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Article Excerpt
In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" Walter Benjamin observes that "just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized--the medium in which it occurs--is conditioned not only by nature but by history" (255). In twentieth-century Mexico the historical spectacle of the revolution--the convergence between the advent of technological reproducibility and the forcible entry of the masses into the realm of sovereignty--moved the image out of the realm of aesthetic distinction into that of social function, and ushered in a fundamental shift in collective perception. The immense photographic and filmic production of the revolutionary decade is an inventory of human action, an imagistic grasping of the concrete conditions of life in its (often cruel) immediacy, and the exposure of a new political optic that revolutionized the social function of art in Mexico and beyond. Within this vast inventory of technologically reproducible photographic and filmic images perhaps the most widely recognized, the most permanent and historically durable, has been that of Francisco Villa en la silla presidencial, two interchangeable photographs that can be purchased to this day in popular street markets throughout the country.
In a recent essay Andrea Noble asks why the image of Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata sitting together in the National Palace on December 6, 1914, with Villa occupying the presidential chair, has come to encapsulate the meaning of the Mexican Revolution in its entirety:
If you had to select one photograph that signals and evokes the Mexican Revolution in contemporary cultural memory, it might well be Francisco Villa en la silla presidencial. Arguably the photo opportunity of the revolution [,... ] [t]he pervasive presence of this photograph in the Mexican cultural landscape, obsessively reproduced and reinvented across a range of cultural texts, cannot be overestimated. Like the heroic statues of revolutionary leaders that sprang up in the aftermath of the conflict, Villa en la silla has become something of a (photographic) national monument in its own right. (195) (1)
Why has this image come to stand in for the whole ten years of revolutionary uprising and civil war? Noble situates her response within the historical framework of the Mexican state's post-revolutionary cultural policies. In particular, she considers the iconicity of the image in relation to the post-revolutionary state's desire to orient memories of the agrarian civil war toward a peace, stability and unity grounded in institutionalization and the state-led mythification of the revolution's actors and most significant deeds. Without going into detail about how exactly the post-revolutionary state utilized or sought to take advantage of such images, Noble observes that the photographs captured the post-revolutionary cultural imagination because they coincide fully with the Obregonist, Callist and Cardenist projects of the 1920s and 1930s; that is, to select and organize the representations of the past and to do so in such a way as to found the state's new hegemonic project on the overriding principle of identitarian (that is, geographic and ethnic/racial) unity:
There is nothing ordered or regimented about this sea of faces and sombreros: this is the revolution as popular struggle. The impromptu scene further bespeaks the mythical meeting of north and south and hence performatively enacts a form of unification that chimes with post-revolutionary discourses of cohesive nationhood. But more than this, the sea of faces with its range of somatic tonalities and associations with the revolution as popular struggle--from the dark-skinned indigenous faces, to the lighter mestizos and pale criollos---becomes the face of modern mestizo Mexico, where discourses of mestizaje played a key cementing role in the process of making the Mexican mosaic cohere. (207)
In other words, for Noble the photographs are visually analogous to the legitimizing projects of "a post-revolutionary hegemonic rhetoric of national identity" (210); a rhetoric that, in typical Hegelian fashion, subsumes all social parts to a whole conjured up as an abstract totalization. According to Noble, Villa en la silla gives the emergent post-revolutionary Mexican state what it requires for its conciliatory processes of social mediation. It does this on two separate counts. First, "these photographic images represent the repressed of the revolution: popular power" (212), thereby allowing the state to demonstrate its integrative and legitimizing function in relation to the subaltern, and still potentially insurrectional, masses in the 1920s and 1930s. "That such 'radical' images were allowed to circulate," observes Noble, "testifies to the status of post-revolutionary cultural politics and power as subject to the processes of negotiation and accommodation between state and society" (212). Second, Villa en la silla also gives the post-revolutionary bourgeoisie what it needs in order to disavow and defend itself against the threat of popular upheaval, because photographs such as these, documenting the cataclysmic disarticulation of social order, "are uneasy reminders of a past, on one level at least, best forgotten" (211).
In their relation to the post-revolutionary state's mobilization of historical national consciousness and "identity," such iconic images give both bourgeois and subaltern classes exactly what they want or need. They are an all-inclusive memory and foundational myth of origin for both bourgeois and subaltern views on legitimate authority in the present, and on its origins in the revolutionary history of a homogenized (national, rather than regional or local) peasant agency. As such, they can be commemorated, celebrated, vindicated ad aeternum from both sides of the hegemony/ subalternity divide, since they are the pure articulation of the social nature of a state whose power always originates in the peasantry, for either positive or negative reasons and results.
