Opening of Radio Prolife
Radio Pro-Life
Dacă viața nu e evidentă în experiența trăită? (Eugene Thacker, After Life)
Primul radio Pro-Life din România a fost inaugurat începând cu data de 22 iunie 2012, ora 20.00.
Ce ar putea însemna tematizarea vieții, cum se poate menține conceptul de viață deschis, în afara limitărilor conceptuale și taxonomice impuse de aparatul științifico-medical? Care sunt mecanismele prin care se produce valorizarea vieții și ierarhizarea unor forme de viață asupra altora și cum se reproduc, împreună cu viața însăși, aceste ierarhii? Cum poate fi depășit înțelesul strict biologic al vieții și care sunt tensiunile între granițele conceptuale și cele economico-politice care delimitează viața de moarte? Viața rămâne într-o zonă de indiscernabilitate, ea nu este definită ca atare, dar este continuu reglementată și investită cu funcții strategice de religie, stat, știință.
În ciuda banalizării din limbajul curent (asta-i viața!, stil de viață, o viață avem!) care reduce înțelegerea vieții în termeni experiențiali și deci individuali și strict umani, conceptul de viață extins în afara antropomorfismului, în afara reducționismului biologic, teologic și legislativ devine miza conceptuală care ar putea redefini politica în epoca contemporană. Dacă “miza politicii astăzi este viața” (Foucault), înțelegerea și conceptualizarea acestei noțiuni devine vitală. Schimbarea percepției asupra vieții poate reprezenta dezosificarea vieții-înscenate de mecanismele economice actuale.
Dacă am privi reproducerea intr-un sens mai larg, care nu se limitează la înțelesul biologic? În loc de reproducere, putem vorbi de producere de ființe umane. Cum ne producem noi pe noi și unii pe alții. Ce fel de forme de viață putem experimenta care să iasă din linia de asamblare a capitalismului târziu care are în centru producția de subiectivitate și economia afectivă? Comodificarea experienței trăite și a subiectivității subiectivitatea de angajat/ă, de mamă, de femeie și deci reglementează reproducerea biologică. Ideologia științifico-medicală produce "metafore performative”: viața devine viață înscenată și prin mecanisme bio-culturale este redusă la multiple forme de a trăi subordonate economiei și logicii producției și acumulării. În același fel, încadrarea în categoriile de gender se face în conformitate cu criterii vizuale, cu "estetica corpului, o estetică a sexualității și a sexului". Logica binară bărbat-femeie este întărită de viziunea dominantă asupra individului ca organism întreg și autonom, în contrast cu viziunea unui corp ca “multiplicitate de expresii care nu pot fi reduse la masculin și feminin” (Beatriz Preciado).
Asistăm la schimbări fundamentale în ceea ce privește regimul vieții, viața înțeleasă în termenii unui organism compact, închis și delimitat este înlocuită, o dată cu revoluția genetică/biotehnologică și mai recent în cadrul biologiei sintetice, cu o viziune a corpului ca agregat celular reprogramabil prin rescrierea software-ului genetic. Viața este deci văzută ca naturală, auto-telică, ca o entitate separată, capabilă să se reproducă pe sine autonom: ceea ce face ca ceva să intre în sfera vieții/să trăiască pare să fie capacitatea de a se autosusține independent de mediul din jur. Ceea ce pare să definească viața este excepționalitatea față de mediu, privilegierea acelui ceva ce pare să aibă viață față de ceea ce atribuim într-o viziune reducționistă non-vieții. Ideologia individualistă care stă la baza teoriilor economice liberale și a capitalismului actual infiltrează puternic știința la alt nivel decât o făcea în secolul 19 când teoria supraviețuirii celui mai puternic a lui Spencer a dominat gândirea științifică în fața principiului ajutorului mutual al lui Kropotkin.
Ce schimbări au produs noile mecanisme de valorizare ale economiei actuale vis a vis de înțelegerea vieții? Sistemele de disciplinare și control descrise de Foucault sub numele de biopolitică sunt transferate acum la nivel micro-bio-politic, miza intervenției corective nu se mai oprește la limita exterioară a corpului, la regularizarea mișcărilor și a relațiilor cu spațiul, ci se infiltrează în interiorul acestuia, biopolitica subcutanată, subcelulară, molecularizată. Viața înțeleasă de Foucault ca intrând sub incidența directă a politicii (de unde termenul de biopolitică și odată cu el industriile bios-ului: bioetica, biotehnologiile) nu mai poate fi privită la nivel individual, personal. Viziunea antropomorfică și individuală asupra vieții reprodusă de mașina antropologică excepționalizează viața umană ca fiind singura cu capacitatea de a se gândi pe sine. Același mecanism care a privilegiat rațiunea în fața capacităților emoționale, viața nutritivă, vegetativă în fața vieții relationale este la lucru.
