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?

–> New Media from the Neolithic to Now

Recently I participated in a Nettime mailing list debate on the subject of “Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis.” The basic question was, what’s happening with the electronic arts since the great dotcom boom deflated? And one of the assertions was that part of the weakness of so-called “new media art” lay in the criticism it does or does not receive. In particular, a contributor named Rama Hoetzlein noticed how most new media criticism was not really about artistic expression, but about the kind of technological determinism promoted by Jean Baudrillard and his followers, all the way down to later luminaries like Lev Manovich. So for him, the problem was that art is being treated like media. Then, since the subject after all was about a possible politics of new media art, another poster named Carlos Katastrofsky said this: “If I see some really good ‘political art’ the first step is to admire it (wow, great work) and then to think about consequences. Art is something autonomous. To me such an approach would free it from being a mere form of communication, a medium, or ‘new media art.’ But at the same time it can be all of that.” So for him, the problem was apparently that art is first of all autonomous, and only secondarily political.

What does one admire in a piece of art? What is its autonomy? And what could be its consequences? I have asked myself these questions for years. Like most thinking people, I have come to a few conclusions. And since I like the idea that art can be “all of that” – a form of communication, a medium, new media art – I would like to share these conclusions with you.

Humans are excessively complex by nature, and inherently social. We are defined by the surfeit of symbolic activity that goes on in our brains and indeed, in our full sensorium, and that comes out not only from our mouths but in all sorts of gestures and postures and practices directed toward the senses and symbolizing activities of others. A long anthropological tradition running from Sapir through Levi-Strauss to Sahlins holds that so-called “primitive” societies are no less complex than modern ones: their languages show comparable range and variety, but they are (according to Levi-Strauss) oriented differently, more concrete in one case, more abstract in the other. There is so much going on in any human being and between any group of human beings that just ordering or harmonizing all this excessive symbolization – I mean, excessive over what the utilitarians think of as the simple quest for satisfaction or corporeal pleasure – becomes a problem in itself. Because madness always lurks on the edges of our reeling imaginations, and then there is also depression, or anger, or jealousy, or prejudice or extreme paranoia, indeed a large number of obscure problems that can disrupt the life of the one and of the many.

Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies

or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics

[This text was developed through a large number of improvised presentations. Thanks to all who listened and responded. The very first, in Chicago at the invitation of Jon Cates,  is archived here. - BH]

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A desiring mind seeks infinity, and finds it today in a proliferation of signals: electromagnetic waves beaming down from the skies, fiber-optic cables emerging from the seas, copper wires woven across the continents. The earthly envelope of land, air and ocean – the realm of organic life, or biosphere – is doubled by a second skin of electronically mediated thought: the noosphere. It’s a vast, pulsating machine: a coded universe grown complex beyond our grasp, yet connected at every pulse to the microscopic mesh of nerve cells in our flesh.

Such is the contemporary circuit of communication. Its existence raises two basic questions. What will be the destiny of this intangible planetary skin? And how does it unfold in our own bodies?

Picture yourself long ago, as a child, discovering the pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes that are found in the museums of the old European sovereigns. The room is inexplicably empty, and you, the child, chance on the twin rotating spheres with their intricate designs, clasped in heavy armatures of wood and brass. One of them sketches the contours of land and sea in meticulous detail, while the other paints extravagant fantasies over a map of the stars. But what is the relation between the continents and the constellations? Why give such rigorously equal weight to fact and imagination? What has the lion, the crab, the archer, the serpent, to do with the compass or the colonies? And why would the sovereign have wavered between the two?

Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños”

Towards the New Body

art students in Athens, December 2008

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Upon opening my laptop to write this article I found an email text with the latest news from Greece, where night after night demonstrators had been facing off with the police, expressing their rage at the murder of the young Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Immense social issues, as pervasive as they are everywhere invisible, were thrust into the burning actuality of the streets by the bullet that pierced the boy’s heart. The text says this:

The youth is revolting because they want to live. With every last one of the meanings of the word “life.” They want to live freely, they want space to create, to emancipate themselves, to play. They don’t want to spend their adolescence in 12 hour days of school and extra courses, their first adult years in the pointless chase of a university degree, the passport to a glorious 800 euro/48 hours a week job in a boring office…. We crave to construct our own, autonomous future… When you really want to live, a spark is enough to make you instinctively attack anything that you think stands in your way.1

The corrupt politics and stagnant economy of Greece are unique, say the security officials. But in Europe and across the developed world, the neoliberal revolution has brought precarious working and living conditions to an entire generation. Meanwhile, city centers became glittering spectacles and skyrocketing levels of inequality were seen only from the viewpoint of the elites. The failure of the transnational financial system now guarantees that the “unique” conditions of Greece will be duplicated in country after country. Like life itself, like art at its best, the spark from the south of Europe is something you can feel in your own body.

