Then leave a text that I have guarded, written by Marc Augé would like to share with visitors.
overmodernity. From the world of tomorrow's world today. Marc Augé
ORIGINAL SOURCE: http://www.memoria.com.mx/129/auge.htm
overmodernity. From the world of tomorrow's world today. Marc Augé
depart, if you please, for the finding two paradoxes. The first concerns us all. We continually hear about globalization, standardization, homogenization up, and indeed the interdependence of markets, speed, faster every day, means of transport, the immediacy of communications by telephone, fax, email, speed of information and also in the cultural field, the pervasiveness of such images, or, in the ecological environment, call attention to the rising temperature of the earth and the ozone layer, we can give the impression that the planet has become our reference point in common.
This planetarization may, in the areas affected and the opinion of observers, seem like a good thing, a lesser evil or horror, but, anyway, a fact. For one thing, however, we multiply the demands of local identity forms and scales very different from each other: the smallest of our peoples light XVI century church and enhances their specialties (Thiers, the capital of cutlery, Janzé , the birthplace of chicken
large-ja) or regional languages \u200b\u200bregain its importance. In Europe and other parts of the world reborn nationalism or re-invent. Religious revivals are based on recovered or reconstructed past (the Mayan religion, movement of the Mexican Central America, the South Korean neoshamanism). Fundamentalism are generated, more or less force, within religions based on sacred texts. These claims of uniqueness to me-knots are ratio (antagonistic relationship) with the globalization of the market and perhaps witnessing today in Russia, Latin America or Asia
, phenomena that are not logical signs exclusive monetary , securities or money. Here again, opinions can differ, but for all, everyone can happily confirm that the world is definitely not the sign of consistency and also anxious to disorders and violence generated by the madness of identity. I
The second paradox is more personal. Or rather has to do with the discipline to which I belong. The anthropologists are specialists in societies traditionally distant and exotic to Western eyes, or specialists in the most archaic in modern societies. So therefore, we can legitimately ask whether they are best placed to study the complexities worldfor current research if your property is not shrinking, disappearing. I think not, I think even the opposite. It is perhaps paradoxical to substantiate the claim that I can help explain the paradox, which concerns us all, paradox of the contemporary world, while divided, unified, standardized and different wing again (and again these terms) and reenchanted disenchanted.
My main argument is that rapid changes in today's world (but also its slowness and its charges) are a challenge to the ethnological approach, but a challenge that did not take quite suddenly, for reasons that I should like briefly before reach the main topic of debate. The ethnographic method is not intended to end the individual (such as psychologists), or the community (such as sociologists), but the relationship that allows passing from one to another. Relationships (Kinship, economic relations, power relations) should be in a given cultural group, designed and operated. Conceivable because they have some evidence in the eyes of those who are recognized in the same community, in this sense are symbolic (say for example that the flag symbolizes the country, but only if it represents a number of individuals are recognized it or through it, if it
recognize the nexus that unites them: is that what is symbolic link). Manageable because they are embodied in institutions that run them (the family, the State, the Church and many others at different scales).
anthropological observation is always contextualized. The observation and study of a group only make sense in a given context and you can also discuss the relevance of a given context: leadership, kingdom, ethnic, cultural area, economic network, and so on. But today, even in the most isolated groups, the context, on balance, it is always global. That context is present in the consciousness of all, interferes everywhere uneven but sensitively with local settings, which modifies the conditions of observation
. Is the analysis of this change to which I invite you now. We can find, I believe, from three complementary movements:
• The passage of modernity to what I will call overmodernity.
• The passage of the places I will call non-places.
• The transition from real to virtual.
These three movements are not, strictly speaking, different from each other. But different vantage point, the first emphasizes the time, the second in space and the third in the image. Baudelaire, early in his Tableaux parisiens [Parisian Portraits] evokes Paris as an example of a modern city. The poet, leaning on your window looks "... the studio singing and chatting, Tubing, steeples, these masts of the city, and the big skies that make you dream of eternity."
tubes are factory chimneys.
Jean Starobinski noted that it is this accumulation, the addition of different temporalities that shapes the modernity of the place. This ideal of accumulation corresponds to a desire to write or to read the time in space: time does not erase the past that all the time present and time future is already shaping up. Benjamin, what we saw in the architecture of the Parisian passages, a foreshadowing of the twentieth century city. In summary, at large, the image space corresponds to a progression, an image of time as progress.
Max Weber, to evoke modernity, talk about the disenchantment of the world. Modernity in terms of disappointment can be defined by three characteristics: the disappearance of the origin myths of the founding myths of all belief systems that seek the meaning of this society in the past, the disappearance of all representations and beliefs , linked to the presence [prégnance] the past, made them dependent on the existence and even the definition of the individual from his environment, man of the Enlightenment is the individual owner himself, who cut his ties superstitious reason to gods, with the homeland, his family, the individual facing the future and refuses to interpret this in terms of magic and witchcraft. But modernity is also the emergence of new myths that are no more, this time, myths, myths of the past but the future, eschatological, social utopias of the future bring (the classless society, a promising future) the meaning of this.
This movement of substitution of the myths of the past for the future is discussed thoroughly by Vincent Descombes-mind in his book Philosophie par gros temps (1984). Here
progress conceived as, say, until the fifties, the design clearly supported by the conquests of science and technology and in the western world, by the certainty that the end of World War II the forces of good had triumphed definitely the forces of evil.
But this idea of \u200b\u200bprogress, directly arising from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, decomposes in the second half of the twentieth century. The evidence of history and today's disappointments come to what might be termed a second disappointment of the world, that manifests itself in three versions at the same time contrasting and complementary.
In the first version, we find that the myths of the future, they too, were illusions. The political failure, economic and moral communist countries allowed a retrospective reading and pessimistic century history and discredits theories which attempt to extrapolate the future. The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard referred the subject as the "end of grand narratives."
The second version is more triumphant. Corresponds to the first term of the paradox that evoked at the beginning. Is the theme of "global village" as the term of Macluhan, a global village crossed by the same economic network where people speak the same language, English, and within which people communicate easily thanks to the development of technology. More recently, this topic got a political translation with the notion of "end of history" developed by the American Fukuyama. This does not hold, of course, that the history of events is finished, or that all countries have reached the same status development, but says the agreement is generally about the formula that associates the market economy and representative democracy for the greater good of humanity. This combination is presented in a way as unquestionable, and if you mark the end of history, to Fukuyama, it is because he identifies the history to what is traditionally called history of ideas.
Without discussing the philosophy that supports this theory, we nevertheless find that since its first formulation, condemned to think about the actual history of much of the world as signs of emergency or delay. In cultural terms, the current American anthropologists have drawn attention to contrary postmodernist today we are witnessing a remarkable cultural multiplicity of claims, the deployment of a true global patchwork in which each piece is occupied by an ethnic group or a specific group. And indeed, in America, only to make reference to it, the claims of the Amerindian populations, often in great poverty, they go through the affirmation of their own culture and their own history, even if of Chiapas and many other parts of Central and South America, when they go, episodically or continuously, to gun violence.
called postmodern anthropology proposes an ideology of fragmentation (the world is diverse and not There is more to say.) Undoubtedly underestimates the stereotypes that play down the uniqueness of particular cultural demands and their integration into the global community (Chiapas is known today by world public opinion as their animator, Subcomandante Marcos, dominates the use of media and cyberspace).
postmodern anthropology has at least the merit of showing, in the cultural sphere, the limits of theories of standardization. But to stay only at the cultural level, perhaps unduly separated from the rest, neglected all political manipulation, all the oppressions that are fundamentalist or other in its way a rejection of liberal global village, and, moreover, also claims a certain end of the story: the end, the fragmentation within the cultural polyphony, the movement that gave meaning, direction, to this story.
standardization theorists, such as the postmodern polyphony, take note of facts but do evil, I think, in submitting its analysis under the sign of the end or death to the story, for some, so the modernity, for others, so for all ideologies. Perhaps
backwards, and today we suffer from an excess of modernity, more accurately, and to disregard any opinion of value, perhaps can be induced to think that the paradox of the contemporary world is no sign of an end or a blur, but a multiplication and acceleration of the constitutive factors of modernity, a sense of overdetermination in Freud, and then Althusser's it, a term used to describe the effects unpredictable and difficult to analyze a plethora of causes.
