Jorge Pavez Ojeda

Lecture Abstract:

Between October 2019 and December 2025, Chile went eventually through every possible scenario in a contemporary polis: a popular uprising that brought millions of people out onto streets demonstrations singing “Chile woke up!” (2019-2020), the approval by plebiscite and election of a Constitutional Convention to draft a new Constitution of the Republic, and the following election of a progressive government that defined itself as “transformative” (2021), the overwhelming electoral rejection (by 62%) of the proposed Constitution accused of being “refoundational” (2022), the election of a new Constitutional Council—this time controlled by the far-right heir to Pinochet—to draft a new proposal and a new rejection of that proposal (2023), and the recent election of a far-right government (2025). In this talk, I want to revisit some of these moments through the images they generated as manifestations of contemporary visual and performative culture. The media coverage and political ekphrasis of these images and performances will be read as expressions of the “cultural battle” promoted by the contemporary far-right in its crusade against “wokeism.”

Engaging debates on Chilean art works, documentary films and records of street demonstrations of these national junctures, I will seek to show how the manipulative strategies of propagation (cutting, montage, repetition, amplification) and the repertoire of rhetorical figures (tropology, fallacies, syllogisms) of the “cultural battle” are articulated as operational mechanisms aimed at capturing vision and hearing. Aimed to inspire and amplify what Spinoza’s ethics defines as “sad passions” (fear, hatred, anger, envy), these operations produces uncertainty and insecurity, and leave off-screen the conditions of production of visual or sound images, in the same way that fascist warfare mobilize the masses sensorium preserving “the inherited conditions of property” (Benjamin). Within the cross temporality of a triple shock—unrest, pandemia, and sectarian threat—the populist far-right promotes the anaesthetical reduction of the senses and the language breakdown as enactment of an inmunitarian “protective shield” (Freud). The “mental map” thus produced offers a simulacrum of “totalization of meaning” (Jameson) in a time of fragmented experiences and spheres of life. Media virtualization of visual culture is thus exploited as a nihilistic mode of deconstruction, which exacerbates a certain semiosis of “fixation of belief” (Pierce) with denialist mechanisms that seek to reduce uncertainty, normalize catastrophe, and naturalize mythical violence in an ahistorical way.

Biography:

Jorge Pavez Ojeda is a noted scholar confronting the violence not merely of the dictatorship but its neoliberal aftermath exemplified in the dossier for the October 2023 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on social media and social movements and his introduction to, “The Book of Revolt and the House of Rejection: On Neoliberalism and the Constitutional Process in Chile, 2019–2022” and his book, Imbunches de la dictadura. El fundamento sádico de la dominación neoliberal (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2023), Pavez Ojeda’s work focuses on visual studies, political anthropology and the historical sociology of race, gender and ethnicity in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has published the books Cartas Mapuche. Siglo XIX (Santiago: CoLibris/OchoLibros, 2008), Laboratorios etnográficos. Los archivos de la antropología en Chile (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2015), Imágenes de la revolución industrial. Robert Gertsman en las minas de Bolivia (La Paz: Plural, 2016, con Pascale Absi). He has also published essays on the anthropology of Afro-Cuban music in Latin American Music Review (2016) and Hau: Journal of ethnographic theory (2021), and on visual anthropology and political history in Aisthesis: revista de investigaciones estéticas (2009), Historia Crítica (2014 y 2022), The Journal of Latin America and Caribbean Antropology (2022), South Atlantic Quarterly (2023), escrituras americanas (2024) and Slavery & Abolition (2025).

Pavez Ojeda will present aspects of the important work emerging from the research project he led between 2021 and 2024 on a grant from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo in Chile: “Visual Sociology of the Uprising: study on temporalities, medias, contagion and the violence of images in the recent mass mobilization in Chile.” The proposal is for a lecture and workshop that would explore the potentials of the popular sound-image and the soundspheres of popular revolt in the context of recent mass mobilization in Chile.

More information please check out Pavez Ojeda’s website.