Coordinated by Christine Mello, the “Contemporary Investigations” panels dealt with the tendencies and paths observed in the creative practices produced in the confluence between science-art and contemporary art.

The debate “Culture in Displacement” took place in the auditorium and brought together Lucia Santaella (theoretician and teacher at PUC-SP), Gilbertto Prado (artist and New Media teacher, Post Graduation vice-coordinator of ECA-USP), Péricles Cavalcanti, Lídia Chaib and Teresa Labarrère (artists).

Mediation |

Essay Lucia Santaella, 2003

Culture in displacement

Whatever the variations in concepts on culture, they can always be considered to be traditional when they emphasis culture as an instrument working against the fortuitousness and disorder arising from out of it. In the everlasting struggle between order and chaos, culture has always been placed alongside order. When we are faced with the incoherency of norms, with behavioral ambivalence, with the profusion of cultural products which exceed the necessities of the social system, we tend to judge culture as being in crisis and find ourselves hoping for its return to normality. 1. Paradigm crisis In an article entitled "Culture as a cooperative consumer", inserted in the book O mal estar da pós-modernidade (The Indisposition of Post-Modernity), Bauman (1998: 165) calls our attention to the difficulty of thinking of culture in this way, alerting us to the aging and inoperativeness of traditional concepts of culture when applied to present-day complex societies, as, if we remain tied to hereditary notions, we will be obliged to consider cultural crises as an everyday condition and abnormality as the norm. Under the light of Kuhn (1974), one can affirm that cultural discourse presently contains all the symptoms of a paradigm crisis, in which the most typical and frequent occurrences appear to be exceptions, turning the distinction between norm and exception an unsolvable dilemma. To face this dilemma, Bauman (ibid.: 167) resorts to Lévy-Strauss in whom she searches for the first signs of a rebellion against the orthodox culture paradigm as an establisher of order. For Bauman, the revolutionary character of Lévy-Strauss's work was unhappily disregarded because of the excessive emphasisplaced on its structural aspects. There are, however, in this volume three guiding and fertile ideas useful in the pursuit of a new framework for cultural studies. They are: a) Cultures and societies are not totalities. What exists are "continuous and perpetual structuring processes in diverse areas and dimensions of human practices, rarely coordinated or submitted to any comprehensive plan". b) The structure which emerges from these processes is not a stationary entity, but one that resembles the wind, "which is not but a breath of air, or a river, which is not but a flow". c) Culture is not for satisfying pre-established necessities. There are neither priorities on necessities or uses, nor a priority of senses over symbols. "Culture serves no proposition and there is nothing, except its internal impulse and dynamics, which may explain its presence". Bauman defends the idea that these three ideas together create a vision of culture entirely distinct from the orthodox paradigm. Culture begins to be perceived as a set of heuristic lines of thought, such as "perpetually restless activity, insubordinate and rebelling, ordered, but, it itself um-ordered, profanely disconsidering the sacrosanct distinction between the substantive and borderline, necessity and accidental". To characterize this new cultural paradigm, Bauman chooses the model of consumers' cooperative, invented in 1844, on Toad Lane, Rochdale, as a form of protest against the logic of crushing and soulless regimentation, typical of life in the factories. It is in fact a model, although radically distinct from the hierarchical and bureaucratic cooperatives that the contemporary world is infested with. All that occurs in the consumer cooperative is not administrated, but neither is it fortuitous. Non-coordinated movements cross each other and gather together in different parts of the structure as a whole, only to free themselves again from all the previously tied knots. Spontaneity here does not exclude, but, to the contrary, demands an organized and intentional action, this action however is not intended to mollify, but to strengthen the initiative's spontaneity. Much in the same manner as "prigoginian" plasma, every once in a while the diffuse activities come together and condense, establishing local and structural concentrations, but only until their paths soon separate once again and disperse (Bauman ibid.: 169). In short, with a field of action very similar to that of culture, this "cooperative" social territory is not centrally administrated, neither is it anarchic. Different from both, it is a self-governed body, carried out in an infinitely distinct manner from that of present day perversions which have distorted that which should be the true sense of self-government. The model is known as "consumers' cooperative" because distribution and appropriation, not production, are the axis of the cooperative activity, since its real production line produces an ever-increasing number of consumers, ever more demanding, experienced and shrewd. The similarity of this model of culture proposed by Bauman is clearly evident with the concept of hybrid cultures so well explored by Nestor Garcia Canclini (1997), a concept today disseminated through various countries in Europe, in special Germany, to characterize the dynamic contemporary culture which does not solidify in hierarchical and stable structures, but, on the contrary, flows and dislocates along paths impossible to foresee in advance. In short, there appears to be no doubt as to the inapplicability of traditional notions of culture to characterize the flux and displacement of present day cultures. What remains to be understood is why an orthodox vision fitted culture up until the XIX century, but no longer applies today. 