Or, let’s find a completely new art criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://sunsetproject.wordpress.com

And now the dialogue is open for whoever has inspiration.

click the image for that deep understanding

an old net-friend “dr. woooo” wrote this to me:

re: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the current global restructure, I’m struggling to keep up with it all, things move so quick now it seems, it is nearly impossible to develop a ‘map’

Indeed, is there any point to it?

My idea over the last 5 years has been that the incessant transforms of global capital are in our nervous systems, like it or not, and that it could be more interesting to see them on the outside, right there big as life, like a skyscraper or a cement factory or a stock exchange. It could be useful and meaningful to map out the restructuring in ways both theoretical and aesthetic, rather than just taking each new jolt through the headlines, the fashions, the clashes in the street, the new management “tools,” the labor movements, the glimpsed oppression at the borders. Since I was flexible (after all) and could ride the cultural air-ticket to a wide variety of destinations, I decided to Just Do It. By going to Edge Europe, to Argentina, to China, to the Midwest and the Middle East, I hoped to meet people who would open up their nervous systems, so that we could not only compare jolts, but better, explore other lengths and depths of time, share different kinds of aspirations, dreams and satirical ironies, replacing headlines with lifelines. I wanted to ask: How has your existence changed since this whirligig of electrocapital came around? And I wanted to feel out what might have come before, not paradise, but historical experience on the intimate level, the kind that shapes a body and the tone of a voice, or the way families and lovers relate, the way people protest or laugh it off or complain or try to escape.

Of course, at the beginning there was a hope to pin it all down, to know how it works, to grasp the “system.” Neoliberalism appeared to have a logic operating not only on the extensive but also on the intensive level, which some of us in the counter-globalization movements had tried pretty successfully to understand in the 1990s and the early 2000s: how capital became cybernetic, biopolitical, the way that relations of accumulation and exploitation were transformed into language and reappeared as motivation in one’s own flesh. To understand that was liberating: it allowed probably hundreds of thousands of people to see a little more clearly through the strategies, to make different decisions about how to use their time and their attention, their love, their sex drive, their computers, their credit cards, their mobility, etc. This kind of mapping is not at all in vain, when you are under the sway of the immense, publicly sanctioned manipulation-machines called “capitalist democracies,” which tend increasingly to merge into one pulsing circuit of soft expropriation and micro-modulated spectacle. But does the intensive knowledge of capital and its limits have any validity (any “purchase” as the English phrase so ironically puts it) where the production system extends outside the centers of accumulation? And can such knowledge even be understood, or more importantly, made useful, inside the new, non-Western centers, where society meets psychology in ways that cannot be presumed on the basis of any shared canon of references or interpretational schemes?

These questions, far from being obstacles to the mapping impulse, now appear to me as fundamental, the very interest and meaningfulness of the whole thing. If there is a social unconscious of globalization — made brutally manifest in simmering national feuds, outbreaks of racism, wars and re-impositions of guarded borders — then that unconscious is founded at least partly on our own opacity to the flows that traverse us, on the way that embodied collectivities “cover up” the capital logic and its insane imperatives. Of course this is where it gets dicey: because what’s the difference between a “cover-up” and an alternative? If capitalism presses necessarily toward individualism — which I believe it does — then any kind of alternative, i.e. any kind of solidarity, necessarily has to involve some kind of community, whether ethnic, national or abstracted. Dogmatically rational leftists are quick to criticize the first two kinds of community, for one good reason: they are not egalitarian, they inevitably draw culturalized lines of inclusion/exclusion. Ethnic and national solidarities operate in denial of the fact that there are always people from the outside, right here among us, working more or less against their will for the system, and being doubly punished for it — that is, both economically (through exploitation) and culturally (through exclusion from whatever counts as “humanity” in a given space/time).

The answer is supposed to be abstract solidarity: in a well-organized society with strictly egalitarian laws, everyone should participate in the fruits of production. I believe this, but my belief itself is abstract, since nowhere do I see it being put into practice. Therefore I am willing to cut a little slack for the really-existing solidarity, to see how it is working on a case-by-case basis. How does peoples’ recognition of each other contribute to a better life? And how does it draw misplaced battle lines resulting in useless enmity and suffering? This is one of the ways I understand “culture” in the broadest sense of the word, and this is one of the multidimensional realities to be mapped out, in a kind of vague and always incomplete way, behind the accelerated pattern of capital flows. To do that kind of mapping is first of all to contribute to one’s “own” culture, that is, to try to share some understanding of the human paradox and hopefully to open up the idea that slowly, intimately, occasionally or maybe even sometimes structurally, social relations can be tipped over onto more convivial plateaus.

All of this sounds great, and also very idealistic. On the one hand there is the risk of superficiality: project a few abstract ideas in your head onto a few glimpses of ways that people live. The only thing I can say is that being called on your superficiality is one of the most productive things in life, it means that your attempt to perceive, learn, communicate and share something is being taken seriously. One of the real obstacles to the multitude of mapping projects — and to the constitution of a “multitude” in all its potential — is the lack of confrontation, of expressed disagreement, of spaces where the superficiality of your own skin is placed at the risk of others, their gazes, their words, their accusations, their potential violence. How to create those spaces and make them productive of greater understanding across the societal divides? That’s another definition of culture, an alternative one, which I think can add a lot to the abstract solidarity of the dogmatic leftists. I look for these kinds of spaces in daily life and on my travels, and I try to contribute to them.

There is, however, another risk on the other hand, which I think might explain the sense of lassitude in dr. woooo’s remark about the near-impossibility of drawing a map. This is the risk of power itself: the risk that it will crush you.

The rise of the neocons in the US, and the way their ideological victory acted to legitimate the resurgence of conservative political forces all over the world, has embodied the risks of blindly crushing power more than any other trend. To a certain extent it has made the finely tuned and subtly insane logic of neoliberalism obsolete, in the face of a kind of crass irrationality that operates above all at the sovereign level. The bloody spectacle of the US and Britain invading Iraq FOR THE OIL is what reopened the geopolitical nightmare, where sovereigns struggle with sovereigns, with all the consequences on the intensive existential level, all the multiplications of misplaced solidarities and blind rage against people whom one does not know.

My situated understanding of the world is that we entered the 2000s not on that uneventful New Year’s Eve, nor even on September 11 of the following year, but on November 4, 2004, when Bush was elected by a real popular vote, bringing the full inertial force of modern, war-making sovereignty back into the world picture. The neoliberal acceleration of capitalism into the nervous system is now freighted, literally, with these massive movements of troops, salvos of missiles, productions and sales of arms, not in a sublimated or sporadic or hidden way but once again as a baseline of the world economy, a regime. It’s like having lead pumping through your veins, again literally for the most oppressed, the ones in the line of fire. And what happens to the overall map is that this sovereign dimension combines with what we used to think of as capitalism-as-usual, so that the development of the productive forces is overdetermined by global military rivalries, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, that overdetermination is capitalism-as-usual. The entire Middle East has lived through it for decades, parts of East Asia suffered it before that, and meanwhile, the unmediated war in Columbia continues. This forces everyone back to the headlines, back to the journalistic kind of mapping, which even at its best (say, Pepe Escobar’s “Globalistan”) is really the worst, the defeat of any chance to save the cultures from the vultures, or to open up those spaces where everyone’s superficiality can be placed at an interesting risk. The secrets for overcoming such lassitude then become part of life’s not-so-little mysteries. Something about which there would be more to say, in another context.

It has been around 5 years since the Continental Drift project started to take form. High points so far: four autonomous seminars in New York with 16 Beaver Group; the Continental Drift through the Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor that just happened; an upcoming session in Zagreb, with 16 Beaver and WHW. I expect to do this kind of thing for around another 5 years, and hopefully achieve various kinds of useful results in collaboration with many different people — unless something great, like a revolution, happens to come through along the way.

The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in the Recent Past and the Distant Futures

the drift as seen by Claire Pentecost; more here

The Glass Bead Game, a novel by Herman Hesse, envisaged a utopian epoch of society in which highly cultivated spiritual aristocrats would play an extraordinary game of aesthetic contemplation, using glass beads that condensed the quintessence of a period, a style or an entire civilization. That was then: the distant future. The bead you see now is actually a piece of garbage, just an average bit of industrial refuse — or rather it’s a resource, since it was “harvested” at the Creative Reuse Warehouse on 135th Street where the City of Chicago runs aground on factory ruins, incipient farmland and the nature/culture chaos of the Calumet River. The dystopian future is already here. Today, no-one can claim to condense the quintessence of anything, let alone play games with it. In fact we don’t know what to do with all the garbage that industrial civilization has accumulated over the past two centuries. Rather than expertly rearranging the existing map of cultural crystals, around a dozen of us decided to try consciously refracting some scattered pieces of the territory, while talking about what it might be with whoever we might happen to meet. The result was the Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.

