Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

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

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

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

This essay inquires into the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. For that it begins not with the azure sky, but with the curve of a dark horizon.

Unstable Constellations

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

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

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium

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

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

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium - A-life creature

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

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

Mirror Maze

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

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

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

Chicago Mercantile Exchange - "the Merc" (2008)

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

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

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

Cloud Gate: "Omphalos" (photo by Wallyg)

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

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

The Lady from Shanghai

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

Ask Why

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

.

.

Notes

Research Program & Course Proposal

Kasimir Malevich, The Knife-Grinder (1912)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felix Guattari, "Four Functors," from Cartographies schizoanalytiques

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

Glaciated Territories
Power’s Reversals
Pocketbook Control
Metamorpheus

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

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

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

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

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

Further readings: you choose in free dispersal…

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

For Express, monthly Marxist culture magazine,Turkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the rest of us waiting for?

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

.

October 2, 2009

To whom it may concern,

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

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

It must be understood by all those concerned that this is art. It will be exhibited in museums, analyzed by critics such as myself, enjoyed and appreciated by visitors and recorded in the annals of art history. However, for all of this to occur the artistic gesture must first be realized outside the museum, in public space, on significant occasions such as the meeting of the G20. Only in this way can its meaning be forged in the hearts and minds of the public, creating the raw material of immediate social relations which, through photographic recording and audiovisual testimony, will later be offered to more sustained debate, and indeed, to the memory of society, through the multifarious operations of the art institutions (museums, journals, magazines, websites, universities, etc). The most important transformation of art since the 1960s has been the introduction of this new category of performance art, which is created flush with social reality before becoming a formalized aesthetic artifact for presentation at diverse locations in space and time.

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

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

Brian Holmes

]]> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/open-letter-in-support-of-the-space-hijackers/feed/ 4 Brian Holmes Space-Hijackers http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/the-u-c-strike/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/the-u-c-strike/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:54:03 +0000 Brian Holmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/?p=1271 ]]>

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

.

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

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

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

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

Communiqué from an Absent Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download Communiqué text as printable pamphlet here

– New from Autonomedia –

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

.

Phantasmagoric Systems

.

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

The subjects treated here range widely, from Affective Images and Conspired Environments to Hyperreal Estate (a high-profile topic during the credit crunch of 2008), Phantom Induction, Reality Maps, Synthetic Fear etc. Impressed by the proliferation of antiquated spectacles and outmoded gadgetry that fills these pages – phantasmagorias, Tiki idols, polygraph devices, punch-card looms, galvanic stimulators, Tibetan tulpas, the “Soirees fantastiques” of Harry Houdini, the videogame Pong, thirteenth-century humanoid automata, the elevation of the Host, steganography, ectoplasmic spirit photography, Muzak and the like – a casual reader might be tempted to compare this lexicon to a great collector’s passion of the preceding decade, namely Bruce Sterling’s “Dead Media Project.” With his usual sardonic humor, the cyberpunk writer sought to compile “a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media.” Closer inspection, however, reveals that Becker’s dictionary is really much more concerned with dead mediums: historical figures from the esoteric annals of cultural intelligence, who themselves “channeled” earlier inventors, spies, organizers or psychic wardens, and whose key concepts obstinately refuse to disappear, since new agents of deceit and domination are always there to pick up the torch and pursue the ancient ideal of reducing the popular mind to putty in the hands of whoever has the money or power to do what they want with it. Each of the seventy-two headings introduces the compact genealogy of an operational concept that continues to haunt us in the present. As it is written in the forty-fifth key: “The cyborg figure of hybrid identity, operating across the domain of flesh and machine, crossing systems of technology and gender, can be read in terms of a phantasmagoric virtual agency, deferring specification of status, form, and identity of the body in networked digital media. The self appears like a ghost, a virtual agent put in place by the mechanism of unconscious processes but having real consequences for the individual’s behavior and experience.”

Two of these haunting figures stand out in particular relief, to my eyes anyway. One is John Dee, the English Renaissance scholar, cartographer, spy and Neo-Platonic occultist who first used the term “British empire” as part of his ceaseless efforts to promote his country’s domination over the still-uncharted seas. As an agent of Queen Elizabeth’s court, he is said to have had the code name 007, which obviously becomes a link to the contemporary military-entertainment complex and more particularly to Walt Disney, the proto-Nazi founder of America’s “magic kingdom.” The other paradigmatic figure is Giordano Bruno, who is accorded “a special place of honor in the science of human manipulation.” A contemporary of Dee but without his high-level patronage, the rebellious Italian monk developed a general science of libidinal bonding far removed from Neo-Platonism, but prefiguring all subsequent research into the instrumentalization of the social tie. As he wrote in De Vinculis in Genere: “There are three gates through which the hunter of souls ventures to bind: vision, hearing, and mind or imagination.” The future nexus of audiovisual media and depth psychology leaps right off the page of the Renaissance incunable, and into the PDF manuals of contemporary advertisers and psychowarriors. Still Becker seems to have special sympathy for Bruno, undoubtedly because he was the greatest scholar-heretic of his time and was duly burnt at the stake for his troubles.

One might wonder who, in our time, takes the trouble to speak a cryptic truth to the powers that conjure up strategic reality? Becker hails from Old Vienna, where he is warmly loved by only part of the city’s population; and one senses a few unnamed local targets for his slings and arrows. If I may use my own imagination, an excellent candidate in the art world would be the highly active foundation of the Erste Bank, which in recent years has seemed veritably possessed by a desire to fund, support and generally buy up cultural activities in all the countries lying south and east of Austria, as if investing in the “hyperreal estate” of the former Hapsburg Empire (though one now has to wonder what the credit-crunch will do to its purchasing power of belief). Adopting a slightly wider perspective – nothing less than the entire Northern Hemisphere – one can see the keen interest that any specialist in strategic reality would inevitably bring to the activities of another Vienna-based institution, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which includes the United States, Canada and Russia. Here we have the epitome of “cultural peacekeeping” in a 56-member organization whose operations have expanded dramatically in the wake of Europe’s failure to do anything whatsoever about the Bosnian wars of the mid-1990s. It is not certain that subsequent conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Iraq or Afghanistan have benefited from the OSCE’s efforts; but certainly the European Union has been able to go on negotiating its territorial interests and strategic alliances under an appropriate cover. This is also an example of how rarely the key concepts of strategic reality ever disappear, despite the endless transitions and translations that mark the modern experience. For it was long ago and far away, during the Cold War in 1950s America, that the cybernetician and former citizen of the Double Monarchy, Karl Deutsch, invented the operational concept of “security communities.” As today’s experts say in nuptial vows that seem expressly made for the endless honeymoons of the State and the War on Terror: “Many seasoned policymakers and hardened defense officials are marrying security to community in new and unanticipated ways: they identify the existence of common values as the wellspring for close security cooperation, and, conversely, anticipate that security cooperation will deepen these shared values and transnational linkages. Security is becoming a condition and quality of these communities: who is inside, and who is outside, matters most” (Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, Security Communities, 1998). The compass-needles that orient our subjective reality maps in the wake of the Cold War are swinging back, alas, to the frigid north of synthetic fear.

