Solidarity and Deterritorialization

Paul Klee, Architecture of the Plane, 1923
Erich Consemuller, Untitled (woman w/mask by Oskar Schlemmer), c. 1926
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These are two posts to the iDC mailinglist that sketch the outlines of a project I might undertake someday, if I have the time and the courage to do the research….

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At a recent conference in New York called The Internet as Playground and Factory I was particularly struck by a talk given by Orit Halpern, on the Hungarian emigre painter and designer Gyoorgy Kepes. Her presentation showed the incredible inventiveness of a Central European artist confronted with the technological possibilities of the postwar USA – an artist dealing with the transformed vision of the city from a swift-flying plane, then later with the staggering speed and volume of computerized information flow. Kepes seemed to be claiming an ability to shape and model the dynamics of technoscientific change. However, the very fascination I felt during the talk reminded me of what I think is one of the biggest challenges for artists and thinkers in the core countries today, and particularly in America, which is how to analyze the cutting edge of technological development without becoming strangely weightless, ecstatic with the complexity, caught up in the flow, lacking all resistance to the present. Note that this is not a critique of Orit or anyone else, but an attempt to state a much more general problem, which was also present in the talk through a reference to Picasso’s Guernica.

Gyorgy Kepes, Hand and Geometry, 1939

In fact this is an old problem of the 20th century, and Kepes himself hails from the milieu where it was first expressed with utter clarity. After the conference I went to see the Bauhaus show at MoMA. The trajectory there is fairly explicit: once they escape from the Gothic limbo of expressionism, incarnated by the shamanic figure of Johannes Itten, the central aesthetic form and operational diagram becomes the grid, which Gropius makes into the basis of Bauhaus pedagogy. The whole adventure can be seen as one of developing the potentials of the grid, as a sensible and yet also mathematizable mediator between the free-floating imagination and the constraints of the industrial process. The aim is to achieve not just a new relation to materials for the industrial age, but above all a thorough-going abstraction of human identity, promising an escape from the horrors that arose out of the combination of modern industry and German nationalism in WWI. The theme of postnational humanity, of World Man, so prominent in the US after WWII, actually has its origins here in interwar Germany. You can see it in the shocking photo of a woman reclining in a modernist chair, her limbs relaxed, her body fully present in the space – and her face erased by an uncannily smooth, reflective metal mask that depersonalizes her entirely, making her into a foreign being, an alien creature of the grid.

The Decade to Come

Ten Years After Seattle

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It was the heyday of globalization, the high point of the Internet boom and the last gasp of the New Economy: the WTO ministerial in Seattle was meant to celebrate the advent of a corporate millennium extending “free trade” to the furthest corners of the earth. Nobody on that fall morning of Tuesday, 30 November 1999, could have predicted that by nightfall the summit would be disrupted, downtown Seattle would be paralyzed by demonstrations and a full-scale police riot would have broken out, revealing to everyone what democracy really looks like and plunging the city into five days of chaos. Nobody, that is, except the thousands of protesters who prepared for months to put their bodies on the line and shut down the World Trade Organization – as well as their hundreds of thousands of other bodies across the world who learned the potentials of the networked society by participating in the far-flung renewal of leftist, anarchist, social justice and ecology movements that began in the wake of the Zapatista uprising five years before. The 30th of November was their day, our day, a tumultuous day in the streets, inaugurating a movement of movements whose resistance had become as transnational as capital.

The Peoples Global Action was essential to the success in Seattle, having launched the struggle against the WTO at its founding meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 1998. The west coast Direct Action Network was essential, for coordinating the non-violent blockades of crucial intersections that stopped the delegates from reaching the meeting. The trade unionists who disobeyed their hierarchies and marched past their restraining marshals were essential, for joining the students and filling downtown with a militant crowd. The Black Blocs were essential, for trashing private property and radicalizing the movement. The nascent Indymedia network was essential, for setting up a new communications system that could bypass the state and corporate media. And all the groups and individuals who had come to Seattle from around the world were essential, for being there to derail the summit and then going home to tell in their own tongues what they had seen with their own eyes: a global protest with its feet on the ground and its fists in the air, ready to challenge corporate capitalism in America itself, with the support of over fifty thousand Americans. Ten years ago the narrative of globalization changed directions, and we are still living out that unfinished story.

INTO INFORMATION!

Reversing History for the Present

Osip Brik with logo of the journal Lef, photomontage by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1924)
 Makrolab on Campalto Island (2003)

Here is the synthesis I attempted to put together at the end of a fascinating conference entitled The New Productivisms, organized by Marcelo Expósito and Jorge Ribalta at the MacBa in Barcelona, March 27-28, 2009. Recordings of all the lectures can be downloaded from the site; the book is forthcoming in Spanish.

