by Adrian Furing
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note: this wonderful essay was sent to us by a friend and colleague of mine in the anarchist school of thought. it was sent to us for the purpose of thorough discussion and critique against Cities and Urban Living. the author of this essay is a practicing Chemist and a prominent chaos theoretician. he is also a co-member of the now defunct University of the Philippines Atheist Circle. but most especially he loves to play classical guitar every time he wanted to evade normality and imposed fabricated sanity.
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The largest Gaussian curve ever been built on Earth, i could ever imagine is the existing calendar. This curve consists of 12 sub-curves we call months; each month-curve consists of 4 sub-curves we call weeks; each week-curve consists of 7 sub-curves we call days; each day-curve consists of 24 sub-curves we call hours; each hour-curve consists of 60 sub-curves we call minutes… and so on. If you draw a curve relating your time in a day (24 hours) versus your schedule – and extend this into a week, you will see that the curves are almost the same; that is, it averages into a curve just like a single day.

And if you extend this curve into a month; and then into a year – again, it falls out to represent just your routinary day. If you focus on the part of the curve where you are “out” (outdoors) and when you are “in” (indoors), and remembering your first 10, 20 or 30years of existence – the proportions of activities would fall out to be the same. The precision of the curves would tell us that these “events” do not just happen because of our will; if it is done by our will, then the curves would not be the same every day. If the curves are precise, then it means it has a pattern; and if it has pattern, it means not random. Being not random means bound by certain rules. And if these rules exist, then it is the one that controls the curve (should be discussed).

Now, if you compare your curve to that of your friend or seat mate`s curve – you would notice that it is proportionally similar, if not the same. Then extend your comparison to your own town, to the city, and to the entire country. What you will find is a curve of a routinary day. That is, a day-curve is just a microcosm of a year-curve. A calendar is a curve and it is a day.

“A calendar is a curve and it is a day” – why is that so? Simple, get out of your room and walk the entire map of your town (or city). Sketch the map of it. (Or if it would be troublesome, try to get or buy a map in a store -caution: updated map!) Where are the major building located? Stores and supermarkets? Church and amusement parks? Government? Where do advertisements and signs posted? Major and minor roads? Then try to analyze… where do these “marks” pointed? Yes, to you; and to every individual living within that area.

A student will wake up early to catch the first class, and spend the time in school until afternoon; return to home, eat – study and sleep. A “labor man” will also wake up early and does similar tasks as the student does. On holidays, they may want to go outside – to the parks, shopping, watching movies, meeting friends – and so on. We find that their actions are actually dictated by the map itself; what to do and where to go. This dictations are molded from young years to being student© and until the student becomes a “labor man”. Here we have a picture of similar, if not the same curve stated above. And what is interesting to comment is that we can see that “A calendar is a curve and it is a day” is not just as it is, but rather “A calendar is a curve, a day and it is a map”.

So how did the student “learn to live” in this map? This question is somehow self explanatory one to answer if we footnote the way we learned to live in “our map”. That is, simply by saying – he learned “it” from parents, friends, teachers; studying and so on. But a quite difficult question to answer is – how did the student “taught to live” in this map. These two questions are not the same in a sense. The first question deals with “these are the things inside the map”; while the second question deals with “these are the things to do inside the map”.

To sum up the two questions together, we have – “how will you live in this map?” To put it generally – “how will you live in this map with those marks within it?”

Of course we state that it is being learned and being taught. But being taught since childhood the weight of being learned is overweighted by the former. Student`s curiosity over the marks on the map is tampered by what are being taught. In actuality, how to live in the map with marks inside of it is far more being taught, and the student`s curiosity of being learned is left to himself, alone. The being learned says “I like to know about this environment”, but the being taught says “No, you adapt to us because we are the environment”. From this we see that the environment is far far more dictated by the being taught than by the being learned. “A calendar is a curve, a day and it is being engineered map”.

Thanks…

by Jong Pairez

This is my attempt to relate Cinema with Political Anthropolgy even though I am aware of the fact that I might be in difficult terms in trying to make sense by marrying these two separate ideas. So what I would rather do here is to embark on a journey from strange directions than to prove statements.

Cinema fascinates me as always since I was a kid but when I recently got introduced to the wonders of Anthropology (thanks to Prof. David Graeber) my experience of looking again to Cinema has changed. There’s a kind of transcendent feeling to it and this gave me a new approach in looking back into reality.

The Colonial Past: Outwitting the State

First, let me try to discuss my understanding of Peter Skalnik’s thesis that a State can possibly be undone by outwitting and not by directly confronting it. “Outwitting the state proved a more efficient way of facing power than violent resistance”, says Skalnik- he is referring the State here as the expression of Colonialism. Now, this might sounds like Pacifism to me but what is interesting here is the idea of disarming the State to the point that it becomes virtually useless.

