Gore Capitalism

Warning / Advertencia

In this book, our aim is not to develop a unitary, hegemonic feminism based on a simplistic critique of violence as foundational to the logics of gore capitalism. We are grounded in a multiplicity of feminisms and we posit the relevance of all of these both as geopolitically-situated systems of knowledge and as responses to specific contexts in which they developed. We believe that these feminisms must not be judged within the impermeable structures of white First World feminism. The feminism posited here departs from white First World feminism in its self-reflexiveness and rejects being closely linked to or used by the imperialist cultural exploitation of feminism (Chakrovorty, 1999, 303). We do not seek white discourses nor white men looking to save brown women from brown men (Chakrovorty, 1999, 303); we do not need First World discourses to explain the realities of the g-local Third World.¹

On the contrary, we believe that First World² discourse should pay attention to what Third World discourses have to say about the evolution of the world of capital and of the world more generally. Reinterpretations of economic roles emerge precisely in the interstices of these peripheral worlds. In these spaces we have seen the creation of new identities and subjects in a broad spectrum ranging from the endriago subjects of gore capitalism to the creation of subjectivities that resist feeding into the static loop of white, heterosexual, masculinist formulas. These new resistant forms do not assume power to be equivalent to violence, but that rather upend that dyad to observe it from novel perspectives, which are able to produce and to imagine new methods for the use of the body, power and desire.

In this book, we argue against positioning oneself in a benevolent hierarchy that would stereotype the Third World as a precarious and vulnerable reality exclusively found in the global South; the vulnerability and precarity are real to a large extent, but only insofar as they are a result of the demands and requirements exported from the economic centers and major world powers and distributed by globalization through the media.

To conceive of the Third World as a geopolitically immutable space—without any possibility for action, empowerment, or the creation of its own discursive frame—is a clear indication of the disdain implicit in a colonialist position. This book does not posit a naïve, partial reading of our realities that—absolving ourselves of responsibility— might suggest the dystopias of globalization belong exclusively to the Third World; nor does it argue that the only possible contributions to globalization (from the other worlds) might be from the position of victims or executioners (or as distributors of organized crime around the globe.)

We do not want abstract discourses disconnected from the body, but instead discourses that are able to re-frame the causes, extent and persistence of violence in the gore-ridden Third World. We want discourses that refuse to appeal to victimization and the nullification of our subjectivities and agency. We want discourses that refuse to rely on reductionist and paternalist thinking that would deny the power of our concrete actions.

We do not seek saviors or discourses of salvation, but rather for our own process of empowerment to be recognized as subjects of the same order and with the same validity as Western subjects, yet without being categorized or translated as identical to them or as a monolith.

Thus, without neglecting our differences, we seek the creation of our own discourses that nurture a transfeminism that confronts and questions our contemporary situation, a situation that is invariably circumscribed by the logic of gore capitalism. By saying this, we do not mean for this book to reject, or fail to recognize, the theoretical and practical work of diverse forms of feminism and their existence throughout history. On the contrary, the fact that our discourse is careful not to dehistoricize the feminist movement—since in fact, we think it is crucial to know this history and to remember it— means that we recognize the important discursive contribution made by feminist movements to the construction of categories that both explain and locate us in relation to the world. In particular, we recognize the importance of the construction of a discursive corpus that has rendered us visible as a movement founded on network; this body of discourse has established the feminist condition as an epistemological category, and simultaneously preserved it as a condition of certain subjects (not exclusively ciswomen) and as a social movement.

For this reason, we join Judith Butler in saying: It seems more crucial than ever to disengage feminism from its First World presumption and to use the resources of feminist theory and activism to rethink the meaning of the tie, the bond, the alliance, the relation, as they are imagined and lived in the horizon of a counter-imperialist egalitarianism.³

We seek an explanation of contemporary events that is not mistaken either for an acquittal or a moral indictment of the violence, nor delimited exclusively by moral judgment, in order to rethink the structuring role that violence plays in the evolution of capitalism and in its culmination as gore.

