comics

Bueno justo en estos días me entero que mi amiga Sandra hace el guion de una tira que se inicia, los dibujos son potentes, aunque con un estilo medio manga que no me resuena tan familiar (como hablar de ilustracion, no tengo ni idea), hay una ambiguedad que esta buena y pinta para una historia interesante. No escaping gravity

Bien distinta en el estilo de dibujo historietil pff como calificarlo, guarro? y autoreferencial por supuesto me reencontre con una de las estrellas del circulo de historietista suburbano con el que simpatizabamos: el granjero de jesu. es gracioso lo generacional de la tira, una onda estamos treintañeros pero siempre seremos medio raros.

Auge

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity. John Howe, trans. London: Verso. Chapter 3: From Places to Non-Places, pp. 75-115
Auge defines modernity as a simultaneity of past in a present that claims to supersede it. If the spatiality of the pre-modern was built around a re-centred space of the park and the church within a reordered time, modernity pushes them places and rhythms to the background, but preserving the temporalities of place as marks of the passage of time. If place is defined as relational, historic and as concerned with identity, then a non place is one that has not got these characteristics. Supermodernity produces non-places, which are non anthropological, do not integrate earlier places, earlier places are turned, classified and distinguished as places of memory. Places are never fully erased while non places are never fully completed, but are as “palimpsests in which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. This distinction derives from the one between place and space, not in De Certeau’s sense of place as arrangement of things, but rather the anthropological place including the movement journeys made in it, the discourses in and about it, and space as a more abstract, a non symbolized surfaces. The traveller’s space is a non-place one in which the position of spectator (the relation between gaze and landscape) is more important that the place itself. Movements generates solitude, thus the lack of relations, with the place generates non places of travel as an emptying of individuality. The movement itself and the abolition of place is the aim of travel, in contrast with pilgrimage whose end is imbued with meaning and a prefigured path. In supermodernity the posture of the viewer empties up the content of the landscape. Non places refers to two aspects, spaces formed in relation to certain ends (as transport), and the relations people have with them. The set of relations established in non places are not directly related with aims, they create solitary contractuality [can we say non places mediate then?, but aren’t other places of capitalism somehow of solitary and contractuality]. Some non-places are created in the evocations of them crates an image, produces myth and makes it work (vs De Certeau who points to discourse as the gap between everyday and the lost myth, here discourse creates the myth). In non places individuals are expected to interact with texts produced by institutional morality. Highways avoid towns and do not require stopping (or even looking) at a place, sign shows proximity to a place and makes comments on them that stand for the place itself, in contrast to old routes and trains that transversed the towns. The non-p create an “average man” that talks to all and nobody, it crates a uniform and shared identity that is in constant relation to the contractual nature of the relation with the non place, there is no commonality but similitude in turn in place of individual identities are formed. A person is relived form his usual identity and determinants, although has to constantly prove his innocence. History is only and element of the spectacle of the non-place, which is dominated by the urgency of the actuality, it is a constant present and a constant encounter with and ideal self (masculine or feminine- esto medio problemático). These images of non place create a system it also creates effects of recognition, the world of consumption as a filled of familiar symbols and non places. Places and non places are tangled together, one becomes a refuge of the other, a home is where a person can be understood is rhetorically demarcated with a communicational boundary. In supermodernity “people are always and never at home the frontier zones or marchlands no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously figures of excess : overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its expression in non places.”(109). Non places hold the contradiction of dealing only with individuals but they are identified only as they enter or leave them, they are not the same for individuals and for governments. Non places are thus a parenthesis but also the target of those in territorial struggles. Terrorism take non place as target as they are anti-utopia: they exist without containing any particular social group. In contrast state administration does not know so much about non places as of dealing with the universalist - localist tension, likewise empire as a totalitarian control over space is never a non place.

Comment: One can criticize the concept of non place in itself as defined within a dichotomyc logic against places. We can also critizise how much can we consider non places as detached form national, regional territorializations, however the particularity of the production of places that (at least) attempt and claim to be detached form other formations (of history, identity, specific social formations) is a point that needs consideration. His obsessively distinguishes non places of supermodernity form the places of modernity and in some cases it is not so clear if these contrast works (ie. i agree that the mall is not the factory, however the factory also erases social contradictions, detaches itself form history and erases the particular identities of workers into an homogeneous labour force, thus the newness may be somewhere else than in these characteristics) ut ultimately what he totally avoids in his analysis is the analysis of the production of difference in which non-places are an active component.

Harvey

Harvey, D. 1996. “From Space to Place and Back Again”, in: Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. London: Blackwell.

Harvey’s interest is to show how contemporary capitalism is producing georgraphies of difference, and to look at these differences as not only results of unequal social relations but also as constituting them. The difference he is pointing to includes the way nature and its appropriation is shaped as a locus of difference. In this chapter he concentrates in defining place agains more general theory of space, time and environment. If space is socially produced, places are unstable locus that “had to be secured against the uncontrolled vectors of spatiality” (p 292). In this place can be understood both as a position “within a map of space-time constituted within some social process”, as well as a “permanence” within the space-time flow, and that transforms this flow. This tension can be thought in relation to the fixity of places produced by capitlist expansion and flows of capital circulation, what we can regard as a political economy of capitalists production of place. “Difference and otherness are produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment, a proliferating geographical division of labour, an increasing segmentation of reproductive activities and the rise of spatially ordered (often segregated) social distinctions.” (295). However this process is not uniformly shaped but rather generated within a series of tensions, the major of which is the tension between place bounded investments of capital and the spatial mobility of capital, which generates a constant spatial reorganization. Some of the processes linked to this are the transformation of time-space in relation to speeding in the mobility f capital, isolation as “protectionist” strategy against this flows, competition for capital among different places, overinvestment in place has made it more difficult to now find “profitable locations.” These movements of capital are not passively accepted by people, but result from a combination of cooptation and coersion of capital. He understands this tension as the cause for a strong emergence of place as a problem for social sciences, in this many works search for “roots” and reinforcing the “dwelling” as ways to reassure a lost sense of identity and reestablishes connection with a world in motion from which people have been dispossessed. Also environmental movements represent an opposition to the capitalistic place construction, as it proposes to produce knowledge of the particularities of a place and that place formation, along an unmediated sensuous interaction of body and world in an ecological sensitivity, as a way of un-alienated interaction with enviros, but it does not regard that this within commodity fetishism (consuming landscapes as sensuous as a chocolate?) which ends up fetishizing the body. It also does this by a re-sacralization of place a search for a genius Loci as a determinate identity of place, but this rises the question of whose identity we are representing and whether this loci represents the inevitable conflict or rather erases it. This is a process also happening in the shaping of a “community” as a localized entity, which can be both used as a way of creating docile bodies for power exploitation, and revolutionary forces with deep transformative potential in other extreme case. The tension between a Marxist analysis of production and heidegger emphasis in dwelling, shares an interest in “production as a privileged moment of sensual engagement with the world” with Marx. For Marx politics of exploitation and fetishism are place based, as for Heidegger place based experience is an escape form capitalist relations, ultimately Marx’s critique is that sensuous experience is in capitalism inside fetishistic relations. This is pointing to the fact that in capitalism there is an ongoing tension between sensuous and social relations in place [yes this is what Lefebvre is pointing to], thus place is dependent of the relations of space likewise space is dependent on the network of relations going on in place. Everyone who moves to establish difference contemporarily has to engage in social practices that mediate the power of capital, thus cultural politics and political economy are intertwined processes of place production. But to consider that places within themselves have power is a to fall in a misleading fetishism, that reproduces the logic of the construction of secure places as a production or resistance to power. In all cases places are understood within “heterogeneous mental maps of the world each of which can be invested with all manner of personal and collective hopes and fears” (321), thus place making is as symbolic as it is a result of material practices. Likewise place base social movements though are good in fighting for the control over place, they easily slide into “parochial politics” which are easily rearticulated by capitalist accumulation, which manages fragmented universal space.
Conlcusion: Places as social constructs, have to be understood as such. “There are ways to provide a materialist history of this literal and metaphorical geography of the human condition and to do it so as to shed light on the production of historical-geographical difference. An understanding of that process makes it possible to ground a critique of both the chimerical ideals of an isolationist communitarian politics and the inevitable insensitivities of any kind of universal emancipatory politics.” (325) In this it has to be considered that to represent “other” places as stereotypically different is a first step into the production of exclusion and a self-definition. How to rethink place is of course of political relevance, but we cannot do this by disinvesting them form space and spatial struggles . Rereading the historical production of spatial difference is a “crucial preliminary step towards emancipating the possibilities for futue place construction. And liberating places –materially, symbolically and metaphorically- is an inevitable part of any progressive socio-ecological politics.” (326)

Critique: Though Harve is in a way mirroring the homogeneization of space under capitalism he kind of falls into the trap of not offering a model to think of difference outside capitalism. There is a tension between difference created by economic flows and other lines of difference which are implicated but not just effects of political economy. In this if place based identities have potential for deeply transformative movements it is not so clear how this shift outside capitalism can be made when capitalism appears as such a uniform, unmediated and universal force. All this does not mean that Harvey does not make a contribution into thinking the newness in a broad sense of capital spatial reconfiguration, his analysis would needs to be refined to be more specific, for instance take into account the difference of spacial fragmentation and competition for resources in "central" and "peripheral" regions (o west and others) and the way difference in terms of a capitaist but also against a western -bourgeoisie- statal model is not just any form of unequal distribution of capital and cultural meanings but one generating a series o intertwined forms of power .

