1.  "I hear something stamping... A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps."  Virginia Woolf, The waves.

2.  "Wild animals.  Man's equivocal attitude toward the wild animal is more than usually absurd.  Human dignity does exist (it is, apparently, above all suspicion), but not on one's visits to the zoo – as when, for instance, the animals watch the approaching crowds of children tailed by papa-men and mama-women. Man, despite appearances, must know that when he talks of human dignity in the presence of animals, he lies like a dog. For in the presence of illegal and essentially free beings (the only real outlaws) the stupid feeling of practical superiority gives way to a most uneasy envy; in savages, it takes the form of the totem, and it lurks in comic disguise within our grandmothers' feathered hats. There are so many animals in this world, and so much that we have lost! The innocent cruelty; the opaque monstrosity of eyes scarcely distinguishable from the little bubbles that form on the surface of mud; the horror as integral to life as light is to a tree."  George Bataille, "Metamorphosis." Trans. Annette Michelson in October 36:22.

2.  The logic of modernity was constituted as a result of subjectivation, a conscious process of identification. But the identity of the Self can only emerge through its differentiation from the Other. The snare of reason thus served to banish animals, as traces of the primitive whose similarity to man necessitated their segregation, classification, domestication. Cohabitation brought with it the danger of contagion, not only by those diseases for which animals – roaming through the lowly, the dirty, the infected – were carriers, but also because they threaten us with an existence that would approach, inevitably, a monstrous savagery, which we proscribe, terrified of our own desire. Once separated, the only mammals that escaped expulsion from modern cities were cats and dogs. The cost: the production of a conditioning, so that they might suppress their wildness and become useful objects, outside of affection or protection. But sometimes we are surprised by a dry bark, or by a prowl that honors no boundaries, that dominates territory as if it were an extension of the body, and a shiver overtakes us: this is the fear that our nervous system, our civilizing production, might collapse. Because sometimes our bodies do remember that we are dogs, and cats, and swine, and flies and lice.

3. "A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that.  It may well be that other agencies, moreover very different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One may retain or extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and genera, forms and functions, etc.  Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need characteristics in order to classify the animals themselves. Serialism and structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resemblances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteristics can be mythic or scientific. But we are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling.  I am legion. The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves watching him.  What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly? Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "1730: Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible..." A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (239). Trans. Brian Massumi.

4.  The artist becomes primitive. He does not make himself into or imitate the primitive, he is simply affected and reconfigured by this logic. There is no place here for exoticism, nor for fantasies of representation as correspondence. There are, rather, affects and intensities. There is a body that allows itself to be consumed by savagery, not as the act of identification of some consciousness, but as an anthropophagic moment of creative involution.  Here the artist is the barbarian who has renounced modernity, penetrating the disturbance at its fracture; the foreigner – the gringo – who no longer conquers, but is rather conquered himself, experiencing the violent clash of two civilizing logics, reason and sacrifice.  Francis Alÿs locates himself in this fracture.  On his perambulations he seeks those irruptive moments when primitive logic exceeds the guidelines of Western rationality.  Two snapshots, one constellation:

1.  A fox runs through the empty halls of London's National Portrait Gallery, its every move registered by security cameras.  A trespasser, it prowls through these spaces where portraits attempt to freeze humanity as a representation of the visage: nobles, saints, politicos, conquistadors, civilizers. Savagery lurks, not invoking any shamanic moment. The wild fox's life is secure here only so long as its hunters remain mere apparitions.  Its existence is strictly monitored, since the mechanisms of power know that our sovereignty depends on its containment. A dialectical inverse of the modern construction: savagery/death//civilization/life.  Here, the intruder, the savage, the hunted animal is alive, stalking a representation of humanity that hangs petrified on the walls of a space of domination that is suspected to be the nullification of existence.

2.  In a desert landscape, a dog barks at a trespasser. The barking waxes and wanes, measuring the trespasser's approach and retreat. The camera is clearly this intruder; the dog summons others of its kind, its only sovereign power; their fury consolidates into a defense against this threat because here the gringo is the enemy, is danger. A space uncontrolled by modernity, in which territory is coextensive with the very body of the animal, its habitat and its force. Here, the dog is the savage that delivers us, by its presence, back to a primitive logic: reason no longer establishes hierarchies of domination; instead, the flow of life is the force that resists, convening our bodies, turning our skin into a wound, our teeth into spears, with a shudder that calls forth our animal immanence.

Two moments of irruption that do not attempt to assimilate the experience of these dislocated spaces to representation.  The image as pure allegory of the concealed, of that which returns and lies in wait. Here the artist is the barbarian, lending his body to a violent clash, carrying his wounds like infectious entryways, presenting himself as a vector for contagion and restoring thus the possibility of man's becoming-animal.

