. dissensus

The Berlage Institute postgraduate program includes a Master Class each semester. This term’s Master Class is conducted and coordinated by Keller Easterling, and entitled “LEVERAGE”.

“The master class reconsiders the material and tactics of architectural activism and entrepreneurialism. Theoretical texts revisit activism in relation to, for instance, piracy, comedy, law, organization, aesthetics, sovereignty, polity and ethics. In addition, the seminar provides material for considering architecture as an index of global infrastructures capable of manipulating power in the service of many political alternatives.”

I have applied to take part in the master class as an external participant in order to prepare and update next semester’s course. Many of the extremely thoughtful and brilliant insights of Keller Easterling’s work are explored, discussed and tested during the lectures and seminar work. Further readings and studio revisions complete the schedule throughout the week, from 2nd till 6th of June.

Yesterday evening, Keller Easterling delivered a public lecture entitled “The Power of Political Phantoms: Leveraging Global Infrastructure”, that was then followed by a discussion led by Peter Trummer.

www.berlage-institute.nl

[ this post will be updated soon ]

Final presentations of the first edition of .dissensus took place during this week’s class. Final papers will be uploaded to this weblog for further discussion. Comments about the presentations and the papers are encouraged and welcome. The intensity and general level of the work produced has been really high and valuable.

More to come soon.

[ Las presentaciones finales de la primera edición de .dissensus han tenido lugar durante la clase de esta semana, la última del curso. Los textos/ensayos finales se harán también accesibles desde este weblog con el fin de fomentar la discusión de los mismos. Esta discusión puede llevarse a cabo mediante todo tipo de comentarios a este post acerca de las presentaciones y trabajos finales, que por otra parte han mostrado un altisimo nivel e intensidad.]

Más, pronto.

In a time where the commons have been either super-exploited (and thus destroyed) or hyper-regulated (and thus paralized or blocked) and physical public space is under siege, devastated, razed or even simply erased, there is more and more need for another kind of spatial practice, one that provides a critical, yet smart and agile approach to space and engages the production of physical spaces for actual direct communication. Simultaneously, there is also a need for another kind of cultural practitionner, another kind of architect, that is capable of operating outside the autonomous purity of architecture’s core, and willing to engage into political battles within contemporary difuse power scapes and ready to develop a sort of “productive piracy”, as Keller Easterling has named a surely more productive attitude towards political leverage that is much more agile, sneakier, cagier, than forthright.. avoiding righteousness, …”too smart to be right”.

These much needed spaces for direct communication must be hybrid in all possible ways: regarding identity, allowing for all kinds of mixtures, cross-breeding and transcultural exchanges; regarding management, by incorporating self-organized, communitarian, private and state controlled elements, simultaneously cohexisting and inter-operating; and also environmentally, by merging the physical with the virtual and digital.

_____

 Again, an ‘other’ insight was presented through both the counterpoint-class and the lecture by Javier Rodrigo who took us into an amazingly motivating, optimistic and hopeful journey through critical thinking, dialogical educational spaces and collaborative practices in and around public space. His eloquent and warm talks allowed for understanding of the very notion of modernity, built upon the idea of discourse and power relations, and the consequent immediate emergence of a constructed ‘other’, and the resulting imbrication of power and knowledge. Critical pedagogy and Freire’s dialogical method were also explored and clarified notions that, along with sociological tools to re-think spatial practices and spatial conceptualization processes, acted as an introduction and preparation for the case-study examples that he intensely explained during his public lecture.

It might be that, just as art has long time ago transitioned from the artistic object to more difuse and collective ‘art practices’, just so architecture should abandon the production of objects (images) to approach the design of processes, conversational ‘pieces’, and much more complex and collectively constructed projects, getting closer to dialogical aesthetics, to aesthetics as a form of politics.

(His texts have been also uploaded to the ‘texts’ section and are also linked below.)

