Είμαστε μπλεγμένοι, εδώ, όλοι μας, σε ένα απέραντο φυσικό κατασκεύασμα τεχνητά συνδεμένων
νευρικών συστημάτων. Αόρατο. Δεν μπορούμε να το αγγίξουμε.
- William Gibson, In the Visegrips of Dr. Satan
Η σύγκρουση δεν είναι προϊόν. Αντίθετα, το προϊόν είναι πάνω απ’ όλα σύγκρουση.
- guerrigliamarketing.it
H αναγέννηση της Δημιουργικής Βιομηχανίας
Στις αρχές του 2006, ο όρος «Δημιουργική Βιομηχανία» (Creative Industries) κάνει την εμφάνισή του στα mail και στις mailing list πολλών εργαζομένων στον πολιτιστικό τομέα, καλλιτεχνών, ακτιβιστών και ερευνητών σε ολόκληρη την Ευρώπη, καθώς επίσης και στις ανακοινώσεις διοργάνωσης σεμιναρίων και εκδηλώσεων. Ένα παλιό ερώτημα επανέρχεται: με περίεργο τρόπο, για πρώτη φορά, ένας όρος μεταφέρεται αυτούσιος από τη θεσμική αργκό στην εναλλακτική κουλτούρα και χρησιμοποιείται τώρα για να αντιπαρατεθεί με άλλες έννοιες κλειδιά (που μπορεί επίσης να αξίζουν ένα αρκτικόλεξο!) και άλλες μετα-δομές όπως πολιτιστικό δίκτυο (Network Culture, NC), οικονομία της γνώσης (Knowledge Economy, KE), άυλη εργασία (Immaterial Labour, IL), συλλογική νοημοσύνη (General Intellect, GI) και φυσικά, ελεύθερο λογισμικό (Free Software, FR), Creative Commons (CC) κ.λπ. Ο αρχικός ορισμός, ο οποίος υιοθετήθηκε το 1998 από την ομάδα εργασίας για τη Δημιουργική Βιομηχανία που συγκρότησε ο Τόνι Μπλερ, τις προσδιόριζε ως «τις βιομηχανίες εκείνες που έχουν τις ρίζες τους στην ατομική δημιουργικότητα, ικανότητα και ταλέντο και που ενέχουν τη δυνατότητα για παραγωγή πλούτου και δημιουργία θέσεων εργασίας μέσω της παραγωγής και της εκμετάλλευσης της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας»[1]. Όπως είναι προφανές, η κοινωνική δημιουργικότητα παραμένει κατά ένα μεγάλο μέρος έξω από αυτόν τον ορισμό – μετά από πολλά χρόνια ο Τόνι Μπλερ συνεχίζει να κλέβει τις ιδέες σας. Ας προσπαθήσουμε να κάνουμε μια διαφορετική ιστορική αναδρομή.
Καταρχάς, υπάρχει μια ευρωπαϊκή γενεαλογία. Οι Adorno και Horkheimer, στο έργο τους Η διαλεκτική του Διαφωτισμού (1944), αναφέρθηκαν στην έννοια της «πολιτιστικής βιομηχανίας» ως μορφή «μαζικής εξαπάτησης». Στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του '90 ο ιταλικός μετα-Εργατισμός (εξόριστος ή όχι) εισήγαγε τις έννοιες της άυλης εργασίας, της συλλογικής νοημοσύνης, του γνωσιακού καπιταλισμού, του προλεταριάτου της γνώσης (cognitariat) ως αναδυόμενες μορφές της αυτόνομης δύναμης του πλήθους (με συγγραφείς όπως οι Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, Marazzi, Berardi). Την ίδια περίοδο ο Pierre Levy μιλούσε για τη συλλογική νοημοσύνη (Collective Intelligence). Αργότερα, από το 2001, η διεθνική κινητοποίηση του Euro May Day συνέδεσε τους επισφαλείς εργαζομένους και τους γνωσιακούς εργάτες κάτω από την ιερή προστασία του San Precario [2]. Δεύτερον, υπάρχει μια αγγλο-αμερικανική γενεαλογία. Κατά τη διάρκεια της χρυσής εποχής της διαδικτυακής κουλτούρας η συζήτηση για την ICT (Information Computer Technology) και τη «νέα οικονομία» συνδέθηκε συχνά με την οικονομία της γνώσης (όπως ορίστηκε εννοιολογικά από τον Peter Drucker στη δεκαετία του '60). Το 2001 η συζήτηση για το copyleft [3] ξέφυγε από τα όρια του Ελεύθερου Λογισμικού και οδήγησε στην καθιέρωση των Creative Commons[4]. Το 2002 το μπεστ σέλερ The Rise of the Creative Class (Η ανάδυση της δημιουργικής τάξης) του Richard Florida (βασισμένο σε αμφισβητούμενα στατιστικά στοιχεία) πλάσαρε έννοιες της μόδας, όπως η «δημιουργική οικονομία».
Μετά από χρόνια φετιχοποίησης της επισφαλούς εργασίας και της αφηρημένης οικονομίας του δώρου, πραγματοποιείται μια κοπερνίκεια στροφή: η προσοχή μετατοπίζεται στην αυτόνομη εργασία και την αυτόνομη παραγωγή. Μια νέα συνείδηση ξεπροβάλλει γύρω από τη δημιουργία του νοήματος, δηλαδή τη δημιουργία της αξίας και –συνεπώς– τη δημιουργία της σύγκρουσης. Είναι η πολιτική δέσμευση μιας γενιάς δημιουργικών εργατών (προτού αναμειχθούν με τους εργάτες στις αλυσίδες μαζικής παραγωγής) και συγχρόνως η «οικονομική» δέσμευση μιας γενιάς ακτιβιστών (εφόσον το κίνημα του Σιάτλ ανησυχούσε περισσότερο για τα παγκόσμια προβλήματα παρά για το δικό τους εισόδημα). Η δημιουργικότητά μου = η αξία μου = η σύγκρουσή μου. Και αντίστροφα.
Το μεγαλύτερο μέρος της αξίας (και της σύγκρουσης)
Σε αυτό το κείμενο προσπαθώ να συμπεριλάβω ένα μέρος της συζήτησης γύρω από τη «δημιουργική» εργασία το οποίο διαφεύγει. Καταρχάς, επισημαίνω τη συλλογική διάσταση της δημιουργίας αξίας: είναι μια διερεύνηση των κοινωνικών διαδικασιών πίσω από τη δημιουργικότητα, τη δημιουργική δύναμη της συλλογικής επιθυμίας και την πολιτική φύση οποιουδήποτε γνωσιακού προϊόντος (ιδέα, εμπορικό σήμα, μέσο, έργο τέχνης, δρώμενο). Ερώτηση: τι ή ποιοι παράγουν την αξία; Απάντηση: το «κοινωνικό εργοστάσιο» παράγει τo μέγιστο ποσοστό της αξίας (και άρα της σύγκρουσης). Δεύτερον, θέτω στο επίκεντρο τον πολιτικό χώρο του γνωσιακού ανταγωνισμού. Δεν εστιάζω στους όρους εργασίας ή τις νεοφιλελεύθερες πολιτικές μέσα στις Δημιουργικές Βιομηχανίες, αλλά στη δημόσια ζωή των άυλων αντικειμένων. Τοποθετώ τα γνωσιακά προϊόντα σε ένα πεδίο δυνάμεων, πλαισιώνοντας ανάλογα αντικείμενα απέξω παρά από μέσα. Προσπαθώ να απαντήσω σε μια άλλη ερώτηση: εάν η παραγωγή μετασχηματίζεται σε δημιουργική και γνωσιακή, συλλογική και κοινωνική, ποια είναι τα πεδία και οι μορφές της σύγκρουσης; Συμπερασματικά, εισάγω το σενάριο ενός «άυλου εμφύλιου πολέμου», έναν σημειωτικό χώρο στον οποίο οι Δημιουργικές Βιομηχανίες αποτελούν μόνο ένα μικρό μέρος.
Μέχρι στιγμής το σενάριο μοιάζει γραμμικό, υπάρχει όμως μια γκρίζα ζώνη που πρέπει να ληφθεί υπόψη: η μαζικοποίηση της «δημιουργικής» στάσης ζωής. Το «όλοι είμαστε δημιουργικοί» είναι κοινό σλόγκαν σήμερα. Πολλά χρόνια μετά το «έργο τέχνης» του Benjamin, ο μαζικός καλλιτέχνης εισέρχεται στην εποχή της κοινωνικής αναπαραγωγιμότητάς του και «η δημιουργικότητα» πωλείται ως σύμβολο κύρους. Η κοινωνική βάση των Δημιουργικών Βιομηχανιών επεκτείνεται (τουλάχιστον στον δυτικό κόσμο) και αποκαλύπτει νέα σενάρια. Σε μια πρώτη φάση, οι Δημιουργικές Βιομηχανίες γίνονται ηγεμονικές (ως πραγματικότητα και ως ιδέα). Σε μια δεύτερη φάση, αντιμετωπίζουν την εντροπία νοήματος και παραγωγών. Χάρη στο διαδίκτυο και την ψηφιακή επανάσταση γινόμαστε καθημερινά μάρτυρες συγκρούσεων στο προαναφερόμενο στάδιο.
Στο παρελθόν, όλες οι διαφορετικές θεωρητικές σχολές εστίαζαν καθεμία σε διαφορετική άποψη. Για να αποσαφηνίσουμε το θέμα πρέπει να αναλύσουμε την ερώτηση στα συστατικά της. Το «δημιουργικό πράγμα» θα μπορούσε να αποσυναρμολογηθεί σε: δημιουργική εργασία (ως αυτόνομη ή εξαρτώμενη εργασία), δημιουργικότητα ως ικανότητα και παραγωγή, δημιουργικό προϊόν (σε όλα τα επίπεδά του: μηχανολογικό, λογισμικό, γνωσιακό, εμπορικό, κ.λπ.), ελεύθερη αναπαραγωγιμότητα του γνωσιακού προϊόντος, πνευματική ιδιοκτησία επί του ίδιου του προϊόντος, κοινωνική δημιουργικότητα πίσω από αυτό, διαδικασία συλλογικής αξιοποίησής του. Επιπλέον, η κοινωνική ομάδα των δημιουργικών εργατών (η «δημιουργική τάξη» ή «κογκινταριάτο» – cogniariat), η «δημιουργική οικονομία» και η «δημιουργική πόλη» αντιπροσωπεύουν διευρυμένα νοηματικά πλαίσια.