We seek, then, a transfeminism that would allow us to think beyond the limits of our current options. We believe that in any given context of oppression, we are forced to create theoretical and practical instruments that help us map out our strategies. We are clear that when there is only one option to choose from, we have to be capable of remaking that very option. To conclude then, if no other option is available, may that choice not be the end of us, but rather through our daily insurrection may it come to re-signify us.

El Inicio / The Beginning

Esto es Tijuana

The fury of clouds that is the Pacific Ocean.

A dismembered torso strewn across the highway at rush hour. Cigarettes lit in rapid succession. The neon lights of the red-light district, microscopic universes. Arboreal metastasis.

Narcos. Machismo. Silicone Land. Whore-Barbie’s Factory. High caliber weapons laughing, cackling. Esto es Tijuana.

Leaving and staying at the same time. Finding another way to say that everything is an eternal return. Irrevocable trajectories and irrevocable women. Violence, tedium and the everyday grind: overdrawn on all accounts. Esto es Tijuana.

The word Bienvenidos laughing in my face. The word Bienvenidos meaning every entrance is an exit. Silence stabs. The desert boils. Migrant screams ring out. Esto es Tijuana.

Donkey-zebras imitating nostalgia. Shiny new cars. Enraged taxis. The head repeats an atrocious mantra, open (yourself) up on the inside. Get into the game. See the Fire. Escape constantly and once and for all bet on winning. Esto es Tijuana.

Where the questions where, when and why might not exist, the same as the word never. Where half of the half does not compute. Where Interminably is the same as Now.

City of over and over again. Where the truth is never known. Where all words—including the word incest—portend multiple histories. Where mi casa es su casa. Where su casa no es mi casa. Where yes, actually, su casa es mi caza: I’m on a hunt and your house is my prey. Esto es Tijuana.

La línea never frees itself from the metallic serpent on either side.

A frontera-woman looks like death and walks with one hand on her revolver. The syringe-man unsuccessfully attempts to fly along the middle of the metal serpent. The transparent and the true. The piercing.

The first and the third world. The border. El bordo. Hell. The other part of the other side. The other side of the other side. The This side of the Other side. The happy world of disenchantment. Esto es Tijuana.

The limit. The perimeter. The edge of the world. He/she/they/what is dragged behind. The shore that licks white, middle-class, civilized culture and brings it to its end. The time bomb that detonates us. San Diego’s garage.

The divided sea laughing raucously entre las olas. Entre Las Solas. In the waves and in all the women on their own. The grayness. The paradox. Esto es Tijuana.

The copyright of the end. Cartel-right. Gore capitalism. Hotels, attractions, nightlife, restaurants, weather and border crossing…

A blind search for combinatorics. Two million possibilities. Crunchy, spicy and totally addictive-fabulous blends. Depictions of sodomy, bestiality, alternative sexual practices, racial and ethnic stereotypes. This is Tijuana.

Everything that enters or leaves the city comes from two parts. Everything here leaves in two or more parts. You can have whatever you can buy. City of businesses. Virgin girls for sale. Affordable prices for foreigners. Luis Donaldo Colosio Acribillado (a.k.a Bullet-Riddled). Música de banda. Morgue. Techno. NAFTA. Esto es Tijuana.

La Tía Juana, Tiguana, Tiuana, Teguana, Tiwana, Tijuan, Ticuan, TJ, Tijuas: you can call her whatever you want because Tijuana—like every other word—means nothing and means: beside the sea.

Esto es Queerland. Aquí empieza la patria / The homeland begins here.

Esto es Tijuana.

At the brink of el bordo, I become blade. Tijuana is affectionate. Unfathomable. Full of possibilities.

To be in love with a psychopath and to say so with a smile.

You should leave now. This is Tijuana.

Introduction

Globalization is not a serious concept. We [US Americans] have invented it in order to disguise our policies of economic entry into other countries.

—John Kenneth Galbraith

We propose the term gore capitalism to refer to the reinterpretation of the hegemonic global economy in (geographic) border spaces. As an example of this phenomenon, we propose the city of Tijuana, located at the border between Mexico and the United States and known as the far corner of Latin America.

