----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Yes, yes, Ricardo! The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been a huge inspiration
to me— by indirect modes through the network and personally in conversation
with your colleague and mutual friend Brett Stalbaum.
With the double negative line of thought (anti-anti-utopianism) in mind, our
works could slipstream through- elude and elide through what appear to be ’the
new normal’ or ‘ordinary’ times— ‘ . A gorgeous example of poetry (AS)
literally tool for survival :
Climb or walk in the morning. Rest midday beneath creosote
bush or mesquite, insulating yourself from the superheated
ground. Remember-even the sidewinder hovercrafts, the bulk of
its body above the scalding sand as it leaves its trademark
J-shaped tracks across the desert dunes.
from The Transborder Immigrant Tool book "The Desert Survival Series/ La Serie
De Sobrevivencia Del Desierto.”
http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool
<http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool>
> On Feb 12, 2016, at 2:16 PM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdoming...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hola Tod@s y Christina,
>
> The question of aesthetics routing around the either/or, and/both, and
> perhaps a neither/nor sensibilities, are extremely important in
> thinking otherwise-of allowing an anti-anti-utopianism to have breath and
> voice-in the uncanny valley of borders across the arcs of the world. Borders
> have become sites of geo-trauma sties that continue to echo deeply in the
> somatic architecture of bodies at the deepest levels over the last few
> centuries, from slave-economies to the Irish to Jews to braceros-it is seems
> to be a past-forward culture of the most negative kind. And the question of
> foregrounding the way that a critical aesthetics, of a
> non-relational-relationality that is not us or them, can give us an
> alter-affects is for me extremely important and the art gesture you have
> linked us to Christina has to be done. (And our own gestures as Electronic
> Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g lab have attempted to connect to these practices
> directly and indirectly: The Transborder Immigrant Tool/La herramienta
> transfronteriza para inmigrantes: http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744
> <http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744> ).
>
> Abrazos, Ricardo
>
> On 2/11/16 4:50 PM, Christina McPhee wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Speaking of movement violence and femicide strongly brings to mind the
>> artist and writer Etel Adnan’s sublime novel (1973), “Sitt Marie Rose.” Set
>> during the Lebanese Civil War and based on a true story, Sitt Marie Rose
>> follows the movements and ultimate execution of a person whose affiliations
>> across enemy lines conflicts with her filiations (family, brothers, sisters,
>> religious identification). Marie Rose refuses to give up teaching
>> Palestinian children in a refugee camp
>> across enemy lines from her home base in Christian Lebanon.
>>
>> "How can one resist without deploying the language of opposition, struggle,
>> and enmity that forms the conceptual arsenal of war? How can one form a
>> collective “we” of resistance without creating an opposite “them”? To what
>> extent does literature resist the very discourse of war that distinguishes
>> between friend and enemy camps? Beyond the mere refusal of war, Sitt Marie
>> Rose points to ways of conceiving conflict otherwise, not as a struggle of
>> arms but as a contest for speech. The novel gestures toward a forum where
>> the political can emerge other than in the warring binaries of friendship
>> and enmity—a trap it eludes, I will argue, via narrative representation, “
>> writes Olivia C. Harrison in an essay on the novel (Resistances of
>> Literature: Strategies of Narrative Affiliation in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie
>> Rose, Post-Colonial Text, vol 5, no. 1 2009)
>>
>> This is why I am continuing to bring up examples of migration-trauma
>> literature and story telling as a thread in this discussion. Its political
>> power is not to be underestimated.
>>
>>
>> Christina
>>
>>
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose>
>>
>> http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Ricardo notes, "As I like to say to my students: "Do we fear the walking
>> dead, because they are dead or because they are walking?" We fear those that
>> move differently”.
>>
>>
>>> On Feb 11, 2016, at 3:41 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <mura...@gmail.com>
>>> <mailto:mura...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Ricardo,
>>>
>>> Does kinopolitics concern itself only with human flows, what about the flow
>>> of jobs across state lines where the workers stay static? Both are
>>> political/economic migrations where the concept of nation states is
>>> weakened. But do, or don't, these different migrations have different
>>> ethical consequences?
>>>
>>> Ciao,
>>> Murat
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 10:14 AM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdoming...@ucsd.edu>
>>> <mailto:rrdoming...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Hola Tod@s,
>>>
>>> The question of blocking human flows and the expanding human flows, of
>>> escape routes and fencing in becomes (a question of kinopolitics).
