It's almost summer time! And in this episode Sabrina Calvo and Giuseppe Porcaro speak about proto-cyberpunk, celebrate the death of dystopia and proclaim a future Europe that looks like a colorful rhizome flower.
People who do a lot of gardening probably know what “rhizome” is in botanical terms. It is a kind of plant that pops out of the ground over an expanding area, giving the impression that many separate plants are emerging in close proximity to one another, but in fact these ostensibly individual “plants” are parts of one big plant, and are interconnected under the ground. It has a distinct philosophical meaning, too, which is associated with the famous French duo, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s work “rhizome” is roughly the philosophical counterpart of the botanical term, suggesting that many things in the world are rhizomes, or rhizomatically interconnected, although such connections are not always visible. Animals or insects that live symbiotically appear to be an obvious example, such as the little birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth when these reptiles bask in the sun with their huge jaws open: instead of eating the birds, the crocodiles let them feed on the bits of meat, etc, between their teeth — their teeth are cleaned, and the birds are fed, in this way forming a rhizome. After all, when one sees them separately, few people would guess that their species-economy is rhizomatically conjoined.
In this episode Sabrina Calvo and Giuseppe Porcaro imagine a future of Europe as a sort of rhizome, where traditions, instead of nations are interconnected, where binary definitions are not able to explain connection within diversity. And by doing so, they also celebrate the death of dystopia.
Sabrina Calvo is an award-winning writer and game designer. She likes to think of her work as a thoughtful, sensitive anarchism. She lives a quiet, focused life between Montreal and Paris. Her latest novel, Toxoplasma, won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2018, which is something similar to the Hugo Awards for France. Toxoplasma is set in a future where the Internet as we know disappeared, the city of Montreal is besieged by the federal army and survives as a sort of anarchist commune, and the world is kind of falling apart.
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.
Europarama is a podcast series about science fiction and the future of Europe by Giuseppe Porcaro, brought to you by the Are We Europe podcasting family.