We take the term gore from a genre of films characterized by extreme, brutal violence. Thus, gore capitalism refers to the undisguised and unjustified bloodshed that is the price the Third World pays for adhering to the increasingly demanding logic of capitalism. It also refers to the many instances of dismembering and disembowelment, often tied up with organized crime, gender and the predatory uses of bodies. In general, this term posits these incredibly brutal kinds of violence as tools of necroempowerment.¹

Bodies are here conceived of as products of exchange that alter and break capital’s logics of production, subverting the terms of capital by substituting commodity production with a commodity-made-flesh in the body and human life, through predatory techniques of extreme violence like kidnapping and contract murder.

Thus, when we say gore capitalism, we refer to the disruption of values and practices taking place (most visibly) in border territories, where one must ask what converging types of strategies are being developed by subalterns—the marginalized—[…] under the transnationalizing forces of the First World (hooks et al. 2004, 81).

Unfortunately, many of the strategies for confronting the First World are ultraviolent forms of capital accumulation,² practices that we categorize as gore. To further clarify this term: whereas in the first volume of Capital Marx writes that, The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense accumulation of commodities (Marx, 1992, 15), in gore capitalism this process is redirected and the destruction of the body becomes in itself the product or commodity; the only kind of accumulation possible now is through a body count, as death has become the most profitable business in existence.

We do not seek purity, correctness or incorrectness in the application of the logic of capitalism and its intended and unintended consequences. We do not seek to make value judgments, but rather to provide evidence of the failure of neoliberal discourse to explain said phenomena. Contemporary approaches are insufficient to theorize the gore practices that are now found around the world; this fact shows the need for such theorization in a world in which there is no space outside capitalism’s reach (Jameson, 1992). Not conceptualizing gore practices does not do away with them, but merely renders them invisible or discusses them using language that creates a double standard inside of a theory, where terms like black market refer to economic practices specific to the Third World, since they are already considered illegal.

We are interested in developing a discourse with the explanatory power to help us interpret the reality produced by gore capitalism, founded in violence, (drug) trafficking and necropower, while at the same time presenting the dystopias³ of globalization and its imposition. We are also interested in following the multiple threads that give rise to the capitalist practices underpinned by extreme and ultra-specialized forms of violence— practices that in certain geopolitical locales have become established as everyday forms of violence used to obtain recognition and economic legitimacy.

The raw nature of this violence obeys a logic born out of structures and processes planned in the very heart of neoliberalism, globalization and politics. We are talking about practices that are transgressive solely because their forcefulness makes the vulnerability of the human body clear, in how it is mutilated and desecrated. These practices constitute a scathing critique of the society of hyperconsumption, at the same time as they participate in it and in capitalism’s inner workings, since:

In many nations, organized crime has become a key political actor and an interest group, a player that must be taken into consideration by the legitimate political system. This criminal element frequently provides necessary foreign currency, jobs and the economic well-being essential for national stability, as well as the enrichment of those who hold political power (through at times corrupt means) especially in poor countries … (Curbet, 2007, 63)

These practices have reached ever more shocking extremes with the advent of globalization, as it is founded on predatory logics that—along with spectralization and speculation in financial markets—foment and implement radically violent practices. In the words of Thomas Friedman, former special adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the Clinton Administration:

For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is … The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. (Curbet, 2007, 64)

Mary Louise Pratt further discusses globalization as a false protagonist:

The term globalization eliminates understanding, even the desire for understanding. In this sense, globalization functions at times as a kind of false protagonist which impedes a sharper interrogation of the processes that have been reorganizing practices and meanings during the last 25 years. (Pratt, 2002, 1)

If we draw on this analysis, we could say that what we are designating here as gore capitalism is one of those processes of globalization, its B-side, unmasking the extent of its consequences. For this reason, we do not deny the complexity of the phenomenon and will inquire into the array of consequences that exceed the interpretative regime that undergirds capitalist monopoly.

