In the long awaited movie Sex and the City, one of the main protagonists, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), hires a personal assistant; she is a young, lower class woman who came from the southern U.S. to New York in search of a job and, indubitably, “happiness.” Being a personal assistant, she has to have the “necessary” commodities; she cannot afford them, but still she is forced to get them, though only for a short period of time. What is a necessary commodity other than a Louis Vuitton purse? Happiness is therefore not achieved (as this popular series/movie/brand promotes) by getting a job, a career or the like; not even by getting the commodity itself; but by getting a lifestyle. This example shows not just how commodity fetishism influences the cultural system of capitalist democracy, but how much life itself today plays the role of the rationalisation of power structures. Today it is not the commodity itself that is the fetish, but a form of life which is. What better way, then, to see the relationship between power and life than by taking a view on life that is neither life, nor power, but is something in between, an alien. The figure of an alien (illegal alien, excluded misfit) surpasses mere administrative questions of the regulation of foreign laborer status; it does not matter if we look at the suburban riots in Paris or even at the military blockade against Mexican immigrants on the southern U.S. border. An alien, as a “phobogenic” object (an object that creates fear in others), has become a sort of a foundation of the cultural system in capitalist democracy that rationalizes the political malfunction of these same democracies. When Joel Kovel describes the relation of the economic forms and patterns of racism, he finds three forms in historical phases of racism: dominant – in which the “savagery” of the black man that endangers the purity of a white woman is controlled by domination and violence; repulsive – in which the “contagious filth” of a black person is “approached” through avoidance; and a meta-racism (a designation of the present capitalist democracies) – in which a difference is being denied through a complete denial of the existence of racism.1 In all of these cases, as Ivan Ward remarks, “the phantom Negro” endangers cultural illusion and structures of power status quo.2 “The phantom Negro,” as an alien, is the ultimate phobogenic object. The present text is precisely about the relation of this phantom to the status quo capitalist power structure.
Sovereignty and Life
The Alien, in its ambiguous position, by not being completely inside, and neither being completely outside the law, exposes the very sovereignty of today’s power structure that is not the “supreme power over a body politic,”3 but is rather a sovereignty that organizes a social context in which individuals should crave for something else as compensation for the lack of participation in political processes, or for a lack of the political process at all.
Just what form of sovereignty are we talking about? First is the “imperial sovereignty”, which is not a sovereignty of a certain nation-state, but a global form of sovereignty that includes dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist organizations and other powers.4 And second, this sovereignty is marked less by definition, and more by paradox, like the one Giorgio Agamben refers to. The paradox of sovereignty, according to him, means that the “Sovereign is at the same time outside and inside of the legal order.”5 To paraphrase him further, I can state that the sovereign, by having a legal power to suspend the law, legally puts itself outside the law. The structure of this paradox that presents sovereignty as a border (in the sense of drawing a beginning and an end) is, as Agamben claims, a structure of exceptions. When Agamben quotes Schmitt, paraphrasing him, we see that “the Sovereign creates and guarantees the situation in its totality, the sovereign has the monopoly on that last decision; there lies an essence of state sovereignty, not as a monopoly on repression or rule, but as a monopoly of a decision.”6 In other words, the sovereign decides whether some situation is “normal” (where legal order is applicable), or whether it is to proclaim a state of exception (stating that the legal order is not to apply). Therefore, sovereignty of a capitalist state does not depend on power over certain political space; it depends on maintenance of a certain truth about that political space. That truth says that the only sovereignty is not some state sovereignty, but the sovereignty of capital itself (as an ongoing state of exception), and that the only politics it has is the politics of the market that supports life as commodity. Hence, once capital reached its initial accumulation within the nation state, it started to reproduce constantly, and in the process of discovering new forms of production, distribution and exchange, it changed the very notion of territory. As philosopher Marina Gržinić observed, de-territorialisation is not the process of erasing territories, but of re-territorialisation – the constant cannibalisation of old territories and the constant reinvention of new ones.
One such territory is life itself. Giorgio Agamben differentiates bare life: life for the sake of life only; Greek zoe; pure nature. This is the life of Homo Sacer, Holy man, a figure that, according to Agamben, can be killed but can not be sacrificed, a life that does not have anything more than its biological life (migrants stripped of any commodity, third world laborers, etc.). The other form of life is bios: life with style, of a citizen; the form of life that can be sacrificed (to the sovereign). Although it could seem that an alien might resemble bare life and although bios might be seen as an oppressor of bare life, our basic hypothesis here is that the figure of an alien is situated between these two forms of life. The alien is the ultimate phobogenic object, a blank position that attracts all residues of failed rationalizations of state-of-exception power structures. What this means is that an alien emerges somewhere in the bare life’s path toward the power structure, or in the path of bios moving away from the rationalization of power structures.
Relationship of Life and Power
As Agamben says, bare life is a life form that is excluded from human jurisdiction and that has not been included in God’s jurisdiction.7 The continuous sovereign sphere is one in which one can kill while committing neither murder nor sacrifice. And holy life, the one that can be killed but not sacrificed, is a life caught in this sphere. As such, and produced as such, according to Agamben, bare life in that sense is a primal effect of sovereignty. Western mainstream media reports and/or the policy makers, when reporting on the situation in Iraq, fail to acknowledge the thousands of dead Iraqis8 but rather acknowledge that a far less number of dead American soldiers (as soldiers, not as members of low class community in the U.S.) are, on the other side, a cause for panic in assessments of the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. Iraqi life is bare life, while a U.S. soldier’s life is bios. The death of an Iraqi is an humanitarian problem, while the death of a U.S. soldier is a political fact. Hence, the sovereignty of the capitalist state, through the lack of ruling over certain social organizations that seek a solution for its problems, rules over life, produces bare life and sustains bios. Production of bare life is paradoxically also a practice of killing it, as a practice of a sovereign’s “right” to rule over the possibility to cease life, or to organize all of life’s relationships and meaning. But bare life is not one that would perceive itself as a victim: it has a tendency to perceive itself as potential bios, potential “success story”. Bare life does see that the state of exception is not the anomaly, but the truth of capital, but it does not react against it, as it wants to become a part of it, to become the one who oppresses. Bare life, therefore, does not react towards the discriminatory hierarchy of state exception (truth of capital), but it tends to react against some other bare life, that allegedly stops it in its way of emancipation to the same hierarchy.
As Mona Chollet explains, in a Marxist model, a worker is called upon to resist a servile and humiliating position that does not allow him/her to compare his/her destiny to the destiny of a wealthy man and demand a share of the wealth.9 In this model, the worker identifies him/herself only to his/her fellow workers, employed and unemployed. According to Chollet, the genius of the political right is exactly in the twisting of this scheme, which has been effective in the past. Today a worker identifies him/her self with a wealthy man and compares himself to those who share his/her situation. Therefore, s/he “sees” that immigrants get social help and he or she doesn’t; s/he “sees” that the unemployed sleep longer, while s/he has to go to work. Chollet says that workers are therefore diverted from the legitimate target, and that this then creates the vicious circle: the more his/her life conditions are deteriorating, the more likely s/he is to vote for the politics that deteriorates them. This is what happens to bare life: the more it suffers, the more it wants to become integrated into the work processes of neo-liberal capitalism; the more it wants to become bios, life with style. It has a tendency not to resist the oppression, but to become an oppressor. As Hardt and Negri say, “Every sovereign power (…) necessarily forms a political body of which there is a head that commands, limbs that obey, and organs that function together to support the ruler.”10 But it seems that the sovereignty of capital does not even need a political body (as a demand for a potential of a different organization of the social); it just needs a body. Thus, bare life is not the only form produced by the sovereign, but the sovereign produces the relationship between two forms of life, in which one, bios, wants to stay included, while the other, bare life, struggles to be included. This obscene relationship marks the situation in which politics are being slowly killed by capitalism, where the tortured body of politics is not hidden, but presented as culture. And here, the main preoccupation of a slave (bios) and of the wannabe slave (bare life) becomes nothing but a lifestyle as an euphemism for a right to be indifferent, or for a right to become an oppressor. The same way the state socialist totalitarian rituals (mass parades, etc.) were used for compensation for other “sins” of their sovereigns, similarly capitalist democracies use entire cultures for the same compensation policy, for the same scope… but it can barely be seen as such.
As an example, the New York Times recently reported11 that there is a peep-show style artistic installation on Coney Island (NY), where two animatronics (demonstration figures) are simulating the act of waterboarding.12 This presentation of a method used by U.S. interrogators against alleged terror suspects clearly shows that something as deadly serious as torture not only symbolizes the legacy of Bush Jr.’s neo-conservative rule, but also the frivolity of its potential installation as public art/entertainment. Incidentally, the New York Times published this article in the Art & Design section of the paper. Therefore, culture has become the other name for political indifference that is nothing else but neo-liberalism (as a dominant form of representation of capitalist state), or in other words, lifestyle instead of a struggle for a more meaningful, or for some other meaning of life.
A Machine that Produces Truth
Like we said, alien is neither bare life, nor bios, but is in-between. How does this in-between look like? When the French of African/Arab heritage started to riot in Parisian (and other French) suburbs, the rioters were immediately presented as insignificant, lazy, unemployed people, who during pauses between dealing drugs like to burn cars. This discrediting of the rioters by the authorities and the mainstream media, besides being an intentional destruction of the political potential of the protests was in my opinion a strategy to keep bare life as bare life. Although probably a mass of the rioters did not want anything more than a job, the effect of the riots was such that it was recognized by the authorities as potentially capable of igniting questions that address the issue of inequality in a far broader, racial and class context. The political repercussions of the riots were pretty effectively denied, as the rioters were presented as a bunch of hooligans, as bare life. When somebody protests against class inequality, against G8 meetings or against globalization, they are a bunch of hooligans, but when somebody protests against Hugo Chavez, against Iranian leadership or against Chinese rule over Tibet, then those are political protests. This is the representation and repression strategy whose aim is to stop the emergence of an alien as a political figure. Not because they demand integration into a society, but because aliens as political figures invoke the possibility of more radical changes to the society all together. A moment when a certain life (bare life or bios) ceases to be such a life, and becomes an alien, is exactly a moment where either of the two (or both) starts to shape a political demand that goes beyond liberal capitalist dogma of the truth of capital. At the moment Parisian suburban riots started to receive (or at least started to get perceived as) a form of political demand that would address segregation (i.e., an issue of class), bare life became an alien and the political form of its demand was denied to it. When the riots developed beyond the boundaries of the suburbs, and started to refer to a process of inequality as a class, and when bare life started to reject being bare life, but at the same time refused to become bios, these are two cases when the alien as political figure emerged. It is a moment when bare life refuses to be sacred, refuses to be available for murder without sanction, and refuses to be available for sacrifice to the sovereign of capital. The alien is the figure that practices the Marxist model mentioned by Mona Chollet. It focuses its hate toward the very nature of the sovereignty of the capitalist state, toward its truth. It identifies not only with other aliens, but also with the possibility of conflict, the possibility of unmasking or exposing the hideous democratic/consumerist ritual as a totalitarian ritual. The position of an alien is not an embellished position; it does not mark some decorated, romanticized role to be coveted; above all, it is not an alienated subjectivity. An alienated subjectivity (the misfit member of a subculture, or some celebrity with a drug addiction everybody loves to hate) is mainstream today; as elaborated by Marina Gržinić, it is a way that legitimizes itself through a “right to choose” concept, which she elaborated in analyzing such films as Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers. Bill Murray as a lost, empty, depressed misfit character in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, presents not an alien but a “sensualised alienated position” to the point to become an attractive, stylish, alienated subjectivity.13
According to Hardt and Negri, “The multitude is an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indifference), but on what it has in common.”14 In the context of this definition, the figure of an alien turns out to be a figure that exposes what is “in common,” what is the same for both bios and bare life. Exposing the truth of capital as nothing but capital itself is a disbelief in the definition of truth imposed by capital(ism). The alien, thus, is not an individual position (as “I”), and it is not a position that demands “emancipation”: it perceives itself as one of many whose “sameness” (common denominator) lies in the fact that they are all subjectivities produced by the order. Therefore, bare life, or even the relationship between different forms of life, is not the primal product of the order’s machine. Its primal product is the “truth” which the individual life tends to accept as its own system of belief; it is the form of life’s grand rationalization of the order, and of itself. This system of belief imposes that its particular truth is the only one possible. This is not a notion that would actualize a question about universal truth, but addresses the capitalist order that monopolizes truth as such, with the imposition of the (im)possibility of struggle for some other truth. This mise-en-scène of life is the capitalist machine’s main product.