The Strategic Reality Dictionary offers seventy-two keys to the construction, imposition and maintenance of contemporary systems of inclusion and exclusion, which only function for two principle reasons: because of stealth, and because they are able to engineer our own unconscious beliefs. Implicit throughout this book – and clearly stated at critical junctures – is the notion that autonomous cultural agents can devise counter-systems that act to reveal, question and disrupt the fictional communities that continue to bind us in unwanted unions, some four hundred years after the time of Giordano Bruno. I would propose, in conclusion, that these keys are communicational models of phantasmagoric systems, which unlock and display, for brief moments, the operations of the complex machinery that stealthily attempts to recreate our own perceptions, affects and expressions. Yet unlike the other systems which they so expertly mimic and reduplicate, these have the grace of immediately dissolving into thin air, while durably revealing the smoke and mirrors that appeared to give them substance. Could we now hope for a sustained effect of such stratagems in a period of evident systemic collapse? As it is written in the twentieth key: “Cognitive capitalism, the disease for which it pretends to be the cure, is a transcendental thanatology of egotistic paranoid self-interest that drives a closed self-referential system to defoliate the flowering of life.” And as we read just a few lines later: “Voluptas, Latin for pleasure and bliss, was born from the union of Cupid and Psyche. The Roman equivalent of Hedone, the beautiful daughter of Eros in Greek mythology, stands witness to a critical hedonism at the heart of political relevance.”

Brian Holmes

.

Art and the World Economy

by
Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

The Crystal Casino

After many long walks, drives and conversations in the prodigious city of Istanbul, we set out to discover where the tomatoes and the oranges come from. We thought we might also see how the phantasmatic juggler operates in one of the world’s most prolific gardens. This quest led us down the Mediterranean coast to Antalya, the fastest growing province in Turkey, the center of the country’s tourist industry and the leading producer of hothouse vegetables for export. On these coastal plains we found acres of crystal palaces: the older glass-paned and newer plastic-wrapped greenhouses of the global horticultural industry. Feeding on the same sunny clime were stretches of condominiums for vacationers, shopping malls, and clusters of five-star hotels including replicas of the Kremlin and the Topkapi Palace.

At first glance the scene was uncannily similar to one we had investigated a few years earlier in the Spanish coastal province of Almería. But with significant differences. The Spanish horticultural industry had shallower roots in both time and space. There it had mushroomed in a compressed twenty-year period so that there were none of the older glass and steel palaces erected in Antalya in the 1940s and 50s; rather we saw uninterrupted stretches of flat white reflective plastic roofs stretching into the distant haze. In Spain the vegetables were grown not in local alluvial soil but in packs of imported substrate, regularly cleared and trashed in dumpsites – pesticides, herbicides, plastic and all. The draining of the regional water table to make all this gardening possible in an arid, semi-desert landscape had brought the region much closer to the brink of ecological collapse. And the precarious labor was supplied by migrant Africans, mostly working without papers and suffering the bigotry inflicted on foreign workers worldwide. In Turkey seasonal labor is drawn from the villages of eastern Anatolia, under conditions largely unknown to us, surely not without their own forms of suffering and discrimination.

In both countries we were struck by the singular views of intensive horticulture abutting luxury tourist destinations, locals struggling to make a living through a global export system in unobscured proximity to golf courses, upscale shops, restaurants and marinas designed for the mobile upper classes of globalization. Such a composite offers a perfect example of what we have come to come to think of as an aesthetics of visible blindness: the capacity of select groups to enjoy the fruits of globalized capital while ignoring the price paid in drudgery and insecurity by others. In Spain we had wondered what kinds of dark glasses the tourists must wear, not to see the damaging excess of the real-estate boom, the unsustainability of swimming pools and golf courses springing from the thirsty desert, the conditions of brutal labor exploitation rivaling those of the nineteenth century. Such a blindness is structural: it’s part of what keeps the whole system going even when it’s clearly headed for social and ecological disaster.

Our guidebook on the trip to southern Turkey was written not only by Hayek and Polanyi, but also by the generous Istanbulite sociologist Zafer Yenal, who had given us the name of a grower so that we might see something more than the astonishing view from a rental car. Equipped only with a bad map and a vague idea of our informant’s territory, we lucked into the right village and spoke his name at the local café. Hospitable cell phones immediately went into action and five minutes later we were having coffee with Mikhat, a distinguished tomato producer, and Aydin, the owner of an orange grove and also the muhtar, or village headman. Aydin had taught himself English from a dictionary while working in the greenhouses, and now served us as an excellent translator, with plenty of his own opinions.

The two of them spent their Sunday afternoon giving us a tour of the typical production chain in Antalya. We visited the family owned greenhouses and orchards, the washing and sorting facility, the box folding plant and warehouse. The closest we came to the beginning of the line was a high-tech seedling company. But a full mapping of the production chain is impossible for those who are directly involved. The growers don’t decide what they will plant. In what is called a “buyer-driven market,” the exact patented varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables grown are dictated by an increasingly consolidated oligopoly of transnational distributors and intermediaries who deliver fresh and processed produce to supermarket shelves. Control of the type of seeds actually in circulation, limited to relatively few out of the vast diversity cultivated through the history of human agriculture, amounts to mastery over the most basic form of shared intellectual property. These gigantic distant players also determine just what other imported inputs – pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers – will be used by small producers throughout the Mediterranean. Such conformity is mandatory if they want to enter the market, and the producers themselves have no bargaining power over the price of these necessities.

Last on our tour was the wholesale depot where teams of kerchiefed women packed produce for shipment and where we sat in the office of the local buyer for a taciturn cup of tea. This buyer marked the end of what could be seen of the production chain from a producer’s vantage point, being the nearest representative of the price mechanism signaled by markets in Istanbul, Russia, Europe and beyond. We were witnessing the scene of our guidebook outlined by Friedrich von Hayek:

The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.3

Hayek believed that human productivity was most effectively coordinated by the market mechanism, registering changes in the availability or need of products across the earth. Fluctuating prices took the place of knowledge, because the chance to make a profit by selling high or buying low signaled exactly where resources could be allocated most efficiently. There is an eerie correspondence between this theory and the way things really work. What small producers are able to know is indeed reduced since they choose neither the seeds nor the chemical inputs or even the type of bee used to fertilize the plants in the greenhouses. On the selling side of their business they “watch merely the movement of a few pointers to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.”

