Continental Drift

Art after Neoliberalism

Katya Sander, Estimations

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

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

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

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Cybernetic History in Das Netz

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

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

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

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New York Stock Exchange, 9/19/08

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Costanzo / REPO History, Wall Street, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope to see y’all along the way.

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Nota Bene:

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

New York Times, Jan. 29, 2009

Or, let’s find a completely new art criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://sunsetproject.wordpress.com

And now the dialogue is open for whoever has inspiration.

click the image for that deep understanding

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

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

Indeed, is there any point to it?

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

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

the drift as seen by Claire Pentecost; more here

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

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

A CALL TO FARMS!

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

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

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

Calendar of Events (tentative) – see below:

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“Security Aesthetic = Systems Panic”

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

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

One can easily imagine how a home, an airport or a harbor can be made “secure.” An initial, safe or “quiet” inside space must simply be preserved from outer harm. But what happens in a complex social system, one composed of many different actors, some with irreconcilably diverging interests? What happens when the space to be protected is as much linguistic and ideological as it is physical and architectural, so that a breach of legitimacy or a leak of information can be perceived as illicit ingress or egress? In short, what happens in a contested environment where threats can arise from within? The response is clear: what happens is vertiginous paranoia.

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Twenty Twisted Rules of the Culture Game

Introduction to the book: ESCAPE THE OVERCODE

table of contents here

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

Thanks to Deleuze and Guattari, and perhaps even more, to the Autonomia philosophers, we have a good idea of what subversion can mean today.1 It’s not about resisting the continual mutations of capitalism from a retrenched identity position, a class status, a locally instituted cultural tradition (a “whole way of life” as cultural studies founder Richard Hoggart said, or even a “whole way of conflict” as E.P. Thompson riposted). It’s about allowing the inherited forms of solidarity and struggle to morph, hybridize or even completely dissolve in the process of encountering and appropriating the new toolkits, conceptual frames and spatial imaginaries of the present. Power flows through the individuals and groups who constitute a social network. It’s generated by their productive activity, so it can always be twisted away from functional paths and channeled in different directions, to meet existential needs or to explore wild and unpredictable desires.

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click for a close-up

An exchange on the Empyre list and the current exhibition of Etcetera in Paris got me thinking of a million things….

Maybe the reason I felt so close to Etcetera and the Grupo de Arte Callejero when we finally met in 2004, is because we went through similar relations to the inflated art scenes of the 90s. Guattari describes it perfectly in Chaosmosis, when he says that art “can move in a direction parallel to uniformization, or play the role of an operator in the bifuraction of subjectivity.” That was exactly the story of cultural consumption in the decades of Mitterand and his culture minister, Jack Lang. The “landscape of French art” became so uniform in those years, with its pseudo-diversity of minor differences always trying to find a way into the institutional market. Meanwhile you knew that the whole world was changing, new divides were opening up in society, new possibilities too. The question was how to break out of this slick, sophisticated conformism, to touch something real in this life? In the mid-1990s I was struggling with the economics of globalization and demonstrating with artists out in the streets. To be an activist then was not fashionable in any way, it was considered totally retrograde in artistic circles. I think that must have been even more intensely the case in Buenos Aires, when HIJOS started to form in 1996.

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…by participatory means, for whoever wants to start right now

“We put our bodies on the line, you put your face in the picture” — Grupo Etcetera

Sometimes you have to face the facts, the ones you do not choose. I’m called an art critic. I produce an apparently endless stream of descriptions, analyses and reflections on certain kinds of objects, images and practices. There is so much to be seen, to be known, to be experienced. But sometimes it seems that all this activity begs the basic questions. For me, they are these: What is art today? How is its critique carried out? For whom can it be useful?

The answers I aim to give are quite personal. They stem from a specific desire, a specific curiosity. But they are also the product of a history, with all its overwhelming force. What we do not choose is what we can most easily share, or what we can’t avoid sharing. So the answers to the most basic questions always end up in some undecidable place, between the singular and the inevitable.

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or, Atlas Shrugged Again

the world-famous penny pyramid

Hey y’all, I just read an amazingly interesting piece of news trivia. It’s an article with one of those lurid yellow-press byline titles: “Debt-Gorged British Start to Worry That the Party is Ending.” New York Times no less. All the puzzle-pieces finally fall into place.

Some backgrounders: Reading a book called “China’s New Consumers”–where you find out that by comparison to the West, there really aren’t any–I was totally intrigued to discover that not only the Americans, but also the Australians and yes, the Brits, fulfill the role of “consumers of last resort” on the world market, eagerly ingurgitating the floods of goods pouring out of Guangzhou Province and seemingly everywhere else on the Chinese seabord. Naive and incorrigible culturalist that I am, I just thought “Hmmm, no doubt those rich Anglophone countries are particularly exposed to the fantastic publicity machines built up during the Fordist period to make national populations consume their own production, and so now they are pursuing that role in the world society.” Never for a moment did I make the slightest inquiry into where the money comes from.

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Geopolitics to Geopoetics

Seminar at 16 Beaver St., NYC (2006)

How does a world come together? How does a world fall apart? Neoliberalism made these questions into one – and September 11 showed that there can be no perfect synthesis. In the twenty-first century the continents have gone adrift. Here is where the maps of a new “great game” unfold, for activists and also for researchers. Locating yourself against the horizons of disaster, then finding the modes and scales of concrete intervention into lived experience, are the pathways for grassroots intellectual action in the contemporary world-system.

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“Virtual Jihadi”

Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March 5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the public by order of the university’s president. Today there is no certainty that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every aspect of Wafaa Bilal’s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue: the value of free speech in a democracy.

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AMSTERDAM CREATIVE CITY

The “Fool’s Façade” in Amsterdam

Merijn Oudenampsen, who gave such a great talk on the Creative City back at the my-CI conference in Amsterdam in November 06, has now published a new version of his ideas in Variant magazine:

www.variant.randomstate.org//pdfs/issue31/31CreativeCity.pdf

The article is excellent, with many sharp insights and lots of valuable resources in terms of bibliography. And above all, if anyone actually wanted to start critiquing the creative city — rather than just oozing with it on the way up to illusory middle-class complacency and blindness — then they could take his article as an inspiration. I mean, as an inspiration to leave the whole Creative Industries discourse behind and focus on reality again.

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