Alien vs. Predator
In order to clarify this even further, let us refer to the action movie Alien vs. Predator (Twentieth Century Fox, 2004). In this movie, Aliens (disgusting, reptilian, completely unknown but resilient creatures – pure other) are beings that are created and nurtured as such by the hunter civilization of “Predators” for the sole purpose of being a “worthy” prey for them. The meaning of existence for Aliens is to resist as much as possible before the Predator hunters kill them. Can we draw a parallel here with Agamben? He says that the basic operation of sovereign power is a production of bare life as a source political element and the threshold of articulation between nature and culture. In pre-modern times, our “aliens” were the bare life that suffered under colonization from the (White) First world, and whose purpose was solely to be at service through slavery to their masters, the white colonizers, i.e., the “predators.” Then, not only was bare life used as a work force, but also as a justification for the segregation practiced by the white sovereignty; the same sovereignty as a “domination of culture” also relegated to itself the right to rationalize its imperialistic territorial gains by oppressing the “pure nature,” as the savages, the slaves, i.e. bare life, were defined. But after the era of colonization, the purpose of bare life (as a result of the imposition of the truth of capital) shifted from “being a slave” to “wanting to be a slave”; which reflects today’s bare life position that (mostly) tends to “succeed” in the First World, to become a lifestyle. It is not about achieving a decent life, but about embracing the perverted notion of a decent life as mindless consumerism. If the prime political relationship is an exclusion (a state of exception as an area of non-differentiation between the outer and inner, exclusion and inclusion), then “bare life” could be seen as life that “wants to be included” into capital, while bios (life of culture) is a life that, under a threat of exclusion from the capitalist order, wants to “stay included”. The paradigm of bios is Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) a camp where Jews lived in “better” conditions, where the Nazis could film them for propaganda purposes, to kill them later. Bare life and bios are therefore inscribed not in a form of capitalist democracy, where equality among human subjectivities is allegedly universal, but into an obscene, banal totalitarian ritual where equality means only that subjectivities are equal as commodities on the market. The state of exception, where capitalism can even suspend itself, is therefore a capitalist attempt to give itself some (ideological) meaning, though such meaning is not less banal than the unlimited power of the market, or the human equality that is defined by the market.
Hence, as the movie unfolds, after the Predator commander is killed, other predators take his body into a space ship… but in the final seconds of the movie, out of his body a newborn alien emerges, as a threat to everyone on the ship. Here, the alien refuses to stay on Earth (the predators’ battleground and concentration camp), and thus, it refuses to respect the rules of the game; it does not want to be in a camp at all. Instead of emancipating itself within the truth of the machine, the alien should start investing its own diverse skills and knowledge to emancipate itself through resistance against capitalism, by unmasking the border of capitalist truth, by showing its nature as totalitarian.
Šefik Šeki Tatlić
1 Cf. Ivan Ward, Phobia, Totem Books, Cambridge 2001. Joel Kovel’s quotation is from this book.
2 Ibid.
3 As defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com)
4 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, Multitude, War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, London 2005.
5 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Giulio Einaudi, Torino 1995.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
9 Cf. Mona Chollet, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/04/CHOLLET/15818
10 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
11 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
12 A form of torture that consists of immobilising a person on his back with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages.
13 Cf. Marina Gržinić, Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.
14 Cf. Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri, op. cit.
Source: REARTIKULACIJA no. 5 - 2008
Friday, January 9, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
From Violence to Resistance
Everything advises us to set aside fetishism with respect to violence and non-violence. It is certainly stupid to measure the radicality of a struggle by the level of its illegality, and is to elevate forgiveness to an unquestionable criteria for action. On the other hand, this is not what preoccupies us the most: in what is referred to as conflict, the passage from latency to visibility always undertakes to alter the “eternal principles” adopted by professionals of politics.
With respect to the old, but not exhausted, question of forms of struggle, the discussion runs in circles, resorting to sophisms and comfortable quotations. On a closer analysis, this debate suffers the chain of effects of a drastic change of theoretical paradigm. A change so significant that it can separate what seemed inseparable and join what seemed opposites. In sum: the struggle against waged labor, unlike the struggle against tyranny, is not longer connected to the emphatic perspective of “taking power”.
Because of its rather advance characteristics, this begins to appear as an entirely “social” transformation, which confronts “power”, but without dreaming of an alternative organization of the State. To the contrary, it aims to contract and extinguish all forms of command over the activity of women and men and to end the State. As it has been said, while the “political revolution” was considered the inevitable premise for modifying and transforming social relations, now the latter becomes a preliminary step.
The struggle can carry its destructive nature to its [logical] end only in so far as it already assumes an other way of living, communicating and producing. Only if there is something to lose beyond one's chains. The theme of violence, idolized and exorcized, was without a doubt linked to the double edged sword of “taking power”. What happens when the existent form of the State is seen as the last possible State form, which deserves to corrupt itself and fall into ruin, but not - surely - to be replaced by a Super-state “of all the people”? Doesn’t violence come to be perhaps the new cult to follow? It seems it does not. In every case, we have an unforeseen paradox: the resort to force should be conceived in relation to a positive order that should be defended and safeguarded. The exodus from waged labor is not a concave gesture, an algebraic subtraction. We must construct different social relations and new forms of life: we must have much love for the present and much inventiveness. Therefore, the conflict will begin in order to preserve that “new” that it has instituted in the process. Violence, if there is violence, is not directed toward tomorrows, but rather at prolonging what already exists, even if informally.
Faced with the hypocrisy or the distracted credulity that today marks the discussion over legality or illegality, it is worth returning to a premodern category: the “ius resistentiae”. With this expression, medieval right did not refer to the obvious faculty of legitimate self-defence when under attack. Nor was it understood as a general uprising against constituted power. It also clearly differed from “sedition” and “rebellion”, in which the uprising is made against the present set of institutions, with the object of establishing different ones. The “right to resistance” has, by contrast, a rather specific and peculiar meaning. It can be exercised when an artisan’s corporation, or a whole community, or even an individual, finds some of its positive prerogatives - validated by tradition or fact - altered by the central power. The salient point of “ius resistentiae”, which constitutes its principal interest in terms of the question of legality or illegality, is the defense of an effective, tangible, “already” accomplished transformation of the forms of life. The large or small steps, small collapses or large avalanches, of the struggle against waged work allow for an unlimited right to resistance, whilst ruling out a theory of civil war.
Paolo Virno
Translation by Nate Holdren
With respect to the old, but not exhausted, question of forms of struggle, the discussion runs in circles, resorting to sophisms and comfortable quotations. On a closer analysis, this debate suffers the chain of effects of a drastic change of theoretical paradigm. A change so significant that it can separate what seemed inseparable and join what seemed opposites. In sum: the struggle against waged labor, unlike the struggle against tyranny, is not longer connected to the emphatic perspective of “taking power”.
Because of its rather advance characteristics, this begins to appear as an entirely “social” transformation, which confronts “power”, but without dreaming of an alternative organization of the State. To the contrary, it aims to contract and extinguish all forms of command over the activity of women and men and to end the State. As it has been said, while the “political revolution” was considered the inevitable premise for modifying and transforming social relations, now the latter becomes a preliminary step.
The struggle can carry its destructive nature to its [logical] end only in so far as it already assumes an other way of living, communicating and producing. Only if there is something to lose beyond one's chains. The theme of violence, idolized and exorcized, was without a doubt linked to the double edged sword of “taking power”. What happens when the existent form of the State is seen as the last possible State form, which deserves to corrupt itself and fall into ruin, but not - surely - to be replaced by a Super-state “of all the people”? Doesn’t violence come to be perhaps the new cult to follow? It seems it does not. In every case, we have an unforeseen paradox: the resort to force should be conceived in relation to a positive order that should be defended and safeguarded. The exodus from waged labor is not a concave gesture, an algebraic subtraction. We must construct different social relations and new forms of life: we must have much love for the present and much inventiveness. Therefore, the conflict will begin in order to preserve that “new” that it has instituted in the process. Violence, if there is violence, is not directed toward tomorrows, but rather at prolonging what already exists, even if informally.
Faced with the hypocrisy or the distracted credulity that today marks the discussion over legality or illegality, it is worth returning to a premodern category: the “ius resistentiae”. With this expression, medieval right did not refer to the obvious faculty of legitimate self-defence when under attack. Nor was it understood as a general uprising against constituted power. It also clearly differed from “sedition” and “rebellion”, in which the uprising is made against the present set of institutions, with the object of establishing different ones. The “right to resistance” has, by contrast, a rather specific and peculiar meaning. It can be exercised when an artisan’s corporation, or a whole community, or even an individual, finds some of its positive prerogatives - validated by tradition or fact - altered by the central power. The salient point of “ius resistentiae”, which constitutes its principal interest in terms of the question of legality or illegality, is the defense of an effective, tangible, “already” accomplished transformation of the forms of life. The large or small steps, small collapses or large avalanches, of the struggle against waged work allow for an unlimited right to resistance, whilst ruling out a theory of civil war.
Paolo Virno
Translation by Nate Holdren
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Сегодня снова я пойду... Today I will go once again...
Сегодня снова я пойду
Туда, на жизнь, на торг, на рынок,
И войско песен поведу
С прибоем рынка в поединок!
Today I will go once again
Into life, into haggling, into market,
And lead the army of my songs
To duel against the market tide.
1914
Velimir Khlebnikov
Велими́р Хле́бников
Туда, на жизнь, на торг, на рынок,
И войско песен поведу
С прибоем рынка в поединок!
Today I will go once again
Into life, into haggling, into market,
And lead the army of my songs
To duel against the market tide.
1914
Velimir Khlebnikov
Велими́р Хле́бников
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Pattern Pattern
These are graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.
Source:http://neojaponisme.com
Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle (english version)
I. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
II. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
III. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.
Gilles Deleuze,Society of Control
L'autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
II. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
III. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.
Gilles Deleuze,Society of Control
L'autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.
Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle
Historique
Foucault a situé les sociétés disciplinaires aux XVIIIè et XIXè siècles ; elles atteignent à leur apogée au début du XXè. Elles procèdent à l'organisation des grands milieux d'enfermement. L'individu ne cesse de passer d'un milieu clos à un autre, chacun ayant ses lois : d'abord la famille, puis l'école (« tu n'es plus dans ta famille »), puis la caserne (« tu n'es plus à l'école »), puis l'usine, de temps en temps l'hôpital, éventuellement la prison qui est le milieu d'enfermement par excellence. C'est la prison qui sert de modèle analogique : l'héroïne d'Europe 51 peut s'écrier quand elle voit des ouvriers « j'ai cru voir des condamnés... ». Foucault a très bien analysé le projet idéal des milieux d'enfermement, particulièrement visible dans l'usine : concentrer ; répartir dans l'espace ; ordonner dans le temps ; composer dans l'espace-temps une force productive dont l'effet doit être supérieur à la somme des forces élémentaires. Mais ce que Foucault savait aussi, c'était la brièveté de ce modèle : il succédait à des sociétés de souveraineté, dont le but et les fonctions étaient tout autres (prélever plutôt qu'organiser la production, décider de la mort plutôt que gérer la vie) ; la transition s'était faite progressivement, et Napoléon semblait opérer la grande conversion d'une société à l'autre. Mais les disciplines à leur tour connaîtraient une crise, au profit de nouvelles forces qui se mettraient lentement en place, et qui se précipiteraient après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale : les sociétés disciplinaires, c'était déjà ce que nous n'étions plus, ce que nous cessions d'être.
Nous sommes dans une crise généralisée de tous les milieux d'enfermement, prison, hôpital, usine, école, famille. La famille est un « intérieur », en crise comme tout autre intérieur, scolaire, professionnel, etc. Les ministres compétents n'ont cessé d'annoncer des réformes supposées nécessaires. Réformer l'école, réformer l'industrie, l'hôpital, l'armée, la prison ; mais chacun sait que ces institutions sont finies, à plus ou moins longue échéance. Il s'agit seulement de gérer leur agonie et d'occuper les gens, jusqu'à l'installation de nouvelles forces qui frappent à la porte. Ce sont les sociétés de contrôle qui sont en train de remplacer les sociétés disciplinaires. « Contrôle », c'est le nom que Burroughs propose pour désigner le nouveau monstre, et que Foucault reconnaît comme notre proche avenir. Paul Virilio aussi ne cesse d'analyser les formes ultra-rapides de contrôle à l'air libre, qui remplacent les vieilles disciplines opérant dans la durée d'un système clos. Il n'y a pas lieu d'invoquer des productions pharmaceutiques extraordinaires, des formations nucléaires, des manipulations génétiques, bien qu'elles soient destinées à intervenir dans le nouveau processus. Il n'y a pas lieu de demander quel est le régime le plus dur, ou le plus tolérable, car c'est en chacun d'eux que s'affrontent les libérations et les asservissements. Par exemple dans la crise de l'hôpital comme milieu d'enfermement, la sectorisation, les hôpitaux de jour, les soins à domicile ont pu marquer d'abord de nouvelles libertés, mais participer aussi à des mécanismes de contrôle qui rivalisent avec les plus durs enfermements. Il n'y a pas lieu de craindre ou d'espérer, mais de chercher de nouvelles armes.