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As Dimitry Vilensky explained, the experimental process of the Chto Delat group only advances by “permanently risking a shared madness.” I offer the following in exactly that spirit.

Like the Soviet productivists, we are faced today with immense changes in both the technological system and in the social relations whereby it functions. Since 1989 the capitalist labor force has doubled, due to the introduction of the former communist countries into the international trading system and to massive shifts of rural peasantries to market economics or indeed, to a worker’s life in the city. Whatever name you care to give it – globalization, informationalism, flexible accumulation – this new deployment of capitalism represents a metamorphosis no less sweeping than the advent of assembly-line manufacturing in the early decades of the twentieth century. As I summed it up a few years ago: “Geographical dispersal and global coordination of manufacturing, just-in-time production and containerized delivery systems, a generalized acceleration of consumption cycles and a flight of over-accumulated capital into the lightning-fast financial sphere, whose movements are at once reflected and stimulated by the equally swift evolution of global media: these are among the major features of the flexible accumulation regime as it has developed since the late 1970s.” The new productive regime opens up vast possibilities of intervention to any artist who tries to engage with it – and many have done so. Any look back at the productivists from our position today remains incomplete without drawing explicit parallels to the activities of artists in the tumultuous period of transformation that has unfolded in living memory, and is still unfolding.

These changes in the mode of production could not have occurred without the massification of access to the Internet and to the many technological systems that have converged over the last two decades, via the global hardware networks of cables, servers and routers and the TCP/IP transmission standard that functions as the general equivalent of information. The existence of a new distribution system fundamentally altered the status, potential and responsibility of the artist, or at least, of those artists who were most aware of and most sensitive to the shifts in social relations. The ardently desired opportunity to hook a whole range of publishing platforms and lightweight audiovisual recording devices into the worldwide distribution system gave rise to vital needs for the disalienated appropriation and redeployment of what had originally been a technology of command and control. The networked communications devices emerging from the military and corporate labs had to be grasped in their materiality and in their logical and semiotic structures, in order to reshape their potentials and reorient their uses. This meant leaving the studio, the gallery, the museum and the academy, to take up the tools of the engineer and to explore the infrastructures of globalized industry. After a careful, yet also audacious look back at the Soviet productivists of the 1920s, the agenda of the leftist vanguards in the 1990s becomes clear. It can be summed up in two words: “Into information!”

UC Protests Continue

Actions at Regents'  meeting, Covell Commons, UCLA -- photos by Derek Liu

Fourteen people are arrested at UCLA while the Regents go ahead with their huge tuition hikes. As the second UC Walkout unfolds across the entire system, a text is published from an occupied “Capital Projects”  building somewhere on the Berkeley campus. The events of the occupation aren’t very clear, but the message is getting closer to home. This time it’s not about debt, it’s not about bankruptcy, it’s more essential:

In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination.  We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else.  Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else.  We have measured ourselves and we have measured others.  It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their capital as a businessman.  It should feel good, gratifying, completing.  It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination.  After all, we are intelligent, studious, young.  We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.

We are convinced, owned, broken.  We know their values better than they do:  life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.  This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages:  Save public education!

When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant.  We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values.  What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all.  And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own.

The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general.  They sell the practice through the image.  We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice.

Read the full text: The Necrosocial.

Also check out an interesting video in which a very middle-of-the-road looking student describes the occupation of Wheeler Hall at UCB, following the short-lived occupation of the Capital Projects building (actually the Engineering bldg). What does she hope? That these movements continue in the US and around the world so that student power can be reinvented as a real political force.

–>Here are some further resources, as of Nov. 24, after the really amazing events of Nov 18-19 including serious face-offs with the cops at Berkeley and UCLA, which may radicalize a huge student/faculty/staff movement.

–First, a great segment of Democracy Now, which includes the audio of the statement read from within occupied Campbell Hall, as well as a good interview with Bob Samuels.

–Occupy California, from Santa Cruz, has links to all the radical and confrontational groups, whose work has been very successful (no confrontation, no movement!).

–Bob Samuels’ blog is worth a read.

–A very interesting post by a UCSB professor, R. Flack, written in advance of Nov. 18-19, where he shows all the conditions that are coming together for a major social movement. This is actually pretty thoughtful stuff.

–Finally, this fairly surreal video on the occupation of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley on Friday Nov. 20 gives a feeling of the intensity of those events:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2009/11/20/BA611ANSAB.DTL&object=%2Fg%2Fav%2Fmovies%2F2009%2F11%2F20%2F58302%40kpix.dayport.com.cbs5.bcv

Is it Written in the Stars?

Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

Tarot (del presente-por-venir) de Barcelona & Cloud Gate
& Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium

On AT&T Plaza in Chicago’s Millennium Park stands a giant stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an indented ellipsoid, 66 feet long, 33 feet high, weighing 110 tons and glistening in the sun like a drop of liquid mercury. Entitled Cloud Gate by its creator, the British artist Anish Kapoor, and nicknamed “the Bean” by locals, it cost 11.5 million dollars and it immediately became what it was intended to be, an urban attraction photographed by endless tourists, the world-renowned symbol of a creative city. Stand below the arching mass of the sculpture and gaze upwards at the omphalos or navel: your body multiplies into drunken curves, improbably fat and impossibly thin, like in a funhouse mirror. Look back at the sculpture from a few steps away: your diminutive image is crowned by a ring of skyscrapers, their outlines etched against a blue horizon.

Returning home from a recent trip to Detroit and a string of other half-devastated cities, I realized viscerally what I knew intellectually: that Chicago is the incomparable winner of the region, the Midwestern capital of the global economy. It’s the city that pioneered both commodity and financial futures, and after a recent round of mergers it is now home to the world’s largest futures and options network, the GLOBEX trading platform run by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (the “Merc”). Elite knowledge workers are making tremendous amounts of money in this city. Yet our neighborhood just a few miles from the lakeshore is full of boarded-up houses and lives that have been foreclosed by the crisis. Twenty percent of the city’s inhabitants have fallen beneath the poverty line and a quarter of the population has no health insurance. The municipal housing projects have been destroyed for private development and over thirty percent of the high school students will not graduate.1 On a sunny day you can see the bright blue sky through the rust-eaten girders of the elevated transport system.

This essay describes the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. It inquires into the emergence, over the past thirty or forty years, of a predatory culture built up around global finance, and into the precarious destinies that result from that culture. It begins not with the azurean blue, but with the curve of a dark horizon.

Four Pathways Through Chaos

Research Program & Course Proposal

Kasimir Malevich, The Knife-Grinder (1912)

Here I want to lay out the elements of a coordinated research-education-writing proposal and submit them to the critique of anyone who cares, in order to hopefully find some partners for the implementation and realization of what could be a new and more socially significant way of learning and producing cultural/intellectual content. Let me know what you think! – BH

“The revolutionary takes what the people give in confusion and returns it in precision.” I heard that bit of leftist wisdom at an informational meeting for the US Social Forum and realized that at the very least, I could apply it to the 60 or 70 published essays I’ve cobbled together from multitudinous sources over the past ten years. The essay by its nature has the strength of singularity, delving deep into some particular juncture of cultural potential and social reality, of facts on the ground and human aspirations, so as to exceed the determinant forces. The logic of exemplarity makes the essay useful to others: it casts a sharply focused pool of light whose very clarity suggests the immense obscurity of all the depths that remain unplumbed. Yet an essay is never a systematic theory. Its objects, its referential context and its metaphorical structure are too specific to be applied anywhere else. The essay is “writerly” in the sense that Barthes described in S/Z: it stimulates some other writer’s efforts to do something completely different. Yet at a certain point, the sophisticated meandering of the writerly is just egotistic bullshit. What you owe us is a solid theory, man, something other people can understand and apply wherever they need it. OK, so that’s what I’m gonna produce. But not alone.

I want to teach a course but not a traditional one. What appears most promising is to develop a multi-authored networked archive combining simple bulletin-board functions with a specific problematic, a syllabus, lecture outlines, extensive source texts and reference materials as well as links to some of my own texts, and ultimately the finished elements of a complete theory of power, conflict, emancipation and political solidarity in contemporary times. This evolving networked platform — necessarily password protected to elude the limitations that copyright places on the free dissemination of knowledge — would be used as a basis for actual seminars, whether in academic or cultural contexts where I would be paid by some constituted institution, in DIY contexts where the motivation of a group would be sufficient to organize the sessions, or, absent myself, in unforeseeable settings where the strength of the materials and the course articulations could be utilized by whoever so desired and was able to make them bear unexpected fruit. In the best of cases, the seminar would unfold dialogically or multilogically, with other theoretical eggheads who would propose counter-examples, problematizations or completely alternative formulations of the subject, while nonetheless taking care to recognize that there is an original thinking-and-working being in the (virtual) room with them. The students of such a course would obviously be free to develop their own investigations and exceed the reach of their putative and temporary masters (let’s remember that Marcuse did his Habilitationschrift with Heidegger, and published it despite the latter’s utter disapproval). In short, such an endeavor would evince the dignity befitting autonomous men and women in search of the others who can help them on their quest to forge a collective framework of existence.

