Second Body /fragment

The free body -  obtained through hard experimentation with all kinds of substances, all kinds of sexuality and all sorts of techniques of freeing ourselves - got exhausted and turned up not that free after all. The enthusiasm and the joy of the freedom lasted for a while but, after years and years of self-expression, a depressive moment arrived when the realization that there is no ‘itself’ to express couldn’t be postponed. The joy and the sensation of freedom felt from getting out of the disciplined body was quickly consumed. The effort of setting free this tool-body is not enough because, similarly to what happened when this is tried in dance, what remains after the 'liberation' are just stereotypes and clichés. Our bodies are shaped by our type of culture, nature, society, economy, politics, especially in the unconscious layers, in the unknown - at the level of reflexes, habits, perception automatisms, affective circuits, etc. It’s not enough to deconstruct or to apply critical thinking to the tool-body or to the world. You need to reconstruct the body and that’s a different kind of work. On the other hand we need this tool-body too because it is what we have for navigating this world.

The familiar habits and patterns of perception and movement are silencing the inhuman factors in the body. "One instinctually arranges one’s life so that the tasks, the tools and the problems and the encounters will recur the same each day, one avoids the limits”. In this way the first body constantly confirms the world and its behaviours, the first body always encounters a known, stabilized world. The quantity of known is constantly expanding until it becomes the totality of perception, until we actually perfectly know what a body can do and what a body is. Our bodies are impregnated with a biological conception, there is a scientific knowledge that we put automatically into bodies and objects. We just know that they are made of molecules and atoms not of affects, spirits, or something similar and we take for granted that a body cannot be in two locations at the same time.

Even if this seems a very solid, grounded reality, there are spaces where this type of thinking is just an impotent fiction. It is possible that an Amazonian continues the end of the last paragraph about the impossibility of the same body to be in two locations at the same time by saying: “maybe not so much in Europe but in Amazonia it can”. Viveiros de Castro was aware that in this kind of worlds a dematerialization of the body and of the thinking was necessary: “What I call ‘body’ is not a synonym with a distinct substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitutes a habitus”. This type of Amazonian material, says Aparecida Vilaça, will allow us to discern a body that is not impregnated with a biological conception, “a body whose existence is fleeting and whose reality lies in the eyes of others”.

The main technique for lucid dreaming and for out of body experiences is to become aware of your body or a part of your body while asleep. This creates a strange feedback loop which initiates awareness and intensifies the presence in the ‘dream world’. By making the dreams real or by becoming real in the dream the 'dreaming body' appears. This kind of body-attention is an interesting way of creating a body and probably there is a key here about how the first body is constituted, and about how the second body can be created. Maybe by deviating a certain amount of attention, of affection, of energy from the first body and the first world in the direction of an intensification of the Unknown, a second attention and a second body can appear, in the same way that, by deviating attention from the dream activity, a dreaming body appears. Maybe by stabilizing this second attention, and by making it a habit, a second body and other worlds can acquire some consistency.
(2012)

Published in Frontpaper magazine Portland, Cadernos de Subjetividade Sao Paulo, Bezna #4 and Unsorcery

We are all Reptilians Now

Film still from They Live, 1988, by John Carpenter


Reality is Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories are in a special relation with reality, they are perceived either as the most radical and profound explanation of it or as pure fiction. They are theories of extremes – you make fun of them or you approach them religiously. Or at least this was the case before 2008, now it looks like they become more and more common sense, banal reality. The recent occupy movements brought the 1% vs 99% discourse in the headlines and slowly by slowly the "financial elites" moved from the weird Internet sites abounding in one eyed pyramids to the mainstream media. It is not so easy to laugh about conspiracy theories anymore.

