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natandacat · 2 years ago

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"My reason for not favouring the term ["cultural genocide"] is that it confuses definition with degree. Moreover, though this objection holds in its own right (or so I think), the practical hazards that can ensue once an abstract concept like “cultural genocide” falls into the wrong hands are legion. In particular, in an elementary category error, “either/or” can be substituted for “both/and,” from which genocide emerges as either biological (read “the real thing”) or cultural—and thus, it follows, not real. In practice, it should go without saying that the imposition on a people of the procedures and techniques that are generally glossed as “cultural genocide” is certainly going to have a direct impact on that people’s capacity to stay alive (even apart from their qualitative immiseration while they do so). [...]

Israel’s borders [are designated as a national boundary and as a mobile index of expansion]. Despite Zionism’s chronic addiction to territorial expansion, Israel’s borders do not preclude the option of removal (in this connection, it is hardly surprising that a nation that has driven so many of its original inhabitants into the sand should express an abiding fear of itself being driven into the sea). As the logic of elimination has taken on a variety of forms in other settler-colonial situations, so, in Israel, the continuing tendency to Palestinian expulsion has not been limited to the unelaborated exercise of force. As Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal have observed, for instance, Israeli officials have only permitted family unions “in one direction—out of Israel.” The Law of Return commits the Jewish state to numerically unlimited but ethnically exclusive immigration, a factor that, formalities of citizenship notwithstanding, militates against the assimilation of gentile natives. [...]

The apparently insurmountable problem with the qualified genocides is that, in their very defensiveness, they threaten to undo themselves. They are never quite the real thing. [...] there is a historical basis to the relative diminution of the qualified genocides. This basis is, of course, the Holocaust, the non-paradigmatic paradigm that, being the indispensable example, can never merely exemplify. Keeping one eye on the Holocaust, which is always the unqualified referent of the qualified genocides, can only disadvantage Indigenous people because it discursively reinforces the figure of lack at the heart of the non-Western. Moreover, whereas the Holocaust exonerates anti-Semitic Western nations who were on the side opposing the Nazis, those same nations have nothing to gain from their liability for colonial genocides. On historical as well as categorical grounds, therefore, the hyphenated genocides devalue Indigenous attrition. No such problem bedevils analysis of the logic of elimination, which, in its specificity to settler colonialism, is premised on the securing—the obtaining and the maintaining—of territory. This logic certainly requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way [meaning killing, apartheid and assimilation can all be considered effective in the genocidal process depending on the interest of settler colonial powers]. [...]

There could hardly be a more concrete expression of spatial sequestration than the West Bank barrier. There again, apartheid also relied on sequestration. [...] as Palestinians become more and more dispensable, Gaza and the West Bank become less and less like Bantustans and more and more like reservations (or, for that matter, like the Warsaw Ghetto). Porous borders do not offer a way out."

Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (2006) (emphases mine)

It's interesting seeing the rancid political side of tumblr where people are giving their takes on what genocide means, so you see these people keep parroting the same Zionist rhetoric that because the Palestinian population steadily grew over the decades, it can not be called genocide. This form of revisionism is important to highlight, because not only is Genocide a preemptive process in order to make life inaccessible for the oppressed, but these people deliberately omit the Nakba, which saw the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs in Palestine and the Israeli territories. These revisionists are more concerned about genocide in quantitive measures, using numbers rather than to acknowledge the disintergration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups. The whole purpose is to form a hierarchy, in which one group's liberty, dignity, freedom and health of people are compromised to the benefit of the oppressor, who will proceed to dehumanize the Palestinians, and then frame yourself as the most progressive country in the world, e.g pinkwashing and etc. To simply regard genocide in quantitive measures is literally a form of denial.

#op if youd rather i just make a separate post tell me #it just immediately made me think of this #its always been a genocide from the start #palestine #israel #genocide

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neurathsboat · 1 year ago

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Compulsive Temporalization

Recently I have picked up the habits of listening to the Zen Studies Podcast again, not because I am so much of a buddhist or a zen practitioner. Not at all. Quite the opposite, I have an increasingly strong feeling that Buddhism, or most religions for that matter, is part of this pipeline of colonial sanity extraction. Why is it always the case that the saint is a dude in a position of power and privilege? Why is it that white hippies monopolize the whole discursive field of zen, meditation, yoga, love for nature, herbalism, and the list go on? Why do they always have to think about spirituality, awakening, soul work, etc. so hard? Well because they are all so messed up. But then they go ahead and assume the position of authority (in various twisted and self-deceptive forms of not admitting it), subsequently legitimizing their entitlement of mass worship. What if histories of religions are written this way: indigeneity and indigenous Ways of Being were broken and torn apart by coloniality.

Colonizers were then no longer indigenous because of their distorted relationship to land, animal kins, and peoples. They therefore not just spread oppression, violence, disease, and misery, but also spiritual ghosts that haunt everyone on earth, indigenous folks included. At this point, everyone is possessed by the ghost of separability, to the point where they are either used to it or severely penalized by colonizing powers if they dare to resist it by imagining otherwise. Of course, separability is torturing, and the colonizer experiences it as such as well. But their privileged position allows them to explore and practice ways of relating otherwise without receiving any injuries. And some of them did, mostly in a way that divorced spirituality from materiality, often time compulsively so, because they can’t afford the breaking down of the very system of injustice that allows them to do that kind of spiritual work. My preliminary thought is that coloniality is expressed, in the symbolic realm, as the subordination of the spatial under the temporal. Both the circular temporality of dynastic/buddhist time and the linear progression of modernity are devices for avoiding talking about spatial relationality. But more thoughts to come later.

#research

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vital-information · 2 years ago

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“Each of these categories has its own temporal scaffold, which also reinforces a notion of developmental time. (For example, race has historically, and continues to be to some extent, structured via the oscillation between the primitive and the civilized; sexuality has tended to be organized through a heterosexual reproductive mandate.)

And temporality, of course, is part of the technology that distinguishes ‘rural’ from ‘urban.’ The ‘rural’ is often temporally naturalized (not unlike reproductive time). What constitutes the rural is a sense of being apart from the whoosh of progress that fills time so that the rural gets marked by either the absence of time or the slowness of time, by its anachronicity, it’s status as stuck in time, it’s backwardness, or it’s engagement with mythical, seasonal reproduction, which is often read nostalgically as outside of capitalist time.

The process of stratification and flattening and disaggregating that theories of intersectionality attempt to interrupt can too easily slip past what a focus on the intersections themselves seeks to arrest. The struggle to name the temporalities of these categories, to hail them as mutually constitutive, and thereby to un-name them as categories and rename them as processes necessarily encounters the elegant temporal ruse of modernity. As Walter Benjamin notes, ‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.’ This homogeneous, empty time vacuums up the variegated temporalities at work in all these sociohistorical-discursive processes that come to appear as solidified, discrete, and given categories. The collapsing of processes into categories—units of analysis—masks the temporalities these processes engage and perpetuate. As categories of modernity, the temporal structures for race, class, gender, sexuality, and the rural, are unevenly placed in flat-space relation, erasing their temporal contradictions and altercations. Taking time into account allows us then to see how spatial practices that racialize bodies and temporal narratives that render the rural fallow and obsolescent share a particular repertoire of technologies engaged with but hidden in time. A series of Manichean dyads (rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban) seemingly stand tautly opposed, their binary structure tempered and tautened by the Western frame of time. Theories of intersectionality seek to countermand the impossibility of narrating simultaneity and highlight the ways in which processes are transformed into categories; unfortunately, the term itself limits its own ability to undo the serialization and linearity its very expression requires.”

— Mary Pat Brady, “The Waiting Arms of Gold Street” in Queering the Countryside

#quotes #rural queer #rural gays #intersectionality #queer theory #queer history

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thevividgreenmoss · 5 years ago

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A Nietzschean sense of the ‘modern’ also informs the work of the most influential of American deconstructionists, Paul de Man, though with an added twist of irony. For ‘active forgetting’, de Man argues, can never be entirely successful: the distinctively modernist act, which seeks to erase or arrest history, finds itself surrendered in that very moment to the lineage it seeks to repress, perpetuating rather than abolishing it. Indeed literature for de Man is nothing less than this constantly doomed, ironically self-undoing attempt to make it new, this ceaseless incapacity ever quite to awaken from the nightmare of history: ‘The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and the continuation of literature.’ footnote3 Since action and temporality are indissociable, modernism’s dream of self-origination, its hunger for some historically unmediated encounter with the real, is internally fissured and self-thwarting: to write is to disrupt a tradition which depends on such disruption for its very self-reproduction. We are all, simultaneously and inextricably, modernists and traditionalists, terms which for de Man designate neither cultural movements nor aesthetic ideologies but the very structure of that duplicitous phenomenon, always in and out of time simultaneously, named literature, where this common dilemma figures itself with rhetorical self-consciousness. Literary history here, de Man contends, ‘could in fact be paradigmatic for history in general’; and what this means, translated from deManese, is that though we will never abandon our radical political illusions (the fond fantasy of emancipating ourselves from tradition and confronting the real eyeball-to-eyeball being, as it were, a permanent pathological state of human affairs), such actions will always prove self-defeating, will always be incorporated by a history which has foreseen them and seized upon them as ruses for its own self-perpetuation. The daringly ‘radical’ recourse to Nietzsche, that is to say, turns out to land one in a maturely liberal Democrat position, wryly sceptical but genially tolerant of the radical antics of the young.