Feldman

cortita y buena

Feldman, Allen 1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chapter 2: Spatial Formations of Violence (pp. 17-45).
Feldman examines the common explanations for violence in Ireland that explain it as a result of various causes, from economic inequalities, to social or economic contradictions. This is as a result of structural problems, which reach moments of intensity and are explode in the “abnormal violent behavior”. Contrarily he proposes to consider it as a generative force, which opens a new arena of social conditions. In this violence as a condition for its own reproduction generates a particular spatiality. For Catholic Irish in Belfast the house is made into a “safe place” in tension with the streets as sites of danger, need of constant movement and hiding. The making of the house as safe is created in a set of practices, to get inside a kind of “purification” of the body takes place in the changing clothes and burning the ones used in fights, The violence as a ritualized practice is manifested in the making of sanctuaries that evoke the events of particular struggles and commemorate specific deaths. The sanctuary is seen as a safe place but only as long as it has military surveillance, which acts as a counter-surveillance to British force. Sanctuaries are then claimed as significant spaces even when they are outside “safe” locations, thus religious marching are turned into acts of political transposing of boundaries, as moments of collective remembering violence and of actualizing its tensions spatially. It is in the memory of violence that specific locations in the city constitute and zones of interface and “neutrality” are shaped.

Appadurai

Un par de notas de los ultimos días. Cierro la lista con los analisis de las transformaciones espaciales de la posmodernidad. Esta corriente en general no me sirvio para contestar preguntas que me venían interesando, y por lo general lei con cierto esceptisimo, si bien Appadurai siempre me resultó interesante. Me doy cuenta que incluso Harvey plantea algunos puntos fundamentales, claro que el tema es como los procesos de los que hablan ponen en funcionamiento movimintos que muchas veces se desprenden e incluso se enfrentan de los movmientos iniciales por ejemplo de fragmentacion espacial del capitalismo tardío.

Appadurai, A. 1996 Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. London: Blackwell, pp. 337-349

Appadurai proposes to think beyond the nation to cosntrcut a post- sovereign moral geography to re consider the principle of territorial sovereignty in which nation-states rest. He argues that this is an urgent topic in the face of the crisis o the nation state, and thus consider the issue of state sovereignty as a cultural topic. It is in the disjunction of state, sovereignty and territory manifested in the new localities that the nation state loses its unity. If the local has always been in contradiction to the unifying forces of nationalism toward and imagined community, it is in the production of trans-localities that this gap becomes enhanced. There is a contradiction between the principles of self determination as freedom to act and move and the encarceration of people to places as a need of the state’s administration to contrl and organize “different types” of citizens resulting from migrations. By tran-slocal he is referring to the intensification of movement, as trans-national migrants, who create a new type of locality, conformed in heterogeneity rather than in the homogeneous unity of a community. Both challenge the isomorphism people, territory over which state sovereignty resides. It challenges the political and ethnographic maps that erase difference within and erases movement. The new heterogeneous ethno-scapes force the state to reconsider the universality of rights even among people occupying one same territory, as this universality demands for an homogeneous population of citizens. National territory and “homeland” become two distinct objects, one of the state bureaucracy and the other for its “citizens-subjects”, territory as defined and boundarized space becomes desattached from people’s national affects, as more heterogeneous ideas of home and roots come into play (based on communities, religions, ongoing relations, ethnicity among others). However the crisis of state territorial sovereignties are not the same in all cases, if for some the problem are refugees, the borders are the main problem in other cases, or the presence of foreign populations in significant centres for national identity. In this cases is more the state administration and power is what is challenged, while nationalities become become articulated in other terms (of race, religion, language, region, among others). “states are the only major players in the global scene that really need the idea of territoriality based of sovereignty.” (342) In this context new post national (non national, translocal) solidarities emerge in which homeland can still be an important marker but gather around notions of community, labour flows, racial or religious ties. Thus the new postnational cartography, indefectibly effected by the globalization of economy, is emerging with more blurry boundaries than neat nation-state division, as some configurations are global and others regional, and defining its new centres (sometimes around trasnlocalities). The idea of coherent nation territory is in part sustained by the cultural theory that territorializes cultures. However if the contemporary moment has been defined as deterrtorialized it is important to note the reterritorializations effected by this two. These reterritorializations take shape of counternationalism, nativisma but also the production of new localized communities (such as refugee camps). But in the extension of nationalisms it must be differentiated the ones generated by diasporic populations from the ones generated by attempts of expanding state nationalism through emigrants [this is we cannot forget politics of this transloclities]. It is the new “minorities” that demand the efforts of the state to reterritorilize them within a new civic order [and has to redifine the limits of tits jurisdiction] Thus the problem is not so much ethnic plurality and transculturality, but the broader gap diasporic pluralism opens to the ideals of territorial stability of the nation state.

Malkki

Este texto (como el de grossberg, que me quedo muy sin comentar, y que es otro punto de partida con la idea de las movilidades estructuradas, que podría desestructurar y las inversiones de afecto que podria desinvertir un poco) incluye un concepto central que uso en mi propuesta metafisica del sedentarismo o metafica sedentaria (sedentary metaphysics), recordaba que su texto era de interes, pero no que me generaba algunas objeciones importantes. Asi que quizas un punto de partida, criticar a Malkki. Por supuesto su texto es importante y abre un par de puntas interesantes.
Creo que tengo tolerancia baja para las critica a las "esencializaciones estrategicas" de los indigenas que se corresponden "el mito del buen salvage". Todo bien, ya aprendimos a que los indios a veces se ponen las plumas para cumplir con los deseos "occidentales" y conseguir cosas, y tambien que estos deseos desconocen y no les importa poco el sufrimento de los indios sin plumas. Ya está, vimos que es una idea problematica, por que parcializa y limita la accion politica, y nos sentimos cool por descubrir la trampa y complejizar el asunto y sentir que le sacamos un velo a una representacion erronea de la realidad, que gente piola. Me molesta bastante esta critica especialmente cuando se vuelve "cliche antropologic" (dice Briones), por que tambien esta critica encierra el problema de hacernos escepticos a "eso que perfoman como indiecitos en el amazonas para conseguir simpatías" y nos hace detener el analisis ahi (idiecitos astutos y nuevos movimientos sociales naive), pero quizas sea interesante hacer una critica mas profunda y pensar que es lo que lleva a tal conjuncion de ideas y que cosas se estan poninedo en juego, que politicas se estan conformando y por supuesto que abren y que limitan estas formas de politica. Por otro lado por que es inevitable (y tiene sentido, mas alla de su "agencia" y de "estructuras") para mucha gente "ser" indios, a pesar de los litros de lavandina invertidos en bañarse en silencio, con verguenza y desesperacion "para sacarse al indio de encima" (cuenta Sider) a pesar de todo siguen siendo indios (no solo identificarse, reconocerse, performar, sino que su subjetividad esta atravezada por tal marca).
Bueno probablemente hacer esta critica no es algo tan problematico en si, pero me molesta cuando se instala como "algo interesante que tenen los antropologos para decir" y se desata una catarata de articulos que repiten lo mismo y cumplen con la heroica misión de salir a desenmascarar movimientos sociales. Y no me refiero a Kuper que hace una critica interesante y que moviliza. En fin, no se por que me enoja tanto si tambien critique este tipo de cosas y especialmente pase horas tratando de explicar esta idea algunos amigxs con los que trabaje.



Malkki, L. 1992 “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 24-44.
Malkii critiques the correlation space – culture in Anthropology, specially by pointing to the sedentary metaphysics of theory, government and commonsensical discourses. The question of rootedness is calling to attention for analysis to take into account that maybe the displacement has become routine, and movement chronic. This is not absolutely new as people has always moved as a result of violence and desire. “The recognition that people are increasingly moving targets of anthropological inquiry is associated with the placing of boundaries and borderland at the centre of our analytic frameworks, as opposed to relegating them to invisible peripheries or anomalous danger zones.” This concern is not so much the result of actual corporeal movements but of issues of cultural displacements, of people, things and cultural products, what Edward Said call a general “condition of homelessness”. She proposes to re-examine the relation between identity and territory (she does this by examining the refugees) both in the refugees’ ideas about their homeland, but also in the discourses constructing a national order of things, and explaining the the condition of a refugee.
Malkii is critiquing the correlation space – culture by pointing to the “sedentary metaphysics” that have ruled theory, state and common sense. Sedentary Metaphysics: is peculiarly enabling of the elaboration and consolidation of a national geography that reaffirms the segmentation of the worlds into prismatic, mutually exclusive units of word order, … is taken for granted so much that is nearly invisible, …is deeply metaphysical and deeply moral, sinking people and cultures into “national soils.” (she quotes Del And Guatary in the need of a nomadology, or to write history form a nomad point and not form the Unitarian state apparatus perspective)
proposes a metaphor of cultures following an arborescent root (trees deeply rooted in the soil) metaphor along with kinship metaphors. This is created both discursively and through practice. This logic defines movement as pathological, as abnormally producing “uprootedness”, mobility is presented as not being a natural part of sociality. In anthropology the lin between nation and culture has produced a “spatial incarceration of the native”, by establishing a orreltion between culture and place and a discontinous organization of them, but also by establishing a correltion between culture and land in the notions of “indigenous”, “autoctonous” linked to place and nature. She critiques the metaphysical and moral implication of these as manifested in for example the alliance between conservation movements and indigenous advocates in the defense of the rainforest. [the morality of rootdenes may a dimension of my analysis, yet I’m not sure it plays the central aaspect of my case] It shows how there not only a need to root others but also a nostalgic search for a home in the mobile west.

