The wrong kind of engagement

Monica was in her mid-twenties and a member of NAR, the MCMB, and L’Adhesiva. She was Catalan and had been heavily involved with the local branch of Amnesty International in Badalona, a satellite town of Barcelona. Through her personal relationship with Alex (the co-editor of NAR), and the friendships she developed with members of L’Adhesiva and the MCMB, her political interests became focused on Mexico (illustrating the way migrants can affect the life histories and political sentiments of people in the localities to which they migrate (Leinaweaver 2013)). I interviewed her about her experiences of engaging in activism directed at Mexico, and about her experiences of counting in Menos Días Aquí. One of the most poignant moments of the interview happened when she described her visceral response to certain victims and certain news media. She described to me how she felt after seeing a video of a beheading on the last day of her count:

162

“After seeing that video, I really felt that something inside me had broken. Something broke inside me. I really felt as if I had turned into a monster for having seen it. I couldn’t get that out of my head for days afterwards. I even got really angry because despite the fact that I remembered many of the dead whom I had counted - especially a young man who they had shot to death before he left his house - that fucking video made me just remember that. It was only some time afterwards that I managed to remember the others whom I had counted. It was like all of the work that I had done that week had been lost, because for me it was like, I had spent all week long speaking with the dead, trying to reach out a hand to them, doing the work of saying “here they are” - like virtual forensics - and then at the end of the week I become the eye which has possibly seen one of their deaths. I mean it’s not that far-fetched to think of it that way. I felt like that, like shit. I felt disgusted with myself. I was like, how could I have watched that? I felt as if the faces of that video were the faces of the 377 people who I counted that week…that video was so horrible; horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Her reaction to the video implies that watching one of the victims die made her feel as if she herself were implicated in their death. It changed her position from one of empathy with those she had counted to one of feeling responsible for their loss. This was not experienced lightly. It led to such disturbing feelings that she could no longer consider herself to be the same: “something inside me had broken”. By emplacing herself in the subjectivity of the wrong kind of other, she felt herself to be irrevocably damaged. Because the count involves such strong emotional involvement on the part of counters, it has the potential to become transformative in ways which may result in the politicisation of counters or a disintegration of their moral selves. The potential to lose herself within the count became even more visible in the next part of her narrative:

“I couldn’t watch the whole thing, but after watching about a minute I covered my eyes as a form of natural protection; if you force your eyes to watch that you have already died. If I had watched the

163

whole thing, I would have died inside, definitely, definitely. Because of everything it implies, seeing. I mean seeing it is to participate in it. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, but I could hear it; I could hear it, I could hear it…it was awful. A lot of those videos are made so that you see from the point of view of the murderer; your eye is the camera, which is even worse. You can’t see the camera - the camera is your eye, as if you were behind the camera, and that’s how I felt. I felt dirty, betrayed. I was…broken. It was if I had suddenly become empty inside, and that I was never going to get over it. I’ll never get over it, not after seeing that. You lose your innocence.”

This is beyond feeling a connection to the victims. Instead, it emphasises the potential of the count to rupture an individual’s sense of subjective ‘wholeness’ by placing them in the imagined subjectivity of the wrong kind of person (in this case, the murderer). Monica felt that she would never be the same after ‘seeing’ the death of one of the people she had counted. It altered her ability to think of herself as engaging in a moral and political action. Instead, she felt “dirty”, “betrayed” and “empty”. That sense of having successfully recognised the personhood of certain victims by counting, which we saw in the first part of the chapter, has been lost. In its place lies a rupturing of the moral personhood of the counter: empathy within the count contains the potential to become something she would not want to be. Empathy with the wrong kind of person, in this context, and from the wrong perspective, becomes dangerous to a counters’ own sense of self.

Monica then went on to emphasise her desire to detach herself in order to counteract such a moral disintegration of her own personhood:

“You feel like you lose your innocence because your imagination can’t take you there. You wouldn’t want it to. I don’t want it to. I don’t want someone to show me that. I don’t need to see it in order to be convinced that I need to do more or less to realise that the situation is getting worse. I don’t want them to show me; I just don’t want to see it, I don’t want to. Something breaks within you. It breaks completely- because a person is doing it. The identification has nothing to do with Mexico. It’s not

164

that Mexico is bad. It’s one person killing another one. When you see it, you’re not a watching it as Mexican, you’re not watching it as a Catalan. You lose your innocence with regards to the limits of cruelty which you thought human beings were able to reach. You lose it. And that’s really tough, because it’s like seeing beyond the limit, but beyond it. And beyond that limit is the abyss. And also, I think that in the end you also lose your innocence because you realise that you don’t know what the limit is; you don’t know it, you don’t. But you’ve reached a little closer to it. I mean, you don’t know the extent to which human beings can reach. You don’t know. But precisely because you don’t know it, you don’t want to explore it. I don’t want to explore it. I don’t have an interest in exploring it. It doesn’t give me morbid curiosity or anything. But now, I’m a little more immune. I’ve moved the limit. Now I know that it can go that far; which means as fucked up as we are, we’ve already assumed that the next thing we have to get through will be worse. You don’t want to become immune to that. You always want to retain the capacity under which that will seem an atrocity.”

This suggests that experience of the wrong kind of subjectivity, and the way in which that disrupted her own sense of moral personhood, actually provided Monica with insights into the human condition itself. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to realise that there were only certain aspects of that humanity which she could accept, or even wish to acknowledge. It obliged her to make a moral imposition as to what kind of knowledge she wanted to be party to, and what kind of humanity she was willing to recognise. Her desire to block out such a position represents a rejection of the existence of the kind of subjectivity which was responsible for the deaths of those victims, and the rupturing of her own sense of wholeness. Monica’s narrative here illustrates the way in which an imposed differentiation between subjects is necessary in order to preserve the integrity of one’s own self (cf. Fausto 2007: 503; Kohn 2007: 12; Viveiros de Castro 1998: 481, 484). The need to impose such subject differentiation can itself be based upon a moral distinction between desirable behaviour and the kinds of subjects one is relating to (Sulkin 2005: 20).

165

This again resonates with Willerslev’s description of mimetic empathy. In describing the partial application of mimicry by Yukaghir hunters, he argues that during mimesis and the occupation of a double subjectivity, difference between selves needs to be maintained in order to prevent them from merging totally. Willerslev calls this “depth reflexivity,” which is “a certain withholding or non- giving of the self” (2007: 12). Such a position allowed Monica to reject certain subjectivities and therefore prevent herself from partially becoming something which she would not like to be (cf. Fausto 2007: 504). In distancing herself from selective subject positions during the count, she was able to employ a form of emotional protection which allowed her to recuperate the memory of her empathetic relation with other victims, rather than that of the murderer. The desire for distance arose from not wanting to experience the feelings which seeing the video had generated. It prevented her from empathising with the other victims she had counted, and revealed to her aspects of ‘humanity’ which, she said, she “did not need to know”. What becomes apparent here is the fact that in order for counters to be able to grieve for the victims they counted, and for them to empathise with individual victims’ stories, they needed to be able to detach themselves from other kinds of subjectivities – those which inspired feelings which threatened the integrity of the self. This was founded in a visceral rejection of the ‘wrong’ kind of subjectivity. In the next part of this section, I focus on another problematic aspect of detaching oneself during the count which featured within counters’ narratives, and the implications this had on the completion of the overall project.