DEMO

The Hero and the God

Joseph Campbell

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the “monomyth."

Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods, and descended. Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper. Aeneas went down into the underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. All things were unfolded to him: the destiny of souls, the destiny of Rome, which he was about to found, "and in what wise he might avoid or endure every burden.

Intifada: Uprising in Gaza

Anita Vitullo

"Everyone here has a demonstration inside his heart"

The uprising might have started any place, but it began in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp—whose 50,000 residents now proudly refer to their home as mu'askar al-thawra ("camp of the revolution"). Gaza Strip residents fueled the uprising with demonstrations that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands, waving flags and carrying symbolic coffins, chanting every variety of nationalist slogan and vowing to revenge the latest martyr. Youths controlled whole neighborhoods in the cities and closed off the entrances to their camps with stone barricades, garbage and burning tires. When soldiers entered, residents pelted them with stones, debris and, occasionally, petrol bombs. Local shopkeepers closed down and laborers who worked in Israel refused to go to their jobs. Israeli officials refer to the demonstrations as "riots" and defend their repression as necessary to preserve "law and order."

Imperial Power Grid: The Role of Energy in Russia’s Colonial Expansion

Mark Cinkevich and Anna Engelhardt

The politics of electricity extraction has been largely overshadowed by the explicit violence of oil and gas. Especially in the case of Russia, oil and gas has appeared to be the crux of the Putin regime’s strength. Today, with the rising demands of an energy embargo against Russia, we hope to support the legitimacy and widen scope of such demands by bringing up the question of electricity. Even though our investigation into dependence on electricity provided by Russia was developed before the escalation of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the colonial logic it reveals is still of relevance.

Providing an insight into Russia’s colonial energy extraction, we feel the need to first explain why we approach it as a matter of colonial politics, rather than class politics. Even though both are closely connected, certain types of colonial violence cannot (and should not) be explained with the logic of capital. Extraction is a particularly useful notion to explain such a difference. Extraction of value in some cases is not mutually exclusive with colonial extraction, with both types reinforcing one another.

Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, The Smartness Mandate

On November 6, 2008, still in the immediate aftermath of the worldwide economic crisis initiated by the US subprime mortgage market collapse, then-chairman of IBM Sam Palmisano delivered a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. The council is one of the foremost think tanks in the United States, its membership composed of senior government officials, members of the intelligence community (including the CIA), business leaders, financiers, lawyers, and journalists. Yet Palmisano was not there to discuss the fate of the global economy. Rather, he introduced his corporation’s vision of the future in a talk titled “A Smarter Planet.” In glowing terms, Palmisano laid out a vision of fiber-optic cables, high-bandwidth infrastructure, seamless supply chain and logistical capacity, a clean environment, and eternal economic growth, all of which were to be the preconditions for a “smart” planet. IBM, he argued, would lead the globe to the next frontier, a network beyond social networks and mere Twitter chats. This future world would come into being through the integration of humans and machines into a seamless Internet of Things that would generate the data necessary for organizing production and labor, enhancing marketing, facilitating democracy and prosperity, and—perhaps most importantly—for enabling a mode of automated, and seemingly apolitical, decision-making that would guarantee the survival of the human species in the face of pressing environmental challenges. In Palmisano’s talk, “smartness” referred to the interweaving of dynamic, emergent computational networks with the goal of producing a more resilient human species—that is, a species able to absorb and survive environmental, economic, and security crises by perpetually optimizing and adapting technologies.

Economic Development and Cosmopolitical Re-involvement

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

The diversity of the forms of life on Earth is consubstantial with life as a form, or mode, of matter. This diversity is the very movement of life as information, a form-taking process that interiorises difference – the variations of potential existing in a universe constituted by the heterogeneous distribution of matter-energy – to produce more difference, that is, more information. Life, in this sense, is an exponentialisation, a redoubling or multiplication of difference by itself. This applies equally to human life. The diversity of ways of human life is a diversity in the ways of relating to life in general, and to the innumerable singular forms of life that occupy (inform) all of the possible niches of this world. Human diversity, social and cultural, is a manifestation of environmental, or natural, diversity – it constitutes us as a singular form of life, being our own mode of interiorising ‘external’ (environmental) diversity and therefore of reproducing it. For this reason the present environmental crisis is, for humans, a cultural crisis, a crisis of diversity, and a threat to human life.

