Because of the leap, critics are still panicking.

Rafa wrote cool and dense: he codified nocturnal frenzy and collectives-characters throbbing in a hybrid language sprinkled with idiomatic photo-ops and things he heard people say.

Rafa would write in his notebook, copy-paste and then remake and remix on the screen, although the main component was his praise for the distinctive life.

His ear was indie music; his typing, post-media metrics. DJ Rafadro was network attitude and ethos.

He kept himself on the margins of Mexican literature. He felt more of an affinity towards his radio show, being a record selector and the street. Rafa was his own post-Mexican literature.

He decided to publish independently and to experiment within social media, combining photography and virtual writing. He was the first systematically cyberrealist Latin American writer.

Rafa loved the city. He followed the trail of new tendencies of consumption, lifestyles and languages. He was a drastic archive, full of winks, a cult author.

Rafa always knew what was next. His recent route: to crashear the academic.

As a person, Rafita was happy and mega-friendly. A disenchanted optimist and good vibes nihilist. He checked out everything that happened in order to ironize about it at an after.

Rafa Saavedra was the most genuine experimental Mexican writer of the last twenty years.

He brought writing out of the book and drugged writing with media.

Rafa’s favorite words: pals, fiesta, beyondeado, ahora, enjoy, Tijuana, my friends.

*

What Rafa and I wanted at the beginning of the century:
http://www.stmedia.net/noticias/escenario/recordando-a-rafa-saavedra#.Uj0azlO5-ky

What Rafa decided to tell us recently:
http://vimeo.com/46787385




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 21 September 2013 }

Goldsmith y el imperio retro-conceptual / Heriberto Yépez

Goldsmith and the Retro-Conceptual Empire



When someone reads Kenneth Goldsmith acritically I think: you need to inform yourself better.

Goldsmith is emblematic of the decade of war against “terrorism.” His work consists of accepting and retransmitting (as is) what power emits, finding it beautiful without having to read it. Using the ready-made as take-over.

He transcribes texts, makes books of pure copy-paste, runs ubu.com, his celebrity prospers. “Uncreative Writing” is already a part of the canon he desired.

His innovation is questionable. One example among others: three decades ago, Ulises Carrión did things that are championed by North Americans today.

They reiterate colonialist practices. By means of manifestos, anthologies and membership, they erase or take over other histories.

His politics attracts students, academics, writers and readers who are undecided between the consensual and the arty. Conceptualism is a cultural manifestation derived from expansionist North American politics. That’s why appropriation is its foundation.

His campaign for stardom and an enterprise of symbolic capital uses a retro-frivolous look as a system of self-defense.

Goldsmith in the White House or on the Colbert Report isn’t the problem, but rather his promotion of a “silly” conformity, complicit with capital and laugh tracks. By depoliticizing writing, he disempowers emerging critical communities. His defect is ethical.

His aesthetic achievements, measured on an international scale, are scant. It’s not conceptualism but a pastiche of other conceptualisms.

Vanessa Place or Goldsmith embody North American expansionism and they give it good taste, post-experimental refinement, radical-soft.

They demonstrate what’s happening with critical post-theory writing that chooses to embrace capitalism while boasting about the twist. A performance of hegemonic possession? No. That would threaten its institutional click.

By denying its apology for capitalist logic and leaving a supposed irony open, a referential machine or a could-be role play, retro-conceptualism collapses. They could have been a performative denunciation but they wanted spectacle and approval, they prefer cynicism to criticism.

Andy Warhol lost his edge. Wharholism today in literature can be successful in the United States or in very colonized countries, mouth to mouth resuscitation among white elites.

By increasing its adhesion to cool conservative values and poses, their text appeal grows in the Globalized South.

One should note the exquisite tone of Goldsmith’s voice: he creates a position familiar with hegemony. The complicity of conceptualism increases as it plays hide and seek with the implications of its program.

An opportunity was lost —if it ever existed— after Language Poetry: a recovery of leftism in North American poetry. It didn’t happen. Love-Obama-tomy arrived.

The Language poets themselves lost credibility by encouraging heirs with reactionary ideals.

North American experimentalism became a fine jewelry shop.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 8 August 2013 }

Bolaño, ¿cuero rock o foto pop? / Heriberto Yépez

Bolaño, Leather Rock or Photo Pop?

Because it is a capitalist career and the inertia of the avant-garde, the academy seeks the “new.”

Ten years after his physical disappearance and fifteen since his hit, Roberto Bolaño is a Latin American writer for readers with literary aspirations.

Literature was a midwife and progenitor for Borges, Rulfo, the Neo-Baroques and the Boom, for which the academy only managed to be ambassador and refrigerator. But Bolaño was already given birth to by the true savage detectives: capitalist readers.

Bolaño dreamed of typing good literature on a cash register. He was planning cryogenics: cool Latin American literature in times of agony. The novel as nostalgia for the novel.

