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Add anything you think is relevant to the course here. Any contribution, large or small will help us  collect and hold what we think is important to keep as traces of our journey through the vast worlds of technique.

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What have you learned about your living space that you didn't know before?

Rebecca Wender: Shoulder opener

Assignment: 1) Recall an early memory of dance practice. What can you recall about how you conducted yourself toward that form? 2) What year was it? Do some quick research about that year. Next week bring to class one thing that happened in the world that year.

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Naomi Klein on Global Neoliberalism | Big Think

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Roles: Caller/Recorder

Around the room: What happened that year? (assignment)

Rebecca Wender: Jaw release

Mapping technique: see PDF ^

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 1

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 1

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 1 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 2

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 2

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 2 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 3

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 3

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 3 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 4

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 4

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 4 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 5

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 5

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 5 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 6

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 6

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 6 of 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 7

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MICHEL FOUCAULT: The Culture of the Self Part 7

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Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 7 of 7

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Andrew journal entry reading

Rebecca Wender: Wrists & forearms

Discussion: Foucault & the ontology of thought

Assignment: Read Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Chapters 1 & 2 - see study questions

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THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

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THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

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DUE: Read PEATSC ch. 1 & 2

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DUE: read both chapters
bell hooks - Work: What’s love got to do with it? &
bell hooks - Values: Living by a love ethic
Journal: reflect & write a question to bring to class next
week.

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bell hooks describes 'perfect' as the will to refine. Does the image of 'perfect; come to mind when you think about the technique that you are working with? Reflect on that  image or its absence in relation to your knowledge about your body. 

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bell hooks describes 'perfect' as the will to refine. Does the image of 'perfect; come to mind when you think about the technique that you are working with? Reflect on that  image or its absence in relation to your knowledge about your body. 

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DUE: assignment
Let's say technique is a care work, a type of labour whose potential in society is to be observable or not. Create an expressive offering that engages these two facets of technique: visibility and invisibility.

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS - CREATIVE PROBLEMS

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IF MICHEL FOUCAULT had survived AIDS in 1984 and had stayed alive until the invention of effective antiretroviral therapy, he would be ninety-three years old today. Would he have agreed to confine himself in his apartment on rue de Vaugirard in Paris? The first philosopher of history to die from complications resulting from the acquired immunodeficiency virus left us with some of the most effective tools for considering the political management of the epidemic-ideas that, in this atmosphere of rampant and contagious disinformation, are like cognitive protective equipment.

The most important thing we learned from Foucault is that the living (therefore mortal) body is the central object of all politics. There are no politics that are not body politics. But for Foucault, the body is not first a given biological organism on which power then acts. The very task of political action is to fabricate a body, to put it to work, to define its modes of production and reproduction, to foreshadow the modes of discourse by which that body is fictionalized to itself until it is able to say "I." Foucault's entire oeuvre can be understood as a historical analysis of different techniques by which power manages the life and death of populations. Between 1975 and 1976, the years when he published Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) and the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality), Foucault used the notion of "biopolitics" to speak of the relationship that power establishes with the social body in modernity. He describes the transition from what he calls a sovereign society, in which sovereignty is defined in terms of commanding the ritualization of death, to a "disciplinary society," which oversees and maximizes the life of populations as a function of national interest. For Foucault, the techniques of biopolitical government spread as a network of power that goes beyond the juridical spheres to become a horizontal, tentacular force, traversing the entire territory of lived experience and penetrating each individual body.

During and after the AIDS crisis, many writers expanded on and radicalized Foucault's hypotheses by exploring the relationship of immunity and biopolitics. The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito analyzed the links between the political notion of community and the biomedical and epidemiological notion of immunity. The two terms share a common root, the Latin munus, the duty (tax, tribute, gift) someone must pay to be part of the community. The community is cum (with) munus: a human group connected by common law and reciprocal obligation. The noun immunitas is a privative word that stems from the negation of munus. In Roman law, immunity was a privilege that released someone from the obligations shared by all. He who had been exempted was immunized. He who had been de-munized, conversely, had been stripped of all community privileges after having been deemed a threat to the community.

Esposito emphasizes that all biopolitics is immunological: Biopolitics implies a hierarchy with the immunized at the top and the de-munized, who will be excluded from any act of immunological protection, at the bottom. That is the paradox of biopolitics: All protective acts include an immunitary definition of community in which the collective grants itself the power to decide to sacrifice a part of the population in order to maintain its own sovereignty. The "state of exception" is the normalization of this intolerable paradox.

Starting in the nineteenth century, with the discovery of the first vaccine against smallpox and Louis Pasteur's and Robert Koch's microbiological experiments, the notion of immunity left the realm of law and acquired a medical meaning. The liberal and patriarchal-colonial European democracies of the nineteenth century constructed the ideal of the modern individual not only as a free economic agent (male, white, heterosexual) but also as an immunized body, radically separated, that owed nothing to the community. For Esposito, the way Nazi Germany characterized parts of its own population (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled) as bodies that threatened the sovereignty of the Aryan community is a paradigmatic example of the dangers of immunitary biopolitics. That immunological understanding of society did not end with Nazism-quite the opposite: It thrived in the United States and Europe, legitimizing the management politics used to control racialized minorities and migrant populations. It is this immunitary ethos that defines current border regimes and underpins the militarized strategies deployed by ICE at the US-Mexico frontier and by Frontex to defend the Schengen Area.

In her 1994 book Flexible Bodies, the anthropologist Emily Martin analyzed the relationship between immunity and politics in American culture during the polio and AIDS crises. The body's immunity, Martin states, is not a biological fact independent of cultural and political variables. On the contrary, what we understand to be immunity is constructed through social and political criteria that produce sovereignty or exclusion, protection or stigmatization, life or death.

Tell me how your community constructs its political sovereignty and I will tell you what forms your plagues will take.

To consider the history of pandemics through the prism offered by Foucault, Esposito, and Martin is to arrive at the following proposition: Tell me how your community constructs its political sovereignty and I will tell you what forms your plagues will take and how you will confront them. In the domain of the individual body, different sicknesses materialize the obsessions that dominate bio- and necro-politics in a given period. In Foucault's terms, an epidemic radicalizes and shifts biopolitical techniques by incorporating them at the level of the individual body. At the same time, an epidemic extends to the whole of the population the political measures of immunization that had until then been violently applied onto those who were considered to be aliens both within and at the borders of national territory.

The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society's immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty's dreams of omnipotence-and its impotence. Foucault's, Esposito's, and Martin's hypotheses may posit epidemics as sociopolitical constructions rather than strictly biological phenomena, but they have nothing to do with ridiculous conspiracy theories about lab-designed viruses paving the way for authoritarian power grabs. To the contrary, they allow us to appreciate how the virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens, and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial, or migrant minorities before the state of exception.

Take syphilis, for example. The epidemic reached Naples for the first time in 1494. The European colonial enterprise had just begun; the disease, in a way, launched the colonial destruction and racial politics to come. The English called it the "French disease," the French said it was the "Neapolitan disease," and the Neapolitans said it came from America; it was thought to have been brought by the colonizers who had been infected by the "Indians." It was rather the opposite. The exchange of pathogens was massively asymmetrical; European germs devastated the New World. The virus, neither living nor dead, neither organism nor machine, Derrida said, is always the foreigner, the other, the one from elsewhere. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection, materialized in bodies the forms of repression and exclusion that dominated modernity: the obsession with racial purity, the injunction against so-called mixed marriages between people of different classes and races, and the multiple restrictions that weighed on sexual relations. At the nexus of this model of community and of immunity, the sovereign body fabricated by syphilis was the white, bourgeois body, sexually confined in conjugal life and consigned to the reproduction of the national population. Thus the prostitute became the living body that condensed all abject political signifiers during the syphilis epidemic: As a working and often racialized woman, a body outside the laws of home and marriage, who turned her sexuality into her means of production, the sex worker was made visible, controlled and stigmatized as the principal vector of infection. At the end of the eighteenth century, social thinkers such as Restif de la Bretonne imagined that the end of syphilis would come with the incarceration of prostitutes in national brothels where women could provide sexual services as their national duty-during every pandemic there are popular gurus offering magic solutions who come to comfort the hegemonic order.

