Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction by Gastón R. Gordillo (review)

Gastón Gordillo’s ethnographic study of rubble in northwestern Argentina is one of the most culturally-engaged, theoretically-supported, and ideologically-provocative texts in Latin American Studies that I have come across in some time. On the surface, Gordillo’s work was originally motivated by the idea of exploring the affective relationship the inhabitants of Gran Chaco region have had with the physical spaces and debris created by the disruption connected with Spain’s colonization of the original peoples of this area and their land. With places like forts, mission and railroad stations, tobacco dryers, or even entire cities (see Part Two/Lost Cities) that experienced, what Gordillo denotes, “the destructive forces unleashed as collateral damage by the construction of the modern infrastructure that followed the conquest of the Chaco,” his hopes of studying the contemporary connections with these ancient nodes of rubble were brought even more current with what is established in his study as the negation of the negation brought on by the bulldozers and their destruction of the forests to make way for soy cultivation, which first gained momentum during the Argentine neoliberal bubble of the 1990s (1; 19). Although the debris that Gordillo originally had intended to study was unassociated with that left behind by the tracks of the bulldozers, he found it difficult to separate older ruins from new ones given that much of these modernizing processes that have materialized through the manipulation of space have and had in common a capitalistic ontology of profits in the name of progress. In order to break the “spell” of ruins fetishized by elites and elitist-official histories through exploitative and imperial relations that produced certain places now (un) officially celebrated as ruins, Gordillo disintegrates the term “ruin” in order to re-conceptualize it as rubble by rethinking “what space is, how it is produced, how it is destroyed, and what is created by this destruction” (2). The theoretical support for these inquiries abound in reference and contribute to the overall fluidity of Gordillo’s anthropological considerations on and continuations to revisiting Argentina’s history, in this case, by analyzing the physical and emotional configurations the Gran Chaco inhabitants have with the materiality of space and rubble in their cities and towns. Seeing the history of Argentina through the lens of an “object-oriented negativity,” we can then revise the history of human creation, destruction, the silencing of rubble, and the struggles over its afterlife in ways that are not dislocated from the suffering and domination that originated with the Spanish conquest and that have evolved, without oversimplifying, into the reconfigurations of space in the name of agribusiness and “the planetary machinery of spatial destruction” (263).

Structurally speaking, Rubble consists of four parts: Ghosts of Indians, Lost Cities, Residues of a Dream World, and The Debris of Violence that thematically orient the ten inclusive chapters, plus the introduction and conclusion. Parts 2-4 also have three theoretical interludes so the reader is not only presented with the socio-historical context of the northwest regions of Salta and Santiago del Estero, but also provided with adequate support from other great minds that have contributed to the discourse on destruction in the modern era. With support from thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Henri Lefebvre, among many others, Gordillo acquires a very fulfilling application of theoretical discourse and terminology on what comes to be a path toward further historicizing and politicizing our understanding of the materiality of space in its immanence and in this area of Argentina (263). Particularly applicable to the overall historicism of this project is Benjamin’s concept of “constellations” as a “thought image” that suggests a “non-causal connectivity [to history and its actualization in the present] defined by multiplicity, rupture, and fragmentation” in order to counter the fetishization of objects (20). What Gordillo proposes is to add disruption and debris to this perspective “to show that spatial constellations are made up not only of inhabited places but also of the nodes...