As the tension mounts and the demonstrations break out, how many museums and educational programs will have the courage to explore the work of activist-artists who have dealt directly with the affects, the aspirations and the self-organization of this precarious generation? Those willing to erase the divide between politics and art will find great interest in the production of the Spanish videomaker Marcelo Expósito, who over the last five years has been carrying out a multi-part evocation of the new social struggles under the name Entre Sueños (Between Waking and Dreams). Unlike conventional documentaries establishing the historical facts, this videography records the nascent movements of history in the gestures and the stories, or indeed the imaginations, of those who attempt to make their own history in the streets.

AT LAST!

download the pdf

No to the Invasion of Gaza!

Jan. 2 and 4 Demos in Chicago

Around four thousand people went out into the freezing cold to meet on the Tribune Plaza, then crossed the river to protest in front of the Israeli Consulate and demand an end to the senseless and criminal war on the Palestinian people. For Chicago this was a big demo: lots of Muslims, lots of Leftists, lots of Jews against the invasion too. A tiny contingent, guarded heavily by the police, demonstrated in favor of Israeli policies; we shouted Shame! Shame! Shame! while walking past them. I think the demo in Chicago was mainly reported, not by local papers or the New York Times, but by China’s Xinhua news service, from which it was picked up by a few papers around the world….

The Jan. 4 demo near the old water tower was smaller but just as important. The war goes on and gets worse every day.

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No more US aid to Israel!

Stop the war in Gaza!

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Following are articles by Uri Avnery and Ziyaad Lunat, from counterpunch.org and electronicintifada.net.

I Had a Dream

I was in some small town in America to give a lecture about finance capitalism. Gradually it became apparent that everyone I met — the most casual encounters, the woman with kids giving me a ride to the lecture hall — was completing my sentences, filling in the gaps. Each one had some fantastically precise detail to add to whatever I was saying, the profits, the management, the expropriation. I was inside the lecture hall, interviewing someone with a microphone, recording it, taking testimony. I was out on the street, in the passing crowds, the heat of the winter night. Suddenly I realized that this entire urban crowd, all the beating hearts around me were totally against the war, each in silence, the best kept secret in the world. It was one of those uncomfortable moments, the anxiety. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, We’ve gotta get out! We’ve gotta get out of the war! Claire was tugging at my arm, glancing nervously around. I looked down at the street: the sticky wheel of a child’s toy painted a curving green line on the sidewalk.

Then we were walking along the tracks. Behind us, above us, an ultramodern train was coming on, sleek and yellow and black and mostly glass, flooding out light into the night. “It’s like these Louisiana state troopers,” Claire said, gesturing for some reason to the train which was actually full of people talking and laughing, reveling, the crowd of New Year’s Eve. “They aren’t really effective after the first two days. They can’t stop it, they can’t do anything. But it’s the thought of what they would do to you afterwards.” I could see it clear as day while she spoke: the trials, the convictions, the prison sentences. “Yeah, it’s what they would do to you.” Suddenly I realized we were walking into the station, onto the quays. Too late. The doors had just shut and our train was leaving.

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Faces of the Zagreb Drift

click the right-hand arrow -->

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Thirty years ago, Mladen Stilinović did a piece called Artist at Work. It consists of four black-and-white photographs that show him lying in bed, rolled up in blankets, facing the viewer or the wall, fast asleep. Irreverence is something he takes seriously! Maybe in hommage to Mladen who was present at the Drift, or more likely following his own inspirations, Vladimir Jeric a.k.a. Vlidi took pictures of all the participants while they spoke, listened, gazed out into space, sank into reflections or somnolence, drifted away into dreams… And somebody caught a pic of him too, in the corner of the frame, a sandwich in hand, laughing. So we had another working session of this quixotic seminar.

Too many crucial themes came up in those four days to list them all at one go, but I want to remember a few that struck me. Straightaway on the first night, after the bus trip around the financialized sprawl of Zagreb, Süreyyya Evren asked about political audacity, based on his reading of Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig” (The Erl King), which describes the terrified visions of a young boy sinking into deadly fever. Is it possible to somehow embrace the threatening force that seems to be spiriting your life away? Süreyyya was trying to look beyond the incredibly polarized Turkish situation, caught between militaristic Old Left nationalism and a local bid for neoliberal globalism that nobody can precisely define, except to say it’s somehow mixed with the Islamism that traditional secularists abhor. But anyway, the great thing about literature — and maybe even better, about a Turkish anarchist twist on classical German lit — is that no one can say exactly what it means either; so it sticks in your imagination while the discussions continue.

