I
want to begin this contestation in a very para-tactical way, in a delirious
way, using/abusing a surrealist method of writing, I’m going to make an
automatic writing list inspired by the four presentations made under the
heading of Platform – Oceans | seas | islands |littorals |
beaches. The following list is clearly inspired by the outstanding
David Goldberg’s call to sound (out) the sea. In the same sense, with my list,
I’m going to sound out the sea of one (my) brain.
The sea, at this
moment, recalls an octopus, a fish, Jesus Christ walking, multiplied food,
Christopher Columbus, a ship, a shellfish, a swordfish, salt, waves, fishermen,
net, rich people on yachts, pirates, buccaneers, islands, capes, lighthouse, confusion,
cruise, water world, bob squarepants,
Alvar Nuñez cabeza de vaca, el pagamento, coral, whales, free willy,
low tide, medium tide, high tide, drowned, flooded, ocean, a message in a
bottle, continent, incontinent, Gulliver, sharks, coast, beach, other,
cannibal, Caribbean, The Tempest, Une Tempête, slave
traffic, drug traffic, submarine, marine, mar, mere,
deep, depth, profound, jellyfish, Sinbad, crocodile hunter, Popeye, work trade,
sea worship, ship, shipwreck, crusade, Rousseau, Crusoe.
Let’s take for instance
Crusoe’s experience; the white European who become a castaway after a
shipwreck. The story of Crusoe is probably one of the most well known plots,
one that plays on different preoccupations and articulates notions of
civilization, race, slavery, mastery, animality, cannibalism, faith, hope,
ownership of the other, conquest of the other, ocean madness, individualism,
etcetera.
Therefore, the
particular relationships between Robinson and one of the other characters he
dealt with are of some interest. Robinson, the main character, the Englishman,
operates as the representative of civilization and the one in charge of
sustaining certain values. As a Christian, he symptomatically names the
fugitive from the native tribe, Friday, the day on which God created the
animals and the beasts. Friday in Crusoe’s mind is adept to be his servant,
companion or assistant, in any case, to occupy a position in which Crusoe is
able to command him. It does not matter if Friday becomes educated and
converts to Christianity, he still will never be able to command any future
enterprise, only to clean up the mess.
Here is a fragment of a
1997 movie version of Robinson Crusoe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJw_WOvPFZ4&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL79D12E5FEA5EC369
In the conditions of
the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, I see very little hope for
the civilizing enterprise and a true dialogue becomes supremely difficult or
impossible. It doesn’t matter if one learns the language of the other, there is
absolutely no possibility that Robinson Crusoe will teach Friday how to change
his role in their relationship or to invert the hierarchy.
Friday is domesticated
and educated by the European Castaway, which means that someone who is
absolutely lost educates him. Who he becomes is someone who shares the general fate
of the native
who also becomes the immigrant, the servant, the object of domination, the
freed one, the alien, the outer space inhabitant, the other culture, and the
multicultural one. Nothing new, nothing outstanding but only a perpetual
position in a never changing structure of power. Perhaps it would have been
preferable for Friday to have been eaten by the Cannibals.
Crusoe’s logic of confusion, his will of the lost, is
perpetrated by the supremacy of the hierarchical systems used to construct
knowledge, history and images. The confusion of Christopher Columbus, his
inability to recognize where he was, drove him to name the inhabitants of the
islands Indians, and in that act, one can identify a similitude to the way
Crusoe named the savage. We can view both Crusoe and Columbus’s voyages as
delirious overlapping journeys in the case of Columbus, through an imagined
Indian Ocean that wasn’t there.
The confusion caused by the oceanic drift is the
aspect of both Crusoe and Columbus’s stories that I wish to point out here. It
is this confusion, provoked by feelings of disorientation, of a lack of
moorings that recalls the image of a continental shipwreck. This land is the
land where we have been shipwrecked and the sea that surrounds us is only drift
and confusion.
We learned how to survive the wreck of the Conquest,
that big bang that overlapped theories and histories, but we are still being
educated by the necessities of a few people. We are frightened, surrounded by
the sea, by the ocean, by the land where we have been shipwrecked. Only those
who master the ocean are able to manage it, to be in charge of the resources it
gives us.
