Editorial Note: The texts below have been submitted or selected to serve as a backdrop for the IRC discussions on fear. They range in length from essays to comments: longer texts have been linked to this page. They have been placed more or less in the order that they were received.
Massumi | Oguibe | Broeckmann | Boyce | Ozaki | Hertz | Oguibe-2 | Cubitt | Sey | deLahunta | Cisler | Dan | IRC Logs
"Fear is a staple of popular culture and politics. There is nothing new in that. In fact, a history of modern nations-states could be written following the regular ebb and flow of fear rippling their surface, punctuated by outbreaks of outright hysteria. No doubt several parallel histories could be written, so copious is the material. One might begin with witch-hunts accompanying the national unifications of the early modern period and end with gay bashing and violence against women at the close of the cold war. This perspective on gendering as a matter of a national concern would be well complemented by a look at the body as fright site from the point of view of its medicalization. Its starting point might be Renaissance syphilis and its end point the mid 1980's shift from herpes to AIDS as privileged locus of biofear production. Then there is always horror at the body as pleasure site: from opium to Ecstasy, from temperance to the war of drugs, from chastity movement to chastity movement (some things never change). These histories might combine into a genealogy of the modern self as seen through the social technologies mounted for its defense and care. A racial-ethnic perspective could follow periodic crime scares, accounting for the variation of the criminalized group: from "Indians", to Irish, to Jews, to blacks and Hispanics. This could find a parallel history in the story of anti-immigration campaigns, leading up to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Yellow Peril, and English-only laws. A class history would find much common ground with the racial ethnic narrative as it followed the trajectory from "dangerous classes" to the Reagan specter of drug-addled welfare cheats. The surveillance, policing, and intelligence-gathering procedures of the national security state itself have their own voluminous history. The list could go on. Natural disasters, transportation accidents, spies, famines and droughts, serial killers, sex addiction, fluoridation, terrorism, rock music, assassination, global warming, Willie Horton, wrinkles, ozone depletion, Satanism, aging... What aspect of life, from the most monumentous to the most trivial, has not become a workstation in the mass production line of fear?."
-Brian Massumi, preface to "The Politics of Everyday Fear", University of Minnesota Press, 1993
I think I might take part in the FEAR OF GEOGRAPHY session, perhaps in the FEAR AT THE 'END' one, too, for the reasons that i have recently be revisiting my experiences as a war child [see my brief essay on this at my site ] as well as relocating my political loyalties from my [former] country Nigeria [whose passport i still carry], and my 'true' country, a now 'virtual' country known as Biafra. in one of the bitterest wars on the African continent, between 1967-1970, Nigeria wiped out more than 2.5 million people from my cultural group, and this in addition to an estimated 1 million killed in a progrom in the north of the country, most of them in the one-month period of august, 1966. eventually, when we decided to secede and form a new country in 1967--which then led to war--our 'eternal vigilance' became our national motto: "he who is surrounded by enemies is eternally vigilant for his life." vigilance becomes a cojunction of para- and post-noia, fear in the present due to fear in the past, after-fear as fear. we still live under fear because, as recent as last month, a few dozen igbo [my group] were slaughtered again slaughtered in the north of the country, one of several such incidents in the past few years. this combined with the fact that i am ordinarily a political fugitive from Nigeria who incidentally has no securities outside [i have no permanent resident status of any country, only temporary leaves to stay] mean that i am personally under constant fear, also, fear of further displacement or worse still, fear of relocation back to the country i fled and have come to renounce. it is a fear of geography, a fear of settledness and comfort, a fear of permanent architectural positioning, apprehension for what happens when each leave to stay period runs out, apprehension for the larger fate of a people under constant persecution and the threat of annihilation, and apprehension over this fear itself. i meant to simply say yes, let me get back to you soon on specifics, but here i go.- Olu Oguibe, Re:positioning fear correspondance
Almost everybody initially tells us that Sao Paulo is very dangerous and that we have to watch out constantly, be careful, not risk anything, etc. Here, 'downtown', it seems that some of that fear is based on the fact that what still could look like a metropolitain, post-colonial centre, has been abandoned by the middle classes and has been taken over by poorer people who spend their days and do their business here. The 'public sphere' as an open, public place where middle class people will go to drink coffee, talk, and do business, is certainly no longer present here. But the poorer people use the same place for doing exactly that, and what is called danger and is articulated as fear and uncertainty, is to a large extent the feeling of alienation and loss. While 'revitalising the centre' would probably mean kicking out the poor people and ensuring stable, high property prices, the richer Paulistanos may have to get used to the new, the transformed and very much vital centre of the city. Without romanicising the situation there it seems necessary to acknowledge the presence and actuality of the people who live in and use those public spaces.- Andreas Broeckmann, Sept. 1997, Re:positioning fear correspondance
(re:IRC topics) i notice there are many at the ends of... this is a thing about tails.- Michael Boyce, Re:positioning fear correspondance
Buddha's Teachings and the Possibility of "Globalization"- Tetsuya Ozaki, An article written for the Re:positioning fear project
Refugee Republic's Message, Can Art Be Journalism?