Logique
Les différents internats ou milieux d'enfermement par lesquels l'individu passe sont des variables indépendantes : on est censé chaque fois recommencer à zéro, et le langage commun de tous ces milieux existe, mais est analogique. Tandis que les différents contrôlats sont des variations inséparables, formant un système à géométrie variable dont le langage est numérique (ce qui ne veut pas dire nécessairement binaire). Les enfermements sont des moules, des moulages distincts, mais les contrôles sont une modulation, comme un moulage auto-déformant qui changerait continûment, d'un instant à l'autre, ou comme un tamis dont les mailles changeraient d'un point à un autre. On le voit bien dans la question des salaires : l'usine était un corps qui portait ses forces intérieures à un point d'équilibre, le plus haut possible pour la production, le plus bas possible pour les salaires ; mais, dans une société de contrôle, l'entreprise a remplacé l'usine, et l'entreprise est une âme, un gaz. Sans doute l'usine connaissait déjà le système des primes, mais l'entreprise s'efforce plus profondément d'imposer une modulation de chaque salaire, dans des états de perpétuelle métastabilité qui passent par des challenges, concours et colloques extrêmement comiques. Si les jeux télévisés les plus idiots ont tant de succès, c'est parce qu'ils expriment adéquatement la situation d'entreprise. L'usine constituait les individus en corps, pour le double avantage du patronat qui surveillait chaque élément dans la masse, et des syndicats qui mobilisaient une masse de résistance ; mais l'entreprise ne cesse d'introduire une rivalité inexpiable comme saine émulation, excellente motivation qui oppose les individus entre eux et traverse chacun, le divisant en lui-même. Le principe modulateur du « salaire au mérite » n'est pas sans tenter l'Éducation nationale elle-même : en effet, de même que l'entreprise remplace l'usine, la formation permanente tend à remplacer l'école, et le contrôle continu remplacer l'examen. Ce qui est le plus sûr moyen de livrer l'école à l'entreprise.
Dans les sociétés de discipline, on n'arrêtait pas de recommencer (de l'école à la caserne, de la caserne à l'usine), tandis que dans les sociétés de contrôle on n'en finit jamais avec rien, l'entreprise, la formation, le service étant les états métastables et coexistants d'une même modulation, comme d'un déformateur universel. Kafka qui s'installait déjà à la charnière de deux types de société a décrit dans Le procès les formes juridiques les plus redoutables : l'acquittement apparent des sociétés disciplinaires (entre deux enfermements), l'atermoiement illimité des sociétés de contrôle (en variation continue) sont deux modes de vie juridiques très différents, et si notre droit est hésitant, lui-même en crise, c'est parce que nous quittons l'un pour entrer dans l'autre. Les sociétés disciplinaires ont deux pôles : la signature qui indique l'individu, et le nombre ou numéro matricule qui indique sa position dans une masse. C'est que les disciplines n'ont jamais vu d'incompatibilité entre les deux, et c'est en même temps que le pouvoir est massifiant et individuant, c'est-à-dire constitue en corps ceux sur lesquels il s'exerce et moule l'individualité de chaque membre du corps (Foucault voyait l'origine de ce double souci dans le pouvoir pastoral du prêtre - le troupeau et chacune des bêtes - mais le pouvoir civil allait se faire « pasteur » laïc à son tour avec d'autres moyens). Dans les sociétés de contrôle, au contraire, l'essentiel n'est plus une signature ni un nombre, mais un chiffre : le chiffre est un mot de passe, tandis que les sociétés disciplinaires sont réglées par des mots d'ordre (aussi bien du point de vue de
l'intégration que de la résistance). Le langage numérique du contrôle est fait de chiffres, qui marquent l'accès à l'information, ou le rejet. On ne se trouve plus devant le couple masse-individu. Les individus sont devenus des « dividuels », et les masses, des échantillons, des données, des marchés ou des « banques ». C'est peut-être l'argent qui exprime le mieux la distinction des deux sociétés, puisque la discipline s'est toujours rapportée à des monnaies moulées qui renfermaient de l'or comme nombre étalon, tandis que le contrôle renvoie à des échanges flottants, modulations qui font intervenir comme chiffre un pourcentage de différentes monnaies échantillons. La vieille taupe monétaire est l'animal des milieux d'enfermement, mais le serpent est celui des sociétés de contrôle. Nous sommes passés d'un animal à l'autre, de la taupe au serpent, dans le régime où nous vivons, mais aussi dans notre manière de vivre et nos rapports avec autrui. L 'homme des disciplines était un producteur discontinu d'énergie, mais l'homme du contrôle est plutôt ondulatoire, mis en orbite, sur faisceau continu. Partout le surf a déjà remplacé les vieux sports.
Il est facile de faire correspondre à chaque société des types de machines, non pas que les machines soient déterminantes, mais parce qu'elles expriment les formes sociales capables de leur donner naissance et de s'en servir. Les vieilles sociétés de souveraineté maniaient des machines simples, leviers, poulies, horloges ; mais les sociétés disciplinaires récentes avaient pour équipement des machines énergétiques, avec le danger passif de l'entropie, et le danger actif du sabotage ; les sociétés de contrôle opèrent par machines de troisième espèce, machines informatiques et ordinateurs dont le danger passif est le brouillage, et l'actif, le piratage et l'introduction de virus. Ce n'est pas une évolution technologique sans être plus profondément une mutation du capitalisme. C'est une mutation déjà bien connue qui peut se résumer ainsi : le capitalisme du XIXè siècle est à concentration, pour la production, et de propriété. Il érige donc l'usine en milieu d'enfermement, le capitaliste étant propriétaire des moyens de production, mais aussi éventuellement propriétaire d'autres milieux conçus par analogie (la maison familiale de l'ouvrier, l'école). Quant au marché, il est conquis tantôt par spécialisation, tantôt par colonisation, tantôt par abaissement des coûts de production. Mais, dans la situation actuelle, le capitalisme n'est plus pour la production, qu'il relègue souvent dans la périphérie du tiers monde, même sous les formes complexes du textile, de la métallurgie ou du pétrole. C'est un capitalisme de surproduction. Il n'achète plus des matières premières et ne vend plus des produits tout faits : il achète les produits tout faits, ou monte des pièces détachées. Ce qu'il veut vendre, c'est des services, et ce qu'il veut acheter, ce sont des actions. Ce n'est plus un capitalisme pour la production, mais pour le produit, c'est-à-dire pour la vente ou pour le marché. Aussi est-il essentiellement dispersif, et l'usine a cédé la place à l'entreprise. La famille, l'école, l'armée, l'usine ne sont plus des milieux analogiques distincts qui convergent vers un propriétaire, État ou puissance privée, mais les figures chiffrées, déformables et transformables, d'une même entreprise qui n'a plus que des gestionnaires. Même l'art a quitté les milieux clos pour entrer dans les circuits ouverts de la banque. Les conquêtes de marché se font par prise de contrôle et non plus par formation de discipline, par fixation des cours plus encore que par abaissement des coûts, par transformation de produit plus que par spécialisation de production. La corruption y gagne une nouvelle puissance. Le service de vente est devenu le centre ou l'« âme » de l'entreprise. On nous apprend que les entreprises ont une âme, ce qui est bien la nouvelle la plus terrifiante du monde. Le marketing est maintenant l'instrument du contrôle social, et forme la race impudente de nos maîtres. Le contrôle est à court terme et à rotation rapide, mais aussi continu et illimité, tandis que la discipline était de longue durée, infinie et discontinue. L'homme n'est plus l'homme enfermé, mais l'homme endetté. Il est vrai que le capitalisme a gardé pour constante l'extrême misère des trois quarts de l'humanité, trop pauvres pour la dette, trop nombreux pour l'enfermement : le contrôle n'aura pas seulement à affronter les dissipations de frontières, mais les explosions de bidonvilles ou de ghettos.
Programme
Il n'y a pas besoin de science-fiction pour concevoir un mécanisme de contrôle qui donne à chaque instant la position d'un élément en milieu ouvert, animal dans une réserve, homme dans une entreprise (collier électronique). Félix Guattari imaginait une ville où chacun pouvait quitter son appartement, sa rue, son quartier, grâce à sa carte électronique (dividuelle) qui faisait lever telle ou telle barrière ; mais aussi bien la carte pouvait être recrachée tel jour, ou entre telles heures ; ce qui compte n'est pas la barrière, mais l'ordinateur qui repère la position de chacun, licite ou illicite, et opère une modulation universelle.
L'étude socio-technique des mécanismes de contrôle, saisis à leur aurore, devrait être catégorielle et décrire ce qui est déjà en train de s'installer à la place des milieux d'enfermement disciplinaires, dont tout le monde annonce la crise. Il se peut que de vieux moyens, empruntés aux anciennes sociétés de souveraineté, reviennent sur scène, mais avec les adaptations nécessaires. Ce qui compte, c'est que nous sommes au début de quelque chose. Dans le régime des prisons : la recherche de peines de « substitution » au moins pour la petite délinquance, et l'utilisation de colliers électroniques qui imposent au condamné de rester chez lui à telles heures. Dans le régime des écoles : les formes de contrôle continu, et l'action de la formation permanente sur l'école, l'abandon cotres pondant de toute recherche à l'Université, l'introduction de l' « entreprise » à tous les niveaux de scolarité. Dans le régime des hôpitaux : la nouvelle médecine « sans médecin ni malade » qui dégage des malades potentiels et des sujets à risque, qui ne témoigne nullement d'un progrès vers l'individuation, comme on le dit, mais substitue au corps individuel ou numérique le chiffre d'une matière « dividuelle » à contrôler. Dans le régime d'entreprise : les nouveaux traitements de l'argent, des produits et des hommes qui ne passent plus par la vieille forme-usine. Ce sont des exemples assez minces, mais qui permettraient de mieux comprendre ce qu on entend par crise des institutions, c'est-à-dire l'installation progressive et dispersée d'un nouveau régime de domination. Une des questions les plus importantes concernerait l'inaptitude des syndicats : liés dans toute leur histoire à la lutte contre les disciplines ou dans les milieux d'enfermement, pourront-ils s'adapter ou laisseront-ils place à de nouvelles formes de résistance contre les sociétés de contrôle ? Peut-on déjà saisir des ébauches de ces formes à venir, capables de s'attaquer aux joies du marketing ? Beaucoup de jeunes gens réclament étrangement d'être « motivés », ils redemandent des stages et de la formation permanente ; c'est à eux de découvrir ce à quoi on les fait servir, comme leurs aînés ont découvert non sans peine la finalité des disciplines. Les anneaux d'un serpent sont encore plus compliqués que les trous d'une taupinière.
Gilles Deleuze
"Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle", in L 'autre journal, n°1, mai 1990
Foucault a situé les sociétés disciplinaires aux XVIIIè et XIXè siècles ; elles atteignent à leur apogée au début du XXè. Elles procèdent à l'organisation des grands milieux d'enfermement. L'individu ne cesse de passer d'un milieu clos à un autre, chacun ayant ses lois : d'abord la famille, puis l'école (« tu n'es plus dans ta famille »), puis la caserne (« tu n'es plus à l'école »), puis l'usine, de temps en temps l'hôpital, éventuellement la prison qui est le milieu d'enfermement par excellence. C'est la prison qui sert de modèle analogique : l'héroïne d'Europe 51 peut s'écrier quand elle voit des ouvriers « j'ai cru voir des condamnés... ». Foucault a très bien analysé le projet idéal des milieux d'enfermement, particulièrement visible dans l'usine : concentrer ; répartir dans l'espace ; ordonner dans le temps ; composer dans l'espace-temps une force productive dont l'effet doit être supérieur à la somme des forces élémentaires. Mais ce que Foucault savait aussi, c'était la brièveté de ce modèle : il succédait à des sociétés de souveraineté, dont le but et les fonctions étaient tout autres (prélever plutôt qu'organiser la production, décider de la mort plutôt que gérer la vie) ; la transition s'était faite progressivement, et Napoléon semblait opérer la grande conversion d'une société à l'autre. Mais les disciplines à leur tour connaîtraient une crise, au profit de nouvelles forces qui se mettraient lentement en place, et qui se précipiteraient après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale : les sociétés disciplinaires, c'était déjà ce que nous n'étions plus, ce que nous cessions d'être.
