2020 - Digital Anthropophagy and the Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age - Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez

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Abstract

In 2009 I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyiand its companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Ageii.Being an artist from Brazil,I could not escape thecultural mystique of ‘Anthropophagy’.For those unfamiliar with the term, the etymologyhas a Greek origin dating back to the mythological Kronos(Saturn) eating his own son–‘Anthrōpophagia’: ‘Anthropos’= human being + ‘phagein’=to eat, i.e., an eating of a human. The words ‘Anthropophagy’and ‘Anthropophagus’weretransplanted by the European conquistadors in the late 1400s/early 1500s to the land massesrenamed ‘America’and ‘The Caribbean’at the onset of colonialism.Starting at this period, some native ethnicities of the ‘Amerindian’populations have been described as practitioners of ritual Anthropophagyand/orCannibalism. ‘Cannibalism’itself supposedly finding its root in a misspellingor ironic naming ‘Canib’iii–by Columbuswhen describing the Carib people of Antilles/Caribbean Islandsduring his navigational enterprises between 1492-1504. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade devouredBrazilian colonial history itselfwritingthe ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, an adjective form of the term, meaning a Manifesto thatpossessesthe agency to eat. The proposition of the Brazilian Moderns was to devour what comes from outside (‘First World’novelties), absorb their useful‘otherness’in order to output something uniquely Brazilian.Thus ‘Antropofagia’isappropriated and forever transformed in the1920s São Paulo into a Brazilian avantgarde. Antropofagia isconsidered by some critics to be perhaps the only true Brazilianartistic canon. Theconceptsof this cultural iconhaveinevitablyimpregnatedmyown artworks, especially in my condition of migrant since the age of 19, living in a constant state of becoming ‘other’somewhere.

Keywords: digital anthropophagy;anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the digital age;manifesto antropófago; Oswald de Andrade;antropofagia;Brazilian modernism;digital age;colonisation;Vilém Flusser;Aílton Krenak; Bauhaus

Anthropophagyofferscomplexities that defy even the fields which have traditionally dealt with such a theme. My fieldsof interest and research focuson Ritual Anthropophagy, its cultural constructions, their appropriation in the arts and through the arts, and the ensuing generative potential for innovation constituting both a philosophy as well as a method of creativity, especially in moments of crisis. Ritual Anthropophagy has been described anthropologically as a switch of perspective. Especially in warring rituals, the winner supposedly consumes the strong enemy (weak individuals are never desired), in order to see oneself as the enemy sees him. This constitutes a motion toward acceptance of otherness in oneself, instead of negation of a dissimilar entity. A foreign strong body as a formidable bodyand its consumption an openness to the highest form of alterity.

While I was moving from New York City to Berlin, Germany, in 2009, I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyicontaining a companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age. Drawing from my experience as a migrant of continuous cultural transformation, a constant motion toward the unknowable‘other’, experimenting with a multiplicity of worldviews and perspectives, I felt an embodiment of the concepts that enliven Anthropophagy/Antropofagia. In my artistic practiceat thattime, being a video and film editor, I was hand-making films from discarded16mm film pieces, creating new narratives for these materials that I found in dumpsters, donated archives, and bulk purchases of undeveloped rolls from Ebay. After receiving the Distinction Prize of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award in 2011 at transmedialeiv, theannual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, I presented my essay and manifesto globally as an audiovisual performance-lecture and a communal ritual. When I finishreciting the Re-Manifesto, handwritten on rice paper, I eat a piece of it and pass the communion wafer to the public, a translation gesture of one of the most disseminated and recognised (ecumenical) meanings behind ‘Anthropophagy’: eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus as bread and wine. The gesture also points to a turn against itself, eating one’s own words, a de-programming act: cor inversum in se ipsum[The heart turned against itself] (Flusser, 2008: 28).