Viata poate fi privita si la nivelul afectelor, proceselor si organizarii, la nivel sub-subiectiv, molecular, la nivelul singularitati sub-individuale asa cum este conceptualizata ea de Giorgio Agamben, Eugene Thecker, Gilles Deleuze, Bracha Ettinger etc
Centralitatea vieții umane în discursul filozofic, politic și științific a dus la construcția unui tabu în jurul morții, însă o dată cu controlul extins asupra corpului fluidizează granițele dintre viață și moarte. Biopolitica devine necropolitică (Achille Mbembe), tanatopolitică (Roberto Esposito). Moartea nu mai înseamnă oprirea oricărei producții, s-a ieșit din paradigma mortii-ca-amenințare-a-capitalismului. Moartea intră într-un circuit productiv care îmbunătățește și extinde viața, fie că este vorba de moartea legală a corpului - în urmă rămân organele pentru transplant sau celulele care se reproduc, fie că este vorba de necrocapitalism, care acționează prin instaurarea stării de excepţie și eliminarea corpurilor dispensabile în întregi regiuni geo-politice. Încă din timpul colonialismului moartea unor corpuri servea la prosperitatea altor corpuri, în același fel în neo-colonialismul actual, urmând modelul plantației și al coloniei descrise de Achille Mbembe, crearea unor zone-ale-morții contribuie la prosperitatea celor care se află în afara lor. Zonele de ocupație militară, cele de dominație economică și de asemenea teritoriile aflate la limita acestora (taberele și închisorile de refugiați) sunt populate de subiecți reduși la statutul de morți vii, iar această zombificare pe scară largă are loc în afara granițelor vizibilității și sub oblăduirea unei așa numite lumi întâi care se declară pentru-viata.
Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe
Radio Prolife Booth
Radio Prolife Booth at Salonul de Proiecte, June 2012
Echipa Radio Prolife la deschiderea din 22 iunie 2012/ Radio Prolife team at the opening from 22th of June 2012:
Irina Costache, Irina Gheorghe, Simina Guga, Mihai Lukacs, Alina Popa, Ștefan Tiron and with the special participation of Akira and Nae Timotei (comix authors http://sefeu.blogspot.ro/) and Ion Dumitrescu (sound design, radio jingles https://soundcloud.com/future-nuggets).
Carpenter's Pro-Life - Abortion Scene
There is a scene that has interested us in Carpenter’s Pro-Life: the spectacle of abortion enacted by a man on another man. The prolifer performs a revenge-operation on the obstetrician, showing the monstrosity of Prolife, the ultimate punishment of transgressing the moral code of religious fundamentalism. Because he is a guardian agent of morality with his army of agents - the sons.
Nevertheless there is another aspect maybe less obvious that is conceptually performed alongside this abortion, which is the monstrosity of the Western scientific paradigm. A doctor, an obstetrician is being bodily penetrated, he is the one who's body is now riddled with an 'artificial hole' (see Sobchack-Baudrillard controversy). It's the physical abortion enacted by a man on another man which performs the monstrosity of the Western thought besides the insanity of Prolife or the monstrosity of keeping moral values at all costs - the selfbirth in the masculine imagination.
Western science answers the masculine fantasy of selfbirth through rational acquisition - the mind replacing the womb as the site of creation. (Rosi Braidotti referring to Donna Haraway)
Now the mind is being replaced again with the body, the womb is now an 'artificial orifice' - it is as if the medical objects have gone crazy, it is a semiotic transgression whereby the objects lose their function, an experiment producing horror rather than truth - as it normally does in the modern scientific mode of production of truth.
So it's a double effect, a double revenge, not only showing the insanity of Prolife but the cruelty of medico-scientific paradigm - based on vivisection, dissection, cutting, bleeding, removing, digging holes, penetrating, peeling, scanning, piercing, sticking. And here we can add from Sobchack quoting Baudrillard to distort a bit the controversy of postmodern technophilia in the detriment of the body: 'brutal surgery' 'continually performed in creating incisions, excisions, scartissue, gaping body holes', 'artificial orifices'. These are the operations that animated the horrors of science starting with the Cartesian tradition on and on. Of course the main performers of this splatter of medico-scientific apparatus are men.