[I agree that the “myth of the good savage”, now also presented as heroic defender of his soil against evil multinational capitalism, that is implicit in these actions is problematic as long as it makes a rootdeness = good correlation at the time that it “naturalizes” the indigenous. She raises an important concern in relation to what happens to thes people if they move (or even desire to move) to the city. Yet Indigeneity as a effect of colonization puts space as a relevant political dimension of struggle, well just as we said with massey that most politics is spatial]

This is a logic that goes mostly uncontested form social science to state discourses, “civilized” populations (agriculturalists) are presented as having a deep and intimate relation with a particular land or terriotory. This rises the question of how to define indigeneity, and the relativity of its time frames, as all populations come form somewhere else, at what moment one becomes indigenous is a relative matter.

My critique: I agree with this however, the complicated issue is to neither erase colonization form these process, nor erase politics, it is not the same to be part of an ex military dictatorship in exile than to be part of a displaced marginalized group.

In sum the dualities produced by national order of things are the rooted-uorooted, and the sedentary – mobile.
She proposes that a logic of the naturalness and moralization of nationalism generates a notion of the refugee as problem, a pathology and an unmoral condition. However in the two cases of Hutu refugees she analyzes she sees two different models challenging the national metaphysics. In one set of refugees living in camps sustain an identity as refugees is constant long for their homeland, a discourse that attract international aid. This notions do not just unsettle notions of nationalism but also generate an alternative national project by expecting to return to their country, only after a certain moralizing process is achieved (and “illegitimate” government taken away form power). The other is a group of people who relocate themselves in a town and rather than retaining a single national identity, they manage a repertoire of identities (hutu, refugee, tanzanises, form that town, etc) and do not long for a moral return to Burundi. She calls these identities cosmopolitan and rhyzomatic, as they do not have a clear starting point and are not rooted in a singe point (following the concept of Del and Guattari). She finishes her work suggested that the rootdness of the national identities were in part what triggered the massacres of Hutu- Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda (and she briefly compares it with the Jewish genocide).

My critique: Even she states that no one identity should be considered as just the decision of the ones holding it, but a complex construction, she implies some preference for the “ryhzomatic cosmopolitan”, a type of identity that she presents as embracing complexity, fluidity and its relational character. One can be sympathetic with such a preference, however the issue of cosmopolitanism raises a multiplicity of questions and need for further explorations if we are going to chose it as a supersiding paradigm, as for example what Gidwani and Sivaramakrishanan do without much presumptions. At the same time it raises the question on how much this is not a general and a-critical celebration of cosmopolitanism form a position of a cosmopolitan academy.


esto es muy largo.

y Grossberg

Esto es parte de mi tesis de lienciatura, del 2003-4.

Grossberg, Laurence 1992. We Gotta Get Out of this Place. Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge

Lawrence Grossberg (1992) argues that power is constituted in everyday life through the correspondence between systems of identification and what he calls economies of value, this are historical systems of production, distribution and cosnumption that regulate the availability or scarcity of value (the simplest systems are the one that regulate economic production, but also power is produced in systems of meaning, social relations, desire and pleasure among others)

Habla entonces sobre las posibilidades que tienen los sujetos en realizar ciertas prácticas y sobre sus efectos. Tales efectos se constituyen en valores, definidos en disputas históricas y no con una existencia intrínseca.
Por consiguiente, los sujetos son constituidos a través de interpelaciones de los discursos hegemónicos que los inscriben y los fijan en posiciones (cambiantes y relacionales) dentro de la experiencia social, que les habilitan acceso a ciertas prácticas y les restringen otras. Pero también se activan articulaciones por parte de los sujetos, alrededor de sensibilidades compartidas. En consecuencia, las personas delimitan prácticas, experiencias y significados, sobre los que se deposita afecto , entendido como la inversión de energía en sitios constituidos como relevantes (Grossberg 1992). Grossberg entiende afecto como un concepto que "identifica la fuerza de la inversión que ancla a las personas en experiencias, prácticas, significados y placeres particulares, pero también determina cuan vigorizada se siente la gente en cualquier momento de su vida, su nivel de energía y pasión. (...) también se define cualitativamente por la forma en que cierto evento es hecho significativo [is made to matter] * (1992:82)". Concluye que es "el plano o mecanismo de pertenencia e identificación"* (1992: 84)
Grossberg (op. cit.), rastrea la producción de lugares dentro de redes de circulación que los atraviesan de manera diferencial, y por lo tanto producen sentidos diversos sobre ellos y efectos diferentes para quienes participan en las prácticas que allí se desarrollan. En palabras del autor, esto es reconocer a los lugares como señales en una movilidad estructurada de los sujetos, y a éstas como parte constitutiva de maquinarias territorializadoras. Estas últimas tienen que ver con la producción de sistemas de circulación que habilitan e inhabilitan formas de uso, movimiento y producción de lugares, entre los distintos sujetos. Grossberg define dos sistemas de identificación: (1) las maquinarias de territorialización, que definen regímenes de jurisdicción, que demarcan lo que se puede hacer y cómo; y (2) las maquinarias diferenciadoras, asociadas a los regímenes de saber y verdad, que delimitan las razones y principios de la acción.
Grossberg también señala que dentro de estas movilidades que se entrecruzan, los lugares aparecen como domicilios temporales sobre los cuales la gente deposita mayor o menor grado de afecto, y por tanto genera distintos sentidos de pertenencia e identificación. En palabras del autor, los lugares
sirven como puntos temporales de pertenencia y orientación, moradas alrededor de las que mapas de significado, deseo, placer, etc. pueden articularse. Las inversiones del afecto son cruciales a esta circulación ya que están implícitas en las prácticas a través de las que estos lugares se construyen. Las inversiones de afecto son el mecanismo por el cual la circulación es detenida, fijada y articulada * (1992: 107).

Puede considerarse que el autor está evaluando las posibilidades de elección que los sujetos están habilitados para realizar, dentro de los constreñimientos de estructuras de circulación política e históricamente constituidas. De este modo, la producción de sujetos está íntimamente relacionada a la de lugares, en tanto los sujetos no se articulan en abstracto sino en lugares concretos. En el presente trabajo tomo a los lugares en estas múltiples dimensiones y no como algo dado, ni tan sólo como escenarios de la acción.

Gordillo

Image credits form no escaping gravity
a post on this soon

Gordillo G. 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gordillo’s book is a historical journey that examines the subordination of western toba people of the Argentinean Chaco and their incorporation to labor relations as making a new social formation that simultaneously produced a new type of space in the Chaco. This book is also an ethnography about how the memories of these past experiences shape the present of the toba communities. Spatialized everyday practices trigger the evocation of memories and conversely memory is built as people move through different places. Finally his work is also a theoretical exploration on the way social relations create space, a space that is not homogeneous but organized in the interrelation of different places only defined in constant tensions. Tensions differ form contradictions in that are not absolute negations, but ongoing, superposed and conflicts in constant redefinition, most times in tension –contradiction- in themselves.

In a dialectical movement through space time he shows how that place is not just a result of the social, and not only a by-product in the constitution of power relations but an active element in the construction of such relations and new post colonial social configuration. He shows how the experience of Toba men and women of going to work to the sugar canes, from the beginning of the century until the 1960s, is still a powerful force shaping their currents relations and notions of poverty and wealth (as spatialized categories), their becoming indigenous (as tobas were the less valued type of workforce in the plantations), relation to a state (that wants to kill them but latter employ them), independence and excess (exaltation of sexuality and “vices”), female independence (as they had a salary independently form men), and also death terror and fear of of physically disappearing as a group. This relations were defined in contrast to the communities and the bush, and also from the Anglican mission station established at the beginning of the century by request of the tobas asking for protection form military attacks. But the sugar cane is also in tension with the contemporary relations with the local municipality (located at the nearest town, where political patrons and toba leaders struggle for resources and especially paid state jobs), modern bean and cotton farms that employs them in the east and the marshlands left by the overflow of the river. The analysis the author unfolds, follow the principles of his argument: places are not described in just one chapter but acquire light when referring to the next place. To understand the way the mission stations were historically constituted as a place (and unmade in their abandonment) he unfolds the experience in the sugar plantations, and to explain the plantations he goes back to the bush and the river, and the importance of this places in the present, to then contrast the bush and the river with the government agencies in Ingeniero Juarez. In this way the author builds a complex net of multiple tensions of place that disestablish places in themselves but rather show how their boundaries and qualities are in their contradiction with other places. Thus he overcomes dual interpretation of dialectic movement as the negative opposition between two separate and independent “things”, and the progressive movements of synthesis which contains both in a ina form that supersedes both. Rather, he shows that contradictions imply the blurry differentiation of “the terms”, it implies that “both” are shaped in this interpenetration, and are always not just two but within multiple tensions.