Anthropophagyin Brazil has been constructed initially from the ethnographic descriptions by German adventurer Hans Staden, recounting his captivity with the (ritualistic anthropophagic) Tupinambá indigenouspeoplein 1553/54. Staden’s Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America) became a global best-seller upon publication in 1557 and remains forever ingrained in the global imaginary,depictingthe Americas as a wild territory.This worldviewhas endured, especiallyafter Theodor De Bry (b. Liège) replicatedthe images created byStadensome decades later,in his art studio established in Frankfurt, in finer, yetimagined details. De Bry never travelled to the Americas, his imaginaryinterpretations executed on copper prints were based on Staden’s texts and woodcut prints.Furthermore, De Bry’s two sons continued his creative productions and replicationsin the 1600s. These images influenced the drawing ofworld mapsof that time period, illustrated showing ‘men-eating’savages inhabitingthe Americanterritories. This was the Anthropophagic history told by Europeans of the ‘new’continentin the 16/17thCenturies, during Shakespearean time.

In my Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age, I reflect on theentanglements of wildly different cultures coming into contact and the uneven reciprocities that ensued. InPindorama–Landof Palm Trees, mythical place of the Tupi-Guarani peoples–the ‘native’wereseduced by European trinkets, such as whistles, mirrors, rattles, giftedto them in exchange for the far more valuable ‘Pau-Brasil’wood.Trees which the natives had to fell, chop, carry and load into the Portuguese caravels in a system of uneven value exchange and exploitation.It is worthwhile to reflect here on the significance of that encounter from the native’s perspective. Aílton Krenak, one of the most recognised voices incontemporary indigenous thought explains:

...well before the [European] geographicdemarcation of Brazil as a country, the narratives of our ancestors built our own histories, which are many. Their recollection are populated by narratives sounded in more than 500 languages, just accounting for those spoken in South America...In each of these ancestral narratives was the prophecy announcing the arrival, the return of the white brother. These narratives dating back to four thousand years already mentioned the life of this other brother, always identified as someone who left our coexistence and was no longer traceable. Having left us, he also lost the sense of humanity we had been building. He had gone to a faraway place and lived there for many, many generations. In this time,he learned another technology, developed other languages and learned a different type of organisation than ours. In our ancestral narratives, he appeared time and again as someone who was returning home, but his thoughts were no longer known, nor what he was searching for. We no longer knew what he wanted. [He learned many things away from us, but also forgot where he came from and found it difficult to know where he was going]. The ancestral narratives are reminders in the form of prophecy or warning of the arrival of the white brother. But the narratives also carry within them a message: the promiseto relink with, to reencounter our former brother. (Krenak, 2015:160-162,author’stranslation)

In 1920sBrazil, during therise ofthe modernistandindustrial era, Anthropophagyexperienced a revival throughBrazilian artistic productions–the Anthropophagic act was transformed from taboo(European construct of indigenous social practice) into (artistic) totem. Anthropophagy was thus invigorated with two remarkablebracketing events: Semana de Arte Modernain São Paulo in 1922, and theManifesto Antropófagovby writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928, published in his newly founded Revista de Antropofagia. Andrade’s Manifesto was a punch in the stomachthat laid deglutition claim to just about anything, from all ‘-isms’toFreudian thought and revolutionary enterprisesacross time. All the while, the Manifestodemandedaccess to ‘the other’, an open license totaste the state-of-the-art influences from outside Brazil without committing to any of them, an unapologetic attitude toward devouring history itself, while fully embracing and celebrating indigeneity and its values, in order to spit out something new, original, worthy of envy. Feeling the effects of swift industrialisationclashing with abreasttraditional cultureswithin reachthroughout the Brazilian territory, Andradealso introduced a characterin his Manifesto: [Hermann Alexander Graf] Keyserling’s ‘technified barbarian’(Andrade, 1928: 3), a role played by the North Americans.

