Conferencia "Migrants: Workers of Metaphors"

Nstor Garca Canclini: Migrants: Workers of Metaphors Conference held at Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporneo ARCOmadrid, February 2005

We know that the word metaphor means transport in Greek. It has, therefore, a natural association with travel, migration, and other modes of displacement. This text stems from the following question: how much can be said about migration through scientific discourse formed with univocal concepts, figures, and hard facts; and how much can be conveyed by artistic languages, whose polysemy is plotted with metaphors? Concepts Versus Metaphors The notion of the opposition between concepts and metaphors persists in debates of recent years, but it is not very sustainable nor can it be seen as equivalent to the schematic confrontation set up in the past between scientists and artists. Their current practices often do not seem far from one another. Scientists also use metaphors, work with approximations, and compete by means of different theories to prove which has the most explanatory capacity. For their part, artists work with concepts and intellectually organize their representations of the real; they convert their intuitions into language, communicate them, and contrast them with social experiences. There is, therefore, a problem shared by epistemology and aesthetics: how does the movement through which language gains dynamism and meaning from metaphors intersect with the movement which aims to specify and fix meaning in concepts. Science, philosophy, and aesthetics all appear to be preoccupied with the reconception of models of connection between the presentation of the facts and forms of intelligibility, which diffuse the border between the reason of facts and that of fiction (Rancire 2002, 66). Perhaps the differences between scientists and artists reside, rather, in the evaluation criteria and legitimacy demands of their work: the scientist is interested in building knowledge in relation to empirically observable referents, whereas the artist is attracted by, more than the production of knowledge, the administration of the uncertainty inherent in the experiences of sensibility and the imagination.

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Migrations and Metaphors Why are migratory aesthetics relevant to the discussion of conceptual and metaphorical languages ? First, migration implies a radical way of experiencing uncertainty, and the passage from one way of naming and speaking to another; this discontinuity is greater if, when moving from one country to another, the language changes, but it also occurs when moving to another society that speaks the same language with different modulations. To achieve an understanding of the importance of the millions of migrants in a society, whether they are emigrating or immigrating, it is not enough to register the number of migrants and the remittance figures to their places of origin. It is necessary to pay attention to what is lost and gained in symbolic transfers, the abandonments and the recreations of meaning. The scenes [1]Fantasized scenes, oblique ways of naming metaphors, allow access to that hidden plot of meanings, to another density of experience. These displacements of meaning are habitual in the language of the foreigner because he or she lives among facts that have other names, and names which have lost their facts. I will use as an example one of the most extensively studied migratory processes, that of Mexicans who go to the United States, analysis of which has changed in recent years to include culture as a key dimension. Official statistics reflect approximately twelve million Mexicans living in the United States, although the instability of temporary migrations, the number of people without identity papers, and the addition of Americans of Mexican origin who remain connected to Mexico, push some estimates up to twenty-three million. For decades, studies concentrated on socioeconomic reasons for leaving Mexico (unemployment, discrepancies of one to seven times the salary paid for work in agriculture, industry, and the service sector), social insecurity and the migrants fight for their rights in the United States, as well as the repressive measures of the U.S., which range from border walls to violent discrimination[2]. The recent spectacular increase in fund transfers sent to Mexico by migrants, which have tripled in recent years to reach twenty-five billion dollars, and which are directed almost entirely towards sustaining households in the country of origin, has made it evident that migration is not an individual decision but a family strategy: by sending various members of the family abroad, almost always the youngest, families diversify their sources of income and make it possible for part of the family to remain in Mexico. But migrants send not only money, but information; they exchange experiences in both directions and establish transnational communities that are in constant communication (Besserer-Kearney 2006). The idea of cultural remittances enters the discussion: migrants send not only money from the United States to Mexico, but also musical and video equipment, televisions, electrical appliances, and fashionable clothes ; conversely, food, taped music, and videos of parties and family ceremonies are sent to California, Texas, Chicago and New York from Mexico. As Lourdes Arizpe notes, assets of prestige and signs of success emblematic of the height of modernity are conveyed from the United States to Mexico, whereas objects and messages, representing traditional affections, solidarity, and reaffirmation of the community are sent from Mexico to the north (Arizpe 2006). Through this exchange, bicultural practices are formed that bring about the coexistence and, to an extent, hybridization of diverse aesthetics. We know that hybridization does not amount to conciliation; it can imply tense combinations,