Nous sommes dans une crise généralisée de tous les milieux d'enfermement, prison, hôpital, usine, école, famille. La famille est un « intérieur », en crise comme tout autre intérieur, scolaire, professionnel, etc. Les ministres compétents n'ont cessé d'annoncer des réformes supposées nécessaires. Réformer l'école, réformer l'industrie, l'hôpital, l'armée, la prison ; mais chacun sait que ces institutions sont finies, à plus ou moins longue échéance. Il s'agit seulement de gérer leur agonie et d'occuper les gens, jusqu'à l'installation de nouvelles forces qui frappent à la porte. Ce sont les sociétés de contrôle qui sont en train de remplacer les sociétés disciplinaires. « Contrôle », c'est le nom que Burroughs propose pour désigner le nouveau monstre, et que Foucault reconnaît comme notre proche avenir. Paul Virilio aussi ne cesse d'analyser les formes ultra-rapides de contrôle à l'air libre, qui remplacent les vieilles disciplines opérant dans la durée d'un système clos. Il n'y a pas lieu d'invoquer des productions pharmaceutiques extraordinaires, des formations nucléaires, des manipulations génétiques, bien qu'elles soient destinées à intervenir dans le nouveau processus. Il n'y a pas lieu de demander quel est le régime le plus dur, ou le plus tolérable, car c'est en chacun d'eux que s'affrontent les libérations et les asservissements. Par exemple dans la crise de l'hôpital comme milieu d'enfermement, la sectorisation, les hôpitaux de jour, les soins à domicile ont pu marquer d'abord de nouvelles libertés, mais participer aussi à des mécanismes de contrôle qui rivalisent avec les plus durs enfermements. Il n'y a pas lieu de craindre ou d'espérer, mais de chercher de nouvelles armes.
Logique
Les différents internats ou milieux d'enfermement par lesquels l'individu passe sont des variables indépendantes : on est censé chaque fois recommencer à zéro, et le langage commun de tous ces milieux existe, mais est analogique. Tandis que les différents contrôlats sont des variations inséparables, formant un système à géométrie variable dont le langage est numérique (ce qui ne veut pas dire nécessairement binaire). Les enfermements sont des moules, des moulages distincts, mais les contrôles sont une modulation, comme un moulage auto-déformant qui changerait continûment, d'un instant à l'autre, ou comme un tamis dont les mailles changeraient d'un point à un autre. On le voit bien dans la question des salaires : l'usine était un corps qui portait ses forces intérieures à un point d'équilibre, le plus haut possible pour la production, le plus bas possible pour les salaires ; mais, dans une société de contrôle, l'entreprise a remplacé l'usine, et l'entreprise est une âme, un gaz. Sans doute l'usine connaissait déjà le système des primes, mais l'entreprise s'efforce plus profondément d'imposer une modulation de chaque salaire, dans des états de perpétuelle métastabilité qui passent par des challenges, concours et colloques extrêmement comiques. Si les jeux télévisés les plus idiots ont tant de succès, c'est parce qu'ils expriment adéquatement la situation d'entreprise. L'usine constituait les individus en corps, pour le double avantage du patronat qui surveillait chaque élément dans la masse, et des syndicats qui mobilisaient une masse de résistance ; mais l'entreprise ne cesse d'introduire une rivalité inexpiable comme saine émulation, excellente motivation qui oppose les individus entre eux et traverse chacun, le divisant en lui-même. Le principe modulateur du « salaire au mérite » n'est pas sans tenter l'Éducation nationale elle-même : en effet, de même que l'entreprise remplace l'usine, la formation permanente tend à remplacer l'école, et le contrôle continu remplacer l'examen. Ce qui est le plus sûr moyen de livrer l'école à l'entreprise.
Dans les sociétés de discipline, on n'arrêtait pas de recommencer (de l'école à la caserne, de la caserne à l'usine), tandis que dans les sociétés de contrôle on n'en finit jamais avec rien, l'entreprise, la formation, le service étant les états métastables et coexistants d'une même modulation, comme d'un déformateur universel. Kafka qui s'installait déjà à la charnière de deux types de société a décrit dans Le procès les formes juridiques les plus redoutables : l'acquittement apparent des sociétés disciplinaires (entre deux enfermements), l'atermoiement illimité des sociétés de contrôle (en variation continue) sont deux modes de vie juridiques très différents, et si notre droit est hésitant, lui-même en crise, c'est parce que nous quittons l'un pour entrer dans l'autre. Les sociétés disciplinaires ont deux pôles : la signature qui indique l'individu, et le nombre ou numéro matricule qui indique sa position dans une masse. C'est que les disciplines n'ont jamais vu d'incompatibilité entre les deux, et c'est en même temps que le pouvoir est massifiant et individuant, c'est-à-dire constitue en corps ceux sur lesquels il s'exerce et moule l'individualité de chaque membre du corps (Foucault voyait l'origine de ce double souci dans le pouvoir pastoral du prêtre - le troupeau et chacune des bêtes - mais le pouvoir civil allait se faire « pasteur » laïc à son tour avec d'autres moyens). Dans les sociétés de contrôle, au contraire, l'essentiel n'est plus une signature ni un nombre, mais un chiffre : le chiffre est un mot de passe, tandis que les sociétés disciplinaires sont réglées par des mots d'ordre (aussi bien du point de vue de
l'intégration que de la résistance). Le langage numérique du contrôle est fait de chiffres, qui marquent l'accès à l'information, ou le rejet. On ne se trouve plus devant le couple masse-individu. Les individus sont devenus des « dividuels », et les masses, des échantillons, des données, des marchés ou des « banques ». C'est peut-être l'argent qui exprime le mieux la distinction des deux sociétés, puisque la discipline s'est toujours rapportée à des monnaies moulées qui renfermaient de l'or comme nombre étalon, tandis que le contrôle renvoie à des échanges flottants, modulations qui font intervenir comme chiffre un pourcentage de différentes monnaies échantillons. La vieille taupe monétaire est l'animal des milieux d'enfermement, mais le serpent est celui des sociétés de contrôle. Nous sommes passés d'un animal à l'autre, de la taupe au serpent, dans le régime où nous vivons, mais aussi dans notre manière de vivre et nos rapports avec autrui. L 'homme des disciplines était un producteur discontinu d'énergie, mais l'homme du contrôle est plutôt ondulatoire, mis en orbite, sur faisceau continu. Partout le surf a déjà remplacé les vieux sports.
Il est facile de faire correspondre à chaque société des types de machines, non pas que les machines soient déterminantes, mais parce qu'elles expriment les formes sociales capables de leur donner naissance et de s'en servir. Les vieilles sociétés de souveraineté maniaient des machines simples, leviers, poulies, horloges ; mais les sociétés disciplinaires récentes avaient pour équipement des machines énergétiques, avec le danger passif de l'entropie, et le danger actif du sabotage ; les sociétés de contrôle opèrent par machines de troisième espèce, machines informatiques et ordinateurs dont le danger passif est le brouillage, et l'actif, le piratage et l'introduction de virus. Ce n'est pas une évolution technologique sans être plus profondément une mutation du capitalisme. C'est une mutation déjà bien connue qui peut se résumer ainsi : le capitalisme du XIXè siècle est à concentration, pour la production, et de propriété. Il érige donc l'usine en milieu d'enfermement, le capitaliste étant propriétaire des moyens de production, mais aussi éventuellement propriétaire d'autres milieux conçus par analogie (la maison familiale de l'ouvrier, l'école). Quant au marché, il est conquis tantôt par spécialisation, tantôt par colonisation, tantôt par abaissement des coûts de production. Mais, dans la situation actuelle, le capitalisme n'est plus pour la production, qu'il relègue souvent dans la périphérie du tiers monde, même sous les formes complexes du textile, de la métallurgie ou du pétrole. C'est un capitalisme de surproduction. Il n'achète plus des matières premières et ne vend plus des produits tout faits : il achète les produits tout faits, ou monte des pièces détachées. Ce qu'il veut vendre, c'est des services, et ce qu'il veut acheter, ce sont des actions. Ce n'est plus un capitalisme pour la production, mais pour le produit, c'est-à-dire pour la vente ou pour le marché. Aussi est-il essentiellement dispersif, et l'usine a cédé la place à l'entreprise. La famille, l'école, l'armée, l'usine ne sont plus des milieux analogiques distincts qui convergent vers un propriétaire, État ou puissance privée, mais les figures chiffrées, déformables et transformables, d'une même entreprise qui n'a plus que des gestionnaires. Même l'art a quitté les milieux clos pour entrer dans les circuits ouverts de la banque. Les conquêtes de marché se font par prise de contrôle et non plus par formation de discipline, par fixation des cours plus encore que par abaissement des coûts, par transformation de produit plus que par spécialisation de production. La corruption y gagne une nouvelle puissance. Le service de vente est devenu le centre ou l'« âme » de l'entreprise. On nous apprend que les entreprises ont une âme, ce qui est bien la nouvelle la plus terrifiante du monde. Le marketing est maintenant l'instrument du contrôle social, et forme la race impudente de nos maîtres. Le contrôle est à court terme et à rotation rapide, mais aussi continu et illimité, tandis que la discipline était de longue durée, infinie et discontinue. L'homme n'est plus l'homme enfermé, mais l'homme endetté. Il est vrai que le capitalisme a gardé pour constante l'extrême misère des trois quarts de l'humanité, trop pauvres pour la dette, trop nombreux pour l'enfermement : le contrôle n'aura pas seulement à affronter les dissipations de frontières, mais les explosions de bidonvilles ou de ghettos.
Programme
Il n'y a pas besoin de science-fiction pour concevoir un mécanisme de contrôle qui donne à chaque instant la position d'un élément en milieu ouvert, animal dans une réserve, homme dans une entreprise (collier électronique). Félix Guattari imaginait une ville où chacun pouvait quitter son appartement, sa rue, son quartier, grâce à sa carte électronique (dividuelle) qui faisait lever telle ou telle barrière ; mais aussi bien la carte pouvait être recrachée tel jour, ou entre telles heures ; ce qui compte n'est pas la barrière, mais l'ordinateur qui repère la position de chacun, licite ou illicite, et opère une modulation universelle.
L'étude socio-technique des mécanismes de contrôle, saisis à leur aurore, devrait être catégorielle et décrire ce qui est déjà en train de s'installer à la place des milieux d'enfermement disciplinaires, dont tout le monde annonce la crise. Il se peut que de vieux moyens, empruntés aux anciennes sociétés de souveraineté, reviennent sur scène, mais avec les adaptations nécessaires. Ce qui compte, c'est que nous sommes au début de quelque chose. Dans le régime des prisons : la recherche de peines de « substitution » au moins pour la petite délinquance, et l'utilisation de colliers électroniques qui imposent au condamné de rester chez lui à telles heures. Dans le régime des écoles : les formes de contrôle continu, et l'action de la formation permanente sur l'école, l'abandon cotres pondant de toute recherche à l'Université, l'introduction de l' « entreprise » à tous les niveaux de scolarité. Dans le régime des hôpitaux : la nouvelle médecine « sans médecin ni malade » qui dégage des malades potentiels et des sujets à risque, qui ne témoigne nullement d'un progrès vers l'individuation, comme on le dit, mais substitue au corps individuel ou numérique le chiffre d'une matière « dividuelle » à contrôler. Dans le régime d'entreprise : les nouveaux traitements de l'argent, des produits et des hommes qui ne passent plus par la vieille forme-usine. Ce sont des exemples assez minces, mais qui permettraient de mieux comprendre ce qu on entend par crise des institutions, c'est-à-dire l'installation progressive et dispersée d'un nouveau régime de domination. Une des questions les plus importantes concernerait l'inaptitude des syndicats : liés dans toute leur histoire à la lutte contre les disciplines ou dans les milieux d'enfermement, pourront-ils s'adapter ou laisseront-ils place à de nouvelles formes de résistance contre les sociétés de contrôle ? Peut-on déjà saisir des ébauches de ces formes à venir, capables de s'attaquer aux joies du marketing ? Beaucoup de jeunes gens réclament étrangement d'être « motivés », ils redemandent des stages et de la formation permanente ; c'est à eux de découvrir ce à quoi on les fait servir, comme leurs aînés ont découvert non sans peine la finalité des disciplines. Les anneaux d'un serpent sont encore plus compliqués que les trous d'une taupinière.
Gilles Deleuze
"Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle", in L 'autre journal, n°1, mai 1990
Friday, December 26, 2008
The poor: a threatening and indispensable enemy. From the dangerous classes to the danger of the multitude.
The corsi e ricorsi of history are strange. It is renowned that throughout the history of capitalism the definition of ‘dangerous classes’ has been very flexible. In the era of manufacture the poor were the dangerous: the multitude of penniless and vagabonds agricultural workers and landless peasants forced to move towards cities and factories. In the era of large industry, the workers became the ‘dangerous class’: assembled en masse in the factory, they exercised a pressure that affected all social relations; the dangerous class had to be pushed on the path of poverty, unemployment, and the industrial reserve army. Today the poor is the enemy once again: in Postfordism, the flexible worker - mobile and precarious, capable of producing cognitive and intellectual surplus - is the enemy, threatened by means of exclusion, as if poverty was not enough. Precarious middle classes, taylorised intellectual labour and an immaterial labour force degraded through industrial instrumentalisation and the alienation of value: this is the fate of the new condition of poverty. However, never has the poor been in the condition of being as productive as he is now. In social production, since labour becomes cooperative, a concrete common realisation - and this common constitutes the core necessary condition for the production of commodities and services - exclusion would seem to be impossible. Despite the myriad of mechanisms of exclusion to which he is subjected, the poor expresses an enormous power of life and production. What is excluded through the legal and economic forms of capital is nevertheless included in the circuits of social and biopolitical production. Thus the poor, the unemployed, the homeless and wage less represent first of all a contradictory situation: they are excluded from a general social condition that conceives of value as built in community. This is the reason for the dangerousness of the poor, the substance of his ‘being foe’ to the actual form of capitalist command.