Interview with Pelin Tan

For Express, monthly Marxist culture magazine,Turkey

Pelin Tan is a generous and irreverent person living in Tophane, Istanbul

Dear Brian, as you might remember when we met last time we were discussing about the question of autonomy in contemporary art practices. In your writings, in terms of this context, you focus on collaborative, ethical-aesthetic and collective art practices. Could you tell us bit about it with some examples of projects, practices and your engagements?

I began as a critic in the mid-nineties, 1994 actually, by working with an open seminar at the Beaux-Arts in Paris run by a professor named Jean-François Chevrier, where we studied the latest Marxist interpretations of globalization and invited people from all walks of society to discuss the crisis of neoliberal restructuring, downsizing, lean and mean corporations, global oligopolies, that sort of thing. The crisis became obvious with the great strikes of December 1995, the largest and longest in France since May 68; so we were ahead of the curve, our work was immediately relevant. Around the same time I started getting involved with the graphic arts group Ne Pas Plier, a communist group located in one of the red suburbs of Paris, called Ivry-sur-Seine. The seminar culminated in the book of Documenta X, a retro-perspective look back over the second half of the twentieth century with a strong focus on economics, including an interview I did with David Harvey. I think the book is pretty good and somehow helped kick off the hybridization of art with various kinds of research into social change. After that, the collaboration with Ne Pas Plier led onward to the cycle of counter-globalization protests, where we were able to bring large amounts of graphic materials and do great interventions in the demos! The Summit of the Americas in Québec City in April 2001 was particularly memorable, we came with twelve or fifteen people from all around Europe, Serbia, Poland, UK, Germany, Spain, France of course, even two people from Argentina… All activist-artists, but Ne Pas Plier also included sociologists, unemployed people, folks from the neighborhood in Ivry. We made 4000 fire-colored masks on the spot and distributed 200 kilos of posters, stickers, etc, turning a gallery exhibition into a gigantic give-away site for the use of the movements. Along the way to the summits there was some pretty amazing stuff in Barcelona, like a week-long workshop on “Direct Action as One of the Fine Arts” in 2000, bringing together over a dozen really funny and virulent activist groups in an anarchist union hall with money siphoned off from the Macba, which for ten years was the most interesting museum in Europe (personal opinion of course). However, there were limits to autonomy in both those collaborations (the limits being the art world and the communist ideology) and I abandoned the Beaux-Arts soon after Documenta and left Ne Pas Plier after our interventions at the Laeken summit in Brussels in December 2001. A text called “Liar’s Poker,” written in 2002, expresses exactly what I was interested in at that time, which was subverting the art scene and encouraging people to more or less steal the resources and work with the social movements developing their transnational critiques, for instance, the No Border movement. Since then I have collaborated with lots of artists and then launched the Continental Drift seminar with Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver Group in 2005. The idea was to look at Anglo-American Empire, how it comes together and at the same time falls apart, how the outlines of the continents change along with the way we inhabit them, new regionalisms, Europe, Latin American revolutions, the Chinese rise to hegemony, all those things. Fundamentally we wanted to criticize Bush and show people they didn’t have to sit quiet like zombies. Continental Drift takes the model developed at the Beaux-Arts and makes it much better, fully collaborative, open to the city, focused on art-activism-social theory, critical and oppositional, free of all hierarchical bullshit and institutional ladder-climbing. Here in the US, where I have returned after 20 years abroad, I am finding lots of interest for this way of working and I am about to launch several other seminars. We need a revolution in this country and we lack revolutionary analysis and praxis. I am looking for ways to contribute.

The CIGNA 7 Get Themselves Arrested

What are the rest of us waiting for?

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Outside an opulent skyscraper in Chicago, a white middle-class lady’s picket sign said it all: “She could not wait!” The sign is filled to overflowing with the photo of a radiant young woman. JENNY, 1984-2009, reads the caption. She was only twenty-five years old.

On a cold Chicago morning, some forty or fifty of us had decided that we couldn’t wait for the House and the Senate to pass a mutilated health-care bill. We held signs and chanted slogans in front of the corporate headquarters: “CIGNA profits, people die, Medicare for all.” Meanwhile, seven principled individuals, including health-care professionals and a physician, had gone inside the glass-domed reception hall to sit down on the floor and demand that the giant insurance company immediately approve all doctor-recommended treatments for its insurees. The police was all they got for an answer.

