dear soft-skinned city or country dwellers,
and – following Diego Hernandez's archaeo-logical position on cities as
evolutionary
"sedentary resilient organisms" (!) – one might add: dear farmers and
villagers ("Los aldeanos") in Nueva York, Montevideo ("a clear example of
non-sustainable-beautiful-architecture, as Leandro
suggested), Jerusalem, Johannesburg, the Rio de la Plata regions,
elsewhere....
the problems are even larger than we thought.
One could assume that the economic crises, and the increasing social divisions
and global divisions and regional economic divisions and discrepancies
will not benefit the "city".
Re-reading the earlier literary references to the invisible cities, Diego's
"city" introduces another construct (but one based on Darwinist
security/survival it seems), or proposition, even if grown and sedimented
through long and changing histories of concentration. The crises will not much
longer benefit the cities, nor the human rights, community functions and
"post-network civilities," nor architects and philosophers, nor occupiers and
exhumers and forensic experts, nor indeed our bones (or those of our ancestors
in graves) and our "archives" and performance "repertoires" , to use a title
of a book from the founder of the Instituto Hemisférico de Performance y
Política (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas, 2003).
I was tempted to write on exhumation, after reading Ana's comment on folks in
Uruguay waiting to hear who might yet be identified (having been 'disappeared"
under military dictatorial regime).
But I know nothing about exhumation.
When I went t look for a description (Uruguayan Peace Commission /
http://www.trial-ch.org/index.php?id=974&L=5), I found the historical archive,
e.g. >In 1985, a “Commission of Inquiry into the situation of disappeared
persons and the events leading up to their disappearances” was created, but it
did not come to any convincing conclusion>> reporting political failure of the
Uruguayan "truth and reconciliation commission," ( as it was called
euphemistically in South Africa),
and then also clinical descriptors of a Dr Horacio E. Solla on >>the
utilization of two techniques used for the identification of human skeletal
remains: the traditional technique of facial reproduction employed by forensic
anthropologists, and the more recent technique of DNA pattern analysis, which
is usually utilized by biochemists. Both techniques were applied to a unique
case to analyze and identify the skeletal remains of a child who disappeared in
the Uruguayan city of Salinas in February 1991.>>
After reading the clinical descriptor system, I felt encouraged to go back to
the issue of phanstasmagoria (Benjamin), trying to understand our attraction to
the banality of ruins and ruination of whatever social utopias
there have been; and perhaps "resilient organism" (in light of Fukushima) is
another allegory doomed to fail. And yet, above all, I was trying to follow
some of the inspiring and positive claims made here, and wishing to thank
Simon and Aristide for their insistence. Simon's insistence the Physiognomie -
or "anatomy" -- of an affective network inside/without the "occupation machine"
is very thought-provoking, and I was trying to read Simon and Aristide
together,
now in the light and reflection of the writings of Alejandro, Diego (the crisis
exploding inside the city walls, as a Trojan horse), Sabela and Alicia
>>Diego schreibt:
Sin embargo, la crisis explota adentro de las murallas de las ciudades, como un
caballo de Troya construido por los propios ingenieros japoneses, en medio de
sus apacibles ciudades
>>
How can we re-turn this image to the strong propositions made by Simon (about
the "molecular revolution in progress") and Aristide?
Simon schreibt:
>>
This is why I asked about the city as the anatomy of the network. And far from
wanting to defend OCCUPY or perplex I wanted to include affect - and indeed
sentiment - in the genetic conditions of the Simulacrum, which, with the
contribution of networking in its broadest sense as communication, facilitates
the habitation of the city as a sensate spatium - as it is lived feelingly and
concretised in the Sensorium.
>>
Can you speak more about how this sensorium is politically effective to
counterbalance the very symptoms of simulacrum hype (affective intensities of
the commodity fetishisms and market imperatives to sell ourselves out)?
Antonas schreibt:
..<< Protocols are meant to be functional small scale legislations that rule a
space through new norms. The problem will be who will have the right to act
with such an even limited civil power in order to make urban protocols valid on
a specific urban background.
New community functions will be necessary in order to prescribe a protocol or
to install it temporarily. The Internet can provide the grouping system in
order that concrete communities of inhabitants decide to introduce and test a
protocol. The municipalities may act as the legalizing power that could accept
or refuse such protocols to run in the city. Protocols can be proposed through
the net and be accepted from different interested communities; urban protocols
organize independent autonomous communal structures; they can also regulate the
relationship between the private sector and specific communities.
In this case, the protocol formations will describe a similar task to the one
we have in the net when we try to elaborate interesting communication platforms
in order to represent or organize wiki functions. We run analogous risks that
the whole setting of rules can be absorbed by the market. But if there is no
other alternative for communities to act in the city, then it will be only the
market to operate, to calculate and to take advantage of every communal
function if we do not invent a systematic reply to this inoperative function.
The communities themselves could make profit out of their own creativity
through the net. Systems of alternative economies could be tested and
implemented. A post-network civility could be under preparation if we could
better describe and propose new legislative tools in order that our projects
for a different society may function. We need the operational formats to
undertake this work and this is what the urban protocols propose foremost.
>>>
What if the very notion of community, however, is still an incomplete social
utopia that needs to be sculpted, as there undoubtedly are interested if
fractured shareholder communities, and other groups and other disaffected
bodies, and what Eric Kluitenberg calls "insular electronic circulations"
("Legacies of Tactical Media") that may not flow well together ? You surprised
me when you displayed so much belief in protocol formation by
"citizens"/civilians and at the same time evoke a "post-network civility" -
what kind of different society are you imagining, after the network, where you
and her and me are making our own protocols? for what? what do "independent
autonomous communal structures" do to survive?
respectfully
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
Kluitenberg's publication "Legacies of Tactical Media" is available online
(download):
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/network-notebooks/no-5-legacies-of-tactical-media/
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