What is at stake here, under the guise of a debate about history and modernity, is nothing less than the dialectical relation of theory and practice. For if practice is defined in neo-Nietzschean style as spontaneous error, productive blindness or historical amnesia, then theory can of course be no more than a jaded reflection upon its ultimate impossibility. Literature, that aporetic spot in which truth and error indissolubly entwine, is at once practice and the deconstruction of practice, spontaneous act and theoretical fact, a gesture which in pursuing an unmediated encounter with reality in the same instant interprets that very impulse as metaphysical fiction. Writing is both action and a reflection upon that action, but the two are ontologically disjunct; and literature is the privileged place where practice comes to know and name its eternal difference from theory. It is not surprising, then, that the last sentence of de Man’s essay makes a sudden swerve to the political: ‘If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions.’ A text which starts out with a problem in literary history ends up as an assault on Marxism. For it is of course Marxism above all which has insisted that actions may be theoretically informed and histories emancipatory, notions capable of scuppering de Man’s entire case. It is only by virtue of an initial Nietzschean dogmatism—practice is necessarily self-blinded, tradition necessarily impeding—that de Man is able to arrive at his politically quietistic aporias. footnote4 Given these initial definitions, a certain judicious deconstruction of their binary opposition is politically essential, if the Nietzschean belief in affirmative action is not to license a radical politics; but such deconstruction is not permitted to transform the metaphysical trust that there is indeed a single dominant structure of action (blindness, error), and a single form of tradition (obfuscating rather than enabling an encounter with the ‘real’). The Marxism of Louis Althusser comes close to this Nietzscheanism: practice is an ‘imaginary’ affair which thrives upon the repression of truly theoretical understanding, theory a reflection upon the necessary fictionality of such action. The two, as with Nietzsche and de Man, are ontologically disjunct, necessarily non-synchronous.

[...]

‘Modernism’ as a term at once expresses and mystifies a sense of one’s particular historical conjucture as being somehow peculiarly pregnant with crisis and change. It signifies a portentous, confused yet curiously heightened self-consciousness of one’s own historical moment, at once self-doubting and self-congratulatory, anxious and triumphalistic together. It suggests at one and the same time an arresting and denial of history in the violent shock of the immediate present, from which vantage-point all previous developments may be complacently consigned to the ashcan of ‘tradition’, and a disorienting sense of history moving with peculiar force and urgency within one’s immediate experience, pressingly actual yet tantalizingly opaque. All historical epochs are modern to themselves, but not all live their experience in this ideological mode. If modernism lives its history as peculiarly, insistently present, it also experiences a sense that this present moment is somehow of the future, to which the present is nothing more than an orientation; so that the idea of the Now, of the present as full presence eclipsing the past, is itself intermittently eclipsed by an awareness of the present as deferment, as an empty excited openness to a future which is in one sense already here, in another sense yet to come. The ‘modern’, for most of us, is that which we have always to catch up with: the popular use of the term ‘futuristic’, to denote modernist experiment, is symptomatic of this fact. Modernism—and here Lyotard’s case may be given some qualified credence—is not so much a punctual moment in time as a revaluation of time itself, the sense of an epochal shift in the very meaning and modality of temporality, a qualitative break in our ideological styles of living history. What seems to be moving in such moments is less ‘history’ than that which is unleashed by its rupture and suspension; and the typically modernist images of the vortex and the abyss, ‘vertical’ inruptions into temporality within which forces swirl restlessly in an eclipse of linear time, represent this ambivalent consciousness. So, indeed, does the Benjaminesque spatializing or ‘constellating’ of history, which at once brings it to a shocking standstill and shimmers with all the unquietness of crisis or catastrophe.

High modernism, as Fredric Jameson has argued elsewhere, was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture. footnote5 This is a fact about its internal form, not simply about its external history. Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object. To this extent, modernist works are in contradiction with their own material status, self-divided phenomena which deny in their discursive forms their own shabby economic reality. To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real. Brooding self-reflexively on its own being, it distances itself through irony from the shame of being no more than a brute, self-identical thing. But the most devastating irony of all is that in doing this the modernist work escapes from one form of commodification only to fall prey to another. If it avoids the humiliation of becoming an abstract, serialized, instantly exchangeable thing, it does so only by virtue of reproducing that other side of the commodity which is its fetishism. The autonomous, self-regarding, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification part of that very problem.

It is on the rock of such contradictions that the whole modernist project will finally founder. In bracketing off the real social world, establishing a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order, modernism must simultaneously bracket off the political forces which seek to transform that order. There is indeed a political modernism—what else is Bertolt Brecht?—but it is hardly characteristic of the movement as a whole. Moreover, by removing itself from society into its own impermeable space, the modernist work paradoxically reproduces—indeed intensifies—the very illusion of aesthetic autonomy which marks the bourgeois humanist order it also protests against. Modernist works are after all ‘works’, discrete and bounded entities for all the free play within them, which is just what the bourgeois art institution understands. The revolutionary avant garde, alive to this dilemma, were defeated at the hands of political history. Postmodernism, confronted with this situation, will then take the other way out. If the work of art really is a commodity then it might as well admit it, with all the sang-froid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable conflict between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, it can always collapse that conflict on one side, becoming aesthetically what it is economically. The modernist reification—the art work as isolated fetish—is therefore exchanged for the reification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. The commodity as mechanically reproducible exchange ousts the commodity as magical aura. In a sardonic commentary on the avant-garde work, postmodernist culture will dissolve its own boundaries and become coextensive with ordinary commodified life itself, whose ceaseless exchanges and mutations in any case recognize no formal frontiers which are not constantly transgressed. If all artefacts can be appropriated by the ruling order, then better impudently to preempt this fate than suffer it unwillingly; only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culture will react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the base. Better, as Brecht remarked, to start from the ‘bad new things’, rather than from the ‘good old ones’.

That, however, is also where postmodernism stops. Brecht’s comment alludes to the Marxist habit of extracting the progressive moment from an otherwise unpalatable or ambivalent reality, a habit well exemplified by the early avant garde’s espousal of a technology able both to emancipate and to enslave. At a later, less euphoric stage of technological capitalism, the postmodernism which celebrates kitsch and camp caricatures the Brechtian slogan by proclaiming not that the bad contains the good, but that the bad is good—or rather that both of these ‘metaphysical’ terms have now been decisively outmoded by a social order which is to be neither affirmed nor denounced but simply accepted. From where, in a fully reified world, would we derive the criteria by which acts of affirmation or denunciation would be possible? Certainly not from history, which postmodernism must at all costs efface, or spatialize to a range of possible styles, if it is to persuade us to forget that we have ever known or could know any alternative to itself. Such forgetting, as with the healthy amnesiac animal of Nietzsche and his contemporary acolytes, is value: value lies not in this or that discrimination within contemporary experience but in the very capacity to stop our ears to the siren calls of history and confront the contemporary for what it is, in all its blank immediacy. Ethical or political discrimination would extinguish the contemporary simply by mediating it, sever its self-identity, put us prior or posterior to it; value is just that which is, the erasure and overcoming of history, and discourses of value, which cannot fail to be historical, are therefore by definition valueless.

[...]

The contradiction of modernism in this respect is that in order valuably to deconstruct the unified subject of bourgeois humanism, it draws upon key negative aspects of the actual experience of such subjects in late bourgeois society, which often enough does not at all correspond to the official ideological version. It thus pits what is increasingly felt to be the phenomenological reality of capitalism against its formal ideologies, and in doing so finds that it can fully embrace neither. The phenomenological reality of the subject throws formal humanist ideology into question, while the persistence of that ideology is precisely what enables the phenomenological reality to be characterized as negative. Modernism thus dramatizes in its very internal structures a crucial contradiction in the ideology of the subject, the force of which we can appreciate if we ask ourselves in what sense the bourgeois humanist conception of the subject as free, active, autonomous and self-identical is a workable or appropriate ideology for late capitalist society. The answer would seem to be that in one sense such an ideology is highly appropriate to such social conditions, and in another sense hardly at all. This ambiguity is overlooked by those post-structuralist theorists who appear to stake all on the assumption that the ‘unified subject’ is indeed an integral part of contemporary bourgeois ideology, and is thus ripe for urgent deconstruction. Against such a view, it is surely arguable that late capitalism has deconstructed such a subject much more efficiently than meditations on écriture. As postmodernist culture attests, the contemporary subject may be less the strenuous monadic agent of an earlier phase of capitalist ideology than a dispersed, decentred network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion. The ‘unified subject’ looms up in this light as more and more of a shibboleth or straw target, a hangover from an older liberal epoch of capitalism, before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the winds as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation or reflex of desire.

If this were wholly true, of course, postmodernist culture would be triumphantly vindicated: the unthinkable or the utopian, depending upon one’s perspective, would already have happened. But the bourgeois humanist subject is not in fact simply part of a clapped-out history we can all agreeably or reluctantly leave behind: if it is an increasingly inappropriate model at certain levels of subjecthood, it remains a potently relevant one at others. Consider, for example, the condition of being a father and a consumer simultaneously. The former role is governed by ideological imperatives of agency, duty, autonomy, authority, responsibility: the latter, while not wholly free of such strictures, puts them into significant question. The two roles are not of course merely disjunct; but though relations between them are practically negotiable, capitalism’s current ideal consumer is strictly incompatible with its current ideal parent. The subject of late capitalism, in other words, is neither simply the self-regulating synthetic agent posited by classical humanist ideology, nor merely a decentred network of desire, but a contradictory amalgam of the two. The constitution of such a subject at the ethical, juridical and political levels is not wholly continuous with its constitution as a consuming or ‘mass cultural’ unit. ‘Eclecticism’, writes Lyotard, ‘is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games.’ It is not just that there are millions of other human subjects, less exotic than Lyotard’s jet-setters, who educate their children, vote as responsible citizens, withdraw their labour and clock in for work; it is also that many subjects live more and more at the points of contradictory intersection between these two definitions.

