[-empyre-] Diego Hernandez post, in Spanish now, translation to Spanish soon!
Oí por primera vez el término resiliencia de parte de unos biólogos que investigaban desde una perspectiva paleoambiental los bañados y humedales de la costa oceánica uruguaya. Lo usaban para referirse a la capacidad de estos delicados ecosistemas para adaptarse a cambios en el nivel del mar (que avanzó y retrocedió varias decenas de kilómetros desde el holoceno), y más recientemente, responder al desecamiento por acción humana de amplias superficies de bañado. Seguramente este contacto inicial con el término me lleve a atribuirle un matiz organicista. En ese mismo sentido, pensar las luchas sociales desde la resiliencia me lleva a concebirlas desde una perspectiva de la inmanencia, quizás bañada con algo de vitalismo. Este sentido de inmanencia y organicismo que asocio al término es lo que me lleva al siguiente razonamiento. Imaginar una ciudad resiliente, como los bañados de Rocha o los amortiguadores de los autos, me lleva a concebirla como una unidad o un ser que reacciona flexiblemente a las agresiones externas, superándolas para así continuar con su existencia. Ahora, ¿frente a qué tipo de agresiones es que reacciona reslientemente? ¿Y qué tipo de existencia es la que esto permite continuar? Los ocupas de NY reaccionan frente a la crisis económica generada por especuladores financieros, que amenaza el empleo, los ahorros, el crédito, e incluso la cobertura social y otros servicios públicos, a partir de los anunciados ajustes en el presupuesto público. En Fukushima se reacciona frente a la crisis ambiental desatada por el colapso de una planta nuclear, que trastoca la cotidianeidad de millones de japoneses y amenaza sus vidas. O sea, se reacciona frente a amenazas al sedentarismo apacible que permite la vida urbana, y que acontecen en el corazón mismo de estas ciudades. O al menos, la receptividad social lograda por estos movimientos se debe a ello. El sedentarismo, obviamente, es una cualidad que se encuentra en el origen de las primeras concentraciones urbanas y Estados. Agricultores, artesanos y administrativos comienzan a fijar sus residencias en un emplazamiento, donde obtienen protección para ellos y sus riquezas, frente a los ataques de poblaciones nómades. Igualmente la agricultura ofrece seguridad de alimento para la subsistencia, y las obras hidráulicas construidas colectivamente en estos centros urbanos ofrecen seguridad de agua para cultivar la tierra. Sabemos como sigue la historia, hasta llegar a la biopolítica de Foucault, el suelo estriado de Deleuze y Guattari y la metafísica sedentarista de Malkki. En los emplazamientos, el poder no sólo ofrece defensa ante ataques (desde invasiones extranjeras hasta rapiñeros), sino también cobertura social (desde salud pública hasta seguro de desempleo); todo a cambio de que el individuo se disponga a trabajar y vivir en un lugar fijo (domiciliación), aumentando la concentración de riqueza en dicho emplazamiento. Las amenazas a estas seguridades que ofrece la vida urbana, explican parte del éxito de los ocupas de NY. Sus demandas sociales no sólo son totalmente aceptadas en los países ricos, sino que son las que se encuentran en la base de la vida urbana. Las ocupaciones tal vez sean entonces una forma de protesta social característica del sedentarismo, del suelo estriado. Es paradójicamente una movilización-sedentaria, a diferencia de la mayoría de las movilizaciones sociales: la larga marcha de Mao, la toma de la bastilla, los ataques de los malones indios a los emplazamientos de los colonos durante la conquista de América, o hasta la “Marchas del silencio” que todos los 31 de mayo recorre el centro de Montevideo: allí se marcha, se camina, y -llegado el caso- se corre. Alguien se imagina a miles de palestinos ocupando el centro de Jerusalem? O miles de latinos ocupando Wall Street, reclamando su derecho a trabajar legalmente? El contraejemplo perfecto de la ocupación de Wall Street quizás sean las violentas movilizaciones que paralelamente realizaron jóvenes inmigrantes en Londres, donde –justamente- predominaba el movimiento. Los ataques a los que NY reacciona “resilientemente” son aquellos representados por otra forma de movilidad: la especulación financiera posibilitada por la movilidad de capitales. Sassen advirtió hace más de 20 años que las “ciudades globales” se vuelven amenazas contra la concepción tradicional de ciudad: amenazan la soberanía y la cohesión social, sus riquezas no son “derramadas” hacia el resto de la sociedad, ni necesariamente permanecen allí, expulsan a las industrias de la planta urbana, no generan empleos para la clase media, ni se integran territorialmente con el entrorno. La ciudad global y la especulación financiera de Sassen tal vez sean una forma que actualmente asume la máquina de guerra de Mil mesetas, reaccionando contra los aparatos de captura estatal. Los aldeanos de NY observan como las murallas de la ciudad ya no ofrecen seguridad frente a una nueva forma de movilidad que
[-empyre-] first part of the translation of Diego's post
