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.

Even artists as “spiritually” oriented as Kandinsky and Klee adopted the grid in their own work. From this basis of abstraction and egalitarian homogeneity, they tried to create an expansive range of subjective potentials. Klee’s work with the affective tonalities of color charts is particularly impressive: the grid-structure vibrates, resonates, in one painting it warps into a mobile mesh, as though blowing in the wind. Equally impressive are the very subtle atmospheric works that both Klee and Kandinsky made using a technique of aerosol sprays, which to my eye have all the lightness and openness of consciousness itself. But there is also the mathematical music of the textile pieces made on a Jacquard loom, or the extraordinary “Project for an abstract color film” painted by Kurt Kranz in 1930.

Kurt Kranz, Project for an Abstract Color Film, 1930
(32 painted images conceived as a filmic sequence)

After going back into the show a second time, looking for something, the idea suddenly came to me: In a period of overt political crisis, the overarching ambition of the school was that of finding both a technics and a regulatory aesthetics for a cosmopolitan industrial democracy. Or to put it another way (and this was the phrase I walked out with): They sought to establish and inhabit the machine process as the vector of a trans-identity. In their view, this alone could provide a psychosocial regulation, or a civilizing process if you will, for the destructive powers unleashed by mass production. The violence of mechanized passions was to be dissolved into an infinite subjective mutability. The aesthetic of Moholy-Nagy – who was Kepes’ mentor and friend, and who brought him to the New Bauhaus in Chicago – carries this ambition to its peak, particularly with the endlessly dynamic variations of the Light-Space-Modulator (film here).

Of course the Bauhaus was a failure in Germany. The problem, if I may interpret it in a shorthand way, was that this incredibly gifted bourgeois vanguard had no social basis of support. Near the end, when the Weimar Republic was seriously vacillating, you can see them scrambling in Dessau under the short-lived directorship of the communist Hannes Meyer, trying to create some social fundament of industrial use value for the mass of the people. The audacious formal experiments fade away in favor of a more immediate, utilitarian approach. Meyer enlists everyone to build a school for the German Trade Union Federation. The school was completed, but the larger sociopolitical strategy did not work. He was forced to step down by the government of the state of Anhalt, for being a communist. Under Mies, who was the last director, the searching cultural and subjective side of the project disappears and a technocratic, proto-corporate look begins to predominate. The International Style is on the horizon.

Curiously, it is in New Deal America that these artists find a chance to realize their utopia. The whole theme of postnational man is adopted after the war by an American intellectual elite that includes a great number of emigre German artists, thinkers and scientists. I find it ironic that the USA, the most liberal of all countries (where liberal signifies the classic bourgeois preoccupation for free trade, convertible money, commercial infinity) should be the place where an institutionalized solidarity, Roosevelt’s welfare state, would finally provide the social basis – or what thinkers of the time would have called the “metastability” – required for pursuit of the vanguard aspiration to trans-identity. Not that this was achieved in the 40s and 50s: it was prepared in that period, and finally came to a massive expression with the next period of crisis, in the late 60s and 70s, when the new paradigm of informationalism began to emerge. I was intrigued by the Kepes images because you could see that aspiration being realized, stroke by stroke, particularly with the aesthetics of information flow and the vanguard ethics that consisted in exposing oneself to a sublime overload of information, so as to learn how to navigate this transhuman environment.

Charles and Ray Eames, Glimpses of the USA (multiscreen film)
Inside dome by Buckminster Fuller for 1959 US exhibition in Moscow

From all of this I withdraw two main ideas. The first, which I can only express in cybernetic terms, is that the constructivist epistemology taken up with such subversive brilliance by Heinz Von Foerster in the 1970s represents a fulfillment of the modernist dream that begins with the Bauhaus artists’ intimation of subjective potentials latent in the abstract grid. I can’t help but see some family resemblance between Von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics and Bauhaus trans-identity. And whether you accept that or not, probably no one would deny that Von Foerster’s classic statements – such as “The environment as we perceive it is our invention,” from the 1973 essay “On Constructing a Reality” – have had enormous consequences on the character of our civilization today, with its simultaneous move into infinite cyberspace and imminent ecological disaster. The second idea is that in our age, marked by the seemingly arbitrary nature of autonomous information systems and by the weightlessly self-creative capacities of global individuals, what threatens us, perhaps with all the violence that marked the mid-twentieth century, is once again the loss of any sense and social practice of solidarity – a solidarity that I would extend beyond people to things, and particularly to those “things” we used to call nature. I really do think it is the lack of any effective practice of solidarity that has now brought our liberal societies to a triple crisis, economic, ecological and geopolitical (i.e. military). We no longer need the mediating figure of Klee’s angel and Benjamin’s text, today we can feel the gathering storm and see the debris piling up in front of us.

All of which loops the loop and brings us back to the initial question: How to analyze what the world is now becoming through the application of technoscience, without losing all resistance to the present and participating in the very dynamics that seem to be rushing us toward our own undoing? How to find a language that allows one to come to grips with all this as an intellectual, and yet not lose contact with the living beings who are most immediately affected by the violence?

For me it’s a challenge, I don’t know how to do it. I guess that’s one of the basic problems that Armin Medosch and I are trying to resolve in our technopolitics project.

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Moholy-Nagy, replica of the Light Space Modulator 1922-1930

Kevin Hamilton wrote:

>My sense is that in some cases, the Bauhaus grid met with some resistant forces in America – largely, that of industry expectations of art and design education. I can’t cite the source at the moment, but I remember reading about how Moholy-Nagy in particular faced pressures in this regard, where Chicago business had grown dependent on the Illinois Institute of Technology for the provision of ready workers in the design and application of visual identity. They apparently began to complain that students under these new European instructors weren’t adequately prepared for working in industry [...]“

If you dig up the reference, do tell. That fits into my understanding, which is that the German and Central European artists, with their strong abstractionist and Gestalt ideas, merely found refuge in the US at first, gravitating notably toward the cybernetic thinkers and finally having their strongest influence in the 60s and 70s. Everyone has always focused on the emigre figures as the bearers of industrial modernism, but what I’m starting to think is that the deterritorializing effects of the early 20th century vanguards went far beyond industrial modernism. The social-democratic regulation of mass production society, which the Bauhaus artists and their Weimar peers were not able to create in Germany, was the result in America of a compromise forged in the 1930s between leftist/workerist forces and industrialists, both of whom had little use for vanguard visuality or trans-identity. That compromise, anachronistically known as “Fordism” (or the Keynesian National Welfare State, if you wanna get geeky about it) produced the consumer society in its classic forms, the cliches of American Grafitti: a society whose epistemological base was still more behaviorist than cybernetic, despite the feedback loops that started coming into play in the 1950s through the monitoring of consumer reception. The consumer culture was all about regimes of identification, working on the acquisitive desire for things, both as the objects of raw libidinal drives and as ego-attributes. Such a culture was not dynamic enough for the elites, who came up against real limits to corporate growth from the late 60s onward, due to all kinds of factors including market saturation, renewed labor unrest, internal hierarchical rigidities, etc.

The corporate elites saw immense possibilities for restructuring in the information sciences, which had already been developing for managerial and logistical purposes since the war. The real rupture came in the crisis of the 70s, which marked the decline of industrialism and the beginning of another economic paradigm. What would be important to understand today is how the vanguard European artists and thinkers (and not only the Bauhaus ones) eventually contributed to the entirely new, post-industrial paradigm of informationalism, which comes massively into play from the mid-70s onward. I think they did contribute the mobility, the superior agility of a trans-identity.

Kevin Hamilton:

> To my knowledge (and Orit likely knows more here), Kepes benefited essentially from a patron in the form of MIT’s president Wiesner at the time, whose utopian vision kept CAVS alive. My understanding is that when Wiesner left, CAVS tanked.”

> This happened more or less at the same time as Von Foerster’s lab ended here at Illinois – his patron, the Office of Naval Research, was forced to drop him when the Mansfield amendment restricted military funding of “blue sky” projects.”

Well, fortunately there were some restrictions placed for a while on the military and the CIA’s license to do whatever they wanted! I’m nostalgic for the Mansfield amendment and the Church commission. The blue-sky research of the 50s and 60s amply laid the grounds for the takeoff of the information society from the 70s onward, with a fresh influx of military money from Reagan’s star wars in the mid-80s, then another huge military injection in this decade, which we’re gonna bitterly regret down the line… Now, I don’t mean to give a univocal reading of informationalism as some kind of dark plot. In my text Filming the World Laboratory I proposed looking at Von Foerster as a kind of double-agent within the military-industrial complex, a subversive figure who rendered much of cybernetic theory useless for command-and-control purposes by the reflexive twist that he gave to it. Patricia Clough, who studied with Von Foerster, seemed like she might have interesting things to say about that interpetation! Bateson, Von Foerster, Maturana and Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, Stengers and Prigogine, they compose a kind of phylum that puts a twist on informationalism and offers possible alternatives, a bluer sky if you will. However, at that level of theoretical elaboration there are always great ambiguities. The power complexes have a way of appropriating everything.

Over the past two days I realized that you can read the book chapter from which Orit Halpern drew her talk, it’s really extraordinary, check it out: http://orithalpern.net/chapter3.pdf . Near the start of the chapter she says something very insightful about the way Kepes fit into the American context where he produced his first book, Language of Vision:

“Language of Vision is, therefore, an inverted lens upon the Bauhaus education. It is not so much a break from this history, as a mutation and extraction of certain impulses within histories of design, now unmoored from previous modern conceptions of material, time, and representation.”

The words “unmoored” and “unbound” – which I associate with “disembedded” (Polanyi) and “deterritorialized” (Guattari) – recurr again and again in this chapter in the attempt to describe the way that Gestalt ideas, originally conceived as designating fundamental perceptual structures, are reworked in a radically constructivist fashion until they become operative schemata for the production of informational worlds. These mediated environments – like the ones that the Eameses built for the US Information Agency and IBM – present their own intrinsic dynamics and complexity, through which the subject “navigates” an existential course, but a fundamentally arbitrary one, cut off (unmoored, disembedded) from any traditional habitus or sedimented ground of experiential knowledge. You see these environments emerging as possibilities in the 1950s, but they couldn’t be massively developed until semicounductors became cheap, in the 70s. It would be interesting to look closely into the theory of things like “sensurround” cinema, which was first used in 1974… Today, the city itself has become a screenic environment, a sensurround. These are the artificial worlds of simulated perception that the great corporations have succeeded in imposing as the leading edges of the informational economy, which is now the second nature that we live in. I’d say the supreme expressions of these radically constructive artificial worlds are to be found in the realms of global finance and of the imperial American military, in the worlds of satellite-controlled warfare and computerized trading, which between them make the greatest strategic use of computing power and informational networks.

