Relaciones externas. Breve Currículum del SCM

The social inhabits multiple topologies. There’s one that is regional and homogeneous, which distinguishes its objects by talking of territories and setting boundaries between areas. There’s another that comes in the form of networks, where similarities have to do with syntactical stability and differences reflect grammatical dissimilarity. But there are others too, and one of them is fluid. For there are social objects which exist in, draw upon and recursively form fluid spaces that are defined by liquid continuity. Sometimes fluid spaces perform sharp boundaries.

But sometimes they do not – though one object gives way to another.

So there are mixtures and gradients. And inside these mixtures everything informs everything else – the world doesn’t collapse if some things suddenly fail to appear. (Mol and Law, 1994, p. 659.)

Annemarie Mol and John Law (1994) reflect on the objects that emerge in socially fluid spaces. For instance, they analyse “anaemia” and how this condition unsettles spatial securities. Doctors may diagnose anaemia by observing a low level of haemoglobin when looking at a patient’ eyelid; noting how a patient gasps for breath or if her conjunctiva is

181 white. Anaemia “flows” through the diagnostic skills of the doctor, as a written number, or through the use of certain medical devices, but in all this fluidity “anaemia” stays the same even as it transforms “itself from one arrangement into another without discontinuity” (Mol and Law, 1994, p. 664). Annemarie Mol coined the composite term

“ontological politics” to suggest that reality “does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices” (Mol, 1999, p.75).

In short, the conditions of possibility are not given, hence the use of the term ontologies, in plural. “Reality” is not out there waiting to be discovered and described, but rather emerges and is shaped within everyday mundane practices. According to Mol, reality is done, enacted and hence multiple. The term politics is used to emphasise the “active mode” of reality, the “process[es] of shaping, and the fact that its character is both open and contested” (Mol, 1999, p. 75).

The term ontological politics “suggests a link between the real, the conditions of possibility we live with, and the political” (Mol, 1999, p. 86). However, as Mol interrogates, “what kind of politics might fit this ontological multiplicity?” In this chapter, I described the kind of politics that an ontological multiplicity brings forth. I have done so by delineating the different states of absence that Alejandro encompasses, and how each of these states have had some impact in the way Alejandro’s absence is perceived and experienced by his family. Through analysing Alejandro’s story, I have studied the socially fluid space that citizens inhabit when their loved ones are absent. I have argued that notions of and families’ reactions to Alejandro’s absence differ from individ ua l missing experiences, and from other kinds of collective absences that, while unexpected, can somehow be explained, for example: missing persons cases after natural disasters, or the unexpected deaths of almost 3,000 persons after the 9/11 attacks in New York, or missing persons cases after the July 7 bombings in London in 2005.

182 Avril Maddrell (2013, p. 505) has argued that death is the ultimate absence. Hester Parr et al. have engaged with the complexities of returned missing adults that, though absent from their regular social networks, did not experience their own “missingness” (Parr et al., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016). In contrast, this thesis examines a different kind of absence, produced by an unexpected event that occurs in ambiguous and violent circumsta nces

Multiplicity entails that the different performances of an object “may collaborate and even depend on one another” (Mol, 1999, p. 83), even though these distinct realities may clash. In this case, Alejandro’s absence cannot simply be explained as a kidnapping or a deliberative decision to take some “time out”. It is more complex. Alejandro’s absence takes on the capacity to retain continuity through transformation (De Laet and Mol, 2000).

His absence does not follow the clear-cut or fixed categories that local governme nts, federal institutions and international laws use to explain what is happening in Mexico.¹⁰³

103 For example in Mexico the government refers to these absences as ‘Not Located’ persons . This entails an assumption that the person might be somewhere else, but is not necessarily in danger. For example, they might have decided to move to the north part of the country to cross the border with the U.S. to work there, or they might have decided to move away from their close social network. Furthermore, in Mexic o

‘disappearance’ does not exist as a crime. In recent years, civil society and NGOs have been promoting the notion of ‘Absence due to a disappearance’ to be adopted in local laws so that the crime can be prosecuted.

There is a different kind of politics attached to each of these categories: the Mexican government does not want to adopt the category of ‘disappearance’ or ‘enforced disappearance’ for the political and international consequences that those crimes entail. International efforts by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and several reports made by the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner detail the extent to which

183 In fact, the use or acceptance of any of those categories constitutes a profound act of violence, not only on the identity of Alejandro, but on the quest and search of his parents.

