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La Piedra Ausente // The Absent Stone

Sandra Rozental did her PhD research in the town of Coatlinchán in the municipality of Texcoco, just outside of Mexico City. As an anthropologist,  the time she spent there and digging around in archives is not surprising– anthropologists do that sort of thing.  She was on the trail of a story about how knowledge, history, and ownership were caught up in modernist Mexican nationbuilding of the 1960s, and how they still are. The resulting research is quite good and I’d recommend her articles to anyone interested, but that’s not what I want to write about.

I want to tell you about her film, “La Piedra Ausente.”  In English, it’s “The Absent Stone.”

el traslado 02

Produced in partnership with Jesse Lerner, it is not an ethnographic piece exactly. It’s a documentary, and seems more of an ethnographic analogue to me. It’s– ok, I’m a sucker for beautiful complicated film, even if I am not a film person, per se. This is incredible.

It’s particularly worth looking at for fans of cinema, of Mexico, and, possibly most relevant here, for academics thinking about the media in which they might render their work.

Made of archival footage, animation, and interviews with Coatlinchán locals and the engineers and architects who took their stone away, the film is about an ancient carved rock. The rock, transported by radical new feats of engineering to be displayed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, became just as much a symbol of Mexico’s modern patrimony and industry as of its prehispanic past.

The documentary tells a good story: the largest carved stone produced in the ancient Americas, referred to as either the god Tlaloc or the goddess  Chalchiuhtlicue,  was in Coatlinchán, half finished and a bit broken, until the mid 1960s. Its removal to Mexico City in 1964 provoked an uprising, or something like one, and an armed intervention. The stone is still remembered in Coatlinchán, in such visual representations as  the replica below.

La Replica

Something really good happened here, something which stands on its own as a piece of film. It is enjoyable in its own right and informative in its own ways.  This film shows a non-didactic commitment to rendering people talking history, talking identity, talking technology and knowledge and ownership, that is really complex and unapologetically ambivalent.

Here’s the trailer. See it if you get the chance. Are there other academic/public crossover pieces that inspire you? What do you think makes for a good one?

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How are monstrous monsters monstrous?

“Monsters never have children,” Peter Sloterdijk told us.  He was suggesting that we moderns, with our obsession with novelty, are about that life, so to speak.

At the end of May, Peter Sloterdijk gave a series of talks at Irvine.  Even if you weren’t in attendance, you may be familiar with Sloterdijk’s work.  The (massive) first volume of his Bubbles was translated into English from the German recently, and it’s making the rounds.

In this particular lecture series Sloterdijk took as his topic “bastards”– the unique, the unprecedented, the uncomfortable– the monstrous, in fact.  His route in was French opulence, with Louis XV’s mistress and advisor the Marquise de Pompedeur (formerly the never-quite-ordinary Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson) and her rise from the emerging middle class to an impossibility of wealth and power.

1. Every wish granted

Madame de Pompedeur is a rhetorical figure in Sloterdijk’s talk. Mme. de P. is not the sum of historical contingence and agency.  She does not bumble along.  In Sloterdijk’s work, she is pure deus ex machina, the composed story which always already is punching its own punchline.

And this semi-fictional figure was told in prophesy, when still a child, that she’d be the King’s lover. With this information, she became the kind of person who could be. It’s not just her rise that Sloterdijk is working through.  It’s the sheer unprecedented-ness of it. Sloterdijk puts it like this:  “In all likelihood Madame de Pompadeur was at the time the only person in France, if not in Europe, whose every wish was granted.”

She is a creature of unlikely entitlement here, an excess of sexy witty sumptuousness for whom all that stuff is only a stopover on the way to what she was made up for. The unlikeliness and completely produced nature of her triumph is worth taking a moment with.

2. On the flourishing of ideals?

Sloterdijk is a great thinker on the topic of flourishing and the mutualism, or exploitation, that sustains.  Bubbles, the first volume in his Spheres,  involves thinking through what he calls placental relationships.  The placenta is the is the companion that makes the subject real, and the framing for similar subsequent relationships. “From it, energies flow to me that form me.  Nonetheless, it remains unassuming in itself, never demanding its own presence” (Bubbles: 357).  For Sloterdijk, the subject will always have a sustaining or constituting other, even if it is imaginary or inanimate.

He gives us placental relationships, sustaining others that “never demand” (or never make demand that we notice) and then he gives us Mme. de P.

What makes her flourish as a subject?  Surely, the king’s attention, and the attention of a nation.  Perhaps also the perfectness of the story: the impossibility that someone like her could emerge from her class produced, after all, the conditions that made her fascinating.  The fortune someone told her as a child was absurd, her rise was amazing, and she, herself,  a curiosity.  An absolutely integral part of the way deus was clearly in her machina is that she shouldn’t have succeeded, at least as far as she’s depicted here.

I rather think this is productive for thinking about idealized subjects.  What kinds of monsters are the impossibly lucky?  Or the rhetorically perfect? I think it’s a serious consideration for feminists watching the media space these days, especially when thinking through the superwomen trope that fabulous performer Beyoncé Knowles or corporate phenom and writer Sheryl Sandberg have been discussed in terms of lately.