Jenny Fritts was lucky, and then she was unlucky. She was a young married mother with love in her heart and a second baby in her body, but she didn’t have the right insurance. She woke up feeling sick in the world’s richest country, and she went to a for-profit hospital where they couldn’t treat her. Instead they told her to take some NyQuil and go back to sleep. The next day she still felt sick. She went to another hospital, she was admitted, and it turned out she had a very serious infection. It was too late to save her baby and fifty-two days later she died in an intensive care unit. If you live in the United States, Jenny Fritts is your neighbor, your daughter, your long-lost cousin, your friend. She could be black, she could be white, she could be yellow, she could be brown, and she could very easily be you.

There’s a big open space in front of CIGNA, but in reality the sidewalk there is pretty narrow: “That’s private property, you gotta get back,” said the security guards each time we crossed the invisible line. Inside the building, the accountants charged with making money for CIGNA’s shareholders are the ones who constantly draw that invisible line, separating those who paid their bills and will get their treatment from those who paid their bills and nonetheless will be denied. The movement of the line determines the profits for America’s multi-billion-dollar private insurance industry.

Open Letter in Support of the Space Hijackers

Concerning the ludicrous and satirical performance of a group of activist-artists on April 1, 2009, at the ill-fated G20 summit in London; whom the British police now propose to bring to trial in a court of law as criminals…

“The vehicle, owned by anarchist pranksters the Space Hijackers, bore a number of fake CCTV cameras bolted onto its turret, a plastic pipe with holes in it for a gun and a bumper sticker that read “How Do You Like My Driving? 0800 F**K YOU”. It blared Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from a sound system. If you can show me a police force that does all that, I can show you a police force on acid.” Leah Borromeo

A number of writers were requested to provide letters specifying the artistic nature of the work done by the Space Hijackers, to support them against spurious charges of impersonating police officers; and that was easy to do, after the extensive reflection occasioned by the ultimately failed attempt of a Federal prosecutor to criminalize the activities of the Critical Art Ensemble in the United States. Further information on the current situation may be found here and here.

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October 2, 2009

To whom it may concern,

I am an art critic, internationally recognized by invitations to speak across the world, notably at venues such as the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on the occasion of the major survey exhibition “Forms of Resistance” in 2007, or at the 11th Istanbul Biennial in 2009, entitled “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” I have published essays in the catalogues of both these events, as in numerous others; and the Van Abbemuseum in collaboration with the WHW curatorial group is now releasing my latest book entitled Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. I state the above to establish my credentials as an expert in the domain of socially engaged art, which is of increasing import to public museums and universities through the world.

Because of this interest in socially responsive forms of art, I was curious to see in the British newspapers on April 1, 2009, what I immediately considered to be one of the most striking, innovative and successful pieces of public performance art to be realized anywhere in the world this year, namely the performance of the “Space Hijackers” group in their obviously fake and deliberately satirical armored vehicle during the G20 summit in London. By offering distorted and, it must be said, hilariously comical imitations of real institutional practices, groups such as the Space Hijackers carry out the vital democratic function of holding up a mirror to society and asking everyone to judge as to the beauty and desirability of our collective reflection. Indeed, this is an instance of what sociologists such as Ulrich Beck or Anthony Giddens call “social reflexivity,” whereby the members of a society represent the state of its institutions, stimulate debate on those institutions among their fellow men and women, and attempt in this way to increase awareness of current developments, in order to fortify the sense of responsibility to the present which defines citizenship in a democracy.

It must be understood by all those concerned that this is art. It will be exhibited in museums, analyzed by critics such as myself, enjoyed and appreciated by visitors and recorded in the annals of art history. However, for all of this to occur the artistic gesture must first be realized outside the museum, in public space, on significant occasions such as the meeting of the G20.

The U.C. Strike

At long last, the shit hits the fan in California…

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After the huge student movements in France in 2006, as well as last year’s occupation of the Sorbonne by the staff and the professors; after the rolling and agitated “anomalous wave” of protests against the Bologna-process restructuring of higher education that swept Italy last year; after the astonishing refusal of tuition fees by Croatian students this spring and summer — to name only three arenas of an expanding transnational revolt — the global crisis of the university has finally come home to the neoliberal heartland: the State of California. On September 24, a walkout of students, professors and staff was called across the entire University of California system, in protest against draconian budget cuts decreed by the UC Regents, which is an extremely powerful and prestigious administrative body whose members are appointed directly by the state governor for 12-year terms.