If space are in tension they still share a common thread, they are all inhabited by different devils: payaks form the mountains, cannibals, the Familiar in the cane fields, and the bush devils, back in their communities. These devils are not metaphors of the social relations, they are not symbols condensing the social meanings and knowledge that sit in places, nor are they manifestations of a perspective which mask social relations, rather they are part of the matrix of social relations in the plantation and thus the plantation as a place (p138). For the analysis of the plantation devils he develops the concept of indigenous fetishism, as, he argues, the devils ultimately condense the experience of death and terror resulting form labour exploitation, in this they are not just images but active forces, and they contribute to reproduce toba’s economic subordination.

I can’t do many critiques as it is a very strong ethnography probably, and very strong ideas. Probably say that I still think the weight of the experience in the sugar plantations and its memories may be mediated by other processes. One is the state which makes its entrance only in relation to the military and then disappears until the refence of the 1990s political patronage. I also wonder if the notion of indigenous fetishism as a condensation of economic exploitation closes the discussion on the devils, as the devils of the bush are defined in the relations of reciprocity. Are there other ways of thinking the materiality of the devils without a reference to economic notions.

Csordas

Csordas, Thomas 1990 “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18(1): 5-47
Csordas argues that embodiment constitutes a concept (and paradigm) to overcome the body-mind, subject-object divisions. It is through the body that experience is possible, which then becomes experience of the body. Csordas combines two focuses that appear to be in tension, that of theory of practice and phenomenology to develop hi paradigm of embodiment for examining Christian charismatic Church phenomenon of spirit possession, glosolalia and communion with the divinity. He uses Merlau Ponty’ idea of perception as pre-objective generative process to understand the way something that was normally understood as superstition can be regarded as real, with this he questions the notion of reality and objectivity altogether. Phenomenology is a useful for understanding perception as an embodied capacity molded by culture but not result of a universal reason. Phenomenology situates reason as a consequence of perception, which poses the potentiality of many variants of objectification, as reality is complex. At the same time he takes the notion of habit to propose that this objects defined after perception do not just create a general external world but the social structure of it. It is, following Bourdieu again form the body’s activity that the social structure is created. He not only applies these concepts but also crates an interesting framework to advance in the complexity of these experiences considering both the point of view of the participants and how a realm of reality comes into being, from a shares experience of social constraints in other spheres and as a response to them. This response is not just a “reaction” is not clearly “resistance” is not an alternative movement but rather a opening of possibilities in a different dimension.

The Shins- Phantom Limb

intermezzo entre bourdieu y csordas

Bourdieu's Outline

It is in the dialectical relation between the body and a space, (…) that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of structures in the world, that is the appropriating of the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world. (Bourdieu 1977:89)

I don't have many comments on this either, this work somehow turned into part of common sense now. I agree focusing on practice is a useful start point, and also help us solve problems of agency, structure and individual. So he gives us an initial push away form looking for stable mechanisms of social interactions, but more importantly away form discourse per se as a privileged force effecting power.
He also gives good advice to ethnographic work (and even though his ethnography is not exactly fantastically innovative) especially in regards to the ethnographers projection of order into the field. It is now a bit of a handy cliché to say that ethnography is a mutual construction of knowledge through practice, but is still an interesting departure point. The problems of Bourdieu are probably that is not so clear the way the tension reproduction - innovation is resolved or which is the point in which the tension is no longer sustainable, in this the process of subjectification is more a given than something he examines. In relation to this the internalization-externalization processes remain a bit obscure, into what exactly is internalized and how objectification happens (through repetition, discipline, external glance, a conduct of conduct for improving self?). Or what is the mediation between sensorial experience - internalization. 

If the different fields: of the social, economic, symbolic are independent and each holds its particular struggles, but somehow are in correlation (thus more symbolic power is linked to more economic power) is not so clear how this relation between fields happen and what type of power is created in the relation between fields. How to explain with Bourdieu moments in which art is devaluated altogether or how popular knowledge suddenly becomes dominant during a popular government, how productions of a field become appropriated by other field. This rises the question of how to understand the overlaps of fields, even he does some of this in relation (more cultural capital = more differed economic capital) in his analysis cultural capital. Political patronage is more about social capital in the construction of a net of followers, about access to a little economic capital, about maintaining an ethic principle of return of favour, is it symbolic in as much as signs of peronism for example are a necessary part of reassuring the circle, is it just symbolic violence that inverts the term of the debt.

Maybe the generative is not very clear for me either. It is clear that structures are arbitrary and are a created by people, it is also clear his proposition of the need to bring the doxa into the field of the critique, but then is not so clear how the new structures appear, is it just an effect of the critique, or the irruption of a subordinated aspect of a field that turns to be dominant.  

Ok here again, my extended notes on the text

Bourdieu understands social relations in a circular movement: the individual generates the social structure of the world through practice. The structure of the world moulds the individuals. With the concept of practice, as social action directed by a social system of dispositions, but also with room for innovation and individual decision making, he bridges the tension between these terms. At the same time he recognizes practice as the concrete base of cultural perception, meanings and actions. Culture is then not an abstract structure through which people conceive the world but a set of material conditions of existence result of practice. The structure is for him an equivalent of the objective conditions, the concrete organization of the social world. Practice is the result of the strategic use by individuals of social dispositions. This dispositions differ form rules as they are not rigid determination, but conforms a habitus a that are themselves the result of a concrete social interaction. Structure, Bourdieu argues, is a dynamic result of action and originated in different and superposed dispositions for action, thinking and feeling.

His proposition of a theory of practice implies having a dialectical view of the relation between practices and structures, between objective conditions and subjective experience. For him we should be able to understand how “rules” only exist as much as are actualized and reproduced through practice, “structuring structures”. Structures structure movement which create and recreate the structures. But also how we are always already in a structure, or for him the objective world (aunque B no lo dice me gusta esta frase, para recordar que siempre aparecemos en un campo politico). A practice that is material and performed through people’s culturally informed bodies that sense, think, feel and act in the world, producing its objective conditions. In this sense he proposes not only to analyze practice, but that the act of analysis is itself a practice. A practice as the researcher is interacting with the group he is studding, trying to understand the dispositions that motivate action, as well as understanding all the variations and particularities of what he observes.
For Bourdieu practice is not just the result of a mental activity of an individual that liberates himself by thinking (in Sartre’s terms). Neither is practice just the mechanical repetition of a social structure. Practice is the concrete action of people in the world. Practice is the result of a person’s previous past experience, of his position in the social system, the knowledge produced in this experience, and particular expectations and way of feeling. Practice is the activity that creates the social conditions of the world. In this sense practice is the “object”, the production of knowledge and method.
Habitus is an embodied system of dispositions that generate and delimits directions action. This concept recovers the individual will and decision making yet showing how we can understand repetitions and continuity in human action. Habitus a then an unconscious way of doing and thinking inscribed in people’s bodies through their interaction with the world, a socially produced field of interactions. A world, that was previously produced by antecessors and has been incorporated by each individual through his past experience. This previous experience, heterogeneous and not necessary coherent, unrecognized by people, orients his future assumptions and strategies in the world. Every new interaction forces a readjustment of the conception of the appropriate – in-appropriate action, but at the same time each situation opens new possibilities. Thus, different people (and the same person under different circumstances) use rules in accordance to particular and contingent interests, in order to gain power by positioning in a better place in the social system. So we can understand practice as the result of different level of assumptions, some deeply internalized (particularly the ones acquired in early childhood) and unconscious, and some that are object of reflection.
Synthetically, the author establishes a circle from objective conditions that are the structure the world to people internalization and use of those conditions. Then from people’s actions that are material and have particular meanings and create those objective conditions. In other words he is looking for the social dispositions that limit and frame human agency as part of unequal power relations, and are reinforced (and veiled) symbolically through symbolic violence. In this I think that he is somehow echoing Marx in that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (frase ya muy citada pero que me sigue pareciendo muy potente)

Bourdieu understands the doxa as the field of the taken for granted, the unquestioned. The doxa is also what is not conscious and what cannot be reflected on. It is a set of ideas but more generating schemes. This is ways of thinking, acting and perceiving the world, that produce a sense of reality. The base of the doxa and its power is the misrecognition of the individuals of the limits it imposes, by presenting this limits as natural limits. Therefore people operate following these schemes producing the objective conditions. By doing so people reproduce the objective conditions without recognizing the power relations and the arbitrariness of the limits they are contributing to reproduce.
Symbolic capital also follows a homologous organization to that of economic and social capital. But the homology is not to be understood as a reflection of one structure upon the other but rather as interconnected systems. Economic capital is a result of economic capital accumulation. Inverting the terms, economic capital accumulation depends on a process of veiling of the objective power relations involved in it through symbolic violence. But symbolic violence is not just “ideology”, but a more general veil of the arbitrariness of social organization, hierarchies and status included as well as economic accumulation, this is done through the imposition f categories and ways of perception by those who have more symbolic capital upon those who have less who recognize it as just a “right” or proper way of acting.
Modes of domination, this is, ways of accumulation of symbolic, social and economic capital, in societies which have no institutionalized state or education system or market, have to be constantly reproduced through strategic actions. In these societies domination is produced in the interpersonal relations, a tension that must be masked under the veil of symbolic relations, thus producing symbolic violence. In contrast, in state and market societies, power relations are fixed in the processes of institutionalization, which reinforces the Doxa. In this cases law guarantees a set of relations and subject position in them, so personal relations are no longer the basis of reproduction. In these cases the social system becomes an objective reality materialized in the institution and people’s relations to them.

