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[Negative Xicanidades] Demanding the Impossible: Heretical Thinking from a Xican@ Nomadic Register9/28/2021 Demanding the Impossible: Heretical Thinking from a Xican@ Nomadic Register “As any number of radical theorists […] have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” —Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009) Mark Fisher’s hopeful diagnosis of our current capitalist-colonial world deviates from his strong attachment to Fredric Jameson’s earlier assessment in various writings that the dominant world is a totalizing, shape-shifting monster incapable of being thwarted off or destroyed. One doesn’t have to look too far to know how political movements or radical thinking from below and to the left are beginning to shake off their pessimisms that this dominant system, or as Chela Sandoval once called it, the “postmodern neocolonial cultural machine” vis-à-vis an engagement with Jameson, is more and more able to collapse to engender new modes of life-giving and life-circulating economies premised on radical egalitarian, democratic, and liberatory models or methods of emancipation. One might look to how the Zapatistas from autonomous municipalities in Chiapas, México are combatting what they call la hidra capitalista, a monster with many heads. Zapatismo teaches us what Chela Sandoval taught us many years ago: that a decolonial line of force—our methodologies of emancipation (whether those of Sandoval or others)—must be co-constructed to enable new forms or methods that perpetually re-orient or re-adjust themselves to make a crack on the wall of Capital (or patriarchy or colonialism or ideology). I think with Fisher’s hope that our supposed “natural order” is “mere contingency” and that we must demand the impossible: our liberation from such an order. Yet what has been troubling me and my commitment to such a radical struggle for hope (and I’ll take cue from José Esteban Muñoz’s use of the term that he takes from Ernst Bloch) is how others situate the boundaries, limits, or threshold of such a demand on certain peoples. An overwhelming example to this is how we, whether People of Color or otherwise in their expressive and expansive politics, overdetermine the role or edge of “white” peoples’ freedom. This is most evident when considering how various non-white groups ask white “adjective” people to develop paternalistic relationships to them—that white people cannot be free because they are irredeemably white, thus always configured into the oppressor. While this is surely an issue and problematic to tackle, my concern here is more of how La Xicanada is entangled into the same ontological fold of limitations—such as, groups wanting their paternalism to their struggle only, not to struggle together horizontally—as some impose on them/us a threshold of our articulations of liberation. It troubles me. Throughout my public writings—and in my first book form collection of them, Xicanx Nomadic Register (forthcoming)—I have been concerned with what speaks to me and what prompts me to write. Ever since my first experiences declaring myself a Chicano and then Xicano—two distinct yet interweaving political consciousnesses—I have always faced an encounter of interpersonal criticism, condescension, or disaffection from others. Even when I was in a MEChA chapter did being “Chicano” become looked down upon, an ironic condition I perpetually encountered. Ridiculed or denunciated as cultural nationalist, being and becoming Chicano was to inherit baggage, as much as it was to inherit a legacy of radicalism, hope, and a politics of emancipation. Identifying with the “X-” in Xican@ did nothing more than add an additional range of critique, ambivalence, or disidentification. Those that did the denunciations said to us, “we are not like you, nor do we desire to be like you—those who desire an identity outside the normative, hegemonic order of things, you Xican@s, are performing heresy.” While I exaggerate here, I mean it. My own writing, thinking, and theorizing (as I work at the foundations of a Xican@ philosophy, or my own philosophical positions) has always engaged what I want to name, vis-à-vis a naming I borrow from the Zapatistas, “the below.” I think-with the punks, the queers, the heretics, the poors, the outcasts, the rebels, the avant-garde artist-practitioners, the cultural workers, the beatnik working-class, and/or the Xican@s who struggle for an image, representation, or articulation that maps their name. I want to unfold and unearth how the below works at power (or counter-power), at subversion (or subversive politics), at resistance (or re-thinking agency, ethics, and enchanting the processes of becoming)—or how to struggle and generate autonomy (not as individual but a collective, network, and planetary future). For me, this has meant heretical thinking or a method of heresy—enunciating and acting against the dominant world’s superstructure (the realm of ideology or imaginary). Heresy: at odds with what is generally accepted. It’s thinking from below, it's thinking against the grain, it's thinking against order, it's thinking beyond the norm, it's thinking that confronts conflict/antagonism. It’s something that pushes us to think otherwise, to be a heretic against the popular ideologies of our world (I thank Gustavo García for pushing me to define what I mean when I speak the heretical). Another way to look at it is how Wynter mobilizes “heretical”: a new subject expression that works through and beyond dominant ideology (and I take this formulation from the decolonial philosopher Daphne Taylor-García). As such, thinking, doing, and creating in and beyond La Xicanada has necessitated for me to re-constitute what we face, how we confront it, and what praxis ought to enable us to move toward our desired horizons. Yet, I propose, and invite. I don’t have the answers. My “oughts” are full of questions. From my own Xican@ nomadic register (a term I use yet don’t define with an exact definition); I want to offer how motion (by way of movement) shapes our conception of struggle. For me, a Xican@ nomadic register meant a way of seeing, a way of perceiving, and way of consciousness. It is mobile, fluid, and transversal. It attempts to speak to transculturation, embody its edges, and re-define the identity of struggle. In musings that operationalize the term, if only as hints or shadow to it, it has meant to become otherwise to feel otherwise, constantly constructing and manufacturing lines of flight, lines of force, and lines that re-orient or re-invent. Heresy here is to feel the movement of lines. So, what does La Xicanada have to do with anything? What does it have to do with liberation? I want to start here: I cannot count how many times I have met Chicanos or Xicanas who once identified with the name and then rejected it: attuning their cultural register to their American Indian identity, “un-becoming” to resort back to Mexican-American, or some other configuration of an identity that disassociated and disidentified. Left perplexed, I couldn’t understand why for many years. What holds La Xicanada? What binds it? What elements or bodies manufacture its materiality? What world does La Xicanada forge? In my own personal quest to understand why people reject Xicanidades or Chicanidades I am left with nothing but an overrepresentation and a crude overdetermination of these cultural embodiments or expression by a dominant image of the Mexican-American. It’s from this frustration that I desire to avoid capture, evade the gaze, and to circumvent the image of La Xicanada wherever I can. As such, I desire a transgressive or heretical Xicanada that does away with its own ontological borders, its own desire to suture itself off. This demand marks a crack on the wall of Capital. It says, “we want more than identity, we want liberation. And that means a never-ending becoming till we get free.” For La Xicanada to demand the impossible is to demand the grounds for existence, to demand a metaphysics of becoming, a rasquache materialism of mystical desire and unruly matter. It is not recognition. It is not absorption. It is not a group (but an organ-ization). It does not desire validation, it validates itself. It is not a new subject that will lead to revolution, to engender a homogenous Latinx configuration. La Xicanada is a movement, an assemblage, a life-world against the grain of the web of modern Western civilization. It is minor, it is decentralized, and it is in motion, however local, however temporary, however futile its desires might be. What is at stake is a new perception, a new becoming, a new consciousness, and a new actional philosophy that is not so new but ancient and rooted in Las Américas. What La Xicanada demands is a name. This name, as they/we desire, hopes to disentangle itself from the dominant order, to suggest liberation is elsewhere—in the alternative worlds we co-construct together. In other words, be unreasonable: demand what is possible! From the California central coast, Territories called Anisq’oyo, Chumash lands. White Mountain Rabbit
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