The notion of supermodernity
Neologism for neologism, for my part I will propose the term of supermodernity to try to think together the two terms of our initial paradox, the coexistence of uniform flows and individuals. The situation overmodernity expands and diversifies the movement of modernity is a sign of a logic of excess and, for one, would be tempted to measured from three excesses: too much information, pictures
excess and excessive individualism otherwise, each of these excesses is connected to the other two. Too much information
gives us the feeling that history is accelerating. Every day we are informed of what's happening in the four corners of the world. Naturally this information is always partial and possibly biased, but alongside the evidence that a distant event can have consequences for us, every day reinforces the sense of be within history, or more accurately, keep it hot on our heels, to return to be achieved by it during the news of the eight or during the morning news.
The corollary to this overabundance of information is clearly our ability to forget, no doubt necessary for our health and to avoid saturation effects that even the computers available, but that results in a syncopated rhythm to the story. Such an event that had drawn our attention for a few days, suddenly disappears from our screens, after our memories, until the day he suddenly reappeared for reasons that escape us a bit and that we are quickly exposed. A number of events thus has a presence ecliptic, forgotten, familiar and surprising at the same time as the Gulf War, the Irish crisis, the attacks in the Basque country or the massacres in Algeria. Do not really know where to go, but we're going and growing fast.
speed transportation and development of communication technologies provide us with the feeling that the world is shrinking. The emergence of cyberspace makes a priority of time over space. We are in the age of immediacy and the instantaneous. The communication takes place at the speed of light. So, our time domain reduces our space. Our "small world" just enough for the expansion of large economic enterprises, and the planet becomes relatively natural in defiance of all attempts
"imperial."
The planner and philosopher Paul Virilio, in many of his books, he was concerned about the threats that could weigh on democracy, because of the ubiquity and immediacy with which characterizes cyberspace. He suggests that some major international cities, some large companies interconnected soon, may decide the future of the world. Without necessarily lead to pessimism so far, we can be sensitive to the fact that in the political arena also local events are presented each seen as "internal" competition that eventually the "right of interference." Clearly, the close-up of the planet (due to the development of transport, communications and space industry) becomes ever more credible (and more powerful eyes more seductive) idea of \u200b\u200ba world government . Diplomatic World commented last month, under the pen of a highly critical of an American professor at the University of San Diego, the outlook for the next century, drawn by David Rothkopf, a consulting cabinet director of Henry Kissinger. David Rothkopf's words in the journal Foreign Policy speak for themselves:
"Compete the economic and political interests of the United States the monitor if the world chooses a single language, it is English, that if it is oriented towards common standards about communication, safety or quality, are under American standards, that if the different parts come together through television, radio and music programs are Americans, and that if common values \u200b\u200bare made, these are values \u200b\u200bin which Americans recognize.
In fact, there nothing special here since no imperial temptations of today or even yesterday, but the remarkable fact is that the global domain is now thought that the media are his main weapon.
Now the third term by which we can define overmodernity passive individualization is very different from the individualism of the modern ideal Conqueror: individualization of consumers whose appearance has to do no doubt with the development of media communication. Durkheim, early in this century and the weakening lamented what he called the "intermediary bodies", collectively as mediating institutions and creating what we call today the "social nexus" such as school, unions, family, etc.. An observation of the same type could be made more strongly today, but we could certainly point out that the media are replacing the institutional mediations.
The relationship with the media can generate a form of passivity to the extent that individuals routinely exposed to the spectacle of a present that is missed, a form of loneliness in so far as navigation invites lonely in which all telecommunications abstracts the relationship with the other, replacing the sound or image, body to body and face to face, in short, a form of illusion to the extent that at the discretion of each of the elaborate points of view, opinions in general rather induced, but
perceived as personal.
Of course, I am describing here a fatality, an inescapable rule, but a number of risks, temptations and even trends. Long ago, the press wrote about some of the Japanese youth, which, through the media, reached the absolute isolation. Depoliticized, poorly informed about the history of Japan, naturally opposed to the atomic bomb and tempted to flee in the virtual world, the otaku (this is how they call them) stay at home between your TV, your videos and computers, dedicated a monomaniacal passion with relentless background music. A well informed American report recently released feeling of loneliness that pervades most of the Internet.
As for the identification of destinations and routes, and the illusion of individual choice that sometimes accompanies it, they develop from the time they weaken the cosmologies, ideologies and intellectual obligations with that are linked: the ideological market equates to a selfservice then, in which each individual can be provisioned with spare parts to assemble your own cosmology and have a sense of thinking for himself.
passivity, isolation and identification are found again in the expansion also know certain movements supposedly religious develop individual meditation, or even in certain sectarian movements.
Significantly, I think, the sects can be defined by its double failure of socialization: a break with the society within which they are (which is sufficient to distinguish them from other religious movements), also fail when creating an internal socialization since the accession fascinated by a guru and replaces it often proves unable to ensure long term in the meeting of some individuals or rather the aggregation that takes the appearance of meeting a minimum of cohesion. Collective suicide, from this perspective, it is expected
output: the individual who rejects the social nexus, the relationship with the other, and is symbolically dead. Non-
places I now announced the second movement, parallel to the first step of
places non-places. For anthropology, the place is an area heavily symbolized, ie, a space in which we read in part or in whole identity of
who occupy, their relations and the history they share. We all have a idea, an intuition or a memory of the place understood in this way. It is, for example, the memory of the village where we spent family holidays and also a literary memory. I think Combray (Combray-Iliers) Proust and the knowledge that Francoise, the servant of the family of the narrator, has all its inhabitants, after close observation of the spaces assigned to virtually everyone in the village area, and even in church, she
gives meaning to the slightest movement of either. The place, in this sense, to use an expression of the philosopher Vincent Descombes in his book on Proust, is also a "rhetorical territory", ie a place where every one recognizes the other's language, even in the silences : in which we understand to mean words. It is, in short, a world of recognition, where everyone knows your site and the other, a set spatial reference points, social and historical, all recognized in them have something in common, share something, regardless of the inequality of their situations. Life, individual life, is not necessarily easy in such a place, it makes sense but not free, so it is conceivable that in different countries and at different times of the transition from village to city has been experienced as a release. Anthropologists studied
such places. "Since the emergence of language, wrote LS, it took the universe mean." It took, in other words, to recognize in the universe before knowing something, sort and symbolize the space and time to dominate human relationships. Parenthetically, despite the fantastic progress of science, this dialogue between sense and knowledge, between symbolism and knowledge is not about to disappear, because the relationships between humans can not depend entirely on the science or knowledge. Thus, the
anthropologists studied in traditional societies that call, how identity, social relations and history are inscribed in space.
in Africa and Asia, Oceania or America, nor the distribution of villages and residence patterns, nor the boundaries between sacred and profane are left to chance. We are not born anywhere, not live anywhere (and have invented words of wisdom to refer to the home residence of the father, mother, uncle, husband or wife: patrilocality, matrilocality, avuncolocalidad, virilocality or uxorilocality). Even nomads have a very coded space. Thus, the Tuaregs are not only naturally fixed and designated routes but also in each of his stops
, tents are distributed in a particular order. This concern with making sense of space in social terms may also apply to the house. Jean-Pierre Vernant has reminded us that the Greeks of classical times differed home, home center and seat female Hestia, Hermes space threshold, male zone and outward. The body itself in some cultures is considered as a receptacle of some ancestral presences
and divided (the case in certain cultures of Southern Togo and Benin) in areas subject to special cures or specific offerings. Thus, in defining the site as a place where you can see the identity, relationships and history, I have termed non-places to the places where this reading was not possible. These spaces, more and more numerous, are:
· The circulation spaces: roads, service areas at gas stations, airports
, airways ...