W_10_01 bromberg_ava [interrogating_public_space]

W_10_02 schäfer_christoph [the_city_is_unwritten]

W_10_03 cordingley_luke [can_masdeu_the_rise_of_the_rurbano_revolution]

W_10_04 miessen_markus [spatial_practices_beyond_models_of_consensus]

W_10_05 rodrigo_javier [de_la_intervención_a_la_rearticulación]

W_10_06 rodrigo_javier [educación_artística_y_prácticas_artísticas_colaborativas]

W_10_07 rodrigo_javier [pedagogía_crítica_perfomativa]

Bodies are becoming like Cities. Cities are becoming more like Global Geographies.

This week’s class was an attempt at a journey through the evolution of the city under the guidance of Edward W. Soja; a quick review of the importance and scope of the three first urban revolutions, namely the emergence of organized agriculture 10.000 years ago around the first ‘cities’ (Çatal Hüyük) (1st), the formation of city-states and city-based empires starting around 6.000 years ago (2nd), and the most recent one intimately bound to the industrial revolution (3rd).

Are we witnessing the beggining of a new (4th) urban revolution?

More attention has been given to the spatial specificity of urbanism for the past few years, and Soja talks (following Lefebvre) about a trialectics of being that combines historicality, sociality and spatiality, seeing them as simultaneous and complexly interwoven, inseparable and interdependent dimensions of human life.

Attached to this spatial specifity, lies what he calls ’synekism’, the stimulus of urban agglomeration, the condition arising from dwelling together in a ‘house’ (synoikismos, syn-oikos), what Manuel Delgado calls ‘the urban magma’, one of the most intrinsic developmental forces of the ‘urban’.

Soja then focuses on the most recent and dramatic transformations that have taken place in ‘cityspace’, by exploring and analizing the restructuring geographies of Los Angeles (which can be then easily extrapolated to other cities) in his six discourses on the postmetropolis. The speed and dramatic implications of these recent extraordinary changes may be at the base of what seems to be a growing ‘unmoooring’ of the contemporary city from its spatial specifity: we are less and less attached to collective references, memory or identity, we can no longer map the metropolis, we can no longer know its borders or limits.

Blurriness.

Celeste Olalquiaga (a contemporary sensitive ‘observer’ of cityspace and its inhabitants) roots this urban sickness in a transformation of the body, a specifically urban and contemporary form of psychasthenia: ‘the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s own body is confused with represented space […] the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond, by camouflaging itself into the millieu. […] The organism succesfully reproduces the elements it could not otherwise apprehend, but in the process it is swallowed up by them, vanishing.’

‘Bodies are becoming like Cities, both increasingly tied to the topography of computer screens and video monitors, giving us the languages and images that we require to reach others and see ourselves.’

The hard materiality of cityspace seems to evaporate as the whole world is drawn into every city’s symbolic zone. In such a ’semiotic extension of details’ (Chambers), there is a simultaneous ‘loss in focus’, for there is no longer a definable ‘outside’ to cities.

_____________________________________________________________

By exploring one of the most extreme cases of urban transformation and complex urban dynamics, the film ‘Lagos Wide&Close’ on the work of Rem Koolhaas and his Harvard Project on the City in Nigerian Lagos, provides an insight of today’s cityspace, its scale, its mechanisms, its complexity and perhaps its growingly sick, almost metastasic, processes.

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soja_edward_w    [six discourses on the postmetropolis]

bauman_zygmunt [city of fears city of hopes]

koolhaas_rem [the generic city]

 Security, Technology and Fear in the City

[some related texts have been uploaded to the texts section]

Traditional forms of protection have been progresively replaced by less visible and much more sophisticated surveillance systems, from satellites and cctv cameras to all kinds of alarms and biometric devices: an infrastructure of security is being ‘laid’ upon the territory.

The emergence of security as a universal value changes our relationship with the future: without a dominant fear shaping our minds (god, death, unemployment, fascism… ), an existential insecurity arises from the pressure of an unknown threat.

Such an anxiety about the presence of danger (the unknown unknowns) is used to manipulate consumer-inhabitants, it is marketized and linked to a lifestyle. Protection, Defense, Surveillance, become necessary conditions for domestic and urban life. And the inherently urban conditions of complexity, diversity, density… are challenged by a quest for simplicity and homogenization in the task of eradicating the unknown.