5.  "Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brotherhoods, animate the battlefields. But so do the animal packs used by men in battle, or which trail the battles and take advantage of them. And together they spread contagion. There is a complex aggregate: the becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor. War contained zoological sequences before it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine and epidemic that werewolves and vampires proliferate."  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "1730: Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible..." A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (243).  Trans. Brian Massumi.

The enraged alphabet
“According the stunted history of the powerful, this part of the planet came into existence when, in the 17th century, imperial European powers "civilized" it, incorporating these lands and their inhabitants to the rest of the modern world.
We must be aware that, perhaps, our existence was until that time relegated to the underworld, and that conquest would thus have been a sort of reversal of the rebel angel's expulsion from Heaven for having challenged God.  A demon restored to the earth above, to the land of overlords, by the only means his readmission would have been possible; that is, under surrender and submissive.  In a word, redeemed.
If this were true, the history of our suffering could be regarded in at least two distinct and opposed ways: firstly, as redemption and admission to the "civilized world;" secondly, as rebellion and a new, reiterated challenge, directed now at a terrestrial god...  Calendars and geographies might be misleading, but the morning born of these Latin American lands will not be the redeemers' heritage, will not be a democracy full of statues and monuments, and bereft of people.  On the contrary, it will be the work of the unredeemed, who will not be satisfied firing at clocks to arrest time...”

OF REDEEMERS AND THE UNREDEEMED...
Subcomandante Marcos
Mexico, July 2007

It would be a misestimation and a theoretical misdefinition to reduce Zapatismo to yet another reiteration in the cycle of messianic revolutionary discourses, which, conforming to the psychic structure of Christianity, allude to salvation, redemption, and the utopian efficacy with which to construct a better, more just normativity.  Its metaphors, allegories, symbolic games and mobilizing strategies profoundly cancel out any transcendental logic – its arc is doubtless one that takes place over the long term – but its forms of encapsulating itself within desire play with the demoniacal, with heresy, with transgression.  Its political model is the pirate republic, its figure of sovereignty is a becoming-criminal, a becoming-sacrificed.

This reading of Zapatismo runs counter to the undeniable and effective use that has been made of the phenomenon in reactivating an utopian imagination in important circles of the progressive Left.  There are many Zapatismos, and undoubtedly the complexity of their repercussions is still scarcely evident, since we find ourselves confronted with a structure that marked by a long-term temporal arc: "they will not be satisfied firing at clocks to arrest time..."  Nevertheless – and we would run out of time if we didn't hurry – the militant core of Zapatismo is quite opposed to this, its instrumental use.  The distinguishing characteristics of Zapatismo are precisely its non-instrumentality – its strategy is precisely to reduce tactics to an intervention into the space of social effervescence – its having already been expended, its economy of the gift and its rigorous insistence on non-accumulation (of power).  Militant Zapatismo radically deconstructs revolutionary logic, which would usurp the father's position, the space of authority, only to decree a new Law.  Such a challenge drives Leninist intellectuals crazy: the Zapatistas' inexplicable difference consists in aligning themselves with desire, and not with justice – as a program assimilable to the civilization model that has dominated history. Militant Zapatismo encapsulates itself within desire, and therein mounts its festival of rage: a war machine predicated on desire, on celebrating desire, on transforming it absolutely.  We would be confronted with a mechanism in which rebellion exceeds (overflows) revolution.
The work of Vicente Razo is unique in its intervention into the chain of discursive displacements operating between the scatological, the revolutionary, the bizarre and the hilarious.  Laughter is restored to its sacred, ironic dimension; that is, to its destructive or diabolical function.  Here, the logic of the joke is always iconoclastic: politics is a festival of totems and false idols, a space in which to transgress taboos and celebrate the domain of the social as a dimension of the sacred.  Razo, unlike many artists of his generation, delivers us to the militant core of Zapatismo as a symbolic strategy: a rebel grammar, an enraged alphabet.  Laughter as a lethal weapon against the accumulation of atrocities that passes for history, parading as the impoverished reality of a triumphant capitalism with no way out.
Contempt and Mountain/City (2008) are documents that register modernity's underworld in the form of the neighborhood of Iztapalapa, where Razo was in attendance during the Zapatista festival of Dignified Rage.  The video diptych seemingly arrives to its addressee like postcards which the author has written from inside the territories occupied by these unredeemed rebels.  Faced with a vanishing future, these lands will not be the redeemers' heritage, will not be a democracy full of statues and monuments... Rather, in their place will be immense speed bumps (obstacles) that delay and unbalance the flow of machines, and the perverse pleasure of enlightened, sensible latrines to piss in before turning around and heading for the mountains.