Guillermo Gómez-Peña
versión en español
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
versión en español |
|
| CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE: | @ Description of Performance @ Short Biography @ Links @ Text 1: "The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier" @ Text 2: "El Mexterminator I" |
| DESCRIPTION: | For 5CYBERCONF, invited artist Gómez-Peña presented a "Mexterminator" performance: a "Living Diorama" where he interpreted the "Ethno-Cyborg" created by the imagination of the internet users, i.e. Mexicans are machos, "latin lovers", bandidos, and other stereotypes. |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Performance artist and writer, he was born in Mexico and arrived in the US in 1978. Since then he has investigated border culture and trans-cultural identity. Through journalism, performance, radio, video, poetry and installations he has explored the relationship between Latinos and the US. From 1984 to 1990 he founded and participated in the "Border Arts Workshop", and contributed to the national radio programme "Crossroads." He is one of the editors of "High Performance" magazine and of the "Drama Review." He has received the Prix de la Parole at the International Theatre Festival of the Americas (1989), the Bessie prize in New York (1989) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), among other awards. Author of the book "Warrior for Gringostroika" published by Graywolf Press in 1993. In 1997, his book "The New World Border" received the American Book Award. |
| LINKS: | @ GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA web search
@ TEMPLE OF CONFESSIONS web site @ CYBERVATO web site |
| TEXT 1: |
"THE VIRTUAL BARRIO @ THE OTHER FRONTIER (or the Chicano interneta)"In Progress as of Jan. 97 "(Mexicans) are simple people. They are happy with the little they got...They are not ambitious and complex like us. They don't need all this technology to communicate. Sometimes I just feel like going down there & living among them." "Caller(live on the TV studio): Are you the Naftazteca? . . . I think it's great what you are doing. But what I want to know is, who the hell are you really? I mean, are you legally in the U.S.? Do you have a green card? I mean, why do you have to be a pirate? Can't you just call a TV station and ask them to let you do your Chic-anou virtual reality stuff on normal prime-time TV? Can't you just do it legally? Don't you think you're contributing to the stereotype of the Mexican as a bandido?" NOTE: This text is still in progress. An earlier version originally appeared in the book "Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, edited by artist Lynn Hershman, Bay Press, 1996. This version is considerably different. Besides rewriting certain sections and elaborating in certain points, I have asked several theorists including Mexican artists Pedro Meyer and Rafael Lozano, performance theoretician Joanna Frueh, Franco Mexican journalist Francis Pisani, and others to respond to my ideas. Their opinions, in the printed version, will appear either as footnotes or in a parallel column with different font. In the internet version, their responses will appear as "hypercards". My colleagues have pointed at various contradictions: Pedro Meyer and Francis Pisani pointed out to me that I criticize the role of "passive victims" that Latinos assume regarding high-technology and yet, I often assume myself the "tone" and positionality of a victim; Meyer politely noted that "it was strange that I chose to write it in English" since I criticize the use of English as lingua franca in the net. I have chosen to not debate or "correct" these and other "contradictions". Instead I have incorporated them to the internal debate of the text. I also wish to express to the reader that my text, like most of my written work, suffers from an acute crises of literary identity; partly, because, it reflects my shifting and paradoxical positionalities as a Mexicano/Chicano interdisciplinary artist and writer; but also because it attempts to describe fluctuating realities, ideas and cultural attitudes which, as of now, I am still not sure of which might be the ideal format to articulate them: a "personal" chronicle(as in the first two sections); a theoretical essay capable of containing contradictory voices(an anathema in academia), or a manifesto-like narrative(as in the last part). I constantly shift from "I" to "we", and the "we", means at different times "my main collaborator Roberto Sifuentes and I"; "my (techno-art) colleagues and I"; "all Chicanos in the net" or "all outsiders/insiders in the net". The "we" is contextual and temporary. I am fully aware of the risks of the use of "we", yet I cannot scape the following predicament: " We" all criticize the impossibility of a "master narrative" in the 90's and yet, "we" all wish to belong to a community larger than our immediate tribe of collaborators. How to solve this, I still don't know. Responses from readers and internet users to this version of the text will find their way into future versions. Comenzamos!). Section I: I: TecnofobiaMy "lowrider" laptop is decorated with a 3-D decal of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the spiritual queen of Spanish-speaking America. It's like a traveling altar, an office and a literary bank, all in one. Since I spend 70% of the year on the road, it is (besides my "World Link" phone card