6 Khipu, Analepsis,and Other Natural Signs: Cecilia Vicuña’s Poetics of Weaving and JoaquínTorres-García’s La Ciudad sin Nombre

A poetics of discontinuity has a different resonance in khipu, a sign system whose literacy remains under colonial erasure. Its analepsis is, in a sense, a simple expression of historical loss. After the violent colonial destruction and interdict of the knot writings of the Andes, nobody today can read the khipu. Yet, the loss notwithstanding, its expression has continued to take shape within the aesthetic form of that which is felt to be lost. In the writings and performances of Cecilia Vicuña, the khipu is a structure in which to comprehend historical violence, as well as to think past it. While the semantics of the sign system remain a mystery, its semiotics or linguistic patterns have been a topic of generative analysis. In Vicuña’s works, those patterns represent rhythms of life in resistance to a colonial historiography that would deny such life, as well as a resistance to the market culture that continues to find new ways to destroy such life and its generative possibility.

Her works therefore carry an important question: if the meanings of this sign system are lost, how can its forms continue to affect the meanings of contemporary reality? As if to insist that a sign is not dead without its semantics—but, on the contrary, that it is animated by the challenge of having to make its meanings across such loss—she writes: “the quipu that remembers nothing, an empty cord—is the core/the heart of memory—/the earth, listening to us … Piercing earth and sky/the sign begins/ To write from below, seeing the efface” (QUIPOem q.8–12). If the khipu remembers nothing, if it is subsumed under the absencing of the colonial archive, the question is how that “empty cord” could have a “heart of memory.” How could it be that the sign’s memory persists because it can “write from below,” emerging from colonial erasures to rewrite those erasures into an “earth and sky” of its own making? If the khipu remembers nothing, can Vicuña’s poetry be the living khipu that she proposes it is—“an empty cord” that is also where “the sign begins”? Can the khipu animate speech across its colonial interdict, and, as she suggests that it does, how does that interanimation define colonial interdicts and amnesias? What is this khipu that “remembers nothing” yet holds inside itself the ability to remake everything?

The materiality of knot writing—knots that are read tactually, as they move between the fingers—has been a means to shed light on Vicuña’s khipu poetics. The tactility of knots gives a kind of archival immediacy to the khipu. Its semantic losses are lost in the sensuousness of the knots (see plate 9). This way of reading Vicuña’s knot works nucleates in a figural trifecta of texture, textile, and text (see plate 10). The texturality of khipu helps Vicuña to disclose the materiality of poetic texts. Art historian and curator M. Catherine de Zegher thus correlates Vicuña’s textual wovenness with enhanced perception of social and ecological networks (qtd. in Vicuña, QUIPOem 17–45), and art critic and activist Lucy R. Lippard reads these “words [in] a weaving vortex” as a feminist bulwark against the “dematerialization” of conceptual art (qtd. in Vicuña, QUIPOem 13).¹Close Literary scholar Juliet Lynd focuses on the “precarious resistance” present in the raw materiality of Vicuña’s works in order to develop a historical materialist reading. In Lynd’s analysis, Vicuña’s opposition to Augusto Pinochet’s free market dictatorship (from which she was exiled) is expressed by way of a resistant “diary of objects … [and] objects of resistance” that include material evidence of the socialist democracy that Salvador Allende led in the pre-Pinochet years of 1970 to 1973, as well as material evidence of the state violence that came with the US-backed ouster of Allende and the torture, murder, and disappearances that sustained Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship (1596–97). The resistant materiality of people and objects during the dictatorship finds an aesthetic form in the khipu bundles, which have outlasted colonial torture, murder, and erasure to make a poetics of resistance present to this day.

Lynd thus characterizes khipu as a contemporary aesthetic strategy for giving presence to absence, giving the khipus a compensatory quality: “As part of the contemporary social imaginary, then, quipus connote an irrevocably lost way of life, and as a constitutive element of Vicuña’s poetry, they represent at once the desire to know the precolonial past and the aporia of memory in the postcolonial world” (1591). To be sure, the khipus have suffered from colonial silencing. But to suggest that they are thus captive to such silence only amplifies the colonial noise around them. “The system of which they once formed an integral part has disappeared,” she writes,

the reinvented quipu does not so much suggest a desire to recuperate that lost code as it signals the emptiness of the traces of the forgotten and unknowable. … [Vicuña’s khipu works affirm] that writing now has the authority that the quipu once had in the structuring of memory, but the alphabetic text lacks the visual, tactile, and spatial dimensions of older forms of encoding memory, of representing the past. … [Its] memory is the trace of an absence, the consciousness of something irrecoverably disappeared. (1591, 1593)

Khipu defined in terms of totalized absence or irrecoverable loss is innocent of the conceptual trouble of living experience. While Lynd’s emphasis on Vicuña’s materiality is important, the emphasis on total loss—wherever it is found—gives way to that Lévi-Straussian melancholia for the always already lost native object, for the condition of hopelessness in which native things must exist, caught in a kind of necessary death.

Another way of taking seriously Lynd’s emphasis on the “irrecoverable” without giving way to colonial totalization is through philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of irrecoverability. In his writings on memory and forgetting, Ricoeur unraveled a living dialectics of absence that the rhetoric of the “irrecoverable” hides. The irrecoverable, whose French verb tense is “‘n’être plus’ (being no longer),” is a special ideological construct of historical representation, in which “the ontology of being-in-the-world … [is] placed under the sign of a past as being no longer and having been.” When historical representation inhabits this domain of the irrecoverable, it creates the conditions in which “past things are abolished” and “the absent thing itself gets split into disappearance into and existence in the past” (280). Ricoeur’s point is that such rhetorical strategies of historical representation hide the work that historical representation itself does to make the past present and to recover the past for present experience. He reminds readers of an Aristotelian relation between an absent thing and its presence in representation: “absence [is] the other of presence!” he writes, insofar as representations elicit the absence of the represented thing (a thing is never so absent as when it is virtualized), while the absence of the represented thing is elided into felt presence in the instance of its representation (a thing is never so present as when we are forced to feel its absence) (17). In Ricoeur’s finessed dialectic of memory and historicity, this means that absence is a condition for the possibility of presence. If there must be anything like n’être plus, that irrecoverability must be understood in implicit relation to the constant recoveries it makes possible.

The difference between the irrecoverable and its implicit recoveries has to do with the redemption of the search itself. In this regard, Ricoeur distinguishes the pragmatics of absence from its semantics—by way of a classical Greek distinction between anamnesis and mneme:

The Greeks had two words mneme and anamnesis to designate, on the one hand, memory as appearing, ultimately passively, to the point of characterizing as an affection—pathos—the popping into mind of a memory; and, on the other, the memory as an object of a search ordinarily named recall, recollection. Memories, by turns found and sought, are therefore situated at the crossroads of semantics and pragmatics. To remember is to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory. In this sense, the question “How?” posed by anamnesis tends to separate itself from the question “What?” more narrowly posed by mneme. (4)

The mnemonic activity of mneme has a simple circuit between sign and historical referent, while the activity of anamnesis involves reflexive engagement with the processes, techniques, and poetics of recollection. That reflexive engagement makes the historical referent a situated effect of historical making. It brings historicities into the present of historical representation, emphasizing the how of memory rather than the what, the search rather than the sought-after thing. In the formal effects of anamnesis, the irrecoverable disappears in the blasting persistence of its poetic, narrative, affective, or intellectual recoveries. In this sense, Vicuña’s question for the khipu is not a what—as in, what does this or that khipu mean?—but rather a how: as in, how does khipu make meaning? How is khipu “the earth listening to us,” and, in its listening, how is it a sign system “piercing earth and sky/[a] sign [that] begins/To write from below, seeing the efface” (QUIPOem q.8–12)? How, in seeing itself effaced, does the khipu make meaning today?

In regard to khipu, such systematicity of how is neither lost in the sands of history nor completely imaginary. Much work has been done to describe the aesthetics and semiotics of the sign system, work that orients Vicuña’s writings. But, more pertinent, what needs emphasis is that her writings are not just meditations on the raw material of a vacated signifier. They are investigations into how the poetics of that signifier provide access to otherwise “irrecoverable” history; how khipu allows for historical experience and interpretation today. She puts her khipu in the present tense. Her claim is bold: her works do not comment on the poetics of khipu. In engaging the poetics of khipu—poetics that go beyond the etymological links between texture, textile, and text—her works be­come primary material contents for an ongoing khipu archive. This poetic move from external commentary to content internalization—that is, from the simple referential circuit of mneme to the immersive recollection of anamnesis—is a version of what I have called analepsis. Analepsis, the trope of retroprojection, is the poetic technique of capturing what Ricoeur calls “the living experience of recognition,” where absence is refigured in “the sort of presence proper to anamnesis” (410). Analepsis—a trope of anamnesis—fills the emptiness of semantic absence with the creative effects of semiotic and aesthetic recognition. How Vicuña gets to anamnesis through analepsis is a leap made possible by the poetic structures of khipu.