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and conflicts between cultures and aesthetics thatintertwine from unequal positions. This means, at least, problems of translatability. However, it could also be useful to examine the aesthetics of migrants as operations analogous to those that the philosophies of language classify as metaphors. Displacements of meaning that generate the interaction of two ways of naming within a single transnational community allow us to conjecture that, as well as translation problems, intersections of significant links and metaphorical associations occur within migratory aesthetics, in order to remedy a division in the ways of life, sensibility and thought between the communities of origin and the society of adoption. On another level, Im interested investigating why the metaphor of the journey has become so attractive in philosophy and the arts, towards understanding its fecundity and its limits. Its possible to suppose that the metaphorical character of the experience of travelling or migrating that I have just mentioned is a clue: above all, I see in the shifts in meaning of migratory experiences an illustrative clue to the attraction that it holds over artists. One might say that the passage from the modern to the postmodern is, among other things, a change from the aesthetics of deep-rootedness to nomadic aesthetics. In modernity, the aesthetics of localization and deep-rootedness predominated. Folklore celebratedterritory, took pleasure in immediate natural and cultural landscapes. The formation of states and national cultures broadened the scale of this environment as a container for experiences. It is notable that even the ruptures with the known and the search for unprecedented forms in the arts were identified with national labels: Russian constructivism, Mexican muralism, or American pop. Later, postmodernism declared that nations were exhausted and imagined that deterritorialization and the blurring of boundaries were the ordinary state of humanity. The world came to be regarded as a transit lounge. Many museums went from registering the art and cultures of a single country to celebrating the criss-crossing of distant images and people. Critics and curators requested works that could be seen as something which has travelled, according to Guy Bretts treatment of the airmail paintings of Eugenio Dittborn, those foldable and compartmentalized rafts that one received only to forward on: they were to be seen between two journeys (Brett-Cubitt 1991). This poetics of the transitory served to get around the obligation of representing embalmed identities and gave resonance to new dramas. The questions central to art and anthropology changed. James Clifford wrote that it would no longer be normal to ask Where are you from? but rather Where have you come from and where are you going? (Clifford 1995, 70). This new perspective developed into a kind of abstract cosmopolitanism that idealized the liberating power of any delocalization. Looking at the world as if moving or relocating were the norm is exaggerated in light of reports such as that of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development in 2006, which registered 191 million immigrants worldwide, reflecting only 3% of the global population. [T]he nomadic planet, affirms the demographer Gildas Simon, in which one moves around and circulates increasingly faster, with a globally decreasing cost, is populated with sedentary people, and the image of a world covered with uncontrollable waves of migration is destined for the great shop of clichs (Simon 1999, 43). The exaltation of nomadism as an ideology that nourishes artistic thought also derives from the growth of tourism and other types of travel, and of course it has to do with the increased

