by Paul North
Santiago-Viñas-Santiago / October 2017
For Willy Thayer, who moved a river in me
Theory in the Critical International. Professors travel. They trek their personal penury and their meager intellectual wares over highlands and lowlands, and, because culture is supposed to fly outward without stopping and never—gods forbid—turn around and go home again, altered by the foreign, we aren't really supposed to be affected by what encounters us on our travels. We are professors, not students. We are experts, untouchable.
How lucky they are in Chile! How lucky they are in Chile, the past is dead and gone, how lucky that their state did not externalize it's hideous violence into secret ops, proxy wars, distant destruction of sovereign states and peoples without sovereignty, offensives in which the people at home barely believed. How lucky they are to have had a home-spun dictatorship, how fortunate that it is over and has been expelled from their nation once and for all. How envious I am that they, so far south, got the full benefit of the freest free market from the Hayek school, the Chicago School, the American corporate school up north. Between us the driest desert in the world—money scoffs at distances. It turned a murderous coup into a social reformation. What stability! "Chile is one of the most stable economies and our honest ally." How lucky that they converted brutalities into profits, detention centers into shopping malls. This is not all. How charmed the life of critical theorists suspended between the desert and the glacier. They don't know how lucky they are! To have their object so clearly in front of them, even if few ears are listening. Except the students, not the students!, some few students whose ear for critique has been sharpened by the experiences of their parents and teachers. They hear the past calling like the hollow whisper on a wireless call.
Portrait of a Thinker in Traffic. Neo-liberalism is good for traffic. Rules are for following, people without means who clutter up the city are for moving out of the centers to new desolate zones. Not like in Argentina—there's no dawdling here, that is the old way. The old way blows away. Stiching his car through the city, the thinker—nothing can block him, not diligent workers or entrepreneurs with their malls, offices, homes. No place to go, no matter. Keep driving. Flow is everything. We are happy with small affordances: to pass consumers and producers by. Passing is pleasure, unlike the acrobats who greet us at each traffic light, jugglers who illuminate the cliff edges of the system of flexible labor. Gainfully employed by contingency, they stand on their heads, balancing balls, a few pesos. "Viste, no se me cayó ninguno." "See, I didn't drop one."