While Ricoeur does not discuss analepsis as such, he does rely on poetic analysis to observe the workings of anamnesis. Here, I briefly follow him in this—specifically, an interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” or “The Swan”—before returning to Vicuña’s writings to extend Ricoeur’s observations into a discussion of the anamnesic poetics of khipu. “Le Cygne” is a poem about the “Old Paris” that (in urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s modernizing rush circa 1861, when the poem was written) no longer existed for Baudelaire. Yet in the poem, that transformation of the city is hapless and incomplete. Wherever he looks, old Paris bursts out “as heavy as a stone.” That constant burst of the foregone into present life is embodied in the roaring wings of “A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked/On the dry pavement with his webby feet” (80). Ricoeur points out that the homophony of le cygne with le signe (sign) “invites the reader to seek out the ruses hidden in the games of representation intended to signify loss” (391). In its homophony of cygne and signe, the poem suggests that signs of loss or even lost signs call forth a present recognition that contravenes such loss. The swan breaking free from the cage of new Paris reminds the poet that the old signs await new bursts of recognition and recovery—forms of attention whose poetic trope is the temporal leap of analepsis. Much as Baudelaire makes old Paris burst through a hapless sign with “mad gestures, foolish and sublime,/As of an exile whom one great desire/Gnaws with no truce” (83), the analeptic leap is intensified by the desire to recover that which is supposed to be irrecoverable, but which in every instance presses for its recognition.

Vicuña’s gnawing “great desire” is to know the sign work and aesthetics of pre-Columbian South America. In this respect, Baudelaire’s poem also prefigures her works, particularly as it reckons with the losses of the colonized people of the world. “Andromache, I think of you!” the poem begins, referencing the twice-conquered wife of the Trojan Hector.²Close Andromache’s symbolic relationship to modern colonialism is amplified at the poem’s end. “And then I thought of you,” it reads,

Widow of Hector—wife of Helenus!

And of the Negress, wan and phthisical,

Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes

Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog

The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;

Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey Grief

Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;

Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.

And one old Memory like a crying horn

Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost ...

I think of sailors on some isle, forgotten;

Of captives, vanquished … and many more. (83)

In these last lines, the sign work of the swan poking through historical erasure takes on figures of slavery, territorial expropriation, cultural erasure, and people captive to the devastation of colonial modernity. What the swan promises is not a promise for a nostalgic and existential flâneur of the corroded metropole (as Baudelaire tends to be read). It is, more forcefully, a promise for people whose memories must see through the rubble and haze of colonization. These promises are what Ricoeur calls “mnemonics of dispossession” (391), quoting Richard Terdiman. Terdiman’s reading of the poem focuses on the crisis of signifying regimes that surrounded its writing (Haussmann’s triumphant respatialization of Paris and the capitalist system it represented). But this reading does not address the poem’s colonial significations (140)—significations for which I adapt the phrase here. In the poem’s “mnemonics of dispossession,” the poet is reminded of a promise of other worlds resounding like a “crying horn” in the hapless and incomplete spatial project of modernity and its colonial formations—which is how Walter Benjamin read the poem’s “illumination” (a reading to which I will return later). To hear the “crying horn,” Baudelaire has recourse to remembering by way of semiotic form—hearing the signe in the cygne. This analeptic leap across seemingly lost memories, even memories dispossessed of semantic contents, present only in a kind of sound and rhythm, is likewise the entry point for Vicuña’s promise of signification. Even if Vicuña cannot read the khipu, her work proposes that the poetics of that sign burst through the ruses of colonial signs.

In Ricoeur’s terms, the promise of signification in Vicuña’s khipu could be described as anamnesis sounding through the cracked mneme of colonialism. Javier Sanjinés examines such “violent, impatient form” that I call analepsis with a Quechua concept of pacha, which refers to a present time dense with multiple possible pasts and futures (110–12). Pacha denotes a “world-moment” that consists of the interactions between sky, earth, and inner worlds—when those worlds collide in a “specific configuration of matter, activity, and moral relationship—a state of experience” (Catherine Allen 22). Drawing on the Andean-inspired Marxism of philosopher José-Carlos Mariátegui, Sanjinés distinguishes the adapt­able temporal heterogeneity of pacha from the inflexible “accumulative process” of Western historiography. In Sanjinés’s estimation, rather than absorb everything into a singular, inescapable process of wealth expropriation, pacha makes possible acts of “skipping over the continuum of history,” particularly in places where “the suffering and humiliated masses enter history.” When the spurned enters the present, it forces a reconsideration of time in its unequal and multiple dimensions, because those peripheralized states of experience must be reckoned with in their centrality. Moreover, pacha itself has a means of organizing that inequality and multiplicity. What was “spurned, humiliated, scoffed at” presents itself in pacha as necessarily present, integral in its contradictory conceptions of time and reality, at once whole and constituted by totalizable fractures. If the phenomenological concept for such an experience of memory is anamnesis—the whole experienced from a part—the experience of memory in pacha gives those parts the ability to create their wholes: pacha is “not satisfied with calling up the events of the past; it seeks to transform them, to reinterpret them in the present” (Sanjinés 110–12). In pacha, Vicuña’s khipu—the scorned and subordinated sign system of the Andes—gains the impatient immediacy in which it was philosophically articulated. This chapter examines that Andean philosophy in its contemporary contexts, in order to explain how the temporal leaps that Sanjinés suggestively describes as “stubborn knots, as knotted cords, disturbing the smooth surface of historical events” are in fact congruent with a poetics of knot writing (97). In allowing for the khipu to offer the theories of time and reality embedded in its knots and twists, this chapter elevates it from figure to trope and concept. In keeping with Vicuña’s assertion of the khipu’s capacity to “write from below, seeing the efface,” my reading embraces the analepsis by which her work bursts through the occlusive ruses of colonial signs. In offering a final instance of such anticolonial poetics, this book concludes with a theory of the natural sign emerging from the spurned Americas—a contexualized theory that helps me to return to the Andean-inspired works of Joaquín Torres-García.

Khipu, which means “knot” in the Quechua language of the central Andes, is a system of knotted cords that the Incas and other Andean people used to record numerical, demographic, religious, legal, historical, and other kinds of information (plate 9). Because the camelid fiber with which these cords are made deteriorates in all but the driest parts of the moist Andean climate, relatively few texts of the once widespread semiotic system survive (this is not to mention the purposeful destruction of the cords during the Spanish colonization). Yet, while widespread, itwas not a uniform system. Different knot patterns were used in different parts of the Andes to communicate distinct things, almost as if there were different languages in the knots. Scholar of khipu Galen Brokaw calls this the “semiotic heterogeneity” of Andean knot writing and points out that it extended and varied in space and time. Knot writing began (insofar as the oldest dateable surviving cords suggest) sometime in the first millennium CE, emerging from the semiotic practices of such pre-Inca cultures as the Moche, Chimu, and Wari. Related to tocapus and yupanas (polychromatic checkerboard notation systems prevalent in the pre-Inca Andes), khipu developed as thread wrapped into polychromaticsquares. It is possible that this development was instigated by a need to make the abacus-like notation system of the checkerboards (the tocapus and yupanas) more portable and usable.³Close The Wari culture of the Peruvian coast and south-central Andes (500–1000 CE) appears to be the first to have “transposed” the polychrome squares into a system of knots (Brokaw 1–21, 84–89).