But it was not the repression of prostitution or the confinement of sex workers to national brothels that brought syphilis under control. To the contrary, the confinement of prostitutes only made them more vulnerable to the disease. What allowed for the near eradication of syphilis was the discovery of penicillin in 1928, as well as a series of profound transformations that directly and indirectly impacted sexual and bodily emancipation during the same decade: the rise of decolonization movements, white women's suffrage, the first decriminalization of homosexuality, the relative liberalization of the ethics of heterosexual marriage.

In the late twentieth century, AIDS would be to heteronormative neoliberal society what syphilis had been to colonial capitalism during early modernity. The first official reports appeared in 1981; activists had finally gathered momentum in removing homosexuality from the realm of psychiatric disease. In 1973, after decades as the pathologized pretext for discrimination and persecution, homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders. The first phase of the epidemic disproportionately affected what were then called the Four H's: homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heroin users. Later, hookers were added to the list. AIDS reconstituted and remodeled the colonial control grid of bodies and updated the surveillance techniques of sexuality that syphilis had initially woven together. As did the suppression of prostitution during the syphilis crisis, the repression of homosexuality only increased the number of deaths. The AIDS community/immunity model is linked to the fantasy of male sexual sovereignty understood to be a nonnegotiable right to penetration, whereas every penetrated body (in the forms of homosexuality, femininity, anality) is perceived as lacking sovereignty (de-munized). In fact, what gradually transformed AIDS into a chronic disease was the depathologization of homosexuality; the pharmacological empowerment of the Global South; women's sexual emancipation, which allowed them to say no to sex without condoms; and access to antiretroviral therapies irrespective of social class or degree of racialization.

Well before the appearance of Covid-19, a process of global mutation was already underway-we were undergoing social and political changes as profound as those that transpired in early modernity. We are still in the throes of the transition from a written to a cyber-oral society, from an industrial to an immaterial economy, from a form of disciplinary and architectural control to forms of microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control. In other writings, I've used the term pharmacopornographic for this type of management and production of the body as well as to describe the political technologies that produce sexual subjectivity within this new configuration of power and knowledge. We are no longer regulated solely by their passage through disciplinary institutions (school, factory, barracks, hospital, etc.) but by a set of biomolecular technologies that enter into the body by way of microprostheses and technologies of digital surveillance subtler and more insidious than anything Gilles Deleuze envisioned in his famous prognostications about the society of control. In the domain of sexuality, the pharmacological modification of consciousness and behavior, the mass consumption of antidepressants and anxiolytics, and the globalization of the contraceptive pill, as well as antiretroviral therapies, preventative AIDS therapies, and Viagra, are some of the indicators of biotechnological management, which in turn synergizes with new modes of semio-technical management that have arisen with the surveillance state and the global expansion of the network into every facet of life. I use the term pornographic because these management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.

The mutation in progress could ultimately catalyze a shift from an anthropocentric society where a fraction of the global human community authorizes itself to exercise a politics of universal extractivist predation to a society that is capable of redistributing energy and sovereignty. At the center of the debate during and after this crisis will be which lives are the ones we want to save. It is in the context of this mutation, of this transformation of the modes of understanding community (one that encompasses the entire planet, since separation is no longer possible) and immunity, that the virus is operating and that the political strategy to confront it is taking shape.
IMMUNITY AND BORDER POLITICS
At least since the fall of the twin towers, governmental politics has been characterized by the redefinition of nation-states in terms of neocolonialism and identity and the return (after the Reagan-Thatcherite phase of neoliberalism, which stressed free movement and free trade) to the idea of the physical border as a condition for restoring national integrity and political sovereignty. Israel, the United States, Russia, Turkey, and the European Economic Community have spearheaded the conception of new borders that, for the first time since the fall of the sniper-patrolled Berlin Wall, have been guarded and defended not only via biopolitical means but incrementally via necropolitical devices, using techniques of exclusion and death.

European and North American societies have decided to construct themselves like entirely immunized communities, closed to the east and to the south, even though these two regions are its chief suppliers of fossil fuels and consumer goods. The construction of this political immunity exemplified the neo-sovereignist governmentality: Europe closed borders in Greece, Italy, and Spain in 2015 and built the largest outdoor detention centers in history around the Mediterranean. The destruction of Europe-for that is what we are witnessing-paradoxically began with that construction of an immune European community, open in its interior but completely closed to foreigners and migrants.

The new frontier is your epidermis. The new Lampedusa is your skin.

What is now being tested on a global scale through the management of Covid-19 is a new way of understanding sovereignty. The body, your individual body, as a life space and as a network of power, as a center of production and of energy consumption, has become the new territory where the violent border politics that we have been designing and testing for years on "others" are now expressed, now taking the form of containment measures and of a war against the virus. The new necropolitical frontier has shifted from the coast of Greece toward the door of your home. Lesbos now starts at your doorstep. And the border is forever tightening around you, pushing you ever closer to your body. Calais blows up in your face. The new frontier is the mask. The air that you breathe has to be yours alone. The new frontier is your epidermis. The new Lampedusa is your skin. For years, we considered migrants and refugees infectious to the community and placed them in detention centers-political limbos where they remained without rights and without citizenship; perpetual waiting rooms. Now we are living in detention centers in our own homes.
BIOPOLITICS IN THE PHARMACOPORNOGRAPHIC ERA
Epidemics, through the declaration of a state of exception, are great laboratories of social innovation, the occasion for the large-scale reconfiguration of body procedures and technologies of power. Foucault analyzed the transition from leper management to plague management as the process through which the disciplinary techniques of the spatialization of power were deployed in modernity. While lepers had been treated with strictly necropolitical measures that excluded them-condemning them, if not to physical death, then at least to social death, to life outside the community-early-modern efforts to control the plague ushered in disciplinary management, with its strict segmentation of the city and confinement of each body in every home.

Strategies adopted by countries confronting Covid-19 exemplify two completely different types of biopolitical technology. The first, involving home confinement for the whole population and operating first in Wuhan, China, then in Italy, Spain, and France, and later in the UK and US, applies strict disciplinary measures that in many respects are not very different from the eighteenth-century approaches documented by Foucault. Strict spatial partitioning, the closing of towns and outlying districts, a prohibition against leaving the area. Everyone is ordered to stay indoors. If it is necessary to leave the house, it will be done by one person at a time, avoiding any meeting. The gaze is absolutely pervasive. Everyone locked up in their cage, everyone at their window. Only the town stewards, medical teams, and police officers will move about the streets and among the infected bodies, from one corpse to another, the "crows" or "terminators" who can be left to die: These are working-class, racialized people "who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices." To reread the chapter on plague management in Europe in Discipline and Punish is to be struck by the fact that French border policies with regard to epidemics have not changed much in centuries. What is at work here is the logic of the architectural frontier, which emphasizes not only home quarantine but also the treatment of infection in isolated hospital wards. That technique has not proven entirely effective.

The second strategy, implemented in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, among other places, involves moving away from modern techniques of disciplinary and architectural control to pharmacopornographic techniques. The emphasis here is on the individual detection of the viral load through the multiplication of tests and constant digital surveillance of patients through their mobile devices. Cell phones and credit cards become surveillance tools that allow close tracking of individual bodies that may be carrying the virus. We do not need biometric bracelets. The cell phone has become the best bracelet: No one parts with it even when sleeping. GPS informs the police of the movement of any body that is suspect. The individual's temperature and other vital signs are observed in real time by the digital instruments of a cyberauthoritarian eye. Here, society is a community of users, and sovereignty is above all digital dominion and the management of big data. In April, Apple and Google signed an agreement to launch a new smartphone-tracking application for Covid-19. If the phone user tests positive, the app notifies public-health authorities; they would then alert anyone whose smartphone has come near the infected person's phone during the previous fourteen days. But such techniques of political immunization are not new and were not only previously deployed for research and the capture of so-called terrorists. Since the early 2010s, for example, Taiwan has legalized access to all activity from sexual-encounter apps, with the ostensible goal of preventing the propagation of AIDS as well as prostitution over the internet. Covid-19 has legitimized and extended such governmental practices of biosurveillance and digital control by standardizing them and making them "necessary" to maintain a feeling of immunity and national health. Nevertheless, the governments that have implemented extreme digital-surveillance measures have not yet envisioned prohibiting the traffic and consumption of wild animals or the industrial production of birds and mammals-which is at the origin of viral zoonosis production, including SARS-COV-2-nor the reduction of CO2 emissions. What has grown is not the immunity of the social body but the tolerance of citizens under the cybernetic control of the state and corporations.

