BEING AGAINST:
(in) The Presence of the Multitude.

by Marsha Gall

This paper is a work in progress and is dedicated to
Maximiliano Tasca (25), Adrián Matassa (23) y Cristian Gómez (25),
who were assassinated on December 31st. 2001
for being sympathetic spectators of the multitude.

[T]he angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
- Walter Benjamin,
Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History

December 2001.

As I conclude my paper on 19th Century Argentinean Circo Criollo (1) for the "Staging the Nation" class, I witness the collapse of my country due to an explosive combination of poor governmental performance and corruption, and a decade of neoliberal policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Images of generalized looting, violence, and a completely altered public sphere circulate through the media. Surrounded by this atmosphere, I decide to entitle my piece on Circo Criollo "Collapsible Stages", and argue for the possibilities that the unstable opens for appropriation and self determination:

"Opposed to the fiction of stability and fixation that the nationalist projects wanted to impose resorting to the pedagogical, these collapsible stages made room for the people to appropriate a space where they could be subjects in the construction of their identity 'as one'." (Gall, 12)

"The Nation" plays itself out through the figure of an imagined community, one that is usually shaped by those in power through the myth of 'national tradition' but, because of the fact that nations are the product of a social construction they can also be rebuilt from below, that is, in the arena of the circus, and/or in the streets. In the years of modern nation-states formation, the Argentinean Circo Criollo, very much like the Mexican Carpa Theatre, emerged with force, despite its precariousness, as the site of a performative identity building. (2)

That was in 19th Century. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, while I am writing about theatre, nation and rebuilding, I attend the spectacle of what looks like the terminal stage of a period of 25 years of neoliberal policies in the Argentinean soil, the complete devastation of what used to be thought of as one of the wealthiest territories in the world. In Buenos Aires' warm December days, shirtless young men, housewives, employees, students, retired people, bikers, motorcyclists, bus drivers, etc, engage with their bodies in a new polis, banging pots and pans to demand a change of policies in the face of national collapse. Malnutrition, unemployment, and fraud are some of the keywords necessary to understand the images, the process, the endless days and nights that take place in a profoundly disrupted urban landscape.

http://www.photoman.pavc.com/pub/albums/public/Argentina_20011220/Ara20011220.htm

On December 19th as a measure to control the lootings and social disruption that the disenfranchised- with the help of sectors opposed to the government- were carrying out, President De La Rúa, announced a 30 day state of siege. As an spontaneous response, the people- mostly the middle class- took the streets, banging pots and pans. This was known as cacerolazo and marked the beginning of a series of popular interventions in the public sphere, through which the peoples voiced their concerns, demands and non-conformity with the course of the government economic policies. The event has been widely chronicled. To summarize its outcome it needs to be said that the cacerolazo provoked Domingo Cavallo's- at that moment Minister of Finance- and president Fernando De La Rúa's resignations (3). Six people and at least 108 wounded and 328 detained was the outcome of police brutality and governmental inoperability.

From the flood of images that reach me in New York, I grasp one, the one that most compels me, the one I choose to open this essay. The image moves in a perpetual present, transcending its status as document, a frozen fragment of the many scenes witnessed by those with camera in hand. It impacts me aesthetically and critically, as all the images of the "one" confronting power usually do. I remain passionately attached to the image of a young man I do not know, who, wielding an improvised cross made out of pieces of metal, faces a diffused power that the photo captures in the shape of smoke. The trail of a tear gas bomb operates in this case as the synecdoche of power. While "the one" is embodied by the young man, power is faceless, pervasive. While the man is still in a kneeling position that sucks him to the ground, power is light, traverses the space, and reaches beyond a corporeal site, a site that the fence- on the right- safeguards. This is how Democracy in 2001 Argentina really calls for a redefinition as post dictatorship. A cameraman and a photographer, absent from the frame but present in the framing, accompany the scene; another level of political action, one that in Argentina has also been repressed with the force of State violence.

May 2004.