Despite its current crisis, the ideology of labour keeps producing negative effects. In the era of large manufacture, working class organisation never liked the poor: if the poor were excluded from the productive process, he was also excluded from any meaningful role in political organisation. Like the capitalists, the working class Left also conceived of the poor as dangerous, not only because the poor can appear to be unproductive social parasites (thieves, prostitutes, junkies etc.) but also because they seem politically unstable and basically irrational. In fact, at certain times in history fascists and reactionary populism used the poor as the social base and weapon against the working class, and counting on their disorganisation and resentment for their exclusion. The working class movement often imagined the poor to be part of the enemy, a full member of that industrial reserve army that could attack the wage relation and put workers’ employment in danger. Whilst communists certainly denounced labour aristocracies, the diffidence towards the poor would not cease so long as the ideology of labour hegemonised the minds of socialists.
In Postfordism the poor comes out of the picture into which he had been forced by large manufacture capitalism and the operaismo of that stage of social composition of labour. In many ways, the more the worker is positively inserted in social productive activity, the poorer he is today. The distinction between directly productive labour and unproductive labour has always been dubious, also in Marxian discourse. However, for Marx the poor were neither productive nor unproductive: they lied outside of production, as the savage lies outside of civilisation. But just as the savage fully resides inside globalisation today, so has the poor entirely re-entered social production. His productive capacity is not virtual - as it used to be when the vagabond was pushed from the countryside to new industrial cities. The labour capacity of the poor is now actual because the entire set of social relations is productive. However, the poor is still the enemy or has become again the enemy par excellence because he is necessary to production, rich in productive capacity and included in social production. All of this, just in the name of the need for inclusion, makes him dangerous and inimical. As it is always the case for the enemy of society, the poor must fight against poverty and thus recognise himself as his own enemy. Such was the case of the worker who, struggling against exploitation, had to conceive his own destruction. The suppression of poverty must then represent itself as the suppression of the poor. But the suppression of poverty is also a struggle against those who organise poverty as the basis of their wealth and of capitalist development.
If it is true that the poor is included in the biopolitical texture of social production, the struggle against poverty will be a constituent one. Poverty reveals the subversive content of the universal participation of the labour force to social production. In the era of large industry the struggles of the poor were always resistance struggles - whatever their outcome. In England, Germany, the United States in the 1920's, and again in Europe during the 1970's, the struggles of the poor were struggles for appropriation. Resistance and appropriation are the struggles of the excluded, but today, with the social inclusion of labour, the struggles of the poor merge and become entangled with those of the workers and they are constituent. They only become effective when they manage to halt the mechanisms of exploitation and hierarchisation of the global labour force. Because of this, citizenship income becomes the constituent political key of the struggles of the poor: it merges the political recognition of inclusion and the project of democratic management of globalisation. Thus the poor becomes the real enemy.
Antonio Negri
Source : Published on Global Magazine, Issue 2, May 2003. Translated by Arianna Bove
Despite its current crisis, the ideology of labour keeps producing negative effects. In the era of large manufacture, working class organisation never liked the poor: if the poor were excluded from the productive process, he was also excluded from any meaningful role in political organisation. Like the capitalists, the working class Left also conceived of the poor as dangerous, not only because the poor can appear to be unproductive social parasites (thieves, prostitutes, junkies etc.) but also because they seem politically unstable and basically irrational. In fact, at certain times in history fascists and reactionary populism used the poor as the social base and weapon against the working class, and counting on their disorganisation and resentment for their exclusion. The working class movement often imagined the poor to be part of the enemy, a full member of that industrial reserve army that could attack the wage relation and put workers’ employment in danger. Whilst communists certainly denounced labour aristocracies, the diffidence towards the poor would not cease so long as the ideology of labour hegemonised the minds of socialists.
In Postfordism the poor comes out of the picture into which he had been forced by large manufacture capitalism and the operaismo of that stage of social composition of labour. In many ways, the more the worker is positively inserted in social productive activity, the poorer he is today. The distinction between directly productive labour and unproductive labour has always been dubious, also in Marxian discourse. However, for Marx the poor were neither productive nor unproductive: they lied outside of production, as the savage lies outside of civilisation. But just as the savage fully resides inside globalisation today, so has the poor entirely re-entered social production. His productive capacity is not virtual - as it used to be when the vagabond was pushed from the countryside to new industrial cities. The labour capacity of the poor is now actual because the entire set of social relations is productive. However, the poor is still the enemy or has become again the enemy par excellence because he is necessary to production, rich in productive capacity and included in social production. All of this, just in the name of the need for inclusion, makes him dangerous and inimical. As it is always the case for the enemy of society, the poor must fight against poverty and thus recognise himself as his own enemy. Such was the case of the worker who, struggling against exploitation, had to conceive his own destruction. The suppression of poverty must then represent itself as the suppression of the poor. But the suppression of poverty is also a struggle against those who organise poverty as the basis of their wealth and of capitalist development.
If it is true that the poor is included in the biopolitical texture of social production, the struggle against poverty will be a constituent one. Poverty reveals the subversive content of the universal participation of the labour force to social production. In the era of large industry the struggles of the poor were always resistance struggles - whatever their outcome. In England, Germany, the United States in the 1920's, and again in Europe during the 1970's, the struggles of the poor were struggles for appropriation. Resistance and appropriation are the struggles of the excluded, but today, with the social inclusion of labour, the struggles of the poor merge and become entangled with those of the workers and they are constituent. They only become effective when they manage to halt the mechanisms of exploitation and hierarchisation of the global labour force. Because of this, citizenship income becomes the constituent political key of the struggles of the poor: it merges the political recognition of inclusion and the project of democratic management of globalisation. Thus the poor becomes the real enemy.
Antonio Negri
Source : Published on Global Magazine, Issue 2, May 2003. Translated by Arianna Bove
under construction
A collaborative artistic experiment based on the idea of re- construction
Artists :Iasonas Kontovrakis, Xanthi Kostorizou,Alexandros Laios, Spiros Nakas, Chrysanthi Papaxenou,Georgia Tourmouzi, Panos Famelis, Maro Fasouli, Kostas Christopoulos
Using improvisation as the central process, a group of artists embark on an adventure constructing a building using the remains found in the surrounding area. The final construction, while housing a common idea, simultaneously cohabitates differing artistic worlds and values. The whole process remains open to additional intervention and elaboration once the initial construction has been completed. Thus adding elements, which will determine the form and value of this experiment and symbolic cohabitation.
Source:our-living-room.blogspot.com
Artists :Iasonas Kontovrakis, Xanthi Kostorizou,Alexandros Laios, Spiros Nakas, Chrysanthi Papaxenou,Georgia Tourmouzi, Panos Famelis, Maro Fasouli, Kostas Christopoulos
Using improvisation as the central process, a group of artists embark on an adventure constructing a building using the remains found in the surrounding area. The final construction, while housing a common idea, simultaneously cohabitates differing artistic worlds and values. The whole process remains open to additional intervention and elaboration once the initial construction has been completed. Thus adding elements, which will determine the form and value of this experiment and symbolic cohabitation.
Source:our-living-room.blogspot.com
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Losing it all to Win again
"Losing it all to Win again "
2007
51 x 13 x 58 cm
wood, acrylic, wool, cloth
Friday, December 19, 2008
Base:Object
Base:Object brings together five new sculptures which explore the status of the pedestal in contemporary art. Strictly as a tool to present a sculpture, to clarify what is and what is not an art object, and to signify the importance of what is being displayed, the pedestal has been undermined in modern art history since Constantin Brancusi's sculptures in the earliest decades of the 20th century. All of the works in the exhibition subversively complicate the duality of the pedestal/art object relationship and unlike Minimalist sculpture from the 1960s, choose to work with and through the form of the pedestal without completely obliterating it. The pedestal can act as a kind of barrier between art and non-art, simultaneously anointing the displayed and effacing itself. When the pedestal becomes the art object, these hierarchies are crushed into a shimmering sea of infinite difference.
Do you know how diamonds get to us? Three hundred miles underground are heats and pressures that crush carbon into sparkling shapes, driven for months or days or hours along hotel corridors called diamond pipes until they erupt in a pile of taffeta and chocolate some moonlit afternoon, an event no human has ever witnessed.
-Anne Carson
The sculptures in Base:Object figure fragility and precariousness, constriction, binding, and fracturing. Surfaces are rough and raw and scarred. These works are experiments to set meaning in motion. These sculptures deny the autonomy of the art object and yet celebrate the motivations and compulsions to make art. The works in this exhibition and by this generation of artists short circuit the embedded ideologies of presentation and recast traditional signs of importance and value. This subversion is made manifest by working a kind of alchemy on the detritus and cheap materials overlooked in a society of consumption.
Sara Barker
abject posture
2008
All of the works in Base:Object display a marked interest in materiality and the painstaking effort of creating an object both seemingly casual and formally rigorous. Eschewing bronze, porcelain, and carved wood, the works in Base:Object are constructed from the everyday materials of the urban world: concrete, Formica, urethane, nylon yarn, canvas, carpet, sheets of glass, bits of wood, foam, drywall. They are the children of Minimalist boxes, no longer simply reflecting the viewers gaze back into the world at large, but displaying their origins in that world. It's the Minimalist cube or the Rauschenberg combine infected by the desires and conditions of the society that bore them. Barker, Hill, Monahan, O'Brien, and Ruby are all working contemporaneously in a time of uncertainty, war, gross economic inequity, financial collapse, and unprecedented environmental destruction. Heats and pressures erupting form-possibilities of renewal built from the ruins of the present.
Sterling Ruby
Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity / DB Deth
2008
BASE: OBJECT
Sara Barker, Patrick Hill
Matthew Monahan, William J. O'Brien
Sterling Ruby
Curated by Cory Nomura
Andrea Rosen Gallery
Do you know how diamonds get to us? Three hundred miles underground are heats and pressures that crush carbon into sparkling shapes, driven for months or days or hours along hotel corridors called diamond pipes until they erupt in a pile of taffeta and chocolate some moonlit afternoon, an event no human has ever witnessed.
-Anne Carson
The sculptures in Base:Object figure fragility and precariousness, constriction, binding, and fracturing. Surfaces are rough and raw and scarred. These works are experiments to set meaning in motion. These sculptures deny the autonomy of the art object and yet celebrate the motivations and compulsions to make art. The works in this exhibition and by this generation of artists short circuit the embedded ideologies of presentation and recast traditional signs of importance and value. This subversion is made manifest by working a kind of alchemy on the detritus and cheap materials overlooked in a society of consumption.
Sara Barker
abject posture
2008
All of the works in Base:Object display a marked interest in materiality and the painstaking effort of creating an object both seemingly casual and formally rigorous. Eschewing bronze, porcelain, and carved wood, the works in Base:Object are constructed from the everyday materials of the urban world: concrete, Formica, urethane, nylon yarn, canvas, carpet, sheets of glass, bits of wood, foam, drywall. They are the children of Minimalist boxes, no longer simply reflecting the viewers gaze back into the world at large, but displaying their origins in that world. It's the Minimalist cube or the Rauschenberg combine infected by the desires and conditions of the society that bore them. Barker, Hill, Monahan, O'Brien, and Ruby are all working contemporaneously in a time of uncertainty, war, gross economic inequity, financial collapse, and unprecedented environmental destruction. Heats and pressures erupting form-possibilities of renewal built from the ruins of the present.