The political management of Covid-19 as a form of administration of life and death gives shape to a new subjectivity. What will have been invented after the crisis is a new utopia of the immunitary community and a new form of high-tech mass control of human bodies. The subjects of the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies that Covid-19 is in the midst of creating do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands. They do not exchange physical goods, nor do they pay with money. They are digital consumers equipped with credit cards. They do not have lips or tongues. They do not speak directly; they leave a voice mail. They do not gather together and they do not collectivize. They are radically un-dividual. They do not have faces; they have masks. In order to exist, their organic bodies are hidden behind an indefinite series of semio-technical mediations, an array of cybernetic prostheses that work like digital masks: email addresses, Facebook, Instagram, Zoom, and Skype accounts. They are not physical agents but rather tele-producers; they are codes, pixels, bank accounts, doors without names, addresses to which Amazon can send its orders.

Covid-19 has also made visible a cartography of unproductive zones of the social body within the new pharmacopornographic system, which are emerging as obsolete in the new regime of technical-digital production. These are zones or population groups that had already been left on the other side of the biopolitical frontier but that today appear twice as vulnerable: the elderly, in particular those who are institutionalized within the death industries known as nursing homes, for whom it is too late to transform into technical-cybernetic subjects; people considered handicapped, in particular those institutionalized within the death industries known as homes for the disabled; criminalized and incarcerated people within the death industries known as prisons and detention centers, parallel universes totally outside the market bubble of the internet. Homeless bodies (outside of domestic disciplinarity as well as digital consumption and control) are considered criminal by the very fact of eluding confinement and are secluded in detention centers that promise more contagion than cure. That wage labor is itself an institution of confinement has never been clearer than now, as we witness "essential" workers as de-munized bodies brutally forced into spaces of lethal risk. The subways of New York are as crowded as ever because the transit authority has severely cut back on the number of trains. The essential workers forced to ride are disproportionately low-income, disproportionately migrants, disproportionately racialized bodies. Their forced mobility is also a type of incarceration. In relation to all of them, traditional confinement institutions, including hospitals, now appear not as enclaves where social and disciplinary order is maintained, but as fragile links in a mutating bio-necropolitical chain.
THE SOFT PRISON: WELCOME TO THE TELE-REPUBLIC OF YOUR HOME
One of the fundamental biopolitical changes in pharmacopornographic techniques characterizing the Covid-19 crisis is that the domestic space, and not traditional institutions of social confinement and normalization (hospital, factory, prison, school, etc.), now appears as the new center of production, consumption, and political control. The home is no longer only the place where the body is confined, as was the case under plague management. The private residence has now become the center of the economy of tele-consumption and tele-production, but also the surveillance pod. The domestic space henceforth exists as a point in a zone of cybersurveillance, an identifiable place on a Google map, an image that is recognized by a drone.

When I studied the Playboy Mansion a few years ago-first the original gothic manor in Chicago, then the Los Angeles successor-I was interested in how it was already functioning, in the midst of the Cold War, as a laboratory in which new pharmacopornographic devices for controlling the body and sexuality were invented. Such devices began to spread through the West as early as the end of the twentieth century and with the Covid-19 crisis have extended to the entire population of the world. When I was conducting my research into the mansion, I was struck by the fact that Hugh Hefner, one of the richest men on earth, had spent nearly forty years lounging around at home, dressed in pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers, drinking Pepsis and eating Butterfingers. Hefner directed and produced the largest-circulation men's magazine in the United States without leaving the house, often without leaving his bed. Connected to a telephone, a radio, a stereo, and a video camera, Hefner's bed was a genuine multimedia production platform.

His biographer Steven Watts characterized Hefner as a voluntary recluse in his own paradise. A fan of every means of archiving audiovisual material long before cell phones, Facebook, or WhatsApp, Hefner made more than twenty video- and audio cassettes a day, containing material ranging from interviews to instructions for his employees. Covered in wood paneling and thick curtains but penetrated by thousands of cables and filled with the era's most advanced telecommunication technologies, the mansion was at once entirely opaque and completely transparent. Hefner had installed a closed-circuit camera in the residence, where there also lived some dozen Playmates, and he could access every room in real time from his control center. The material filmed by the surveillance cameras also ended up in the pages of the magazine.

Beyond the transformation of heterosexual pornography into mass culture, the silent biopolitical revolution launched by Playboy signified a challenge to the divisions that had been at the root of nineteenth-century industrial society: the separation of the spheres of production and reproduction, the difference between the factory and the home, and, along with that, the patriarchal distinction between masculinity and femininity. Playboy tackled that difference by proposing the creation of a new life enclave: the bachelor pad, connected to new technologies of communication. Its new semio-technical producer need never leave, either for work or to make love-and what's more, those activities had become indiscernible. His round bed was at once his worktable, his manager's desk, a photo-shoot set, and a place for sexual encounters; it was also a television studio where the famous program Playboy After Dark was filmed. Playboy anticipated discourses on telecommuting and immaterial production that the management of the Covid-19 crisis has transformed into a national duty. Hefner called this new social producer the "horizontal worker." The vector of social innovation that Playboy set in motion promoted the erosion (and then the destruction) of distance between work and pleasure, production and sex. The life of the playboy, constantly filmed and diffused through magazines and television, was entirely public, even if the playboy never left his home or even his bed. Playboy 's challenge to the division between the masculine and feminine spheres lay in turning the new multimedia operator into an "indoors man," which seemed like an oxymoron at the time. Watts reminds us that that productive isolation needed chemical support: Hefner was a consumer of the amphetamine Dexedrine. So, paradoxically, the man who never got out of bed did not get much sleep. The bed as a new multimedia operation center was a pharmacopornographic cell: It could only function with the use of the contraceptive pill, with drugs that sustained a high level of production and, eventually, with a broadband connection so as to maintain the constant flux of semiotic codes, which had become the playboy's sole true sustenance.

The bed as a new multimedia operation center could only function with the use of the contraceptive pill, with drugs that maintained a high level of production and, eventually, with a broadband connection so as to maintain the constant flux of semiotic codes.

Does all this seem familiar to you now? Does all this oddly resemble your own confined life? Let us remember the slogans used by French and American leaders alike: We are at war. Do not leave your home. Telecommute. The biopolitical measures for contagion management imposed during the Covid-19 crisis have turned horizontal workers-more or less playboyesque, their labor cognitive or immaterial-into the most likely survivors of this pandemic. Each of our domestic spaces is today ten thousand times more technical than Hefner's rotating bed was in 1968. Telecommuting and devices of telecontrol are henceforth at the tip of our fingers. Outside, subaltern vertical workers, racialized and feminized bodies, have been condemned.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzed monks' cells as vectors of and models for the transition from the sovereign regime, with its bloody techniques of controlling the body and subjectivity, to the disciplinary architectures and devices of confinement that arose in the eighteenth century for the management of entire populations. Disciplinary architectures were secular versions of monastic cells, spaces in which the modern individual was made into a soul confined within a body-a literate soul able to read the orders of the state. When the writer Tom Wolfe visited Hefner, he wrote that the latter was living in a prison that was as soft as an artichoke heart. One might say that the Playboy Mansion and Hefner's rotating bed, transformed into objects of pop consumption, functioned during the Cold War as spaces of transition where the new prosthetic, the ultraconnected subject, and also the new forms of pharmacopornographic production and consumption that would come to characterize contemporary society were invented. That mutation has become widespread and has amplified with the management of the Covid-19 crisis: Our portable telecommunication machines are our new jailers and our own domestic interiors have become the soft and ultraconnected prisons of the future.
SUBMISSION OR MUTATION
All this could be bad news or a great opportunity. It is precisely because our bodies are the new enclaves of biopower and because our apartments are the new cells of biovigilance that it is more urgent than ever to invent new strategies of cognitive emancipation and resistance, to set in motion new forms of antagonism.

It is precisely because our bodies are the new enclaves of biopower and because our apartments are the new cells of biovigilance that it is more urgent than ever to invent new strategies of cognitive emancipation and resistance.

