IDPURE Post Western (160 pages) by IDPURE éditions

Post Western

IDPURE ĂŠditions

“Ce n’est pas un fantasme ou un ruisseau.”

Post Western Published by IDPURE

In many parts of the world, recurring issues have begun to resurface through the web, media, magazines and daily press. Where do we stand in this world dominated by the West? Who sets the tone in today's politics, economy and popular culture? Will the next decade continue to be dominated by the West? This special edition, which we define today as an annual, intends to outline a new dynamic, a change, a multi-polar metamorphosis, non-traditional, fragmented, in a world that encourages us to think in a disorderly manner, fumbling, discovering, contributing to discover and drawing our thoughts from various sources. We could compare this social report by taking the theoretical and philosophical phenomenon of rhizome developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, defining with extreme complexity the rhizome as an organizational system tree in which elements do not follow a line of hierarchical subordination, with a base that branches out into several extensions in which any element can affect or influence the design of other elements. Fortunately, we are far from the early 1990s, when the term globalization was synonymous with the United States. Even if we will always need to organize and unify our thoughts to further understanding, we are today experiencing the Post Western world, and this should last for quite some time, which does not mean the decline of the Western world, but the empowerment of the rest of the world. Thierry H채usermann Publisher

PUBLISHER/Editor-in-Chief Thierry Häusermann Editors/Art DIRECTION Raphaël Verona and Joël Vacheron Design This is not www.thisisnot.ch Typeface Plain Medium (François Rappo) researchers Nicolas Nova Ondine Jung Léna Le Pommelet Selma Farhan Printing PCL Presses Centrales SA EDITORIAL OFFICE IDPURE éditions Chemin du Pré 4a, 1110 Morges, Switzerland info@idpure.ch www.idpure-editions.ch

SPECIAL Thanks Bruce Sterling, Dazed and Confused, Dummy Magazine, Tendai Maraire (Shabazz Palaces), Michaël Ellsworth (Civilization), Thames & Hudson Ltd, Polity press, Quartet Books, Letizia Monti, Nicolas Nova, Raphaël Rapin, Mirjam Wirtz, Frank Marshall, Basile Zimmermann, Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman

Impressum

Post Western

Basim Magdy, They Endorsed Collective Failure as the Dawn of a New Renaissance, 2013. Acrylic, spray paint and watercolor on paper. 45.5 Ă&#x2014; 60.5 cm. Courtesy Hunt Kastner, Prague

———————————English—It is not a fantasy or stream. During the period is difficult, that repetition and system throughput of the language to understand the appropriate measures they still.———————————Français—Ce n’est pas un fantasme ou un ruisseau. Au cours de la période est difficile, que la répétition et le débit du système de la langue pour comprendre les mesures appropriées qu’ils fixes.

The same sentence has been translated from one language to an other with Google Translate. Like chinese whispers, let’s say Google Whispers, each step alters the original message until it becomes a collection of discrepant words.

Joël Vacheron

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Post Western?————————————————————————— Ce n’est pas un concept, ni un courant. Il s’agit plutôt d’un système pour appréhender la perméabilité, les récurrences et les contingence des langages lorsqu’ils circulent dans une ère qui gagne en fluidité. —————English—This is not a concept or a current. It is rather a system for understanding the permeability of the recurrences and contingency languages when moving into an era that is gaining fluency. —————Spanish—Esto no es un concepto o una corriente. Es más bien un sistema para la comprensión de la permeabilidad de las recurrencias y las lenguas de contingencia cuando se mueve hacia una era fluidez. —————German—Dies ist nicht ein Konzept oder ein Strom. que está ganando Es ist vielmehr ein System für das Verständnis der Durchlässigkeit der Rezidive und Kontingenz Sprachen beim Bewegen in eine Ära, die immer

fließend ist. —————Persian— ‫نایرج کی ای موهفم کی هک تسا نیا‬ ‫تسین‬. ‫یاه نابز و دوع زا یریذپ ذوفن کرد یارب متسیس هن و تسا نآ‬ ‫تسا نایرج رد هشیمه هک تسا نارود کی هب تکرح لاح رد هک ینامز یلامتحا‬.

