The desire to detach could create its own problems. This would be expressed as a tension on the part of counters between wanting to get the count finished as quickly as possible each day and to engage with victims as people. Here, I argue that this tension created a consciously employed interplay between engagement and detachment. This tension would allow participants to complete the count without losing the ability to empathise with individual victims.
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For Javier, the need to finish on time and physical tiredness of the count interrupted his need to delve into the stories of victims:
“I took so long to count because I had to really make an effort to carry on. Suddenly it just all gets too much; you feel tired, the difference in time zones is horrible. You end up counting them like bread or chickens; one, two, three. So then I thought that by doing that you’re not giving the crisis enough respect. But you end up doing that because you don’t want to take even longer to do it, you’ve had it up to here with tiredness, and the dead still keep on coming. It’s as if the dead keep coming and coming, like they were coming out of a machine, and you want to give them dignity, you want to dignify them, give them a place. There was a change on the last day in comparison with the first. It’s no longer the same. You’re getting the last dead down as quickly as possible. Even so, there are some that stay with you.”
His tiredness, and the time it took him to complete the count, created a need to finish as soon as possible. However, realising that this prevented him from engaging with individual victims’ stories as much as he would like actually served to highlight the importance of that aspect of the experience to him. It made visible the potential of recognising their individual victimhood to give them “dignity”. The count became an interplay between feeling the need to detach, and desiring to connect. The awareness of that interplay, however, and what it signified, actually ensured that the political meaning of the count was not lost to volunteers.
The descriptions of counters would often take on this dual aspect. In their narratives, they would explain how they wanted to “mechanise” the count so as not to take so long, and to then re- engage themselves with it so as not to feel as if they were dehumanising the victims. Alex described that character of the count to me in detail:
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“Another thing that happens to you is that you try to mechanise it, you try to normalise it so as to save time and not be in front of the computer for so many hours at a once. But in the end, that’s impossible, it really is impossible, you can’t do it. It’s not the worst thing you can do, but you are still trying to normalise the tragedy. They just become one more number, and you don’t realise you’re doing exactly what the government is doing - treating them just like one more number. The worse thing is that you end up using the same mechanisms as the hit men in order to protect yourself from drowning in hurt”.
We see an interplay between engagement and detachment taking place within this narrative. Detached urgency is necessary in order to actually complete the task at hand and ‘finish’ the count each day. However, this can also give a sense of dehumanising the victims. It once again leads to the inhabitation of the wrong kind of subjectivity (someone who does not want to relate to the dead, like a hit-man). But it was only by distancing themselves during the count, and becoming aware of detachments’ possible impact, that counters actively tried to ensure their engagement. This meant that detachment could become a means for ensuring a continuation of engagement.
Monica went on in her interview to tell me that:
“That’s why Menos Días Aquí needs to continue being a weekly project in which various people can participate. Human beings are adaptive…we’re capable of adapting ourselves to everything. But there are things which can never stop being an event, which can never be routine. That’s why I don’t want to count again right now, even though I could; I don’t want it to become routinized and for it not to affect me anymore”.
Here, Monica shows an awareness that she needed to employ a certain amount of both engagement and detachment in order to meet the aims of the project, and her own felt need to
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adequately remember the victims. Both detachment and engagement, then, were implicated in the carrying out of the count. Each night was experienced as a conflictual interplay between desires for an enabling detachment (which would allow counters to count the maximum number of victims in the shortest time possible, and combat tiredness), and the practice of empathetic engagement with victims (as an ethical endeavour in which each victim was seen as being worthy of memory and grief). Counters themselves were intensely aware of this, and their awareness served to highlight the political potential of the project. It also intensified their own commitment to meeting those aims. Hence, counters “move[d] in and out of different relationships” with victims, and that movement was essential to the very completion of the count (Anderson 2001: 178). The cultivation of detachment (and engagement) in this context demonstrate the way both are, in fact, lived as “structure[s] of feeling” (Anderson 2001: 178).
Ingold argues that “life is given in engagement, not in disengagement”, and that it is through engagement that the world is “revealed to us” (2000: 60). However, recent studies have shown that detachment is not a negative practice which prevents our participation in the world. Rather, it is an integral feature of our very engagement with it (Anders 2010; Anderson 2001; Daston and Galison 2007). Indeed, Yarrow claims that “the theoretical privileging of engagement diverts attention from the productive aspects of various forms of disconnection, distance and detachment” (2013: 8). As we have seen so far, in the context of carrying out the count, both detachment and engagement became enabling and limiting in different ways. Too much of either was undesirable since it could curtail the very activity of counting. Hence, “although forms of engagement and detachment can curtail or truncate one another, they also extend one another and make one another possible” (Candea 2010b: 255).
Indeed, as the interplay between different states of distanciation and engagement during the count show, and as Yarrow notes for the stone masons working on Glasgow cathedral, “specific modes of engaging and detaching are mutually implicated” when it comes to completing the task in hand successfully (2013: 3). In her study of American expatriate food-bank volunteers in Florence,
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Trundle argues that “knowledge and action, and means and ends” emerge together from daily practices of “getting the work done” (2012: 211). She shows how volunteers view charity work as representing the height of moral compassion but, in order to express that compassion and get the charitable work done, they were obliged to “value an ethic of disinterested equality.” Trundle notes that “this challenges an underlying assumption within development practice, which values ‘engagement’ and considers ‘detachment’ to be morally suspect” since “the two domains were experienced as inseparable.” (2012: 211). As such, behaviour, action, and feeling are as much influenced by differing forms of detachment as they are by engagement (Grassiani 2013; Harvey 2010). As a result, “once it is envisaged not as false consciousness but as a telos for people’s actions, and traced through every-day micropractices of the self, detachment emerges as the constant counterpart and complement of engagement, not as its radical alternative” (Candea 2010b: 244). The interplay between engagement and detachment during the count demonstrates its importance to the completion of the activist project itself. They gave counters room to sway between different emotional states and hence to cope with the demands of the count in ways which were both ‘ethical’ and ‘practical’. It allowed them to meet the political aims of the project
and their own personally felt obligations to victims. In this case, such a process had both personal
and political consequences (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Parreñas 2012; Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). This section has shown how particular emotions became implicated in the growth and articulation of specific forms of political commitment. They allowed for a deep sense of connection to individual victims to be articulated (and thus created a space for the acknowledgement of their existence). At the same time, emotional turmoil within the count, and an interplay between states of engagement and detachment, meant that the political importance of the project became both acknowledged and actively pursued. In the next section, I argue that this process was heavily implicated in the generation of a specific form of politicised knowledge.
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