Today we know that on the most fundamental level, whether in the visible spectrum or in the ultraviolet, all living beings emit a photon flux.
I. The Route and Its Objects
A dirty comb. A box of Ibuprofen (no Ibuprofen). The sticker of a plastic water bottle (no water bottle). A box of cigarettes (no cigarettes). The sole of a shoe (no shoe). A shoe (no sole). A wallet (no money). A rope. A folded map of routes titled “Guía de puntos de apoyo al caminante Eje Bucaramanga” (no caminante).
These are not missing objects from Jorge Luis Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopedia.[1] Their (seemingly) arbitrary grouping is unlikely to make Michel Foucault laugh,[2] to inspire him to challenge the taken-for-granted “mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed” (Foucault 1994, xvii) in order to disturb the fiction we call order and critically engage with its finality and its power to feed us hierarchies, classifications, and taxonomies as if they were the most natural thing in the world: commonsense, common knowledge. These are objects that were left behind, by choice or by necessity. Objects that had, at some point, life-saving properties for someone, somewhere. Objects that, dirty, crushed, incomplete, and broken, appear not as entities but as the quiet witnesses of a life in transit, their state of abandonment a question that, left unanswered, speaks loudly of the violence of a state, the precarity of a country, the labor of millions of bodies, and the systems of control and vigilance that dictate who counts and who does not count as citizen and, often, as human. Their worn quality is a reminder that, like humans, objects have social lives—in Arjun Appadurai’s terms[3]—and that, living, they change and adapt, their agency and their power to affect bodies and other objects increasing, decreasing, and mutating depending on the context. They make it impossible to confidently speak of things—of their order and of their disorder—in the abstract: a polished shoe that leisurely walks on the street and a sole-less shoe that drags itself through a trocha in the Venezuela/Colombia border are not the same shoe.[4] They are barely the same thing.
Underscoring this transformation that all objects go through when thought of not as separate from but in their dynamic interactions with bodies and spaces has been one of the central aims fueling the theoretical corpus that founded the field of new materialism. It is also a central premise in El camino de los objetos (2022), a photographic series by Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist Ronald Pizzoferrato, which captures objects—including the ones in the aforementioned list—that Venezuelan migrants traveling by foot either take with them or have left behind.[5] Sometimes the photographs show the owners of the objects, their faces hidden, and other times the objects appear on their own. In both instances, the message is the same: no one disappears without leaving something behind, and looking for and shedding light on that something—literally shedding light, for photography, as Roland Barthes reminds us, is “the action of light on certain substances … [and] the formation of the image through an optical device” (1981, 10)—gives weight to absence. It makes lives matter regardless of whether we have access to their complete life story, and it creates a visual record of languages, gestures, and modes of survival and resilience: all things that history cannot (and rarely wants to) account for, with its simple terms of completion, finality, and eventfulness.
In a world saturated with images—and one, according to Chiara Bottici, “deprived of imagination” (2014, 1)—, it is however worth wondering about the fate and the limits of these photographs, about what happens when the light they cast is inevitably absorbed by the stronger, blinding light produced by the accumulation of thousands (if not millions) of digital images shared daily, an accumulation where migration crises like the Venezuelan one find themselves fighting with wars, famine, sneakers, bombs, rockets, and kittens for a second of the attention of a global spectator-turned-user for whom the only way to not fatally drown in this wave of interpellations is to learn to think of photographs as showing something that was, even if that something still is: as creating (rather than just capturing) a past that, in its pastness, can be digestible and forgotten in an instant.
Faced with this need to turn the relentless interpellation of the overwhelmingly visual present into a quick-to-digest or quick-to-forget past, a question emerges: How do we train ourselves to engage with the present as present and to embrace the heavy (emotional, social, political) burden that comes with doing so? How do we look at photographs like Pizzoferrato’s, at the objects in them, and the bodies shaped by and shaping those objects, without moving on so quickly and immediately turning them into a distant past (or, academically speaking, into a complex theoretical abstraction) that might be touching but that cannot really touch us? What follows is not a conclusive answer to these questions, but an account of a moment in which experiencing the present otherwise felt possible. This moment features an unexpected interaction with an object that is absent from the list included above, and that nevertheless is deemed essential by those who have been forced to leave their home behind. A cell phone. And not just any cell phone, but a partially present one emitting a barely-there signal that created what I, drawing from the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, propose to call “the firefly effect.”