—————Russian— Это не концепция или поток. Это не возможно для системы, чтобы понять проницаемость рецидивов и языков при переезде в эпоху, которая всегда актуальна. —————Danish—Dette er ikke et begreb eller et vandløb. Det er ikke muligt for systemet at forstå permeabilitet gentagelser og sprog, når de flytter til en æra, der altid er relevant. —————Slovenian—To ni koncept, ali potok. Nemogoče je, da sistem razumejo prepustnost ponavljanja in jezika, ko se preselijo v obdobje, ki je vedno ustrezna.—————Hindi—यह एक अवधारणा या धारा नहीं है. वे अभी भी उचित है कि एक अवधि में कदम जब यह प्रणाली throughput और भाषा की पुनरावृत्ति को समझने के लिए असंभव है. —————Swahili—Si dhana au mkondo. Wao bado sahihi hatua katika kipindi cha wakati throughput mfumo na marudio ya lugha ni vigumu kuelewa. —————Japanese—空想やストリームではない。言語のシステムスループットと繰り返しが理解することは困難である期間中に、彼らはまだ適切な措置。 —————Italian—Non è una fantasia o un flusso. Durante il periodo è difficile, che la ripetizione e la produttività del sistema della lingua per capire le misure appropriate da essi ancora.———————————————

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Introduction

Knots

Frank Marshall 24

Mirjam Wirz 30

Loy Bowlin 36

Kari Altmann 40

Jon Rafman 46

Daniel Sannwald 52

Babak Radboy 86

Zak Group 116

Basim Magdy 60

Shabazz Palaces 102

Maziyar Pahlevan 118

Jonathan Zawada 68

Hagihara Takuya 108

Killian Loddo 74

Pinar&Viola 78

Contents

Hanif Kureshi and Painter Kafeel 112

Jan Abellan 114

Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters 122

Prince Rama 128

James Ferraro 147

Post Western

Interviews by JoĂŤl Vacheron Daniel Sannwald Basim Magdy Pinar&Viola Mazhiar Pahlevan Gijs Frieling

58 64 82 120 125

Contents

Quipu

Threads i Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1997 ii Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, 2000 iii Oswald de Andrade, Cannibal Manifesto, 1928 iv Homi K. Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, The Location of Culture, 1994 v Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996 vi Bruce Sterling, Atemporality for the Creative Artist, 2010 vii Kowdo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, 1988 viii Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), 2011 ix Fatima Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria, On Gulf Futurism, On the starkly avant garde culture of them Middle East, 2012 x Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2000 xi Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, 1993 xii Adam Harper, Vaporwave and the Pop-art of the Virtual Plaza, 2012

16 19 21 26 28 32 35 37 38 42 43 134

Exchangers   

Discussion between Missla Libsekal and Keiron LeVine on Diptych, disGUISE and Adornate Ryan Weafer, Azis Totale, Balkania Fanzine Mashallah News

Contents

92 96 100

Post Western

—— Virus—Vernacular—Vaporwave—Totems—Thirdspace—Queer—Negrophilia—Mockery—Metaphilosophy—Mimicry —

al and Keiron LeVine Libsek issla l—M hal ars — kM Maziyar Pahlevan n Ho a g dy — ra Jonatha mM F — a n m y B as i iK Taku a —Zaw ro — l a a r . d B ———— a — Ja es Ferra h iha Vio a m g E b h ar & d a Ha w — Pin ——— — ar d — — Prince Rama — So j a ———

——

— —

douard Glissan t — — —— E H o m iK all . —— B h a b arsh h a — — — —— Prince rank M i ol a — F Rama — Pinar &V

—

ne — Shabazz Palaces m a n — —— LeVi — ck — iron en — Ke J a M — l— ka — se — Lib — la P e Zawada — Miss t rin than — J on a e ld — a m —— a e A —J anzine, Rya s r nw ch —— nia F Fe nW an e alka r —— lS B z r e r r e a -S a o— ro fe ani tra nne r SD — — odd w f Ha l o L a U — d nn an B a s Soja — ———— Killian Lod w i Killi m ————— Edward a — ld Magd iola y — Mirjam Wirtz iri — Adam Ha — Pinar &V rpe ad Q — rade ———— G ijs Fri de A n d elin swald g a —— O nd hlevan — ——— Jo H Pa F nd aa ari s e l- M an t —— — — h r s — s s i — ia A / Pa ra Mis Da G li ————— Soph i s n l n iha t a e r i L ard e K i a b f Hag e lS el — Jan se ou Abellan — Takuya k a al Ed nn and e w g— K e iron L lin er r St Fe e — p— c es u — — m ru ro R — B Ja a kG f —— Edou m y— — Za a n a i r — l d n G a gd l i s s a — nt ————— Loy Bow Fatim im M a Al Qadiri — Bas

r Fe

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Post Western

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Daniel Sannwald —— James Ferraro — auman ——— ygmunt B Harper — Z

