Illegible Spaces

A note about Semaphores
By Jordan Essoe

Introduction

Semaphores is an exhibition project about globalization, physical manifestations of psychological geography, and the legibility of the environment around us. The project questions our relationship to illegible spaces, and how it defines and manufactures exile and empathy. The work is multidisciplinary, and includes works of collage, video, painting, performance, photography, writing, and sculpture; and incorporates materials ranging from oil on canvas and handwriting on notebook paper to sugar cubes, peg board, and shredded brown paper bags. As an exhibition, it has a linear design, with separate galleries intended to be experienced by the viewer in sequence. As a visual exercise, the project pursues a sense of spatial uncertainties and [dis]quiet. Conceptually, the project considers specific economic, political, and military aspects of globalization towards an understanding of communication structures allowed by – and in some cases a byproduct of – free marketeering, intergovernmental agency, and mutual defense imperialism. I’ll begin this note by addressing the general context for the project before moving into a discussion of the individual works.

Communication Failures

The successes of global communication structures are no more or less important as the failures, but it is through looking at the breakdown or limitations of information technologies that we can better understand how illegible spaces in the global village are created and maintained. Communication failure occurs both by error and by fault, but many of the consequences are consistent. Anywhere in the world, for example, insufficient access to education is the single most compelling risk factor connected to poverty. Information asymmetry can and should be thought of as directly enabling wealth concentration. Concentration of wealth forges exiles of both the haves and the have-nots, with dense illegible spaces dividing the population. Therefore, in all instances and to all degrees that communication structures fail to achieve egalitarian exchange of information and reciprocal interconnectivity, they are not inert conditions. They are the conditioning responsible for actualizing a world with nurtured illegible space and manufactured exile.

Failures or flaws of communication structures are not limited to lines or methods of communication not used responsibly, or even limited to systems that are constructed intentionally for deceitful transmission. An appropriate definition of failure also includes a refusal to develop communication systems within and for illegible spaces where none currently exist (with respect paid to maintaining levels of appropriate privacy in accordance with regional culture and international human rights standards). This is an important secondary ethical aspect to the dialog about communications infrastructure, because lack of information not only enables poverty, but also deactivates empathy through the uneven preservation of distance. The promotion of empathy is an attractive replacement for the Chicago school’s brand of self-interest towards the common good, but distance remains one of empathy’s reliable cures. Consequentially, if distance needs to be deactivated in order to promote empathy adequate enough to stimulate the development of interconnectivity, then this is a Catch-22, and a stabilizing effect for illegible spaces.







Distances

It is remarkable how and why distances are enacted and enabled or preserved. Forces of globalization are often described as tools for compressing space and making distances appear smaller. Since we have acquired the technologies and resources to accomplish either compression or inflation of space, distance should be thought of as a potential feature without default value that requires deliberate activation or deactivation. Bodies of government and transnational business do not usually elect to deactivate distance unless it is in their specific self-interest to do so – frequently to make use of an opportunity of unfair advantage – and common citizens do not typically behave much differently. In many cases, to varying degrees, individuals may elect to promote their own isolation and fortify the distance around them. Why? Distance enables private property and a sense of entitlement. Distance enables a sense of individuality and security. Distance disrupts empathy and places it at arm’s length, replacing it with more comfortably egocentric sensations like apathy or guilt or fear. Distance enables robbery, rape, and expulsion to occur in secret.

Even when people do not actively pursue or protect their own isolation, it is sometimes protected for them – by law enforcement, economic restraint, or cultural norms – and this can seemingly validate a feeling of homelessness inside the global village. Illegible spaces between neighbors are promoted by the powerful because illegible space prevents, among other things, popular uprising. Qualitative isolation exists with ubiquity within the elite sectors of the Global North in ways that are defined by concepts of privilege. It is commonly contrived as a privilege to feel divorced from your neighbors, immediate and far.








Displacement

There are different forms and expressions of exile, all representing characteristics of fracture in the global village. Since exile is binary, and defined by which side of a dividing wall you are on, two distinct types of exile are considered by the Semaphores project. The first is psychological exile, typified by a sense of anomie or symptomatic detachment from one’s local, regional, and/or international community. The other is literal, violent, physical expulsion.

Multiple works in this project specifically examine an ongoing crisis in Colombia. In its northwestern region of Chocó, tens of thousands of indigenous Afro-Colombians are being brutally expelled from their agrarian communities at gunpoint. Their homes and natural territory are immediately overturned and converted into palm oil plantations in the service of junta entrepreneurialism. From a global perspective this is, unbearably so, not a fully unique circumstance. There are other contemporary scenes of systematic pillage that similarly confess an expulsion directed by factors of economic globalization – and the peculiar sociopolitical envelope into which the fragile awareness of evictions of this kind tends to disappear into. This specific case in Colombia felt urgently appropriate to the Semaphores project for multiple reasons.

Of primary interest is Colombia’s contradictory proximity to the United States. The U.S. continues to be Colombia’s profound sponsor, primarily in military and “law enforcement” matters, but we have not yet awarded the country a “free-trade” agreement (fortunately, considering that, among other facts, more trade unionists are murdered in Colombia than in anywhere else in the world). You can fly from Miami to Bogotá in 3 ½ hours, but tourist traffic is spare. Ostensibly, a neighbor as physically near and as economically associated with us as Colombia should feel closer. But the informational and cultural geography make it distant, and the purview feels deeply obfuscated.

