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>Talking with walls
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>The Cantharide Powder inside the wall
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>Talking with walls
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>Session 3, ClaudiaTranscript
Talking with walls.
>Session 1, All members
Time is over. There’s no contemplation.
1.
Inside the wall, there are four men, but the wall itself, a monument, a reference and rupture with time and history. (This correspondence between the walls and the city, the deaths and the living’s ones).Human’s behavior intends to ritualize past and memories in art pieces. That’s why creation is close to a mythical and teleological(1) background. To be concrete, Luther, Calvin, Knox and Zwinglie were sculpted in rock in the center of a small city - the most international of the world: Geneve. The Reformers, they were called, and the wall is also a sculpted sign for humanity, in the way that represents an ethical mark that Occidental religion inaugurated in education and politics for the world.
And this is the point where I begin: the mark that the Reformation made in Ethics (as a religious movement: Christian Church), introducing writing and reading as main tools of human’s knowledge, permitted its recognition as a memorable monument sculpture; and gave later the paradoxical power to condemn and incarcerate, his owns citizens. For our particular case: the marquis de Sade.
Space as control. Architecture as tool of power and creation: the game of construction is an ideal and the destruction of an exception. The rock itself as mechanism of a bivalent foundation : « monument » of proud and « monument » of punishment. The monument as an aesthetic and ethic representation of the concept.In spite the anacronism that is tacit, each particular speech we consider (Reformers and Sade), affected immediatly as educational statements. And this it’s the point that joins with the workshop we share now.
2. Popes: off.
« Il m’ arriva une foies de m’ éveiller en sursaut vers le milieu de la nuit :
Satan était là qui, sans tarder,
‘Ecoute’, me dit-il, ‘ Luther, docteur savantissime. Tu sais que, durant quinze années, tu as célebre des messes privées ; que dirais-tu ci ces messes privées étaient une horrible idolâtrie ? Que dirais-tu ci le corps et la sang du Christ n’y avaient pas été présents, et que tu n’ eusses adoré, fait adorer aux autres que du pain et du vin ?’
Je liu répondis : ‘J’ai été ordonné prête, j’ai reçu l’ ontion et la consécration de mains de L’ Evêque, et j’ ai fait tout cela par obéissance aux commandements de mes supérieurs. Porqui n’ aurais-je pas consacré, puisque j’ ai pron0ncé sérieusement les paroles du Christ, et que j’ ai célébré ces messe avec un grand sérieux ?Tu le sais bien.Dans cette angoisse, dans ce débat contre le Diable, Je voulais repousser l’ ennemi que les armes qui m’ étaient familières sous La Papauté ; je lui objectais l’ intention et la foi de l’Eglise, foi et intention auxquelles je m’ étais conformé en célébrant des messes privées.
La Conférence entre Luther et le Diable.
Racontée par Luther lui-même.The middle ages started with a great concentration of power in the hands of the Popes and Church. They were the masters of land, laws and human’s mind, soul and beliefs. As « mediums » and witness between the holy word, sacred experience and God’s voice, passed only by them, controlling life itself for the Occidental tradition. An ephemeral movement that started with a doubt, generated a new age for human knowledge: the Renaissance arrived and Humanism became the strongest power inside this « new » mentality.
Science, religion, art, ethics and politics were also touched by this force and finally, the centripal concentration of power and static domain of thoughts became a centrifugue symptom that brought the Christian God to Earth. Behind the dark and inexplicables interpretations of the Church about the Holy Bible, man was exposed to several penitencies and punishments by the popes, bishops and the Church itself. But those holy masks started to had a face and those hidden practices (like orgies), land occupation and money concentration became evident to everybody…and in the name of God and in the house of God, skeptism opened an unknown door that corruption tried to hide.
Divines promises were over. An internal fight introduced segregation as divorce inside beliefs and attitudes. Many questions arrived, and that’s when Protestantism started to show the other face of the mask and the new dimension of man.
