Re: [-empyre-] Re: [empyre] empyre and empire - retour des choses, or, taking off, with ballast

["Lucio Agra" <lucioagra@gmail.com>]

Yeah, I see what you mean and it is a great parallel (or contrast,
better saying). On the one hand you have all the promises that the net
would provide - total liberty (vs. some sufocating dictatorship
ambiences such as ours in Latin America, seventies) and, in the other,
the surveillance still menacing this "free zone". Well, kind of a
situation we lived here in the time between 64 (coup) and 68 (strenght
of dictatorship).
I think you put it in a much better way than I dream I would do.
Only one observation about the info came from the link you quoted:
Torquato Neto did not commit suicide because of a supposed " forced
"psychiatric care."". The fact is: at that time there were many people
- young - that were put on  forced "psychiatric care" because this was
the way pearents thought you should treat youngs on drugs (even if
someone was just smoking pot now and then).
Torquato volunteered to enter in a treatment some times because there
was also a romanticized view about madness, and after several
experiments with LSD, he believed he would join an imaginary community
of mad people. Gilberto gil, on the other hand, was forced to enter
into a clinic because he was caught with marijuana in a police raid
and it was kind of deal: this or go to jail... Besides, anyone who
used long hair at that time was subject to police suspicion... I would
not say it did not happen abroad but, in our case, people with long
hair were nothing but a few... post-tropicalists.
best
Lucio BR
PS: I am talking about some facts that happened prior to my
generation, for I was born in 1960, like Arnaldo Antunes. We were
afortunate to become adults at the end of dictatorship and passed our
teen age under it. On the other hand we were pressed by our
predecessors and, at the same time, by a foreign "no future" influence
came with punk. I think it may explain something, perhaps... or not!
On 3/8/06, Christina McPhee <christina@christinamcphee.net> wrote:
> Yes, indeed, that was one of the provocations behind mentioning
> Tropicalia 2, to point gently towards Tropicalia itself as a
> 'modern' critical practice with political implications (to say the
> least) during a regime that sought to curtail and even silence its
> practitioners.   Tropicalia's story influenced me very much when I
> was starting to work in new media, not least for the vitality of the
> music itself, but also because of what apparently happened (probably
> others on the list from Brazil can help me out here) to its members
> (see quote below).   I was inspired to think about the 'zero' degree
> of a landscape of surveillance. How your choices as an artist propel
> you, possibly, into conditions of peril.In what ways speech, in the
> topologies of the internet, supposedly a 'free' environment, might be
> challenged or truncated or shut down. How one longed not just for
> 'freedom from' oppression but also 'freedom to' create and how this
> longing itself might lead to exile. How speech in exile might derive
> from a submerged or furtive being -- the 'exotic' 'other' or
> 'queer' ; so in a way it was from Tropicalia that I derive  the
> geneology of my  cyborg  as a topology of the net, an aphasic
> topology but also one that might speak 'truth' (or "parrhesia",
> fearlessness in speaking the truth, a characteristic of Tropicalia).
> "Parrhesia" as an interrogation into the cultural space of the net
> itself ---  as in this small but wild
> speculation on  neural.it, http://www.neural.it/english/
> aphasiaparrhesia.htm   Christoph's Cosmolalia is a related and more
> concrete analysis.
>
>
> Christina
>
>
>
>
>         Brazilian Tropicalia
> 1968
>
> In 1967, singer/composers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso introduce a
> new sound in Brazilian music, inspired as much by Jimi Hendrix and
> Chuck Berry as by mellow bossa nova. Along with rock musicians Os
> Mutantes and Tom Ze, they produce a startling collective record,
> Tropícalía ou Panís et Círcensís (Tropicalia or Bread and Circuses),
> that mingles traditional Brazilian rhythms with electric guitars and
> psychedelic flourishes. Their often humorous lyrics poke fun at
> Brazil's consumer society and other aspects of the contemporary culture.
>
> Many Brazilians see the music as an adulteration of Brazil's musical
> birthright by an American aesthetic. On occasion, Veloso performs to
> so many boos, he stops midsong. Nevertheless, over the next year, the
> Tropicalistas develop a cult following that begins to spread to an
> entire generation inspired by their music and spirit.
>
> Brazil's military government distrusts the Tropicalistas, who dress
> in the feathers and velvets of the hippie movement. Veloso's 1968
> tune, "E Proíbído Proíbír" ("It is Forbidden to Forbid"), which takes
> its title from a slogan of the May student protests in Paris,
> provokes officials further, and they label the musicians a political
> threat and a decadent influence who will corrupt Brazilian youth.
>
> In December of 1968, the military government consolidates power. They
> then arrest Veloso and Gil, jailing them without charge for several
> months, and then recommending they leave the country. The artists
> remain in exile for four years, spiriting compositions with veiled
> lyrics from London to Brazil for others to record and perform. Others
> in the Tropicalismo movement are less fortunate; several undergo
> torture or forced "psychiatric care." One Tropicalisto, the lyricist
> and poet Torquato Neto, commits suicide after such treatment.
>
> Gil and Veloso are able to return to Brazil in 1974 and rebuild their
> careers. Military rule in Brazil ends in 1985 with the election of a
> civilian president. By then, tropicalia musicians gain worldwide
> attention, influencing such North American performers as David Byrne
> and Paul Simon.
>
>
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/music/tropicalia_a.html
>
>
>
> On Mar 7, 2006, at 8:35 PM, Lucio Agra wrote:
> Two or three things, still, about le "retour des choses":
>
> Tropicalia 2 was not intend to be a revival play but in fact it was.
