Re: [-empyre-] Viewing Axalotls

["arteonline" <arteonline@arteonline.arq.br>]

> Hi Regina,
>
> Reading the "Axalotls" story by Cortazar in your piece "Viewing Axalotls"
at
> http://arteonline.arq.br/viewing_axolotls , I am reminded somewhat of
Franz
> Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis," where the speaker turns into a giant
> cockroach (the Kafka text is at
> http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm , for those who might
> like to check it out). But the transformation of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's
> story seems quite different from the transformation in Cortazar's story.
In
> Kafka's story, the transformation is an absurdly terrible thing, a life
> wasted to the point where it is somehow only natural that he has turned
into
> a big disgusting bug. Whereas the transformation in Cortazar to Axalotls
> does not seem to have those overtones. I wonder if you would care to
comment
> on that aspect of the story and your use of the Cortazar story?

I think that  there is a large difference between these books. Kafka is
Expressionist and Cortazar belong to "Magic Realism". I think that the story
of Kafka is much more social than Cortazar story. If you know the amazing
expressionist movie "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang (1926), you will see that in
that movie human beings  were not cockroaches, but ants/bugs. I think
Kafka's story and  "Metropolis" are linked with the Industrial Revolution.
The text below shows this:

"The machine does not liberate the worker from his/her work, but turns
his/her work empty of content. In the manufacture and in the workmanship,
the worker uses the tool. In the factory, he serves  the machine. In the
manufacture the workers constitute members of an alive organism. In the
factory, there is a dead organism , independent of them, to which the
workers are incorporated as an alive appendix."
(Karl Marx, The Capital)

Gregor Samsa turned into a cockroach because he felt himself  as a cockroach
and
cockroaches/men are needed in those times... (Only in those times?!...)

Cortazar story, I think speaks much more about the impossibility of
communication between human beings and animals, but more than this it speaks
about the impossibilty of to be the other, in this case I think that it can
be enlarged to human beings, the impossibility to really understand the
other. I am not speaking about prejudice, I am speaking about alterity.
Alterity is always the ethnograph / anthropologist's object of study . It is
just this that I try to clarify in this part of the text I sent this
morning:

"Everyone sees the world in his or her own likeness and therefore the
dialogue between "Me and the World" is different from person to person." So
that,  there are many realities or better than this is to ask: Is reality
possible? Perhaps Reality is really Magic?

However if you begin think, you will discover another fundamental difference
between Kafka and Cortazar. Gregor Samsa turn into cockroach and disapeared,
only the cockroach keeps on in the story. Cortazar "man" or my "woman"  turn
into Axolotl but keep on being man/woman and it is just this that I think is
fantastic because it was a notable intuition of Virtual Reality and in this
case the story is deeply social : Me and my Avatar Woman. If you think in
this way you can think about Ideology or about Media building Ideology or
you. Here a question must be done:

_Who builds Ideology? Who says that 2+2=4 in our today's world ?

> Also, I note that Cortazar's "Axalotls" is from his collection "The End of
> the Game" and your piece has a kind of a game in it. Is this coincidence?

Yes, it is.  Almost everybody like games. All my books have a game, the
first four have old games and the next four will have modern games. The
first that has a  computer  game (very simple) is " Viewing Axolotls".
However, my games are not really games, they are a way to show ideas that I
consider important in a ludic way. Computers are successfull because they
are
ludic among other things. By the way, one of the Autumn news of the Museum
of the Essential and Beyond That  is a Show of Art Games.

Cortazar book has this name because of one of the stories of the book.

 Regina
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