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Mariana Ortega, "Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad" (Duke UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
- [00:51]
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- [01:51]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast. Please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:58]
Sarah Tyson
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. I'm co host of the channel along with Carrie Figdor and Blaine Neufeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Mariana Ortega, Associate professor of Philosophy, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Latina Latino Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her new book, the Art of Living in Latinidad, is just out from Duke University Press. How can habits of racialization be affected by art in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In carnalities, Ortega focuses on photography, using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative practices of primarily Latinx artists. Moving from the ocular to the mouthly, Ortega opens up possibilities for being affected by art. She also shows how artists use aesthetic practices to transform themselves, the possibilities for life and as means to refuse to forget the dead. Mariana Ortega, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
- [04:20]
Mariana Ortega
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Sarah Tyson
It's great to have you here. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your background as a philosopher, and how you came to write this book.
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Mariana Ortega
My philosophical interests started very early on in high school when I read the Myth of Sisyphus by Camus and I was fascinated by Sisyphus predicament. And of course I had just come from Nicaragua and I had experienced a war there and so I had a lot of questions in my mind about the meaning of life and the meaning of death and the meaning of suffering. So since high school I was thinking about those issues. In college I studied Camus and I wrote a thesis on the notion of absurdity in Camus as well. When I got to grad school, I realized that many people were not interested in existentialism or Camus, but instead in my program. It was a program University of California, San Diego, and it was a program that was very historical and I had the opportunity to study all kinds of philosophies. But importantly I read. I started reading Being in Time and since there was no opportunity for me to think about existentialism in terms of Camus, I started reading Heidegger. And I became fascinated with the question of subjectivity and the question of subjectivity as I connected to this issue of the day. And also the possibility of being able to change oneself and change the norms and the very norms and practices that made us who we were. So that was the question. Those were the questions that were key for me in grad school. And then I got my degree and I started teaching, and somebody gave me a work by Maria Lugones. And then I started reading other work by Latina feminists. And I have to say, that was the biggest transformation in my intellectual life. It was a reorientation. I started reading, teaching myself, work by Chicanas, Latina, black feminists. And I could never come back to philosophy in the same way. I could never do philosophy the same way. And so that's how I ended up writing in between, which is a text that works on an account of subjectivity, multiplicity, subjectivity informed both by phenomenology and Latina feminism. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about. I continue to think about subjectivity, but I was thinking in terms of the way that it was very personal. I was thinking the ways in which art has been important in my life and, in a sense, has made my life better. The way that I have engaged with novels and painting and film and how those works allowed me to get a sense of joy in life, despite all my thinking about the importance of death, you know, and all my existentialist questions. And I think that that is what prompts carnalities, in a sense, this very personal experience of having come to the US In a terrible situation and having some very difficult moments as my family and I were immigrants in this country. And thinking about that and then connecting that to questions that I have started thinking about in terms of the book in between, about what it meant to be the type of subject that's not a unified subject subject. That's a subject that is in the margins, that is in between, and a subject that has to figure out ways of surviving hostile environments. And so you have the person, my personal experience, then my phenomenological training and existentialist questions. And then, of course, there is the specific work on photography that absolutely moved me, which is Roland Bard's Camera Lucida. And I remember reading that book and being as excited as reading the Myth of Sisyphus, because it's a book about mourning, about loss, and trying to figure out what to do with it, even though it's dressed as phenomenology, but it's really a book about affect and feeling and loss and love and loss of love. And so those three moments, I think in my continuous reading of Photographic Theory, just for fun, all these three moments converge in Carnalities, which is a book primarily about how to think about creative practices and art, how selves that are in the margin, selves that are in hostile environments, can use creative practices in order to put themselves in the map to self name to self transform, but also to engage in practices of memory and also for mourning their dead.
- [10:54]
Sarah Tyson
Yeah. And one way you introduce this project is to describe it as one of carnal aesthetics. And each turn, in that phrase, is really doing crucial work that you unfold over the project. And I can see where it's coming from with the story you just told about how this came about. It really makes so much sense. So can you help us understand why you put together those two words, carnal and aesthetics?