How to get to know the place where you’re living? One of the answers is to settle in deeply, to sink roots, to become part of the landscape or the urban beat. But a “place” in contemporary times is always also a “space,” crisscrossed by a warp and weft of flows that end up weaving almost everything you see, the solid seams. What we wanted to do was to filter through the regional neighborhood, to  check out the nearby distances, at a time when Champaign sounds closer to Paris than to Urbana — except to those who move constantly between them. What if there was radical culture right here in the Midwest and we were not seeing it? Or being it? The idea was to let slip an open secret: the existence of latent cultural corridors that you alone can bring to life, just by circulating within them.

discussion at Tomahnous Farms, by Ryan Griffis; more here

OK, all this was “very experimental.” In other words, an ad hoc group of people made a few good guesses about what to do, leaving most everything up to chance and circumstance. The conclusion, inevitably, was that it will all have to be different next time (what Heraclitus would call a truism). Our particular roll of the dice started in Urbana, fabulously I must say at the Indy Media Center, where a collective of desiring-media people not only managed to buy the stately and defunct Post Office, but also to rent a small part of it back to the neoliberal US government — since the townspeople still expect to receive their letters. Mike Wolf, Claire Pentecost and I arrived late, and unfortunately missed Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross’s intro to the art show “The Audacity of Desperation,” which offered some witty and amazing multiples reflecting on the current American political scene. Fortunately we did arrive just in time to catch a “local” guy named Kevin Hamilton giving a lecture about an even more “local” guy, the Viennese physicist and cybernetician Heinz von Foerster, who taught in Champaign-Urbana for a couple decades, notably during the late 1960s. This was an auspicious beginning for me, since I have a nagging cybernetic fetish and Kevin managed to ask at least half the questions that have been struggling to get out of my personal glass bead…

What does it mean to solve a problem? Von Foerster offered a wildly popular class in “Hermeneutics,” which was or purported to be a practical introduction to problem-solving in a complex society of, basically, white male engineers. The class was run in what seemed like a very original way, including the functions of a “scribe” to keep an objective account of what went on in each session, and a “metascribe” to add a subjective flavor. So you can get a peek at what happened through the archives, and also through a journal issue that was published as a culmination of each semester, with a page where each student explained, catalogued or graphed out their “problem” and its “solution.” Classic human problems like how to get laid as many times as possible, or what kinds of drugs you could score on campus in 1968… But was that the whole story?

Von Foerster ran a thing called the Biological Computer Laboratory, which was funded, like the overwhelming majority of blue-sky research at the time, by the US military. He was the figure who initiated “second-order cybernetics,” whereby the architect or observer of a system tries to see him- or herself as an integral part, affected and transformed no less than any of the other functioning parts of the system. He was quite fascinated by an event which shook up his own local system in 1968, and of which he was also a part: a conference organized by a television news station, in order to bring together university figures from around the country to converse on the air about campus unrest. As the debate got loud and stormy, focusing on the napalm that US airplanes were spewing all over Vietnam, a local civil-rights activist named John Lee Johnson asked about the “psychological napalm” that was constantly being dumped on blacks in the USA. This was the question that finally cracked the TV’s crystal ball: and everyone involved went fulminating back into their corners, despite von F’s elegant attempt to explain it all as a problem of metacommunication or some such cybernetic concept.

Confronted with an unusually large number of notes and clippings on the event, preserved in the Von Foerster archive, Kevin Hamilton wondered whether the research into second-order cybernetics had anything whatsoever to do with the local activism of John Lee Johnson, which involved the pragmatic improvement of schools, hospitals, community services, the daily substance of fundamental human rights. Kevin thought maybe the two were totally separate, strictly irrelevant to each other. When I look at the smooth cybernetic management of economic flows today, I wonder if local shortfalls aren’t part of some perfectly computed neoliberal picture? Kevin brought up Operation Paperclip, then preferred not to speculate on whether Von Foerster might have been among the Nazi scientists that the CIA imported for the anti-communist cause, inviting us instead to ask how resistance and radicality can make a difference amidst the most tightly run system — for example, amidst military research carried out at universities like Champaign-Urbana. I think his question is a great one for anyone working at a university today, where the imperative to create intellectual property calls most of the scientific shots that DoD doesn’t. But I also think there might have been some good reason for the Mansfield Amendment of 1973, which limited military research budgets to direct wartime applications. Just how far can you dance to the generals’ tune? Or how high can you fly on their scores?

In the end, all of us were fascinated by the obscure, unsung hero of the Biological Computer Lab, the composer Herbert Brün, who mistrusted the computable flows of ordinary semantics and put all his marbles in the basket of anti-communication: “a human relation between persons and things which emerges and is maintained through messages requiring and permitting not yet available encoding and decoding systems.” In other words, enigmas that the machines can’t process, and that orient both us and them in the quest for something beyond what we already are. That’s maybe what I call “the pathic core at the heart of cybernetics.” Following Kevin’s brilliant talk, Claire and I offered a few ideas about what Continental Drift could be, and why you might do such things anyway, of which my version can be found right here.

Revolutions Then & Now

The basic principle of the drift was simple: in each city or region, one or two or a few of us would set up meetings with someone at a particular place. The group would then gather, listen, ask questions, look around, maybe get lost, eat a meal, spend the night and so forth — onwards and outwards and upwards. After a week of this, with conversations and reflections in between, your head is spinning! Among the threads that most entangled us was in fact revolution.

Maybe it started at the north end of Champaign, at a meeting with Ken Salo of the UIUC Urban Planning Department and Aaron Ammons of CU Citizens (Champaign-Urbana Citizens United for Peace and Justice, to which Ken also belongs). The issue was environmental justice, or what to do about that the toxic waste buried in the ground at the site of a former coal-to-gas manufacturing plant in a black neighborhood (see Ryan Griffis’ post on the subject). What struck me were Ken’s stories about liberation movements in South Africa where he’s from, and his distrust of the courts as a way to get anywhere in the US right now. He thinks that the state and the corporations always figure in possible rights claims, and effective strategies against them, before taking any action. The relevant examples were the thick binders full of indecipherable information and booby-trapped legalese that the state and the gas utility laid down on the table, in response to the citizens’ demands for transparency on the neglected local site. All that adds up perfectly in the central computer, but how could anyone from North Champaign really deal with it? What seems more important to Ken than law courts are social movements, demands that overflow the legal procedures with the living weight and resistance of people in the street. Aaron Aamons told us about the C-U Citizens’ Unity Marches, moments of organizing that bring folks together beyond any particular campaign. Ken Salo kept coming back to the words “aesthetics,” by which he meant the culture of struggle, how it’s made into something common that people can touch and feel. Voices from the the so-called “third world” have a lot to tell us about the need for social movements in the US today.

Dr. Ken Salo; photo by Claire

Later on, at Mess Hall in Chicago, we watched a movie about one of the things that makes you want a revolution right now: The World According to Monsanto. The film actually starts with one of the worst cases of environmental racism this side of Bhopal, namely the town of Anniston, Alabama, the so-called “Model City,” where Monsanto went on manufacturing deadly PCBs for years in full knowledge of their toxicity. The twonspeople finally came to a one-time monetary settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing and no pursuit of any individuals. Today the corporation’s major money-makers are genetically modified “Roundup Ready” seeds that can grow to market under a deluge of pesticide — a kind of Intellectual Property that Monsanto pushes in an endless quest to establish a monopoly position on farm inputs at the world scale. The film gives fantastic insight into the kinds of far-flung operations that a contemporary corporation can undertake, and their consequences. It shows you how to research such things, how to find the information, how to go straight to the scene of the crime: a kind of do-it-yourself aesthetics of investigation, somewhat like what we were doing in the Continental Drift, but with a hundred times more focus and precision. What it doesn’t show you are the social movements that can seriously oppose such corporations, or how you could become part of them.

Two days later, when we went down through the South Side to meet Martha Boyd at the Creative Reuse Warehouse, what we saw was an impoverished and devastated local area crying out for environmental justice. Martha lived on the site and got to know it in detail, particularly the Altgeld Gardens housing project of the 1940s whose history of hope and decline she explained to us. Today she is working with various groups to try to put this area literally back on the map (including, for instance, the neighborhood right outside the warehouse, which the local alderman didn’t even know was in Chicago). Her main efforts go to the Chicago/Calumet Underground Railroad Effort (C/CURE). Someday we hope to visit an eco-park here along the Calumet River, with maybe a re-creation of a now-vanished stop on the Underground Railway that helped slaves escape from the old South. Today the most inspiring seeds were the ones coming up out of carefully tilled soil that some locals were just using, rent-free, to grow huge gardens beneath the summer sun.

Gerald Raunig, from Vienna, arrived at Mess Hall while the Monsanto film was ending. The next day Dan Wang interviewed him for a session at the collaborative art space InCUBATE, on his book “Art and Revolution.” One of Gerald’s ideas is about concatenation: the way dissimilar things fit together outside any formulas or rules, the “and and and” of art & revolution. We talked all the way from the Paris commune to the counter-globalization movements, which Gerald was involved in through his work with the Publix Theater Caravan, a travelling agit-prop group that evolved out of a political squat in Vienna. We were also trying to get to some further concerns about how exactly you create that aesthetics of resistance that Ken Saro was mentioning, and what were the effects of a complex, multilingual critical discourse like the one developed by the Transform project that Gerald helps coordinate.