Brokaw borrows the term “transposition” from Julia Kristeva’s writings. He notes that Kristeva came to use the term as a replacement for “intertextuality,” which she believed was being used in more simplistic ways than she had intended. Rather than the account of literary interanimations that intertextuality came to denote (i.e., “study of sources”), she used the Freudian concept of transposition to describe “the passage of one sign system to another.” Transposition was a tertiary poetic process, in addition to metaphor and metonymy, whose Freudian equivalents in the work of the unconscious were condensation and displacement. This third poetic process was the psychoanalytic equivalent of “the thetic position: the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one.” The thetic or thesis position is a self-reckoning within the changes of sign systems. It is the “enunciative and denotative positionality” that emerges when a person is forced to mark out their meaning amid a stream of changing semiotic regimes. Kristeva notes that it is therefore related to a kind of “anamnesis,” inasmuch as changing sign systems induce “considerations of representability” (59–60). That consideration takes place in a consciousness of contradiction between sign systems, a kind of criticality that emerges from the self-aware shifts in the meaning of signs—conscious shifts that Brokaw calls “semiotic heterogeneity.” Woven into the first Wari transpositions of tocapus and yupanas—that is, woven in the first khipus—was thus an occasion to meditate on the nature of the changing sign, on its hows as well as its whats.

While Brokaw does not give as much granularity to his interpretation of “transposition” as I have here, he does show how the pragmatic shifts of knot writing gave rise to theories of representability. Inasmuch as “transposition” refers to a kind of criticality within “semiotic heterogeneity,” Brokaw delineates such transposed formations in the Quechua-language concept of quilca. Quilca is a complex theory of mediation that helps to shed light on how khipu can be conceptually laden. In an essay on the concept of quilca, Brokaw begins by demonstrating the multifarious use of the word in the colonial period. In colonial-era texts, quilca refers to color, paint, painting, embroidery, sculpture, writing, book, khipu, checkerboard notations, and other media. He demonstrates that any analysis of the term that has associated it with a single medium has come up short because the term refers to semiotics and aesthetics in a general sense: “Quilca reflects a kind of metonymy, by which the literal meaning of the term referring to a semiotics/aesthetics of color also refers by association to the media that employ it” (“Semiotics” 181). In its multitiered denotation—referring to different media and their semiotic and aesthetic codes—quilca appears to be an indigenous media concept. Brokaw emphasizes that this media concept preceded the arrival of the Spaniards, inasmuch as it was ready to hand when these foreigners arrived with their books and alphabets. In the crisis of representability that Walter Mignolo calls “colonial semiosis” (Darker Side 7–20), quilca was available as a conceptual tool for understanding representational heterogeneity.

This use of the concept is evident in colonial catechisms where quilca is used to think through the representability of Christ. Transposed into a Christian context, quilca reveals how distinct its philosophical lifeworld is from the Christian one. For example, the Third Lima Council’s Quechua-language Catecismo of 1583 reads:

And the Christians know very well that Jesus Christ, and Our Lady, and the Saints are in heaven alive and glorious, and that they are not in those bundles, or Images … and they revere the Images, and kiss them, and they bare themselves before them, and kneel down on their knees, and they beat their chests; it is because of what those Images represent, and not for what they are in themselves. Just like the Corregidor kisses the provision and Royal seal and puts it on his head, not because of the wax or the paper [quillcata quellca], but rather because it is the King’s quilca [Reypa quellcan].

(qtd. in Brokaw, “Semiotics” 193–94)

The italicized terms demonstrate the problematics of quilca. Whereas the speaker wishes to instruct the student in the difference between image and representation (and thus to abstract the divine from its earthly picturings), the Quechua language translates all of these representational aspects into variants of quilca (“quillcata quellca … quellcan”). Rather than clarify the difference, quilca problematizes the continuity between media and their messages. In thus presenting representability as an array of materials and modalities, quilca reveals the contradictions of the Spaniards’ worship of images (which the Spaniards argue are not images but abstract devotional icons)—while it also insists on the animating intimacy between representational materials and abstractions. In its insistence on the intimacy shared by pictures and the immateriality of the thing they represent, the use of quilca in the passage offers a sense of representability that is opposed to that of the Spaniards, and it also offers a provocative conceptual rationale for reframing the contradictory Spanish episteme. In quilca, the material and conceptual—a medium and its messages, the visible and invisible, even the earthly and divine—are interwoven into necessary aspects of one another, interanimating rather than mutually repressive.

Scholar of khipu Gary Urton has argued that these philosophical considerations—properly speaking, transpositions or “considerations of rep­resentability”—gave khipu certain structural properties. Khipu was not only a way of communicating and was not only a way of thinking about communication; it was importantly also a means for thinking about the relation between media and material reality. For instance, in an analysis of the uses of khipu to map kinship structures, Urton describes the relation between knots and social structure in terms of “the great synthesizing and synchronizing structure at the heart of the empire.” “Seen in this light,” he adds, “khipus can be understood as a medium for discourses of power”—discourses that are ultimately “concerned with his­tory.” Grounding his interpretation in philosophical debates about structure and historical change, he describes the khipu as a means of comprehending history in its invariant structures and those structures in the pulls of historical flow. In its concerns with the representability of the material world (and therefore of the mutual impact that representations and things have on one another), “khipu history took the form of structural history or, more accurately, the history of structures” (153, 258, 5). Urton’s observation about khipu structuralism recalls Michael Taussig’s writings on the “animated structuralism” of the Andes. His The Devil and Commodity Fetishism—a work focused on the dialectic of indigenous Andean myth and the commodity fetishism of mining in the Andes—describes an Andean worldview that is sensitive to the interplay between structure and historical change. Taussig explains how this interplay remains “animated” because it takes place in a consideration of “pattern[s that] not only exist but have to be continuously preserved” (161). Unlike the coldly abstract sense in which “structuralism” tends to be invoked, the native structuralism described by Urton and Taussig points to a broader sense of reciprocity and responsibility for the structures that hold to­gether a material world. These reciprocities can be considered a logical extension of a media concept that does not alienate signs from their materials or abstractions. That is, if khipu designs are conceptually entwined with their tactility (quilca in all aspects and scales), then built into that sign system is a relational circuit between a design and its physical twining—which is to say between structure and material iteration, a “world-moment” or “specific configuration of matter, activity, and … relationship—a state of experience” (Catherine Allen 22, 25). In this distinct structuralism, reciprocity is not a matter of simple exchange between individuals; it is a mutual interpenetration or weaving of individual actions and the structure of the world—threading into a tight knot what would be incorrectly (in terms of that structure) distinguished as “culture” and “nature.”

It is no accident that Urton and Taussig both arrive to their conclusions about the “animated structuralism” of the Andes in a discussion of kinship. As Marshall Sahlins has noted, kinship is a place where biology and symbols intersect, offering a handy instance in which to consider the relation between “physis and nomos, nature and law” (What 14). Yet (as Sahlins also notes) that relation is inextricable from its cultural contexts. It matters where and how that relation is articulated. In the Andean instances with which Urton and Taussig are concerned, kinship takes on the same problematics of representability that animate khipu structuralism. In this sense, khipu is a kind of overarching trope of weaving that characterizes all levels of relationality in the Andean world, from interpersonal to cosmological—as well as acting as an interface that relates the personal and cosmic. In its priority over all aspects of relationality, this structure is called ayllu.

While Urton and Taussig both write about ayllu—as does Brokaw,who associates it with “principles of reciprocity” (History 89)⁴Close—its most encompassing description appears in the work of Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena. In her Earth Beings, a decade-long study of practices of Quechua political community building, de la Cadena situates a study of ayllu in the contemporary Pacchanta village southeast of Cusco, Peru. While she does not discuss khipu as such, in her informants’ descriptions of ayllu the metaphors of thread and weaving dominate. Descriptions of relations are so completely determined by principles of reciprocity or mutual interdependence (like threads in a weaving) that relationality itself seems to be a khipu structure. She calls this structureof a world that is woven in its relationships “being-in-ayllu” or “ayllu-relationality” (44). And its most evocative descriptions are given in thewords of a bilingual Quechua-Spanish grade school teacher named Justo

Oxa, one of her primary informants. She quotes him at length, and offers a helpful gloss on the distinct modality of weaving that is active in ayllu:

The teacher explained: “Ayllu is like a weaving, and all the beings in the world—people, animals, mountains, plants, etc.,—are like the threads, we are part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone, just as a thread by itself is not a weaving, and [as] weavings are with threads, a runa [a person] is always in-ayllu with other beings—that is ayllu.” In this understanding, humans and other-than-human beings do not only exist individually, for they are inherently connected composing the ayllu of which they are part and that is part of them—just as a single thread in a weaving is integral to the weaving, and the weaving is integral to the thread. … [C]omposing the ayllu are entities with relations integrally implied; being at once singular and plural, they always bring about the ayllu even when appearing individually. Thus viewed, the ayllu is the socionatural collective of humans, other-than-human beings, animals, and plants inherently connected to each other in such a way that nobody within it escapes that relation. … (44)

Dela Cadena points out that the reciprocity of ayllu implicates humans in nonhuman relations, integrating individuals in a weaving that involves animals, plants, and other other-than-human beings. That modality is meant to elicit responsibility for one’s actions, inasmuch as any one person’s actions are intimately linked to the well-being of other beings, whose actions in turn are congruent with the given individual’s welfare. With such relations intrinsically implied, individuals are fractals of a larger design; that is, entities whose form does not make sense outside of the pattern in which they are threaded and woven.⁵Close Dela Cadena goes on to observe that such woven relationality has many conceptual implications beyond kinship, including the conception of representability.