A strong regulation and control of public space is thus seen as a basic requirement to guarantee security conditions, what leads to zero tolerance policies, police control and repression, urban fortification and defensive landscapes.

The whole city-space, the whole territory is under surveillance, and public space is either destroyed or non-existent.

//

In a multitasking world in which our attention becomes promiscuous and we engage in a sort of continuous partial attention, Jordan Crandall describes a transformation of our visual capacities that, affected by these all-encompassing vigilant visualities and such an ecology of fear, transition to new ways of perception (precision-guided-seeing, or tracking).

Readiness, or preparedness, as the embodied dimension of this continuous partial attention and vigilance, is now, along with regulation, another operative means of the society of control.

But readiness, as an affect of our inner states, as a form of activation that is not necessarily available to the conscious mind but contains the potential for action, operating through our proprioceptive and visceral functions, can be also used to expand the time-space of embodiment, incorporating a sort of ‘constantly moving preconscious frontier’, and opening up a space between affect and contemplation.

//

When the anxiety about danger and the quest for security become primordial needs and values at a state, or global, scale, war results.

And the horror, destruction and loss of war, may be only roughly approached or described by means of the sublime.

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This week’s class will host the visit of David Reznak, an extremely sensitive and engaged film maker, who also runs ‘La Enana Marrón’, an experimental film center in Madrid. He will deliver another insight into our exploration of contemporary vigilant visualities, in the form of a short talk and a screening of a series of selected short films that address some of the issues dealt with in the class.

As in previous weeks, our guest will also take part in the school’s lecture series, with another lecture/screening on Thursday at 10.45 in the main lecture room. Once again, I strongly recommend attending both the class and the lecture since they will complement each other.

David Reznak’s first long documentary (after many awarded and acclaimed short films) ‘ La Osa Mayor Menos Dos’ premieres in Madrid and Barcelona on May 9th.

This post will be updated soon.

zizek slavoj [ ideology today ]

zizek_slavoj [ the matrix ]

zizek_slavoj [ welcome to the desert of the real ]

zizek_slavoj [ multiculturalismo_o_la_lógica_cultural_del_capitalismo_multinacional]

[Versión en castellano más abajo] 

Michael Haneke’s cinema of disturbance poses a series of interesting and urgent questions about the contemporary condition and its effects on personal relationships. Perhaps Benny is actually an inhabitant of ‘surmodernité’, aimlessly wandering between non-places, transit points and temporary abodes, and constantly ‘watching’ a filtered ‘virtual reality’ that he believes to be in total control of, but is in fact not only controlled but also actively produced by the media.  

But beyond the pessimistic and nihilistic views of Baudrillard’s simulacra, what’s most interesting is to try analyzing the consequences of Benny’s (our) inability to distinguish Deleuze’s actual and virtual, and his (our) will for control or power exercised through his (our) voyeur’s gaze.

The total breakdown of communication and personal relationships that Deleuze brilliantly explains by stating that ‘Eros is sick’, is perfectly enacted in Haneke’s film: only money or power differentials link one character or movement to another. The appartment seems to be divided into plots of land, and thus private ownership defines also domestic life. Communication with Benny is often based in money and short notes, and his parents are either unable to communicate or much more concerned about their own social standing and image. Meanwhile, Benny develops his own personal version of the universal schizophrenia that Deleuze posits as the result of the ‘diffuse conspiracy of capital’.

Who is really doing the manipulation? Who controls what is ‘real’ and who creates memories?

Several narrative machines and tecniques are used in Funny Games to remind the spectator that what he/she is watching on the screen is actually a fiction. A fiction that Haneke uses to reflect on the de-sensitizing effects of aestheticized violence in cinema and media. He wants to treat violence as what it really is - serious pain or injury to the ‘other’- and he does, truly and fully, by concentrating on the effects of this violence on the characters, rather than by showing violence itself on the screen. The spectator is forced, almost ‘raped’, to both imagine, or make-up the ‘real’ violence taking place outside the screen limits, and to project his/her own perceptions on top of the ‘figures’ inhabiting the film, that are less characters than projection surfaces for such perceptions.