O si Lefebvre reloaded

La estrategia fue no abrir el libro de nuevo para no ser deborada, pero algo asi paso leyendo las hojas de notas. al menos sirve para darse cuenta que Lefebvre es mucho mas refinado que los usos que le di hasta ahora. La anotation fue inundada luego por parte de las notas.

Lefebvre, H. 1991 [1974] The Production of Space. Trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell: London.
1. Lefebvre considers that place is social: each social formation (each society and mode of production in his terms) produces space in a particular way in which contradictory relations and social hierarchies unfold; but is also produced: not only as a result-means of economic production, but in the generation of social relations, which means to consider their relevance in the reproduction of social relations (form biological reproduction, workforce reproduction and reproduction of social relations of production which include the visible and invisible representations). He is against economicistic explanations of space which regard space as an object, and thus generates a space fetishism, by erasing social relations (see p88-93).
Lefebvre incorporates the propositions of phenomenological perspective (he is in dialogue with Bachelard, Heidegger who consider are only focusing in two dimensions of space: abstract conceptions and the lived representational): “Being has a history and a history is nothing but the history of being” (p121), thus he also takes historical dimensions and the social contradictions into the understanding of any place production.
He regards space as a concrete abstaction (p 100 –for space time p 118). His analysis of the production of an abstract space as a necessary condition for capitalism and the violence that this process demands, echoes in the historical incorporation of the Chaco to the Argentinean state.

2. Hence, Lefebvre proposes a three-dimensional process in the production of places: 1) conceived: the planning of places from positions of power, 2) lived: the representations of places by its users that may challenge those ideological dimensions, and 3) perceived: the practices over places that effectively produce and reproduce them, following both the lines set by power positions and alternative constructions. (p 33-38)

3. After this definition he dedicates the rest of the book to define the transition form absolute space (form middle ages to absolutists state especially ch. 4 p 229-262) to the production of the abstract space of capitalism (p 262- . Space as a product and a means of capitalist (national and bourgeoise) domination embodies its contradictions which prefigure the possibility of a new space. He has a chapter analyzing the contradictions of abstract space (p 352-) “Contradiction of space make contradictions of social relations operative” (365). He states that difference arrises in the peripheries: which contradicts the universality of the abstract space. (373) If labour is abstracted space of capitalism need is abstract too, spatial practices are related to production and reproduction, knowledge crates an homogeneous space measurable (ie. geometry which he criticizes form the beginning of the book), and the lived space is limited to work, and the visual.

Abstract space is based on the city predominance over the country, in architecture is marked by the division inside/outside, the façade and the perspective. Abstract space is not just an empty or natural or homogeneous, it is also complex and obscure: creates differential hierarchically structured spaces; it is obscure, send aspects of the social to the obscene by negating them (for obscene p 99). In sum he defines it as predominantly visual (p282), geometric and phallic (p285). For the first there is a need of making transparent spaces for control, the space of capitalism as one in which “there is nothing to hide”, for the second the making of an isomorphic space the space for the commodity and the commodification of space, and the phallic as its masculinist preponderance, and ojectual absolut verticality of buildings (ie see 40, 166). He exemplifies the fracture of space with the female body as without organs (Lacan) (p 355).
State. Capitalism is the result of the expansion of the space of accumulation and the rise of forces of production, but is the link violence and the economic which gives place to the constitution of the State. The establishment of the state as an abstraction veils the class struggle, by establishing an ideology of sovereignty. It is state what produces territory as a result of its dominion of space (279-280) “Every space s born of violence… state power endures only by virtue of violence directed toward space” (280). Violence directed over nature and population, creates unity, creates the rationality of accumulation, bureaucracy an reassured by monopoly of force by arm. Space is fragmented, hierachized, submitted to sovereign power of state.

4. His analysis includes a long reflection on how the soviet revolution’s project failed as a result (he argues) of the failure of inaugurating a new spatiality, in this he shares the ideas of situationists in the need of motorizing revolution form the everyday life, but rather than arguing for the way this would be done through artistic movements (Lefebvre will say “ representations of the relations of production which subsume power relations, these two occur in space: space contains tehm in the form of buildings, movements and works of art” p 33), he sees the importance of liberating space. Space can be appropriated for new uses, new practices (p 165). It is for this that his book is ultimately a political project of a differential space which need the establishment of new knowledge, new relations, possibility of difference.

5. Lefbvre’s unending book can be re-read in search of different topics (ie. knowledge, language, visuality, ), one of the tangential topics I’ve been interested in is his understanding of body-space. For Lefebvre, the body is the agent of the social production of space, and then it is part of each dimension through its productive energy. The body is separated from objects and the world, language is put as a mediation in te production of a knowledge which is “over” the world. But also body’s sexual drive is repressed, it is thus a castrated body. (p 40) To reestablish practice and sensorial qualities of the body is also a way of producing a new type of knowledge by decentering (esto resuena a Nietzsche, creo). A new type of knowledge should overcome dichotomies. In this way competence and performance within spaces are embodied activities and a way of knowledge, bodies are the motor of practice and what enables perception. Therefore the lived body is the base of experience. An experience shaped by power relations but also that can be contested from the body. The body has the potential of inaugurating a new type of space. This brings to another contradiction: the abstraction of space from social relations can only be achieved through violence that is reproduced by dominant knowledge of the space . Again it is through the body that this contradiction can be recognized and then overcome. Synthesizing his conception of the body as a potential for political transformation he states that: “The restoration of the body means the restoration of the sensory-sensual, of speech, of the voice, of the smell, of hearing. In short the non-visual. And of the sexual…” (363) “The social space contains potentialities (of work and re-appropriation) (…) that correspond to demands of a body “transported” outside itself in space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates a project of a different space.” (349).


6. Space and Language (131-166): space has meaning and may imply a message, but space is cannot be understood as language, rather discourse is in – about – of space. He critiques Jackobson, Barthes, Pierce, Nietzsche.
“No space ever vanishes utterly living no trace” (p 164). Every new addition reinterprets the past.” (P 164) But also “ Nothing disappears completely, however, nor can what subsist be defined solely in terms of traces memories o relics.” (229)

Varios contradictions:
Quanity vs Quality
Exchange valu vs use vale
Violence vs knowledge
Savoir vs connnaissance
Domination vs appropiation
Repetition vs differece

“A space in which each individual and or collective subject would become aquainted with use and enjoyment is at present only at infancy” (p 381) Cantrak power can be challenged by local powers in which the machine of the state is replaced by machines managed form below. This questo of counter space overwhelms the division between reform and revolution
“The enigma of the body is its tendency to produce difference unconsciously” (395)

The end of my notes just say What is the subject? A momentary centre. The object? Likewise. The body? A focusing, active and productive energy.

Grosz Architecture From the Outside y notas varias

Grosz, E. 2001. Architecture form the outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press
Elizabeth Grosz presents a series of essays she wrote in dialogue with architecture, and to do so she proposes to create a third space, nor architecture nor philosophy form which to look at both.

