The Tyranny of Common Sense

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Description

As one of the first countries to implement a neoliberal state apparatus, Mexico serves as a prime example of the effects of neoliberal structural economic reform on our sensibility. Irgmard Emmelhainz argues that, in addition to functioning as a form of politico-economic organization, neoliberalism creates particular ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. It reconfigures common sense, justifying destruction and dispossession in the name of development and promising to solve economic precarity with self-help and permanent education. Pragmatism reigns, yet in always aiming to maximize individual benefit and profit, such common sense fuels a culture of violence and erodes the distinction between life and death. Moreover, since 2018, with the election of a new Mexican president, neoliberalism has undergone what Emmelhainz calls "post-neoliberal conversion," intensifying extractavism and ushering in a novel form of moral, political, and intellectual hegemony rooted in class tensions and populism. Integrating theory with history and lived reality with art, film, and literary criticism, The Tyranny of Common Sense will appeal to academics and readers interested in the effects of neoliberalism and, now, post-neoliberalism in Mexico from a broader, global perspective.
Acknowledgments

Introduction to the English Edition

1. Neoliberal Sensibility and Common Sense

2. Mexico's Neoliberal Conversion: Spatializing Political Economics or Neocolonial Extractivism

3. Subjectivation and Governmentality: Life, Work, and Imagination under the Neoliberal Sensible Regime

4. Neoliberal and "Post-Neoliberal" Culture Policy: Farewell to Autonomous, Committed Art?

5. After the Neoliberal Ruin of the World in Common, Can We Share a World Beyond Representation?

6. A Country in Pain: Resignifying Violence toward Autonomous Spaces for Survival

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Latin American
• Película fotográfica
• México
• Visual culture
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• Mexico
• Caribbean
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438485959
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE TYRANNY OF COMMON SENSE
The Tyranny of Common Sense
Mexico’s Post-Neoliberal Conversion
IRMGARD EMMELHAINZ
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2021 Irmgard Emmelhainz
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Emmelhainz, Irmgard. author.
Title: The tyranny of common sense : Mexico’s post-neoliberal conversion / Irmgard Emmelhainz.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includesbibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021001873 | ISBN 9781438485935 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781438485959 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Neoliberalism—Mexico. | Common sense.
Classification: LCC JC574.2.M6 E46 2021 | DDC 320.510972—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001873
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Lizzy, Layla, and Roberta.
To Nacho Sánchez Prado, Oswaldo Zavala, Dawn Paley, and Sayak Valencia, my fellow Horsemen and Horsewomen.
To David Emmelhainz.
To the women from the Grupo de las comidas de los viernes.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the English Edition
1 Neoliberal Sensibility and Common Sense
2 Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion: Spatializing Political Economics or Neocolonial Extractivism
3 Subjectivation and Governmentality: Life, Work, and Imagination under the Neoliberal Sensible Regime
4 Neoliberal and “Post-Neoliberal” Culture Policy: Farewell to Autonomous, Committed Art?
5 After the Neoliberal Ruin of the World in Common, Can We Share a World Beyond Representation?
6 A Country in Pain: Resignifying Violence toward Autonomous Spaces for Survival
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lizzy Cancino, Roberta Sonamour, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, José García, Arturo Barranco, Eshrat and Javan Erfanian, Bruce Parsons, Silvia Gruner, Miguel Ventura, Rebecca Colesworthy; each knows why. And my teachers Amparo Fernández, Karen Cordero, David Raskin, Rebecca Comay, Sonia Nimr, John-Paul Ricco, Franco Berardi, Coni Comaleras, Fabián Sejanes, Belu Oteda.
INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
The official estimated number of the March 8, 2020, women’s march in Mexico City was eighty thousand, but it definitely felt like we were many more. Knowledgeable veterans calculated up to ten times more women at the demonstration, although many had been dissuaded by physical and police barriers to make it to the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square and the symbolic center of the country. The jacarandas were with us, all in full purple bloom. A few days before that, Harvey Weinstein had been sentenced to twenty-three years in jail for various accusations of rape, abuse, and harassment. The day after the march came the strike. The strike became so important that small, medium, and big corporations either joined in or condoned the strike supporting their female workers. Giant retail companies like Comercial Mexicana and Banco Santander displayed public support for the women’s general strike in banners inside their branches, while some brands’ logos were disseminated on social media to symbolically strike in solidarity.
