Exclusive excerpt: “Coming of Age at the End of History” by Camille de Toledo

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from the book “Coming of Age at the End of History” by Camille de Toledo. Published by Soft Skull Press: “In the tradition of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Coming of Age at the End of History caught the European public and critics by a storm since its publication in France, Germany and Italy, but de Toledo is as influenced by Don DeLillo, Chuck Palaniuk and Hakim Bey as by his European brethren, and as much by the possibilities of language and literature to transform society as either bullets or ballot boxes. The next revolution will be hidden, literary, nomadic and nonviolent…with Coming of Age at the End of History it has already begun.”

EXCERPT BEGINS AFTER THE JUMP

When I go back and try to pinpoint the first appearance of  the laughter of the vanquished, a certain image always haunts me. Was it in Guatemala, in the Honduras? An amazing spectacle. A sacred spectacle, par excellence. I was barely ten years old. It was on television. It was a little girl, right in front of the camera. Actually, it wasn’t a little girl, it was a little girl’s head, sticking up out of a mudpond, the rest of her body already submerged. The body already gone and the head too, vanishing. There, just a few yards from me, from us, from everyone. Thousands of miles away from everyone too. And the rescuers! Where were the rescuers? There were none. The only thing you could do was watch the little head of the little girl in the mudpond. If I had to locate the source of that laughter, I’d look around that mudpond, even in the mud, in the spectacle of that mud. Because there too, suddenly, the image neutralized our outrage and laughter allowed us to bear our helplessness without dying of shame. Yes, we didn’t kill ourselves on that day. Maybe we should have… out of dignity.

The laughter has changed since then. It’s no longer a means of surviving despair. Now it is an instrument of submission. It is used incessantly to ridicule our dreams. I still remember those images from 1996, the ones that showed the “Intergalactic Conference” organized by Subcomandante Marcos. The TV news sought to prove its own relevance by showing the “behind the scenes” of the event, that was their “angle” on the story. Watching the media watching the media watching the media… The images showed a wall of cameras facing the head of the Zapatista Army, French intellectuals lost in the jungles of Lacandone, folklore and T-shirts bearing the image of the “Sub”. The whole little demi-monde of global resistance wallowed in the mud. For there was mud there too. Mud around the huts, mud on the paths. There was unending heavy rain. The leaky roof let the rain in and mud filled the interior of the dormitories. Why was an area that furnished 40% of Mexico’s hydroelectric power awash in mud within minutes of the first drops of rain? We might have asked ourselves that. Why in spite of huge oil and gas reserves did the building lack running water? Finally, why did that mud resemble the treatment reserved for the 10 million indians living in Mexico? Yes! We MIGHT HAVE… but no, we preferred another response, more modern, more Situationist, and admittedly, more conformist. What we saw was the farce of these intellectuals wallowing in the mud while the Zapatista uprising was saved by 4×4s. We got the message all right: misery is a spectacle. Oppression is an image. The little girl is in the mud. No one can help. It’s the camera that’s the problem. It’s better to criticize the frame than what’s inside it; at least the frame can be changed. You can’t change the world. And anyway, like the angry queen said, “desiring revolt is already revolt.” So that would be the angle: Marcos Superstar, and the Intergalactic Conference rained out. Just like Wimbledon. Very funny. That would make a nice punch line. We laugh in the editing room: pretty funny, those “I Love Marcos” T-shirts in the central market of San Cristóbal. “did you see the American with the Ché Guevara pin? Elle called him a “Fashion guerilla”.

Seen through the humor of mass dandyism, the Zapatista uprising looks like a fall runway show. “It would seem as though Helmut Lang is trying to invent ski-mask style…” The whole world knows it. Nothing means anything. The entire world is in the mud, in the laughter of mud. “Chiapas is being bled through a thousand different channels: oil pipelines, gas pipelines, power lines, freight cars, through bank accounts, through trucks and pickups, boats and planes, secret trails, dirt roads, tracks and pathways; these lands continue to pay their tribute to various empires: Oil, electric energy, cattle, money, coffee, bananas, honey, corn, cocoa, tobacco, sugar, soy, melons, sorghum, melons, mamey sapote, mangos, tamarind, avocados—and Chiapan blood flows out through 1001 fangs sunk into the neck of southeastern Mexico. Billions of tons of natural resources go through Mexican ports, railway stations, airports, and road systems to various destinations: the United States, Canada, Holland, Germany, Italy, Japan—but all with the same destiny: to feed the empire. The dues that capitalism imposes on the southeast corner of the country ooze out, as they have since the beginning, in mud and blood[BF1] .”[1] What should we have heard in Marcos’ words here? The story of capitalism’s penetration of a remote backwater? A collection of cold statistics or rather the insurgent lyricism of a people cheated out of their life’s blood, the funeral music of a wilderness converted into a system of commodity flows, of a primordial abundance pillaged by the logic of scarcity? The spectacle dismantled the world’s reality, and with it went our capacity for outrage. We became little better than a studio audience for an unending performance. We were invited to submit our judgments, but as though we were film critics at a premiere. All the classic causes of revolt have now become raw materials themselves, commodities circulating through the same system, following the same routes as sorghum, tamarind and mangoes. They have Controlled Origin Labels and an exotic aftertaste.

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[1] Subcommandante Marcos, Ya Basta, communique of the EZLN. []find English translation/reference (Seven Stories Press?).

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[BF1]This Marcos quote in published translation?