· The spaces of consumption, super and hypermarkets, hotel chains
· The spaces communication: screens, cables, wave-like
sometimes intangible.
We think, at least in a first level of analysis, these new spaces are not places where social relationships are entered last. It would, for example, very difficult to analyze in Durkheimian terms of a waiting area at Roissy: exceptions, fortunately always possible, individuals move not related, or to negotiate anything but obey a number of guidelines and codes to guide them, each on his side. In
Highway, I only see the profile impassively ahead, a look parallel, and then when I have it before the little red flash lit almost without thinking.
These non-places are juxtaposed, is fit and so tend to look: the airports are like supermarkets, watch television on airplanes, listen to the news by filling the tank of our car at gas stations that seem increasingly more, also supermarkets. My credit card gives me points I can make airline tickets, etc.. In the solitude of the non-places for a moment I can feel liberated from the weight of the relationship, if you have forgotten your mobile phone. This bracket has a
perfume of innocence (in French can play with the word "non-places"), but
can not imagine that extend beyond a few hours. The black version of the non-places would be the transit areas where we all eternity, refugee camps, all these fields of fortune who receive humanitarian assistance, and where an attempt to restore the sites.
Non-places, then, are empirical existence and some geographers, demographers, planners or architects describe the current and raising urban extension spaces, if retained the proposed definition, are real non-places. Hervé Le Bras, in his book planète au village [The planet in the village], emphasizes that we live in an era of highly developed urban sprawl popping the limits of the old city: a more or less disorganized tissue unfolds along the lines of communication, of rivers and coastlines.
speaks in this context of "urban filaments" and takes the example of the urban network that extends without interruption from Manchester to the Po plain and geographers which they named "blue banana" to describe the peculiar dispersion seen in the photographs taken at night by the satellites. Augustin Berque, in his book Du geste à la cité [From gesture to the city], demonstrated how the city of To-kyo lost its registration in the scenery while also disappeared inside their places of sociability. Until recently, one of the elements of great landscape
(Mount Fuji or the sea) is always seen from any street. But the construction of large buildings abolished these views. On the other hand, the last alleys or dead ends created meeting places for exchange and discussions, about the workshops and stores, disappeared under the effect of that transformation. The architect Rem Koolhaas
proposed the expression "generic city" to describe the uniform of the cities that are everywhere today on the planet. The generic city, he writes, "is what remains after a vast canvas of urban life have gone through cyberspace. A place where strong feelings are dull and diffuse, rarefied emotions, a discreet and mysterious as a vast space lit by a bedside lamp. " He adds: "... the airport is now one of the elements that characterized most distinctively to the Generic City [...] It is, moreover, an imperative, because the airport is more or less everything a average individual has the opportunity to hear the [...] most cities the airport is a condensate at a time of hyper-and what hipermundial: hipermundial because proposed goods and are not in the city, hyper because it provides products that do not exist anywhere else. "
is necessary to clarify the opposition between duty and non-places is on. varies according to the present, the functions and applications. As the times: a this-gave a historical monument, a park, some neighborhoods of Paris do not have the same outlook, or the very meaning of the day or night, opening hours and when they are almost deserts. Obviously. But we also note that the spaces built for a specific purpose may see their roles changed or adapted. Some large shopping centers in urban peripheries, for example, have become meeting places for young people who have been attracted, no doubt, by the types of products that can be seen (television, computers, etc., which are a means to access the vast world today), but further , driven by force of habit and the need to fall back into a place where recognized. Finally, it is clear that the use is also what makes the place or non-place: the passing traveler does not have the same relationship with the space of airport employee who works there every day, he meets his colleagues
it passes an important part of your life.
The definition of space is therefore a function of those who live there. In a thesis that led to a book, Coeur de Banlieue [Heart suburb], one of my former students described how Courneuve, in the city of 4000, the youngest (10 to 16 years) were bands that appropriated the territory of the city, eventually defended against other bands and enforced the new members of initiation rites that were always related to the domain playful and symbolic place. In this case we should speak rather of superlocalización. On television, live, until we saw before the show adults mourn the collapse of the "bars" (large buildings suburbs), in which they lived. While these large groups of housing might seem appalling to foreign observers, others had been, somehow or other, a place of life.
The superlocalización can be linked to phenomena of exclusion or marginalization. We know that youth of the suburbs "rush" on Paris on Saturday night, and more specifically to certain neighborhoods ¾ la Bastille, Le Forum des Halles, Les Champs Elysées, which certainly seem to condense the quintessential "show "urban and where they have the opportunity to see and possibly experience the devices that provide access to the world of information and the image. Perhaps today we see the shop windows of television and computers as we were before, in my Breton village on the shores of the sea to dream and travel items. The "off-site" of a city, the capital, which are captured by definition only your reflexes, would be the counterpart of "super-site" of the metropolis. Speaking of space
we are naturally led to speak of the eye, not to be identified, in this regard, a danger, a risk. All superlocalización carries the danger of ignoring the others, immediately outside of desimbolizar, in this sense, social relations, and, indeed, to obviate having only accessible through images, even dreamed or fantasized world. Staying away from this risk only to our suburbs, I think that is the risk of all to varying degrees. But the emergence in some continents of gated, private
to cities, and in all major world cities overprotected buildings with electronic drawbridges, shows that for many, what we call planetarization corresponds to a contradictory attempt, and in some ways a bit ridiculous, to reconcile the withdrawal of the body away from narrow borders and wandering of the gaze through the images of the world or the world of images: is not, after all, the attitude of who sleeps in the crook of his bed to dream with his experiences the day before?.
From the real to virtual
Met here, I think, the focal point of our subject. Beyond our questions as to the changes of time and space, it is the relationship we have with reality, conceived itself as problematic as we dare to discuss the transition from real to virtual.
first two points:
The term "virtual" is used today in an unclear manner. Called virtual images are not as images. For this reason, they are eminently present, and some facts that represent are also present also. On the contrary, all the fictions which give way, all the "worlds" that represent (as in video games) are not necessarily "virtual" if you have no chance, no chance to be "present" or conducted, until they are realities "in power" (think here in the definition of Littré. Virtual: "That it is only potential and no actual effect.") Instead, what is virtual, and could be a threat, is the effect of absolute fascination, reciprocal return the image to look and look to the image that the development of imaging technologies can generate.