Skalnik’s introduction to his book “Outwitting the State (1989)”, he emphasized that there are societies who already exist without giving importance to any centralized organization of power, he termed it as Archaic Polities. These are societies that he would later present in his book as contrasting model to European states and nations that it has conquered. Skalnik wrote, “Most people living in modern societies equally experience powerlessness in facing the state that rules over them. They can only exceptionally identify with it and thus diffuse state power. Their only way to preserve identity and integrity is by trying to outwit the state.” (pp.17)

Peter Skalnik stated some examples of societies who successfully outwitted the state, most of them are tribes from different parts of the world whom Western colonialist expansionism tried to conquer.

The Kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa installed by British colonial power, for example, instantly displaced colonial power as soon as various tribal groups in the territory found opportunity to use the method in re-consolidating their own archaic polity, which eventually resulted in a unified action to repel the colonizers. (pp.13)

Enter Cinema

In Cinema, the State makes sense only when its inherent narrative is perpetuated. Sensory-motor schema, as Bergson would call it, helps reinforce narrative in Cinema that perpetuates dogmatic images. In this same process the State becomes perpetual. Therefore, early cinema has similar likeness to ancient mythologies that helped preserve centralized power and authority of ancient State empires.

The book “Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema” (2000), celebrated authors studied Gilles Deleuze’s classifications in Cinema when it was dissected into many parts. “Brain is unity. The brains is the screen.” (pp.366), exclaimed Deleuze. This realization enable me to understand the process how image in motion never stop tracing the circuitry of our brain. And through this manner, it is very important to analyse how Image works in our brain.

Movement-Image (Perception-Image, Action-Image , Mental-Image) and Time-Image (Serial Form, Minor, Fabulation, Oral) is the result of Deleuze’s anatomical classification of Cinema, he derived it from Bergson’s understanding of two perfect real dimensions, which the term Actual and the Virtual came in. The meticulous dissection of Cinema revealed upon me the truth behind the cultural mechanism of modern State that controls images, as Dudley Andrew would put it, “...cinema is also an institution, often a state one, consisting of various constraints on images.” (pp.218)

Outwitting Cinema and State: Towards Metacinema and Molecular Society

In the last words written by Gregory Flaxman in his Introduction to the book, “Brain is the Screen”, he ended the text with an invitation to “extract ourselves from chaos, where life is always in the process of becoming, of creating, of thinking.” (pp.47) This can only be possible when Images itself has evaded the sensory-motor schema of prefabricated production factory.

Alongside with evasion, when State power is also diffused we can say that its narrative breaks into tiny pieces. This process of fragmentation allows everyone who outwitted the State to create their own realities- molecular societies. Dogmatic images produced by sensory-motor schema will eventually deconstruct to pave way for a more playful construction of narratives.

27 July 2008
Manila, Philippines

Note: i stole this from an online discussion on Punk and Sound Art at Korakora mailing list where i am enlisted and had a recent critique against Punk and its recuperated state. Using Baudrillard as my reference in understanding Punk as an image to further analyze how the image can be used for consumption in Market Economy. The following text below is an email from my ex-professor in Artschool where i dropped-out. It’s a reaction from my previous statement (look for the qoute). She has a very interesting insight most especially how she used antibiotics and artificial sweetener as an analogy to Punk as hyperreality. But i disagree on her usage of Telos, which she indirectly point out that we already reached the End of everything and has become Helpless

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Trevor, Jong, and all,

I looked up “punk” and got interesting results from Wiktionary.

In 16th century English usage, punk refers to a prostitute: “My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife”, Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.

Then in late 19th and early 20th century, punk referred to material (such as wood) used as tinder for lighting fires, wicks or fuses (for fireworks). So the earlier sexual connotation seems to have remained. Same in the in the US, where “punk” was prison slang for a softie male used for sex by bigger and stronger males. Punk also connoted rape or submitting to anal rape (punk-out).

Then later, a US television program popularized a tamer connotation of punk to mean a sissy.

I guess that if one looks at the economic and political conditions of the time (esp the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s-80s), the term punk was appropriated to label that youthful subculture in capitalist democratic countries that rejected commercialism and political idealism. Basically, the aesthetic (whether in fashion, music, lifetyle) was an anti-establishment attitude.

Sometimes I think that – much the same way young people are exploited – subcultures and countercultures are “created” by the dominant culture in order to distribute pressure and tension that might undermine the power and influence of the dominant culture.