Personal comparative literature. Having that language is gold: the Bolaño oeuvre consists of characters or worlds that are episodes of national literatures and a Calvary for writers. It seems like a “reflection” but it’s retro.

Bolaño’s prose isn’t out of this world. Nor are his structures or beings. His success was transforming the essays of Carlos Fuentes (the sexiest essayist from the Boom) into novels and publishable drafts. He was a designer.

By speaking Hopscotch (colloquially), Bolaño is a Chilean-Mexican-Spanish (atrocious ménage) adaptation of intellectual table talk and paper arrogance. Bolaño wears a rocker’s leather vest but he’s pop.

We liked Bolaño because he marked a moment when readers, journalists, critics, students, writers and academics all read the same book at the same time.

Latin American literature in real time and overtime. All his books are memories of other fashions and resistances.

Sufficiently exiled to be Latino literary coffee, Bolaño tastes like a “savage.” But a savage wearing jeans, an exotic with a brand.

He’s a marginal writer from the 1970s who knew how to become a 1998 Canon camera.

He knew that in order to “save himself” all he needed was a novelistic contest, the possible market. He made a novel about a Hispanic dandy who pretends to be a leader of poets, and who doesn’t actually write a total novel (but creates the illusion that he could).

Bolaño, as an “important” writer, is a product for export.

When others were preaching the death of the Latin American novel, Bolaño raised the flag anew, and the best part is that he didn’t have a clear nationality. Almost a white flag, asking postmodernism for Paz.

Bolaño’s pages appeal to the complete gamut of cultural agents.

And because the figure of the actor, the writer and the singer are blended into one with him, his literature is read like photography.

Bolaño didn’t write a single genre with excellence, but he remembers them all and this age likes that.

We, the savage detectives, that is, desperate collectors and romantic readers.

Bolaño consisted of being ultra-literary in a very unliterary age, artificial respiration for several literatures —Mexico, Chile, Spain, the United States— in a minor era.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 19 July 2013 }

Los peligros del traductor / Heriberto Yépez

The Dangers of the Translator

Reading is more valuable than writing. But there’s a form in which reading and writing become vice versa to each another: translating. And its dangers.

I’m speaking of literary translation, that voice-guard, that looks after the realized variation and election.

The first danger of translating is betraying the other (the translated) without betraying oneself, the mine-myself.

Translating for the sake of what’s translatable.

Fixing, normalizing, “improving.” To bring the other “correcting him.”

If the translator is a great writer, the reader knows him better. But let’s not fool ourselves: translation shouldn’t be a branch of plastic surgery.

Translating should be strangeness. A translation should always be a third way with languages that bump into each other. Translating should differ from both.

If translating the words and leaving the original syntax would be illegible, to naturalize an author in a different language is to reduce him to content and ignore his form (not his alone!).

The most beautiful translations almost always impoverish that difference.

The aesthetics of translation (divergence) struggles against the aesthetics of style (purification).

What is most translatable is the easiest and idiomatically standard literature. What is most translatable is the least literary.

Another danger lies in what we translate. Let’s be frank (that is, dictators): translation is colonial.

What is translated, for example, into English, French or German? The literature made by Noble Savages!

Rarely will a culture (an editorial market) translate a foreign literature that will throw its own understandings out of orbit, send its hegemony into crisis. What is translated almost always confirms the historical prejudices or the provisional imaginaries of the political moment.

Generally, unsubmissive foreigners are not translated and instead marketable or functional foreigners are chosen. We translate what is exemplary. What serves as an example of something we want to make visible in our own culture.

To translate is to make visible.

Frequently at the expense of making (it) audible.

Some translators want to distance themselves from this hegemonic tradition and seek to translate toward the dissonant and the unassimilable.

One mission of the translator is how to translate without producing assimilation, with the knowledge that assimilation is funest.

Translation should show us that there are many forms; it fails when it makes us feel that our language, our culture, our mode can do everything.

Translation should be, on the contrary, wanting to transmit the sensation of being incomplete, of being insufficient and, yet, doing it without creating the impression that what is foreign surpasses us, that we need to convert to it.

As the attentive reader can hear, translating should avoid the colonial.

The colonialist translator and the colonized translator. Translating as imperialism and translating as autocolonialism.

Translating is the greatest literary danger.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 27 October 2012 }

Libros made in Tijuana / Heriberto Yépez

Made in Tijuana Books


I will go over five recent books of literature from Tijuana.

Outside Tijuana few people know that for many years the work of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite was being read alongside that of Roberto Castillo Udiarte (1951), an emblematic poet of border literature. Nuestras vidas son otras. Antología personal 1985-2010 (Aullido Libros-Nortestación, 2010) gathers some of his poetry, which like his prose has the tone of a neighborhood guy, warm and informal. Castillo is a border classic.