of course), my main means to keep in touch with my agent, editors and collaborators spread thoughout many cities in the U.S and Mexico. The month before a major performance project, most of the technical preparations, and last minute negatiations and calendar changes, take place in the mysterious territory of cyber-space. Unwillingly, I have become a techno-artist and an information superhighway bandido. I use the term "unwillingly" because, like most Mexican artists, my relationship with digital technology and personal computers is defined by paradoxes and contradictions: I don't quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them; I don't want to know how they work; but I love how they look and what they do; I criticize my colleagues who are acritically immersed in las nuevas tecnologías, yet I silently envy them. I resent the fact that I am constantly told that as a "Latino"(an all encompassing definition which I have questioned many times in my critical texts), I am supposedly "culturally handicapped" or somehow unfit to handle high-technology; yet once I have IT right in front of me, I am tempted and uncontrollably propelled to work against it; to question it, expose it, subvert it, and imbiude it with humor, radical politics and linguas polutas such as Spanglish and Franglé. In doing so, I become a sort of virus, the cyber-version of the Mexican fly: irritating, inescapable, and highly contagious. Contradiction prevails. Two years ago, my collaborator Cybervato Roberto Sifuentes and I bullied ourselves into the net, and once we were generously adopted by various communities(Arts Wire, and Latino net, among others) we suddenly started to lose interest in maintaining ongoing conversations with phantasmagoric beings we had never met in person(and that I must say is a Mexican cultural prejudice: if I don't know you in person, I don't really care to converse with you). Then we started sending a series of poetic/activist "techno-placas" in Spanglish. In these short communiqués we raised some tough questions regarding access, identity politics and language. Since at the time we didn't quite know where to post them in order to get the maximum response; and the responses were sporadic and unfocused, our interest began to dim. For months we felt a bit lonely and isolated(It's not hard to feel marginal and inconsequential in cyberspace, specially if you are a social creature and a "public" artist). And it was only through the gracious persistance of our techno-colleagues that we decided to remain seated at the virtual table, so to speak. Today, despite the fact that Roberto and I spend a lot of time in front of our laptops (when we are not touring, he is in New York, and I'm in San Francisco or Mexico City) conceptualizing performance projects which incorporate new technologies and re-designing our web sites, every time we are invited to participate in a public discussion around art and technology, we tend to emphazise its shortcomings and overstate our skepticism. Why? I can only speak for myself. Perhaps I have some computer traumas, or suffer from endemic digital fibrosis. I've been utilizing computers since 88; however, during the first 5 years, I used my old Mac as a glorified typewriter. During those years I probably deleted accidentally here and there over 300 pages of original texts which I hadn't backed up in discs, and thus was forced to rewrite them by memory (Some of these "reconstructed texts" appeared on my first book "Warrior for Gringostroika", Greywolf Press, 1994).The thick and confusing "user friendly" manuals fell many times from my impatient hands. I spent many desperate nights cursing the mischievous gods of cyber-space, and dialing promising "hotlines" which rarely answered, or if they answered, they provided me with complicated instructions I was unable to follow.. My bittersweet relationship to technology dates back to my formative years in the highly politicized ambiance of Mexico City in the 70's. As a young "radical artist", I was full of ideological dogmas and partial truths. One such partial truth sputed that high-technology was intrinsically dehumanizing (enajenante in Spanish); that it was mostly used as a means to control "us" -little techno-illiterate people, politically. My critique of technology overlapped with my critique of capitalism. To me, "capitalists" were rootless(and faceless) corporate men who utilized mass media to advertise their useless electronic gadgets, and sold us unnecessary apparatuses which kept us both, eternally in debt(as a country and as individuals) and conveniently distracted from "the truly important matters of life". Of course, these "important matters" included sex, music, spirituality and "revolution" California style (meaning, en abstracto). As a child of contradiction, besides being a rabid "anti-technology artist," I owned a little datsun; and listened to my favorite U.S. and British rock groups in my Panasonic importado, often while meditating or making love as a means to "liberate myself" from capitalist socialization. My favorite clothes, books, posters and albums, had all been made with technology by "capitalists"; but for some obscure reason, that seemed perfectly logical to me. Luckily, my family never lost their magical thinking and sense of humor around technology. My parents were easily seduced by refurbished and slightly dated American and Japanese electronic goods. We bought them as