Contrasting ayllu to sociologist John Law’s apothegm that “‘to represent is to practice division’ … to separate representer from represented, signifier from signified, subject from object,” de la Cadena notes that ayllu construes representability in the same intense reciprocity that binds individuals to broader ecological networks (44). In ayllu, the concerns of quilca are expanded to considerations of human and other-than-human interwovenness. Oxa emphasizes this in his assertion that in ayllu people are both “like the threads” and “part of the design.” This tight correlation between materials and design leads him—and de la Cadena—to speak of “being-in-ayllu” and the “in-ayllu world,” in which the names of things and things themselves are entangled and mutually affective (44, 116). That is, signs are not inert vehicles for the transmission of knowledge about things. Instead, signs are present and active in their scenes of enunciation, imposing their veridictional force on the world and its happenings. This leads in turn to de la Cadena’s conclusion about the temporal and ontological leaps made possible by ayllu: “in the prose of the in-ayllu world, where there is no separation between the event and its narration, eventfulness can be ahistorical. Far from the events not having happened, this means that events are not contained by evidence as requirement” (116).

De la Cadena’s conclusion draws boldly on Michel Foucault, whose writing on the “prose of the world” offered a critique of the natural semiotics that de la Cadena associates with ayllu. Yet de la Cadena’s point—which will help to explain how khipu poetics work in Vicuña’s writings—is that not all the natures of natural signs are the same. The nature of signs in ayllu is distinct from the nature of the sixteenth-century ecclesiastical European natural sign with which Foucault was concerned. For Foucault, the problem of the natural sign was one of infinite iterability and singular reference. Nature is enclosed in signs whose secrecy stirs human language to life. Yet, once stirred, speaking humans come to find that natural language “is everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God.” In this version of a natural sign, “the general configuration of nature” refers in every instance, explicitly or implicitly, to the order of a Christian God (Order of Things 31–33). Nature is nothing but a code hiding the messages of a singular divinity. Dela Cadena emphasizes that this is not the version of nature that informs signs in ayllu. Rather than instantiate a singularity of signified, the “prose of the in-ayllu world” prioritizes multiple domains of possible authority and reference. That is, in the reciprocal entanglements of ayllu, “storytelling creates the jurisdiction of the earth-beings whose story is being told” (114–15). Because representability is not limited to humans (or even animals and plants) but is coextensive with the materials and designs of a world, the crowd of possible sources of authority for what a world can be is more vast than that offered in sixteenth-century ecclesiastical semiosis. In the world of in-ayllu narration, the beings of stories, as well as the earth-beings that they represent—which de la Cadena describes as “different entities emerging in more than one and less than many worlds and their practices”—can effectuate their own “jurisdictions” or spaces of authority. What she calls the “prose of the in-ayllu world” is a specific configuration of nature in which multiple iterability is associated with multiple reference and authority. In this configuration of nature, seeming fragments carry the possibility of whole worlds inside them.

Staying with Foucault for another moment, it is evident also how such representability in ayllu affects the possibility for a contemporary poetics of khipu. De la Cadena rather perversely quotes Foucault’s critique of the hiddenness of meaning in natural signs—but in order to reveal how such hiddenness is changed when considering the signs of the Americas in their native and colonial contexts: “it is not possible to act upon those marks without at the same time operating upon that which is secretly hidden in them” (Foucault qtd. in de la Cadena 115; see Foucault, Order of Things 32–33). In Foucault’s critique, such marks are dangerous because they tantalize people with a lost similitude between human language and the divine meaning of things. But even he concedes that not all similitudes are the same.

Elaborating this idea in his introduction to erotic novelist and artist Pierre Klossowski’s The Baphomet, Foucault explains that the natural sign in and of itself is not the problem; the problem is the ideology through which such a sign is apprehended.⁶Close The doctrines of the Christian church “constituted one of the great causes of vertigo” for the natural sign whose nature is never its own: “what [such a sign] says, it says by virtue of a profound belonging to an origin, by virtue of a consecration. There is not a single tree in the Scriptures, not a single living or dissicated plant which does not refer back to the tree of the Cross—or to the wood cut from the First Tree at the foot of which Adam succumbed … [and] the tree of the Fall one day becomes what it has always been, the tree of the Reconciliation” (Baphomet xxvii). Foucault explains that, in contrast to this closed analogical circuit, Klossowski imagines a situation in which language no longer seeks to redeem a fallen world or to discover a hidden one, but can create one. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead”—while interpreting that assertion to mean that the analogical or ecclesiastical conception of the natural sign has given way to the conception of the sign as convention and pragmatics—Klossowski developed a theory of “fabulation” that is compatible with the “thread” and “design” of ayllu described by Oxa and de la Cadena. He offers his theory in an extended comment on Nietzsche’s aphorism, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” (which appears in The Twilight of the Idols):

The fable, I said, is an event that is narrated; it happens, or rather, it must make something happen; and in effect an action takes place and narrates itself. … The re-fabulation of the world also means that the world exits historical time in order to reenter the time of myth, that is, eternity. Or rather, it means that the vision of the world is an apprehension of eternity. Nietzsche saw that the mental conditions for such an “exit” [sortie] lay in the forgetting (of the historical situation) that was preliminary to the act of creating: in forgetting, the past is remembered [sous-vient à] by humans as their future, which takes the figure of the past. It is in this way that the past comes to [advient] them in what they create; for what they believe they create in this way does not come to them from the present, but is only the pronunciation of a prior possibility in the momentary forgetting of the (historically determined) present.

(“Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” 88)

Just as we find in Ricoeur, in Klossowski’s Nietzsche, forgetting makes possible a kind of sign that is creative of the situations in which it finds itself. In the fable—a genre characterized by legendary creatures, speaking animals, and other anthropomorphic beings—audiences are asked to forget their entanglement in historical time and to accept the possibility of the disaligned time of myth and animal life. Klossowski’s concept of “fabulation” suggests that such practices of temporal disalignment are also found outside the genre conventions of the fable. Wherever forgetting is induced with the aim of making possible the disaligned time of myth and animals, he sees “fabulation.” And, wherever such fabulation reflects on its relation to time, it becomes a hermeneutics for the sign, revealing the vying temporal densities at play in language.

As if written to echo de la Cadena’s analysis of Oxa’s words, Klossowski’s considerations of representability with regard to time, event, myth, and history are congruent with a poetics of ayllu in which “eventfulness can be ahistorical.” When de la Cadena locates in ayllu Foucault’s cryptic assertion that “it is not possible to act upon those marks without at the same time operating upon that which is secretly hidden in them” (Foucault qtd. in de la Cadena 115; Foucault, Order of Things 32–33) she uncovers a confluence between the Klossowski hidden in Foucault and the “thread” and “design” of representability in the “in-ayllu world.” Indeed, she so asseverates that world that Foucault is made to signify within its configuration of nature. What is “secretly hidden” in his words is a consideration of representability within the reciprocal entanglements and multiple authorities of ayllu. Missing from those words, however, is a consideration of how the forgetting involved in remembering the hidden meanings of signs is affected by the problem of uneven development. Whereas forgetting takes on an imperative and even heroic cast in the writings of Nietzsche and Klossowski (as well as Ricoeur)—where it is an intellectual imperative obligated by a need to make creativity impactful—in the colonial contexts of the Americas, forgetting is already woven into the conditions of engagement. In this situation, in which the memory of the past has been forcibly erased, and in which such signs as khipu have been effaced and eliminated from the archive, the condition for engaging such signs is already ahistoricity, loss of forgotten content, and ruptured rhythm—eventfulness is ahistorical. This enforced forgetting begs the adjectival modifier that Saidiya Hartman offers to fabulation with her description of “critical fabulation,” or that “re-presenting” whose reduplicative prefix “re-” denotes the effort of returning to “matters absent, entangled, and unavailable” because of colonial destruction (11). In this broader sense, analepsis can be seen as the principal trope of the Americas, inasmuch as the archive of the Americas is encompassed by erasures. Even in the embrace of the temporal heterogeneity that Sanjinés celebrates in its Quechua conception as pacha, whenever the “suffering and humiliated masses enter history” they reveal the amnesia and partial­ity of the historical record (110–12). The pacha of these lands is a pacha riven with the reckless violence of primitive accumulation—yet it is pacha nonetheless. That is, tactics of organizing inequality, fragmentation, and multiplicity can still be configured within the cultural lifeworlds of the humiliated and seemingly superseded. Insofar as the presence of the humiliated insists on a right to time, these subjugated embody anamnesis, filling out the content of the present with the necessity of remembering amid so much loss. In the signs of the Americas, the how of memory is definitive and encompasses that encompassing erasure.