In this way they become like players sitting at a roulette table, watching the spinning numbers that will determine how well they fare in a given year. “We are farmers, gambling is what we do for a living.”4 For both inputs and outputs the farmers are deeply integrated into the global food market, and since they have no control over the price of either, their sense of working blindly has intensified as world food prices and petroleum-based input prices oscillate erratically on the readouts of the electronic markets, climbing one year to the heights of prosperity, falling precipitously the next. Whether or not they can make meaningful adjustments to global markets affected by fluctuating demand, oversupply, natural disasters, changing standards, currency exchange rates and commodity market speculation makes the difference between whether they will go bust, hit a jackpot, or just get by. In this way, we discovered, the lives of villagers trying to join a world of consumer abundance are affected by the wild hopes and deep anxieties of what the political economist Susan Strange long ago called “casino capitalism.” With its elegant greenhouses gleaming in the sun alongside the debt-financed palaces of postmodern tourism, Antalya appeared as the land of the crystal casino.

No Accounting For Taste

We spent the night in the town of Finicke, whose main street is adorned with monuments to the magnificent orange. One shows a globe on a pedestal; on top of this concrete world stands a girl holding an orange out to the sky. Producers of all kinds of things want to offer their goods to the world market, and why shouldn’t they? Though the present level of global integration is unprecedented, oranges have been coveted treats in northern climes for centuries. The oranges we brought back from Antalya were some of the best we ever tasted: juicy, sweet and full of complex flavors. We wish we could say the same for the tomatoes, whose flesh was hard and flavorless despite their deep red color and impeccable round design. Are the orange trees holdovers from an older horticulture, unlike the tomato seedlings nurtured in mass-produced plastic trays? Are they less subject to the distortions of just-in-time production? Is it easier to breed an orange for long distance shipping than to breed a packable tomato retaining the tenderness and flavor we recall from our childhoods? Is it a matter of luck? Of preference? Or some kind of obscure gamble with the intellect, the heart, the bank account and the senses?

These questions can be existential ones for those who try to place themselves as tasty products in the world vitrine. While grateful for the chance to travel, exhibit and present in far-flung locales, many of us grow uneasy when self-performance on the art circuit turns into a contest to raise your own price as a signifier of others’ intelligence, passion, perversity or secret foreknowledge of upcoming trends. In financialized economies where speculation on the future values of the sky above can wreak havoc with the ground beneath your feet, it’s quite hard to believe that artistic expression is not just standing in for something bigger to come – like a gigantic hotel, residential complex or entertainment district that will wipe out the gritty neighborhood whose vibrant local life inspired you. We’ve thought about these problems for years, while trying to develop other contexts for the expression, reception, elaboration and understanding of art practices.5 And when food prices spiked with the commodity bubble of 2008, then plunged again after farmers around the world had been lured into costly investments, we found it even harder to keep our desires focused on the next invitation to Asia / Latin America / Western Europe / the Middle East. We too felt like cherry tomatoes on a roulette wheel spinning wildly out of control.

In Antalya province at the site known as Yanartaş arises the famous Mount Chimaera, known since late Antiquity for its flames that flicker in the night, for its literally burning ground. Historical sources cite this geothermal wonder as the origin of the myth of the Chimera, a fire-breathing hybrid of lion, goat and serpent; while the natural explanation describes exhalations of methane from metamorphic rocks. This mythical and real place reminds us of contemporary Chimerica, the hybrid continent we try to call home. For the last ten years its Eastern workers have produced nearly everything its Western consumers crave, while the East side lends back to the West the money received for the floods of goods, in order to keep the wheels of industry turning.6 This unusual geographic phenomenon, characteristic of the global division of labor and power, has been one of the mysteries of late Neoliberalism. What kept mankind alive on its disjunctive territory, from Chicago to Shanghai, was a system of exchange whose human foundations no one cared to know, as long as the volatile prices added up to profits for politicians and businessmen on both sides. The lure of gain stoked a decade of unsustainable development, reflected outside the centers of accumulation by the ugly mirrors of impoverishment and war. Meanwhile, those tastes that market researchers can exhaustively account for – consumer drives and investor appetites – sucked the juice of life from two vast populations, while setting the stage for an economic collapse on a scale last seen in the 1930s. The natural explanation in this case was not metamorphic but mathematical.

About a hundred and fifty years ago, Marx described the commodity as that product of human labor whose exchange value, seemingly animated with a life of its own, acts to render invisible the social relations that produced it. About twenty years ago, some inglorious number-crunching quant invented a meta-commodity called the “collateralized debt obligation” (CDO). It’s a derivative contract whose price is determined by a statistical analysis of the behavior of underlying assets, which in this case are not things but the ability of borrowers to pay their loans. What these meta-commodities did was allow banks to sell to distant investors the revenue expected from payment on home mortgage loans, so that the bank which initially did the lending got its capital back from thin air, and could immediately go out looking for more borrowers on the ground. To make the deal sweeter for the distant investors, the loans were split into tiny fractions and recombined with hundreds of others, so that the risk of any single failure to pay was diluted by the hundredfold. Meanwhile other quants calculated the statistically average rate of bankruptcy on the housing market, which was considered to have the regularity of a natural phenomenon. Another kind of derivative, known as a “credit default swap” (CDS), was sold as insurance on this risk, and indeed on many others, in combinations and hybrids that defy the imagination.

The brilliance of the math and its perfect correspondence with the laws of financial nature omitted just one tiny detail, which was that this circular, self-reinforcing system entirely transformed the markets it was supposed to regulate and stabilize.7 Prices rose from the ground like tongues of fire until they reached trembling heights: cut off from all connection with the underlying capacity of the borrowers to pay, the flame fell back to earth and burned everyone it touched. As foreseen, the default insurance went into effect, but for losses exponentially exceeding what had been judged possible in nature. And then, metamorphosing from the joyful illusion that it once seemed to be, the fabulous Chimerican prosperity of the early 2000s turned into a monstrous creature, rampant in every country on the face of the earth.

We do not know exactly where the current crisis will lead. But what we have been foreseeing for the last several years is “Continental Drift”: a rearrangement of the unlikely bicontinent in which we briefly lived, the decline of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the beginning of far-reaching changes in the geopolitical order.8 Rather than speculating right now on what those changes may bring at the global level, it may be more useful to draw some conclusions about the relations of art and economics in the period we have just lived through.

From the current economic perspective, growth is the only measurable good, making the signs of rising profit into the one convincing form of beauty. Wall-to-wall computers, flashing LEDs, gleaming glass and glittering buildings are among the finest sights, but the highlight in the flesh is always the person on the stage, the speculative performance. You too can be a top-value signifier, seemingly animated with a life of your own. And a world-class museum can become the gateway of real-estate paradise, if the bar is more spectacular than the paintings. Since your price is moving upwards on the market, why not let gentrification be your derivative? Very few people involved in contemporary art actually think this way, but very many of the funding decisions in the cultural world are made on exactly this basis.

Where the commodity as described by Marx acted to conceal the social relations of labor that produced it, the meta-commodities of our time act to conceal the collective deliberations that create the environment in which any labor, leisure, productivity or culture can take place. The government of human affairs has been privatized by the calculations of a supposedly natural law. The veil over all this is what we’ve been calling the aesthetics of blindness. But if that is the case, those of us working art face one very important question. How could the veil be lifted?