Artist at Work, Stilinović, 1978

I’m just recalling ideas, scattered comments. Mirko Petric, from the Croatian city of Split, wondered why there had to be an international meeting with hotels and per diems just to be able to get together, like in the seventies, and actually speak with each other about basic issues? Claire Pentecost from Chicago showed diagrams of the transnational food system as a strictly linear, waste-producing machine inserted in a cyclical ecology. Constantin Petcou, a Romanian working with the AAA “self-managed architecture association” in Paris, insisted that if you do not make a concrete change, if you do not succeed in constructing something and consuming what you produce, then you have gained nothing. For Miklós Erhardt in the Hungarian context, it is clearly the nationalist Right that now has the creativity to make a change, as he showed in scary and sobering mass images. We could say similar things in America, but about the neoliberals. Angela Melitopoulos, who moves between Greek and German origins, tried  consistently to bring the discussion back to artistic processes in the mediated societies, saying that by picking up a camera and filming your own life you can escape the scenario that someone else has stuck you in. Finally, in the closing discussions on Sunday morning, Jelena Vesić from the Prelom collective spoke the “heavy words,” party and state, saying that their economic and political situation is fundamentally different from anything American artists or intellectuals could face, and in Serbia that they don’t have the luxury to avoid such basic political issues. After which Dejan Krsić from Zagreb, reviewing his notes of the whole seminar, made the observation that the New Left is lacking exactly what used to form the strength of the old one, namely an idea of modernization and a vision of progress.

–download the video of the last hour here–

For me, these last hours of discussion brought the whole seminar together: both the basic predicaments and the possible solutions. But it isn’t easy or obvious, instead it’s a starting point from which something further could begin. Ayreen Anastas, from Palestine and the US, was the first to object to the word “progress,” but you could sense the same feeling coming from all the Americans. Those who have been on the receiving end of imperialism, and also those who’ve spent their lives trying to resist it where it originates, can’t hear that nineteenth-century word as anything but a mistaken and dangerous ideology. This is yet another place where the “coloniality of power” mentioned earlier on by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu comes in. Western European Leftists shoud pay more attention to that phrase, and all the realities behind it. From the postcolonial perspective, the disaster of progress means the absolute necessity of resistance and critique. But what about modernization, which was the key twentieth-century word on which the great egalitarian programs were founded? Can’t we think of it in a more open way, as the continuous transformation of the territory through the application of science and technology? Couldn’t there be a better, less deadly way to carry that out, without accepting the idea that there is a single, nightmarish technological destiny? Earlier in the seminar, Charles Esche from the Vanabbemuseum in The Netherlands had asked about the need for a new ideology, by which I think he means a system of operational and regulatory ideas, a way to actually run things. Again it seems like a poisoned word: but at the same time, in the absence of an articulated and sharable project that can guide the processes of transformation, it is almost certain that scattered forces of resistance will have no hold over anything, that they will never be able to move beyond an intimate or small-group scale….

My own belief is that we need to produce both concrete projects and a vastly multiplied vision, if we want to make our lives count beyond ourselves and if we want to return some kind of future to the pasts of the Left with which we may identify. A radically democratic ecological critique of progress can yield a new understanding of modernization, one that includes cultural difference and self-determination along with a practical understanding of the cycles of the earth, far beyond the old narratives of an industrial proletariat in a national frame. I think that all the great productive blocs now have their edges, their exploited or abandoned peripheries whose populations are leaving to become the laboring mainstays of the very center that helps destroy their homelands. Liberal fascism — a name for the present social order when it gets ugly — tries to divide into a hierarchy the people who could oppose its projects of destruction. It sets up a gradated system of inclusion and exclusion to divide classes of people from each and to set them against each other, with police, borders, barbed wire and militaries marking off ever more extreme gradations. Crucially, it tries to divide the precarious classes who have had some access to official education from the excluded classes who have had none, who have had to learn everything as they could, the hard way. What the Left needs, in order to offer anything at all to huge numbers of people who no longer see it or hear it, is to envision something like ecodevelopment on a continental or regional scale, a political process for improving life and movement across the territory, through methods that are both collaborative and ecological, and therefore span the divides between classes and also transform the very linearity of the rationalized production systems. What the Left needs, what the world needs, is to be able to give both the precarious classes and the migrants an active role in building a better world, in a system where the most educated and capable can also participate on the basis of something other than a pure quest for personal profit. We need to envision a chance for the potentials of technological change to be redistributed by their root producers, beyond national borders and racism, in an economy of embodied and responsible flows that organizes itself in a productive relation to critique and to radically democratic debate. A modernization that carves out the places for localized decision-making, for the affirmation of communities of value, but also for artistic experiments with the process of becoming. It’s clear that nothing like this exists in reality and that many promises have come to nothing, so there is no use to be naive, for sure. But is it clear, in a unifying world society, that movements of political resistance can do without this kind of constructive proposal?

These questions are as important in Europe and East Asia as they are in the Americas and around the world, they are the crisis-questions. Yet the philosophical and critical aspects will only count if we can also seize technology, reshape the real forces of productivity. The gap left by failed ideologies has to be filled by strong new claims on science, including critical claims, in order to answer all the sides of the Brechtian demand, “What keeps mankind alive?” WHW, the curatorial collective who welcomed us in Zagreb, has taken that question for the central theme of their exhibition project in Istanbul. Who could disagree that it’s timely? The predictable crisis that never seemed to arrive in reality is now at hand. Mumbai was hit with violent suicide attacks while we were in Zagreb; since we left, Greece has already been through an insurrection, still unfinished as I write. And I have the impression there are many more events on the horizon. If there was ever a moment to invent something, this is it.