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— Edouard Glissant ————— Loy Bowlin Ulf Hannerz — M ————— a ziyar P an a h levan — Gijs Frieling

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—— ———

—— Matriarchy — Liquefaction — Hybr idity — Hauntology — Creolization — Colonial —Atavistic— Acousmatic ————— appropriation fluidity

han Zawada na t Jo

P. 17, left-to-right, down: Jon Rafman, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Seventeen Gallery, London; Wifredo Lam, La Lettre, 1939; Daniel Sannwald, Pluto & Charon; Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters, West Moon Street detail, 2012; Baoulé mask photography Roman Bonnefoy; Killian Loddo, Hot Couture; Jonathan Zawada, Riddle Peach for Sixpack France; Missla Libsekal/Kerion LeVine, from Adornate series

“Live in seclusion or open up to the other:“ this was supposedly the only alternative for any population demanding the right to speak its own language. It is how inherited premises of centuries-old domination were given legitimacy. Either you speak a language that is “universal,” or on its way to being so, and participate in the life of the world; or else you retreat into your particular idiom— quite unfit for sharing—in which case you cut yourself off from the world to wallow alone and sterile in your so-called identity. However, as populations became liberated from legal (if not actual) dependencies, the view emerged that it is the language of a community that controls the main vector of its cultural identity, which in turn determines the conditions of the community’s development. This viewpoint has been considered suspect and, more often than not, pernicious. During this same period all developmental processes became reduced to one exclusive type of perfection, that is, technological. Hence the puzzle: What is it that you are demanding when a language, one single language, would provide you with the key to progress? Nations could have only one linguistic or cultural future—either this seclusion within a restrictive particularity or, conversely, dilution within a generalizing universal. This is a formidable construction, and the “oral genius” of peoples of the world urges us to burst our way out of it. The words of griots and storytellers washed up on the edges of large cities, and eroded by second-rate forms of progress, still endure. Gradually, the governments of poor countries are coming to understand that there is no single, transcendent, and enforceable model for development. In this explosion of incredible diversity, linguistic relations have become marked by creations springing from the friction between languages, by the give-and-take of sudden innovation (for example, initiatory street languages in southern countries), and by masses of generally accepted notions as well as passive prejudices. The assumption that was, perhaps, most crucial concerned the hierarchical division into written and oral languages. The latter were crude, unsuited to conceptualization and the acquisition of learning, incapable of guaranteeing the transmission of knowledge. The former were civilizing and allowed man to transcend his natural state, inscribing him both in permanence and in evolution. It is true that literacy is a matter of utmost urgency in the world and that, lacking other appropriate materials, this is usually accomplished in what are called communication, or vehicular, languages. But we have come to realize that all literal literacy needs to be buttressed by a cultural literacy that opens up possibilities and allows the revival of autonomous creative forces from within, and hence “inside,” the language under consideration. Development thus has linguistic stakes, with consequences that can be neither codified nor predicted.

Edouard Glissant Poetics of Relation, 1997

Post Western

Threads

P. 19, left-to-right, down:  Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme cover, Gallimard  Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau, 1892

Relationships between languages that were supposedly transcendent because written and others long kept at a level referred to, with a hint of condescension, as “oral”—these relationships I described of suddenness, unplanned adaptation, or systematic apprenticeship—have been made even more complex by both political and economic oppression. The relationship of domination, consequently, is the most blatant, gaining strength in technological expansion and generalizing a neutral uniformity. Dominated languages are thus pigeonholed as folklore or technical irresponsibility. At this point a universal language, such as Esperanto, no matter how well thought out, is not the remedy. For any language that does not create, that does not hoe its own tuff, subtracts accordingly from the nongeneralizing universal. The relationship of fascination has become, of course, less and less virulent, but it drove intellectual elites of “developing countries” to the reverent usage of a language of prestige that has only served them as self-impoverishment. Relationships of multiplicity or contagion exist wherever mixtures explode into momentary flashes of creation, especially in the languages of young people. Purists grow indignant, and poets of Relation marvel at them. Linguistic borrowings are only injurious when they turn passive because they sanction some domination. Relationships of polite subservience or mockery come about when frequent contact with tourist enclaves plays a substantial role, along with daily practices of subordination or domestic service. This tendency to promote the appearance of pidgins is swept aside by the politics of national education, when these are well conceived and carried to completion. Relationships of tangency are by far the most insidious, appearing whenever there are composite languages, languages of compromise between two or more idioms—for example, the Creoles of francophone regions in the Americas or the Indian Ocean. Then the erosion of the new language must be forestalled, as it is eaten away from within through the mere weight of one of its components, which, meanwhile, becomes reinforced as an agent of domination. Relationships of subversion exist when an entire community encourages some new and frequently antiestablishment usage of a language. Englishspeaking Caribbeans and blacks in the United States are two convincing examples in their use of the English language, as are the Quebecois in their appropriation of French. Relationships of intolerance are seen, for example, in the teaching of a communication language. The language is established once and for all in its (original) history and regarded as uncompromising toward those formidable contagions to which speakers or creators from elsewhere are likely to subject it. An “atavistic fluidity” in exercising a language is deemed indispensible to its perfection, resulting in the opinion that theories concerning its learning and teaching can only be developed in the “country of origin.”