Ein Gespräch zwischen Tetsuya Ozaki und Ingo Günther in Tokio-Tetsuya Ozaki, An interview with Ingo Günther
0000 Void.
0001 Suck.
0010 Nutriment. Information.
0011 Eat food. Crunch data.
0100 Nurture desire bear progeny. Shelter knowledge guide future.
0101 Even starve the body to feed the mind. Imagine an interpretation of the silence around us.
0110 Create symbolic life, not designed for comfort but for expanding the possibilities for discomfort. Proclaim cultivation of the senses the work of all previous history. Name the world skin of the mind.
0111 Decline to submit to the touchstone of material conditions. Throw a centuries long party, who wants nirvana! Beggars crash the banquet. Truncheons crack. Take refuge in musey-rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, living rooms. What the sum of historically created possibilities permits? Only one intellectual adventure signifies anything for humanity, and that is the collective voyage from effective mass illiteracy to critical thought and self determination.
1000 With masterworks and geniuses we keep art safe. Congealed into things it can now be worshipped, aleluxus! Avant-garde shock therapy applied to the historic corpus fails to keep it breathing: ironic quotes in dead styles become the last viable means of expression. Forms, styles and manifestos sink into entropic chaos. Alchemy grows stale, only spectacle persists--the truth is another form of hysteria.
1001 Abstract ideas do not function as regulatory truths, but sustain the injustice latent in their conception. Trapped in a lie, art cannot continue as art and still speak the truth to power.
1010 Blind, deaf, dumb, poised on the brink of rebirth or limbo, afraid to ask the question.
1011 Sweep aside dead art. What will be left?
1101 Anything the artist spits.
1110 Seeds. Words.
1111 Spit.
0000 Void.
-256 Words on Fear at the End of Art, Paul Hertz, Chicago, 1997
...i have taken to describing my birth place as aba, west africa, without a national identification since i do not possess any beyond the virtual belonging to biafra.in reflecting upon this matter, one issue comes to my mind, namely, the issue of the fear of naming, a fear that i believe is, also, a fear of location, a fear of geography since names not only identify us but, even more importantly and on occasion insidiously, associate us with things and referents beyond our selves. in other words names are relational; they situate us because they tie us to "other" totems: place, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, incident, moment, history, sometimes with enormous consequence. hence the anxiety over the possibility--indeed danger--of mis-naming, which is same as mis-placement.
often, to be named is to be placed at great risk, to be made to pay a great cost. for the stranger in an unfamiliar territory naming holds the balance between welcome and damnation, between acceptance and rejection, between freedom and incarceration. and for the person with a past naming holds the balance between peace and the trauma of recollection, between safety and penance.
the moment of naming, therefore, is a moment of apprehension, where the weight and power of utterance is revealed in full, calling to mind that most decisive moment when, in all the lores of creation, the divine principle condemns each creature to a destiny by naming. it is hard to imagine a more fearful moment.