Terry Eagleton, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

#*#essays #terry eagleton

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hugopaquete · 6 years ago

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Title; Dromology of orbital bodies: sound composition, using commercial and military satellites tracking technologies. Year: 2018-2019 Core Area; Space-Earth Interactions background (problem / need / opportunity): Problem: This project is part of my doctoral project entitled Imanências Espectrais: Reflexão sobre o Pós-Digital nas Artes Sonoras in progress, funded by FCT: Foundation for Science and Technology. It starts from my experience with sound spatialization for multiple audio channels and the need to establish elements of sound production and autonomous trajectories starting from the concept of exteriority and telematics. Thus, this project reflects on the sound spatialisation where routes, trajectories and movements are developed, which in this case are mapped and sonified in real time by means of orbital motion of the satellites in real time, articulating in a direct relation with devices external to the planet earth that represent human activity at the limits of the planet and the universe. Need: To develop this project, it was necessary to first understand what technical possibilities were needed to develop the project and this connection. The solution was to find an IP with the information of all commercial and military satellites and have an update in real time. This issue was critical to the project because composition and spatialization had to be generated in real time. Access to "information flows" was therefore critical to the toning processes involved. This situation has been solved with the development of a software and hardware that allows to access in real time this information with also to choose the satellite that is to be followed in real time. These issues were solved in partnership with my collaborators Christopher Zlaket (1992) of Arizona State University, specialized in interface design and David Stingley (1993) of MIT, specialized in computer science. Methodology; Exploring the technical means of hardware and software to establish a telematic relation with civil or military satellites as elements that have autonomy, an orbit and can generate indeterminism in the production of the musical-sound work. In this way, the research allowed the development of an autonomous technological system to generate sound starting from the processes of sonification and the conversion into musical sound elements of spatialisation to integrate in my processes of artistic experimentation, reinforcing the practical theoretical investigation that I develop. Using the Arduino one r3 to a Midi shield as three possibilities. Input/Output and through conversations for Midi. Thus, using the midi protocol we could control virtual sound and image software as well as analog synthetics hardware. This practical, theoretical project, serves to construct discourses in art from where they immerse in concepts such as telematics and electromagnetic fields of information, accentuating the context of the impacts of technology as a culture in society and its implications, social, political and meaning. It drives concepts such as post-media and post-digital and their consequent analyzes and discursive implications in the 21st century. Results; Construction of technical hardware and software to expand the possibilities of sonification in the sound arts. Presentation of practical examples developed as the built system. The impact of the research work; Contribute conceptually to the understanding of the concept of post-digital through the artistic and technical device based on a practical, theoretical investigation that by means of sonification processes expands the fields of representation in the art and the formal means in the musical sound expression.

#sound art #new media #digital art #post-digital #arte and #hugo paquete #noise #telematics #hacking #satellite #Tecnology #technoculture

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writeaboutart · 6 years ago

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of demons and spectres

“Of Demons and Spectres” is the essay written by Joselina Cruz, curator of the Philippine Pavillion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. The essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue for the pavillion, and then in the exhibition booklet of the re-positioning at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, which took place from 23 May to 20 July 2019.

The essay is quite long, but I am amazed at how it was able to piece together all these different lines of thinking. In other news, I learned by posting this that formatting outlines on Tumblr is a real pain.

I. Questions / Context

A. How does one represent one's own country (in the context of Venice as the most prestigious art stage in the world)?

Can we find it in current art practices?

Can we seek it from past art productions?

Can we ascertain it elsewhere, through generative ways of reconstituting the contemporary without being trapped in the past or the present?

B. Shifting ideas about nationalism, nation identity, and the national.

Politically, we see shifting nationalisms emerging in Europe and Asia

Authors addressing the idea of "nation" come up with a discourse necessarily based on the context of the contemporary, and influenced by continuous re-definitions of gender, literature, and history.

Some events of the past year occurring in other parts of the world show a global shift to very "interesting times". [1]

II. Framework

A. The art of comparison as origin of nationalism

Jose Rizal calls it el demonio de las comparaciones in his novel Noli me Tángere

Benedict Anderson's experience with Former President of Indonesia, Sukarno, as mentioned in the introduction of his The Spectre of Comparison.

B. Nationalism in the midst of spatial and temporal dislocations

Nationalism that is spatial and temporal

Spatial, developed during the latter part of 19th century, equality across borders

Temporal, subsists in fear of difference and protects sameness

Nationalism as experienced in parts of the world

Europe - traverses both definitions, may run the spectrum of ethnocentricity or may be civic-focusedb.

Asia - countries play off the world powers and are not beholden to them

The nation exists best as imagined (thesis)

Individuals hold different nationalities and occupy different geographical spaces, essentially allowing the individual to be part of various nations.

Temporal dislocations allow for ideas, objects, and people themselves to be imagined beyond the present.

C. Contemporaneity

Rizal and gardens as triggers

Gardens triggered Crisostomo Ibarra's el demonio de las comparaciones.

Gardens are bound to the colonial act of forcing nature to follow shape under the hand of the gardener/colonizer.

Gardens to which Rizal, through Ibarra, compares Jardin Botanico to is a generalized garden Europe, a failed utopia.

Rizal in the garden observes two states of existence, without losing sight of his position - living in the present and capable of seeing both colony and colonizer.

Rizal's el demonio de las comparaciones is part of contemporaneity that re-maps history and art production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks.

Contemporary and the Contemporaneity

The usual definition of contemporary is an unsettled present, constantly bound by time.

There are several difficulties with this definition of contemporary.

The contemporary finds itself in a constant state of becoming, always being made, and as such, the present becomes the past before it can even get to the future.

"Contemporary art" has no critically meaningful referent, and often the term is diluted without its existential, social, and political meanings.

The exhibition depends upon the coming together of different but equally present "temporalities" such that all temporalities are present, but one must also be aware of their distance from it; one must be critical.

"The contemporary is understood as a dialectical method... with a more radical understanding of temporality." [2]

'Dialectical contemporaneity' does not designate a particular style, rather an approach [3] making it possible for the exhibit to be mined as a politicized project.

D. Point of Engagement

Access by the point-of-view of Anderson to produce a sightline that accesses past and future (Rizal) and future and present (Maestro and Ocampo).

Access through its triple temporalities - as a 21st century exhibition linking with 19th century via an experience during the 1960s, the twentieth century.

III. Artworks Overview

A. Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo exemplify belonging to two states.

Maestro's belonging is of Canadian and Filipino, while Ocampo's belonging is of FIlipino and American.

The two artists' practice are intertwined with their own thinking of origin and status.

Their individual practice are also responsive to their shifting topographies, calibrating reflectively as they move across places.

B. With the two artists' works, the point of engagement is the body, the means by which either negotiate areas of their critical positions.

In Noli Me Tángere, the politics of Rizal was embodied by Crisostomo Ibarra, echoing the work of Merleau-Ponty when the body enters a space.

For Maestro and Ocampo, the site of engagement is the body itself

Maestro's work references the body in terms of its presence, whether absent or distant.

Ocampo's work references bodies that are ruinous and ruined, rendering them in utter disregard of their natural contours or functions.

IV. Lani Maestro's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. Engagement with the Body

The works feature the body as a metaphor, a political site, and a social construct.

The works present how the body occupies and is occupies, and how it produces a presence in its absence.

The works echo previous works in this qualification.

ladders that reach out to windows inside a box

book of images of waves picturing a moving ocean

sound piece with a murmured phrased.

silent post cards containing a line or two

The works incite a return to the individual.

B. No Pain Like This Body (2010/2017)

Influences

The novel of the same name by Harold Sonny Ladoo

The conditions of poverty, homelessness, prostitution, and drug abuse prevalent in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Characteristics

The work has the same height as a regular person, thus situating the body to the work, its text and color.

The work employs a text reversal to derive the capacity and incapacity of the body to handle discomfort.

Appearance in Previous Exhibitions

The work was first exhibited in a gallery with shop windows opening to the street.

The work glowed bright enough so that people were drawn to and were able to experience the work even after gallery closing time.

C. these Hands (2017)

Influences

The poem Flowers of Glass by Jose Beduyab.

The "cradle of jewelry-making" in France [4]

Reading

The work resonates to the body part valuable to artists.

The work speaks in anticipation of the wounding of the body

The work speaks about fear of violence that comes with the severance of limbs.

D. meronmeron (2017-2019)

Title

The word meron comes from mayroon.

The analogy may: existence, roon: place; thus mayroon: existence in a space.

The word meronmeron doubles itself: meron is to have, thus meronmeron to have being.

Reading

The art work awaits the audience to fill the latent obligation of its title. [5]

The benches fulfill the work's commitment once they are occupied.

V. Manuel Ocampo's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. The body as unabashedly present B. The disappointment with the real

Manuel recalled the experience seeing the paintings of Juan Valdez de Leal in Seville in 1997.

Manuel is a painter first and everything else is a poor second, and as such his paintings resist definitions.

C. The iconography of Manuel

Catholic elements (which have received attention)

Swastikas

Bodies cut up revealing spilling organs

Excrement

Abstract art with a native version

Magritte shown as a rat

Ad Reinhardt cartoons

VI. Synthesis

A. The artists do not simply resist authority, as they also engage and critique the discourse of their practices.

Maestro rethinks her oppositional relationship with "East" and "West".

Ocampo ponders on his "contamination" of culture.

B. The site of the spectre is not firmly situated.

The loci where the local and global meet are not essential to the practices of Maestro and Ocampo.

The same applies for artists and curators moving across nations and spaces.

The registers of experiencing the spectre (in the exhibition) are varied.

Rizal's sad melancholy

Anderson's moment of understanding

Maestro's re-thinking of "East" and "West"

Ocampo's contamination of cultures

The consciousness of the colonial émigré was crystallized by Rizal as he continuously flipped between the contexts of home and the colonizing other.

The same privilege exists for us who live in the 21st century, although not similarly as luxury, as there remains the call to determine whether we will remain as tourists or engage beyond mere surfaces.

VII. Conclusion

A. Venice as “the exhibition” ought to be contested, unless participation is a national desire to “officially” be part of the contemporary and global art discourse (which have its own responsibilities and consequences.

B. The artists in “The Spectre of Comparison” produce a global discourse, interrupted by discursive and complex imaginings that allow for the consciousness of worlds to be constructed across geographies, temporalities, and he haunting of soectres.

––––––––––––

Footnotes:

[1] Notably, Pres. Rodrigo Duterte's approval of the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, and his bloody war on drugs; the election of Donald Trump as US President, Brexit, and continued nuclear missile testing of North Korea.

[2] Claire Bishop, Radical Museology.

[3] Ibid.

[4] In conversation with Lani Maestro.

[5] Ibid. Lani said an artwork is not complete unless one engages with it.

#notes #venice art biennale #philippine pavillion #mcad #the spectre of comparison #joselina cruz #lani maestro #manuel ocampo

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frantzfanonarchives · 7 years ago

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What we learn from the film “Concerning Violence,” about Franz Fanon’s writings and ideas.