Tijuana: crimen y olvido (Tusquets, 2010) by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite (1962), like other novels by him, is fragmentary and has a northern accent. Crosthwaite is usually paratactic and playful; in this book he decided to be more syntactic and dramatic. It would be simplistic to read this book only looking for a plot; one has to read it like a look-out post for narrative structures.

Tijuana writers have been influenced by English, multiculturalism, music and new technologies. Their rhetoric remixes. From Spanglish to the blog, Tijuana literature was born far from Mexico City; dreamed in casinos, currency exchanges, lines to reach the other side and nightspots, it took on its own form. Teejay style.

From this clique of synthetic writings we can still find the derivation of Señora Krupps (Static Books, 2010) by Javier Fernández (1971). More than short stories, machines of heterodox prose. The text of Tijuana distinguishes itself piece by piece through its framework. It conceives the page as menu, jukebox, Foreign Club and maquila factory.

Along with Crosthwaite’s, another book that circulates nationally is Confesión de un sicario. Testimonio de Drago, lugarteniente de un cártel mexicano (Grijalbo, 2011) by Juan Carlos Reyna (1980). Reyna grew up reading Crosthwaite, Castillo and Saavedra. His book is a journalistic application of the resources of Tijuana literature. The testimony of an assassin? Yes, but also a dose of Zeta magazine and Nortec. Reyna created the context for the drug dealer to be transcribed by border literature.

Crossfader 2.0. B-sides, hidden tracks & remixes (Nortestación, 2011) by Rafa Saavedra (1967) is the fifth book from this post-everything freelancer; the voice in off of a radiant desperation. Those who know how to read note that this post-literature is an open bar of verbosity. Noise and voices in clubs and parties. Page music. Pessoa plus pop.

Tijuana literature is made up of code-making, fusion and utopizzas.

Maybe it’s already over: the city that gave it a form is gone. Tijuana literature is a collection of postcards from its entropy.

TJ is a minor literature –Deleuze dixit– made by a minority within a bigger language. A defense of difference denied. Gregarious, over-codified, ironicized.

Except TJ doesn’t deterritorialize itself but rather, hyperterritorializes itself.

Tijuana didn’t write to continue Mexican Literature but instead to narrate a un-national city. To assemble literature, bi-tongue and music. Cool corrido: an other identity.


hyepez.blogspot.com




{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 30 July 2011 }

Žižek, el intelectual contraataca / Heriberto Yépez

Žižek, the Intellectual Strikes Back


Soon after Foucault had decreed the end of the era of intellectuals, Slavoj Žižek appeared.

It’s no accident that Žižek sought the presidency of Slovenia. Žižek wants power. He has it. No other philosopher obtains so much attention in the media, the academy and Internet.

A famous documentary about Derrida captured a certain unease in front of the camera and some inability when it came to improvising “philosophy.”

Žižek is famous not only for his sharp ideas but also for his somewhat grotesque body, his eternally itchy nose –oh phallic conflict–, his rough pronunciation of English, being uncombed when he speaks, a political repertoire of dirty jokes, overall, his voracity when thinking aloud, very loudly.

Is he original? No. Žižek is a Marxist brand (Stalinist stand-up) and a Lacanian psychoanalyst: verbose, neurotic and grandiloquent. (Lacan is the Marcel Marceau of psychoanalysis.)

His relationship with capitalism is similar to Baudrillard’s: a fervent critic of the market who, nonetheless, is fascinated by film, from where Žižek extracts all sorts of theoretical implications. Žižek is an accurate interpreter of Hollywood’s political unconscious.

In opposition to cultural relativism and an occasional totalitarian, Žižek clones himself in his articles, talks, conferences and books.

He is a philosopher about whom one can talk without having to refer essentially to his work. His media interventions define him. One reads his books and, actually, they are always the same one, from The Sublime Object of Ideology to The Parallax View.

What’s the key to his global success?

Žižek is a character. Funny. He feeds the cliché that a philosopher is a crazy person, a maniac, full of strange ideas. Žižek fulfills stereotypes.

Besides, he’s a commentator of popular culture. He applies psycho-Marxist theories; he makes them accessible. The Frankfurt School turned into an interview.

And, above all, Žižek –and what westerner isn’t?– he’s a closet gringo. He is Marx uncovering the ideology behind the Matrix with his mouth full of popcorn.

He is the return of the intellectual who can explain everything and who strikes back against the empire; therein his danger.

His legacy will be ambivalent. On the one hand he divulges leftist ideas in first world countries in the midst of capitalist crisis. On the other hand, he trivializes criticism.

In Žižek, to philosophize becomes an exotic spectacle: digestible and politically incorrect stand-up. Reality-theory Žižek isn’t theory but rather its performance. Fascist proof that postmodern philosophy has now blended with global culture. And that provokes tics in Žižek and the world.

If you haven’t read Žižek, don’t worry. Žižek has already read you.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 12 March 2011 }