[-empyre-] The city as a skin -- Sparta and the helots

[Antonas Office]

Thank you Johannes for this Zizek's reference and your ideas.

I also think that there is a lot of noise about the occupy movement and not a lot of interesting things were born from it till now. I also find ineffective 
many "occupations" and urban resiliences. I do not believe in utopian romanticism. In the same time there is a need to think in two different scales. The big image will be formed by a description of this last phase of capitalism; its characteristics and some possibilities of exit from it. The small scale of remarks concerns some observations that may be related to the practices we discuss. The twitter mobilizations or the occupy rationale are part of this small scale observations. The small scale is not isolated from the big one and vice versa. Both the network phenomena and the occupy movement are more interesting then mere technical details of the situations we observe. 

Concerning the network communities there are two distinct strategies that include them in the political sphere. The first one is the strategy that allows quick gatherings and "real" movements through the use of smart phones or without it. The point is here that the network is used in order to control a relation to the "real world". Even if this aspect of the network phenomenon seems more related  to the "reality" of the society, it is also sometimes operated in a frame similar to game practices. Japanese games with controlled actors in the city seem technically similar to the movements of some protesters that use twitter or other applications in order to move with coordination in the city. The second aspect of the network political actions is grounded into the network itself. It uses its own structures in order to think or sabotage part of its system.

The occupy movement even is till now acting in the periphery of the political sphere, it sometimes only intends to create isolated platforms that operate as islands "out of capitalism"; this gives to capitalism an even more liberal view. In the same time however we observe in the post network cities a different relation to the public space. The public space is unimportant or "occupy-able". It is important from a point of view of architecture to make an account of this aspect of the communities that act in the cities. They can exist if they occupy a space. A different relation to what was meant as public space is recorded here. An occupied zone is hospitable if we accept it's rules. But it installs again a different attitude than the civic: a civilian is not the performing subject of the occupation. New rules apply to the occupied territories in a way that we cannot say if we are or not in the realm of a typical western society. Furthermore from this occupation practices we may learn how a separative concept will perform new divisions of the old society. Protesting occupations are less important than the structure of isolated functioning urban systems; they may be platforms of discussion protest or different commerce and the can also be malls or typical capitalist islands; this is not important to me. The user replaces the civilian. The most powerful element of this change is a deep tendency of the society to be formed as an archipelago of distinct platforms. Beyond the occupy movement and the vague Leit Motiv "occupy everything" we encounter a different concept for the future city. 

Divide or unify, resistance or resilience, republic or democracy: those old questions take in this particular moment different meaning.

Aristide Antonas

Sent from antonas iPhone

On Mar 14, 2012, at 22:05, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> dear all:
> 
> from Sabela's Montevideo- city of skin,   back to Sparta- military-oligarchical system of Antiquity.  Thinking of "displacements" [desplazamientos], as Ana might add, through social
> and political class structure, one can study an ancient city-state, Sparta, of enormous military strength and organization, probably dating back to the 7th century BCE, but the 
> conflict with Athens, the early democratic city-state,  of course took place during the time of the Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BCE, and although I did not read Thucydides,
> I remember learning about Sparta and Athens in school, and admiring (I can't remember exactly now)  the Spartan constitution and political system that made everyone (the male
> Spartiates) serve in the military more or less their entire life.... 
> 
> thank you Aristide for your reply, and I do not doubt that you argue well when you state:
>>> 
> it is wrong strategically to underestimate a change. I propose a reading of an urban field; I think that there is a significant transformation recorded in the city of Athens and that we have to study it not as an isolated phenomenon but as a part of a changing equilibrium. Of course: no homogeneity is absolute, no change erases a past conditions but some observations are needed in order to orient our future works.
>>> 
> 
> I cannot remember exactly when "Sparta" –  the "invisible city" –  [today I believe a small town of 9 000 inhabitants?] came up in Slavoj Zizek's lecture on "The Deadlock - Revolutionary Thought Today,"  but I believe in the first half of his political reflections Zizek looked at the Arab uprisings and the OCCUPY movement in the larger context of the economic/financial crises and social instabilities under the totality of late global capitalism and its various ideological superstructures, and how ineffective some "occupations" and urban resiliences/resistances might have been or turn out to have been against the backlash or the recuperations of hegemonic power; and in this first half his introductory metaphor was drawn from an Iranian proverb (about how to grow flowers over a buried corpse).
> 
> He mainly seemed to want to ask how global capitalism and its symptoms can be grasped and contested, and how we can, in political analysis, and a cold look rather than emotional indignation at banks or speculators or other provocateurs (left or right), make sense of the symptoms of our predicaments (our new tatoos on our skins).  Sabela, what are these tatoos saying about us? 
> 
> 
> He then, i think, recommended not to believe in magical realism or utopian romanticism (Ana, he does love sci-fi novels and movies, though, as you can imagine) but look at how hegemonic response organizes itself (in Brussels, Washington, or Beijing), and he had some less hopeful comments on the Indignados in Spain, and the people protesting in Athens or "occupying" "wall street"  (of course here we are now in literary and metaphorical lands, and also perhaps tactical strata of discourse, of images on screens and skins of cities, psychogeographical maneuvers, and "digital media" tools as well, if we remember CAE and their activism with tactical media  - I suppose we have moved from "nosotros somos Marcos"  to the  Facebook group “We Are All Khalid Said,”  as Eduardo points out? and what does that mean, in terms of slogans or "messages".......?).  Zizek even made a remark that it is bizarre to imagine our Greek neighbors now potentially being considered humanitarian victims, suffering from food shortage (images in feel good advertising consequently moving from Africa to Greece), but then he urged us to do an ideological systems analysis of the totality today (in world politics). And here he came up with the suggestion not to look at Athens but at Sparta, at the current neo-Spartan oligarchy.
> 
> Neo-Sparta is an oligarchical pyramid, says Zizek, with the bloated bankrupt USA at the top playing the role of military-ideological hegemonic power constantly in a state of war (by necessity since bankrupt and in debt), having successfully enacted that role also with its "war against terror" and the production of ideological obfuscations. (History did not end,  Francis Fukuyama).  In the middle of the pyramid, the tax paying citizens, are EU-Zone/Europe and Asian manufacturing industrial states, and the large bottom (the helots made up 90 per cent, i believe, of the Spartan city state) is constituted by the poorer regions and countries that have no rights.    
> 
> The US of course needs the world to feed it, and the phantasmagoria is very Benjaminian -- we do not live in ruins or in ruined end times:  the shameful spectacle is in perfect working order,. and for the ones without rights, with no freedom (outside of freedom, as the Turkish philosophical policeman told Zizek), the fantasy that comes closest to mind, we were told by the philosophical Lacania professor Zizek,
> is the one by Tom Sawyer or anyone else who has ever imagined being witness to their own funeral. 
> 
> Is this what you had in mind Aristide, that we are becoming attuned to an emerging set of fantasies where, in the global capitalist neo Sparta, we can begin to see ourselves without citizen rights, food, healthcare, education, work, and therapy, or access to generosity and solidarity -- urban-rural communal (religious / ritual / ethical?)  values?  
> 
> 
> respectfully, and with apologies if i misrepresented Zizek's political thinking.
> 
> Johannes Birringer
> 
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