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global interdependence of the artistic markets, the proliferation of biennials, work-related travel, and the transnational itinerance of works and exhibitions. However, we must analyze this nomadic model in relation to the scale on which experiences of travel involve the global population and artists. In 2006, tourism-related travel involved 842 million people, a higher percentage than that of migrants who travel for work or political reasons, but a small minority in relation to the world population (El Pas 2007). As for the reordering of the art market according to the logic of globalization, it must be remembered that,while artists who sell their works for over thirty thousand dollars constitute a transnational system of competitors- the majority of art producers and disseminators continue to work within the framework of iconographic national traditions and in dialogue with the public in their own countries. In many societies, the plastic arts remain as sources of what is left of the nationalist imagination; they still constitute stages for the consecration and communication of the signs of local identity. Why then, have migration and travel erupted with such force, as key figures, in the arts? There are motives that could be called realistic, namely, that artists represent the multiplication of migrations, exiles, and tourist displacements. I would also like to suggest that journeys metaphorize the condition of artists today. The journey represents the three-fold uprooting experienced by artists in the twentieth century. Art lost its space when it left the home of its language, which was the painting; when it questioned the institution that contained it, which was the museum; and when it shared with globalized cultures the experience that the national model is insufficient to encompass social imaginaries. These starting points are useful in understanding the aesthetic dilemmas with which the artists face the issue of migration. Tragedy and melodrama prevail as genres. The artistic account of migration, as well as that of the media, continues largely to offer the most dramatic images: wars and repression, illegal border crossings and death. It is not by sheer coincidence that photography and video are the preferred modes of representation, often subsuming the crafting of the experience in the documentary record. The mega-exhibition Exodus, by Sebastio Salgado, which has been touring the world for the last decade, aligning with a single visual discourse,refugees from Vietnam, candidates for migration in Tijuana, Palestinians in Lebanon, Rwandans in Tanzania, street children in So Paulo, and multitudes of Indonesians who leave the countryside to work in construction in Jakarta,persists as a canonical example of migratory aesthetics. One of its problems is that the standardized treatment of economic migrants, political or war refugees, disabled people, families, and solitary individuals, from forty countries,renders them interchangeable if we do not read the clarifying text at the bottom of the picture or infer the differences from the most literal characteristics of the faces or the clothing. Other ways of speaking artistically about travel and migration have developed in recent years , beyond the documentary record and its epic or dramatic dimensions. They also deal with what these experiences of displacement can detonate in the re-creation [3]of the artistic work and in the relationship of the work metaphorical or conceptual with social processes (globalization and borders, differences and asymmetries[4]). I offer two examples, both from the same artist,

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Francis Als, that are indicative of other roads. The first work was produced for the exhibition inSite, which is periodically held in Tijuana and San Diego, on the border between Mexico and the United States, with artists invited from many countries, who often deal with the question of migration. Als, who took part in 1997, used the money with which inSite financed his work to make a journey from Tijuana to San Diego without crossing the U.S.-Mexico border: he took a route perpendicular to the dividing line, following a detour that took him to Santiago, Chile, Tahiti, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, and Vancouver. The work that he submitted was his travel journal, entitled The Loop. Neither tourism nor exile, but simply a journey, which the notes reveal as a not very enthralling one: I am still unable to get interested in the city, he records after various days in Santiago; Very pleasant but uninteresting, he writes in Sydney; he sees Singapore as a gigantic shopping center. I do not have expectations (Als 1998, 3743). The second experience was an exhibition entitled Ten Blocks around the Studio, situated in the historic center of Mexico City. After wandering through this delimited territory and collecting stories from the people who cross it in their intraurban journeys, which are a key part of existence in a megalopolis, [5]Als carried out a series of experiments there: a) he made collectors, small toy-sized devices in which he implanted a small magnet, with which he walked through the streets accumulating heterogeneous metallic samples; b) he photographed all kinds of carts, circulating objects and containers used by loaders and vendors; c) with the aim of collaborating in the formation of urban myths and legends, he documented the life of a three-legged stray dog in the historic center, a symbol of the precarious strategies required for survival in the city; d) he pushed a block of ice for nine hours through the streets of the center until it had completely melted and videotaped the action, metaphorically enacting the disproportionate relationship between effort and result: this minimalistic sculptural process, in decomposition, reflects on the precariousness of subsistence work and provides, according to Cuauhtmoc Medina, a criticism of sculpture as the production of objects of permanent prestige, instead understanding it as a means of intervention in the imaginary of a certain local time and social situation (Medina Als 2006, 63). There is one difference between the two journeys. The quick trip around the world only to arrive at the neighboring city, from Tijuana to San Diego, is nomadism for nomadisms sake, complete indifference to what is being seen in Santiago, Tahiti, Singapore, etc. His journeys around Mexico Citys historic center, where he has lived for years, find within everyday experiences the support for a reflection on the collection of waste, the coexistence with street vendors, and the discovery of the metaphorical dimension in the solitude of a stray dog or an object . New Foreigners In recent years, although border walls, passports, and migratory dramas have continued to be represented in the arts, other separations between natives and migrants are emerging that dont merely owe to geographical boundaries. New differencesnot territorial, or mainly territorial onesproduce new disagreements, asymmetries, and inequalities. A foreigner is not necessarily someone who comes from elsewhere and speaks another language; it is also someone who does not have access to strategic networks, nor takes part in controlling these networks and therefore depends on the decisions of others. I am going to synthesize some