Artistic expression allows us to look at something like the psycho-perceptual level of these transformations, and so art movements become really interesting when you trace their development over space and time. Orit’s research confirms the “family resemblance” that I saw between the abstraction of the Bauhaus grid and the radical constructivism of a cybernetician like Von Foerster. But the resemblance is expressed through an inversion, or what I’ve described as a chiasmus, which reverses some of the key terms that were initially at play. I think this has to do with the dialectical reversal of industrialism into informationalism (cf. my short text Into Information!). Orit writes the following, concerning the operative procedures that evolved in the wake of Kepes and the Eameses, but also of Wiener and the cognitive sciences:

“There is no single norm for vision. If, for example, the pre-war designers and psychologists thought there is a “natural” or essential gestalt form that preceded the perception of an image, then in post-war design that form is now manipulatable, you can build any gestalt to produce any perceptual field. The designer doesn’t need to learn the rules gestalt psychology discovered, the designer must understood the principle of relationality and builds gestalts. An inversion, if we will, of the original modernist design principles. The ideal of a singular, or objective form of vision is replaced by a fantasy of effectiveness or affect serving particular functions.”

It’s a brilliant insight which has everything to do with the concept of simulation that Baudrillard and others have developed, but here it is much more precise, you see exactly how the collaboration of cognitive scientists, designers and corporate sponsors produces the environments we live in, which can also be called “control spaces” (Sze Tsung Leong’s term). Orit’s work is the most precise theoretical genealogy of these environments that I have yet read, very inspiring.

One more point from Kevin:

> The question that remains is this – What can we learn from the consequent influence of the Bauhaus grid on Chicago’s image industry, or of cybernetics on economics and management theory? Are these examples of the familiar story of long-term capital-driven projects borrowing from the avant-garde without sustaining it? How else might we tell these stories?”

That’s the question! Telling these stories otherwise is one of the most important things, since the informationalism to which those figures helped give rise is now in crisis and the outcomes of that crisis are going to shape our civilization for decades to come. Keith asks about a pattern whereby emigre thinkers are functionalized in the US context, or (I’d add) remain as kinds of prophetic figures whom we still don’t understand (Marcuse, Bateson, Varela, many others…). But the pace of change is such that we not only have to go back and tell the stories differently, but also sustain some vanguard positions ourselves, in the face of parallel developments in database capacities (for simulation) and biometric identification techniques (for control). These are going to take on huge importance in the coming decades. We may all feel like emigres in the strange new landscapes that are coming.

It’s clear there was a postwar thinker who knew everything about information theory and was able to use that idiom to express basic issues of life and death and solidarity and betrayal, albeit in a predominantly tragic mode. That was Lacan, whose algorithms of the relation to the Other were meant to infuse an existential content to the mathematicized functions of the emerging communication system. In Lacan’s time, the Other appeared at the limits of Western humanism, in the national liberation movements of decolonization. Today, as the capacity to produce artificial Gestalten is dramatically augmented through neuroscientific research, the locus of the Other shifts: the Other is at once very near, just beyond the police perimeter of exclusion from the security society, and at the same time very far away, within us, as the radical schiz between the programmed realities that constitute the greater part of our own consciousness and something else which we can’t name. I’d say this namelessness is the field where the Other is blurred and obscured by anxiety over our own deaths in the coming deflagrations, both social and ecological, promised by the vast contradictions of informational rationality. The issue that concerns me in contemporary informatics is not play and it’s not the factory either either, it’s the abuses of the power to create worlds for mortal beings. In the face of the corporate-state appropriation of the very capacities of perception, what counts is an ontological question: How do we touch a human reality that persists through the successive artificializations, or through the flux of what I’ve been calling trans-identity? Orit’s text closes on the ontological question. It’s food for thought and maybe for some more discussion.

best, Brian

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The full discussion appears in the iDC archive.

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.

All of the activist-artists in the report-back show, Signs of Revolt, took part somehow in the inspiring and dramatic events created by the movement of movements – events that started well before Seattle, for example at the Carnival against Capital in the City of London on June 18th 1999, or at any one of the surprising and often hilarious Reclaim the Streets parties that broke out across the earth on that global day of action. Some of us would meet again and again beneath the tear gas and the water cannons: in Prague to shut down the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, in Quebec City to refuse the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in Washington, Seoul, Nice, Miami, Barcelona, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Geneva, Heilegendam or wherever the agenda of global capital could not be allowed to proceed with a cynical “no comment” from the citizenry. We would witness tragic scenes, in Genoa, Italy, where Carlo Giuliani was assassinated by the police, or in Cancún, Mexico, where the South Korean peasant activist Lee Kyung-hae stabbed himself in the heart out of grief for his fellow farmers forced by “free trade” to leave their land. Then we greeted each other once again at some local corner of the largest march in world history, on 15 February 2003, when over ten million people cried out against the impending war in Iraq – only to learn, dispirited, that the leaders of our supposedly democratic countries cared nothing for votes cast in the streets.

Despite that defeat we would go on journeying in wintertime to the World Social Forum under bright southern skies, or attend a local forum or a report-back session or read an article or a webpage or a book about this powerful articulation of ideas that has contributed so much cooperative knowledge to everyone involved in alternative politics – and particularly to the new generation of grassroots movements and leftist governments in Latin America. We would organize against the wars, mount Mayday parades across Europe and beyond, develop free software networks, squatted social centers, radical education projects and festivals for life and empowerment. At all these events and throughout long periods of organizing in between, the activist artists would be there, designing posters and fliers and puppets and websites, sewing costumes and flags, printing tee-shirts and tracts, making music, dreaming up tricks and displays and wild new mobilizing techniques – continuously searching for the deep subversion that changes lives on the spot, while sending out a message loud and clear to everyone. The colorful and inventive side of the worldwide movements has been as important as the political demands written in black and white on the page.

What is the paradoxical thread that links virtual images, embodied performances, graphic inventions and prankster’s tricks to flagrant acts of dissent and disobedience, on the one hand, and reasoned debates of political philosophy, on the other? The artistic process of the global protest movements since the outburst of Seattle is everywhere traversed by a radical incompleteness, which expresses the individual’s or the community’s relation to the social whole. Incompleteness is first of all an invitation to participate. You can take the image in your own hands, you can add to it and change it, explain it to others, paste it into some new creation for a different use. You can be part of the performance, experience its meanings and its feelings from the inside, share them with others on another day in another way, using different gestures and colors and words. You can help build the backdrop and the stage, or better, follow the pathways of art beyond representation, to construct new and unexpected ways of living where practical reality fuses with utopian desires and dreams. This is a philosophy of change that begins in the heart before it is translated into acts by the body and into words by the brain. Art has a prefigurative role in the protest movements, it offers a foretaste of a better life; but it also puts things together on the spot, it constructs a different world. With the realization that climate chaos is upon us, this constructive aspect of the artistic process takes on its full dimensions in the here and now: it’s about creating the conditions of another existence that doesn’t poison the planet, and not just sitting around and waiting for others who will never do it for you.

Yet there is another meaning to the radical incompleteness of art in the grassroots movements, equally powerful and paradoxical. You can see it in the images themselves, in their ambivalence and ambiguity. Because they are joyful, surprising, hilarious – but often quite strange and threatening too. There is a kind of dark specter that the laughter dissipates but never quite chases away: Ronald McDonald with a machine gun in his hands, a red-nosed clown in army fatigues, images of people tied up in nets, an armored personnel carrier blaring Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The prefigurative role of art, and even its constructive capacities, would become a lie if it did not also recall the world as it is, the really existing social whole with its immense problems bearing down on us at every moment. So the art of the protest movements mingles dream and reality, beauty and terror, and expresses the symbolic violence of a necessary break with society as it is, while never forgetting that the real violence continues. There is not yet any way to surmount this contradiction, this radical incompleteness – but each new wave of struggles brings fresh insights and new people too, more eyes and ears and tongues and hands to take hold of the scattered pieces and knit them together into another movement that will try and try again.

Ten years ago people power was reborn in Seattle, and not only there but wherever else human beings decided it was more urgent and inspiring and realistic to take to the streets. In one of the most memorable documents of those days – the documentary film “This Is What Democracy Looks Like,” collectively authored by over a hundred video-activists – a chorus of voices repeats in a great rhythmic surge: “Ten years from now, the thing that’s going to be written about Seattle is not what teargas bomb went off on what street corner, but that the WTO in 1999 was the birth of a global citizens’ movement for a democratic global economy” (click here for the whole film). Since then we saw a first crash that brought down the dot-com delusion, and then, in a weird and distorted slo-mo sequence, the inflation of a real-estate bubble that installed greed and self-satisfied blindness in people’s homes, in the very ground beneath our feet, generating a false sense of prosperity that would soon turn into real expropriation on a massive scale. The global economy was less democratic than ever, and for a while, the global citizens’ movement seemed to have disappeared.

Those were disturbing years to live through and it has been a relief to see the veil torn at last from everyone’s eyes, with the departure of Bush-Blair from power, the collapse of bubble economics and the visible quagmire of the wars, now rejected by a majority in Britain and the USA. Yet the most important thing that happened in these last ten years is the achievement of a scientific consensus on climate change that not even the American Chamber of Commerce can deny anymore – since the Yes Men corrected their identity and voiced the truth that they would not admit. Today there is a new movement on the rise, far larger and more deeply rooted in daily life, reaching across the generations to say there is something more to existence than the economy.

The next ten years begins on 30 November 2009, with another WTO ministerial in Geneva. But the failed paradigm of corporate free trade, overdevelopment, expropriation, immiseration and endless pollution will be far overshadowed by the movement that has arisen to force the global climate negotiators in Copenhagen to stop concealing the real smokescreen of carbon in the atmosphere with their rhetorical smokescreens of false promises and non-solutions. We know in advance that they will not deliver, and that many more mobilizations will be needed. The decade to come will see the most passionate struggle of them all: the one that finally takes apart the neoliberal system, to invent a future that no one claims to own and that no one trades away for profit, a future that every body can live with.

PUT THE FUN BETWEEN YOUR LEGS: Become the Bike Bloc

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!”

Specialists in the field will undoubtedly gasp at my adaptation of Osip Brik’s famous slogan, “Into production!” The reasons why are evident: first constructivism, then productivism were ostensibly founded on the rejection of language, syntax, representation, reflection and interpretation, as well as the compositional techniques that they imply in art and all the visual adaptations of literary simile, metaphor, allegory, allusion, etc. In other words, from a strict historical viewpoint the linguistic vagaries of information could only be the opposite of the material functionality sought by the productivists. Yet this did not stop Marko Peljhan from cloaking his reinvention of the artist’s laboratory in an explicitly constructivist and productivist guise, which is the sculptural form and the operational agenda of the Makrolab, with its extensive capacities for grappling directly with the military and corporate technologies of information. The proposal of a “new productivism” in contemporary art clearly owes much to this example, as it also does to the equally explicit gesture of the Activist Club constructed by Chto Delat. These are strong proposals, where the historical reference is not merely decorative, but generative. As art critics, can we not glimpse the unfulfilled potentials of the past in the most audacious inventions of the present?