fayuca (contraband) in Tepito neighborhood, and they occupied an important place in the decoration of our "modern" middle-class home. Our huge color TV set for example, was decorated as to perform the double function of entertainment unit and involuntary postmodern altar -with nostalgic photos of relatives, paper flowers, and assorted figurines all around it; and so was the humongous sound system, next to it, with an amph, an 8-track recorder, 2 record players and 17 speakers which played all day long, a syncretic array of music including Mexican composer Agustin Lara, Los Panchos (of course with Eddie Gorme), Sinatra, Esquivel, Eartha Kit, tropical cumbias, Italian opera and rock & roll(In this sense, my father was my first involuntary instructor of posmodern thought). Though I was sure that with the scary arrival of the first microwave oven to our traditional kitchen, our delicious daily meals were going to turn overnight into sleazy fast food, soon my mother realized that el microondas was only good to re-heat cold coffee and soups. The point was to own it, and to display it prominently as yet another sign of modernidad. (In Mexico, modernity is conceived as synonimous with U.S. technology and pop culture).When I moved to California(and therefore into the future), I would often buy cheesy electronic trinquets for my family(I didn't qualify them as "cheesy" then). During vacations, to go back to visit my family with such presents ipso facto turned me into an emisary of both prosperity and modernity. Once I bought an electric ionizador for grandma. She put it in the middle of her bedroom altar, and kept it there -unplugged of course, for months. When I next saw her, she told me: "Mijito, since you gave me that thing(still unplugged), I truly can breath much better." And she probably did. Things like televisions, short wave radios and microwave ovens; and later on ionizers, walkmans, crappy calculators, digital watches and video cameras, were seen by my family and friends as alta tecnologia (high technology), and their function was as much pragmatic as it was social, ritual, sentimental and aesthetic. It is no coincidence then that in my early performance work, chafa (cheap) technology performed ritual and aesthetic functions as well. Verbigratia: For years, I used video monitors as centerpieces for my "video-altars" on stage. Fog machines, strobe lights and gobos, megaphones and voice filters have remained since then, trademark elements in my "low-tech/high-tech" performances. By the early 90's, I sarcastically baptized my aesthetic practice, "Aztec high-tech art", and when I teamed with Cyber Vato Roberto Sifuentes, we decided that what we were doing was "techno-razcuache art". In a glossary which dates back to 94, we defined it as "a new aesthetic that fuses performance art, epic rap poetry, interactive television, experimental radio and computer art; but with a Chicanocentric perspective and an sleazoide bent." II: Mythical DifferencesThe mythology goes like this. Mexicans (and by extension other Latinos) can't handle high technology. Caught between a pre-industrial past and an imposed modernity, we continue to be manual beings; homo fabers per excellence; imaginative artisans (not technicians); and our understanding of the world is strictly political, poetical or metaphysical at best, but certainly not scientific or technological. Furthermore, we are perceived as sentimentalist and passionate creatures (meaning irrational); and when we decide to step out of our realm, and utilize high technology in our art (most of the time we are not even interested), we are meant to naively repeat what others-mainly Anglos and Europeans- have already done. We, Latinos, often feed this mythology, by overstating our "romantic nature" and humanistic stances; and/or by assuming the role of colonial victims of technology. We are always ready to point out the fact that social and personal relations in the US, the land of the future, are totally mediated by faxes, phones, computers, and other technologies we are not even aware of; and that the overabundance of information technology in everyday life is responsible for the US's social handicaps and cultural crisis. Paradoxically, it seems that our lack of access to these goods is preecisely what makes us overstate our differences: We, "in the contrary", socialize profusely, negotiate information ritually and sensually; and remain in touch with our (still intact?) primeval selves. This simplistic and extremely problematic binary world view portrays Mexico and Mexicans, as technologically underdeveloped, yet culturally and spiritually superior; and the US as exactly the opposite. Reality is much more complicated: The average Anglo American does not understand new technologies either; people of color and women in the U.S. don't have "equal access" to cyberspace. Furthermore, American culture has always led the most radical(and often childish) movements against its own technological developement and back to nature. Meanwhile, the average urban Mexican is already afflicted in varying degrees with the same "First World" existential illnesses produced by high technology and advanced capitalism. In fact the new generations of Mexicans, including my hip generación-Mex nephews and my 8 year-old fully bicultural son, are completely immersed in and defined by personal computers, Nintendo, video games and virtual reality(even if they don't own