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Mariana Ortega
Yes. I'll start with aesthetics. By aesthetics, I don't mean the traditional aesthetics, which is supposed to be marked by disinterestedness. I'm thinking here of the 18th century notion of aesthetics, which I've always found puzzling, right. As to why is it that art objects should not be connected to content, to. To politics, et cetera. And so I don't mean aesthetics as disinterestedness, but rather as very much interestedness, insofar as that interestedness is mediated through perception. So aesthetics, in the way that I think of it, is connected to perception or sensation. And here I mean not just the predilected perceptual apparatus, which is the eye, right, but all of our body, all of our senses, getting a sense of the world via our whole embodiment. And by the carnal, I don't mean flesh as flesh, as the object of flesh, or what is traditionally juxtaposed to the spirit, spiritual, right, Sort of the sinful parts of us, but rather the carnal to me is something that I theorize with the help of both Gloria Saldua and Merleau Ponti, insofar as I think of the carnal as that which names the intimacy between human beings that are perceiving, by people, selves that are perceiving, and that which is being perceived, be it objects or humans, non humans, anything that is an object of perception for us. And so the carnal in my mind has to do with this intimacy in perception. And so when I put the two together, carnal aesthetics, I'M thinking of creative practices, right? Creative practices that allow us to. That are forged from and with this intimacy through that perceptual attunement to the world and all that there is, including a spiritual realm. How through that attunement, we also deal with different media and shape different media and produce different objects, and not for the purpose of putting those objects in a museum, but for the purposes of improving our lives or getting a sense of relief, actually, from a difficult life. Here consider Anzaldua, and how she writes are auto historias. She's somebody who is very much in between, in between worlds, right? Who lives in the borders, in a place called Nepantla, what she calls being in the middle. She's Mexican, She's American. Mexican American. She has indigenous roots and she's also a lesbian. And so she's dealing with multiple ways of being, multiple identities, and she's not understood. She doesn't fit in any of those identities fully. She doesn't belong fully to any of these places, which causes her great stress and also leads her to have a life in which she has to experience multiple violences because of her identities. And so what does she do? She writes borderlands. She writes cuentos, auto historias. And through the writing, I think she is finding herself. She's developing herself and also learning to live with the pain caused by this life of in betweenness. So that's what I mean by a carnal aesthetics. It's attunement to the world. And because of that attunement with that attunement, having some creative outlet in order to continue one's existence.
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Sarah Tyson
And this gets to this movement that you ask us to make. You start with the eye, the organ of the eye, which I think sounds like a natural starting place in a book that's particularly interested in photographs. But you begin at the eye. You call it a prelude, right? It's sort of like, let's get. Let's. Fine, we'll talk about ocularity, we'll talk about vision. But then. So we can get to the thing I really want to do about photos. And I think it makes a lot of sense why you need to start at the I. And so how do you get us past the I?
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Mariana Ortega
Why.
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Sarah Tyson
Why start at the I? And then. And how do you get us past it?
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Mariana Ortega
Yes, it's indeed a prelude. And. Well, usually there's a long history, right, of ocular centrism. And even in philosophy, we have been enamored by the I in light. And so the I Being the main medium through which we can get to the light and basically to truth, to knowledge, to certainty. And in my account, I think that I do have to start with the I, despite all the problems with the eye. Because we need to know what is problematic with it. In the sense that I am thinking about the I in vision is in terms of the colonial operations of perception. And so if you think about the colonial gaze in the way that different types of beings have been produced through these colonial operations. Of considering beings in other parts of the world as less than human, as lesser than childlike beasts, et cetera. And I do have to say that photography, since its inception, has been tied to that production. Sort of the ontological production of new kinds of beings. In order for us to hate those beings, right, to undermine them. And in that sense, photography is complicit and very much a technology of the colonial gaze. And so it's definitely important for me to think about the colonial gaze. As I will talk about a little bit more later. I'll say more about how I see photography. Because I do not want to. I no longer see photography as a mere index, as merely indexing something that is there. But rather as a carnal operation, As a medium through which we can effectively connect to that which we're experiencing in the photograph. But to start, concentrate on this colonial gaze, the colonial operation. And what is of interest to me is how these operations of visuality. Especially as connected to other beings, work. And it is here where I have been helped by the work of critical phenomenologists. And I think of Linda Alcove, Gail Weiss, Helen Fielding, Helen Ngo, Emily Lee, and, of course, Ali Alsagi. And I always remember reading Linda Alcove's Visible Identities. When she pushes us about thinking of the ways in which our perception of visible difference becomes sedimented. And we become habituated to see in very specific ways. And to see racialized bodies in specific ways. And how all these different philosophers that follow continue with that question. And start really looking into what it means to visually understand a racialized being. And how, in the end, we have the habit of considering people of other races in a negative light. And it is Alsaji's account that really points to this connection of the visible perception with affect in a negative way. And I am fascinated by that. Because what she does is try to figure out how philosophers can deal with this question of perception, of habituation. But the fact that perception is connected to the affective. Something that we don't talk as much about when we're talking about theories of race in terms of anti racism. There are a lot of discourses, a lot of theories as to how to fight racism. But the fact of the matter that you can read the theory, but what if the person. You can change laws, you can have theories, but how do you get to that affected. Those affected modalities of racialization? She does interesting work by looking at art, artworks and how artworks might allow for the possibility of reconfiguring the habits of perception. And I think that's one of the things that was of great interest to me, Alcoff, thinking about, okay, we have to learn about the practices of seeing if we really need to understand how racism works. But also all these other phenomenologists trying to figure out, okay, now what do we do if in fact, racialization is a habit?