[ El perturbador e inquietante cine de Michael Haneke lanza una serie de interesantes a la vez que urgentes preguntas acerca de la condición contemporánea y sus efectos sobre las relaciones personales. Quizá Benny sea en efecto un habitante de la ’surmodernité’, vagando sin aparente objetivo entre no-lugares, puntos de tránsito y moradas temporales, observando constantemente una ‘realidad virtual’ filtrada, la cual él considera bajo su control absoluto y sin embargo está siendo no solo controlada sino producida por los medios.

Pero más allá de las pesimistas y nihilistas visiones del simulacro de Baudrillard, resulta más interesante analizar las consecuencias de la incapacidad de Benny (o la nuestra) para distinguir lo ‘actual’ de lo ‘virtual’ deleuzianos (ambos reales), y su (o nuestra) voluntad de poder o de control, ejercida a través de su (nuestra) mirada de voyeur.

El absoluto fracaso comunicativo y de las relaciones personales que Deleuze explica brillantemente al afirmar que ‘Eros está enfermo’, se escenifica perfectamente en la película de Haneke: únicamente los diferenciales de dinero o poder conectan unos personajes con otros, unos movimientos con otros. El apartamento parece dividido en parcelas de terreno y por tanto la propiedad privada define también la vida doméstica. La comunicación con Benny se basa frecuentemente en el dinero y en pequeñas notas adjuntas, y sus padres son a veces totalmente incapaces de comunicarse y otras veces están mucho más preocupados de su propio status social e imagen. Mientras tanto, Benny desarrolla su personal versión de la esquizofrenia universal que Deleuze propone como resultado de la ‘difusa conspiración del capital’.

Pero quién está realmente llevando cabo la manipulación? Quién controla lo que es ‘real y quién crea los recuerdos, la memoria?

En Funny Games se emplean varias técnicas y máquinas narrativas con el fin de recordarle al espectador que lo que está viendo en la pantalla es en realidad una ficción. Una ficción que Haneke utiliza para reflexionar sobre los efectos in-sensibilizantes de la violencia estetizada y coreografiada en el cine y los medios de comunicación. Pretende tratar la violencia como aquello que realmente es - un grave daño o lesión hacia el otro que la sufre - y lo consigue, de forma auténtica y completa, concentrándose en los efectos de esta violencia sobre los personajes que la sufren, mucho más que mostrando la violencia misma en la pantalla. El espectador es obligado, casi violado, a imaginar o inventar la ‘auténtica’ violencia que tiene lugar fuera de los límites de la pantalla (fuera de campo), y a proyectar sus propias percepciones sobre las figuras que habitan la películas, que son, más que personajes, unas pantallas de proyección para estas percepciones. ]

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Another interesting guest lecture will take place during the class on Wednesday. Aida Sánchez de Serdio (PhD in Arts) will help us deal with the cinema of Michael Haneke providing an experienced gaze on the field of visual and cultural studies. She will also participate in the semester’s lecture series on Thursday, when she will deliver a lecture/screening entitled: ‘Out of Field: The Politics of the Gaze, The Politics of Representation’. It is again strongly advisable to attend both the class and the lecture, provided they will be different and complementary. Furthermore, Aida’s reflections and research will be of great help in order to approach the definition of additional narrative machines. Please join us at the main lecture room on thursday around 10.45 am.