Africa is a Country

Michael Watts: Franz Fanon is a towering figure in the modern history of thinking about race, human emancipation and democracy in post-colonial states, and radical psychiatric practice. Born in 1925 in Martinique, he died in 1961 in the United States, and was buried in Algeria, a country in which he had lived and worked during the anti-colonial war of liberation. Frantz Fanon’s short rich life weaved together two preoccupations: professional psychiatry and revolutionary praxis. Working in unison, each was put to the service of fighting human suffering and racism and to the goal of post-colonial liberation. Fanon’s contempt for the post-colonial national bourgeoisie across much of Africa was withering and unreconstructed. His writing on the violence of colonial racism and on the productive role of violence in human emancipation was as controversial when The Wretched of the Earth first appeared in 1961 as it is today. Daring to produce a documentary – Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense – basedloosely on this book and Fanon’s ideas, and to take the topic of violence head on is either brave or foolish. Or both. Using archival footage from the wars of liberation in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia, Swedish director Göran Olsson has his hands full. To what effect?

Erin Torkelson: Göran Olsson’s 2014 film Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense is a sensitively rendered and deeply disturbing look at Swedish archival footage of anti-colonial warfare, relying on rock-star academics (Gayatri Spivak) and academic rock-stars (Lauryn Hill) to blend image and text, in a postmodern bricolage structured around Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. While I generally enjoyed the film, I am troubled by the premise — laid out clearly in the press packet (and on the IMDB site, box cover, movie poster, etc.) — that the value of this movie is in its archive: alternatively called a ‘new archive of unseen footage’ and an archive of ‘the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation.’

I am left wondering what, exactly, is “new” about this archive? There is plenty of footage of “anti-imperialist self-defense” floating around late night South African TV (with doccies poking fun at “Rhodesians” at country clubs or stories of victims and perpetrators brought together to “reconcile”); there is a horrific corner of the internet where colonial soldiers post films of their murderous devastation throughout Africa (lest we forget mercenaries filmed “kills” in order to be paid); and there have been several archive-based documentaries about African anti-colonial wars in recent years (Cuba: An African Odyssey, a 2007 French documentary film immediately comes to mind). Suggesting that the archive itself is the most important contribution elides the fact that African anti-colonial wars were very recent history and footage of them actually exists. Stressing the value (the never-before-seen-ness) of the archive seems to (once again) place Africa in an awkward pre-history, outside of time, and certainly outside of film. Likewise, why are these scenes the most ‘daring moments in the struggle for liberation’? Surely, that occludes so much bravery and sacrifice across the continent? Considering these questions, it seems to me that what is ‘new’ is that it’s a Swedish archive, and what is ‘daring’ is that is Swedishjournalists filming (it says as much in the press packet: “radical Swedish filmmakers” capturing anti-imperialist liberation “firsthand”). In this sense, the movie is self-reflexively Swedish, (re)centering the European subject in anti-colonial struggles in Africa.

Indeed, you can see this Euro-centric perspective throughout the film. It is extremely difficult to watch the (re)enactment of the white, male gaze overlaid with Frantz Fanon’s words — a gaze that is most transparent, most visible and most deeply problematic in a pornographic scene of a beautiful, though mutilated, topless woman, feeding her infant. And while the press packet fesses up to some European ‘paternalism’ and ‘bias,’ it also continually appeals to Sweden’s history of anti-apartheid activism, “material contributions” to the ANC, and “official neutrality.” Olsson’s invocations of the ‘paternalistic’ Sweden and the ‘activist’ Sweden are separated by several paragraphs in the press packet, but I think, our challenge is to see how these statements work together in a discursive formation: how does the second statement (about Sweden’s liberal activism) work to justify, excuse or erase the first (about Sweden’s paternalism and “bias,” often a euphemism for racism)?

This is why having Gayatri Spivak introduce the film is such an interesting choice. In her classic, “Can the Subaltern Speak” she takes Foucault and Deleuze to task for making the Western, European, male intellectual visible and transparent, and thereby occluding the subaltern subject. In many places, the same could be said of this film. Is Göran Olsson asking Gayatri Spivak to absolve him of these very same sins?

Camilla Hawthorne: What I appreciated most about Concerning Violence was that it was not framed as an apologia for The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter, which is effectively how Homi Bhabha (in his preface to the 2004 Philcox translation) framed his psychoanalytic rejoinder to the narrow readings by Arendt and Sartre that painted Fanon as a “prophet of violence.” Indeed, the documentary goes to great lengths to visually center the originary violence of colonialism, a racialized, everyday violence that is etched into material landscapes and carved into human flesh. I also appreciated Spivak’s thoughtful introduction, which concluded with a frank caveat about the limitations of Fanon for explicitly feministreadings of colonial and anti-colonial violence. Just as Fanon famously “stretched” Marx, she suggests, it is now our task to stretch Fanon.

But upon discussing the doc with Erin, I am also left wondering: what can we make of the documentary’s geographical provenance in a Swedish archive? And why was the footage reassembled and released now? Can this documentary be read against the backdrop of Europe’s complicated and contradictory relationship with postcoloniality as a condition, a relation, and a field of academic inquiry? While it has undoubtedly generated important and reflexive scholarship that challenges the racist myth of European boundedness and homogeneity, the postcolonial turn in Europe has also morphed into either a romanticized, colonial nostalgia (in which colonialism is glossed as cosmopolitanism and multiracial conviviality) or a redirection of scholarly and popular attention to white Europeans in the context of anti-colonial struggles.

We must not lose sight of the fact that this is all happening at a conjuncture when European states are navigating the tensions of inclusion and exclusion and the boundaries of European citizenship as the empire “strikes back” in the form of immigration; in the Nordic countries such as Sweden, known for their bountiful social welfare systems, those on the left have struggled to incorporate a national self-image of progressiveness and openness toward refugees and asylum-seekers with the stark and too-close-to-home realities of virulent racism and xenophobia. A generous take on the documentary can read it as an attempt to situate current struggles over the construction of Europeanness within the context of a broader (and spatially extended) historical, colonial trajectory—as opposed to a “crisis” catalyzed by the arrival of large numbers of postcolonial migrants during the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, however, one could also view Concerning Violenceas a sort of attempt at absolution—an effort to displace contemporary reckonings with racism (see: the Swedish racist cake controversy or the work of geographer Allan Pred) as merely aberrational while simultaneously incorporating African anti-colonial struggles into a romantic national Swedish narrative of inclusion and antiracism.

Brittany Meche: I will begin by saying I found something temporally jarring about Göran Olsson’s 2014 film Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense. Above and beyond the tinge of Third Worldist nostalgia, something about the timing and the narrative rhythm felt out of step. I locate my unease in the treatment of the title concept, violence. Famed postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak opens the movie arguing against a reading of Fanon that presents violence as salvational. Instead, Spivak insists that The Wretched of the Earth is Fanon’s meditation on what happens when people are “reduced to violence.” However, Spivak’s presumed lessening gives me pause, and it seems at odds with the steely narration of songstress Ms. Lauryn Hill. Ms. Hill’s rendering of Fanon’s words as they punctuate these moments of “self-defense” do not bely descent into a hellish resignation. Though, lest I be accused, as Fanon is and was, of heralding violence as divine ascent, I contend that these images of jungle patrols, feckless missionaries, mangled mothers and persistent fighters, are undoubtedly terrestrial—the provenance of neither angel nor demon.

Consequently, where in an analysis of violence as reductive descent is there room for Malcolm X’s defiant political prescription: “By any means necessary”? It is this issue of means and ends that is at the heart of my unease about the temporal rhythm of the film. Sitting in the 21st century and gazing back at the 20th, what are we as viewers to make of this representation of decidedly political violence? Particularly in a moment when violence as a means of resistance has been discredited, not necessarily for its ineffectualness, but because it has become the prized possession of powerful states. The term self-defense in the subtitle of the film recalls Olsson’s critically-acclaimed 2011 project The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Still, I am left pondering: to what extent, in the present moment, can oppositional politics be situated within a framework of self-defense? What does self-defense look like amid late-stage racial capitalism and unending wars on terror? When one can be shot in a position of surrender or when “no-fly zones” are used to justify the bombardment of cities and countless civilian deaths, what articulations of defense remain? Ultimately, I am agitated, exasperated and, yet, profoundly humbled by these images of armed black and brown radicals, poised to make history.

Participants:

Dr. Michael Watts is the Class of 1963 Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and books. His research interests include: political economy, political ecology, West Africa, South Asia, development, Islam and social movements, resource conflicts, and the oil industry.

Brittany Meché is a doctoral student in Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on U.S. military policy in West Africa, risk and preparedness infrastructures, postcolonial theory, race, diaspora, and empire. You can follow her on Twitter @BrittanyMeche.

Erin Torkelson is a doctoral student in Geography at UC Berkeley. Before attending grad school, she worked in South Africa for seven years with land and housing NGOs and social movements. Her current research interests include Southern Africa, youth politics, generation, memory and migration.

Camilla Hawthorne is a doctoral student in Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research addresses the politics of Blackness in Italy, diaspora theory, and postcolonial science and technology studies. She tweets at @camillahawth.

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russellmoreton · 3 months ago

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Clay Work/1000 pots : Visceral Practices by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: russellmoreton.blogspot.com/ Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris Visualising Environmental Agency "Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)" "These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency." Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane. 1000 "pots" performative site 2011. The Yard, Winchester.

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meditativeyoga · 6 years ago

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Learn to Listen to Your Inner Voice

Through the technique of yoga exercise, we could learn how to listen to -- and comply with-- our internal guidance.

Jill met her ex-husband at an organisation lunch in 1998. They linked promptly, the means old close friends do, as well as invested the remainder of the mid-day in intimate discussion. Later, as Jill walked back to her workplace, a thought emerged: 'If you're not cautious, you're going to end up weding this individual, and also that would certainly be a significant blunder.'

Much later on, she marveled at the incisiveness of her internal voice. 'I do not consider myself as instinctive,' she told me, 'but then, I noticed that this was info I should take note of. Then my normal shroud dropped. My feelings took over. I fell for him, we obtained wed, defended five years, and also finally got divorced. Just what I can not get over is that I knew all along as well as couldn't hear myself!'

I comprehended just what she was speaking around. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I can recall lots of celebrations when I 'knew' something and also neglected it, due to the fact that some social factor to consider, need, uncertainty, or anxiety talked louder compared to my own internal knowledge. But I've likewise uncovered that the much more I have the ability to pay attention to that inner recognizing, the much deeper my feeling of individual credibility becomes.