Colonial loss thus instantiates a condition for seeing how creativity implicates memory, as well as for observing how such implication is folded into the conceptions of time and reality in which it happens. This is Vicuña’s fundamental insight—and helps to explain her assertion that a “quipu that remembers nothing” could be “the core/the heart of memory” (QUIPOem q.8–12). In investigating the form, techniques, and conceptual contours of this sign system, she amplifies its semiotic how, “piercing earth and sky” with the sound of khipu representability considering itself. Whereas Klossowski might call this an instance of “fabulation,” for Vicuña—who recognizes the uneven terrain of colonial forgetting—it is simply “memory” in its active political form. Her most explosive political act is to be creative in the so-called mnemonics of dispossession. When she insists on an irrevocable contemporaneity for the khipu, she countermands the principal colonial order, which is to remain dispossessed of creative agency.⁷Close As Klossowski suggests, such creativity dispels the colonial trance of historicity and the historical inevitability of one’s subjugation and self-loss. Moreover, when considered within the representability of ayllu, such creativity entwines in the material reality of everyday life.

In ayllu, the threads of everyday life are a part of the ever-shifting (never referentially singular) design, and that design gives a form and meaning to the threads. To return to the epigraph with which the present book opened—Benjamin’s critique of the concept of origins, amid the “eddy in the stream of becoming”—Vicuña’s work resonates with a reading of this passage by philosopher Howard Caygill. Caygill writes that the sense of Jewish loss and endangerment in an ethnonationalist context (Germany in the 1930s) led Benjamin to replace concepts of “substance and subject with transitivity … [and to replace the] Kantian transcendental deduction of the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality from the pure unity of the apperceptive ‘I’ [with] such categories of modern experience as ‘porosity,’ ‘threshold,’ and ‘shock’ from the impure dispersal of transitivity.” Caygill explains that Benjamin never gave up on an idea of origins. Instead, he configured origins within modalities of impurity, dispersal, and transitivity. Rather than signify a search for an originary and fallen world (whose lost greatness warrants the necessity of deathly purifying violence—and whose “pure unity” is related to the policing of divisiveness, heterogeneity, imperfection, and “undesirables” in a social group), Benjamin’s “origins” are “intricately woven into the weft of everyday life” (Caygill, Colour 119). Caygill’s metaphor of weaving is consonant with de la Cadena’s description of ayllu: as with the “in-ayllu world,” Benjamin’s sense of origins is a means by which to see the past as the handiwork of present threads and design. But Benjamin distinctly offers to that social formation an emphasis on the necessary fray and imperfection of such a woven world.

With regard to a search for origins, fray and imperfection necessitate themselves because only in their emphasis can origins be something other than a warrant for purification. Fray and imperfection challenge the possible purity of thread and design—to always, as Vicuña has it, “write from below/seeing the efface.” Benjamin and Vicuña do not deny the violent history from which everyday life extends. On the contrary, they write from its present flows. But in doing so, they offer that historicity the generative problem of its fray in other cultural configurations and ontological entanglements. In a manner reminiscent of Benjamin’s writings on origins, Vicuña forces the political and temporal problem of origins on the khipu. That is, upon its historical silencing, she forces the problem of present creativity. How could it be that the khipu “write[s] from below/ seeing [its] efface” (QUIPOem q.12)? How indeed is the analepsis of the Americas fulfilled in the imperfect totalizability of khipu? How is that totalizability made real in her writings? And how does its realization remain totalizable—that is, a source of possibility, virtuality, and imagination—by virtue of the semiotics of the khipu itself?

The point to be emphasized is that Vicuña not only writes poetry about khipu. More incisively, she writes within khipu, complicating a distinction between the form and content of this sign system in her works. To remain with the poem through which the present chapter has been thinking, a turn to the visual presentation of that poem in its book—the collection aptly titled QUIPOem (1997)—reveals how the poem works inside khipu semiosis. This book, like Vicuña’s other published collections, is a collage-like amalgamation of writing, images, and objects that she calls a “diary of objects” (QUIPOem q.34). As her description suggests, in these books materiality is a key feature of their testimonial-like corroboration of an enduring self. In Vicuña’s case, exiled from Chile after Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the self that endured witnessed the shock of the coup and the violent political repression that followed. That repression was carried out through an infamous secret police, torture, and the “disappearing” of opponents to Pinochet’s extreme rightist regime. These forced disappearances—in which the state abducted political enemies who were tortured and killed, and the bodies hidden or destroyed—were widespread in the right-wing military dictatorships of Latin America throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (and indeed occurring in many locales to this day). Because the aim of such regimes is to make political opponents completely nonexistent, it is not sufficient to kill them. They must be erased from the records of life and death (the bodies must be removed from the possibility of legal representability)—or, as the Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla put it, “they are neither dead nor alive. They are disappeared” (qtd. in Bilbija et al. 113). Against this institutionalized culture of disappearance (and the debilitating fear it instills in a population), Vicuña’s books bear materiality as a trace of representability resistant to disappearance. Her “diary of objects” is a metonym for the necessary material re­presentability of the bodies and objects erased by these dictatorial regimes. In this way, their materiality finds kinships in the bodies and objects erased by the colonial regimes that prefigured the right-wing dictatorships. That is, her books’ material emphases are also a source of relation to the resistant representability of the indigenous cultures of the Andes, where—Taussig reminds us—“preconquest institutions still flourish” (Devil 159). And it is by way of such still flourishing preconquest cultures that Vicuña’s materiality takes its cast of representability in khipu semiosis.

The poem itself (“the quipu that remembers nothing, an empty cord—is the core/the heart of memory—/the earth, listening to us ...”) is spread in a khipu-like material structure over six pages (see figs. 27, 28, and 29). In those pages, what I have been presenting as a text of poetry is actually a combination of typographic text, calligram-like handwriting, and a photograph of her sculpture in sand (which she calls a “precario” or fragile object). For instance, what I have translated as an em dash followed by italics—“cord—is the core”—is in Vicuña’s text a drawn line that continues into a line of cursive writing. Likewise, what I have rendered as poem

line breaks with forward slashes—“is the core/the heart”—are breaks between media and representional materials. The poem has three such breaks: separating it across a foldover page from figure 27 to figure 28, across a photograph of the sand sculpture from figure 28 to figure 29, and across the page of text that separates a textual line that runs across the photographs from figure 29 to figure 27 (I will explain what I mean by this below). That multitextuality—bringing various instruments of representation to bear upon one another, and thus to complicate a consideration of their representability—could be interpreted as a kind of quilca awareness. Much as quilca made possible a critical investigation of conflicting representational regimes in the colonial catechism, the composite text of Vicuña’s book begs a consideration of how a poem might extend into drawing, photograph, sculpture, and sand.

Yet inasmuch as that extension involves both the technological instruments of modernity (book and photograph) and preconquest techniques of organizing time and space (weaving and sculpture), not to mention the nonhuman materials of the natural world (sand, grass, and sticks), this extension also begs consideration of what colonial aporias and amnesias interfere in the act of remembering described in the poem. What Ricoeur (via Terdiman) called the “mnemonics of dispossession” are active in every leap that the poem takes from one medium to the next: in each one it reminds readers of a lost connection between these signs and their signified things. That constant reminder entails what Benjamin—in his analysis of the same Baudelaire poem that motivates Ricoeur—called a “mimesis of death.” Benjamin does not mean that the apparently foregone objects of Baudelaire’s world are dead. Rather, he means to point out that in Baudelaire’s poem those objects of a seemingly foregone era cannot be disappeared because the poem itself reveals their enforced disappearance to be “as brittle as glass—and as transparent” (Selected Writings 4:50–51). In the breaks and separations of Vicuña’s poem, Benjamin would have seen the glass of enforced disappearances cracking amid the presence of that which the dictatorships could not disappear: the persistent creativity of the writer. In Vicuña’s hands, the seeming fractures of colonial historicity are the looped fissures where the relational wovenness of the khipu is made.