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Sarah Tyson
Right?
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Mariana Ortega
It's not just something that we can deal with rationally, but it's a habit. And not only is it a habit, but these are habits of disgust, of hate. Right? And so how do we deal with that? And so for me, that was an invitation to. I've always taken art seriously and I've always thought about the way in which images. I'm fascinated about the relationship between image and word. I've always thought about that. But now, after reading these works on critical phenomenology, I really wanted to explore more this idea of how is it that imagery. And of course, that's why I start with the eye, right? You know, starting with the visual. How images, in the end, how working with images allow us to get, I think, a more nuanced understanding of the operations of racism, which, of course, leads to the understanding that the eye is not enough. Because even though we can look at an image, haven't the experience. Experience of a photograph by seeing it, we're not just seeing the photograph. We're not just seeing the sculpture, we're not just seeing the painting. We are effectively responding to these works. And so I think artworks lend themselves for. At least for philosophers. I think it's important for us to see how they operate, how understanding our aesthetic experience might lead us to find other avenues of understanding racialization and perhaps reconfiguring habits or getting a fuller picture of what racism is about and what it means for a racialized person that has been other. To understand how they feel and to make from it.
- [25:33]
Sarah Tyson
Yeah, to make. Because this is the Anzaldua. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt you. Yes, yes, yes.
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Mariana Ortega
That's why it's really. I think of the I just as a prelude, really, where we learn A lot, because it continues being operative right everywhere. But I think it's important for us to become more attuned to other ways of perceiving the world. And I think this is where Gloria Anseldua, for me, has been so key. And including the Barthian camera, Lucia Barths of Camara Lucida, and also Chela Sandoval and her methodology of the oppressed, which takes into consideration the importance of affect in the production of ideologies. Because we only think of. We try to think of. We tend to think of ideologies as that at least philosophers do, right, in working in these very rational ways. But the fact of the matter is that they work precisely because they have this affective force. Yes. And so all of these thinkers have inspired me to go beyond discourse or to look somewhere else. And that's why I'm working now with images, photography. But interestingly enough, I had been working with images before, but I hadn't really put all the elements together as I'm doing now in Carnalities. Yeah.
- [27:17]
Sarah Tyson
And you think a lot in the book about how ideologies can shape us and shape subjectivity, and how the artists you're considering have been shaped by things that are actually responding or working on themselves, or self naming or self transforming through their artistic practices. And one of your focuses is Auto Arte, and especially through the work of Laura Aguilar. And you talk about her work, Creating Carnal Crossings. And so this working up, you sketched a bit about Gloria Anzaldua's work, and then you extend this, right, you get to the mouth with Gloria Anzaldua's work, and then you start looking at Laura Aguilar's work. So will you talk about Auto Arte and about Carnal Crossing?