The images of bodies being dragged by their hair, by the limbs, bloody, thirsty, desperate bodies have vanished for the moment. The dust has settled, at least for the moment. Now pictures perform as historical documentation, as a way of going back, a replay in order for us to see from a distance. A critical distance very much needed. However, it is still difficult to see clearly. It is difficult to see in an absolute fashion. Now I return to December 2001, to me writing about collapsible stages, and I think of the "unstable" as open to appropriation but in a different way. I am not sure I want to praise the unstable any longer. Or, at least, I feel a distinction must be made: collapsible stages can be taken over, rebuilt by different social and political actors. In post dictatorship Latin America, refoundations can imply a return to nationalistic projects, far from those sought after by the peoples.

Now that the crisis seems to be in a less virulent stage, the multitude in the streets calls urgently for a dramaturgical take. Cindy Brizell & André Lepecki, following Eugenio Barba, define dramaturgy as "the labor of weaving together […] it is the weaving of the threads of trauma. […]" (15) The role was born in Europe before the figure of the stage director arose. Currently it implies that art making is moving from the realm of established disciplines. It also implies that, as we live in the society of the spectacle, it is advisable to interrupt the chain of events and pose the question about their meaning, tracing their precedents and imagining possible outcomes or directions. In sum, dramaturgy implies an interpretative task around the politics of the question.

Argentina's case demands a clarification of the meaning of embodied politics, or, perhaps, to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri signaled as the importance of the multitude becoming a political subject, that is, the subject of a political action towards the future. In Empire, Negri and Hardt define the multitude as

"[the] new figure of the collective biopolitical body. […] it is a multitude of singular and determinate bodies that seek relation. It is thus both production and reproduction, structure and superstructure, because it is life in the fullest sense and politics in the proper sense." (30)

They signal that the multitude is constituent power while Empire is constituted power and a mere apparatus of capture, a reactionary force. One of the central ideas in the book is that the new world order is a response to the power of the multitude, that the authors identify as the power of nomadism and desertion. However, they point out that there is still one stage that the multitude must undertake to overthrow the forces of Empire. For the authors, the question resides in the possibility of the multitude becoming a political subject.

Photo: Mariano Tealdi

"The mere refusal to order leaves us on the edge of nothingness- or worse, these gestures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it. The new politics is given real substance only when we shift our focus from the question of form and order to the regimes and practices of production." (Empire, 217)

Where do the actions of the Argentinean multitude lead.? Some see the possibility of a horizontal democracy. Others, the seed of a neofascist idiosyncrasy, that right wing sectors, represented by military residue such as Aldo Rico y Mohamed Ali Seineldin, could easily co-opt, as some of the internet web pages dedicated to congregate publics around the crisis and its possible solution bear witness to. (4)

There has been a lot of talk about the events in Argentina Activists around the world embraced what happened with enthusiastic hope. Many thought of Argentina as a realization of the power of the multitude, as a revolution of sorts, linking the cacerolazos and the piquetero movement and the recuperated factories with the antiglobalization movements. The proliferation of the connective "and" gives an account of the many movements that the crisis gave rise to.

The piquetero movement arouse in 1997 in the cities of Cutral- Co and General Mosconi, in populations that, due to the privatization of state run companies were emptied of the state of welfare that they had previously had. The first piquete took place there, when unemployed workers interrupted the circulation of Capital by blocking the main routes. The movement gave visibility to those that, without belonging to the structure of production, could get together around the fact of their lack of work. Pickets were historically born as a way of impeding docile workers- those that did not engage in strike- to gain access to the factory. The piquetero movement in Argentina dissolves the space of opposition blocking not the site of production but the circulation lanes.

Photo: Diario Clarín

In the same lines, the movement of recuperated factories gives agency to workers that, after the bosses mismanagement of the sources of work, decide to take over the production sites and run the bankrupt enterprises in a horizontal manner. One of the most famous cases is Brukman, a male garment factory, in which the majority of workers are women.

http://ar.geocities.com/claudiolasheras/fotoperiodismo2.html

On December 18th 2001- the day before the uprising- after months of not receiving their salary, Brukman workers decided to make a strike in their work posts. The owners, that were supposed to return to the factory with the money they owed, never came back. The workers organized different commissions to run the industry in an efficient manner. To this day they have resisted two attempts of evictions, and are organized to the point that they offer trade workshops to unemployed people- from the piquetero movement and others- so they can join them in the production plant. This shows the solidarity networks that are present amongst the singularities that constitute the multitude in Argentina. 10.000 people working in 150 factories and enterprises are the figures that have been reported as the outcome of the movement of recuperated factories.