So I asked Jill, 'Have you ever before exercised adjusting in to on your own, simply on a regular day, and asking on your own,' Exactly what's my deepest wish now? ' or ' What does my psyche actually want for me?' You understand, seeing if you can enter a partnership with your inner knowledge so you can hear what it's telling you?' Jill drank her head. I suggested that she spend a few mins a day doing that as well as see just what happened.

As somebody that has needed to learn by hand to pay attention to internal wisdom, I could assure you that (1) credible assistance is actually there as well as (2) noticing it is not that hard. Like every little thing important in life, it's about taking note. If we reduce a bit and check in with our body and sensations, we soon see that helpful inner messages involve all of us the time -- through physical feelings, flashes of insight, intuitive feelings, and also from that state of cleared up intelligence the Yoga Sutra calls rtambhara prajna, or 'truth-bearing wisdom.' We could use this information to readjust our program, song our inner state, and connect with the environment.

' I have actually discovered how to take notice of a certain sensation of emotional discomfort,' David, an economic expert that meditates regularly, told me. 'When I feel it, I stop as well as examine myself out internally. Almost always, I'm embeded some unfavorable psychological loophole. So the unpleasant feelings signify me when it's time to alter the way I'm assuming in a circumstance.'

Lacey's relationship with internal advice started one day in a yoga class. Feeling shaky in a present, she began to explore her body, trying to find a location of security. Spontaneously, an idea showed up: 'Press down through the balls of the feet and also expand your stance.' Lacey did simply that and certainly, she really felt a lot more grounded.

Both of these individuals have actually found their natural knowledge -- in David's situation, it comes as feelings or emotions, while Lacey seems to access hers through the body. Both are circumstances of exactly what I would certainly call typical or personal-level inner support -- the kind that assists us find our bearings and also instructions in day-to-day life. This sort of advice materializes itself in different ways -- as the physical 'knowing' that makes us aware that we remain in threat, as the subtler spatial feeling that shows a ballplayer where to propose a catch, as the capacity to 'get' whether it's the ideal moment to push your close friend to discuss his sensations or whether it's far better to let him be. All of us have our very own all-natural, individual methods of adjusting into this internal wisdom -- whether we feel it in the gut, in the heart, or as some other kind of internal sensation. We just have to discover how to acknowledge it as well as make it conscious.

Extraordinary Guidance

Then there's what we might call remarkable, or extranormal guidance, messages that really emerge in critical, life-changing minutes to guide us in making major choices, advise us about prospective risk, or help us take the next action in our spiritual journey. Jill's internal finding out about the man she wed resembled that. As it provided for her, this kind of message could arise as an assumed in the mind. Or it can, and often does, come as an image, a dream, or a sense of being drawn in a certain direction -- as in those famous tales regarding spiritual numbers that hear a call from God or a traveler who feels a strong internal pull to go down a certain road, where he comes across a guy who's been injured and also requires aid or an attractive female who becomes his better half. That kind of inner advice can feel radical, greatly at probabilities with the voices of standard knowledge, culture, and our suggestions of that we are and also what we want.

It could likewise be rather significant. A male I recognize as soon as gotten up in the middle of the evening after dreaming of a paper guillotine resting by his child's bed. He went to the kid's room and saw a sheet of paper resting on top of the bedside lamp. The light bulb had actually melted via the paper, which was simply bursting right into fires. He is encouraged that acting upon the dream saved his child's life.

This is the kind of inner advice that has the tendency to get our interest. We offer it different names -- the voice of God or our higher Self, the enlightened voice within us. Yet it is just a much deeper, subtler level of the standard support that we are constantly making it through the body and also feelings. If you approve that every little thing is constructed from one substance, one intelligent awareness, it makes good sense that the guidance that appears spiritual and the kind that seems ordinary in fact come from the same source, and that both should have to be honored.

The Real Thing

Whether internal advice materializes itself through the body as digestive tract reactions, with the heart as feelings, or via the mind as cleared up knowledge, instinct, a vision, a voice, or a dream, it is wise -- most likely smarter, in specific circumstances, compared to the cognitive mind. That's because it comes from a degree closer to the significance, the deep Self, or what is often called the wisdom mind. Listening to inner support is among the ideal ways to access the informed sage or visionary artist that lives inside us. When we follow our true internal instincts, we are receiving assistance from a master.

Of training course, there is a tough facet to all this. Exactly how can we tell just what is 'genuine' inner assistance and what is just a stray impulse or covered up need, or also some type of mental fixed? Actually, when there's a great deal going on in the mind, it can be tough to locate the inner voice. (This is one need to frequently peaceful the discursive mind through reflection.) The majority of us uncovered early that our own second-nature feeling of points was commonly at chances with the ideas communicated by our moms and dads and caretakers. As we discovered to adjust to others' desires -- a needed part of human socialization -- we additionally learned to override our instinct and also to substitute the voices of our moms and dads, society, TV, ad campaigns, the information, and our peers for the advice that arises from within.

In fact, we could obtain so far out of touch with our internal wisdom that we really question its presence. Before we could hear the much deeper wisdom, we might initially have to accept that it is there to be heard. We have to discover out how to removal past, or still, the completing social voices that obtain in the way. Lastly, we require to learn the best ways to differentiate between the actual assistance of the deep Self and also the voices of our concerns, needs, and delusions.

Getting to Know Yourself

It helps to have some understanding regarding your own propensities. Perhaps you have a judgmental internal moms and dad that appears as a vital internal voice or a sensation that things will certainly turn out badly. If you recognize the best ways to acknowledge that voice, you won't error it for the voice of reality. Maybe you have a bent toward dream or wishful reasoning. If you could acknowledge when the component of you that still wishes to count on Santa Claus is running, you can be cynical of any kind of messages to spend your last $70 on lotto game tickets. If you recognize you have a driving, perfectionistic streak, you could look askance when you're inwardly 'guided' to keeping up all evening to complete a task and instead understand your body's need for rejuvenation.

We all have elements of ourselves that are sensible, mature, and deeply credible. We also have parts that are untaught, susceptible to making decisions based upon childhood worries or fantasies of omnipotence. One factor to practice functioning with instinct is so we can discover how to discriminate in between an understanding that comes from the wisdom mind, the detoxified heart, or the deep body as well as one that comes from the component of us that may be called pre-rational -- the part of us that hasn't fairly surrendered to expanding up.

When you obtain a suspicion about something major, it's always great to ask on your own the difficult inquiries, like 'Is this inkling grounded in any way in truth? Is it conforming with my basic concepts as well as worths? Would certainly I encourage somebody else to act upon this inkling? Does it mirror the principles of the spiritual customs I recognize? Is it most likely to cause damage to myself or another person? Will following this inkling make me dispirited? Will it inflate my feeling of being special or' chosen'?'

Wisdom Mind

The extra you agree to analyze the understandings you obtain, the much more you'll find out how you can acknowledge the assistance that in fact comes from the knowledge mind. The transforming factor for me in discerning the sensation of clear inner guidance was available in a mundane as well as apparently unimportant way. I will fly house from India and had actually been packing promptly, discarding every little thing that really did not suit my travel suitcase. While the taxi waited at the door, I found I didn't have my airline company ticket.

Frantically, I transformed out my bag, the drawers, the trash can. Absolutely nothing. Finally, I shut my eyes, obtained silent, and asked my consciousness, 'Please discover my ticket. '

Seconds after I made the petition, an extremely faint series of words began to appear in my mind:' Look in the trash can once more. 'I did. My ticket, it ended up, was folded up between two other documents, concealed so well that I had not seen it.

I connect this tale for 2 factors. Initially, since the assistance was so certain and concrete that it was impossible to discount it as dream. Second, due to the fact that it offered me my initial clear feeling of how credible assistance appears to me. It can be found in trickles. I feel it appearing as if from a depth. It really feels little and also refined-- actually, for me, the' still little voice'-- though some people have informed me they receive pictures regularly compared to words. It is commonly so subtle that if I'm not looking, I will not discover it. When I do, there's a high quality to it that brings launch or convenience. And if I absolutely pay interest to it, it additionally feels unpreventable-- also if it is calling my focus on something that challenges my individual condition quo.

Testing Your Guidance

Although it happened accidentally, my experience with the ticket offered me a version for hearing and also dealing with inner support. When I want to comprehend something or decide, I ask for advice, then I try out following the guidance I get. There's a procedure I use that has truly made a distinction in my capacity to hear just what my further Self wants to tell me. Here's how you can attempt it yourself.

1. Invest a long time developing your inquiry, getting as clear as possible regarding it. Create it down.( This is necessary-- the act of writing concretizes your concern or issue.) You could begin by requesting help in settling a creative trouble, bothersome partnership, or living circumstance. You can ask for understanding concerning your method or regarding an internal tendency that interrupts you.

2. Sit comfortably with your back erect yet not stiff and your eyes closed. Hold the concern in your mind. Say it to on your own a couple of times as well as notice the sensations that arise when you do. Notification any kind of thoughts that show up, consisting of resistance to the process. Write them down if they seem vital or relevant.

3. Use the rhythm of the breath as a support. Maintain your interest on the breath until the mind unwinds and becomes quieter.

4. Sink your interest deeper. You could do this by focusing on the heart facility (in the center of the breast) or on the stubborn belly center( 3 inches below the navel, deep inside the body). Or you could use a visualization: Visualize on your own descending a stairs into a peaceful cave, moving step-by-step up until you locate yourself confined in quiet.

5. In this silent area, ask the sage within you, the individual of wisdom who resides in your inmost core, to be present. Or, if there is a specific divine being kind or educator or sage you appreciate, you could ask that being to be existing. Conversely, you could merely have the sensation that you are asking support from the universe, the Tao, the resource of all. Recognize that it suffices to ask that internal knowledge be existing, if you do, it will certainly be available.

6. Ask your question. After that wait quietly, without expectation or discouragement, to see what emerges. Keep in mind that insight does not always come in words. It may come as a feeling, an image, or something said by one more person. Also, it may not come the moment you ask for it. Instinct emerges in its very own time. When you have seeded the question, listen during the next 24 to Two Days, due to the fact that response to your concern will arise.