However, I do not want to appeal only to the audacity of artists in this attempt to describe a new productivism. The contributions of the art historians Devin Fore and Christina Kiaer challenge the initial self-interpretation of the constructivist artists during their “laboratory phase,” revealing some of the paradoxes that the Soviet artists faced when they went into production. The results of these fertile inquiries show that the difficulties faced by what might be called the “informationalist” artists of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as the attempts to resolve those difficulties, are not without parallels to the conditions that the productivists faced during their entry into the realm of mass manufacturing and the machine process. Let us look more closely at these parallels.

Poster, Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

On the one hand, the issue of appropriation is paramount in both cases: for resistant leftist artists confronted with an emerging industrial system, it is a matter of finding languages to make the reified products of distant laborers appear as the fully sensible, comprehensible and sharable tools of a collectively productive activity. This is the role of the “operative word” whose theory Devin Fore uncovers in the work of Alexei Gastev, which anticipates many of the concerns of cybernetics.1 It is also the role of filmic montage for Vertov, in Man with a Move Camera (1929) or in the sound film Enthusiasm: A Symphony of the Donbass (1931), portraying Ukranian coal miners. The corollary of Vertovian montage in the informational economy is clearly hypertext in the revolutionary and disalienated perspective opened up by Ted Nelson in his early book Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974). Nelson launched one of the major strategies of resistance to the control society, by seizing and appropriating the information-processsing device at its very core: the code. And let no one object that the Soviet artists who reached the factory floor did not have to be resistant: for it would be naive to think that the imposition of Taylorist-type management techniques in the revolutionary factories was any less alienating in the late 1920s and mid-30s than the continual flux of cybernetic control messages has been from the 1990s to today. Only when Soviet productivism is conceived in its resistant, vanguard role does it begin to take on meaning for our time.

On the other hand, it is a matter in both cases of entering into the subtle and intimate struggle over the production of subjectivity at the affective and partially unconscious levels of sexuated existence and re-production, as mediated by the clothing, fashion, domestic tools and commodities that Popova, Stepanova and Rodchenko attempted to design and put into production, as we see in Christina Kiaer’s pathbreaking texts.2 Grasping the relation between industrial production and affective experience in the Soviet era makes it particularly relevant to our own time, where the “mediatization of consciousness” through electronic devices and the symbolic contents they help circulate has become the mainstay of the economy. The feminist front of informationalist art, opened up discursively by Donna Harraway in her famous portrait of the cyborg, came to exercise a major influence on all levels from the mid-1990s onward, through carefully constructed circuits such as the ironically named Old Boys Network. The histories of net.art and net.criticism in the 1990s, as well as the continuing development of an immanent critique of the Internet by circuits such as Nettime, provide many examples of the parallels between the productivists and the informationalists – that is, for anyone who can throw off their attachment to the authority of the past and overcome the general unwillingness to take a stand in the present disaster, the way the Soviet artists did.

That said, it would be a mistake to over-stress the similarities. A gaping chasm obviously separates leftist artists in nascent proto-socialist societies from new-leftist artists in dying hyper-capitalist societies. In addition to that caveat, I see two almost perfect inversions between the figures of the productivist and the informationalist artist. Indeed, this inverse symmetry is so strong that it reinforces the possibility of comparison even while destroying any misleading point-by-point analogy. The reason for this is that the precisely opposite positions of the two types of artists result from the dialectical negations that each new mode of production (or if you prefer, of industrial praxis) imposes on the previous one. Thus the artistic responses to the two modes of production – the factory and the network, the machine process and informationalism, or if you prefer, Fordism and post-Fordism – appear in their symmetrical differences, displaying the formally inverted structure of a chaismus. Let us consider the double dialectical reversal that produces this chiasmus.

First of all, in the text delivered at the MacBa conference – under the title “Arbeit sans phrase” – Devin Fore reflects on the condition of industrialized man subjected to the drudgery of the Fordist assembly line, quoting Hannah Arendt to evoke the danger of a mute subservience that left humanity “on the verge of developing into an animal species.” He sees Vertov’s filmmaking as a response to this underlying menace. But the post-Fordist cybernetic communication regime, whose rise has precisely to do with the attempt in the capitalist countries to overcome the alienation of the machine process to which the downfall of communism is often attributed, confronts us with exactly the opposite threat. Humanity is now in danger of becoming all talk, with no body, no time, no territory. The recent realization, as a really existing social-technical device, of Paul Klee’s quizzical pictorial utopia The Twittering Machine (1922) clearly confirms the point. What is missing today is not language but the mutism of resistance, the “I would prefer not to” of Bartelby the Scrivener – or what I have elsewhere called “the pathic core at the heart of cybernetics.” Doug Ashford’s text, which recounts his rediscovered concern with the pictorial sovereignty of abstraction following upon a dismaying experience with the pseudo-politics of contemporary linguistic chatter, fits directly into this new predicament. The ultimate meaninglessness of the informational flux is the distractive background against which an art of percepts and affects – or what Guattari would have called an a-signifying semiotics – takes on a new resonance, far from the machine process that confronted the productivists.

The second inversion between the situation of productivist and informationalist artists becomes apparent when one reconsiders Benjamin Buchloh’s assessment of factography. He claims that the visual factographers sought systems of representation-production-distribution that could recognize collective participation by establishing the conditions of “simultaneous collective reception” in a vast territory that was spatially fragmented by the industrial division of labor.3 Yet the historical realization of this quest, in Buchloh’s analysis, was the oppressive propaganda machine of the fascist and totalitarian dictatorships, whose lingering effects can still be felt in the contemporary mass media (Fox News, etc). Today, however, the informationalist artist does not only face the visual and discursive hangovers of the former mass-mediated societies, but above all, a situation where the disjointed assembly lines of globally coordinated just-in-time production are reflected at light-speed (literally: via fiber-optic cable) in the disjointed, desynchronized, hyper-individualized reception of networked media, whose extreme tendency is that of automatically generating pseudo-messages tailored to the profiles of single receivers. The difficulty for leftist thinking is inescapable here, because as Hito Steyerl insists in her critical work as well as her films, we cannot possibly desire any return to simultaneous collective reception. The reason is that differentially articulated reception represents a victory – or at least, a partial victory – over the oppressive nature of fascist broadcasting and contemporary capitalist mass media. What we need therefore, in my view, is to produce is the possibility of a simultaneous collective response to the fragmented conditions of differentiated reception. This, and perhaps this alone, can lend political agency to informationalist art production.

Big Noise Films and Indymedia (2000)
Shot by over 100 media activists

So far, the most clearly self-aware attempt to insert an alternative operational process into the new system of communication and control is the one carried out by the meeting of open-source software engineers and agit-prop tactical media artists collaborating within the broad spectrum of social and political forces that was known as the counter-globalization movement, and that is now being re-articulated within the context of the twin struggles against precarity and climate change. In these movements, people from vastly different horizons, animated by their own singular concerns, succeed in converging at particular times, in particular places, around particular sets of issues that have been carefully framed so as to leave their evolution open to the new existential situations that continually arise amid the rapidly circulating flow of affects and images and signs. What is striking in these contexts is the relation of the informational flux and knowledgeable bodies in the street, as well as the social relation, most apparent in the Latin American region, between post-Fordist language workers and indigenous peoples – a relation which has gained extraordinary salience in the World Social Forums as well as in the electoral victories of Chávez and Morales. Similar encounters also occur without the ostensible presence of engineers and technicians. One example, plucked from among hundreds, would be the remarkably virulent work of Mujeres Creando with all kinds of marginal social actors in Bolivia. In a different vein, one could recall the urban tactics of Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou with local inhabitants and vernacular architecture in Paris, or Precarias a la Deriva in Spain, and so forth.

These aestheticized relations between language workers and marginal social subjects appear at first glance paradoxical, as they disturb the purity of an analysis based on successive modes of production, fetishizing first the assembly line, then the computer. What is at stake, however, is precisely a resistant critique of the dominant relations of production, a critique which includes both the appropriation of useful tools and the rupture with mystifying ideologies. Just as the productivists needed to go to the factory floor to complete the critique of the bourgeois idealism from which their artistic practice was gradually emerging, so the informationalist artist must sink all the way into the biological substrate of every information system – and therefore, into the human nervous system in its cellular and sexuated chaos, far from its schematic cybernetic caricature. What is called biopolitics is exactly this movement of submersion/subversion: learning to inhabit and fully embody the circulation of mathematicized information that currently alienates our linguistic capacities and estranges us from political agency. Such a bodily engagement risks at once the speed of information through fiber-optic cables and the resistance of flesh, bone and memory, discovering a living solidarity where capitalism can only see – and manage – the abstract circulation of meaningless deadly bits. At the outset of the 1990s and perhaps even more so today, the great artistic challenge remains the plunge into information, that is to say, into the unfolding of the present as the lived experience of social relations that can be changed.

The tracing of a chiasmatic parallel between productivist and informationalist artists is exactly the kind of contribution that art history could make to aesthetic and political practice in the present, if it dared; and that contemporary art criticism could make, if it had the conceptual tools and the historical sophistication to do so. These are the pressing reasons for collectivism in the interpretation of art, and not only in its creation. To sketch out such a parallel as I have done above is not to fully realize its full potential, not by any means. For that we would need more time, deeper work, and above all, more acute and emancipated desire. But in these few short remarks formulated at the close of an extraordinarily interesting seminar, and at a time when the ultra-differentiated and mathematicized flux of financial capital appears to be reducing any form of resistance and political agency to a condition of fragmented and hyper-individualized insignificance, what I do hope to have done is something rather simple and yet essential. I hope to have reiterated, with the gains and insights of the experience itself, the demand that was implicit in the very proposal of a seminar on “the new productivisms”: the demand to face the conditions of the present, and to reach the core level at which they might ultimately be transformed.

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Notes

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:

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.

Unstable Constellations

Imagine the night sky as an overarching dome, filled with thousands of shimmering points of light. Like celestial messengers they glitter and gleam as they drift across the face of the heavens. Each of these bright stars represents the stock of a publicly traded corporation. The intensity of their luminous presence varies in real time according to the frequency of trading. If one star co-varies with others – that is, if a pattern emerges between the rates at which certain stocks are bought and sold – then the flickering points of light draw slowly together, forming unstable constellations.

The illuminated dome is an artwork by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, entitled Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. It refers both to the financial economy and to ancient astrological techniques for the calculation of human destinies. For its London installation it was connected to a Reuters news feed (Tate Gallery, 2001); in Copenhagen it was wired directly to the local exchange (Nikolaj Art Center, 2004). At first glance it might resemble dozens of other stock-market visualizations, remarkable only for the astrological metaphor. But there is a further element to this piece, which transforms it into an existential allegory of contemporary social relations.

