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THE INTERTEXTUAL AND MAGICAL KALEIDOSCOPE OF PABLO ESCOBARВ’S ILLEGAL CULTURE

C. M. Jaramillo

Abstract

Pablo Escobar was the king of cocaine, seeing himself as В‘a king of magiciansВ’ because he had magically broken the geographic limits of the illegal cocaine trade. In other words, it is what we can consider in some ways a representation of illegality. To understand and define illegality, we must understand legality first. Omar Calabrese in his book Neo baroque defines legality as something that creates a border. A border can be constructed by cutting or defining limits, which is what Calabrese identifies semiotically as the В‘detailВ’. A border is also a membrane that is identified by two spaces: the interior and the exterior space or aperture and closure. In this sense, legality in contrast to illegality is part of the system, but at the same time, it is what limits it and could cause illegality because of its exteriority. On the other hand, the exterior is the opposite of legality, the bipolar representation that against the dogma of the existing system. It could be related to scandal, provocation and rebellion. We could also question what illegality is by defining its relationship with the law. It can be what Noam Chomsky meant when he stated that he particularly agrees with Michel Foucault that the law has the power to define what is illegal, which is not necessarily about justice, because the law is a form of control. Thus, illegality is an ambiguous form of discursive structure that does not necessarily have unacceptable value, nor does it follow borders. One of these linguistic representations seems to be the contemporary monster, which like EscobarВ’s monstrosity cannot be defined in the past normative of good and bad. In that context Calabrese defines the word, it can have an ambiguous meaning because the monster neutralizes, suspends and annuls the linguistic value. We could probably even say that what Edward O. Wilson might like to say is not the perception anymore of reality; rather, we find something more powerful, a myth that interlaces fear with wonder. In that context, in some ways it embraces spectacle, or what we could call the carnival, and on the other hand, it represents an enigma of the weird or strange that can be related to excess and the marvellous that cross the limits with reality. Calabrese uses also the term ex-cedere to define what does not follow the normative of moderation, which means to break limits. The ordinary and the usual can also be characterised by excess, danger and eccentricity, which was observed upon EscobarВ’s illegality. In that way, Calabrese describes it as a В‘new poetical linkВ’ when words like metaphor do not follow the normative. Rather, language found creative ways of coding linguistic values. In that way, it also breaks the boundaries of reflecting reality and language because of the deformation of the representation. In more detail, the metaphor reflects the extraordinary and strange representation rather than borders of a moderate reality. EscobarВ’s illegality is not only about breaking geographic limits, but he deconstructs also the social, historical and cultural norms of the existing system. In that context, Escobar's history lost its credibility and normativity because it becomes an intertextual of media composed by narratives of real fiction of an idealistic world and influences by the media and the 'being language', literature. Even the cultural mode of communication such as images, texts, architecture, urban design and objects found illegality by denying freely every kind of rule. By creating and grouping modes of communication upon a hypothetical form, we can study EscobarВ’s illegality in different forms and eventually reconstruct the whole. It is constructed by fragments of diverse and multiple images, architecture, urban design, texts and objects that are organised in a free, intertextual, chaotic, poetical and hypothetical structure: we can know it as kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscope can be found by re-archaelogization/ Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge is a group of statements that allow us to study discourses that are not close. Rather, they are metaphorically like archaeology, fragments in the search for totality. Calabrese also describes it as pieces that do not have clear edges like a coastline and show a system that is hypnotically unknown that tends to focus on investigation. By looking at FoucaultВ’s discourses, illegality can be studied by considering kaleidoscope as a verbal performance produced by group of signs, formulations, sentences or propositions. He considers that what makes that serial is discursive formation, which is then the principle of dispersion and redistribution. Foucault develops this methodology to study the contemporary episteme that he describes in his previous book, The Order of Things. The linguistic object does not end in the physical object, but rather it is a plural form of constant metamorphosis that we could observe in EscobarВ’s intertextual kaleidoscope. By studying and reconstructing EscobarВ’s kaleidoscope, we could finally see NovalisВ’ thinking to describe this kind of form that is constructed illegally as a labyrinth. He thinks that the poet is a В‘magic priestВ’. Moreover, the poetic, magic priest likes to play with words, and these words are often metaphors. In the case of Escobar, we can observe Escobar playing with other forms of communication such as the economy, transport object, architecture, urban design and image. But in the end, these metaphors tend to be enigmas because they are a strange way of understanding a secret message that has a fantastic and ambiguous representation that needs to cover illegality. The reader has been then challenged to solve the labyrinth, like the spectator who wants to understand the trick of a magician. In that sense, the reality of EscobarВ’s legendary kaleidoscope was similar to his exporting cowboy jeans invisibly covered with something fantastic and illegal like cocaine.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018H/61/S07.018

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