Ο αρχικός ορισμός των Δημιουργικών Βιομηχανιών εστιάζει στην εκμετάλλευση της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας. Οι αντιλήψεις του Richard Florida σχετικά με τη δημιουργική τάξη και τη δημιουργική οικονομία είναι βασισμένες μόνο (στις αμφισβητούμενες) στατιστικές και στην ιδέα μιας πολιτικής ατζέντας για τη Δημιουργική Βιομηχανία (CI) που προωθείται από τις τοπικές αρχές. Σε ένα άλλο επίπεδο, τα Creative Commons αφορούν στις ελεύθερες άδειες, γεγονός που αποτελεί μια θεσμική λύση για να γίνει διαχειρίσιμη η ελεύθερη αναπαραγωγή και η διανομή που επέφερε σε μαζική κλίμακα η ψηφιακή επανάσταση («δημιουργώντας ένα επίπεδο λογικού copyright»[5] όπως υποστηρίζουν). Εφορμώντας από ένα άλλο υπόβαθρο, ο ιταλικός μετα-Εργατισμός και το κίνημα των επισφαλών εργατών επισημαίνουν την κοινωνική και διανεμητική μορφή της παραγωγής (το «κοινωνικό εργοστάσιο» του Tronti [6] και απαιτούν ένα ελάχιστο εγγυημένο εισόδημα. Γεωγραφικά κοντά στους τελευταίους, ο Enzo Rullani (που εισήγαγε τον όρο «γνωσιακός καπιταλισμός») προτείνει να εστιάσουμε στην αυτόνομη δύναμη των παραγωγών παρά στη διάσταση της εξαρτημένης εργασίας, καθώς η κοινή ευημερία αποτελεί μια λύση που μεταβιβάζει γνώση, ρίσκο και δημιουργικό κεφάλαιο στους θεσμούς. Μια τέτοια αποσαφήνιση των πολιτικών απόψεων γύρω από τη Δημιουργική Βιομηχανία είναι απαραίτητη, ώστε να διευκρινιστεί τι δεν καλύπτει το παρόν δοκίμιο. Δεν θα εστιάσω στις συνθήκες εργασίας των (επισφαλών) γνωσιακών εργατών ούτε στην εκμετάλλευση της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας και τη νομική προστασία της δημόσιας σφαίρας, αλλά στη συλλογική παραγωγή της αξίας και στον ισχυρό ανταγωνισμό που αντιμετωπίζουν οι γνωσιακοί παραγωγοί στην «άυλη» σφαίρα.
Ο Lazzarato διαβάζει Tarde: η δημόσια διάσταση της αξίας
Η σύγχρονη κριτική δεν διαθέτει μια σαφή αντίληψη για τη δημόσια ζωή των προϊόντων της γνώσης: κυριαρχείται ευρέως από μεταφορές κλεμμένες από τα Creative Commons και το Ελεύθερο Λογισμικό, οι οποίες υποστηρίζουν μια σχεδόν επίπεδη άποψη χωρίς να συμπεριλαμβάνουν καθόλου τις έννοιες της αξίας και της αξιοποίησης. Για το λόγο αυτό, θα ήθελα να εισαγάγω ένα δυναμικότερο σενάριο ακολουθώντας τους Maurizio Lazzarato και Gabriel Tarde, οι οποίοι εξηγούν με ποιον τρόπο η αξία παράγεται από τη συσσώρευση της κοινωνικής επιθυμίας και της συλλογικής απομίμησης. Ο Lazzarato έχει επαναφέρει τη σκέψη του Γάλλου κοινωνιολόγου Tarde στο βιβλίο του Puissances de l'invention (Δυνάμεις της επινόησης)[7] και στο άρθρο του «La psychologie économique contre l'economie politique» (Η ψυχολογική οικονομία ενάντια στην πολιτική οικονομία).[8]
Συνοψίζοντας σε λίγες γραμμές, η φιλοσοφία του Tarde αποτελεί πρόκληση για τη σύγχρονη πολιτική οικονομία επειδή: 1) εξαλείφει την αντίθεση υλικής και άυλης εργασίας και θεωρεί τη «πνευματική συνεργασία» ως κύρια δύναμη όχι μόνο στον μεταφορντισμό αλλά και στις παραδοσιακές προ-καπιταλιστικές κοινωνίες· 2) θέτει την καινοτομία ως κινητήρια δύναμη αντί μόνο της χρηματικής συσσώρευσης (οι Σμιθ, Μαρξ και Σουμπέτερ δεν κατανόησαν πραγματικά την καινοτομία ως εσωτερική δύναμη του καπιταλισμού, μια άποψη που ενδιαφέρεται περισσότερο για την αναπαραγωγή παρά για την παραγωγή)· 3) αναπτύσσει μια νέα θεωρία για την αξία όχι πλέον βασισμένη μόνο στην αξία χρήσης αλλά και σε άλλα είδη της αξίας, όπως την αξία της αλήθειας και την αξία της ομορφιάς. (Lazzarato: «Η οικονομική ψυχολογία είναι μια θεωρία δημιουργίας και συγκρότησης των αξιών, ενώ η πολιτική οικονομία και ο μαρξισμός αποτελούν θεωρίες μέτρησης των αξιών»[9].)
Η καίρια για την παρούσα μελέτη διορατικότητα του Tarde, αφορά τη σχέση επιστήμης και κοινής γνώμης. Όπως υποστηρίζει ο Lazzarato: «Σύμφωνα με τον Tarde, μια επινόηση (επιστημονική ή όχι) που δεν αποτελεί αντικείμενο απομίμησης είναι κοινωνικά ανύπαρκτη: για να τη μιμηθούν, μια επινόηση πρέπει να προσελκύσει την προσοχή, να παράξει μια δύναμη “διανοητικής έλξης” προς άλλα πνεύματα, να κινητοποιήσει τις επιθυμίες και τις πεποιθήσεις τους μέσω μιας διαδικασίας κοινωνικής επικοινωνίας. […] Ο Tarde διαπιστώνει ένα ζήτημα που διατρέχει ολόκληρο το έργο του: τη συστατική δύναμη του κοινού (public)»[10]. Θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε: οποιαδήποτε δημιουργική ιδέα δεν λαμβάνεται ως πρότυπο απομίμησης είναι κοινωνικά ανύπαρκτη και δεν έχει καμία αξία. Στον Tarde το Κοινό είναι η «κοινωνική ομάδα του μέλλοντος», ενσωματώνοντας για πρώτη φορά τα Μέσα Μαζικής Επικοινωνίας ως σύστημα αξιοποίησης, προβλέποντας κατά κάποιο τρόπο το μεταφορντισμό. Επιπλέον ο Tarde θεωρεί την εργατική τάξη από μόνη της ένα είδος «κοινής γνώμης» που ενοποιείται στη βάση κοινών πεποιθήσεων και επιδράσεων παρά κοινών συμφερόντων.
Η σύνδεση των απόψεων Tarde-Lazzarato εισάγει ένα δυναμικό ή καλύτερα ανταγωνιστικό μοντέλο, όπου τα άυλα αντικείμενα βρίσκονται αντιμέτωπα με τους νόμους της «νοόσφαιρας»[11] –καινοτομία και μίμηση– σε ένα σχεδόν δαρβινικό περιβάλλον. Ο Tarde είναι επίσης διάσημος για την εισαγωγή της καμπύλης σχήματος S με την οποία περιγράφει τη διαδικασία διάδοσης της καινοτομίας, μια άλλη καλή πρόταση για όλους τους ψηφιακούς προγραμματιστές που πιστεύουν σε έναν ελεύθερο και επίπεδο χώρο.
Εντούτοις μια διαδικασία διάδοσης δεν είναι ποτέ τόσο γραμμική και ειρηνική όσο μπορεί να αναπαριστά μια μαθηματική γραφική παράσταση. Σε συλλογική κλίμακα ένα γνωσιακό προϊόν πάντοτε «παλεύει» ενάντια σε άλλα προϊόντα για να πετύχει μια φυσική ηγεμονία. Το πεπρωμένο μιας ιδέας είναι πάντοτε ηγεμονικό, ακόμη και στην «πνευματική συνεργασία» ή στην ψηφιακή σφαίρα της ελεύθερης αναπαραγωγής. Το φυσικό περιβάλλον των ιδεών είναι παρόμοιο με την κατάσταση της φύσης στον Hobbes. Η φράση «Homo homini lupus» (ο άνθρωπος λύκος για τον άνθρωπο) θα μπορούσε να ισχύει για τα media, τα εμπορικά σήματα, τα σύμβολα και οποιοδήποτε είδος «σημειωτικών μηχανών» της γνωσιακής οικονομίας. Είναι ένας άυλος αλλά συχνά όχι σιωπηλός «πόλεμος όλων των ιδεών ενάντια σε όλες τις ιδέες». Εάν οι Lazzarato και Tarde εντοπίζουν τη συλλογική παραγωγή της αξίας, μια τέτοια ανταγωνιστική φύση είναι πιο ξεκάθαρη διαβάζοντας τον Enzo Rullani.
Ο Enzo Rullani και ο «νόμος της διάχυσης»
Ο Rullani ήταν από τους πρώτους που εισήγαγαν τον όρο «γνωσιακός καπιταλισμός»[12]. Αντίθετα από τους περισσότερους, δεν επισημαίνει τη διαδικασία διανομής γνώσης, αλλά προ πάντων τη διαδικασία αξιοποίησης της γνώσης. Είναι αρκετά σαφής για το γεγονός ότι ο ανταγωνισμός επικρατεί ακόμη (και είναι ίσως ισχυρότερος) στη σφαίρα της «άυλης» οικονομίας. Ο Rullani είναι από τους λίγους που προσπαθούν να μετρήσουν πόση αξία παράγει η γνώση και ως έμπειρος οικονομολόγος δίνει επίσης και μαθηματικούς τύπους – όπως στο βιβλίο του Economia della conoscenza (Οικονομία της γνώσης)[13]. Ο Rullani λέει ότι η αξία της γνώσης πολλαπλασιάζεται με τη διάχυσή της και ότι πρέπει να μάθουμε πώς να διαχειριζόμαστε αυτό το είδος κυκλοφορίας. Όπως υποστηρίζει ο ίδιος, στη συνέντευξη με την Antonella Corsani που δημοσιεύτηκε στο Multitudes το 2000: «Μια οικονομία βασισμένη στη γνώση είναι δομικά συνδεδεμένη με τη διανομή: η γνώση παράγει αξία εφόσον υιοθετείται, και η υιοθέτηση (σε αυτή τη μορφή και τα επακόλουθα πρότυπα) δημιουργεί την αλληλεξάρτηση».[14]
Η αξία των άυλων αντικειμένων παράγεται από τη διάδοση και την αλληλεξάρτηση: είναι η ίδια διαδικασία που υπάρχει πίσω από τη δημοφιλία ενός αστέρα της ποπ και πίσω από την επιτυχία ενός software. Η ψηφιακή επανάσταση κατέστησε την αναπαραγωγή των άυλων προϊόντων ευκολότερη, ταχύτερη, πανταχού παρούσα και σχεδόν ελεύθερη. Εντούτοις, όπως ο Rullani επισημαίνει, η «ιδιοκτησιακή λογική δεν εξαφανίζεται αλλά υπάγεται στο νόμο της διάχυσης»:[15] η ιδιοκτησιακή λογική δεν βασίζεται πλέον στο χώρο και τα αντικείμενα, αλλά στο χρόνο και την ταχύτητα.
Υπάρχουν τρεις τρόποι με τους οποίους ένας παραγωγός γνώσης μπορεί να διανείμει τις χρήσεις της, διατηρώντας ταυτόχρονα ένα μέρος του πλεονεκτήματος: 1) με τη διαφορική ταχύτητα παραγωγής της νέας γνώσης ή εκμετάλλευσης των χρήσεών της· 2) με τον ισχυρότερο έλεγχο του νοηματικού πλαισίου· 3) με το δίκτυο συμμαχιών και συνεργασίας, το οποίο είναι ικανό να δημιουργήσει και να ελέγξει τους τρόπους χρήσης της γνώσης μέσα σε όλο το κύκλωμα της διανομής.
Διαφορική ταχύτητα σημαίνει: «Πήρα αυτήν την ιδέα και μπορώ να τη χειριστώ καλύτερα από τους άλλους – ενώ αυτοί ακόμη εξοικειώνονται με αυτήν, εγώ την αναπτύσσω περαιτέρω». Η καλύτερη κατανόηση του νοηματικού πλαισίου δεν είναι κάτι που μπορεί εύκολα να αναπαραχθεί – αφορά τη γενεαλογία της ιδέας, την πολιτιστική και κοινωνική ιστορία ενός τόπου, την εμπιστευτική πληροφορία που συσσωρεύεται με τα χρόνια. Το δίκτυο των συμμαχιών ονομάζεται μερικές φορές «κοινωνικό κεφάλαιο» και λαμβάνει τη μορφή των «κοινωνικών δικτύων» στον ιστό (web): αφορά τις επαφές σας, τις δημόσιες σχέσεις σας, το δρόμο που μένετε και την αξιοπιστία σας στο διαδίκτυο.