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experiences of this metaphorical foreignness, which I have proposed to work on during a programmed workshop with artists, curators, and social scientists in August 2007, with the aim of designing a multimedia exhibition at Espacio Telefnica in Buenos Aires, in 2008. 1. Within advanced communication technology studies, there is a talk ofdiscussion [6]about the migration of the analogic to the digital. This transfer is seen as a shared narrative of the passage from an economy based on material products to one that is centered in knowledge. The dematerialization of the productive process is also associated with partial indifference to geographical, economic, and political demarcations. Dematerialization and deterritorialization. However, in these delocalized scenes, a territorial language continues to be used: there is talk [7]of digital natives and print-literate immigrants (Winocur 2006). Youth who were born to television, computer, and Internetmultimedia nativestend to make those who become disorientated by digitalization feel like foreigners; parents who need help from their offspring to cope with their digital ignorance, teachers or writers who take refuge in paper culture in the face of the challenges of culture.com. Those of us who try to join the new world must learn a second language; we experience our old skills as inferior, and seek to translate the familiar into the new: we read the manual before using the program; we print out email in order to read it; and we use the telephone to confirm that it has arrived. 2. A second group is that of the native foreigners. This includes those who must live in exile from their countries, who have been persecuted not necessarily by dictatorship but also, often, by a society with which they live at odds; or those who for similar reasons remain in their native countries as dissidents or internal exiles, and are disenfranchized as citizens: in internal exile; or those who leave and feel disorientated when they return , because the society to which they have returned shows only scattered signs of the one they knew before. The testimonials of exiles often document these experiences[8]. In evoking the deception which many exiles feel upon their return, and how, upon return to their native country, they begin to miss the city where they lived as migrants, more than one has rememberedcalled [9]the words of James Baldwin: Its better not to go back, because if you do you will no longer be able to maintain the illusion of having a homeland.[.....][10] In an interview with Graciela Speranza, who asked him why he no longer lived in Great Britain, John Berger replied: Ever since I left school at sixteen, I began to feel that there was something in me that made the English uncomfortable. Without intention or any type of provocation, simply trying to be myselfspeaking, listening, moving around and reactingI felt that I provoked a kind of awkwardness all around me. And of course, when one lives in a place in which they feel that they are always violating some rule to the discomfort of others, one ceases to feel at home. This is because to feel at home means precisely to know that one can be oneself and be accepted by others. [.........][11] What is to be done about this awkwardness? One can move to another country or remain in ones own as a foreigner. There are aesthetic dilemmas, in a broad sense, that have to do with ones lifestyle, ones sensibility, and ones ways of thinking and expressing what one feels. These dilemmas tend to express themselves in the ways that the foreigner reorganizes his