Sterling Ruby
Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity / DB Deth
2008
BASE: OBJECT
Sara Barker, Patrick Hill
Matthew Monahan, William J. O'Brien
Sterling Ruby
Curated by Cory Nomura
Andrea Rosen Gallery
The Parthenon of Books/Homage to Democracy
Marta Minujin, "The Parthenon of Books/Homage to Democracy, Buenos Aires,"
(December 1983)
Ομόνοια blues
Ή το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης
Η σύγχρονη πόλη ζει μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα αντίφαση. Από τη μια είναι χτισμένη με αδρανή υλικά και μεταβάλλεται αργά, στη λογική της μακράς διάρκειας που χαρακτήριζε πάντα τα οικοδομικά κελύφη της αρχιτεκτονικής της. Και από την άλλη είναι ο φυσικός φορέας της κοινωνικής και πολιτισμικής δραστηριότητας που μεταλλάσσεται διαρκώς με έναν φρενήρη ρυθμό κυκλοφορίας ανθρώπων και εμπορευμάτων, πληροφοριών και εικόνων κάθε είδους και μορφής. Είναι δύσκολο να συλλάβει το μυαλό μας την κινητικότητα αυτή, διαρκώς κινούμενο και το ίδιο, μέσα στο φυσικό του σώμα και στο δίκτυο της πληροφορίας, βιώνοντας την καθημερινότητα του χώρου ζωής και εργασίας, του αυτοκινήτου και του μέσου επικοινωνίας. Ολα γύρω είναι ή φαίνεται πως είναι σταθερά και αμετάβλητα. Η τριλογία της οδού Πανεπιστημίου- Βιβλιοθήκη, Πανεπιστήμιο, Ακαδημία- είναι όπως ήταν προτού γεννηθεί οποιοσδήποτε από εμάς, με εξαίρεση την πρόσφατη «επένδυση» ενός κτιρίου με «hondos» πίσω από τη Βιβλιοθήκη, στην οδό Ιπποκράτους, που έχει αλλάξει δραστικά το βάθος πεδίου. Και όχι μόνο δεν αλλάζουν τα κτίρια, αλλά συντηρούνται επίμονα και συστηματικά για να φαίνεται ότι δεν αλλάζουν. Το ίδιο ακριβώς συμβαίνει- παραδόξως- στην πλατεία της Ομόνοιας. Λέω «παραδόξως» γιατί οι περισσότεροι θα υποστήριζαν πως η πλατεία αυτή άλλαξε πολύ τα τελευταία χρόνια. Και όμως, η πλατεία, που ορίζεται από το μέτωπο των περιμετρικών κτιρίων, διατηρεί την τετράγωνη μορφή που είχε πάντα και περιβάλλεται από τα κτίρια που γνώρισα και εγώ σαν παιδί. Και εδώ τα κτίρια έχουν συντηρηθεί, καθαριστεί και αναδειχθεί για να εξασφαλιστεί το αμετάβλητο του αρχιτεκτονικού κελύφους, με εξαίρεση ένα, «ντυμένο» και αυτό με «hondos», στη γωνία της 3ης Σεπτεμβρίου. Αυτά που αλλάζουν περισσότερο από οτιδήποτε άλλο σε μια πόλη είναι τα κάθε είδους κινητά συστατικά της, οι άνθρωποι, τα αυτοκίνητα, τα εμπορεύματα, η εικόνα των εμπορευμάτων (τα «hondos» δηλαδή). Σε αυτά υποτάσσεται η οργάνωση των ροών της κίνησης και των εφήμερων στάσεων, αυτά εκφράζουν το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο και την πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση στο σύγχρονο αστικό τοπίο.
Η Ομόνοια ήταν και είναι ζωτικός πυκνωτής στη σύγχρονη μεγαλούπολη στην οποία ζούμε. Ο Δρομέας ήρθε και έφυγε, όπως έρχονται και φεύγουν οι δημοτικοί άρχοντες. Το σιντριβάνι του 1960, έργο αρχιτέκτονα και γλύπτη, διαρκώς μεταβαλλόμενο στη ροή της μέρας και της νύχτας, μείξη χρωμάτων και υδάτων, αυτοκινήτων και ανθρώπων, ήταν μια εφήμερη «εγκατάσταση» στη μακρά διάρκεια της πλατείας. Και η σύγχρονη πλατεία είναι το έδαφος μιας πολιτισμικής εντροπίας επειδή προσφέρει την ευκαιρία για λίγο μεγαλύτερη στάση στη διαρκώς μεταβαλλόμενη σύνθεση της κοινωνικής συγκρότησής της. Η αταξία αυτή είναι χαρακτηριστικό πύκνωμα της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης στην οποία αναφέρομαι. Οι διασταυρούμενες ροές φύλων και φυλών, συναλλαγών και ανταλλαγών, αυτοκινήτων, τουριστών και δύο γραμμών μετρό με οκτώ δρόμους που οδηγούν σε όλες τις γειτονιές της Αθήνας είναι το αποκορύφωμα της αστικής πλατείας της μεταβιομηχανικής κοινωνίας. Το πρωί και το απόγευμα, στο φως του ήλιου, στον ηλεκτρισμό του υπογείου, όλη τη νύχτα στις ανταύγειες του γενικού φωτισμού, η πλατεία είναι εξαιρετικά ζωντανή χωρίς να είναι ίδια. Μοιάζει με πλατείες από όλον τον κόσμο, που υλοποιούν το μητροπολιτικό ανάλογο της καρδιάς, Τimes Square και Αlexanderplatz, αλλά είναι ταυτοχρόνως διαμορφωμένη με ισχυρή αστική τυπολογία και είναι γεωγραφικά ορισμένη σε σχέση με το πολιτισμικό αποκορύφωμα της πόλης, την Ακρόπολη, ώστε να επιβάλλεται και ως κλασική πλατεία. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της σύγχρονης μεγαλούπολης είναι μια σύνθεση αντιθέσεων που γνωρίζαμε ήδη από τον περασμένο αιώνα, αλλά τώρα εκρήγνυνται ως πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση και επιταχύνονται σε πείσμα της αδράνειας του οικοδομικού περιβάλλοντος. Συγκρίνοντας την Ομόνοια του Γιώργου Ιωάννου με τη σημερινή μπορούμε να μετρήσουμε αυτή την αλλαγή και ίσως να ορίσουμε ένα υψηλότερο συντελεστή ρευστοποίησης των διαφόρων κοινωνικών δράσεων, αλλά δεν πρόκειται να εκπλαγούμε. Και όμως, η έκπληξη του ιθαγενούς κοινωνικού συνόλου ήταν απρόσμενα ηχηρή όταν σχεδιάστηκε η «τελευταία» Ομόνοια με το πρόσωπο της πόλης του 21ου αιώνα, ψηφιακή, διεθνής, κοινωνική, ως ιδανικό πλαίσιο της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης.
Η γενικευμένη αντίδραση απαίτησε αναδρομικά το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης του 19ου αιώνα, την πλατεία του μεγάλου χωριού, με τραπεζάκια έξω και δεντροστοιχίες, με την ευτυχία γραμμένη σε όλα τα πρόσωπα και βεβαίως με «καθαρότητα» σε όλες τις ταυτότητες και τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις. Και το ζήτησε πάνω από μια τεχνητή πόλη, στην «ταράτσα» του πολυώροφου επικέντρου της, στο roof-garden, έχοντας ήδη «απωθήσει» τη μη καθαρή σύνθεση των κοινωνικά και πολιτισμικά επίμεικτων δράσεων σε όλη την υπόλοιπη χώρα, στις γειτονιές και τα σπίτια, στα εργοστάσια και τα χωράφια, έχοντας εξορκίσει επιδεικτικά το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο και την πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση για χάρη μιας πόλης-θεάματος του εξιδανικευμένου εαυτού της. Ποιο μπορεί να είναι λοιπόν το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης σε μια εποχή της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης; Τι άλλο από ένα πεδίο συγκερασμού των πολιτισμικών και εθνικών ταυτοτήτων, των κοινωνικών και οικονομικών αποκλίσεων, των φυλετικών, των θρησκευτικών και ηθικών διακρίσεων. Στη Νέα Υόρκη, στο Λονδίνο, στο Παρίσι, στις μεγάλες πόλεις, η διαπολιτισμικότητα αυτή ήταν εγκατεστημένη από τον περασμένο αιώνα και αποτελούσε
ένα δεδομένο που έτρεφε, μέσα από την αντίθεση και τη σύγκρουση, την πολύβουη σύνθεση του αστικού προσώπου τους. Τόσοι και τόσοι από μας έχουν ταξιδέψει και έχουν απολαύσει τις «βρώμικες» πλατείες, έχουν περπατήσει σε ανήσυχους δρόμους των δυτικών μητροπόλεων, χαμένοι στη βαβούρα της πολιτισμικής συνύπαρξης και στο θέαμα των αντιφάσεων. Μαύρα, άσπρα και κίτρινα πρόσωπα, πολύχρωμα ρούχα, ακατανόητες γλώσσες και μουσικές, σε πλατείες και πεζοδρόμια, πραγματικό μωσαϊκό πολιτισμών που συναντιούνται αλλά δεν σμίγουν και όμως πορεύονται μαζί, τη μέρα και τη νύχτα, στη δουλειά και στη ζωή. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης του 21ου αιώνα θα είναι το πρόσωπο μιας αμοιβαίας αναγνώρισης των διαφορών, μιας πολιτισμικής συνάντησης που «οικοδομείται» ως ανθρώπινη σχέση στο εσωτερικό του αργά μεταβαλλόμενου αρχιτεκτονικού κελύφους κάθε αστικού περιβάλλοντος.
Σε ένα κέλυφος σαν και αυτό, σε μια «Ομόνοια» ολοκληρωμένη όπως σχεδιάστηκε, για τον 21ο και όχι τον 19ο αιώνα, πρέπει να δοκιμαστεί η δυνατότητα να αποκτήσει ο χώρος της συλλογικής μας ύπαρξης το όποιο κοινωνικό πρόσωπο επιθυμούμε. Χωρίς αμφιβολία, η συνάντηση αυτή θα είναι μια σύνθεση πραγματικών αντιθέσεων. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο θα είναι οπωσδήποτε ένα πρόσωπο με τα ίχνη των συγκρούσεων που θα έχουν αφήσει ουλές, που θα έχει «φάει» το δέρμα του ο συγκερασμός, όπως «τρώει» το ανθρώπινο πρόσωπο ο καιρός και ο χρόνος. Η πολιτισμική συνάντηση, αυτή η πανάρχαια πρακτική των λαών που κινούνται πέρα από θάλασσες και από στεριές, θα οξύνει τις ανταλλαγές, θα ωριμάσει τις επιρροές, θα γονιμοποιήσει. Στην Ομόνοια λοιπόν- συμβολικό ανάλογο της σύγκλισης που ορίζει το όνομά της- κρίνεται το πρόσωπο που θα αποκτήσει η πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση. Και αυτό το «πρόσωπο» δεν θα είναι τελικά ένα ζήτημα του χτισμένου αλλά του ανθρώπινου περιβάλλοντος. Θα είναι το δικό μας πρόσωπο.
Παναγιώτης Τουρνικιώτης
Panayotis Tournikiotis
Πηγή:ΒΗΜΑ ΙΔΕΩΝ - Τεύχος 05/12/2008
Η σύγχρονη πόλη ζει μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα αντίφαση. Από τη μια είναι χτισμένη με αδρανή υλικά και μεταβάλλεται αργά, στη λογική της μακράς διάρκειας που χαρακτήριζε πάντα τα οικοδομικά κελύφη της αρχιτεκτονικής της. Και από την άλλη είναι ο φυσικός φορέας της κοινωνικής και πολιτισμικής δραστηριότητας που μεταλλάσσεται διαρκώς με έναν φρενήρη ρυθμό κυκλοφορίας ανθρώπων και εμπορευμάτων, πληροφοριών και εικόνων κάθε είδους και μορφής. Είναι δύσκολο να συλλάβει το μυαλό μας την κινητικότητα αυτή, διαρκώς κινούμενο και το ίδιο, μέσα στο φυσικό του σώμα και στο δίκτυο της πληροφορίας, βιώνοντας την καθημερινότητα του χώρου ζωής και εργασίας, του αυτοκινήτου και του μέσου επικοινωνίας. Ολα γύρω είναι ή φαίνεται πως είναι σταθερά και αμετάβλητα. Η τριλογία της οδού Πανεπιστημίου- Βιβλιοθήκη, Πανεπιστήμιο, Ακαδημία- είναι όπως ήταν προτού γεννηθεί οποιοσδήποτε από εμάς, με εξαίρεση την πρόσφατη «επένδυση» ενός κτιρίου με «hondos» πίσω από τη Βιβλιοθήκη, στην οδό Ιπποκράτους, που έχει αλλάξει δραστικά το βάθος πεδίου. Και όχι μόνο δεν αλλάζουν τα κτίρια, αλλά συντηρούνται επίμονα και συστηματικά για να φαίνεται ότι δεν αλλάζουν. Το ίδιο ακριβώς συμβαίνει- παραδόξως- στην πλατεία της Ομόνοιας. Λέω «παραδόξως» γιατί οι περισσότεροι θα υποστήριζαν πως η πλατεία αυτή άλλαξε πολύ τα τελευταία χρόνια. Και όμως, η πλατεία, που ορίζεται από το μέτωπο των περιμετρικών κτιρίων, διατηρεί την τετράγωνη μορφή που είχε πάντα και περιβάλλεται από τα κτίρια που γνώρισα και εγώ σαν παιδί. Και εδώ τα κτίρια έχουν συντηρηθεί, καθαριστεί και αναδειχθεί για να εξασφαλιστεί το αμετάβλητο του αρχιτεκτονικού κελύφους, με εξαίρεση ένα, «ντυμένο» και αυτό με «hondos», στη γωνία της 3ης Σεπτεμβρίου. Αυτά που αλλάζουν περισσότερο από οτιδήποτε άλλο σε μια πόλη είναι τα κάθε είδους κινητά συστατικά της, οι άνθρωποι, τα αυτοκίνητα, τα εμπορεύματα, η εικόνα των εμπορευμάτων (τα «hondos» δηλαδή). Σε αυτά υποτάσσεται η οργάνωση των ροών της κίνησης και των εφήμερων στάσεων, αυτά εκφράζουν το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο και την πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση στο σύγχρονο αστικό τοπίο.