This outside is her positioning for the dialogue but it is also a question, what is the outside of architecture and philosophy. If the inside has always been in relation to the outside, as outside is “active in the production of the inside” in disjunction of series rather than in the conjunction. (69).
Some interesting points in relation to the inside-ouside (p 67-69):
P 68 Deleuze describes three characteristics of a relation between two series as: (p67) 1)A relation can only be thought if tehe series are separate and a zone of proximity with its own ways of functioning is created. 2) “the outside is capable of asserting itself form the inside… this frunctionn as the unsaid and the unseen within discoure and representation.” 3) Insofar as both series are modified with the encounter of each with the other, with the drawings of lines to link them, they ar capable of interactions or becomings… (for Deleuze Foucaut), the inside is an effect of the outside: this inside is a fold or doubling of the outside, a contortion o the exterior surface: “It resembles exactly to the invagination of a tissue in embryology, or the act o doubling in sewing: twist fold stop and so on.” (Deleuze) (68)
“this outside must be thought itself or perhaps even life itself” She goes on asking what is thinking and she follows Del. : to think is to problematize, knowledge, power and thought are atriple root of problematization, thinking is the space between seeing [or listening or touching or…] and speaking [or writing, or running, or painting, or..]. In this “the middle is always the privileged point to begin, why though is best captured in between” … The interiority of these series is of less interest than the way these two series are capable of being aligned to connect to create their plane of consistence or coexistence, which is made possible through the operations of this outside (69).
“Becoming is what enables th trait, a line, an orientation, an event to be released form the system, series, organism or object that may have the effect of transforming the whole, making it no longer function singularly: it is an encounter of bodies that releases something form each and in the process, releases or makes real a virtuality a series of enabling and transforming possibilities.” Thought, life is that space outside the actual hich is is filled with virtualities, movements, trajectories that need release [not so sure about the verb release] It is what a body is capable of doing without necessity and without being captured in what habitually does, a sea of (possible) desires and machines waiting to their chance, their moment of actualization”(70)
Deleuze can be understood as the philosopher who evacuates the inside (whether of a subject and organism or a text) forcing it to confront its outside, evacuating it and thereby unloosing its systematicity or organization, it is usual or habitual functioning, allowing a part, function or feature to spin, off or tu mutateinto a new organization or system, to endelessly deflect, become, make. (p 72 -73)
In her work she has a strong interest in the body, one o her main critiques to philosopher that have considered this topic is that they all talk about a general human body, but there is not one body but at least two. In this gender and sexuality generates different spatialities and temporalities, but also different genders access space differently. She question how could architecture start considering the construction of gendered specific spaces. In regards to this topic she discusses with Butler in that changing sexual identity is not as easy as sliding away form the repeated interpellations, one can perform a different identity which is not the same as becoming.
If architecture can take concepts form philosophy as tools, philosophy can do likewise, not just by taking architectural concepts as metaphors, but also by considering the dimension of concrete building as part of the practice of philosophy.
She argues that emerging forms (ie life) should be considered as part of spatial concerns, this genesis is the emergence of new forms of assemblage in which there is no clear distinction between animated- inanimate but what new possibilities the configuration opens up (ie the internet, which she analyzes forma genre perspective). In this she shows and interest in time as an undetachable form space, as emergence and genesis unfold in space but in emergence time is constituted.
She is also interested in technology not just as a body interface but as also something that gets internalized in the body. She uses psychoanalytic ideas of the phantom body in order to understand the way body parts can be replaced by technological devices, but also how the city becomes a part of the (sexualized) body the body in the city as well as the city in the body.


Bueno a ver. Empece leyendo los textos mas pos- (estructuralistas, bue que se yo con las definiciones) , por que me interezaba despegarme un poco de Lefebvre -aunque esta bueno y siempre se le puede a volver a entrar por otro lado, pero deciamos crea un poco de adiccion-. Esta bueno me parece importante correr un poco de pensar al espacio como proceso, que si bien dinamico tiene cierta linealidad y resolucion dialectica, y contradicciones que si bien multiples y con limites inciertos, quizas fomentan pensar en lugares con cierta sedimentacion. (el otro dia recorde que Raffles dice algo importante sobre esto de la sedimentacion y es como los lugares no solo se transforman en espacios de confluencia sino que tambien se diluyen y dejan de ser visitados para transformarse en un trazo, aunque no me acuerdo si usa esta palabras). Me faltan algunos pero Thrift desde la geografia habla de vectores, velocidades, imágenes, efectos, afectos, microbiopolitica y por lo tanto de devenires constantes. Todo esto me parecio interesante, pero cuando volvi a la etnografia me dio cierto alivo pensar que las trayectorias no estan en un espacio trasparente (que necesitan las imágenes para trasmitirse en en los microsegundos que obsesionan a Thrift) sino que aun vale la pena pensar moviemientos mas lentos que van encontrado cosas por el camino y que justamente son detenidos por distintas fuerzas, como las peregrinaciones o los viajes por la selva o visitas a para multiplicar relaciones. No es que una perspectiva impute a la otra pero si esta bueno pensar las escalas.

Bueno en tercer lugar volver a la bibliografía sobre el cuerpo, y ahí tengo prominencia de feministas, me dio otro especie de alivio en dar cierto volumen al movimiento. Creo que esta bueno pensar en que vectores se van abriendo, y que cambios implican las velocidades altas, pero a la vez pensar todo esto se actualiza o no en un movimiento desde cuerpos enmarañados de maneras diversas con otras cosas- personas- maquinas (bueno thrift cita los estudios en neurciancia, es parte del cuerpo si le interesa). Bueno Young, si bien muy criticada por hacer tipologías, ayuda a pensar que los vectores que se abren guardan alguna relacion con la forma en que esos cuerpos estan diferenciados –en generos- y jerarquizados. Aca Grosz tambien hace notar que los filosofos que hablan del cuerpo lo toman de modo generico, y apuntan evidentemente al cuerpo masculino y propone que al menos deberiamos hablar de dos cuerpos. (Disgresion: mmm esto estaría problematizado por buttler y la repetición perfomativa y tambien por las antropologas lanzadas a ver “otras” construcciones de genero, y encuentran cuerpos “bisexuales” con proceso de distinción solo momentáneas (aaa no me acuerdo quien), cuerpos imperfectos que tienen que ser sometidos a cirugías que cierran el cuerpo para devenir sexuales (Boddy), y cuerpos que solo tienen genero en tanto repiten ciertas practicas (Astuti), y es intersante que todos estos trabajo hacen tambalear discusiones de genero desde perspectivas teoricas que quizas ni se planteaban hacer criticas tan profundas.) Grosz tambien habla de lo dominantemente masculino del espacio de las ciudades y de las tecnologías y se pregunta que implica esto para los otros cuerpos en la ciudad. Su idea del cuerpo en la ciudad y a ciudad en el cuerpo es interesante para pensar corporizaciones diferenciales.

Pero lo que mas me hizo pensar (mientras caminaba de un café a otro) fue que probablemente el tema interioridad-exterioridad es algo que atraviesa los distintos temas que quisiera conjugar en el trabajo (también los que me quedan afuera y no se como incluir). Bueno por un lado tenía este tema en mi trabajo anterior cuando me preguntaba si el barrio esta o no esta en la ciudad y por supuesto que está pero bien corrido al margen, sin continuidad con el resto de la ciudad, claro también que con el crecimiento de los suburbios es menos un campo abierto y mas un continuado de barrios que se van formando con otras migraciones. Como sea esa tension de estar y no estar es un poco lo que define al barrio, lleno de gente que quería estar en la ciudad y el estar en el barrio les implica una mejora por estar “mas cerca de” un centro de progreso, y estar medio claustrofobicamente fijados, donde cada vez hay menos espacio. Notas de campo:
[Una mañana de junio de 2002 tomábamos mate con Esteban y su hermano Pablo, ambos de unos 26 años. Esteban comentó que cuando él vio lo que estaba pasando en Buenos Aires (19-20) pensó que dentro de poco tiempo los indigenas se pueden volver a levantar, que puede ser que haya guerra como antes, porque cada vez les sacan más y ellos hace años que aguantan. Mientras señalaba el lugar que ocupa la vivienda, expresó que están apresados, explicó que ahora están en ese lugar chiquito, que apenas les alcanza para vivir. Antes tenían más lugar y ahora cada vez están más encimados. Continuó explicando que no solamente les reducen su territorio sino que envenenan el agua de la que viven. Por eso piensa que si no llegan a un acuerdo con las mineras va a haber Guerra entre los paises involucrados. Pablo asiente y agrega que no hay otra alternativa. Le pregunto si los aborígenes van a pelear y me dice que no sabe porque están muy débiles, ya cada vez tienen menos fuerza para pelear y no hay guerreros como antes. Pero igual afirman que si los quieren echar, si los quieren matar, van a pelear.]
En todo esteo el barrio esta “entremedio”, en las relaciones con el adentro social y en la espacialidad de adentro-afuera de la ciudad.

Mi otro pregunta tenía que ver con lo indígena que también tiene que ver con otras lineas de interioridad exterioridad, que se espacializa en el barrio, pero también se encarna. La gente se presenta omo indígena en relacion a una trayectoria (venir del campo, ser pobre, memoria de peleas con el ejercito, no ser claramente ciudadanos, ser objeto de “desarrollo”) y en relacion a practicas, (hablar idioma, relaciones familiares, formas de trabajo, comida que se reconocen indígenas).

Bueno esto sigue estando en mi trabajo ahora pero seguramente si el eje va a ser el movimiento, como dice Grosz (creo) el adentro y el afuera se generan al atravezar lugares, entonces algo intersante sería ver el modo en que estos adentros afueras se van definiendo (como en el relato de barring de gente andina en la ciudad que solo empieza a hablar quechua cuando llega a un punto de su viaje en colectivo de visita a su pueblo). Y de vuelta la interioridad – exterioridad del cuerpo y la ciudad pero en el movimiento mas que en el “habitar”. Si la interioridad – exterioridad se van definiendo en el trayecto, se define también por lo que deja de estar y lo que se va dejando atrás, puede pensarse en movimientos de “escape” pero también de búsqueda, aunque claro las dos cosas estan juntas y cada vez que hay escape se encuentran cosas, pero quizás sin buscarlas. Y de vuelta la interioridad – exterioridad del cuerpo y la ciudad pero en el movimiento mas que en el “habitar”. Bueno esto de lo que no esta, (se puede sumar lo que no se dice, lo que no se hace, etc? Sider) necesitaría un poco mas de trabajo.