Edouard Glissant Poetics of Relation, 1997

Post Western

ii Paris’s avant-garde artists were the first to co-opt black culture to promote their ideas about modernity. Black imagery, whether drawn from popular culture or from African carvings, suited the modern artist’s need for inspiration, difference and subversion. At a time when black people in Europe were still uncommon, iconography taken from African sculpture became an artistic device for distinguishing avant-garde art, and a conceptual tool for signifying anarchy and transgression. In prewar Paris, numerous African carvings entered the art market and fuelled the avant-garde’s appetite for new forms of expression. Painting, sculpture, ethnography journals, exhibitions, Dadaist and surrealist “negro” balls, photography, fashion and furniture designs all reflected the range of responses to I’art nègre. Through these art forms it is possible to trace the black artefact from its African source to the Parisian market, and to follow its transformation from its initial appearance in avant-garde painting to its use in manufactured objets d’art, furnishings, fashions and accessories. African carvings that reached Paris at the turn of the century were generally and collectively referred to as I’art nègre or les fétiches. Both words came from the pidgin language that European seamen, traders and some Africans used to communicate with each other as they traded along the West African coast. The words had currency in the marketplaces of Guinea and the Ivory Coast but meant little in the African interior. In Paris, they still carried all the exotic, mystical and superstitious meanings that Europeans had accorded them when they first encountered African masks and sculptures. But European ideas about fetishism related little to the actual spiritual traditions of central or western Africa. The superstitions surrounding fetish objects reflected Europe’s own medieval occult practices and witchcraft more than beliefs actually held in Africa. Colonial Parisians inherited these ideas. The avant-garde, especially, thrived on them. Fetish imagery in painting had been used previously by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin during his stays in Tahiti between 1890 and 1892 and between 1895 and 1897. Paintings with Tahitian carvings and idols such as Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watches over Her) of 1892, combined with myths about Gauguin’s own native existence in the islands, cultivated his artistic mystique and influenced the avant-garde, themselves looking for models of the primitive. Superstitions applied to African objects joined with other notions about the occult, theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, alchemy and magic then popular within avant-garde circles. For example, the memento mori themes that initially informed Pablo Picasso’s mould-breaking painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 were quickly usurped by ideas of African idolatry and black magic after his first contact with I’art nègre. In Picasso’s recollection of confronting African masks in the

Petrine Archer-Straw Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, 2000

Threads

Trocadéro museum, sixteenth-century superstitions combined with twentiethcentury angst and iconoclasm: “Those masks weren’t just pieces of sculpture like the rest, not in the least, they were magic things… these negroes were intercessors, that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. They were against everything, against unknown threatening spirits… I kept on staring at the fetishes. Then it came to me. I too was against everything… I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! The All…” For many artists like Picasso, works previously seen as products of backward societies were now admired for their conceptual sophistication. The avant-garde considered I’art nègre powerful enough to transform and effect profound change, even within the “civilized” context of Paris. Georges Braque, Picasso’s companion painter of the Cubist years and a keen collector of I’art nègre, stated: “The African masks opened a new horizon to me. They made it possible for me to make contact with instinctive things, with inhibited feeling that went against the false [Western] tradition which I hated.”

P. 20–21, left-to-right, down:  Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906–1907  Over 700 Brazilian Indians protested in Brasília to urge the government to respect their rights, 2011  Frontispiece to Rousseau’s Émile by de Launay, 1782  “The soap Dirtoff makes me white!” c. 1900

Petrine Archer-Straw Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, 2000

Post Western

iii Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not tupi that is the question. Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos. I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal. We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers. What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this. Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake. It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil. One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm. Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Lévy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality. We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men. The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls. Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along. We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata. But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic. Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the talk. The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions. We can only be present to the hearing world.