In a way that recalls Oxa’s suggestion that the thread is actively involved in making the design, Vicuña’s poem coheres its various media elements in a series of lines and angles that are khipu-like in their design, as if held together by a fabric that holds the book together. For instance, figure 29 presents the same sculpture shown in figure 28, but from another angle. The angle from which the viewer sees the sand sculpture in figure 29 is the same angle from which the line of written poetry arrives to the sand sculpture shown in figure 28. In giving the reader a sightline that takes place from the angle of the poem’s “view” of the sculpture in figure 28, the photograph in figure 29 invites the reader into the interior of the poem, treating its text like a habitable vantage. That treatment of the text—in which it has a kind of “view” on its surroundings—suggests as well that the text has perception of some kind. We are given its view on the sand sculpture. If readers are invited thusly to enter the text, whose textual elements are interwoven with the materials of the sculpture, then by extension readers are invited to enter the sculpture (which is coextensive here with text)—as well as to enter the khipu-like topology of warp and weft that holds all of these materials together. Woven into its interior, a reader’s relation to the poem they have just read retroactively changes. A reader’s position becomes internalized to the “quipu that remembers nothing,” introjecting that seeming vacancy with the experience of reading. In this introjection, the act of reading bypasses two temporal rifts: most presently, it skips backward from the effects that figure 29 plays on figures 27 and 28; yet also, by virtue of this formal retroprojection, skips backward to the other side of the colonial silencing by which khipu is supposed to remain unread.

Here, analepsis plays upon the spatial relations of the book in order to transgress its linear structure. In doing so, the book subverts chronological distance.⁸Close Readers are put in a position of reading in khipu, which—much like being in-ayllu—sutures multiple temporal threads. In reading Vicuña’s quipoem, readers are in the relational wovenness of khipu and ayllu, while also inescapably in a book of contemporary poetry and art. To return to de la Cadena’s repositioning of Foucault’s cryptic Klossowskian statement that “it is not possible to act upon those marks without at the same time operating upon that which is secretly hidden in them” (qtd. in de la Cadena 115; see Foucault’s Order of Things 32–33), we can understand how that repositioning itself participates in a kind of shifting in ayllu or the relational topology by which things have relational values in a design. Foucault becomes a node in the woven world that encompasses and holds him in place. Likewise, in Vicuña’s poem, readers are put inside the elements that are “secretly working” in signs, only to find that those secrets are external to the signs and not very secret at all, inasmuch as they are the open system of reciprocities that holds the elements of the book together—and, insofar as we are introjected in the poem in its reading, that holds readers in khipu-ayllu as well.

The poem that extends from the left of the photograph in figure 29, and whose shape horizontally mirrors the sticks vertically propped in the sand in the sculpture (as if the poem’s lines were shadows cast behind the sticks by the sunlight), supports such comparison of khipu and woven textual topology:

The ear is a spiral

                            to hear

a sound within

An empty furrow

                          to receive

A standing stick

                          to speak

Piercing earth and sky

                          the sign begins

To write from below, seeing the efface.

(QUIPOem q.12)

The poem is a meditation on the relation between signs and things. It is organized around two referential poles: the “ear” of the first line and the “sign” of the penultimate line. The ear is the subject with which “spiral,” “empty furrow,” and “standing stick” are associated. Therefore, the actions of spiral, furrow, and stick are all extensions of what an ear does: “hear,” “receive,” and “speak.” While the last of these actions seems alien to what an ear does, this is because the actions and their actors (spiral, furrow, and stick) are also drawn into the gravitational pull of the poem’s second referential pole: “the sign … piercing earth and sky.” Enacting what it references, the signifier “sign” acts as if it were the subject with which the spiral, furrow, and standing stick were identified. In so doing, it extends upward and backward in the poem—from earth to sky, but also backward in time or analeptically—to do what stick, furrow, and spiral do. The sign “speaks,” “receives,” and “hears.” While the last of these actions seems alien to what a sign does, this is because—conversely—the proximity of the ear returns to assign meanings to the poem’s actors and actions. In its multidimensional syntax (a grid interrelating various media in the text), the poem weaves into a single knot the ear and sign—perhaps represented by the spiral in the middle of the sand sculpture (fig. 28). In offering the sand spiral as the visual icon of ear and sign, the whole poem twists into this icon—while also ostensibly emanating from it, if it indeed is the case that the poem is “writing from below.”

Congruent with the multidirectionality of the spiral, the poem gives neither “ear” nor “sign” full control of actions and objects. Indeed, the poem’s meticulous design complicates distinctions of sign and thing. In straddling sign and ear across a variety of actions and actors, like the knots hanging from the main cord of a khipu rope, the poem locates their relation in an always-suspended orthogonality. They intersect but pull in their own directions as well, giving a woven form to the world that holds these items and their names in place. Its final line, “writing from below, seeing the efface,” reminds readers that the text at hand is very literally a text at hand: the discrete signs, media, and objects of the poem are elements of a situation in which erasure is countermanded by the khipu text in a reader’s hand, evidence of a woven form written from below. Or, as Vicuña puts it in a Benjaminian meditation titled “Origin of Weaving,” the textile is the context for the text—that is, the khipu is the world-making form from which the content of her poetry emerges. First textile, then poem:

textile, text, context

from teks, to weave, to fabricate, to make wicker or

wattle for mud-covered walls …

(Unravelling 10)

This passage highlights the idea that the textile is the primary form for Vicuña’s writings, as well as more generally for her sense of what writing is. Rather than the product of alphabetic accumulation, her notion of writing focuses on a topology or a study of positions in a framework of intersecting positions. Vicuña’s abstract and systematic understanding of khipu as topology “inspired”—in his own words—Argentinian-born visual artist and scholar of Andean aesthetic form César Paternosto to describe khipu in terms of a “structural paradigm” that he called “the tectonic principle” (165). Relating khipu to Andean cultural mastery of sculpture, engineering, architecture, mathematics, and textile weaving, he insists on a master principle of positional logic in the Andes. While he calls it “tectonic” to relate Vicuña’s network of etymologies in teks to “tekton” or builder, the topological is more direct in emphasizing what Vicuña emphasizes: any builder or maker begins in a network of positionalities whose aesthetic and ontological nature is a kind of weaving (plates 9 and 10). And in the Andes weaving is indeed the aesthetic form on which other arts—sculpture, writing, poetry, masonry, and even government—are modeled. First textile, then text.

As if they were written to describe the philosophical nuances of Vicuña’s hard emphasis on the wovenness of the in-khipu world, the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are worth dwelling on momentarily. In their critique of simplified distinctions of “word and thing,” they write, “a form of content is not a signified, any more than a form of expression is a signifier. … We are never a signifier or signified. We are stratified” (67). Scholar of semiotics Paul Bains explains that Deleuze and Guattari suggest here that the consistency of language emerges from “multiplicity and its social/cultural stratifications. … They analyze language in terms of actions that produce transformations, rather than in terms of words and things or signifiers and signifieds” (104). This is of import because the symbolic aspect of language, what inheres in the notion of an abstract and transcendent sign, obscures the relational nature of linguistic activity. Language is related to action in all domains and, according to Bains on Deleuze and Guattari, is thus coterminous with it. Its unqualified immanence in action means that pragmatics comes closest to elaborating its “nature.” Yet, Bains notes, pragmatics fails to appreciate certain actions immanent to language, especially the way in which language “specifies the space in which it exists” (101). In extending the creative effects of language beyond “pragmatics and context” to consider its “ethological, ecological, corporeal, and incorporeal dimensions”—its ontologies—he puts Deleuze and Guattari into conversation with theories of natural semiotics in the writings of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

Like Deleuze and Guattari, Maturana and Varela coauthored impor­tant works on the possible semiosis of nonhuman systems. What Maturana and Varela termed “autopoiesis” refers to a structural coupling between a system and a medium that can be observed in living organisms. In the terms of the present chapter, they describe a kind of quilca that is coextensive with the natural world. In cellular structure, for instance, “the product is the same as the network of processes involved in production” (Bains 88). That is, organisms and environments are completely interdependent and mutually determining. Bains describes how these ideas implicate semiotic systems: “the flow of interactions between participants” (the system of language) is immanent to the medium in which they interact (a medium relation that Maturana and Varela call “languaging”). In turning the noun of language into a verb they emphasize that the linguistic medium is constituted in the interactive system: “notions such as transmission of information, symbolization, denotation, meaning or syntax, are secondary to the constitution of the phenomenon of languaging in the living of the living systems that live” (qtd. in Bains 109–10). For the purposes of the present book, they give to the decolonial sense of “languaging”—as developed by Walter Mignolo to denote creativity inthe transcultural exchange of language and culture—a sense of nature-bearing form. That is, in their hands, rather than a modified transcultura­tion, languaging is ontology configured in its most complete sense. Languaging is not only a tactic for “thinking and writing between languages” (Mignolo, Local 226); it is a way of carrying, orienting, manipulating, and effectuating the real worlds in which thinking and writing happen.