- [28:06]
Mariana Ortega
Yeah, to make sense of Auto Arte, I think it's important. I'm not sure if listeners are familiar with Anzaldua, and so maybe I'll say a little bit more. So, as I've mentioned, Anzaldua uses art in order to name herself, in order to, I think, to survive and to transform herself in. So doing what she does is come up with what I think is an aesthetics that is a carnal aesthetics in the way that I have previously described, an aesthetics that's very much informed by an attunement, by a perceptual attunement to all the things that are going on around her, but also in her, in terms of paying attention to her dreams, to her intuitions, to her spiritual experiences, to her desires, to her psychological states. And so all of these together, put together, allow her to. What she says is to put the pieces of herself that had been shattered in these moments of. She calls them arrvatos. And Arrvatos is sort of shocks, right? Daily shocks of existence. When life is hard and you're constantly as somebody who's marginalized, for example, being a migrant in a country that has a politics, that hates migrants, for example, consider the life of people like that. Consider immigrants right now, for example, who are so scared in their daily life, the daily quotidian moments, which are supposed to be easy and fluid, how they have become full of arrivatos, of changes, of disruptions, of violence. And so living that way for Ansaldua creates this. She calls it intimate terrorism. And those are strong words, but I think they convey the kind of pain and horror that can accumulate in somebody's self. And in Anzaldua is very much aware of these arrivatos and how they fracture a self, and so makes the self feel confused, sometimes so confused and afraid that you cannot move, that you cannot make the next decision, your next choice. The way she puts this is it doesn't allow you to cross to the other side. And so through the attunement, the perceptual attunement to what's inside, what's outside, with all that is around her, she starts creating the stories, right? Making art. And it is through the making of the art that she starts getting a sense of who she is. And so in that sense, I see that interpret Anzaldua as using her very body, right, as this carnal crossing, a mediation between all that is there, right, all that can be perceived, and her own desires, intentions, needs and experiences. And so the Ansalduan account allows me to go beyond the I insofar as you include your whole body and you become perceptually attuned, what I call effective mapping. It allows you to effectively map yourself in the world. And it is a carnal aesthetics that both is based on this interlacing that we talked about between the perceiver and perceived, but one that moves that intimacy, that interlacing forward, right, in order to create so new experiences or new ways of being, new art. And so auto arte in my reading, is that intimate, the more intimate personal moment of the creative process is that moment when you are the one who's feeling that pain. And specifically, it's connected also to what Anzaldua describes as the cuatlique state. The cuatlique state is that moment when all the indignities right? Of being a person of color in a place where one is not wanted or respected, Feels terrible. And then all the arrivatos to the point where one freezes and for her is a moment of pain, terrible pain, and confusion and paralysis. And it is in that paralysis. And here I think both in terms of Alsagi's account of hesitation and Anzaldua's account of the cuadlicua state, because both of them are looking for that interval, that moment where all kindness, everything slows down and the self becomes more attuned to her perception. And in that attunement, for Alsagi, you can perhaps start thinking or reconfiguring habits, right? For Ansaldua, it's the moment where you start becoming quite aware of your intuitions by other ways of knowing. And that allows you to make your next move. It allows. It's part of the creative process. And so in Auto Arctic, I'm thinking of that intimacy when one is, as it were, has one's hands tied, but at the same time is also going through that moment of slowing down, of listening to oneself and trusting oneself, rather than what the ones that have the colonial eye would want from oneself, what they think about oneself, what they expect from us. And so it's a very intimate process in which we can use any type of creative process in order to learn about ourselves otherwise than we're expected to be by the colonial gaze. And so I say mouthly, that this brings mouthly operations in the move from eye to mouth. People might ask, but why the mouth? Well, the mouth is very much involved in all kinds of perception, in taste, you know, connected to the nose, as we smell, etc. Very much multiple perceptual organ. But anua, it's from a quotation from Ansaldua when she says, todo pasava porresa voca el viento, el omares, la tierra, the wind, the earth. And when I read that, I remember thinking, wow, to think of how the whole world can pass through a mouth. And what does that mean? Right? And that's why I think of the mouthly in the way that I do, as a multiple perceptual sense that discloses the intimacy between us and the world. And so the work of Gloria, of Laura Ilar, is an example, a beautiful and painful example for me, of auto arte with photography. Auto arte with light. Yes, yes.
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Sarah Tyson
Do you mind delving a little bit in for listeners who may not be familiar with her photographs, a little bit into what she does?
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Mariana Ortega
Yes. Laura Guilar is a Chicana who is someone who was not educated formally, who taught herself at first photography, and then she started taking classes. Somebody who's a lesbian also. She was a very large woman who felt very uncomfortable with being so large. She felt uncomfortable with being a lesbian at first. And. And she starts using her camera. And I think of her as using her camera in the way that Gloria Anselua uses her pen or her computer, right? That is to say, it is the camera that ends up being the medium that allows her to make herself otherwise than she's expected to be as a. A poor Chicana, right, that has not studied much and who has dreams of becoming an artist, but who knows that the art world is not for women, it's not even for white women. Imagine why would it be for a Chicana woman like her? But she does not stop taking photographs. She starts taking photographs of people in her community. She starts taking photograph of lesbians in our community, in various social settings, in clubs that are less known and lesbians that are. That are doing better in their lives. So she's constantly navigating, mapping herself in different terrains where social class is different. And she's constantly asking herself, okay, how am I doing my art? What does it mean for me to do this art? And then I think there must be an amazing moment, right, when she decides to take photographs of our body, a body which in some videos of our work, she hates herself because she doesn't like herself. And yet she uses the camera, she starts taking the photograph. And in the book, I explain how I think that Laura Aguilar gives birth to herself by way of her photography. And not only does she do that, she connects to the world because what she starts doing is her nature point portraits, where she goes out there in the world and takes photographs on the sand with the trees. And when you see those photographs, I invite the viewers to go look up her work. You can see that she is becoming part of that world and she is developing an intimacy with that world. And that's the sense in which I think she has done a carnal aesthetics through her photographs. And in so doing, she has defined herself, named herself, and has resisted the colonial gaze.
