When the brain learns something new it generates its own opioids. Opium and morphine do not completely cancel the perception of pain, but rather cancel its affective aspect: “I am in pain but it doesn’t affect me.” They reduce the phantasmagoric component of pain, the part that frightens. The affective component of fear is reduced only by learning to detach paralyzing anxiety from fear of real danger. By understanding that much of what we experience and feel is not an exclusive property of our individual experience, but rather something we share with many others, we can move away from egocentric suffering and confront, along with others, the social contradictions that express themselves through our bodies.
Dr. Joseph Feelgood, “Hacia una fisiologia de las luchas emancipatorias”, p. 19, Ed. See you Later, Alligator 2006
Learning is an essential element of both our activities and of collective reflection on what we do and what we want to do. We try to be aware of the steps we take. We often feel there is not much time. We struggle with anxiety, that very urban malaise linked to uncertainty over our capacity to be a consumer or, more directly, to survive.
Abriendo Caminos conceives learning as both a practice of construction and a political project: a very partial education strategy. [The name Abriendo Caminos means Opening Roads – tr.] We believe that local struggles with the communication media gangs that are part of the logic of imperial power are very uneven. They cannot be reduced to a pitched battle to conquer the audience or to seize control of the means of symbolic production, which under certain conditions can be desirable. We do not think that there is one exclusively valid form of struggle.
Our goal is for the audience to cease to exist along with the spectacle that allows it to exist and gives shape to it; our desire is for consumers of symbols to recognize themselves as subjects capable of consciously acting in order to carry out their own symbolic production. We find that the experience of filming, editing, and broadcasting expands the capacity to criticize media language and defetishizes the means of image production, while simultaneously producing a creative and increasingly autonomous time. That does not mean that we know how exactly we learn or that we use tactics precisely which can be reproduced and are proven to be effective. We learn along the way, with the symbolic and material resources available at the moment. We try not to specialize, nor do we all neurotically try to know the same things. Complementarity of knowledges and reactions in the face of the same situation can be a source of power and cohesion.
Diversity is a weapon that has not been explored enough: the “Benetton” discourse that neutralizes diversity is going to explode when we learn to better coordinate politically incorrect diversities and when we are able to agree on moments in which we can concentrate our energy in the same point of instability, and within moments of dispersion across different fronts.
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The discussion of subjectivity forces us to take responsibility for our own identity as it has been constructed by social forces and by ruptures with those forces: to know our own history within History. The reduced space that this quest has historically been given in historical narratives might be partially explained by the dynamics of the Cold War, in which the West claimed monopoly over the exaltation of the individual while the East laid claim to the collective. But present conditions are different. There are many new struggles, ideas, investigations, and experiments, still minoritarian but growing, that make it possible to genuinely talk about subjective aspects of existence—ours and others’. These are more felicitous sketches of the relation between the individual and the collective. But, at the same time, in those discussions there is too much noise, too many exercises that neutralize the power (potencia) of the conflicting subjectivities: states in which the relation between material and subjective conditions are not problematized. We see this in the difficulty in openly discussing our own strategies of material reproduction, the inability to see the diversity of developing subjectivities and how the latter are moored to different forms of exploitation and alienation. In order for those exploratory discussions to be different from market research on consumer profiles, and to avoid feeding them, we need to address our own contradictions, acknowledge them and avoid conceptions that claim moral purity, so common among the petty “vanguards” of big cities.
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Those who venture into institutional spaces, whether to use their resources or radicalize conflicts in those spaces, are usually confronted with a sense of unease when they face a sponge-like medium, always thirsty to absorb all kinds of representations, but hesitant when it comes to give the material and symbolic tools it cares so much about to spaces in which there is some kind of true friction. Like sponges, one would like to squeeze them so that they release more. At times the medium seems viscous: every spontaneous movement that tries to liberate itself from schedules and other bureaucratic demands of business logic finds itself trapped amidst the viscosity of the medium, of those who want to earn a safe place and remain in it, only looking upwards.
It can be more useful to regard artistic events in institutional spaces as a misunderstanding: an instant alliance of different and even opposite interests, of tactics that seek to build incompatible strategies. Sometimes nobody immediately wins in those moments. What matters is what kind of identities manage to create more meaning and more of a future within them.
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Abriendo Caminos is a collective of journalism that was born in 2003 by decision of social organizations of unemployed workers and neighbors of Claypole, 25 km south to Buenos Aires. La Comunitaria TV, Radio Abierta La Gomera, radios La Terraza y El Sotano, our paintings on the walls and printed press are all members of Abriendo Caminos. The name comes from a piquetero motto: “cortando rutas, se abren caminos” that means “cutting (obstructing) routes, new roads are opened”