Some conspiracy theories described long ago the verticalization of power, the pyramidal dominance of the world and of our lives by supra-democratic structures and financial capitalism. Some of them prefigured what is now almost common sense, the fact that the new economy is centered on forming and exploiting subjectivity. They are contemporary mythologies that capture the collective imagination explaining in simple ways what's going on, providing glimpses of the future. Unsurprisingly Boris Groys considers that "following the death of God, the conspiracy theory became the only surviving form of traditional metaphysics as a discourse about the hidden and the invisible. Where we once had nature and God, we now have design and conspiracy theory."(1)

The Birth of Homo-Saurus

But who are "we" in these last mythologies?
In the beginning of the 80s neoliberalism took over and new forms of life were born, a new subjectivity appeared, mainly as a result of increased exploitation of our intimate capacities like affectivity, sensibility, imagination... Conspiracy theories and some areas from the periphery of culture like obscure SFs and B movies were sensitive to the changes that appeared in the human shape, and, as a result, the reptilian was born. Reptilians appeared in movies, writings, peoples dreams, in repressed memories of abductions extracted under hypnosis and they were retrospectively projected back onto the entire history.

Reptilians are described as cold and calculating individuals devoid of empathy, extremely individualistic and competitive, with lack of compassion, "far less emotionally sensitive than humans". They are mostly from the ruling class, successful CEOs, bankers, politicians, media moguls. And they are contagious, they seek to influence everyone by stimulating the behaviour patterns of the reptile region of the brain that is responsible for hierarchical thinking, aggression, conflict, division, lack of compassion, fear…(2)

Now we know that reptilians do exist. Of course, in scientific research they are called different – psychopaths. The main characteristic of the psychopath is the same as that of the reptilian, lack of empathy. And it seems like the psychopaths are likely to be found in the same places as reptilians, namely business, law, politics and the media, or, to put it in the words of Robert Hare, who did years of research on psychopathic behavior: “Wherever you find money, prestige and power you will find them".(3)

Psychopathy is a successful adaptive behavior for getting ahead in our type of society. In general if you are sensitive to the ecological, social impact of what you are doing and empathic with human and non human suffering you're out of business. In order to be economically successful you have to be a psychopath. Psychopathy is the job description for success.

This is in a way, for the 99%, a very comfortable situation – there are some bad guys, the one percent of pigs, reptiles or anyway something fundamentally different from us, the good guys, and they do all the bad economico-political stuff. There is a historical tendency to degrade what you want to exploit, dominate, torture or eliminate by identifying them as animals – to compare the victims to brutes who deserve such treatments. In this crisis the same mechanism was set off – there was a lot of hate towards the greedy bankers, hedge funds managers, towards the disgusting animals that started all this collapse.

But Neoliberalism or Financial Capitalism is not only on Wall Street, it is in our habits, patterns of perception and movement, in our reflexes, attitudes, desires. The most scary thing is not that the psychopaths are privileged and socially and economically rewarded in this Financial Capitalism, but the fact that this new economy and our way of organizing society is producing the psychopath. Recent studies using fMRI and magneto-ecephalography (MEG) have established that cultural experience and the way our society is organized radically shapes the microstructure of the brain, virtually influencing all critical brain areas, shaping and determining neural patterns, affecting brain structure, and modulating cognitive function. Our bodies and minds are organized by these reptilian impulses and empathy is the "obstacle" that is wiped out in this financial reality.(4) We are all reptilians now. In different degrees.

The Imperceptible Evil

The new subjectivity was so much different from the previous one, of industrial capitalism that it was perceived as radically alien – it comes from far away, another galaxy or from underground bases. The neoliberal subjectivity appeared as something repulsive, sometimes scary, the new corporate life was perceived as a fundamental evil.


Similar phenomena seem to happen in periods of fundamental socio-economical change. Michael T. Taussig describes how in South America, as a result of colonialism and the appearance of Capitalism, new forms of exploitation appeared with effects like: the individual is dislocated from the community. Wealth exists alongside crushing poverty. Economic laws triumph over ethical ones. Production, not man, is the aim of the economy, and commodities rule their creators. All this new situations were perceived as manifestations of the Devil and the collaboration with the new economy was perceived as a contract with the Devil.(5)

This perception changed quickly and the previous horror of capitalist organization of society became ordinary reality, normal everyday life. This kind of normalization seems to happen all the time and was happening with the reptilian too. At the end of 80s the cultural assimilation/camouflage of the reptilians looks to be completed. Movies like They Live or Society captured very well that – you need special lenses or a special sensibility to see or feel the reptilians and the horrible things that they do.

