Territorial policy and its forms

Greta Winckler

contact: gwinckler[a]filo.uba.ar

Abstract

The dispute over how various processes of political activism are carried out results in a struggle for the very definition of the term: what is politics. Or rather, what is understood by a manifestation of the political. From the 1960s onwards, traditional forms of participation linked to trade union organisations or political parties began to be questioned, giving way to sociological and anthropological theorisations on the so-called “new social movements”. In Latin America, following the reflective lines of the so-called global North, fields of study also began to open up that consider the multiplicity of possible manifestations of the political. However, the relationship between image and politics in this particular framework was not part (nor is it part today) of the theoretical path that was and continues to be so fruitful. This responds to a global verbalisation of the social sciences - which think of images as simple illustrations. This conception is currently being questioned, especially by the so-called affective turn that runs through the humanistic disciplines. However, not only the iconic turn is ignored - if we take up a category of North American visual studies from the 1990s - but also the richness provided by the research of visual anthropology (which can be traced back to the beginning of a discipline such as anthropology at the end of the 19th century); as well as the perspective of the German Anthropology of the Image. The same can be said about the prolific work of Georges Didi-Huberman, whose re-reading of the unclassifiable methodology of Aby Warburg is central to understanding a type of anachronistic knowledge that makes possible the least expected interconnections between various phenomena of social life. Current trends such as the sociology of the image, recovered by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Bolivia, obliterate the path of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks, closing the power of the image to timid outlines of a possible theoretical proposal, which in the end is an updated return to the semiotic theories that subordinate the mechanisms of creation of meaning of images to those of discourse

The forms that territorialized politics assumes in countries like ours, in Argentina, cannot be explained only within the framework of a chronology of the development of militancy and social organization practices. They open up to multiple phenomena that intertwine the borders of the political-institutional, social militancy, the artistic and the academic - as well noted by the local avant-gardes in the 60s and 70s. Within this framework, a genealogy is recovered but not as a search for a primordial and unique origin, but as a chain of clashes of experiences and processes that allow us to address the praxis of the present, and above all the idea of ​​form. This complex, polysemic word is understood here from the contributions of Didi-Huberman and his return to the visualities promoted by the Russian avant-gardes of the 20s, as well as formalism and the so-called conceptualism in the artistic field. The intersection of art, life and politics in the 20th century in Argentina's avant-garde movements fuels and is central to understanding practices that can be seen today in the many manifestations of embodied politics, such as the feminist movement.

Publications

«Genealogía visual de movimientos juveniles: el arte y el cuerpo en la manifestación política. Una mirada desde la Antropología Visual» en e-imagen Revista 2.0, Vitoria-Gasteiz-Buenos Aires, Sans Soleil Ediciones, marzo  2016

“La manifestación política y sus formas. La acción colectiva y su entorno visual”, en Antropología e Imagen. Guarini, Carmen; Gutiérrez de Angelis, Marina (comp.). Buenos Aires, Editorial Sans Soleil. 2015