Thus, I see punk as a mechanism to suppress and absorb the methodologies of intellectual dissent against the oppressive tools and effects of capitalist democracies.

todays punk is nothing but a hyperreality of punk itself. it cannibalized its own image. or in situationist terminology, punk has already reached its state of being recuperated. but punk as a counterculture can only re-invent itself into tiny particles that has its ephemeral lifetime, only to mutate again into another, giving birth to a vast multitudes. this is how i encounter radical mutants in Tokyo who consider punk as their fictional ancestor. (jong)

I think the above paragraph means that since punk has already been accepted by the mainstream, punk has thus lost its original utility (rejection of commercialism, authority and established order).

So, punk can only hope to remain as a “counterculture” if it can quickly and endlessly mutate against the rapidly evolving mainstream. And since mainstream has already imbibed punk itself, one can say that punk is cannibalizing itself in this entire evolving process.

If I am not mistaken, “mutant” is a term used in postmodern social theory to refer to the absence of fixed categories. Thus, one says that one is of a racial mutant and not that one is of a racial type.

I can imagine that “radical mutants” perhaps call themselves as such because of the focus on collective action and participation (an aspect of the radical tradition) in their process of mutation. Of course, the radical tradition was more concerned about the relationship between social action and social change. I don’t know if radical mutants are as much concerned about these, and whether these are reflected in their principles and methodologies.

Surely every society has its own brand of “mutants”, “deviants” and “punks” to which the dominant group allows various levels of tolerance. Here it is interesting to compare with the sexual connotation of punk. The keyword there is “allow” which underlies the usefulness (whether sexual, commercial, political, etc.) of these shifting subcultures to the growth and strengthening of the dominant culture. This situation is comparable to the mutation of bacteria as reaction to the use of antibiotics wherein the antibiotic is the “radical mutant.”

Is there, for example, any practical advantage of being a hyperreality of oneself? Have you any idea how the “radical mutants” might view themselves -and how this might relate to your perspective of them? (trevor)

Hyperreality deals with how meanings are constructed with no reference to systems of representation, thus the debilitation of consciousness from differentiating between reality and fantasy. This is similar to the “decadence” that I described in an earlier e-mail, but worse because no longer is the object simply confused with the symbol, but rather the object is dropped altogether and the symbol disappears with only the basal instincts seeking simulated stimulation. People who live in their hyperreality world are perhaps similar to brain cells habitated under aspartame (artificial sweetener) stimulation. This is an interesting analogy because research suggests that aspartame is an excitotoxin, that is, a chemical agent that over-excites brain cells (which accounts for the addicting effect) thereby burning them out before their time.

In the world of hyperreality, brain cells never age, they all die young.

The questions that Trevor asks regarding the influences, relationships, perspectives and actions of things (the “how-to’s” and the “what-is’s”) are important in the resonance between thought and action (or, as in computers, between input and output). The questions ask clarifications of what transpires in the middle – the processing – the questions that hyperreality attempts to prevent people from imagining.

I hope that Jong, whose earlier writings reflect a Marxist and dialectical awareness, should be able to answer those questions – whether for himself or for/with others.

Mabuhay!
Fatima

EXAMINING THE POST-LEFT:

Is Post-left current a new sectarian trend that criticizes Leftist tradition without transcending the sectarian nature of the Left itself?

If Post-leftism negated the authoritarian practices of the Left, what is then that they inherited from the Left? What was the hybrid?

Roderick Sumang, Delter Algay, Edwin Lee, Jesus Manaqued, Sherilo Moraleja, Socrates Silan Jr., Dennis Tolentino, Noel Cusi and Jose Menpin — all undocumented workers — flew to Mauritius a month ago to work as crew members on the fishing vessel Ruei Thih Fa.

With their Taiwanese captain Jui-yin Huang and nine other Chinese crewmen, they set sail from Mauritius’ capital, Port Louis, on Oct. 31 and began work on Nov. 2, unaware that they were to fill 22-hour work days.

On Nov. 5, their fourth day at work, they took action.

Jolted awake by the captain’s buzzer after only two hours of sleep, seized by a fit of spontaneous protest, they barged into his cabin and locked him up.

It was a successful rebellion. Claiming that the captain and vessel owner had deprived them of food and rest, the Filipinos kept him under constant guard while one of them steered the boat back to port.

“We did not plan anything. It was spontaneous,” Sumang, 33, told reporters at the airport.

“On the morning of Nov. 5, [the captain] was shouting at us. We were sleeping, then he buzzed our cabin. We all got up but somehow we no longer intended to work because we were already tired and hungry,” he said.

Sumang, a resident of Valenzuela City who traveled to Mauritius to work as a first-time fisherman, quoted one of the other Filipinos as saying that it was best for the group to fight their boss’ purported abuse.

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