Esquirlas / Splinters: for an anarchist approach to the Haymarket affair

© Francisco Morán and Back to Haymarket: Notes from the Gallows, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Francisco Morán and Back to Haymarket: Notes from the Gallows with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Esquirlas / Splinters: for an anarchist approach to the Haymarket affair

Francisco Morán, Southern Methodist University

Almost without exception, the covers of the monographs about the Haymarket affair offer to the eye the explosion of the bomb. In both Paul Avrich’s study as well as James Green’s, the vortex of the cover design toward which the reader's attention is drawn inevitably is the very instant of the explosion. In the book Urban Disorder, by Carl Smith, the Great Chicago Fire gains visual prominence to the point that it burns more than the half of the cover. Given the fact, however, that the Great Fire of Chicago, as the signifier of urban disorder, is linked to and takes us to the Haymarket affair and the Pullman strike, the masses of smoke from the fire on the cover do not fail to evoke the Haymarket bombing. In all cases, the graphic design appeals to iconic images of violence and chaos that, as demonstrated by Smith, played a key role in the perception of urban space, in sharp contrast to the promises of organization and discipline of that same space offered by technological modernity. The rails, bridges, telegraph wires supplied the illusory image of the domestication of the urban space. Yet, when looking at the aforementioned images what one finds is only the very impossibility of actually seeing an ordered city. In Avrich’s book the policemen – the signifier par excellence of law and order – are thrown violently outwards toward the bottom and the right corner of the cover. We know that they are policemen because we see uniforms and caps, but those very same figures are fuzzy, and even the two that are the closest to the explosion could hardly be identified as law enforcement officers. Something similar happens with the cover of Green’s book where the explosion has the appearance of a sinister halo of light, which while occupying the center of the image, indeed dislodges the subjects with such inordinate violence, as if here also the violence had attained an agency of its own becoming just violence, which insistently looks us in the eye.

Literally and metaphorically, these images blind us and challenge from the outset any attempt to produce a tidy, coherent story. Before the explosion of the bomb that repeatedly blows up on these covers, I think that this chaos suggests that there is another poetic approach to the Haymarket affair, as valid as any other: rather than the chronological narrative, well organized, another approach would play its cards only on splinters of truth; splinters caught on the fly at the very instant of the explosion. Such a story could just as well have only one recognizable organizing principle: the obsession that could  cast us into the whirlwind of that story. This research would then be ruled by the anarchist principle of any explosion: splintered truths, and slivers of truth  caught in an image, in a fleeting gesture, in a face, in rumors, as well as in the so-called historical facts. Each sliver itself must suffice as a signifying force, and of course, it will eventually become apparent for the readers that nonetheless each one of them, as well as each twist and detour we will take is strongly interconnected. Yet, this has to be achieved without following any predictable map. Therefore, let us light the fuse. Where will the explosion throw us? We don’t know yet.