Simulacra 101 (2024)

17/03/2022

ISS right above Mauritius. Photo taken a few minutes ago

16/03/2022

So you thought you knew everything about the Dodo? Read on...

Who has not heard of the expression ‘As Dead as the Dodo’, the expression used to signify a final, irreversible ending, inspired by the life of the legendary big bird who lived on the island of Mauritius, was seen, slaughtered and eaten by visiting Dutch sailors, famished from their long solitary journey across the Monsoon covered waters of the Indian Ocean. We have all heard of the Dodo. Lewis Caroll included a Dodo in the Wonderland Alice visited, so it must have been a species which excited quite some interest despite or because of its extinct status at the time. Our research has uncovered extraordinary tales around the legend of the Dodo. Read on...

As is common knowledge, it was the Dutch sailors who first brought the presence of this bird to the attention of the world. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC demanded that written and pictorial records be kept of all sea journeys. These records often included shipping routes, safe harbours, places where refurbishment of goods and shipment could be found. They also include topographical details of the landscape and sometimes artists were made to accompany the fleet so as to draw the flora and the fauna encountered. It is thanks to those artists that we have the first and probably only sketches of the Dodo, scientifically known as the Raphus Cucullatus. The first descriptions of the bird speaks of it being ‘large birds, with winds as large as a pigeon/ The sailors noted the large stomach which could provide substantial meal for the famished and travel weary sailors.

As logic would have it, the first thought of the sailors was food. History sitting back comfortably in snug twenty-first century homes can judge them, but who can imagine the psychological and physical conditions of the sailors who encountered these animals after long sea journeys on vast stretches of unchartered waters, before the advent of the GPS and telecommunication services, through which today’s brood of sailors can connect and understand their position in relation to the known spaces of human habitation.

Other than the Dutch sailors two rare instances of encounters with the live Dodo bird have been recorded in the annals of history. Peter Mundy, a British trader, travelling with the East India company kept his journals where he mentions seeing Dodos in Surat in 1628. He notes that emperor Jahangir had two captive Dodo birds in his menagerie.

Another unusual encounter was by a British theologian and Historian Sir Hamon L’Estrange who encountered a living Dodo on the streets of London while taking a night walk with friends. The latter episode is mentioned in the first scientific monograph on the Dodo written by Strickland and Melville in 1848 and according to them they take this as proof that the specimens of the Dodo actually reached Europe alive, before our memory of them dwindled down to seeing stuffed specimen in the Natural History Museum.

Recently excavations in the Mare Aux Songes, in the South East of Mauritius uncovered some fossil remains. But the first excavations took place around the year 1865. It was only in 1866 that it became possible to describe the Dodo scientifically for the first time with the discovery of fossil material.

A first scientific monograph was published by Hugh Strickland and Alexander Melville in 1848. Scientfiic interest in procuring specimens of the dead bird increased after this. A priest called George Clark, Master of the Diocesan School at Mahebourg spent many years looking for specimens of the birds. It was sugarcane workers who brought to his attention the bones they found in Mare aux Songes, on the estate Mon Desert, near what is now Plaisance airport.. According to historians, such was the frenzy for acquiring the complete skeletons of the dead bird that the Natural History Museum purchased one by one all the bones that would make up the full skeleton.

But there was human drama to follow.

The bones of the Dodo became both the focus of rivalry in trade and academic publications as several well known scientist of the day rushed to add their name to the discovery of the legendary animal. Of these was one Richard Owen who was a comparative anatomist at the British Museum and was eager to associate his name with the Dodo. On the other side was the figure of Alfred Newton who was to become the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University based on his work on the Dodo bones. However, none of these scientists were present on the island. They relied on the services of George Clark, the schoolmaster who had both a personal and pecuniary interest in selling bones to both parties as they became available. One can only imagine the silent rivalries by way of long distance courier between these two. But it seems Alfred Newton had privileged access to information transpiring in the remote South Sea island through his brother Edward Norton, who was appointed colonial administrator to Mauritius between 1859 to 1877. The tale of academic rivalry going through the byway of the son of Charles Myllus former Registrar of Slaves in Mauritius and later administrator of the Seychelles. A fascinating tale emerges worthy of a Dickensian mystery. But one thing is for certain, through the Dodo trail those scattered islands in the middle of the Southern Seas can definitely make it to the pages of history beyond what is officially known through conventional history.

And by way of a final surprise to end this article, queue this for an unexpected presence of the Dodo bird. It seems that there is a dodo sculpted into one of the pillars of Goblekli Tepe, the Neolithic archaeological site discovered in the 1990s which researchers say date way back before known history, predating oldest known civilisations. And on one of the pillars of Gobekli Tepe we can see a carving of a Dodo, see for yourself.

