through europe

The Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban

 

Once upon a time, a King called Yunan reigned over a city in Persia. He was a powerful and wealthy ruler, who had armies and guards and allies of all nations of men; but his body was afflicted with a leprosy which philosophers and men of science failed to heal. He drank potions and he swallowed powders, but naught did him good and no physician was able to procure him a cure.

At last there came to his city a mighty healer of men, the sage Duban. This man was a reader of books, Greek, Persian, Roman, Arabian, and Syrian; he was skilled in astronomy and the wisdom of the ancients; conversant with the virtues of every plant, grass and herb, as well as philosophy and the whole range of medical science.

Now this physician had heard of the King's malady and all the bodily sufferings with which Allah had smitten him and how all the doctors and wise men had failed to heal him. Upon this he sat up through the night in deep thought and, when the dawn broke he donned his handsomest dress and betook himself to King Yunan, kissing the ground before him. He called down blessings on the King, saying:

Up until the 20th Century bread had long been the staple food of the British Poor in both the city and the country: From the middle-ages black, brown and white bread were ever present through plenty and want and little was to change for centuries, especially for the better. Even as late as the 1890's bread was the only solid food in over 80% of the meals for the majority of children in Bethnal Green.

 

As the primary food of the people, the “staff of life”, bread has proved to be a hugely important not just as cause, but as buffer, to social unrest and revolution: In 1789 French women marched on Versailles driven by the price of bread; in 2011 millions took to the streets across North Africa and the Middle-East under the slogan 'bread, freedom and dignity; yet in 1848 English bread prices and its political structure were stabilised by cheap wheat as a wave of revolutions swept through Europe; and today...

 

 

 

The Reflux

 

Ten years after 1968, Italy was probably the only Western European country in which the wave of rebellion and dangerous dreaming of the 60s hadn’t yet exhausted its energy. The desire for autonomy, communism and communization seemed to be deeply rooted both in the hearts of the factory workers and in those of the students. While the institutional apparatus of the P.C.I. appeared determined to entrench itself within the parliamentary framework and the rhetoric of gradual and progressive social change, myriad other groups were still opting for the uncompromising strategy of full communism ‘here and now’. Countless collective experiences, free radios, workers’ associations and even armed groups were, at that time, still blossoming in almost every Italian city.

 

The form is swallowing the content.

Capital as a form is no more able to hold together the entropic force of global society, but so far the agony of capitalism is not coinciding with the emergence of autonomous forms of society.  Biopolitical innervations of capital in the collective mind and the body are producing in fact a spasm paralyzing the process of subjectivation.

The black hole of financial abstraction is swallowing and destroying the product of two centuries of development and civilization, and is aggressing its content: the productive potency of the general intellect. The social civilization, created during the Modern age is invested and corroded by the metastases of the financial cancer.

How can the content get free from the form? This is the question that we should answer, while, as you can see, the building of civilization is crumbling.

 

Video gaming is an immersive experience that allows players to navigate new worlds and synthesise abstract concepts. However, the effect of video games on players’ perceptions of nature has not been particularly considered, despite the noted ‘stealth learning’ potential of video games as a tool for environmentalists. With this in mind, in this article I discuss Pokémon, a video game series that has been formative in the development of my own visions of a utopic environmental future.

 

Primarily, I suggest that Pokémon World can in some senses be perceived as a model environmental utopia, the flaws of which mirror the conflicting demands projected onto landscapes by ecological and free-market ideologies IRL (In Real Life). I then go on to examine the contradictory implications of the games’ adoption of scientific observation as a navigational framework in relation to its necessity of ‘winning’. I conclude by indicating that Pokémon’s attempt to reconcile some of these tensions between harmonious ecology and exploitative modernism assumes the form of a specific type of contemporary nature worship or totemism.