Circles bring you back to the beginning, it’s a rhythm. How to embrace the threatening spirit and change it into something entirely different? Pedro Lasch — whose genealogy defies all resumé — reminded us of the political inventions that have been unfolding over the last fifteen years in Latin America, from the Zapatistas to the many diverse forces behind Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Isn’t this something that we need to understand much more deeply, also on the level of party and state, in order to translate that experience into terms that can make sense in other contexts? Another thing that no one understood in the early discussion of political audacity was Angela Melitopoulos trying to get back to Deleuze — and actually, to the ecologist Von Uexküll — with the idea of the tick and its three affects (it’s attracted to the light up in the branches, sensitive to the smell of passing animals, desirious to dig into the softest place it can find). For me this was another question of the New Left and the old one. I still don’t know exactly what Angela was trying to say, but I guess most of the New Left has three political desires, three fundamental and sometimes contradictory attractions, before any project can even be discussed. They are the responsibility of equality, the chance to cooperate, the right to be different. Communists were short on the last one, anarchists don’t always take full stock of the first one, and since 1968 the New Left has been paralyzed between the two. Isn’t art about waking new affects out of feverish dreams? What keeps mankind alive are complex sets of desires that can also become reality. First the vision has to awaken those desires. You have to see the light to let yourself get carried away. Then you can take the leap. And if there’s a warm body down there on the ground, maybe we can run with it!

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photos by Igor Grubic

wecanrun.org

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MEGAGENTRIFICATION

Limits of an Urban Paradigm

CCTV Building, Beijing / Handball Arena, Zagreb

Text for The Neoliberal Frontline: Urban Struggles in Post Socialist Societies

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

David Harvey

What is the city for? The response of neoliberal urbanism has been extraordinarily coherent: the city is a living and breathing machine for maximizing the return on investment. The frenetic gentrification of attractive city neighborhoods over the course of the last decade and the dramatically swelling real-estate bubbles that came in its wake have provided the most obvious illustration of this primary rule. Behind the urban scenes, the transnationalization of municipal bond offers has been widely used to raise capital for the infrastructure of the real-estate boom, opening up lucrative financial markets and reconfiguring the links between municipal and national governance in the process. These two major trends have both been subordinate to a third phenomenon, the grand prize of neoliberal urbanism: the installation of postmodern production facilities, whether the big league of global corporate headquarters and associated services, or the smaller but still highly profitable gemstones of credit-based luxury consumption (shopping centers, tourist districts, franchised boutiques). In a breathtaking press toward total makeover, the face of cities across the world has been changed since the early 1980s, not only to fit an aesthetic norm, as is widely conjectured, but above all in accordance with an underlying toolkit, a unified set of productive and regulatory procedures. The result of the three interrelated transformations can be termed mega-gentrification: an entirely new, globally connected urban realm responding to the needs and desires of increasingly homogeneous world elites.

This pattern is increasingly well known, and I will sketch out its features in more concrete detail below. What has not yet been formulated is the question that appears on the horizon of the current credit crisis and the prolonged recession or depression that is almost sure to follow. Yet this question is the only thing that really matters today, it is the crux of our present moment. Is neoliberal urbanism a destiny? Or can a combination of local inhabitants’ movements, national regulation and a broad transnational analysis of prevailing trends act together to counter the most damaging processes that are currently at work? While entire sectors of the corporate elites slide into bankruptcy and the state comes back in with a vengeance, can contesting social forces reclaim a right to the city?

ZAGREB DRIFT

download pdf here

It’s always useful to turn dreams into realities, because you get to measure the differences and even let yourselves be guided by the intrinsic gaps between the two. Continental Drift was the dream of a geopolitical analysis carried out by a diverse group (theorists, artists, activists) and mapped onto everyday social and political life as an expanding set of explanations and expressive potentials. The dream was made in USA, and even on Wall Street in New York City, but it was realized by a group of immigrants, returning exiles and general misfits, all marked by the basic heresy of left positions in an age of liberal capitalist empire. By transplanting this inquiry to Zagreb, Croatia – the home of the What, How & For Whom? collective – it seems we are bringing a new dream into focus. The desire is that of widening the intrepretative circle, crossing divides of language and historical experience, trying to build capacities of understanding and confrontation between the immigrants, exiles and misfits of the big continental blocs and especially their edges – the cracks that open up wherever anyone can no longer stand what is taken and imposed as the norm. Empire as we see it is always falling apart, for better and usually for worse, under the pressure of massive processes which we are unlikely to even see coming, let alone grasp or have the agency to change in any way. Yet as the urgency and also the absurdity of the present predicament begins to rise in intensity, at least all around there are people trying similar experiments.

THE AFFECTIVIST MANIFESTO

Artistic Critique in the 21st Century

New York Times Special Edition courtesy of Yes Men and friends!

website here, PDF here

texto castellano aquí

In the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal elements it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Today all that has changed, definitively.

