Week 3: Thrift & Farman
1) Thrift’s “bare life” makes me think of the concept buen vivir (the good life) that has been coined by indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador. Both concepts share certain similarities. For example, for Thrift bare life is the different set of actions that our cognitive self perceives but in a delayed way. It is the absolute representation of the way in which the body acts before one is conscious of the situation. Therefore, this moment is the background of the relationship between ‘nature’ and the human experience. For the indigenous communities in Bolivia, buen vivir is the state of harmony between the world of humans and the world of nature. If buen vivir is threatened by external forces (colonialism, for example), natural equilibrium is completely lost. Thrift’s warning about the way capitalist forces intend to emulate and sell some of the characteristics of ‘bare life’ makes me think of the period of colonization where the disconnection from humans from the world of nature marked the beginning of a time of violence and death. In the conclusion of chapter 3, Thrift explains that he is hopeful about the future since “there are the myriad activities which exist at the edge of the economic system which travel all the way from those who are simply looking for simple forms of exercise to those who are trying to sense something different” (p. 74). However, I think that in most cases our practices become less related to the purity of bare life and more connected to the its ‘commercial’ realm. For me, there are some practices that become naturalized and seem to be separated from economic interests. In buen vivir the only way to ‘decolonize’ the body is to turn away from the machinery of the market. Would it be possible to ‘de-capitalise’ (I think I made up a word), bare life?
2) It seems that Lefebvre and Thrift are not diametrically distant regarding the understanding of the performativity of bodies and the capacity to produce space. Also, both make a special emphasis on the importance of time in the understanding of space as the center of social relationships (although from my perspective, Thirft gives more relevance to present time whereas Lefevbre focuses on the history of time). However, I think that the conflict between these two authors is the conception of nature. Undoubtedly they consider that nature is the ideal space that escapes from the constraints of the capitalist world. However, Lefebvre considers that nature is more an ideal than a reality. For Thrift, nature is always ready to be accessed. How can we conceive the idea of nature? Should we just look at it as an arbitrary construction (a social one) that we can live and experiment? Is nature a fixed territory where ideal connections are made? Does nature exist?
3) Finally, (yes, I have focused all my questions in Thrift’s article), I have been thinking of Paul Virilio’s concern about internet. For Virilio, Internet has the potential of being a general accident that might affect the whole world. By accident he talks about the loss of the public sphere (or the real life in the city, the democratic participation, the experience of being alive). I’m bringing Virilio’s concern to this question because (and I don’t know why) Thrift avoids talking about the internet in his non-representational theory. Once again, and I might sound repetitive, what type of space is the Internet? Which are the practices on internet that might give it a sense of space?
Definition (Still working with space):
Space:
Looked in isolation, space is nothing else but an empty abstraction. Therefore it is important to see space as a live organism that is spatially distributed (Thrift, 2007). In other words, space cannot be defined according to the proximity of the objects that surround a human body, but it must be understood as a web of relations and actions of different human experiences. Lefebvre (1991) corroborates this notion by pointing out that one of the characteristics of space is that it enables a set of relations between things (object and products).