- [41:19]
Sarah Tyson
Yes, and she. Her work is so funny too, at the same time, I mean, she develops a sense of humor that. That portrait she does of herself at her friend's house, when she's house sitting, and there's this beautiful, well appointed in the way that she's positioned herself as so ambiguous, right? Is she worn out? Is she done or is she relaxing, she's holding a cold drink. It's unclear. And you can read it in these different ways. And it's so. Yeah. So I do hope people will go and look at her photographs because they're, as you say, they're doing a lot. Okay, so now we're about to start talking about the second half of the book. The first half is really thinking about these carnal crossings as we've been talking about. The second half is going to talk about the crossing of the US Mexico border. It really builds on what you've been doing, but the register of the work changes. And it's interesting. The photographs that introduce them and the fourth chapter are really a different kind of photograph. They're not meant as art, as I understood those photographs. It's of objects that are found by people who perish in the crossing. So they're from the Pima county office of the Medical examiner. And so this is not a self making. And you begin to see. And then this chapter takes us to people who are gonna make art out of things found in this crossing. And the thing that ties the sort of, as I understood it, the two sort of kinds of photographs that you're talking about in this chapter together is that we can listen to these photographs and that's what. And so will you talk about listening to photographs and these objects that are. That are in the medical examiner's office. And then these really beautiful. It's border Cantos that are these beautiful pieces of both art and then also music together and what the role of listening is.
- [43:33]
Mariana Ortega
Yes. Before I talk about how I use ORC of Tina Camp, who has inspired me to follow her methodology of listening to photos, I should say that the second part, the entire book, is both an entwinement between the personal and the communal. The personal and the communal is at work in both parts. But there's more of a highlighting of more of the personal in the first section and in the second part.
- [44:12]
Marshall Poe
At.
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Mariana Ortega
Least in the first chapters, there is more this connection to community. I should add that one of my jobs when I graduated from college was to be an ESL teacher. I taught ESL in Los Angeles and most of my students were undocumented. And I dream. I always say that it was one of the most important jobs that I've had, if not the best, because I was a very brainiac, a brainy philosopher that kept thinking in abstractions. And then I met my students and I had to teach them English. And a lot of them were not. They didn't know grammar in Spanish. And so I had to find different embodied ways of teaching, right. But a lot of them have crossed the border and had suffered tremendous violence. And that's where I first learned of that kind of violence in the border. And then I had been thinking a lot about different ways in which the figure of the migrant is discussed by the US government, various US Governments, actually, and the tremendous hate towards the figure of the migrant. While I know, you know, I had worked with a lot of them and I knew how hard they work. I used to teach at night until 11, because all of them were working, cleaning, taking care of children and doing construction jobs for other people. And so they would come really late at night to learn English. And I remember thinking about Claudia Ansaldua and all I've learned about Ansaldua in terms of the borderlands and how she uses art, right? And then hearing all this hateful rhetoric and seeing. Witnessing all the hate against migrants. And so I was thinking, how do philosophers deal with this? How can I, as a philosopher, deal with this? I'm not sure how to do it, but I think I want to do something to honor these communities. And so I think my searing it in, in terms of lived experience, phenomenology, the role of photography, Ansaldua, all these things got together and informed my next thinking about specific kind of photographs, photographs that are specifically related to crossings, to difficult crossings, difficult migrations. And that's where when I started looking at more photographs about immigration and I came across these photos by the coroner, and I was absolutely blown away when I first wrote about them, I had not read Tina Camp, so I had not understood the methodology of listening to photographs, but they still. These photographs talked to me, affected me in a sense. Excuse me. In a sense, what happened was that I thought that they carried so much sorrow that I thought of that sorrow as unsettling me. And then I started thinking about the ways in which a work, a photograph, even though it's not a regular type of photograph, could unsettle us to prompt us to think about the lives of immigrants. And so those are photos. It's horrible to think about. They're near the