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium

To create Black Shoals, the artists worked with artificial-life researcher Cefn Hoile, who developed computer algorithms for the generation of “creatures” that would feed off nutrient energies released by the traded stocks. On the basis of the programmer’s genetic codes, populations of creatures are born, grow, reproduce and die, developing unique survival strategies that cannot be predicted in advance. Like traders, they form vast alliances or operate warily on their own, display tremendous mobility or remain fixed in one position, focus solely on particular stocks or cast their nets across the entire virtual universe. And like traders, they are affected both by the fluctuations of the market in general and by the strategies of their rivals. A photo documenting the work shows a dense cloud of tiny A-life agents. The caption reads: “These creatures would breed voraciously when they found food, causing huge swarms which would spread across the dome eating everything in their path and eventually dying out when nothing was left to eat.”2

If this allegory of the trader’s condition can be termed “existential” it is not because the creatures are alive in any natural sense, but instead because their artificial world is decisively shaped by a complex flow of data streams whose relations continually border on chaos. But does the allegory apply only to the denizens of the global exchanges? In his General Theory, Keynes famously used the image of “animal spirits” to evoke the affective enthusiasms that motivate market behavior. Drawing on that image, the underground cultural critic Matteo Pasquinelli has compiled an entire bestiary of postmodern parasites whose life-support depends on the surplus values generated by electronic trading.3 He suggests that the form of our cities, the organization of our labor, the content of our entertainment and, I would add, the rules of our lawbooks and the teleological principles of our arts and sciences are all dependent on the greed, fear and irrational exuberance that drive the denizens of the electronic markets. They provide the common underpinning – both the affective and the monetary basis – for contemporary urban existence. Seen from this perspective, the “stars” of global finance gleam with dangerous passions, and hyper-competition rules our creaturely destinies.

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium - A-life creature

As proven by the series of crises that have surged through the world economy over the last thirty years, nothing has more powerful effects at ground level than the shifting map of the financial stars above. The artists put it like this: “Because the stock market has the kind of cybernetic properties of biological systems and other complex phenomena (feedback loops etc.), it can be studied in the same way as biological systems. This tends to give rise to a sense that the market is somehow a ‘natural’ expression of some fundamental forces. One of the lessons we learned in our long journey to understand something about the operations of big finance is that the market is only a natural expression of the particular artificial world model that it embodies – in the same way that the artificial life creatures in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium are natural expressions of the computer program that they exist in.”

Black Shoals is a great work because it asks two fundamental questions. First, what is the “artificial world model” that contemporary civilization has come to embody, under the decisive influence of speculative finance? And second, will the “creatures” of this particular world – not only the traders themselves, but all the cultures of global circulation that have sprung into existence over the last thirty years – now have to dramatically change survival strategies, or perhaps even die out and disappear in the wake of the current crisis?

Mirror Maze

Writing in 1986, Susan Strange described the extreme volatility of the financial sphere as “casino capitalism.” While investment bankers made fortunes, risk and instability arose to dominate everyday experience: “The great difference,” Strange writes, “between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter we are all involuntarily engaged in the day’s play.”4 By the mid-1980s, the continually rolling dice had disrupted the entire international system for the production and exchange of goods and services. The United States retained the central role in economic governance that it had won with WWII, but its hegemony was now founded on the management of chaos.5

The casino age began with the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods fixed exchange-rate scheme in the years 1971-73. The new regime of floating rates required the hedging of international payments by purchasing a whole range of foreign currencies, to offset potential devaluations in any of the monies actually being used. Already in 1971, Milton Friedman wrote a paper arguing for the necessity of trading currency futures, which soon replaced pork bellies as the mainstay of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.6 The appearance two years later of the first networked currency trading system, called the Reuters Monitor, marks the departure point for the ongoing proliferation of financial information networks.7 What became crucial in the trading pits was the relation of the speculating individual to the ciphers of opportunity flickering on the screen. As Urs Bruegger and Karin Knorr Cetina explain in an article on “The Global Lifeform of Financial Markets”: “The screen is not simply a ‘medium’ for the transmission of messages and information. It is a building site on which a whole economic and epistemological world is erected. The world-character of this site also comes about through the performative possibilities of the dealing systems implemented on screen.”8

1973 also saw the publication of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula. Exactly when the stability of the welfare state began to falter, two University of Chicago professors, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, proposed its financial replacement – or its neoliberal derivation. Their aim was to find out how to accurately price a formerly obscure instrument known as a “European call option.” That’s a privately sold contract granting the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares of a stock for a guaranteed price at a future date. The difficulty was to know how much the guarantee should sell for. Their strategy was to assemble a fictional portfolio of stocks and options, and develop a technique of “dynamic hedging” to continually buy and sell shares, balancing out the fluctuations in price among the separate elements of the portfolio in order to maintain an overall value that would cover the exposure of the option. The cost of the option would then be equal to the cost of continually hedging against possible changes in the value of the underlying stock; and the key predictive variable for estimating this cost would be the stock’s average volatility, or its standard deviation from its historical mean, which they calculated with a formula borrowed from the physics of Brownian motion. What they created was both a mathematical proof and a theoretically risk-free trading technique that used a carefully weighted constellation of values to distribute randomly occurring fluctuations back into the statistically regular equilibrium of the market as a whole. A third colleague, Robert Merton, added a piece of stochastic calculus called “Ito’s lemma” – which actually came from Japanese rocket science – in order to allow for high-speed computer processing. Together they had invented the contemporary derivative.

Chicago Mercantile Exchange - "the Merc" (2008)

The success of the formula touched off an explosion, or if you will, a supernova of derivatives trading. It has continued expanding up to the present, reaching a potential or “notional” value of $683.7 trillion in mid-2008.9 To attain this impossible sum – roughly ten times global GDP – the option-pricing formula had to be rewritten for an enormous variety of contracts, including both specialized over-the-counter deals and standardized products whose costs and profits could be calculated instantaneously in the trading pits by means of networked computer devices. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee explain: “The model was extended to encompass increasingly abstract forms of risk that went beyond simple commodities options pricing into the much more sophisticated world of complex financial derivatives…. In ensuing years, mathematical statistics would work not so much in concert with but rather alongside those who fabricated and marketed derivative products. Computer pricing programs and the in-house technicians who designed them would functionally and socially mediate their relationship. Eventually traders could run the pricing programs with little technical, never mind real mathematical, expertise or understanding. The result was the evolution of parallel but barely connected worlds.”10

As the key discovery behind derivatives, the Black-Sholes formula can be placed at the origins of the “artificial world model” of finance capitalism. But it is also the source of a fundamental disconnect between the informational sky above our heads and the existential ground beneath our feet. On the one hand, the expertise of the “hardest” natural science, physics, provides the bedrock of quantitative certainty that alone can quell the anxiety of government regulators and secure the confidence of investors. On the other, the “performative possibilities of the dealing systems implemented on the screen” are what actually generate the profits, pumping the animal energy of the trader’s passions into the financial stars above our heads and sparking the positive feedback loops of bubble economics.11 Never mind that the bedrock of certainty – the so-called “efficient market hypothesis” – would later prove to be a chimerical fiction.12 For the cycle of profit-taking and reinvestment to continue recirculating indefinitely without any reference to material production – that is, for the sky above to take on a life of its own – just one further element was needed: systemic corruption that could subvert the checks and balances designed to prevent speculative bubbles. This corruption takes the form of what William K. Black calls “control fraud,” or the ability of corporate officers to suborn the regulatory instances, both internal and external, that are supposed to keep the system in balance. Corruption at the top can transform control functions – accounting firms, ratings agencies, even Greenspan’s Fed itself – into delusional devices for the maintenance of confidence, despite the obvious signs of market failure.13

The word “speculation” comes from the Latin verb specere, which means to look – in this case, to look into the future. But it is also related to speculum, or mirror. What the world model of financial capitalism does at ground level is to transform select living environments into grotesquely magnified reflections of the primary relation between the grasping trader and the profit-making opportunities flickering on the screen. The gentrification process that reached global scale in the mid-2000s has transformed entire cities into glittering mirrors of the narcissistic desire to gaze into an ever-more opulent future.14

Cloud Gate: "Omphalos" (photo by Wallyg)

Art, in the instrumentalized form of the “creative industries,” has been an important vector of this total makeover. Take one example of the results: the construction of flashy postmodern casinos in the impoverished core of Detroit, as a predatory regeneration strategy for a ruined city. No longer a production zone, the urban environment has become a stage for an infinite variety of speculative performances. Evoking the supposedly unlimited potential of human capital, these performances seek to justify future investment – in oneself, the land, a product, an algorithm, a business. Yet they take place under highly ambiguous circumstances, where the performer is often a “mark,” the target of someone else’s strategy.

The texts by the artists of Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium suggest the existence of self-reinforcing ties, or positive feedback loops, between the A-life creatures and their objects of financial desire. But the programmer, Cefn Hoile, tends to portray his creations as victims of a financial universe beyond their ken: “The creatures’ relationship with their artificial world of stars is a mirror image of our relationship with the financial markets – they strive to survive, competing with each other in a world whose complexity they are too simple to fathom.”15 By accentuating the victim’s role, the allegory largely misses the predatory nature of creaturely existence. For not only do real-life traders prey on each other and on the assets or savings of smaller, more gullible investors, and not only do the banks and the great corporations prey upon each other and on consuming populations. In addition, the entire bestiary of financialized civilization gradually becomes imbued with the relations between hunter and hunted that the American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, first described a century ago in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, the passion for the hunt has spread throughout the body politic. It lays the affective basis for what James K. Galbraith calls “the predator state”: a form of governance without any notion of solidarity, which encourages everyone to aspire to the condition of the hunter while at the same time delivering them over to the opposite fate of the prey.16 As Matteo Pasquinelli points out, representations of such base passions are rarely to be found in the idealizing images of contemporary art, which tend either to bow before the overarching logic of code or to exalt the febrile flights of desire. For an image of the predator society I am tempted to look back, not all the way to Veblen’s time, but to the “Magic Mirror Maze” of Orson Welles’ film noir classic, The Lady from Shanghai, released in 1948 at the very outset of America’s rise to hegemony. The surreal closing scene of the movie offers a prescient glimpse of the distorted realities generated by the spectacular power-brokers of the neoliberal democracies.