Sorry for the delay but translate into English is a tough job, guys and gals! :) It took me twenty minutes to find the crossreferences to Deleuze and Guattari in English :( I read them in French Spanish and Swedish, never in English, the Wikipedia was not helping this time :) I heard for first time the term resilience from some biologists investigating from a paleoenvironmental prospective the sanks and humid zones from the Uruguayan oceanic coasts. They used it to describe the capacity of those sensible ecosystems to adapt to changes in the sealevel (the sea went forward and backed tenso f kilometers from the Holocene period) and more recently to answer to the human actions which have been drying up huge surfaces of sank lanas. Surely this inicial contact with the term gives me a way to refer to the term as organicisting. In the same way when I think on the social struggles from a resilient point of view I think about them as immanent with maybe some addition of vitalism. The following reflection is based on this asociation to immanens and organicism. If I think about a resilient city, as the banados de Rocha or the shock absorbers of the cars I conceive it as an unity or a being reacting with flexibility to the external aggressions, overmounting it to continue it’s existence. But, which are the kina of aggressions make the reactions resilient? And which kind of existence is the one allowed to continue? The Occupy mov in New York reacts to the economical crisis generated by financial speculators which are threating the emplyment, the savings, the credits and now the social welfare and other public services, orginated on the cuts on the public budget. In Fukushima the reaction is against the environmental crisis started in the collapse of an nuclear plant changing the everydays life of millions of Japanese and threating their lives. They react to the threats to the peaceful sedentism which allow us to live in cities, these threats happen in the self core of those cities. Or the social reception to those movements is caused by it. The sedentism is a quality we find in the at the beginning of the first human concentrations and Status. Farmers, handworkers and administrators settle down in a place where they can get protection for them and for their wealth from the nomadic populations. The farming garantee the food input for survival and the waterworks made by collective efforts give water for cultivating the mark. We know how the story continues, to Foucault’s biopolitics, Sabemos como sigue la historia, hasta llegar a la biopolítica de Foucault, the patterned soil of Deleuze y Guattari and the sedentary metaphysics of Malkki. In the settlements the power doesn’t only give protection from attacks (from foreign invaders to robbers) but also social welfar (from public health to unemployment insurance); the only thing the individual must be prepare to give in exchange is the disponibility to work and and live in a fixed home (permanent residence), contributing in that way to rise the accumulation of wealth in this settlement. The threats to the securities given by the urban life explain in certain way the success of the occupants in New York. Their social demands are not only accepted in the rich countries, they are in the bottom of urban life itself. Las amenazas a estas seguridades que ofrece la vida urbana, explican parte del éxito de los ocupas de NY. The occupations are maybe a kind of social protest typical of the sedentism, the patterned soil. This is the paradox, a sedentary mobilization, a difference of the majority of the social mobilizations: Mao’s long march, the taking of the Bastille, the attacks from the Indian to the the colonies during the conquest of America or the “Silence Marchs”, which all the 25th of May goes through the center of Montevideo: there is a march, you walk and/or it’s necessary you run. -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] urbanismo crítico, intervención bioregional y especies emergentes / soziale Plastik
dear Alejandro muchas gracías por la explicacíon. thanks much for your explanation (Instituto Hemisférico), and reference. Lovely trailer on http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/es/mision, nice beat to the music. (i looked for spanish and portuguese translations of the initiatives but could only find them in english language, then found that the Instituto is housed within the Department of Performance Studies in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and supported by US foundation funds [Teniendo como sede el Programa de Estudios de Performance de la Universidad de Nueva York, en 1998 el Instituto recibió una beca inicial de planificación por parte de la Fundación Ford]; naturally I began to think about what the agendas are, the motivations, the development benefits. / The undertaking seems massive, and looks impressive, all the same. / El ímpetu inicial era el de crear un consorcio de instituciones que pudieran albergar los intereses académicos en el cruce entre el performance y la política en las Américas, y a su vez, crear una colección de materiales artísticos y académicos