-Olu Oguibe, Re:Positioning Fear Correspondance
Visit also the following essays that might be relevant to Fear at the End of Geography:
Interzonality, and The Uncertainty of Geographies , originally commissioned for and published in the catalog of the exhibit, "Interzones" at the Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 1996.
Tragedy and the Artist: Remembering Biafra which deals with the trauma of the biafra war experience.
Fear at the end of fear; fear that there is only the code, and that there is, as every teenager knows, only the deaths of the elderly, but never your own. The fear, heightened by the vertigo of internet, that your words and images will circulate and proliferate forever, even though they will be forever decaying from an impossible authenticity; that in our outpourings there is the ghastly immortality of the vampire, condemned to an eternal present, a null space of decadence, in which only pleasures stimulate jaded appetites, and love is mutated into desire.Fear, the mad adrenalin rush, is after all a gift; the thickened pulse of flight and attack, the energy of panic, the momentary strength of fright as you discover new capacities of a lazier body. Today in the cold western world with its dumb privacy and its solitary media, we write glib letters to impersonal institutions to argue that scares and shocks are bad for our children and bad for the bereaved and bad for the sick and bad for us. A culture that fears fear fears its own strength.
What strength that is is to be explored, and thanks to rafael and Nell and Will and Graz for facing fear, which only we have to fear.
-Sean Cubitt, Re:Positioning Fear Correspondance
Working script: Symphony for the Invisible City.- James Sey, Re:Positioning Fear submission
The Fear at the End of Geography: the gap between my perspective on this and Olu Oguibe for example, who submitted a short statement on this topic to the site, is going to be large. Living and choosing to remain within the relatively privileged, secure and safe cultural circumstances of northern western Europe/ USA has given me the opportunity to have a very particular trajectory in terms of an 'artistic career' as a dance maker and performer. I can frame this trajectory within geographic parameters -- primarily focussing on NYC/ Boston/ London/ Amsterdam. In fact, I have just recently had the opportunity to choose for different geographic situation but turned it down because of various reasons -- I was invited to take part in an exchange tour of Indonesia and Japan to investigate the contexts for contemporary performance in those countries with an eye to future cross-cultural exchange. I decided to stay in Amsterdam, not to travel to these far away locations and to focus on my current research in the field of dance, which has been in the area of the overlap between "Dance and Technology" (http://www.art.net/~dtz) . In this context, I frequently engage in abstract and theoretical discussion over the post-geographical potentials of the 'internet' for example as a new sort of 'performance space'... and the implications of this for the 'body'. In the area of telepresence/ absence, I have had the opportunity to observe practical experiments whereby performers are 'beamed' via cuseeme or some other means from one place to another... with mixed results. However, in the face of Mr. Oguibe's concerns about the 'fear at the end of geography' I wonder that my perspectives on this topic will seem obscenely trivial (and well they should) beside his experiences as a war child and current state of living in fear. We shall see.-Scott deLahunta, Re:Positioning Fear Correspondance
Place, Community and Travel: Three book Reviews.- Steve Cisler, Re:Positioning Fear submission, regarding fear at the end of geography.
Covers the following books:
People, Land, and Community: Collected E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures. Edited by Hildegarde Hannum. Yale University Press, 1996
Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. James Clifford. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place Edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson. Yale University Press, 1996
DA FEAR a.k.a. FRICA (fragments from the script of Happy Doomsday! - a war game under construction)In early May 1104, the crusaders won a battle at Harran, on the river Balikh. The victory came late in the evening, so the two armies camped afterwards in front of each other. But as the night wore on, the Normans became increasingly uneasy, and the fear of death crept over them. The first groups of defectors were driven back by the sentinels, but their numbers grew and a panic flight began. When the Moslems woke up, they saw in amazement that the camp of the unfaithful was deserted and recognized the power of the worst enemy and the best ally - FEAR.
