First draft essay

WHAT ARE YOU READING :

“Malinche and the end of the world”, Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Malinche is a mythological figure from the Latin American traditional history. She was the daughter of a noble Aztec family and she was given as a gift to European traders during the Spanish colonization of the Mesoamerica. She became the lover of Cortés, and helped him to interpret the Aztec language and culture. Thanks to her the Christian messages of the Spaniards melted with the pre-colonization mythologies. A new world was created by building a bridge between the two different civilizations. She’s indeed the symbol of the end of a world (the Aztec tradition) and the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic world. Only when a world collapse in favor of a new universe of meaning , we can start seeing new possibilities. This story is describing the situation which we are experiencing now: with the crisis of the democratic system, the institution on new bio-financial capitalistic economic structures, with the automation of our cognitive potencies, the emerge of new conflicts and new bio-fascists and aggressive identitarian movements. We are still not able to translate these new codes of our modernity into a compatible form of connection. Only in deactivating our old ways of communication and perception (like all forms of empathy, solidarity, irony and compassion) we can start assimilating the language of the digital automaton. Berardi ends the text with a series of questions like:

“Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton?”

“Can consciousness act on neural evolution?”

“Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge?”

“Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?”

Is this assimilation really necessary and are our human cognitive capacities able to connect with the functionally complex structures of our automatic technologies?

WHY ARE YOU INTERESTED :

I found interest this text in relation the the research that I’m doing on the meaning of “mobility” in the globally extended society in which we live.

In a world where national boundaries are collapsing in the name of a transnational circulation of ideas, languages and popular culture where lies the meaning of being public?

The existence of a public and free zone is it easily builded in a global village?

Which are the contradictions within the concept of globality regarding our necessity of moving freely in (public) space?

Our economic system is the paradigm of mobility: the movements of capital are quick as a flash. The abstraction and proportion of our financial economy cannot be assimilated to the way we live and move in our public space. Mobility is enforced by our globalized world, however it is impossible to ignore the fact that mobilization is not equally distributed. Our physical movements can still be blocked, arrested, checked, surveilled and planned. In analyzing the structure of the airport I found interesting to bring its architecture and functionality as paradigm of this paradox: the airport is a liminal place where different cultures are crossing and facing each other. In order to limit and control this “intersectional movement” lots of surveillance and disciplinary structures are imposed in places like the airports.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO MAKE :

My first idea was to make a fake guide on “how to get Arrested in airports”. A sort of choreography of illegal movements that analyze and reflects upon the system of quantifiability of people’s intents. The choreography will be published on a little instruction book of movements that could be distributed to the passengers at the entrance of an airport. (I was thinking about Schiphol, inventor of the Biometrics for surveillance) The publication should be accompanied by a physical performance within the space of the airport. Playing and imitating the regulations of the airport without getting into real troubles. At the moment I’m studying all the different surveillance dispositive that are usually present in airports, and from this analysis I want to define a sort of itinerary that emphasize and go through all the different technologies used in airport to limit our movements.

research strands: lit of texts to follow on from this.