Álvaro
Seiça Neves
THE HIPERPERIFERY OF THE POINT
In defense of the fox
Point P.
Quoting Roland Barthes,
when is about photography analysis, became the indispensable sugar without
which the coffee cannot be drunk. Any thought on photography, that wishes to be
self-legitimated (as a way to confirm us – I don’t like confirmations), or to
be blistered seriously and scholar, it would have to include always a reference
to La Chambre Claire (1980). Well, those
who prefer coffee without sugar surely understand that we should go beyond the
notions of studium and punctum. Abandoning the Latin concepts
of Barthes, we arrive into a Greek word: periphéreia,
as a way to observe the photographical image, as a way of thinking its own
specificity.
In the photography there
are focus of interest that are associated not with the punctum, but to its periphery. In this point periphery, in this
neighborhood area, one can find more details that are symptomatical than the punctum (sting, puncture). If we think
that there are specific areas and that they are distributed around the image as
a mapa-mundi with temperature
incidence shafts – oscillating between hot spots and cold spots, but always
with shafts in the hottest spots and in the coldest spots, never in a point but
in a neighborhood area, we could call this areas a point hiperperipherical
areas.
It’s in the neighborhood
of a shaft, or in the neighborhoods of several shafting points, that we find
the most relevant information of a photographic image. The punctum, which until then was central and axial, but not obviously
the geometric center of the composition, swap its fulcrum for an installed
position on the periphery.
Point V
In an essay written in
2006, The discontinuity of the
intersections, about a reading of Contingency,
irony and Solidarity (1989), of Richard Rorty (2), I defended that two
texts – a fictional text and a metatext,
that comes from the critical analysis of the first – when compared, when placed
in an intersection, could never result in a simple point Whether they were seen
as a plan and a line, or line and line, the intersection of this two masses in
progression will always be a perimeter of possibilities, whose
…substance it will be no
more than the structure of ambiguity, the relation with the untouchable. In
this perimeter of possibilities, takes place the encounter of readings. This is
where a microscopic universe becomes autonomous and reveals itself with great
difficulty, or rather, with the persistence sagacity
We obtain,
therefore, an image of
the encounter process of two works or two readings, understood as two lines, as
continuities that we want to be intersected. Those continuities have empty
spaces, discontinuous, and it’s in the empty spaces that the neighborhood occurs,
the sense of the proximity. The place, that it’s not a place, because is about
time and a mode, may signify not the usual ambivalent characteristic of authors
correspondence – made by reproductions, slides simulacra – but rather, the
interpretation seized in the negatives of the matter. Because, the common is
not made only with visibility, neither one can deduce with enough clarity and
precision this space of similarities. It’s why it will always loose the objectivity
aim, the one that attempts a total approach to the evident.
This metametatext (without being ridiculous),
building the periphery (neighborhood)
or the periphery network as textual analysis figures, approaches us from the point
P formulation, in the way of a critical model of understanding and thought.
Ponto
R
Why the fox and not the horse? Because we were
taught that the horse was good and we could ride, that could be domesticated.
Because we were taught that the fox was bad. That the fox steals, that to be a fox is to be shifty. Fox is to be foxy: is the noun with adjective
qualities, which was spelling us that we would be sneaky, that we would pass in
the shadow of a sunny day, to usurp the hunting, to clean the creeping nests
and the bright eggs, and to bite, with a large jaw, the neck of a young lamb.
But if we refute this mental process alter-acquired, or if we try to deconstruct
the stone that formed inside, to rebuilt it in a mosaic, we could think that
doesn’t matter so much if it’s the horse or the fox that stays good in the
story. That not everything that is
domesticated is immediately good, or relevant. That doesn’t matter so much the
A point, where the fox is motionless, neither the B point, where the fox is
already with a rabbit between its teethes, in a quick speed over the shadow.
It doesn’t matter so much that B point, of arriving, of evil acceleration. We are interested the route between the
point A and B. We are interested in the possibilities of the route, that
one where the fox killed the rabbit and that where the fox just wandered over
the plains – observing the route as potency and not as an act. Having this
route as a question – be the one of the fox, the one of the photography, of the
literature, of architecture, dance, cinema or music. In a defense of the route
it’s necessary to build a defense of the fox.
