Frontispiece to Jean Blaeu’s Atlas Maior 1866

 

autochthony: self sprung from the earth: a logic –– hemisphere

The labor of the godless—Bartolomé de las Casas calls bárbaro barbarous—is in the hand that digs underneath a tricky substance of turned meaning. A continent excavated a continent classified. The erosion beginning somewhere in there, in the baskets of earth dumped and sifted and lightly dusted on the skin the skin measured and pigmentized and the pigment replicated and finely painted baroquely. Who stands with feet adjacent to the barbarous? Who kneels? Who is missing in the culpability of an autochthonous emergent?

We call FIRE the pressure and angst in the act of looting, the act of rioting, burning, kneeling and saying no. Finance Insurance Real Estate. The new autochthony. The landscape excavated by the very action of self-defense against the actions against landscape.

What is brow adjacent to the emergent body of bounty? Ships in a distance observant. Cliffs eroding. Tide sifting. Angelic legitimacy. A monument. Empirical truth.


Juvenile Convicts at Work in the Fields, 1903 Detroit Publishing Company, LOC

Early subtropic science consisted mainly of descriptive narrations on the potential of land to bear to its owner what was already dormant within. Indigenous wealth. Tobacco, cotton, grains. But first places of labor. The labor. The deviant form of the body bent over instrument. Romanticized but excepted. An emergency for it and thus a system to organize the emergency. Crisis.

The criminal is created in the position. The position is invented by the body for the work. The work is implemented for the bounty. The bounty invented for the logic. When the Type A soils are raked and hoed away, carted and broken down and sifted, a soft almost ticklish place is revealed. A relationship sparks between precariats, convicted and others, others and yet attentive. Convincing. An irruption is the premise of erasure and it being systemic.

A language is created to capture irruption. To preserve capture (captivity?): the bind. A photo preserves this and preserves the crisis in a feedback loop of signifying positionality without the context. Discourse saves but the mind, liberal in its application of sound reasoning, democratizes the scene and the cost is culpability. The marketplace of guilt.

So goes the logic.


casta painting, “9. De negro é india sale lobo/ negro 1. India 2. Lobo 3.” (Zambo) Anonymous 1780

The contemporary is always looking upon casta as a way of mitigating the exceptionalist responsibility of naming while keeping the named working and the work self incriminatingly a response to crisis. A need for work. A growth for finance. A stable platform, an insurance against risk and ground for home. This is a continuum, the production of knowledge from place––the exploitation of place, the making coeval of place and body, labor and precarity.

The crisis of change and human impact exposes actuarial typification. A problem. A tide. A storm. An invasive species of thought, description, and body. Is the democratic paradox itself––to care from a universal necessity. To police in the attempt to preserve positions. A new language irrupts from new acts of defense.