The discussion spilled out of the hot InCUBATE space onto the street, where we all sat on chairs in a circle, drinking a few beers and pausing periodically for the clattering aesthetics of the passing subway trains that just about rattle your mind out of your head. At the end, a totally cool Latino guy, actually a neighbor, broke in to say he wasn’t sure what we were really talking about, but if it was art and resistance he could tell us about the hip-hop movement right in this neighborhood, for instance some murals across the road. He explained how later on, the commercial media made hip-hop into something totally different from what it had been at the start, but they went on working anyway, doing things in the neighborhood. At the end I was amazed that the cops hadn’t come to sweep us off the sidewalk, which seemed like a minor miracle; but the neighbor guy said, that’s cause we were white. “If you were Black or Latino the cops would’ve been here in five minutes.”

That was true right now, but what about then? What about ‘68, the Democratic National Convention, Martin Luther King’s murder and its aftermath in Chicago? Claire had read one of the classic Black Power novels, by a fellow named Sam Greenlee, called “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.” It’s about a fictional character named Dan Freeman, the single token Negro of the CIA, who learns the moves, completes the tests, but then drops out of the agency, passing himself off as a do-gooding social worker in Chicago while actually organizing ghetto gangs with all the insurgency techniques of The Company. A dream of deliberate blowback on a massive scale. Greenlee, who had fought in Korea, then worked for the propaganda department of the Foreign Service in the early 60s, actually got his incendiary novel made into a feature-length movie, with scenes of guerrilla warfare in the Chicago streets (actually filmed in nearby Gary, Indiana, with the support of a black mayor). It was pulled from theaters after just a few weeks, undoubtedly under pressure from the FBI, but at last it has been released on DVD, so we watched it at the newly opened Backstory cafe at the Experimental Station, on the South Side not far at all from where Greenlee still lives. “I was mad,” said this alert, passionate, generous old man, after we’d seen the aesthetics that he was willing to put out in public.

Sam Greenlee

Greenlee explained that he got back to the States in 1965 after quitting the Foreign Service, saw the way that things were going, predicted it would turn into a violent revolution, and gave up the novel he was working on to write “Spook.” It was ready by ‘66, the same year the Panther Party was founded in Oakland; but it was only published in 1969 by a small press in England, then subsequently in the States. I wished Gerald Raunig had been able to stay and see this amazing embodiment of Foucault’s theory of power, which says that power is necessarily produced from below, generated by all the people who make the social order real — and who can therefore take that power into their own hands, twist it away from its normative ends and use it for different purposes. Art seemed amazingly close to revolution in Greenlee’s film, which must have taken fantastic courage and clever trickery to make. Yet the movie came out late, in ‘73, years after the Black Power movements had peaked and began to subside under police repression. Today, the kind of blowback that Greenlee was explicitly calling for only happens much farther afield, with Al Qaeda, whose actions none of us on the drift could even dream of imitating. What is left, in the novel and the film, is really a cultural document of explosive anger and the hope for something better — an artistic document of the revolution that we don’t know how to find, where to locate. I looked at the bookshelves of the Backstory cafe before leaving: they were filled with those distant documents of art and revolution, the paradoxical basis of Leftist culture in the present.

Milwaukee and Dreamtimes West

After Chicago we hit the road for Milwaukee. There we were met by the artist Nicolas Lampert, who organized a visit to the amazing urban permaculture operation called Growing Power. This inaugurated the seriously organic side of the drift (though we had already been to Tomahnous Farm outside of Champaign-Urbana, and also had breakfast with Lisa Bralts, who is a neighborhood organic gardener and the director of the Urbana Farmers’ Market). Growing Power is a non-profit organization started by the charismatic former basketball player, Will Allen, on the only land zoned for farming within the city limits of Milwaukee. Out back there are goats, a huge and hilarious chicken coop, ducks, bees, compost heaps, long plastic hoop-houses which keep plants warm in the winter. Previously existing cast-iron-and-glass greenhouses have been redone to house impressive three-tiered gardens: lettuce, tomatoes or other vegetables on top, usually in pots that can be taken outside in fine weather; a middle layer of watercress, which filters the water draining down from the vegetables; and a lower pool, dug five feet deep into the earth, that holds thousands of farmed fish in nutrient-rich water that is constantly pumped up to the top-level vegetables and cycled continuously down through the watercress, turning the waste-water of the fish into fertilizer for the plants, then delivering a purified environment back to the fish and thus constituting a self-sustaining heterotopia in three dimensions! This “aquaponic” model was a revelation to me, both for the fantastic efficiency and the beauty of the whole thing: I finally started to understand why so many friends are entranced by permaculture.

Julie fishes in the 3-tiered garden; photo by ready subjects

Growing Power is about culture on a lot of levels. You can take an introductory tour there for around two hours, like the one we were given by a wonderfully knowledgeable woman named Julie. You can take part in workshops that last for several days and get hands-on experience for your own garden or community farm. Growing Power also accompanies emerging projects over a period of years, helping to set up unique permaculture operations in different communities around the country. Finally, there are apprenticeships for Milwaukee youth, some of whom have been working at the gardens for many years. The place produces tremendous quantities of salad greens and delicious sprouts which are sold to co-ops and restaurants. It also recycles organic waste from local businesses, and is developing experimental projects such as a giant anaerobic converter which could someday produce methane from kitchen trash. With gas prices shooting up through the roof, and corporations like Monsanto pushing pesticides and GMO seeds that make a mockery of the word nutrition, Growing Power is obviously a model for the locally produced food of the future. And the secret of the place, the hidden bio-engine powering all this greenery, is actually the best composter on the planet: the lowly earthworm. Growing Power is home to literally millions of worms, whose castings help to create the very soil that the plants are grown in. Vermiculture is the underground hope of the Urban Garden Revolution!

We ate sprouts and salad for dinner, then discussed this and many other revolutions on the rooftop of Nicolas Lampert’s Milwaukee studio, out on the southwestern edge of the city where packs of coyotes are said to howl at passing trains. Nick showed images from the Seeing Green show that he had put together, including a very beautiful film called “Water Water Everywhere,” made by Ray Chi working with teenage students from Cass St. School. The next morning we went to the Black Holocaust Museum, founded by James Cameron, the survivor of a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob and the author of a book called “The Time of Terror.” You can hear and watch Cameron’s interviews, and learn a million things about the Middle Passage, the life on the plantations, the civil rights struggles and other more or less glorious facts of American history. The Museum opened late because the basement was flooded from the week’s heavy rains. In fact, the whole state of Wisconsin was flooded and the the waters were moving down the Mississippi. Under brilliant but always short-lived sunshine we set out for points west, and ultimately for Dreamtime.

Wisconsin has the most registered cooperatives in the United States. It’s home to back-to-the-landers, Mennonites, Amish people who don’t drive cars, anarchists and fundamentalists on the lam from civilization, as well as plenty of plain old conservative dairy farmers who make sure the roads stay ploughed in the winter. Our first meal, at the Langeby house out near Elk Mound where Dan Wang arranged our stay, was the site of a spontaneous potluck dinner cooperative put together by the Langeby’s friends from thirty miles around, mostly part of the home-school network that educates the lovely and creative children who were playing in the grass everywhere you looked. Everyone in the tents survived the night of drenching rain and we got up at 7 am to go see the Holm girls dairy farm, part of the Organic Valley cooperative. The cleanest farm and the sweetest cows I ever saw, kept by two California dotcom refugees and their daughters who were making their dream come true, with a lot of conviction and I think, a little difficulty, since the people who put the milk in your coffee rarely have life easy. We weeded in the Langebys’ garden, hung out in the house sheltering from the rain, cooked another great dinner and then Claire and I were lucky enough to sleep in an empty room, while others tented their way through the Greatest Downpour of Them All… The next day we visited the Organic Valley headquarters in the town of La Farge, also known as the CROPP cooperative.

Organic Marketing; photo by Claire

Someone should write a book about this place, if they haven’t already. It’s a farmer-owned cooperative, now doing half a billion dollars worth of business annually getting organic vegetables, eggs, meat and above all dairy products out to people around the USA, with farms in various parts of the country. 350 people work directly for the co-op, making it by far the biggest employer in the area, although notice carefully that the labor end of the company is not cooperative, that’s only for the farmers — among whom I’m afraid you’ll find plenty of arch-Republicans. The CEO of the outfit, George Siemon, is as it turns out an old Rainbow Tribe member (ah, remember those mythical Rainbow Gatherings back on the West coast in the 70s?). I was fascinated to see elements of the counter-culture that I had known and left behind in California now scaling up, trying to keep some integrity and simplicity while doing 100 million more dollars worth of business every year. If they can keep growing at this pace without losing the effective reality of their idealistic values, we will all witness a quiet revolution: cooperative business at a continental scale, able to outproduce and displace the corporations. Sounds like a fairytale in the capitalist USA, but already it has come partially true, with all the usual contradictions. Let’s see how that one develops over the next few years.