Touching Ground

Let’s look through the spectacles of the man watering the beans in the garden, with gleaming coins scattered here and there as though devoid of any value. Polanyi’s major work, The Great Transformation (1944), retraces the rise and fall of the gold standard, which served as the global medium of exchange during the period of the British Empire. More profoundly it studies the belief in a self-regulating market, elevated to the status of a natural law whereby supply and demand automatically find their proper equilibrium. The self-regulating market is the underlying structure designated by Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand, then later by Hayek’s more pragmatic image of the telecommunications system. Looking further, Polanyi observed that the fundaments of human existence – labor, or the health of our bodies; land, or the cyclically recurring growth of the natural world; and the human institutions of governance, including money itself – were treated as freely available resources by the capitalist market which invested no care in their reproduction over time. Labor, land and money are “fictitious commodities” by Polanyi’s account, because their actual origins and destinies lie outside the market, even though the market depends on and depletes them. The Great Depression and the World Wars are historical examples of the price ultimately paid for their neglect.

The persistent recourse in economics to the illusion of a natural market law serves to justify the core functions of labor and resource exploitation, while the investment of financial signifiers with supernatural powers acts to distract from the many crimes that accompany the system (or some would say, provide its very basis). These include imperialism, or the plunder of distant territories by force of arms; enslavement, or the physical coercion of human beings against their will; the formation of monopolies and oligopolies, permitting the fixing of prices in markets closed to the entry of smaller producers; and more recently the reign of mass deception, whereby will and desire themselves are reshaped by the media bombardment of manipulative messages. The grip of the natural law delusion is what gave Margaret Thatcher her hour of credibility, adamantly repeating “there is no alternative.” It’s remarkable that since the present round of computerized and networked financial innovation began in the mid-1970s, the ranks of the number-crunching quants and the formulas they employ are drawn largely from theoretical physics, reinforcing the economists’ claim to be describing unequivocal phenomena of nature.

What makes Polanyi so interesting is his refusal of this natural market law. Yet unlike communist planners of the early twentieth century (to whom neoliberals automatically reduce any proponents of an “alternative”) he did not believe that human needs and possibilities could be calculated by a central agency. He understood the dynamics of human societies to be the result of three quite different fields of organization, each of which does not function according to any inherent natural law, but instead by the more-or-less conscious development of ad hoc principles that gradually work themselves into a sustainable balance. The first of these broad fields of human interaction is exchange, which occurs in a bewildering variety of forms across history, and not only as the reductio ad absurdum of human relations to monetary mathematics. The second, still quite apparent to the citizens of modernized societies, is redistribution as it is carried out by a centralizing administration. In recent history this was the welfare-state function, largely banished by the class politics of neoliberalism. The third domain of social coordination, almost as ignored by official scholarship as it is by market fundamentalists, yet one which still pervades and supports contemporary life, is reciprocity: the informal circulation of services, privileges, favors, care and support between individuals, families, clans, friends, voluntary associations and identity groups. It was a notion of open-ended reciprocity that prompted a Turkish sociologist to share his rural contacts with us, that made those contacts treat us as guests to whom they offered time, information, openness and a splendid local lunch. In many more incalculably extensive ways, it is reciprocity that undergirds and makes livable the harsh inhabitation of a world ruled by market numbers.

By recognizing these three fields in their heterogeneity and in the specificity of their mutual interaction it is possible to go beyond the eternal quarrels of the liberals, the communists and the anarchists, each of whom insists on the preeminence of just one field: the market, the state or voluntary association. Unfortunately, they cannot even adequately describe the real workings of their single sphere of interest, since society is always constituted by particular combinations of all three. Rather than operating within or against an idealized totality that does not exist on its own, one finds more chances in navigating between existing realms whose specific relations can be played against each other, and changed for the better.

This multidimensional understanding of society provides the tools to draw up much more useful maps of complex situations, including multiple roles for art. When the market is invested with a superhuman accuracy of judgment, critics and institutions too often validate only what it has already validated. In this scenario the artists become like our counterparts the horticultural producers, conforming their inventions to signals from a distant empire of finance. But neither would it be satisfactory to have the state manage what kind of art will be produced and experienced. Nor is it enough to have an art with no relationship to exchange or redistribution. Art is a shifter between the three broad fields of interaction, dramatizing insufficiencies, suggesting possibilities, escaping deadlocks, opening utopias and bringing overly theoretical principles back home to lived experience. As cultural producers we want to bring this full range of possibilities into play – in order to touch the ground, to regain some contact with the fundamental conditions of existence.

Sixty-five years ago, in a phrase whose timeliness verges on the uncanny, Polanyi wrote that “the trading classes had no organ to sense the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts.” The sentence strikes home in a world marked by climate change, financial crisis and war. If exactly the same problems are facing us today, then isn’t this what art most urgently needs to become: a sense organ of humanity, a space in which to perceive and express the transformations that human groups are unleashing upon themselves and their environments? A space in which to inquire about the creation of value, the roots of conflict, the sources of vital energy, the paths toward better ways of living?

Of course, much of artistic production already does that, but in contexts made confused and ambiguous by the operations of financialized taste. What is finally becoming more obvious today, in the context of the triple crisis – economic, ecological and geopolitical – is that mainstream cosmopolitan culture has been largely absorbed into a predatory system of capture and manipulation, instilling commercial ideologies and prosumer drives and generating multiple forms of self-interested blindness even in the spaces devoted expressly to vision. The resulting breakdown of the human ecology, or lack of sense in world affairs, is provoking a widening crisis of legitimacy. This explains the election of a relatively idealistic figure like Barack Obama, or at a smaller scale, the selection of a group like WHW to curate the Istanbul Biennial. The question is what to do with the opportunities offered by this legitimation crisis.

Some practitioners have recognized that if art is to play any autonomous role in the shaping of contemporary sensibilities, it should be developed and evaluated within spaces of reciprocity where the predatory functions have no hold, whether these are private spaces, self-organized associations, informal networks of exchange or independent media projects. We are not just talking about strong images emerging from circles of peers under particularly turbulent social circumstances, which can now capture lots of attention on the markets. If art is to escape overcoding by existing value-forms, it must be created along with philosophical concepts and forms of social practice that are resilient enough to preserve their integrity despite the existing norms and functions. State institutions – not to mention corporate sponsorship – cannot be trusted to provide the context of art production, for one simple reason: the current panorama shows the extent to which they have failed. Yet at the same time, many positive developments on the cultural landscape show that artists, critics and curators who have developed strong networks of reciprocity can also find allies in both state-redistributive and market-exchange institutions, in order to develop singular and transformative proposals and to distribute them widely.