The Subharmonic Murmur of Black Tentacular Voids. Commentary on Nothing
Eugene Thacker

We may, in a general sense, think of mysticism as a vague, impressionistic feeling of wonder or awe that may or may not involve drugs, and that may or may not involve nature hikes and generally blissing out. We can also think of mysticism as actually enabled by an overly optimistic, "gee-whiz" scientific instrumentality, in which the Earth is the divinely-sanctioned domain of the human, even and especially in the eleventh hour of climate change. Neither of these is what we mean by mysticism here. Whether it is of the political left or right, whether it is the affectivist-hippie mysticism or the eschatology-of-oil type of mysticism, in both cases mysticism is ostensibly a human-centric and human-oriented experience. Mysticism in these cases is always a union "for us" as human beings.

Ambitopia and Affective Atmospheres. Unpacking Ideology Inside Pervasive Systems

Emilia Tapprest and Victor Evink

“Knife through the vast underwater realms of beauty and adventure. Use your sonar, dive deep, flip above the waves. Explore, solve puzzles, unlock the secrets of crystal glyphs. The fate of the world rests on your wits and fins.”

With this enticing description, adapted from the back cover of the 1992 SEGA game Ecco the Dolphin, a vivid narrator in the audio fiction piece ‘Liquid Dream’ welcomes the listener to a district-wide urban neverland for full-time gamers called Dolphin Waves. The playful and carefree tone reflects the ludic atmosphere of life in this place. Dolphin Waves is one of the three speculative near-future worlds of Zhōuwéi Network, a critical worldbuilding research project focusing on the relationship between embodiment, datafication and power. Through imagining three types of datafied societies in 2041 and bringing them to life cinematically, the research explores how different ideological underpinnings produce affordances for distinct affective undertones.

Evidence of Things Unseen but Heard

Louis Henderson

“…sound and silence. What bridges the two elements is echo, the traces of creation. If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.”

Bristol, August 23, 2017

A grey and pink sky dashed across with the deep blues of post storm light. Dark rain clouds and a river the colour of lead. At Portishead the boat begins to bear right, from the Mouth of the Severn fed by the North Atlantic, into the River Avon and onwards towards the city of Bristol. Heading down past Clifton and into the Cumberland Basin, eventually the boat enters Bristol Harbour. On the left are the offices of Lloyds Bank, a company that grew to its powerful status from insuring enslaved people and slave ships during the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Normativity of the Creeks

Elizabeth Povinelli

All Or Nothing

There is a coastal tidal creek in Northern Australia where a young girl lies facedown. Called Tjipel in the language of the area, she came to this creek as a beautiful teenager who decided to dress as a young man, equipping herself with male clothes and hunting implements, including a spear and spear thrower. As she travelled down the coast, she did various things, including spearing a wallaby. But the heart of her story concerns an encounter she had with an old man. As she passed between two coastal points, a bird told her that an old man was approaching. And so she lay belly down in the sand to hide what parts of her body would reveal—that she was in fact an adolescent female. The old man, thinking she was a young man, insisted that (s)he get up and cook the wallaby. She put him off, claiming to be sick.

Ghosts of the Plantation

Caitlin Vandertop

Viewed as an energy-commodity, sugar can be seen to mediate the effect of energy on narrative time – what might be termed narrative energetics (Macdonald 2013) – in plantation fiction. As a commodity, sugar is a calorific fuel yet it also ‘naturalizes necessity’, in Niblett’s terms, ‘shaping bodies, tastes, habits, and even emotional geographies (sugar “highs” and “lows”)’ (Niblett 2015, 268). The historical process of cultivating the taste for sugar, as is shown in Sidney Mintz’s seminal study, Sweetness and Power (1985), altered the tempo of modern life by establishing disciplinary productivity in the cane fields and determining the hours of factory time in industrial Europe, forcing working-class women to substitute farmed foods for the short-term bursts of energy provided by the sugary cup of tea.