Εδώ είναι σαφές ότι μια δεδομένη ιδέα παράγει αξία σε ένα δυναμικό περιβάλλον όπου υπάρχει ανταγωνισμός από άλλες δυνάμεις και άλλα προϊόντα. Κάθε ιδέα ζει σε μια ζούγκλα –σε κατάσταση συνεχούς ανταρτοπόλεμου– και οι γνωσιακοί εργάτες συχνά ακολουθούν το πεπρωμένο του πνευματικού τους παιδιού. Στον καπιταλισμό των ψηφιακών δικτύων, ο χρόνος αποτελεί όλο και περισσότερο μια κρίσιμη διάσταση: το χρονικό πλεονέκτημα μετριέται στα δευτερόλεπτα. Επιπλέον, στην κοινωνία του «λευκού θορύβου» το σπανιότερο αγαθό είναι η προσοχή. Η οικονομία της σπάνης υπάρχει ακόμη και στον γνωσιακό καπιταλισμό ως έλλειψη προσοχής και της σχετικής οικονομίας προσοχής. Όταν όλα μπορούν να αναπαραχθούν παντού, ο χρόνος γίνεται σημαντικότερος από το χώρο.
Ένα παράδειγμα του ανταγωνιστικού πλεονεκτήματος στην ψηφιακή σφαίρα είναι το μουσικό CD που περιλαμβανόταν σ’ ένα τεύχος του περιοδικού Wired (Νοέμβριος 2004) με άδεια πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων Creative Commons. Μουσικά κομμάτια παραχωρήθηκαν από τους Beastie Boys, τον David Byrne, τον Gilberto Gil, κ.ά. για δωρεάν αντιγραφή, διανομή και sampling (βλ: www.creativecommons.org/wired). Η νεοφιλελεύθερη ατζέντα του περιοδικού Wired παρέχει τα βοηθήματα για την κατανόηση αυτής της νέας μορφής δικαιωμάτων. Στην πραγματικότητα υπάρχουν περισσότερα παραδείγματα μουσικών και εργατών του πνεύματος που συνδέουν τη δραστηριότητά τους με την ελεύθερη παραχώρηση δικαιωμάτων (copyleft), με τα Creative Commons, ή με ανταλλαγή αρχείων σε δίκτυα peer-to-peer. Μάθαμε μόνο για τους πρώτους, σαν να μην πρόκειται για επίτευγμα και όσων ήρθαν δεύτεροι. Όπως και να ’χει, ποτέ δεν υπάρχει πλήρης προσχώρηση στη σταυροφορία των Creative Commons, είναι πάντα μια υβριδική στρατηγική: κυκλοφορώ μέρος του έργου μου ανοιχτά και ελεύθερα για να κερδίσω αναγνωρισιμότητα και αξιοπιστία, αλλά όχι όλο το συγκεκριμένο έργο μου. Μια άλλη στρατηγική είναι ότι μπορεί να αντιγράψεις και να διανείμεις όλο αυτό το περιεχόμενο, αλλά όχι άμεσα, μπορείς να το κάνεις μετά από τέσσερις μήνες. Και υπάρχουν επίσης άνθρωποι που παραπονιούνται ότι τα Creative Commons και το Ελεύθερο Λογισμικό αποτελούν αντικείμενα πειρατείας από τις εταιρείες – το θέμα είναι ότι ο κόσμος εκεί έξω είναι γεμάτος κακή μουσική που μπορείς ελεύθερα να αντιγράψεις και να διανείμεις. Δεν είναι σκάνδαλο, πάντα υποψιαζόμασταν ότι επρόκειτο για έναν αγώνα δρόμου.
Ο Rullani καταδεικνύει με ποιον τρόπο ο ανταγωνισμός είναι ακόμα παρών στην οικονομία της γνώσης, ακόμη και στο προτεκτοράτο των digital commons. Ο ανταγωνισμός είναι ένα πεδίο στο οποίο η ριζοσπαστική σκέψη δεν αποπειράθηκε ποτέ να εισέλθει· διότι δεν είναι πολιτικά ορθό να παραδεχτείς έναν τέτοιο ανταγωνισμό και διότι οποιαδήποτε πολιτική λύση είναι αμφιλεγόμενη. Είναι αδύνατο να ανασυγκροτηθεί οποιοδήποτε ενιαίο πολιτικό υποκείμενο (όπως στην εποχή του προλεταριάτου) αρχίζοντας από ένα τέτοιο βαλκανοποιημένο σενάριο «κοινωνικών εργοστασίων» και μοριακής βιοπολιτικής παραγωγής. Ωστόσο, εάν η ατομική υπεραξία είναι δύσκολο να μετρηθεί και να αποδοθεί, η συλλογική συσσώρευση είναι ακόμα κάτι ορατό και απτό.
Ο David Harvey και το συλλογικό συμβολικό κεφάλαιο
Εάν οι Tarde, Lazzarato και Rullani είναι χρήσιμοι για να αντιληφθεί κανείς το πλαίσιο του ανταγωνιστικού habitus των ιδεών (διάδοση, απομίμηση, ανταγωνισμός, ηγεμονία), το δοκίμιο του David Harvey The art of rent (H Τέχνη του Ενοικίου)[16] εισάγει μια σαφέστερη περιγραφή της πολιτικής διάστασης της συμβολικής παραγωγής. Κατορθώνει να συνδέσει την άυλη παραγωγή με το πραγματικό χρήμα όχι μέσω της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας αλλά ανιχνεύοντας την παρασιτική εκμετάλλευση του άυλου τομέα από τον υλικό.
Κεντρικό παράδειγμά του αποτελεί η Βαρκελώνη, όπου είναι ξεκάθαρη η σύνδεση μεταξύ της οικονομίας, της αγοράς ακινήτων και της πολιτιστικής παραγωγής ως κοινωνικό κεφάλαιο. Η επιτυχία της Βαρκελώνης ως διεθνές «τοπόσημο» δημιουργήθηκε από τις πολιτιστικές και κοινωνικές ρίζες της και τροφοδοτείται συνεχώς σήμερα από μια κοσμοπολίτικη και εναλλακτική κουλτούρα – στην πραγματικότητα, αυτό το συλλογικό προϊόν γίνεται αντικείμενο εκμετάλλευσης πρώτα και καλύτερα από τους κερδοσκόπους της κτηματαγοράς. Οι μορφές αστικού εξευγενισμού (gentrification) είναι γνωστές. Από-κάτω-προς-τα-πάνω: Οι περιθωριακοί προσελκύουν τους καλλιτέχνες οι οποίοι προσελκύουν τους «ευγενείς» (gentry). Ή αντίθετα από-πάνω-προς-τα-κάτω: Τα προοδευτικά ιδρύματα τέχνης εγκαθίστανται σε γκέτο […] αυξάνουν τα ενοίκια και αναγκάζουν τον κόσμο να φύγει. Παρόλα αυτά, ο Harvey θέλει να αναδείξει μια πιο γενική διαδικασία.
Ο Harvey εφαρμόζει την ιδέα του μονοπωλιακού ενοικίου στην κουλτούρα: «Κάθε ενοίκιο βασίζεται στη μονοπωλιακή δύναμη των ιδιωτών ιδιοκτητών τμημάτων του πλανήτη». Υπάρχουν δύο είδη ενοικίου: μπορείτε να εκμεταλλευτείτε τη μοναδική ποιότητα ενός κρασιού ή μπορείτε να δείτε τον αμπελώνα που παράγει αυτό το εξαιρετικό κρασί. Μπορείτε να φτιάξετε ένα ξενοδοχείο σε μια πολύ όμορφη πόλη ή να πουλήσετε τη γη όπου θα χτιστούν ξενοδοχεία σαν αυτό. Ο καπιταλισμός πάντοτε ψάχνει για «σημεία διάκρισης» (marks of distinction). Σύμφωνα με τον Harvey η κουλτούρα σήμερα παράγει τα σημεία διάκρισης που ο καπιταλισμός μπορεί να εκμεταλλευτεί πουλώντας υλικά αγαθά. Στην κλίμακα της πόλης, η αγορά ακινήτων είναι η μεγαλύτερη μπίζνα που τροφοδοτείται από την οικονομία της γνώσης. Κάθε άυλος χώρος έχει τα υλικά του παράσιτα. Σκεφτείτε τα ανταλλαγή αρχείων και τα iPods.
Εάν ο βαθμός διάδοσης δημιουργεί την αξία ενός γνωσιακού προϊόντος, σύμφωνα με τον Rullani, ο Harvey βάζει ένα όριο σε αυτή την αξιοποίηση. Η διάδοση σε τόσο μεγάλο εύρος μπορεί να εξαφανίζει τα σημεία της διάκρισης μέσα σε ένα μαζικό προϊόν. Υπάρχει ένα εντροπικό τέλος για κάθε ιδέα μετά την ηγεμονική της περίοδο. Ο Harvey αναδεικνύει την πρώτη αντίφαση: την εντροπία των σημείων διάκρισης: Η αντίφαση εδώ είναι ότι όσο πιο εύκολα εμπορεύσιμα γίνονται αυτά τα προϊόντα τόσο λιγότερο μοναδικά και ιδιαίτερα είναι. Σε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις το μάρκετινγκ από μόνο του τείνει να καταστρέψει τη μοναδική ποιότητα (ιδιαίτερα εάν στηρίζεται σε ιδιότητες όπως η αγριότητα, η ανοικειότητα, η καθαρότητα μιας αισθητικής εμπειρίας κ.λπ.). Γενικότερα, στο βαθμό που τέτοια προϊόντα ή δρώμενα είναι εύκολα εμπορεύσιμα (και αναπαράγονται μέσω παραποιήσεων, πλαστογράφησης, απομίμησης ή αντιγραφής) τόσο λιγότερο παρέχουν έρεισμα για μονοπωλιακό ενοίκιο. […] επομένως, κάποιος τρόπος πρέπει να βρεθεί ώστε ορισμένα αγαθά ή τόποι να παραμείνουν μοναδικά και αρκετά ιδιαίτερα (και θα εξετάσω αργότερα τι μπορεί να σημαίνει αυτό) ώστε να διατηρηθεί ένα μονοπωλιακό πλεονέκτημα μέσα σε μια κατά τα άλλα εμπορευματοποιημένη και συχνά σκληρά ανταγωνιστική οικονομία.
Μια δεύτερη αντίφαση που συνδέεται με την πρώτη είναι οι τάσεις προς μονοπώλιο: εάν η αξία αυξάνεται, ο μόνος τρόπος να διατηρηθεί το ενοίκιο είναι να δημιουργήσεις μονοπώλια και να αποφύγεις τον ανταγωνισμό. Παραδείγματος χάριν, η ψηφιακή και δικτυακή επανάσταση επιτίθεται στα παραδοσιακά συμφέροντα μονοπωλιακών ενοικίων (που χρησιμοποιούνται σε «εδαφοποιημένες» περιοχές) και τα αναγκάζει να επινοήσουν νέες στρατηγικές. Η συνήθης αντίδραση ήταν η απαίτηση για ένα ισχυρότερο καθεστώς σχετικά με την πνευματική ιδιοκτησία. Σε ένα άλλο επίπεδο, τα κεφάλαια αναγκάστηκαν να βρουν νέες υλικές και άυλες περιοχές για εκμετάλλευση. Ο Harvey παρατηρεί ότι ο καπιταλισμός ανακαλύπτει πάλι τους τοπικούς πολιτισμούς για να συντηρήσει τα μονοπώλια: η συλλογική και άυλη σφαίρα του πολιτισμού είναι μια κρίσιμη διάσταση για να διατηρηθούν τα σημεία διάκρισης σε μια μεταφορντιστική οικονομία.