seas, right? Bodies, sometimes bones, because animals eat the bodies in the desert. So sometimes you just find these objects with very few indications of the bodies. But. But they pointed at least to me, to the lives of. And the importance of the lives of these people who were crossing. This is not to say that I don't want to romanticize immigrants or immigration. No. But I do want to remind readers of the Import of their work, why they matter and what happens to them in these crossings. And so I first read the photos as indicative of this tremendous sorrow that in my mind has the possibility of carrying out an unsettlement. I don't give a normative account because I don't think it's possible to do that with works of art. Some people really want that, but I'm not sure. At least that's not the project that I'm doing here. A lot of what I'm doing is showing how Latinx people are producing carnalities, which are these creative practices that I've been talking about. But I was so moved by these photos that I thought I must write about them. And then after I read Tina Camp's book Listening to Images, I realized that she's doing a similar movement in terms of. Listen, you know, of considering the effective aspect of the photograph, the carnal, what I'm calling the carnal aspect of the photograph, which I learned from Camera Lucida. Right. That I almost sometimes think of photographs as a skin of light. Right. It's skin insofar as that they are the. That medium that allow us to have a relation to what's out there or supposedly out there from us. Right. And so the listening aspect, once I read Kant's methodology, it really pointed out this idea of how the quotidian, sort of what she calls the lower frequencies in photos. Photos, she uses photos that are used for passports. Those are the most boring photos that are not supposed to indicate anything. Right. They're supposed to just give us data to analyze so that we can make sure that if we go after the person, we know exactly what their measurements are, et cetera. But she uses them in order to find out to imagine the lives of the people in those passport photos. Well, I use these objects because they are letters. They're love letters, bibles, medicine, food, ideas of what they want, what people want to do once they reach the so called promised land. Right. And so those are the photos that I start with in this chapter in order to motivate this idea that, that the photograph as an. As a carnal medium has the possibility of teaching us something about the lived experience of multiple. Multiple beings all over the world. Right. That are doing. Are engaging in perilous crossings in order to better their lives or actually to save their lives.
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- [53:53]
Sarah Tyson
And the next place that you go is involves these shoes and these photos of shoes and people using shoes. And so we're back into people making art but using again objects that have endured the crossing. Right. With the people who are crossing. And this allows you to develop a discussion of Feeling Brown. So from Jose Munoz. So how do you connect this particular work of photography with Feeling Brown?
- [54:26]
Mariana Ortega
Yeah, the series you're referring to is by Veronica Cardenas and who is based at the border and what they do is that they travel with migrants when they're crossing and takes photos of them. But their early series was one called Traveling Souls and it was photographs of about 400 and something pairs of children's shoes. Also it also includes shoes of older adults. But there are a lot of children's shoes. And what they did was to place the shoes, their shoes when people enter. There was a time at that time there were a lot of unaccompanied children coming in. And I want us to consider that imagine a child alone crossing the border. To me that I had a really difficult experience coming to the US but nothing close to something like that where you have to walk and then cross this river. And there's an organization that welcomes them and takes all their soiled clothes and shoes and gives them new clothes. And Veronica picked up the shoes and then placed them as if making what I think what I consider altars for the living altars with the shoes of mostly children. And so to me, that is a carnality, a creative praxis in which Veronica is alerting us to the experience of these immigrant children. I connect that to Jose Esteban Munoz account of Feeling Brown. And a lot of the photos in that second part of the book are connected to this notion and Feeling Brown. For Jose Esteban Munoz, he says, it's a structure of feeling, and it's a structural feeling of getting a sense that one is a problem. He's inspired by the voice work. And so it's. Rather than forging an account of identity, Munoz forges this account of being Brown, which means that you are the kind of self, usually somebody from the south, right, that is perceived as a problem, that is treated as a problem. And for Jose Esteban Munoz, this allows us to make connections with each other. All of us who feel as a problem or who are treated as a.
- [58:02]
Sarah Tyson
Problem.