> In some sense Caetano and Gilberto Gil were intending to deal with
> some questions they believed were still important at that time. The
> song "As coisas" is from Arnaldo Antunes, contemporary poet who
> certainly has some traces of Tropicalia in his songs and poems but no
> more than he has some traces of 80s and 90s pop culture...
> I accept you remark on this idea of flowing time permanently moving
> back and forward. But do not thing that it is quite distant from that
> other I meant before quoting Pound and Vico. The Brazilian concrete
> poets searched in both sources a way to understand the past as a
> living present. BTW, I did not mention before, but I think that one of
> the Concrete Poets, Haroldo de Campos proposed a concept which I think
> can be more useful in this discussion than the already classic
> post-modern. In a text called "The post-Utopian poem" (I believe there
> are translations to English or french) he suggested the idea that
> Baudelaire was really modern and Mallarmé was, then post-modern (an
> idea I think I saw here somewhere).
> He also suggested the idea of post-Utopian, assuming that the main
> trace of Modern tradition was the search for Utopia and that was
> precisely - in his view- what was declining in contemporaneity.
> Caetano Veloso and Arnaldo Antunes were great friends and admirers of
> Haroldo and the peculiar understanding that Concrete poetry has made
> of modernist poets like Pound.
> best
> Lucio BR
>
> On 3/5/06, Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> if ballast  is the subject of  -empyre- ,
>
> let's call it x
>
> since we don't know what it is (yet).
>
>
>
>
> Let us consider the set  [ technology never-not human ] ,
>
>    invert it [technology always-already human]
>
>
>
>     and then make a  recursive equation  to solve for x
>
>    (technology never-not human)
> _________________________
>
> (technology always-already human)
>
>
>
> x =  ( technology never-already human ) (technology always-not human).
>
>
>
> Thus we ascend (in a mobius spiral) to the empyrean like a hot air
> balloon with a leak.
>
>
> just having fun...
>
>
>
> ---and speaking of retour des choses,
>
> I want to quote from Tropicalia 2  : As Coisas  Electra Nonesuch
> Records 1993
>
> ( Gilberto Gil music, lyris Arnauldo Antunes)
>
> As coisas tem peso,
> mass, volume, tamahno,
> tempo, forma, cor,
> posicao, textura, duracao,
> densidade, cheiro, valor,
> consistencia, profundidade,
> contorno, temperatura,
> funcao, aparencia, preco
> destino, idade, sentido,
> as coisas nao tem paz.
>
>
>
> things have weight
>    mass, volume, size
> time, form, color
> position, texture, duration,
> density, smell, value,
> consistency, depth,
> contour, temperature,
> function, appearance, price,
> destiny, age, meaning
> things have no peace
>
>
> to listen http://christinamcphee.net/merz_city/texts/ascoisas.html
>
>
>
> Double inversion: the retour des choses is not just a feedback loop
> as in modernist dynamics but a mobius strip, and probably, has no
> peace (or piece! :-). Not even furniture.
>
>
> Lucio writes,
>
>
> The question of humanization of tech have been discussed in many
> symposiums but it always seems strange to me. At least computers are
> the most human machine I've ever heard about. It has a screen that
> can
> only be "viewed" by frontal human eyes, over a keyboard, something
> that can be typed only by fingers that have the abilities to do it.
> BTW, "digital" comes from Latin "digitum" which means "digitum" (the
> remark is from one of the main poets of my country Decio Pignatari).
>
> Mediated performance could mean something that would offer a new
> vision over the modern tradition... I leave it as a suggestion to
> think...
>
> Christophe writes:
> This was the original intuition by Blank & Jeron or by Valery
> Grancher when
> he made his first webpainting in 1998 (he refers to Picabia, Jasper
> Johns
> etc.), or Miltos Manetas with his internet paintings...
>
> I?m very much influenced by this ironical idea of the ?retour des
> choses? as
> we would say in french. What is the most stupid thing you can do
> when you
> are a net.artist: the answer is: painting a website on a canvas.
> What was
> the most stupid thing I could do, with my epiphanies: replacing the
> computer
> with a human being.
>
> I think this provides interesting conceptual loops at the age of
> globalization:
> 0) Human beings speak
> 1) Google hacks all the speeches of mankind
> 2) I hack Google in return
> 3) From this double hack, a human being speaks (the human browser)
> and we
> are back to 0), but we made a very big loop ;-)
>
> Saul writes:
>
> a  subject that is at once both fluid/ adaptable and
> incapable of deluding itself into believing it is capable of acting
>
> Christiane writes:
>
>
>
> Are the networked and performative artistic practices in which many
> of us are involved a valuable counter-balance and at the same time
> the foundations of today's "empire"?
>
> GH writes:
>
>
> . Although the notion of a person functioning or being directed by
> web information is amusing, I think that the emotion of surprise
> and disjunction is more important....
> If we follow what the philosophers say; all digital media is
> alienating. Both Christina and Christophe use those tools to
> humanize.
>
>
> and Simon, finally,
>
> not counter-balance perhaps but ballast, then to Christiane's
> question,
> yes. And a ballooning discussion like this might remind itself how
> strong
> the lines of false-consciousness are (and in Nietzschean recursion
> endless)
> tying it down to the idea of empire it tries to lift, lift out,
> take, take
> off? (Something I believe Aliette has been very clear on.)
>
>
>
> -cm
>
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