Moreover, Maturana and Varela are emphatic about the livingness of language in nonhuman domains. The worlds carried in languaging are not limited by human interactions. Relational effects between living systems create the patterns of conduct that linguists have separated from life by way of the symbolic theory of language. But that symbolic theory cannot explain how “the flow of interactions” moves between materials and linguistic elements and effects. Khipu can “write from below”—as Vicuña says—because its materials have a system that organizes the patterns of conduct around it, as well as a present shaping force on human memory, perception, imagination, and forgetting. This is its autopoiesis and its means of continued creativity and ramification in contemporary experience. The system is immanent to the medium in which Vicuña entwines herself and her readers (see plate 10). In imposing its structural coupling or topology on readers, organizing their experience of time by organizing their spatial and temporal relations (indeed, in acting as the topological system that Taussig calls an “animated structuralism”), Vicuña allows khipu to act as an autopoietic natural sign.

To put it another way: if readers do not assume that language obtainsits defining feature from representational, informational, archival, or even strictly epistemological functions, if we can perceive that it is in some meaningful basis an interactive phenomenon and system of positions (as the in-ayllu or in-khipu conception of language insists; and as the idea of language as languaging reaffirms), then the silence of the colonial archiveis cracked. Such silencing is indeed—as Benjamin put it in his reading of Baudelaire’s poem—“as brittle as glass—and as transparent” (Selected Writings 4:50–51). In its continued making of positions and perspectives, the khipu speaks. It gives form and content to Vicuña’s poetry within its own topological design. Her languaging is the representability of khipu representing itself.

This is the feature of autopoiesis in khipu that resists enforced disappearance and thus can be described as a kind of resistant representability. In a different context, Jerome McGann likewise drew on Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis for understanding the autonomous representability of texts, employing the concept to explore textuality as “feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them” (15). In his works, he has expanded a sense of textuality beyond language and print to involve the generative effects of electronic and informational technology. But he does not move laterally in semiotic interfaces to examine something like khipu. His sense of textuality did not exactly take stock of autopoietic texturality. In khipu, the “feedback system”—which encloses user and text in a shared effort of producing, maintaining, and defining the system that organizes their effort—is continuous with threads and design that have resisted colonial silencings. Moreover, the semiotics and aesthetics of that resistant thread and design have persisted in the resistant words and makings of people like Oxa and Vicuña. To rephrase McGann’s uses of Maturana and Varela: it is not only that feedback systems cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them; feedback systems resist separation from those users. Those users in turn become expressions of the resistance of the semiotic and aesthetic system.

The meaning of resistance is used in its full political resonance here. Poetics of resistance are typically understood as positional statements in a state of war. Benjamin scholar Caygill thus begins his study “on resistance” with Carl von Clausewitz, reasoning that “the ambivalent experience of a blocking or aporia that is also an uprising or insurrection—an experience that might be called the state of resistance—locates it on the crossroads between violence and speech” (On Resistance 9). The economy of war frames the discourse of resistance. Its poetics implies speech in refusal of death, silence, or what I have called here the enforced disappearance of khipu (so as to compare its colonial destruction to the political terror of twentieth-century free market regimes). With respect to khipu, its representability has resisted that destruction by eliciting voice. In animating and structuring poetic acts to this day, its “feedback systems” not only have resisted the colonial interdict but have come to shape and define it as well.

The title of this section is drawn from anthropologist Roy Wagner’s phrase, “the symbol that stands for itself.” Wagner describes how the formal and aesthetic properties of signs effectively allow for signs to create their own meanings. I repurpose the phrase here to emphasize not meaning but relational structure. Relating itself in a colonial context, the formal properties of khipu encompass and give definition to that context, giving it another nature in which to understand itself. Interconnecting that context into a text that is textile, khipu subsumes relations into a textural structure of reciprocal warp and weft—the social fabric called ayllu in Quechua, a type of reflexivity reaching into nonhuman domains. Indeed, its embededdness in animated materiality has kept khipu resistant. That materiality brings to life anticolonial significations of ongoing resistance—positions in a topology that extends into nonhuman worlds. In distilling the political message that interconnects Maturana, Varela, Deleuze, and Guattari, Bains could have been writing as well about Vicuña’s khipu:

This autonomy of language is also creative, allowing its participants todescribe, imagine, and conjure up the past and invent the future. Order-worlds may constrain and determine subjectivity, in particular as one is born into regimes of signs. However, there is always the possibility of unpredictable encounters and novel interactions leading to previously unimagined observations, statement-acts, and networks of conversations. … “Accordingly, all coercive political systems aim, explicitly or implicitly, at reducing creativity and freedom by specifying all social interactions as the best means of suppressing human beings as observers and thus attaining political permanence. ...” The Achilles hell of absolute domination = relations. (130–31)⁹Close

Ultimately, the political explosiveness of Vicuña’s khipu is that it is creative. Written amidst the double political shock of colonial governance and its continuance in Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, Vicuña’s khipu functions not only as remembrance but as relation making as well (see plate 10 for a literalization of this idea). Khipu is not only subject to normative positions, spaces, and temporalities of history. It shapes positions, temporalities, and spaces as well, transforming historical experience in a deixis of present creativity. Rather than serve simply as a shadow symbol for market regimes and colonial power, it sheds light on the communitarian philosophies and ecological reciprocities that lurk immanently in the materials of these Andean signs.

Such is the political possibility of the signs studied in this book. They are more than traces of a foregone and conquered past. They allow for people in the present to confront and determine colonial legacies. The autopoietic sign itself confronts and determines its past, present, and future. Not only humans move subsumption in multiple directions; the signs that stand for themselves also subsume. They subsume because their constellation of poetic effects—in metonymy, metalepsis, amphiboly, introjection, montage, and analepsis—flashes like lightning over the landscape of thought and feeling through which people move.

The texturality of the sign was also woven into the outfit that Joaquín Torres-García wore to the artists’ ball at the Waldorf Astoria in 1921. In his drooping cartoonish overalls (see fig. 1 in the preface and fig. 30 in this chapter), the motif of the city took on tones both dismal and clownish. The outfit is a kind of combination of the costume of a court jester and an abject human billboard—the wearable cityscape is thus an amalgamation of commodity and critical ridicule. Luis Pérez-Oramas (poet, art scholar, and curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s 2015-16 Torres-García ex­hibit) analyzes this tension by way of Jean-François Lyotard’s “distinction between the textural and the figural.” As Pérez-Oramas argues, in Torres-García’s outfit the figure of the clown is disrupted by the textures of the market, eliciting a disruption found throughout Torres-García’s works: a rift between “the space of the text and the space of the figure.” In this book I have explored a similar rift—but I have articulated it from world structures other than that of capital. In doing so, the present chapter has arrived to something other than what Lyotard describes as the “ontological separation” between figures and texts, or signs and things (qtd. in Pérez-Oramas 28, 36). As in Vicuña’s works, in Torres-García’s writing and art the signifier is not constrained or alienated by the capitalist system it encounters, subverts, and just as often subsumes. Its totalizability is also generated from the cultures of the native Americas. Torres-García called this totalizability “cosmoplastia” or “cosmoplasty,” a neologism that blends the words “cosmos” and “plasticity” in order to reference the pliable consolidation of word and thing.¹⁰Close “Signo: Estructura,” he affirmed, later adding, “reality is only a symbol … and we all know that form is only a mask” (qtd. in Pérez-Oramas 11). If it is the case that such a relational in-ayllu realizability of signs guides his sense of the sign, it is no surprise then that in his works the plasticity of signs bears the densities of whole worlds, temporalities, and processes of change. Crossing the threshold of the Waldorf Astoria, the outfit bears some sense that it wishes to channel that building, its geography, and the historical panorama of the city. Rather than simple superstructural expression of New York City infrastructure, the outfit is a source of transitivity for those material bases,

wearing and shaping them, while also making possible their disrobing and divestment.