II. Cell Phones in Transit
Over the past decade, scholars and artists have increasingly turned to digital technologies such as cell phones, social media, and web applications, to analyze, represent, and in some instances intervene in patterns and experiences of migration. Perhaps the most notable example—at least in the context of migration across the Mexico-U.S. border—is the Transborder Immigrant Tool. The project was created in 2007 by co-founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab, Ricardo Domínguez and Brett Stalbaum, together with a team of poets and professors, in response to the staggering number of deaths among migrants attempting to cross the border. It repurposes inexpensive cell phones with a GPS tracking device and software meant to help migrants in their journey by providing information on food and water caches, security activities, and safer routes, as well as a poetic audio composed of twenty-four poems. As Natalie Alvarez notes, the project came under the investigation of the US Congress in 2009 and 2010, which ended up issuing a letter to the chancellor of the University of California San Diego—where some of the EDT members were faculty—accusing them of the felony of encouraging illegal migration to the United States (Alvarez 2018, 113).
In the context of the more recent Venezuelan migration crisis, smartphones have become essential survival tools. As Alethia Fernández de la Reguera Ahedo, Alejandro Martín del Campo Huerta, and Juan Carlos Narváez Gutiérrez show in their work on the use of TikTok among Venezuelan migrants crossing the Darién Gap, access to smartphones, social networks, and apps allows migrants to “share information, find work, receive and/or send financial resources to continue their journeys, connect with humanitarian aid networks, and generate political actions” (2024, 62). Moreover, amid “an unprecedented phenomenon where the testimonies of migrants can go viral and impact digital communities as never before” (2024, 61), the content migrants create using their phones has served to enable participation and creative collaboration with a mass audience, and to denounce violations of basic human rights taking place at various borders.
For those who have been able to settle in their new destinations, cell phones act as lifelines in a different way. As Victoria Bernal notes in her study of diasporic citizenship, digital media provide “easy, cheap, and immediate means of communication across legal and institutional barriers as well as across geographical distances” (2014, 10). They allow those living abroad to continue participating in the political life of the nation, which, in the case of Venezuela, has been a task both essential and remarkably difficult given the censorship and the violence perpetrated by the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, which has led to an alarming increase in the number of arrests and executions of those opposed to the regime. This connection to the nation that is facilitated by the possibilities offered by cell phones and digital media comes at a high emotional cost, as seen in a text recently published online in the magazine Trópico absoluto by Venezuelan author Adalber Salas Hernández, titled “Luciérnagas”: “Miro el celular de noche. Repaso tuits, videos, artículos, comunicados, declaraciones públicas. Sigo las noticias sobre los presos, los desaparecidos. Trato de ordenar los hechos en mi cabeza. Separar el hecho del rumor, el rumor de la amenaza. Miro el celular sin poder dormir y el cuarto está a oscuras” (2024).
Thus, in addition to being tools that serve to strengthen governmental operations of border control and surveillance and, more broadly, to consolidate what Gilles Deleuze calls a “society of control,”[6] cell phones also help bodies in transit survive, inserting them in networks that configure new modes of solidarity, care, storytelling, political activism, artistic practice, and citizenship. Hence why they rarely make it to the list of things migrants leave behind as they move across different stages of their journey; as shown in a survey of Venezuelan migrants conducted in 2022 in Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras, and Perú, many would rather sell all their other belongings than lose their cell phones and Internet access (Mixed Migration Centre 2023). In their ability to send signals and cries for help that move across geographical borders, cell phones represent the promise that, amid the fear, the precariousness, the violence, and the isolation that often characterize the experience of forced migration, someone is on the other side of the call/text/post, listening, keeping company, and bearing witness: a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, a conocido. Sometimes, however, the signal a cell phone sends travels in unexpected ways, and it accidentally reaches a stranger. Perhaps someone who did not know or was not thinking about migrants (Venezuelan or not) crossing borders. Or someone who thought they were just visiting an archive: a place that, being a “sepulcher,” can, in theory, store a cell phone, but that cell phone could never be ringing. It would have to be dead. In theory.
