Suchergebnisse

This dissertation studies the current Spanish economic, political, and social crisis and its representations through apocalyptic imaginaries. I seek to establish a fundamental political and cultural distinction between two models of these imaginaries traceable in representations of Madrid. On one hand, it looks at cultural discourses that display catastrophist projections of the present and the future, insisting on alarmistic and deterministic messages. On the other hand, it looks at other discourses that subvert this representation of the capitalist crisis as the end of the world, shifting the symbolic value of the apocalyptic imaginaries towards figurations of the end of capitalism. I argue that there is a fundamental tension between these two dissimilar recoveries of the apocalyptic cultural tradition that determines conflicting political aims regarding the social battle for the "right to the city." The first model—most present in public discourse, the media, and mass entertainment channels—promotes a depoliticizing ideology that is functional to the reproduction of the capitalist system. These kinds of narratives lead to widespread states of collective political isolation and generalized pessimism that hinder social reactions to oppressive regulations and policies of dispossession imposed during crises. The second model—which eventually appears within social movements and countercultural production—identifies subjects' and collectives' political agency to imagine and rehearse new and emancipated ways of life through alternative organization of society. To make this argument, I focus my study in three different tropes: desertification, flood, and waste. These are all present in a set of objects and texts from different sources that I analyze, such as press articles, narrative fiction, song writings, and the visual arts, among others. In doing so, I deploy a theoretical framework that combines historical and contemporary conceptualizations of cultural apocalypsis from fields such as anthropology, history, cultural studies or philosophy (Koselleck, De Martino, Jameson, Fisher, among others) with critical literature about the contemporary city within capitalism (Observatorio Metropolitano, Lefebvre, Harvey, etc.). Ultimately, it is my goal to analyze the political condition of imagination and culture by establishing a systematic framework of analysis that takes into serious account structural features, material conditions of production, places of enunciation, and the differential effects in cultural and social reconfiguration of these imaginaries.

In this article, we analyze the first Grito Mudo or Silent Scream —a collective act of disobedience committed by the Indignados movement in Madrid´s Puerta del Sol Square in May 2011— as a glottopolitical scene. In this act, the self-summoned multitude remained silent for one minute just before midnight, when the High Court´s sentence declaring the gathering illegal was to become effective. This collective performance brings together different discursive forms (including language, silence and bodies) to conflictually challenge the normative regimes that place limits on how political participation and democracy are conceived. Glottopolitical scenes, according to Elvira Arnoux, "alter to some degree that which is automatically accepted as well as communicative routines, and force those who are involved to engage in an interpretive action that accounts for the anomalous effect that was generated". From this perspective, we analyze first how the indignados´ ritual is discursively established through the active rejection of the lettered forms that establish the political limits of liberal democracy —originating in legal discourse— according to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. We will then analyze the potencial of this gesture to shape, through its aesthetic and discursive form, a new collective political subject. The silent scream will then be analyzed in contrast with Spain´s New Year´s Eve grape-eating ritual, celebrated annually in the same urban space wrapped in similar aesthetic forms. Through De Certeau´s theory on the common´s daily political practices and, later, Turner´s theorization of "liminal states", we will explain how the Silent Scream, on the basis of its ritual condition, expresses a new political subject and democratic ideal through a series of antidisciplinary practices where the aesthetic formulations of the multitude reinterpret, loosen and circumvent the limitations of official grammar. ; En este artículo analizaremos el primer Grito Mudo, gesto colectivo de desobediencia realizado por el movimiento de los Indignados en la Puerta del Sol de Madrid en mayo de 2011, como escena glotopolítica. En esta acción, que consistió en que la multitud auto-convocada guardase un minuto de silencio justo antes de la medianoche, cuando entraba en vigor la sentencia que ilegalizaba la concentración, convergen diferentes formas discursivas (que incluyen el lenguaje, el silencio y los cuerpos) que ponen en conflicto los regímenes normativos que limitan el sentido de la participación política y los límites de la democracia. Este tipo de escenas glotopolíticas, según Elvira Arnoux, "irrumpen alterando en cierta medida lo aceptado o las rutinas comunicativas y obligan a una actividad interpretativa que dé cuenta del efecto de anomalía que generan". Con arreglo a esta perspectiva, empezaremos analizando cómo el ritual de los indignados se instaura discursivamente a través del rechazo activo de las formas letradas que establecen los límites políticos de la democracia liberal, con origen en el discurso jurídico, de acuerdo con Carl Schmitt y Walter Benjamin. Después analizaremos las potencias de este gesto para conformar, a través de su forma estética y discursiva, un nuevo sujeto político colectivo. El grito mudo, se estudiará entonces en contraste con el ritual de la Nochevieja, que se realiza anualmente en el mismo espacio urbano y cuya estética coincide en muchos puntos. A partir de la teoría de De Certeau sobre las tácticas políticas cotidianas del común y, posteriormente, de la teorización de los "estados liminales" de Turner, explicaremos cómo el Grito Mudo, en tanto que ritual, expresa un sujeto político y un ideal democrático nuevos, mediante una serie de prácticas antidisciplinarias en donde las formulaciones estéticas de la multitud reinterpretan, luxan y esquivan las limitaciones de la gramática oficial.