Photoman- Indymedia

The neighborhood assemblies are also part of the multiples. After the cacerolazos and the popular uprising of December 19th and 20th people carried on meetings in squares, in the street or in squatted stores. The basic claim of this form of horizontal democracy was expressed in the voice "Que se vayan todos" ("Go away everyone"). These assemblies were constituted mostly by middle class people, mainly ahorristas. The ahorristas- savers- are another singular of the Argentine multitude, a singular that many critics are suspicious of, because they are said to have benefitted from the exclusion and sacrifice of the most needy, during the years of Carlos Menem presidency (1989-1995, reelected till 1999).

At the beginning of December 2001, after a pouring out of 20 million dollars, and in order to prevent the fall of convertibilty- the Argentine peso was pegged to the dollar for a decade- Minister of Finance Domingo Cavallo decreted what was to be known as the corralito. That meant that people could not withdraw their own savings from the banks, since these had ran out of money.

http://www.tabaquismo.freehosting.net/dejavu/argentina.jpg

The general discontent- specially in the face of the government expropriation of the small forms of property, that for many constituted their lifetime savings- led to this state of permanent deliberation. The multitude's insurgency found its expression in the cacerolazos that were to be continued in the assemblies. This form of direct democracy communicates the rejection of centralized political power, even as it is enacted via the political parties. In "The Neiborhoods Rise", John Jordan and Jennifer Whitney offer an insight of how these meetings are experienced by their social actors:

"As Roli, an accountant from the Almagro assembly said: 'People reject the political parties. To get out of this crisis requires real politics. These meetings of common people on the street are the fundamental form of doing politics." (5)

Critics centered their attention on the "Que se vayan todos" call, and qualified it not as a recuperation of the ideals of the res-publica but as a pre-politic, pre-fascist state of affairs. "Who would occupy the space of democratic representation if all leave.?" "Can't the multitude see that not all were accomplices?," are some of the questions posited by intellectuals. Other interpretations of the sentence deal with a conservative view in which, for them, "Que se vayan todos" speaks of a desire of strong institutions and of class difference as people knew it in the past. Argentina was one of the only, if not the only, Latin American country with a wide middle class. The collapse not only meant death and misery for the poor, but also the slip of low middle class to share their condition with the poor. While some international activists link these actions with the antiglobalization movement, cultural critic Alejandro Kaufman states that:

"The antiglobalization movement like other European movements from the 60' s and 70's have called into question consumerism or a capitalist way of living. On the contrary, this is a group that protests because they were not provided with the warranty that this system of consumerism was to continue." (Página 12, Buenos Aires 28/01/02. My translation.)

http://www.crisisstates.com/CAW/gallery1.htm

Critics also saw in the enthusiasm around the appearance of the multitude the logic of the mass media that privileges the event over the sense of history. Linking the portrayal of events in Argentina with the rhetoric that surrounded September 11 and the World Trade Center site as "Ground Zero", Nicolás Casullo states that

"Media always presents a zero degree of the events that is absolutely unreal, conceptual, abstract. I would say that the gaze that makes the thing appear as an irruption is the typical gaze of a mass media society.[…] The fact that there is a history is forgotten, it omits every memory and it says: 'Ok, gentlemen, we start from scratch: there is an antiterrorist war. These are the terrorists, the new Hitler and we are the good ones.' […]." (Página 12, Buenos Aires, 25/03/02. My translation.)

Photo: Nicolas Pousthomis

Sociologist Horacio González stresses the dangers of thinking about the multitude detaching the concept from the history of the peoples (pueblo).