para propósitos de investigación y pedagogía.Los participantes compartían materiales y metodologías, aumentando la capacidad tecnológica necesaria en sus instituciones para facilitar la colaboración pedagógica a través de las fronteras. A medida que los esfuerzos iniciales fueron tomando forma, el Instituto Hemisférico comenzó a desarrollar un archivo de materiales de investigación y a capacitar a estudiantes graduados en un ambiente de colaboración multilingüe. Estos estudiantes graduados también desarrollaron la experiencia necesaria en el uso de la informática, expandiendo así sus habilidades en la producción colaborativa de conocimiento y en la comunicación de sus proyectos a los públicos del hemisferio. The initial impetus was to create a consortium of institutions that would house scholars interested in the intersection of performance and politics in the Americas, and to build collections of scholarly and artistic materials for research and teaching. Participants worked together to share materials and methodologies, and to build technological capacity at partner institutions to enable collaborative teaching across borders. As the initial efforts took shape, H.I. began to develop an archive of of research materials and to train graduate students in a multilingual, collaborative environment. These graduate students also developed expertise in the information technologies that would enormously expand their abilities for collaborative knowledge production and for communicating their findings to hemispheric audience. [Instituto Hemisférico] What is a hemispheric audience? ? los que es esto püblico del hemisférico? Una otra pregunta , for favor: How would you summarize the artistic strategies involved in your project Urbanismo crítico, intervención bioregional y especies emergentes [http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-62/meitin]? ¿Cómo resumiría usted los artístico las estrategias involucradas en el proyecto Urbanismo crítico, intervención bioregional y especies emergentes -- as it seems, to me, that when you speak of performance or performative actions, you really mean NGO-like initiatives, organizational strategies --- perhaps comparable to some political network action theory implied in Aristide Antonas's propositions on protocol formation and building communal functions [ urban protocols organize independent autonomous communal structures; they can also regulate the relationship between the private sector and specific communities AA] - and self-management regarding ecological and economic measurements or biregional interventions... -- Lo que parece, a mí, que cuando se habla de performance o acciones performativa, que realmente quieres decir-como las iniciativas de las ONG[organización no gubernamenta], las estrategias de organización --- tal vez comparable a alguna teoría de las redes de acción política implícita en las propuestas de Aristide Antonas - protocolo de formación y la construcción de las funciones comunes [ protocolos urbanos independientes organizan las estructuras comunales autónomas, sino que también puede regular la relación entre el sector privado y las comunidades específicas AA] - y la autogestión con respecto a las medidas ecológicas y económicas o bioregionales intervenciones ... you argue: También se realizaron procesos de investigación territorial que produjeron una forma organizada de resistencia que enfrentó los discursos globalizantes de la corporación, cambiando el rumbo de los acontecimientos.15 En otros casos, estas se utilizaron para la promoción de energías alternativas con equipos integrados por actores diversos (asociaciones, agrupaciones políticas, instituciones barriales, colectividades) y con técnicos de otros campos del conocimiento (politólogos, biólogos, ingenieros, geógrafos,
[-empyre-] Diego Hernandez post, now translated in full
I heard for first time the term resilience from some biologists investigating from a paleoenvironmental prospective the sanks and humid zones from the Uruguayan oceanic coasts. They used it to describe the capacity of those sensible ecosystems to adapt to changes in the sealevel (the sea went forward and backed tenso f kilometers from the Holocene period) and more recently to answer to the human actions which have been drying up huge surfaces of sank lanas. Surely this inicial contact with the term gives me a way to refer to the term as organicisting. In the same way when I think on the social struggles from a resilient point of view I think about them as immanent with maybe some addition of vitalism. The following reflection is based on this asociation to immanens and organicism. If I think about a resilient city, as the banados de Rocha or the shock absorbers of the cars I conceive it as an unity or a being reacting with flexibility to the external aggressions, overmounting it to continue it’s existence. But, which are the kina of aggressions make the reactions resilient? And which kind of existence is the one allowed to continue? The Occupy mov in New York reacts to the economical crisis generated by financial speculators which are