The Lady from Shanghai

The hero of the film is the working-class Irishman Michael O’Hara, played by Welles himself. Following a chance encounter in New York, O’Hara is lured by his own greed and sexual desire into the intrigues of a rich American couple who sail him across the Panama Canal in a private yacht, embroiling him in a complex murder plot that finally leads to the mirror-maze of a San Francisco funhouse. Drugged and disoriented, he witnesses a wild shootout between the rich but impotent trial lawyer, Arthur Bannister, and his exotic wife Elsa, a high-class Caucasian prostitute born in China, played by Welles’ estranged wife Rita Hayworth. Faces and bodies multiply in a baroque confrontation of proliferating images, before the first shots ring out. As the mirrors shatter and the labyrinth of reflections falls away in broken shards, the husband and wife finally kill each other, fulfilling what the film portrays as their destiny. The Welles character escapes from the world of distorted spectacle into the open air, wondering how he will forget, how he will live on into the future.

Ask Why

Today it is the mirror-maze of the speculative economy that lies in ruins, and the question is how to forget the impossible desires projected from the financial stars above, how to imagine other destinies. Yet what seems likely, if the current political passivity continues to reign, is that the multitudes of artificial lifeforms that flourished briefly in the glass-house environments of the financial capitals will now just fade away like the swarms of lesser creatures in Black Shoals, leaving the major predators with their weapons intact, still firing at each other. The danger is that the present crisis – with a magnitude comparable at least to that of the 1970s, if not the 1930s – will be resolved by those at the top of the social hierarchy, who are now attempting to reboot the speculative economy. In that case, the profound reshaping of social institutions required to end the crisis will be decided exclusively by them. If we want to make an egalitarian change in our world model, it’s urgent to understand what happens in the boom-bust cycles – before they are used against us once again.

Ask why was the slogan of the former energy-trading corporation Enron, whose opaque financial strategies, illegal business maneuvers and extensive support in Washington made it an exemplar of control fraud at the turn of the millennium. An advertisement aired just before bankruptcy in 2001 shows three businessmen with seeing-eye dogs and the heads of mice, wearing dark glasses and tapping the ground with white canes. The off-screen voice explains: “Enron Online… is creating an open, transparent marketplace that replaces the dark, blind system that existed.” Another ad promotes weather derivatives to protect against unforeseen climate events; the CEO who doesn’t buy them is shown as a sitting duck at a carnival sideshow, easily picked off by any kid with a BB gun (or more likely, a PC and a broadband connection).17 As for the slogan itself, it’s a classic symptom of the speculative economy: an injunction to know that reverses into its opposite. Why ask? is the real message. At stake here is the function of the veil, which turns sophisticated knowledge, indeed visibility itself, into a weirdly transparent cloak of secrecy and denial. Visible blindness is the underlying formula of financial governance.

Enron Online commercial: "Ask Why"
Watch the whole commercial here

Perhaps the insight we’re missing is the answer to a simple question: What is a derivative? We know that it is a fungible contract, created by applying a mathematical formula to an underlying asset or commodity whose price is susceptible to fluctuation on volatile markets. By assembling constellations of values that statistically tend to fluctuate in opposite directions, derivatives were supposed to mitigate the risks of globalization with the highest degree of efficiency. The idea was that that all risks, including collective ones, should be made into salable products, formatted for the market by private actors in search of a profit. Yet although it is salable, the derivative cannot be understood as an ordinary commodity of the industrial era. Marx described the commodity as that product of human labor whose exchange value, seemingly animated with a life of its own, acts to render invisible the social relations that produced it. Derivatives, however, have nothing directly to do with production; instead they are conceived to manage the environmental risks that weigh on the future of speculative activity. In this sense they are meta-commodities that govern the unfolding of the contemporary economic model. Their fascinating appearance acts to conceal the private deliberations that effectively shape the environment in which any productive or consumptive activity can take place.18

The lifeform of the financial markets is now animated by these meta-commodities, which lend the new cityscapes their dazzling character. But what the pulsating lights of the central business districts hide is the privatization of the social state – indeed, the privatization of government. Gentrification is the fetishism of severed democratic relations. Meanwhile, as Lee and LiPuma point out, the proliferation of derivatives actually increases the risks that they are supposed to mitigate.19 Yet the breakdown, when it comes, can also have its payoffs. Consider the way that Enron’s manipulation of energy markets led first to rolling blackouts in California, then to the recall of the Democratic governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has used the credit crisis as an historic chance to destroy public services.20 In the name of future prosperity for the middle-class citizens of California, the “Governator” is terminating public funding for the socialized university system that allowed so many Californians to achieve middle-class status.21 What European activists call “precarity” – that is, a condition of generalized uncertainty regarding education, employment, housing, health care, retirement and other life chances – now appears as a destiny, rising up against horizons blocked by the advancing threat of climate change. The supernova has finally imploded, leaving black holes in the future.

As the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote in 1973, “the ‘design’ of a post-industrial society is a ‘game between persons’ in which an ‘intellectual technology,’ based on information, rises alongside of machine technology.”22 This is exactly the formula of neoliberal finance. Can we finally ask why the citizens of the world’s democracies accept to play such strange games between persons, where they are alternately the hunter and the hunted? In the great hall of Chicago’s Merc or in the proliferating electronic spaces of the GLOBEX network, derivatives traders hold up a distorting but oddly faithful mirror to the wider worlds of so-called “digital labor.”

At the outset of this decade, in a text entitled “The Flexible Personality,” I identified a widespread desire among the new knowledge workers to mix their labor with their leisure in an enticing or even eroticized atmosphere of free play.23 A hilarious image from the Yes Men, showing a corporate executive in a skintight “Management Leisure Suit” with an electronically networked “Employee Visualization Appendage” rising like a golden phallus from his hips, served to make the point. The kind of “play-labor” celebrated by the pundits of Web 2.0 may have had transgressive connotations in the 1960s, but today it is only a grotesque parody of Huizinga’s homo ludens, or a woeful caricature of the sublimated sexuality that Marcuse envisioned in his revolutionary book, Eros and Civilization. What has disappeared from the networked cultures of casino capitalism is the willingness to engage in political conflict – even while the civilizational forces of Thanatos, or unbridled aggression, bear down on the biosphere. Now it is those aggressive drives that must be sublimated and channeled into a necessary struggle. Rather than draping aesthetic and epistemological veils over blatant expropriation, shouldn’t artists and knowledge workers seek political confrontations with those who set the rules of the game?

The struggles against privatization that have begun unfolding within the University of California system (and therefore at the heart of what autonomous Marxist theorists long ago identified as “cognitive capitalism”24) have finally opened up a significant grassroots challenge to the logic of the predator state and the financial world model that it incarnates.The California outbreaks were preceded by major student movements in France, Italy and Croatia, and followed about a month later by parallel events in Austria – only the latest in a worldwide wave of movements refusing the instrumentalization of higher education. These struggles are important, because the university has become the crucial laboratory of neoliberal management and financial engineering, in addition to its traditional role as R&D center for the industrial war machine.25 Only far-reaching changes in the ways that knowledge is elaborated and made productive can reorient our complex societies away from the suicidal pathway of climate chaos and generalized warfare, steering them instead toward a sustainable and survivable future.

Addressing himself to European artistic vanguards steeped in the heritage of Italian Autonomia, Matteo Pasquinelli calls for “the sabotage of creative value” and “the explosion of the social relations enclosed in the modern commodity.”26 In the university, that would mean trashing the concept of individual market freedom and prying open the meta-relations of governance that are concealed in abstruse mathematical formulas. Such an explosion has become urgent. We need a different world model, which cannot be abstracted from price information analyzed by computers. But it will take more than critical insights to gain anything concrete. Beneath the curve of the night sky there awaits, not only occupations of public buildings and demonstrations on the streets, but also an existential struggle for the quality of our dreams. Critical intelligence and the radical imagination will have to merge with the animal spirits of political conflict, to chart new paths through the fateful spaces where symbolic constellations are etched on living skins.

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UC Faculty-Staff-Student Walkout, September 24, 2009

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Notes

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.

The theory I want to develop deals with the forms of subjectivation, cooperation, control and struggle against capitalist and imperial oppression in the so-called post-Fordist or neoliberal period, 1978-2007 — which has clearly come to its crucial turning point. But to characterize this period fully requires a step back to the Keynesian-Fordist manufacturing economy and the American-led world-system (1939-67), from whose ruins the financialized neoliberal order sprang. Both of these periods display a large number of systemic regularities, and indeed, they seem to call for an “ideal type” of individual, of the kind which I initially described in my 2002 text, “The Flexible Personality.” The ideal type — a cruel but useful sociological fiction — is a kind of composite portrait of the real individuals whom a given period calls forth, and to some extent actually produces, in order to support its major functions, to staff its command posts and carry out its most pressing tasks, but also to sustain its forms of leisure, intimacy, family life, consumption and so on. In short, the ideal type is the existential figure of systemic regularity, the embodiment of a set of norms. But to understand how we move from one socio-economic paradigm to the next means overcoming the norms. It means examining the periods of crisis when systemic regularities break down: 1929-1938 (the Great Depression), 1968-77 (May 68, the US defeat in Vietnam and the years of relative Third World independence), and above all, 2008-? (the implosion of neoliberalism and the decline of American hegemony – or “hegemoney” as Arrighi says). What’s being proposed is not only a theory of historical regularities, but also of historical change.

Four idealized phases of techno-economic "great surges" lasting 40 to 60 years
Source: Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

Crisis is as important to define as stability, but it’s exactly what escapes definition. It occurs when there is no longer an acceptable “fit” between four broad dimensions of social life: a mode of industrial production, a system of economic redistribution, a cultural horizon of beliefs and expectations and an international military/monetary order. It’s inseparable from conflicts over the political structure of society and the direction, meaning and value of its development. Periods of crisis contain the seeds of far-reaching transformations in technoscience, labor organization, artistic expression and democratic legitimacy; but only some of those seeds take root and grow to the point where they come to saturate the ecology of a stable system. How do the process of systemic change unfold in lived experience? What are the pathways toward a new social order? To reach the level at which change actually occurs demands a micropolitical understanding of the ways individual subjects and small groups learn to tolerate and “inhabit” the dominant social structures, and above all, how they unlearn their tolerance for domination and seek new ways of living. Thus the four macropolitical dimensions have to be characterized, not only as attributes of an abstract social whole, but as concrete factors weighing upon and configuring the multiple “worlds” of distinct groups and individuals. Here we can make use of Guattari’s fourfold cartography of subjectivity, and attempt to characterize both the ideal types and certain real groups in terms of the existential territories that they inhabit, the aesthetic constellations that help open up their sensibilities to the larger environment, the social formations or “machines” that they construct with others, and the relation to abstract ideas that continually deterritorializes them and precipitates them into difference (or what Guattari calls “chaos”). The search for an understanding of how people change in chaotic times is what motivates this project. Because we are living in chaotic times. To move through the present period of crisis will require both the capacity to innovate, and the perspicacity to place bets on which trends will ultimately cohere into a new stable order — if any ever do…

Felix Guattari, "Four Functors," from Cartographies schizoanalytiques

The construction of a theory like this entails mountains of reading and long periods of tenuous, trial-and-error interpretation, which is why the context of a seminar could be very useful. But the expression of the theory should be succinct, striking, impeccably logical and rich in artistic metaphor: that’s the work of writing. Fortunately I have done some of the initial research already, and sedimented it in the aforementioned confusion of essays. For the initial courses I will draw on a few of those texts, particularly from my new book Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. These essays will be augmented both with the source materials on which they are based and with new materials arising from the process of investigation. This archive can be further enriched by anyone who wants to develop parallel or contradictory research. For the moment I am conceiving a meta-theoretical introduction followed by four chapters — “Four Pathways through Chaos.” The pathways could be entitled:

Glaciated Territories
Power’s Reversals
Pocketbook Control
Metamorpheus

–> The Introduction will review the existing theories of historical change in the capitalist societies, focusing on the driving force of technology, the functions of regulation and socio-cultural norms, the role of conflict and the periodization of major crises. Key texts will be The Flexible Personality and the more mainstream, yet still extremely searching and sophisticated analysis by Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Techno-Economic Paradigms.

