Re: [-empyre-] Forward from Mariam Ghani: translation + minding thegaps

["ricardo miranda zuniga" <ricardo@ambriente.com>]

A couple weeks ago I attended an opening lecture and discussion for a
weekend long workshop at 16 Beaver, NYC - "Continental Drift" with Brian
Holmes ( http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.html ).  The workshop was
dedicated to mapping tactics of resistance against current global
hegemony.  

In his opening lecture, Brian discusses the U.S. construction of large
global economic blocs since the end of WWII, beginning with the 1944
Bretton Woods Monetary System (international marketing system - U.N.,
World Bank - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system ), to the
1948-52 Marshall Plan... to eventually establish today's tri-dominant
economic system with the U.S. dollar, the Euro and the Yen.

I feel that Brian's questions and proposals are too closely aligned to
the topic of our discussion to not put it forth as we near the end of
the month.  Below I've copied Brian's overview to the project that he is
engaged in.  It seems to me that Brian's project is invaluable in
considering our roles as net savvy cultural producers that must
investigate/utilize these liminal zones that Mariam and Ian have
discussed and grab as much of that 2% net traffic for cultural
resistance, representation and engagement - be it through ambiguity or
in-your-face tactics.  Afterall, we play a role in articulating the
border zones of the net and forms of engagement through artistic
production.  It is through creative production that we can choose to
either mediate "spaces for the partly visible and invisible" or to
disrupt the normative borders that are manifested both within the net
itself and that which the net mirrors.  Also through engagement and
production we play a role in the formulation of an ethics of online
cultural translation. 

Overview for Continental Drift, Brian Holmes:
http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=205&Itemid=125

"Continental integration refers to the constitution of enormous
production blocs ? and particularly, to NAFTA and the EU (while
nervously awaiting the configuration of a full-fledged Asian bloc around
Japan and China).

But continental drift means you find Morocco in Finland, Caracas in
Washington, Latins in Americans, "the West" in "the East" ? and so forth
in every direction. These are the metamorphic paradoxes of contemporary
power.

The continental blocs are functioning governmental units one scale up
from the nation-state. They represent specific attempts to articulate
and manage the vast constructive and destructive energies that have been
unleashed by the last four decades of technological development, from
the introduction of the worldwide container transport system in the
sixties, all the way to the emergence of widespread satellite
transmission in the eighties and the Internet in our time. Military
strategies, the competitive rush for markets, but also the uncertainty
and turbulence of the neoliberal globalization process itself has led
capitalistic elites to seek forms of territorial stabilization ? however
violent this "stabilization" may be. This means re-organizing, not just
spaces and flows, but also hearts and minds, whether in the centers of
accumulation or on the peripheries. We are all affected, wherever we are
living.

The main hypothesis I want to put out here is that the two
really-existing blocs ? NAFTA and the EU ? are both developing not only
a functioning set of institutions, but also a dominant form of
subjectivity, adapted to the new scale. This form of subjectivity is
offered to or imposed upon all those who still live only at the national
level, or on the multiple edges or internal peripheries of the bloc, so
as to integrate them. At the same time it serves to rationalize ? or to
mask ? the concomitant processes of exploitation, alienation, exclusion
and ecological devastation. In what different ways does this integration
of individual and cultural desire take place? How is it resisted or
opposed? How to imagine an excess over the normative figures of
continentalization? Where are the escape hatches, the lines of flight,
the alternatives to bloc subjectivity? And what types of effects could
these exert on the constituted systems?

To answer such questions in any meaningful way requires several
different levels of investigation. First, the driving forces of the
globalization process ? including neoliberal doctrine, the globalized
financial system, the transnational institutions and Imperial
infrastructures such as the Internet or the GPS satellite mapping system
? have to be identified and observed in operation. Second, the evolving
forms of territorial governance and the constantly shifting territorial
limits of the major continental blocs have to be described and
differentiated from each other. Third, the dominant forms of
subjectivity in each bloc - the models of success and jouisssance - have
to be characterized, using the tools of social psychology. But the most
interesting and probably the most urgent thing is to conduct singular
and transversal investigations on the margins of these majority
formations, to see how people are reacting, innovating, resisting and
fleeing.

The goal, then, is to map out the majority models of self and group
within each of the emerging continental systems, to see how they
function within the megamachines of production and conquest ? and at the
same time, to cross the normative borders they put into effect, in order
to trace microcartographies of difference, dissent, deviance and
refusal. For that, it's necessary to travel and to collaborate, to
invent concepts and also set-ups, ways of working. One tactic is to
juxtapose sociological arguments with activist inventions and artistic
experiments. Another is to crisscross the languages, and even better,
the families of languages, and to reside in the gaps between their truth
claims and sensoriums. But still another is just to drift and see what
happens. The ideas of Felix Guattari, particularly in Chaosmosis and the
untranslated study, Cartographies schizoanalytiques, can provide a kind
of disorienting compass for these attempts to articulate something
subjectively and collectively, outside the existing frames.

Obviously, this kind of project is scientifically "impossible." No
conceivable group of researchers, and certainly not an ad-hoc operation,
could possibly synthesize the varieties of knowledge needed at these
scales. This is where a de facto censorship begins to operate, with all
kinds of consequences. To accept the impossibility is to condemn oneself
to ignorance, not only of the contemporary macrocosm (the world-space),
but also of the dynamics of your own microcosm (what happens in your
head, what pulses in your veins). So we're gonna try the project
nonetheless.

Modularity and experimentalism will be the strategies for eluding any
tacit censorship of this irrational desire to know. Modularity, because
it refuses the totalizing construction and always leaves room for an
extra module to be inserted in a line of questioning, completing it,
problematizing it, or opening up a new bifurcation. Experimentalism,
because the existing rationalities and protocols of truth are simply not
enough to make a world, and only the undiscovered form or order holds a
chance of breaking the deadlocks that confront everyone, at the micro
and macro scales of disaster in the twenty-first century.

This project stems from the geophilosophical desire of an individual,
but demands only to multiply. The research will be done through the
opportunities of various collaborative projects, on location and over
the net... "

http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=205&Itemid=125