threating the emplyment, the savings, the credits and now the social welfare and other public services, orginated on the cuts on the public budget. In Fukushima the reaction is against the environmental crisis started in the collapse of an nuclear plant changing the everydays life of millions of Japanese and threating their lives. They react to the threats to the peaceful sedentism which allow us to live in cities, these threats happen in the self core of those cities. Or the social reception to those movements is caused by it. The sedentism is a quality we find in the at the beginning of the first human concentrations and Status. Farmers, handworkers and administrators settle down in a place where they can get protection for them and for their wealth from the nomadic populations. The farming garantee the food input for survival and the waterworks made by collective efforts give water for cultivating the mark. We know how the story continues, to Foucault’s biopolitics, the patterned soil of Deleuze y Guattari and the sedentary metaphysics of Malkki. In the settlements the power doesn’t only give protection from attacks (from foreign invaders to robbers) but also social welfar (from public health to unemployment insurance); the only thing the individual must be prepare to give in exchange is the disponibility to work and and live in a fixed home (permanent residence), contributing in that way to rise the accumulation of wealth in this settlement. The threats to the securities given by the urban life explain in certain way the success of the occupants in New York. Their social demands are not only accepted in the rich countries, they are in the bottom of urban life itself. This is the paradox, a sedentary movilization, a difference of the majority of the social movilizations: Mao’s long march, the taking of the Bastille, the attacks from the Indian to the the colonies during the conquest of America or the “Silence Marchs”, which all the 25th of May goes through the center of Montevideo: there is a march, you walk and/or it’s necessary you run. It’s someone who can imagine thousands of Palestinians occupying the center of Jerusalem? Or thousands of Latinos occupying Wall Street, reclaiming their right to work legally? The perfect counterexample of the occupation of Wall Street are perhaps maybe the violent movilizations of young immigrants in London where the movement was extended. The attacks to which New York reacts “resilientely” aer those represented by another kind of mobilty: the financial speculation made posible for the mobility of capitals. Saskia Sassen warned for twenty years ago that the “global cities” are becoming threats against the tradicional conception of the city. They threat the suvereignity and the social cohesión, their wealth is not longer “spread” to the society or stay there, they expel the industries from the urban grid, they don’t generate employment for the middle class or integrate themselves with the environment. The global city and Sassen’s financial speculation are maybe the form taken actually by the warmachine of A Thousand Plateaus, reacting against the state apparatus. New York’s farmers observe how the city walls are not longer living security in front of a new kind of mobility threating their wealth. In that way the occupations in New York show the city as a resilient being reacting against the mobility of the capital and the global financial speculation. And the city react in a sedentary way: ass in the floor of Wall Street to hinder the pirates have access to the harbours and sail away with their bounty. Something similar happened with Fukushima: during decades it was known we were under the treta of a
[-empyre-] today starts the last week of my moderation
And I am not sure how many of my guests are still on schedule for this week. Depending of different things many of them has not being able to participate actively in the discussion, Pablo is moving to Brazil to make a PhD, Diego moved to Brazil to continue his PhD (Brazil is hot in academia, seems so :), Leandro is busy with a lot of teaching jobs and Brian, Eduardo and Teddy are on the move, travelling around. But everyone of them promissed a last post and I wanted only to say to all of you not guests but participating actively how happy and impressed I am by your knowledge, enthusiasm and your sharing generosity! Thanks to Antonas, to Johannes, to Simon, to Nick, to Lucio, to Alejandro, to Michelle, to Irina, to everyone sharing and sharing... It had been a wonderful month and I am grateful and inspired, thank you for following me and my topics! Thanks for taking Spanish and the South as worthy interlocutors in a conversation where to try to define and discuss but also to act! And thank you to all my guests, to Ethel, Sabela and Alicia, who despite heavy working schedules and family responsabilities took their time to be guests. And thank you to Eduardo, Brian and Teddy, to Carlos and Pablo and Leandro and Diego. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] The city as a skin -- Sparta and the helots / molecular revolution in process ?