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daily life, work, and family within his native country or in the country to which he decides to move. Then why France? Speranza asks Berger. First I thought about Italy, a country which I love deeply because Italians are a people who understand pleasure... I lived in Italy for a while; I made friends there and met some extraordinary people such as Moravia, Carlo Levi, Pasolini. But there was also something there that did not quite work. Just as the Italians understand pleasure, they do not understand silence, the need to be alone. It is an adorable characteristic if you wish, but it creates a difficulty in sociability, because the need for silence or solitude becomes a personal question. Berger claims to have chosen France because he spoke the language and because a number of writers and thinkers who were important to him at the time were FrenchMerleau Ponty, Camus: so coming to France was like going into a building with whose corridors of thought I was familiar. The next issue is what to do when, after a while, one has to live in two places: the new destination and the place of origin. One solution is the disjunctive one; Berger calls it thus as he explains how he lives part of the year in the Alps and the other part in Paris: In reality I am quite practical. I commit myself totally to what is happening and also to the local people. And this is the case in the city or in the countryside. This way of organizing one place and another separately corresponds for Berger to the explanation he gives for what he believes makes the English uncomfortable with him: A certain intensity. But there is perhaps something else. In the typical logic of English discourse one should speak of that and the other in order to finally arrive at this. These mechanics of communication require great effort of me, and it was obvious that something in me seemed strange to others. One of my grandfathers was an immigrant, an Italian from Trieste and, for some reason, the majority of my closest friends were immigrants from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I felt at home with them; I knew that they accepted me (Speranza 1999,129131). This experience of feeling at home among foreigners can be extended to constitute the basis for a philosophy which exalts foreignness, even in ones own country, over any form of localism. In a round table on this subject, the anthropologist Roger Bartra said: The most difficult thing about Mexico is living as a foreigner being Mexican..[...][12] Edward Said, who is of Palestinian origin, and who lived in Cairo, then Lebanon and then critically assumed his longest residence - New York -, quoted a phrase from Hugo de Saint Victor to explain why he did not seek to reconcile these experiences of belonging, now in tension: Whoever finds his homeland sweet is still a tender apprentice; whoever finds that all land is like their home is like the native, and is now strong; but he who finds the whole world a strange place is he who is perfect..[...][13] I would say that the aspiration that makesrobs the contemporaneity from this formula non-contemporaneous is the term perfect.. [14] 3. The opposition native/foreigner can be metaphorically applied to other reorderings of that which is ones own and that which is foreign. Modernity has made us accustomemade us accustomed d us to think of belonging in terms of the framework ofas framed by nations and their territories, and in relation to a formal order guaranteed by the national institutions and the rights of citizenshipcitizen rights. Being a citizen implied implies participatingparticipating and having rights (to be educated, to work legally, to vote) and obligations (to pay taxes and to comply with the laws). However, Ffor decades informality a lack of adherence to national and legal structures has been growing in within the labour markets and business markets for

