Ana Arzoumanian He says he writes to understand and encounter the world. Although he seeks answers in writing, new questions always end up opening. Paradoxically, he did not know how to speak Spanish until he was 5 years old. She was born in Buenos Aires, but grew up feeling foreign and passing through. His identity was forged as a descendant of Armenians who hoped to liberate their homeland so they could return. But that never ended and she had to invent her own territory. He found it in the word, in the writing. She graduated as a lawyer, is a psychoanalyst, poet, writer and essayist. “A revolution without revolutionaries” (Leviathan) is his latest book, an essay that delves into the troubled depths of cybernetic culture that has been redefining humanity itself, a humanity that until now was founded on writing that is now being modeled by algorithms.
News: Why “A revolution without revolutionaries”?
Ana Arzoumanian: Because in other times when we talked about revolution, we understood it as a moment where those revolutionary subjects appeared in the street killing, terrorizing, generating change through a violent act. Now we are in the field of a digital or cybernetic revolution, it is a change that is also taking place through a violent event, but what there are not those subjects who were called revolutionaries. Or maybe they are, but behind, working in multiple technology companies. The fact is that there are deaths and there are changes and there is a completely new structure.
News: What was the most foundational learning from your research?
Arzoumanian: The unstoppable nature of the process, this is something that cannot be stopped, that changes the root structures. I compared it to other revolutions, I went to the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. I imagined what was happening to people: to those peasants who had to relocate their workforce, to the bourgeoisie as a new social class and everything that it implied in terms of anguish, quality of life, affections and ways of narrating the world. I understood that in history these things happen, that there is no point in trying to stop it, that it is better to analyze it and try to do something with it. We have to be vulnerable, fragile and, at the same time, strong to be able to enter the dynamic that is proposed to us.
News: I just said that, as in any revolution, there is violence and there are also deaths. What are those deaths?
Arzoumanian: They are the physical deaths in the different wars, some of which are hybrid, because before there was an army fighting another army while now it is an army bombing a civilian population. But there are also other forms of death, which are those of subjects who have to give up their identity, I am referring to the displaced. Also to those who live in their cities, but a part of their way of life dies, I am thinking of certain workers.
News: Did the concept of reality also die?
Arzoumanian: Yes, in other times reality was present, it was updated. Putting together a fiction was a desire for imagination, for narration. Because reality was very present. Now it has completely turned around and we are immersed in a constant fiction and what we desire is not fiction but there is a desire for reality. And this is very problematic. Because the desire for reality is strong and we don’t know where to look for it or who is going to offer it, and politicians somehow know how to handle that very well and give us reality: reality is wars, not being able to eat, not having work, all that catastrophic dimension that is presented as the plausible, touchable reality.
News: He says that democracy has become a prosthesis and talks about how we are abandoning the category of citizens. What are we if we are not citizens?
Arzoumanian: First, we are consumers and prosumers, because we not only consume, but we also produce consumption and we produce it without realizing it, we are in the machine that produces consumption, and that machine is social networks.
News: Do algorithms end up knowing much more about us than we do ourselves?
Arzoumanian: Completely. And then they predict our desire and there is a predictability of desire and also of crime, of crime. Everything is already calculated. Even writing, for example, chat works with algorithms that predict our way of writing, our way of understanding writing, and so on. Democracy is based on words, on parliament, a place of speaking, where words have a value that corresponds to reality, which is not a fiction. In a world in which the image is above the word, that parliament ends up being a staging, a spectacular scene, that is, a scene of the spectacle of the voice, so it does not build democracy.
News: He works a lot on memory and legacy. In this situation where transience seems absolute, what place is left for memory?
Arzoumanian: This moves me a lot because I did a kind of experiment with my images of the Armenian identity attached to some videos of Caucasian women created by artificial intelligence. It was surprising to see that. Memory can now leave traces based on synthetic images. Just as we are cyborgs, because we have all these prosthetic things, the memory will also be built from prostheses and it will be a cyborg memory.
In his case, the transmission of painful community history was very present, it was “feeling what was splintered in everyday life.” She says that women like her grandmother, who had experienced the Armenian genocide firsthand, had to also make memory a care. “To tell and transmit certain things, they had to filter and make certain narrative negotiations. Because memory is not only about recounting what happened, but it is also about taking care of what and how it is told because what is at stake is hate. One thing is to transmit a claim from resentment and another to do it from love, lulling and not leaving the other without the nourishing elements that have to do with love.”
When she was little, if Turkish music played at a dance, her family would leave the place: Turkishness was the enemy. But then she married a man from an Armenian family who had been born in Türkiye. Since they spoke Turkish, Ana ended up learning that language.
News: Did you also have to do your screening?
Arzoumanian: Yes, and leave the hymns in a more picturesque space if you want, leave the flags to be able to understand this issue more, to enter the feeling, the emotion, to reach compassion. It is a learning that “the enemy” is also a construction.
News: Compassion is connecting with the other as a human being, beyond their beliefs. Today we are increasingly atomized?
Arzoumanian: Yes, since the Enlightenment and modernity we had a formation based on the idea of the individual, the subject of law, responsible for his actions, a strong self that does what he wants and what he needs and a self that orders. And in reality there is no such. We see it in biology: we are made of microbes, we are a big bug with little bugs and with that we live together and the idea is the relationship, to live together, because ultimately we are that, there is no such thing as an individual. I think it is a responsibility that we people who work with words have: to tell others what we are thinking, what we are feeling about the world and for that we have to allow ourselves to go through what the world offers and deliver it to the other, as we talked about memory, in a careful way.
News: In this technological context, what is the mark of the human today?
Arzoumanian: For centuries we believed that humanity was in language. But today machines can also produce words. Then the question arises: where is the human? Maybe in emotions, in the ability to feel. The great unknown is whether synthetic feelings will one day exist.
