WEBVTT

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1641, what will
become the prison

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begins in Europe in
the mind of Descartes.

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"Cogito, ergo sum."

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"In regarding the New
World and its peoples,

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the European man is
thrown into crisis.

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All he thought he
knew of humanness

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is destabilized at the sight
of the Black and Indigenous

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body, its physicality.

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Surely, they aren't also human.

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Surely, I am not like them.

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And so he turns inward to
make sense of the world.

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He rebuilds reality from
the anchor of the thought.

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And in thinking
himself, radically

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separates mind from
body into dual natures--

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angel and animal, pure
soul and bestial body.

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This is the birth of
the white imaginary,

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the construction of
white identity central

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to Western consciousness and its
dualism of reason over nature.

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Reason alone makes us
men and distinguishes us

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from the beasts.

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The thinking European man
as fundamentally different

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from unthinking nature.

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No longer bound to a
collective consciousness,

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reason places man above nature.

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And just as mind
controls body, so

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does man control
the physical world

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and the nature-bound
body of unmapped terrain,

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a slight metaphysical shift that
forms the worldwide structure

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of oppression.

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And in so doing, produces
the consciousness

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that will rupture the world.

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Forgive me these
abstractions, I'm

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speaking from the
end of this timeline.

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I'm looking for the
origin of the world

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wound, the seismic
shift and consciousness

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that estranged us
from each other,

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and continues to
produce this present,

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the prison, the border.

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I'm speaking from the burning
rainforest, the rising ocean,

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the atrocities of
our dying future.

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To locate the site of
rupture, I must investigate

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the scene of the crime.

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Europe, the origin of a
consciousness that cannot

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imagine a world without
prison, police supremacy.

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The radical separation
of mind from body

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fundamentally remakes reality.

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Mind over matter is
serious business,

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a dualism that will
entrench colonial logic

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into the sciences, just as they
are developing and documenting

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the life and matter of
the universe, imagined

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through masculine reason over
the animalistic, feminized,

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nature-bound body.

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Reason over nature
produces the supremacy

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of the European man in contrast
to the irrational colonial

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subject.

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The axis of difference upon
which the new world is built,

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mapped, peopled, labored,
gendered, fertile coasts,

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virgin territories,
vulnerable to ships

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sailing the Cartesian
plane across the world,

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splitting in two.

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Reason dismantled our collective
conscience and shared knowledge

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systems.

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When man encounters the
unknown, all difference

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is made irrational to make
man coherent, obliterating

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the colossal mystery
of our planet, reduced

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to a dim blue seed.

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His divine intelligence defined
against the irrational animal

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will go on to invent
race, himself,

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the angel above the brute,
the monster, the savage,

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the prisoner, the slave.

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Diminishing complex
eco-spiritual agriculture,

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advanced astronomical
navigation,

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to the limits of his perception.

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Intricate social
systems of kinship

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lost to skeptical simplistic
binaries, a reality structured

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by antagonism, empirical
evidence, the burden of proof.

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Science and law will
produce the animal body

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as suspect, criminal,
fugitive alongside the prison.

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Reason is the domain
of empire, its function

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to set man's gaze on the
horizon of expansion,

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that in preserving itself,
criminalizes the world.

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Another seismic shift, in
reorienting the world and man,

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difference becomes permanent.

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Blackness, the savage,
the heathen, the feminine,

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the base, the queer,
the contagion, reason

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produces the condition of
difference as inherent.

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The other is always not him.

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For the European man to
exist, he must always

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be defined against difference.

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Every encounter and estrangement
reminding each of the war.

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The other never satisfying the
gaze that unmakes the world.

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From the same mind,
"cogito, ergo sum,"

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as point of origin on a cross,
xy-axis that go on infinitely.

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This is not a neutral geometry.

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On the Cartesian plane,
empire thinks itself

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into existence as the center
of an infinite expansion.

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Dual hemispheres of unequal
power, mapping reality

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as property, as
capital, as resource,

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as inheritance for
the European man,

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a crown infinitely
possible in any direction.

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Inextricable--
human from European,

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knowledge from colony,
science from race.

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Benefactor of empire, what
hubris to shift consciousness

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from world to self,
to shift truth

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from belonging to the world
to the European man alone?

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Himself, the judge, and all
else subject to judgment.

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Power is the insistence
of what one believes

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to become everyone's truth.

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And so this reality was mapped
onto the Cartesian plane

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along axes of difference.

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A man doesn't evolve to reason.

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Reason imagines
difference to create

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man a superior,
tearing reality in two

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to build an empire of fear,
always requiring subjugation

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to produce the self,
borders to produce

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space, gender to produce labor.

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A consciousness
built on fear that

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makes a world in which we are
ever more not like each other.

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And in so doing, makes
all the world a cell."

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