THIS ISSUE: Colectivo Situaciones and the production of sociability In a recent visit to London hosted by the Micropolitics Research Group, Colectivo Situaciones raised some intriguing hypotheses about the contemporary political situation in Latin America. With a long track record of intervention in Argentine social movements since the early nineties, the collective claims that social action is at a crossroads today - a situation of impasse.

Impasse

The Colectivo Situaciones’s perspective on the current political situation in Latin America differs from the majority of rather euphoric analyses of the so-called ‘Latin American Moment’ (momento Latinoamericano). It is easy enough to come across articles, essays and talks in the Anglo-Saxon world in praise of the convergence of intent between most ‘left’ and ‘centre-left’ governments that have taken power in Latin America in the past ten years and the social movements such as the landless movement in Brazil, the indigenous movement in Bolivia and the unemployed (piqueteros) movement in Argentina. It is often argued that this seeming democratic collaboration between grassroots movements and official governance has initiated a new type of cooperation in Latin America, which is supposedly a particular and favourable situation for the region. Instead, Colectivo Situaciones warns against the real threat of closure that this ‘transition moment’ presents for the more radical political question: what could Latin America become after neoliberal capitalism?

Departing from their local, almost artisan-like practice in Argentina, the collective identifies a situation of impasse in social action at a global scale. The impasse is generated precisely when social movements can be remodelled as extensions of the government.

They provide a concrete example: the impasse is generated when the struggle of the unemployed for ‘dignified work’ (trabajo digno) in Argentina is appropriated by the government and utilised as a policy of reproletarisation under the slogan ‘decent work’ (trabajo decente).

The impasse is this current ambiguous situation, where the dynamics of creation that animated a growing social antagonism from the early nineties has apparently been detained

What can be done when social action faces a deadlock? Colectivos Situaciones looks back at the recent experience of the social movements trying to find a sort of “useful memory”. Far from an exercise in nostalgia, they say that “it is a matter of opening up new possibilities to re-launch the more radical political questions that remain suspended today. […] We are searching for possible re-openings at the very time of the ‘Latin American Moment (momento Latinoamericano) with all its ambiguities, potentialities and irresolutions”. But defining that praxis of “opening up possibilities” can be quite tricky, especially considering the slippery political landscape described as a “situation of impasse”.

What is the Colectivo Situaciones?

	Latin America integration - Colectivo Situaciones
	Common Latin American identity? - Colectivo Situaciones
	Militant Research_Colectivo Situaciones
	Anomaly X Utopia - Colectivo Situaciones_Argentina
	Projects/discourses of integration of L. America - Colectivo Situaciones
	Emancipation of LA_Colectivo Situaciones

Militant Research

The Colectivo Situaciones insists on differentiating their practice of ‘militant research’ from academic research or political activism or the work of NGO’s. Militant research is used as a concept-tool that works on the premise that all interpretations of the world are linked to some kind of action. Related to practices of co-research and institutional analysis, the Colectivo proposes that all new knowledge production affects and modifies the bodies and subjectivities of those who have participated. Rather than use research as a tool to categorise and separate knowledge from practice, militant research operates transversally, becoming part of the process that organises relationships between bodies, knowledge, social practices and fields of action.

As far from institutional procedures as it is from ideological certainties, the question is rather to organise life according to a series of hypotheses (practical and theoretical) on the ways to (self-) emancipation. To work in autonomous collectives that do not obey rules imposed by academia implies the establishment of a positive connection with subaltern, dispersed, and hidden knowledge, and the production of a body of practical knowledge of counter-power. This is just the opposite of using social practices as a field of confirmation for laboratory hypotheses. Research militancy, then, is also the art of establishing compositions that empower the quests and elements of alternative society.

For more than a decade, the Colectivo has been involved with the unemployed workers’ movement (piqueteros), H.I.J.O.S., the organization of the children of the disappeared during the dictatorship, and Creciendo Juntos, an alternative school run by militant teachers; and they have recently set up the publishing house Tinta Limon, producing books and pamphlets that explore the question of power and counter-power, and liberating thought. Their evolving practice does not work on the basis of a set of knowledge about Latin America and the world, nor on the basis of how things ought to be. In this sense, there is nothing utopian about their work. They are not projecting images of an ideal future. For the Colectivo Situaciones, the future of Latin America ought to be constructed out of questions, not saturated by ideological meanings and models of the world.

Credits

Article by Leandro Cardoso.
Video by Nayana Fernandez and Leandro Cardoso.
Graphics by Mariana Delellis, Sound effects by Pat Burns.
Translation by Mary Adeline Royal Kaminski and Ana Lucila Granada.

Special thanks to Susan Kelly from Micropolitics Research Group and Sue Branford.

Read more about Colectivo Situaciones on:

www.situaciones.org

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en