7. As insights come, compose them down. Hold each one in your mind as well as allow it percolate. See just what comes up and also note the feelings. You could be drawn to translating the insight, but it is also sufficient simply to hold it in your awareness. As you do, it will create shifts in awareness all by itself.

Note that if your insight feels judgmental, punishing, or blaming, it is probably not originating from your inmost source. In basic, the knowledge of your inner awareness is extensive, loving, as well as embracive. Your instinct could ask you to take obligation for a scenario, however it will certainly never ever inform you responsible yourself or a person else.

8. Ultimately, think about a step you could require to put your understanding into activity. Here is where the genuine experiment starts. The only way to discover how to follow your user-friendly guidance is to try it and be really aware of the results. It could be that the guidance you obtain unwinds a circumstance promptly. In some cases, if the situation you're inquiring about is knotty, you might need to take a series of tiny activities, to request for more advice, and to maintain observing the results. Occasionally the assistance you obtain is just for currently, and also the following actions could emerge in time.

As you do all this, you'll naturally develop an attunement to your very own deeper knowledge. You'll locate yourself removaling with life extra masterfully, more imaginatively, as well as with higher trust fund. In time, you may also recognize that you've generated the enlightened sage who lives inside you. All it takes is a readiness to transform back right into on your own just a few times a day as well as ask,' What does my much deeper Self desire for me currently? Exactly what would the sage in me carry out in this circumstance?' It's when you start to invoke as well as pay attention to your deep knowledge that your inner life begins to shine via every one of your activities and also you understand just how sensible you absolutely are, how intuitively caring, how deeply attuned to the rhythms of life itself.

Sally Kempton, also referred to as Durgananda, is a writer, a meditation educator, and also the owner of the Dharana Institute. For additional information, browse through www.sallykempton.com.