- [58:04]
Mariana Ortega
It is a manner of making community, or he calls it a brown commons. How does this connect to Veronica series? It connects to it insofar as I read Veronica's series, they have a series of these traveling souls, but they also have a series where they went to. The port of Hidalgo where hundreds of Haitians were waiting for asylum, and they took these photographs to document the experience, their experience as well. And I see this series of photographs as an archive of Feeling Brown, that is to say, as the photographer's way of opening up our affective registers so that we at least have the possibility, the opportunity to slow down and to consider the experience of these selves who are doing these difficult crossings. And so here again, a carnality, this photographic series, which are by a Latinx photographer, also trying to use their creative, their creativity in order to put these issues on the map. And also not just for mere data or information, as you would read in a newspaper, although their photographs have now been picked up by the New York Times. But in order to give us the opportunity to understand effectively what these cells are going through, what these children, where these children had to go in order to reach the US Alone, right? But together, right, but with other parents. And so for me, these are such important works because they really not only document these waves of migrations, but they also bring to light the particular sorrow that is involved in these movements of crossing.
- [61:08]
Sarah Tyson
And I found part of the cast off shoes being made beautiful and moving. I did find this sort of the way you talked about it, as an altar, the shoes, the objects, the worn out objects themselves becoming more precious for Having been put in this photograph and then that they also keep the shoes. They don't just. It's not gathering up the shoes, taking a photo and then throwing them out, but actually treating them as. As precious objects. There's something very affecting about that. I think that, as you say, points back to these shoes carried. These kids wore these shoes across this impossible task.
- [61:55]
Mariana Ortega
And the shoe makes you think of the one wearing the shoes. There are many monuments or acts of remembrance in terms of using boots for soldiers, women's shoes. Right. In Juarez, Mexico, for the feminicides, there have been multiple. The Holocaust Museum, you know, when you see that pile of shoes. But somehow, again, there's this sense of. Of. Of. Of multiple shoes which might lead you to think that you are of obfuscating the particular people that wore them. But for some reason, shoes have this. You know, they. They have the signs of the one who wore them, the way they. The shape are changed. Right. And that makes you. That connects it to a particular being that was wearing them. And so it really brings both sort of the communal suffering, but also the personal aspect of the journey. And I think that gives them a lot of power. Yeah.
- [63:12]
Sarah Tyson
In the final chapter, you explore being undone by aesthetic experience. And you end it with a letter to Roland Barthes. How did the arc of that chapter develop? Did you know you were going to write a letter to him to end the chapter or that. Yeah, I was really curious because it's so effective and it's so affecting and it's a very difficult chapter and the images are very difficult in that chapter. And then you end with this letter.
- [63:42]
Mariana Ortega
Yes, in a sense, that's where I go full circle. Right. To sort of the auto arte. Because in a sense, I realize. I don't think it's something planned in the way I work, but in the end, this book is my auto arte, because this is what I do. Right. I write, but I insert myself in the book. And that last chapter has to do with this photograph that is a very horrible, horrific photograph of remains of the. Of a body of a Sandinista who's fighting the. The Samoa regime. And I still remember the first time I saw that photo and being sick and. And it was. I got nausea and it was very nauseating. It was a very bodily violent experience. And I guess the photograph for me was a way of bringing back. Bringing me back to my past, which a lot of times I try to forget. You know, growing up, being a young person that has to be in the middle of this war revolution, the moment you don't know what you're going through in a sense of. In terms of its. The importance of implications, the political implications, et cetera. You only notice the fear and the dread, right? And then leaving everything behind. And we didn't bring much, and so we had to be taken care by people from different churches who brought us food, etc. And I immediately, I think, went in a direction where I wanted to think about existential questions, but through the philosophical medium, that is to say, in an abstract way, it was easier to do so. And I think that's why I ended up doing philosophy, because I think it stopped me from really taking into consideration the political, personal implications of war, et cetera. It was a way of dealing with a past that was too difficult to deal with, right? So what do I do? I start doing metaphysics, subjectivity. And so I'm still fascinated by existential questions, but the more philosophy I did, the more abstract it became, right? But I think seeing this photo reminded me that I have to think that this is something that I have to contend with, even though it's all over my life. It has colored my life in many ways, right? In terms of fears, et cetera. But this horror of a photograph disclosed the excess. Well, we can I use Kristeva. At the time, I was invited to do a talk on Kristeva, and I was rereading her book on horror. And it was such a coincidence for me to find this work and to be able to think through it by way of a theory, of course. But the theory showed me that, in fact, this is a photograph that can undo me, that it takes you to the limits of the self, of what you can take, where art, right, is no longer. But for Meiselas, who took the photograph and became very famous with her photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution, this