We are still being trapped by the ocean, not only by
the oceaness of the ocean, but also by the Civilized European epistemology that
can only understand it as the opposite of the land, a narrow perspective in
which everything is seen as the opposite of something. In a very appropriate
image of the apocalypse, we are acquiring old perspectives at the end of time.
We are afraid of something; we need something to be afraid of. We create
opposites in order to justify our fear and our will and means of domination of
nature.
Addressing the image of the surfer showed by Goldberg,
surfing can be seen as one of the ways to feel that humans domesticated the
ocean, civilized it, but only in a superficial way, that means, only on its
surface. We can proudly use a surf board as if it were a piece of land surfacing
above the water, in order to re-enact the scene of Christ not walking but
surfing the waves. Beneath the surface of the images of Christ walking on water
or the surfer, lays a deeper meaning.
Ever since the shipwreck initiated by the conquest, we
feel that every colonial episode has transformed our whole understanding of the
relationship between the sea and the land, between the ocean and the earth, but
on the other hand, we feel that nothing has changed. If we take for instance the fuller isoedric
dyxomap projection, and we attempt to use it to replace the actual
coordinates we use to understand the earth, we may drift into other allegorical
problems, one can imagine the continent as the site of a shipwreck and our
lives as those of castaways or marooned sailors. We are faced then with the impossibility of
accurately representing or charting our course into the depths of nowhere.
But the point I wish to make is that the type of
subject derived from that enlightening narrative of Crusoe’s experience; the
radical individualistic subject depicted by Crusoe’s character, is the
perpetual lonely soldier in a frantic ride against nature. He represents the
crusading human’s desire to travel far away, into the ocean of planets,
asteroids and universes, not caring that the human is going to feel alone, in a
world that doesn’t give him any stability or security.
This is a fragment of Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954)
Robinson is with his dog, but he’s alone, he’s with
the cat or the parrot but he feels alone eternally lonely, he searches tirelessly
in order to in the hope of not feeling abandoned or marooned in the universe. The
Apocalypse seems to complete the image, and at least make the human feel that
he’s not that lonely. Sometimes one can sense that the Apocalypse is the step
humanity has to take to evolve, to transform nature and to become something
other, at the same time, the apocalypse differentiates between the living dead
and the spirits, the good and the bad, those admitted into the glorious kingdom
of heaven and those that are to be excluded.
Maybe we should plan to face the apocalypse with a
surfboard.
Despite the numerous interpretations of the Robinson
Crusoe story, we still face the ghosts that inhabit the story as if they were
brand new. The narratives of Nature found in Crusoe, which tend to come back
again and again: the survivor, he who is skilled enough to confront
inhospitable nature, has already been transformed. Our quest for survival has
become a different narrative about the earth and its wealth; Happy Water, Green
politics, natural reservations, conservationism, sustainability, everything is
in our hands. Don’t use too much water, be natural, be wild, love the animals, and
don’t eat meat. We survive as consumers and we have created a new subject of
opposition, a new emerging class of green people, green politics who are at the
front of the green apocalypse.
We see that there has been a transformation; now the
consumer is compelled to clean up the mess, while the managers of the world
keep on exploiting and educating in a very humanistic approach to preserve not
only the world, but the actual relations of the world. Who is deciding how to
master and mange the climate change policies?
Art also has to deal with those inner contradictions,
with the representation of the human and the non-human as we saw in the
exhibitions during the JWTC. It seems that one of the responsibilities of art
is to construct different images and critique existing images of the possible.
To be transgressive. We repeatedly have had to struggle with powerful
narratives of corporative land owners, of religions, and with remixes of those
same narratives, and we are still cleaning up the mess of the residual
processes of history in whose construction we had no part.
Southern epistemologies appear to be a way of encouraging
other dialogical forms. As Achille
Mbembe pointed out about the singularity of human kind, human beings are part
of the unique but they are not the unique. Instead, human life can be seen as an impure
form of water. (Impure Ocean).
Southern epistemologies can be seen as epistemologies
of the impure or composite epistemologies. We can decide not to be blinded by
the promises of green consumerism, which mask the same old narratives of
exploitation and occlusion, the same ideologies masked by the promise of the
apocalypse and of redemption. We can prefer not to take our places in the
glorious green heaven of the believers and instead stand with our feet firmly
on the ground. From that perspective maybe we can sound (out) the polluted sea
that we are.
Andrés Jurado