The photo below comes from the book by Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock ‘Gobekli Tepe : Genesis of the Gods’, published in 2014. The authors express their surprise at discovering a bird who is believed to have lived and died in Mauritius carved on the pillars of this mysterious ancient monument. The two carvings of the Dodo in the photo below can be seen on pillar 18 in enclosure D of Gobekli Tepe.

The ramifications of this are huge across time and space. Is it possible that our posthumously famous extinct Dodo might have existed before the continental drifts which split the original unified land mass of the earth.

https://sites.google.com/view/simulacra101/so-you-thought-you-know-everything-about-the-dodo-read-on?authuser=0

16/03/2022

Leadership in the age of absence:

We are in March 2022. The world watches in surprise as the world stage plays a drama with codes which we thought were those of another era. Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, the Moghuls, Western Empirical powers all deemed in their time, following the ideology of their day, that they were fully on the side of legitimacy and morality, if not jingoism, when they invaded other nations, seized territories, plundered, killed, r**e and erased people and cultures. Since then the world has changed and International treaties have been put in place: The 1907 Hague Convention , The Geneva Convention of 1949. Despite skirmishes which often deliberately went under the radar of the international mainstream media, it has become understood that the invasion of one country by another for annexing its territory are the legacies of a bygone age, despite the fact that military invasions have occurred again and again, often presented as peace efforts, when it came with the sanctimonious of Western ‘peacemaking’ through war.

However, the recent move into full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin has shocked the world. But despite the self-righteous outrage across the world and absolute sympathy with the Ukranian population being slaughtered at the altar of international geo-politics, one cannot help but feel there must be more than meets the eye in this war which seems to have dropped from a time warp capsule.

For one thing, there is a lot which could be said about the hypocrisy of maintaining world peace through the deterrence of arms, which has fueled international arms trade for many decades now. When engineers imagine and strategists project, game developers invent fantasies of invasion, a scenario like today’s must secretly feel like a dream come true for those devising strategies and games in their comfortable offices while the people on the ground are left to cope with the impact of all this slaughter.

It is significant that the Ukrainian president has donned his military uniform to fight, responding with the same antiquated code which Putin has publicly used to mask the geo-political reality of this conflict. The amenable vast territory of Ukraine has proved central to its destiny. It has known multiple invasions by almost every military front from Napoleon to the Ottomans. But today it matters as being centrally positioned as a major gas pipeline supplier for Western Europe. Throw into this its rich natural mineral resources such as coal and metallic minerals. Despite almost universal transformation of Vladimir Putin into a caricatural villain, we have to bear in mind the potential sense of vulnerability which Russia apprehends should Ukraine be in league with powers so ready to undermine Russia's long standing regional influence over this area of the world. Caught in a international geopolitical game which plays upon the legitimate desire for independence of a nation, Ukrainian find themselves caught today in a conflict which seems to come from pre-twentieth century scenario. The point of invoking the Ukrainian scenario is to provide a contrast to the type of leadership which the world has witnessed over the last few years, during the abominable pandemic years.

In the last few years the populations of the world have watched in dismay as one ineffective leader, succeeds another almost everywhere. There seems to be very few of our international political leaders who can live up to the old image we have of decisive well-informed charismatic leadership which made the hey-day of the middle years of the first half of the twentieth century the world over.

It is curious how suddenly all nations seem to have been confronted with a spate of incompetent, ego-centric or deliberately obtuse leaders. Don’t we all dream of a world where the Premiers will, rather than go for a grab at power for power’s sake, really pull up their sleeves and start tackling the real problems of poverty and unemployment and finally get to the much needed reforms in the health and education sector, before they deal with the urgent social disturbances created with the swiftly changing conditions of urban and rural existence, due to the impact of the simultaneous globalization and fragmentation of our flows of information and its concurrent parallel and contradictory lines of identification and collective self-projection. Not to speak of the urgent issue of climate change and its impact on habitat and food. At this point in time the populations of the world feel that they are at the end of a much lengthened rope of endurance and that the time has now come for fairer treatment of the populace by its political leaders.

There is a cynical popular saying which states that one gets only the leaders one deserves. But that is not taking into account the way in which the last three decades and the technological somersault we have experienced have dramatically altered our localized and collective experience while the narratives describing those experiences have remained stuck in a nostalgic idea of an old order of the world.

