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That’s why a third outdated understanding (invoked to exhaustion in these weeks) is the most laughable of all: to lament that in “Mexico” there’s no “rule of law,” and, instead, that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 }