Αυτά είναι στενά συνδεδεμένα με την κατανόηση πώς οι τοπικές πολιτιστικές δημιουργίες και οι παραδόσεις συμπεριλαμβάνονται στους υπολογισμούς της πολιτικής οικονομίας μέσω των προσπαθειών συγκέντρωσης των μονοπωλιακών ενοικίων. Θέτει επίσης το ερώτημα κατά πόσο το τωρινό ενδιαφέρον για την τοπική πολιτιστική καινοτομία, την αναζωογόνηση και την ανάδειξη των τοπικών παραδόσεων συνδέεται με την επιθυμία του κεφαλαίου να αποσπάσει και να ιδιοποιηθεί τέτοια ενοίκια.
Η πολιτιστική πατίνα της Βαρκελώνης και τα μοναδικά τοπικά χαρακτηριστικά της είναι ένα στοιχείο κλειδί στο μάρκετινγκ οποιουδήποτε προϊόντος της πόλης, πρωτίστως της αγοράς ακινήτων. Αλλά η τρίτη και σημαντικότερη αντίφαση που επισημαίνει ο Harvey είναι ότι το παγκόσμιο κεφάλαιο τροφοδοτεί τις τοπικές αντιστάσεις επειδή θέλει να εκμεταλλευτεί τα σημεία διάκρισης.
Από τότε που οι καπιταλιστές όλων των ειδών (συμπεριλαμβανομένων των μεγάλων διεθνών παικτών) γοητεύονται εύκολα από τις προσοδοφόρες προοπτικές των μονοπωλιακών δυνάμεων, διακρίνουμε αμέσως μια τρίτη αντίφαση: ότι οι πιο άπληστοι οπαδοί της παγκοσμιοποίησης θα υποστηρίξουν την τοπική ανάπτυξη η οποία έχει τη δυνατότητα να παράγει μονοπωλιακά ενοίκια ακόμα κι αν το αποτέλεσμα μιας τέτοιας υποστήριξης είναι να παραχθεί ένα τοπικό πολιτικό κλίμα ανταγωνιστικό προς την παγκοσμιοποίηση!
Πάλι εμφανίζεται η περίπτωση της Βαρκελώνη, ένα αρκετά σοσιαλδημοκρατικό πρότυπο επιχείρησης που δεν μπορεί να ισχύσει εύκολα σε άλλο πλαίσιο. Σε αυτό το σημείο ο Harvey εισάγει την έννοια του συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου (που τη δανείζεται από τον Bourdieu) για να εξηγήσει πώς η κουλτούρα πέφτει θύμα εκμετάλλευσης του καπιταλισμού. Το επίπεδο της πολιτιστικής παραγωγής όταν συνδέεται με μια συγκεκριμένη περιοχή παράγει το κατάλληλο περιβάλλον για τα μονοπωλιακά μισθώματα.
Εάν οι αξιώσεις για μοναδικότητα, αυθεντικότητα, ιδιαιτερότητα, διάκριση είναι το θεμέλιο των μονοπωλιακών ενοικίων, τότε σε ποιο καλύτερο πεδίο είναι πιθανό να εγερθούν τέτοιες αξιώσεις παρά στον τομέα των ιστορικών πολιτιστικών προϊόντων και πρακτικών και των ιδιαίτερων περιβαλλοντικών χαρακτηριστικών (συμπεριλαμβανομένου, φυσικά, του δομημένου, κοινωνικού και πολιτιστικού περιβάλλοντος); […] Το πιο φανερό παράδειγμα είναι ο σύγχρονος τουρισμός, αλλά πιστεύω πως θα ήταν λάθος να αφήσουμε το θέμα εκεί. Επειδή αυτό που διακυβεύεται εδώ είναι η δύναμη του συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου, των ειδικών σημείων διάκρισης που συνδέονται με κάποιον τόπο, ο οποίος αποτελεί πόλο έλξης για τις ροές του κεφαλαίου γενικότερα.
Το συλλογικό συμβολικό κεφάλαιο της Βαρκελώνης αποκτά τώρα πιο ξεκάθαρη μορφή. Το εμπορικό σήμα «Βαρκελώνη» είναι μια «συναινετική παραίσθηση» που παράγεται από πολλούς αλλά που την εκμεταλλεύονται λίγοι. Η συνθήκη των γνωσιακών εργατών (και ολόκληρης της κοινωνίας) είναι ένας φαύλος κύκλος: παράγουν τη συμβολική αξία για την οικονομία της κτηματαγοράς η οποία τους ξεζουμίζει (εφόσον υποφέρουν από τις υψηλές τιμές των ακινήτων στη Βαρκελώνη). Επιπλέον, ο Harvey μας βοηθά να κατανοήσουμε καλύτερα τον Florida: η αποκαλούμενη «δημιουργική τάξη» δεν είναι παρά ένα simulacrum του συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου για να αυξήσει τα σημεία υπεροχής μιας δεδομένης πόλης. Η «δημιουργική τάξη» είναι το συλλογικό συμβολικό κεφάλαιο που μετασχηματίζεται σε ένα ανθρωπομορφικό εμπορικό σήμα και ένα μονοπωλιακό ενοίκιο που εφαρμόζονται σε τμήματα μιας κοινωνίας («δημιουργική τάξη»), μιας περιοχής («δημιουργική πόλη»), της ίδιας της πόλης («δημιουργικός τομέας»). Η «δημιουργική τάξη» (creative class) είναι ένα παρασιτικό simulacrum της κοινωνικής δημιουργικότητας το οποίο αποσπάται από το πρεκαριάτο (precariat) και συνδέεται με την ανώτερη τάξη.
Η περίοπτη θέση της Βαρκελώνης μέσα στο ευρωπαϊκό σύστημα των πόλεων έχει εν μέρει βασιστεί στη σταθερή συσσώρευση συμβολικού κεφαλαίου και στη συσσώρευση σημείων διάκρισης. Το ξεθάψιμο μιας ξεχωριστής καταλανικής ιστορίας και παράδοσης, το μάρκετινγκ των ισχυρών καλλιτεχνικών επιτευγμάτων και της αρχιτεκτονικής κληρονομιάς (φυσικά ο Gaudi) και του ιδιαίτερου τρόπου ζωής και λογοτεχνικής παράδοσης δεσπόζουν, υποστηριζόμενα από έναν κατακλυσμό βιβλίων, εκθέσεων, πολιτιστικών εκδηλώσεων που γιορτάζουν τη διαφορετικότητα. […] Αυτή η αντίφαση σημαδεύεται από ερωτήματα και αντιστάσεις. Ποιών η συλλογική μνήμη πρόκειται να γιορταστεί εδώ (των αναρχικών που σαν τους Ικαριστές[17] διαδραμάτισαν έναν τόσο σημαντικό ρόλο στην ιστορία της Βαρκελώνης, των Δημοκρατικών που πάλεψαν λυσσασμένα ενάντια στον Φράνκο, των καταλανών εθνικιστών, μεταναστών από την Ανδαλουσία, ή ενός μακροχρόνιου συμμάχου του Φράνκο όπως ο Σάμαρανκ);
Ο Harvey προσπαθεί να σκιαγραφήσει μια πολιτική απάντηση, διερευνώντας ποια μέρη της κοινωνίας εκμεταλλεύονται το συμβολικό κεφάλαιο και ποια είδη συλλογικής μνήμης και φαντασιακού διακυβεύονται. Το συμβολικό κεφάλαιο δεν είναι ενιαίο αλλά ένα πολλαπλός χώρος δυνάμεων, και μπορεί συνεχώς να τίθεται σε διαπραγμάτευση από το πλήθος που το παρήγαγε.
Είναι σημαντικό να καθορίσουμε ποια τμήματα του πληθυσμού επωφελούνται περισσότερο από το συλλογικό συμβολικό κεφάλαιο, στην παραγωγή του οποίου έχει ο καθένας, με τον δικό του ιδιαίτερο τρόπο, συμβάλλει τώρα ή έχει συμβάλλει στο παρελθόν. Γιατί να αφήσουμε το μονοπωλιακό ενοίκιο που συνδέεται με αυτό το συμβολικό κεφάλαιο να γίνεται κτήμα μόνο των πολυεθνικών ή ενός μικρού ισχυρού τμήματος της τοπικής αστικής τάξης; […] Η πάλη της συσσώρευσης σημείων διάκρισης και συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου μέσα σε έναν πολύ ανταγωνιστικό κόσμο έχει αρχίσει. Αλλά αυτό παρασύρει στο διάβα του όλες τις ερωτήσεις που εστιάζουν στον τόπο: ποιου η συλλογική μνήμη, ποιου η αισθητική, ποιος κερδίζει. […]. Επομένως το ερώτημα που προκύπτει είναι πώς αυτές οι πολιτιστικές παρεμβάσεις μπορούν από μόνες τους να γίνουν ένα ισχυρό όπλο ταξικής πάλης.
Η κρίσιμη ερώτηση είναι: πώς μπορούμε να αναπτύξουμε ένα συμβολικό κεφάλαιο αντίστασης που δεν μπορεί να χρησιμοποιηθεί ως ένα ακόμη σημείο διάκρισης; Όπως παρατηρεί ο Harvey, αυτός ο φαύλος κύκλος λειτουργεί ακόμα καλύτερα στην περίπτωση της τοπικής αντίστασης. Το παγκόσμιο κεφάλαιο χρειάζονται την αντίσταση της αντι-παγκοσμιοποίησης για να βελτιώσουν το μονοπωλιακό ενοίκιο. Ειδικά στην περίπτωση των γνωσιακών εργατών η αντίσταση είναι πάντοτε άρτια υπολογισμένη και καλά σχεδιασμένη: και στην περίπτωση της Βαρκελώνης παράγει ένα ερεθιστικό αλλά ποτέ επικίνδυνο περιβάλλον για την παγκόσμια μεσαία τάξη. Εμπνευσμένοι από την ιστορία της Βαρκελώνης, εισάγουμε έναν άυλο εμφύλιο πόλεμο μέσα στο χώρο του συμβολικού κεφαλαίου.
Άυλος εμφύλιος πόλεμος
Προτείνουμε τον όρο «εμφύλιος πόλεμος» καθώς οι συγκρούσεις μέσα στον γνωσιακό καπιταλισμό δεν έχουν καθαρά ταξική σύνθεση και μοιράζονται τον ίδιο χώρο των media. Επιπλέον, εάν είναι αλήθεια ότι «δεν υπάρχει πλέον έξω» (όπως οι Negri και Hardt δηλώνουν στην Αυτοκρατορία[18]) και ότι «δεν υπάρχουν πλέον κοινωνικές τάξεις, αλλά μόνο μια ενιαία πλανητική μικροαστική τάξη, στην οποία έχουν διαλυθεί όλες οι παλιές κοινωνικές τάξεις» (όπως το θέτει ο Agamben στο The Coming Community[19]), οι συγκρούσεις μπορούν να λάβουν μόνο τη μορφή μιας αέναης εσωτερικής πάλης. Το πλήθος υπήρξε πάντα ταραχώδες και αποσπασματικό. Εάν ο Florida ονειρεύεται μια «δημιουργική ταξική πάλη» (όπου τα fashion victims είναι τα πρώτα θύματα, υποθέτουμε), εμείς προτρέπουμε προς έναν εμφύλιο πόλεμο μέσα σε εκείνη την κομφορμιστική «τάξη» (και μέσα στην κομφορμιστική έννοια του πλήθους). Επιπλέον ο «εμφύλιος πόλεμος» εναρμονίζεται με τη λαμπρή αντίσταση της Βαρκελώνης (ένα πολιτικό υπόβαθρο που τροφοδοτεί κατά τρόπο ενδιαφέροντα το τωρινό κοινωνικό κεφάλαιό του) και αποτελεί επίσης μια υπενθύμιση των εσωτερικών διαμαχών κάθε πρωτοπορίας (αναρχικοί και κομμουνιστές άρχισαν να σκοτώνονται μεταξύ τους).