Additional readings could include Giovanni Arrighi and Beverley Silver’s short, dense and amazing book, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World-System or David Harvey’s classic on The Condition of Postmodernity (esp. part 2, “The political-economic transformation of late twentieth-century capitalism”).

–> The first pathway, Glaciated Territories, will study the development of Keynesian-Fordist industrial society and the emergence of first-order cybernetic control systems during the Cold War phase of American global hegemony. Norbert Weiner’s automated anti-aircraft gun forms the earliest example of a first-order control system; Jay Wright Forrester’s Industrial Dynamics shows its applications in the factory; the Worldwide Military Command and Control System marks its military apogee during the Vietnam War; and commercial television and the feedback loops of the Neilsen ratings system express it in all the banality and commonness of everyday life. Key texts will be Antonio Negri’s landmark essay, Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State Post-1929 and my own Future Map.

Further readings could include the first two essays from James Boggs’ 1964 book The American Revolution (The Rise and Fall of the Union and The Challenge of Automation); the great book by Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America; James Beniger’s The Control Revolution; and… let’s stop there for the moment.

–> The second path, Power’s Reversals, will examine various facets of the 1968-70 uprisings in terms of the Foucauldian-Deleuzean understanding of the reversal of macropolitical power into micropolitical agency. The thing to grasp is not the return of a suppressed term at a higher and more inclusive level (as in the master-slave dialectic), but something entirely different: autonomy, non-identity, dispersal. Key texts will be Mario Tronti’s The Strategy of Refusal and a chapter from Deleuze’s Foucault (Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside).

Further readings: you choose in free dispersal…

–> The third path, Pocketbook Control, will consider the new form of hyper-individualized control society that emerges over the last three decades from the crisis of the 1970s and the global redeployment of capitalism. It takes the iPhone as an exemplary vector of control. Key texts here are Suely Rolnik’s Geopolitics of Pimping, chapters 10 and 11 of Michel Foucault’s course at the Sorbonne, The Birth of Biopolitics, and my essay The Absent Rival: Radical Art in a Political Vacuum.

Additional readings could include André Gorz’s wonderful book that blew our minds in France in the 1990s, Misère du présent, richesses du possible (in English Reclaiming Work: Beyond the wage-Based Society); Stiegler’s short and very criticizable book which should be out soon, For a New Critique of Political Economy; and some selections from the Koolhas book, The Harvard Guide to Shopping, particularly the Sze Tsung Leong text called “Ulterior Spaces.”

–> The fourth pathway, Metamorpheus, will propose a theory of collective metamorphosis through artist/activist practice, based on Guattari’s assertion that what we need is not a microphysics of power, but a micropolitics of desire. This kind of collective transformation takes place against a stark background of control, as portrayed for popular consciousness in the film “The Matrix.” The key text here would be my essay Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies: The Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics.

For additional reading, check out some of my texts on artist/activist projects from Escape the Overcode or explore the references in “Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies.” And for anyone who doesn’t know them already, definitely take some time with with two of Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs” and “Apparatus of Capture.”

So there’s the outline and it can also be do-it-yourself if anyone has such curiosity. One more hint for the user’s manual: Since the outset of the industrial revolution (if not the Middle Ages) none of this cultural stratigraphy ever really disappears. It’s always one layer, then the next layer. Much of the Fordist organization of society has survived intact, three-quarters of contemporary activism was invented in the 60s, and I guess we won’t be rid of flexible accumulation anytime soon, whatever the crisis. Four pathways, heavy layers, lots of chaos.

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A few further notes on feasibility. One can easily imagine that at a place like 16 Beaver in New York, interested participants could present films and artworks corresponding to each of the periods and problematics, as well as generating an intense closing discussion on artistic and activist strategies in the present crisis. One could easily imagine that a course like this could be team taught with another researcher or group of researchers who would be able to critique certain orientations, propose other bibliographies, concepts, epistemologies, finalities, or even polemically oppose certain decisions, as part of a personal investigation or maybe even, if things worked out particularly well, as part of a shared writing process. The interesting question on the receiving end would be, who would want to take such a course? What does this kind of “student” look like and above all, desire? How would they participate, contribute, take over?

An encouragement and a sense of social and technical possibility comes from the courses currently being proposed at the The Public School (for architecture). Many people seem to be using the impressive a.aaaarg.org site as a text archive for proposed classes, as in this one on attention economies (the texts are archived on AAAARG, the class is taught at the Public School). The use of the AAAARG site appears like a good thing because it is becoming a socially recognized format, offering lots of use-value to anonymous visitors. Other platforms could, of course, offer similar functionalities; the question is where one can give the most encouragement to a non-normalized, free and open ethic of learning and elaborating technical, organizational, artistic and political knowledge.

All of this remains to be done and the outline above is just a first step, there remains a lot of work before anything is realized. The researcher and media critic Armin Medosch is working on very similar questions and has agreed to help develop some of the content and argumentation as part of his own projects (this text was initially published on the collaborative platform he has put together, The Next Layer). A context does exist for four seminar sessions and a public lecture at the invitation of the European Graduate School in Toronto, which is a good stimulus for moving ahead. The production of other, perhaps more experimental contexts depends on finding a few collaborators. So let’s see what happens.

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.

You claim that “collective aesthetic practices, proliferating in social networks outside the institutional spheres of art, would be one the major vectors for this double desire to grasp and transform the new world map”. You describe it as a do-it-yourself geopolitics. Sometimes, as a person from the site of art production coming exactly from 1990s DIY practice, I have doubts about it as I also face a lot the danger of getting quickly normalized and institutionalized as soon as you create an autonomous network and space. How to prevent it… among the art events, markets, bodies of institutions and state?

Yeah, you’re quoting a text written at the end of the network-fever period, around 2003, summing up the kind of wild enthusiasm we felt during the height of the counter-globalization movement. A lot was done, important experiments with political consequences, and I wanted to inscribe some of that in my essays, especially the ones gathered in the book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms (2007) but also in the text “DIY Geopolitics” from my recent book. Of course you cannot do that stuff in art contexts and museums get filled with a lot of opportunistic simulations of activism that does not really exist. For me as a theorist, it was necessary to move on to other ways of working. However, if you look at a figure like John Jordan, he has gone back to assuming the persona of an artist, teaching and performing, and at the same time he keeps on inventing aesthetic techniques for protest interventions, like CIRCA – the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army – which is a huge, viral, multitudinous practice. Someone like Alex Foti, who is not an artist, had a similar influence in the EuroMayday movement. So, art or not, who cares? The important thing is to try new experiments after the former inventions come back formatted and repurposed, overcoded. That’s why I say, “Escape the Overcode” – you can never hang on to the old stuff, society takes it away from you. Despite all that I think the art scene is good for more concentrated and sophisticated aesthetic practices, good for developing theory, good for getting around and meeting people too. I publish for free, collaborate, protest, subvert whenever I can, and I am not too worried about being recuperated, although frankly the whole Biennial episode was pretty embarrassing for me, I am not used to making such compromises. However, that’s the breaks of operating in an alienated society: the content and orientation of the Istanbul Biennial was great, a huge advance over what is normally done, but the frame, determined by other forces, was pure neoliberalism, with an additional national-fascist component brought by Koc. You could say similar things about Documentas 10 and 11, the big difference is that there was more protest in Istanbul, bravo for Istanbul, obviously I appreciate it! However, I do think the work of WHW has had very positive effects over the last ten years and I do want to help change the art institutions so that they are more meaningful and can maybe even help people to survive what promise to be the dangerous decades of the early twentieth-first century. We’re not there yet, the institutions have not been transformed, as the recent experience proves.

The economic geographers JK.Gibson-Graham ask: “How might non-producers of social surplus have a say in how surplus is generated, appropriated, distributed, and those to which it will not?”1. As recently I refer to Gibson/Graham’s claim that they try to find the ethical place for the distribution of social surplus value; the value that is not produced in any specific form but reclaimed even by non-producers. How can this help to explain collective places of contemporary art practices that pursue discursive engagements through ideological background and supposedly free themselves from the institutional structure in order to reclaim the distribution of the social surplus that might help to question the ethical positioning? What is the relation between socially-engaged collective art practices between “the existing flows of surplus value”?

That would be a better question for Claire Pentecost, who is one of the keyholders of a space called Mess Hall here in Chicago, they do exactly the things you are asking about. If you don’t mind I’ll let her answer:

“Mess Hall is an artist-run space on the north side of Chicago. It was started over six years ago when a landlord read in the New York Times arts section about Temporary Services, a Chicago based collective. He contacted them and asked if they would like to run a gallery in a storefront in a building he owns at a price of $1.00 per year. Temporary Services was not interested in taking on such a project by themselves, but saw the opportunity of expanding on surplus, so they invited several other artists to work with them in starting a space. The artists who run the space are called “keyholders” as they literally each have a set of keys. There are about 10 of us now, only one of whom was part of the founding group. No one is a director; we run the space without hierarchy and it seems to work very well. We don’t really know the motivations of our landlord, and it really doesn’t matter; we have always done what we wanted with the space and he has never bothered us about it. All kinds of things go on there: skill sharing workshops, film screenings, reading groups, lectures, panels, discussions, performances, exhibitions, demonstrations, celebrations, memorials. The programming is a mixture of things we organize and things proposed to us. We get several proposals a week. Almost everything that happens there would not be supported by a market-economy. Everything at Mess Hall is free. It’s an experiment in a generosity economy since our being there depends on an originary act of generosity. In 2007, inspired by the Black Panthers, we decided to make a ten-point declaration of our principles. It was a maddening, yet clarifying and satisfying exercise, one we recommend. Here are the results:

–We demand cultural spaces run by the people who use them.
–We create the space to remix categories, experiment, and learn what we do not already know.
–Mess Hall explodes the myth of scarcity. Everyone is capable of sharing something. –The surplus of our societies should be creatively redistributed at every level of production and consumption.
–Social interaction generates culture!
–We embrace creativity as an action without thought of profit.
–We demand spaces that promote generosity.
–Mess Hall insists on a climate of mutual trust and respect – for ourselves and those who enter our space.
–No money is exchanged inside Mess Hall. Surfing on surplus, we do not charge admission or ask for donations.
–Mess Hall functions without hierarchy or forced unity.”

