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

[Dominguez, Ricardo]

Hola Jon y Anthony,

I am answering Jon in this note:



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



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Hola Jon. Indeed, the scent of the Intergalactico of Zapatismo has been my casting matrix for a long long while now. It remains the gesture that disturbs the ongoing streaming episodes of the modernist parenthesis ala Latour. Also, something that your questions spawned in me, was a fragment of memory from from my book sniffing youth, that was a pre-figuration of Taussing for me. I remembered when I encountered the The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda in my local used book store, The Paperback Rack, in Las Vegas around 1973. That gave me at the time, like so many others, a way-finding process for social avatars to drift south in the desert of the real.

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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.



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Yes, following the smells of modernity’s spells is charged with multiple forms of magic that capture the state, the stateless, zombie capitalism(s), unsustainable bubbles, blank-out-blanchings, castrophic state deferrals, tempophagistic extictions, Platonic reboots, looping affects, crisis commodities, black hole selfies, extractive extinctions and anthrobscene systems. Magic is a burrito that can wrap time and space around any form, object or condition.

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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?



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The stick is the slant. It is effluvia that is not either/or, or and/both, and these days not even neither/nor. The stick is the phantasmal scent of the “something else at play.” Mayan technologies is that crafting of Nazca lines witching forth un [ ] blindings spells without orgin(s). Indigenous futurism(s) then disoccupy the purity of the inside/outside of your list and instead send out slanted dispatches of geomancy between dying earths. At least that is where my nose goes today.



Abrazos,

Ricardo

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________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Anthony Discenza <adiscenza at cca.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2019 9:35 PM
To: margaretha haughwout <margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com>
Cc: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: MODERNITY'S SPELL

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