In the former Eastern Block same process happened but with a bit of delay. In the beginning of 90's in Romania, when people started to travel to the West, all kinds of stories about their contact with the neoliberal subject appeared. They were depicted as cold, individualist, non empathic, with fake professional smiles, non-human, robot-like, ghosts with dead souls. But turbo-capitalism arrived at full speed and all these stories are gone, we are the same species now, yet with minor cultural differences. Very quickly "reptilian" became normal, and perception of difference disappeared.

It looks like in order to be able to criticize our own form of life we need a contrast, a big shift in the economic and social forces that are producing us. In transition periods between two systems (as it was the beginning of neoliberalism) there are short time-windows in which the shape of the subjectivity can be visible. But what can be done in a situation like the current one when the difference that rendered the production of Homo-Saurus visible has quickly disappeared?

Becoming Empathic Reptile

One of the favorite solutions of conspiracy theories for defeating the reptilian is love, to send love right along their energy streams. Make reptilians defeat themselves by having them transmit love energy wherever they intend to travel, abduct, possess, etc.(6) This makes sense, if the reptilian's main characteristic is a total lack of empathy, love as radical empathy seems to be the solution. Love is the opposite of reptilian-neoliberal simple and efficient, profit-oriented algorithms, individualism and permanent competition with the others. Love as radical empathy is one of the few states of being where we can be, sometimes in a dramatic way, triggered out of our economic patterns of perceiving all human and non human presences and relations. Nevertheless, there is a big problem with this kind of solution, it is not very helpful, it's like saying that the solution against poverty is to get rich, which may be true but has little practical use. The problem is that there is no place from which the states of mind and feelings related to love and empathy can be experienced because they are erased or perverted in our increasingly reptilian world.

Paradoxically, a first step in addressing our reptilian nature can be to go in the opposite direction, to intentionally become reptile, to consciously embody the reptilian. When we intentionally perform the (micro)behaviours and (micro)perceptions that constitute our reptilian nature, an awareness can appear at this molecular level where the reptilian inserted itself almost unnoticed in the human shape. We can become aware about the way we embody the reptilian and maybe we can start to feel our reptilian features. And this is the moment when mutations start to happen and new forms of life, different bread of monsters can appear.
(2012)


1. Boris Groys, Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility
2. David Icke, The Biggest Secret.
3. Jim Craven, Capitalism: A System Run By and For Psychopaths.
4. Gary Olson, Empathy and Neuropolitics: This is your brain on neoliberal culture. Any questions?
5. Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.
6. The Mystic Avenger, How to defeat the Reptilians.

What can we do with an Apocalypse

It is 2012 and the Apocalypse is here. The question is what can we do with it, what can we do with this concept, what is its potential? Apocalypse in the common sense means the end of the world, it etymologically means a lifting of the veil or a revelation about what is already here, hidden in plain sight.

Nowadays we have too many signs of the end and not so many about the revelation. We cross or we are about to cross some major important boundaries like climate change, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater usage, land cover change... Each of these rifts in planetary boundaries constitutes an actual or potential global ecological catastrophe.(1) The panic of the end is everywhere: it is in the current desperate phase of capitalism with its aggressive and destructive scratching for the last resources, using techniques like tar sands, fracking and deep sea exploitation... And, similarly, it is in the aggressive exploitation of the sensitive zones of human subjectivity - our emotions, empathy, sociability, intuition, imagination are now extracted and put to work at the center of the economy. The consequences on ecosystems, socio-systems, psycho-systems are the same – they are all collapsing.

All this should be presented daily in the news, everybody should think, debate, try to find solutions... But it isn't. To deal with some peripheral symptoms then facing the monster seems to be preferable - what to do with the fact that acidification of oceans dangerously increased by 30% lately, climate change is now largely irreversible (2) or what about the fact that we are in the middle of the fastest mass extinction in the known history, including the 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs extinction? (3)
The spectacle goes on at any price, and the price is continuously growing, while more and more policing at all levels is needed. A militarization of police takes place everywhere. Even drones with no human attached, the perfect partner of capital, are in the air now searching for enemies. And there are drones that are set to operate on the domestic fronts too, the war is with the 99%, the enemy moves closer and closer, the terrorist is your neighbor, the enemy is you. With all the private contractors that are replacing the police and the state army, the administration of death can become more profitable than the exploitation of the living. So, the morbid component of capitalism (until now only externalized and contained at the periphery, in the 3rd and 2nd World) is spreading everywhere.