III. The Call Is Coming from Inside the Archive
In March 2023, Douglas Lyon, a physician, epidemiologist, and founder of the NGO TodoSomos, arrived at Cornell University with a suitcase filled with notebooks. The notebooks contained hundreds of first-person handwritten testimonies collected from Venezuelan migrants between 2019 and 2021 along the route from the Colombian-Venezuelan border to the interior of Colombia.[7] Distributed by Lyon and his partner, Solymet Carrero, in various refugios, the hefty notebooks had a message on the first pages encouraging people to write and reminding them that their story mattered. After the conclusion of the project, Lyon and Carrero began looking for a home to archive the notebooks, so they could serve as records of a moment in Venezuelan history that has been widely registered online through various social media platforms but that has left few if any material footprints. After long conversations, Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections became that home, and an enthusiastic team of librarians began the arduous work of processing the notebooks in the now called TodoSomos Archive, aided by the transcriptions done by Venezuelan scholar Waleska Solórzano.[8]
Archiving these notebooks has come with significant challenges and has led to difficult conversations regarding questions of privacy, identity, and protection of minors, among other topics, not to mention the immense effort it has taken to decipher and transcribe the handwritten paragraphs. All these challenges, however, will eventually be overcome. What is harder to figure out—the broader question that sets heads spinning—is what happens to the archive when it suddenly finds itself storing, not the remains of a life that existed, but the voices of lives that exist. When what it preserves is not the dead time of the past, but the living time of the present. It would be easy to imagine the stories in these notebooks being displayed on a website, shared on Instagram or Facebook, or featured on newspaper articles—all modes of storing information that take for granted immediacy, that know themselves to be in syntony with the urgency of the present and the liveness of the living. But when archiving is “a kind of internment, laying something in a coffin, if not to rest” (2002, 22), as Achille Mbembe argues, then how can anything alive be archived without perishing in the process?
As theoretical provocations, these questions productively complicate the role archives have played throughout history, and might (or might not) be playing now, in a globalized cultural moment when the value of preserving the remnants of a distant past in an institutionalized archive seems to pale in comparison to the excitement provided by digital technologies, seemingly infinite social media platforms, and by interactive museums offering immersive experiences, such as allowing visitors to talk to the holograms of the dead (and have them talk back) rather than having to read their dusty and lengthy survival testimonies.[9] They also challenge the oft-cited claim that archives are intrinsically connected to death. This claim is at the center of Mbembe’s theorization of the archive. In addition to noting the importance of the entanglement of building and document for understanding the power of the archive and drawing attention to its inscription in the universe of the senses, Mbembe argues that archiving requires placing fragments of a life in order, “one after the other, in an attempt to formulate a story that acquires its coherence through the ability to craft links between the beginning and the end” (2002, 21). The possibility to impose order over these fragments depends on a fundamental event: death. Death to the extent that “the archived document par excellence is, generally, a document whose author is dead and which, obviously, has been closed for the required period before it can be accessed” (2002, 21). Examining archives, he concludes, “is to be interested in that which life has left behind, to be interested in debt. However, it is also to be preoccupied with debris. In this sense, both the historian and the archivist inhabit a sepulchre” (2002, 25).
In Escribir después de morir, Javier Guerrero reads the materiality of the archive, its “sedosas superficies acariciables” (2022, 18), as evidence that the authors whose death, as Mbembe notes, allowed for the creation of the archive, have “imantado sus pertenencias, han erotizado sus documentos para también investir de libido a quienes nos acercamos a sus seductores fondos y narramos sus historias” (2022, 19). There is, thus, life after death: an afterlife that, according to Guerrero, impedes totalizing or putting an end to an author, their work, and the archive that holds them, giving them instead a “porvenir” made possible by “cuerpos contaminantes que interactúan en acto de presencia” (2022, 23). Guerrero’s reading of the archive’s materiality is a call to pay attention to the interactions that take place inside the archive and that cannot be reduced to simply reading or consulting information. When hands meet paper, a sort of “conjuring” takes place that allows for, if not the reality, then the imagined possibility of cross-temporal coexistence. This is certainly true for the TodoSomos notebooks, where the handwriting on each page appears as an impression: a unique moment of real physical contact that occurred in the past and that, inside the archive, persists as a glimmer. But the TodoSomos archive goes one step further in reclaiming the life that exists in spite of, or because of, the death in the archive, for, unlike the authors afterliving in the archives Guerrero explores, the authors of the hundreds of stories the notebooks contain are, presumably, not dead. Being in transit, we do not know where they are now, a couple of years after the last notebooks were collected, and, in most cases, due to the difficulty of deciphering the handwriting, we do not know their names (not all of them at least). But we know—we hope—they are alive. And if we really wanted to confirm it—if we dared to do so—all we would need to do would be to pick up our phones and call one of the numbers that appear in many of the stories.