But it’s also important to remark, that experience that was reserved only for sacred practices (Sola experientia) (2), became accesible to daily life. That fracture opened a human possibility and disponsibility of knowledge not only with God, but also with other fields: and started a new establishment of other disciplines, a bridge with creation and world itself. Experience as a daily practice, became an important tool to epistemology, sciencie, astronomy, agriculture, etc.
This trivalent movement (experience as mechanism, tool and possibility that permits to know about us, life and God), innovated also reality’s conception: God belonged to an inside and outside world. Speculation turned weak in the way that word not only talked about an unknown language and experience. The Holy Word was written as testimony of God’s existence (historical statement), and also as communication with man. That’s why latin speech lost importance: the Pope’s words and inteligibles speeches do not certify God’s kingdom. Church permitted a direct contact and a simultaneusly exchange of experience with man. The intermediaries were not indispensable to confirm faith and beliefs between Bible and man, God and man and, Church and man. Public congregations, allowed also a space for solitude and independece: permitted to share but gave freedom to interpret the word itself.
Luther’s position marked history not only for the question that he introduced to Christian’s Church (about the need of the intermediator). He opened a posibility to linguistics (as translator of the Bible from Latin to German) : created German as a written language and started the same movement with vernacular languages. He also gave importance to technics in the way that printed speech and imprint’s source became a team and tool for human’s knowledge and daily habits (lecture and interpretation). Those factors played an important role in communication that it’s still available for us. (McLuhans speech about Guttenbergs’ imprint).
Man became a powerful and single individual able to interpret (as hermeneut) a discourse. Autonomy gave importance to each member of the community not only as part of a holy book but as member of society. In spite of this change, man’s consciense was also « manipulated » by the idea of shame: mortals as sons of Eve and Adam, never be cleansed from the original sin.
Feudalism, infallible's powers and punishment’s impositions finished somehow. As reading and comprehension were incorporated into a common practice accessibles to everyone, life’s « democratization », generated a mass capable to write (in first person), and able also to understand the words of others. New jobs as translators, writers, printers, etc., were also generated. Traveling was also an important tool during these age and the recovery of ancient manuscripts from Greece arrived to the Occident during the 15th century. Humanism as an argot word from Italian students, opened an ideological position for history itself. The transgression started.
3. But…What’s education ?
« Je vous envoie donc ce livre, a fin que vous voyiez par quels signes admirables et par quels effets de sa puissance. Christ m’a déliée des vœux monastiques et m’a octroyé une telle liberté que, bien qu’il m’ait fait le serviteur de tous, Je ne suis cependant soumis qu’à lui seul. Car lui seul, sans intermédiaire, est mon évêque, mon abbé, mon seigneur, mon père et mon maître. Je n’ en connais pas d’autre… ».
Luther, M. Lettre a son père Hans Luther.
Walbourg. 21 Novembre 1521.Reformers as the name makes allusions, re-formed a passage of history, of ethics, of law. The consequence: a new citizen arrived, an active person with the permission to explore, write and create, who talked directly with life.
In terms of ancient civilizations (presocratics, f.e), greeks educated their society in another conception: they never had the sense of sin. They shared life and existence as a way of knowledge not only about the world but themselves in a deepest form. The harmony of this discipline is called pedagogy, This method started in the first ages of life and incorporated also disciplines for the body, the sprit and the mind, all together, to join with creation and perception of life. Technique was the proper word to name this method. Through it, it was possible to impulse, to transmit energy in a dynamic exchange of forces that will transform human’s perception. This dialogue and power, allowed also silence as an element of life. Nature represented silent circles, perpetuals, eternels, immodifiables. Man as witness of this power can talk to existence itself. And in this moment, it’s possible to talk about ethics for this society: sharing life with others meant respect for the nature, and those primordial forces and sources of action. Ethics was never meant to be an imperative or a shameful condition that has also the power of punishment.