Contrary to what one might imagine, our health will not come from a border or separation, but only from a new understanding of community with all living creatures, a new sharing with other beings on the planet. We need a parliament not defined in terms of the politics of identity or nationality: a parliament of (vulnerable) bodies living on planet Earth. The Covid-19 event and its consequences summon us to once and for all go beyond the violence with which we have defined our social immunity. Healing and rehabilitation cannot be a simple negative gesture of social retreat, of the immunological closing of the community. Healing and care can only stem from a process of political transformation. Healing as a society would mean inventing a new community beyond the identity and border politics with which we have produced sovereignty until now, but also beyond the reduction of life to cybernetic biosurveillance. To stay alive, to maintain life as a planet, in the face of the virus, but also in the face of the effects of centuries of ecological and cultural destruction, means implementing new structural forms of global cooperation. Just as the virus mutates, if we want to resist submission, we must also mutate.

We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation. We must operate a critical reappropriation of biopolitical techniques and their pharmacopornographic devices. First, it is imperative to modify the relationship between our bodies and biovigilant machines of biocontrol: They are not only communication devices. We must learn collectively to alter them. We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together.

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, a curator, and a trans activist. An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, a collection of his columns between 2013 and 2018 for Libération and other media outlets, was published in 2019 by Semiotext(e).
Translated from French by Molly Stevens.

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IF MICHEL FOUCAULT had survived AIDS in 1984 and had stayed alive until the invention of effective antiretroviral therapy, he would be ninety-three years old today. Would he have agreed to confine himself in his apartment on rue de Vaugirard in Paris?

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There are several reasons why know yourself has obscured take care of yourself. First there has been a profound transformation in the morals of western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality in austere principles under the precept that we should give more care to ourselves than to anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as immorality, as the means of escape of all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality, which makes self-renunciation the condition of salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically a means on self-renunciation. We also inherit a secular tradition that sees an external law as the basis of morale. How then can respect for the self be the basis for morality? We are the inheritors of a social morality that seeks the rules for acceptable behavior and relations with others. Since the 16th century, criticism of established morality has been undertaken in the name of the of recognizing and valuing the self, therefore it is difficult to see the care of the self as compatible with morality. Know thyself has obscured take care of yourself because our morality and morality of asceticism insists that self is that which one can reject. The second reason is that in theoretical ... from Descartes to Rousseau knowledge of the self, the thinking subject, takes on an ever-increasing importance as the first step in the theory of knowledge. To summarize, there has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, the care of the self and knowing yourself. In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of self appeared as the consequence of the care for self. In the modern world, knowledge for oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.

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1) What constitutes self-knowledge? & How do we get to know ourselves? /What are the means to getting to know ourselves?
2) What constitutes self-care? & What do we take for self-care? / When there is already an industry around that?

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By Ursula K. Le Guin: Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way Fearless

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By Ursula K. Le Guin: Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way Fearless

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To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer.

What does that mean,
to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear?
Favor debases:
we fear to lose it,
fear to win it.
So to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.

What does that mean,
to take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer?
I suffer because I'm a body;
if I weren't a body,
how could I suffer?

So people who set their bodily good
before the public good
could be entrusted with the commonwealth,
and people who treated the body politic
as gently as their own body
would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

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A map of the language used to introduce each other to our chosen self studies.

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Definition of virtuosity. 1 : great technical skill (as in the practice of a fine art) 2 : a taste for or interest in virtu.

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When Macarena invited me to participate in this special issue on "Decolonial Gesture," I had already been invited by Rozina Cazali to participate in an event titled "Del gesto al pensamiento decolonial" in Guatemala under the auspices of Absurdo. Simposio de Arte y Pensamiento Político Contemporáneo. Both titles bring "gesture" next to "decolonial." Since I have been working on the idea of "decolonial option(s)" in conversation with the "decolonial turn," it was both intriguing and compelling to think about this new dimension of decoloniality. "Decolonial turn " acquired its meaning in the frame of previously defined "turns": linguistic turn, pragmatic turn, and discursive turn. Furthermore, before going to Guatemala I attended a workshop in Pittsburg entitled "Mimicry and Decolonial Performance" where Native American art historian and curator, Jolene Rickard, opened up the workshop with a lecture in which Native American rituals and ceremonies were interwoven with Western performances. At that point I began to think that if we take "gesture" to mean a movement of part of the body, then the same term "gesture" would conjure different meanings when the frame is a ritual, a ceremony, or a performance. Why? Because ritual and ceremony, on the one hand, and performance on the other belong to different universes of meaning. If we, in front of a ritual or a ceremony, name them performance it would be as irreverent and offensive as it would be for a performer to hear his or her performance called ritual or ceremony.

"Decolonial option" was framed in relation to two universes of meaning. On the one hand, ideological options (systems of ideas) such as Christianity, Liberalism, and Marxism (pervasive in Western civilizations), and Islamism or Confucianism beyond the West; and on the other, disciplinary options (social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, professional schools, etc.). What, then, are "decolonial gestures "? What are the set of "gestures" that are not decolonial and in relation to which "decolonial gesture" defines itself as an option? If "gestures" are signs and if "universes of meanings" are semantic frames, at what juncture could gesture be created or interpreted as decolonial?

The first step toward answering these questions, then, was reviewing the meaning of gesture:

ges*ture \ˈjes-chər, ˈjesh-\

n (ME, fr. AF, fr. ML gestura mode of action, fr. L gestus, pp. ofgerere) (15c) 1 archaic : carriage bearing 2 : a movement usu. of the body or limbs that expresses or emphasizes an idea, sentiment, or attitude 3 : the use of motions of the limbs or body as a means of expression 4 : something said or done by way of formality or courtesy, as a symbol or token, or for its effect on the attitudes of others <a political ⁓ to draw popular support>. (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

What, then, would a "decolonial gesture" be and/or do when its meaning lies not in the content but in the process and the context (in the universe of meaning)? Any sign that we-human beings or living organisms endowed with a nervous system, walking on two extremities, and using the other two to inscribe signs in flat surfaces, and the mouth to produce sounds that convey complex meanings-generate, create, or make is always embedded in universes of meanings that we also create and that allow us to understand a given sign, gesture, or attitude (see Mignolo 1989). When we say, for example, "sociology" or "Christianity" or "Islam" or "liberalism," none of these names name a homogeneous semantic field. All of them are "non-homogenous," and name a given universe of meaning. Sociology or liberalism or Christianity or Islam, etc., are such universes of meaning. In spite of the diversity that characterizes a given universe of meaning, each carries in its definition its own frontiers. No one will confuse "liberalism" with "sociology" or "Christianity" with "Islam," although it is possible to talk about Christian or Islamic or liberal sociology. But no one will confuse sociology with psychology, for example, in spite of the fact that they are both "diverse" in themselves, solidified as they are by a narrative within each universe of meaning. Christianity, Islam, sociology, or liberalism-each of them is not an ontological entity that someone outside the universe of meaning has named as such. Universes of meaning are invented and constituted by a narrative that belongs to the same universe. There is no metanarrative that could constitute a universe of meaning to which the constituting narrative doesn't belong.

Similarly with "decolonial." It is certainly diverse, but few people will confuse decolonial with postcolonial for the distinction between the "de" and the "post" is non-negotiable by the self-constituting narrative of each respective universe of meaning. The "post" and the "de" belong to different genealogies of meanings, processes, and contexts, having in common an element of content: colonialism. Negotiations can take place among agents that engage in meaning-making in different universes, and become "observers" (scientific observers?) of "post" and "de" universes of meaning to which their own discourse does not belong.

The "post" remains within the modern colonization of time and space (see Mignolo 2011). The idea of European Renaissance was built upon a double colonization-that of space and that of time. The colonization of time consisted in inventing "Antiquity" and the "Middle Ages" and placing the "European Renaissance" in the present of a linear history. The colonization of space and time and the universalization of Western history made a number of moves possible: the "relegation" of the history of China to modernity's past; the demonization of Islamism; the exclusion of the entire African continent from history (e.g., Hegel); as well as ignoring (Hegel again) of the splendors and contributions of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations to human history. By con-fusing the European narrative of global history with the history of Europe, the self-fashioning narrative of Western Civilization left at the margin of its history the regions and people that Europe colonized. Simultaneously, the Middle Ages also made it possible to place Western Christianity at the center of their known world, which before the Renaissance was Jerusalem.