In our view – and this could be our polemic – the forces of reciprocity are not politically alive enough in art today. If we have worked with activism, and if we have developed autonomous critical initiatives like Continental Drift, it’s clearly for this reason, to engage in productive dialogues with other initiatives that have opened breathing spaces instead of just adapting to their instrumentalization. Today under the pressure of a triple crisis that will no longer go away, but only continue to morph into successive forms, it is necessary for artists, intellectuals and curators to develop higher levels of ethical exchange before engaging with the compromises of the state and market spheres. Not to maintain a politically correct consensus or some vain illusion of purity and self-sufficiency, but to find the precise resources that are needed to open up intense and problematic spaces of perception, revealing in advance the further conflicts and collapses which await and threaten – while in the best of cases offering broader perspectives, sweeter affects, clearer concepts and more generous actions in reality.

Polemics aside, we’ll close with an attempt to answer this essay’s recurrent questions. They have to with the origins of taste, the creation of alternatives, and the place of perception in artistic expression. Since one of the problems we’ve identified is an excess of economically animated forms and performances – a visible blindness – our research will shift further toward a tactile dimension.

Worlds At Your Fingertips

In a memorable passage from an unfinished book, a philosopher performs the simplest experiment in perception: touching one hand with the other. Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked in the tradition of phenomenology, trying to provide a philosophical definition of the primary scientific act: the clear and distinct perception of an object by a subject who stands outside it, exterior to what is being perceived. But when your fingers touch your own fingers, perception doubles back on itself and the subject becomes inseparable from the object. In this common experience the scientific mind must confront its own presence, its pulsating inherence to the phenomena that it wants to put at a distance. Like the casting of a gaze, touching involves the expression of a desire to know the world that is indissociable from whatever we will ultimately know of it. Yet there is a still more common and more poignant experiment in perception: one hand touching someone else’s, my hand touching yours. It is through this common experience that one discovers other worlds.

The self-reflexive turn of phenomenology shows that expression – and along with it, the vast material of spoken and written language – is an irreducible part of perception.9 Consequently, the upsurge of the new and the encounter with the other can only be sensed in historically shared frameworks of words, ideas, artworks, urban forms etc, themselves existing flush with perception and in intimate contact with its proliferating differences. To perceive is to constitute the object with the quality of your own attention, but also to be constituted by it: perception is a self-affecting movement that changes the very nature of one’s sensorium, while spilling over through language, gesture and affect to others who also perceive, reflect and evaluate. In this way sense is made. Overflowing from each body in the world, the reciprocal relation of perception and expression gives rise to cultural experience: crisscrossing artifacts of sensate desire, overlaid upon each other in complex patterns that point beyond whatever they designate, toward the depths and the horizons of the worlds we constitute together.

Merleau-Ponty called this intertwining of perceptions “the chiasm” – a Greek word designating a point of crossover between two flows. An example would be the optic chiasm, where the nerves coming from the left and right eye cross and intermingle before vision separates again into different areas on the right and left sides of the brain. We have yet to find Lake Chiasma on the natural landscape, but we know this feeling of plunging into and emerging from intertwining perceptual worlds.

The emphasis on perception could evoke practices of a documentary nature: attempts to film, photograph, sketch, graph, record, speak or otherwise represent the world. Such practices are extremely important, because they offer a chance to begin overcoming the blindness of contemporary society. Yet we must take one further step toward a politics of perception. In a critique of phenomenology and specifically of Merleau-Ponty, another philosopher shows that what is never taken into account by the scientific gaze is the human imagination. What happens, asks Cornelius Castoriadis, when we focus our attention on dreams, on delirium, on hallucinations? When last night’s dream is taken as a valid object of perception, “all of philosophy is knocked out of order.”10 Yet dreams and visions, like images themselves, are also common phenomena. They are the bearers of their own particular kind of truth and capacity to change the world.

There is a name for the insurgence of the image as a productive force in human thinking: the radical imagination. Castoriadis defines it as “the capacity to posit that which is not, to see in something that which is not there.”11 This imagination is not only visual: it is auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, it is sexual and affective, it touches other people. Here is the intersubjective force that transforms our relation to nature. Those who proclaim the inexorability of market law do not only refuse to perceive its obvious failings; they also try to cover up the human potential to see what is not there, to express an aspiration. The politics of perception is inseparable from a collective exercise of the radical imagination. As Castoriadis explains: “I call autonomous a society that not only knows explicitly that it has created its own laws but has instituted itself so as to free its radical imaginary and enable itself to alter its institutions through collective, self-reflective, and deliberate activity. And I call politics the lucid activity whose object is the institution of an autonomous society.”12

Polanyi wrote the history of the self-regulating market up to its first culmination in the mid-twentieth century, showing that its claim to a basis in natural law was fictive, and that under the cover of this fiction it destroyed the traditional institutions on which it was based in reality. He called for the creation of new institutions, which could successfully re-insert or “re-embed” the world market into a tissue of acknowledged interdependencies that would stabilize it and keep it from exerting its most destructive effects. Today we are light years from that kind of wisdom. Yet it is still possible to conceive another society, not by the appeal to natural law but by the exercise of the radical imagination, and by its transformation through a political process into collective institutions.

Museums in the overdeveloped countries are still primarily used for historical conservation and the validation of isolated personal expression, though they are increasingly becoming sites of social design as well, launching pads for new product-behaviors.13 But what contemporary societies more urgently need are experimental institutions where the perception of lived environments, the creation of tastes and values and their codification into laws and definitions of reality can all be played out again in concentrated symbolic forms, which include contestation, ambiguity and internal contradiction. It is the artists’ intervention on powerfully articulated symbolic material that can touch others, elicit responses and open up a space of reciprocity for many different uses of the radical imagination.

An international exhibition or biennial can be this stage or arena, a time made of many temporalities, a place where many places and their inhabitants come to meet. This does not mean that everyone will agree. In an age marked by extreme exploitation, environmental destruction and violent conflict, it’s likely that they won’t. But the exhibition can also be a place to sharpen new symbolic weapons, or to shift the terms of old arguments. Instead of instilling preprogrammed behaviors in a manipulative way, it allows for self-conscious experimentation with the orientations of one’s own perception, and for debate about the possible worlds that are bodied forth in images.

We were touched by our visit to Istanbul, and by our glimpse of a life out in the countryside that we could never have imagined – despite its arrival in bits and pieces to faraway supermarkets. As in the naïve image of the girl standing on a globe and holding the fruit of her local culture up to the sky, we wanted to offer some food for thought in return: a glimpse of the kinds of knowledge that artistic practices can bring, a feel for singular situations whose life on the ground can never be communicated by the abstract movements of a pointer on the dial of the global markets. To engage with this knowledge, rather than ignoring it, is one way to contribute to a systemic change. Maybe it’s another kind of gamble, but this is what we are looking for in art today: a politics of perception.

.

.