"[…] the concept of the multitude cannot be thought without the concept of 'the peoples'. […] it is better to talk about multitudes […] using a cautionary plural. In this way we can point out to the volatile and at the same time energetic character of these excitable forms of public consciousness. They do not replace the popular, or the notion of social classes." (Página 12, Buenos Aires 17/01/02. My translation.)

What is at stake in the Argentinean case is the exhaustion of not only an economic model but also of the ways in which politics gets enacted. This discussion is all about the performance of politics, as embodied in direct action, through the collective body of the multitude. The multitude's performance of presence banging pots and pans evaluates- much as the IMF does- the efficacy of the Argentine government.

It also challenges the ethics and validity of international economic programs such as the IMF, the World Bank, etc, that it claims has drained developing countries through the demand of State structural reforms such as market deregularization, privatizations, welfare programs cuts, and the like. This process shows how in a globalized world the space left by the collapsible/ unstable can be appropriated by anyone. Or, as the soccer jargon expresses: "Está para cualquiera." ("Anyone can win".)

Sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists have been resorting to their theoretical frames and methodologies to interpret, and to question the different performances at stake in this pre-revolutionary Argentina. The recuperated factories case reawaken Marxist concepts that, till the moment, were seen as perhaps too abstract and detached from reality. Althusser's writings on interpellation haunted the Argentinean State apparatuses in their vigilance and defense of private property. Negri himself was consulted via video conference by excited intellectuals about the insurgence of the multitude as a possible political subject in Argentina (6). Old texts were read alongside the events. Rivers of ink overflow, carrying theories and critical readings produced with the urgency of the event itself. Not only events but also the people were claiming for a clarification. The role and importance of the critical was also called forth as part of this political performance. Because the intelligentsia was also included in the ouster "Que se vayan todos".

While I feel anxious of all what I am missing in terms of background to fully comprehend and interpret these happenings, or to position myself either with the critics or with the enthusiastic crowd, yet I am a participant and an observer, an observer trained in the field of performance studies to think seriously about performance. This has prompted me to join- not the street actions, which I missed- but the debates around it. Here I will look not only at events that have been constructed or that can be conceptualized as performances -cultural, organizational, political, governmental. I will also employ performance as a lens, an episteme, a way of knowing, or a post discipline perhaps well suited for a post dictatorship, post politics moment.

Photo: Mariano Tealdi

Emerging as a field in the 70's, performance studies is seen by some scholars as a post discipline, given the fact that it defies traditional disciplinary formations, bringing together theatre, anthropology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, history, queer theory, feminism, philosophy, and even physics and technology.

In "Aesthetics and Politics: From Fujimori to the Gulf War", Beatriz Sarlo proposes to frame "the electoral campaigns in Argentina, Brazil and Peru" as "a practice that could be called, at least provisionally, post-politics." (181) She resorts to the discourse of politics as spectacle- specially produced and circulating through the mass media- to contextualize the period she is referring to- the nineties. Linking her work to the concept of simulacra, she posits the new political style of the south cone as one that "renounces representation", that is, one in which the sign substitutes the referent. In Sarlo's view this constitutes a void of politics as we knew it before. In the case I am dealing with, post-politics relates to a post performance, in regard to the evaluation of an administration or the carrying out of certain procedures, and also in terms of past politics as we know it, that is, incarnated through democratic representation.

In the Event of Performance.

In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor defines performance as

"vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called 'twice-behaved behavior'" (p. 2,3)

To arrive at the definition of performance as 'twice- behaved behavior', Schechner begins offering another concept that can prove useful in the analysis I am rehearsing here: he talks about "restored behavior" as the main characteristic of performance.

"Restored behavior offers to both individuals and groups the chance to rebecome what they once were- or even, and most often, to rebecome what they never were but wish to have been or wish to become." (Between Theatre and Anthropology, 38.)