The "de" in decolonial emphasizes the confrontation with "colonial" at the very moment that it appears (e.g., the Taki Onkoy movement in colonial Peru). The history of the "decolonial," not as an academic discipline or field of study, but as a response to designs of the invaders, is part and parcel of the history of "modernity/coloniality" (see Mignolo 2009). As a matter of fact, the colonization of space gave rise to a historical complexity that can only be properly addressed if we delink from the Euro-centered assumptions that relate "les mots et les choses" and that Michel Foucault, after Jorge Luis Borges, brilliantly theorized. Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality is one complex concept-a concept that is not naming a thing or event but a complex relational structure of power that Anibal Quijano has summarized as "domination/exploitation/conflict" (Quijano 2000, 555). "Domination" and "exploitation" are not only physical relations but epistemic as well: dominance and exploitation require justification and legitimation. When both are taken for granted by the majority of the population they are hegemonic. This means that "domination and exploitation" could be achieved either by hegemony or by force (police, army).

That something like gesture, turn, or option, could become a name carrying "decolonial" as an adjective presupposes that gesture, turn, and option could be something not only decolonial. "Decolonial gesture" and "Christian, Islamic or sociological gestures" are all meaningful and acceptable expressions. But here we are now in the real nexus of what I describe as the space of options. We have to conclude that not every gesture, not every "X," is decolonial. For an "X" to be decolonial it is necessary that such "X" carries an indication that connects a given gesture with the decolonial universe of meaning.

The semantic domain in which "decolonial gesture" has been proposed invokes the notion of "performance" which, in general, describes some kind of action:

per*for*mance \pə(r)-ˈfȯr-mən(t)s\

n (15c) 1 a : the execution of an action b : something accomplished :deed feat 2 : the fulfillment of a claim, promise, or request :implementation 3 a : the action of representing a character in a play b : a public presentation or exhibition 〈a benefit ⁓〉 4 a : the ability to perform :efficiency b : the manner in which a mechanism performs 〈engine ⁓〉 5 : the manner of reacting to stimuli :behavior 6 : the linguistic behavior of an individual :parole; also : the ability to speak a certain language compare competence. (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

If we understand the definition of "gesture" as a "a movement of the body or limbs that expresses or emphasizes an idea, sentiment, or attitude," we narrow down the meaning of "decolonial gesture": it is a body movement which carries a decolonial sentiment or/and a decolonial intention; a movement that points toward something in relation to something already constituted that the addressed of the gesture or whomever sees the gesture, recognizes in relation to "colonial gesture." Universes of meaning are never constituted in themselves but always in relation to networks of differences. If, for example, many of us have been pleasantly surprised by the several "decolonial gestures" of Pope Francisco, it is because many of us have been for years fed up with the colonial gesture of any other Pope that we experienced in our lives. "The decolonial" option, turn or gesture is always at once analytic of and signs of delinking from coloniality. Delinking means always already being engaged in project and processes of re-existence, re-surgence and re-emergence of all signs of living in plenitude and harmony that coloniality repressed, suppressed, or disavowed in the name and justification of "modernity" as salvation.

Western Civilization has understood performance within the binary of the opposite, as either fictional or not fictional (see Pavel 1989, Mignolo 1987-88). When we say that Marlon Brando's performance in The Godfather was thrilling (or boring), for example, our judgment refers to an event at a different level than the event by which we qualify Mary's performance in class when we say that Mary performed very well, assuming that there is a Mary, there is a class in which she was registered. Ritual and ceremonies in non-Western Civilizations (e.g., Aztecs, Navajos, Ashanti, or Chinese before Western disruption) do not fulfill the expectation of the fictional. Rituals and ceremonies are no mimicry (pretending according to certain explicit rules, and distinguishing from "passing") in the Aristotelian sense. Aristotle's definition of mimesis is not universal; it made sense for the Greeks, and later on it was adopted by the builders of Western Civilization. It traveled over the world with European imperialism, but never erased rituals, ceremonies, story telling, and ancient wisdom in non-Western civilizations. Now, in our time, we know it: resurgence, re-emergence and re-existence are the key words of building decolonial global futures. Decolonial gestures shall be part of these processes rather than a new academic fashion. When "decolonial gestures" delink from Western "performance" (and mimesis, and representation, and the limited universe of meaning of Western Civilization) they become part of decolonial options, attitudes, and turns, at the same time that decolonial options, attitudes, and turns need decolonial gestures to be constituted, felt, seen, understood as such. By delinking and resurging, decolonial subjects and subjectivities are constituted. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes the moment in the "Grandmother Stories" of Elder Edna Manitowabi when:

Gzhwe Mnidoo put her/his right hand to my forehead and s/he transfereed all of Gzhwe Mnidoo's thoughts into me. There were so many, that the thoughts couldn't just stay in my head, they spilled into every part of my being and filled up my whole body. Gzhwe Mnidoo's knowledge was so immense from creating the world that it took all my being to embody it. (Simpson 2012, 42).

This quotation as well as the entire argument unfolded in her book, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back. Stories of nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence (2012), are an unmistakable decolonial gesture grounded in a particular genealogy of being, sensing, believing, and knowing. Canadian First Nations after centuries of decolonial re-existing AND now with full consciousness of their re-surgence and new emergence. The phrase "all my being to embody it" does not refer to a question of the individual but of all individuals in the community. There is no mediation, like the church or the mosque, between the androgynous energy that concentrates and disperses knowledge through all the creation. Gzhwe Mnidoo reaches every living organism in the same way and knowledge is dispersed and embodied in the materiality of re-generation (not production or reproduction) of life.

Embracing and embodying such cosmology, instead of Western imperial Christian, Catholic/Protestant cosmology, means to affirm the equality of beliefs and ways of being. Such a strategy is a strategy of delinking from Western modern epistemology and its hermeneutic which is based in the detachment of soul/body, mind/body and in a Masculine superior being, and also a strategy of regaining the confidence and the knowing of the androgynous Energetic force of Creation. Gzhwe Mindoo (and equivalent names among Aztecs and Incas) is as relevant for pueblos originarios of the Américas as the Bible is for Christians believers. However, for First Nations and Indigenous cosmologies, the Bible is also of relative significance in so far as Native Americans theologians of Liberations can bypass the institution, the Church, and embrace Christ as one of them (see Tinker 2004).Decolonial subjects are in the making, re-covering the principle that knowing is living and living is knowing.

What do I mean by saying that Aristotle's concept of mimesis as the basis to understand comedy and tragedy, worked well for the Greeks, but that was that? For Muslim philosophers and Aztec men of wisdom it was an obscure concept. Jorge Luis Borges's genius and irony captures this dilemma in one of his memorable short story: "Averroes." It is the story of Averroes in the process of translating Aristotle's Poetics and running into serious difficulty to translate the Greek words tragedy and comedy which, for Aristotle, both presuppose mimesis:

His pen moved across the page, the arguments entwined irrefutably, but a slight preoccupation darkened Averroes' felicity. It was caused by the Tahafut, a fortuitous piece of work, but rather by a problem of philological nature related to the monumental work which would justify him in the eyes of men: his commentary on Aristotle. This Greek, fountainhead of all philosophy, had been bestowed upon men to teach them all that could be known; to interpret his works as the ulema interpret the Koran was Averroes' arduous purpose [...] The night before two doubtful words had halted him at the beginning of the Poetics. These words were tragedy and comedy [...]; no one in the whole world of Islam could conjecture what they mean.

Averroes put down his pen [...] From this studious distraction he was distracted by a kind of melody. He looked through the latticework balcony; below, in the narrow earthen patio, some half-naked children were playing. One, standing on another's shoulders, was obviously playing the part of a muezzin; with his eyes tightly closed he chanted: "There is no god but the God." The one who held him motionlessly played the part of the minaret; another, abject in the dust and on his knees, played the part of the faithful worshipers. (Borges 1964, 148; emphasis added)

Averroes' difficulty translating the term comes from the simple fact that the Greek concept of "mimesis" was totally alien to Islam, and of which-let's say it, just in case-Islam has no need. Mimesis is not a universal concept. For that reason Averroes couldn't conceive that what the children were doing was, in the eyes of Aristotle, imitating. In Aristotle's Poetics, he expressed in the word mimesis what today is rendered as performance (often translated as "actuación" in Spanish).