[ Otra conferencia invitada tendrá lugar durante la clase del miércoles. La doctora en Bellas Artes y profesora de la Facultad de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Barcelona, Aida Sánchez de Serdio, nos ayudará en la tarea de explorar el cine de Michael Haneke aportando una mirada experta en el campo de los estudios culturales y visuales. También participará en el ciclo de conferencias del EDC de la ETSAV el jueves, ofreciendo una conferencia/proyección titulada: ‘ Fuera de Campo: Política de la Mirada, Política de la Representación’. De nuevo es un placer recomendar la asistencia a la clase y a la conferencia, ya que serán diferentes y a la vez complementarias. Las reflexiones y el trabajo de investigación de Aida serán además de gran ayuda en la definición de ‘máquinas narrativas’ adicionales. La conferencia del jueves será en el salón de actos a las 10.45 am. ]

augé_marc [no lugares - una antropología de la super(sobre)modernidad]

massumi_brian [realer than real - the simulacrum according to deleuze and guatari]

sanchez de serdio_aida [fuera de campo]

This week’s class will host the visit of Marta Sánchez of Pragda Films, to offer a counterpoint on the ‘borders’ theme. Her visit will be double-worth since she will also deliver an interesting lecture/screening on thursday morning as part of this semester’s lecture series. The contents of her participation in the class on wednesday and the lecture on thursday will not be the same, so it is strongly advisable to attend both. It will be worth.

On the other hand, as I was suggested last week, some material related to the class has already been uploaded just in case you want to check it before the class.

[ La clase de esta semana incluirá la visita de Marta Sánchez de Pragda Films, que ofrecerá un contrapunto al tema ‘fronteras’. Su visita es doblemente valiosa ya que incluirá también una conferencia-proyección el jueves por la mañana, incluida en el ciclo de conferencias del EDC de la ETSAV. El contenido de su participación en la clase del miércoles y el de la conferencia del jueves serán diferentes, por lo que es muy recomendable acudir a ambas. Merecerá la pena.

Por otro lado, tal y como se sugirió la semana pasada, he ‘colgado’ ya algunos textos relacionados con la clase por si alguien quiere acercarse al tema antes de la misma. ]

cruz_teddy [Transborder-flows: Urbanisms Beyond the Poverty Line]

sassen_saskia [Ethnicity and Space in the Global City: A New Frontier?]

[Versión en castellano más abajo] 

The Camp could be seen as the extreme capsule: a capsule of exclusion. When sovereign power exerts its ability to ’suspend’ legal order, the ‘exception state’ emerges as the inmanent principle of order. When such an exception state becomes permanent, the Camp unfolds: a piece of territory has been placed outside normal legal order. A new biopolitical ‘nomos’ results of the transition from a suspension of law (an order without a concrete place, ‘Ordnung ohne Ortung’) to a permanent exception state (’Ortung ohne Ordnung’). Agamben then warns of the risks of such an absolute biopolitical space in which the citizen becomes ‘homo sacer’, inhabitants of the camp are dispossessed of any political statute, excluded from community life (bios) and thus reduced to bare life (zoe).

At a geopolitical scale, the logics of the space of flows and liquid modernity are also re-shapping the global territory: a ‘liquid’, de-territorialized power is deployed through the action of manyfold networks on a multiplicity of territorialized nodes. Thousands of discontinuous territorial fragments give shape to a sort of archipelago of exception. Such a geography of extraterritoriality has been recently explored by Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke and Ines Geisler, in a essay in which they try to define different types of ‘islands’, as externally alienated, internally homegeneized extraterritorial enclaves. In any case, these are spaces of political void, uncertain legal order, and dark stategical interests, created and maintained by a growing number of ’spatial’ devices, in their own words: ‘makeshift barriers, temporary boundaries, invisible security apparatuses…’

The exploration of these ‘islands’, both to define their position, shape and size, and to understand the logics of their complex dynamics, seems to be an urgent task. And as we have seen in the class, it matches the already successful research conducted by Eyal Weizman himself along with Rafi Segal in the Palestinian territories, revealling a ‘formidable’ long term strategy in which jewish settlements aim at fragmenting and re-organizing West Bank’s territories in order to difficult or block the possibility of a Palestinian State.

Amos Gitai’s ‘Alila’ illustrates the complexity of the conflict by showing the extremely cramped nature of the country, and ultimately of the Mediterranean society, but also by giving the ‘other’ (non arab-non jewish) inmigrants a voice and a face, a space… they are another island. On the other hand, Gitai’s sequence shot provides a very rich insight into the borders between personal and public space, as well as unmatched depth and a field of invisible yet paramount gaps that I want to describe as the first example of a ‘narrative machine’.