At this point, a second precision may be necessary. I have no intention of lecturing against the image and communication technologies (this does not make sense). Emphasize the dangers of alienation progressive technology, the confusions induced by the weight of laziness and habit, try to recognize the force and effect of the illusion, it is well to remember that the image, however sophisticated it may being, only an image, ie a-gave me an illustration, sometimes for exploration, communication often or too distracting. Marx said that relations with nature ultimately correspond to relations between men, we could more obviously the more so, say the same for relations with the images.
I would then rattle off all the ambiguities of our relationship with the image before suggesting under what conditions can not be an obstacle to self-construction of our individual and collective identities.
For-it is here, I think, lies the central challenge of our future. The image received or perceived, especially that our television broadcast, has several characteristics.
· Similarly events: millions of dead in Afghanistan, another failure of the Paris Saint-Germain.
· Similarly people: political figures, stars entertainment, sport and of television itself, but also the other dolls and puppets that stick to the skin of that caricature, or even fictional characters in some soap operas that seem more real than the actors. This equalization is not innocent as far as drawing the contours of a new Olympus, close but inaccessible like a mirage in which we recognize the heroes and gods without really knowing them.
· It makes uncertain the distinction between reality and fiction. The events are designed and staged to be seen on television. What we saw in the Gulf War had the appearance of a video game. The landing in Somalia was made when announced, like any other show in front of hundreds of journalists. If the international political life today, often has aspects of "soap opera" is certainly first and foremost, because it must be brought to the screen, for many reasons, which involved both the tactical calculations of the actors and the expectations or customs of the spectators.
Mediations and policies are subject to the exercise media. Some see on TV today the equivalent of the Greek agora, but may underestimate the passivity that leads to the definition of the citizen as a spectator.
Another deleterious effect of the strong presence [prégnance] of image, might well be equated with that of other drugs the way light, we call addiction. Addiction to isolate the individual image and offers drills neighbor. More'm in the picture, unless I invest in trading activity with the neighbor that is on reciprocity, constituting my identity. The symbolic relationship of the talking at first, and that in all societies is both object and challenge of ritual activity, involves this dual activity
recognition of others and self-reconstruction.
The images in this highly social activity, can have a decisive role as a mediator, so he used in enterprises of conquest and colonization whose history gives us many examples. So the mendicant orders, and then the Jesuits to convert the Indians of Mexico began to change their images, an Aztec tradition rich in this area by the Christian and Castilian Baroque. This "war of images" to take the title of the book of specialist in the history of Mexico Serge Gruzinski lasted centuries and even today is not quite finished when the last few years the American-born Protestant evangelism starts, but not success, to eliminate any reference to the Catholic or pagan images, and leads, with less noise, a new war of religion that extends to every continent, especially with overlapping screens, because, while denouncing the Catholic imagery or pagan fetishes, evangelists and do not hate the show, and the display.
The new fact today, and here lies the problem, is that often the image no longer represents a mediating role with the other, but they identify with it. The screen is not a mediator between me and presented me. Do not believe reciprocity between them and me. I see them but they do not see me. This mediation naturally may exist elsewhere, I can have a family bond, political, intellectual and friendly that I see on the screen. The trouble begins when the drill installed, when the fiction serves as real, when everything happens as if there were no other reality than the image.
However, this phenomenon of substitution of reality by the image, which was initially supposed to represent or illustrate it, is widespread today, and take, finally, an example of this is not strictly either directly or political or media. The world is run today by population flows are essentially in opposite directions: the immigrants who made their economic difficulties precipitated a Western world that tend to mystify, tourists, with an eye glued to their cameras and dazzled, travel the country often are those from where the immigrants. It is true that, traveling the world, photograph and film, found essentially in our travels, as in the famous English hostel, which we ourselves had been there: images and dreams.
Not long ago, Disney Corporation won a competition organized by the municipality and the State of New York for the construction of a hostel, a shopping and entertainment center in Times Square and the redevelopment of the neighborhood. What stands in the project of the architects of Disney is installing the world of Superman, with its chaotic architecture and traversed by galactic rays, in the heart of the city as normal component of it. Some journalists
noted that the new Times Square was faithful to the aesthetics of the leisure facilities already installed in the United States. Outside the sophisticated debates about the meaning of the work, the Disney effect is serious and constitutes self-reference for the future. Ripples and the curl: a state in which fiction was nurtured by the imaginary transformation of reality, we have moved to a state in which it strives to replicate real fiction. Under this deluge of images, is there still room for imagination
?
must be concluded, and perhaps refine or correct, the feeling of pessimism a bit distant it may be seen in my words. I do not feel itself, not distant nor pessimistic, I would like to convince them to make two comments and telling a story.
The first observation is that the real sociology, or if you prefer, the Royal Society, is more complex than the models that attempt to account for it. Let's say in concrete reality, the evidence in support or direct the development of interpretative models are not excluded but is superimposed.
In reality, as we can see particular disenchantment of the world never was, never was man's death, so great stories or end of the story, but there were changes, inflections, changes and new ideas, reflections while and other changes. Not to be confused the history of ideas or techniques to the story, period. We are assured: the story continues.
Perhaps even, in a sense (if we pay attention to the fact that from now on the horizon is the planet as a whole), we anticipate that it is only now beginning, which only now comes out of prehistory. If the reality of today is often the appearance of a show, a
movie or show, if we have the feeling that the extension of anonymity spaces, spaces of the image and communication, history condemns many human loneliness, and the globalization of the economy also many (often the same) exclusion. However, we can certainly take a lesson fruit of authorizing, I think, the anthropological experience: the individual alone is unthinkable and impossible existence. With few exceptions, humans will not be lost in the blink of the media. And whether it confirms the sense of symbolic deficit of social weakness that grips us sometimes (but ...), Durkheim can be sure that a symbolic and social recomposition be operated by multiple routes and invisible. Yes, for better and less good, the story continues.
No doubt the history of tomorrow, as today's, will be covered by a double voltage between sense and science on the one hand, solitude and solidarity, on the other. Science, contrary to the myth and ideology, has nothing to reassure us:
moving forward the frontiers of the unknown, and it is clear that today to find Pascal resurrects dizziness in the privacy of the individual the sum of its determinants ( we are mapping the human genome), just in time in which astrophysics repaints the idea of \u200b\u200bthe infinitely large.
We are only at the time of totemism and elemental symbols in the time where nature provides a language easily to the organization of men. But you have to live, followed by growing our garden, "as Voltaire, and that address the need for social, everyday thinking on a human scale, ie somewhere between the individual and the infinite: no social rework.
's history now forward (and unprecedented) will be consciously perceived as the planet Earth as a tiny element among a host of other systems. But for this very reason, adventure, tomorrow, will remain an adventure identity: the relationship between them will be even more challenging.
Some time ago I was lucky enough to deal a lot with a group of Indians yaruropumé on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. Isolated, almost no resources, it held Indian-ing almost every night ceremony, Tohe, during which the shaman travels to the home dreaming of the gods. Morning travel account, which often have a concrete goal (ask the opinion of a god, recover stolen the soul of a man or a woman ill, news of the dead), and describes the land of the gods.
This country is a quiet town where cars circulate among altasconstrucciones lit. At crossroads, food and drinks are delivered at their discretion. Overall, this world of gods is a magnified image of Caracas where they Pume never been, but which have collected some pictures or some questioning echoes visitors or browsing journals found. Thus, our cities have invaded the imagination of these Indians. But are city of dreams, in two senses. In reality, when some of these Pume leave their camp, stop at the gates of the city, in the slums where the TVs are proposed, all the time, substitute the pictures of your dreams, fictions abandoned by their gods. The dream and reality are degraded jointly. Cities of dreams
Indians are not more real than the Indians of Western dreams and together they vanish. But this double misunderstanding demonstrates, in its way, that we have become all
(tragically, unevenly, but inevitably) contemporaries. It is the story of this contemporary, rich in hope and full of contradictions, which begins today.
