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

[fabi borges]

Hello everybody.
Thank you Margarethe for put me here again :-)
Amazing subject and emails. I love it!
I could beginning with the strong idea of Anthony about Petrol:

"I find myself thinking about petroleum a lot lately, about the
incomprehensible array of stuff we produce from it, and how all these
materials are rapidly rendering the planet increasingly inhospitable for
human life. For me, it is the essence of the science fictional to
contemplate the fact that our entire world runs on energy and materials
produced from a black, gooey slime made of plants and animals that died
hundreds of millions of years ago. But it also makes me think of magic,
specifically necromancy: the summoning up of the dead to serve our needs.
Black magic, indeed. But the magic circle is broken; the spell is totally
out of control; the unleashed energy of the dead is now reclaiming the
earth, returning it to a climate more suitable for itself…"

In one of my firsts text about Tecnoshamanism: SEMINAL THOUGHTS FOR A POSSI
BLE TECNOSHAMANISM (
http://www.modspil.dk/docs/technoshamanism_fabi_borges.pdf)  I used to
nominate the traditional and/or ancestral thinking in the contemporary
world as  "Rubish Land" - "Dirty Shamanism", "Noise Shamanism", or
"transversal Shamanism". I took a image of Estamira to help me to think
about it:

Estamira, the heroine of Marcos Prado'eponymous film is a good example of
technoshamanism: she is the Pajé of garbage, the schizofrenic prophetess of
refuse. She is a woman who represent the state of putrefaction, the
exposions of gas, who literally cohabitates with the "left overs"of
mankind. It is from civilization's garbage dump that this "dirty
shaman"speaks to us of other time s and their accomplishments. she
hallucinates about garbage. What methodo could be more effective if you
want to know about a planet's civilization? Her shamanism is more than
transversal, it is motivated by the power of excess, by the misplaced, by
the leftovers. I will not deny that she did recycle things, but it is all
the filth that turned her into something special, a specialist on the
spectrum of exclusion. If she had not been surounded by all that garbage,
she probably would never have gone so far with the schizofrenic connections
that she produced. She became a historic figure in the hands of the
director Marcos Prado, whose deep insight emphasized the connection between
Estamira and all the world's refuse. She talks about the smell of the
garbage, of its internal implosions, of its constant transformation, of the
satellites connected to the antennas erected in the land fill by arrogant
authorities; she speaks about control and about the illusions wich create
control. Although at some point in the documentary the director creates a
link between her prophecies and her mental illness which seemed to becaused
by a trauma and thus presents us with a psychoanalytic explanation of the
mental problems, there are readings of the film wich ignore these attempts.
In Estamira's case, what cannot be denied is her fluent relationship with
the Earth's garbage.

Estamira was not the unique case that made me to understand deeply the
connection between a shamanism and the destruction / shamanism and war /
shamanism and death - I worked for many years with homeless and indigenous
people - and one thing I was always attempted was the spontaneous rituals
of misery! The sidewalk litanies! The syncretic rituals of decimated
indigenous groups. This shamanism is never pure, but transversal, as
Viveiros de Castro call it, transversal is the negotiation of traditional
culture with all the noise of monotheism and the garbage culture. It is a
hope against monotheism colonization and evangelic colonization now...
Shamanism survive, but it doesn't mean it is just for well been. Shamanism
is not pure and it is not good necessarily  - this idea about pure and good
is associated with
the ideas of the "good savage" of Rousseau. Too white.

I don't want go too far here, but I believe a lot in the magical syncretic
thought - it means the rubish of the world is a entity as well. the magic
is out of the control Anthony puts it, but it still a entity. The Yanomami
indigenous people used to call the entities of the smoke of the mining as
"Xawara"- I understand it as a entity or
a spectrum adored by certain types of humans.

I would like you see this two wonderful brazilian movies from the last
decade - that show a bit about what we are calling dirty shamanism - or
transversal, etc.
- Estamira https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibuo079DGF8 (I am sure you can
find the subtitles)
- BirdWatchers  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk0KQt75ZWU (well, I am
sure you can find the movie with subtitles)

Sorry if I took too much space aswell.
fabi borges.










On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 at 12:21, Dominguez, Ricardo <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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. *
>
>
>
> *>>> *
>
> *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.*
>
> *<<< *
>
>
>
> *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. *
>
>
>
> *>>> *
>
> *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. *
>
> *<<< *
>
>
>
> *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?*
>
>
>
> *>>> *
>
> *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*
>
>
> *<<< *
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *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
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



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