Από την άλλη πλευρά, «άυλη» είναι η συνεχής πάλη στο στάδιο της κοινωνίας του θεάματος: μια σκληρή «μπαλλαρντιανή»[20] ζούγκλα από εμπορικές μάρκες, αστέρες της ποπ, γκάτζετ, συσκευές, δεδομένα, πρωτόκολλα, simulacra. Άυλη εκμετάλλευση είναι η καθημερινότητα των επισφαλών εργατών, και ιδιαίτερα των νεότερων γενεών, αρκετά ενήμερων για το συμβολικό κεφάλαιο που παράγεται από τις ζωές τους «που μπαίνουν στη δουλειά» (νέες τάσεις και τρόποι ζωής που παράγονται από αυτό που ο μετα-Εργατισμός αποκαλεί βιοπολιτική παραγωγή). Ο άυλος εμφύλιος πόλεμος είναι η έκρηξη των κοινωνικών σχέσεων που εσωκλείονται στα προϊόντα. Στο βιβλίο του Les révolutions du capitalisme (Οι επαναστάσεις του καπιταλισμού)[21] ο Lazzarato λέει ότι «ο καπιταλισμός δεν είναι τρόπος παραγωγής, αλλά παραγωγή τρόπων και κόσμων» (που φτιάχτηκαν από εταιρίες και πουλήθηκαν στους ανθρώπους) και ότι ο «παγκόσμιος οικονομικός πόλεμος» είναι ένας «αισθητικός πόλεμος» ανάμεσα σε διαφορετικούς κόσμους.
Ο άυλος εμφύλιος πόλεμος είναι επίσης οι συνηθισμένες συγκρούσεις μεταξύ των γνωσιακών εργατών παρόλη τη ρητορική περί διανομής της γνώσης και των ψηφιακών κοινών (digital commons). Είναι το γνωστό αστείο: «ένας φίλος μου, μου έκλεψε την ιδέα μου για ένα βιβλίο σχετικά με το Creative Commons». Είναι ο γνωστός ανταγωνισμός μέσα στον ακαδημαϊκό και καλλιτεχνικό χώρο, η οικονομία των αναφορών, ο αγώνας για τις προθεσμίες, ο ανταγωνισμός για τη διοργάνωση φεστιβάλ, ο φθόνος και η καχυποψία μεταξύ των ακτιβιστών. Η συνεργασία είναι δομικά δύσκολη μεταξύ των γνωσιακών εργατών, στις τάξεις των οποίων η οικονομία γοήτρου λειτουργεί κατά τον ίδιο τρόπο όπως ακριβώς σε οποιοδήποτε star system (για να μην αναφέρω τους πολιτικούς φιλοσόφους!), και όπου οι νέες ιδέες πρέπει να αντιμετωπίσουν η μια την άλλη, εμπλέκοντας συχνά τους δημιουργούς τους σε μια διαμάχη. Όπως ο Rullani επισημαίνει, υπάρχει σχεδόν περισσότερος ανταγωνισμός στη σφαίρα της οικονομίας της γνώσης, όπου η δυνατότητα αναπαραγωγής είναι ελεύθερη και όπου αυτό που έχει σημασία είναι ταχύτητα.
Αντιμετωπίζοντας τον παρασιτισμό
Ο παρασιτισμός είναι η παράλληλη εκμετάλλευση της κοινωνικής δημιουργικότητας. Υπάρχουν πράγματι πολλοί τρόποι εκμετάλλευσης της δημιουργικής εργασίας που δεν βασίζονται στην πνευματική ιδιοκτησία και παράγουν περισσότερη αξία και σύγκρουση. Όπως έχουμε δει, ο Harvey εισάγει το πλαίσιο του «συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου» και διατυπώνει την άποψη ότι οι «πολιτιστικές παρεμβάσεις μπορούν από μόνες τους να μετατραπούν σε ένα ισχυρό όπλο ταξικής πάλης». Ο πολιτικός ακτιβισμός στον πολιτιστικό τομέα, οι δημιουργικές βιομηχανίες και η νέα οικονομία έχουν πάντοτε παραμείνει μέσα σε αυτά τα πλασματικά όρια, οργανώνοντας τοπικές διαμαρτυρίες και απαιτώντας πολιτιστική ευημερία ή σταθερά συμβόλαια. Πρόσφατα, ένα πιο ριζικό αίτημα για την αντιμετώπιση της εκμετάλλευσης της κοινωνικής δημιουργικότητας θέτει το ζήτημα του βασικού εισοδήματος για όλους (δείτε το www.euromayday.org). Αντιθέτως, ο Rullani σημειώνει ότι ένα σύστημα πρόνοιας μεταφέρει ταυτόχρονα καινοτομία και ρίσκο στον κρατικό μηχανισμό ισχυροποιώντας τον. Παρόλα αυτά, αυτό που προτείνει ο Harvey είναι να αναλάβουμε δράση όχι μόνο στο επίπεδο του συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου αλλά και στο επίπεδο του παρασιτισμού που εκμεταλλεύεται τον πολιτιστικό τομέα. Ένα δύσκολο σημείο, δύσκολο για να πιαστεί η ριζοσπαστική σκέψη, είναι ότι όλη η άυλη οικονομία (και η οικονομία του δώρου) έχει ένα υλικό, παράλληλο και βρώμικο ομόλογό της, όπου παίζονται τα πολλά χρήματα. Δείτε Mp3 και iPod, P2P και ADSL, ελεύθερη μουσική, ζωντανές συναυλίες, τρόπος ζωής της Βαρκελώνης και κερδοσκοπία της αγοράς ακινήτων, κόσμος της τέχνης και αστικός εξευγενισμός, παγκόσμιες εμπορικές φίρμες και sweatshops.[22]
Μια μορφή αντίστασης που προτείνει ο Harvey στην περίπτωση της Βαρκελώνης είναι περισσότερο μια επίθεση στο μύθο της «δημιουργικής πόλης» παρά οι δήθεν ριζοσπαστικές αντιδράσεις που συμβάλουν στο να την καταστήσουν ακόμη πιο ξεχωριστή. Εάν οι άνθρωποι θέλουν να επανακτήσουν τη συμβολική υπεραξία που οικειοποιήθηκε από κάποιους κερδοσκόπους, το μόνο που μπορούμε να φανταστούμε είναι μια επαναδιαπραγμάτευση του συλλογικού συμβολικού κεφαλαίου. Εδώ μπαίνει η εναλλακτική λύση μιας εκστρατείας επανακαθορισμού της ιδιαίτερης φυσιογνωμίας της πόλης σε επίπεδο βάσης ώστε να υπονομευθεί η συσσώρευση του συμβολικού κεφαλαίου και να εκτραπούν οι ροές χρημάτων, τουριστών και νέων κατοίκων που προσελκύονται από συγκεκριμένα σημεία διάκρισης (η Βαρκελώνη ως ανεκτική, εναλλακτική, πόλη χωρίς προκαταλήψεις, κ.λπ.). Επιπλέον ένας άλλος τομέας δράσης που προτείνεται εδώ είναι οι συγκεκριμένες περιοχές όπου ακμάζει «η τέχνη του ενοικίου» (συγκεκριμένες περιοχές όπως το Raval ή το Poblenou), όπου η συμβολική συσσώρευση θα μπορούσε να αρχίσει από την αρχή με ένα, λιγότερο συμβολικό, σαμποτάζ. Στην περίπτωση της Βαρκελώνης το «παράσιτο» που πρέπει να αναδείξουμε είναι η κερδοσκοπία της κτηματαγοράς, αλλά θα μπορούσαμε να δοκιμάσουμε αυτή την πρόταση σε μια ευρύτερη κλίμακα.
Πρόσφατες μορφές αντίστασης είναι σχεδόν πάντα αρκετά αντιπροσωπευτικές και προσανατολισμένες στα μμε, οραματιζόμενες την άνοδο ενός νέου κογκνιταριάτου (cognitariat) ή την επαναπολιτικοποίηση του συλλλογικού φαντασιακού και των παραγωγών του, όπως στη χρυσή δεκαετία του '60. Πολλοί ακτιβιστές και καλλιτέχνες –όπως ο Harvey– γνωρίζουν τον κίνδυνο που μπορεί να προέλθει από την υπερεκτίμηση των μηνυμάτων και των πρακτικών τους. Στο τέλος πολλές ενέργειες διαμαρτυρίας εν μέρει πέτυχαν να συγκεντρώσουν την οικονομία προσοχής (attention economy) γύρω από το στόχο τους. Τα παραδοσιακά μποϊκοτάζ στις μεγάλες εμπορικές φίρμες μετατρέπονται μερικές φορές σε δωρεάν διαφήμιση προς όφελός τους. Αυτό που ο πρόσφατος ακτιβισμός και η κριτική σκέψη δεν έχει προσπαθήσει ποτέ να εξερευνήσει είναι η υλική (και οικονομική) διάσταση που συνδέεται με το συμβολικό. Οι γνωσιακοί εργάτες πρέπει να αρχίσουν να αναγνωρίζουν την υπεραξία του φαντασιακού που παράγουν πέρα από τα άυλα αντικείμενα και τα απώτερα πολιτικά αποτελέσματα κάθε συμβόλου. Αφήνουμε το συμβολικό, μπαίνουμε στην οικονομία του συμβολικού. Αναμένουμε μια γενιά γνωσιακών εργατών ικανών να κινητοποιηθούν από το φαντασιακό.
Tou Matteo Pasquinelli
Σημειώσεις
[1] Πηγή: www.wikipedia.org/Creative_industries. Η λίστα της κατηγορίας DCMS αφορά στην παραγωγή στους εξής τομείς: Διαφήμιση, Αρχιτεκτονική, Αγορά Τέχνης και Αρχαιοτήτων, Εφαρμοσμένες Τέχνες, Design, Σχεδιασμός μόδας, Κινηματογράφος και Video, Διαδραστικό Ψυχαγωγικό Λογισμικό, Μουσική, Αναπαραστατικές Τέχνες, Εκδόσεις, Υπηρεσίες Υπολογιστών, Τηλεόραση και Ραδιόφωνο.
[2] Σ.τ.Μ.: San Precario, ο άγιος της επισφάλειας: ευφημισμός που δημιουργήθηκε στο πλαίσιο μιας κινηματικής γλώσσας για την επισφαλή εργασία (όπως επίσης το πρεκαριάτο).
[3] Σ.τ.Μ.: Ελεύθερη άδεια χρήσης σε πνευματικά δικαιώματα, το αντίθετο του copyright.