California is the state where, in 1979, the infamous Proposition 13 began choking off funding for public services, while launching the “taxpayer revolt” of the rich and inventing the basic neoliberal campaign rhetoric that would bring Ronald Reagan to power. Since 1983 there has been only one Democratic governor of the state, Gray Davis, which means that the UC Regents have mostly been named by Republicans in order to represent multiple business interests in the fields of both research and education. The budget squeeze has been permanent, since the same Proposition 13 set the requirement of a two-thirds majority vote for any new local or state taxes. After Governor Davis was prematurely recalled by a Republican smear campaign following the “rolling blackouts” inflicted on the state by possibly the most corrupt corporation of the dot-com era, Enron, it was the new “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenneger who signed the 2004 Higher Education Compact with the President of the UC Regents. In the context of the ongoing financial crisis and the resulting budget shortfalls across the US federal system, Schwarzenegger is now using the effective minority rule granted to the Republicans by the two-thirds majority requirement to be the “Terminator” of California’s public education and research, which the Compact redefines as a private good, to be produced by corporate investors and sold to clients on an open market.

There are now plans to raise tuition by 32%, in addition to a 9.3% hike approved last May, as a consequence of the long-term withdrawal of state funding, further exacerbated by the current fiscal crisis of state governments. The result will be the elimination of large numbers of economically disadvantaged students from the university and a shrinkage of the student population by as much as a third. In a video-taped speech where he explains many of these issues, the award-winning Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff had to choke off his emotion as he recalled how glad he had been, thirty-four years ago, to come to teach at a public university: his own parents had been too poor to attend high school.

A wealth of information on both the budget crisis and the student/staff/faculty movement can be found by following the links at the UC Walkout website. Among the more interesting bits, a talk by Wendy Brown, the first American academic to understand Foucault’s courses on the birth of biopower and to realize that neoliberalism means “the end of liberal democracy.” For a wider perspective on the course and meaning of such struggles in the world, there is the Edufactory collective, as well as The New School in Exile and a highly subversive text on the protests at that institution in December 2008, Preoccupied. But if somehow you have not yet done so, the first thing to read — and certainly one of the most powerful student-movement texts since the Situationist tract On the Poverty of Student Life — is this impresive and impassioned document, emanating from the “Research & Destroy” collective and prefiguring the events at UC Stanta Cruz. where the Graduate Student Commons is still occupied as I write:

Communiqué from an Absent Future

This is a brilliant text for one simple reason: it says flat out a large number of things which are simply true, concerning the fundamental bankruptcy of the public university and of the society whose decay it has helped to perfect with a thousand sophisticated branches of knowledge and a thousand techniques of social engineering. The current economic collapse, the defeat of the US oil-grab in Iraq after the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and now the extension of the war in Afghanistan are only the most visible hallmarks of this decay, which has crept into daily life on every level, from the most pragmatic to the most subjective. Check this bit out to get the tone and the basic angle of attack:

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century — 80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume — a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education — rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

Strategic Reality Dictionary

– New from Autonomedia –

Konrad Becker’s Strategic Reality Dictionary is being launched on September 29 at Eyebeam in New York – an excellent occasion to publish the preface.

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Phantasmagoric Systems

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“Information is indeed ‘such stuff as a dreams are made on.’ Yet it can be transmitted, recorded, analyzed and measured,” remarked Karl Deutsch in his 1963 book The Nerves of Government. The Czech-American social scientist was the leading Cold War specialist in “models of political communication and control.” The latter half of the twentieth century saw a world-wide implementation of computerized social programming, aimed first at instilling order and paranoid regularity into the chaos that followed WWII, then increasingly, from the 1960s onward, at evoking febrile dreams from populations whose new mandate was not to labor, but to invent; not to produce, but to consume; not to fear, but to desire. By the late 1990s, after the massification of the Internet had begun in the wake of the integrated world spectacle of the First Gulf War, this condition was well known by at least some of those on the receiving end. Tactical reality hackers such as the Critical Art Ensemble, Arthur and Marielouise Kroker, Luther Blissett, the Yes Men, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Marko Peljhan and the Bureau of Applied Autonomy arose to infiltrate the global information system and expose its (dys)functions with probes, pranks, parodies and satirical jokes. All of these groups and individuals operated in the tactical space of momentary incursion and instant retreat that had been mapped out by Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey, in his poetic anarchist pamphlet on the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The concerns of this slim volume are different. With his seventy-two keys, Konrad Becker aims to unlock the gates of strategic reality: its construction over centuries, its imposition through stealth and force, its dull and laborious maintenance, and its dissolution and destruction by those who can’t take it anymore.

THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

Art and the World Economy

by
Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost

Municipal statue, city of Finicke, Antalya province, Turkey
(all photos CP; published in catalogue of 11th Istanbul Biennial)

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An old man with a hearing aid stands with his back to a low wall, juggling a profusion of juicy oranges and bright red tomatoes. One by one he plucks them from the air and sets them down in perfect pyramids, orange and red. The juggler is the neoliberal ideologist Friedrich von Hayek, who thinks that that to act in a world of commodities, all you need to know are their prices:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they make speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number or important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.1

On the other side of the wall is a garden crossed by winding paths. Here and there, gold coins lie scattered on the ground, as if devoid of any value. A bespectacled man in a woolen suit is watering a row of beans in the sun. His name is Karl Polanyi, and he reflects aloud on the history of the industrial revolution:

The middle [or trading] classes were the bearers of the nascent market economy; their business interests ran, on the whole, parallel to the general interest in regard to production and employment… On the other hand, the trading classes had no organ to sense the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits.2

Both these men were economists, and both became famous in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Their ideas developed in opposite directions, and over the long run, it is the former with his principle of ignorance who has been vastly more influential. Could the latter have anything to say to us today, in the wake of yet another global crisis? Do artists, curators and intellectuals need to think about what they are doing in the world economy?

Decipher the Future

Chris Marker, Sans soleil (1982)

We are at a threshold of social change, brought on by a failed economic model which has also led to melting icecaps and blazing war. The paradox is that few people appear willing to make a change in their own lives and to contribute to a historical transformation – the kind of which art and philosophy make us dream, and which the violence of the world makes us desire so intensely. Unlike in turn-of-the-century Argentina the banks have not even temporarily closed their doors, and the middle classes of the overdeveloped countries are not out in the streets alongside the workers and the excluded. Not that it would necessarily suffice if they were.

It is hard to forget the photographs of endless ranks of police on guard before the Buenos Aires boutiques, while the insurrectionists marched in their thousands. It is equally hard to forget the testimony of one of the enragés of May 68 in Paris whom I happened to meet, who explained that to his shock and eternal disappointment, August came and the radicals who had paralyzed the city left on vacation. These emblematic images – the power to enforce a suffocating status quo and the imperious aspiration of a pleasurable void – can serve as a prelude to this inquiry, which tries to answer a triple question. What constitutes a break, a rupture, in societies like ours? How does a momentary departure from the norm become a durable alternative in people’s lives? And if such alternatives do exist, what are their chances in the current crisis?

The question asks about the metamorphosis of subjectivities through processes of collective resistance. But it also asks how such shifts play out in the more diffuse evolution of society over time. Finally it asks about the horizons of these mutations, what they make possible for the future.

Istanbul Biennial

Panel Discussion:

Who Needs A World View?

September 12, 4-6 pm

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“The idea that someone in chains, muzzled in a hole in the ground in the company of worms, might in no way be prevented from thinking whatever he likes, may well console those who see being in chains as an unalterable destiny. In reality, people muzzled by the economy can only think freely if they can free themselves in thought, that is, from the economy. And they can only do this if their thought changes the economy, in other words, makes the economy dependent on it…. The recognition that thought has to be of some use is the first stage of knowledge.”

Bertolt Brecht, “Who Needs A World View?” (c. 1930)

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How should we know what to do about the world economy? How can artists and intellectuals intervene across the diverging scales of contemporary politics?

Liberal democratic society has only two measures of value, and therefore only two standards for organizing its collective decisions: profitability and popularity, calculated on the markets and in the media. This formula has given rise to extreme consumerism, predatory business elites and populist political leaders who draw on ethnic and religious identifications to pump up their individual images. What has disappeared in the spectacular splash and the aggressive national posturing is any kind of collective project, such as the industrial modernization projects on which so many Leftist artists and intellectuals collaborated in the early twentieth century. The question we face, as artists and intellectuals, is how existing forms of cultural production and distribution can be reconfigured, in order to help generate egalitarian aspirations after the current bankruptcy and collapse of the exclusionary liberal formula of market-driven, media-centered democracy. How can new values of solidarity and reciprocity become visible in thought, serving as measures and standards for vitally needed changes in reality?

This panel asks about a view of the world, which is essential to any collective project at contemporary scales. Yet this cannot be a static or univocal “world picture.” It would be futile to resurrect the industrial utopias of modernism, or to remain content with scattered snapshots of oppression and resistance, mere gestures of hope and rage. Postmodern fragmentation must be overcome, not by going back to monolithic disciplinary structures but instead by creating long-term frameworks of understanding and action. What’s lacking are ways to coordinate disparate modes of perception and expression, so that situated acts of showing and saying can become pathways into sustained processes of collaborating and doing, both within existing communities of value and across the boundaries of language, class and historical experience. Art is a way to crystallize perceptions and memories, to express desires and ideals and to open them up to transformative debates. It is a vector of denormalization and liberation, for sure: but it is also a symbolically effective arena for the negotiation between individual freedom, small-group autonomy and social planning in complex societies.