the software). In fact I would go as far as to say that in Mexico generational borders are often determined by the degree of familiarity with high technology. Far from being the rrrroomantic pre-industrial paradise of the American imagination, the Mexico of the 90's, is already a virtual(and therefore mythical) nation whose cohesiveness and fluctuating boundaries are largely provided by television, transnational pop culture, tourism, free market, and yes, the internet. But life in the ranchero global village is ridden with contradictions: Despite all this, still very few people south of the border are on line, and those who are wired, tend to belong to the upper and upper middle classes, and are mostly related to corporate or managerial metiers. Everytime my colleagues and I have attempted to create a binational dialogue via digital technologies (ie. link Los Angeles to Mexico City through satellite video-telephone), we are faced with a myriad complications. In Mexico, the few artists with ongoing "access" to high technologies who are interested in this kind of transnational techno-dialogue, with a few exceptions, tend to be socially privileged, politically uninformed and aesthetically uninteresting. (*1) And the funding sources down there willing to fund this type of project are clearly interested in controlling who is part of the experiment. The zapatista phenomenon is a famous exception to the rule. Techno-performance artist extraordinaire Subcomandante Marcos communicates with the "outside world" through a very popular web page sponsored and designed by Canadian liberals (It is still a mystery to me how his communiques get from the jungle village of "La Realidad", which still has no electricity, to his web page literally overnight).However, this web page is more known outside of Mexico for a simple reason: Telmex, the Mexican Telephone company, makes it practically impossible for anyone living outside the main Mexican cities to use the net, arguing that there are simply not enough lines to handle both telephone and internet users. "The world is waiting for you - so come on!" "Rebecca(Solnit) thinks america online is like K-Mart and keeps getting lost in the aisles somewhere between press-on-nails and flash-sessions. This morning aol fell asleep while I was forwarding your text to my brother (the Sandinista one) and it disappeared. Maybe it's like a combination of K-Mart and the Argentinian military, what with all this disappearing." III: The Cyber-migra & the webbacksRoberto and I arrived late to the debate, along with a dozen other Chicano experimental artists. When we began to dialogue with US artists working with new technologies, we were perplexed by the fact that when referring to cyber-space or the net, they spoke of a politically neutral/raceless/genderless and classless "territory" which provided us all with "equal access", and unlimited possibilities of participation, interaction and belonging, specially "belonging"(in a time in which no one feels that they "belong" anywhere). (*2) Yet there was never any mention of the physical and social loneliness, or the fear of the "real world" which propells so many people to get on line and pretend they are having "meaningful" experiences of communication or discovery. To them, the thought of exchanguing identities in the net and impersonating other genders, races or ages, without real (social or physical) consecuences seemed extremely appealing and liberating, and by no means, superficial or escapist. Some feminist colleagues have expressed to me the fact that for women "exchanguing genders" in the net can be both "liberating" and transgresive. The utopian rhethoric around digital technologies, specially in California, reminded Roberto and I of a sanitized version of the pioneer and frontier mentalities of the Old West, and also of the early century futurist cult to the speed, size and beauty of epic technology(airplanes, trains, factories, etc.) Given the existing "compassion fatigue" regarding political art and art dealing with mattters of race and gender, it was hard to not see this feel-good phylosophy(or better said theosophy) as an attractive exit from the acute social and racial crisis afflicting the U.S. Like the pre-multicultural art world of the early 80's, the new high-tech art world assumed an unquestionable "center", and drew a dramatic digital border. And on the other side of the tracks, there lived all the techno-illiterate artists, along with most women, Chicanos, Afro-Americans and Native Americans in the US and Canada, not to mention the artists living in "Third World" countries. Given the nature of this hegemonic cartography, those of us living South of the digital border were forced to assume once again the unpleasent but necessary roles of webbacks, undocumented cyber-immigrants, digital viruses, techno-pirates, and virtual coyotes (smugglers). We were also shocked by the benign or quiet(not naive) ethnocentrism permeating the debates around art and digital technology, specially in California. The master narrative was either the utopian and outdated language of Western democratic values or a bizzarre form of anti-corporate/corporate jargain. The unquestioned lingua franca was of course English, "the official language of international communications"(*3); the theoretical vocabulary utilized by critics was hyper-specialized (a combination of "software" talk; revamped post-structuralist theory