This is not to say that chaos should be left free reign. But the conjunction of the contradictory pulls of globalization in the world of education and culture have been confronted with the lateral axis of indigenous or community allegiances whose narratives of identification often remain at the level of the spoken word only, therefore difficult to document, as they are passed down through oral tradition across the generations, sometimes not even through words but through an approach to space, time and nature which modulate the pattern of days and imprint on the growing consciousness of children an implicit understanding of a vision of the world, which they would be hard put to describe objectively while they practice it.

In this way, we find that there are always rhizomic escapees from the official pro-globalisation positions, which complicate decision making at all levels of institutional and state organisations. An archaeology of how power works or does not work in postcolonial societies would be a much needed research. Some famous African writers have expressed their disillusion with the post-independence failures of their nations. Some of these are Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born- 1968), Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannahs-1987)

At this point in these reflections it might help to offer a solution to the problem of leadership, but as observers we are all caught in the paradoxes of the pragmatics of space and time. However, if the beginning of a solution can come from understanding the past, maybe this is where we should go to understand ideas of leadership.

In Constructing the Political Spectacle( 1988) Murray Eldelman talks about the construction and use of political leaders and he makes a few interesting observations: according to him, more often than not, appointed political leaders are but the front to mask a very confused, often corrupt political ecology. They get elected by becoming a symbol of change, innovation and transformation but paradoxically their political image and survival depends upon treading the middle ground of consensus, pactising with rival partners and ensuring the continuation of conservative, recognizable modes of social organization which will lull voters in the quietude and comfort of habit, rather than force them to change. Despite that murky political ecology around the figurehead of the leaders are crystallized notions of competence, nationalism and its obverse. Ultimately belief in leadership is a catalyst of conformity and obedience.

The paradoxes of political dialogue have a lot to do with it, as in their quest for political survival, specially in the present day of instant transmission of action, words, behavior, political figures tend to invent commitments dependent upon the fashion of the day, rather than ideologically understand the long term implications of the causes they apparently sponsor. This could explain the pervasive disappointment and failed expectations for action. In short political aspirants have less of an image to respect and can better propose real innovation than established figures who need to surf upon the interest of the day and be ready to publicly change their allegiance and commitment as the expediency of the moment warrants. This goes a lot towards explaining the wait-and-see attitude of most prominent political figures. Causes in themselves matter less than the fashion of the day, hence the voters are forever left with an illusion of hope followed by dissatisfaction by the inexistence of political action to follow upon stated intention,

According to Elderman: ‘Leaders win acclaim and their followers win reassurance and hope from courses of action that reaffirm accepted ideologies while connoting boldness, intelligence, change, and paternal protection.’ (1988)

There are many ways to build the public image of a leader, one of these obviously goes through mastering political rhetoric, committing to socially visible causes which draw sympathy like the socialization of children, rather than more thankless involvement in more long term improvement which can lead to genuine social transformation over time. Because the position of the political leader depends upon the continuation of the existing social structure rather than its overturn, and by so doing the established leader implicitly endorses the dominant social ideology rather than challenge it.

On the one hand there is a tradition which thinks that leaders emerge from the social condition and commitment which create them, as they become ‘spaces’ through which the concerns of the day are articulated. They are inevitably the product of group interests, created through the interplay of social, linguistic and political group preoccupations.

On the other hand, some conservative thinkers tend to think leadership is an innate quality. This was mostly associated with nineteenth century conservative ideas that leadership as an innate quality which is inherited. Despite the inequalities of the distribution of wealth, power, prestige and clout, the twentieth century’s major models of education have systematically worked to prove the second option as fallacious and untenable. Unfortunately, in many postcolonial countries there systematically seems to exist an overlap between modern notions of political leadership and old notions of tribal and community leadership. Hence we have the uneasy situation of dynastic politics which throttle the very notion of democracy by installing a grip of hegemonic control which can sometimes outrun the existence of a party in power.

How does the media deal with the myth of leadership. It seems that in general the people who make up the media are as saturated as the population in general with popular myths of cyclically reinvented politicians as they run after existing and potential leaders, be they weak willed and ineffective or braggart and ineffective, locked in the wait-and-see game on every side. The media deals with them through everyday reporting which reinforce the image, the myth at the expense of the real exercise of power. It is easier to talk about statistics, rallies, legislations, important appointments than to investigate the real consequence of the loopholes of power on the lives of real citizens. Whose interest is being served by the maintenance of the status quo as the will to analyse and understand recedes? That the citizens are generally dissatisfied with their politicians is understandable but that the media should have reached the level of also inducing disinterest in the people whose very voice they aim to represent and articulate is cause for concern. Maybe it is time to revive the high ideals of the Fourth estate as a counterpoint to political power and reinvent another form of leadership in the realm of ideas rather than power.