What they were actually doing at Organic Valley HQ while we were received and given a fascinating explanation of how it all worked, was trying to coordinate some volunteer relief efforts and free distribution of dairy products for all the people flooded out of their houses in the Kickapoo River valley where the town La Farge is located. Hoping to get more insight into the complexities of the cooperative, I asked some questions about the function of advertising in this kind of enterprise where the quality/price ratio isn’t the only value that computes; but for clearer answers we would have had to seek out specific individuals in the company. Maybe what I really wanted to grasp was the place and the ruse of the enigma: that moment of anti-communication where nobody’s exactly sure what the relationship really runs on. But these questions take time, lots of time. And here was the obvious thing on the whole drift: the only real limit to understanding your territory is the time and the curiosity and the energy you can put into it.

Dreamtime was the last stop on the way. Dreamtime Village is an anarchist colony, poetry treasure trove, permaculture garden and half-ruined heterotopia consisting of a few buildings, a decaying schoolhouse and a piece of cultivated land in the unincorporated town of West Lima, founded in the early ’90s by mIEKAL aND & Elizabeth Was. At the time it must have been a lively and fantastically interesting place, overflowing with permaculture workshops in the summertime and all kinds of wild artistic explorations in the old schoolhouse. Now it is a calm, surrealistic and no-less fantastically interesting place, with a smaller permanent population than in its heyday, but a rich trove of knowledges for those whose seek them. mIEKAL aND Camille Bacos greeted us in the big house at nightfall, with conversation and a bottle of homemade currant wine, which was unusual and delicious. A block away is the Hotel, another chaotic building with lots of rooms, one of which is decorated by the amazing schizophrenic collage art of Malok. Upstairs in the big house we would discover the four parrots in a fabulous video-poetry-hypertext workspace. Never forget that Dreamtime is the home of Xexoxial Editions, aka Xexoxial Endarchy Ltd., initially based on xeroxed D.I.Y. books and now shifted to print-on-demand. Among the authors in the collection is the mythical Bern Porter, about whom mIEKAL, sensing an interest, was willing to regale us with stories. Bern Porter, it turns out, is among the very few original beatnik poets to have worked on the Manhattan Project. The legend we heard is that he was lied to every day, having no idea what was really coming down the pipe until the day of the explosion, whereupon he quit his job with the government. This story gave rise to vivid debates about whether we are all being lied to every day, just the same, or whether there is now a significant difference, namely they don’t even bother to lie to us any more and people just tolerate it. Bern Porter went on to do fantastic cut-up advertising poetry (”The Book of Do’s” & “Here Comes Everybody’s Don’t Book”), as well as a famous title in the Exoxial collection, “The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You,” and the allegorical autobiography “I’ve Left.” Right now I’m still waiting for the combined efforts of the US postal service and some Abebooks affiliates to come through with surving copies of that last title, plus “Where to Go, What to Do, When You Are Bern Porter,” the biography by James Scheville, where I hope to learn at least some authorized version of the one true Manhattan Project story….

Camille and friend at Dreamtime Village; photo by Claire

What to do and what to don’t with the leftover leftist culture of the last two centuries? We didn’t make it to Dr. Evermore’s Forevertron, an enormous would-be spaceship disguised as a piece of outsider art, located maybe an hour away from West Lima. However it seems that many egalitarian futures could be invented on the ground, in the Midwest which, when you think about the relativity of maps and compases, is clearly here and everywhere. The Forevertron of the Present could take off with the formation of more ad hoc exploratory collectives, digging deeper beneath society’s spectacular crust to get at whatever might still pass as the Grounds or Ground Zeros of Existence. Some future destinations and forms of investigation have already been suggested. I am very impressed with the possibilities of this kind of group research, which could both be more focused, aiming for hard facts and significant patterns, and at the same time more speculative, inquiring into the dreams we live by, the ways both societies and individuals shape their worlds. Obviously, it will all have to be different next time.

Opting for place instead of space on the last sunny day of the westward drift, a few of us went down to the town of Viola where Driftless Books and its tenant — yet another US post office — had just been flooded out again by the Kickapoo River, which had done the same the preceeding August with historic floods (it’s like climate change in your own basement). The urgency was to save the post office and with it, the viability of the whole building, which entailed stripping off the soaked paneling and linoleum, clearing out all the heavy metal filing cabinets, pulling the remaining nails out of the floor and mopping more or less everything that was covered in smooth brown silt. Eddie the anarchist bookseller was an excellent guy to meet, however briefly, and we were happy to lend an afternoon hand, pushing mops, hauling cabinets and pulling a few hundred nails. Meanwhile others were working in the garden back at Dreamtime, or fetching the water from the spring. But when the immediate floods are over everything still remains to be done: and the end of the story can only be further….

Drying the Tent at Dreamtime; photo by Claire

A CALL TO FARMS!

CONTINENTAL DRIFT is an invitation to look at our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental, and the global. Continental Drift is a mobile assemblage of people presenting their projects, observations, experiments, discoveries and questions, and producing value through social exchange. Continental Drift through the MRCC is a self-educating tour through our concrete world and its abstract representations, discovering distant lives in familiar situations, and embracing the interdependency that links what is usually treated as separate. Continental Drift is intended for anyone seeking to locate global forces in daily life and to reorient aesthetic invention in response to an ethics of equality.

Join us June 4-14, 2008 in the Radical Midwest!

For updates sees: http://radicalmidwest.blogspot.com

Calendar of Events (tentative) - see below:

CHAMPAIGN - URBANA

DAY 1: Wednesday, June 4

* The Audacity of Desperation– Conversations with artists/curators Jessica Lawless & Sarah Ross about the exhibition.

* Kevin Hamiliton: “That Happened Here?” Sorting through the Records of an Earlier Radical Moment
A new(ish) resident of Champaign-Urbana discovers some old radicals in the archives. What was the Biological Computing Laboratory? What research and teaching took place there? In the modern history of struggles to live out justice and freedom, one sees so many different models, different relationships of seeing to knowing, of knowing to being, of being to being with others. Who knew that right here in town were a group of faculty and students who worked as a group to integrate these things, to teach and research from what they believed to be radically true? This presentation will provide some material for discussion of that moment, and hopefully without too much nostalgia from people too young to have been there. If you were around campus in 1968, come help us complicate the picture.

* Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes: Introduction to Drift

DAY 2: Thursday, June 5

10:30am-12n Backyard talk with Lisa Bralts
910 S. Lynn St., Urbana
Lisa Bralts is the City of Urbana Farmer’s market director. She’s been a food activist for years, on the board of the local Co-op and former communications director of the Illinois Food Bank. Lisa will share her knowledge on regional food sustainability and challenges for local populations.

12:30 Visit to Tomahnous Farms in Mahomet, IL.
Meeting point: 910. S. Lynn St., Urbana at 12pm, carpool to the farm.
Tomahnous Farms grows organic fruits, vegetables, farms meat, eggs and honey and sells through a CSA and local vendors. Located in a growing ’suburb’ of Champaign, Lisa Haynes, grower and land use activist, will give a tour of the farm and discuss issues with losing farm land.

7:00 PM Exhibition and potluck, Garage & Garden, 706 E. Fairlawn,Urbana.
This is the first gathering at Garage & Garden. There will be projects about the re-use of locally produced waste, imagined neighborhoods, and things to take with you. Garage & Garden is a space for discussions about re-making our neighborhood in relation to current food production, energy consumption, political organization, and more.
www.letsremake.info/garagegarden.html

DAY 3: Friday, June 6

10:00am Fighting Toxicity
Douglass Branch Library, 504 E. Grove St., Champaign
Local scholars and activists from C-U Citizens for Peace & Justice will discuss their fight against social and ecological toxicity in Champaign.

Noon Drift to Chicago, with rest-stop discussion

CHICAGO

DAY 4: Saturday, June 7

* Release Party for AREA Chicago #6: City As Lab Saturday 2pm-4pm @ Paseo Prairie Garden (adjacent to the south exit of the Logan Square ‘el’ exit)
This issue of AREA Chicago looks at Chicago as a policy laboratory in which experimental public policy in the areas of housing, labor and education are tested on the residents of Chicago.

* Gerald Raunig in dialogue: 7 pm @ InCUBATE (2129 North Rockwell)
Vienna-based philosopher visits Chicago for the first time, breaks down the
latest in art/social action theory.

DAY 5: Sunday, June 8

???Visit to Englewood as part three of Let’s Remake the Neighborhood????

* Tour the C/CURE initiative with Naomi Davis and Martha Boyd in the Riverdale neighborhood.

