Here Be Dragons – Introductory Thoughts by TSCI
What follows are thoughts that I have been sharing with members of the collective that I belong to, Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry, on an enxhibit on critical cartography I've co-curated with TSCI : Here Be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization. We cobbled the thoughts together after collectively thinking about the show. I shared them in a brief lecture I gave on the exhibit to the first year Humanities class I help TA at York University -- HUMA1650: The Networked Imagination. I took the class on a tour of the exhibit this past Tuesday.
For those of you interested, the show is currently showing at the Toronto Free Gallery, at 660 Queen St. East in Toronto. It'll be showing until Dec. 17. (Here are some pictures from the opening on Nov. 12).
As part of the exhibit, we're also showing, amongst others, Bureau d'etudes' compelling -- and beautiful -- map on Argentina's newest social movements post 2001.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here Be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization: Introductory Thoughts - TSCI
Nov. 22, 2005
Basically, the two overarching tactics that inform the show are:
1) How counter-cartography visibalizes the networks of power that remain hidden
within our complexly globalalized, overly administered contemporary epoch, and also
2) How counter-cartography makes known the networks of counter-power and resistance that arise as actions against those dense networks of power and as actions for more democratic, more humane, less commodified possibilities for life.
The maps are complex, dense, and intense and take time to process. You must spend time with them to understand them. This is, in part, a response to three integral dynamics at play:
1) The complexity of the networks of power. There are many lines, and branches
that radiate out from power’s nodes.
2) The thought and time that researcher-activists must spend in order to unravel the social, political, informational, and social-psychic structures of those power
networks.
3) The maps ask you to slow down and take time with them. This contrasts with the
ideology of speed and the practices of cultural distraction that global capital relies
on. Capitalist power wants you to be overwhelmed, to not know where to turn, to
rely on “experts” and “bureaucrats” and administrators to figure out life for you.
So, in taking time with these maps, you’re practicing a form of resistance: the
resistance is in your very act of – as a reader and interpreter of the maps -- placing yourself in a contemplative, engaging mode, rather than the mode of distraction and passivity that consumer culture invites. This has affinities to the Walter Benjamin essay we read: distraction/ vs. reflection.
Alo ask yourself, then: Is there an “aura” in these pieces? What about reproduction as resistance? How are these maps speaking too a radically democratic stance? What are they calling you to do?
What is the dragon in Here Be Dragons? The dragon is two-headed; that is, there are two heads, or two sides, to the dragon at play. Perhaps there are many dragons at play, too:
One head of the dragon could represent the structures of power networks that
remain hidden. Some of the maps speak to this more than others. This is the
dragon of control and domination. These areas of control and their complex
institutional structures remain outside the apparent, knowable world of our
everyday lives. Yet they directly and indirectly form a part of our everyday lives
in our contemporary high-capitalist/post-Fordist reality. The social relations and
institutions that ground this hidden reality help shape our individual and collective
consciousnesses. They frame our ideologies. They are, in reality, concrete and even geographical structures, as the maps illustrate. And they are also emergent and time-based. Recall what McLuhan and Innis have to say about
time/space and media.
The other head could be the dragon of resistance, of counter-power, of
emancipation. The networks of resistance are always fomenting, always present,
always active and creating new alternatives outside of the spheres of state and
corporate power. This is living power, power from below, as opposed to the dead
power of instrumentality and control. These counter-powers vizibalize where
power really emanates from: from below. After all, it is we – you and me -- that
legitimize power: Counter-power is situated in the local, in the neighbourhood, in
your networks, on the street, rooted in your everyday life.
The two-headed dragon also resembles the two-sidedness of technology, as we’ve been
discussing in course: Recall Postman and Ellul: technology gives something and takes
something away. Recall the stories of Pandora’s box, Prometheus, and Icarus, as well.
Technology can be used by power to dominate but can also be used by those that are
oppressed, alienated, or exploited, from below, to not only resist but to also create new possibilities: another kind of world. Technologies “open up” possible worlds. They also close off these worlds via ideologies of efficiency and “means” that instrumentalize and over-administrate life.