This planetarization may, in the areas affected and the opinion of observers, seem like a good thing, a lesser evil or horror, but, anyway, a fact. For one thing, however, we multiply the demands of local identity forms and scales very different from each other: the smallest of our peoples light XVI century church and enhances their specialties (Thiers, the capital of cutlery, Janzé , the birthplace of chicken
large-ja) or regional languages \u200b\u200bregain its importance. In Europe and other parts of the world reborn nationalism or re-invent. Religious revivals are based on recovered or reconstructed past (the Mayan religion, movement of the Mexican Central America, the South Korean neoshamanism). Fundamentalism are generated, more or less force, within religions based on sacred texts. These claims of uniqueness to me-knots are ratio (antagonistic relationship) with the globalization of the market and perhaps witnessing today in Russia, Latin America or Asia
, phenomena that are not logical signs exclusive monetary , securities or money. Here again, opinions can differ, but for all, everyone can happily confirm that the world is definitely not the sign of consistency and also anxious to disorders and violence generated by the madness of identity. I
The second paradox is more personal. Or rather has to do with the discipline to which I belong. The anthropologists are specialists in societies traditionally distant and exotic to Western eyes, or specialists in the most archaic in modern societies. So therefore, we can legitimately ask whether they are best placed to study the complexities worldfor current research if your property is not shrinking, disappearing. I think not, I think even the opposite. It is perhaps paradoxical to substantiate the claim that I can help explain the paradox, which concerns us all, paradox of the contemporary world, while divided, unified, standardized and different wing again (and again these terms) and reenchanted disenchanted.
My main argument is that rapid changes in today's world (but also its slowness and its charges) are a challenge to the ethnological approach, but a challenge that did not take quite suddenly, for reasons that I should like briefly before reach the main topic of debate. The ethnographic method is not intended to end the individual (such as psychologists), or the community (such as sociologists), but the relationship that allows passing from one to another. Relationships (Kinship, economic relations, power relations) should be in a given cultural group, designed and operated. Conceivable because they have some evidence in the eyes of those who are recognized in the same community, in this sense are symbolic (say for example that the flag symbolizes the country, but only if it represents a number of individuals are recognized it or through it, if it
recognize the nexus that unites them: is that what is symbolic link). Manageable because they are embodied in institutions that run them (the family, the State, the Church and many others at different scales).
anthropological observation is always contextualized. The observation and study of a group only make sense in a given context and you can also discuss the relevance of a given context: leadership, kingdom, ethnic, cultural area, economic network, and so on. But today, even in the most isolated groups, the context, on balance, it is always global. That context is present in the consciousness of all, interferes everywhere uneven but sensitively with local settings, which modifies the conditions of observation
. Is the analysis of this change to which I invite you now. We can find, I believe, from three complementary movements:
• The passage of modernity to what I will call overmodernity.
• The passage of the places I will call non-places.
• The transition from real to virtual.
These three movements are not, strictly speaking, different from each other. But different vantage point, the first emphasizes the time, the second in space and the third in the image. Baudelaire, early in his Tableaux parisiens [Parisian Portraits] evokes Paris as an example of a modern city. The poet, leaning on your window looks "... the studio singing and chatting, Tubing, steeples, these masts of the city, and the big skies that make you dream of eternity."
tubes are factory chimneys.
Jean Starobinski noted that it is this accumulation, the addition of different temporalities that shapes the modernity of the place. This ideal of accumulation corresponds to a desire to write or to read the time in space: time does not erase the past that all the time present and time future is already shaping up. Benjamin, what we saw in the architecture of the Parisian passages, a foreshadowing of the twentieth century city. In summary, at large, the image space corresponds to a progression, an image of time as progress.
Max Weber, to evoke modernity, talk about the disenchantment of the world. Modernity in terms of disappointment can be defined by three characteristics: the disappearance of the origin myths of the founding myths of all belief systems that seek the meaning of this society in the past, the disappearance of all representations and beliefs , linked to the presence [prégnance] the past, made them dependent on the existence and even the definition of the individual from his environment, man of the Enlightenment is the individual owner himself, who cut his ties superstitious reason to gods, with the homeland, his family, the individual facing the future and refuses to interpret this in terms of magic and witchcraft. But modernity is also the emergence of new myths that are no more, this time, myths, myths of the past but the future, eschatological, social utopias of the future bring (the classless society, a promising future) the meaning of this.
This movement of substitution of the myths of the past for the future is discussed thoroughly by Vincent Descombes-mind in his book Philosophie par gros temps (1984). Here
progress conceived as, say, until the fifties, the design clearly supported by the conquests of science and technology and in the western world, by the certainty that the end of World War II the forces of good had triumphed definitely the forces of evil.
But this idea of \u200b\u200bprogress, directly arising from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, decomposes in the second half of the twentieth century. The evidence of history and today's disappointments come to what might be termed a second disappointment of the world, that manifests itself in three versions at the same time contrasting and complementary.
In the first version, we find that the myths of the future, they too, were illusions. The political failure, economic and moral communist countries allowed a retrospective reading and pessimistic century history and discredits theories which attempt to extrapolate the future. The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard referred the subject as the "end of grand narratives."
The second version is more triumphant. Corresponds to the first term of the paradox that evoked at the beginning. Is the theme of "global village" as the term of Macluhan, a global village crossed by the same economic network where people speak the same language, English, and within which people communicate easily thanks to the development of technology. More recently, this topic got a political translation with the notion of "end of history" developed by the American Fukuyama. This does not hold, of course, that the history of events is finished, or that all countries have reached the same status development, but says the agreement is generally about the formula that associates the market economy and representative democracy for the greater good of humanity. This combination is presented in a way as unquestionable, and if you mark the end of history, to Fukuyama, it is because he identifies the history to what is traditionally called history of ideas.
Without discussing the philosophy that supports this theory, we nevertheless find that since its first formulation, condemned to think about the actual history of much of the world as signs of emergency or delay. In cultural terms, the current American anthropologists have drawn attention to contrary postmodernist today we are witnessing a remarkable cultural multiplicity of claims, the deployment of a true global patchwork in which each piece is occupied by an ethnic group or a specific group. And indeed, in America, only to make reference to it, the claims of the Amerindian populations, often in great poverty, they go through the affirmation of their own culture and their own history, even if of Chiapas and many other parts of Central and South America, when they go, episodically or continuously, to gun violence.
called postmodern anthropology proposes an ideology of fragmentation (the world is diverse and not There is more to say.) Undoubtedly underestimates the stereotypes that play down the uniqueness of particular cultural demands and their integration into the global community (Chiapas is known today by world public opinion as their animator, Subcomandante Marcos, dominates the use of media and cyberspace).
postmodern anthropology has at least the merit of showing, in the cultural sphere, the limits of theories of standardization. But to stay only at the cultural level, perhaps unduly separated from the rest, neglected all political manipulation, all the oppressions that are fundamentalist or other in its way a rejection of liberal global village, and, moreover, also claims a certain end of the story: the end, the fragmentation within the cultural polyphony, the movement that gave meaning, direction, to this story.
standardization theorists, such as the postmodern polyphony, take note of facts but do evil, I think, in submitting its analysis under the sign of the end or death to the story, for some, so the modernity, for others, so for all ideologies. Perhaps
backwards, and today we suffer from an excess of modernity, more accurately, and to disregard any opinion of value, perhaps can be induced to think that the paradox of the contemporary world is no sign of an end or a blur, but a multiplication and acceleration of the constitutive factors of modernity, a sense of overdetermination in Freud, and then Althusser's it, a term used to describe the effects unpredictable and difficult to analyze a plethora of causes.
