March 24th
Brown University
As a guest lecturer for Heather Bhandari’s ART/WORK class, I will offer an interactive presentation focusing on vulnerability, integrity, conformity, and compliance–not just as individual artists, but co-creating a culture of creativity in the face of digital-age tyrannies.
SUMMARY
I explore the ethical question: “We do not even know what a body can do, Spinoza says. That is: We do not even know of what affections we are capable of, nor the extent of our power.” In France, “la réalité dépasse le fiction” is an idiomatic expression that evokes E.T.A. Hoffman’s exhortation in The Sandman, “There is nothing more marvelous or madder than real life.” The idea that “reality transgresses fantasy” compels me to demand that my readers and viewers interrogate their own corporeal imaginations. Surrealism is only beyond the real within the context of status-quo normalcy and internalized fascism / “manufactured consent.” Congruently, “radical” is only extreme within the context of normalized illusions of neutrality—normalized by empires and nation-state thinking.
… While I was a professor of critical pedagogy at UC Santa, many of my students were baffled by my continual references to my Sephardic heritage in the context of institutionalized racism, colonialism, compulsory education, globalization, and climate chaos. They dismissed the possibility of ancestral memory, claiming it doesn’t exist because they couldn’t find it on Google. … “Your brain evolved to continually redefine normality and choice only begins once you cultivate awareness.” Beau Lotto Edge Consciousness: The Peoples’ Pluriverse excerpts: The ancestral land of the Ute Nation, Paonia, Colorado (originally peony, but intentionally misspelled by the settler colonialists in 1891) our home for the past two years, is the quintessential embodiment of synergistic opposites. Residing at the juncture of mountain and high desert, extreme political differences thrive side-by-side. Our North Fork Valley is known for its gun-toting big ranchers, coal miners (the neighboring West Elk Coal Mine is the third largest in Colorado), glyphosate/Roundup addicts, anti-immigration zealots, and dangerously homophobic, fundamentalist body-phobic Christians. Yet, equally present are the Pagan off-grid artist-activist, hippie-homesteading, garlic-braiding, beekeeping, cheesemaking, yak rearing, herbal medicine conjuring, gleaning, seed-swapping, wild-weed cultivating, beer-brewing, methamphetamine-making, decolonized/decentralized alternative banking, creative self-sustaining entrepreneurs, permaculturist, natural-building, tiny-home dwelling, body-worker fermentation fiends, farmers, and midwives—including a smattering of Jews, Buddhists, and Baha’i followers. Diversity requires friction. As I write in Slowwashing: The Fiction of Frictionless: Solipsistic mania underlies ecocidal infrastructures that eradicate diversity. Carl Honoré reminds us that, in fact, ‘society is not frictionless.’ Fast-forward-cultural tyranny of Silicon Valley helped shape the normalcy of frictionlessness—constructing the desire for immediate gratification. Our techno-euphoric sped-up society feeds the dangerous illusion that friction should not exist. Friction inherently involves difference. Honoré urges us to remember that friction generates light; it generates heat. Friction causes us to pause, to reflect. Friction-based practices necessitate a public-private dialectic; they embody simultaneous analysis and action. Diversity requires an embodied practice of edge consciousness. An edge is an interface between two mediums: it is the surface between the water and the air; the zone around a soil particle to which water bonds; the shoreline between land and water; the area between forest and grassland. It is the scrub, which we can differentiate from grassland. It is the area between the frost and non-frost level on a hillside. It is the border of the desert…