#meditation #spiritual #spiritual journey #Yoga

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tpr-1 · 2 years ago

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Dimensional Friction

Once folded into dreams of endless oceanic abundance, coral reefs now tell a different story about the passage of time in Earth's tropical oceans. It is a story told, in part, by those who have learned to read coral skeletons as historical records. By extracting and analysing the internal mineral matter of living, dead or fossil corals, skilled observers can interpret how a coral colony has responded to changing ocean conditions. Histories of temperature, turbidity, lunar cycles, terrestrial runoff, pollution, nuclear testing, colonisation, agriculture, monsoons, floods, and bleaching events are just some of the changes legible in the crystalline mineral structures that form tropical reefs. Like other “proxy records”, such as ice cores or tree rings, coral cores allow an image of the pre-instrumental planet to take shape, from the era before climactic changes were monitored in real time. But history is not all that that takes shape. Anticipatory regimes, concerned with predicting planetary-scale climatic changes, use “coral chronometers” (Knutson et al., 1972) to thicken the imagined trajectories of saltwater environments and the planet itself, producing timelines that stretch to 2050, 2100 or 2300 (Ainsworth et al., 2016; Cornwall et al., 2021; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007; Morato et al., 2020; Sully et al., 2022). Coral cores are no longer only representatives of the reefs and coasts where they were grewown. Like other proxies, they have become “objects of the earth system” and of global climate science (Sörlin and Isberg, 2021: 723). They have been folded into larger planetary-scale trajectories that stretch backward and forward in time. What enables incremental records, such as coral cores, to be folded together into these trajectories is that they are viewed and measured through time-depth, a vertical temporal orientation that structures the work of geologists, archaeologists and other scientists who rely on forms of excavation (Simonetti, 2014, 2015). Vertical time depth, like “chronometry” before it, has become a powerful technology of the imagination (Bear, 2020; Sneath et al., 2009), allowing “natural records” to be read like geological strata, and leveraged in the work of anticipation. In coral core laboratories, cores are made available to timelines and trajectories through a suite of “vertical” techniques and practices developed after coral chronometry was discovered as a viable dating method in the 1970s (Knutson et al., 1972). Since then, dating practices have become increasingly dynamic and varied, opening the mineral depths of coral skeletons to global climate science. But crucially, these are predominantly vertical practices. I examine some of these techniques as they appear in an Australian coral coring laboratory, and the discursive, technical, and imaginative problems they give rise to for coral scientists. These problems suggest that the vertical is an inadequate analytic for capturing the complex ways that proxy records and global climate science intersect. In the past decade, the vertical has come under scrutiny as a spatial and temporal orientation (Billé, 2020; Bridge, 2013; Elden, 2013; Peters and Steinberg, 2014). This turn echoes the ascendency of geological thought in early 21st-century theory and invites emerging questions not only about stratigraphy and time-depth but also their counterfactuals: alternative modes of temporal thought that go beyond the vertical (Hardenberg and Mahony, 2020; Simonetti, 2015; Yusoff, 2018). If a coral core is not only an expression of vertical time depth, what other possibilities emerge within the mineral matrix of its skeleton? To consider those possibilities, in 2018 and 2019 I visited the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a government research facility that houses a coring lab and archive of coral skeletons roughly 50 kilometres south of the city of Townsville, on a remote headland overlooking the Great Barrier Reef. I went to encounter vertical practices and technologies up close, to understand the labour of the coral core scientist and to learn how the temporal structure of corals intersects with the temporal structure of global climate science. AIMS was chosen because it houses one of the largest core archives in the world and is run by active core scientists who have developed some of the key contemporary techniques for analysing cores. The corals stored and analysed at AIMS have been used to provide “important checks on the performance of global climate models” and to “predict future climates in a warming world” (Cantin, 2014: np). It was Janice Lough, a senior principal research scientist at AIMS, who first showed me the labour of the coral core scientist. Assembling a planetary timeline, she told me, is like making a “jigsaw puzzle” — a puzzle she has been studying for “30-odd years” (Lough and Barnes, 1989, 1990; Lough and van Oppen, 2018). “Tree rings are an important source of proxy climate records,” she told me, “but they obviously don't grow in the tropical oceans, which are of interest because first of all, they're the heat engine of the global climate system”. Lough was raised in the United Kingdom (and still speaks with an English accent) but lives in Townsville, a city of 180,000 on Australia’s north-eastern coast and one of the “gateways” to the Great Barrier Reef. In Townsville, the epistemological engines of global marine science churn — more knowledge about coral reefs is produced here than anywhere else in Australia (or perhaps the world). Part of that production involves transforming coral skeletons into proxies of the global climate in laboratories like the one where Lough works. The friction of dimension Guided through these laboratory spaces, I noticed certain kinds of friction emerging in the work of producing corals as temporal puzzle pieces. These frictions do more than lead scientists (and ethnographers of laboratory times) deeper and deeper inside the coral matrix, from encounters with massive colonies growing on the reef, to the layered mineral structure of their annual banding patterns, and finally into the microscopic “weave” of their carbonate structure. The spatial (and temporal) scales that become salient here, seem to edge toward the microscopic. The vertical seems to dominate. But as I will show in this article, the close work of producing and synchronizing proxy records through coral cores can produce the conditions where new (or old) formations of hierarchic power are consolidated. The laboratory, like other spaces where temporal order is produced, is a space where political possibility gestates (Bear, 2016; Gell, 1992; Munn, 1992). To surface these and other possibilities, I introduce dimensional friction as an analytical framework to reveal intersecting temporal structures. By directing attention to the rub between what appear to be “natural” proxies and “cultural” timelines, dimensional friction gives access to the ways that proxy records such as corals are wielded as time. Dimension names a quality of the work involved in making time-data through the proxies of coral cores: in addition to being turned into “lines” of time, these mineral objects are always being dimensioned — dimensionally produced — as time data is extracted from living and non-living corals. By paying attention to the ways dimensions are shifted and produced through techniques in a lab, I can also make space for the distinct kinds of “temporal work” performed by marine animals that grow mineral skeletons. What corals grow are not timelines, or stratigraphic records, but mineral volumes with distinct dimensions produced by their hyperbolic surfaces. “I want you to see this,” Lough says, and she opens a metal drawer in the archive, full of cores. They’re creampale coloured, heavy like rocks, and appear as almost undifferentiated masses of calcium carbonate (the mineral that coral animals use to build their skeletons). Lough points out a core with an undulating pattern of small holes at one end. “You can see there the little calyces where the little coral animals would sit; even in something that's several meters high, it is only that thin layer on the outside edge where the coral animal is living”. The rest? “Basically, empty skeleton — except it's not empty because it contains history”. A history with height, size, weight, density, width, depth and other qualities. Engaging these spatial dimensions in the context of the laboratory is helped by a canon of social theory — in anthropology, cultural studies, critical theory, geography — that looks toward the topological, or spatial more generally, for guidance on thinking new sociocultural or planetary formations (Mol and Law, 1994; Vasantkumar, 2013). In the 1990s and early 2000s, spatial concepts like these became salient in social theory. For Tsing, writing in 2005, “overcoming the limits of globalizing ontologies” makes it “necessary to invent—perhaps endlessly—new spatial concepts that linger upon the materialities and singularities of space” (Tsing, 2005: 424). The dimensional inherits this earlier spatializing impulse in anthropological thought because thinking, making, working, wielding time, is always engaged in space. I intend dimension to function as a bridge between the kind of spatializing work that took hold in earlier decades and the temporalizing work demanded of us by the 21st century. I use it as an edge-finding strategy that gets to the boundaries of stratigraphic orientations as they come into being in the laboratory — orientations that define how coral becomes useful to planetary timelines and how it might become otherwise. The scales at play here are vast. Much of the literature on coring is driven by an underlying focus on the ways that a polyphony of timelines and trajectories are incorporated into vast continuous temporal records of Earth (Antonello and Carey, 2017; Edwards, 2010; Isberg, 2018; Jordheim, 2014; Salazar, 2018; Sörlin and Isberg, 2021). The kinds of friction that appear in this literature are often those that appear at a certain scale: at the level of incorporation. Drawing together and standardising proxies of all kinds, including coral cores, is not easy because they can be nonlinear, noisy or time-uncertain (Dee et al., 2016: 1164). In his analysis of Earth System Science, Edwards introduces two forms of friction related to this difficulty: friction as “the struggle to assemble records scattered across the world” and metadata friction as “the labor of recovering datas context of creation, restoring the memory of how those numbers were made" (Edwards, 2010: 461). These frictions emerge partially due to inherent clashes between the temporal structures of proxies and those of the disciplines that seek to synchronise them. For Edwards, this means we will never have "a single, unshakeable narrative of the global climates past”, only “versions … a shimmering mass of proliferating data images, convergent yet never identical" (2010: 460). While Edwards’ friction appears as a rub, chafing or resistance that eventually brings one or more versions of the planet into fuzzy focus, Anna Tsing’s friction constantly makes and unmakes hegemony across scales (Tsing, 2005: 19). In her 2005 ethnography of global connections Friction, she considers how globality — a formation with a similar scale to Edwards’ shimmering mass — is produced. For Tsing, the scale of the model (ie., the globe itself) can overwhelmingly define the forms of friction that come to matter, which is why she refuses to privilege the scale of the global “above all others” and instead, with ethnographic hunger for the particular, follows “globemaking interactions much closer to the ground” (Tsing, 2005: 112, 115). Tracking what I call dimensional friction is a means of following similar planet-forming interactions in the lab — interactions that precede the weaving of proxies and planetary time. These interactions involve scientists directly manipulating the dimensions of mineral cores that are drilled from coral colonies growing across the 344,400 km2 of the Great Barrier Reef. Understanding planet-forming interactions in the lab involves negotiating with the temporal pressures affecting reefs and the production of coral time: the rhythms, speeds, cycles, temporal forms and imagined trajectories that frame the intersection between corals and global climate science. These pressures go far beyond the labs at AIMS. The temporal form of coral reefs Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, our planet’s largest coral reef system, is not immune to the wider narrative arc of corals in the 21st century. This is an arc characterised by loss in its many guises: mass-bleaching, plummeting biodiversity, decreased productivity, failed migration, phase-shifts, dissolution, extinction. Though the amount of coral cover has always varieoscillated, some estimates suggest that more than 40% of all tropical reefs will be destroyed by 2100 unless conditions rapidly change (Sully et al., 2022). Other estimates suggest 70% will be destroyed by 2050 (Elias, 2018: 245) — on some reefs, like those around Kiribati, losses may already exceed that number. The primary cause is heat: “extreme warm-water events” known as marine heatwaves have increased over the past century (Oliver et al., 2018). When the water stays too hot for too long corals panic, ejecting the life-giving symbiotic algae living inside their tissue. It’s true that in periods without disturbances, fast-growing corals can quickly expand reefs, which was seen on the Great Barrier Reef in 2021 and early 2022 (AIMS, 2022). But the expansion of fast-growing (and easily damaged) species is not a replacement for older biodiverse communities including slow-growing resilient corals (Richards, 2022). Many scientists now believe we have entered a world in which coral-dominated ecosystems of the past millennia are in decline (Birkeland, 2015; Elias, 2018; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007; Hughes et al., 2018, 2019). As I write now, in early 2022, another mass-bleaching event has hit the Great Barrier Reef. Researchers have predicted that after 2035 the reef would bleach twice each decade, and annually after 2044 (Heron et al., 2018) — a death sentence for many corals. But there have already been six mass-bleaching events since 1998, and three have occurred in the past six years: 2016, 2017, and 2022. Like other transformed ecologies employed in “planetary fortune-telling”, tropical reef ecosystems are taking on something similar to what Jerry Zee describes as a “temporal form that arcs toward disaster” (2017: 217). Like clockwork, more articles are published in newspapers and magazines declaring this event at once “unprecedented” and yet almost inevitable: a “grim milestone” on our deepening passage into a world defined by rising emissions (Cave, 2022: 2). A sense of urgency and of time “running out” pervades the discourse. In 2021, in response to these bleaching events, a United Nations committee suggested the Great Barrier Reef be added to the list of “World Heritage in Danger” (UNESCO, 2021: 85), requiring Australia to take “accelerated action at all possible scales” (UNESCO, 2021). Accelerated action. Instead, Australia sought to accelerate its coal mining operations, and fought the “in danger” recommendation through global lobbying. These examples reveal some of the rhythms, speeds, cycles, temporal forms and imagined trajectories that frame the intersection between global climate science and corals in the laboratories at AIMS. They also signal the wider shift that this article is embedded within, a Gestalt-like switch that has given the work of the coral core scientist a distinct urgency and weight: a shift between the politics of coral space and coral time. In the latter-half of the 20th Century, the politics of coral space — in particular the Great Barrier Reef — emerged as a “battleground” (Wright, 1977). Governing bodies, who hoped to turn the reef into a vast mining zone, battled grass-roots environmentalists in the 1970s for control over the use and management of the reef. The results of this conflict led to the creation of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in 1975, a protected spatial zone bounded by a notional line where mining and other activities were strictly prohibited. The boundary no longer works as intended: how does a notional line hold back a warming ocean that is indifferent to management plans, policy changes or zoning restrictions? In the 21st Century, the politics of coral time emerges as a battleground. The coring laboratory at AIMS is just one part of a much larger war fought “in the hallucinatory register of how the future is simulated” (Adams et al., 2009: 257). This has become a struggle over trajectories and timelines, as much as a war over emissions, ecosystem services, or even life itself. Part of that conflict is staged in laboratories like AIMS, located off a two-lane highway south of Townsville. The labour of the coral core scientist The air conditioner is broken, so I’ve wound the windows down. Outside the car, the air smells like burnt wood. Hundreds of fires are simultaneously raging across the state, burning millions of acres of bush land — an adumbration of the devastating “Black Summer” fires Australia will experience in 12 months. There’s a temptation to understand the air smelling of what some might call “temporal rupture” (Hamilton, 2016), but it’s really the smell of a much slower, longer transition, “a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (Fitz-Henry, 2017; Serres and Latour, 1995: 60). A thin gauze of smoke wraps the horizon in all directions. It’s so hot, fruit bats are dying as they hang from fig trees. Their small, furry bodies lie among the leaf litter. Newspapers report that a man fried an egg on his driveway. The front-page headline of a one local paper reads, in thick black letters: “Hotter than hell.” These descriptions of Townsville and its surroundings outline the contours of a timescape (Adam, 1998) transformed by the distinct logics of climactic changes, colonisation, militarisation, extraction, accumulation, and marine science. These logics are not the frame or setting in which coral time comes into being. In some cases, they are also the content of coral time itself. For such a significant facility, AIMS is easy to miss. On my first visit I overshoot the turn-off which leads to a winnowed two-lane road that runs beside a yellow sign warning of crocodiles. The AIMS facility is at the dead end of this road: a compound of buildings on a rocky coastal headland that looks over the Pacific Ocean. Built in 1972, the facility is tasked with the sustainable use and protection of Australia’s marine environment. Alongside rooms for researchers, wet laboratories, and a fully-fledged “sea simulator” that mimics present and future ocean conditions — I pass one tank labelled “2100”, with young branching corals learning to grow in an imagined copy of a future sea — is a small collection of rooms that houses the coral core lab. To the uninformed visitor, this series of small rooms looks like a stonemason’s workshop, with hollow drill bits and mineral fragments lying on metal benches. At the centre of the space is the archive, where more than 10,000 cores and fragments are spread across a series of metal shelves. Inside the lab, the air is cool. Around us, the technologies that produce the temporal structure of global climate science sit silent: machines for milling and drilling, machines that measure density, devices for reflecting light. The walls are covered in x-rays, images from sensory electron microscopes and photographs. “Hold this” says Lough. And she passes me a tube of calcium carbonate as long as my forearm and about 10 centimetres in diameter. It’s heavy, I say, like a rock. “That’s because it is”, she replies. “It’s calcium carbonate”. This almost-solid mineral mass was extracted vertically from a living coral colony with a hollow-barrelled drill. How do they do it? Lough directs me to a photograph on the wall behind us, past the customised milling machine from Taiwan (which slices cores thin for x-raying). In the image, washed in turquoise, two wetsuit-clad divers float vertically underwater around a boulder-shaped coral selected for coring. This is how cores like the one in my hands are extracted. The photograph was probably taken in the 1980s, Lough thinks, when AIMS first started coring “up and down the Great Barrier Reef”. In the photo, a drilling device resembling a tripod has been firmly attached to the top of the coral colony. A handle on the device allows the divers to lower a hollow drill into the core and extract a series of vertical tubes. Floating above the coral colony, the divers have their fists raised in excitement — the gesture of someone who has had a breakthrough. “That’s not an official dive sign as far as I’m aware” says Lough. Around us, lying silent in their metal shelves, are 10,000 coral fragments taken during these dive and drill expeditions. Lough does not see the pieces as disconnected fragments but sets of vertical columns that together form extended records of the recent and distant past, with time moving backward as she travels down through each assembled skeleton. For coral core scientists, a longer set of fragments from one colony means a longer proxy record, which means access to more time data and the possibility of producing a longer time series. As in other disciplines that rely on excavation — archaeology and geology — much coral coring work imagines time materializing vertically as the past appears through descents into stratigraphic depth (Simonetti, 2014, 2015). Analysts of coral cores enter coral time in a similar way, by “reading” down a vertical core. It’s a practice inherited from ice coring. Of the research on proxy records, anthropologists, historians of science and geographers have focused almost exclusively on ice coring. This focus is justified: many of the foundational techniques, technologies of imagination and temporal concepts required for working on incremental records were developed and deployed through ice coring research in the mid-20th century (Achermann, 2020; Isberg, 2018). Around this time, climate scientists turned toward the vertical, driven by geopolitical tensions, militarization, the Cold War and scientific endeavour (Achermann, 2020; Benson, 2020; Hardenberg and Mahony, 2020). It was an orientation borrowed, in part, from disciplines like archaeology or stratigraphy, and from the subterranean possibilities of oil drilling. Through ice coring work, the temporal structure of global climate science shifted, temporally and spatially, “from the horizontal to the vertical, from the present to deep time” (Isberg, 2018: 6; see also Achermann, 2020 and Antonello and Carey, 2017). The vertical became, according to Hardenberg and Mahony, “a proxy for the temporal” that enabled “epistemic revolutions to take place” (2020: 597, 603). But though this broad 20th-century story is well outlined, grounded perspectives at smaller scales are still missing: “how, for instance, does the vertical influence lab science? How does it inform the processes through which science represents the world? What are the implicit limits of a vertical dimension of science?” (Hardenberg and Mahony, 2020: 604). To consider questions like these and describe how coral cores and global climate science intersect in laboratories I will introduce three moments at AIMS when technical pressure was applied to coral cores as they became “pieces” in a planetary time-puzzle. In these moments, dimensional friction emerged through simultaneously discursive, technical, and imaginative problems that lured coral core scientists (and ethnographers of laboratory times) deeper and deeper inside the coral mineral matrix, into the carbonate structures that form reefs. These problems engage the morphology of massive coral colonies growing on the Great Barrier Reef, the shifting growth axes in extracted skeletons, and lastly, the volumetric “weave” of carbonate coral structures — problems that suggest the vertical is an inadequate analytic for capturing the complex ways that corals and global climate science intersect.

