Clandestine Bodies, Creative Languages: Power, Precarity, and Poiesis

Abstract This research takes the phenomenon of clandestine messages from garment workers on clothing tags as its starting point. Drawing on such events, I argue that those messages, in which an unknown, unnamed, and disembodied worker sends a clandestine call for help, illustrate how precarity (and resistance) in dependent capitalist countries operates. I take the messages in the labels as an alternative source for approaching modes of subjectivation, highlighting moments when precarity, as a zone of life, disturbs the libidinal and symbolic fantasies of neoliberalism through ephemeral but disruptive acts—which are, for that, also poietic. In theoretical terms, I aim to resituate Spivak's subaltern thesis by using the label's cases to show how the discursive power operating in hegemonic representations is fundamentally related to a libidinal and aesthetic kind of enunciation. For that, I seek support from Lacanian thinking, along with Latin American critical schools, such as dependency theory, decolonial studies, and feminist approaches. Drawing on them, we can see alternative communication abilities emerging from the clandestine messages on labels, whose performativity can be read as a sinthome. By addressing Lacanian reflection on symptoms, and putting it into dialogue with aesthetic interventions, I sought to open our analysis to scenes of interpellation where a performative body is called to exist through ironic metaphors with affective abilities, causing horror and anguish. The psychoanalysis terrain is, then, presented as an interesting site to take the affective turn in IR forward by exploring different onto-epistemologies.