What “other worlds” are these maps proposing, explicitly and implicitly?
These maps are one way of using new technologies such as the Internet, databases, and
mapping software to begin to liberate us from the enclosures we live in. The Internet, for
example plays a central role in both organizing and designing these maps and
disseminating the information, especially with Bureau d’etudes and Govcom,.org. Ask
your self how these reappropriations of the technology can help us break free from our
enclosures.
Some of the themes in the exhibit:
1) How is power organized?
2) How are the structures of counter-power organized?
3) Making the invisible visable and making the marginal and peripheral visable, too.
4) Unconcealing the concealed. Making known the unknown.
5) Cartographic epistemologies (theories of knowledge; how can we come to know
what we know), techno-epistemologies.
6) Power is both centralized within hubs of power and diffused into spatial
territories, psychic territories, narrative territories, ideological territories. It is the structure of these actual and virutal terriorializations that’s being visibalized.
7)How are we, as individuals, lost in these power networks. What do they deny us
as individuals and communities? Or, in the counter-cartographies and networks of
resistance maps, how are we visibalized?
8) What do these maps help us see? What do they help us do?
Some of the theoretical touchstones that undergird the maps:
Critical cartography (Brian Holmes and Richard Rogers, in particular (see below
for links to two essays)).
Political economy of media networks (rooted in Marxist analyses of capitalism;
see also Manueal Castells, Frank Webster, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford,
and many others.)
Theories of power: Foucault’s bio-power, Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomes,”
Deleuze on Nietszche (active/reactive forces).
Theories of hegemony and counter-hegemony (Gramsci, Lukasc), ideology and
“instrumental reason” (Marx, Marcuse, Horkheimer, structuralism and post-
structiralism).
Globalization theory
Philosophies of being/non-being: Heidegger’s concealment/unconcealment.
Philosophies of technology: Heidegger’s “enframing,” technological
consequences/effects and technological pessimism and optimism (Ellul, Postman,
McLuhan, etc.), technological histories and epochs (Mumford, McLuhan, Innis,
etc.).
These two excellent essays on counter-cartographies will come in handy for those that
wanting to do projects on mapping and perhaps tackle the question on the midterm.
For those of you interested, the show is currently showing at the Toronto Free Gallery, at 660 Queen St. East in Toronto. It'll be showing until Dec. 17. (Here are some pictures from the opening on Nov. 12).
As part of the exhibit, we're also showing, amongst others, Bureau d'etudes' compelling -- and beautiful -- map on Argentina's newest social movements post 2001.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here Be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization: Introductory Thoughts - TSCI
Nov. 22, 2005
Basically, the two overarching tactics that inform the show are:
1) How counter-cartography visibalizes the networks of power that remain hidden
within our complexly globalalized, overly administered contemporary epoch, and also
2) How counter-cartography makes known the networks of counter-power and resistance that arise as actions against those dense networks of power and as actions for more democratic, more humane, less commodified possibilities for life.
The maps are complex, dense, and intense and take time to process. You must spend time with them to understand them. This is, in part, a response to three integral dynamics at play:
1) The complexity of the networks of power. There are many lines, and branches
that radiate out from power’s nodes.
2) The thought and time that researcher-activists must spend in order to unravel the social, political, informational, and social-psychic structures of those power
networks.
3) The maps ask you to slow down and take time with them. This contrasts with the
ideology of speed and the practices of cultural distraction that global capital relies
on. Capitalist power wants you to be overwhelmed, to not know where to turn, to
rely on “experts” and “bureaucrats” and administrators to figure out life for you.
So, in taking time with these maps, you’re practicing a form of resistance: the
resistance is in your very act of – as a reader and interpreter of the maps -- placing yourself in a contemplative, engaging mode, rather than the mode of distraction and passivity that consumer culture invites. This has affinities to the Walter Benjamin essay we read: distraction/ vs. reflection.
Alo ask yourself, then: Is there an “aura” in these pieces? What about reproduction as resistance? How are these maps speaking too a radically democratic stance? What are they calling you to do?
