Vicente Gutiérrez

I dare to think of a world without cities, i.e. a world with plenty of “clean, safe cities” and without abandoned objects to take or manipulate. This would imply that all footprints and stains, smells and textures, and all of the other wonders of reality that enrich our lives would disappear. Nowadays, despite town planning, by construction mafias that destroy urban life and communities, we can still stumble upon, step on and break things.

One undeniable fact about cities is that within them we are surrounded by lots of objects, at rest or in motion, conventional or unique. When we walk through any city (from one end to the other, walking in circles, aimlessly...) subconsciously we always need to grab something valuable; from the dump, from the stall... We at least think about the possibility of interacting.

All cities are governed by the domination of safety, neatness and cleanliness, which is aimed to establish better police control. Fortunately, in this period of capitalist decline there will always be garbage strikes, labor demonstrations, fierce winds, violent storms... and all of this will make destroyed objects emerge once and again, as objects displaced to areas where nobody would expect to find them. (...) Leer más

Introduction

Sometimes we tend to use the expression ”from the outside of language”. Through it we intend to mean something like what will follow. There is a commonly accepted standard of verbal communication in everyday life that is supposedly determined by a logical discourse. In the ”logic” goes, unequivocally it seems, a use of language spoken pragmatically, usefully, identifiably. Presumably, if the spoken language does not have these characteristics, that is, if it doesn't retain certain established linguistic rules, we would be illegible, we would not understand each others. It is a fact that this amounts to maintain, inevitably, rigid forms of communication that are held on the basis that they have to mean something, that they have to make sense, that they have to be comprehensible, that is, we need to have a rational communicative behavior, or else we would turn illogical, we would fall into nonsense, we would become absurd and irrational. And it is precisely what it is about: for who could continue preventing us from losing ourselves orally, from initiating talks through which (this is language, a means, rather than a tool) humanity could restitute to itself relationships sponsored by the satisfaction of its (...) Leer más