How you define and discuss the differences in 1960s and 1990s of counter-urban practices involved with contemporary art practices?

That’s gonna be tough, I was only an itty-bitty baby in 1960. Probably there are a lot more such practices now, because a few generations have opened up a space in the public imaginary for such things. Also the decay of public services under neoliberalism means there are a lot of abandoned spaces, poor spaces, where you can do things because it’s a ruin. On the other hand, the brutality of the police is on the rise and the security panic is limiting all kinds of informal practices these days. One big difference is that from the 70s up to today, the practice of real counter-spaces and not just fancy theoretical models requires the practitioners to exit from the bourgeois high-art or architecture circles. An example is all the experiments organized by Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou in urban interstices in Paris, including Ecobox and their subsequent projects, which are marginal in architectural discourse but have an important presence in the city and have also fostered a communications network between practitioners all over Europe. It’s amazing work, Hackitectura in Spain is another example – but people higher up the foodchain of architecture just don’t want to get their hands dirty with such things. The nostalgia for the ’60s just makes me want to puke by the way. I think much more interesting experiments are happening today. The architects in their fancy ties and the pseudo-Situationist urbanists in the universities have lost their nerve and imagination, so most of them stick to models and studies and moan about the good old days. Fortunately there still are some exceptions, more and more, but the hypocrisy of ’60s nostalgia remains a sore point.

By contrast to the formalism of the often de rigueur relational aesthetics, French theorist Jacques Ranciere enlists an ontological argument to detect and describe similar construction in art performance and political performance. Which I find similar with most of your arguments that are about the role of art; especially when you describe at the end of your text in “The Politics of Perception” (with Claire Pentecost). Could you give some examples? What could be the forms of resistance?

You’re right, at the close of that text we traced a totally ontological line from Merleau-Ponty to Castoriadis, with Guattari in the background, who would be a direct mediator with relational art. You seem a little dubious about the results! Claire and I are interested in the affects of resistance and alterity, which are not only the affects of fire and let’s bang it up in the streets. There can also be longer-term projects, involving some kinds of care and changes in daily life, aspects which feminism has given more attention to. That work with tacit dimensions of knowledge and feeling also extends into performance and of collaboration, where the people involved are the artistic material and the work is trans-subjective, it consists in the effects it has on others. We did try an experiment the summer before last, called the Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, which involved around a dozen people moving through the vast Midwestern territory for about ten days, contacting other groups, visiting sites, trying to understand where we are and where we could be in this weird, half-devastated former industrial region, which is also ravaged by agribusiness and more recent forms of corporate hyperexploitation, not to forget an enormous heritage of racism and the prison industry too. I don’t think you can do that kind of experiment in an artistic frame – we certainly did not –  but there are some spinoff works that can be worth showing as traces or proposals for the future. Generally speaking, the reception and elaboration of artistic gestures requires more attention than is usually given, as you can see by the fact that there is so little important art criticism, with the exception of maybe Boris Groys or Suely Rolnik. All the interesting catalogues are mostly about politics, geography and sociology, which is obviously important and welcome, but it leaves a hole at the very center of the artwork. The problem is that there is no good language for affect, you have to invent a style to express it. In our co-written text we wanted to explore various economic, philosophical and artistic issues while also developing a style between us. It’s just one further attempt. Of course I dislike relational art because it always seems like an advertisement for a relational process that never happened. Still the ontological dimension exists and I am looking for more ways to work with it.

As an art critic how do you think your practice is functioning in the production of art knowledge? How you describe your position?

Oh, it’s clear, after for working for years with museums and accomplishing something, I guess, now I want to help open up space for more radically critical and constructive leftist practices within what I consider to be one of the key institutions of neoliberal society, namely the universities. There’s a programmatic text that sketches out the basic idea, “Extradisciplinary Investigations,” once again developed with Claire though she isn’t a co-author this time. It’s a matter of leaving your discipline – art, philosophy, geography, psychiatry, whatever – and coming to grips with another discipline, not just as a theory but as an effective vector of power in the world. You try to cast light on that other discipline, get inside it and then criticize or even intervene on the effects it is producing; then you take that experience as a way to transform your original discipline. Most of what I now write about partakes of this process. I’m gonna be meeting with faculty from a number of departments out at Northern Illinois University the day after tomorrow, around exactly those themes. In 2002 I used a similar strategy in a text called “The Flexible Personality,” which was conceived as a Trojan Horse or a kind of discursive equivalent to Trotskyist “entrism” – you know, when the intellectual Trots would plant themselves in institutions without ever saying who they really are, and try to surreptitiously take over. Well, this text on the Flexible Personality adopted the arguments and tone of the Frankfurt School, fully legitimate as top-level dead white male theorists in the academy, and it used that heritage to suggest the possibility of criticizing the knowledge economy and practicing what I called, as a detournement of Habermas, “communicative activism”! Now I constantly meet students who have appropriated that text as a possibility for a radical approach to contemporary society and its forms of exploitation and oppression. It seems to be a touchstone for many of them, like “Liar’s Poker” has been for a number of activist-artists. The point is to contribute to getting us out of this twisted neoliberal hegemony that has poisoned the planet while reducing mainstream intellectuals and artists to narcissistic idiots of culture or natural born killers in the financial sphere, a rather sad fate either way, imho.

As an outcome of the transformative relation of the art object-subject, current artists are more practicing as a researcher, critical agencies with producing several forms of mapping, alternative publications…bit different then the image of modern artist of the previous century. Do you think this practice could have a danger to be easily appropriated by different geographies of neo-liberalization?

All of the excitement around mapping began with the new topologies of the Internet and the model of contextual research coming from architecture. It was very necessary because the pace of social change became so rapid after 1989: it was another world, you had to get oriented. I liked Bureau d’Etudes the best because they were the most critical, we collaborated and distributed those crazy maps by the thousands in the big demos. A few years later it was natural for Eyal Weizman to work with them on the Territories show which was another important milestone (I did the editing and translations for the catalogue, funny how that happens). However, it must be recognized that there has been a lot of fancy prestige associated with the simple fact of making a map or a diagram. Geography hooks into this new art/research fashion pretty easily, and I don’t have to talk about social-network graphs, because the opportunities for corporate cooptation of that are all too obvious. It’s normal, the vanguard work on that kind of stuff was completed five or ten years ago and now the patterns are set and the big-time cultural production is launched. It’s time to leave mapping behind. The revolutionary web experiments of the 1990s have become Facebook, a new variety of mas delusion. This is why I am moving toward the ideas of territorial intimacy and inquiries around class and precarization, which are urgent here in the US and have the potential to help people get really really angry. We understand the network society now and it is time to attack the networked ruling class, that’s what I think.

You were involved with the journal Multitudes but left it (as far as I know); could you tell about that, and your experiences about the border of discourses and disciplines how it influenced your decisions in integrating yourself to art and activist sites?

Multitudes was a fantastic intellectual crossroads, full of friendship and cooperation, utopian philosophy, aesthetic adventures, economic analysis, political militancy, network experimentation and also a lot of acrimonious polemics which is apparently how it works in any Parisian journal… I followed it from its inception in 2000 and then joined in 2003 after having set my own course, so that was a good foot to begin on. Fundamental to the journal were the Italian emigrés, Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonella Corsani, Carlo Vercellone and others, most of whom also came to Barcelona and participated at the Macba in contexts organized by Marcelo Expósito, so there was a clear interlinkage with art developments as well. The Italians worked mainly on the concepts of general intellect, social cooperation, cognitive capitalism and the common. But Multitudes went far beyond the Italians because it also gathered many former collaborators of Deleuze and Guattari, including French people like Anne Querrien, Giselle Donnard and Eric Alliez, but lots of people from outside France as well, ranging from the Belgian epistemologist Isabelle Stengers to the Brazilian schizo-analyst Suely Rolnik. In addition to the basic concepts of autonomous Marxism, quite well known by now, I have been specially interested in Guattari and schizo-analysis, which provides the kind of trans-subjective ontology I was talking about above, as well as important understandings of social assemblages and processes of deterritorialization. The use of the horse-head nebula on the cover of my recent book is fully inspired by Guattari’s notion of chaosmosis, which is a process of self-transformation including territorial and cosmic components. But back to Multitudes: the journal made a significant contribution to the leading edge of leftist philosophical, economic and aesthetic discourse in this decade, and I am glad to have made a significant contribution to the journal by editing one full issue (number 15) and one dossier or “majeure” (number 28) as well as various articles. There was recently a big split in the journal (yet another one) which resulted in the departure of the whole Autonomist wing and a number of associated people, myself included. My reading of that is complex (I do give some ideas about limitations of the general Autonomist discourse in the introduction to my recent book), but one thing is clear. Coming out of the 1990s dot-com boom, Multitudes banked on the idea that networked cooperation represented a productive innovation within capitalism. This new cooperative potential could be seen, in good Marxist fashion, as being contradictory to the limits imposed on  (immaterial) production by the very nature of capitalist exchange. Yann Moulier Boutang in particular developed this kind of idea, maintaining that the cooperative potentials of cognitive capitalism had already brought about a “great transformation” in the capitalist societies, including many positive aspects that now should be stabilized and protected through a “new new deal” along the lines of Roosevelt in the 1930s. This basic position led him to many rather absurd conclusions, such as the idea that because of their supposed role as the register and stimulus of cooperative production, the stock markets would work wonders promoting a green-economy boom in California. Yeah, sure. After the financial crisis fully declared itself in September 2008, the hypocrisy of being in a journal whose “director” made such statements (because YMB had managed to have himself considered the “director” of the journal too) became unbearable to me. There also emerged a fairly broad consensus among the exiting members of the journal that the mechanisms of parasitic governmentality, cybernetic control and financial expropriation were the defining features of cognitive capitalism, and that the point was not to stabilize the system but to explode it. So that was the end of the story as far as I am concerned. However I am glad to remain part of the ever-expanding circles of Autonomist Marxists and I think brilliant things were done in the journal Multitudes. May its afterlives bear ever more fruit and cause ever more disruption.

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.