"Gesture" is something we human beings do with the body or that can be interpreted metaphorically as such: "Juan's gift to Mary was a nice gesture." This means that there is a social code by which we, human beings, can communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, by "gesturing" instead of by "speaking" or "writing" or "singing" or "walking." Speaking and writing are the means of communication by which a set of ideas is put together; or conversely, a set of ideas to be articulated requires oral or written expression (which could be in music, or painting, or video, and/or other semiotic sign systems). Speaking and writing are two faces of a particular kind of "language"-verbal language, to be more specific, which has two manifestations, the oral and the written.

French linguist and philosopher Emile Benveniste once observed that verbal language is the only semiotic code that is used to conceive itself as such (e.g., verbal language is a conceptualization created by the use of the code verbal language) as well as to describe, explain and interpret other semiotic codes: sounds (like music), images (like painting), moving images (like cinema) material forms (like sculpture), body movement (like theatre and dance). If you are a musician or a multimedia artist, you will need verbal language (oral or written) to teach about your art, to tell journalists what you do or to convince donors that you need financial support to do what you do. Just dancing or showing videos to a committee that decides on grant and fellowships won't do. Although sometimes it may, like in Flashdance (1983). One can argue that it is also possible to conceive and describe a piece of music by dancing or a painting by composing a piece of music, etc. However, it is through verbal language (oral and written) that all other codes and the world, if you wish, is conceived and interpreted. It is also true that physics and astronomy, for instance, describe and explain many things with numbers. Nonetheless, and in the last analysis, verbal language (oral or written) is necessary to help people beyond the scientist to understand the meaning of a formula, and for the scientist to explain the context of his or her formula.

But that is not all. In verbal language the oral is transmitted through sounds and the written through visual signs. Whether the written code of a given idiom (English, Chinese, Nahuatl, Arabic or Russian) is alphabetic or not, the fact remains that the audible (speech) and the visible (writing) characterize the code identified as "verbal language." The alphabet for deaf people is an interesting case for it brings together the visibility of the written sign with the visibility of the hands's gestures. In these three cases (oral, written and hand-gestures) we remain in the domain of verbal discourses.

Actions named by "performance" in Western Civilization can be either representational or non-representational, and can be fictional or not fictional. Fictional performance actualizes the mimetic code of Western poetics founded in Aristotle's legacies. Artistic performance actualizes the aesthetic code founded in Kant's legacies. Thus, if "gesture" implies performance, fictional and non-fiction, then fictional performances call for the question of aesthetics.

Aesthetics became a philosophical concept in the writing of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. It was derived from the Greek word "aesthesis." Aesthesis refers to the senses, sensibility, sensing, and sensations we feel in the body. With Baumgarten "aesthesis" mutated into "aesthetics" and became a concept naming the philosophical discourse that provides a theory of "aesthesis." Shortly after, Immanuel Kant theorized the "sensations" (aesthesis) of the beautiful and the sublime. While in Baumgarten "aesthesis" refers to sensations in general, Kant restricted his use of the word to the sensations of the beautiful and the sublime. Kant's philosophical discourse became the historical foundation of "aesthetics," a branch of modern Western philosophy that regulates taste. Given the racist assumptions of the time, Kant uses the philosophical discourse on aesthetics (critique of judgment) as well as on reason (critique of pure reason) to classify and rank the population of the world according to their rational and aesthetic capabilities. Kant's aesthetics provided the foundations for the regulation of taste and genius (the artist) in Western modernity. Post-modern (Rancière), altermodern (Bourriaud), and dialectical aesthetics (Jameson) are all variations of modern aesthetics.

If "gestures," like performances, can be fictional or not fictional, are decolonial gestures also fictional or not fictional? The massive and collective gestures of the Arab Intifadas or the Indignados of Greece and Spain suggest a terrain in which the distinction between fictional and non-fictional doesn't apply. They were not fictional in the sense that the manifestations were fictional manifestations, or mimetic (in the Aristotelian sense) manifestations. Yet the graffiti that colored the streets of Tunisia and Cairo were visual images that implied body gestures (the movements of the hands) and the sensations of the entire body, the anger and the anguish, the indignation and the humor needed to deal with the absurdity of the situation. The graffiti are as much non-fictional as they are fictional gestures and visual outcomes. However, it is very important that the graffiti in Tunisia and Cairo were part of the larger social phenomena, the Arab Intifada (see http://electronicintifada.net/tags/graffiti).

One could say that in this case graffiti is a manifestation of "art of protest," an expression popularized in the 1970s. Suggesting the connection with "art of protest," the graffiti in Cairo and Tunisia graffiti is different from, say that of Chicano/as in San Antonio, Texas. In San Antonio, there are two "genres" of graffiti in San Antonio: the majority celebrates the deeds and memories of the Chicano and Chicana community (Kim, 2010). These graffiti are basically "gestures of community building." On the other hand, there are graffiti that make visible the sensibility and the inegalitarian conditions of the Chicano/a nation within a state controlled by the imaginary of an Anglo/a nation. These graffiti are both "gestures of protest." Are these two modalities of graffiti " decolonial gestures?" It will depend, as I suggested above, on what "decolonial" means to someone arguing that certain graffiti in San Antonio is decolonial. This is a general rule of interpretation. To talk about "cubist painting" will depend on the meaning the interpreter assigns to "cubism" in relation to the painting. Reversing the direction, if an artist is aware that "cubism" provides a conceptual structure for a tendency in the world of art, the artist herself could shape her work in conversation with such frame. The same reasoning is valid, in my view, for the expression "decolonial gestures."

The thesis implicit in what I said so far and explicit in what I will say from now on is the following: coloniality (short hand for the colonial matrix of power) is the structure of management that, since the sixteenth century, was set up by specific actors, categories of thought, and institutions (see Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2009.) Actors, categories of thought, and institutions go hand in hand with the formation of subjectivities (e.g., a sense of being in the world, world-sense rather than world-view). Subjectivities emerge in the double confluence of, on the one hand, what we learn through the body (what the senses tell us) and, on the other, how we "process" this through our brains. The "mind" should not be identified with the "brain"; rather the mind comes from the conglomerate of the senses and brain. Expressed as a formula, this would be senses+brain=mind. Gestures are signs through which our body (senses+brain) expresses itself. The point, then, is that the colonial matrix of power (coloniality) was forming imperial subjects at the same time that it was formed by imperial subjects. Or if you wish, the subjects who were building the colonial matrix of power were forming themselves as imperial subjects. Imperial subjects, in their intent to make the world the image and semblance of the colonial matrix of power, generated all over the world, through five hundred years and across diverse temporalities (in America, Asia and Africa), colonial subjects and, of course, subjectivities.

If then, imperial subjects formed and were formed by the colonial matrix of power, colonial subjects were brought into the spider web, some acquiescing and others not. For those who did and do not acquiesce and assimilate, there are many ways of expressing their/our disagreement, disgust, and anger with the humiliation imposed by the colonial matrix. Said humiliation is at one and the same time patriarchal and racist. Racism and patriarchy are epistemic ontologies. What may seem an oxymoron is part of the decolonial vocabulary: to dismantle and disobey the categories that built and sustain the colonial matrix. This is a task that colonial subjects are undertaking all over the world, to delink and decolonize ourselves (our subjectivities), and from there, to engage in world-making not regulated by the colonial matrix. What world-making could that be? It is necessary to invent them, and they are already underway: starting from our subjectivities, building economies to administer scarcity (or ecoSImias); delinking from democracy and development toward a vision of life that embrace harmony and plenitude, as many of us have been learning from pueblos originarios, Native Americans and First Nations; delinking from religion to liberate spirituality; delinking from science and Western philosophy to liberate wisdom, knowing, and sensing; and delinking from aesthetics to liberate aesthesis.

"Decolonial gestures" would be any and every gesture that directly or indirectly engages in disobeying the dictates of the colonial matrix and contributes to building of the human species on the planet in harmony with the life in/of the planet of which the human species is only a minimal part and of which it depends. And that would contribute to planetary re-emergence, re-surgence, and re-existence of people whose values, ways of being, languages, thoughts, and stories were degraded in order to be dominated.