Arrived at this point, we can conclude that the route
is one of the most important characteristics of art. The allegory of the fox
shows us that we must learn to distrust our beliefs and to avoid the
automatism. Think about a classic music concert. Think about the audience.
Think about the public. When our bad-tempered ears sense a silence (dot) in the
music (course), the brain receives an anti-stimulus (impulse), giving immediately
orders to make noisy applauses. Making more relevant the arriving point
(silence) than the course (music). That’s why the piece 4’33’’ from John Cage is so unbearable and the outside tiny noises,
before silenced by the orchestra sound, earn so much relevance – the brain
doesn't stand the silence; has to interpret it, has to fill it, give it a
tangible form. The brain doesn't stand the empty.
Plan
Once the human being will achieve to flood the
coastal area and leave little territory inhabited, seeing him, therefore,
compelled to urgently colonize other planets, we will see what is already
happening in small scale, in Spain, Portugal and in many countries. In Spain,
in the edges of the urbanized areas, takes place a very curious kind of
archeological surgery. With the help of a careless scalpel it’s possible to
generate specialized roundabouts in a specific historical period: keeping a 19th century gate,
cutting an emaciated roman bridge. In Portugal, a short trip around an old
national road, punctuated with small places, immediately return us an excellent
open air museum – the most genuine of all, the one that reflects in 1:1 the
long history of Being. There we can find remnants of old constructive systems obsolete
edifications, as well as old cars models and the compiled history of the last
decade’s signage, publicity and logos. In the future, the space museum it will tend to disappear and, in
the impatience of an entertaining society rather than meditation, the thematic
park will substitute the museum. The human beings of the future, flesh and bone
with prosthesis will have touristic trips organized to visit the spots of the
old planet, a mist of nostalgia and popcorns. They will visit the remains of
the great metropolis and total uninhabited areas. Their touristic tours will
forget the micro-scale to embrace the macro-scale, in trips of an historical
and leisure aim.
The cities of the future will have no more a neuralgic
center, punctuated, but will be connections between the peripheries of this old
point, indistinct clusters of neighborhoods – the conurbation will be the
figure of speech of these uninterrupted masses, without borders. If we think
about an urbanization (colonization) out of the planet earth, this tendency
will be even more clear, if we think about the fact that the city will be no
longer thought as such, but as another space-urbanistic typology. This typology
will live of connections between virtual and real spaces. The center will no
longer prevail, giving primacy to the route and to the connectivity. The human
being, an apparently free individual, will be pushed to be in constant motion
between spaces; will be pushed, through the antroproducts
and infoducts (3), to the
non-fixation, and to the non-meditation, to ubiquity, to respond to different
social stimuli in a simultaneous and instantaneous way, without space-time
barriers. A society of conduction, in space and to the Space, in permanent
movement, will be developed – a society between points, a society that will not
remain in a certain point (sedentary), but will always be in transit between
two points (nomadic).
Man it will be updating is virtual profile, that is,
living its virtually replicated self, in a faster way than its own real
profile. We will assist to the virtual individual, absent from is body. Join to
this last paragraph a lucid analysis of the contemporary society, add the complete
reading of Paul Virilio, add some science-fiction, stir slowly over low heat
and wise handling. Think!
Notes
1. The Hellenic culture always seduced me much more than the Latin
culture: the Romans, worst than the barbarian (and note that barbarian is converted
in synecdoche, because it generalized itself in the contemporary lexicon as primitive,
rude, brutal; fact that doesn't differs much from the Romans), that is,
undercover Barbarian, were rough figures, dresses with borrowed suite (from the
brand Hélade).
2. Rorty, in turn, makes a reading of the works of Orwell and Nabokov.
3. Antroproducts are not only
lifts that connect to stationary points in the Outer Space, but also, the
conductors of human beings in an urbanized space, without meaning necessarily
the vehicles as we know. The Infoducts
(note that for a technological and material dimension, immediately arise Latin
words), that include the existing information conductors (TV, internet, communications),
will suffer a large mutation, hardly guessable, but including the
three-dimensional holograms of transmission (in real time).
_______________________
ÁLVARO SEIÇA NEVES
Writer. Editor of Bypass Magazine. Évora. Lisbon
Other Articles in the same issue:
ANDRÉ SIER
PEDRO OLIVEIRA
PEDRO LEVI BISMARCK
ANDRÉ TAVARES