Socratic’s tradition includes a new practice: citizen as member of the society (Athens), who must be able to give and to receive. But laws became a matter of human instance that forgot somehow in nature’s power, in spite of being conscience of its presence. (Oracle’s tradition).
To incorporate those procedures to the dialogue we have with history, the Reformers (Luther), democratized human’s knowledge when they gave it the priviledge to interpret the sacred word. The ethical discourse were tacit: man was guilty from the first moment. (Was born to be guilty). Freedom started operating as action and tool, but always attached to that « pecatum’s » condition. Laws were impressed to allow man to act in an ethical and moral way, always marked by sin. Freedom was marked in terms of limits and punishment. The State became the owner of laws and human’s behaviour. Church conceded a State of « freedom » (hermeneutic tool but dependant of sin). But control and power never permited a deeper exploration of freedom and democracy: freedoms were always limited by the fact of being born guilty. Democracy had its own foundation in a contradiction: a government for everybody based in « equisetum » : only one person submitted a social group of « individuals » supposed to be « autonomus », to have « autonomy » and independance of choice.
4. Homo-ashes.
To synthethize, education became an enterprise without limits : alphabetization, reading, comprehension, were the most successful tools for human behaviour: learning was the highest status between humanism and popular education as an important mission of the corpus of the State. Reformaors protected the sacred word by its own diffusion to everybody (contrary to medieval’s doctrine), in a kind of democratization of the language: from Greek to Latin, to Latin to Vernacular language (German as written language). Man was translator, hermeneut and transmittor of the message that he had read. The human voice talked with God’s word. An independent state of mind demolished intercessors and idolatries. Only one image became radical in importance: Jesus Christ as the son of God, as man itself - and not the spirit, the transubstantiation doctrine of the magical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
The citizen arrived with plenty of power to understand, create and interpretate a new code for reality. This homo-sapiens (res cogitas, res extensa), trusted in his own knowledge as a triumph of reason, as a conquest of mental kingdom. Nature began to be dominated by knowledge in a hierarchy relation, that colonized two dimensions of being (for the moment): time and space. Cartesian geometry insured a new measure, a new discourse that gave force to an ethic conception of life and a methodical procedure in sciences . (Scepticism became a tool to distrust in human sensibility: it can be a trick of the imagination to makes human’s mind become blind. This separation between reason and sensibility repercussed within a new entreprise, called later: revolution).
For the moment, homo-sapiens founded a highway to science, technics and knowledge, giving less importance to creation and sensibility. Evolution meant high. Religion, science and politics founded in this abstract state, human’s challenge. Australopitecus ran from the jungle and founded the megapolis. Industry, working mechanisms, money and society became the most important aspects for man. Law was an imperative of reason, as Kant interpreted and named. Man had autonomy: free to choose. Will to power was determined by the law itself. (But autonomy for the presocratic’s tradition, was inside: the knowledge of « one-self », was permitted to live in community, and never was the law from outside the one to allows to do it).
Law pretended to be equal and to admit difference. But difference was the sign, the exception that must be punished. Law as communism: uniformed knowledge and human behavior. Law as judge: surveillance’s tool to conserve order, peace and justice as imperatives to living within society, in community.
Homo-sapiens : a lethal ideal of truth.
6. Reformator ? Innovator ? Rennovator ? Deformator ?
Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give it to man. He was punished with the fury of the God, and set in perpetual chains. Those whose go past the limits, pay the consequences. But a question arrives: Does humanity need those characters? A Cicute’s victim, a crucifixion-resurrection screenplay… a killer angel? Or a serial killer that defends power itself ?
The role of transgression is to overdose the rule for a main purpose. Reformators changed a rule. Martyrs died by the rule. But what’s the difference that concede insurrectors another space for acting ?
Insurrectors have a position that can not accept a judge of truth as true and as imperative to regulate life. Sade never believed in slavery as a natural condition to man. His behaviour was a proof -
For the moment I work this text.