* Screening of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, appearance by filmmaker Sam Greenlee 7 pm @ Backstory Cafe (6100 South Blackstone)

MILWAUKEE

DAY 6: Monday June 9

Visit to Growing Power, the Black Holocaust Museum, The Brady Street Pharmacy (which doubles as an art space) and other places..

WESTWARD

DAY 7: Tuesday, June 10

* Travel to Elk Mound the long way, arrive in the late afternoon

* Noon break at Marl Lake, swimming

* Evening meal and hang out with the Langbys and some friends/collaborators of theirs from progressive home schooling and local food networks. Camp at the Langbys.

DAY 8: Wed, June 11

* Walk a mile to the Langby’s neighbors for a tour of their organic dairy farm (they are farmer members of CROPP).

* Help out around the garden, if you feel like it. Evening public Drift event at the Eau Claire Public Library, a talk or discussion, or screening?

DAY 9: Thurs, June 12

* Travel to Viroqua/LaFarge/West Lima

* See and traipse the Brown Family land.

* Evening picnic and walk-through of Heavy Duty Acres, with Mike Koppa, a city boy who made the leap to Vernon County

* Lodge/camp at Dreamtime Village.

DAY 10: Friday, June 13

* Tour the HQ of CROPP.

* Work on trellis projects at Dreamtime

* Evening Drift session: Articulating our Visions

MADISON

DAY 11: Sat, June 14

* Travel to Madison, stop somewhere for U-pick strawberries.

* Strawberry jam making party at the home of Dan and Sarah, plus strawberry shortcake feed

* Late-night Selections in Dan’s basement/print shop/listening station
at 2:53 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Draft Timeline for the Coming Seasons

We are sprinkled about the region, not like cinnamon on a latte, or
paprika on a deviled egg, more like dew forming and rain falling.
The following is a list of some of the opportunities to re-sprinkle
ourselves, flow in different watersheds, lap at different shores,
dissolve different minerals, and deposit our nutrient rich sediments
in other waterways. DSW made this list and I added a couple items in
the hopes compiling a general picture of some of the possibilities.
This timeline as well a greater “inventory of projects, places, and
working relationships relevant to the RMCC” are what Dan and I have
talked about drafting together. Please add to it, flesh it out,
and/or come up with a better format if you feel compelled:

1)January 17-20, conversations + Library of Radiant Optimism + Danish
visitors / Mess Hall
2)January 26 or 27, Liberation Radio Workshop / Mess Hall
3)February, conversations with Feel Tank and AREA / some place in Chicago
4)March, IVAW Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan / Washington DC (related?)
5)May, Nick and Sarah ceremony + an organized learning event? /
Kickapoo River Valley + Dreamtime, Wisconsin
6)June July August ??, Continental Drift through the RMCC / Indiana -
Illinois-Wisconsin
7)August-September, Domestic Struggle pt 3 - exhibition, events, and
public projects? Art of This? Minneapolis
8)Early September, RNC + PNC + other activist, possible encampment at
Wolf’s house or somewhere / St Paul
9)November, Dakota Commemorative March / Minnesota
10)2008, Tamms 10-year anniversary of Hell / Tamms, southern Illinois

]]> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-midwest-radical-culture-corridor/feed/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/gsa-security-days-in-vienna/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/gsa-security-days-in-vienna/#comments Fri, 30 May 2008 13:43:11 +0000 brianholmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/?p=321

“Security Aesthetic = Systems Panic”

This isn’t the first time I’ve participated in the events of the Global Security Alliance. Previously I spoke under the fictional name of Frank Beauregard, director of the Paris-based “Risk A” division, with some slick European ideas on “security aesthetics” for cultural peacekeeping. The chic aesthetic future of security tried to look good in the face of an explicit critique of warlike, ineffective Anglo-American practices used in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what I want to talk about today, in case anybody missed it, is the implicit angle of Beauregard’s critique, and the target of GSA operations in general. None other than the deep paranoia and drive toward total paranoid control that’s now being expressed in even the “fuzziest” realms of security society, namely culture.

Let’s approach this whole thing philosophically. Where does security end, and insecurity begin? Systems analysts recognize this as a classic boundary question. Its answer determines the precise deployment of any security system. But as we shall see, this particular boundary question cannot be answered under present conditions, except through the definition of a second system, a specifically interrogatory one. Drawing on the special definition of an American art critic of the 1960s, I’ll call this second kind of bounded entity an “aesthetic system.”

First we should consider how security systems are installed in reality. Attention is focused on every point where an environment, conceived as “secure,” comes into contact with its outer edges. Typically, these edges of the system are doors, windows, property lines, borders, coasts, air-space - every place of ingress or egress. At each of these edges, a catalogue of known and present dangers is established. An analysis is conducted to determine the most effective responses to these dangers; and locks, barriers, fences, warning devices, surveillance personnel, armed guards, etc. are positioned at the system’s boundaries to repel the threat. Further efforts are expended to look into the crystal ball of the future, predicting all those points where new threats could call for the definition of new boundaries. More matériel and personnel can then be deployed, or at least, readied for deployment. The security system expands dynamically, continually adjusting its relations to the outside world, continually redefining its own boundaries as a system.

One can easily imagine how a home, an airport or a harbor can be made “secure.” An initial, safe or “quiet” inside space must simply be preserved from outer harm. But what happens in a complex social system, one composed of many different actors, some with irreconcilably diverging interests? In other words, what happens in an environment where threats can arise from within? The response is clear: what happens is deep paranoia.

The problem of the system’s edges suddenly multiplies: the boundary to be secured is now the entire volume of the system, its width, its breadth, its depth, and most damnedly of of all, its human potential for change in the future. The resulting proliferation of eyes, ears, cameras, snooping devices, data banks, cross-checks and spiraling analytical anxiety in the face of every conceivable contingency is what defines the present security panic. Yet there is a further complication, which merits our attention, particularly in what is called a democracy. This is the fact that security measures, in the face of an internal enemy, come very rapidly to be shrouded in a veil of secrecy. This is not only to preserve their immediate effectiveness, though that is, of course, an issue. But secrecy, from the viewpoint of the security system, is also required to keep the initial security measures from backfiring and actually increasing insecurity.

For what if innocent but marginalized social groups knew the extent to which they are being spied on? Would they not then feel further alienation, and maybe even defect to the side of the enemy? And what if mainstream citizens themselves had to be surveilled, for fear that a violent anomaly might be lurking somewhere in an average profile? If they knew they were being spied on, wouldn’t these honest citizens become angered, and demand an end to the proliferation of security measures? Doesn’t opinion control then become necessary too? And how about cultural censorship? Where does security end, and insecurity begin?

As you can see from the world around us, any security system is destined under stress to become an entity of uncertain contours, a veritable black hole in society, extending its cloak of invisibility to the extent that its internal paranoia deepens; and at the same time generating an external paranoia about its operations that can only translate into a redoubling of its initial drive to stealth and invisibility. Under these conditions, what becomes necessary for the maintenance of a democracy is a specific kind of social system, whose probing and questioning can provide some renewed transparency. This is is where art criticism used to have great ideas.

Writing in 1968, Jack Burnham predicted the coming demise of the traditional art object, and with it, of the figure of the artist as Homo faber, or man the maker. In their place would arise the “aesthetic system” shaped by Homo arbiter formae, man the decider of forms. The essential reasons were technological and organizational: in an age of ever-more complex and powerful information machines, constructed by ever-more sophisticated and extensive organizations, an art that retained the simple posture of manufacture, or hand-making, would inevitably be condemned to lose all relevance in the world. Yet this declining relevance could be countered if the artist rose to the challenges of the contemporary process of production. As Burnham wrote:

The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts… Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system… In evaluating systems, the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control.

Burnham’s ideas were way ahead of his time. In the 1960s, what he mainly had before his eyes were sculptural environments, or what we now call installations: relatively simple systems of interaction with the public, which no longer appeared as art objects, but rather as heterogeneous assemblages of parts, some of which might break down and could then be replaced, without in any way damaging the originality or authenticity of the system. That was already a revolution. What we’ve seen emerging in the art of our time, however, particularly since computerized communications technology became available in the 1990s, are aestheticized versions of complex socio-technical systems: networks of actors, equipment, physical sites and virtual spaces allowing for the orchestration of quite diverse activities. In this context of spiraling interactivity, the most important artistic decisions are the ones that shape the systemic boundary, lending the system its degrees of recognizability and irrecognizability, and thus, its potential for symbolic agency. As Burnham remarks, the systems artist “operates as a quasi-political provocateur, though in no concrete sense is he an ideologist or a moralist.”