Y seguramente tiene algo que ver con mi trabajo fallido del año pasado sobre las imágenes de cuerpos desmembrados, mirados desde lo quirúrgico y el saber medico -como algo que tiene que cortar y abrir-, la escenificación de lo político -ensangrentado-, y la necropolitica.

Termino de escribir esto y me parece demaciado general y seguramente forzado, que va ser.

Rural Cosmopolitanism

Vinay Gidwani Gidwani and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2003 Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 37; 339
The authors focus on what they call rural cosmopolitanism, by examining the circular migration between country and the city, as a movement that disrupts the traditional divisions of rural and urban spaces. It also reexamines the notion of globalization and point to the fact that rurality has rarely been included as being involved in this type of analysis when they are also intertwined in globalizing movements as well as being important nodes in the flows of capital, populations, technologies and ideas. For this they base on Lefebvre by understanding the way the lived (representational) and the perceived (practice) dimensions of space are reproduced in the movements form country to city. They propose to expand the notion of the cosmopolitan, by retaining the aspect of the concept that refers to the coexistence of capacities of a person to adapt to and have social competence in multiple socio-cultural formations, but deny the specificity of being a process only linked to big metropolis which function as centres for global capital flow. The circular migrant does not only transmit ideas when they move form one place to the other, but also techniques and material forces which transform the spaces of their circulation. Recent process of industrial regionalization and demands for specific types of labour force are the types of new phenomenon enhancing these types of movements (which have probably always existed). Restricting the cosmopolitan only to trans-national, transcontinental flows limits the analysis to only one of its dimensions and scales, by preventing us see how other social subjects, by moving transform the conception, inhabitation and perception of spaces. Examining these invisible movements can be relevant to nation formation, social movilization and modernity in India, and also in a more general way in other postcolonial contexts.

Bueno breve, nada que me parta la cabeza, pero muy en linea con el "caso" que voy a pensar. Esta bueno el poner atencion en que los movimientos son circulares y los polos de atraccion van variando, aca mas que nada por movimento de capital -en el ciclo D-M-D y la movilizacion de fuerza de trabajo-. Esta bueno tambien pensar un concepto asociado a la globalizacion desde lo mas supuestamente "anti-global" que son campesinos moviendose. Tamben esta bueno que la proponen como diemnsion necesaria para entender al modenidad, nacionalismo, movilización. Bueno algo obvio pero que no me habia detenido a pensar ultimamente en que el capitalismo necesito las grandes relocalizaciones de campesinas con los enclosures, otra dimension espacial de la politica. Bueno tambien recuerda que esta bueno tener el panorama en clave economica.

湘南乃風 黄金魂 PV

S: the chorus is like...

rise, rise, without fearing what's ahead
9:13 PM
run, run, until you crash into something
rise, rise, if it's swim or sink
bet on that your tomorrow is better than your now

adorno y arlt

rafa me mando esta cita de adorno en el blog archive - sometim3s :

Behind the mirror. First word of caution for authors: check every text, every fragment, and every line to see if the central motif presents itself clearly enough. Whoever wants to express something, is so carried away that they are driven along, without reflecting on such. One is too close to the intention, “in thought”, and forgets to say, what one wants to say.

(esta bueno, auque me da algo de duda eso de pretender que se "entienda" algo, bue mientras tanto sigo vomitando, pagare mis deudas en un purgatorio dirigido por adorno sin duda.)

claro agrego, la cita famosa de arlt, y algo de urgencia

"El futuro es nuestro por prepotencia de trabajo. Crearemos nuestra literatura, no conversando continuamente de literatura, sino escribiendo en orgullosa soledad, libros que encierren la violencia de un "cross" a la mandíbula. Sí, un libro tras otro, y "que los enucos bufen".

Benjamin "The Flaneur"

Benjamin, Walter (1973). Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. New Left Books: London.

Benjamin presents the context in which Baudelaire is writing, that of the rise of life in the cities and the consequent appearance of a city life style. He points how at the opening of the 19th C literary movements shifted form panoramas, which elaborated descriptions of the new urban settings, to physiologists, that presented the movement of progress through descriptions of the functioning of machines. Baudelaire slides form these genres, as he understands that there is a different demand from modernity. The figure of the flaneur is both a character that condenses some of these newness of living in a modern city, and a perspective form where to observe the space of the city and the new social formation of the multitude form within but at some distance. Is a point form which to be and to give account of the tension between the extreme closeness of being in the multitude and the great anonymity and the ephemera of the encounter, (an immersion in a constant “good by”). The flaneur is a complement of the city architecture, he wanders at night thanks to the new gas-lights (that allow night life and also permits the clarity surveillance), it is also an inhabitant of the arcades, shopping streets roofed by the shop owners. The flaneur thus gives subjective descriptions in the city and its instantaneous moments, fragments of the life in the city (as the passing by a street and all the small fragments of scenes one passes by –he refers to Poe) rather than the totality of actions in a community that are recognized by everybody. The flaneur is in constant movement and has no concrete direction, the trajectory can only be understood ones finished and never recreated (as the woman cleaning the street when passing by won’t be there again if ones returning). Both this movement and anonymity trigger the need for new forms of social control and surveillance. Benjamin discusses the tensions around house numbering by the police and which were resisted both in working class neighbourhoods, and by Baudelair himself who avoided paying rent by moving constantly and changing addresses (buena idea).

Mmm probablemnete debería leer bastante mas para redondear los aportes (y leer la a buck morss tb), me queda como deuda. Este texto me lleva de nuevo al problema de la perspectiva que voy a tomar y desde donde mirar las trayectorias y que es exactamente lo que voy a reconstruir. Si no me convense de De Certeau que hable de reconstruir trayectorias desde historias, tampoco quiero tomar una perspectiva en la que percepciones subjetivas de los viajes sean lo que los define. Si bien me intereza saber que “ven cuando ven” distintas personas durante los viajes, probablemnte me intereza pensar efeco de que es el movimiento y que trabajo hace el movimiento sobre sujetos y re-configuarciones de los espcaios-trayectorias. Bssss no se si esto tiene algun sentido. Bueno volvamos, hay algo de estilo en el que escribe que esta que no es ni socilogico, ni de critica, ni literario del todo, calculo que eso es en parte lo que hace que tanta gente se lo apropie de distintas formas, pero no creo que se le pueda hacer decir cualquiercosa, da imagenes bastante potentes que sugieren ser usadas no de cualquierforma.
Me resulta interesante como flaneur – luz artificial- noche - arcadas –cigarrillo se conectan y hacen a la ciudad-y lo nuevo de la ciudad (“yo paso fumando” dijo mi pequeño hermano una vez). No es la arcada sola o el flaneur solo lo que hace el “trabajo”, sino la connexion, que se puede expandir a la connexion ciudad-muchedumbres. Me resulta interesante la irreversibilidad de las trayectorias (algo que tiene que ver con lo anterior sobre perspectiva-metodo). También es interesante la secuencia muchedumbre en movimiento… nuevas formas de control, que marca que formas en que canalizando el movimeninto se construye poder.

Pfffff probablemnte este comentario no hace el honor necesario, me recordo lo mucho que nos afecto cuando lo leimos en el cbc, y no me acuerdo si tiene algo que ver o no con el free-walking nocturno, todo hace mucho. A bueno y el dibujito de mafalda me hace pensar los limites del flaneur, quizas como decia massey haya que distinguir niveles de trayectorias las mas o menos validas, pero tambien trayectorias con mas o menos posibilidad de "deriva". Por ahi aca tenemos dos extremos, la posicion desde la que hay mas posibilidades de deriva son o de mucho "excedente" en posibilidades de movimiento y ocio, pero tambien posiciones desde las que no queda mas que moverse, en la que el movimiento es escaparse constantemente o buscar algo todo el tiempo.

Massey 2005 For space. o el sabor del encuentro

Ok this was also a key text for my work. El cambio de diseño es puro credito de Rafa.

Chapters 11-14

Chapter 11
Space is not a map. As long as map presents the space form above it constructs it as a surface rather than depths, this is not inherently bad, but is partial. Maps try to establish determinacy into what is indeterminate, but because of chance space is not representable (quoting Letch). for which she proposes the metaphor of the palimpsest of multiple erasures and overwirtings This is not solved by presenting the hidden transcripts of sedimented mapping, which would be imaging space " as superimposed horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming" (110), it fails to let us think the flow of juxtaposition of multiple trajectories shaping space. She takes the example of the flaneur as a trajectory that has no origin and no end, it has no identity but is rather and entity of contingency. To travel in between places is to move between collections of trajectories and to reinsert yourself in the ones to which you relate.