In any case is it not all a stage. As we watch Putin and Zelenskyy stalk their stage let us take time to reflect on staging our own performance in leadership of ideas.

https://sites.google.com/view/simulacra101/leadership-in-the-age-of-absence?authuser=0

16/03/2022

Cyclones. Globalism, Folklore and the Indian Ocean

Have you noticed the number of strong cyclones which have visited us recently., not to speak of the torrential rains and the flooding. 'Batsirai' and 'Emani' were the latest two cyclones which have left the Western Indian Ocean islands reeling from their strength as well as the sheer expanse of their size. Frankly, sometimes you would look at these cyclone maps and it did seem as though they covered virtually the whole Indian ocean.
Brace yourselves, we have been warned that there are more cyclones on their way before the end of the cyclone season.
It is a cause for wonder why we have had so many intense cyclones following so swiftly upon each other, with the wave of devastation in their wake, especially on the island of Madagascar, but also with major impact points on Reunion island and Mauritius.
In May 2021, The Guardian ran an article which said it was the rapid heating of the Indian ocean which are impacting the intensity of the cyclones. According to scientists the whole Indian Ocean, specially its western area is warming up much more than any other ocean in the world.
But hang on, you have also heard of the bush fires in Australia, as well as flooding in both Africa and Australia, and to crown it all the invasion of the desert locusts in many African countries.
Well, more than ever the region will have to come together to make sense of how to cope with the new ecology of Climate Change beyond the official poses.
As it is, other major man-made ecological disasters compounded the stress already impacting this region. The Wakashio disaster off the South East coast of Mauritius made international headlines because of the threat to the biodiversity in this region of the Southern Oceans and international outrage followed. However, there was another similar man-made disaster, less publicized internationally but still very relevant to the people whose habitat are impacted by it.

In early June 2021 the X-Press Pearl caught fire while anchored off the port of Columbo in Sri Lanka. The boat burnt for two weeks with it cargo of 1,489 containers, contaminating the surrounding lagoon with chemicals and plastic. The region is still reeling from the impact of this disaster. The Wakashio and the X-Press Pearl are a minimal fragment of the many shipments crisscrossing the Indian Ocean for international trade. A few years back the world was all ears for the ravaging impact Somali pirates were having on world trade as they attacked container ships near the Gulf of Aden and on the East coast of Somalia. This lead to the re-routing of ships across the Cape of Good Hope. The smaller latitude lines towards the Southern part of the globe have been used to surprising effect by maritime companies to shorten the sea journey between the Indian Ocean and Latin America. It seems that ships find it less length to rally the South Pole and follow the shorter meridian to reach South America than they would were they to follow the central meridian of the Globe.

Many were surprised to discover post-Wakashio that the Southern Indian Ocean was being used as a major sea route for trade between Asia and the Western world. But the Indian Ocean has always been at the centre of considerable Maritime activities before the advent of Western explorers. A few books by major historians testify to the complex routes this trade took for many centuries such as The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History by Sanjeev Sanyal, The Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean by Pedro Machado, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empires by Sugata Bose. As fascinating as are the complex sea routes evoked in these rich studies, it might be in the literary annals that we find an echo of the long standing beliefs circulating around the Indian ocean. Equivalent to the Greek legend of Scylla and Charybdis, the Javanese have the legend of a Queen of the Indian Ocean called Nyai Roro Kidul. Javanese fishermen pray to her before taking their boat to sea.
On the other side of the Indian Ocean, mythologies of another kind abound, Some of these have been fictionalized in The Dragonfly Sea, a novel where the Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor uses the oral folkore of East Africa around the sea as a basis for her novel or in Sea Loves Me in which the Mozambican novelist Mia Couto mixes popular folklore with a deep sense of the profound multicultural heritage of the region.
There is a lot more which could be said about the complex history of this fascinating region but for the time being we will end with the sense that, in a strange turn of events, the written word is preserving what popular memory seems to have lost or allowed to fade into oblivion about the fate of the Ocean surrounding them

https://sites.google.com/view/simulacra101/cyclones-globalism-folklore-and-the-indian-ocean?authuser=0

16/03/2022

In 1991 Baudrillard wrote an essay called ‘The Gulf war did not take place’. Considering that in January 1991 America had invaded Irak and proceeded to invade this country in what was a planned military operation called ‘Desert Storm’ this statement of the famous French philosopher might have sounded slightly unhinged to many observers.