The backdrop against which art now stands out is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated image can do is to mark a possible or real shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we may relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What we look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence.

How does that chance come to be? Expression unleashes affect, and affect is what touches. Presence, gesture and speech transform the quality of contact between people, they create both breaks and junctions; and the expressive techniques of art are able to multiply those immediate changes along a thousand pathways of the mind and the senses. An artistic event does not need an objective judge. You know it has happened when you can bring something else into existence in its wake. Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories. These territories are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which imposed that particular type of privacy or privation.

When a territory of possibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions. There is no use defending such territories, and even believing in them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently need is to be developed, with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles, technologies – in short, with cultural codes. An emergent territory is only as good as the codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar, its science and its legalisms. Which means that every new territory needs artists, technicians, intellectuals, universities. But the problem is, the expert bodies that already exist are fortresses defending themselves against other fortresses.

Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping fascism, venomous neoliberalism. But what we face is not so much soldiers with guns as cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing from the affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neoliberal society is densely regulated, heavily overcoded. Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge has to be extradisciplinary. It starts outside the hierarchy of disciplines and moves through them transversally, gaining style, content, competence and discursive force along the way. Extradisciplinary critique is the process whereby affectively charged ideas – or conceptual arts – become essential to social change. But it’s vital to maintain the link between the infinitely communicable idea and the singularly embodied performance.

World society is the theater of affectivist art, the stage on which it appears and the circuit in which it produces transformations. But how can we define this society in existential terms? First, it is clear that a global society now exists, with global communications, transport networks, benchmarked educational systems, standardized technologies, franchised consumption facilities, global finance, commercial law and media fashion. That layer of experience is extensive, but it is thin; it can only claim part of the lifeworld. To engage with affectivist art, to critique it and recreate it, you have to know not only where new territories of sensibility emerge – in which locale, in which historical geography – but also at which scale. Existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales.

In addition to the global, there is a regional or continental scale, based on the aggregation of populations into economic blocs. You can see it clearly in Europe, but also in North and South America, in the Middle East and in the East Asian network. Make no mistake, there are already affects at this scale, and social movements, and new ways of using both gesture and language, with much more to come in the future. Then there is the national scale, seemingly familiar, the scale with the richest sets of institutions and the deepest historical legacies, where the theaters of mass representation are overwhelmingly established and sunk into phantasmatic inertia. But the national scale in the twenty-first century is also in a febrile state of continuous red alert, hotwired to excess and sometimes even capable of resonating with the radically new. After this comes the territorial scale, long considered the most human: the scale of daily mobilities, the city, the rural landscape, which are the archetypal dimensions of sensibility. This is the abode of popular expression, of the traditional plastic arts, of public space and of nature as a presence coequal with humanity: the scale where subjectivity first expands to meet the unknown.

And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.

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Vincent Bethell: website here, film here

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THE INTERSCALE

Art after Neoliberalism

Katya Sander, Estimations

You enter a typical white cube, with four evenly spaced rectangles on the wall in front of you. One is an ordinary window looking at the world outside. Another is a video monitor with a recording of the view. The two remaining screens oscillate between bright colors – pink, blue, yellow – and scenes of a woman’s hands with polished red fingernails, deliberately cutting out pieces of some black plastic material. There is a soundtrack: ambient bustle, as though you were waiting for an office worker to pick up a dangling phone. Words appear on the screen: So, I just want to know about uncertainty… and knowledge… and if everything can be calculated and known? And now you begin hearing a voice, speaking about mathematical models and what insurance agents do for a living. “The less we know, the higher the risk. Risk always has a price, of course,” explains a specialist. The work, Estimations (2008 ) by Katya Sander, is a series of disembodied conversations with anonymous interlocutors, about the calculability of disaster and its uncertainties.1

Outside the window, a typhoon lashes the distant trees. The woman’s hands assemble a black box with four rectangular windows: a scale model of the room you’re in. Halfway around the world, on Wall Street, a financial maelstrom topples a huge investment bank, then threatens the insurance giant AIG. Its derivatives unit, located in the City of London, had specialized in credit-default swaps: sophisticated mathematical models assembled in the black box of a computer, to hedge against the risks of equally sophisticated mathematical models.

The Sixth Taipei Biennial, curated by Manray Hsu and Vasif Kortun, was a show of political art from around the world, including a core group of directly activist works. The exhibition focused on “a constellation of related issues arising from neo-liberal capitalist globalization as seen in Taipei and internationally.” I arrived on September 12, amid the first gales of the typhoon. The following day all the public buildings in the city were closed for the storm, and the panel on the present situation of international biennials was canceled. The Internet was full of stories about Lehman Brothers, which collapsed that weekend, and AIG, which went into government receivership just a few days later. Our canceled panel was held that evening in the lobby of the hotel, with the artists and the curators, plenty of free-flowing drink and gusts of rain that kept blowing through the swinging glass door. “We came here for an exhibition about neoliberalism,” I said as an opener. “But that Utopia is over! Neoliberalism is dead. Now we have to wake up to the world of regions.” Controversy ensued until late in the night, a fantastic discussion in the eye of the storm. What I’d like to do here is to revisit that glimpse of the past and the future.