Η Ομόνοια ήταν και είναι ζωτικός πυκνωτής στη σύγχρονη μεγαλούπολη στην οποία ζούμε. Ο Δρομέας ήρθε και έφυγε, όπως έρχονται και φεύγουν οι δημοτικοί άρχοντες. Το σιντριβάνι του 1960, έργο αρχιτέκτονα και γλύπτη, διαρκώς μεταβαλλόμενο στη ροή της μέρας και της νύχτας, μείξη χρωμάτων και υδάτων, αυτοκινήτων και ανθρώπων, ήταν μια εφήμερη «εγκατάσταση» στη μακρά διάρκεια της πλατείας. Και η σύγχρονη πλατεία είναι το έδαφος μιας πολιτισμικής εντροπίας επειδή προσφέρει την ευκαιρία για λίγο μεγαλύτερη στάση στη διαρκώς μεταβαλλόμενη σύνθεση της κοινωνικής συγκρότησής της. Η αταξία αυτή είναι χαρακτηριστικό πύκνωμα της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης στην οποία αναφέρομαι. Οι διασταυρούμενες ροές φύλων και φυλών, συναλλαγών και ανταλλαγών, αυτοκινήτων, τουριστών και δύο γραμμών μετρό με οκτώ δρόμους που οδηγούν σε όλες τις γειτονιές της Αθήνας είναι το αποκορύφωμα της αστικής πλατείας της μεταβιομηχανικής κοινωνίας. Το πρωί και το απόγευμα, στο φως του ήλιου, στον ηλεκτρισμό του υπογείου, όλη τη νύχτα στις ανταύγειες του γενικού φωτισμού, η πλατεία είναι εξαιρετικά ζωντανή χωρίς να είναι ίδια. Μοιάζει με πλατείες από όλον τον κόσμο, που υλοποιούν το μητροπολιτικό ανάλογο της καρδιάς, Τimes Square και Αlexanderplatz, αλλά είναι ταυτοχρόνως διαμορφωμένη με ισχυρή αστική τυπολογία και είναι γεωγραφικά ορισμένη σε σχέση με το πολιτισμικό αποκορύφωμα της πόλης, την Ακρόπολη, ώστε να επιβάλλεται και ως κλασική πλατεία. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της σύγχρονης μεγαλούπολης είναι μια σύνθεση αντιθέσεων που γνωρίζαμε ήδη από τον περασμένο αιώνα, αλλά τώρα εκρήγνυνται ως πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση και επιταχύνονται σε πείσμα της αδράνειας του οικοδομικού περιβάλλοντος. Συγκρίνοντας την Ομόνοια του Γιώργου Ιωάννου με τη σημερινή μπορούμε να μετρήσουμε αυτή την αλλαγή και ίσως να ορίσουμε ένα υψηλότερο συντελεστή ρευστοποίησης των διαφόρων κοινωνικών δράσεων, αλλά δεν πρόκειται να εκπλαγούμε. Και όμως, η έκπληξη του ιθαγενούς κοινωνικού συνόλου ήταν απρόσμενα ηχηρή όταν σχεδιάστηκε η «τελευταία» Ομόνοια με το πρόσωπο της πόλης του 21ου αιώνα, ψηφιακή, διεθνής, κοινωνική, ως ιδανικό πλαίσιο της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης.
Η γενικευμένη αντίδραση απαίτησε αναδρομικά το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης του 19ου αιώνα, την πλατεία του μεγάλου χωριού, με τραπεζάκια έξω και δεντροστοιχίες, με την ευτυχία γραμμένη σε όλα τα πρόσωπα και βεβαίως με «καθαρότητα» σε όλες τις ταυτότητες και τις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις. Και το ζήτησε πάνω από μια τεχνητή πόλη, στην «ταράτσα» του πολυώροφου επικέντρου της, στο roof-garden, έχοντας ήδη «απωθήσει» τη μη καθαρή σύνθεση των κοινωνικά και πολιτισμικά επίμεικτων δράσεων σε όλη την υπόλοιπη χώρα, στις γειτονιές και τα σπίτια, στα εργοστάσια και τα χωράφια, έχοντας εξορκίσει επιδεικτικά το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο και την πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση για χάρη μιας πόλης-θεάματος του εξιδανικευμένου εαυτού της. Ποιο μπορεί να είναι λοιπόν το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης σε μια εποχή της πολιτισμικής παγκοσμιοποίησης; Τι άλλο από ένα πεδίο συγκερασμού των πολιτισμικών και εθνικών ταυτοτήτων, των κοινωνικών και οικονομικών αποκλίσεων, των φυλετικών, των θρησκευτικών και ηθικών διακρίσεων. Στη Νέα Υόρκη, στο Λονδίνο, στο Παρίσι, στις μεγάλες πόλεις, η διαπολιτισμικότητα αυτή ήταν εγκατεστημένη από τον περασμένο αιώνα και αποτελούσε
ένα δεδομένο που έτρεφε, μέσα από την αντίθεση και τη σύγκρουση, την πολύβουη σύνθεση του αστικού προσώπου τους. Τόσοι και τόσοι από μας έχουν ταξιδέψει και έχουν απολαύσει τις «βρώμικες» πλατείες, έχουν περπατήσει σε ανήσυχους δρόμους των δυτικών μητροπόλεων, χαμένοι στη βαβούρα της πολιτισμικής συνύπαρξης και στο θέαμα των αντιφάσεων. Μαύρα, άσπρα και κίτρινα πρόσωπα, πολύχρωμα ρούχα, ακατανόητες γλώσσες και μουσικές, σε πλατείες και πεζοδρόμια, πραγματικό μωσαϊκό πολιτισμών που συναντιούνται αλλά δεν σμίγουν και όμως πορεύονται μαζί, τη μέρα και τη νύχτα, στη δουλειά και στη ζωή. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο της πόλης του 21ου αιώνα θα είναι το πρόσωπο μιας αμοιβαίας αναγνώρισης των διαφορών, μιας πολιτισμικής συνάντησης που «οικοδομείται» ως ανθρώπινη σχέση στο εσωτερικό του αργά μεταβαλλόμενου αρχιτεκτονικού κελύφους κάθε αστικού περιβάλλοντος.
Σε ένα κέλυφος σαν και αυτό, σε μια «Ομόνοια» ολοκληρωμένη όπως σχεδιάστηκε, για τον 21ο και όχι τον 19ο αιώνα, πρέπει να δοκιμαστεί η δυνατότητα να αποκτήσει ο χώρος της συλλογικής μας ύπαρξης το όποιο κοινωνικό πρόσωπο επιθυμούμε. Χωρίς αμφιβολία, η συνάντηση αυτή θα είναι μια σύνθεση πραγματικών αντιθέσεων. Το κοινωνικό πρόσωπο θα είναι οπωσδήποτε ένα πρόσωπο με τα ίχνη των συγκρούσεων που θα έχουν αφήσει ουλές, που θα έχει «φάει» το δέρμα του ο συγκερασμός, όπως «τρώει» το ανθρώπινο πρόσωπο ο καιρός και ο χρόνος. Η πολιτισμική συνάντηση, αυτή η πανάρχαια πρακτική των λαών που κινούνται πέρα από θάλασσες και από στεριές, θα οξύνει τις ανταλλαγές, θα ωριμάσει τις επιρροές, θα γονιμοποιήσει. Στην Ομόνοια λοιπόν- συμβολικό ανάλογο της σύγκλισης που ορίζει το όνομά της- κρίνεται το πρόσωπο που θα αποκτήσει η πολιτισμική παγκοσμιοποίηση. Και αυτό το «πρόσωπο» δεν θα είναι τελικά ένα ζήτημα του χτισμένου αλλά του ανθρώπινου περιβάλλοντος. Θα είναι το δικό μας πρόσωπο.
Παναγιώτης Τουρνικιώτης
Panayotis Tournikiotis
Πηγή:ΒΗΜΑ ΙΔΕΩΝ - Τεύχος 05/12/2008
And Now?
Nicos Charalambidis, "Cport", 2008
Jonathan Callan, "Samson", 2006
Other Artists
Nikos Alexiou, Katerina Apostlolidou, Dimitra Vamiali, Kostis Velonis, Yiorgis Yerolympos, Steve Yianakos, Vagelis Gokas, Jonathan Callan, Sam Herbert, Aikaterini Gegisian, Yiannis Theodoropoulos, Lina Thedorou, Eleni Theofylaktou, Dionisis Kavalilieratos, Lizzie Calligas, Panos Kokinias, Maria Konti, Alexis Kyritsopoulos,Daphne Lianantonaki, Nikos Markou, Irini Miga, Maro Mihalakakos, Vassili Balatsos, Kostas Bassanos, Nikos Navridis, Antonis Ntonef, Zafos Xagoraris, Maria Papadimitriou, Leda Papakonstantinou, Nina Papakonstantinou, Eftihis Patsourakis, Paris Petridis, Hrair Sarkissian, Dimitris Skalkotos, Su Mei Tse, Jan Fabre, Makis Faros, Maria Finn, Nicos Charalampidis, George Xadjimihalis, Katerina Christidi, Petros Chrisostomou, «intothepill.net» (Yiannis Gregoriadis, Lina Theodorou, Yiannis Isidorou).
And Now? - Greek State Museum, Thessaloniki
Curated by Christina Petrinou
December 17 - February 22, 2009
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Non Conformist Chair
Design by Eileen Gray (1925)
Eileen Gray explains the non conformist shape of this model. "We deliberately left out one armrest to give more ease to the body. You can comfortably lean over to one side or turn around when sitting on this chair".
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
"You'll Live, But I'll Not..."
You'll live, but I'll not; perhaps,
The final turn is that.
Oh, how strongly grabs us
The secret plot of fate.
They differently shot us:
Each creature has its lot,
Each has its order, robust, --
A wolf is always shot.
In freedom, wolves are grown,
But deal with them is short:
In grass, in ice, in snow, --
A wolf is always shot.
Don't cry, oh, friend my dear,
If, in the hot or cold,
From tracks of wolves, you'll hear
My desperate recall.
Anna Akhmatova
1959
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver
The final turn is that.
Oh, how strongly grabs us
The secret plot of fate.
They differently shot us:
Each creature has its lot,
Each has its order, robust, --
A wolf is always shot.
In freedom, wolves are grown,
But deal with them is short:
In grass, in ice, in snow, --
A wolf is always shot.
Don't cry, oh, friend my dear,
If, in the hot or cold,
From tracks of wolves, you'll hear
My desperate recall.
Anna Akhmatova
1959
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver
Better Living Through Chemistry
Mosanto House of the Future, Disneyland, Anaheim (1957).
According to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the House of the Future "was a design anomaly: though fabricated from materials concocted in an industrial laboratory - the company's motto was "Better Living Through Chemistry" - the house took the shape of a flower from another galaxy, an abstract sculpture with four, lobate wings or blossoms budding from a central stem.
No longer Le Corbusier's "machine for living," the family home was a work of modern art, in which function was subordinate to the dramatized forms of eyes, legs, fingers, lungs, and a pliant skin of sleek white plastic. The all-plastic wings were composed of modular panels in contoured shapes filled with foam insulation.
Each one featured a picture window - a huge eye with the proportions of a TV screen."
Monday, December 8, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Tribes of clutter
The Comfort of Things
Daniel Miller, Polity Press
This book sums up how far social anthropology has progressed since Henry Mayhew wrote about the skull shapes of costermongers in the 19th century. Daniel Miller's approach is more in keeping with that of the wild and weird Tom Harrisson and the pioneers of Mass Observation in the 1930s. Having studied cannibalistic tribes in the New Hebrides, Harrisson despatched researchers to Bolton and north London to spy on the British working class at play. They reported on, among other things, the fixation with astrology, the football Pools, and "the cult of the aspidistra". These brief expeditions were undertaken as a tentative consumerism began to lighten the lives of the masses. At the time, George Orwell, having returned from his sojourn in Wigan, suggested that fish and chips, tinned salmon, radio and strong tea might have averted revolution.
Flying ducks and flock wallpaper: possessions mortared with memory
Ultimately, if hope lay with the proles it lay with them as consumers. This, at least, was the contention of Dr Gallup, whose market research techniques attempted to understand the British as consumers, just as Mass Observation attempted to understand them as citizens. In The Comfort of Things, Miller investigates the citizens of contemporary London by way of their consumerism - or at least their material possessions, in an era of unprecedented mass consumption.