How then does a democratic aesthetic come into play, in the face of a security panic with its inherent tendencies toward invisibility, concealed intentions, censorship and even aggression? What we have is the paradoxical, yet also paradigmatic case where one systemic boundary can only be identified by determining another. What this means is that an aesthetic system must be constituted as a fully operational reality, an alliance or network, which can probe the contours of the secret, dissimulating system, and at the same time, reveal those hidden outlines mimetically, through its own outer forms, its own vocabularies and images, its characteristic modes of appearance and communication. What you get then, in art, are elaborate fakes, doppelgangers, double agents, fictional entities that strive to produce outbreaks of truth at their points of contact with the hidden system. What you get, in other words, are counter-models, the virtual outlines of rival systems. This is the principle of some of the most advanced art of today. Jack Burnham understood it in 1968. But there’s just one problem: later generations of critics did not read him. The job of art and cultural criticism today is to help create space in democratic societies for the necessary fictions, satires, double-identities and shadow-boxing of aesthetic systems.

Introduction to the forthcoming book:

ESCAPE THE OVERCODE

Creative Art in the Control Society

Let’s go straight to the point. How does art become subversive of the social order? How does it undermine normal, legitimate, accepted patterns of behavior, and how does it open up possibilities for transformations of everyday life? What can subversive art accomplish in the political arena? And what are its limits, its unrealized potentials?

To answer those questions you have to describe a specific kind of society, and the subjectivities who act within it. In this book I’m going to deal first of all with world society, which exists in the lives of millions and perhaps billions of people, even if it is still very strange and new. Beginning in the 1970s, changes in the organization of production, distribution, communication and finance made possible an integrated world market. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the integrated world market became a reality, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, not only in the “core” regions of North America, Western Europe and Japan, but across an immense tapestry of intensively connected urban hubs and more-or-less saturated suburban and rural hinterlands. That’s globalization. Of course you also have no-go zones, pockets of insurrection, shooting wars and countries that threaten secession or fall entirely off the map of connectivity. Capitalism is defined by permanent crisis. The worldwide extension of a readiness to respond to permanent crisis, and to profit off it, is what defines the globalization of capitalist subjectivity.

I want to be both personal and collective. In the late 1990s, like millions of other people, I became aware of the changes in the society around me and in my own body. It was a strange, exhilarating, disorienting experience, to feel your sensorium innervated by signals coming from around the world, not only through radio and television but now through the highly individualized technology of networked computers. The 1990s also saw a continuous intensification of financial meltdowns, unemployment, homelessness and sans-papier movements, echoed and interpreted by the distant and astonishing narratives of the Zapatistas. One way I responded to the crises of those years was to sketch a portrait of the new relation between the managers and the managed, the exploiters and the exploited, melded together in the ambiguous figure of the “Flexible Personality.” It was vital to understand how the earlier strategies of artistic subversion had been captured by a new paradigm, how they had been integrated into the rhetoric and even the technological forms of the networked and culturalized world economy. Like the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, I thought that each new phase of capitalist development has to integrate at least some of the critique addressed to the previous phase. But unlike them, I believe there are still resources for social change in the so-called “artist critique” of the Sixties. What’s more, new alternatives and forms of subversion are constantly being invented and put into practice, by people who have been through the welfare state period with its expanded educational entitlements and no longer necessarily match the traditional descriptions of the working classes, the marginalized identities, etc. So the interesting thing for me, in the face of a society that seemed to have coopted cultural critique, was to help develop ways of recapturing subversion, in the hope of changing the rules of the global economic game - or trying to, anyway.

Thanks to the Autonomia philosophers, but also to Deleuze and Guattari, we have a good idea of what subversion can mean. It’s not about resisting the continual mutations of capitalism from the retrenchments of an identity position, a class status, a locally instituted cultural tradition (a “whole way of life,” as cultural studies founder Richard Hoggart said, or even a “whole way of conflict,” as working-class historian E.P. Thompson riposted). Instead, it’s about allowing the inherited forms of solidarity and struggle to morph, hybridize or even completely dissolve in the process of encountering and appropriating the new toolkits, conceptual frameworks and spatial imaginaries. Power necessarily flows through the individuals and groups who constitute the social network, it is generated by the productive activity of those individuals and groups, so it can always be twisted away from its functional paths and channeled in different directions, to meet immediate existential needs and to explore the most wild and unpredictable desires. You can see this clearly in computer hacking, when someone takes the central productive techniques of contemporary society and diverts them for non-profitable or illegal uses. But similar things are done by artists: commercial images and corporate organizational forms are taken apart, altered in detail or even at their functional core, then repurposed in a process very much like reverse engineering. I call this “reverse imagineering.” As it has been known since the Sixties, subversive practices can be the basis for a playful, surprising and literally disarming style of conflict, one that displaces the fields and stakes of struggle, opening up new lifeworlds even as it pursues directly political goals. It’s a way to change the rules of the protest game. That’s what happened at the counter-summits, on the global days of action, and in a fabulous variety of networked campaigns, hoaxes, protest actions and media interventions, in a cycle of struggles running roughly from 1999 to 2003. We called it counter-globalization.

The keyword of this cycle of struggles was direct action: the ability to intervene concretely, to put your body on the line, with the aim of blockading some particular event, stopping some corporate or governmental decision, bringing the worst to a halt and opening up space for something different. Art, in this context, could unfold in the dimensions of self-understanding, desire and group process, on the affective as well as the linguistic levels. It could be an active utopia, a transformative force at the core of subjectivity. Artistic gesture in the context of the counter-globalization protests was a way for people to reinvent themselves individually and collectively, amidst the intense experience of a confrontation with power. But whoever looked beyond the drama of their own action could see that what we were engaged in was also direct representation: seizing media presence to spread messages that could be widely received, appropriated, relayed through other channels and used to bring political pressure on administrators and elected officials. Direct representation was about going to the places of power and taking the headlines away from the guys in the suits - and in that context, artistic forms and techniques could be very effective at getting attention, at transmitting attitudes and messages, at lending visibility and desirability to minority positions that resonated far beyond their immediate presence.

Of course these two things are contradictory, because representation always distorts whatever was done on the ground, and whatever meaning it was supposed to have for the people who did it. Representation in the commercial media exposes you to the traps of being identified, analyzed, categorized, and repackaged for the needs of whatever power formation has captured your image. But the contradiction between direct action and direct representation is what produced the strongest and most productive effects, at both the existential and the political levels. And I love that kind of grassroots politics, so I took part in direct action as much as possible, while writing about the subversive artistic practices that were an important part of it.

At the time I worked a lot with the French information-mapping group, Bureau d’Etudes, and we developed many ideas that were distributed through our website “Tangent University.” What intrigued me about the proliferation of cartographic projects that sprang up in those years was the diagrammatic nature of the critical, oppositional and alternative network maps. These maps often show very heavy formations of power, populated by robustly constituted entities whose operations can be described and whose interconnections can be traced out in a more or less exacting way. But what they also show, when all the names and informational elements are stripped away, are naked, indeterminate patterns of energy, of constituent power, the kind you feel coursing through your own body in the process of social change. The network map can be an energy diagram. That’s exactly what you can use for subversion - and the feeling you get in your body when the energy goes off track, when it is liberated, is also a guide for what to do with it.

Once we understood that individuals and groups can become mobile and active within the maps of constituted power, then it became possible to intervene in the social and political arenas. The theories and practices of cooperation brought into play by autonomist movements, social hackers, anarchist collectives and some of the more innovative unions and NGOs were put to all kinds of uses, extending far beyond these initial groups. Through inspired collaboration, one could help to invoke huge, complex, networked demonstrations and occupations, then participate in them as a “free radical” in an emergent multitude, a movement of movements. This is the moment of the mask, the bacchanalia of resistance, the “carnival against capital” that activist-artists like John Jordan or Alex Foti have helped to unleash in city after city, in forms and with political demands that have continued to evolve up to the present. One of the things that creates this possibility is the open identity of the collective name, which the Luther Blissett project explored in the late 1990s and made into one of the primary vectors of subversion in media culture.

Art can transmit that pleasure of the mask and the collective name, so that it becomes a model, a possibility for others. You can don the mask of power and appear within the constituted circuits, but speaking in a different tongue, twisting the functional language of networked capitalism into different meanings, satires, denunciations, voicing calls for action ranging from policy change to sabotage to exodus. The Yes Men are a hilarious example. On the one hand, they embody and symbolize the possibility of “do-it-yourself geopolitics,” literally taking the stage from the officials and rewriting their policies optimistically, for the better, or more often ironically, for the worse. The Yes Men speak the truth of power, they lay bare its lies, hypocrisies, brutalities. On the other hand, their way of working is tremendously open, cooperative, playful, inviting anyone who can lend a hand to subvert all the communicational skills they may have developed in their working life - as I had the a good chance to see in 2007, when an entire TV crew in Paris helped us pretend to be a Washington news channel interviewing political parties in the course of the recent French elections. In fact, we were on the second floor in one studio, with help of one team, while another was putting us in duplex with the politicos just downstairs! Behind the individualized image of the Yes Men disguising themselves with the faces of power, then subverting corporate or government events with their stunts and speeches, what was happening was the emergence of collective phantoms on a much larger scale: movements that take whatever name they choose, like Reclaim the Streets or Tute Bianche or No Border or Mayday, and then make the category-trap of mediated politics into the open field of their own self-transformation. Subversion is really the takeover of urban space and the alteration of capitalist tools and images for experimental ends, which allows you to break out of the normalized patterns and engage in some kind of vital contact with the social world and your own self, your own potentials. That’s what I wrote about in a long series of essays that were distributed for free over the net during the counter-globalization movement, and then finally gathered together into a book called Unleashing the Collective Phantoms; Essays in Reverse Imagineering. The cover image was taken from the intervention Nikeground - Rethinking Space, by the group 0100101110101101.org, in collaboration with Public Netbase in Vienna.

