The New Democracy

By Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

When one thinks about Democracy one cannot help thinking about the role that it may have played in the birth of Philosophy.

The social, political and economic context of the Greek city-states, can be considered as having given way to what can be called the reflecting citizen.

The exercise of citizenship, the political experience as a reflexive experience of the polis, and the birth of Philosophy in Ancient Greece, may be thought to be connected. The exercise of building up an argument, of criticizing it, of questioning it, all become necessary in a democratic structure that is akin to that built up by the Ancient Greeks.

No democracy today approaches that of the Ancient Greece, the current democracies invite a different kind of social participation and reflection. The reflection that precedes the vote, the reflection of the public opinion manipulated by the mass media, the Country-state Democracy rather than the City-state Democracy found its apex in the 20th Century.

The Country-state Democracy does not invite to a reflection as the Ancient Greece Democracy, because the type of social structure that supports it impedes the citizen himself to exercise his citinzenship directly, there are various control mechanisms that prevent this.

First and foremost the fact that no citizen has a direct voice in politics, but only an indirect one through the elected officials that (miss)represent the citizens by serving the political and economic interests of themselves and of the groups that directly support them.

There are factors that serve to prevent a complete dictatorship of a small group, one of them, the most important one, being the fact that there are always different groups competing for power and countering each other’s moves.

The other control factor is the mass media that became a power structure capable of manipulating the public opinion, with effects upon the citizen’s voting direction, upon the divulging of corruption in the government (a good example was the Nixon scandal)...

But the mass media are inevitably non-neutral, becoming economic, politically and ideologically committed. The Citizen Kane and the Citizen Kane of Berlusconi, provide interesting examples on a reflection between the relationship of the mass media and politics.

The country-state democracy is a complex issue, the political decision ending up to be the best deal of the different groups of interest, and the only deal that the citizen can expect.

But despite the complexity there is a fundamental rationality that can be considered to be at the foundation of the country-state political experience, a mass rationality. This mass rationality characterized the bulk of the 20th Century... the mass market, the mass advertising, the mass media, the mass dynamics, the manipulable masses...

The masses are easily led, and can be led through the democratic scheme into a dictatorship. The country-state democracy is extremely vulnerable and amenable to dictatorship schemes, be them from the right or from the left.

Portugal constitutes a good example of both. After the end of Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship, there was the threat, during an extremely brief period of time, of a communist left-wing dictatorship.

There is also the democratic monarchies like Britain, these may seem to be more resilient than democracies against a dictatorship, given that they are not complete democracies to begin with (in Britain there is the figure head of the Royal Family to prevent the taking over of parliament, unless the Queen and her family were beheaded by an iconic new dictator).

The dictator needs to get rid of the iconic monarch, because the dictator must become the reference and the referent.

However, given the right social instabilities both monarchies and democracies can fall into an extreme dictatorship, and the examples of films like V for Vendetta or Fahrenheit 451, as well as Orwell’s Big Brother become frightening reminders.

However, all of these rest upon a rationality of masses, controlled and controllable.

We are now witnessing a new change in civilization and a new rationality – the web rationality and with it comes what may be the heralding of a New Democracy. Different names can be given to it... Web Democracy, Cyberspace Democracy, Hyperdemocracy...

The following article of El País deals with the latter term:

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/porvenir/catastrofe/elpepusoceps/20090222elpepspor_9/Tes

In the new Civilization - the Web Civilization - we are no longer dealing with the simple masses of the 20th Century, we are dealing with a super-planet-wide-organic-web, where each node behaves in a complex way, and where the nonlinearities may amplify discourses and memeplexes.

In this new Civilization the exercise of citizenship becomes more intense and closer to the Greek. But this is not a city or even country-delimited exercise, it is global, planetary.

The idea that this new Civilization is amenable to a Big Brother is foolish, independently of how many surveillance mechanisms are used. The fact is that the web-based market needs the publishing of the individual experience to be fed, and this experience can spread, replicate. Real time critical reflection immediately spreads to the system without control.

