coldhearted scientist وداد

This is an article on Sarmiento in the desert. I’ve always liked the title – it’s worthy of Bataille – so let’s finally read it. I’ve been meaning to since 2002!

• Lo que el desierto hizo con Sarmiento fue decisivo para la historia argentina. The concept of going out to the desert is key in everything he wrote, did, and theorized. Creating a country depended upon getting to know the desert space, and the desert has been for Sarmiento a campo de pruebas y ensayos políticos, sociales, militares, científicos and literarios.
• S. wrote Facundo (1845) and Campaña en el Ejército Grande (1852) about this. These two texts were written inside the limits described by this problematic space, the desert, to which he “goes” in 1845 and “returns” in 1852. Literally, text 1 was written in exile in Chile, and text 2 documents his return to join the campaign against Rosas. This is when S. finally actually went to the desert.
• It is as though, in this campaign, S. – participating as a journalist – the press were finally invading the pampa.
• Alfredo Ebelot, secretary of the Revue des Deux Mondes, wrote a book about the pampa (apparently for Alsina). In one almost Proustian scene, he is assaulted by a vision of the pampa when he hears the word “cimarrón” in downtown Bs. As. Here, the desert enters the city. “Había olor a espacio,” writes Ebelot. Sarmiento had complained about the same thing: the mores of the country have invaded the city and S. smells death, nihilism, unproductive use, and logistical waste that consumes enormous human and economic resources. (That’s what the caudillo system does.)
• The pampa, S. says, creates monstrous forms of association. There is an excess of life but the lack of modern organization and the misuse are an instinct of death … gauchos end up being paramilitaries rather than workers.
• Civilization, on the other hand, serves the common good. In the city one is free of the tyrant but also of one’s passions. Barbarism is heterogeneous, discontinuous, keeps multiplying, and so on, but civilization puts order in things and smooths them out … but barbarism corrodes this. A spectre haunts the pampa (and the city), and its name is Facundo, and the border (between civilization and barbarism) exists within the city.
• S. is effectively inventing a problem here. The issue for him isn’t the borders but the extensión. The Revolución de Mayo accelerated the extensión and the lentitud of the pampa, and mismanaged, the gauchos’ excessive life becomes an instinct for death when they form montoneras. Rosas has turned the pampa into a space of zombies and spirits, and people without souls.
• (This article is better than these notes, and I wonder if notetaking is actually bad for reading)
• Union, for S., means sewing the divided body of the country together, and synchronizing velocity. Union is always ecstatic, as it brings rhythms together; lentitude and speed, once heterogeneous, are harmonized.
• (More academic adivce I dislike: don’t read, write, if you read, you are procrastinating on writing. I, on the other hand, if stuck on writing, need to read. Old articles are good, they remind me of my train of thought. I just saw a sentence in another article from this same bound journal volume that will finally let me jump-start the rewrite of a manuscript of mine. Do you see?)
• “Sólo desencarnada la fuerza o voluntad política de las masas puede dominarse, por eso el
  propósito de Sarmiento es arrancar del cuerpo del desierto sus poderes, y orientarlos en
  otra dirección, a toda velocidad.”
• The press, and civillized things, are “máquinas de abstracción” that will get the power out of the gauchos’ bodies, turn it toward plowing the pampa as opposed to letting the pampas’ excess life energy remain untamed (and corrosive to civilization)
• Affective maps: the cartographer’s map controls, but the map of the baqueano is entirely different (like Michel Serres’ maps in his work Atlas.
• “Martínez Estrada trata de explicar cómo funciona un saber que nodepende tanto de lo que un sujeto hace sobre el espacio, sino de lo que el espacio hace sobre él. Pero no a la manera romántica, que concibe un fondo indeterminado de sentido prerreflexivo, no dado a la conciencia, que se actualiza progresivamente al pulsar la cuerda interior del sujeto —el sentimiento. No es la naturaleza pensándose a sí misma a través del intérprete, ni un sujeto expandiendo naturalmente su intuición. El saber del baqueano no parte del objeto ni del yo; más bien pasa por el medio. Solo es una relación, un punto de vista donde lo que entra en juego es el borde más exterior, más irritable del yo y el borde más superficial del paisaje; esa zona turbulenta, microscópica, incorpórea, que no existe fuera de los términos que la expresan.”
• And even S. recognized that you needed the knowledge of the baqueano to traverse the pampa
• Poe’s oblique look: S. looks at politics that way, the way the baqueano looks at the desert plain. To write is to explore that space as the baqueano explores. He looks at the pampa covered with the masses of people in it, and let’s not forget that he’s concerned about the spectre that haunts Europe and the world, he is aware of the 1848-related disquiet.
• “Devolverle el alma a esos cuerpos supone acoplarlos a otro sistema de consignas, a la máquina capitalista que el proyecto de Sarmiento pretende dirigir sobre la pampa. // Mejorar, elevarse, adquirir: Sarmiento convoca al fantasma del capital para convertir esos cuerpos en consumidores. Combatir por volver a las ciudades su vida propia, como declara en Facundo, significa entonces llamar al fantasma del capital —y de la capital— para que se encarne en esos cuerpos que recuerdan al Señor Valdemar, suspendidos al borde de la nada, a punto de ser tragados por el desierto.”
• So the bodies of the gauchos, dead, are to be mesmerized and brought to life as consumers and workers, creators of capital (more or less, per the above and per Poe’s story).

This is a smart article, and I am glad I remembered it. (I love Sarmiento’s writing, of course, as well.)

Axé.