>>> Kinopolitics is the theory and analysis of social motion: the politics of
>>> movement. Instead of understanding societies as
>>> static systems, we look at regimes of movement both perceptible and
>>> imperceptible. Social motions that can be framed as flows, junctions,
>>> and circulations-floods, flux, and vector. Immigrants and refugees are
>>> figures of movement, nomadic, that no-longer bound to rights and
>>> representation of static states-the figure who walks and unmakes the
>>> aesthetics and romance of the nation or the union. As I like to say to my
>>> students: "Do we fear the walking dead, because they are dead or because
>>> they are walking?" We fear those that move differently".
>>>
>>> This creates the constant need to stop, block, detain, or eliminate sectors
>>> of these walking communities.
>>>
>>> One of the outcomes is that containment zones like Juarez, Mexico, or
>>> spaces along political Equator, or Free Trade Zones, and Pipeline cultures
>>> is the segmentation of people as disposable or available for disposable.
>>> And more often than not women are the first to be the targets:
>>> http://www.texasobserver.org/femicide-in-juarez-is-not-a-myth/
>>> <http://www.texasobserver.org/femicide-in-juarez-is-not-a-myth/> and also
>>> worth reading is the book the Femicide Machine:
>>> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheFemicideMachine.pdf
>>> <https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheFemicideMachine.pdf>
>>>
>>> Two text that have found helpful kinopolitics are:
>>>
>>> Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century:
>>> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/Escape.pdf
>>> <https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/Escape.pdf>
>>>
>>> and The Figure of the Migrant
>>> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheMigrant.pdf
>>> <https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheMigrant.pdf>
>>>
>>> Abrazos,
>>> Ricardo
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2/10/16 7:27 PM, Irina Contreras wrote:
>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Johannes,
>>>>
>>>> I appreciate the request to think about sexual violence as it pertains to
>>>> the encampments. For myself, I think of sexual and gender based violences
>>>> as direct results of colonial regime. Following people like Nicole
>>>> Guidotti, I think of the way she speaks of utterances as a way to discuss
>>>> how scholars "gloss over" certain facts pertaining to
>>>> sexualized/gendered/racialized/classed information when producing text.
>>>> That's obviously done within so many kinds of work, research, activism and
>>>> scholarly texts.
>>>>
>>>> At the same time, I am intrigued ( I think that's the word I will use for
>>>> the moment) at how we are literally surfing all over the globe at the
>>>> moment in the conversation. This seems much to do with the topic at hand,
>>>> right? Talking about borders and immigration etc is certainly not a tight
>>>> container by all means. Not that we want it to be....
>>>>
>>>> Lastly, I just wanted to add in regards to the number of companies
>>>> mentioned, it seems important to mention the various pipelines being
>>>> constructed. I think Genie and Dow Jones both have a role in that. Which
>>>> to further play connect the dots also made me think of Christina's mention
>>>> of the Cherokee peoples and while a different group but a number of the
>>>> pipelines throughout Canada mirroring the sexual assaults and femicide
>>>> throughout these lands. So I guess again in thinking about the limits or
>>>> lack of limits to thinking about borders i.e. when people are forcibly
>>>> created into being borderless is where I am left...
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Babak Fakhamzadeh
>>>> <babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> <mailto:babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>> As far as I'm aware, there are no private drivers/actors in the Syria
>>>> conflict. That is, the Syrian, US, Saudi Arabian, Turkish, Iranian and
>>>> several Gulf states are the only ones paying to keep the conflict
>>>> going. So, if the Haliburtons, or hardware providers, would be taxed
>>>> in this context, all that would happen would, essentially, be each
>>>> state taxing themselves.
>>>>
>>>> Sure, Halliburton and its successors have made huge profits,
>>>> particularly in Iraq, but at a risk. Not so much for corporate
>>>> Halliburton, but for the individual employees. There is no way but to
>>>> have big risks come with big rewards, meaning that it's only
>>>> economically expected for the Haliburtons of this world to make lots
>>>> of money.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not defending either conflicts in Iraq or Syria from any angle.
>>>> I'm only pointing out that 'solving' the problem is not that
>>>> straightforward. Probably the main problem is not the Haliburtons or
>>>> pick your favourite oil companies of this world, who simply,
>>>> primarily, react to opportunity (see Cockburn's The Rise of the
>>>> Islamic State,
>>>> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407471-the-rise-of-islamic-state
>>>> <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407471-the-rise-of-islamic-state>),
>>>> it's the political desire for influence and control.
>>>> In the 'west', 'the people' might be able to have some meaningful
>>>> influence on steering the course of their nations, in many other
>>>> countries, this is not the case, leaving warmongering autocrats to do
>>>> pretty much whatever they want, and for-profits to step in to the
>>>> voids they create.