and psychoanalisis), and largely de-politicized (i.e.postcolonial theory and the border paradigm were conveniently overlooked); and if Chicanos and Mexicans didn't participate enough in the net, it was solely because of lack of information or interest, (not money or "access") or again, because we were "culturally unfit". The unspoken assumption was that our true interests were "grassroots" (and by grassroots I mean, the streets in the barrio and our ethnic-based community institutions), representational or oral (as if these concerns couldn't exist in virtual space). In other words, we were to remain painting murals, tagging, plotting revolutions in rowdy cafes, reciting oral poetry and dancing salsa or quebradita. IV: 1st draft of a manifesto: Remapping cyberspaceIn the past two years, many theoreticians of color, feminists and activist artist have finally crossed the digital border without documents. This migratory invasion has forced the debates to become more complex and interesting. Since "we" (as of now, the "we" is still blurry, unspecific and everchanguing) don't wish to reproduce the unpleasant mistakes of the multicultural days, nor do we wish to harass the brokers and curators of cyberspace as to elicit a new backlash, our strategies and priorities are now quite different: "We" are no longer trying to persuade anyone that we are worthy of inclussion (we know we are either temporary insiders or insiders/outsiders at the same time,). Nor are "we" fighting for the same funding (since serious funding no longer exists (specially for politicized experimental art). For the moment, what "we" desire is to remap the hegemonic cartography of cyberspace; to "politicize" the debate; to develope a multicentric theoretical understanding of the (cultural, political and aesthetic) possibilities of new technologies; to exchange a different sort of information (mythopoetical, activist, performative, imagistic); and to hopefully do all this with humor, inventiveness and intelligence. Chicano artists in particular wish to "brownify" virtual space; to "spanglishize the net", and to "infect" the lingua franca. With the increasing availibility of new technologies in our communities, the notion of "community art" and "political" or politicized art is changuing dramatically. Now the goals, as defined by activist artists and theoreticians, are to find innovative grassroots applications to new technologies(ie. to help the Latino youth literally exchange their weapons for computers and video cameras), and to link all community centers and artist collectives through the internet. Artist-made CD-roms and web pages can perform an extremely vital educational function: they can function as community "memory banks" ("encyclopedias chicanicas"), sites for encounter, dialogue, complicity, and exchange; and virtual bases of operation and action. To attain all this, the many virtual communities must get used to a new cultural presence-the webback ( el virus virtual); a new sensibility; and many new languages spoken in the net. APPENDIX: RESPONSES TO THE TEXT Section II: *1. -Pedro Meyer:"I find several things wrong with this sentence. It is not only in Mexico that this is the case; It is the world over that high technologies are a matter reserved for the privileged. This is true since time began. Only that today the high technologies are electronic, and belong to the digital world. In the past it was other materials that were the subject of scarcity and thus privilege, for example at the time of the Mexican muralist movement in the forties, it meant access to certain walls on which to paint. It's obvious that there were more painters than there were walls available on which to paint. So not everyone who wanted to, could paint on such walls, at least not on "important" walls of public buildings. Going back further in time, the Aztecs gave the artists in their society a very special place in which to develop their skills, and again that was a matter of privilege. So it's disingenuous to consider that art when associated with privilege is necessarily diminished in it's stature. One can find countless instances throughout the history of art, where privilege was never very far from the great masterpieces that were created... The observation that the (Mexican) artists associated with new technologies, are politically uninformed or aesthetically uninteresting, responds more than anything to a populist interpretation by a number of people in the world of culture who have taken it upon themselves to dismiss new technologies as a if it were a symbol of status to be a technophobe. In reality what they are doing is covering up their own shortcomings and ignorance of what new technologies truly have to offer, by taking on such a negative attitude. What better way to deal with such limitations than to dismiss them outright. One would also have to factor in how reactionary and lacking in courage, such attacks against any changes really are. A true artist thrives in the explorations of all that there is new. To live on the cutting edge and trying to make sense of it all, is no task for the weak of heart. It's always easier to stay within the comfort of the known, than to risk failure in the process of trying what is not yet under control. To say that the outcome is for the most part 'uninteresting' is to assume that the aesethetic choices already had an opportunity to work themselves out. New forms require a period, sometimes quite prolonged, of incubation. If we observe a beautiful person, do we acknowledge that that same person at one time was only a faetus with little or no resemblance to that future beatiful presence? And in the end, who does the judging? Are we conscious that such "aesthetic choices" of beauty are if nothing else just part of a set of cultural expressions of value and not universal truths?" Section III: *2.