All these conditions provide a continuous state of emergency, a lot of important distractions and non-events. There is a great time acceleration, always something urgent to figure out, to fix, there is no time to reflect, to evaluate the whole - all the solutions are technical and punctual. The veil is lifted but there is no time to see.
Even the supposed resistance looks to be trapped in this small range of perception – in the end, for protests we have to be realistic and to have reasonable demands - like, everything will be OK, we just have to change this bad and corrupt politicians, we just need to have more people on the streets... There is a very conservative impulse beyond all this. Everything is based on the image of what already is, there is a strange lack of imagination, it seems that the only solution that we can imagine is to amplify the problem.

Two million people in New York against the War in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Athens, sometimes even winning in confrontation with Police, but what for, to be ruled by a technocrat from Goldman Sachs? The same thing happens now in Romania: the government was changed at "the pressure of the streets" into something much more toxic. Just to have an idea, the prime minister is a former head of a secret service agency, the Ministry of Agriculture is the CEO of Monsanto Romania... We are not ready to face the hopeless situation of the protests, maybe because it is too late, and somehow we can feel it... Ignorance and collective denial seem to be the main strategies in use, in order to cope with the depression related to our present and (no) future.
Our needs are linked in a complicated way with the present capitalist reality and this makes it practically impossible for us to can really move away. Without necessary wanting it, we continue to protect the status quo and to operate according to an economic logic that pushes us to the wall. In a perverse way, we are all depend on our collapse and that's why we can't even imagine an alternative.

Talk with the elephant in the room, in its own language

It is a hopeless situation and we still have too much hope. In the “2012” movie, between the hundreds of the 1% elite that saved themselves on that ark, miraculously there was also one family from the 99% to show that even in the midst of the catastrophic end of the world there is still some hope. We have to kill that stupid hope or to leave it to the 1%.

There are some small signs that we are more ready than before to give up hope and to go a bit beyond the reformist impulses. For instance, as a reaction to the softening of the discourse around the Occupy movement, a FULL COMMUNISM meme appeared on Twitter. Here is a very good description of this meme: Like #occupy, it’s a shared shout of “I’m fucking sick of this shit”. Unlike #occupy, however, it also holds an added threat: “I’m so fucking sick of this shit I have no desire to reform it. I want to go beyond. I want to fuck shit up”.(4) Similarly in Romania people preferred to #occupyRomania, #Universitate (the name of the square where the protests happened in Bucharest), the #revolutie (revolution) hashtag to communicate on Twitter.
And there are also small signs that are visible everywhere in the daily life. For instance in all statistics Romania is one of the most depressed nations. Some friends from abroad are amazed that the waitresses, saleswomen and salesmen are not even trying to smile to their clients anymore. But this is an important sign of sanity, of connection with one's own feelings, of acceptance of depression and the misery of (self)exploitation. It is much more problematic to try to keep it up or to be adjusted. The world as it is now doesn't seem to be the best moment and place to be happy.

Maybe we should occupy our depression and hopelessness and let it work. A lucid desperation can be a good idea. Even fear can be a good idea. Probably the best way to go through this panic and anxiety era is to stay afraid, to stay in contact with the collapse - panic and anxiety to get their object of fear. Maybe it is time to see what is happening when the collective energy of hopelessness, depression, mixed with a lucid fear and an apocalyptic awareness, accumulates. If we don't block them anymore and we let them work.

