Continental Drift

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)

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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?

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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.

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Panel Discussion:

Who Needs A World View?

September 12, 4-6 pm

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“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)

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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

Leisurely reflections on art, knowledge, education

Palle Harding, Model for a Qualitative Society

Chris Marker’s Le joli mai (1962) is an essay-film that documents the modernization of French society amidst the hushed and repressive period of the Algerian war of independence. Midway through this idiosyncratic catalogue of social change there is a staged interview with two far-sighted engineers who describe the technological future that is unfolding beneath their eyes. Machines have already been invented, they explain, which will render work unnecessary; labor will be a thing of the past. Existing hierarchies will lose their material necessity: a civilization of free time, of leisure for all, will emerge. But why then does everyone behave as if nothing had happened, the interviewer wants to know? Nonplussed, one of the engineers responds: “It is possible that the future world will be divided in two terribly contrasting clans, the initiates and the non-initiates. Obviously it’s a problem… not a technical problem, but a problem of consciousness. Technology now allows human beings to be free; why don’t they want to be free? I can’t answer you. In fact, I don’t have any idea.”1

The utopias of the sixties arose from this theme of technologically granted leisure time, opening up the space of civilizational play that had been described by the Dutch author Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. Perhaps the most extraordinary image of these dreams is conveyed by the drifting cities of New Babylon, elaborated in the form of scale models by the architect Constant: an infinite proliferation of experimental constructions snaking across the European landscape, forever unfinished, offered to playful appropriation by their inhabitants who could also simply leave them behind, to lose themselves in the surrounding nature – while beneath the ground, in subterranean galleries that no one even bothered to describe, all the production necessary for existence was carried out by robots.1 In the same period Guy Debord, a friend of Constant and a reader of Huizinga, wrote of “the battle of leisure is taking place before our eyes” and called on artists to “take a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play.” As he explained: “By obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the proletariat not only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the terrain of the struggle. New forms of this struggle then arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts.”2 The technique of the dérive, the ludic “science” of psychogeography, the forms of unitary urbanism, and the construction of situations were to be the tools for this extension of the struggle to the new terrains of culture. It was a matter of overcoming passivity, of sparking a new protagonism within the fields of civilizational play. But even these artistic tools contained the possibility of misuse, as a regressive, commercialized culture industry was there to demonstrate. The critical complement of Situationist aesthetics would be an analysis of the commodification of consciousness in the spectacle society.

Today, when the “battle of leisure” sounds like a ludicruous piece of rhetoric from the past, the technological dream of Marker’s two engineers has largely come true, at least for the middle classes in the globalized centers of accumulation. The shocking thing is how few people allow themselves to realize it. The postmodern information economy pulses before our eyes, with its words, sounds, images and ambiances, a semiotic surround built up from pure imagination – and in that respect, free for the taking. Over the last decade, various upheavals on the cultural-political terrain have shown that the tools of this economy can be reappropriated, transformed and diverted to other uses. Experimentation with the Internet has been inseparable from an upsurge of radical democracy, this time on a transnational scale. Street protests, dramatically growing in size and energy around the turn of the century, have seen a fresh flowering of the art of constructed situations.3 The aesthetic institutions themselves – whose normative functions will be discussed below – seem to be assailed once again by an intense debate over the value of art, and the paths of its expansion outside the traditional frames. But as conservative demands for new forms of population control gained legitimacy under the shadow of September 11, a question arose for the million insurrectionary minds of today. Will a repressive hush fall back over the emergent world society, as the postmodern tool sets are gradually outfitted with surveillance mechanisms and encumbered with intellectual property laws, while dissident behaviors are pacified and normalized within corporate frames? Or will a resurgent artistic activism learn from its historical failures, and launch new and more effective techniques for the free and open transmission of countercultural knowledge? How to enlarge the circle of initiates? How to increase the possibilities of active participation? How – and where – to extend the terrains of struggle?

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

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

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

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or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics

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

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

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

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

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Towards the New Body

art students in Athens, December 2008

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

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

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

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

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ESCAPE THE OVERCODE

Table of Contents

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===> INTRODUCTIONS

–The Affectivist Manifesto:

Artistic Critique for the 21st Century

-Toward the New Body:

Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños“

–Recapturing Subversion:

Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture Game

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===> POTENTIALS

01-Network Maps, Energy Diagrams:

Structure and Agency in the Global System

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics:

Global Protest and Artistic Process

03-The Potential Personality:

Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

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===> EXPERIMENTS

04-Coded Utopia:

Makrolab or the Art of Transition

05-Extradisciplinary Investigations:

Toward A New Critique of Institutions

06-Differential Geography:

Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation

07-The Speculative Performance:

Art’s Financial Futures

08-50 Ways to Leave Your Lover:

Exit Strategies from Liberal Empire

09-The Absent Rival:

Radical Art in a Political Vacuum

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===> GEOCRITIQUE

10-Remember the Present:

Representations of Crisis in Argentina

11-Continental Drift:

From Geopolitics to Geopoetics

12-Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power:

Interview w/16 Beaver

13-Invisible States:

Europe in the Age of Capital Failure

14-Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle:

Flexibilization, Corporatization and Militarization of the Creative Industries

15-One World, One Dream:

China at the Risk of New Subjectivities

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===> DARK CRYSTALS

16-Adam Curtis: Alarm-Clock Films

Cultural Critique in the 21st Century

17-Future Map:

Or How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance

18-Filming the World Laboratory:

Cybernetic History in Das Netz

19-Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies

or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetic

20-Swarmachine:

Activist Media Tomorrow

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===> CONCLUSIONs

Decipher the Future

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download the pdf

Jan. 2 and 4 Demos in Chicago

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

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

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No more US aid to Israel!

Stop the war in Gaza!

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

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

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

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

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

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Limits of an Urban Paradigm

CCTV Building, Beijing / Handball Arena, Zagreb

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

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

David Harvey

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

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

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download pdf here

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

Artistic Critique in the 21st Century

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

website here, PDF here

texto castellano aquí

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vincent Bethell: website here, film here

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