2. Flux and displacements Up until the second half of the 19th century it was not difficult to detect the hierarchy of cultural strata divided in two distinct sides, on one side, the erudite strata, on the other, the popular strata, known respectively as high and low culture. The fine arts (drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture), spectacle arts (music, dance, theater) and belles lettres (literature) were distinguishable from folklore, from the popular forms of culture. Starting with the industrial revolution, however, this scenario began to get more and more complicated. The appearance of technical means of cultural production (photography and cinema) and the crises of codification systems effected by modern art, in painting, music, theater, dance, started dissolving the well demarcated limits between art and non-art. It was these same technical-industrial means of reproduction - newspapers, photography, cinema - which propitiated the emergence of culture for the masses, intensified by electronic broadcasting mediums - radio and television. From this resulted cultural mixes between the erudite, popular and massive, blending into hybrid and volatile fabrics as seen in urban cultures. Communication channels simultaneously became means for art production, as is the case of photography, radio and evidently, video. Starting in the 80's, the tendency for transitions and hybridism's of communication channels among themselves was augmented, creating appear propitiating cultural consumption of that available and discarded: photocopying machines, videocassettes, video clips, videogames, remote control, followed by the industry of CD's and cable TV, in short, technologies for symbolic heterogeneous demands, segmented and more personalized. It was this that, in 1992, I called Culture of the medias. Under this denomination, I tried to account for phenomena emerging in the cultural dynamism of the 80's, phenomena distinct from the logic which was straight from mass culture. Contrary to that which is essentially produced by a few and consumed by masses without the power to interfere in the symbolic products they consume, the culture of the medias inaugurated a dynamics which, weaving within itself and spreading within the relations of medias between themselves, began to make it possible for consumers to choose alternative symbolic products. The fluid circulation and the complex articulations of the levels, genders and forms of culture, provoked by this media culture, produces a blending of its identities and augments cultural markets, expanding habits of cultural consumerism, which only further confirms the model proposed by Bauman and his consumers' cooperative. Inseparable as well from the trans-nationalization of culture is, allied to the new economic and social order of post-industrial globalized societies, the media cultural dynamics is a key piece to better understand the displacements and contradictions, the movable designs of pluralistic-temporal and spatial heterogeneousness which characterizes post-modern cultures, borderline cultures, fluid, de-territorialized. As if the constant instabilities, interstices, avalanches and reorganizations of "mediatic" post-modern cultures were not enough, since the middle of the 90's, these scenarios began to cohabit with an information and communications revolution ever more omnipresent which is being called the digital revolution. In the middle of this revolution, the computer has provided the possibility of converting all information - texts, sounds, image, video - into one universal language. Through the digitalization and compression of data it permits, all medias can be digitally translated, manipulated, stored, reproduced and distributed, producing the phenomena which is known as the convergence of medias. Through the connection of data processing with telecommunications which resulted in transmission networks, access to the exchange of information, which today connects the whole world, has given birth to new forms of socialization and culture, known as digital culture or cyber culture (Lemos 2002a e b; Santaella 2003: 55-59). 3. The synchronization of cultural time and space An important aspect to better understand the dense and hybrid fusion of culture in displacement is that of the simultaneity of all cultural formations from the past in synch with those of the present. To think on this synchronization, I have divided cultural formations into six great eras: oral culture, written, printed, massive, and those of the media and cyber culture. Although these cultural formations appeared chronologically one after the other, the emergence of a new formation does not necessarily mean the extinction of that coming before. All of the six cultural eras, mentioned above, coexist, cohabit simultaneously in contemporary times, because, when speaking of culture, there is always a cumulative process of "complexification", where a new cultural formation is integrated into the prior one, provoking readjustments and new functionalities