The original Christian impulse to control "souls" and territories where the souls dwelled, translated later on into the secular impulse of controlling persons and territories where "natural resources" dwelled. Not all "gestures" that express disagreement and condemnation to the current state of things are decolonial gestures (e.g., increasing devaluation of life, including human life, in all and every imaginable dimension (violence of all sort, political and familiar, war, exploitation, commercialization of human bodies and natural resources [natural resources are a "human right" not a commodity], human organs, increasing wealth and political power of "illegal" drug commerce, etc.). And of course, not everything in the world shall be decolonial, for the simple reason that the basic decolonial gesture would be to confront any global design with the pretense of universality. So, postmodern critics that accuse the decolonial of aiming toward a new hegemony are indeed projecting their own fears and desires.

Decolonial gestures would, then, be all gestures (fictional and non-fictional, artistic and non-artistic) that explicitly confront the colonial matrix. If the confrontation is implicit, it would be the process of interpretation that brings a given "gesture" (and here I am taking "gestures" as synonym with "sign") in the decolonial frame. Decoloniality is an option that co-exists with other options in a given universe of meaning. Human life is a constant, conflictive co-existence of options and each option organizes universes of meaning in which which people dwell. Universes of meaning, needless to say, were not established with the creation of the world by some supernatural energies (Popol Vuh) or being (the Bible), but were created by narratives that told the story of the creation of the world by supernatural beings or energies. The Bible, the Koran and the Popol Vuh each framed the meaning of the world in creation-stories. If the Bible, as any other story of creation, tells us first how the world was created and, secondly, how the human species was created, the colonial matrix of power built a third narrative: the narrative of the Western Civilization.

Thus, the colonial matrix of power is the very foundation of Western Civilization. Therefore, from everyday life to disciplinary formation, universes of meaning built simultaneously an epistemology and ontology. The colonial matrix not only was built and maintained through millions of "colonial gestures," but it was successful in making believe that the fictional world thus created (epistemology) was indeed what the world was (ontology). Decolonial gestures purportedly undo the epistemic ontology of Western Civilization, but also work toward re-doing a world in which the imperial/colonial dimension of Western Civilization is erased and the emancipatory dimension is enhanced. This means to prevent any imperial bent: for example, the belief that Western Civilization could leave behind its imperial exploitative side and now engage in an imperial emancipatory campaign. Decolonial gestures, as suggested before, cannot be dictated by imperial subjects but should come from the creativity and the engagement of (de)colonial subjects.

I turn now to one specific and complex "event" by the Berlin-based Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic, the provocative "Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000-05), the work that catapulted her to international recognition (Ostojić and Mignolo, 2013). The quotation marks on "event" alert you to the fact that what I will examine in the next few pages delinks from canonical frames to the extent that fiction and non-fiction collapse as well as the correlated distinction between art and life. This "event" is, above all, a magnificent indictment to coloniality in its manifestation in the twenty-first century.

The mutation of coloniality allowed the core States that formed the European Union to build a rhetoric of modernity and a logic of coloniality that could erase Eastern Europe and disguise the fact that Western Europe "is" indeed the European Union. The mutation of coloniality operates on the rhetoric of development and progress for former Eastern and Central Europe, the regions managed by the former Soviet Union. One of the consequences was and is migration. Migration from former Eastern to Western Europe was almost as difficult as from Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Russian Federation. The European Union Maastricht Treaty of 1993 clearly showed that, with the exception of Austria in Central Europe, none of the Central and Eastern European countries were considered in the Union. Migrations from the "East" to the "West" became an issue and Ostojic courageously confronted it through artistic means when she started the project "Looking for a Husband with EU Passport" in August of 2000.

A digression on the word "art-work." What does it mean to use the word "art" today beyond the expressions that remain within the coded "genres" of art and literature established by/in the rhetoric of modernity. "Art" refers to a skill:

1 : skill acquired by experience, study, or observation 〈the ⁓ of making friends〉 2 a :a branch of learning: (1): one of the humanities (2) pl : liberal arts b archaic : learning scholarship 3 : an occupation requiring knowledge or skill 〈⁓ of organ building 4 a : the conscious use of skill and creative imagination esp. in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced b (1) : fine arts (2) : one of the fine arts (3) : a graphic art 5 a archaic : a skillful plan b : the quality or state of being artful 6 : decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter. (Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

Aristotle used the Greek word "poiesis" and put the emphasis on "making" instead of the skill necessary to make something. Consequently, the skill to make something, learning to do something is not learning to make a "work of art." The expression "work of art" is the result of bringing together two universes of meaning: art as skill and art as making within the regulation of taste: the beautiful and the sublime.

While the sublime refers to the vibration of the senses, aesthesis, in front of the spectacle of nature, the beautiful captures the vibration of the senses, aesthesis, in front of the spectacle of a skillful (art) creation that conforms to certain rules of taste. We can admire the gymnastic flair of "artists" in a circus but that will not qualify within the rules of beauty established by aesthetics: the philosophical discourse that invented and managed the concept of beauty and sublime-end of digression.

The word that fittingly describes what Ostojic did is "event." An event is a composition of gestures or signs. Signs can be begotten in and by the body or by "nature": a dark and cloudy sky is a sign that it may rain, but has not been precipitated by a human body movement. Gestures and signs that con-form an event that could be interpreted as decolonial shall be gestures and signs created by and in the body of human beings.

Ostojic posted her nude photo on the internet and announced that she was looking for a husband with a European Union passport. This initial gesture (or sign) was a decolonial weapon working on several layers. First, it brought to the open the veiled intention of many women in former Eastern Europe to do exactly what she was announcing, but through other means-by presenting themselves in sexually attractive clothes, make-up, and photographic poses. "Sexually attractive" here refers to the coded sexuality of the women's bodies already embedded in the male heterosexual imaginary. By this "gesture" Ostojic uncovers the heterosexual contract that connect men and women through the fantasy of colonial love. By putting a naked photograph of herself on the web, Ostojic's second gesture breaks up the veiled colonial fantasy that romance and love has anything to do with heteronormative marriage. In a liberal and capitalist society, marriage is a contract with the ethical complicity of religious institutions that legalize sexual relations.

By marrying a German man, one of about 500 candidates, Ostojic explodes into pieces-third gesture-the modern distinction between art and life, helping us to understand that such distinction is indeed a celebration of modernity that hides the logic of coloniality: art is mimesis, representation, a fiction, a fake, a simulacra of the real. Such distinction has imposed itself over ritual and ceremonies in societies for which such distinction did not make sense. Borges, always extremely perceptive, understood that Averroes couldn't have understood what "mimesis" was: the children in the courtyard were playing but playing is not a fiction separated from life. It is life, it is a ritual, it is pleasure, it is living in community and love.

Ostojic came from former Communist and former Yugoslavia to Germany and Berlin unified after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. For Germany, unification meant the end of the Soviet menace. For the "nations" of the dismembered Yugoslav "state," unification meant to be at the mercy of the forming European Union reinforcing its frontiers to control migration. In her fourth gesture, Ostojic's discloses the underlying logic of Soviet colonial communism and the European Union colonial liberal capitalism.

The fifth gesture came when she divorced, after three-and-a-half years of marriage, and organized a party to celebrate the divorce. If marriage was a deal, a sexual contract, then divorce is another deal: the end of the social contract and freedom for both contractors. No tears, no mourning, nothing engendered by the myths of colonial love. Indirectly, this invites us to think that same-sex marriage-as important as it is-remains still caught in the web of colonial love legitimized by marriage. The sexual contract is a colonial regulation, part of the larger social contract and parallel to the racial contract (see Paterman 1999).

The public and private, a cherished distinction of the secular modernity, explodes and falls into pieces through Ostojic's work. If the word "performance" was introduced to capture the mutation of certain genres of modern artistic expressions, these mutations became post-modern-that is, these were changes within the same frame and universes of meaning of the modern. "Performance" was needed to capture the emergence of a series of "postmodern gestures." But Ostojic's work is no longer amenable to post-modern gestures because, precisely, her work makes visible the "unnatural" artistic conventions of modern (Kant), post-modern (Rancière) and alter-modern aesthetics (Bourriaud).