In shear numbers, Colombia has the second largest internally displaced person population in the world, behind only Sudan. Over four million Colombians are exiled within their country, a figure roughly double of that for Iraq. The tens of thousands of recent victims joining this haunting statistic in Chocó are displaced through a polygonal arrangement: right-wing paramilitaries working in conjunction with the domestic agrofuel industry are employed by the Colombian government and publicly supported by President Alvaro Uribe and his ambition to emulate the lucrative palm oil boom in Malaysia and Indonesia. Their actions are financed, in part, by the United States through its USAID program. If the paramilitaries wish, they execute those landowners that resist or organize against evacuation. Once the target land is stripped and developed into operational plantations, palm oil is harvested for export, primarily to be used as a biofuel or food additive. As an additional convenience, the plantations are useful money laundering fronts for coca trafficking, a more traditional revenue source for paramilitary operatives.

In essence, a coalition of governmental, corporate, and mercenary pirates are eliminating the rightful owners of legible space and restructuring these spaces as foreign, manufacturing exiles. Witnesses are strangers, watching through soiled windows.





Grand Design

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1940, is used throughout Semaphores as a type of conceptual informant, and many of the works in the project take their titles from the text. The narrative, which Borges plainly suggests is an allegory about totalitarianism, is in this context a useful lens through which to debate the problematic of remaking the world by grand design under the larger heading of globalization. Borges’s story contains myriad literary nuances too intricate to address here with precision, but importantly it is about the charmed conception of a fictional world that manifests control over reality and, with increasing, modular strength, threatens to substitute it completely. The grand design, despite having initially less treacherous intentions, can be described as the promotion and mass manufacture of virulent illegible space.

This new world order is summoned through the careful efforts of a vast secret society of intellectuals dating back to George Delgado (a linguist who in real life proposed and completed an original universal language in the 1650s) and philosopher George Berkeley. The project’s aims were originally limited to the creation of an imaginary country named Uqbar, but two centuries later, on a different continent, the ambition of the idea was revised:

Buckley listened with some disdain as the other man talked, and then burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet.

Tlön is the name of the emerging usurper world, and Orbis Tertius is the title given to the secret society’s project to improvise its blueprint, manufacture evidence of it, and covertly disseminate it. The primary communication lines for distributing the ideas of Tlönist doctrine are encyclopedias, those traditional guides of selective “total” knowledge. As Tlön increases in strength and influence, we are told that some of its more nonsensical cultural geography or self-contradictory concepts are curbed as a way of compromising with the status quo reality. Regardless, the more integrated that our reality and Tlön’s unreality become, the less stable and knowable any of it appears.

The story is narrated in the first-person by a fictional double of Borges, in an almost dry, journalistic tone. Many other characters have real-life counterparts, including Borges’s good friend and sometimes collaborator Bioy Casares (and, as previously suggested, several historical figures). Owing to these and many other illusive exchanges between fact and fiction, and Borges’s recurring play with reflection and metaphors of doubles, the level of acquaintance with one’s environment is hazy (for both character and reader). The instinct to preserve the self, and the sphere of the familiar that compliments it, is put into question.

Due to contact with Tlön, unnatural objects are manifested purely through a mentalist process of hoping for them (extremely heavy cones, made of metal that does not exist in this world), deteriorating relics are preserved simply through the incidental witnessing of them (a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from site on his death), and the continuity of unique personal identity is replaced with corporate identity (All men, in the climatic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare). The philosophical ideas Borges pursues with Tlön advance beyond Berkeleian immaterialism (whose chief percipient and anchor is God) into a brand of panspychism that altogether denies the existence of objective, material reality. Hence, Tlönic language refuses all nouns.

Forces of economic globalization (back here in the real world) are directed by either immaterialist or materialist points of view, alternating between them depending on what or whom are being evaluated. Similar to the commonly insensitive mindset of people who are distracted by the complexity of their own lives, business always believes in the existence of its own objective reality, but only sometimes believes in the objective reality for other things and of other people. The materialist worldview is applied bilaterally in instances where strong displays of public empathy make it otherwise difficult to deny the reality of external human consequences. In many other circumstances – where empathy is uncertain, divided, or otherwise illegible or invisible – objective reality beyond the back fence is treated insouciantly as a set of theoretical and profoundly malleable constructs (constructs without nouns). From the perspective of Tlön, our world is its awkward fiction, and from the perspective of international business, native populations in the way of opportunity have fictional rights. From the perspective of the narrator, a witness to terrible corruption from a distance, he or she themselves can feel rendered fictive through their isolation and sense of abject powerlessness.





Trafficking

This exhibition project gained its titled Semaphores because of the irregular history of the word – a concept and a name that has been used for many dissimilar communications technologies over the centuries, from telegraph towers in 18th century France, traffic lights in 19th century England, and today’s digital regulators that manage data flow between multiple computer processors. Importantly, a semaphore is never the message itself, but the method of delivery, and it often dictates the speed and timing of a transmission. Beyond this, its definition is fairly mercurial, and it is easy to begin to think of the word “semaphore” as a prevailing concept or metaphor unto itself, elastic and available for broad interpretation.

Applied to this project about globalization, the title Semaphores is intended to function in two ways. On a purely conceptual level, it describes in general terms an emphasis on communication structures, and asks the viewer to consider the parameters of that proposal in a global context. Secondly, the title presides specifically over a group of constituent interdisciplinary artworks that utilize many different communication technologies and formats towards a unified whole. Yet, of course, contact with each artwork facilitates a signal independent from that whole, which returns us to thoughts of compartmentalization, information asymmetry, and the bifurcated nature of communication traffic.






Jordan Essoe’s Semaphores closed February 28, 2009 at Ampersand International Art, in San Francisco.

Please visit www.essoe.com or www.ampersandintlarts.com for more information.