Oswald de Andrade Cannibal Manifesto, 1928

Threads

P. 22–23, left-to-right, down:  Rio carnival, mimicry  José de Alencar Theater, Fortaleza, Brazil  Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928 and A Negra, 1923

We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Cariba instinct. Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism. Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude. We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings. We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age. Catiti Catiti Imara Notia Notia Imara Ipeju Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms. I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him. The only place there is no determinism is where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us? Against the stories of men that begin in Cape Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar. The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions. Against antagonistic sublimations brought over in sailing ships. Against the truth of the poor missionaries, defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo—It is a lie repeated many times. But no crusaders came to us. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up, because we are strong and as vindictive as the land turtles. Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of vegetables. We never had any speculation. But we believed in divination. We had Politics, that is, the science of distribution. And a socio-planetary system. Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatives and speculative boredom. From William James and Voronoff. Transfiguration of taboo into totem. Cannibalism.

Oswald de Andrade Cannibal Manifesto, 1928

Post Western

The pater familias is the creation of the stork fable: a real ignorance of things, a tale of imagination and a feeling of authority in front of curious crowds. We have to start from a profound atheism in order to reach the idea of God. But the Cariba did not have to make anything precise. Because they had Guaraci. The created object reacts like the Fallen Angel. Ever since, Moses has been wandering about. What is that to us? Before two Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil discovered happiness. Against the Indian de tocheiro. The Indian son of Mary, the godson of Catherine of Médicis and the son-in-law of Don Antonio de Mariz. Happiness is the real proof. No Pindorama matriarchy. Against Memory the source of habit. Renewed for personal experience. We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our instruments and our stars. Against Goethe, against the mother of the Gracos, and the Court of Don Juan vi. Happiness is the real proof. The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Created— illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his taboo. Daily love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibalist instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate—envy, usury, calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized, it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals. Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins in the land of Iracema—the patriarch Joa Ramalho the founder of Sao Paulo. Our independence was never proclaimed. A typical phrase of Don Juan vi—My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does it! We expel the dynasty. We have to get rid of the Braganza spirit, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte. Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, defined by Freud— in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.

Oswald de Andrade Cannibal Manifesto, 1928

Threads

Frank Marshall, from Renegades series

Threads

P.26–27, left-to-right, down:  Bills, c. 1950, Léopoldville— modern-day Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Their name was taken from Buffalo Bill  “I love KPop,” lonely_snow princess  Le charmeur de serpents, Jean-Léon Gérôme, c. 1870  Still from Losing You, video inspired by sapeurs, Solange Knowles, 2012  Dance of Caporales, Bolivia, mimicry

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures Of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, “human and not wholly human” in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, “writ by the finger of the Divine” often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe-l’oeil, irony, mimicry and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects Mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counterpressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference—mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in “normalizing” the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke’s Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word “slave:” first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the “Colonial” State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature.

Homi K. Bhabha Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse The Location of Culture, 1994

Post Western

It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely “rupture” the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a “partial” presence. By “partial” I mean both “incomplete” and “virtual.” It is as if the very emergence of the “colonial” is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.

Homi K. Bhabha Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse The Location of Culture, 1994

Threads

P. 28–29, left-to-right, down:  The Production of Space cover, Henri Lefebvre, 1992  Michel de Certeau  La Chaux-de-fonds, Switzerland  Text message slang  Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, 2013

