[-empyre-] Alter-mapping, alter-passage, and altering-art

[simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>,

Pau Delgado's "What are the actual reasons to decide to be an immigrant? 
If a relatively peaceful and 'welcoming' country like Uruguay is not 
enough for a refugee to stay, then, how should we read this? How should 
the economic aspects be considered in this case?" prompts me to put the 
question of the face-value of crisis, to ask about the crisis of 
face-value, that is of the "refugee crisis" in the era of a global 
labour marketplace, which, taken at face-value, engages those "economic 
aspects" of immigration Pau raises his question regarding. There is an 
irritant in the sense of urgency around the 'space' of immigration; it 
irritates perhaps by the notion of performativity in the expanded 
meaning Judith Butler brings to it to address all kinds of pressing 
contemporaneities. These seem to be constantly at crisis point. But 
maybe it is in the nature of a critical engagement to exacerbate, 
performatively, to dramatise, to push things to a point where they can 
appear to demand general attention and public and expert opprobrium or 
approbation and assure an issue market penetration, a sharp point. The 
question here would be, what is being performed or enacted before the 
immigrations are called a refugee crisis? because the crisis is 
statistical, has the logic of large numbers, which impress generals and 
publics.

Analysis would then operate in an opposite direction. Because it is 
irritating that cases, in their economic, humanitarian, political, or 
publicity, aspects are irreducible. How account for qualitative 
differences? Between colonisation in the age of empire pre-WWI, 
neocolonisation under the liberalisation of marketplaces, and now 
something else, a kind of political movement of bodies in their 
self-awareness of being data, of operating at the level of the 
statistic-ecstatic Big, and at the level of the Little, where we all are 
both flesh and... the "and" of a mathematisable virtuality, taken up in 
the mathesis of multiplicities as numerical and non-qualitative.

Still there is I think a shape to what is happening at present. I am 
waiting to understand it.

Best,
Simon Taylor