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decades: a large part of the population works without contracts, labour lawslabor rights, or medical services within the society in which they were born.[15][16] This has also become a polemical central theme inaxis for migratory debates due to the increase ofin people without identity papersundocumented immigrants, those who cross borders and participate in other societies in under the worst conditions of immigrationforeignness and, of who are subject to vulnerability without rules. [17][18] RecentlyLately,, social and cultural studies are addressing other modes of the rising informality are appearinghave been the focus of in social and cultural studies and becoming generalized[19].[20] Surveyss on of young people in various Latin American countries show reveal that the a majority obtainhas access to unstable jobs without rights, via through informal routes, such as friends or relatives. [21] Something similar is occurringtakes place in consumerismmerism: in Mexico, more than 70% of young people seeklook for music, clothes, and films oin pirate marketsthe black market.[22] In this unregulated business, outside of nation-state legality, youth find ways to be connected with foreign cultures. Wide sectors of Latin American societiesy feel foreign with respect in relation to the formal order[23]; they see the speeches of politicians as disconnected from reality, and the decisions that affect their survival as governed by outside powers and subject to few long-lasting rules. For this reason, many act as foreigners with respect to national institutions. They can do this through individual transgressive behavior, but collective networks are also appearing that function in the same way as foreign minorities: associations of unlicensed peddlers who do not pay taxes, of taxi drivers without permits, of groups of ticket scalpers for shows and off-the-cuff car-minders, mafias of waste collectors and drug-traffickers; a multiplicity of services organized in circuits outsidethe scope of the legal order. These informal groups are expressed in their aesthetics: for example, drug-dealings[24]narcocorridos;that transforms the urban landscape; cardboard collectors who exhibit their recycled materials (and even have their own publishing house in Buenos Aires: Eloisa Cartonera); and of course, the networks of young people who download, create, and exchange music, texts, and videos on the Internet. These aesthetics are almost always characterized by precariousness, improvisation, and recycling, in which the objects and messages and their production, circulation, and use are all foreign to legitimate culture. Immigration as a Metaphor Is it legitimate to extend the native/foreigner opposition to non-territorial interactions? To use the word foreigner as a metaphor is not only to refer to immigration in the figurative or imaginary sense. Even the geographic forms of migration, the most visible and categorical, include displacements and strangenesses that go beyond a change of landscape or language. The migrant also feels foreign to historical traditions, secret condensations of meaning that formed another way of living. For this reason, the metaphor is not a secondary or derived scene whose truth resides in the hard facts provided by demographic or socioeconomic studies about migrations. In light of this interaction between scientific descriptions, conceptual definitions, and

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metaphorical re-elaborations of migration, we can ask ourselves which are the most appropriate formal, literary, digital, or visual resources with which to allude to the less evident ways of being a foreigner in the face of natives, an undocumented person amid citizens, a print-literate person confronted with digital internauts. If what characterizes the condition of the foreigner is a series of disarrangements between the stages and the performances, there is no one language or genre more appropriate than another, but only problems of relationship between different languages and vacillations in translation. There can be an epic moment in the representation and the artistic imaginary conveyed by migrants when describing the escape, or confrontations with those who are different. On the other hand, the setbacks in reciprocal recognition push the choice for melodrama. But in a world where it is rare for power to be an absolute monopoly, or suffering to exist without negotiation and solidarity, ambivalent movements on one side and the other are opportune for testing more complex, less polarized modes of illuminating interculturality. A number of artists today speak, without denying the conflicts, of the fecundity and the uncertainties of these transactions. Perhaps their principal decisions do not lie in choosing a genre, but rather in asuming responsibility for the practice of translation. When it does not involve affirming a true culture, faced with another that also pretends to be one, the question is how to communicate that what which some say one way and others another. This has nothing to do with the old aspiration to convert art into the language of universal reconciliation, but, rather, with conceiving a place in which to experience differences, the impossibility of complete translation, and the chance to know something different. This is seen in the works from the series On Translation by Antoni Muntadas, which relates diverse modes of seeing and naming in indefinite cultures or situations: information offices, waiting rooms, international press conferences. Even in spaces with better-profiled identity pretensions, the aesthetic event erupts when, instead of affirming a meaning, uncertainty and strangeness are allowed to emerge. In the arts and culture, the idea that there can be original and definitive works must be suspended. As Borges said, The concept of definitive text only corresponds to religion or tiredness. (Borges 1996 I, 239). In secular societies, in a plural world, it is possible to conceive of all cultural works, spaces, and circuits as drafts or attempts to speak. Epics, like much political art, tend to align foreign stories into a single one. Melodrama acts out the discrepancies of affections and the difficulty in recognizing the other (Martn Barbero 1992), but it seeks an ending in which strangers disappear or change their minds and integrate. The experience of translation, however, sets in relation the comparable and the incomparable, what can be communicated and the unyielding silences. The migrant, all migrants (even in the least educated sectors), is always a translator, someone who constantly lives, between his place of origin and his adoptive culture, the experience of what can or can not be said in another language. However, as Paul Ricoeur observes on the subject of translations, besides successful translation and the experience of insuperable differences, there exists also the search for how to say something equivalent, how to say it in