However, the purpose behind this deliberately provocative statement was to make audiences realise to what extent our participation in national and international events had become a voyeuristic affair where we are invited to always be spectators to always deferred experienced, which can be lived only through the signs which represent it.

In this case the war was televised on live television and commented upon round the clock. This was the first time that a war actually 'took place' on television. Since then there have been many and we are since living under the throes of another such event- the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which bespeaks of a return to an old perception of tribal territorial rights, with invader nation justifying their rights to occupying territories which are not legally theirs in the name of jingoistic nationalism.

Both the notion of tribal leadership and the concept of territorial expansion through invasions are issues which deserve in-depth exploration. This will have to be deferred for later.

In the present article we wish to look at the concept of the deferment of experience which has become a sinequanon of our contemporary experience, speeded up by the advent of social media. So that we have the illusion of participating while being merely spectators to lives and events which always have to be staged. We have become hostages to the idea that if an event is not staged it does not really take place. The sleuth of new YouTube careers and reality shows, as well as social media staging of private and intimate moments, has reached its apogée in our present time. The positive aspect of this is that as McLuhan anticipated the world has become connected in one global village. In the wake of the lockdowns occasioned by the 2020 pandemic, we discovered to what extent digital connections were important to keep our world going and the connection occurred not just within landlocked territories but also across the world, connecting people with similar interests across the vast geographical divides of North and South, East and West.

However, on the obverse side of this, is the fact that our perception of events has acquired the quality of superficial understanding, often evoked in code names which spark automatic reactions, somewhat in the manner of the Pavlovian response to automatic stimuli. So that we do not really have the patience to think through the implications of events, becoming potentially prey to invisible manipulation through the judicious use of specific code words, which often are enough to spark and direct reactions, which are unfortunately increasingly becoming uniform under the dominating pall of political correctness.

Citizens of the world are avid for justice and fairness and they want to stand on the side of good in all circumstances. But it might be important here to realize that there is no abstract notion of goodness against an out-and-out villainous party. We have had enough novelistic rewritings and movie prequels to make us realize that there is always a story within the story, that the narrative of the good avenger against the evil villain always masks an obscured reality, which is not transmitted down through mainstream narratives but which might exist in the alleyways of unacknowledged popular memory.

Because of this avidity for justice, coupled with a certain naiveté in unraveling the semiotics of the obvious at the expense of the more coded aspects of events, it is now relatively easy for news outlets to manipulate audiences by coding information, depending upon the type of responses which are expected of the readers or audiences. There are codes to evoke outrage, codes to rally behind causes which serve specific purposes of power, codes which are also reflected in the news hierarchy, as well as what is given priority, as opposed to what is obscured through silence. One of the strategies of present news reporting consists in providing increasingly superficial news reporting which skim the surface of events, reproducing what is both common knowledge and readily visible to any observer, with little attempt to get beneath the surface of matters.

To be fair, the advent of 24 hour television has contributed a lot to this type of superficial coverage which suffers from an excess of repetition, for the imperative of broadcasting at all cost, before real investigations can be carried out. Unfortunately, this surface reality explained by the conditions of live news reporting has spread to written news as well. Thus today we have news which pretends to inform but which consists in reporting what is commonly known with little attempt to go beneath the surface. This has as consequence the creation of pools of absent knowledge on the part of readers, simultaneously with the reinforcement of the comfort of known territories of social understanding, which has neither the desire to question its own limits nor to understand difference.

There is no answer to the equation of what exists outside the conditioning that mainstream media provides. But to understand the situation is already the beginning of empowerment.

This situation has been significantly exacerbated by the proliferation of new modes of engagement provided by the explosion of social media. In an unprecedented way digital participation of national and international events has exploded the top-down power of big news outlet by providing the illusion of participation and trans-corporeal presence. We can be following the New York Marathon, the refugees in Kiev, the Indian ocean mega cyclones all within a few minutes from the comfort of our domestic space. At the same time this potential expansion of surface knowledge like a sparkling mirror ball nullifies real engagement and uses the enumeration of facts to mask lack of real understanding. Information becomes a series of consumerist objects or moments which vie for our attention. It is obvious that to return to a pre-digital age is a near impossibility, nor would it be desirable. But there is a need to reflect on the quality of our engagement with the flow of information, so as to halt the arrow-like flow with rhizomic offshoots, which ground and personalize our engagement through localized experience. Simulacra 101 is one of the rhizomic offshoots in such a vision.

https://sites.google.com/view/simulacra101/simulacra-101-meanderings?authuser=0

Simulacra 101

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