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anniekoh · 6 years ago

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weaponizing maps

More proof that fetishizing “knowledge” (or transparency) without considering the political powerlines is irresponsible if not outright exploitative. (Previous post on “trojan horses of participatory mapping”)

Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas (2015) by Joe Bryan and Denis Wood

“'Map or be mapped,' the saying goes among those associated with the wave of participatory mapping that began in the 1980s. Weaponizing Maps gives this saying radically new meaning, with equal parts analytic depth and political charge. Readers inclined to use maps for causes of social justice will proceed fully informed of the daunting forces they are up against—from the counterinsurgency designs of the world’s most powerful military to ostensibly progressive scholars who deploy the fine tradition of participatory mapping toward dubious ends.” —Charles R. Hale, PhD, Director, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, University of Texas at Austin

“Joe and Denis trace how maps, over and over and over again, perform vital discursive work, how they transform territory into property, how they create facts, and how those facts seem to, time and time again, serve the particular interest of the state and/or capital at the expense of certain groups of people.” —Human Geography

From Chapter 8 (p 148-149) on the Bowman Expeditions in Weaponizing Maps

In retrospect, it’s easy— perhaps too easy— to see the México Indígena project as an inevitable weaponization of indigenous mapping... “indigenous communities” whose collective rights to property, recognized in the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, were actively slated for conversion to individual titles under the auspices of sweeping land reforms introduced in 1993.

... Most of these lands were formally recognized as ejidos, created through the restitution of lands to agricultural workers upon the dissolution of large estates or haciendas. Another category of communal property, the comunidad agraria or comunidad indígena, recognized existing forms of communal land tenure and often closely followed colonial-era arrangements. Both categories worked well enough on paper, accommodating revolutionary demands that rights to land belonged to those who worked it, and establishing a regime of collective property rights that functioned alongside private property rights. In practice they proved problematic for state officials who, among other challenges, were notoriously vexed in their efforts to map these lands and properly register their ownership. Their indeterminacies and ambiguities created what historian Raymond Craib has termed a “fugitive landscape” that at once escaped official control and abounded with opportunities for malfeasance and illegality. In the wave of the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s, Mexican officials targeted this this fugitive landscape for “regularization.”

...To achieve these goals— of dissolving communal lands and registering private property— Mexican officials created PROCEDE [an acronym for the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Lots]. As with land regularization programs elsewhere, PROCEDE required the production of new surveys and maps as a crucial first step toward regularization. These surveys and maps did not necessarily reflect on-the-ground tenure arrangements so much as create, in the abstract, an imagined order on which regularization could be modeled. The program had immediate and far-reaching implications for rural Mexico that went well beyond the simple titling of land. As the México Indígena team put it, “For thousands of indigenous communities in Mexico, the PROCEDE program represents a silent revolution, undoing social property and changing communal ownership patterns that in some cases date back to pre-Colombian times.” Much as allotment policies were used to dissolve tribally held lands in the United States in the late 1800s, PROCEDE actively sought to incorporate indigenous lands in Mexico into the market through registration of individual rights and subsequent privatization. The effort amounted to assimilation by economic means, relying on the market to overcome centuries of political and economic marginalization frequently justified in terms of race.

Raymond Craib’s research looks fascinating by the way.

Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (2004)

In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or “state fixation”—with determining and “fixing” geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors, and metropolitan geographers traversed a “fugitive landscape” of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory.

The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico•s agrarian reform, Journal of Historical Geography (2010)

Abstract: The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico•s agrarian reform In the immediate aftermath of Mexico’s revolution (1910–1920), increasing numbers of surveyors, agronomists, and agrarian bureaucrats headed out to the countryside to implement the agrarian reforms promised in the decree of 1915 and the Constitution of 1917. In this essay I ask a very basic set of questions about the use, evaluation, and making of spatial knowledge in a revolutionary context: when bureaucrats went in to the field after the revolution, what did they do? What roles, if any, did local inhabitants themselves play in the processes that unfolded? And what constituted the acceptable body of knowledge -- the archive -- necessary to resolve persistent boundary questions that impeded the reform?

Relocating Cartography, Postcolonial Studies (2009)

481-482: The scholarly trend in recent decades has been to view scientific activities such as surveying and mapmaking as two cogs in an imperial machine*a ‘scopic regime’*grinding across far-flung colonies and distant landscapes...

The importance of such work should not be underestimated. For one, it initiated (or at least dramatically extended) a turn away from a focus on maps as generally mimetic representations, as unproblematic ‘statements of facts about the earth’s surface’; rather, it sought to situate maps within a social, cultural and political world and as products of practices that were integral to the history of cartography

Second, such work served as a corrective to the celebratory, legitimation narratives*populated by bold explorers, objective scientists, and mimetic maps*characteristic of much of the history of cartography.

485: Here [in his book Relocating Modern Science] Raj intersects with a welcome, if long-overdue, shift in emphasis in the history of cartography in recent years: a recognition that the history of cartography needs to pay attention to the role of people other than imperial scientists, explorers, and bureaucrats in the acquisition, circulation and creation of spatial knowledge and representations.

#cartography #critical geography #geography #mexico

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ruinanxi · 3 years ago

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Public Sphere of Coffeehouse

...the coffeehouse emerged as a principal institution of the public sphere, a channel and site of public communication and as an arena linking the socio-cultural with the political. In an attempt to comprehend Ottoman public life through coffeehouse patronage as a social practice, the emphasis is on the spatiality rather than the temporality of this institution...

...Jean Chardin's opinion the degree to which freedom of speech was allowed in the coffeehouses of the Orient was unique in the world (cited in Dawud 1992, 1).

...The expressive side of the public sphere and its spatialisation in public spaces, like coffeehouses, and especially the theatricality and heterotopology involved in such and similar sites were conducive to the formation of forms of sociability that make up the public sphere...

----The Publicness and Sociabilities of the Ottoman Coffeehouse

...In Habermas’s account, the public sphere is founded in its simple accessibility to individuals, who come together without hierarchy in an equality of debate. Through their discussions, first of literature, and later of news and politics, the individuals who assemble in the coffeehouse come to form a new public culture...

----An introduction to the coffeehouse: A discursive model

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modalities-of-care · 3 years ago

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Question: Aims of the proposed research programme

Proposed Title: Infrastructural Cosiness: At Home in the Network

Background and Rationale

I am proposing a PhD by artistic practice that will aim to rethink the spatial and ideological form of the home. I will focus on life within the contemporary city, extending domestic research towards a more urban condition that is increasingly shaped by the functions of networked technology. I believe that we are currently witnessing a not only a housing crisis in the UK but a much more widespread crisis of the home. We must interrogate our inherited structures of domesticity and familiality in order to progress the feminist task of constructing emancipatory and radical alternatives. A key proponent in this will be the role of technological developments, and how we might harness them towards re-thinking the spatial and relational forms of domestic arrangement.

My recent artistic output has explored these issues through installations of video and object-based works, performances and events that prompt and depict moments of rupture within the familiar domestic and networked urban experience. Constellations of collaged videos, domestic appliances, and figures made of soap have served to explore the intimate matters of living together, personal care, household maintenance, wellness, and the effects of globalization upon living space. In addition to gallery-based works, I have produced online projects and discursive events such as Comfort Zones – a series of symposia held without permission in the showrooms of various IKEA stores. These two strands of my practice both inform and draw from one another; with events and interventions in physical and virtual commercial spaces acting as a stepping stone between theory and practice.

Research Questions

The key questions I will be exploring through this PhD are:

- What is the significance of “home” within our current networked society?

Homes have become multi-identity, multi-task environments that no longer offer the stable “retreat” of past forms of domesticity. Is the home as a place of retreat a necessity and how might we successfully “retreat” within our networked domestic and urban context?

- How might we make ourselves “at home” within the network itself? Can a transient or virtual space be “home”?

Our hybrid digital and physical bodies have been incorporated into circuits that produce a new kind of digital home.

Research Methodology

I want to utilise the discursive and imaginative space of art to rethink the spatial and ideological form of the home. Art is closely involved in developments within the domestic and urban landscape, with its position at the front line of globalization; as a prototype of immaterial labour; and as an integral cog in the process of gentrification by which cities around the world are transformed and new lifestyle modes are promoted. Art provides a complex position from which to explore these issues. In what we might call hyper-gentrification, property developers in London and beyond are using art as a tool to “place-make” and generate cultural capital and thus more valuable assets. I intend to examine these developments alongside the role online platforms such as Airbnb have played in transforming the home as the fortress of the family, into the home as marketable asset.

My practice-based research will initially take the form of a series of discursive events and interventions that utilise the particularities of certain urban and domestic locations in order to facilitate conversations around these issues. These experiments will take place in both physical and virtual spaces; generating ideas and content for the development of object-based and video works. Working fluidly between spaces - both physical and virtual; private and public - fits my theoretical concerns as it allows an active exploration of the effects of an increasingly virtual architecture of the everyday upon the spatial and ideological forms of the domestic. Studio based production and experimentation will then lead towards the development of a new body of work that will take the final form of an installation that will serve to propose future spatial and ideological forms of the “home”.

Time Schedule

Year one: Review key literature on meaning and construct of home and effects of network upon spatial and social units . Research how artists are addressing the current domestic landscape; instigate a series of context-specific events/interventions.

Year two: In-depth experimentation with object and video forms in the studio; researching architectural theory and practice that propose new spatial forms for the home.

Year three: I will draw conclusions, and the work will come together through written thesis and exhibition that proposes potential “homes” for the future.

#phd #funded #ahrc #home

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