Almost 100 years later,the role ofthat‘technified barbarian’, an important allegory in Andrade’s Manifestobegets the question: ‘Who isconsidered theBarbarian now?’Who, in fact, is the barbarian at the gate, controlling the inputs and outputs of the digital age? This new erawas mycueto write the‘Anthropophagic Re-Manifestofor the Digital Age’in 2009, a remix of concepts birthed from a paradigm shift, sensing deep changes brewing in the imminent increase of interconnectivity speed about to take over the world via broadband internet service embedded in more advanced mobile digital devices. I translated this new reality into a latent cultural cannibalism in the age of digitalculture, of whichunceremonious information consumption practiceswould push the internet-worked information society toward a new type of colonialparadigm. Acolonisation via viral ideas with the conquering of new types of property, where digital data becomes an extremely valuable raw resource and new currency, and anyone can be a coloniser. A new practice of consumption –ingestion, digestion and excretion –involving a technological mediation. Using Anthropophagy as both metaphor and strategy to navigate the rough seas of internet constitutionalism and innovation, I set out to consider new power structures favouring ‘embrace, devour, share’within a new code of ethics as a holistic natural transparent approach for our socio-economic survival.All the while maintaining a healthy ecosystem online –based on net neutrality –and also offline, to support ethical information traffic and a safer metabolism of such large amounts of information.

But how could this new online frontier be explored any differently than in the past terrestrial colonial scenarios of exploitation? It would not take very long indeed for wild exploits to loom in the horizon. The online community –if there has been ever such a thing as a ‘community’–steering wide-eyed in a Jules Verne’s Nautilustype ofvesseldid not manage to reach the cost of utopia.The hope was perhaps to get to the destination navigating theinternational online waters free from land-based government.However,in a space of just ten years, roughly 2009-2019, the online worldhasgone from innocent ebullient optimism to fear, scepticism and pollution. A vertiginous trajectory from an environment of relatively equal stake-holders at the beginning of the internet era with a horizon built brick by brickto thecurrent world entirely calculated to fit into a smartphone –the new acculturation tool.Its degenerativedynamics alikea‘Requerimiento’(penned in 1513 by jurist Juan López de Palacios, to be read out loud even in empty beachfronts with the purpose of submitting non-conforming indigenous to the complete rule of Spanish kingdom, under penalty of death). And although history teaches us patterns, models and structures of dominance and subjugation, the long journey traced since the 15/16thCentury Iberian caravels only shows us how much today's internet-worked culture has fallen into those same patterns, models and structures.

Digital Anthropophagy, a term I coined in 2009, whose sentiment permeates my Re-Manifesto, reflectsa globalised user-based practice and cultural manifestation occurring online and outwards into the physical world and back online as a resonating never-ending feedback loop of vast cultural consumptionand transformation. Whereas there have been plenty of profound exchanges and symbiotic profiteering online, it has become increasingly apparent that a lesser form of Digital Anthropophagy is unfortunately also possible, namely: cannibalism. While Anthropophagy produces new forms, bodies, effects, original expression, synthesis; cannibalism is an act of poor destruction, at bestit produces just a copy, without imagination, without ritual, without magic.

To compound the lesser favourable winds of development, this new era of consuming ‘The Other’in a supposedlyimmaterial way has only revealed that the digitalworldis heavily material. All the apparatus that supportitarebased on materials:bodies implicated in the production of devices, content and data; rare metals extracted from the earth and ocean to make our digital lightness/heaviness of being, colourful, pleasant, and chic. We have been payinga high price for the commodification of life.Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without these technological companions and coadjutants to our lifestyles, they have so profoundly changed our humanity. The conveniences and addictive happiness these devicesafford usersexist in the very tension between the material world and thedeep level of abstraction invisible and impenetrable to most who have embarked in this great digital adventure.

Looking back at my Re-Manifesto, I recognise it as a provocation –what does it mean to be Anthropophagic in the Digital Age with thesupreme interconnectivity of the informationsociety, in whicheveryone is consuming the world,and each other,at an unprecedented pace and intensity? By opening up a new blank map on which to inscribe a new history, I was exploring potential: both high and low. In this tension, I recognised that our cannibalistic relations,not only toeachother, but also with technology,werecausing an ontological shift in the way we see ourselves as human, an ontological turn proposed by philosopher Vilém Flusser in Für eine Philosophie der Fotografiein 1983. Flusser proposes that,starting with the invention of photography, human beings began orienting themselves from the images, which not only stand as surfaces (mediations) between human and world, but also veil what stands behind its algorhythmic representation.