[4] Σ.τ.Μ: Η Creative Commons (CC) είναι μια μη κερδοσκοπική οργάνωση αφιερωμένη στην επέκταση του εύρους των πνευματικών έργων που είναι διαθέσιμα για να βασιστούν σε αυτά και άλλα έργα και να κυκλοφορήσουν νόμιμα. Η οργάνωση έχει εκδώσει διάφορες άδειες πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων γνωστές ως άδειες Creative Commons. Αυτές οι άδειες επιτρέπουν στους δημιουργούς να δηλώσουν εύκολα ποια δικαιώματα διατηρούν και ποια δικαιώματα εκχωρούν προς όφελος άλλων δημιουργών. (Ο ορισμός από: http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons).
[5] Πηγή: www.creativecommons.org/about/history
[6] M. Tronti, Operai e capitale, Torino: Einaudi, 1971.
[7] M. Lazzarato, Puissances de l'invention: La Psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l'économie politique, Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002.
[8] M. Lazzarato, “La psychologie économique contre l’Economie politique”, στο Multitudes n. 7, 2001, Paris. Extentended Italian version “Invenzione e lavoro nella cooperazione tra cervelli” στο Y. Moulier Boutang (επιμ.), L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002. Web: multitudes.samizdat.net/La-Psychologie-economique-contre-l.html
[9] [δική μου μετάφραση] M. Lazzarato, “Invenzione e lavoro nella cooperazione tra cervelli” στο Y. Moulier Boutang (επιμ.), L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, όπ.π.
[10] Στο ίδιο.
[11] Σ.τ.Μ.: Η νοόσφαιρα υποδηλώνει, σύμφωνα με τους Vladimir Vernadsky και Teilhard de Chardin, τη «σφαίρα της ανθρώπινης σκέψης». Η λέξη προέρχεται από την ελληνική νοῦς + σφαῖρα, κατά λεξιλογική αναλογία με το «ατμόσφαιρα» και το «βιόσφαιρα». Σύμφωνα με τους ίδιους, είναι η τρίτη κατά σειρά στις φάσεις της ανάπτυξης του πλανήτη, μετά την γεώσφαιρα και τη βιόσφαιρα. (Μετάφραση του ορισμού από: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere)
[12] E. Rullani, L. Romano, Il postfordismo. Idee per il capitalismo prossimo venturo, Milano: Etaslibri, 1998. E. Rullani, “La conoscenza come forza produttiva: autonomia del post-fordismo”, στο Capitalismo econoscenza, Cillario L., Finelli R. (επιμ.), Roma, Manifesto libri, 1998. E. Rullani, “Le capitalisme cognitif: du déjà vu?”, Multitudes n. 2, 2000, Paris.
[13] E. Rullani, Economia della conoscenza: Creatività e valore nel capitalismo delle reti, Milano: Carocci, 2004.
[14] [δική μου μετάφραση] A. Corsani, E. Rullani, “Production de connaissance et valeur dans le postfordisme”, Multitudes, n. 2, May 2000. Paris. Πρωτότυπη ιταλική εκδοχή στο Y. Moulier Boutang (επιμ.), L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, όπ.π. Web: multitudes.samizdat.net/Production-de-connaissance-et.html. Ισπανική εκδοχή:
www.sindominio.net/arkitzean/xmultitudes/multitudes2
[15] Στο ίδιο.
[16] D. Harvey, “The art of rent: globabalization and the commodification of culture”, στο Spaces of Capital, New York: Routledge, 2001. Επίσης, “The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly, and the Commodification of Culture” στο A World of Contradictions: Socialist Register 2002, London: Merlin Press, November 2001.
Web: www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001966.php
[17] Σ.τ.Μ: Ο Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) ήταν Γάλλος φιλόσοφος κι ουτοπιστής σοσιαλιστής, ο οποίος είχε ιδρύσει το Ικαρικό κοινοτιστικό κίνημα κι είχε ηγηθεί ομάδων μεταναστών, που ήθελαν να δημιουργήσουν μια νέα κοινωνία στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες της Αμερικής. Επίσης, στον Cabet αποδίδεται η επινόηση του όρου communisme. (Πηγή: http://thrymmata.blogspot.com/2009/04/jacques-ranciere.html)
[18] A. Negri, M. Hardt, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, σ. 186.
[19] G. Agamben, The Coming Community (Michael Hardt, μτφρ.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, σ. 65.
[20] Σ.τ.Μ.: Ο ορισμός του επιθέτου «μπαλλαρντιανός» (ballardian) περιλαμβάνεται στο Collins English Dictionary: «Ό,τι μοιάζει ή παραπέμπει στις συνθήκες που περιγράφονται στα μυθιστορήματα και στα διηγήματα του Τζέι Τζι Μπάλλαρντ, ιδίως στη δυστοπική νεωτερικότητα, τα ζοφερά ανθρωπογενή τοπία και τις ψυχολογικές επιπτώσεις των τεχνολογικών, κοινωνικών ή περιβαλλοντικών επιτευγμάτων». (Πηγή: http://www.ekathimerini.gr/4Dcgi/4Dcgi/_w_articles_civ_12_26/04/2009_311951)
[21] [δική μου μετάφραση] M. Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme, Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en http://eipcp.net/policies/cci/pasquinelli/en rond, 2004.
[22] Σ.τ.Μ.: Η αγγλική λέξη sweatshop σημαίνει: χώροι μαζικής παραγωγής ειδών υπόδησης και ένδυσης που χαρακτηρίζονται από ανθυγιεινές και επισφαλείς συνθήκες εργασίας εντατικής εκμετάλλευσης.
Πρωτότυπο κείμενο: “Immaterial Civil War: Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism”, στο Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (επιμ.), My Creativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, Institute of Network Cultures, Άμστερνταμ 2007.
Στο διαδίκτυο (αγγλ.): http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/immaterialcivilwar.pdf
Μετάφραση: ratnet 2009
Source:ratnet.blogspot.com
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Bataille par les communards
Adolphe Disderi,1871
Secteur transforme en champ de bataille par les communards et les Versaillais.
Farewell to Function: Tactical Interiors
Disorientation: We Are Almost There
Many of the more prominent artworks produced in the last decade or so are characterized by a recasting of what were once called installations as something closer to interiors, relegating the installation to a supportive role that places meaning in the service of activity. From an artwork spread out everywhere we turn to one that is located very precisely in the features that can be said to make up the space—the walls, the furnishings, the floor coverings, the display structures, the shelves. Whether it’s the artwork as lecture hall, museum lobby, bookshop, screening room, library, dining hall, video store, or rec room, one finds a consistent engagement with architecture’s interior spaces and conventional typologies. But this repeated rendezvous has been mostly a dance of half steps—these “interiors” don’t so much use site as setting and material as put a new skin on it. While various artists may have considered what this “slouching toward the interior” may mean for art production, few have considered the potential that may be stored in the interior itself as reflexive structure, malleable form, and analytical tool.
Jorge Pardo’s lobby at Dia or the interior of his Mountain Bar in Los Angeles, for instance, do little but reiterate his project—both in terms of the concerns that drive it and the design languages that it appropriates—on a larger scale. Perhaps these works complicate things, but only internally—that is, only in stretching the question regarding the indeterminacy of sculpture (a question that underlies his entire project) into larger architectural expanses and non-art-institutional spaces that demand more complex forms of bureaucratic negotiation, capital investment, and user engagement. The morphologies and decors employed in these spaces, however, were not introduced as another layer of variables or information—a layer that by its very destabilizing presence forces certain reconfigurations. And something similar can be said about the “interiors” of any number of artists who have been active since the early to mid 1990s.
Carsten Holler, The Double Club, 2008-2009.
Carsten Höller’s The Double Club (2008–9), a half-Congolese, half-Occidental bar, disco, and restaurant in London, was an interesting recent effort to test the interior as a complex structure. At the very least, it revealed an understanding of decor as bound to cultural codes as much as to personal vocabularies, of the interior as determined at an interface between external factors and “internal” languages. In understanding this, and in showing it twice and side by side, The Double Club assumed a diagrammatic function. Aside from all the eating and dancing and cavorting that took place in it, the structure itself was meaningfully employed to convey at least two different kinds of information: information, on the one hand, about Congolese and Western cultures (even if schematically), their interaction (or lack thereof), their differences, and so forth; and information, on the other, regarding the very conditions of the interior itself. The Double Club was a double diagram.
In this case, the doubling is instrumental in articulating the difference between the interior as container and the interior as self-reflexive structure. It offers a vertical diagram—or a surface-substrate diagram—confronting the look of the space with the structural conditions of the interior. It’s a diagram cast in high relief by the overlapping of two separate nightclubs. This very process of assembling—this effort to establish a system of relations in order to produce a specific morphology and identity—is twice shown and, inevitably, thematized. There’s nothing like repetition to underscore a point and introduce a moment of self-reflexive difference.
We have also seen a horizontal diagram in which two cultures are juxtaposed within an interior, like the DöplirCaffé in China Miéville’s The City & The City, in which
one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, share a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed.1
But whereas Miéville’s Jewish-Muslim composite (combining the two overdetermined populations of our age) assumes a kind of inevitability in our current geopolitical landscape, the Western-Congolese assemblage feels more arbitrary and more open. Why not Trinidadian and Swiss, Nigerian and Mexican, Cambodian and Argentine, Inuit and Indian? One can imagine this horizontal diagram held in tension by such an arbitrary polarity, proliferating into an unhinged arrangement of multiple cultures, of multiple polarities, inducing disorientation through the geo-zapping that would happen with every step. But in The Double Club, as it stood, the disorientation was contained or only implied: visitors risked being suddenly jolted from only one ambiance/culture to another, all the while clearly seeing this potential shift frozen in the double decor of the club.
Tobias Rehberger, Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinenat, 2009.
Tobias Rehberger’s “bar-cafeteria,” Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen (2009), shown at the last Venice Biennial, renders literal this disorientation and amps it up. He trades incommensurable cultural signs and styles for total sensorial immersion in hyperactive graphics and shapes. Shooting lines, folding planes (physical and represented), bending tubes and ducts, proliferating stools and other slightly deformed furniture pieces, punctuated by recurring moments of intense orange and teal and yellow, begin to articulate an almost unmanageable and gleeful explosion of abstract signage, blurring references, and elongated and twisted artifacts. The senses reel with acceleration and vertigo—it’s a deranged op painting that slipped its frame to stretch like a flexible membrane over the architecture, torquing the pieces of furniture into slightly skewed shapes in the process. Whatever diagrammatic potential there was in Höller’s project is here forfeited to an affective quasi-delirium, to the possibility of shooting a dizzying charge right into our nerve endings.
I read the disorientation that Rehberger aims to induce as a physical stand-in for the ontological disorientation produced by the interior as its sails away from the solid ground and protected territory of sculpture. Even when Rehberger or Pardo produce functional or seemingly functional artifacts, their feet remain firmly planted on terra firma. This is precisely what allows them to flirt with the possibility of running out into and back from the liminal space that sculpture shares with other modes of object production. They seem unwilling to burn the bridges they cross. Rehberger confirms this, I think, with some of his remarks regarding the Venice project:
I am not actually designing the bar-cafeteria in the new Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The sculpture I am making, which is based on dazzle painting [a camouflage paint scheme used on ships during World War I], is the bar-cafeteria.2
The interior, however, rather than being a self-contained thing, the way a sculpture ostensibly is, materializes out of a series of relationships—relationships to architecture, to infrastructure, to program, to function, to materials, to social and cultural codes, to (brand) identity, to fashion, to specific schedules, to mediatic representation, to available capital and technologies, and so forth. These relations generate a system of articulation: they work on matter to produce distinctive forms.
But there is another system at play in the production of the interior: that resistant and cumulative aesthetic or decorative set of codes that we call the designer’s language. Ideologically determined or not—that’s a different discussion—this “language,” the demands it places on things at the moment of production, also has generative impact. And it is at the charged interstitial space or interface where these two systems make volatile contact that the interior takes shape.