In one of Castaneda's books(5) Don Juan speaks about a kind of death awareness as the base of some very powerful transformative processes. He speaks about Death as our eternal companion that is always to our left, at an arm's length and it's always watching us, until the day it taps us. Death awareness is essential for a different perception about what is important and to give the necessary impulse to start the radical change of subjectivity needed to become a man of knowledge or sorcerer. It works as an advisor and puts the things that we deal with in a configuration with much more potential.
What if we do the same with apocalypse at a social scale? Being aware that Apocalypse is at the length of an arm away can be the social equivalent of Castaneda's individual approach to death. Having all the time in our peripheral view the current collapse - the thousands of starving children that are dying every day, the 200 species of animals and plants that are disappearing every day - can give us the real dimension of what is happening, the needed urgency and the impulse for radical change. Apocalyptic awareness can be the constant transformative presence that we need - a weapon-concept that reopens the field of the possible in a dead world. So, let’s talk with the 'elephant in the room', in its own language.


1. John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe, http://t.co/0AsQYGAw
2. Gilbert Mercier, Overpopulation, Climate Change, Food Crisis, War: The Horsemen Of Apocalyptic Capitalism, http://t.co/LPxz9SE2
3. Here is an archive of articles about the current mass extinction http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html
4. @Spitzenprodukte, On FULL COMMUNISM: cursory notes on the evolution of mimetic non-demands http://t.co/QtW2tWoM
5. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

The Inauguration of the People's Salvation Cathedral

The Romanian Orthodox Church wants to build a huge People's Salvation Cathedral. Of course with money from the state budget (around 900 millions euro). Ironically it will be next to the House of the People, the huge building made during Ceausescu's regime. The construction is on, but near it a small, simple and cheap prefab-church has been already built for temporary use, as a way to mark the territory. The Presidential Candidate organized a public campaign announcing that the People's Salvation Cathedral has been already finished and 11.11.11 was the date set for its inauguration.

For the ceremony the Candidate dressed in priest and, after a very short religious procession, he inaugurated the prefab-church as the actual People's Salvation Cathedral. He also apologized in the name of the Orthodox Church for the exploitation and commercialization of gypsy slaves by the Romanian Orthodox Church that went until later 19th century (a taboo issue for the Church).

The priest announced that the orthodox churches will be open day and night and will serve as a shelter for the continuously growing number of homeless people, pushed away from their homes by the harsh Turbo-Capitalism.

He announced also some possible reforms inside the Church, for example granting women the same rights as men to perform the mass and have access in the hierarchical structure at any level, not just to clean the church and sell candles. He also criticized the hierarchical structure of the Church and its hypocrisy - everything is in gold, a lot of properties and political power. The top members of Church travel in limousines surrounded by police, blocking the traffic for the rest of people. In all these facts, the Candidate-priest recognized the Antichrist - the opposite of the Jesus message encompassing simplicity, poverty, love...

Nevertheless the general tone of his preaching was pervaded by a sense of thankfulness for the honor to inaugurate the People's Salvation Cathedral. The priest was happy to help the Romanian Orthodox Church make such an important step towards christianity: choosing to build a simple and spiritual church instead of the opulent home for the Antichrist.

The official sermon was abruptly interrupted by an aggressive orthodox faction that pushed the priest down the stairs and recommended him to perform a self-decapitation immediately after he would take off the holy costume.

DORATO ACTION - PAVILION DISCREDIT

The 'Presidential Candidate' was happy when it got the invitation to participate in 'Just do it. Branding biopolitics' exhibition in Pavilion Unicredit space.
At Pavilion Unicredit one encounters:

Discussion with Franco Berardi Bifo about the Presidential Candidacy project

Bifo: You underline awareness as the "main word". Don't you think that impotent awareness is kind of masochistic? What's the use of awareness when conscious collective action seems impossible?
Florin Flueras: Probably the impossibility of conscious collective action is because too much unconscious collective action - too much production, agitation, too much immersion in the official perception of the reality, too much involvement in the consumerist-capitalist religion.
Maybe for a conscious collective action the first thing that we have to do is to make space by stoping the unconscious collective action. A moment of paralyzing awareness can be good - a total stop, a total silence, a zero moment.

Cooperativa Performativa

Before (concept)
Maybe in a process the most important thing is how to work, to find a concept for working, in order to do something interesting, "new", you have to challenge the means of production..