[ El ‘Campo’ puede entenderse como la cápsula extrema: una cápsula de exclusión. Cuando el poder soberano ejerce su capacidad para suspender el orden jurídico emerge el estado de excepción, principio inmanente de tal orden. Cuando el estado de excepción se estabiliza y se hace permanente, aparece el Campo: una porción de territorio se ha extraído del orden jurídico normal. Un nuevo ‘nomos’ biopolítico resulta de la transición desde la suspensión de las leyes (un ordenamiento sin lugar o territorio específico, ‘Ordnung ohne Ortung’) hacia un estado de excepción permanente (’Ortung ohne Ordnung’, un lugar concreto sin ordenamiento, sin ley). Agamben advierte entonces de los riesgos que conlleva un espacio biopolítico absoluto como este en el que el ciudadano deviene ‘homo sacer’: los habitantes del campo son despojados de todo estatuto político, excluídos de la vida en comunidad (bios) y por tanto reducidos a la vida nuda (zoe).

A escala geopolítica, las lógicas del espacio de los flujos y la modernidad líquida también están influyendo y transformando el territorio global: un poder ‘líquido’ y des-territorializado se despliega a través de la acción dispersa de múltiples redes sobre un sinfín de nodos territoriales. Miles de fragmentos territoriales discontinuos conforman una suerte de archipiélago de excepción. Una geografía de la extra-territorialidad que ha sido recientemente explorada por Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke e Ines Geisler, en un ensayo en el que intentar definir una serie de tipos de ’islas’, como enclaves extra-territoriales internamente homogéneos y externamente alienados. Son en cualquier caso espacios de vacio político, orden jurídico incierto y oscuros intereses estatégicos, creados y mantenidos mediante un creciente número de dispositivos espaciales, en sus propias palabras: ‘ barreras provisionales, límites o fronteras temporales, invisibles aparatos de seguridad…’

La exploración de estas ‘islas’, con el fin de definir su posición, forma y tamaño, y comprender las complejas lógicas por las que se rigen, parece ser una tarea urgente. Y tal y como vimos en la última clase, coincidiría en muchos aspectos con la ya fructífera investigación llevada a cabo por el mismo Eyal Weizman junto con Rafi Segal en los territorios palestinos, que ponía de manifiesto una ‘formidable’ estrategia a largo plazo en la que los asentamientos judíos tratan de fragmentar y re-organizar los territorios Cisjordanos con el fin de dificultar o bloquear la posibilidad de un Estado Palestino.

La película de Amos Gitai, Alila, ilustra la complejidad del conflicto mostrando la extremadamente ‘apretada’, caótica y compacta naturaleza del país, y, en último extremo, de la sociedad Mediterránea, pero también proporcionándole al ‘otro’ inmigrante (no-árabe y no-judío) una cara y una voz, un espacio… quizá ellos también sean una isla. Por otro lado, el plano secuencia de Gitai ofrece una riquísima e interesante mirada sobre las fronteras del espacio personal y el espacio público, asi como una profundidad inigualada y un campo de invisibles pero a la vez cruciales ‘intervalos’, ‘vacíos’, e ‘interrupciones’ o discontinuidades que me gustaría describir como el primer ejemplo de ‘máquina narrativa’. ]

[versión en castellano más abajo]

Ulrich Beck’s second modernity unfolds within the liquid space of flows… a landscape of risk, uncertainty and constant change. Hyperindividualism and a never-ending process of suburbanization and ’super-urbanization’ lead to even further isolation… capsules proliferate. Is there a phenomenological alternative to heterotopian urbanism and capsular architecture? how to escape from the theme park and the mall? how to avoid the simulated (fake)public spaces of the postmodern atriums?