This scene seems to affect us as viewers in multiple ways, escaping a single identification pattern and beyond the dissatisfaction/gratification binary. This is the most probably unintended side effect of the monstrous scene, apart from criticizing the Prolife war scenes by pushing the limits of representation and employing the excess of artifice. Not only religion but scientific thought as well can produce the performance of horror.
The doctor in Carpenter’s Pro-Life can be seen as a trickster in the field of science: ignoring the rules of the game (disembodiment, which is another word for objectivity), he’s ready to take it on the chin, or to be more precise on all his body, the only protecting shield to keep away his sweat and blood is the bulletproof vest (in the film the obstetrician was wearing this vest - sign of the ongoing fear of religious fundamentalism). In a way he's not modest, if we think of Donna Haraway's modest witness, in that he's not invisible, so the abortion crusader punishes him for this hybris of lack of modesty. The attack on the clinic is a prolongation of a scientific experiment in which the doctor is polluted by his own body.
The abortionist's fleshy endeavors in the world of science recall the tension in feminist and technology debates of the last decades between a situated embodiment called for by a strand of feminist discourse (including Vivian Sobchack) and the disembodied world of cyber-science, celebrated by the utopianists of cyberspace or how Parisi called them the cowboys of cyberspace. Parisi is proposing overcoming this dichotomy, as in fact it has already been scrambled to pieces by our bio-digital capitalist culture, in which borders between technology and biology have been blown out. With the emergence of synthetic biology, cloning, in vitro fertilization,etc, this continous merry-go-round between what is called biology and what is called technology is producing molecular mutations, monstruos hybrids, uncanny cellular encounters, raising questions about what a body is and what a body can do, blurring the lines between natural and artificial.
The Reproduction of Darkness/ The Darkness of Reproduction
by the Bureau of Melodramatic Research
March 2012
This text is emotionally part of Bezna#2, but will remain as well outside of its reproductive cycle.
The Reproduction of Darkness
All the way through the protests negative, dark feelings - rage, despair, mania and brutal honesty have been the main accepted, broadcasted and lived emotions. The politics of negativity have been at work and they bound together across class, gender and age different communities, from state functionaries to pensioners, from social activists to unemployed, from workers to students. Fantasies of gallows, mefistos, chopped animals, splatter, decapitations and death were animating every vision of realpolitik. The voodoo effect was re-invested every night, the protesters became the new witches holding magical powers besides the voting power bestowed by a blunt representative democracy. Witches covent versus parliamentary impeachment.
After the violent nights of 14th and 15th of January(1), there was an inverted sense of revolutionary heroism. The heroic image of the able-bodied revolutionary (or the ultra-fit ultra) was replaced by a crazy display, an effective schizo-magical practice of exorcizing the neoliberal demons. There was a Grand Guignol unfolding in the public sphere, a grotesque spectacle with all the props including the SMURD-nurses(2) who were traditionally present on stage to take care of the fainting bourgeoisie. The masochism of freezing in cold winter goes hand in hand with the sadism of the representation. The harsh conditions determine the genre on both the political and the climatic level. There is no hope for warming up (except global warming), one depicts blood while struggling to pump one’s own into the body extremities. Radical meteorology and extreme economical conditions (impoverishment) have produced new affectivities and bleak radicalism.
What is the relation between an aging population and civil disobedience? Can the old become the new ultras in their infinite rage and readiness to surrender their bodies to police violence? What is the dialectics between the “demographic winter” and the revolutionary winter in Bucharest, 2012?
Inhabiting a decrepit body and living a precarious life means becoming violence-proof. The old body is disposable. The subject becomes faint. There is no becoming, there is only fading away. In this precarious bodily state, violence is material, it is the act of staying alive.
In the square precarity becomes a self-assumed methodology. Poor quality images accompany vulnerable bodies, the demonstration placards are handwritten lists of pleas on recycled bottoms of cardboard boxes, black-and-white A4 prints on paper, occasionally covered in plastic sheaths sneaked out of some office desk to the square. A trash culture inhabits the place, the Gothic scenario is staged in the form of a B-movie, low-resolution, on a hand-held camera. According to Hito Steyerl, the poor image is the “lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances”(3). It is disposable, but also easily reproduced, distributed, replaced. There is no technological pressure anymore, no aesthetic claims and no authorship. The slogans spread, we copy bleakness, we reproduce depression.
In the wake of the anti ACTA protest, Piata Universitatii defies copyright. The reproduction of darkness is free.