0414…….
0412…….
0416…….
These are all mobile numbers from Venezuela’s phone companies—Movistar, Digitel, Movilnet—in the hands of Venezuelan people who are not in Venezuela. Real evidence that you can, in fact, carry your country on your back, and a concrete sign that there are, in fact, more bodies in the archive than we might have suspected (or wanted).
I could talk about how fascinating this is; how interesting, how rich. But I will not, because it is not. It is agony. A phone inside the archive should not be ringing.
I have lost count of how many students who have found these numbers while consulting the notebooks have asked me if they should call them. Should, not can. And I do not know, because the truth is, I do not want to call—and neither do they, not really. Because if we did, then we would have to go all the way, and no one is ever ready for that. It is the same feeling of believing in ghosts yet praying every night to never have to see one. Not the fear of being disappointed, but the fear of finding ourselves with more responsibility than we bargained for. The fear of being in true contact—not in dialogue, in contact—with the always-elusive and not dead “Other.”
What makes this even more complicated, headache-inducing, and anxiety-provoking, is that the appearance of these phone numbers does not constitute a direct, individualized address. They are not asking me to call: they are asking anyone (everyone) to call. Had it been me, explicitly, straightforwardly, it would have been easy to either dismiss this request as being an imposition or answer it because it would be coming from a conocido. This need for clarity inside the archive is what Guerrero calls the “imperativo de la transparencia”: “el archivo transparente apunta hacia una hegemonía que desecha las posibilidades de alteridades e insiste en la finitud de la vida y la fijación del sentido” (2022, 17). A hegemony, thus, stubborn in its demand for a clear whole. But the phones do not give us that, not because there isn’t a real possibility of filling the gap in the knowledge that the numbers open, but because, “interstitial, intermittent, nomadic, improbably located” (Didi-Huberman 2018, 18), they give us access to a clandestine knowledge—what Didi-Huberman calls “firefly knowledge”—we did not want, and in doing so, make us painfully aware of the exact moment when we decided not to respond to someone’s cry for help.
Agony, then, the kind produced by the relentless ringing of an unanswered phone.
IV. The Firefly Effect
Georges Didi-Huberman has given a lot of thought to fireflies. He chases their “brief, weakly luminous flashes” (2018, 19) as he embarks on a journey that becomes a theory of the image and that takes him through an eclectic assortment of thinkers—Derrida, Pasolini, Dante, Benjamin, Agamben, Bataille, and Blanchot, among others. In their work, he finds a tension between luce and lucciola, spotlight and glimmer, the all-encompassing light of the horizon (which he associates with “definitive states, arrested times of totalitarianism or the finished times of the Last Judgment” (2018, 61)) and the intermittent light of an image that “passes by us, tiny and moving, right up close” (2018, 61). We have grown used to looking at the former, to craving the clarity of the horizon, but that—he argues—has made us “incapable of looking at the slightest image” (2018, 61). These images, firefly images, are always “on the brink of disappearance, always altered by the urgency of their flight, always close to those who, to fulfill their plans, hide in the night and attempt the impossible, risking their life” (84). They are “a thing that burns,” a thing that falls “toward us, […] to us” (2018, 63), a thing that sends weak signals as it dances in the night in a movement that is nothing more than “a dance of community forming desire” (2018, 27).
It was pure serendipity that, in the breaks I took from reviewing the transcriptions of the notebooks where I saw the cell phone numbers for the first time, I began reading Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies. Now, I cannot see them as separate from each other. Didi-Huberman’s work gave me the vocabulary I needed to name how I felt when I saw those numbers in the actual notebooks, which the librarians had displayed on a few tables for my students to read during one of our classes.[10] I do not want to say that the numbers are fireflies—a metaphor that risks fetishizing something born out of desperation or necessity. But I do believe the effect they produce on those who encounter them is like the effect fireflies produce on those who notice and follow them around. A firefly effect. Unlike the butterfly effect, which is, ultimately, about the clarity that comes when cause and effect are identified and chaos becomes less chaotic, the firefly effect is the intimate encounter with an indestructible desire to connect. A desire that appears not as blinding light but as a fragile signal coming from an object we do not see, in the hands of a living body that is not there—a body that has retreated into the shadows of the night. The firefly effect is the theory that if someone calls out, someone else, somewhere—and the archive, as we have seen, is not exempt from being that somewhere—will hear. And the choice to answer it or not could cause a tornado.