Can the interior, then, as this node within a complex matrix of infrastructural webs and local value systems, serve not only as a container for participatory projects, but as a starting point for critical reflection within art production? Do recent approximations of the interior reveal it to be fertile territory in this regard? Can the interior be a conceptual structure through which ideas are articulated, the way the cinematic remake in video art and the parametric in design have been in recent years? Or, asked a different way: can the interior be recuperated as a vehicle to think through and not just in?
Herbert Bayer, Design for a Cinema, 1924-25.
Italian Ice Cream Shops and Poisoned Cherries
If we speak of recuperation, it’s because the interior has been considered in complex ways before. After the wood-paneled and sumptuously upholstered Victorian apartments that, as Walter Benjamin cleverly pointed out, appear to have been decorated for the presence of dead bodies (the perfect setting for nineteenth-century detective stories), and the eclectic ahistoricity of Jugendstil at the turn of the last century, came efforts to consider interior spaces—inside and outside the home—in complex ways. For example, there are moments in constructivism, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus in which we see the interior treated as vector rather than setting, as malleable typology rather than a set of staid conventions, as active social hub rather than neutral container. The moldings and the upholstery, the organic form and the etched glass, are replaced by gargantuan graphics, hard edges, and abstract patterning—the functions that emerge in the wake of new technologies become generative opportunities in the context of these movements.
The Radical Architects of the late 1960s—Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Hans Hollein, and others—treated the interior as a rich semantic space through which political and cultural concerns could be articulated and explored. Even Tomas Maldonado—who, in an attempt to defend his side of the divide between the cold industrial design of the Ulm School and its sympathizers, on the one hand, and the hot semantic design of the Radicals, on the other, proposed that the Italians in the latter group were merely designers of interiors—had to concede that their efforts had some critical bite. Although engaged in problems he considered to be anachronistic—addressing an affluent minority in the developed world, trading an old conformism for a new one, and so forth—Maldonado knew that if we were to consider the conformism of the past with the current one, we [would] have to at least acknowledge that we have won something in terms of an internal dialectic, seeing as, according to the very designers of this new conformism, the objects they produce are deliberately ephemeral and lack lasting value. In this sense, the conformism that these objects produce is itself ephemeral, as it is consumed at top speed by consumerism. Such a conformism implies not so much “being up to date” as being “ahead.”3
Archizoom, Dream Beds, 1967.
The “ahead” within quotation marks is of course ironic: it’s the phantasmic “new” that capitalism always calls for but rarely generates in its hypercharged landscapes of endless stylistic recycling; it’s the mirage of perpetual innovation diffused throughout the culture in order to speed up the cycles of consumption. Self-consciously designing to the rhythms of this constant chase for the new was a way to understand this unprecedented social reality and, also, to produce forms that were implausible before this dynamic was catalyzed by the European postwar economic miracles.
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Archizoom, No-Stop City / Interior Landscape, 1969.
While this willingness to participate in a hands-off-the-wheel way in the modes of production and reception may have been at odds with Maldonado’s general position, there is little doubt that it was initiated consciously and reflexively. It was intended to drive things to the point where they would be turned on their head. Interiors and the objects in them would be juiced up with the energy generated by this dynamic of chasing the new until they ballooned into unredeemable hyperboles, into clunky and gaudy artifacts that would border on folly and parody, always at risk of becoming instantly outmoded. As Andrea Branzi wrote in 1967:
The problem for us . . . is how to serve up an ice cream in such a way that he [the customer] loses the desire to eat it for the rest of his life. Or an ice cream that, once it has been bought, grows bigger than him and humiliates him. Or that becomes a piece of the world surrounding him and frightens him . . . In short, an ice cream with no alternatives: either you eat it or it eats you. Or rather: it starts to eat you as soon as you have finished it. And then we think: apple-bombs, poisonous sweets, false information, in short Trojan blankets, beds, or horses that are brought into the house and destroy everything in it.4
The postwar interior that the Radical Architects turned to was an active field where advances in industrial design met antiquated and inflexible values; where behaviors began to be modified by objects; where expendable goods sat inside immovable walls, juxtaposing incommensurable logics, temporalities, and technologies; where the cataclysmic shifts from manufacturing society to information society, from a contained avant-garde culture to an expansive culture industry, were registered. Branzi describes the domestic interior of the 1960s as “the true theater of post-industrial complexity.”5 It was a space in which larger and turbulent social shifts were embodied in compressed form.
The focus on the interior in the case of the Radicals signals a shift from the sphere of production—the factory and the logic of the assembly line, which had permeated industrial design for the previous five or six decades—to the sphere of reception.6 Among other things, this focus was a matter of cognitively mapping a reality that was changing, and of finding proper ways of inhabiting and critically engaging with it, not because manufacturing and the political economy that organized it had vanished, but because they were forced to share space with emerging immaterial means of generating and moving capital, with spectacle and mass media, with increased leisure time and the proliferation of a gadget industry, with changing social mores and cultural conditions—the rise and commodification of information technologies and the new demands that social movements made on the mainstream.
Who’s Afraid of Decor?
In contemporary design, we may see this reflexive current not in the super-integrated interior, the complete environment, whereby everything becomes product, whereby brand, like some living and invasive plant, weaves itself right into the walls, into the display structures, into the doorknobs, into the cash registers, into the hairstyles of the employees, with its spores seeping into the very oxygen particles in the room, turning air into ambiance, life into look. Not even when this is done to such a degree of excess that it is rendered jolting or parodic. We may see it, instead, in negative iterations: in the interior as cancelled structure, as an allegory of so many foreclosed possibilities. Something that may happen, for instance, when Jerszy Seymour floods the room where all his products are displayed (Being There, “River Workshop” at the Villa Noailles, 2009). He creates an interior while negating the interior. It’s a mise en scène of the interior not happening, where what is usually employed to stimulate desire now unmotivates it, creating not a moment of total immersion but one of impenetrability or conceptual slippage.
▴ Jerszy Seymour Design Workshop, Being there, Jeu de Palme, Polycapralactone wax.
Fleshing out this anti-interior, Seymour remains within the series of relations needed for the interior to materialize by very deliberately refusing to address them. Architecture, program, function, fashion, and so on, are all metaphorically crossed out; the framing discourse of design, however, is the ground on which this is done. (Other systems of relations—institutional support, DIY politics—provide the “lateral” spaces from which to articulate his oppositional stance.) It is only in this explicit negation that his flooded room can be read as that imaginary liquid state of the interior, as a typology still untouched by the many elements that put profit before well-being and ultimately determine the character of the interior in general in our moment. As he has done before by applying pressure to conventional typologies, Seymour is conjuring that bracketed space or moment where we can still imagine a history of design that didn’t turn out the way it has.
It may be in trying things that the designer won’t try (one is spared any sense of obligation to the discipline or its history not intrinsic to the situation), in debilitating some of the protocols indigenous to the field she or he often adheres to (even if unwittingly or through oppositional stances), in remaining insensible to “the chase for the new” that guarantees success in the commercial world, that the use of the interior in an art context may be of interest. One could engage things in a tactical way, understanding “tactics” in Michel de Certeau’s sense—as actions or modes of behavior that have no legitimate institutional ground and don’t aim to make advances in any field. They use, opportunistically, the spaces opened by established practices and institutions in order to unleash unexpected performative elements and to address needs that fall outside the conventional parameters that these practices and institutions adhere to.7
Treating the interior in this way allows us not only to work against the relations of which the interior is both a relay point and a morphological manifestation, but also to alter the relations’ variables—habit may dress them up as immutable, but they don’t need to be. In other words, the art context would allow us to invent programs and alter conventional functions; to introduce value systems usually absent from the equation; to rely on decorative languages or sign systems that may not have an outlet in design institutions and histories, or simply to apply lethal doses of ambiguity to the very idea of a signature language; to tap new infrastructures and propose new routines; to politicize parts of the process through calculated decisions and infuse things with increased self-reflexivity and the complex understanding of site-specificity inherited from Institutional Critique and similar practices; to complicate mediatic representation and representation in general; to practice an amnesia in order to wrest away permission to mix incongruous elements and ferment strange brews of seemingly incommensurable materials; to shift the points of stress and strain and torque the list of expectations (maybe the call for clarity in terms of brand identity becomes its opposite); and so on.
Andrea Branzi, 1969, Research for “No-Stop City” theoretical project of a diffuse metropolitan system.
We can be promiscuous with the unexpected. We can run interference by introducing dirty data into the interface. Models need no longer be drawn from the same sphere that they have always come from. The indeterminate home-restaurant in an immigrant neighborhood could be as good a starting point as Karim Rashid’s Kurve; the Tuareg tent as available as the proliferating blob-teriors supposedly signaling the most advanced practices out there; the generic languages of the mobile home designer as rich with potential as the sophisticated vocabularies that are taught at the Royal College of Art; Marcel Broodthaers’ inanimate stage sets (strange and perverse simulacra of the bourgeois apartment) as legitimate a source as any of interior design’s favorite textbook cases.
For instance, what of the interior as a vector or active (diagrammatic) stage, where the transmission of information and human interaction happen not against a purely aesthetic or graphic backdrop, but, on the contrary, in an interior, thematized and activated, that becomes part of the information transmitted, affecting the interaction it shelters? The Double Club was this—or, at least, approximated this. In such a situation, the very idea of a backdrop ceases to make much sense. The very morphologies and graphics that determine the “look” of the interior begin to articulate the flows—of ideas, of interests, of money, of ideology—that cross them, as they diagram their very own structural realities.
And this may afford the possibility for another autonomous but interconnected layer of possibilities to be annexed to the artist’s project. In this layer, deliberate discontinuity, productive dissonance, deformity, indeterminacy, mutation, modification, growth, and instability could generate increasingly transformative articulations that exist in a state of mutual animation with the rest of her project. In an art context, one can practice a kind of interior-design teratology with impunity.
Andrea Branzi, 1969, Research for “No-Stop City” theoretical project of a diffuse metropolitan system.
We can also consider the interior as an active tool, independent of the need for it to function in relation to other art objects, activities, or fictional dressing up. The interior itself is—or can be—a diagram of so many relationships that it needs little supplement. And switching the variables within those relations introduces new information, unexpected and foreign material that generates instability at the structural level and is bound to speed the processes of differentiation whereby a thing—the interior—becomes different than itself, allowing new morphologies to emerge, expanding the range of things it can become or how it comes to be, cracking open tightly sealed conventions so that unexpected concerns and positions can sneak in. It could be a matter of working at the level of the interior’s constitutive parts in order to render it a more complex and tactical tool of articulation—a matter, on the one hand, of attempting to chart topographies that still don’t assume physical form, that lie latent in the framework of the interior, where virtual possibilities, not yet pressured into actual forms, sit suspended; and, on the other hand, of placing the interior at the service of concerns that are usually foreign to it (although there is no necessary reason why they should be).
In the end, one is left with questions that invite testing: Can working the interior from an art context open a new dimension for it or in it, just as video and filmic art opened a critical dimension in the cinematic remake? Can shifts at the level of the variables that make up the relations that provide the necessary conditions for the interior have exciting repercussions in spatial articulation? Do their potential ramifications generate morphologies unexpected enough to be worth the effort? Can the interior be tactically inhabited in such a way that, operating on its structural substrate, we can articulate urgent and relevant things—things perhaps not always falling within the scope of design—through tweaked morphologies, unexpected decors, typological deformations, and complex deployments of space?
▴ Ettore Sottsass, The Planet as Festival: Study for a Dispenser of Incense, LSD, Marijuana, Opium, Laughing Gas. 1972-73. Graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 13 3/8" (38.4 x 34 cm).