The Cooperativa Performativa intention is to use the unpredictable interaction between more processes that are meeting in the same space and time, in order to create new dynamics - a synergic system (a system in which the processes are amplify by the interactions, evolving together and the result mysteriously is bigger than the sum of the components).

Cooperativa Performativa is a frame for a group of persons to collaborate so that each one to develop his own project. A very practical working protocol: less space, one studio for developing five pieces; less money, with the money for a project we did five; multitasking - we where involved in five projects simultaneously. One motivation was that each of us to develop in his direction instead of correcting/compromising our desires in order to find a common sense. It was a frame designed especially for the possibility of disagreement, to avoid the endless negotiations for arriving inevitable to the lowest common denominator.

Can be an alternative to the old models who encourage that products and information should be guarded, kept secret, and used as a means to separate for competitive advantage.. is based on openness - the possibility to transfer materials, knowledge, strategies, methods between processes and to start from not knowing place - to allow that this complex situation of connecting processes to find a way to work.. 

Seems to be in the air now this shift of focus from unit, product, towards connection, link, relation. in a relation the other is not so predictable like yourself and this force you to go out from your territory .. Cooperativa Performativa wants to provide the frame for the situation of being lost in the process to appear, to deliberately lose the control of the process in order to can go in unknown. to work indirectly towards the product, to go sometimes out from your knowledge and practise.

Cooperativa Performativa operates in order to question/challenge things like: art institutions attitudes of putting the artists in a competition situation for founding or visibility. Proprietary feelings and copyright attitudes related to own work. The necessity of governance or of an hierarchical structure in a group. The classical ways of collaboration oriented towards a product and based on agreement, negotiation and compromise. The importance of originality and creativity and of protective attitudes towards them. The question is what is the main motivation behind doing a work - success or a genuine interest, if is second you are interested to share and to copy, you don't care about protecting your "originality", your territory.

After - Sect Mentality exposure:
In every (closed) community there is a sort of unquestioned hierarchy, dominance, influence. Cooperativa Performativa frame based on decentralized, non-hierarchical collaboration entered in conflict with this "establishment". Personal conflicts, artistic rivalry, group status, dominance, hierarchy are some of the layers activated by our proposal.

Usually in a community there is a tendency to form a clan mentality based on unquestioned common believes, values, attitudes, prejudices and unconscious influences. It is commode to interiorize the values, attitudes, behaviours and to function "intuitively", "naturally", or based on "what you feel"... but running in the background the operating system of your group, having all the time a "moral" bio-cultural authority behind. Based on this authority easily judging, give verdicts, take decisions. It's a very simple way of thinking, it tells you what is good/bad, correct/incorrect, moral/immoral. One of the ways in which this protectiveness is manifested is by killing the open discussion, in order to solve the problems inside the frame, on safe territory where everything is a common moral, instance, unquestioned just applied. This mentality instantly tells you who are the friends and the enemies. The sect mentality and moral operates for protecting the property, for teritorrialization, not around real relations or feelings. Probably because of the long history of hierarchy and authority in the communities, the power relations are deeply biological and cultural inscribed.

People do everything to protect their way of life and their level of comfort. If you don't want to change and you don't want to become irrelevant the only solution is to conserve your status and position by other means, like putting down the others in order to be equally weak. If you cannot update yourself the solution is to block the others development too. We had this experience with some artists from an old generation - the critique was received as a personal attack, they closed all the time the dialogue. I call this "ianegic complex" (named after a Romanian dance teacher who reacted aggressively to new tendencies, in order to protect her importance in the dance community).

So beyond the artistic production the project created awareness about the social-political relations in our group-community. As a way of production was very interesting and succeeded to create different dynamics, etc. We had a quite unpredictable process, inventing the working methods on the way. As a result we developed five performances not very similar, in my opinion. I don't know if it is something in common in the end in our works. According to some feedbacks, at three of us was visible a common interest in finding a direct, open and relaxed way of approaching the audience and in the dissolution of convention - a specific ideology or mentality about theatre and performance. The problems in our process appeared just when we dropped our concept - that each of us to develop his own thing in our meetings - and we tried to do something together as a group, to find agreement and common decisions.