Alejandro’s identity and understanding is not fixed. He can travel diverse states of absence mediated through his families’ experiences. Alejandro’s absence remains an event that could be the consequence of a traffic accident, a criminal act such as abduction, or could be understood in relation to other absent persons, thus being considered, and transformed into, a disappearance. In this sense, Alejandro’s absence is “continuous with a number of others” (De Laet & Mol, 2000, p. 231). Analysing these performances of absence reveals its multiplicity. This is not to discuss absence in the plural, but the various performances of Alejandro’s absence that have relations between them, that are fluid. As Mol argues in her study on anaemia:

Anaemia is multiple, but is not plural. The various anaemias that are performed in medicine have many relations between them. They are not simply opposed to, or outside, one another. One may follow the other, stand in for the other, and, the most surprising image, one may include the other. This means that what is ‘other’ is also within (Mol, 1999, p.

85, emphasis added).

Just as the various anaemias that are performed have many relations between them, Alejandro’s absence takes various forms. What I have shown throughout this chapter are not different perspectives on absence as experienced by different families in Mexico.

Neither have I been discussing different categories of absence that are useful in some contexts. I have described different versions, different performances of absence, that co-exist with one another. Alejandro’s absence is constantly produced and enacted; thus it can only be understood as a dynamic entity that is in fluid states of transition, as new im/materialities interact with existing ones. It is through travelling and moving through

absences in Mexico are increasingly part of a government strategy to ‘disappear’ dissident voices in collusion with members of organised criminal groups.

184 uncertain spaces that an “object that isn’t too rigorously bounded, that doesn’t impose itself but tries to serve, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive in short, a fluid object, may well prove to be stronger than one which is firm” (De Laet & Mol 2000, p. 227).

Concluding Remarks

The fluid expressions of Alejandro’s absence ─ all the traces along his journey – are made actionable by those who experience his absence. Alejandro’s absence does things; it is productive, because its movement brings possibilities for the imagination and the making of scenarios, the plotting of possible maps and routes. By analysing the traces left by the absent, families are able to blend the future into the present and make it actionable.

Similar to process of mourning and grieving, families of the disappeared engage with memorials and everyday memorialization practices in order to give presence to those who are absent (Edkins, 2011, 2010). These practices can be seen as ways of “keeping kin and kinship alive” and as alternative forms of care giving. Such practices can be, but are not limited to, landscape transformation, memorial benches and public or private memoria ls.

However, there are other ways in which families can evoke the absent. These alternative practices of making present an absence has been discussed by Riches and Dawson (1998 cited in Maddrell, 2013, p. 508) as an “instrumental response to bereavement”, i.e. these families want “to do something” to counter their bereavement. The notion of “doing something” differs according to each particular case but, generally, the efforts of families are geared towards crowdfunding campaigns or public awareness of a dangerous space or a rare disease. As has been shown, in Mexico, families who want “to do something”

are learning how to locate, trace and identify disappeared persons. They are continua l ly engaging with forensic materialities and making sense of numbers, transport data, phone

185 records, drone mapping, social media, statistics, songs, CCTV images, body fluids and forensic analysis, among others.

Alejandro’s absence is a fluid technology in the sense that there are a set of practices that are organised around it in order to produce certain outcomes. The fluid states of absence experienced in Mexico open up possibilities for change. Fluid absences transform people:

from housewives to human right defenders, from factory workers to national NGO’s leaders, and lawyers. These absences transform private citizens into public citizens. It is through this fluid technology that forensic citizens craft themselves as new politica l subjects. Alejandro’s absence has transformed those that gather around him. For instance, when I asked Don Alfonso what was the most significant knowledge he had acquired in all these years of search and he replied: “I am a civil engineer and a business man, but since Alejandro’s disappearance, I became a full time researcher. That’s what is most significant” (Interview with Don Alfonso, August, 2014).

Technologies depend on a power-seeking strategist who, given a laboratory in Latour’s (1983) terms, promises to change the world. In this case, the power-seeking strategists are the families in Mexico who are searching for their loved ones and that, when in contact with fluid technologies, plot, for everyone to see, how they can change the world.

Don Alfonso closes the book he has been showing me. This is one of the ten or twelve volumes that make up Alejandro’s file. After all these years of research, and gathering information, maps, newspaper articles, police records, DNA analysis, organised crime network analys is, mobile phone records, tree networks, etc., he has decided that the best way to safely keep all of this information is to produce perfectly bound books with dark-green hard covers. All this time, we have been talking comfortably in their living room. This is where they keep everything

186 related to Alejandro, at home. Don Alfonso lifts the book from the table

and carefully places it in orderly fashion along the other volumes. Then, he looks at me and says: Look, this is Alejandro.¹⁰⁴

104 Interview with Don Alfonso, August 2014.

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