So, following the path that Schechner- and Anthropologist Victor Turner- initiated, Taylor draws the distinction between the levels on which we can approximate performance, that is, as

"the object/ process of analysis, that is, the many practices and events […] that involve theatrical, rehearsed, or conventional/ event appropriate behaviors." or as "the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance. […] performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing. The bracketing for these performances comes from outside, from the methodological lens that organizes them into an analyzable 'whole'." (The Archive and The Repertoire, 3)

Taking a diverging stand from those who view performance as that which disappears, or that which is constituted precisely by the fact of its own disappearance, Taylor emphasizes performance as a mode of storage, one that operates differently than the classical archive. Although referring to performance within a totally different context, that of the visual arts, Peggy Phelan, in one of the texts that are central to the field of Performance Studies, defines the ontology of performance as totally foreign to reproduction:

"The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered." (Unmarked, 147.)

In this sense, Taylor, replicates:

"Debates about the 'ephemerality' of performance are, of course, profoundly political. Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performances practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?." (5)

To me the debate has the shape of a Moebius strip. It is precisely because of its evanescence that performance needs the act of its re-iteration. Thus, the 'sides' of this appearance/ disappearance debate just signal where the different scholars choose to remain, if within the politics of the ephemeral, and thus eluding 'regulation and control' (Phelan, 148), or within the politics of reactivation and social memory. I would add that the tension between ephemerality or persistence also opens the inquiry to the field of the 'post', that is, of the consequences of performance, the after-event, that in Argentina's case has proven to be vital, or to be more accurate, lethal. In this way, for Schechner the feature that best defines performance is its repetitiveness, the possibility it opens for rebecomings. For Taylor, via her conceptualization of performance as embodied memory, performance gets defined by its being transferable.

In Argentina, the total collapse of the politics of representation, as it plays out in a democratic system, called forth the presence of the peoples in the street.

Photo: Indymedia

Acknowledging that their representative authorities had betrayed them, the multitude, composed of many diverse sectors, reclaimed the public sphere to voice their concerns and to make their demands sound. Through the terminal stage of the crisis, that some scholars and activists envision as the opportunity of an inaugural politics, Argentineans finally got the meaning of part of their history. They buried the infamous sentence "Por algo habrá sido" ("They must have been involved in something"), that explained in their minds the disappearance of 30.000 men and women in the years of the Dirty War. Now, the causal relationship shifted as they understood the link between State terrorism and the imposition of neoliberal policies during the democratic periods- specially throughout the Menemist era. People could finally see that the nation's dismantling of the last twenty five years (1976-2001), via State violence and deregularization was a well orchestrated plan, that many resisted or suffered with their bodies. In this sense, many that have never joined the H.I.J.O.S escraches (7), appropriated the technique to shame publicly fraudulent banks, speculators, and exploiters.

Photo: Andrew Kaufman

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo also played a vital role in the December uprisings, functioning as an ethical referent and a reminder of the power of reclaiming public space. One of the songs that integrated the repertoire of the multitude, when the repressive forces attempted to kick them out of Plaza de Mayo, stated: "La Plaza es de las Madres y no de los cobardes." ("The plaza belongs to the Mothers and not to the cowards.") Diana Taylor' s take on the concept of "scenario" proves useful in this regard, especially as she states that

"scenarios conjure up past situations, at times so profoundly internalized by a society that no one remembers the precedence. […] Rather than a copy, the scenario constitutes a once-againness." (The Archive and the Repertoire, 32)

It may be true that, as Horacio González notices, the concept of the multitude erases the history of the popular movements that has been so integral to Argentinean history. (Página 12, Buenos Aires, 02/11/02) It can be also appropriate to agree with Nicolás Casullo when he points out that the multitude participates in the logic of the mass media, more interested in covering the event than in linking it to a previous history. (Página 12, Buenos Aires, 03/04/02) In this way, the multitude could be held responsible for its thinking of itself as an orphan, not only of its representatives but also of its historical antecedents. The multitude, according to these critics, is seen as an emergent, as erupting, and in this way, following Hardt and Negri, it is the embodiment of constituent power. That is why the multitude is a cool thing to see; it is joy, creativity, excitation. The multitude, many agree, is seductive, it echoes the trope of ground zero, and not the notion of historical build up. But, undoubtedly, the presence of the repressive forces in tanks and horses, hitting protestors with whips and wooden sticks, operated for many as a wake up call, a repeat of Dirty War tactics, a once-againness that they were not willing to accept.

