Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age: 10th Anniversary Rendition

In 2009 I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyi and its companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Ageii. Being an artist from Brazil, I could not escape the cultural mystique of ‘Anthropophagy’. For those unfamiliar with the term, the etymology has a Greek origin dating back to the mythological Kronos (Saturn) eating his own son – ‘Anthrōpophagia’: ‘Anthropos’= human being + ‘phagein’= to eat, i.e., an eating of a human. The words ‘Anthropophagy’ and ‘Anthropophagus’ were transplanted by the European conquistadors in the late 1400s/early 1500s to the land masses renamed ‘America’ and ‘The Caribbean’ at the onset of colonialism. Starting at this period, some native ethnicities of the ‘Amerindian’ populations have been described as practitioners of ritual Anthropophagy and/or Cannibalism. ‘Cannibalism’ itself supposedly finding its root in a misspelling or ironic naming – ‘Canib’iii – by Columbus when describing the Carib people of Antilles/Caribbean Islands during his navigational enterprises between 1492-1504. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade devoured Brazilian colonial history itself writing the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, an adjective form of the term, meaning a Manifesto that possesses the agency to eat. The proposition of the Brazilian Moderns was to devour what comes from outside (‘First World’ novelties), absorb their useful ‘otherness’ in order to output something uniquely Brazilian. Thus ‘Antropofagia’ is appropriated and forever transformed in the 1920s São Paulo into a Brazilian avantgarde. Antropofagia is considered by some critics to be perhaps the only true Brazilian artistic canon. The concepts of this cultural icon have inevitably impregnated my own artworks, especially in my condition of migrant since the age of 19, living in a constant state of becoming ‘other’ somewhere.

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https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/4.0/ Ramos-Velasquez. Exchanges 2020 7(2), pp. 6-16 Anthropophagy offers complexities that defy even the fields which have traditionally dealt with such a theme. My fields of interest and research focus on Ritual Anthropophagy, its cultural constructions, their appropriation in the arts and through the arts, and the ensuing generative potential for innovation constituting both a philosophy as well as a method of creativity, especially in moments of crisis. Ritual Anthropophagy has been described anthropologically as a switch of perspective. Especially in warring rituals, the winner supposedly consumes the strong enemy (weak individuals are never desired), in order to see oneself as the enemy sees him. This constitutes a motion toward acceptance of otherness in oneself, instead of negation of a dissimilar entity. A foreign strong body as a formidable body and its consumption an openness to the highest form of alterity.
While I was moving from New York City to Berlin, Germany, in 2009, I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagy i containing a companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age. Drawing from my experience as a migrant of continuous cultural transformation, a constant motion toward the unknowable 'other', experimenting with a multiplicity of worldviews and perspectives, I felt an embodiment of the concepts that enliven Anthropophagy/Antropofagia. In my artistic practice at that time, being a video and film editor, I was hand-making films from discarded 16mm film pieces, creating new narratives for these materials that I found in dumpsters, donated archives, and bulk purchases of undeveloped rolls from Ebay. After receiving the Distinction Prize of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award in 2011 at transmediale iv , the annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, I presented my essay and manifesto globally as an audiovisual performance-lecture and a communal ritual. When I finish reciting the Re-Manifesto, handwritten on rice paper, I eat a piece of it and pass the communion wafer to the public, a translation gesture of one of the most disseminated and recognised (ecumenical) meanings behind 'Anthropophagy': eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus as bread and wine. The gesture also points to a turn against itself, eating one's own words, a de-programming act: cor inversum in se ipsum [The heart turned against itself] (Flusser, 2008: 28 Using Anthropophagy as both metaphor and strategy to navigate the rough seas of internet constitutionalism and innovation, I set out to consider new power structures favouring 'embrace, devour, share' within a new code of ethics as a holistic natural transparent approach for our socio-economic survival. All the while maintaining a healthy ecosystem online -based on net neutrality -and also offline, to support ethical information traffic and a safer metabolism of such large amounts of information. But how could this new online frontier be explored any differently than in the past terrestrial colonial scenarios of exploitation? It would not take very long indeed for wild exploits to loom in the horizon. The online community -if there has been ever such a thing as a 'community'steering wide-eyed in a Jules Verne's Nautilus type of vessel did not manage to reach the cost of utopia. The hope was perhaps to get to the destination navigating the international online waters free from landbased government. However, in a space of just ten years, roughly 2009-2019, the online world has gone from innocent ebullient optimism to fear, scepticism and pollution. A vertiginous trajectory from an environment of relatively equal stake-holders at the beginning of the internet era with a horizon built brick by brick to the current world entirely calculated to fit into a smartphone -the new acculturation tool. Its degenerative dynamics alike a 'Requerimiento' (penned in 1513 by jurist Juan López de Palacios, to be read out loud even in empty beachfronts with the purpose of submitting non-conforming indigenous to the complete rule of Spanish kingdom, under penalty of death). And although history teaches us patterns, models and structures of dominance and subjugation, the long journey traced since the 15/16 th Century Iberian caravels only shows us how much today's internet-worked culture has fallen into those same patterns, models and structures.
