Total Mobilization: Stasis, Infrapolitics, and Contemporary Temporalization in Alonso Ruizpalacios’s Güeros

Laburpena

Alonso Ruizpalacios’s 2014 cinematographic debut Güeros is a nostalgic coming-of-age that engages with the golden age of Mexican cinema, emblematic spaces of Mexico City, and the student-led strike of 1999 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) against its privatization. By examining the film’s depiction of another iteration of the historical Mexican student movement, this article analyzes the notion of movement, which is crucial for cinema, Mexican political culture post-1968, and Western political thought. This project points to how political movement, usually associated with the creation of political antagonisms, public protest, and the construction of a popular subject, is akin to what theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Ernst Jünger, and Gil Anidjar argue is modernity’s total mobilization of life by which every aspect of subjectivity is turned to an increasingly accelerating war or a productive effort.

This article shows that the film’s alternation between personal, political, and narrative planes questions the notion of movement as the foundation for militancy and social change against neoliberal reform and whether these have been subsumed by the ever-increasing forces of spectacular capitalism. From an infrapolitical perspective, this article argues that faced with the increasing compulsion of the mediatized markets and identitarian politics to engulf every aspect of life, Güeros meditates on the exhaustion of movement and argues that the film posits the existence of something yet to be thought about and that emerges from the crevices of that which cannot be reduced, or rather, mobilized, by the market or politics.