International Errorist

It is September 11th , 43 years of the coup in Chile and 15th of the attack to the Twin towers in the United States. This issue propose to think and discuss the notions of “(T) Error and culture / Financial Terrorism”, as a substantial part of the bio-political control in this permanent state of emergency and crisis. We have invited colleagues and collaborators from different countries and disciplines, most texts have been written or edited for this issue. Other articles have adapted or translated for publication in this site. We have decided to compose this edition in stages we invite a large number of employees who have accepted the invitation, so the launch of this number will be weekly throughout the month of September.

I spent the first years of the ’80s in Manhattan. I went there as a writer for a musical magazine based in Milano. I wrote about the after punk no wave scene of New York, about street art, and Keith Haring's graffiti, and Rammelzee and Basquiat. In 1977 the city of New York had declared financial bankruptcy, and many industrial investors flied away to more healthy states of the country. When I got to New York the urban landscape was impressive: wide areas looked like abandoned cemeteries, deserted factories, empty stores. A visionary Major, whose name was Ed Koch, had a brilliant idea: he opened the city to the artists and young adventurous people inviting them to give a new life to downtown areas, particularly to the East Village and Lower East side. Special grants and low rents were offered for urban renovation. Thousands flocked and restructured lofts turning them into places of creation, technical and existential experimentation, and cultural exchange. Musicians, artists, tech-savvies made the city a sort of laboratory of the possible futures. Then AIDS came. Things are always more complicated than our explanations, of course, but I think that this is a way to describe the most intimate core of the digital mutation that followed decades of social solidarity and free eroticism. The acquired immunity deficiency syndrome jeopardised and overturned self-perception in daily common life, dissolving the community of erotic egalitarian friendship that we had formed in the two previous decades. Depression may be described as the condition in which the conscious organism loses ability to find meaning in the surrounding world. But the meaning does not lie in things, or in the signs of language. It is generated by the endless shift from an interpretation to the next, from the uncertain and ambiguous exchange of gestures. Meaning is the effect of affective communication among agents of language. As meaning emerges in the relational dimension, the possibility of meaning dissolves when the community of bodies disaggregates. This is the starting point of depression. Digital technology has spread during the decade that followed the eruption of the Aids epidemics. Although it was generated by sexual contact, AIDS was mainly a psycho-media epidemic. It was based on the communication of a retrovirus, but it resulted in the communication of fear. When the contact with the other's body became a danger, when the perception of danger spread in the social unconscious, language transmigrated from the conjunctive to the connective sphere.

A literal conversation has pierced our recent history: every time the Argentine State has talked about “internal security”, it said: “internal commotion because of human action”. A literal conversation has pierced our recent history: every time the Argentine State has talked about "integration to the world", it said: “to go into debt in order to integrate us and grow”. What is “unprecedented” about this literality is that the previously mentioned conversation has not been a reason for debate. And it is a conversation that shakes our corporeality daily, given that, for the last fifty years, the bodies that have revolted against this conversation have undergone two particular fates: disappearance or debt. And in the “second survival” (those of us who have not disappeared but got into debt) this conversation has politicized our bodies to the extreme.

The doctrinaire body of State terrorism in Argentina, its main source of ideology -with its corresponding practical implementation-, was spread massively by means of certain novels of popular literature. Not only did these books offer a heroic and exculpatory story for the military, of all ranks, regarding their most unscrupulous actions, but probably they also seduced a significant part of the population through simplistic views –such as the "ticking time bomb scenario"- that justified the worst crimes.