Digital Anthropophagy, a term I coined in 2009, whose sentiment permeates my Re-Manifesto, reflects a globalised user-based practice and cultural manifestation occurring online and outwards into the physical world and back online as a resonating never-ending feedback loop of vast cultural consumption and transformation. Whereas there have been plenty of profound exchanges and symbiotic profiteering online, it has become increasingly apparent that a lesser form of Digital Anthropophagy is unfortunately also possible, namely: cannibalism. While Anthropophagy produces new forms, bodies, effects, original expression, synthesis; cannibalism is an act of poor destruction, at best it produces just a copy, without imagination, without ritual, without magic.
To compound the lesser favourable winds of development, this new era of consuming 'The Other' in a supposedly immaterial way has only revealed that the digital world is heavily material. All the apparatus that support it are based on materials: bodies implicated in the production of devices, content and data; rare metals extracted from the earth and ocean to make our digital lightness/heaviness of being, colourful, pleasant, and chic. We have been paying a high price for the commodification of life. Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without these technological companions and coadjutants to our lifestyles, they have so profoundly changed our humanity. The conveniences and addictive happiness these devices afford users exist in the very tension between the material world and the deep level of abstraction invisible and impenetrable to most who have embarked in this great digital adventure.
Looking back at my Re-Manifesto, I recognise it as a provocation -what does it mean to be Anthropophagic in the Digital Age with the supreme interconnectivity of the information society, in which everyone is consuming the world, and each other, at an unprecedented pace and intensity? By opening up a new blank map on which to inscribe a new history, I was exploring potential: both high and low. In this tension, I recognised that our cannibalistic relations, not only to each other, but also with technology, were causing an ontological shift in the way we see ourselves as human, an ontological turn proposed by philosopher Vilém Flusser in Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie in 1983. Flusser proposes that, starting with the invention of photography, human beings began orienting themselves from the images, which not only stand as surfaces (mediations) between human and world, but also veil what stands behind its algorhythmic representation.
I had proposed Digital Anthropophagy as a valuable cultural concept for our time, neither euphoric nor pessimistic. Now, reflecting on what the Internet has become in these last ten years, I see that a global 'user culture' has succumbed in the digital era to meta structures that engulf us and transform us into cannibalised bodies. I am reminded of a constant theme in Flusserian philosophy that speaks of our highly technological moment: 'The change of codes is far more important than the invention of new media…the function of codes is not dependent on a metaphysical 'eidos' of the medium, but on how the medium is handled' (Guldin, R. et al, 2008: 5). Flusser himself states: 'Indeed we are actively generating our tools and through them we are generating the world, but it is also true that those tools are hitting back on us and are generating us' (Flusser, 1991).
The question now seems to be what world should we generate next in widely and wildly divided global societies? Do we need another paradigm shift, a radical discontinuity to sever deep dependencies on the control mechanisms of the digital age? Flusser believed that the artist is an agent who can intervene in programmed apparatus, be it a technological black box or institutions of control. If an indigenous ritual-philosophy informed artistic and cultural production in the 1920s, why not consider indigenous art production, which has managed to transcend time and western artistic cannons, to inform a new imagination? Aílton Krenak and Bené Fonteles offer the following: Although rooted in performance, she employs a variety of media to formulate meta-narratives. Explores structuralist image-making processes and their integration into performative installations and audio-visual experiences.