http://www.crisisstates.com/CAW/gallery1.htm

De La Rúa's declaration of the state of siege itself, not simply the restrictions, triggered the presence of the many as one in the streets of Buenos Aires to engage in acts of civil disobedience. Here it is the memory element within the singulars of the multitude. Mediation was not enough. No-body better than one's body. There they were, caught in the scenario of repression, but they felt courageous or desperate enough to disregard it. In "Ruidos que hablan broncas. El decir y el hacer de las cacerolas en Argentina."- "Noises that speak of anger. The telling and doing of the pots and pans in Argentina"- Claudia Briones et. al. inform that "between December 19th 2001 and March 31st. 2002, 2.014 cacerolazos of diverse magnitude were undertaken" (9) Whenever there was something that needed popular clarification, the cacerolas were there. Not automated responses, not persistent representation, but embodied practice, re-production, re-presentation. The people were following closely the unfolding of decision making within the private spaces of the Congress, the Government House, the Court of Law, even the private residencies of those implicated in power.

Photo: Nicolas Pousthomis

It might be useful to think about the concept of the multitude in terms of what allows us to see, to expect, to embrace, to hope, and to fear. As Negri and Hardt point out, the force of the multitude is not a being merely against, as if the act of opposing alone would suffice. Even when these authors state that "This being-against [is] the essential key to every active political position in the world, every desire that is effective- perhaps of democracy itself." (211) they also acknowledge that refusal leads to nothingness, and that the power of the multitude towards futurity resides in its being "the immediate actor of biopolitical production and reproduction." (65) To my understanding, the concept of multitude opens up the way for us to see- in a mode that the trope of "peoples" does not- the different networks across class difference that are active within the encompassing figure of the many.

It is important to see why not only the multitude per se- that is, the different movements that engaging in acts of civil disobedience are articulated in the notion of multiples- but also the concept reactivated by Hardt and Negri- and Paolo Virno- proves to have the energy to trigger all the debates that I have referred to throughout this paper. It is as if the figure of the dramaturge should interrogate not only praxis at the level of the street but also at the level of those who are supposed to give it a certain meaning. Up to know, this multitude eludes a definite verdict. It invites a play of the unstable. Unstable institutions, unstable theories. The multitude shows, once more, that we are far from the certitudes of modernity, and that truth will only arise in practice, where perhaps we will be able to "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" by the dream of a fixed meaning.

In an époque so marked by the predominance of the virtual- in terms of the promise of what is to come- the many as one, the multiples within the multitude, show that, at least for the moment, it feels good to be in the body, to rebuild from below, to counter poor governmental performance and international monetary institutions vampirism- with the power of our presence.

Photoman- Indymedia

Notes:

(1) In Argentine theater history, the Circo Criollo (Creole Circus) is associated with the name of Jose "Pepe" Podesta and his family. Circo Criollo' s shows had two acts: one was the traditional circus performance in which clowns, trapeze artists, jugglers, ecuyeres, and magicians, among other artists, performed their prowess to enjoy the audience. In the second part, clowns at first and then actors, performed pantomimes representing different scenes, in a sentimental, funny or heroic mood.

(2) In Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha presents the pedagogical and the performative as two unequal (in terms of established power) but strong forces of collision in the project of identity formation. The pedagogical takes the people as its object of civic education in order to incorporate them within a system. The performative is the counter narrative that the people, as subjects, undertake, embodying their own ideas of what their nation is, or what this peculiar feeling of belonging means for them. To my understanding, the pedagogical in Argentina's nation building played itself out, among other realms, within the established theatres, via formal European theatre, while the performative appeared in the improvised, hybrid like, Circo Criollo, a genre that for the telling of its stories drew from vernacular characters like the gaucho or the recently arrived disenfranchised immigrants.