Filming the World Laboratory

Cybernetic History in Das Netz

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What does it mean to be part of a cybernetic system? For a conscious human being it means taking part in an evolving loop, where you are both the subject and the object of experimentation. This is the relation that has developed between scientific inquiry and world-changing technology. Researchers reshape the environment that defines them, and vice-versa. Such self-affecting loops are the vectors of a radical constructivism, an artificialization of existence. Their content and their continuous metamorphosis are what gives form to life in a cybernetic society.

From its earliest beginnings in logic and control engineering, cybernetics grew to become not a single discipline but a full-fledged scientific paradigm, based on the concepts of purpose, information, feedback, circular causality and dynamic equilibrium. Warren McCulloch conceived this science as an “experimental epistemology”: a way of knowing continually tested and modified through laboratory investigations which only that particular way of knowing makes possible.1 Biological processes and man-machine interactions were the initial sites of cybernetic investigation. But as the paradigm expanded, thanks to the patronage of Anglo-American research administrators in the 1940s and 1950s, the laboratory shifted its sites of inquiry from the deepest recesses of the mind to the entire range of social relations, before finally focusing on the most integrated circuit of them all, the ecosystem. Engineers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, neurologists, linguists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and sociologists all made it their business to animate this experimental laboratory, in order to satisfy their own curiosity as well as the demands of the state, the military and the corporations. To the extent that such experimentation continues – using the almost limitless behavioral data furnished by the Internet – we are all part of a cybernetic system, which may be called the world laboratory. One crucial question for understanding the societies we live in today is how this laboratory has developed historically, on what basis, with which raw materials and to which ends: because only through its historical unfolding can an epistemology bring forth a world. Another crucial question concerns our own roles in the construction, alteration or rejection of the world laboratory.

Cybernetics was a hot topic in scientific journals and the mainstream press from the end of World War II until the late 1970s. Its public presence then declined, as the disciplines it had transformed began producing their own breakthroughs and as cognitivism arose to provide a more strictly objective paradigm for the sciences of mind. Mass access to the Internet in the 1990s gave millions of people their first chance to use the communications technologies that had been developed in the military labs, to experience their global reach and to verify that information, as Gregory Bateson had explained, is the “difference that makes a difference” in your own life. This turning-point in the experience of everyday existence was accompanied by a spate of fascinating books on the history of cybernetics, whose authors have become well known among hackers, cyberpunks, computer scientists and social theorists. But it was left to an artist and filmmaker, Lutz Dammbeck, to attempt a deeply historical and fully actual critique of this technological way of knowing, in a feature-length documentary film entitled Das Netz.2

FINANCIAL CRIMES

New York Stock Exchange, 9/19/08

Here’s my speech for Democracy in America: The National Campaign, NYC, September 23, 2008.

The hardest thing for an American to remember is that there are better ways of living in the world. The first reason why this is so hard to remember is that throughout your existence the government and the corporations have been telling you the American way of life is simply the best there is. And the second reason is that throughout your experience you’ve seen how this one best way of life inexorably divides the winners from the losers, leaving wreckage in its wake and producing monsters on both sides of the divide. The hardest thing for an American with a conscience is not to wake up every day feeling cynical to the core. But there are better ways of life, that allow people to take care of each other, to avoid war and destruction, to recognize necessary limits and to organize social relations for the common good.

The hardest thing for an American artist to remember is that creativity is not strictly private, like a piece of property or a message in a secret code. The first reason why this is so hard to remember is that  the “creative class” in America is all about golden boys, glamor girls, copyright and cash payoffs, it’s about prestige, power and privilege among the elites. And the second reason is that the spectacle of this privatized creativity is so hard to swallow that black bile is the most comon gastric reaction for most thinking and feeling people. The hardest thing for an American artist with a conscience is to make work that’s not wound up into a compact ball of resentment beneath an indecipherable dystopian skin. But there’s still a need and an overwhelming desire for art that’s lucidly open, fearless, critical and beautiful, showing every possibility of existence and collective transformation within the cracks and the fissures of the declining machine.

For the past fifteen years, while living in Europe, I’ve been working on the critique of financial capital. I’ve written dozens of articles, collaborated with artists, participated in journals, forums and exhibitions, organized events and seminars and above all, I’ve protested against the worst excesses of capitalism in street demonstrations all across the world. What we always tried to do was to combine the analysis of particular problems with immediate acts of dissent, expressions of liberation and perspectives for the longer term. But I know that it was easier outside, in countries where the word “Left” still has a political meaning. After Bush took power and the corporate oil, weapons and engineering complex began their two wars, I had to put all my observations together and realize how deeply, extensively and pervasively the transnational capitalist Empire of the present is made in the USA, a creation of American economic and military sovereignty. And that’s why I decided to come back here to the belly of the beast.