dear soft-skinned city or country dwellers, and – following Diego Hernandez's archaeo-logical position on cities as evolutionary sedentary resilient organisms (!) – one might add: dear farmers and villagers (Los aldeanos) in Nueva York, Montevideo (a clear example of non-sustainable-beautiful-architecture, as Leandro suggested), Jerusalem, Johannesburg, the Rio de la Plata regions, elsewhere the problems are even larger than we thought. One could assume that the economic crises, and the increasing social divisions and global divisions and regional economic divisions and discrepancies will not benefit the city. Re-reading the earlier literary references to the invisible cities, Diego's city introduces another construct (but one based on Darwinist security/survival it seems), or proposition, even if grown and sedimented through long and changing histories of concentration. The crises will not much longer benefit the cities, nor the human rights, community functions and post-network civilities, nor architects and philosophers, nor occupiers and exhumers and forensic experts, nor indeed our bones (or those of our ancestors in graves) and our archives and performance repertoires , to use a title of a book from the founder of the Instituto Hemisférico de Performance y Política (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, 2003). I was tempted to write on exhumation, after reading Ana's comment on folks in Uruguay waiting to hear who might yet be identified (having been 'disappeared under military dictatorial regime). But I know nothing about exhumation. When I went t look for a description (Uruguayan Peace Commission / http://www.trial-ch.org/index.php?id=974L=5), I found the historical archive, e.g. In 1985, a “Commission of Inquiry into the situation of disappeared persons and the events leading up to their disappearances” was created, but it did not come to any convincing conclusion reporting political failure of the Uruguayan truth and reconciliation commission, ( as it was called euphemistically in South Africa), and then also clinical descriptors of a Dr Horacio E. Solla on the utilization of two techniques used for the identification of human skeletal remains: the traditional technique of facial reproduction employed by forensic anthropologists, and the more recent technique of DNA pattern analysis, which is usually utilized by biochemists. Both techniques were applied to a unique case to analyze and identify the skeletal remains of a child who disappeared in the Uruguayan city of Salinas in February 1991. After reading the clinical descriptor system, I felt encouraged to go back to the issue of phanstasmagoria (Benjamin), trying to understand our attraction to the banality of ruins and ruination of whatever social utopias there have been; and perhaps resilient organism (in light of Fukushima) is another allegory doomed to fail. And yet, above all, I was trying to follow some of the inspiring and positive claims made here, and wishing to thank Simon and Aristide for their insistence. Simon's insistence the Physiognomie - or anatomy -- of an affective network inside/without the occupation machine is very thought-provoking, and I was trying to read Simon and Aristide together, now in the light and reflection of the writings of Alejandro, Diego (the crisis exploding inside the city walls, as a Trojan horse), Sabela and Alicia Diego schreibt: Sin embargo, la crisis explota adentro de las murallas de las ciudades, como un caballo de Troya construido por los propios ingenieros japoneses, en medio de sus apacibles ciudades How can we re-turn this image to the strong propositions made by Simon (about the molecular revolution in progress) and Aristide? Simon schreibt: This is why I asked about the city as the anatomy of the network. And far from wanting to defend OCCUPY or perplex I wanted to include affect - and indeed sentiment - in the genetic conditions of the Simulacrum, which, with the contribution of networking in its broadest sense as communication, facilitates the habitation of the city as a sensate spatium - as it is lived feelingly and concretised in the Sensorium. Can you speak more about how this sensorium is politically effective to counterbalance the very symptoms of simulacrum hype (affective intensities of the commodity fetishisms and market imperatives to sell ourselves out)? Antonas schreibt: .. Protocols are meant to be functional small scale legislations that rule a space through new norms. The problem will be who will have the right to act with such an even limited civil power in order to make urban protocols valid on a specific urban background. New community functions will be necessary in order to prescribe a protocol or to install it temporarily. The Internet can provide the grouping system in order that concrete communities of inhabitants decide
Re: [-empyre-] The city as a skin -- Sparta and the helots / molecular revolution in process ?