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another way. One of the ways of doing this is to revert to metaphors. And with regard to concepts, even philosophical and scientific ones, let us remember as Mieke Bal does, that concepts travel (between disciplines, periods, and scattered academic communities): concepts resemble metaphors in that they do not condense meaning in a single way, once and forever, because they are flexible points of coincidence, provisional strategies to enable us to converse, collaborate, or argue with a certain coherence. We discover that we can be foreigners in our own society when we ask ourselves, faced with a compatriot: What did s/he mean? By relativizing territorial and transnational migrations, I do not propose to diminish either their dramatic importance or their interest for artistic work. Rather I mean to pinpoint other ways of being a migrant and a foreigner generated by mechanisms of reordering what is ones own and what is foreign, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, that occur in the immediate environment or within globalized networks. As we have already seen, going around the world or throughout ones own city can be equally intense and challenging ways of travelling. An art and a knowledge that render us sensitive to the foreign within our own culture contribute to an understanding of how we migrate, and how to deal with the untranslatable or that which, at times, we manage to say.

REFERENCES Als, Francis, Para viajar de Tijuana a San Diego en Luna Crnea, nmero 15, Mxico, mayo/agosto, 1998. Als, Francis, Cuauhtmoc Medina y Corinne Diserens. Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio. Mxico DF, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2006. Arizpe, Lourdes, Mexicanidad, migracin y globalizacin, retos culturales de Mxico frente a la globalizacin. Mxico, Porra-Cmara de Diputados, 2006. Asher, Francois, La mtaphore est un transport. Des ides sur le mouvement au mouvement des ides, en Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. CXVIII (37-54), 2005. Bal, Mieke, Conceptos viajeros en la humanidades, en Estudios Visuales: ensayo, teora y crtica de la cultura visual y el arte contemporneo, 3, Murcia, diciembre 2005. Besserer, Federico y Kearny, Michael. San Juan Mixtepec, una comunidad transnacional ante el poder clasificador y filtrador de las fronteras. Mxico, Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana, coleccin de estudios transnacionales, 2006. Brett, Guy y Cubitt, Sean. Camino way. Las pinturas aeropostales de Eugenio Dittborn, Santiago de Chile, 1991.

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Borges, Jorge Luis, Las versiones homricas, en Obras Completas I, Buenos Aires, Emec, 1996. Clifford, James, Las culturas del viaje en Revista de Occidente, Madrid, No. 170-171, julio-agosto 1995. De Lucas Martn, Javier, El desorden en movimiento, en Jos Luis Perez Pont y otros, Geografas del desorden. Migracin, alteridad y nueva esfera social, Cabildo de Fuerteventura, Gobierno de Aragn, 2006. El Pas, El nmero de turistas creci un 4,5% en 2006, hasta alcanzar los 842 millones en El Pas, Madrid, 30 de enero de 2007, p. 49. Levitt, Peggy, The transnational villages. Londres, University of California Press, 2001. Lpez Espinosa, Mario. Estudio sobre remesas de mexicanos en el exterior y su vinculacin con el desarrollo econmico, social y cultural de sus comunidades de origen. Programa de Migraciones Internacionales, Oficina del Internacional del Trabajo, Ginebra, 2003. Martn Barbero, Jess, Televisin y melodrama. Bogot, Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992. Mons, Alain, La metfora social. Imagen, territorio, comunicacin. Buenos Aires, Nueva visin, 1994. Muntadas, Antoni, On translation, Barcelona, MACBA, 2002. Rancire, Jacques, La divisin de lo sensible. Salamanca, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, 2002. Ricoeur, Paul, La metfora viva. Buenos Aires, ediciones Megpolis. 1977. Sobre la traduccin, Buenos Aires, Paids, 2005. Simon, Gildas, Les mouvements de population aujourdhui, en Philippe Dewitte, Immigration et intgration letat des savoirs, Pars, La Dcouverte, 1999. Speranza, Graciela, John Berger: una cierta intensidad, en Graciela Speranza, Razones intensas. Conversaciones sobre arte y literatura, Buenos Aires, Libros Perfil, 1999. Winocur, Rosala, Procesos de socializacin y formas de sociabilidad de los jvenes universitarios en la red en Guillermo Sunkel (coordinador) El consumo cultural en Amrica Latina, Convenio Andrs Bello, Bogot, 2006. [1] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM

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What scenes? Who is fantasizing? [2] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM This is a bit ambiguous, as you are implicitly referring to the U.S. government, and while border walls are a part of U.S. immigration policy with respect to its border with Mexico, it seems a stretch to argue that violent discrimination is such a policy, Its also unclear in this context what you mean by violent discrimination. As such, I think it would be better to differentiate between policy (measures), and the possible results of that policy or the actions of U.S. citizens acting independently of the U.S. government, rather than combining what are in effect apples and oranges in one phrase. If youre aware of a U.S. government policy that effectively employs or advocates violent discrimination, then I think a footnote specifying that policy or practice would be in order. [3] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Why the recreation? Do you mean it in the sense of reproduction? Below you discuss the creation of the work, not the recreation of it. [4] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM The way this is styled the terms within the parentheses should be examples of social processes, but of the four terms you provide only globalization could be described as a process. [5] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Self evident? [6] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Here and below, as you appear to be referring to some kind of published discourse, a footnote is in order. Otherwise, the talk to which you refer exists for the reader entirely on your say so. [7] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM See above. As there is no quotation here, the reference to Winocur, doesnt really ground the reader in relation to the discussion to which you allude. The phrase there is talk is extremely general it could refer to a conversation between two taxi drivers as easily as to a pattern of discourse among scholars.

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[8] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM This needs a footnote. Again, as above, the statement rests entirely on your say so. [9] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [10] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Citation? [11] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Citation? You need the citation after the first quotation after the subsequent ones, you need provide only page numbers as long there is no other intervening quotation. [12] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Citation? [13] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Citation? (Said) [14] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM ?? Not sure what you mean here by non-contemporaneous or how an aspiration (whose? Saids?) makes Saids formula so. Contemporaneous means happening at the same time it implies comparison between two or more specific things as in the growth of capitalism was contemporaneous with the decline of feudalism. It does not mean restricted to a specific moment in history. In this case, how is Saids formula noncontemporaneous or more importantly with what is it noncontemporaneous? Do you mean that the fact that Said is wielding a quotation that was formulated with respect to another historical period in reference to his own reveals that a complex relationship between the individual and the experience of exile transcends specific historical circumstances? [15] 10/29/08 12:40 PM

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Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [16] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM These statements seem excessively general. The rights and obligations attached to citizenship differ from country to country. To which nation(s) are you referring? While education is a right in some countries, it is not in others. And, in the U.S., for example, the right of the population to have access to medical care, is an ongoing subject of political debate. There is no right to work under a contract, and the labor laws apply to every legal resident of the country only illegal immigrants are not protected by labor laws. And the statement that for decades (how many?) the situation in the labor markets and the business world (where? The industrialized nations? Everywhere?) is such that a large part of the population (of what country? What do you mean by large?) increasingly works under conditions of informality (What do you mean by informal? Illegal? Outside of the mainstream?) is also bafflingly vague. A footnote referring to some kind of documentary background would help. [17] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Isnt the issue of a shadow economy involving non-citizens somewhat different than the issue, which you address above, of citizens who work or function outside of the legally sanctioned structures of society? [18] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [19] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM ?Sense? [20] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [21] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [22] 10/29/08 12:40 PM

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Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [23] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM Footnote? [24] 10/29/08 12:40 PM Jonathan Smit October 24, 2009 1:43 PM ? How is drug dealing a form of aesthetics?

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