We will be all old worms, old hooligans, because there is no offspring, there is no future. Old and New Europe are both old. The fear of aging will not be solved anymore because everything will be wrinkled and all consume will be +70. The gendarms will be old, police will have Alzheimer, the heroes of the revolution will be decrepit. The aging spectacle will be watched over by heart&lung machines.
“I am an old hooligan, but a young worm”
“I am a worm-pensioner”
“The plan of the government: general euthanasia”
“You will pay for the cultural, social and economic genocide”
The Darkness of Reproduction
Birth rates are slowing down, graph curves are bending down. Reproduction means future, the reproductive imperative is part of a narrative of optimism, inherent to the capitalist system. No reproduction conveys no future, but capitalism carries no future as well. Financial futurism cannot sustain actual existence in the long run.
Winter has been traditionally associated with barrenness, with childlessness, it is the time when forces must be saved, it is a time for pure survival. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that these protests arose in the middle of the cold winter, because there is no more rationale to self-preserve. The economic and material conditions that capitalism reproduces for the 99% can be experienced as an extended and never ending ice age.
In the middle of the cold square, images of abundance are lacking, there is only an abundance of images of poverty. But how is the political power represented, what are the internal relationships between members of the political class? A pink placard was depicting a mother-and-child classic theme, whereby the role of the suckling is taken by President Basescu and the mother is played by Elena Udrea. Too much breastfed, it writes. The man-politician-chief is represented at the breast of the woman-politician-subordinate. What is striking about this representation is that it reveals, as Mariarosa dalla Costa and Selma James put it, the woman “as a safety valve for the social tensions caused by capitalist organization”(4). Actually the woman-politician, Elena Udrea, was in this case representative of all the wives who had to comfort their newly laid off husbands (it is obvious that many of this category were present at the protests). At the same time, this is a proof of the still strong nuclear family doctrine. The image renders transparent what the same author called “the productivity of passivity”, while it probably had the original intention to create a counterpart for the constant infantilization of the (protesting) population and, in turn, to represent the president himself as a dependent, spoiled infant. The biological reproduction has been supplanted by the reproduction of political power, which has to be stopped.
Radical passivity is a non-productive passivity, it is one with the un-mother, with the non-reproduction. The refusal of work(5) must be accompanied by a general strike in the realm of reproduction. The capitalist function of the uterus must fade out.
Will the spring be silent?(6)
As the story tells us, the stork delivers the babies in spring, flying north from the poor south. The rich north is getting warm then and is hoping for high fertility rates. In the wake of the harsher and harsher austerity measures, we will all grow old and invulnerable to the violent protectors of the rich. Progeria and depression, rage and despair and above all a sense of community and social cohesion could stop the next spring to be silenced.
1. In January 2012 the biggest anti-government protests took place in Romania (the widest social unrest after the 1989 Revolution)
2. SMURD= Romanian Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication
3. Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 2009 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
4. Mariarosa dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of the Women and the Subversion of the Community, 1972
5. Franco Bifo Berardi, What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?, 2003 http://eipcp.net/transversal/1203/bifo/en
6. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Bezna on web (you can download here all the issues): http://bezzzna.blogspot.ro/
March 2012
This text is emotionally part of Bezna#2, but will remain as well outside of its reproductive cycle.
The Reproduction of Darkness
All the way through the protests negative, dark feelings - rage, despair, mania and brutal honesty have been the main accepted, broadcasted and lived emotions. The politics of negativity have been at work and they bound together across class, gender and age different communities, from state functionaries to pensioners, from social activists to unemployed, from workers to students. Fantasies of gallows, mefistos, chopped animals, splatter, decapitations and death were animating every vision of realpolitik. The voodoo effect was re-invested every night, the protesters became the new witches holding magical powers besides the voting power bestowed by a blunt representative democracy. Witches covent versus parliamentary impeachment.
After the violent nights of 14th and 15th of January(1), there was an inverted sense of revolutionary heroism. The heroic image of the able-bodied revolutionary (or the ultra-fit ultra) was replaced by a crazy display, an effective schizo-magical practice of exorcizing the neoliberal demons. There was a Grand Guignol unfolding in the public sphere, a grotesque spectacle with all the props including the SMURD-nurses(2) who were traditionally present on stage to take care of the fainting bourgeoisie. The masochism of freezing in cold winter goes hand in hand with the sadism of the representation. The harsh conditions determine the genre on both the political and the climatic level. There is no hope for warming up (except global warming), one depicts blood while struggling to pump one’s own into the body extremities. Radical meteorology and extreme economical conditions (impoverishment) have produced new affectivities and bleak radicalism.