It’s fascinating and almost awesome for me to be in New York City, at the pinnacle of the global Ponzi scheme, and to hear news of its collapse unfolding day by day. What’s happening is not an accident or a footnote to the presidential campaign. The computerized brain of global Empire has just had a psychotic breakdown, and now the palpitating body of humanity will have to stitch its organs back together amidst unprecedented convulsions of economic chaos and psychic strain. We in the worlds of art and culture should take this breakdown as an opportunity, and make infinitely better use of this crisis than we have ever done before.

What does it mean to be a derivative? As the public at large is now learning, a financial derivative is a mathematical formula that reorganizes a simple promise of payment into a complex bundle of eventualities and obligations that are calculated to become profitable under certain conditions of the future. The shocking thing is how much we, as artists and cultural producers, have become derivatives of these formulas. In New York City we are constantly confronted with the figure of the trader whose mathematical wit makes money out of thin air. The trader, the banker and the investment broker are the masters of the semiotic economy, which is made purely of images and signs. This model of the financial wizard is supposed to be replicated in the semiotic realm of art, except there, what you’re supposed to conjure up for state and corporate managers are the emotions, the desires, the insights and the imagination of the public. You’re supposed to make them smarter, more inventive, more innovative, so they can think out of the box and make some new killing on the markets of sex, power, money and esteem. The fact that Damien Hirst made two hundred million dollars on the worst day of the banking crisis is proof that this is real. But what if the public no longer fits the managers’ models? And what if the future doesn’t turn out the way it’s expected?

Jim Costanzo / REPO History, Wall Street, 1992

The subprime crisis arose for one reason: the mathematical models of collateralized debt obligations did not take into account the possibilty that housing prices could ever decline. Except in that one case, which no one bothered to consider, there was not supposed to be any risk in trading those derivatives. Freedom to lie, cheat and steal was guaranteed by overwhelming profit, as long as a speculative market could be supposed to rise in value eternally. Imagine what kind of an ego this produces as a model for public culture. Of course it’s wildly confident, and at the same time irrational, exhuberant, reaching constantly for the moon. But when its one imaginable future turns out not to be real, then suddenly another future comes barging onto the scene. We already saw it with the collapse of the New Economy. What followed inexorably were the security panic and two new wars, not just as responses to 9-11 but also as markets for a state-driven economy that has already borrowed over four trillion dollars, in by far the largest expansion of government debt that history has ever seen. And make no mistake, the same kind of danger is here once again. When America’s financial crimes are over, the only thing the politicians can sell to the people are police, guns, armies and outright war. The risk of a new kind of fascism inside the country has never been higher, as you could see in the massive police deployments around the political party conventions in Denver and St. Paul just a few weeks ago. The very possibility of what the Left imagines as dissent in public space has now almost entirely disappeared. To keep the United States from going any further down the authoritarian road, all of us are going to have to contribute to a very different way of facing the risks of the future. The need to intervene in the mainstream political process is now paramount.

Many people I know are afraid to lose their radicality, and its real commitments, through a confrontation with the mainstream. I don’t mind saying that’s my problem too. But the thing to do is to pursue your radical research in its native idiom, that is to say, on its original basis, and then take the extra trouble to legitimate it in the more conventional languages of the Democratic party, the academic establishment, the public museums and the media. Only by pursuing a radical critique on the intellectual, social, affective, sexual and psychic levels can you find any way to break through the soft consensus of normality and discover something worth living for. And only by confronting those discoveries with the mainstream ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting can you escape the trap of marginality and deepen your own breakthroughs and intuitions, by making them publicly real.

A massive crisis like the one that has begun right now makes that double process of research and expression both possible and urgent. On the one hand, every radical cultural producer now has the chance and, I think, the responsibility of extending their inquiry to the vast new worlds of complexity, and often of insanity, that have come into being all over the earth, at the deliriously accelerated speeds of computerized trading. On the other hand, it is urgent for cultural producers to communicate the stakes of contemporary transformations, without remaining in the ghetto of specialized languages and vanguard techniques. We need a broader understanding of what art can be, certainly not a return to the old splits between avant-garde rupture and documentary realism. Art has a key role to play in the economy, in communications and in the spectacles of power. Much of the world today exists in the imagination, in the semiotic realms that I was describing before. And they have a huge effect on concrete reality.

Today, at last, there is a major movement of politically active art, struggling at grips with society as it is and trying actively to change it. You can see that in the Democracy in America exhibition, but I have also seen it all over the world. We have gone far beyond the old practices of shocking the conservatives and the Republicans, toward social and technological investigations, experiments with the forms and measures of value on the economic and psychic levels, direct interventions into public space and incursions into the networked media spheres where so much of reality is invented and normalized. Ten years ago this stuff was marginal and no one wanted to talk about it. Now it’s showing in the financial capital of the world, New York City. There is something encouraging going on, right here in the belly of the beast.