Dear Johannes, I am so thrilled by your brilliant exposition and synthesis of the whole month's conversation! But I react a bit about your comment I know nothing about exhumation. I read your book some years ago (Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture) and I found very interesting your dialogue with Marina Grzinik about how the people from Sarajevo challenged the snipers and the war to attend performances and to continue feeling themselves cultural beings. I heard the same story from some friends who performed in Sarajevo, as Bibbi Andersson did and other friends setting up theater plays. I was in Tuzla last year and marched together with 300 women who lost their male relatives in Sebrenica. They were opening massgrave after massgreave, searching for their killed relatives. I met Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala some time ago and she told us the same story, how she and her relatives were called every time a new massgrave was opened and a new body was exhumated. And you are German, a people who has been stigmatized and almost banned, made responsable for killings and massgraves. In the Baltic countries, in Sovjet, they are still opening graves from the Second World War and exhumating bodies. I should say every one of us is an expert in exhumations today. And exhumation is the big star of all our popular television culture, CSI, Bones, Silent Witness, the forensic physicians are as popular as latino lovers :) Ana On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:42 AM, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: dear soft-skinned city or country dwellers, and – following Diego Hernandez's archaeo-logical position on cities as evolutionary sedentary resilient organisms (!) – one might add: dear farmers and villagers (Los aldeanos) in Nueva York, Montevideo (a clear example of non-sustainable-beautiful-architecture, as Leandro suggested), Jerusalem, Johannesburg, the Rio de la Plata regions, elsewhere the problems are even larger than we thought. One could assume that the economic crises, and the increasing social divisions and global divisions and regional economic divisions and discrepancies will not benefit the city. Re-reading the earlier literary references to the invisible cities, Diego's city introduces another construct (but one based on Darwinist security/survival it seems), or proposition, even if grown and sedimented through long and changing histories of concentration. The crises will not much longer benefit the cities, nor the human rights, community functions and post-network civilities, nor architects and philosophers, nor occupiers and exhumers and forensic experts, nor indeed our bones (or those of our ancestors in graves) and our archives and performance repertoires , to use a title of a book from the founder of the Instituto Hemisférico de Performance y Política (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, 2003). I was tempted to write on exhumation, after reading Ana's comment on folks in Uruguay waiting to hear who might yet be identified (having been 'disappeared under military dictatorial regime). But I know nothing about exhumation. When I went t look for a description (Uruguayan Peace Commission / http://www.trial-ch.org/index.php?id=974L=5), I found the historical archive, e.g. In 1985, a “Commission of Inquiry into the situation of disappeared persons and the events leading up to their disappearances” was created, but it did not come to any convincing conclusion reporting political failure of the Uruguayan truth and reconciliation commission, ( as it was called euphemistically in South Africa), and then also clinical descriptors of a Dr Horacio E. Solla on the utilization of two techniques used for the identification of human skeletal remains: the traditional technique of facial reproduction employed by forensic anthropologists, and the more recent technique of DNA pattern analysis, which is usually utilized by biochemists. Both techniques were applied to a unique case to analyze and identify the skeletal remains of a child who disappeared in the Uruguayan city of Salinas in February 1991. After reading the clinical descriptor system, I felt encouraged to go back to the issue of phanstasmagoria (Benjamin), trying to understand our attraction to the banality of ruins and ruination of whatever social utopias there have been; and perhaps resilient organism (in light of Fukushima) is another allegory doomed to fail. And yet, above all, I was trying to follow some of the inspiring and positive claims made here, and wishing to thank Simon and Aristide for their insistence. Simon's insistence the Physiognomie - or anatomy -- of an affective network inside/without the occupation machine is very thought-provoking, and I was trying to read Simon and Aristide together, now in the light and reflection of the writings of Alejandro, Diego (the crisis exploding inside
[-empyre-] the city and the network
