Trying to examine the stitching of Cusicanqui’s text is maddening. Closing in on the detail of one stitch, for example the dyad chi’ixi-chhixi, I lose track of the of the greater weave. The only way is to move in and out, view the taypi from nearer and farther, in endless alternations of perspective. The wak’as are symbols that accumulate meanings–an endless agglutination. The basic exemplary element of this agglutination is the heteronym, the sonic dual forms that territorialize and deterritorialize creating endless aftershocks of Andean relationality: “the gesture of continuous contextualization”. I can’t help but think of the waka as a sign or mark and thus an accumulation of the Derridean différance: whose sign does not uphold the binary opposition but enfolds difference. Could we extend Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” to “there is nothing outside of the taypi”–? To allow Cusicanqui’s language to expand the language of Derrida: différance as an endless flickering between the signifying and signified, an action that embroiders the taypi’s weave that must be read and re-read many times–a constantly expanding arena of synthesis? Quijano writes of a binary duality that codified and reifies human difference (heterogeneity). There is no différance in colonial homogenization, only a naturalization of difference. Agglutination exists for capital’s accumulation of the forms of labor. Quijano write that “an inevitable consequence of the Eurocentric perspective, in which a linear and one-directional evolutionism is amalgamated contradictorily with the dualist vision of history, a new and radical dualism that separates nature from society, the body from reason, that does not know what to do with the question of totality… making it, thus, into a distorted perspective, impossible to be used, except in error” (Quijano, pg. 221). Is the revolutionary act one of différance, that in différance we may “cease being what we are not”? (Quijano, pg. 222)
- I would like to go on a tangent and recommend a podcast, “Seeing White” by John Biewen with Chenjeri Kumanyika, a 14-part examination of the notion of “whiteness”. The second episode “How Race Was Made” zeroes in on the invention of race, looking first at the writings of Ibn Battuta and then at the biography of Prince Henry the Navigator, written by Gomes Eanes de Zurara. The biography was commissioned by the Prince’s nephew (a.k.a. the Portuguese King) to justify slavery, thus glorifying Prince Henry and codifying Africans as inferior and beasts at the same time. This is interesting to listen to with Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” in mind.
- This Interview with the Curators of the Exhibition of the Potosi Principle is a fascination look behind the curtain and useful supplementary reading.