I had proposed Digital Anthropophagyasa valuable cultural concept for our time, neither euphoric nor pessimistic. Now, reflecting on what the Internet has become in these last tenyears, I see that aglobal ‘user culture’has succumbed in the digital era to meta structures that engulf us and transform us intocannibalised bodies.I am reminded of a constant theme inFlusserianphilosophy that speaks of our highly technological moment: ‘The change of codes is far more important than the invention of new media...the function of codes is not dependent on a metaphysical ‘eidos’ of the medium, but on how the medium is handled’(Guldin, R. et al, 2008: 5). Flusser himself states: ‘Indeed we are actively generating our tools and through them we are generating the world, but it is also true that those tools are hitting back on us and are generating us’(Flusser, 1991).

The question now seems to be what world should we generate next in widely and wildly divided global societies?Do we needanother paradigm shift, a radical discontinuity to sever deep dependencies on the control mechanisms of the digital age?Flusser believed that the artist is an agent who can intervene in programmed apparatus, be it a technological black box or institutions of control. If anindigenous ritual-philosophy informed artistic and cultural production in the 1920s, why not consider indigenous art production, which has managed to transcend time and western artistic cannons, to informa new imagination?Aílton Krenak and Bené Fonteles offer the following:

[Indigenous artistic expression] is born from a magical world that unveils the unconscious and reveals the ‘third bank’ of a river that can’t be reached with an actual canoe. In order to cross it, what we need is the technology of a mind with imagination, but also an invisible canoe that may take us to that bank without expecting goals or outcomes. Everything requires more than a mystical and magical trance, a free transit between visible and invisible worlds that are not separated. As the Toltec shaman Miguel Ruiz says, ‘you are both the dream and the dreamer’.

In order to be that primordial dream and to compose it, indigenous peoples need to be left in peace in the forest, unaffected by the barbarism of ‘civilisation’, continuing to create an art that can navigate thedifferent banks with interdisciplinary independence, with solidarity and interaction, involved with everything rather than developed, without losing its creative body and its cultural and spiritual essence, which persists from cave and rock painting to the plural and instigating contemporary art forms. (Krenak et al, 2019: 148)

To dream new worlds and new frontiers is the only way out. But to cultivate one’s birth ground or chosen home is the only way in, which is what the original populations of the many places called ‘America’will tell us. Likewise,Flusser, having escaped the Holocaust seeking refuge in Brazil in 1941, but losing his family in concentration camps, was well aware of Nationalism’s project. He saw in the zero-dimension of pure numbers a dangerous capacity to generate (i.e., to project) and effectively change the worldsupported by meta-apparatus. The danger implicatedin a changeofour subjectivity,potentially transformingour species into an entirely programmable and predictable subordinate apparatus to be fully utilised in mechanisms of control.But history bears no obligation to repeat itself just for the sake of teaching lessons. It is useful to once again devour history against neo-colonialrule, against cannibalistic destructive binaries that erasediversity, against techno-escapism,andto movetoward a multiplicity that celebrates other forms of alterity, different modes of living, fluid identities and the pursuit of happinesslanding with our feet back on earth, our home. To embrace the dissimilar absolutely, but away fromthe obsolete neo-liberal patriarchy andinto the welcoming wild arms of‘matriarcado de Pindorama’(de Andrade, 1928)... ‘From this Earth, on this Earth, for this Earth. And it’s about time’(De Andrade, 1944, author’stranslation).

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar through a Bauhaus Promotionsstipendiumand the Bauhaus University’s Equal Opportunity Office for travel support to present at the Conference Bites Here and There: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism across Disciplines, 11.2018.

Contexto

Aparece en https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/22/

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