Quoted in Ana Longoni, “‘Vanguardia’ y ‘revolución,’ ideas-fuerza en el arte argentino de los 60/70,” Brumaria 8 (Spring 2007): 66.
This work has been listed under several titles, including Lock-up Action, Encierro y Escape (Entrapment or Confinement and Escape), and Acción del Encierro.
On July 28, 1968, the Onganía regime revoked the autonomy of Argentina’s universities, which had first been granted in the reform of 1918.
As Cerejido notes: “It was 1968 and as the Tucuman Arde action was taking shape, (Carnevale) presented Encierro, the piece documented in the photograph that I saw in Kassel. For this piece she told me in the interview, it was her intention to induce the people into exemplary ‘liberating violence.’ The liberating violence was spiked by some elements of screwball comedy. The exterior wall and the door of the gallery were made of glass. Once the people were inside, Carnevale locked the door from outside. The glass was covered with posters that the trapped public (most of them students) proceeded to remove. Then a group attempted to take apart the hinges. A man that was passing by, seeing the desperation in some of the faces inside, broke the glass wall to let them out. At this point an artist friend who was inside as a mole, disappointed by the actions of the rescuer, hit him with an umbrella. There was pushing and shoving, angry insults and the noise of broken glass. It happened to be October ninth, the first anniversary of Che’s assassination in Bolivia and the police were particularly alert. Soon a police battalion intervened and closed down the exhibit.” Fabian Cerejido, Assured Pasts or Gambled Futures: Contrasting Approaches to Context in Selected Twentieth Century Mexican and Argentine Art Practices (UCSD, Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism, 2010), 67.
There is a good reason, I believe, for the persistence of this revelatory modality in both art and revolutionary theory. When confronted by countless instances of human cruelty, there is a sincere desire to believe that this is not due to some intrinsic predisposition, but is instead the result of a lack of knowledge or insight. We want to believe that humanity remains violent, vengeful, passive or complicit only because we have not yet adequately grasped the true nature of our own identity or our relationship to others. This is the utopian kernel, the optimistic humanism, at the heart of avant-garde discourse.
Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1981), 31.
Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974), 190. "Voline" is the pseudonym of Russian anarchist Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eichenbaum.
Lenin’s account of “exposure literature” in What Is to Be Done? focuses on the genre of factory or industrial investigations, then popular in Russia. 9 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 85. He writes on page 119, “Our wiseacres, however, at a time when Russian Social-Democracy is passing through a crisis entirely due to the lack of sufficiently trained, developed, and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneously awakening masses, cry out, with the profundity of fools: ‘It is a bad business when the movement does not proceed from the rank and file.’”
Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 85. He writes on page 119, “Our wiseacres, however, at a time when Russian Social-Democracy is passing through a crisis entirely due to the lack of sufficiently trained, developed, and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneously awakening masses, cry out, with the profundity of fools: ‘It is a bad business when the movement does not proceed from the rank and file.’”
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 48.
What Is to Be Done? was written in response to divisions within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) during the early 1900s. The two primary factions within the RSDLP, which would subsequently evolve into the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties, were identified with political journals. The moderate faction, associated with Rabocheye Dyelo (“Workers’ Cause”), was willing to accept some negotiation with liberal democratic forces in Russia and worked primarily through legal forms of trade unionism. The more radical faction, associated with Lenin and Iskra (“Spark”), advocated armed rebellion and sought to overthrow the entire political system of Tsarist Russia.
This wouldn’t prevent Lenin himself from accusing the Mensheviks of precisely the same fault: underestimating the capacities of the proletariat. For Lenin, the Mensheviks’ failure to support the uncompromising Iskra plan was evidence of their own a lack of faith in the radicalism of the proletariat. See V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (January–July 1905, Volume 8), trans. Bernard Issacs and Isidor Lasker (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 34.
“The Congress most emphatically condemns this disruptive conduct and warns all Party-conscious Social-Democrats against the notorious organization-as-process theory which has been used to justify disorganization and which has debased the theory of revolutionary Marxism in an unheard-of manner.” Ibid., 191.
“This shows (something Rabocheye Dyelo cannot grasp) that all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element,’ of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about ‘overrating the importance of ideology,’ about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labor movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders.’” Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 39. “And so, we have become convinced that the fundamental error committed by the ‘new trend’ in Russian Social-Democracy is it’s bowing to spontaneity and its failure to understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us Social-Democrats.” Ibid., 53. “But what was only part misfortune became full misfortune when this consciousness began to grow dim (it was very much alive among the members of the groups mentioned), when there appeared people—and even Social-Democratic organs—that were prepared to regard shortcomings as virtues, that even tried to invent a theoretical basis for their slavish cringing before spontaneity.” Ibid., 63.
“Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.” Ibid., 31.
“There is no middle course … to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology …” Ibid., 40–41.
“The Bolshevik idea was to build, on the ruins of the bourgeois state, a new ‘Workers’ State’ … The Anarchist idea [was and] is to transform the economic and social bases of society without having recourse to a political state, to a government, or to a dictatorship of any sort. That is, to achieve the Revolution and resolve its problems not by political or statist means, but by means of natural and free activity,economic and social, of the associations of the workers themselves, after having overthrown the last capitalist government.” Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 175.
Voline continues: “It was quickly corrupted. It organized itself as a privileged caste. And later it flattened and subjected the working class in order to exploit it, under new forms, in its own interest. Because of this the whole Revolution was falsified, misled. For, when the masses of the people became cognizant of their danger, it was too late. After a struggle between them and the new masters, solidly organized and in possession of ample material, administrative, military, and police strength, the people succumbed.” Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 157. Voline himself was criticized by the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, who called him a “moralizing intellectual unconnected with social practice.” See Paul LeBlanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), 208.
Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 47.
Debray was a young philosophy professor from Paris at the time. Despite receiving a thirty-year prison term from the Bolivian government, he was freed in 1970 following an international campaign that featured the efforts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle, and Pope Paul VI. Debray went on to become an advisor to François Mitterand during the 1980s.
Debray contends, “The guerrilla force, if it genuinely seeks total political warfare, cannot in the long run tolerate any fundamental duality of functions or powers.” He cites Guevara on this point, arguing that, “the military and political leaders” should “be united, if possible, in one person.” Revolution in the Revolution, 107. 23 Ibid., 65. Debray is paraphrasing Castro here.
Ibid., 65. Debray is paraphrasing Castro here.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 86.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 106.
Debray continues, “At bottom Trotskyism is a metaphysic paved with good intentions. It is based on a belief in the natural goodness of the workers, which is always perverted by evil bureaucracies but never destroyed.” Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 114.
“These are the militants of our time, not martyrs, not functionaries, but fighters. Neither creatures of an apparatus nor potentates: at this stage, they themselves are the apparatus.” Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 102–103.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 112. In fact, the deliberate disconnect between the foco and a larger, urban, party-based structure, as well as the foco’s reliance on volunteerism and exemplary violence, was questioned at the time by figures such as Abraham Guillén, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who criticized foquismo in his book Estrategia de la Guerrilla Urbana (1966).
Ibid., 109.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 109. See also page 84.
To be continued in “The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent.”