[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: MODERNITY'S SPELL

[Jon McKenzie]

Hola Ricardo,

Thanks for your Big Nose story of Mayan technology: you’ve been following that scent now for quite a while. 

The smell and spell of modernity can be read as the secular rebooting of Platonic ideation and its global exportation via Descartography (the outlining/ideating of the world into nation states and colonies via navigational globes and disciplinary fields). Corporations, governments, and universities all practice the magic of the state, the term anthropologist Michael Taussig uses to describe modernity’s spell. 

Are indigenous futurism(s) a counter-spell to the demythologizing of life worlds achieved by the white/blank mythology ("la mythologie blanche" is Derrida’s term) that blinds itself to the figurative origins of its rational conceptual systems? Modernity’s spell casts itself over (and as) our critical thinking by separating the knower/known, intelligible/sensible, mind/body, subject/object, humans/world, epistemology/ontology, and history/mythology.  

Can the stick, the cat’s cradle, and the cyborg goddess each figure as the reenchantment of the world—or is something else in play?

Jon




> On Nov 18, 2019, at 7:22 PM, Dominguez, Ricardo <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hola tod at xs,
> 
> Thanks to Margarthata and all who have been sharing these last couple of weeks. I have learned a great deal and I am not sure if I can respond in terms of the deep practices that all of you have being doing between breathing-seeds and alter-spaces for growing. 
> 
> So I will just jump into the telecractic capture spells of modernity being diffracted by Mayan technologies that can perhaps set the stage for indigenous futurism(s). And as always it starts with a stick:
> 
> The Big Nose tells a story:  
>  
> One day I was waking with La Mar (The Sea), the deepest and wisest of the Zapatistas, when we saw a young child running about shouting: “Todos a la consulta!  Todos a la consulta!” A young Tojolabal boy, Pedrito, apparently rallying all the towns folk to a local consulta, or local assembly meeting. The village is in assembly when a military airplane from the Army Rainbow Task Force and a helicopter from the Mexican Air Force, begin a series of low flights overhead. The assembly does not stop; instead those speaking merely raise their voices. Pedrito is fed up with the menacing air-craft, and he goes, hyper-fast, in search of a stick inside his hut. Pedrito returns with a piece of wood, and declares: “I’ m going to disturb the airplane; it’s bothering me.” When the plane passes over Pedrito, he raises the stick and waves it furiously at the warplane. The plane then changes its course and leaves. Pedrito says “There now, that good.” He drops the stick and continues to rally his community. I, the Big Nose, slowly move towards the stick that Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully and give it scientific consideration: length, weight, texture, smell and taste. I, the Big Nose, turned to La Mar and said, “it’s a stick!” “Yes, she said, it’s a stick” Now the Mexican Air Force helicopter was now above me. Trying to remember what Pedrito did, I swing at the air with the stick. Suddenly the helicopter from the Mexican Air Force turned into a useless tin vulture, the sky parted, the sun came up, and everything became like golden marzipan.”  “But it’ s a stick,” I, the Big Nose say. “Yes, it seems like a stick,” says La Mar (the Sea), “it is also Mayan technology.” 
> 
> The stick breaks Modernity's spell while playing with its technology and allowing something else take place in the seeds of time-song of algo [  ] rithms to occur. 
> 
> 
> 
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> on behalf of margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com <mailto:margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>>
> Sent: Monday, November 18, 2019 12:51 PM
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: MODERNITY'S SPELL
>  
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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