photograph has a different meaning for people who look at it. It has a different meaning for me. I did not witness that horror, but I was in tremendous fear. And so I could see how work of art brings out all the excess that we try to hide, but that, in the end comes back to us. That has to do for Christeva, has to do with death, with all the liquids that fall out of our bodies, our feces, our urine, our blood, right? That in the end, that's who we are, which very much connects it to flesh as an object, right? But the fact of the matter is that these liquids, these solids, are symbolic of who we are and what, in the end, we are to become of our death, right? And all the fears that are connected to that. And so that's what the chapter is about. And I worry that's a little bit to self reference. I mean, to self involved. To self. The way that I put it before is that it's looking at my own fellows too much, you know, to self absorb. And so I. I'm a little bit worried about that. But I also understood that it was something that I had to do because I was talking about difficult crossings. And I connect that discussion to one of the books that was the inspirations for the Carnalities Camera Lucida, where Bards looks at photos from the Nicaraguan revolution and says that there's nothing interest of interest there. And when reading Barthes, I had already objected to some of. Of his comments on racialization and the punctum of certain photos that had to do with race. And I found that there were many very problematic readings of these photos. But in this instance it was about his thinking of this photograph as having absolutely no interesting point to it. And I thought, wow, I was pierced because I love Barth, because I had been so moved by his being moved by the loss of his mother and the way that he thinks of photographs. Right. That the photograph has this umbilical cord to you, to the one who experiences it. And so I felt betrayed in a sense, and I took it personally. And I just didn't know how I would write in a traditional philosophical way, although already I have been moving away of writing in a more traditional philosophical way. But in this case it demanded even more. Something more personal. But then I thought this is already so personal, I don't know what to do. But then. And what is, you know, if you think about it, the letter, that is the most personal. And so. But that's the only way I thought I could really just let him know and sort of get it out of me, this idea of how doing theory in the end is not enough, doing this course is not enough. And I think that's also what I'm saying in the book, but also that. That the letter is also another. It's symbolic of another move and an invitation for us as philosophers to really be serious about other ways of telling the things that we know or the things that we're learning and being mindful too of considering topics in different ways. For example, there's a lot written on immigration, but when I go to a lot of the talks, it's as if the immigrants and migrants themselves have disappeared. It's all about the law, about should we invite people who are more educated or not. This is the reason why. And this is. And you lose the people, you lose their experience. And I am not sure that it's a good thing for us as philosophers to write about race without being at least a bit mindful of the lived experience of those who have racialized and are going through this experience. And it's odd to write about immigration in such an abstract way with concerns about justice and human rights, and not consider sort of the lived experience of those crossings. And so that last chapter, in a way, is my way of saying perhaps we need to do things differently and for good reasons. Right. We have to have the humility to know what our limits are in our theories.
- [73:33]
Sarah Tyson
Well, I found it to be a work of art myself, and reading it. So what are you working on now?
- [73:40]
Mariana Ortega
After Carnality's Spin, it was very, very hard to do the research for that book. Right now I just finished. I continue thinking about photography and memory making. So I just finished an article on photography and memory making inspired also by the work of Saidiya Hartman on Venus in Two Acts. And I've been thinking a lot about the way that she thinks she expands the archives, right, by bringing up this idea of critical fabulation when she's dealing with such a difficult task of what it means to tell the story of beings that were not allowed to be human beings, to have lives, right, that appear in the archive just as number, numbers, votes. And I started thinking about that, and then I saw this series, photographic series, and I thought that what this artist was doing was, in a sense, I was trying to think whether we could perform something that I'm calling photographic fabulation, when we're trying to tell a story of something impossible to tell. And this is a story of. Is an artist named Coyotli who is trying to honor the knowledges of her mom, the indigenous knowledges of her mother, through recreation of some moments of her childhood in Ecuador and creating these photographs that are supposed to be her memory, but are not, but that also point to what Quijano calls the coloniality of power, how colonization still rules our lives. And so that's a paper on sort of this possibility of photographic fabulation. I just finished it, but I'm still thinking about it. I think I need to add much more to it. In the back of my mind, I always keep thinking that I want to write something on love, because I do think that I've been so inspired by Anzaldu and Chela Sandoval. And so I wanted to. The other idea is to do a little bit more on the hermeneutics of love inspired by Chela Sandoval. And what, what would it mean to do philosophy lovingly? That's just. I have all these ideas about it. I don't know if it will happen or not.
- [76:50]
Sarah Tyson
Well, I hope it does. Mariana Ortego, thank you so much for this conversation.
- [76:55]
Mariana Ortega
Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate your engagement with the book and this conversation, Sam.