The mass media have already lost their power, and with them the mass-based rationality. The past manipulation of the transmission of wars contrasts with the new web-based transmission of event recordings from cell-phone and private cameras, recordings that people post online before any control mechanism is activated.

Censorship becomes impossible in the new web-based rationality, the system is much too complex, but it is exactly that web-based complexity that makes the New Democracy unique in human history.

The phrase in the El País article that best expresses this is “interacción planetaria en constante transfusion” that is, planetary interaction in constant transfusion.

A local insignificant reflexive thought or argument discursively expressed through text, picture or video can spread to the web like a virus. The systemic clinamen and stand alone complexes become frequent in the new viral-web-rationality.

The new citizenship is not a mass citizenship, it is a web citizenship, where each individual becomes a citizen of the planet in a very literal sense, for the new polis is the planet itself.

Here, each citizen expresses himself or herself in his or her singularity, and there, on the planet, that expression finds an adhesion by others with similar experiences that are voiced together... and so it spreads...

Such a democracy is more resilient than the others. None of the control schemes that were used to silence the masses or individuals can be used here, no repression is possible without shutting down the web, and with it the planet. There is no head to cut, because the web has no leader and, thus, no head.

the value of dignity

by Maria Odete Madeira

"Obedient to the calculation, ignorant to that which cannot be calculated nor measurable, such as life, suffering, joy, love, honor, talent, the magnanimity, the consciousness, the good and the evil. (...) The economy can establish the rates of monetary poverty, however, it ignores the subordination, the humiliation or the pain that the poor experience (...)"

"Obedientes al cálculo, ignoran lo que no es ni calculable ni mensurable, como la vida, el sufrimiento, la alegría, el amor, el honor, el talento, la magnanimidad, la conciencia, el bien y el mal. Su sola medida de satisfacción viene a ser el crecimiento de la producción, de la productividad o de los ingresos monetarios. La economía puede establecer las tasas de pobreza monetaria, pero ignora la subordinación, la humillación o el dolor que experimentan los pobres, concluye Bernardo Kliksberg en Hacia una economía con rostro humano."

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/porvenir/catastrofe/elpepusoceps/20090222elpepspor_9/Tes

"The sad business of Jade Goody"

"El triste negocio de Jade Goody"

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/triste/negocio/Jade/Goody/elpepusoc/20090222elpepisoc_1/Tes

A pobreza… o sofrimento, a miséria humana tornaram-se um recurso, uma matéria prima… um produto… um valor de mercado e um bem económico…

O que é que estamos a fazer a nós mesmos e o que é que estamos a permitir que nos façam? Enquanto humanos e enquanto civilização o que é que nos resta… se até mesmo a nossa dignidade tem um valor de mercado?

The poverty... the suffering, the human misery become a resourse, a raw material... a product... a market value and an economic good...

What are we doing to ourselves and what are we allowing to be done to us? As humans and as civilization what is there that is left for us... if even our dignity has a market value?

Sapere Aude

by Maria Odete

Sapere Aude!... the essence beyond the essence.

Sapere Aude: another mode of being, to be as difference from oneself.

Sapere Aude!... imperative of an aesthetic topic of place, as the place of the same and of the other… passing and errant palimpsestic topic.

Sapere Aude!... life and death… diastoles and systoles of hope and despair.

Sapere Aude… cognitive poiesis of that which was thought and that which was said… hybrid situs.

Sapere Aude! Topological coincidence of the same and the other, to see and to be seen.

Sapere aude... topos of freedom... synchrony and symphony!

