Technologies of Resistance: Media, Anarchy, and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico

Abstract

All history is media history, and all politics are media politics. This dissertation provides an analytical frame for seeing and studying the people, ideas, political movements, and social arrangements that populate history as both solid forms and fluid processes; that is, as beings in the world whose shape, influence, and “essence” are never fully nor statically defined by some individual, isolable, ahistorical qualities but, rather, come to be (and be defined as) what they are in an open, interpenetrating, and constantly unfolding conversation with the world they’re a part of. Media, I argue, are the facilitators of that conversation—the connective (im)material tissue that entangles beings with one another and with the world in which they live, become, and function. Thus, in the chapters that follow, I examine two political movements on either side of the Mexican revolution (1910-1920), embodied in the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM), as they developed in conversation with medial environments that were changing, that changed them, and that they, in turn, tried to change themselves. In so doing, I attempt to reframe analyses of their politics in terms of their entanglements in and navigation of these medial environments, their efforts to harness components within those environments for their own ends, and their strategies for reorienting the arrangement of said environments to better fit their visions of the world people deserved to have and the lives they deserved to live within it. In Chapter One, I establish the theoretical foundations and justifications for analyzing media, history, people, and (leftist) politics this way. Ultimately, this chapter aims to answer three central questions: (1) Under what circumstances could we come to understand anarchism as the eventual horizon of all politics that could be described as “left”? (2) In comparing the political and intellectual principles of classical anarchism with Reiner Schürmann’s concept of an-archē, how might such a comparison enable us to conceptualize the medial arrangements by which hegemony is actualized and to interpret politics as the struggle to intervene in and reshape said arrangements? (3) How can Sloterdijk’s spherology, combined with an elemental understanding of media as the technics of life itself, provide a framework for analyzing (leftist) politics in these terms? In the following chapters, I synthesize these thorny theoretical questions and express them concretely by interrogating the media politics of the PLM and the PCM. While I do analyze the primary medium through which each movement represented itself—Regeneración, the PLM’s official newspaper, and El machete, which would become the official organ of the PCM—I zoom out to show how each medium participated in broader, diffuse, and interconnected medial-political efforts to intervene in the hegemonic medial arrangements of their time. In Chapter Two, I primarily examine the diffuse and interconnecting dimensions of a concerted media politics that made up the movement of magonismo, from networks of Liberal Clubs throughout Mexico to Regeneración itself and the clandestine, transnational medial infrastructure through which it was produced, disseminated, and engaged with. In Chapter Three, however, while examining the media politics of the PCM party apparatus (such that it was) and its newspaper, El machete, I devote more attention to surveying the tangled, hegemonic medial landscape in which the early PCM hoped (but struggled greatly) to intervene in the 1920s.