(3) For a follow up of Domingo Cavallo after December 2001 go to http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/eng/events/index.html and http://www.hemi.nyu.edu:8000/esp/newsletter/issue6/pages/globalcondemnation.shtml

(4) For an excellent account of the different activist and reactionary web sites around the cacerolazo movement see Victoria Ginzberg's article "Todo lo que se dice y se cocina en el ciberespacio cacerolero" "All that is said and cooked in the pot banging cyberspace." (http://www.pagina12web.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-1223.html)

(5) In http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/txt/2002/0918que_se_vayan04.htm

(6) See Negri, Antonio et. Al. (2003) Diálogo sobre la globalización, la multitud y la experiencia argentina. Buenos Aires: Paidós..

* Marsha Gall (Marcela Fuentes) is a Fulbright Fellow and a PhD candidate in the Performance Studies Department at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Founding member of Producciones ParaNada she works in theatre, performance art, and independent radio as director, producer, dramaturge and/ or performer.

References:

Bhabha, Homi (1990) Nation and Narration. Homi Bhabha, ed., London: Routledge.
Briones, Claudia. et.al "Ruidos que hablan broncas. El decir y el hacer de las cacerolas.
en Argentina." http://hemi.nyu.edu/eng/seminar/peru/call/workgroups/popperf1cbriones.shtml
Brizell, Cindy and André Lepecki. "Introduction: The Labor of the Question is the
(Feminist) Question of Dramaturgy." In On Dramaturgy. Women and Performance. Vol. 13: 2, #26 2003.
Casullo, Nicolás. "Cacerolazos, ni sacralizar ni consagrar." Página 12, Buenos Aires,
25/03/02.
Gall, Marsha "Collapsible Stages: El 'Ser Nacional' in 19th. Century Argentine Theatre."
González, Horacio. "Cacerolas, multitud, pueblo." Página 12, Buenos Aires 17/01/02.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000) Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Jordan, John and Jennifer Whitney. "The Neiborhood Rise" .
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/argentina/txt/2002/0918que_se_vayan04.htm
Kaufman, Alejandro. "Uno no constituye una acción política por los ahorros." Página 12,
Buenos Aires 28/01/02.
Phelan, Peggy. (1993) Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York:
Routledge.
Sarlo, Beatriz. "Aesthetics and Post-Politics; From Fujimori to the Gulf War." Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No.3, The Postmodernist Debate in Latin America (Autumn, 1993), 180-193
Schechner, Richard. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Resources:

• Videography:

"19/20 Ecos de una rebelión." ("19/20 Echoes from a Rebellion") Directed by Maite LLanos, Ezequeil Adamovsky, Juan Laguna, María Eva Blotta, Mariana Percovich, Federico Sainz, Martín Bergel and Barra Productions. 2002.

"Argentina, crecer o desaparecer." ("Argentina, Growth or Disappearance.") Directed by Luciano Zito. 2003.

"Piqueteras." ("Women Picketers.") Directed by Malena Bystrowicz and Veronica Mastrosimone.

"Obreras en lucha." ("The Struggle of Brukman Workers.") Directed by KR Litzenberger, Remy Kachadourin. Produced by Gepgrafia Subversiva. http://www.revolutionvideo.org/alavio/

• Film

"Memorias del saqueo." (A Social Genocide.) Directed by Fernando Solanas. 2003.

• Links

HIJOS http://hijoslucha.netfirms.com/

Madres de Plaza de Mayo http://www.madres.org/ and http://www.madres-lineafundadora.org/

Acorralados http://www.acorralados.com/

La Vaca http://www.lavaca.org/tapa.shtml

Argentina Arde http://orbita.starmedia.com/argentinaardelp/index.htm

Latin American Center (UCLA) http://www.isop.ucla.edu/lac/article.asp?parentid=3566

Cacerolazo Global

http://www.nodo50.org/railesverdes21/inicio/CaceroladaMadrid.htm

http://www.cyberclass.net/cacerolazo.htm

http://www.mipagina.cantv.net/westpoint/paris.htm

Escrache

• Images

http://www.andrewkaufman.net/argentina/00.html
http://argentinaphoto.linefeed.org/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/business/newsid_1504000/1504769.stm
http://www.crisisstates.com/CAW/gallery1.htm
www.taiga-press.com/features/ argentina_crisis/