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

Abstract

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 key for cinema (as the idea of moving image suggests), as well as Mexican political culture ensuing 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 analogous to what thinkers like Ernst Jünger and Gil Andijar have referred to as “Total Mobilization” (Mobilmachung) and “political hematology,” respectively. These perspectives argue that, during modernity, there is a rising biopolitical mobilization by which every aspect of subjectivity is turned to an increasingly accelerating war and/or productive effort. This article shows that in spite of the film’s sympathy for the UNAM’s strike, 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 and the subject, Güeros meditates on the exhaustion of movement. On the contrary, this piece 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 better said, mobilized, by the market or politics.