Initially Miller - currently a professor of anthropology at University College London - took the conventional approach to his craft, using expeditions to India, Trinidad and the Solomon Islands to investigate contemporary humanity "through the material form". In this new book he challenges the assumption that an attachment to things makes us more materialistic and superficial, consequently ruining the true potential of relationships. It is an assumption that environmental fundamentalists and certain psychologists line up behind when blaming the "affluence" of the masses for every earthbound evil. It is these and those of a similar mindset that you hope Miller might be addressing when arguing that such clichés and assumptions are seldom put to the test. "Possessions often remain profound," he says, "and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people."
But this is only part of the wider question he addresses in The Comfort of Things. It's a question that goes to the root of social science: what rituals and customs do human beings create to bring each other together? He argues that contemporary Londoners do not live their lives according to the cosmology of a religion or a belief in society. In fact, he echoes Margaret Thatcher in suggesting that there may no longer be such a thing as society, simply individuals in relationships with other people and objects. The latter is the impetus for this book, and a year and a half of research spent interviewing the inhabitants of a street in south-east London.
The "Stuart Street" of The Comfort of Things is an arbitrary choice, but its very ordinariness makes it interchangeable with other neighbourhoods in the capital. Diversity rather than homogeneity is what interests Miller, and this is what distinguishes the endeavour from the Britain that Mass Observation investigated. Only 23 per cent of the inhabitants of Stuart Street are London-born, and many of the 30 individuals allocated a "portrait" in this book hold allegiances to foreign localities. The modern London is fragmented, and the loss of identity has become its defining characteristic. In Miller's findings collectivism and community do not have an effective role to play in Stuart Street or elsewhere in the metropolis. "If ever we lived in a post-society, whose primary focus is on diversity rather than shared or systematically ordered culture, the London street is that post-society."
As such, for Miller, the study of material culture is the clue to understanding modern values. However, it is the characters less defined by the objects that surround them which prove to be the biggest finds in this book. There is Malcolm, a man whose email address is more of a "home" than his accommodation on Stuart Street, where his desire to embrace a digital existence has him jettisoning ornaments and accoutrements for a virtual life on the laptop. And the opening chapter of the book, "Empty", is the story of George, a 76-year-old who is more the stuff of fiction - the missing link between Melville's Bartleby and Miss Haversham. "It was after meeting George that we found ourselves in tears," writes Miller. "Because in every other instance there was a sense that at least that person had once lived. This was a man more or less waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who had never seen his life actually begin."
George is someone whose existence has been entirely dependent on the say-so of others, ranging from his parents to the state. Even the business of obtaining objects and decorating his flat requires decisions that are too big for him to deal with. His environment is beyond that self-conscious minimalism, that ethical thrift or that anti-consumerism which becomes its own lifestyle choice. His is a home where nothing survives as a clue to the history, or even the existence of its sole inhabitant: no mementoes, ornaments, photographs.
George is therefore the character who rattles part of Miller's thesis: "People sediment possessions, lay them down as foundations, material walls mortared with memory, strong supports that come into their own when times are difficult and the people who laid them down face experiences of loss."
Each portrait in The Comfort of Things is a chapter that reads like a short story. Miller has a tenderness and an affection for these characters, and his descriptions sometimes soar like passages in a novel, although there are moments when the author's projections tend to hint more at his own limitations than those of his subject. One such is the suggestion that George's lack of identity and passion for royalty make him ideal fodder for fascism.
Between the alienated and dysfunctional figures unearthed by Miller's research are those who find a joy and a passion in the things that help them nest and settle in a fragmented city. There is the cockney Londoner of old here, too, the breed whose bones lie beneath the city's paving stones; those forgotten by the new model "Londoner" who has rebranded the capital by way of a beloved multiculturalism that is as mythical as the "Middle England" he or she loathes. Working-class Marjorie accumulates things that, according to Miller, "never lose their rapport with the present". She is constantly changing the gallery of framed photographs that shroud her living room and watching old videos in an abode stacked with images of her family, as well as those of celebrities from the Beatles to television newsreaders.
Marjorie, perhaps more than any of the other characters in The Comfort of Things, best epitomises the theory that Miller is left with when his work in Stuart Street is done: in modern London, households and individuals alike have themselves to create the values that once defined us as a society. This is the departure that, here in the 21st century, has made social anthropology embark on a rethink. In losing the opportunity to study something known as society, it has been forced to focus solely on the individual and the home.
To the contemporary anthropologist such as Daniel Miller, "This street is New Guinea and every household in this book is a tribe."
text by Michael Collins
Source:www.newstatesman.com
Daniel Miller, Polity Press
This book sums up how far social anthropology has progressed since Henry Mayhew wrote about the skull shapes of costermongers in the 19th century. Daniel Miller's approach is more in keeping with that of the wild and weird Tom Harrisson and the pioneers of Mass Observation in the 1930s. Having studied cannibalistic tribes in the New Hebrides, Harrisson despatched researchers to Bolton and north London to spy on the British working class at play. They reported on, among other things, the fixation with astrology, the football Pools, and "the cult of the aspidistra". These brief expeditions were undertaken as a tentative consumerism began to lighten the lives of the masses. At the time, George Orwell, having returned from his sojourn in Wigan, suggested that fish and chips, tinned salmon, radio and strong tea might have averted revolution.
Flying ducks and flock wallpaper: possessions mortared with memory
Ultimately, if hope lay with the proles it lay with them as consumers. This, at least, was the contention of Dr Gallup, whose market research techniques attempted to understand the British as consumers, just as Mass Observation attempted to understand them as citizens. In The Comfort of Things, Miller investigates the citizens of contemporary London by way of their consumerism - or at least their material possessions, in an era of unprecedented mass consumption.
Initially Miller - currently a professor of anthropology at University College London - took the conventional approach to his craft, using expeditions to India, Trinidad and the Solomon Islands to investigate contemporary humanity "through the material form". In this new book he challenges the assumption that an attachment to things makes us more materialistic and superficial, consequently ruining the true potential of relationships. It is an assumption that environmental fundamentalists and certain psychologists line up behind when blaming the "affluence" of the masses for every earthbound evil. It is these and those of a similar mindset that you hope Miller might be addressing when arguing that such clichés and assumptions are seldom put to the test. "Possessions often remain profound," he says, "and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people."
But this is only part of the wider question he addresses in The Comfort of Things. It's a question that goes to the root of social science: what rituals and customs do human beings create to bring each other together? He argues that contemporary Londoners do not live their lives according to the cosmology of a religion or a belief in society. In fact, he echoes Margaret Thatcher in suggesting that there may no longer be such a thing as society, simply individuals in relationships with other people and objects. The latter is the impetus for this book, and a year and a half of research spent interviewing the inhabitants of a street in south-east London.
The "Stuart Street" of The Comfort of Things is an arbitrary choice, but its very ordinariness makes it interchangeable with other neighbourhoods in the capital. Diversity rather than homogeneity is what interests Miller, and this is what distinguishes the endeavour from the Britain that Mass Observation investigated. Only 23 per cent of the inhabitants of Stuart Street are London-born, and many of the 30 individuals allocated a "portrait" in this book hold allegiances to foreign localities. The modern London is fragmented, and the loss of identity has become its defining characteristic. In Miller's findings collectivism and community do not have an effective role to play in Stuart Street or elsewhere in the metropolis. "If ever we lived in a post-society, whose primary focus is on diversity rather than shared or systematically ordered culture, the London street is that post-society."
As such, for Miller, the study of material culture is the clue to understanding modern values. However, it is the characters less defined by the objects that surround them which prove to be the biggest finds in this book. There is Malcolm, a man whose email address is more of a "home" than his accommodation on Stuart Street, where his desire to embrace a digital existence has him jettisoning ornaments and accoutrements for a virtual life on the laptop. And the opening chapter of the book, "Empty", is the story of George, a 76-year-old who is more the stuff of fiction - the missing link between Melville's Bartleby and Miss Haversham. "It was after meeting George that we found ourselves in tears," writes Miller. "Because in every other instance there was a sense that at least that person had once lived. This was a man more or less waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who had never seen his life actually begin."
George is someone whose existence has been entirely dependent on the say-so of others, ranging from his parents to the state. Even the business of obtaining objects and decorating his flat requires decisions that are too big for him to deal with. His environment is beyond that self-conscious minimalism, that ethical thrift or that anti-consumerism which becomes its own lifestyle choice. His is a home where nothing survives as a clue to the history, or even the existence of its sole inhabitant: no mementoes, ornaments, photographs.
George is therefore the character who rattles part of Miller's thesis: "People sediment possessions, lay them down as foundations, material walls mortared with memory, strong supports that come into their own when times are difficult and the people who laid them down face experiences of loss."
Each portrait in The Comfort of Things is a chapter that reads like a short story. Miller has a tenderness and an affection for these characters, and his descriptions sometimes soar like passages in a novel, although there are moments when the author's projections tend to hint more at his own limitations than those of his subject. One such is the suggestion that George's lack of identity and passion for royalty make him ideal fodder for fascism.
Between the alienated and dysfunctional figures unearthed by Miller's research are those who find a joy and a passion in the things that help them nest and settle in a fragmented city. There is the cockney Londoner of old here, too, the breed whose bones lie beneath the city's paving stones; those forgotten by the new model "Londoner" who has rebranded the capital by way of a beloved multiculturalism that is as mythical as the "Middle England" he or she loathes. Working-class Marjorie accumulates things that, according to Miller, "never lose their rapport with the present". She is constantly changing the gallery of framed photographs that shroud her living room and watching old videos in an abode stacked with images of her family, as well as those of celebrities from the Beatles to television newsreaders.
Marjorie, perhaps more than any of the other characters in The Comfort of Things, best epitomises the theory that Miller is left with when his work in Stuart Street is done: in modern London, households and individuals alike have themselves to create the values that once defined us as a society. This is the departure that, here in the 21st century, has made social anthropology embark on a rethink. In losing the opportunity to study something known as society, it has been forced to focus solely on the individual and the home.
To the contemporary anthropologist such as Daniel Miller, "This street is New Guinea and every household in this book is a tribe."
text by Michael Collins
Source:www.newstatesman.com
Για τη Μεσσαλίνα, ακολασία κι άρνηση
Σε κάθε σιωπηλή πτυχή των ημερών μου
ελλόχευε ένα ποίημα,
όχι απ’ αυτά που γράφουν στο χαρτί,
αλλά από κείνα που ‘ναι διάχυτα στον άνεμο
ή που κυλούν με το αίμα μας στις φλέβες
και που ‘ναι αυτό καθεαυτό το αίμα πιθανόν
μεθυσμένο από το χρώμα, το ρυθμό και την ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής
Η κάθε νύχτα, μου μιλούσε με ένα ποίημα
που ‘σπρωχνε και φούσκωνε τα τζάμια
σαν ιστία πλοίου επειγόμενου να φύγει
κι η καμάρα μου τότε ναυαγούσε σε κυκλώνες
πυρετού και φαντασίας εξημμένης
απ’ το χρώμα το ρυθμό της ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής.
Στα μπρούτζινα κορμιά των μονομάχων
στα διψασμένα μάτια των φρουρών
ελλόχευε παντού, με τόση λυσσαλέα επιμονή
αυτό το διψασμένο κι αδηφάγο ποίημα
ώστε μ’ άναψε και μ’ έκαψε και μ’ έκανε
ολόκληρη κι εμένα ένα ποίημα, που αναπτύχθηκε
και τέλειωσε στο χρώμα, το ρυθμό και την ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής.
Σταύρος Βαβούρης
από τη συλλογή Τρία ποιήματα, 1954
(1925-2008)
ελλόχευε ένα ποίημα,
όχι απ’ αυτά που γράφουν στο χαρτί,
αλλά από κείνα που ‘ναι διάχυτα στον άνεμο
ή που κυλούν με το αίμα μας στις φλέβες
και που ‘ναι αυτό καθεαυτό το αίμα πιθανόν
μεθυσμένο από το χρώμα, το ρυθμό και την ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής
Η κάθε νύχτα, μου μιλούσε με ένα ποίημα
που ‘σπρωχνε και φούσκωνε τα τζάμια
σαν ιστία πλοίου επειγόμενου να φύγει
κι η καμάρα μου τότε ναυαγούσε σε κυκλώνες
πυρετού και φαντασίας εξημμένης
απ’ το χρώμα το ρυθμό της ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής.
Στα μπρούτζινα κορμιά των μονομάχων
στα διψασμένα μάτια των φρουρών
ελλόχευε παντού, με τόση λυσσαλέα επιμονή
αυτό το διψασμένο κι αδηφάγο ποίημα
ώστε μ’ άναψε και μ’ έκαψε και μ’ έκανε
ολόκληρη κι εμένα ένα ποίημα, που αναπτύχθηκε
και τέλειωσε στο χρώμα, το ρυθμό και την ιδέα
μιας ακολασίας μουσικής.
Σταύρος Βαβούρης
από τη συλλογή Τρία ποιήματα, 1954
(1925-2008)
Monday, December 1, 2008
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