[-empyre-] spatial flow /spatial justice

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all
Alessandra thank you again for stimulating all these though-provoking posts and discussions, and I already wish there was more time
and I apologize for not being articulate enough to probe, yes, ask here, what motivated the discussion in the first place (I asked Alessandra off list and she wrote me
a very beautiful and straight forward reply),  why are we addressing seemingly abstract philosophical issues such as "materiality" or "spatiality" even though of course they
are not theoretical and philosophical only. 

But I imagine your group -- *liquid blackness*, a research project on blackness and aesthetics - did not gather to share weekly readings of authors or theorists only;  and in the first week, and intermittently, you
did mention art exhibitions and artists whose work inspires thought & practice, and some here have shared their aesthetic stance with us and some have questioned even the notion of the liquid ("liquid disavows the concreteness  that blackness needs for analytical efficacy", Simon suggested?). I tried to question is yesterday regarding the lawscape, and the impossibility of moving to the side or outside of it.

..that brought me to ask Lauren why she feels (her) blackness racialises architectural space, and that was not a good question, as one could perhaps assume that space always already is racialized, but how do we define
the contexts or how to contexts define the conflict between persons (bodies) that are moved by a desire to occupy the same space at the same time. (that was a question apparently underlying Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos' 
writing on spatial justice).

Sarah's postings made me go and look at Denise Ferreira Da Silva's "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness at the End of the World," and Da Silva clearly suggests a feminist political activism that has an agenda, and begins with a Marxist historial materialist analysis of the 'effects of the Category of Blackness' , and she carefully attacks numerous "tools of raciality" that  consistently reproduce the occlusion (the closing to consideration at the level of the concept) of the colonial (juridic, economic, symbolic) architectures"...

It seems to me that a political agenda, then, would have to really be more concrete at attacking our racical states, now,  within neoliberal capitalism, now colonizing the entire world. For me currently working in Europe, that would clearly suggest asking myself how regimes of discrimination (say after the fall of the Wall 1989, the end of communism in Europe, the so-called war on terror after attack against the US in 2001, or the current migration and refugee crisis as the out-fall of the invasionist or interventionist wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the unrestrained financialization and effects on economies, to mention some) are reconfigured, affecting you and me, and how the main logic of capitalism  (Mbembe calls it necropolitics) is an operation of death (real and social death) along the lines of inclusion/exclusion. The impacts of global capitalism are clearly seen now in Europe during the refugee crisis, the disgusting deals that are made, the renewed "colonial (juridic, economic, symbolic) architectures" that are brokered, etc. One's movement also is now one's fear, expecting further bombs, fences, jungle camps, controls, finger printings. 

and global capitalism's "spaceless space," what is that now if not deeply racialized? how do I fight racist ideologies on a daily pervasive basis?

Da Silva ends by invoking "virtual reality" or virtuality (see my ironic photo attached, front page of Times, 2 days ago) ---
"when virtuality guides our imaging of political existence, then the only significant political demand is Reconstruction: the end of statecapital is the demand for the restoration of total value expropriated trough the violent appropriated of the productive capacity of native lands and slave labor"  -  but the end of Capital?  how can one imagine?


Johannes Birringer


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: VR goggles for leaders.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 596089 bytes
Desc: VR goggles for leaders.jpg
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20160429/6be39e37/attachment-0001.jpg>