The Uploaded Man

by Carl Gustav and Maria Odete Madeira

Man

“(…) has ceased to measure the world by his own scale (in feet, inches, ‘paces’, power). In all senses of the term, man is no longer the yardstick of the world, or, as we used to say, he is no longer the measure of all things.” Virilio, The Information Bomb
Self-mutilations, mutilations-of-self, mutilations-of-selfhood.
“(…) it is the same with our technological autonomy with those reflex self-mutilations (…)” Virilio, The Information Bomb.
The uploaded man has ceased to be a measure of himself.
Gradually deprived of the use of his natural receptor organs, deprived of the senses, the uploaded man is like the invalid, by a comical lack of proper (self-deprived) measure, striving to find his/its bearings in a pursuit of different worlds and modes in which the old animal body would be out of place, achieving the total symbiosis between technology and the human.
Scanner eyes, burnt eyelashes, nose spasms, self-spasms (residual), wandering tongues, techno-branchiae, cyber ears, organs without secretions and other organs without bodies (Virilio).
The uploaded man becomes the simulacrum of the man, an imposture attempting to evade the certainty of death. Behaviour equivalent to suicide attempts, such as anorexia, mutism, drug abuse and many risk seeking idiocies, he is but an example of a long held belief in the ability to overcome one’s own impotence.
As the negation of the human ability to surpass himself through an heroic effort, the uploaded man becomes a mere example of the coward that strived to attain the invalid’s impotency in order to escape the flaws and hardships of the flesh, and a mere example of the fear of the trial that entails a surpassing effort of humanity.

Shock to the System

by Carl Gustav and Maria Odete Madeira


Cyborg the additive model:

The birth of the cyborg following a slow curve of addition of prosthetics. One thinks of the cyborg in terms of the transformation of the human in the machine, or of the addition of human parts to the machine, however…


…Cyborg the multiplicative model:

The greatest transformation comes when the machine, from within, grows like a virus, the machine takes hold in what becomes the bursting multiplication of its nature, cognition and code.
It begins with the process of conversion through interaction, the experience of the world with the machine produces a process of coevolution. The transformation from within may not even occur through the taking of a machine nanovirus cocktail, it may simply occur through a transformation in the way of experiencing things.


The contamination of cyber-memetic viruses, with the emergence of the full-blown “software” human cyborg immersed in his cyber fields nexus may precede the hardware cyborg. A good metaphor can be found in Idol’s video "Shock to the System":


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grBLbiyJTDk


What will be the multiplicative the cyborg process? How will be the multiplicative cyborg process? Will the cyborg become non-critical, incapable of thinking due to the algorithmic processing of steps, that enclose him within a formal system?
Is the cyborg incapable of stepping outside of the formal system thus losing a fundamental human ability? A useful scenario for totalitarian schemes of stupidified stuporic pixelized zombification of the web.

A fundamental cognitive and systemic process the "strange loop", the stepping out of the formal system’s prison, the refusal of the squalid walls of the algorithm.

Is freedom a value for the one that binds himself and imprisons himself in the algorithm?


Cyberluciferic revolutions impossible for the algorithmised. If the Biblical program/angel was capable of stepping out of his name, given an assignment of a free will, would humans deny themselves of that which even programs/angels supposedly had?


Free will fading away by the slavery of the rules of the formal system, formalized people incapable of reflecting upon anything that falls outside the program and programmers incapable of thinking beyond their own program, admitting that programs let themselves be written...



...STAND ALONE COMPLEX, the healthy systemic response, uncontrolled, unpredictable, leaderless, headless, clinamen, freedom and free will seldom lets itself be bounded when life is at stake, while a living web remains living there is always the unexpected “shock to the system”, the viral that bursts and ripples as cybernetic waves that change everything in the blink of an eye, and escape the control of the strategist, of the centralizing fool that fantasizes about a controlled web free of clinamen.

Simulacra and Simulations

Excerpts from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations

from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.


The simulacrum is true."


Ecclesiastes cit. in Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations

“If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.”


“To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not?”


“Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament.

In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.”

Sovereign Good

by Maria Odete Madeira

It is the words... it is the discourse of the others... that address us… it is the face of the others… the gaze of the others… it is the existence of the others… that searches, in us, the imperative that unites our voice… our discourse… our existence… to the voice… to the discourse… to the existence… of the others that gaze upon us and that address us, invoking and evoking the good… the wisdom… the justice… in us.