In the same sense, given the existence of movements, discourses, and resistance activities that seek to confront the reach of capitalist discourse, we think it is vital to clarify that our reflections on gore capitalism do not share the assumptions of (nor are they limited to) capitalist discursive practices. We propose gore capitalism, then, as a heteroclite space that has not been sufficiently theorized within these alternatives to capitalism, which understand gore capitalism as strongly rooted in capitalist logic and so relegate it to the realm of the irrational, labeling it undesirable and dystopian.

In a similar way, the process of gore capitalism is rendered invisible by the discourse of the official capitalist economy and neglected within its system of thought; it is not considered especially significant or complex (despite its noteworthy explicatory functions), but rather it is relegated to consideration only as part of the black market and its effects on capital. However, now that the criminal economy is estimated to make up no less than 15% of global commerce,⁴ the effects of gore capitalism on the world economy is evident; these numbers bestow it with real power in terms of planetary economic decisions.

The urgency of devising a critical discourse that describes gore capitalism derives in part from the need to have a common language with which to discuss the phenomenon, for it is well known that the world reveals itself in language, and social relations are elaborated in language (Heritage, 1984, 126).

As language is a core element in the epistemological organization of the world, we think it vital to investigate, review, reason through and attempt to propose an explanatory discourse that might provide us with a conceptual frame to think through, analyze and approach these spaces/fields and their practices. We also think it is essential to name these spaces/fields and their practices from a transfeminist perspective, by which we mean a network that opens discursive spaces and fields to all those contemporary practices and subjects that have not been directly analyzed. We are especially concerned with the lack of explanatory language for the phenomena we identify here with the term gore capitalism. We cannot ignore the relationships between legal and illegal economies and the rampant use of violence as a mode of capitalist necroempowerment and wealth accumulation. If we were to do so, we would neutralize the possibility of action against them and obscure the fact that these processes regularly impact the bodies of all those who are part of the minority becoming—upon whom, one way or another, all of this brutal violence falls.

Thus, we propose an analysis of gore capitalism, understood as the systematically uncontrolled and contradictory dimension of the neoliberal project (Pratt, 2002, 2). It is a product of economic polarization, the excesses of information/advertising that create and support a hyperconsumerist identity and its counterpart: the ever-shrinking numbers of people with the financial power to satisfy their consumer desires. This process creates radical capitalist subjects we term endriago subjects (See Chapter 2) and new discursive figures that make up an episteme of violence, as well as reconfiguring the concept of work through a perverse sense of agency, now rooted in the necropolitical commercialization of murder. All of this is evidence of the dystopias produced through an unconsidered adherence to pacts with (masculinist) neoliberalism and its objectives.

Endriago subjectivities are created in the face of this world order, as individuals seek to establish themselves as valid subjects with the possibility of belonging and ascending within society. These subjects create new fields, out of one of the most ferocious, devastating and irreversible processes of capitalist investment. They contradict the logic of what is acceptable and normative because of their new awareness that they have become redundant in the economic order. These subjects confront their situation and their context by means of necroempowerment and the fugitive, dystopian necro-practices of gore, as they convert this process into the only possible reality and attempt to legitimate the processes of underground economies (black market, drug trafficking, weapons, bodies, etc.) through their reign of violence. These actions both create and reinterpret new fields apart from the valid ones and thereby wield influence over political, public, official, social and cultural processes.

As Pratt affirms, "Once again we live in a world of bandits and pirates,⁵ now in the form of coyotes and polleros⁶ [drug-traffickers, hitmen, kidnappers, etc] who work on the borders of the whole planet" (Pratt, 2002, 3).

It is no accident that drug trafficking is currently the largest industry in the world (followed by the legal economies of fossil fuels and tourism), that drug money flows freely through the arteries of global financial systems, or that drug trafficking is itself one of the clearest examples of gore capitalism.

It is clear that this is not the scene we imagined for the beginning of the new millennium (Pratt, 2002, 2), but it is the one we are faced with; it is our philosophical responsibility to analyze it in order to expose the weakness and inflexibility of discourses of globalization and neoliberalism, which are unable to explain these processes.

Contemporary history