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LG: When we began to organize at the end of the 90s, for many in Latin America to be a left-wing militant was to be boring, an idiot, a jerk. For us it wasnít that way: we smoked dope, threw parties, danced techno, and constructed many spaces, and we were united. Afterwards, little by little, the field was opening up, and many people came, saw and left. We felt that part of our role was to generate that self-criticism in order to attract others. The strategy that has to be followed, we said, is to not abandon the flags, the pamphlets, the megaphone, the figure of the leader, but we are going to question them. And the best way of questioning them is to use them, alter them. The problem was the seriousness, solemnity, and monumentality of the old discourses. We also recovered surrealism, thus we could never generate an idea of the poor or worker as socialist realism does. We recovered many things from the old politics, but for a forward-moving construction, because we already knew that it was a failure.
SGN: After a failure like that, the terms "militancy" and "revolution" must be either redefined or abandoned. In your practice, there are neither militant squares nor a call for 70s style revolution. There is a parodical recourse that dissembles those traditional figures. How would you define it?
FZ: The militant subject is basic for us. The basis of a militant attitude is, first, the commitment to the cause, second, solidarity, third, to value your colleague as yourself, because youíre struggling for a collective way out, fourth, coherence, fifth, to fight for a large scale change, not only small scale. We are militating, for example, every time we give an interview, because we try to involve the person we are talking to, so that that person continues the chain. Before we were very rigid in our organization, following the model of another global context, maybe that of the 70s.
LG: The first instance of militancy with Etcetera... was with H.I.J.O.S.. We realized that associating ourselves with social organizations, in artistic militancy terms, resulted in moderating certain aspects of our development in order to respect the logic of an organization. We realized also that the field of militancy that we had to have was that of militant and artistic research, with our own development of the points that we thought would lead to the liberation of mankind. The field that has interested us as militancy — because we believe it is a field that has been abandoned — is the field of art, because what ends up happening is that the majority of the militants who adopt a political conscience, carry out their militancy in cultural areas that are outside of the elitist, hegemonic space that is closed to art. We are interested in occupying those spaces as the only way of potentializing the counterculture, of creating culture.
SGN: Is it not incoherent for an errorist to establish coherence as a value?
FZ: For Errorism, not every error is errorist. The second point of the manifesto says that errorist error is the error where the errorist is conscious of the unconsciousness of erring. And, in this way, he acts and lives. That is, we donít provoke error. Error is always present in reality. When I talk about coherence, I mean that one keeps to a line, is authentic in what one says, doesnít follow fashions. Coherence in an errorist would be to have that consciousness whereby the poem writes itself. Itís similar to many of the experiences of Dada, of psychic automatism, and Zen poetry also. The struggle of Errorism consists in freeing the people of the idea that error is negative, when, in reality, it is what traces out the map of life. When one is an errorist, one is conscious of the fact that error is passing in the present, and then it doesnít cause bad blood, but that it is lived with a new dynamic. A coherent errorist, when presented with a new error situation, takes it in stride, always.
SGN: Then error would not be the fact that a thing turned out differently than you expected, that it failed. In that point you go further than the idea of error. It is to deny error, it is allowing yourself to be taken along by lifeís events and to operate from that standpoint, and not from a prior plan.
FZ:Exactly.
SGN: Perfect. Then there is a postulation that the classic idea of revolution and the classic idea of militancy are given the boot. Being coherent with Errorism, wouldnít it be interesting to further probe of the concept of militancy and revolution? Because, itís evident that you are not agitating for mass movement, you are a few crazies who are in the streets. Now, the idea of relationships amongst individuals is another thing entirely. The strongest traditional revolutionary concept is that the present is read — is lived — from the future. As such, the present is much flatter than the future to come, where we imagine ourselves living. That teleological progression is disarming, whether one wants it or not. So, I ask again, what are you saying when you say "revolution"?
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