I.

If we could see ourselves in this moment, poetics would die. Such is the dynamic of fighting against poetics; trying to kill it and reveal it before it kills us. Poetics or the annihilation of the senses through the banalisation of the Image.

This hardly seems like a good place to start. I vaguely remember what I learned in Portuguese classes and (I confess) I used the internet to do some research on how to write a text. I don’t know how to do it poetically through prose – tragedy still lingers; writing is learned through writing not for those who read us, but for those who do it with us.

In the relationship with art, under the context of plastic arts, I now identify myself as an author (the gender neutrality of the subject is not threatened by the maleness of the word in Portuguese). At the mirror conceptual limit, in the relation between the concepts of author and lyrical subject, there is no gender for me; there are (free) poetic manifestations and gender constructions.

But it is difficult to be an author. If acting is hard enough, and performance seems to be a scandal, is it not even harder to manage all the parts of the Image?

Is it possible to write two hundred pages of wandering thought? Writing like drawing, ignoring academism and doing it.

I don’t write enough to know what interests me in this domain. Perhaps practice makes it right (or the knight). A knight who, more or less noble, reminds me of the idea of the lyrical subject (which I do not consider to be far from the notion of the author) – and the social pressure in constructing the Individual.

– Isn’t Tabacaria, by Álvaro de Campos, the 20th century’s most brilliant poem?

I hope these introductory words are a model to understand the object below: a digression on something that cannot be delimited in an absolute way.

II.

The successive simultaneity of aesthetic phenomena creates the concept of sensation as Image (moving image). If we are here, in this prime format of the teleprompter, the moment should prove the illusory stillness of things – or the illusion of the escape from the Image.

It seems difficult to explain why we like or dislike something. The identification processes are living strange and uncertain times; when building a cartography of a minimally binocular or multi-level reading, one must know its codes, more than knowing how to map it – figuring it out to build the common place.

– The ad of a fast-food chain disrupts the melodic musical flow to say that they are giving extra chips.

Under the fast culture, the excess is not enough; not enough to numb the senses. The times that portray the reality of the times, in human relationships, resemble these images. It is more about quantity than minimum quality, like those extra chips.

Time. Money.

Quantity. Quality.

(In the capitalist environment, I ask: how to make money by being?

Nobody knows, ask the people who do theatre).

To be is a profession? I remember that I wanted to be an astronaut in the beginning. To be an astronaut you have to study hard and know physics, for example. You need a lot of study for everything. And that’s good. But it’s ironic that we are being asked to do that in a system that is increasingly fragmented, without recasting and with merged subjects; like the sushi we eat – and enjoy.

It sounds like an interesting academic experiment. But I don’t think Portugal has a stable labour market to sustain this exotic menu of short-term professions. A different scenario seems to happen abroad, where training is more consolidated, perhaps because there is built-in experience in a real and more robust labour market. Do I have a narrow view of social events? Don’t things work like that? Being an astronaut seems easier now – if you’re aiming for the sky.

Space is still not as big as the Earth. From another point of view, in the anti-romantic sense that allows you to ignore the habits of mass consumerism (among other contexts and variables), the idea of being a teacher is attractive. It should be (insert positive adjective) the possibility of following and stimulating the cognitive development of a young person – if this does not include, when accompanying the Other, the intervention of Social Services and the Court of Justice.

When I hear that God is sadistic, I accept that dimension of human existence. Television makes one disturbed; with the sad news of the images.

Then I remember that in some parts of the Middle East women can already vote; but they have no right to independent legal personality – and I suspect God is a comedian.

Public space (digital or urban, both with their physicality) is advertising. Some masses of the political sphere describe it as democratic space. I like to think of democracy as a hybrid place or flexible object that assumes a continuous form without defining boundaries – people who construct public space (as place) through the particular needs of private spaces – with intermediate variations, masses and layers that establish dynamics, rhythm or flow. All space is sensitive.

III.

With communication growth, technological progress and the media democratization have fostered the development of new ways of communicating and Communication Sciences have acquired new perspectives. In contemporary times, the fusion and consequent blurring of boundaries has also become commonplace. And we are talking here about that blurring.

Distance is a unit of measure of sensation.

Switching on. Disconnecting. Closer, further away.

The (relative) sense of proximity through technological means seems to inversely reflect a lesser attention to the Other in identity construction.

I think about the dilution of Bauman’s liquid world, keying in on the constant joining of the imaginary of worlds in the untenable dimension of place; through the immediacy of suspending spatial boundaries (and mixed temporalities), it produces the most fragile and blinding fabric in the history of human relations – and mapping altered affections.

After reading the “Portuguese Charter of Human Rights in the Digital Age”, I was reminded of the mailboxes of the urban public (-private) space. In some of them we find a rectangular sticker paper where we read this message: “(unaddressed) ADVERTISING IS FORBIDDEN HERE”.

This message clearly expresses that the individual does not want to receive information that is not addressed to them – but that is not always respected. I wonder: is there a symbol with this feature in the digital realm? Why is advertising sent to inboxes today on social media (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp…)? What is the degree, in physical specifics, of cognitive proximity between users?

There is also the private space in the community. I don’t think people living in the same building would commit the atrocity of putting advertising in each other’s mailboxes. That would be an invasion of the private sphere. For me, this behaviour is just like that of the advertising agent who works for a telecommunications company (and it looks like a compulsive gambling symptom) – but they still say hello, at least.

It is curious that there are jobs whose purpose is to invade the privacy of the Other. And that, among all the things that potentially bring about ethical-moral problems, is the best of all possible worlds.

If the intention is not poetic, there is no real sharing; it is just ignoring the Other’s boundary – that is a non-space, a degree of freedom where emptiness dwells.

In the hedonistic age of self-media, built on the noisy pillars of the fear society, it seems to me an assault on desire to be crushed by capitalism’s mother tool. Freedom is a movement with a poetic function – close your eyes.