The notion of supermodernity
Neologism for neologism, for my part I will propose the term of supermodernity to try to think together the two terms of our initial paradox, the coexistence of uniform flows and individuals. The situation overmodernity expands and diversifies the movement of modernity is a sign of a logic of excess and, for one, would be tempted to measured from three excesses: too much information, pictures
excess and excessive individualism otherwise, each of these excesses is connected to the other two. Too much information
gives us the feeling that history is accelerating. Every day we are informed of what's happening in the four corners of the world. Naturally this information is always partial and possibly biased, but alongside the evidence that a distant event can have consequences for us, every day reinforces the sense of be within history, or more accurately, keep it hot on our heels, to return to be achieved by it during the news of the eight or during the morning news.
The corollary to this overabundance of information is clearly our ability to forget, no doubt necessary for our health and to avoid saturation effects that even the computers available, but that results in a syncopated rhythm to the story. Such an event that had drawn our attention for a few days, suddenly disappears from our screens, after our memories, until the day he suddenly reappeared for reasons that escape us a bit and that we are quickly exposed. A number of events thus has a presence ecliptic, forgotten, familiar and surprising at the same time as the Gulf War, the Irish crisis, the attacks in the Basque country or the massacres in Algeria. Do not really know where to go, but we're going and growing fast.
speed transportation and development of communication technologies provide us with the feeling that the world is shrinking. The emergence of cyberspace makes a priority of time over space. We are in the age of immediacy and the instantaneous. The communication takes place at the speed of light. So, our time domain reduces our space. Our "small world" just enough for the expansion of large economic enterprises, and the planet becomes relatively natural in defiance of all attempts
"imperial."
The planner and philosopher Paul Virilio, in many of his books, he was concerned about the threats that could weigh on democracy, because of the ubiquity and immediacy with which characterizes cyberspace. He suggests that some major international cities, some large companies interconnected soon, may decide the future of the world. Without necessarily lead to pessimism so far, we can be sensitive to the fact that in the political arena also local events are presented each seen as "internal" competition that eventually the "right of interference." Clearly, the close-up of the planet (due to the development of transport, communications and space industry) becomes ever more credible (and more powerful eyes more seductive) idea of \u200b\u200ba world government . Diplomatic World commented last month, under the pen of a highly critical of an American professor at the University of San Diego, the outlook for the next century, drawn by David Rothkopf, a consulting cabinet director of Henry Kissinger. David Rothkopf's words in the journal Foreign Policy speak for themselves:
"Compete the economic and political interests of the United States the monitor if the world chooses a single language, it is English, that if it is oriented towards common standards about communication, safety or quality, are under American standards, that if the different parts come together through television, radio and music programs are Americans, and that if common values \u200b\u200bare made, these are values \u200b\u200bin which Americans recognize.
In fact, there nothing special here since no imperial temptations of today or even yesterday, but the remarkable fact is that the global domain is now thought that the media are his main weapon.
Now the third term by which we can define overmodernity passive individualization is very different from the individualism of the modern ideal Conqueror: individualization of consumers whose appearance has to do no doubt with the development of media communication. Durkheim, early in this century and the weakening lamented what he called the "intermediary bodies", collectively as mediating institutions and creating what we call today the "social nexus" such as school, unions, family, etc.. An observation of the same type could be made more strongly today, but we could certainly point out that the media are replacing the institutional mediations.
The relationship with the media can generate a form of passivity to the extent that individuals routinely exposed to the spectacle of a present that is missed, a form of loneliness in so far as navigation invites lonely in which all telecommunications abstracts the relationship with the other, replacing the sound or image, body to body and face to face, in short, a form of illusion to the extent that at the discretion of each of the elaborate points of view, opinions in general rather induced, but
perceived as personal.
Of course, I am describing here a fatality, an inescapable rule, but a number of risks, temptations and even trends. Long ago, the press wrote about some of the Japanese youth, which, through the media, reached the absolute isolation. Depoliticized, poorly informed about the history of Japan, naturally opposed to the atomic bomb and tempted to flee in the virtual world, the otaku (this is how they call them) stay at home between your TV, your videos and computers, dedicated a monomaniacal passion with relentless background music. A well informed American report recently released feeling of loneliness that pervades most of the Internet.
As for the identification of destinations and routes, and the illusion of individual choice that sometimes accompanies it, they develop from the time they weaken the cosmologies, ideologies and intellectual obligations with that are linked: the ideological market equates to a selfservice then, in which each individual can be provisioned with spare parts to assemble your own cosmology and have a sense of thinking for himself.
passivity, isolation and identification are found again in the expansion also know certain movements supposedly religious develop individual meditation, or even in certain sectarian movements.
Significantly, I think, the sects can be defined by its double failure of socialization: a break with the society within which they are (which is sufficient to distinguish them from other religious movements), also fail when creating an internal socialization since the accession fascinated by a guru and replaces it often proves unable to ensure long term in the meeting of some individuals or rather the aggregation that takes the appearance of meeting a minimum of cohesion. Collective suicide, from this perspective, it is expected
output: the individual who rejects the social nexus, the relationship with the other, and is symbolically dead. Non-
places I now announced the second movement, parallel to the first step of
places non-places. For anthropology, the place is an area heavily symbolized, ie, a space in which we read in part or in whole identity of
who occupy, their relations and the history they share. We all have a idea, an intuition or a memory of the place understood in this way. It is, for example, the memory of the village where we spent family holidays and also a literary memory. I think Combray (Combray-Iliers) Proust and the knowledge that Francoise, the servant of the family of the narrator, has all its inhabitants, after close observation of the spaces assigned to virtually everyone in the village area, and even in church, she
gives meaning to the slightest movement of either. The place, in this sense, to use an expression of the philosopher Vincent Descombes in his book on Proust, is also a "rhetorical territory", ie a place where every one recognizes the other's language, even in the silences : in which we understand to mean words. It is, in short, a world of recognition, where everyone knows your site and the other, a set spatial reference points, social and historical, all recognized in them have something in common, share something, regardless of the inequality of their situations. Life, individual life, is not necessarily easy in such a place, it makes sense but not free, so it is conceivable that in different countries and at different times of the transition from village to city has been experienced as a release. Anthropologists studied
such places. "Since the emergence of language, wrote LS, it took the universe mean." It took, in other words, to recognize in the universe before knowing something, sort and symbolize the space and time to dominate human relationships. Parenthetically, despite the fantastic progress of science, this dialogue between sense and knowledge, between symbolism and knowledge is not about to disappear, because the relationships between humans can not depend entirely on the science or knowledge. Thus, the
anthropologists studied in traditional societies that call, how identity, social relations and history are inscribed in space.
in Africa and Asia, Oceania or America, nor the distribution of villages and residence patterns, nor the boundaries between sacred and profane are left to chance. We are not born anywhere, not live anywhere (and have invented words of wisdom to refer to the home residence of the father, mother, uncle, husband or wife: patrilocality, matrilocality, avuncolocalidad, virilocality or uxorilocality). Even nomads have a very coded space. Thus, the Tuaregs are not only naturally fixed and designated routes but also in each of his stops
, tents are distributed in a particular order. This concern with making sense of space in social terms may also apply to the house. Jean-Pierre Vernant has reminded us that the Greeks of classical times differed home, home center and seat female Hestia, Hermes space threshold, male zone and outward. The body itself in some cultures is considered as a receptacle of some ancestral presences
and divided (the case in certain cultures of Southern Togo and Benin) in areas subject to special cures or specific offerings. Thus, in defining the site as a place where you can see the identity, relationships and history, I have termed non-places to the places where this reading was not possible. These spaces, more and more numerous, are:
· The circulation spaces: roads, service areas at gas stations, airports
, airways ...
