Abstract
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation has been struggling for greater rights and autonomy for the indigenous Mayan peoples of Chiapas , Mexico for the last three decades. The iconography, semiotic system, and progressive myth-making the Zapatistas produce in the hundreds of murals adorning their communities disseminate a powerful anti-state and anti-capitalist ideology that mutually reinforces the Zapatista culture on which the functioning of their communities, economy, and overall sociopolitical campaign depend. We argue that their positive, forward-oriented and environmentally sensitive art, and the broader political, social and pedagogical discourses it represents, is strongly congruent with Guattari ’s intellectual focus and political orientation toward developing a transversal “ecosophy ,” an ethico-aesthetic perspective that can enable greater freedom from the heavy chains of both the Mexican government and the global neoliberal capitalist system in which Mexico is embedded.
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Notes
- 1.
For detailed explanation of fugitive explorations, as a methodological component of transversal poetics, as well as the dissective–cohesive and investigative–expansive modes of analysis; see Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida and Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations.
- 2.
For more on the idea of a subject, according to transversal poetics; see Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England.
- 3.
For more on sociopolitical conductors and transversal movement; see Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England.
- 4.
For example, consider the now very controversial articulatory space of Donald Trump, “Trump-space,” which includes: 1) concrete changes to the environment, such as during his first one-hundred days in office, pre-production for the building of an eco-disastrous wall along the border between the USA and Mexico , prevention of random people from emigrating to the USA, deportation of people who have lived, worked, and raised families in the USA over decades, and killing people and destroying property and natural landscapes by dropping bombs on Yemen, Syria , and Afghanistan; 2) regular dissemination of questionable and unverifiable information coming from primarily the White House but also from other contingencies that together promote a consistent and therefore unifying impression of disingenuity and uncertainty; and 3) the grotesque fetishization of Trump through which his abstract value far exceeds any presidential or humanitarian qualities he might possess or has successfully demonstrated through quantifiable actions. Negotiating and channeling information streams, sociopolitical conductors, like White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in the case of Trump-space, interface and infiltrate the spatiotemporal operations within articulatory spaces, such as those of news media, public intellectuals, and activists, as a means by which to identify, constrain, and appropriate sites of difference (contrasting information and perspectives), subjunctivity (hypothetical scenarios vis-à-vis uncertainty), and transversality (manifest indeterminate disarticulation and metamorphosis).
- 5.
On the genealogy of transversal thought in contemporary critical theory; see Gary Genosko , “Afterword: Subjects Matter,” in Reynolds, Transversal Subjects, 262–71.
- 6.
See Guattari (1984) Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. New York: Penguin.
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LeVine, M., Reynolds, B. (2018). Fugitive Pedagogy: Guattari’s Ecosophy in the Mural Discourse of the Zapatistas. In: Cole, D., Bradley, J. (eds) Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0583-2_10
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