Decades later, in 1941 back in Montevideo, Torres-García writes an al­legory of transitive cosmoplasty, La Ciudad sin Nombre. “The City without a Name” tells the story of an anonymous flâneur walking an unnamed city, observing its bustling activity, architectural and aesthetic objects, literary coteries and cultures, and general sociological scene. At various points in the manuscript, this anonymous writer inscribes the mantra of “structure” and “sign” into the text, most certainly to signal the book’s commitment to cosmoplasty. That commitment is manifest in the texture of the manuscript itself, which is a handwritten manuscript, not a typescript (see fig. 31). Moreover, like a combination of de Angulo’s pictographic ethnography, Ortiz’s and Geyer’s multilayered multiliteracy, Twombly’s hieroglyphic ductus, and Vicuña’s khipu texturality, this manuscript is an instance of semiotic heterogeneity. The text itself visualizes the materiality of the alphabet: reproducing the shape, slope, size, and style of the author’s handwriting. But it also encloses that visualization in the aesthetic norms of Andean pictography. Torres-García offers a straightforward example of this tactic in his work “Indoamérica” (fig. 2 in the preface), which presents such words as “pacha mama” (Andean Earth goddess—literally, world mother), “vida” (life), and “Indoamérica” in the shape and style of the surrounding pictographs. Pictography is not asked to operate alongside alphabetical writing. It is presented as a texturality that can absorb and carry the meaning-making function of the alphabet. It is the aesthetic in which the alphabet appears.

In the visualized text of La Ciudad sin Nombre, pictographic visualcharacteristics have a shaping effect on the alphabet and the representation of urban modernity. The seen city is seen through the lens of pictographic writing. Such pictographic urbanity contravenes Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama’s conception of a “lettered city” that is coextensive with modernity. In the pages of Torres-García’s book, the urban motif of the modern world is experienced as a pictograph. To be sure, the urban motif itself captures the pictograph in the kinds of amnesias, losses, and dispossessions that Baudelaire made vivid in his poem “Le Cygne.” But, as Benjamin’s Baudelaire suggests, those amnesias interlock in acts of remembering—acts that crack the totality of the modern scene. From such opened crevices is emitted the plasticity of a cosmos, as well as the heterogeneous structures in which that plasticity is given distinct shape. In Torres-García’s book, the shaping structure is pre-Incan Andean pictography—derived principally from the stonework of the ancient Tiwanaku, Chavín, and Cerro Sechín metropoles from around 2000 BCE. Any examination of these pictographs must peer across the seemingly impossible temporal distance of four millennia. Yet in examining the unique temporal density of these signs Paternosto has noticed how such distance is flattened at the touch. In his The Stone and the Thread, a study of the contemporary impact of ancient Andean art, he notices that the stonework of the Andes is distinctly fabric-like. Unlike the stonework of Mesoamerica, which is driven primarily by “iconographic aims,” “the flat, synthetic, lithic iconography of [the Andes cultures] first evolved in the reductive, geometrizing matrix of the textile medium … the monoliths of Tiwanaku [for instance] are entirely covered by filigreed reliefs that reproduce textile designs.” He calls this the “plectogenic nature” of the Andean world, which is to say a natural world “first developed intextiles” (18–19).¹¹Close This textile-based sense of textuality infuses the pre-Incan Andean icons with the same values of in-ayllu mesh, by which thetexture of the text is a contact point between different times and places. Moreover, if those intersections and interstices are conceptualized—asthey are in ayllu—as resources for reciprocity between memory and imag­ination (the past in its present fashioning), then the icons in Torres-García’s book also stand as the evidence of a woven world. In such a world, semiotic structures reaching across the seemingly impossible temporal distance of four millennia are surfaced into present tactility. In theirsurface effects, they channel the depth of time and world. In this way, a “nature” first developed in textiles continues to subsume nature in the present moment. Torres-García’s pictographs do not illustrate the text but rather reveal its plectogenic nature. Like the geometric icons in the stone reliefs of Tiwanaku, the pictographs in Torres-García’s book express a model of time that disrupts the rectilinear course of colonial historiography, and it also infuses that disruption with the in-ayllu conception of resistant reciprocal representability. The implicit threads holding the book together carry the design of an Andean cosmos. And, by plectogenic extension, those threads implicate themselves in the appearance of the wearable pictographs at the Waldorf Astoria in 1921. The city of New York becomes a “city without a name” and is held together instead by pictographic threads and designs.

But while the textures of Torres-García’s works bring the city into a kind of woven structuralism, the contradictions of such intercultural animation do not go away. Not quite a pure pictograph, the visualized text in Torres-García’s works bends and folds in the traces of modernity, urbanism, commodity, and the alphabet. In this complexity, the pictographs work, rather, as what Benjamin would have called “Denkbilder” or thought pictures. As Gerhard Richter explains, the Denkbild was a strategy developed by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory for staging dialectical encounter: when an object is seen as the complex combination of image and thought that it is, its various other contradictions and problematics are likewise made perceptible. In other words, Denkbilder are means of transforming objects into situations, and objecthood into the site of transitivity and transformation that it in fact is (1–43). In its aspect as a philosophical “picture puzzle,” the pictograph of the Americas stages the problem of multiple epistemologies, ontologies, temporalities, and mnemonic and creative priorities. Yet in its particular coordination of thought and image—not quite a picture, not quite a word either—the pictograph arrives with certain capacity for organizing the Denkbilder of the Americas. As Theodor Adorno puts it with reference to the poetics of the “picture puzzle” or Denkbild, pictographs “get thought moving … they strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire” (qtd. in Richter ix). Resonating with Sanjinés’s description of the totalizable archival fragment as a kind of “ember,” waiting to set fire to situations in the living present, Adorno’s description of the Denkbild insists upon the necessary historical context that the pictograph nonetheless wishes to enkindle and cast into new light.

Inextricable from historical contexts, the signs of the Americas also burn through those contexts with their distinct semiotics and worlds. Such a contradiction makes possible their criticality and creativity. That creative criticality is blazed into a passage from Chicano novelist Miguel Méndez’s Pilgrims in Aztlán, a story set in the US-Mexico borderlands where people suffering racial governance seek redemptive justice in the mythic Aztec homeland of Aztlán. Like the Aztec priests whose defiant speech at Tenochtitlan subsumed a semiotic chaos into the resilient signs of the Americas, Méndez writes:

When amnesia began to sow shadows in our memory, we went to our ancient lakes, seeking in the depth the faces we had lost. We saw through the mist of the ages that they were blurred and no longer the same. We reached the ancient bed of a river, facing the mountain of granite. We shouted for the echo to give back to us the names and the voices that had departed … leaving us empty. We came down from the hills, along the trails and roads, dragging our roots against the thorns, the snow, and the fire. We inquired after our destiny, but no one wanted to understand us because our signs were so strange. … We descended to the bottom of the sea, where the stars descend to their nests, to ask if the heavens know where we are headed or where we come from. … Know, those who have been immolated, for in this region you will be the dawn and you will also be the river . … (178)

The passage narrates the losses of colonial violence through a series of failed apostrophes. The speaker seeks contact with their past in addressing lake, river, mountain, and foothill valley. But in all of those places their speech fails them because the signs have been estranged. In the murk of colonial semiosis, the speaker’s signs have been alienated from redemptive pasts and futures. Yet that amnesia also induces the intensity of the speaker’s search. In that search, Méndez’s speaker takes on the intensity of the stars burning above, descending into the watery nest of the lake to cool in a critical investigation of their pasts and possible futures. If this is a Denkbild, it is one into which the speaker walks—as if it were a landscape over which a new constellation burns bright. It feels at times like the murky lands of colonial historicity. But the night atmosphere is clear with the possibility of other forms, rhythms, and worlds. In entering the image, the signs finally resonate. They promise a dawning and rivering. They promise light liquefied.