Special Issue: Research Notes
METHODS | Structure of the publication
*1st PART: RESEARCH [27 Sep - 16 Oct ]
During this period of time, all the XPub students are researching and finding topics to explore and study in the publication.
*2nd PART: PRACTICING - EXPERIMENTING - CREATING CONTENTS [17 Oct- 24 Oct]
From those topics, the creation of the contents starts. The idea is to gather a wide range of issues and transform them in different kinds of forms. From interview 'till essays, journalistic reports or fictions, experiments and performances with a public with their guidelines written in form of manual.
*3nd PART: INTERACTION ! [17 Oct- 24 Oct]
If the topic needs an interaction with a public, in this part an intervention to involve other people in the process will happen.
*4nd PART: CONSTRUCTION OF THE PUBLICATION [24 Oct - 06 Dec]
The last part consist in the physical construction of the publication: the moment where all the contents and the experimentations should be organized in a structured form.
MANIFESTO | Personal Intents
Talking about scarcity means recognize the wideness and the hypothetical paradoxes of the significance of the term. From the french “escarcete”, “scarce” is something restricted in its quantity, insufficient in satisfying a need.
The significance of the term depends on a series of factors like
- the geographical context
- the economic system
- the politics.
It goes without saying that from these factors some other questions are popping out:
- Can we talk about a global scarcity?
- Which is the economical system who causes scarcity ?
- Who are the people that are suffering from a situation of scarcity?
- Which are the existents regulations that are trying to solve the problem?
Modernity turned into a “hypermodernity” where the idea of an infinite progress seems to be the major faith.
This infinite escalation to an ideal form of technological, social and economical progress is strictly linked to an idea of catastrophe: our current idea of progress has “derailed or is on the wrong track”, in sense that the capability of our aspiration to an infinite acceleration is not sustainable, and it never was. Our system of patriarchalism, privatization, class domination and capitalism produced the scarcity that we’re going to meet and we are currently exploring.
Redundant technologies, hierarchical societies, exploitation and domination are the key words of our era: there’s a common feeling of oppression and scarce that comes from our abundance of resources and technologies.
What if we would start to reconsider all of these necessities that we apparently have?
The enormous possibilities of our time could maybe begin to mature and start to being distribute in different ways?
Could be possible to turn this “western obsession” of being privileged into a tool to produce liberation and new potentialities?
What if the economic growth of our society will leave its confident facade and however start to be seen in its transparency of being an impossible and fake system of development?
The unsustainability of our system has become common knowledge. It creates a sense of another history characterized by a subtle intuition of “what is that could be otherwise” if abundance will be managed in other ways. The problem of capitalism is that those two consciousness, realizing which are the problems and imagining new solutions, are living in constant tension. They cannot really fit together. The actuality of our domination system cannot definitely match with the potentiality of living in freedom.
There’s a necessity of reviewing of all our parameters in order to find new forms of dialogue and collectivity. Scarcity is disconnection, separation, financial speculation, poverty of intellect and sociality, cultural reductionism, uniformity, mass production and totalitarian politics.
What if we start to reconnect our cognitive potencies in new bodies of collective imagination, what if the unimaginable becomes imaginable?
In order to make a little step in this sense, we write this publication: a collective embodied encyclopedia of methods, analysis and speculations around possible new forms to discuss and talk about scarcity.
ISSUES | Topics and contents
Notes and research questions. Texts from research materials.
Social effects of technology and delocalization: necessity to reclaim a new sense of urbanity?
“THE GLOBAL CITY. De- Nationalizing of Time and Space” Saskia Sassen
Intersecting temporalities and spacialities, GLOBAL CITIES: series of new economic and cultural projects.
New politics: opening for new dynamics and actors from the unbundling of the national specialties and temporalities.
National space was never considered as a unitary condition, even though institutionally constructed as such. concept of “de-nationalization”: concept that cannot be reduced to a geographic conception as was the notion in the heads of the generals who fought the wars for nationalizing of specific institutional arenas.
Is inadequate to understand the spatiality of globalization only in terms of hyper mobility and space/time compression.
The global city is emblematic for the vast concentration of hyper mobile dematerialized financial instrument and the concentration of material and place-bound resources that can circulate fast al over the globe. combination between spatial dispersal of economic activities and telematic global integration: strategic role for major cities in the current world economy.
There is no purely virtual firm or human, even if we are relocating physical activities to digital spaces and locating digital capacities into human body.
The strategy of global economy is based on the play between two monster/master temporalities: the collapsing temporality, the national state as an historic institution, and the new temporality, the economic globalization.
From this intersection new economic dynamics/ opportunities can be thought as partly de-nationalized temporalities.
Dominant narrative of economic globalization = narrative of eviction.
Place no longer matters, the only type of worker that matters is the highly educated professional.
City has emerged as a site for new claims, “organizational commodity” for global capital.
WHOSE CITY IS THIS?
A new political opening to new capacities across national boundaries.
Global capital and the new immigrants are two major instances of transnationalized categories
Re-visitation of the old-hierarchies: the next scale in terms of scale is no longer how integration is achieved.
The local now transacts directly with the global / the global install itself in locals and the global is constituted by multiple locals.
Necessity of re-thinking the distinction between global and local.
New spaciality: “deterritorialized form of proximity contains multiple territorial moments.”
Immigrants: NEW CONNECTIONS with NEW COMMUNITIES within a cross-border network.
Culture of immigrants: deterritorialize local cultures, not predicated on locational proximity.
New significance of context: is not anymore related to the surrounding, but with the global.
New strategy: cross-border geography constituted through multiple locals.