Notes

Chris Marker, Sans soleil (1982)

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

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

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

Electric Shades

A consensus on the Left locates the last historical break in the global movement of 1968, not only in the affluent North but also in the South, marking the apex of the national independence struggles. The same thinking grudgingly concedes another break in 1989, often cast as an inevitable implosion rather than the consequence of any political will. But this concept of the “historical break” is drawn from Marxist dialectics, with its teleological schema of history as a struggle between self-aware social classes. And as the most acute witnesses of the Sixties recall, the culminating episodes of Third World liberation also marked the dissolution of the communist notion of collective action that had defined the Left since 1917.

Chris Marker offered a reflection on the breaking wave of twentieth-century collectivism in his film Sunless (1982), particularly in the scene filmed in 1980 in Guinea-Bissau, where then-president Luis Cabral decorates a military fighter for his revolutionary deeds. Cabral’s half-brother Amilcar had waged a successful guerrilla war against the Portuguese, which this ceremony commemorates. Yet the soldier’s tears upon receiving his honors “did not express a former warrior’s emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others.” One year later the soldier, Major Nino, would be the author of a military coup. The desire for singularity is the worm in the fruit of collective vision. The commentary continues: “Beneath each of these faces, a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal trauma through the great trauma of history.”

The film’s pathway through the spiral of a nascent world society, from Europe to Africa, Asia and North America, has its origins in this rupture, understood on the historical Left as a break-up of the very dynamic of history. Marker insists on the point, quoting the Portuguese poet Miguel Torga on the 1975 revolution against the Salazar dictatorship: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting, all he seeks in the revolutionary act is the sublimation of his own image.” But then the scene shifts to the fascinating synthesized images of Hayao Yameneko, electric shadows replaying the struggles of the 1960s and 70s (the first to be shown are the great Japanese protests against the construction of Narita airport). The facticity of filmic recording (what André Bazin called “the ontology of the photographic image”) has dissolved into mobile sprays of colored dots, making the sequences appear as shades of the dead. For Yameneko, the electronic realm is a space of freedom. In a bittersweet phrase that delivers the key to his own predicament, the narrator draws the cultural consequences of the sublimated self-image: “I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”

Chris Marker/Hayao Yameneko, Sans soleil

Twenty years before, pop art had monumentalized the images of press photos and comics, exposing the manufactured collectivities of postwar Fordist culture to their own affective origins. Marker still does it in Sunless, showing streaming Japanese crowds beneath huge, idiosyncratic billboards. Yet what he understood at the outset of the 1980s, through the youthful intercessor Hayao Yameneko, was that future histories of subjectivity would be miniaturized into personal electronic mirrors, like those reflective glasses that tint the world and make everyone an enigma to the others. Is there a politics of the endlessly mediated urban dream whose musical score the narrator of Sunless claimed to decipher in the Tokyo subway?

From the 1980s onward, postmodern sociologists repeat the contrary. They say that ours is the age of liquid life, liquid love, liquid fear, liquid time.1 Amid the flux of technoscientific change, they say, our reactions to events can never gain the consistency of viable politics and shared ethical principles. And they are right about one thing. Any alternative to the postmodern norm has to deal with the chaotic flux of change – and its systemic regularities.

99, our 68

The communist notion of collectivity cast a long shadow over both its adherents and its opponents. In order to “think seriously” on the Left we cling to the idea of class categories, although they have no home in common consciousness. We expect that in a crisis the individuals produced by neoliberalism, with their private interests and fantasies, will automatically find or adopt a collective identity that alone would give them the power to act politically. It should have been understood decades ago that not individuals submitted to massive investments in consciousness management, but only social movements with their unique combinations of embodied practices, philosophical discourses and aesthetic inspirations can launch changes in political subjectivity. And it should have been understood that in our age of relentless overcoding, only experimental groups and tightly woven networks can prolong those transformations into any kind of durable alternative.

When seen from this angle, the ruptures of contemporary society are many – hardly reducible to 1968 or 1989. The year that counts is the year that changed your life, the year you merged into the crowd, discovering a language, a set of gestures, a way of reasoning and acting and also forms of pleasure, of sexuality, a manner of being among friends, of working, of collaborating. But this is also the year, perhaps repeated several times over the course of a life, when you discover systems, implacable and deadly forces on a large scale, operating on strong instrumental, juridical and sovereign grounds, systems that crush other people and threaten what appears as an increasingly precarious existence. You want to break from that nexus of forces. Emerging from the compact heterotopian crowd of protesters, you try to communicate what you have understood – and the panoply around you is vast, of assertions, interpretations, calls to action, lifestyles too. This is the state of ambient confusion in which a political subjectivity is born.

Pink Bloc, World Bank/IMF protests in Prague, 2000

99 was our 68. So I read, in an echo of my own thoughts, on someone’s weblog.2 In June of that year, Reclaim the Streets launched the first “carnival against capital,” followed by the Seattle protests. But the year could have been 1997, when the Zapatista encuentro was held in Spain, or 1998, with the first global days of action against the WTO. Once again, lines of communication and collaboration were opening between the militarized bastions of consumer society in the North and other ways of living and struggling in Latin America, Africa, India or even China: the map of the world was redrawn, somewhat as the invention of a “Third World” had transformed the bipolar map of the Cold War order in the early 1950s. Yet for this new political generation, the tracing, the very cross-hatching of the continents was different. Because the map of the world was now overlaid with a microscopic mesh; and if distant struggles mattered here, where you live, it was because your struggles were intimately connected to farflung communities of collaborators, compañeros, persuasive voices, friends.

The experiments with networks were not only an aesthetic fashion or a new entertainment. They offered access to the intimate thoughts of strangers, to newly invented rituals of exchange, to debates and dialogues on the most important issues, to crowds on the streets and above all to political agency. They reawakened a feeling of generosity, a gift economy on a massive and molecular scale. Through social movements that are discounted by the pundits and the mainstream sociologists, but which were in reality immense, a political generation regained the capacity to come to grips with an unprecedented geographical redeployment of capitalism – whose crisis-prone business cycles and savage outbursts of aggression and barbarism were about to show themselves at full force once again.

That recently lived history was infused with a constructivist spirit, responding in our time to the experiments of the Soviet vanguards. But this “new productivism” emerged in the context of the economy’s linguistic turn and therefore has to be discussed not only in terms of tools and work routines, but above all in terms of communication and codes.3 The Internet’s emergence as a transnational public sphere in the mid-1990s involved a literal decoding of specialized government, military and corporate knowledge. The black boxes of Cold War technology were gradually opened and the operating codes of planetary communication were revealed to the profane.