-Joana Frueh:"I do not want to exchange my sex, and my genders are many. I am abundant in identities in my daily, intimate, and professional lives. My identities merge in variant combinations, then supersede each other as they operate according to the integrity of a single human being who is not a fragment or a figment of her own or someone else's imagination. People make up stories about themselves and others all the time. Narration-as-imagination can be fun, and dangerous, in real space. I am not cyber-efficient, not a cyber-aficionado--I want soul-inseparable-from-the-body in front of me, arm in mine, in my bed. I feel affection for people in the flesh, for facing the source of a voice as it eases or lurches out of a body and touches me allover mine; I want to hear whether a voice resonates deeply, from a diaphragm, or thinly, from chest or throat. I want to participate in emotional upheavals, withdrawals, magnetics when I am part of a group's or individual's physical energy. I want eros--rich and joyous connectedness--as close as I can get it, and that demands touching, sensibly and sensually. I see no other way to build the body of love. Over the summer I read a lot of Sade. In "The 12 Days of Sodom", one of his funniest yet most somber novels, I met the expert whore and storyteller Mme. Duclos. She is radiant and brilliant, and she confidently displays her exceptionally beautiful buttocks. She is one of the few characters who leaves the isolated, impenetrable, and lugubrious Chateau de Silling alive. Silling is the gothic castle par excellence. It is the site of fascinating and grisly debauchery. The four protagonist debauchees, all men, do not victimize Duclos, for to their eyes, ears, minds, and bodies, she is splendid. Duclos is forty-eight and so was I when I read "120 Days...". I identify with her, despite my problems with Sade and the ones I imagine Duclos to have with him, too, in a chapter I'll soon write for my new book "Monster/Beauty: Paradox of Pleasure". There I will inhabit her. As I walk home from my neighborhood park, I AM her. This is the identity exchange of a literary and art fetishist, me, of a Sade fan who adores his and Duclos's unity of body and mind. Mind-incomplete-without-body, Duclos, a pro-porn feminist like me, is one of my erotic identities, virtual as literature, real as a clarification of my needs and pleasures in erotic and aesthetic self-creation. I like bodies to be high-content and high-context, like art and the erotic. In my experience and to my knowledge, "low-context messages"(John Simmons, "Sade and Cyberspace," in James Brook and Iain A. Boal, ed., "Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information [San Francisco: City Lights, 1995], 146-47) pervade cyberspace. There the human body radically distorts, reduces, and romanticizes into information, through which it may assume a nauseating omnipotence--the authority of disembodiment. In 1989 Marvin Minsky wrote, "We are entering a new century in which you are connected to the world, to the virtual world. And much more intimately than you are connected to the real world . . . . Our connection with the real world is very thin, and our connection with the artificial world is going to be more intimate and more satisfying than anything that's come before " (Minsky, quoted in "SF Camerawork [Spring-Summer 1993]:4). Eros is very thick and very real, and I do not belong to Minsky's "our"; yet I know how thinness belongs to people's disaffection from daily and seismic figurative slaps-in-the-face and kicks-in-the-butt. Writing in 1989 from his position as Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Minsky says, "If it was possible, I would have myself downloaded" (Minsky, in "Is the Body Obsolete? A Forum," "Whole Earth Review" [Summer 1989]: 37). This is no way to court intimacy with aging or racialized bodies, for many people would choose to be an easy body, attractive and unproblemtic in terms of normative social standards. I do imagine that some people would choose "bodies" of terror; but one can be a cultural terrorist monster/beauty- in her body of origin. This requires creativity and courage. Disembodiment inhibits eros, which is both material and incorporeal. Eros propels people into physicality and sociality; eros has physical and social consequences. Interactivity is not erotic connectedness, whose profusion occurs in the high-context plenitude of prosaic reality. MONSTER/BEAUTY, PERFORMING LIKE A FLORIBUNDA *3. Why then,- several colleagues, including Meyer and Pisani, ask me, did I choose to write this text in English? I can only think of two answers: First, because I only know two languages, and Spanish speaking users in the net are still a micro-minority. How else could a Mexican communicate with an African or a Hindu? How else would you, whoever you are, be reading this text right now? And second, because in order to fight hegemonic models I strongly belive we need to know and speak the language of hegemonic control. END |