What is the relation between an aging population and civil disobedience? Can the old become the new ultras in their infinite rage and readiness to surrender their bodies to police violence? What is the dialectics between the “demographic winter” and the revolutionary winter in Bucharest, 2012?
Inhabiting a decrepit body and living a precarious life means becoming violence-proof. The old body is disposable. The subject becomes faint. There is no becoming, there is only fading away. In this precarious bodily state, violence is material, it is the act of staying alive.
In the square precarity becomes a self-assumed methodology. Poor quality images accompany vulnerable bodies, the demonstration placards are handwritten lists of pleas on recycled bottoms of cardboard boxes, black-and-white A4 prints on paper, occasionally covered in plastic sheaths sneaked out of some office desk to the square. A trash culture inhabits the place, the Gothic scenario is staged in the form of a B-movie, low-resolution, on a hand-held camera. According to Hito Steyerl, the poor image is the “lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances”(3). It is disposable, but also easily reproduced, distributed, replaced. There is no technological pressure anymore, no aesthetic claims and no authorship. The slogans spread, we copy bleakness, we reproduce depression.
In the wake of the anti ACTA protest, Piata Universitatii defies copyright. The reproduction of darkness is free.
We will be all old worms, old hooligans, because there is no offspring, there is no future. Old and New Europe are both old. The fear of aging will not be solved anymore because everything will be wrinkled and all consume will be +70. The gendarms will be old, police will have Alzheimer, the heroes of the revolution will be decrepit. The aging spectacle will be watched over by heart&lung machines.
“I am an old hooligan, but a young worm”
“I am a worm-pensioner”
“The plan of the government: general euthanasia”
“You will pay for the cultural, social and economic genocide”
The Darkness of Reproduction
Birth rates are slowing down, graph curves are bending down. Reproduction means future, the reproductive imperative is part of a narrative of optimism, inherent to the capitalist system. No reproduction conveys no future, but capitalism carries no future as well. Financial futurism cannot sustain actual existence in the long run.
Winter has been traditionally associated with barrenness, with childlessness, it is the time when forces must be saved, it is a time for pure survival. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that these protests arose in the middle of the cold winter, because there is no more rationale to self-preserve. The economic and material conditions that capitalism reproduces for the 99% can be experienced as an extended and never ending ice age.
In the middle of the cold square, images of abundance are lacking, there is only an abundance of images of poverty. But how is the political power represented, what are the internal relationships between members of the political class? A pink placard was depicting a mother-and-child classic theme, whereby the role of the suckling is taken by President Basescu and the mother is played by Elena Udrea. Too much breastfed, it writes. The man-politician-chief is represented at the breast of the woman-politician-subordinate. What is striking about this representation is that it reveals, as Mariarosa dalla Costa and Selma James put it, the woman “as a safety valve for the social tensions caused by capitalist organization”(4). Actually the woman-politician, Elena Udrea, was in this case representative of all the wives who had to comfort their newly laid off husbands (it is obvious that many of this category were present at the protests). At the same time, this is a proof of the still strong nuclear family doctrine. The image renders transparent what the same author called “the productivity of passivity”, while it probably had the original intention to create a counterpart for the constant infantilization of the (protesting) population and, in turn, to represent the president himself as a dependent, spoiled infant. The biological reproduction has been supplanted by the reproduction of political power, which has to be stopped.
Radical passivity is a non-productive passivity, it is one with the un-mother, with the non-reproduction. The refusal of work(5) must be accompanied by a general strike in the realm of reproduction. The capitalist function of the uterus must fade out.
Will the spring be silent?(6)
As the story tells us, the stork delivers the babies in spring, flying north from the poor south. The rich north is getting warm then and is hoping for high fertility rates. In the wake of the harsher and harsher austerity measures, we will all grow old and invulnerable to the violent protectors of the rich. Progeria and depression, rage and despair and above all a sense of community and social cohesion could stop the next spring to be silenced.
1. In January 2012 the biggest anti-government protests took place in Romania (the widest social unrest after the 1989 Revolution)
2. SMURD= Romanian Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication
3. Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 2009 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
4. Mariarosa dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of the Women and the Subversion of the Community, 1972
5. Franco Bifo Berardi, What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?, 2003 http://eipcp.net/transversal/1203/bifo/en
6. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Bezna on web (you can download here all the issues): http://bezzzna.blogspot.ro/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)