Hackers continually extended the process of decoding to anything with a digital lock on it, launching a notion of open cultures in the process. The Linux project, based on the public-domain Unix operating system, threw a wrench into the global game-plan of corporate expansion by reverse-engineering a type of Intel chip that had been designed to work only with Microsoft code. Soon a majority of web-servers would run free software. As the open media formats became widely available, new kinds of voluntary association and self-organization were developed to make use of them. Control hierarchies, connective possibilities, structural limits and default options were all recoded, at the level of the machines themselves and more broadly in an increasingly transnational society. For the explosion of the Internet occurred at a time of suddenly opening borders and democratization, in the wake of 1989. Decoding and recoding became fundamental to social change, as individuals, groups and organizations struggled to make a fresh start, with new tool kits at hand and without the perception of overwhelming constraints or pre-inscribed rules.

Hackitectura, Fadaiat festival, 2005

Since the year 2000, when the dotcom boom deflated and the trending machineries of the overdeveloped nations called a halt to the widespread experimentation with digital gift economies, what we’ve witnessed – and experienced as intensive pressure on the nervous system – is an attempted return to order, or a planetary campaign of overcoding, as Deleuze and Guattari named it in A Thousand Plateaus. The notion, developed from the critique of linguistic structuralism, describes the analysis of human behavior, the constitution of abstracted and regularized models conceived to channel it along preferred paths, and the imposition of those models upon entire populations, via devices, interaction routines, collective facilities and built environments.

I have detailed both the history of this concept and its pertinence for the current situation in closing series of texts included in this volume. But to grasp intuitively what overcoding means, just consider the explosion of Web 2.0 platforms for the solicitation and surveillance of everyday comportments, combined with the constitution of strictly traceable identities, the securitization of public space and the more sinister aspects of contemporary military programs – including “homeland” programs. The targeting society in which we live is a containment strategythat attempts to overwrite and codify the swirling cloud of aspirations to emancipation that always unfold in the capitalist democracies. The fundamental ambiguity of networked existence sprang into full view after 2001, as multiple processes of overcoding began to cohere into a new imperium. Its deep symbolic and affective structures – its most powerful capture devices – are what today’s political generation has to deal with, in order to give itself consistency in time and find its responses to the present.

Territory and Experiment

I realized what I was doing when a friend said to me: “That’s a territory.” He was talking about images of the streets, chronicles of the global upheavals. The experience of mobile grounds, constellated with aesthetic performances, underwritten with oppositional discourses and functioning as proliferating social assemblages, led onwards to other territories, where the question each time is the articulation of the many in view of a horizon. The reason is that a horizon is open and yet does not prevent you from seeing where you are, from feeling the ground beneath your feet. Not by chance did the cartography of potentials become the emblematic expression of a rhizomatic culture.

For me, the mapping aesthetic has culminated in a recovery of Guattari’s most singular project, the Schizoanlytic Cartographies.4 The four fields of experience that Guattari proposed do not map out anything in space but instead try to diagram the overlap of rhythms, images, ideas and embodied pacings that allow a subjectivity to cohere in one place, the territory. Yet the very rhythm that touches a ground also tends to dissolve that one place into the clasping of other milieus, other possible activities that may become places in their turn, always beneath the call of the virtual. Setting up such mobile “places” and exploring their horizons of possibility becomes the most interesting and urgent thing to do. It involves the convocation of metaphors, the analysis of actualities, the forging of devices and points of entry, the unleashing of an experimental project in society with all the energies and capacities of those who compose it. The “continental drift” in which some of us have been involved for years now requires its vehicles, its multiple eyes, tongues and ears. It requires the intensity of its locales, meetings, expressions; but also its means of dissemination and archiving, its protocols and its emblematic dreams, plus a few mailboxes and land addresses.5 Once again: “That’s a territory.”

Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, 2008

Artist-activists, whether readers of Guattari or not, have taken this social and machinic creativity in the most diverse directions. Projects such as Makrolab or Hackitectura offer explicit examples, complete with their own models and prototypes, their meta-narratives. But I am also thinking of the kernels of marginal political and aesthetic activity that have multiplied around the world, from the Social Forums to the wildest anarchist cells, the neighborhood centers, the cooperatives of artists, the publishing groups and research projects, all the dissident attempts to transform the law or the psyche or the living space. These are not blueprints for a future society but territorial experiments, alert to what moves on the horizons around them but also to the inner dynamics of their own endeavor, its evolving metaphors, physical locales and discursive linkages to the possible and the real. What could seem like a retreat from the global movements of a few years ago has been a deepening of experimentation, in the space that opened up again when the scattered threads of a former internationalism were rewoven into a new relation of distance and proximity. Borrowing a phrase from the Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi, one could say that in many lands and at many different social levels, the development of alternative projects currently resembles a phase of latency and crecimiento interior(growth inside).6

The reference to Zibechi’s work on autonomous social movements in Argentina in the mid-1990s has a meaning, despite the huge differences from any situation in the Northern hemisphere. After a period of tremendous economic expansionism that solicited the vital energies of great populations – and which led, on the autonomous left, to a corresponding inflation of the concepts of “biopower” and ‛biopolitics” – what is now staring the citizens of northern states in the eye is a widespread erosion of middle-class status, as has occurred in successive waves throughout Latin America since the outset of the neoliberal period in the 1970s. Because it shakes institutional stability and undermines the dominant processes of overcoding, “precarity” or “precaritization” can offer a chance for critiques to be validated, and above all, for alternatives to make sense. One European country, Greece, has even seen the rise of grassroots movements spreading like wildfire and spearheaded by determined insurrectionists. But one cannot expect social forces in all countries to be so robust; nor does the Argentinian example let us be certain that if the streets are blocked and the city stops for a month or two, the order of the world will change. If the movement of crecimiento interioris so vital right now, it is because of an urgent need to know the ground on which you are standing, including its cracks, its buried secrets, its backwaters and dead-ends. It’s a practical question. The limit-experience of political marginality is to look around at the people in a crowd and to realize that you do not really have any idea what they might do if this situation were suddenly to get worse.

Among the Sphinxes

The problem with the overcoded societies is that they do not leave you in the face of your own questions. The frame of the answer is sketched out in advance: not the exact contents, but the abstract parameters. In art as in politics, the serious discussions always go back to the 1960s and 70s. Maybe our chronologies need reevaluating. Maybe it is the questions of the present, or even the future, that make past thoughts important. In any case I want to close with an unfinished story, borrowed from a contemporary videomaker, in order to explore the scales of existence on a North American territory to which I’ve gradually been returning over the past few years.