The sixth of Ostojic's gestures was to mount an installation in Berlin consolidating all the gestures and the processes during the five years that the project lasted. The installation consists of a series of photos, including her initial advertising photo looking for a husband, of the marriage and the divorce, along with texts of numerous candidates in the Wedding Book. These are presented as framed documents on three walls, and in rectangular display case in the middle with documents of the entire process. Hanging on the wall, between the pictures, a small flat screen television projects the first encounter of Ostojic and her husband in a green, peaceful, locus amoenus prairie in New Belgrade, Ostojic´s home town. Ostojic's "decolonial event," then, consists of six "decolonial gestures" (which of course could be more or less depending on the interpretation). The event can be read decolonially because each gesture delinks from specific regulations of the colonial matrix of power. But it is not just delinking; it is building on the ruins of the colonial matrix. Certainly, the colonial matrix is still there; yet there are also visions of the horizon of life that the colonial matrix repressed and is still trying to kill. But life cannot be killed.

I see two last and most radical gestures of Ostojic's decolonial "event." The first is to disobey all the expectations of modern, postmodern, and altermodern "aesthetics," as well as the postmodern celebration of "installations" (see Jameson 2012). As a matter of fact, aesthetics is out of the question. Ostojic liberates aesthesis, the senses, the senses of gender/sexual relations, of economic and political regulations, of racism and patriarchy. "Art" is used by Ostojic to liberate herself. But this is not just an individual act of liberal consciousness but a decolonial (deracial and depatriarchal) event that explodes not only aesthetics but the Western novelty of "performance art." Performance art indeed was introduced to escape the cage of representation, and it was and is important but, at the same time, like gay marriage, remains within the rules of the game established in and by the colonial matrix. Ostojic jumped-jumped to something else, to something that is coming, and we do not know what exactly that is. That is precisely her aesthesic (I am saying aesthesic and not aesthetic) force. The "event" is not representation of life. It is life made representation. And it is no longer Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra." The force of Ostojic's work is making technological games just that, pure games that can blur the lines on the screen between the real and the simulated. What Ostojic does is related to life, to the pain and humiliation of colonial subject, humiliated by racism, patriarchy, and the criminalization of migrants.

The second radical decolonial gesture is putting together an "event" that did not require funding from generous wealthy donors, and that most likely will not be funded by any generous wealthy donors. Grants are embedded in the colonial matrix of power. The granting institutions not only have the privilege of setting the rules and appointing the committee that will "judge" the value of the proposals, but they also create a relationship of dependency that, on the one hand, is humiliating for those who are granted economic support, and at the same time disguises that humiliation (even for the person humiliated) by the "honor" of being recognized as a valuable person (artists, social scientist, scientist in general) and by being portrayed in the mainstream media if the award is big, or in the home institution if the award is of less national or international relevance.

"Decolonial gestures" are scalars and it is idealistic to expect always the most radical and to condemn them because they are not truly decolonial. Decoloniality is a long process that takes place at several levels in different times. Because the colonial matrix of power is a structure of interconnected domains that are made invisible by training "experts" in only one small domain, decolonial gestures in one domain impinge on the others. It is the butterfly effect. You can use a metaphor of modern sciences or of ancient indigenous wisdom: life is the interconnection of the living, not a privileged sphere of the human. To Poision the waters and the lands is to poison ourselves, even if we are the owners and administrators of Monsanto.

Ostojic's "event" remains a point of reference for complex delinking and for the art of living once delinking puts us in the void: for those of us who do not have a place to land when we delink (particularly those of us who are Europeans or of European descent) the void shall be the place to start anew together with ongoing projects, in which delinking is to re-merge, to re-surge, to re-exist from the devaluations, the disruption, and interruption that Western Civilization impinged on other civilizations in the name of salvation, progress, civilization, modernization, and development. Decolonial gestures, decolonial turns, and decolonial options are different aspects of a global march toward delinking from the darker side of Western (post) modernity.

Walter Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Before coming to Duke in January, 1993, he taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and di/pluriversalities.

His recent publications on these latter topics include: The Idea of Latin America (2005),Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, co-edited with Elizabeth H. Boone (1994), and The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995) which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association. He is also author of Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999) and editor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994-95). His current interests include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Notes
[1] We should also remember the concept "decolonial attitude," used by Nelson Maldonado-Torres in Against War. Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008). The concept "attitude" was also used in a different context by Remi Brague in his Europe. La voie Romaine (1999). Defending the thesis that Europe is essentially Roman, Brague uses the expression the "Roman attitude" to profile European culture. The question is: what makes of an attitude, a gesture, or an option turn X instead of Y or Z?

[2] Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (New York: Signet, 1978) confronts precisely this puzzle. Her Native American knowledge is translated into the novel form, and the novel form is already caught into the fictional/non-fictional code. Border thinking, dwelling in the borders, involves using but not submitting (or the contrary subverting and re-directing) the novel-form. As in Chimamanda Acichie, the novel here becomes "storytelling," and storytelling in First Nation and Native American epistemology is both and it neither: literature and philosophy, fiction and ceremony, but always from indigenous cosmologies of the Americas absorbing the cosmology of indigenous, Europeans, and their descendants in the Americas.

[3] Kant's racial discourse can be found in Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,and Geography. See the classic article by Chukwudi Eze, "The color of Reason," in African Postcolonial Philosophy (1997) and my own " The Darker Side of the Enlightenment: A Decolonial Reading of Kant's Geography" (2011).

[4]I learned from two other sources other than the Greek and Biblical tradition, both con-joined by Saint Thomas Aquinas. One is the Persian translations of Q' uran and the other the philosophical wisdom of ancient civilizations in Atanhuac and Tawantinsuyu.

[5]See the project EcoSImías, an alternative economic structure inEcuador, analyzed by Quijano Valencia in EcoSImías. Visions and practices of economic / cultural difference in the context of Multiplicity (2012).
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Looking for the Meaning of Decolonial Gesture

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When Macarena invited me to participate in this special issue on "Decolonial Gesture," I had already been invited by Rozina Cazali to participate in an event titled "Del gesto al pensamiento decolonial" in Guatemala under the auspices of Absurdo. Simposio de Arte y Pensamiento Político Contemporáneo. Both titles bring "gesture" next to "decolonial."

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A sassy woman has gone viral for her incredible takedown of a Conservative pastor who tried to slut shame her declaring "We are all sluts!"

Samirah Raheem put right-wing activist and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson in his place at Los Angeles SlutWalk last year.

But her incredible response has only just gone viral - nearly a year later - with the internet becoming obsessed with Samirah's incredible response.

SlutWalk is a national movement of protest marches calling for an end to rape culture.

69-year-old Jesse has made a name for himself online for his controversial views on race and religion on his ultra-conservative YouTube channel.

Trying to provoke a response Peterson asks Samirah if she is a 'slut'.

She responds: "Yes we are all sluts. You're a slut, all the dudes behind us are sluts, your cameraman is a slut, your PA is a slut and your mic is a slut."

"So you sleep around with a lot of men?" Peterson asks.

Firing back Samirah says "No, no I'm a virgin.

"A slut isn't what you made it Jesse a slut is what I made it - a boss.

"It doesn't matter if I'm a virgin or what the woman's sexual history is.

"Your momma's a slut, your grandma's a slut, everybody is."

Clearing trying to embarass the model and catch her out Peterson begins to pick on her choice of clothing.

"You look like a slut," he says.

"No, I'm dressed like a woman. I dress like this because I can dress however I want to."

Samirah's intelligent quips have won her thousands of fans on social media combined with her sassy facial expressions.

"How old are you?" Peterson asks to which she answers "grown".

Firmly putting the pastor in his place she says: "A slut is a word for anybody who is owning their sexuality, turn it up and don't let Jesse twist their answers around.

"I own my body, my body isn't a political playground, it's not a place for legislation, it's mine. It's my future."

And responding to the issue of religion and sexuality she says: "God would want me to be whatever I want to be because God believes in choice and you should know that Jesse."

Her quotable quips are now being traded online with social media users praising her for her intelligent and thought-out response under pressure from Peterson.

Talking about the positive response to the clip Samirah told Dazed : "It just made me realise that you have to be your true self and that's what people are gonna resonate with.

"I never have felt this kind of unconditional support from my peers. It showed me to relax and be yourself because people love that.

"You know it's the cliché - be yourself! It works!"

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Woman's incredibly sassy response to right-wing pastor calling her a slut

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A sassy woman has gone viral for her incredible takedown of a Conservative pastor who tried to slut shame her declaring "We are all sluts!" Samirah Raheem put right-wing activist and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson in his place at Los Angeles SlutWalk last year.