Of course, when you go through this exhibition you can wonder if it is not just a representation of political contestation, like a demonstration under glass with videos instead of real people. That danger of life turning into mere representation is present in every specialized sphere of activity, not only the art world. On the one hand, I think it’s fantastic to have this kind of show, because it helps communicate a real taste for the urgency and pleasure of political engagement, in rich cultural terms that can never be reduced to propaganda or party lines. But on the other hand, I can say as a critic and an activist that what has not yet been accomplished in the USA is an understanding of artistic practice that does not always come back to purely aesthetic valuation, in a rank order of formal qualities that is acceptable to galleries, museums, magazines and academic careers. If the reception and the use of this show does not break through that conventional understanding, we will still be stuck in the familiar cocoon. How long will the basic cowardice of criticism continue to render artistic practice so broadly insignificant, leaving it either as a plaything for the rich, as a neutralized image of the status quo for the academics, or as a melancholic object of desire for radicals stuck in the pasts of their dreams? This is where I take my own responsibility, and this is one of the reasons why we have made such efforts to develop a new way of dealing with art, theory and activism through the work of Continental Drift at the 16 Beaver space right here in New York City.

There is a better way of living, there is a finer way of feeling, there is a more beautiful and meaningful way of making art, and there is a chance to save the rest of the world and ourselves from more excess violence by the United States of Capital. Dividing the winners from the losers has now put all of us on the losing side. But meanwhile, what they want to do is achieve another round of concentration in the banking sector and go out stirring up more crisis and war. For years after 9-11, Americans looked to all the world like a bunch of zombies, moving through the slo-mo scenarios of the neocons and the presidential media. It’s time for the zombies to reawaken and quit eating each other’s flesh. Let’s reorganize our bodies and put them on the line for the next ten or twenty years, because life is not finance — and that’s how long it will take to change anything real.

I hope to see y’all along the way.

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Nota Bene:

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.

New York Times, Jan. 29, 2009

50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

Or, let’s find a completely new art criticism

Seul Bi and the "troop soup" (pude chige)

For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let’s take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively.

The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty – the hedonism of insignificance.

If that’s the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise – for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture?

I’m sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called “the West,” and a correlative rise of some of “the Rest,” who could seriously say that a certain set of local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured – even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons?

Let’s face it, the task of a transnational critique for the new arts of living within, against and beyond the existing states of the world’s societies is daunting to say the least. However, I think all is not lost in this domain, for three connected reasons. The first is that over the last, say, fifty years, and particularly over the last fifteen, we have seen the still very superficial but nonetheless real emergence of something like a world society. To put it another way, there is now some kind of connective tissue (call it the transnational economy, the transportation system and global English) that does bind our possibilities of life together, though without in any way reducing them to being identical. The second is that the vast proliferation of readily accessible archives (libraries, web pages, video banks, record collections, museums) offers at least some chance to rapidly sample all sorts of information and impressions about what kind of shape a particular society is in, and even what kinds of steps are being made to try and change it. And third, given the above and maybe a good translator too, what you can do is actually try to stage a dialogue with the people you are meeting, and hope that some of them respond, give you pointers, correct your mistakes, calm down your unconscious arrogance and add their own reflections and aesthetic productions into the mix – not only to obtain a better and more useful critique of their society, but also of yours. Which last, I might add, is something essential and desperately needed, particularly if you are a European or an American.

The above is a theoretical program, but also just a reflection on some experiences as a critic and activist out in the wide world. The most recent of these experiences was particularly interesting: I was invited to participate in and to evaluate a project of artistic remembrance and envisioning, focused on the American military bases that are now (maybe) in the process of closing and moving out of the South Korean city of Dongducheon, and indeed of a range of sites around the DMZ, even as a new megabase is prepared further to the south in a place called Pyeongtaek. This was an incredible chance to get a first-hand look at what I think is the scourge of American and Western democracy, namely what Chalmers Johnson calls the “empire of bases.” (And I happen to think that the first-hand look, however fleeting and superficial, is of tremendous importance whenever you really want to learn anything). As it turned out though, this was also an incredible chance to start getting to know a unique spot on the earth, South Korea, which for the worst of reasons has been particularly close to the U.S. over the last six decades, despite the fact that many many Koreans would really rather close that never-ending chapter called the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.

The trip was too short, but still amazing, and it got me to do some new things in criticism (maybe dubious ones), like using a pop song for starters rather than a quote from Foucault, and approaching street demonstrations via Korean feminists rather than Toni Negri. In the end I had to conclude that the old French saying, “Celui qui aime a toujours raison” (those who love something are always right), is in fact wrong, since we humans are capable of awful loves, and not only in aesthetics. That said, we’re also uniquely capable of starting all over again, as y’all probably know in your intimate experience. And so let’s ask the question: What would tomorrow look like without 750+ American military bases scattered across the planet? With a little help from my new friends, I tried to go further with that line of inquiry, as you can see right here:

http://sunsetproject.wordpress.com

And now the dialogue is open for whoever has inspiration.