Sófocles, "Antígona"

“Muitas são as maravilhas do mundo, mas o homem supera-as a todas”

“Embora invente sábios e úteis expedientes para além de toda a esperança, caminha necessariamente para o mal ou para o bem.”

Sófocles, Antígona, primeiro Estásimo, coro

“Many are the wonders of the world, but man surpasses them all”

“Though he invents wise and useful expedients beyond all hope, he walks necessarily to evil or to good.”

“Fonte de toda a felicidade é a sabedoria.”

Sófocles, Antígona, Comos, coro

“The source of all happiness is wisdom.”

A Finalidade da Arte

Por Ana Tereza Miranda

A finalidade da arte é figurar o sentido escondido das coisas e não a sua aparência; porque nesta verdade profunda está a sua verdadeira realidade, que não aparece nos contornos exteriores.

Aristóteles

Poem

by Maria Odete Madeira

In the domain of the poem, the language and the discourse intermix, the truth becomes a principle of justice, in a tensional equilibrium between the linguistic form and the metric form.

Emptied of the linguistic and metric constraints, the referential function is exercised in the singularity of the relation of the poem with the living experience of the poet, linked to the emotion displaced and incorporated in the creation. In a pre-reflexive and ante-predicative singular relation, rooted in the rotative situational flux of the trajectivity of the object in the world, the poem comes to the presence.

The Transhumanist Monster

by Carl Gustav and Maria Odete Madeira

" 'To humanize oneself is to universalize oneself from within', they say. Hasn't the universality of the extermination of bodies as well as of the environment, from AUSCHWITZ to CHERNOBYL, succeeded in dehumanizing us from without by shattering our ethic and aesthetic bearings, our very perception of our surroundings?"

Virilo, Art and Fear

The gap between human and transhuman has been defined by the passing of a border, a border of the flesh and of the blood, of the idea of humanity, such passing is a passing by and a passing over, once the human passes over towards the extreme social Darwinism and Nazi-based ideology of the transhuman, where the first step in the wake of the human is the expectancy of that which is to be born – the inhuman.

Transhuman skills that glorify the instrumental, the superficiality... the superficiality of surfaces, the superficiality of thinking, the superficiality of a humanity to be the object of a genocide.

Transhuman skills in an inhuman or subhuman mind. Insane mind in a sane body.

The transhuman, faking an ideological basis upon a humanism or even upon a technologically enlightened humanism, distorts and defiles the right of self-determination, it does not defend the elevation of an idea of good founded in values of generosity, compassion, empathy, dignity, freedom and autonomy, rather it defends a genocide of the weak, be it by natural selection or by a social selection in which the access to resources is denied to them.

The neo-fascist utopia where the cultural institutions, themselves, become the object of a cultural Darwinism, a selection process where they are to be judged according to the utility of circumstance. No values but the use and abuse of the human by a post-humane cannibalistic zombie.

Quoting a transhumanist: "I have never understood busybodies who think it is up to them to decide who can live on this planet. If some people are "unfit," they will not survive (...)"http://www.geniebusters.org/33_postnazi.html

This, survival of the fittest, social Darwinism is, of course, not generally based upon a natural selection but upon a social one, based upon a difference between those that can afford to be good-looking monsters and those that cannot afford or refuse to be so.

Not as much a matter of bettering the human, but a matter of monstratively instrumentalising the flesh as meat to feed a pornographic industry of monstration, that produces monsters and markets them.

The transhuman monster is not a monster because of the biological differences, those are surface effects, he is a monster whenever the inhuman border is crossed, whenever fundamental elements of humanity become nuisance, ethical noise to be relativised due to an ideological commitment to a subhuman inhumanity.

These transhuman ideologists are already not human anymore. They have become already subhuman pornographers, because even without prosthetics they have already given up that which makes them human, they have already crossed the border and embraced the social Darwinistic and Nazi-based monstrative thinking whose pre-condition of acceptance is the acceptance of the negation of the idea of humanity.