in it. And this is why today we live a true general confraternity of all forms of communication and culture, in a giant melting pot: oral communication which persists still with undeniable strength, intensified through its integration in audio visual mediums, mainly cinema and television; the written word, which manifests itself in the multiplicity of graphic and design manifestations; the printed culture which fills libraries and newsstands with a profusion of headlines and colored magazine covers which capture the attention of pedestrians hurrying by; massive culture which, far from losing its power, learned how to live with its competitors, both the media culture, which is the culture of availability, and cyber culture, which is the culture of accessibility. All these cultural formations coexist in a complex game of overlappings and complementarities. According to that I have already affirmed on other occasions (Santaella ibid.:57), this is due to the fact that human culture exists in continuum, it is cumulative, not in the linear sense, but in that of an incessant interaction of traditions and changes, persistency and transformation. Artesian production methods did not disappear to give place to industrial means of production. Painting did not disappear with the advent of photography. Theater did not become extinct; neither did novels with the advent of cinema. Gutenberg's invention produced an increase in the production of books, the same way the mechanical press and modern machinery accelerated the process even more. Books did not disappear with the explosion of newspapers; neither will both of them, books and newspapers, disappear with the coming of tele-information processing networks. They may, at the most, change supports, from paper to electronic screen, the same way books jumped from leather to papyrus and then to paper. Industrial methods will also not disappear to cede their place to those electronic, the same way electronic methods will not disappear with the coming of tele-information processing methods. Cinema did not cease to exist due to television. On the contrary, cable TV today depends on cinema for one of its main sources of alimentation. Change may effect, at the most, the technology which gives support to cinematographic production, but not to the language invented by cinema. Video will not disappear due to the advent of hyper media. On the contrary, it will demand an intensification of production, as what can be expected from here on is a tendency to form alliances, as that announced by digital TV, interactive with the computer and the telecommunication networks. Of all the communication means and of all the languages which transversely weave the threads making up the hybrid fabric of culture, cinema and video are isomorphic languages and representative of the dynamics of displacement, of the fleeting intensities in the incessant circulation of stimuli coming from different orders which characterize this culture. In the flux of its rhythms, in its speed, simultaneity and visual abundance, in its inherent high-impacting audiovisual fragmentation, they are, in short - cinema and more so video - the defining arts of contemporary space-time experience. Also defining this experience is the hyper media or network language, in the appeal they exercise on users who navigate on monitors, programming content, in a universe of evanescent and eternally accessible symbols; a user in a state of readiness, connecting in the midst of knots and bonds, traversing multi linear routes, multi sequential and labyrinthine, which they themselves help to create upon interacting with the knots among texts, images, music, videos, etc. In reality, the fragmentation, discontinuity, displacement, non-linearity which is inherent in hyper media is not reducible to a mere factor of language, but, as a factor of language, permeates every corner of our culture. According to what I have enunciated in another work (Santaella ibid.: 97), to permeate all parts of culture signifies penetrating into the essence of the way we live. We today dislocate through time-space in such a fragmented manner, discontinuous and non-linear as the syntax of knots and bonds of a hyper media. All on has to do is to imagine how the day-to-day life of a person in a large city is processed, accompanied by a mobile phone connected to the Internet, of a notepad, or even a notebook, moving through the chaotic traffic, attending to absurd obligations; a person who, upon entering home, by merely pressing a button, is circled by sound, voices, images and which, navigating on fluid architectures of informational space potentially acquires conditions to bring the planet inside his private world. As far as I can see, this may help us understand what it means to come and go in the dense forest of symbols of a culture of multiplicity, diversified, of the fluxes and displacements, of the unpredictable metamorphoses.

Bibliography
Bauman, Zygmunt (1998). O mal-estar da pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
Canclini, Nestor Garcia (1997). Culturas híbridas. Estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade. São Paulo: Unesp.
Kuhn, Thomas (1974). A estrutura das revoluções científicas. São Paulo: Perspectiva.
Lemos, André (2002a). Cibercultura. Tecnologia e vida social na cultura contemporânea. Porto Alegre: Sulinas.
____________ (2002b). Ciberensaios para o século XXI. Salvador: Eduíba.
Santaella, Lucia (2003). Culturas e artes do pós-humano. Da cultura das mídias à cibercultura. São Paulo: Paulus.