>>>>
>>>> Hence, the conflict in Syria and its consequences.
>>>>
>>>> But, how did the Gulf countries manage to not take in any Syrian
>>>> refugees and get away with it?
>>>> --
>>>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com
>>>> <mailto:babak.fakhamza...@gmail.com> | http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>>> <http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/>
>>>>
>>>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 8:54 PM, Ana Valdés <agora...@gmail.com>
>>>> <mailto:agora...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>>
>>>>> Johannes it was not only me, the great majority of the Latinamerican
>>>>> refugees coming to Europe during the 70:s are today relatively integrated
>>>>> in Europe and many of them come back to South America and are today's
>>>>> ministers in different socialdemocrats governments.
>>>>> I speak mostly of Chile and Uruguay.
>>>>> My point is the clue to absorb refugees was to give them tools to be
>>>>> selfsufficient to teach them skills necessary to manage the challenges of
>>>>> a new life, languages, therapy for them surviving jail and torture,
>>>>> family reunification for them separated from their relatives needing
>>>>> support, a profession or a work.
>>>>> The problem is the numbers today all the resources of wealthy welfare
>>>>> countries as Germany Norway Sweden Danmark Finland and France are
>>>>> strained to give huge amounts of refugees their bare needs it means
>>>>> shelter medical support and food it's not enough to grant the refugees a
>>>>> worthy life it's only a patch for their most immediate needs.
>>>>> But countries as Greece or Hungary or Serbia are not able to deal with
>>>>> the huge waves of refugees pouring every day from warzones.
>>>>> As I wrote in an ocassion here the only ones having huge profits from the
>>>>> wars are the manufacturers of weapons and the owners of parallel armies
>>>>> as Blackwater Haliburton Dupont and many others. A way to deal with the
>>>>> mounting cost of fleeing refugees should be apply big taxes to all
>>>>> companies dealing with weapons.
>>>>> Let them pay the consequences of their unethical warmongery.
>>>>> Ana
>>>>>
>>>>> Den 10 feb 2016 18:19 skrev "Johannes Birringer"
>>>>> <johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>
>>>>> <mailto:johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>:
>>>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> what is "kinopolitics"?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> just wondering as the term (referring to kino/cinema)? was not clear to
>>>>>> me when I think Ricardo
>>>>>> first brought it up...
>>>>>> unless there is a link here to what, I think, P.Sloterdijk once wrote as
>>>>>> a critique
>>>>>> "political kinetics”, kinetic movement of 20th century politics of speed
>>>>>> and displacement,
>>>>>> war machines, etc
>>>>>> - i think in 1989 he even spoke of a kinetic inferno, but I doubt that
>>>>>> at the time he
>>>>>> could anticipate the current refugee migrations and displacements.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> thanks for your reply Isabelle, I need more time to reflect, as I think
>>>>>> my question was really how the "camp" has been used as a metaphor or
>>>>>> as a symbolic system by philosophers and that is not what we were
>>>>>> talking about, and my confusion came from a sense of the romantic
>>>>>> resistance
>>>>>> I felt you proposed vis à vis governmental / central policy of
>>>>>> containment (which is not in fact
>>>>>> quite true for Germany, I surmise, where regional administrations and
>>>>>> help organizations
>>>>>> in a distributed federal landscape need to take often their own
>>>>>> initiatives for help?); Calais
>>>>>> and Grande-Synthe at Dunkerque may be dfferent in that respect, but i
>>>>>> visited facilties in the
>>>>>> Saarland near a town where I grew up and managing help was done through
>>>>>> a mix of
>>>>>> local institutions and mini-NGOs, and provisions for sleep, care, food
>>>>>> were not
>>>>>> left to "Jungle" self administration and done cooperatively, I wonder
>>>>>> actually what
>>>>>> forms of governance or camp community formation happen under the
>>>>>> circumstances,
>>>>>> and how different the anticipations or hopes may be (and Ana, your case
>>>>>> back then surely
>>>>>> sounds as if you had been very fortunate).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I wonder whether there would be room here to also look at some of the
>>>>>> incidents of
>>>>>> sexual violence, puportedly committed by immigrant asylum seekers
>>>>>> staying in Germany
>>>>>> at the time of the criminal offenses (Cologne e.g.), and how such
>>>>>> violence has been used
>>>>>> now against migrants by the instrumentalizing political wings and press.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> regards
>>>>>> Johannes Birringer
>>>>>> dap-lab
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> empyre forum
>>>>>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>>>> <mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> empyre forum
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>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>
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