As society keeps on becoming segregated, polarized and capsularized, an interior and an exterior are defined and separated… fear then drives to further capsularization, which in turn generates more fear… Isolated cells need however to communicate, but capsules force to a mediated communication through diverse representational devices and thus to failure: representation provides a fundamentally partial and autonomous experience and/or perception, and, most importantly, one that is disconnected from that which is not represented… Such perception remains unaware of the Other… the inhabitant of the outside…

But, isn’t the outside itself an enormous space of resistance? Isn’t it a space for new forms of community and new networks?

Most likely unaware of dominant and established logics, and thus, essentially original, subversive and transgressive… multiple processes take place in the ‘outside’… and so, our gaze must be somehow re-oriented towards these other spaces, these other landscapes, in order to escape from ‘capsular’ world, and more interestingly, in order to make visible or audible whatever takes place outside of it…

Exploring the ‘Other’ might be the only way of approaching an understanding of the conditions… an understanding of the field in which we operate… And in order to place the task, the project, the action we undertake in the total context of everyday life as Bauman suggests, we may need to first master Bateson’s pathological level of learning: dismantling accepted cognitive frames to then reassemble something completely different… Should we approach madness?

Perhaps Seidl’s undefined position in-between reality and fiction, document and feature… has been constructed upon such a new frame of perception, and provides a privileged point of view into our own ‘blindness’.

…?

[ La segunda modernidad de Ulrich Beck se pone de manifiesto en el ‘liquido’ espacio de los flujos… un paisaje de riesgo, incertidumbre y cambio constante. El hiperindividualismo y un interminable proceso de suburbanización y ’super-urbanización’ conducen a un mayor nivel de aislamiento… las cápsulas proliferan. Hay alguna alternativa fenomenológica al urbanismo heterotópico y a la arquitectura capsular? es posible escapar del parque temático o del centro comercial? es posible evitar los (falsos) espacios públicos simulados del atrio postmoderno?

A medida que la sociedad se va haciendo más y más segregada, polarizada y capsularizada, se van generando, definiendo y separando con mayor claridad un exterior y un interior… el miedo conduce entonces a una mayor capsularización, que a su vez genera más miedo… Las células aisladas resultantes necesitan comunicarse, pero la cápsula implica necesariamente una comunicacion mediada, filtrada a través de diversos dispositivos de representación, y conduce por tanto al fracaso comunicativo: la representación proporciona una experiencia y/o percepción fundamentalmente parciales, autónomas, y sobre todo, una experiencia y/o percepción desconectadas de todo aquello que no es representado… Una percepción ajena al Otro, ajena al habitante del ‘exterior’…

Pero no es acaso ese ‘exterior’ un enorme espacio de resistencia? No es acaso éste un espacio para nuevas formas de comunidad y nuevas redes?

Muy probablemente ajenos a las lógicas dominantes y establecidas, y por tanto, esencialmente originales, subversivos y transgresores, multitud de procesos tienen lugar en el ‘exterior’… y por tanto, nuestra mirada deba quizá re-orientarse hacia estos ‘otros’ espacios, estos ‘otros’ paisajes, para escapar del mundo capsular, pero también, sobre todo, para hacer visible o audible todo aquello que acontece fuera de él…

Explorar el ‘Otro’ puede que sea quizá la unica forma de acercarnos y entender las condiciones y el ‘medio’ en el que operamos… Y para ser capaces de, tal y como sugiere Bauman, poner en ‘total contexto’ la tarea, el proyecto o la accion que afrontemos o llevemos a cabo, quizá debamos antes dominar el nivel patólogico del aprendizaje descrito por Bateson, y desmantelar entonces los marcos cognitivos aceptados para después re-construir algo totalmente diferente… Sería necesario aproximarnos a la locura?

Quiza la posición indefinida e intermedia de Seidl, entre la realidad y la ficción, el documental y el largometraje… se haya construido desde un marco perceptivo de ese tipo, totalmente nuevo, ofreciendo entonces un punto de vista privilegiado sobre nuestra propia ‘ceguera’ (incapacidad perceptiva).

…? ]

[ Side texts by Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman have already been uploaded to the ‘texts’ section. ]

[ Los textos complementarios de Michel Foucault y Zygmunt Bauman pueden descargarse desde la sección ‘texts’. ]