Social Movements and Biodiversity on the Pacific Coast of Colombia

Arturo Escobar and Mauricio Pardo

Rediscovering a region: the Colombian Pacific region

The Colombian Pacific region is a vast tropical rainforest area around 960 km long, its width fluctuating from 80 to 160 km (roughly 700,000 km2). It extends from Panama to Ecuador, and from the slopes of the western mountain range (Cordillera Occidental) to the Pacific ocean. An approximate 60 per cent of the population inhabits a few cities and large towns, while the remaining population dwells in riverbank areas along the more than 240 rivers flowing from the mountains to the ocean. Afro-Colombians, descendants of slaves brought from Africa at the beginning of the seventeenth century for gold-mining activities, form the majority of the population, although the number of indigenous inhabitants amounts to approximately 50,000.

The Sacrificial Crisis

René Girard

Almost every society has festivals that have retained a ritualistic character over the centuries. Of particular interest to the modern inquirer are observances involving the deliberate violation of established laws; for example, celebrations in which sexual promiscuity is not only tolerated but prescribed or in which incest becomes the required practice. Such violations must be viewed in their broadest context: that of the overall elimination of differences. Family and social hierarchies are temporarily suppressed or inverted; children no longer respect their parents, servants their masters, vassals their lords. This motif is reflected in the esthetics of the holiday—the display of clashing colors, the parading of transvestite figures, the slapstick antics of piebald “fools.” For the duration of the festival unnatural acts and outrageous behavior are permitted, even encouraged.

Transnational Building of a Modern Planning Regime in Iran

Elmira Jafari & Carola Hein

In 1962, in the midst of the Cold War and under the direct influence of John. F. Kennedy’s presidency, Mohammad Reza Shah launched his White Revolution, generally known as a top-down modernization project.13 Due to rising socio-political unrest in Iran, Kennedy pressured the Shah to initiate reforms.14 The Kennedy administration hoped that the White Revolution reforms could prevent Communist-inspired revolution in Iran. The administration, therefore, funnelled money to Iran to stabilize the US position in the Cold War contest. However, for the Shah, the key ambition of the White Revolution was to make Iran in general and Tehran in particular a ‘showcase of modernization’ in the Middle East region.15 The White Revolution, therefore, embraced fundamental social and economic reforms in which land reform was among the most influential.

Exile and Creativity

Vilém Flusser

This essay will explore neither the existential nor the religious connotations of the concept of the term exile. However, we should keep in the back of our mind the Christian story of man’s expulsion from Paradise and his entrance into the world, the Jewish mystic’s story of the exile of divine spirit in the world, and the existentialist story of man as a stranger in the world. All of these stories should be kept in the back of our mind without being verbalized. For the intention here is to interpret the exile situation as a challenge to creative activity.

Kinshasa and its (Im)Material Infrastructure

Filip De Boeck

Simulacra of Infrastructures

In ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the African city architects, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers and others devote a lot of attention to the built form, and more generally to the city’s material infrastructure. Architecture has become a central issue in western discourses and reflections on how to plan, engineer, sanitize and transform the urban site and its public spaces. Mirror-ing that discourse, architecture has also started to occupy an increasingly important place in attempts to come to terms with the specificities of the African urbanscape and to imagine new urban paradigms for the African city of the future. Indeed, one can hardly underestimate the importance of the built form and of the material, physical infrastructure if one wants to understand the ways the urban space unfolds and designs itself. For example, studying the process of the “bunkerization” of the city, as it is called by its inhabitants, that is the fact that one of Kinshasa’s crucial spaces, the compound, has evolved from an open space lined by flowers and shrubs in the 1940s and 50s to today’s closed parcelles, surrounded by high walls that make the inside invisible to the street, would certainly contribute to a better understanding of the city’s his-tory of unraveling social relationships, its altered sense of security and its changing attitude towards the qualities of public and private.