Nikeground is a fantastic act of reverse imagineering, which not only involved the satirical proposal of installing a thirty-meter “swoosh” sculpture on the Karlsplatz as an exemplary piece of corporate art, but also the physical installation of a several-ton infobox on the square itself. The infobox was used to fictively advertise what the Nike corporation does in real life: namely, transform urban space in its own image, and create the existential parameters within which that space will be experienced. It announced the transformation of the historical public square into Nikeplatz, and further explained how the corporation was rebranding streets and squares and neighborhoods around the world. At the center of this elaborate hoax was the product itself, a pair of brand-new red sneakers, displayed in the infobox for the public to desire: the very shoes that connect you to the ground and give you your mobility in the city. The idea of this project was to respond to the real transformation of urban space with an aggressive, distorted mirror, both in order to show it for what it is, and to suggest that you can change the rules of the game, by taking the right to intervene subversively in the city.

While a scandal arose in the press, with concerned citizens protesting this fake expropriation, another urban myth was reawakened among those in the know: the trashing of the Niketown in Seattle, during the 1999 WTO summit. As the 01 group explained: “We wanted to use the entire city as a stage for a huge urban performance, a sort of theater show for an unaware audience/cast. We wanted to produce a collective hallucination capable of altering people’s perception of the city in this total, immersive way.” The question is, how far can this kind of intervention go? Are there limits to the subversive alteration of perception and behavior? What else can be done with subversive art in the control society?

Capture and Overcode

This book starts out with the concept of the generative diagram, traced out in network cartographies and embodied in the figure of “the potential personality.” There’s an existential reason for that beginning: it corresponds to the real territory of a freelance writer in the information economy, feeling out the cultural and political possibilities of the communications economy, trying different forms of practice. The belief that one can find an opening in cooperative production is an optimistic attitude common to thousands of leftist cultural producers around the world, who have taken a cue from the Autonomia philosophers with their vitalist ontology of living labor. Yet there’s a shift in the approach here, which is also shared by many others. Instead of focusing on urban subversion, as I did in the past, my new work is about artistic and activist research. What you’ll find in these pages are experimental projects that range over planetary space and delve deeply into the meshworks of technology, organizational forms, cognitive structures, spatial imaginaries. In the search for subversive potentials, I’ve become less interested in direct action, and more involved with unclassifiable projects that function as mobile laboratories and experimental theaters of social and cultural change. Makrolab, Transcultural Geographies, Capturing the Moving Mind, the Counter-Cartographies Collective, the Edu-Factory project, the My Creativity, Hackitectura, the WHW collective, and the 16 Beaver group are among the inspirations here.

Once again, the reasons are existential. The increasing repression of the last big cycle of struggles, the consolidation of the post-9/11 security panic and the failure of the antiwar marches of February 15, 2003, all contributed to a decline in street protest in many countries, and a partial retreat of activist art into purely symbolic and therefore melancholic forms. But there is also a theoretical reason for this new kind of work, which has to do with the insufficiencies in a key idea that has been widely developed in autonomist circles, in Italy, France and around the world. This is the concept of the apparatus of capture - that is, the series of essentially parasitic social constructs that are thought to contain, normalize and channel the vital energies of the generative diagram. Behind this idea there is a long history of philosophical concepts and activist projects that has been immensely inventive, but that today could be taken much further, in new directions.

Deleuze and Guattari’s text on “The Apparatus of Capture” is a geophilosophy of power, pitting the territorial deployments of the state against the subversions of the nomadic war machine. At its heart is the notion of overcoding, conceived in relation to the ancient empires described by the historian of Indo-European mythologies, Georges Dumézil. Overcoding is the institution of a social tie, a quasi-magical bond, imposed as a language of power. It’s the organizing grammar of a transcendent symbolic hierarchy that casts its unifying net over the proliferation of primitive tongues that had initially named and encoded their disparate patchworks of territory. This overcoding of experience appears everywhere there is a symbolic hierarchy, mapping out a realm of transcendent figures that serve as ideal measures of rank and value, to organize the chaotic tangle of social relations on the ground. The overcode is the law of the gods, the language of the stars, given voice and effective reality by the emperor. Capitalism, however, with the extension of the world market, comes to decode these transcendent structures, releasing dynamic, mobile flows on a plane of pure immanence; and world populations then enter the endless strategic game of encoding, decoding and recoding the possible forms of existence. This game is played out in the smooth space of the market, whose image for Deleuze and Guattari is not the hierarchical chessboard, but instead the undifferentiated grid of the Japanese game of Go.

The ideas of capture and overcoding lay the foundation for the first really challenging political interpretation of globalized capitalism, which is Hardt and Negri’s Empire. The work, a major reference for the movement of movements, adopts exactly the logic and the historical succession developed by Deleuze and Guattari - but applies them to explain the difference between the classical forms of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperialism and the smooth, networked space of today’s global market. The apparatus of capture now designates all the devices for the modulation of experience and the channeling of behavior that serve to organize the productive energies of the multitude. The use of the word “devices” suggests concrete machines and procedures, but also another level of power which is both subjective and intersubjective. In their reformulations of what used to be called capitalist command, Hardt and Negri come very close to what Foucault called governmental technologies: that is, “the entire set of practices used to constitute, define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, in their freedom, can have towards each other.” From here, Foucault went on to develop his broader concept of governmentality, that is, the liberal, rule-governed state as it exists in our own reasoning and processes, in our own heads. Hardt and Negri, with their concepts of the multitude and living labor, want to challenge the entire system of measures and values on which this governmental capture is based.

How do the processes of capture and overcoding function in the present? The displacement of the transcendent apparatus of capture within the fully immanent context of capitalist social relations is perfectly in tune with the historical understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet the immediate world of direct social relations - and direct violence of exploitation - does not so much dissolve the ancient operations of overcoding, as transmute them. Deleuze and Guattaru insist that the archaic, quasi-magical powers of the ancient emperors continually return under new modalities in the modern period. And this insistence is echoed in the notion of a networked “empire” distinct from imperialism. What’s more, Negri and Hardt also follow the brilliant insights of Deleuze into the society of control, and they relate the specific procedures for the capture and modulation of attention under networked capitalism to the regulatory effects exerted by the monetary regime of floating exchange rates, with all the consequences it has for the financial sphere as a whole. What they have done in this way, along with other theorists of power in the networked society, is to open up one of the most important fields of research for any kind of practice that wants to gain autonomy from the reigning system of values. The concepts of encoding and overcoding have an obvious significance here. But we could go much further.

The relation between fluctuating electronic monies and human attention is I’ve tried to flesh out in texts such as “Future Map,” “One World One Dream,” and above all, “The Speculative Performance.” I’m certain that the screen environment and the kinds of temporal objects that unfold there can be much better understood by exploring the underlying technoscientific principles, which are those of cybernetics, cognitive psychology and chaos theory. A clearer grasp of how they have been applied over the course of the last half-century is fundamental to autonomous practices, since it is ourselves, as cultural producers, who are called upon to fill these screens with content. And beyond these proliferating screens, there is a constantly expanding universe of computerized processes of registration, analysis and surveillance, all designed to pattern the movements of populations, to produce effects of governance. So we’d better know how they work, and how they can be undermined - because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion. This is one of the major areas of investigation in this book.

But overcoding in the global market society does not only involve the directive signals of computers and screens. Throughout his later writing, Guattari uses the term to talk about the creation of models of interaction, patterns of experience. The sociological analysis of populations, and the creation of architectures and environments to direct and condition their behavior is a basic fact of life in contemporary societies. For example, one way to to prolong the discussion of subversion in projects like Nikeground is to look at the role of global brands in structuring contemporary subjectivity. And exactly this discussion will bring us up against the limits of the concept of capture.