Brian Springer is known in media-activist circles for one great work: the pirate documentary Spin (1995). What he did was to purchase a satellite dish and an off-the-shelf decoder, allowing him to record broadcasts from the emerging corporate sector of orbital TV. In the early 1990s, major news channels had just adopted a networked mode of production, sending live feeds of interviews and eyewitness reports across the microwave spectrum for editing at distant studios, without applying any kind of signal encryption. Average consumers stuck to existing channels and ignored these uncensored frequencies, but Springer was able to capture some 500 hours of raw news feeds, full of candid gestures during the make-up sessions and commercial breaks, as well as shocking declarations that were never intended for the public ear. Televisual decorum – the overcode of spectacular politics – was shattered by its primary exponents, allowing a media activist without much funding to construct an astonishing documentary of the 1992 Clinton-Bush campaign from between rather than behind the scenes. Along with Ujica and Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), Spin became a touchstone for a generation of tactical media practitioners trying to open up the broadcast system, both to expose official manipulations and to develop new kinds of informed expression.7

Fast-forward to 2007, now infamous as the year in which the overblown American real-estate market began to collapse. Springer releases a very different, semi-autobiographical film called The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.8 The film takes its name from the earliest American ballad-opera, written in 1767 as a satire on the twin colonial crazes of treasure-hunting and spiritism. But the 2007 version opens with a close-up on a strange syncretic sculpture, a “creature” at once insect, reptile, amphibian and mammal. A halting, faintly British-accented female voice, clearly synthesized by a computer, reads a database entry on this mysterious stone artifact. Switching to the first person, the creature’s electronic voice then explains: “I have been lost for a very long time…”

Brian Springer, The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity, 2007

The hybrid creature, a narrator of its own legend, introduces us to the Springer family: the mother, Doris; the father, C.W.; and the two sons, Larry and Brian. Their story is a search for a Spanish explorer’s golden treasure and personal diary, supposedly buried in the limestone caves beneath a Missouri farm. But there is another main character: Kate Austin, a friend of Emma Goldman and an unsung heroine of American anarchism, who lived on that same farm in the late nineteenth century. Her personal papers disappeared at her death, leaving an aura of uncertainty around this rare bird, a rural woman anarchist. A satellite image of the Missouri countryside becomes a treasure map. A red dot on the site of the Austin farm connects to three others: the limestone cave, a mysterious hieroglyph carved into a rock, and the spot where the hybrid creature was found in the 1880s, before archaeologists declared it a fake and it was “lost by the institutions of history.” With that, all the elements are in place for a plunge into a very personal story, and an excavation of the national unconscious.

Amid reflections from Emma Goldman on the willingness of patriots to drop bombs from flying machines and recollections of Ben Franklin’s fears that the craze for treasure-hunting might ruin the country’s fledgling economy, what gradually emerges is the tale of an average man, C.W. Springer, who left the United States for one of America’s most thoroughly forgotten wars, the “Korean conflict.” His job was to operate in advance of the front lines, directing the extensive napalm bombing that killed hundreds of thousands and reduced much of the country to violet ash. Upon return from the war he could not speak for weeks; but he gradually came back to life and, as we learn from the distant, almost disbelieving voice of the electronic narrator, he “rose into the middle class, and purchased a home in eastern Kansas.” Years later he would teach the Springer family how to see ghosts, by staring at an image and then brusquely closing your eyes. In the early 1970s, they found that the strongest afterglow was produced by TV news anchors reporting on Vietnam… But then rumors about buried treasure led C.W. and his family to Church Hollow in Missouri, the site of the Austin farm. The traumatic memories of Korea faded away into a seemingly endless quest to find the buried gold.

The film reaches its enigmatic center with re-enactments of the automatic writing seances of Springer’s mother, Doris. She feels that her hand has been mysteriously injured, before realizing that what she can and must do with it is trace out the diaries of a Spanish priest who was killed by Indians in the cave, with the gold of an earlier empire in his possession. This “channeled” diary (the spiritist equivalent of spurious campaign promises?) is described by Springer as “a repressed retelling of her husband’s experience with wartime atrocity.” It becomes the blueprint for an endless, futile and increasingly dangerous quest in the cave, which the movie appears to be trying to exorcise on several levels. But what never does come to light are Kate Austin’s vanished writings: a possible signpost to another future, outside the nightmare of imperial war and domestic expropriation from which millions of credulous Americans are now struggling to wake up in disbelief.

In 1995, Spin pointed to the open window of technological and organizational change at a moment when the scramble for globalized markets left gaping holes in all kinds of security systems. Soon afterwards, activists in disguise like the Yes Men would step through those gaps and create their own public twists on world events, relying on a knowledge of complex networking processes that the corporate powers did not yet fully control. In 2007 when that openness had become ancient history, the same filmmaker who looked upward at the stars began peering down into the networks of delusion beneath our feet, even as an occupying army tried to secure dinosaur wealth beneath the desert sands of Iraq and the subprime mortgage debacle swept away the average man’s home-owning dreams.

To define the “apparatus of capture,” A Thousand Plateaus explores two opposed ideas: the legalistic concept of mutuum, the medium of exchange, involving freely drawn and freely severed contracts; and the hierarchical concept of nexum, the bond, the knot, the social tie of obedience and submission. The latter is the symbolic domain of the “fearsome magician-emperor” found under multiple guises in Georges Dumézil’s studies of Indo-European mythology. We have seen the sobering return of that figure in the United States over the last decade; yet it now appears mistaken to suppose that a borderless flux of mutual exchange represents the definitive overcoming of the old territorializing claims of sovereign power. For the two concepts mark the opposite poles of a single economic relation, as Dumézil makes clear: “Mutuum is, literally, (aes) mutuum, ‛the money borrowed,’ and also ‛borrowing.’ Nexum is the state of the nexus, of the insolvent debtor who was, very literally, bound and subjugated by the creditor.”9

Springer’s film explores the same issues in material and embodied forms. The quest for release from wage labor (through buried treasure, real estate, the stock market…) opens up a darker morass of ancient debts, where sensations of promise and entrapment become inseparable. There are vital clues here for a future cultural activism that will have to deal not only with advanced technological communications but also with more obscure human motivations, and with the archaeology of an economic order that threatens to collapse into the myriad holes, blind tunnels and architectures of bluff that comprise its very foundations. The Disappointment taps a formidable underground vein – the kind that pulses with buried life, and that you can only mine deeply, at your own risk.

In his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari associates the territory not only with openness to deterritorialization but also with the threat of a “black hole”: the loss of the outside, the inability to think, to feel, to see anything except a near environment which has become so close that it merges with your own skin. Groups working experimentally at a territorial level, at grips with the aesthetics of everyday life, try to open a horizon after recognizing and exploring the common pitfalls where the languages of power become rooted in the generations. In the industrial democracies, the link between Fordist mass production, consumer desire and faraway war – underwritten by colonial racism – remains the bedrock of symbolic politics, overcoded in our time by the sophisticated and yet violent financial nexus. Under pressure, every country becomes an enigma, crying out to be deciphered. To open up a mobile territory at this level of societal paralysis is to create a break in the psychic decor, to offer the uncertain crowd an exit at the moment of greatest tension.

For Springer amid the industrial ruins of the Midwest, the feminist anarchism of Emma Goldman’s unknown rural friend is a diagram of possibilities yet unrealized, a free rhizome. Following its imagined and desired pathways, the narrator, a local sphinx with an electronically frozen voice, could emerge into the daylight and speak with the others.

.

Notes

Panel Discussion:

Who Needs A World View?

September 12, 4-6 pm

.

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

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biennial info here