New community functions will be necessary in order to prescribe a protocol or to install it temporarily. The Internet can provide the grouping system in order that concrete communities of inhabitants decide to introduce and test a protocol. The municipalities may act as the legalizing power that could accept or refuse such protocols to run in the city. Protocols can be proposed through the net and be accepted from different interested communities; urban protocols organize independent autonomous communal structures; they can also regulate the relationship between the private sector and specific communities. Johannes quoted Aristides today in an earlier post and I wondered why we suppose in a situation of crisis the Internet is going to work and our network of serveces and computers are going to run ad perpetum. In a situation of war the first thing to be destroyed are the masts of mobile communication, the cables, the electronic hubs. And we are, again, speaking about cities in the developed part of the world with skilled communities running sophisticated protocols, with municipalities based on cooperation and transparency. What happen with the Indigenous communities organized by Zapatistas? The caracoles, their hubs of liberated territory, are good working example of new protocols based on old memes and ancient uses. And in Africa maybe the communities want protocols which can be used when the electricity is faulty. I think every democratic change must be low key and not depend of advanced technology. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. — Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the city and the network
Hola Leandro and Diego and thank you for interesting and original posts! Regarding the animal life and biopower last year I translated from French to Spanish some texts produced by the artist collective Bureau d'Etudes, where Brian Holmes has been involved. The texts were used by the Spanish curator Maria Ptqk, she runs a wonderful blog/mag, called Maria Ptqk magazine, http://ptqkblogzine.blogspot.com/ Her exhibition Softpower, showed in a Basque exhibition hall, is about how agrofood and biotechnology are ruling us with the support of multinationals and states. Subrosa participated in this exhibition showing their work with in vitro conception and other things related to the female body and the politics of contraception. The book can be downloaded from here http://ptqkblogzine.blogspot.com/2012/02/en-este-blog-se-lleva-el-papel.html Ana On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Leandro Delgado oxibi...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everybody We do not live only in the context of an economic crises. Maybe I sound too political, but first of all we do live a moral crises. If we do not assume that, we will never formulate the right analytical questions. Cities, and big cities, are making animals out of human beings, and I am not saying “dehumanized” beings but humans who take care of their own animal life. In the post-historic society born and developed in (big) cities, humanity is leading itself towards the return to animality, as Agamben suggests citing Alexandre Kojève: “the ‘American way of life’ was the type of life proper to the post-historical period, the current presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the future ‘eternal present’ of all humanity. Thus, man´s return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present”. I must add that the possibility of taking care of our own animal life is allowing biopower to more easily domesticate human beings through technological manipulation of desire somehow taking advantage of the tension between humanity and animality. That´s why I agree with Ana that any democratic change should not depend on technological advance. And maybe what Diego calls as conservative happy sedentary resilience (I really enjoyed his post) could be what Zizek does not like about this kind of upheavals in the sense that they are the expression of a kind of resistance from people who are organized only in the terms of “here I am” or, in animality terms, something like “I do not like the system, then I bark (and eventually could bite)”. That is why I think that resilience should be seen, observed and considered also in everyday practices of survival in the cities, practices that has nothing to do with broadcasted or spectacular events, e.g. homelessness, informal jobs, life in the slums, etc. And I would like to know how (and which of) these forms of painful resistance actually works out without the control of biopower (if it does) and how animality in all these examples shows and allows a relationship with humanity (if it does) different from all we can know and understand from our comfortable animal lives. Best, Leandro On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 10:15 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: New community functions will be necessary in order to prescribe a protocol or to install it temporarily. The Internet can provide the grouping system in order that concrete communities of inhabitants decide to introduce and test a protocol. The municipalities may act as the legalizing power that could accept or refuse such protocols to run in the city. Protocols can be proposed through the net and be accepted from different interested communities; urban protocols organize independent autonomous communal structures; they can also regulate the relationship between the private sector and specific communities. Johannes quoted Aristides today in an earlier post and I wondered why we suppose in a situation of crisis the Internet is going to work and our network of serveces and computers are going to run ad perpetum. In a situation of war the first thing to be destroyed are the masts of mobile communication, the cables, the electronic hubs. And we are, again, speaking about cities in the developed part of the world with skilled communities running sophisticated protocols, with municipalities based on cooperation and transparency. What happen with the Indigenous communities organized by Zapatistas? The caracoles, their hubs of liberated territory, are good working example of new protocols based on old memes and ancient uses. And in Africa maybe the communities want protocols which can be used when the electricity is faulty. I think every democratic change must be low key and not depend of advanced technology. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