Some quotations form chapter 11:
p 118: " The presentness of the horizontality of space is a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force unawarness.... is not just buried histories but histories still being made now." "So take the train... You are not just travelling throgh space, you are altering it a little. space and place emerge form active material practices. Moreover this movement... is also temporal. The London you left is not the London of now. It has already moved on." (mmmm habia un griego que decia algo sobre el tiempo y que uno no se baña dos veces en el mismo rio... parmnides? ahora lo googleo)

p 119 "at the end of the journey, then a town or a city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle of trajectories.... You are, on that train, travelling not across space-as-a-surface you are travelling across trajectories.... Thisnking space as a multiplicity of trajectories , imagining a train journey as a speeding across on going stories, means brining the woman [you see through the window] to life, acknowledging her as another ongoing life."
p 120 Acknowledging all the different trajectories implied in space is impossible, yet we can still "retain some sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings."

p 124-5 "you can never simply go back to home or to anywhere else... the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this is the point. For to open up space is to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as a the products of interrelations...
Finale p125 "You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to now, but where that now is itself constituted by nothing more than -precisely- that meeting-up (again)."

Chapter 12 She has a very long analysis of how nature, that what we tend to see as a fixed and stable entity over which culture acts upon as a transforming force, has a deep history of transformation and change. She uses this image to point to a kind of always already unstable nature of spatiality. She is arguing against the fixity of place as a location in space. All essences are events, no fix “place” really exists but a flow of movement. Space is more a constellation of stories as a temporary point of encounter of multiple and conjunctural trajectories. The scope processes are in relation to the scales of spatial and temporal dynamics . (She takes a definition of the political form Laclau, Mouffe and a bit of Derrida.)
To overcome the distinction space and time, we can think of space as a series of encounters in an ever changing flow of spacio-temporal events. Space “If space is simultaneity of stories-so-far, then place are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”(130) Force of narrative in shaping reality. But still materiality of forces, not just discourse. Non human forces, not rationality but are forces non the less.

Chapter 13 The political is the moment of when the tension between the different unspoken alternatives bought by the different trajectories encountering in space become antagonism. The resolution of this antagonism entails the visibility of power relations (I add in their reconfiguration).
Spatiality as a condition of the socio-political, what she call the through-togetherness, is two fold: it is inherently unstable, all spatial politics are attempts to put order into the chaotic, to control juxtapositions in space. "Place does change us, not through some visceral belonging but through the practising of space, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories, place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us." (154) The spatialization of the social, has at least two dimensions, 1) it is in space time that the social and the political unfold and specifically is the sphere of multiplicity, and 2) much of the political practice is constituted through the negotiation of places, in which the imaginations of space are both means and "object" of this negotiation. She takes cities as particularly dense places in the respect of the political, she understands this because of the lack of rooted identities which makes them a site of negotiation of multiple constellations of identities, within hierarchies of spatial geographies. "negotiations of place are on the move between identities that are on the move. It also means that any politics catches trajectories at diferent points, is attempting to articulate rythms that which pulse at different beats. It is other aspect of the elusivness of space that render politics so difficult."

h 14
There are no rules for the spatiality, no valid statement ca be made as: openness is good vs closeness is bad. To mantain a generality is a way of maintaning an imagination of universality in relation to space , and a type of spatial fetishism ("spaces should always be open to new comers" says the left but then the newcomers are yuppie gentrifying a neighbourhood and thus they defend localism.) There is no good or bad politics in locality or openess, but socio-political relations of power and place in which each case is ntangled (this echoes in Lacalau and Mouffe there is no universal politics of topographic categories ie the state is not bad per se) . There is not an a priori on whether or not one should argue for or against openess but is a consecuence o regarding the power relations involved.
p 172-6 She make a critique to post modern theory in the dangers of being to enthusiastic about openness and nomadity. Nomadity and the notions of the periphery, escape (the desert as a space of pure intensities) can be linked to a modernist vision of space a bourgeoisie identity of the analyst, but ultimately an imperial imagination. She draws on citique by Kaplan Hansen and Pratt to Deleuze and Guatari. Lines of flight may be individualistic and be in sharp contrast to mass migration or escape. Also “Europeans in the name of mobility and unboundedness, casually and symptomatically invade half of the world of the desert.” (172). In that the “others” inhabiting the “deserts” would not have the same possibilities of fleeing o the desert as they are already there “the others are not allowed a life of their own” (173) (she points to Miller critique form an anthropological perspective). She argues that following a deconstructionist perspective does not necessarily avoid being he instability of meaning can also be part of forms of oppression. In this line she also replies to Hardt and Negri their critique thst if places are open then the concept is useless altogether. She points that this is based on binaries openness-enclosure as universal that further reproduces the problems of the romance of free flow.
“The closed geographical imagination of openness, just as much as that of closure, is itself irretrievably unstable. The real political necessities are an insistence on the recognition of their specific and an address to the particularity of the questions they pose.” (175) She ends up with Derrida, proposing that the only way to operate politically in the face o openness or enclosure is through experience and experimentation.

Sumo - La Rubia Tarada

Benedict Anderson on Creole Populations

Una tarde que fui a hacer tramites a Filo, me lo crucé a Pablo en la vereda. Venía pensando sobre peregrinajes y movimiento asi que fue bastante afortunado el encuentro. Me tiró dos referencias que vienen mas que bien (que luego Otamendi corroboró), Turner y Anderson. –Anderson... Benedict? - Si en el analisis de los nacionalismos habla del peregrinar de funcionarios y retoma a turner incluso. Había dejado a Anderson como esas lecturas pedagógicas iniciales (en la combinacion Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawn, Anderson Perry - eran familiares Benedict y Perry?), asi que estuvo bien releer partes de naciones. En este tiempo me habia olvidado por un lado que Anderson tiene unas cuantas ideas interesantes, en especial el tipo de procesos historicos que va uniendo en su argumento (aunque claro a veces muuuy forzado), por otro lado las barbaridades que dice.

En especial habia olvidado su analisis de los nacionalismos americanos, que retoma la idea de peregrinage de Turner como parte de lo que conforma la unidad entre criollos. No queda del todo claro cual es el detonante que hace recaer indefectiblemente a los movimientos independentistas criollosen el nacionalismo, pero Anderson presenta varios argumentos: 1) las fuertes restricciones de la corona española para e comercio de sus colonias entre si, 2) la discriminación hacia los criollos que no pueden aspirar a ser funcionarios mas alla de los límites administrativos de la colonia, en contraposicion a los funcionarios españoles que tienen posibilidad de ir y volver entre america y europa (Anderson recuerda como con el surgimiento de los nacionalismos se instala tambien con mucha rapidez el racismo que no abundaba durante el absolutismo, donde las poblaciones eran intercambiables y asimilables al poder de un soberano) , 3) el terror de los criollos a las sublevaciones de los sublternos (por decir) 4) el surgimiento de una identidad compartida entre criollos en sus peregrinajes hacia acentros administrtivos, (cuyas cabeceras eran generalmente comandadas por españoles) y la inversion de la logica de la corona española (si no permite el acceso criollo al estatus de español, entonces por que dejarse comandar por un grupo ajeno a America?) 5) la propagacion de las ideas iluministas en las elites criollas y la influencia de la declaración norteamericana, 6) (por supuesto para guardar coherencia con el resto del libro) la propogacion de periodicos en America Hispana. Todos estos elementos combinados parecieran ser la formula detonante de los nacionalismos "prematuros". Mientras tanto el "atrazo" del capitalismo español respecto al resto de europa explicaría la fragmentacion en multiples naciones (en lo que eran las divisiones de la corono española, claro) que impiden una Latinoamerica unida en la conformacion de una identidad americana unica, algo que si logra Eu, que hereda la sofisticacion Inglesa al parecer y hace efctiva la apropiacion del apelativo Americano para su nacion.
Su conclusion es:
"the fialure of the Spanish America experience to generate a permanent Spanish America wide nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the local backwardness of Spanish capitalism and tchnology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire. (Is Indian nationalism not insperable from colonial administrative market unification, after the mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial powers?"
Claro lo que importa a los terminos de mi tema es que justamente es en la comunitas del peregrinar de los funcionarios criollos que Anderson ve un escenario efectivo para el surgimiento de movimientos independentistas que se alzan alrededor de una idea de nacion soberana, que se define por su oposicion a la nacion colonial que las domina. En este ejemplo el efasis que hace en la necesidad de unificar el idioma lo tiene que dejar de lado, por que no ayuda a pensar como se definen los limites nacionales ni tampoco que se hace con la heterogeneidad social -y linguistica-. En este sentido la distancia al centro administrativo y un reclamo por un manejo local de los asuntos es lo que prima. Es decir que me sirve pensar como se deinen espacialidades de soberania y el rol que juegan los viajes, de los españoles a america por un lado y de los funcionarios americanos viajando solo entre paises latinos, un movimiento que permite una articulacion pero tambien una conciencia de limites que justamente sirven para definir los limites de la nacion. Habría que ver como eplica los nacionalismos asiaticos y africanos en relacion a estos temas y si establecería diferencias.

correcciones mañana