What is the dragon in Here Be Dragons? The dragon is two-headed; that is, there are two heads, or two sides, to the dragon at play. Perhaps there are many dragons at play, too:
One head of the dragon could represent the structures of power networks that
remain hidden. Some of the maps speak to this more than others. This is the
dragon of control and domination. These areas of control and their complex
institutional structures remain outside the apparent, knowable world of our
everyday lives. Yet they directly and indirectly form a part of our everyday lives
in our contemporary high-capitalist/post-Fordist reality. The social relations and
institutions that ground this hidden reality help shape our individual and collective
consciousnesses. They frame our ideologies. They are, in reality, concrete and even geographical structures, as the maps illustrate. And they are also emergent and time-based. Recall what McLuhan and Innis have to say about
time/space and media.
The other head could be the dragon of resistance, of counter-power, of
emancipation. The networks of resistance are always fomenting, always present,
always active and creating new alternatives outside of the spheres of state and
corporate power. This is living power, power from below, as opposed to the dead
power of instrumentality and control. These counter-powers vizibalize where
power really emanates from: from below. After all, it is we – you and me -- that
legitimize power: Counter-power is situated in the local, in the neighbourhood, in
your networks, on the street, rooted in your everyday life.
The two-headed dragon also resembles the two-sidedness of technology, as we’ve been
discussing in course: Recall Postman and Ellul: technology gives something and takes
something away. Recall the stories of Pandora’s box, Prometheus, and Icarus, as well.
Technology can be used by power to dominate but can also be used by those that are
oppressed, alienated, or exploited, from below, to not only resist but to also create new possibilities: another kind of world. Technologies “open up” possible worlds. They also close off these worlds via ideologies of efficiency and “means” that instrumentalize and over-administrate life.
What “other worlds” are these maps proposing, explicitly and implicitly?
These maps are one way of using new technologies such as the Internet, databases, and
mapping software to begin to liberate us from the enclosures we live in. The Internet, for
example plays a central role in both organizing and designing these maps and
disseminating the information, especially with Bureau d’etudes and Govcom,.org. Ask
your self how these reappropriations of the technology can help us break free from our
enclosures.
Some of the themes in the exhibit:
1) How is power organized?
2) How are the structures of counter-power organized?
3) Making the invisible visable and making the marginal and peripheral visable, too.
4) Unconcealing the concealed. Making known the unknown.
5) Cartographic epistemologies (theories of knowledge; how can we come to know
what we know), techno-epistemologies.
6) Power is both centralized within hubs of power and diffused into spatial
territories, psychic territories, narrative territories, ideological territories. It is the structure of these actual and virutal terriorializations that’s being visibalized.
7)How are we, as individuals, lost in these power networks. What do they deny us
as individuals and communities? Or, in the counter-cartographies and networks of
resistance maps, how are we visibalized?
8) What do these maps help us see? What do they help us do?
Some of the theoretical touchstones that undergird the maps:
Critical cartography (Brian Holmes and Richard Rogers, in particular (see below
for links to two essays)).
Political economy of media networks (rooted in Marxist analyses of capitalism;
see also Manueal Castells, Frank Webster, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford,
and many others.)
Theories of power: Foucault’s bio-power, Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomes,”
Deleuze on Nietszche (active/reactive forces).
Theories of hegemony and counter-hegemony (Gramsci, Lukasc), ideology and
“instrumental reason” (Marx, Marcuse, Horkheimer, structuralism and post-
structiralism).
Globalization theory
Philosophies of being/non-being: Heidegger’s concealment/unconcealment.
Philosophies of technology: Heidegger’s “enframing,” technological
consequences/effects and technological pessimism and optimism (Ellul, Postman,
McLuhan, etc.), technological histories and epochs (Mumford, McLuhan, Innis,
etc.).
These two excellent essays on counter-cartographies will come in handy for those that
wanting to do projects on mapping and perhaps tackle the question on the midterm.
posted by Marcelo Vieta at
10:55 AM