Hegemony, however, is fragile and there is an important weakness underlying the incorporation of Villa and Zapata into the post-revolutionary pantheon of heroes and collective memorization. As Ilene O'Malley observes:
Because Villa and Zapata were basically class heroes who represented still unresolved grievances against the propertied classes, their images carry within history lessons that belie the myth of the Revolution. The incorporation of Villa and Zapata has at its core a contradiction: it keeps alive the threat it is supposed to subvert. The same propaganda that dazzles the public with their machismo perpetuates the possibility that the examples of their struggles may undermine the ideology of the present regime. (144)
Noble notes that,
[...] read against the grain of the hegemonic discursive structures in which it circulated, Villa en la silla could be seen--paradoxically--as a potentially radical and destabilizing image that speaks to the experiences and concerns of the popular classes. Instead, however, the photograph's sanctioned meaning turns on a disavowal of historical knowledge (both Zapata and Villa were vanquished by the conservative revolution embodied by Carranza and Obregon) in favor of belief: in the radicalism of the new order. (210)
Villa en la silla therefore embodies an economy of violence that uncovers three distinct moments within each of its two camera flashes: (1) the agrarian revolution as the foundation of the post-revolutionary state; (2) the constitutive exclusions of this state (again, the agrarian revolution); and (3) the specter of the potential return of that which is excluded.
However, in Noble's accurate account of the historical significance of this iconic image there is a speculative understanding of history that is grounded in the implicit establishment of a direct historical-political continuum between the events of December 6, 1914, the general cultural policies of the post-revolutionary Mexican state, and mnemonic processes of bourgeois/subaltern identification. As a result of this implicit continuum Noble is able to project the post-revolutionary state's identitarian cultural nationalism back in time, to the photographs taken on December 6, 1914, in order to then project that bourgeois ideal back into a future in which revolutionary historical experience has already been reterritorialized by the state and its class interests into specific rationalizations and productive biopolitical grids of intelligibility for both the present and the future.
Within this continuum Villa, Zapata and the faces that surround them become the human essence not so much of the revolution per se, but of a post-revolutionary managerial rationality designed to replace the contradictions of insurrection with the bourgeoisie's capacity, by utilizing moments of agrarian subjectification that nevertheless threaten official accounts of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary worlds, to orient historical intelligibility toward order, homogenization, and the establishment of a common bio-political language that unites the state and the peasantry as the mutual origins of the national post-revolutionary community.
This managerial rationality might not always be capable of fully suturing state hegemony to the histories of agrarian peasant revolt, Noble indicates. However, she concludes, the cultural memory generated by the technological reproducibility of Villa en la silla presidencial has indeed been able to "shore up" (213) the relation between history, insurrection and the post-revolutionary state, in order to indicate the latter as the historic destiny of all those poor, landless people who took up arms in the Mexican revolutionary wars.
However convincing this interpretation might be in retrospect, one underlying problem does remain concerning the status of the political in this approach to the agrarian event. Within Noble's interpretation of the iconic value of these photographs, December 6, 1914 cannot exist as an event in its own right since the significance of its images is always already captured by a relation of unmediated reciprocity between the peasant occupation of the capital city and the history that followed it (including, presumably, the ratification of the Constitution of February 1917 and the post-revolutionary agendas of the Obregon, Calles and Cardenas regimes). Noble notes that the images "represent the repressed of the revolution: popular power" (212). But this is still too vague because "nothing is political in itself merely because power relationships are at work in it. For a thing to be political, it must give rise to a meeting of police logic and egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance" (Ranciere 32). Reading Villa en la silla as an expression of popular power repressed in post-revolutionary times characterizes this profoundly political spectacle as a subconscious prophecy of the destiny and place of the peasantry in what would later become its captured relation to the state and to post-revolutionary institutional history: a biopolitical history that began with General Obregon's Agua Prieta rebellion and the assassination of Venustiano Carranza in May 1920, and that then continued with the rise to power of the Obregonist and Callist factions of Sonora and the process of the revolution's institutionalization through the formation of the caudillo-led party-state.
Noble's approach to Villa en la silla is grounded in what William Spanos has called "the essential imperialism of metaphysical ontology." In his impressive reading of Heidegger--"Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings which aims to recover them as such as a whole for our grasp" ("What" 93)--Spanos characterizes metaphysics as an end-oriented mode of inquiry intended to domesticate or pacify the indeterminate realm of the uncanny in order to reduce it to a condition of management:
Metaphysics [...] in its post-Greek, that is, Roman, form, is a way of thinking that perceives "beings" or "things-as-they-are" from a privileged vantage point "beyond" or "above" them, that is, from a distance--an "Archimedean point," to appropriate Hannah Arendt's apt phrase--that enables the finite perceiver to "overcome" the ontologically prescribed limits of immediate vision or,...
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