· The spaces of consumption, super and hypermarkets, hotel chains
· The spaces communication: screens, cables, wave-like
sometimes intangible.
We think, at least in a first level of analysis, these new spaces are not places where social relationships are entered last. It would, for example, very difficult to analyze in Durkheimian terms of a waiting area at Roissy: exceptions, fortunately always possible, individuals move not related, or to negotiate anything but obey a number of guidelines and codes to guide them, each on his side. In
Highway, I only see the profile impassively ahead, a look parallel, and then when I have it before the little red flash lit almost without thinking.
These non-places are juxtaposed, is fit and so tend to look: the airports are like supermarkets, watch television on airplanes, listen to the news by filling the tank of our car at gas stations that seem increasingly more, also supermarkets. My credit card gives me points I can make airline tickets, etc.. In the solitude of the non-places for a moment I can feel liberated from the weight of the relationship, if you have forgotten your mobile phone. This bracket has a
perfume of innocence (in French can play with the word "non-places"), but
can not imagine that extend beyond a few hours. The black version of the non-places would be the transit areas where we all eternity, refugee camps, all these fields of fortune who receive humanitarian assistance, and where an attempt to restore the sites.
Non-places, then, are empirical existence and some geographers, demographers, planners or architects describe the current and raising urban extension spaces, if retained the proposed definition, are real non-places. Hervé Le Bras, in his book planète au village [The planet in the village], emphasizes that we live in an era of highly developed urban sprawl popping the limits of the old city: a more or less disorganized tissue unfolds along the lines of communication, of rivers and coastlines.
speaks in this context of "urban filaments" and takes the example of the urban network that extends without interruption from Manchester to the Po plain and geographers which they named "blue banana" to describe the peculiar dispersion seen in the photographs taken at night by the satellites. Augustin Berque, in his book Du geste à la cité [From gesture to the city], demonstrated how the city of To-kyo lost its registration in the scenery while also disappeared inside their places of sociability. Until recently, one of the elements of great landscape
(Mount Fuji or the sea) is always seen from any street. But the construction of large buildings abolished these views. On the other hand, the last alleys or dead ends created meeting places for exchange and discussions, about the workshops and stores, disappeared under the effect of that transformation. The architect Rem Koolhaas
proposed the expression "generic city" to describe the uniform of the cities that are everywhere today on the planet. The generic city, he writes, "is what remains after a vast canvas of urban life have gone through cyberspace. A place where strong feelings are dull and diffuse, rarefied emotions, a discreet and mysterious as a vast space lit by a bedside lamp. " He adds: "... the airport is now one of the elements that characterized most distinctively to the Generic City [...] It is, moreover, an imperative, because the airport is more or less everything a average individual has the opportunity to hear the [...] most cities the airport is a condensate at a time of hyper-and what hipermundial: hipermundial because proposed goods and are not in the city, hyper because it provides products that do not exist anywhere else. "
is necessary to clarify the opposition between duty and non-places is on. varies according to the present, the functions and applications. As the times: a this-gave a historical monument, a park, some neighborhoods of Paris do not have the same outlook, or the very meaning of the day or night, opening hours and when they are almost deserts. Obviously. But we also note that the spaces built for a specific purpose may see their roles changed or adapted. Some large shopping centers in urban peripheries, for example, have become meeting places for young people who have been attracted, no doubt, by the types of products that can be seen (television, computers, etc., which are a means to access the vast world today), but further , driven by force of habit and the need to fall back into a place where recognized. Finally, it is clear that the use is also what makes the place or non-place: the passing traveler does not have the same relationship with the space of airport employee who works there every day, he meets his colleagues
it passes an important part of your life.
The definition of space is therefore a function of those who live there. In a thesis that led to a book, Coeur de Banlieue [Heart suburb], one of my former students described how Courneuve, in the city of 4000, the youngest (10 to 16 years) were bands that appropriated the territory of the city, eventually defended against other bands and enforced the new members of initiation rites that were always related to the domain playful and symbolic place. In this case we should speak rather of superlocalización. On television, live, until we saw before the show adults mourn the collapse of the "bars" (large buildings suburbs), in which they lived. While these large groups of housing might seem appalling to foreign observers, others had been, somehow or other, a place of life.
The superlocalización can be linked to phenomena of exclusion or marginalization. We know that youth of the suburbs "rush" on Paris on Saturday night, and more specifically to certain neighborhoods ¾ la Bastille, Le Forum des Halles, Les Champs Elysées, which certainly seem to condense the quintessential "show "urban and where they have the opportunity to see and possibly experience the devices that provide access to the world of information and the image. Perhaps today we see the shop windows of television and computers as we were before, in my Breton village on the shores of the sea to dream and travel items. The "off-site" of a city, the capital, which are captured by definition only your reflexes, would be the counterpart of "super-site" of the metropolis. Speaking of space
we are naturally led to speak of the eye, not to be identified, in this regard, a danger, a risk. All superlocalización carries the danger of ignoring the others, immediately outside of desimbolizar, in this sense, social relations, and, indeed, to obviate having only accessible through images, even dreamed or fantasized world. Staying away from this risk only to our suburbs, I think that is the risk of all to varying degrees. But the emergence in some continents of gated, private
to cities, and in all major world cities overprotected buildings with electronic drawbridges, shows that for many, what we call planetarization corresponds to a contradictory attempt, and in some ways a bit ridiculous, to reconcile the withdrawal of the body away from narrow borders and wandering of the gaze through the images of the world or the world of images: is not, after all, the attitude of who sleeps in the crook of his bed to dream with his experiences the day before?.
From the real to virtual
Met here, I think, the focal point of our subject. Beyond our questions as to the changes of time and space, it is the relationship we have with reality, conceived itself as problematic as we dare to discuss the transition from real to virtual.
first two points:
The term "virtual" is used today in an unclear manner. Called virtual images are not as images. For this reason, they are eminently present, and some facts that represent are also present also. On the contrary, all the fictions which give way, all the "worlds" that represent (as in video games) are not necessarily "virtual" if you have no chance, no chance to be "present" or conducted, until they are realities "in power" (think here in the definition of Littré. Virtual: "That it is only potential and no actual effect.") Instead, what is virtual, and could be a threat, is the effect of absolute fascination, reciprocal return the image to look and look to the image that the development of imaging technologies can generate.
At this point, a second precision may be necessary. I have no intention of lecturing against the image and communication technologies (this does not make sense). Emphasize the dangers of alienation progressive technology, the confusions induced by the weight of laziness and habit, try to recognize the force and effect of the illusion, it is well to remember that the image, however sophisticated it may being, only an image, ie a-gave me an illustration, sometimes for exploration, communication often or too distracting. Marx said that relations with nature ultimately correspond to relations between men, we could more obviously the more so, say the same for relations with the images.
