16.3. Artificial Life and Blade Runner

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
...  Time ... to ... die."

"Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in the production of works that employ moving images?

I will attempt to answer these questions by using the paradigm that imagines the constitution of the world from the relationship between event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely founded on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm the images, the signs and the statements have the function of representing the object, the world, whereas in the paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images, signs and statements do not represent something, but rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain this paradigm using two concrete examples: the dynamic of the emergence and the constitution of post-socialist political movements and the way television functions, in other words, signs, images and statements in contemporary economy." Maurizio Lazzarato, Struggle, Event, Media

"The semiotic components of capital always operate in a dual register. The first is the register of “representation” and “signification” or “production of meaning”, both of which are organized by signifying semiotics (language) with the purpose of producing the “subject”, the “individual”, the “I”. The second is the machinic register organized by a-signifying semiotics (such as money, analog or digital machines that produce images, sounds and information, the equations, functions, diagrams of science, music, etc.), which “can bring into play signs which have an additional symbolic or signifying effect, but whose actual functioning is neither symbolic nor signifying”. This second register is not aimed at subject constitution but at capturing and activating pre-subjective and pre-individual elements (affects, emotions, perceptions) to make them function like components or cogs in the semiotic machine of capital." Maurizio Lazzarato Semiotic Pluralism

"Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: they are the mind’s indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim." Ursula K. Le Guin: City of Illusions.

2.3. Global city and Swallowtail Butterfly

"The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure.
To capture this theoretically and empirically requires, correspondingly, a new type of
conceptual architecture. Constructs such as the global city and the global-city region
are, in my reading, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. The activ-
ity of naming these elements is part of the conceptual work. There are other closely
linked terms which could conceivably have been used: worldcities," "supervilles," informational city. Thus, choosing how to name a configuration has its own substantive
rationality.

When I first chose to use global city/T did so knowingly—it was an attempt to
name a difference: the specificity oFthe global as it gets structured in the contemporary
period. I did not chose the obvious alternative, world city, because it had precisely the
opposite attribute: it referred to a type of city which we have seen over the centuries/ in
earlier periods in Asia^ and in European colonial centers.^ In this regard, it can be said
that most of today's major global cities are also world cities, but that there may well be
some global cities today that are not world cities in the full, rich sense of that term. This
is partly an empirical question; further, as the global economy expands and incorpo-
rates additional cities into the various networks, it is quite possible that the answer to
that particular question will vary. Thus, the fact that Miami has developed global city
functions beginning in the late 1980s does not make it a world city in that older sense
ofthe term."

Saskia Sassen: The Global City: Introducing a Concept

Cities are very complex and multifaceted. They are sites for extreme exploitation of masses of people; but they are also sites for new types of politics, new ways in which the powerless can engage power in a way they cannot in rural areas, for instance or in small towns. And they are also sites where the many different cultures of resistance, subversion, contestation of power can become present to each other, aware of each other, in a way they cannot on a plantation or in a small town where the diversity is lacking. Cities have become international spaces for a diversity of actors and subjects. They have of course always been so, though perhaps a bit less than today and in a different way from today. Cities are new frontier zones where actors from many many different types of struggles and national origins can come together.
...

Cities are strategic sites for global capital, sites for exploitation, and sites for developing new forms of resistance. They will remain and become so even more. That is my notion of the global city: it is not just about global capital, as some say, it is also about a new type of politics that has to do with engaging the global in the localized site that is the city, and a coming together of the most diverse types of efforts and people from around the world. Nowehere is all of this as concrete as in major cities.

And nowhere are there such vast concentrations of women in the strategic economic sectors at the top of the system and in the infrastructure of low wage jobs that is strategic for the servicing of the top sectors and households. And nowhere do the conditions of illegal trafficking in women materialize so clearly as a mechanism for illegal profit as in these cities. The strategic nature of all these dynamics and the vast concentrations of women from different countries and socio-economic backgrounds it entails, signals the possibility of a variety of concrete politics of resistance, contestation and implementation by women. Because these cities have women from so many different countries one effect could be to strengthen the formation of existing, and also lead to new cross-border networks. The cross-border network of global cities is a space where we are seeing the formation of countergeographies of globalization which contest the dominant economic forms the global economy has assumed.

Saskia Sassen: Women in the Global City. Exploitation and Empowerment

And the film, 2,5 hours of Shunji Iwai: Swallowtail Butterfly