The question, therefore, is not whether art should be interventionist, but what kinds of interventions it can perform, at what scales, where and why and how and with whom. To overcome the cynical view of large exhibitions as spectacular malls for the sampling of “world flavors,” or as global popularity contests with an underlying profit motive, will require many kinds of work on the aesthetic, ideological and organizational levels. Only at this price can artists and intellectuals even aspire to contribute to collective projects, and to find more trustworthy ways of measuring their success or failure.

Over half a century ago, Brecht put the question bluntly: Who needs a world view? Today the answer could be this: Anyone who stops to think about the immense challenges that await us over the next half-century.

Participants: Meltem Ahiska, Bassam El-Baroni, Charles Esche, Marko Peljhan, Irit Rogoff; moderated by Brian Holmes

Biennial info here

Games, Corporations, Distant Constellations

Leisurely reflections on art, knowledge, education

Palle Harding, Model for a Qualitative Society

Chris Marker’s Le joli mai (1962) is an essay-film that documents the modernization of French society amidst the hushed and repressive period of the Algerian war of independence. Midway through this idiosyncratic catalogue of social change there is a staged interview with two far-sighted engineers who describe the technological future that is unfolding beneath their eyes. Machines have already been invented, they explain, which will render work unnecessary; labor will be a thing of the past. Existing hierarchies will lose their material necessity: a civilization of free time, of leisure for all, will emerge. But why then does everyone behave as if nothing had happened, the interviewer wants to know? Nonplussed, one of the engineers responds: “It is possible that the future world will be divided in two terribly contrasting clans, the initiates and the non-initiates. Obviously it’s a problem… not a technical problem, but a problem of consciousness. Technology now allows human beings to be free; why don’t they want to be free? I can’t answer you. In fact, I don’t have any idea.”1

The utopias of the sixties arose from this theme of technologically granted leisure time, opening up the space of civilizational play that had been described by the Dutch author Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. Perhaps the most extraordinary image of these dreams is conveyed by the drifting cities of New Babylon, elaborated in the form of scale models by the architect Constant: an infinite proliferation of experimental constructions snaking across the European landscape, forever unfinished, offered to playful appropriation by their inhabitants who could also simply leave them behind, to lose themselves in the surrounding nature – while beneath the ground, in subterranean galleries that no one even bothered to describe, all the production necessary for existence was carried out by robots.1 In the same period Guy Debord, a friend of Constant and a reader of Huizinga, wrote of “the battle of leisure is taking place before our eyes” and called on artists to “take a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play.” As he explained: “By obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the proletariat not only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the terrain of the struggle. New forms of this struggle then arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts.”2 The technique of the dérive, the ludic “science” of psychogeography, the forms of unitary urbanism, and the construction of situations were to be the tools for this extension of the struggle to the new terrains of culture. It was a matter of overcoming passivity, of sparking a new protagonism within the fields of civilizational play. But even these artistic tools contained the possibility of misuse, as a regressive, commercialized culture industry was there to demonstrate. The critical complement of Situationist aesthetics would be an analysis of the commodification of consciousness in the spectacle society.

Today, when the “battle of leisure” sounds like a ludicruous piece of rhetoric from the past, the technological dream of Marker’s two engineers has largely come true, at least for the middle classes in the globalized centers of accumulation. The shocking thing is how few people allow themselves to realize it. The postmodern information economy pulses before our eyes, with its words, sounds, images and ambiances, a semiotic surround built up from pure imagination – and in that respect, free for the taking. Over the last decade, various upheavals on the cultural-political terrain have shown that the tools of this economy can be reappropriated, transformed and diverted to other uses. Experimentation with the Internet has been inseparable from an upsurge of radical democracy, this time on a transnational scale. Street protests, dramatically growing in size and energy around the turn of the century, have seen a fresh flowering of the art of constructed situations.3 The aesthetic institutions themselves – whose normative functions will be discussed below – seem to be assailed once again by an intense debate over the value of art, and the paths of its expansion outside the traditional frames. But as conservative demands for new forms of population control gained legitimacy under the shadow of September 11, a question arose for the million insurrectionary minds of today. Will a repressive hush fall back over the emergent world society, as the postmodern tool sets are gradually outfitted with surveillance mechanisms and encumbered with intellectual property laws, while dissident behaviors are pacified and normalized within corporate frames? Or will a resurgent artistic activism learn from its historical failures, and launch new and more effective techniques for the free and open transmission of countercultural knowledge? How to enlarge the circle of initiates? How to increase the possibilities of active participation? How – and where – to extend the terrains of struggle?