In the public sector over at Cook Country Hospital on Harrison street, where the night before I took my neighbor — another young woman without insurance — the line is different, yet still somehow the same. It’s incredibly long before you get registered, and then you wait and you wait and you wait all night, until they call your name. If you fall asleep at 3 AM, or if you go off looking for another hospital as my neighbor did to no avail, they call your name three times. Those who sleep through it have to sign up again and do the whole thing over. According to the accounting system that we have now, the Emergency Room is a drain on the taxpayer’s money and patients should be discouraged by the length of the wait. My neighbor Courtney was finally admitted at eight in the morning, just hours before I went down to protest at CIGNA. The day before she had been refused treatment at a private place, where they charged 300 dollars cash up front just to have a technician read an existing X-ray and confirm that her fractured elbow would cost too much for someone without a policy. Now she’s still waiting for surgery as I write, five days after slipping down that muddy slope on a weekend trip out to the country.

“Everybody in, nobody out” we chanted as the cops went inside. They hauled ‘em out, one by one, they threw the civil disobedience protesters in the paddy wagon and took ‘em down to the station. Out on the narrow strip of public sidewalk, Illinois state representative Mary Flowers explained just how wrong the Republican crazies really are, when they claim the health care bills in the House and Senate would result in state-run “death panels” pulling the plug on grandma. The real death panels are the insurance companies, she explained, and not only because the way they pad their pockets is by refusing coverage,  by refusing treatment, by continually drawing the line between their wealth and your well-being. The insurance companies are killing us because they block the path to the single system that can provide medical coverage for everyone, when they need it, regardless of what’s in their pocket at the time.

“Health care is a human right!” chanted the protesters outside. The solution that all the advanced countries except the United States have adopted is a publicly run medical system that covers everyone, without exception — even while the richest will still be free to go to their private doctors and hospitals. The difference is that they will no longer go there with the money they stole from people they claimed to be insuring. Funny thing, in the cafe near the Board of Trade where I went to drink hot tea and escape the rain, some wheeler-dealer types were saying that all anybody wants to invest in right now, in this economy, is insurance. The salary of H. Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA,  has gone down because of the economic crisis, poor guy. With bonuses, stock-option gains and other compensations, he only raked in $10.23 million last year, according to Forbes magazine.

Illinois state representative Mary Flowers is the author of an amendment to House Bill 311, called The Health Care for All Illinois Act. As you can read in the text, “It is the purpose of this Act to provide universal access to health care for all individuals within the State, to promote and improve the health of all its citizens, to stress the importance of good public health through treatment and prevention of diseases, and to contain costs to make the delivery of this care affordable.” If passed in Illinois, insurance companies would no doubt challenge it at the national level. And that battle would be another step toward the goal of a decent health-care system for a civilized country.

The protest in front of CIGNA insurance corporation, at 52 Monroe St. in Chicago on October 8, was organized by a local group called Chicago Single Payer Action Network (Chi-SPAN). They are affiliated with a national network called Mobilization for Health Care for All, which has already mounted a similar action in New York City, where seventeen people were arrested. Another action is coming up at an insurance company in LA, and next week, on Thursday October 15, they will help organize actions across the country. As I write, 689 people have pledged to be arrested like the CIGNA 7 and the New York 17, and that number is going up all the time. But you don’t have to let the police throw you inside the wagon. You can protest outside in support, like I did yesterday morning, and you’ll be just as free to show up the next time in solidarity. You can give your name at the station, and you’ll be out in an hour and a half. Or like some of the civil disobedience volunteers, you can refuse to give your name and go to jail like Mahatma Ghandi or Henry David Thoreau.

This is the kind of movement we need in America. It’s local and it’s national, it’s legal and it’s confrontational, it matters to people of all colors and classes and it’s a struggle we can win. Push Barack Obama harder, and you’ll help him become the president we elected him to be! Health care is getting killed by the lobbyists, the politicians and the medical-industry profiteers. It’s high time for the people to take it to the streets.

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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. Only in this way can its meaning be forged in the hearts and minds of the public, creating the raw material of immediate social relations which, through photographic recording and audiovisual testimony, will later be offered to more sustained debate, and indeed, to the memory of society, through the multifarious operations of the art institutions (museums, journals, magazines, websites, universities, etc). The most important transformation of art since the 1960s has been the introduction of this new category of performance art, which is created flush with social reality before becoming a formalized aesthetic artifact for presentation at diverse locations in space and time.

For at least half a millennium, since the Renaissance, art has been one of the vital focus-points of social reflexivity in the Western societies, extending the necessary debates that sustain democracy from the purely intellectual plane into the fully human dimension of sensuous experience. In this case, the death of an innocent bystander after an unprovoked beating during the G20 summit clearly underscores the importance of the debate on excessive police power raised by the performance of the Space Hijackers. To prosecute artists for fulfilling their professional and ethical obligation to a free society would be to turn democracy on its head, depriving citizens of one of their most vital resources in their ongoing attempt to govern themselves. Please do not make the mistake of attempting to interdict such practices. History has consistently shown this to be impossible.

Thank you for your consideration of these arguments. I remain disposed to offer any further clarifications.

Brian Holmes

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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.

The anonymous text goes on to cover a long list of societal failures in excruciating detail. What it calls for — as you could guess from the shortest excerpt — is nothing less than a revolution. I’m not going to disagree. But because this moment and this movement are so important, I am going to take issue with one aspect of what I consider to be an otherwise perfect analysis. This criticizable aspect comes only after a series of remarkable arguments that have to be taken on board in order to get to the heart of the question:

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

This is true. What we are witnessing with the current economic crisis and the collapse of state budgets is the culmination of the neoliberal program, i.e. the end of the welfare state that was instituted in the 1930s and strengthened again in the 1960s, and consequently, the beginning of the full-scale precarization of the former middle classes in the US and in Northwestern Europe, as it has already occured in countless countries of Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, after their subjection to bankers’ techniques for the extraction of value from public institutions and infrastructures. To destroy any democratic critique of this process — and to open up another lucrative private market in the same blow — it is necessary for capitalist logic to destroy the public university. The real-estate bubble and its deflation, which finally delivered a wake-up call to the general public, is at the same time serving as the pretext for a decisive round of privatizations that seek to finish the job, and eliminate any resistance to the appropriation of the entire public sector. That this extreme makeover of the former welfare state will undoubtedly be fatal to the entire system, threatened with climate change and also with the looming revolt of all kinds of peripheries and underclasses — seems not to matter one whit to the people in charge. Precisely because to a large extent, there is no one in charge. The logic of capital has not only pervaded the hearts and minds of those who benefit in any way from it – the very middle classes produced during the postwar period by welfare-state entitlements – but it has also sedimented itself in a very large number of technologies, laws, bureaucratic procedures, organizational models and operational goals, whose inertial force is tremendous and still serves as a powerful tool in the hands of those elites who are, in small numbers, very conscious of what they are doing. Yet all this, immense as it is, hardly removes us of the obligation to think and to act intelligently, strategically, in what is clearly a dangerous situation.

The knot of the text comes when it attempts to define its own speaking subject: the students whom the university educates. Not coincidentally, this is the passage that introduces the call to insurrection — yup, that’s the word, right here in Amerika — which takes up most of the third part of this extraordinary text:

The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

Now exactly here, I want to ask the question: how can anyone accept this idea that the function of the university is to reproduce the working class, without distorting every meaning of the words, “working class”? The working classes of the university are the janitors, the food-service people, the maintenance men and women, the day-care staffers and receptionists, all the people stuck in increasingly exploited and precarious positions. Even when they do the same jobs at night or at odd hours scattered over the week, the students aspire to be trained as scientists, engineers, technicians, health-care professionals, government officials, middle and upper managers, and cultural ideologists (a category in which I would include both artists and teachers). The difference between them marks the common consciousness and it has to be addressed, even at a time when the objective distinctions between students and workers are blurring. It is true to say that the United States, like all countries that have undergone full-scale neoliberal regime change, no longer has any essential need for its traditional working class, since industrial work has been largely outsourced, automated or delegated to immigrants under conditions of extreme exploitation facilitated in many cases by lack of citizenship papers. But it is false to say that the neoliberal societies do not need the “human resources” produced by the university. They do, crucially, to maintain their advantages in what they themselves define as the Darwinian struggle of each country and indeed, of each corporation against all the others. The present aim of the Republicans – the neoliberals – is to save money on taxes, to open up new markets for education and research while continuing to exploit the remaining (and hardly inconsequential) public budgets, and to exert further discipline over its future middle-management cadres by placing them under even more intense threats of joblessness and inability to pay their enormous student loans. In other words, they want to complete the program first launched in the age of Prop. 13.

Why then, in such a brilliant text, do we get such a major mistake of class analysis? Undoubtedly because from that point forth, it is very easy to lapse into an outdated concept of revolution, wherein everyone dons a black mask and engages in a sweeping orgy of destruction that will send the existing system up in flames and allow the rise of a new one from its ashes. Now, does that appear likely? Has anyone studied what Homeland Security has been preparing for in this country for the last eight years? Has anyone observed the massive deployment of police, National Guard, secret service and Army personnel armed with so-called less-lethal weapons at the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, or at the RNC in St Paul last summer? Above all, has anyone noticed how successfully agents-provocateurs have been used at all these kind of events since the anti-globalization movement brought street demonstrations back to the Western countries at the turn of the millennium?

The “Communiqué from an Absent Future” marks the return of an insurrectionalist spirit to the United States, where it has not been seen on any large scale since the 1970s, with the brief exception of an important moment in Seattle. This spirit should be put to good use by everyone. If the current movement goes anywhere, some rioting in the streets is gonna happen, and a lot of occupations. But no one should kid themselves that student riots are going to change the system. What students can do, from their own class position, is both to reach out to the hyper-exploited working classes toward whom they are, in effect, precariously sliding, and at the same time, to help to radicalize all those around them in what has become the central institution for the reproduction of the neoliberal hegemoney, namely the contemporary research university. This will require inventing original techniques of radical action that can’t be neutralized and made into a pretext for fascist reactions. Strikes that shut a university down — as has already happened for a day in the huge UC system — can also open up space for questioning what the uses of the university could be in a different society. Writers, media makers, performers and artists, whether inside or outside the university, can use this moment to go further, to dig deeper into our hearts and minds and desires, and to lay the basis for a long-term, broad-based, constructive refusal of the literally insane and dangerous system that has taken root in the US over the course of the last three decades and especially the last ten years.

If the former role and glory of the public university under the welfare-warfare state is definitively over, then what can it become in the future? Wouldn’t the best way to shut down its current operations be to convince all those inside it that the way it is operating is a travesty of all its potentials, including those inscribed at the heart of every academic discipline? Why not shut it down with an excess of transformative intellectual and artistic production that would have a huge insurrectional advantage, namely that it could not be stopped by police armed with truncheons and stun guns and less-lethal weapons that they are just dying to use? In the absence of a deep, problematic delegitimation of neoliberal capitalism and the invention of new ways to run a complex society, which transparently appears as the most urgent thing for all of us to focus on, the real revolution will never come. Yet the way things are going, with climate change and planetary civil wars looming on the horizon, all of us are mortally threatened by the absence of that revolutionary future.

Download Communiqué text as printable pamphlet here