1. Spatial practice is defined as producing a spatiality that “embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations (lieux specifiés) and spatial sets (ensembles) characteristic of each social formation.” It “ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion” and “implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance” (terms he borrows from linguistics but warns should not be seen as subordinating the knowledge of space to its disciplinary hegemony). The spatial practice of a society “secretes that society’s space; it propounds (Ie pose) and presupposes it (Ie suppose), in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it.” Spatial practice, as the process of producing the material form of social spatiality, is thus presented as both medium and outcome of human activity, behavior, and experience. “From an analytical standpoint (À l’analyse), the spatial practice of a society is revealed (se découvre) through the deciphering of its space.” To illustrate how this deciphering changes over time, Lefebvre adds a whole paragraph on “Modern” spatial practice under capitalism, which he links to the repetitive routines of everyday life (Ia réalité quotidienne); and to the routes, networks, workplaces, private life, and leisure enjoyments of the urban (la réalité urbaine). This materialized, socially produced, empirical space is described as perceived space, directly sensible and open, within limits, to accurate measurement and description. It is the traditional focus of attention in all the spatial disciplines and the material grounding for what I redescribe as Firstspace. 2. Representations of space define a “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers (“découpeurs” et “agenceurs”), as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent—all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.” This conceived space is also tied to the relations of production and, especially, to the order or design that they impose. Such order is constituted via control over knowledge, signs, and codes: over the means of deciphering spatial practice and hence over the production of spatial knowledge. For Lefebvre, “this is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production),” a storehouse of epistemological power. This conceived space tends, with certain exceptions “towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs,” again referring to language, discourse, texts, logos: the written and spoken word. In these “dominating” spaces of regulatory and “ruly” discourse, these mental spaces, are thus the representations of power and ideology, of control and surveillance. This Secondspace, as I term it, is also the primary space of utopian thought and vision, of the semiotician or decoder, and of the purely creative imagination of some artists and poets.

Edward Soja Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996

Post Western

In a twist that would confuse (or be forgotten by) many readers, Lefebvre did not define the “dominated” space as that of material spatial practices. Instead, he turned to the third space of his triad to exemplify the controlling powers of conceived space. 3. Spaces of representation are seen by Lefebvre both as distinct from the other two spaces and as encompassing them, following his strategic use of social space in his preliminary thirding. Spaces of representation embody “complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not.” They are linked to the “clandestine or underground side of social life” and also to art, which Lefebvre described as a coding not of space more generally but specifically of the spaces of representation. Clearly an attempt is being made here to retain, if not emphasize, the partial unknowability, the mystery and secretiveness, the non-verbal subliminality, of spaces of representation; and to foreground the potential insightfulness of art versus science (or, for that matter, moral philosophy or semiotics), a key pillar of Lefebvre’s metaphilosophy. Here then is space as directly lived, with all its intractability intact, a space that stretches across the images and symbols that accompany it, the space of “inhabitants” and “users.” But it is also, Lefebvre takes care to note, inhabited and used by artists, writers, and philosophers—to which he would later add ethnologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and other “students of such representational spaces”—who seek only to describe rather than decipher and actively transform the worlds we live in. He follows these references with two key points. First: “this is the dominated—and hence passively experienced (subi) or subjected—space which the imagination (verbal but especially non-verbal) seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays (recouvre) physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” and tends towards “more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs.” Second: here we can find not just the spatial representations of power but the imposing and operational power of spatial representations. Combining the real and the imagined, things and thought on equal terms, or at least not privileging one over the other a priori, these lived spaces of representation are thus the terrain for the generation of “counterspaces,” spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning. With its foregrounding of relations of dominance, subordination, and resistance; its subliminal mystery and limited knowability; its radical openness and teeming imagery, this third space of Lefebvre closely approximates what I am defining as Thirdspace.

Edward Soja Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996

Threads

PICÓS: Soundsystem and DJ-Culture in the Caribbean town of Barranquilla, Colombia, 2012 and CUMBIA SONIDERA: Soundsystem and DJ-culture in Mexico City and Monterrrey, Mexico, 2010–2011 30

Mirjam Wirz

Post Western

Mirjam Wirz

Threads

vi There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor. This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent. It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction. The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work —it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t P. 32, left-to-right, down: match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.  The End of History and the Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. Last Man cover, Francis That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paFukuyama, Free Press, 1992 per, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about  Tahrir Square, Cairo, as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled Egypt, 2012 television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a  Electron microscopic paper narrative. virus cell I don’t think we are going to get one. We could conceivably get a new ideology  Guy Fawkes mask, or a new business model that is able to seize control of the course of events Anonymous group and reinstate some clear path to progress, that gets a democratic consensus  Sony Center, Berlin behind it. I don’t think that’s likely. At least not for ten years. I could be wrong, but it’s not on the near-term radar. P. 33: What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency resRammellzee artwork pieces; cue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind Diablada Traditional mask, of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into Oruro, Bolivia; Tansformers an era of decay and repurposing of broken character from Michael Bay structures, of new social inventions within movie, 2007, based on the networks, a world of Gothic High-Tech and Favela Chic Transformers toy line; Godzilla (as I’ve called it), a crooked networked bazaar of his(Still from 1954 movie directed tory and futurity, rather than a cathedral of history, and by Ishirô Honda) a utopia of futurity.

Bruce Sterling Atemporality for the Creative Artist, 2010

Post Western