New spaciality: CROSS BORDER NETWORK OF SPECIFIC SITES.
New constructed zone: inhabited/constitued by multiple units or locals -flow of transactions-
The global city is a function of the global network (constitued by hyperconcentration of activites and resources)
We need to recognize what is the local nowadays. Specifying the new territorial and institutional conditions of the local in a global and digital era.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CONTEXT?
Public space and migration:
Decolonization and migration Relations between migration, translocality, and urban transformations
Relations between decolonization and cyberspace.
"The Network Society. A Cross Cultural Perspective." Manuel Castells
The network society is global!
It works and integrates a multiplicity of cultures and contexts.
Communication, Media and the Public Space:
Network Society: pattern of networking, flexibility, recombination of codes, ephemeral symbolic communication.
Cultural expressions of this society: hypertext = multimedia system.
Media in network society= large variety of channels of communication, which increasing interactivity.
Inclosure of communication in the space of the electronic hypertext= effect on politic. Media have become public space.
The commons of society are made by electronic networks.
Local experience are now fragmented, customized, individualized.
The socialization of society takes place in the networked, digitized, interactive space of media and network communication.
Media are dictating politics and policies.
"The capsule and the network" / Lieven De Cauter
“Architecture is man’s ultimate medium”.
“The more mobile we become, the more capsular our behavior: we are sedentary nomads”.
Capsularization: “the greater the increase in physical and informational speed, the greater the human need for capsules”. (= container. A tool or extension of the body as artificial environment. “A capsule is a medium that has become, a milieu, an environment”)
Screens are mental capsules.
World of screens = capsular world.
Capitalism has become transcendental in intensity and extensivity. = liberalization - deregularization - privatization.
Shift from industrial to informational capitalism = consequence: social exclusion, disconnected population groups, ghettoization of the “offline” populations.
Deindustrialization - Individualization of labour - disintegration of patriarchal family : main processes behind the rise of the 4th world.
New territoriality: demographic growth and migration waves, global economy and destruction of the welfare state, DECENTRALIZED NETWORK as logic of society. (“Castells: Black holes of informational capitalism”)
Individualism = official ideology of Neo-liberiberalism.
Consumer = isolated, atomized individual.
Heterotopia / Foucault : term opposed to Utopia = existent but enclosed inversion of the continuos space of daily order.
Space of network = space of heterotopia : “ In a territory in which the space of flows or the non-place prevails, the heterotopia is the paradigm of simulated places to be or to stay “.
Proliferation of heterotopias places and urbanism.
The growth of the outside the capsule /( Africa, ghettos, Fourth world, illegal immigrants …) enhance our logic of spectacle (Debord) and simulation. I mmigrants and refugees are not citizens, strange status of being in between inside and outside, between BIOS ( community life) and ZOE (bare life), between law and outlaw, between human being and homo sacer (figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual., Agamben).
Camp = the paradigm of planetary biopolitics
Concentration camp = extraterritorialization of a given group
Camp = extraterritorial enclave within the territory of a nation, locus of EXCLUSION and CONCENTRATION.
Refugee camps = humanitarian concentration camps
Wall of Ceuta and Melilla = the most painful urban intervention in Europe since the Berlin wall.
New dominant spacial structure = space of FLOWS
We still don’t live in the network, but in capsule: all the networks functions with capsule.
All the networks are ruled by control:transition from a disciplinary society to a control society.
Control society : control is externalized, transferred to sophisticated machines
Globalization : technological logic of capsularization + logic of exclusion in a polarized society.
IDEA:
Work on the topic: migration and cyberspace and analyze it in a sort of public performance / game / participative design workshop
“Is there a home in cyberspace? The Internet in migrants’ everyday life and the emergence of global communities”
“People, as long as they are physical beings, cannot but live and act in space, and the spaces they create reflect and shape social life in its totality.”
“Space is constituted by social relations and transformed along with them.”
FLOWS AND PLACES / Castells
Time has taken on new characteristics in the network society.
Leibniz argued, that space is created in between things, and therefore there can be no such thing as empty space, not the least because this would be a sub- stance without properties. It is the objects that create space.
Space is constituted by the relationship among these objects. Without objects, there is nothing in between, hence there is no space.
The now dominant informational mode of communication is giving new meaning to ways of conceptualizing the world which are in many of their aspects much older.
Space, then, is a product of society.
Technologies have always shaped the social reality of space and time.
Media and Migration through the Lens of Mediatization and Transnationalism
Lecture of Magnus Andersson at Malmö University, Sweden
What is fixed and what is mobile in processes of mediation, migration and identification?
The media are vital since they bring about work of imagination and they create interplay between absence and presence Yet, they are not boundless.
The ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of places has traditionally been the implicit point of departure for migration theory, which entails a focus on places rather than mobility.
Gregory Bateson. Morale and National Character
Not the people but rather the circumstances under which they live differ from one community to another .
We have to deal with differences either in historical background or in current conditions
It is possible, in fact, to argue that since the same circumstances never occur for individuals of different cultural back-ground, it is therefore unnecessary to invoke such abstractions as national character.
At any given moment, the behavioral characteristics of any mammal, and especially of man, depend upon the previous experience and behavior of that individual.
We know of the significance of learned character from other types of data, and it is this knowledge which compels us to consider the additional "entity."
Arbitrary nature of national boundaries.
The individual, whether from a physiological or a psycho-logical point of view, is a single organized entity, such that all its "parts" or "aspects" are mutually modifiable and mutually interacting; and second, that a community is like-wise organized in this sense.
Is, to me, inconceivable that two differing groups could exist side by side in a community with-out some sort of mutual relevance between the special characteristics of one group and those of the other.