[-empyre-] first part of the translation of Diego's post

[Ana Valdés]

Sorry for the delay but translate into English is a tough job, guys and
gals! :) It took me twenty minutes to find the crossreferences to Deleuze
and Guattari in English :( I read them in French Spanish and Swedish, never
in English, the Wikipedia was not helping this time :)

I heard for first time the term resilience from some biologists
investigating from a paleoenvironmental prospective the sanks and humid
zones from the Uruguayan oceanic coasts.

They used it to describe the capacity of those sensible ecosystems to adapt
to changes in the sealevel (the sea went forward and backed tenso f
kilometers from the Holocene period) and more recently to answer to the
human actions which have been drying up huge surfaces of sank lanas.

Surely this inicial contact with the term gives me a way to refer to the
term as organicisting. In the same way when I think on the social struggles
from a resilient  point of view I think about them as immanent with maybe
some addition of vitalism. The following reflection is based on this
asociation to immanens and organicism.

If I think about a resilient city, as the banados de Rocha or the shock
absorbers of the cars I conceive it as an unity or a being reacting with
flexibility to the external aggressions, overmounting it to continue it’s
existence.

But, which are the kina of aggressions make the reactions resilient? And
which kind of existence is the one allowed to continue?

The Occupy mov in New York reacts to the economical crisis generated by
financial speculators which are threating the emplyment, the savings, the
credits and now the social welfare and other public services, orginated on
the cuts on the public budget.

In Fukushima the reaction is against the environmental crisis started in
the collapse of an nuclear plant changing the everydays life of millions of
Japanese and threating their lives.



They react to the threats to the peaceful sedentism which allow us to live
in cities, these threats happen in the self core of those cities. Or the
social reception to those movements is caused by it.

The sedentism is a quality we find in the at the beginning of the first
human concentrations and Status. Farmers, handworkers and administrators
settle down in a place where they can get protection for them and for their
wealth from the nomadic populations.



The farming garantee the food input for survival and the waterworks made by
collective efforts give water for cultivating the mark. We know how the
story continues, to Foucault’s biopolitics, Sabemos como sigue la historia,
hasta llegar a la biopolítica de Foucault, the patterned soil of  Deleuze y
Guattari and the sedentary metaphysics of  Malkki. In the settlements the
power doesn’t only give protection from attacks (from foreign invaders to
robbers) but also social welfar (from public health to unemployment
insurance); the only thing the individual must be prepare to give in
exchange is the disponibility to work and and live in a fixed home
(permanent residence), contributing in that way to rise the accumulation of
wealth in this settlement.



The threats to the securities given by the urban life explain in certain
way the success of the occupants in New York. Their social demands are not
only accepted in the rich countries, they are in the bottom of urban life
itself. Las amenazas a estas seguridades que ofrece la vida urbana,
explican parte del éxito de los ocupas de NY. The occupations are maybe a
kind of social protest typical of the sedentism, the patterned soil.



This is the paradox, a sedentary mobilization, a difference of the majority
of the social mobilizations: Mao’s long march, the taking of the Bastille,
the attacks from the Indian to the the colonies during the conquest of
America or the “Silence Marchs”, which all the 25th of May goes through the
center of Montevideo: there is a march, you walk and/or it’s necessary you
run.


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"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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