Killing is older than diet. I thought it started from dietary reasons. My guess is that it all comes from fear. FEAR? Never met that guy. FEAR doesn't get your ass, like a dog; another kind of parasite. Sounds like competition! It competes everything. And yet it's not obvious stuff. More like a pain? Nah, pain came later, FEAR was first. Reminds me of God. God is just prozac, lets you down in the end. Fear doesn't! No, thank God, if I can... Why say that?? Because FEAR sharpens all: weapons, brains, emotions... Reminds me someone going 2 the loo more often than required by the diet. ... FEAR is the mother of technology... Who are those creatures? ... and the father of history. How come we don't have it?
In 1997 the first wireless connections were made available to the horse people. Some 750 years after their last tour of the Eurasian plane, the nomadic pools were given mysterious signals from the same directions. Hardware was a shamanistic mirror in which the spirits were talking about more than weather forecast, stock rates and cattle breeding: they were connecting the yourtas in an endless net of available light paths. The mouse was moving by itself in the hand of the Drummer, showing where the next campaign should hit. Internet was better than cavalry war, because of the logistics: feeding the networks proved to be easier than feeding millions of battle horses. The slash & burn method that the Mongol hackers mastered so fast was the best way of stimulating and simultaneously controlling the connections. The war lasted 45 years. It still goes on.
Because FEAR is the domain of the superior beings. We're not complex enough 2 need it. It's a matter of warm blood? It would be 2 simple, mind you. No, it's a matter of perception. ? Why do you fly away when a Hand comes to smash you? Just because I don't like large shadows moving over me. Nothing personal. See? That's the difference. Fear is personal. OK, then how do they kill it? Like any parasite - by shrinking, shopping, zapping, smoking, shagging, all kind of tricks that make it stronger. Plants experience FEAR also. That's what they say, but who believes them.
Vampirism originates, according to several sources (archeology, anthropology, history of religions) in the cultural area of Central Africa. The beginnings of the practice are unclear, but an inscription dedicated to the wars of Senusret III (1820 BC) and found at Gebel Barkal makes the first mention of blood sucking living-dead in relation to a Nubian prisoner who mysteriously appeared in that garrison and terrorized it for a while. The heroes of this endless dialogue must come, if we pay attention to the flux of information delivered, from that period and that area. How could two mosquitoes become vampires is unclear to me. But, in any case, that incident enabled them with several remarkable skills: first an endless capacity of survival; then a totally fluid perception of space-time units; connected to that an unexhausted mobility which, I have to admit, is used with a sense of decency; also, important detail, a peculiar visual accuracy, combining: zenithal views which reduce the Earth at a patchwork of abstractions (semiotized as maps); and a possibility to dive into details which is after all the characteristic of insects perception. Basically their discourse (a quite flat exposure of their direct experiences) is as abstract as possible and simultaneously of a theatrical naturalism in details. The advanced human psychology of those chaps comes precisely (I guess) from their human pathology. Mind you that they are a special brand of blood sucking parasites, accumulating in the process a series of features, not necessarily sympathetic, but also a lot of knowledge (always good). Their taste for sexual debates, and mainly for scatology is somehow boring. Also, their endless discussions about smell and connected areas, which comes from a liver problem (my guess). Their addiction to battle fields has to do with the vampire trade, and I must stress here their implicit morality, since if there is a place where nobody cares what happens to blood - battle fields are the one. All in all, their conversations gave me a better sense of what interaction is about: a bloodless, but bloody lust for abstract control of very fleshy things. And a speed invented by god but used for lower purposes.
-Calin Dan, Re:Positioning Fear Correspondance
Editorial Note: The content, spelling and order of the IRC logs has been left as is. Only server messages and most general greetings have been removed.
IRC Log Day 1 | IRC Log Day 2 | IRC Log Day 3 | IRC Log Day 4
You are welcome to send texts regarding fear or the project to rafael@lozano-hemmer.com
