Friday, March 1, 2013 | 02:30 - 04:30
Host Organization: Department Of Sociology And Anthropology
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Constellations of Rubble:
The Spatial Generativity of Destruction
Gast?n R. Gordillo
University of British Columbia
What, exactly, is a ruin? Can the ruptures congealed in the countless ruins that are strewn all over the world help us look at space differently? In this paper, I propose to look at ruins as nodes in spatial constellations that reveal the generative afterlife of traces of destruction. This move, I argue, requires submitting ruins to what Adorno called ?a logic of disintegration?: a process through which seemingly bounded objects are dissolved into the disjointed, immanent multiplicity of rubble. My argument draws from subaltern experiences of ruins and rubble at the foothills of the Andes in northern Argentina, which unsettle elite, fetishized views of ruins and can help us rethink space, its production, and its destruction and afterlife. The palimpsests of rubble examined in this paper are the product of centuries of state violence against indigenous people and of more recent waves of capitalist expansion, disruption, and decline. The most recent patterns of debris were generated during my fieldwork by the dramatic expansion of agribusiness that, in bulldozing local spaces, was subsuming this region to patterns of urbanization and industrialized production and thereby dissolving the very distinction between the rural and the urban. In examining how these myriad nodes of rubble form a regional constellation, I seek to reveal, first, the extent to which the destruction of space has become sedimented in contemporary geographies and, second, the power of this rubble to continue affecting the people living around it. Drawing from Benjamin and Adorno, I argue that seeing ruins as outward-looking nodes in constellations of rubble reveals the historical processes of violence congealed in those objects. This requires moving beyond ?ruins? in order to look at space through a new lens, attentive to the material and affective immanence of the multiple ruptures that define it.
Gast?n Gordillo is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. A Guggenheim Scholar, he is the author, among other books, of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (forthcoming with Duke University Press), Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (2004, Duke University Press, Winner of the AES Sharon Stephens Book Prize), and En el Gran Chaco: antropolog?as e historias (2006, Prometeo).
Friday, March 1, 2013
02:30 - 04:30
Cost:
Free
No registration required
Location:
Loeb Building, Room: A720
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