Can an action be purposeless?—asked rhetorically Pierre Bourdieu in his Theory of Action, as if Bourdieu were paraphrasing A. N. Leont’ev five decades later. Nope, for every action has its object. No object is an object, would teach us any Zen master applauding with one hand whilst covering the moon with the index of the other one. But the construction of the object, any object, cannot be estranged from the word, from meaning making, and in doing so, the construction of the subject is inherent to the construction of the object and vice versa. It’s like building a city with no citizens. It’s like citizens building, well…nothing, not even having a place to live while they build the place they live in.
Can there be human action without signs? Very limited. Ask a toddler and you will get bubbles and mumble for answer. But the toddler’s gestures could count as signs as well. Umberto Eco also taught us that the unavoidable aim of the sign, in its supreme mystic sense, is to be interpreted [by someone], linking again purposeful/purposeless action and representation.
Can there be a sign without meaning, a sign that transpires individual sense, but no universal meaning? What are the limits to representation? What is exactly a representation such as a sign? How can we get rid of its fetishist pool, or even worse, how can the subject be a subject without the influx of the social, external, material representation (the tool, be it psychological or not). In other words, how can the subject cease to be the end result of fetishism? Of the fetishism of objects that have a life of their own? What the child learns (including first and foremost language) is for him or for others? Forget and forgive Jacques Lacan and welcome Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
A group of artists are about to explore, once more, the limits of representation, looking perhaps for the holy grail of the absolute knowledge on the limits of representation or just for fun, or both. Miguel Herberg and visual artist Domingo Sánchez Blanco are about to burn and bury representations of the material support of representations known as moving pictures (films) of events belonging to a near past in Chilean History: Chilean prisoners in the concentration camps of Chacabuco and Pisagua. These were the infamous detention camps set by Pinochet in Atacama Desert, using the old and forgotten buildings that housed the «caliche» or «nitrate» miners, financed by English capitalism, designed by English industrial entrepreneurs and built by Chilean workforce. Pinochet’s military and civil Government, a contubernium of military treators and coward coup d'état cheer leaders, the ones that brought to the South-American nation a second-class mercantilist revolution in the 1980s, really had a knack for sarcasm.
Contrary to what many intellectuals think in Indian Flanders, in what is left of the old Province of Chile, these artists will burn and bury nothing, for representations cannot be burned and buried. Representations are collective and live in between the material and the immaterial. Memories are collective as their ultimate support is social-based distributed signs. The material support of those representations can be burned and buried but for them to exist at all you need, let us say, people, subjects in which they live the social life of the collective. So even whilst they will be burning and burying those representations of the material support of the representations called «historical memories» or whatever, what in fact they will be doing is sowing another layer on top of those memories, which can always be recovered and shared: just ask anybody who attends the funeral these artists are planning to perform at the Art Museum-Mausoleum of Morille, a small Castilian village in Salamanca Province. The attendees can tell the story of the requiem mass (as the surviving prisoners of the camps can chronicle their buried experiences with words). Burning and burying are but the emergence and flourishing of a new network of signs, a new collective (a particular) that will recontextualise the old one with individual sense. We need sense, living sense, in our lives, not buried meanings in a dusty audio-visual archive.
Is it an act of appropriation? Yep. Is it an act of art colonialism? Of course. The mastery of any language is an act of appropriation. The tortured and the collective that survives death can appropriate and modify at will the act of the torturer or the executioner in a sort of aikido of words/signs, in a sort of martial lock that turns the corrupt force of those who committed ill deeds against themselves. And to me that is exactly what Herberg is trying to accomplish. Even though he did not phisically stay in the camps, by reporting them, he has been all these years a prisoner of his own documentarian acts and of the politically-correct discourse that sets the story straight. Would a crew of German filmakers who knew no word of Spanish have achieved what they have said they have on their own?
Now it is time to apply the aikido lock. Fight back against dead meanings, against the fossil record buried by institutions, some of them long gone, like the German Democratic Republic, the Studio H&S, which (partially) produced and reproduced the moving pictures of the camps, or quintessential burial places, like museums. They truly become concentration, detention camps of representations built by the very Governments that create legitimate forms of discourse just to pontificate against those who abuse those forms, built by the very establishment that betrayed their people. The question we ought to answer here is when exactly the films produced by the propaganda apparatus of what would soon become a Stalinist regime turn into the sacrosant providers of legitime memories? Is there a cure for documentalist fetishism?