Analysts of the brand now see it as a common semiotic ground for uprooted urban consciousness, a psychic crossroads for post-traditional subjects with no fixed identity. This matches the Autonomist idea that the productive cooperation of living labor can only be captured by coercive strategies which are fundamentally weak, exerting only a containing, channeling effect. In a concise and original book called Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, Adam Arvidsson goes straight to the heart of our discussion: “Nike’s efforts to make its logo condense a complex web of meanings and intensities have the effect that with a swoosh certain actions come to assume distinct and particular meanings,” he writes. And he continues: “What brand owners own is a particular pre-determined frame of action, a particular relation between ‘action and semiosis’; between what consumers do and what their actions mean to them.” What consumers do is to buy products and put them to their own uses; and what their actions mean to them is that they are creatively individual and connected to others. If corporations control anything, it’s only the possibility to make this creative interaction unfold in programmed directions. Arvidsson sees a promise of increasing freedom in this two-way street of the brand relation. Yet I would think that if any autonomy were going to be gained from this interplay with the brand, then the directions into which creativity is channeled would have to become a central issue: not only how it is exploited for gentrification or turned into intellectual property, but the ways that the production and consumption of the “creative industries” conditions our desire, shapes our subjectivity.

Arvidsson believes that the brand only succeeds in capturing the attention and loyalty of consumers when it allows them to fill its empty signifier with personal significance. The “mediatization of social life,” he argues, actually increases “the ability of human communication to produce a surplus sociality, what [Maurizio] Lazzarato calls an ‘ethical surplus.’” The key thing for the brand is to become a vector of this surplus, aggregating it into a pole of attraction while continually allowing for creative divergences and the formation of new communities. Information-gathering techniques ranging from personalized ethnographic interviews to automated data-mining can then be employed to record and synthesize the unique contributions that consumers make to brand content, permitting an extension and transformation of the trademark image, and therefore, greater use-value for the creative consumer. From this perspective, the intensification of consumer surveillance society would only mean that the two-way street of the brand relation can be extended to infinity. But in the course of that extension, the crucial function of ethics could come to play an ever-more important role. Arvidsson thinks it does.

Reading his book, it seems at times as if a post-Fordist “communism of capital” were amazingly close. For Paolo Virno in his Grammar of the Multitude, the “communism of capital” signified all the possibilities of the flexible work regime: the abolition of wage labor, the end of state coercion and the valorization of everything that makes an individual unique. But for Virno, these were unrealized possibilities. What Arvidsson suggests is that the normative character of advertising in the regimented 1950s has now dissolved into a relational paradigm where all the initiative is left to the consumer. It is she who sets the terms on which consumption and communication will take place. To be sure, brand management is still a form of governmentality, guiding and orchestrating the diverse expressions that arise from below: “The task of brand management is to create a number of resistances that make it difficult or unlikely for consumers to experience their freedom, or indeed their goals, in ways different form those prescribed by the particular ambiance.” The most powerful of these “resistances” is against resistance itself. In a very interesting passage, Arvidsson recounts how consultants define the “cool” or resistant individual in ways that exclude any threat to profitability, but instead identify new sources of information about the future paths of social desire. “Capturing cool,” he writes, “is a matter of incorporating and profiting from the resistance that consumers spontaneously produce.” Yet still he claims, inexplicably from my perspective, that capitalist command over the informational economy is in crisis. “The forces of production are becoming too advanced to be contained within the capitalist relations of production,” he writes on the final page of his book. So, according to the most precise autonomist analysis of brands, the apparatus of capture is now in the process of setting us free.

Decoders

The analysis flows perfectly from its postulates - but the conclusion appears wildly mistaken. What we’ve seen since the turn of the century, after a major outpouring of subversive art, a concerted attack on intellectual property regimes, and a world-spanning protest movement unfolding under the slogan “no logo,” is less an implosion of the brand-relation than a veritable explosion of commodity fetishism at the scale of the global market, and at the speed of fiber-optic networks. I’ve traveled a lot in recent years, and nowhere do I see any generalized disaffection from the signifiers of participation in the capitalist economy. More ominously, the culturalization of commodity production has been accompanied by a resurgence of both confessionalism and racism as political rhetorics and as logics of exclusion or even war. Of course, these are complex phenomena, which are not necessarily correlated. But it seems to me that by attributing an ontological vitality exclusively to living labor, and discounting other social forces as mere parasites, one begins to falsify the very character of capitalist society. And that actually diminishes the “principle of hope” that the vitalist ontology of labor has done so much to reawaken.

What becomes visible in my own studies of the production or “prosumer” end of the creative industries - in texts like “Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle” or “One World, One Dream: China at the Risk of New Subjectivities” - is the tremendous efficiency of the new motivational paradigm and the power of conviction it holds for those involved in culturalized production, despite the increasingly negative trends emerging from the capitalist world market - and despite subversive interventions from a minority of the participants. The thing is that even in flexible markets, everything connected to the arts offers you an economy of self-development, which is no small attraction. To theorize an inevitable breakdown of the system under the pressure of inherent contradictions would be to repeat an historical error of Marxism. What’s happening in the creative industries is better described an intensely vital Nietzschean struggle over the transvaluation of values. This struggle unfolds between those who have been won over to the most innovative strategies of overcoding, that is, of concentrating power, prestige and competence; and those who, on the contrary, seek constantly to decode the frameworks of their experience, to escape the imposition of calculated models of behavior, and to discover forms of interaction where the gap between an ethics of collective conduct and an aesthetics of singular desire is the central of value, the truly significant question. The enigma, for us, is why this second option is only taken by a relatively small minority. What creates a contemporary leftist culture? How is a subversive subjectivity forged? And what blocks its formation?

One thing I’d suggest is that experiences of cooperation across the divides of class, geographical origins and ethnicity is fundamental to the crucible from which dissenting subjectivities emerge. The radical social and cultural differences of those who cooperated in the counterglobalization movements, and the potential of that cooperation to transform the lives of people, bear witness to a subversive potentially that extends far beyond the moments of convergence and action. The type of mobile, dynamic, protean individual shaped by participation in the world market may have a better chance of eluding capture when he or she is exposed to confrontations of values with people from very different horizons. In any case, it’s clear from the resurgence of racisms and nationalisms - and from their calculated imposition through governmental processes of overcoding - that the interactions of the global market are not the only vector for the formation of subjectivity. In fact, it seems that layers or strata of subjectivity are formed quite differently at different scales, from the global to the continental, the national and the urban, all of which bear on the intimate. What we need at this point in autonomous cultural production is maybe less quick and dirty attacks on the brands - as tempting as that still is! - and deeper attention to an anthropology of self-transformation. And since many thousands of highly active people who reshaped their convictions through the confrontation of recent social movements are beginning to experiment with cultural self-management, and to encounter others engaged in more long-term processes of transformation, it may now be possible to create the contexts for new experiments in decoding and recoding, or really, in collective metamorphosis.

One extremely useful thing would be more precise, and maybe less paranoid examinations of the specific ways that governmental technologies operate, so there can be more discussions in public space about “whether we want to be governed that way,” as Foucault would have put it. Art is perfect for this, because the installation can easily be a meta-model of control systems and capture devices, as I have tried to indicate in various essays in this book. Another thing that can be done in artistic practice is to try and characterize the different scales at which subjectivity is formed, and to explore their interactions, so as to map out new kinds of lifeworlds. This has been the effort of the essays gathered under the category of Continental Drift, and beyond them, of the experiments in collective investigation that have been carried out with the 16 Beaver group. But the most interesting thing of all is to engage in full-fledged experiments with the grounds, the dreams, the philosophies and the concrete social machines through which people become other, leaving their initial territories behind and embracing the culture of self-transformation that remains the most fertile potential of post-68 leftism. I think Félix Guattari has given one of the most useful indications in this sense, with the fourfold map of his schizoanalytic cartographies.

What’s at stake here, in the first place, is the relation between mute existential territories and constellations of poetic, lyrical or artistic refrains, which make up what he calls “universes of reference or of value.” Guattari wants to us to understand and talk about the ways that subjectivity gains the desire to speak and to act through a contact with the deterritorializing rhythms of art. But rather than stopping there, and specializing in that mute and inchoate domain, he goes on to see how people leave their initial grounds of existence, to participate in the temporal flows of concrete social projects, which are themselves deterritorialized by rhizomes of abstract ideas. The four zones of the map then become a matrix of relations between different domains of action and experience. What you’re looking at, with Guattari’s meta-models, are not determinate maps, but instead, suggestions of the kinds of interactions that people can try to orchestrate with each other, in full knowledge that there will always be thresholds of unexpected chaos before any kind of world comes together. Every truly subversive activist project attempts this kind of risky passage between worlds. What we need in autonomous cultural production is to try such experiments in more focused, intense, complex, and perhaps ultimately even grander and more chaotic ways. Today, from my perspective, that appears as one good chance for recapturing subversion, and changing the rules of the culture game.

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Table of Contents

===> Introductions

–Risk of the New Vanguards

–Recapturing Subversion

===> Interventions

–Network Maps, Energy Diagrams: Structure and Agency in the Global System

–The Potential Personality: Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

–Coded Utopia: Makrolab or the Art of Transition

–Extradisciplinary Investigations

–Differential Geography: Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation

–The Speculative Performance: Art’s Financial Futures

===> Continental Drift

–Remember the Present: Representations of Crisis in Argentina

–Activist Research: from Geopolitics to Geopoetics

–Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power: Interview w/16 Beaver

–Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failur