I would then rattle off all the ambiguities of our relationship with the image before suggesting under what conditions can not be an obstacle to self-construction of our individual and collective identities.
For-it is here, I think, lies the central challenge of our future. The image received or perceived, especially that our television broadcast, has several characteristics.
· Similarly events: millions of dead in Afghanistan, another failure of the Paris Saint-Germain.
· Similarly people: political figures, stars entertainment, sport and of television itself, but also the other dolls and puppets that stick to the skin of that caricature, or even fictional characters in some soap operas that seem more real than the actors. This equalization is not innocent as far as drawing the contours of a new Olympus, close but inaccessible like a mirage in which we recognize the heroes and gods without really knowing them.
· It makes uncertain the distinction between reality and fiction. The events are designed and staged to be seen on television. What we saw in the Gulf War had the appearance of a video game. The landing in Somalia was made when announced, like any other show in front of hundreds of journalists. If the international political life today, often has aspects of "soap opera" is certainly first and foremost, because it must be brought to the screen, for many reasons, which involved both the tactical calculations of the actors and the expectations or customs of the spectators.
Mediations and policies are subject to the exercise media. Some see on TV today the equivalent of the Greek agora, but may underestimate the passivity that leads to the definition of the citizen as a spectator.
Another deleterious effect of the strong presence [prégnance] of image, might well be equated with that of other drugs the way light, we call addiction. Addiction to isolate the individual image and offers drills neighbor. More'm in the picture, unless I invest in trading activity with the neighbor that is on reciprocity, constituting my identity. The symbolic relationship of the talking at first, and that in all societies is both object and challenge of ritual activity, involves this dual activity
recognition of others and self-reconstruction.
The images in this highly social activity, can have a decisive role as a mediator, so he used in enterprises of conquest and colonization whose history gives us many examples. So the mendicant orders, and then the Jesuits to convert the Indians of Mexico began to change their images, an Aztec tradition rich in this area by the Christian and Castilian Baroque. This "war of images" to take the title of the book of specialist in the history of Mexico Serge Gruzinski lasted centuries and even today is not quite finished when the last few years the American-born Protestant evangelism starts, but not success, to eliminate any reference to the Catholic or pagan images, and leads, with less noise, a new war of religion that extends to every continent, especially with overlapping screens, because, while denouncing the Catholic imagery or pagan fetishes, evangelists and do not hate the show, and the display.
The new fact today, and here lies the problem, is that often the image no longer represents a mediating role with the other, but they identify with it. The screen is not a mediator between me and presented me. Do not believe reciprocity between them and me. I see them but they do not see me. This mediation naturally may exist elsewhere, I can have a family bond, political, intellectual and friendly that I see on the screen. The trouble begins when the drill installed, when the fiction serves as real, when everything happens as if there were no other reality than the image.
However, this phenomenon of substitution of reality by the image, which was initially supposed to represent or illustrate it, is widespread today, and take, finally, an example of this is not strictly either directly or political or media. The world is run today by population flows are essentially in opposite directions: the immigrants who made their economic difficulties precipitated a Western world that tend to mystify, tourists, with an eye glued to their cameras and dazzled, travel the country often are those from where the immigrants. It is true that, traveling the world, photograph and film, found essentially in our travels, as in the famous English hostel, which we ourselves had been there: images and dreams.
Not long ago, Disney Corporation won a competition organized by the municipality and the State of New York for the construction of a hostel, a shopping and entertainment center in Times Square and the redevelopment of the neighborhood. What stands in the project of the architects of Disney is installing the world of Superman, with its chaotic architecture and traversed by galactic rays, in the heart of the city as normal component of it. Some journalists
noted that the new Times Square was faithful to the aesthetics of the leisure facilities already installed in the United States. Outside the sophisticated debates about the meaning of the work, the Disney effect is serious and constitutes self-reference for the future. Ripples and the curl: a state in which fiction was nurtured by the imaginary transformation of reality, we have moved to a state in which it strives to replicate real fiction. Under this deluge of images, is there still room for imagination
?
must be concluded, and perhaps refine or correct, the feeling of pessimism a bit distant it may be seen in my words. I do not feel itself, not distant nor pessimistic, I would like to convince them to make two comments and telling a story.
The first observation is that the real sociology, or if you prefer, the Royal Society, is more complex than the models that attempt to account for it. Let's say in concrete reality, the evidence in support or direct the development of interpretative models are not excluded but is superimposed.
In reality, as we can see particular disenchantment of the world never was, never was man's death, so great stories or end of the story, but there were changes, inflections, changes and new ideas, reflections while and other changes. Not to be confused the history of ideas or techniques to the story, period. We are assured: the story continues.
Perhaps even, in a sense (if we pay attention to the fact that from now on the horizon is the planet as a whole), we anticipate that it is only now beginning, which only now comes out of prehistory. If the reality of today is often the appearance of a show, a
movie or show, if we have the feeling that the extension of anonymity spaces, spaces of the image and communication, history condemns many human loneliness, and the globalization of the economy also many (often the same) exclusion. However, we can certainly take a lesson fruit of authorizing, I think, the anthropological experience: the individual alone is unthinkable and impossible existence. With few exceptions, humans will not be lost in the blink of the media. And whether it confirms the sense of symbolic deficit of social weakness that grips us sometimes (but ...), Durkheim can be sure that a symbolic and social recomposition be operated by multiple routes and invisible. Yes, for better and less good, the story continues.
No doubt the history of tomorrow, as today's, will be covered by a double voltage between sense and science on the one hand, solitude and solidarity, on the other. Science, contrary to the myth and ideology, has nothing to reassure us:
moving forward the frontiers of the unknown, and it is clear that today to find Pascal resurrects dizziness in the privacy of the individual the sum of its determinants ( we are mapping the human genome), just in time in which astrophysics repaints the idea of \u200b\u200bthe infinitely large.
We are only at the time of totemism and elemental symbols in the time where nature provides a language easily to the organization of men. But you have to live, followed by growing our garden, "as Voltaire, and that address the need for social, everyday thinking on a human scale, ie somewhere between the individual and the infinite: no social rework.
's history now forward (and unprecedented) will be consciously perceived as the planet Earth as a tiny element among a host of other systems. But for this very reason, adventure, tomorrow, will remain an adventure identity: the relationship between them will be even more challenging.
Some time ago I was lucky enough to deal a lot with a group of Indians yaruropumé on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. Isolated, almost no resources, it held Indian-ing almost every night ceremony, Tohe, during which the shaman travels to the home dreaming of the gods. Morning travel account, which often have a concrete goal (ask the opinion of a god, recover stolen the soul of a man or a woman ill, news of the dead), and describes the land of the gods.
This country is a quiet town where cars circulate among altasconstrucciones lit. At crossroads, food and drinks are delivered at their discretion. Overall, this world of gods is a magnified image of Caracas where they Pume never been, but which have collected some pictures or some questioning echoes visitors or browsing journals found. Thus, our cities have invaded the imagination of these Indians. But are city of dreams, in two senses. In reality, when some of these Pume leave their camp, stop at the gates of the city, in the slums where the TVs are proposed, all the time, substitute the pictures of your dreams, fictions abandoned by their gods. The dream and reality are degraded jointly. Cities of dreams
Indians are not more real than the Indians of Western dreams and together they vanish. But this double misunderstanding demonstrates, in its way, that we have become all
(tragically, unevenly, but inevitably) contemporaries. It is the story of this contemporary, rich in hope and full of contradictions, which begins today.
ORIGINAL SOURCE: http://www.memoria.com.mx/129/auge.htm