For the march, the water in the fountain on Reforma Avenue, adorned with the sculpture of Roman goddess Diana, and the water in the fountain of the wisdom goddess Minerva in Guadalajara had been dyed red as if they had begun to bleed. In Mexico City’s Zócalo, the names of women murdered by femicide violence found in public records were inscribed in white-mold letters. Mothers of murdered and disappeared daughters led the multitude. The feminist march and strike were reproduced in cities across the country and in Latin America, creating waves of green (the emblematic color of the pro-abortion struggle) and purple, which in Mexico City matched beautifully with the blooming jacaranda flowers that had arrived a month earlier than usual. During the march, there was no direct repression, but as I mentioned, access to the Zócalo was dissuaded. The images of a half-empty Zócalo contrasted with Reforma Avenue packed with demonstrators in purple and green, matching the jacarandas. A total of six people were detained for attacking protesters at the doors of Palacio Nacional (National Palace, the siege of the federal government), which had been heavily protected with metal doors. Bellas Artes Palace, hotels, restaurants, and shops along Reforma and Alameda Streets displayed similar kinds of armored protection. And yet, the hundreds of riot squad female police with faces reddened by the sun, who were stationed on the edges of the procession, passively observed the marchers through their protective masks and watched as the morras 1 either spray-painted or broke through the armoring and began to destroy windows, doors, and security cameras. A few meters from me, a group of morras had begun to smash the window of a Starbucks next to the Hilton Hotel with a long hammer and a thick wooden beam. Further along, I saw a similar group throwing rockets that exploded into loud banging noises and dissolved into pretty-colored gases. Morras were also releasing rocks the size of soccer balls, had burned the wooden barricades protecting the Cathedral in the Zócalo, and had begun to circle around the bonfire, chanting. To me, these expressions of rage were beautiful, and I silently thanked them for risking their skins, freedom, lives, integrity, and sanity for all of us. While these not at all sporadic episodes of vandalism occurred, many of the other women present chanted, “No violence, no violence,” without knowing or understanding that those violent gestures indeed spoke on behalf of the women’s struggle. “The origin of women’s oppression is private property,” I said to a fellow woman marching in my contingent, wishing to have a moment to discuss Engels and Federici with her, and to remind her of the Chilean hymn by LasTesis “El violador eres tú” (You are the rapist), which directly accuses the State of being founded on and maintaining heteropatriarchy and thus gender violence. Beyond the political need for an intersectional feminism, a feminist popular pedagogy needs to be more widely adopted to enable a general understanding of the links between heteropatriarchy and State indifference to gender violences. After all, it is the State that grants aggressors impunity. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—the first ever from the left to be in power in Mexico—took the long-expired stance of universal struggle for rights and emancipation. “I am not a feminist, I am a humanist,” he declared, in sync with the leftist prejudice that feminism is a petit bourgeois struggle that takes away focus from the struggle against the main enemy. Days before, the First Lady had shared a flyer supporting the women’s strike on her Instagram account, only to post a different flyer a few hours later in which she expressed support for the president and his regime. According to the president, only some of the striking and marching women were fighting against femicide, “but there is another current that is against us and they want the government to fail and prevent the consolidation of the Fourth Transformation [the self-ascribed historical name of López Obrador’s regime].” 2 Paranoid, the president accused women of being conservative and wanting his government to fail, when in truth, one of the main demands of the march had been that the State cease giving impunity to gender-violence criminals. By expressing paranoia and indifference toward the women’s march and strike, just as authorities behave blandly when action against women’s aggressors needs to be taken, the president himself is demanding silence from the victims. This is why vandalism against official monuments (Patrimony) is a direct expression against State impunity granted to male aggressors of women. A symbolic gesture toward the Catholic Church’s historical and present complicity with women’s oppression during the March 8th protest took place as women “liberated” the Cathedral erected across from the Palacio Nacional by pulling away the shielding fences and leaving their bras hanging around the entrance gates. “¡Fuimos todas!” 3
At the beginning of November 2019, the collective Mujeres Organizadas had called for an indefinite strike at UNAM to protest against gender violence. Female students took eleven out of the thirty-nine UNAM campuses, including the Filosofía y Letras and Ciencias Políticas y Sociales faculties. Despite the establishment of an institutional protocol in 2016 to deal with harassment from professors to students and male students against women, the morras paralyzed classes and barricaded entire sections of the university, demanding that the protocol be amended and real action be taken. This occurred against the backdrop of the long and very visible struggle in the mass and social media to bring justice to Lesvy Berlín, a UNAM student murdered on campus by her boyfriend in 2017. A judge had concluded that it had been a suicide, despite the existence of surveillance images of them having a fight and him eventually hitting her. Finally, in October 2019, her boyfriend at the time, Jorge Luis González Hernández, was accused of femicide and condemned to forty-five years in prison. Berlín’s case served as a catalyzer to reclaim State authorities to become implicated in femicide cases. At the end of March, a group of women has been occupying the main siege of the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission) in Mexico City for almost seven mont