Text by Gean Moreno
1 China Miéville, The City & The City (New York: Del Rey, 2009), 22.
2 Tobias Rehberger in “Does Venice still matter? Matthew Slotover, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tobias Rehberger and others on the Biennale,” The Art Newspaper, May 29, 2009 (emphasis added), →.
3 Tomas Maldonado, “Diseño Industrial, Presente y Futuro,” in Es la Arquitectura un Texto? y otros escritos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2004), 95. Author’s translation.
4 Andrea Branzi, “Radical Architecture,” in Andrea Branzi: The Complete Works (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 38.
5 Andrea Branzi, “A Homeless Country: Experimental Models for the Domestic Space,” in Italy: Contemporary Domestic Landscapes 1945–2000, ed. Giampiero Bosoni (Milan: Skira, 2001), 157.
6 For this notion of moving from the sphere of production (with the factory as a governing metaphor) to the sphere of reception, see Herbert Muschamp’s “Reception Rooms,” in The Work of Ettore Sottsass and Associates, ed. Milco Carboni (New York: Universe Publishing, 1999).
7 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Source: e-flux 15
Many of the more prominent artworks produced in the last decade or so are characterized by a recasting of what were once called installations as something closer to interiors, relegating the installation to a supportive role that places meaning in the service of activity. From an artwork spread out everywhere we turn to one that is located very precisely in the features that can be said to make up the space—the walls, the furnishings, the floor coverings, the display structures, the shelves. Whether it’s the artwork as lecture hall, museum lobby, bookshop, screening room, library, dining hall, video store, or rec room, one finds a consistent engagement with architecture’s interior spaces and conventional typologies. But this repeated rendezvous has been mostly a dance of half steps—these “interiors” don’t so much use site as setting and material as put a new skin on it. While various artists may have considered what this “slouching toward the interior” may mean for art production, few have considered the potential that may be stored in the interior itself as reflexive structure, malleable form, and analytical tool.
Jorge Pardo’s lobby at Dia or the interior of his Mountain Bar in Los Angeles, for instance, do little but reiterate his project—both in terms of the concerns that drive it and the design languages that it appropriates—on a larger scale. Perhaps these works complicate things, but only internally—that is, only in stretching the question regarding the indeterminacy of sculpture (a question that underlies his entire project) into larger architectural expanses and non-art-institutional spaces that demand more complex forms of bureaucratic negotiation, capital investment, and user engagement. The morphologies and decors employed in these spaces, however, were not introduced as another layer of variables or information—a layer that by its very destabilizing presence forces certain reconfigurations. And something similar can be said about the “interiors” of any number of artists who have been active since the early to mid 1990s.
Carsten Holler, The Double Club, 2008-2009.
Carsten Höller’s The Double Club (2008–9), a half-Congolese, half-Occidental bar, disco, and restaurant in London, was an interesting recent effort to test the interior as a complex structure. At the very least, it revealed an understanding of decor as bound to cultural codes as much as to personal vocabularies, of the interior as determined at an interface between external factors and “internal” languages. In understanding this, and in showing it twice and side by side, The Double Club assumed a diagrammatic function. Aside from all the eating and dancing and cavorting that took place in it, the structure itself was meaningfully employed to convey at least two different kinds of information: information, on the one hand, about Congolese and Western cultures (even if schematically), their interaction (or lack thereof), their differences, and so forth; and information, on the other, regarding the very conditions of the interior itself. The Double Club was a double diagram.
In this case, the doubling is instrumental in articulating the difference between the interior as container and the interior as self-reflexive structure. It offers a vertical diagram—or a surface-substrate diagram—confronting the look of the space with the structural conditions of the interior. It’s a diagram cast in high relief by the overlapping of two separate nightclubs. This very process of assembling—this effort to establish a system of relations in order to produce a specific morphology and identity—is twice shown and, inevitably, thematized. There’s nothing like repetition to underscore a point and introduce a moment of self-reflexive difference.
We have also seen a horizontal diagram in which two cultures are juxtaposed within an interior, like the DöplirCaffé in China Miéville’s The City & The City, in which
one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, share a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed.1
But whereas Miéville’s Jewish-Muslim composite (combining the two overdetermined populations of our age) assumes a kind of inevitability in our current geopolitical landscape, the Western-Congolese assemblage feels more arbitrary and more open. Why not Trinidadian and Swiss, Nigerian and Mexican, Cambodian and Argentine, Inuit and Indian? One can imagine this horizontal diagram held in tension by such an arbitrary polarity, proliferating into an unhinged arrangement of multiple cultures, of multiple polarities, inducing disorientation through the geo-zapping that would happen with every step. But in The Double Club, as it stood, the disorientation was contained or only implied: visitors risked being suddenly jolted from only one ambiance/culture to another, all the while clearly seeing this potential shift frozen in the double decor of the club.
Tobias Rehberger, Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinenat, 2009.
Tobias Rehberger’s “bar-cafeteria,” Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen (2009), shown at the last Venice Biennial, renders literal this disorientation and amps it up. He trades incommensurable cultural signs and styles for total sensorial immersion in hyperactive graphics and shapes. Shooting lines, folding planes (physical and represented), bending tubes and ducts, proliferating stools and other slightly deformed furniture pieces, punctuated by recurring moments of intense orange and teal and yellow, begin to articulate an almost unmanageable and gleeful explosion of abstract signage, blurring references, and elongated and twisted artifacts. The senses reel with acceleration and vertigo—it’s a deranged op painting that slipped its frame to stretch like a flexible membrane over the architecture, torquing the pieces of furniture into slightly skewed shapes in the process. Whatever diagrammatic potential there was in Höller’s project is here forfeited to an affective quasi-delirium, to the possibility of shooting a dizzying charge right into our nerve endings.
I read the disorientation that Rehberger aims to induce as a physical stand-in for the ontological disorientation produced by the interior as its sails away from the solid ground and protected territory of sculpture. Even when Rehberger or Pardo produce functional or seemingly functional artifacts, their feet remain firmly planted on terra firma. This is precisely what allows them to flirt with the possibility of running out into and back from the liminal space that sculpture shares with other modes of object production. They seem unwilling to burn the bridges they cross. Rehberger confirms this, I think, with some of his remarks regarding the Venice project:
I am not actually designing the bar-cafeteria in the new Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The sculpture I am making, which is based on dazzle painting [a camouflage paint scheme used on ships during World War I], is the bar-cafeteria.2
The interior, however, rather than being a self-contained thing, the way a sculpture ostensibly is, materializes out of a series of relationships—relationships to architecture, to infrastructure, to program, to function, to materials, to social and cultural codes, to (brand) identity, to fashion, to specific schedules, to mediatic representation, to available capital and technologies, and so forth. These relations generate a system of articulation: they work on matter to produce distinctive forms.
But there is another system at play in the production of the interior: that resistant and cumulative aesthetic or decorative set of codes that we call the designer’s language. Ideologically determined or not—that’s a different discussion—this “language,” the demands it places on things at the moment of production, also has generative impact. And it is at the charged interstitial space or interface where these two systems make volatile contact that the interior takes shape.
Can the interior, then, as this node within a complex matrix of infrastructural webs and local value systems, serve not only as a container for participatory projects, but as a starting point for critical reflection within art production? Do recent approximations of the interior reveal it to be fertile territory in this regard? Can the interior be a conceptual structure through which ideas are articulated, the way the cinematic remake in video art and the parametric in design have been in recent years? Or, asked a different way: can the interior be recuperated as a vehicle to think through and not just in?
Herbert Bayer, Design for a Cinema, 1924-25.
Italian Ice Cream Shops and Poisoned Cherries
If we speak of recuperation, it’s because the interior has been considered in complex ways before. After the wood-paneled and sumptuously upholstered Victorian apartments that, as Walter Benjamin cleverly pointed out, appear to have been decorated for the presence of dead bodies (the perfect setting for nineteenth-century detective stories), and the eclectic ahistoricity of Jugendstil at the turn of the last century, came efforts to consider interior spaces—inside and outside the home—in complex ways. For example, there are moments in constructivism, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus in which we see the interior treated as vector rather than setting, as malleable typology rather than a set of staid conventions, as active social hub rather than neutral container. The moldings and the upholstery, the organic form and the etched glass, are replaced by gargantuan graphics, hard edges, and abstract patterning—the functions that emerge in the wake of new technologies become generative opportunities in the context of these movements.
The Radical Architects of the late 1960s—Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Hans Hollein, and others—treated the interior as a rich semantic space through which political and cultural concerns could be articulated and explored. Even Tomas Maldonado—who, in an attempt to defend his side of the divide between the cold industrial design of the Ulm School and its sympathizers, on the one hand, and the hot semantic design of the Radicals, on the other, proposed that the Italians in the latter group were merely designers of interiors—had to concede that their efforts had some critical bite. Although engaged in problems he considered to be anachronistic—addressing an affluent minority in the developed world, trading an old conformism for a new one, and so forth—Maldonado knew that if we were to consider the conformism of the past with the current one, we [would] have to at least acknowledge that we have won something in terms of an internal dialectic, seeing as, according to the very designers of this new conformism, the objects they produce are deliberately ephemeral and lack lasting value. In this sense, the conformism that these objects produce is itself ephemeral, as it is consumed at top speed by consumerism. Such a conformism implies not so much “being up to date” as being “ahead.”3
Archizoom, Dream Beds, 1967.
The “ahead” within quotation marks is of course ironic: it’s the phantasmic “new” that capitalism always calls for but rarely generates in its hypercharged landscapes of endless stylistic recycling; it’s the mirage of perpetual innovation diffused throughout the culture in order to speed up the cycles of consumption. Self-consciously designing to the rhythms of this constant chase for the new was a way to understand this unprecedented social reality and, also, to produce forms that were implausible before this dynamic was catalyzed by the European postwar economic miracles.
/>Archizoom, No-Stop City / Interior Landscape, 1969.
While this willingness to participate in a hands-off-the-wheel way in the modes of production and reception may have been at odds with Maldonado’s general position, there is little doubt that it was initiated consciously and reflexively. It was intended to drive things to the point where they would be turned on their head. Interiors and the objects in them would be juiced up with the energy generated by this dynamic of chasing the new until they ballooned into unredeemable hyperboles, into clunky and gaudy artifacts that would border on folly and parody, always at risk of becoming instantly outmoded. As Andrea Branzi wrote in 1967:
The problem for us . . . is how to serve up an ice cream in such a way that he [the customer] loses the desire to eat it for the rest of his life. Or an ice cream that, once it has been bought, grows bigger than him and humiliates him. Or that becomes a piece of the world surrounding him and frightens him . . . In short, an ice cream with no alternatives: either you eat it or it eats you. Or rather: it starts to eat you as soon as you have finished it. And then we think: apple-bombs, poisonous sweets, false information, in short Trojan blankets, beds, or horses that are brought into the house and destroy everything in it.4
The postwar interior that the Radical Architects turned to was an active field where advances in industrial design met antiquated and inflexible values; where behaviors began to be modified by objects; where expendable goods sat inside immovable walls, juxtaposing incommensurable logics, temporalities, and technologies; where the cataclysmic shifts from manufacturing society to information society, from a contained avant-garde culture to an expansive culture industry, were registered. Branzi describes the domestic interior of the 1960s as “the true theater of post-industrial complexity.”5 It was a space in which larger and turbulent social shifts were embodied in compressed form.
The focus on the interior in the case of the Radicals signals a shift from the sphere of production—the factory and the logic of the assembly line, which had permeated industrial design for the previous five or six decades—to the sphere of reception.6 Among other things, this focus was a matter of cognitively mapping a reality that was changing, and of finding proper ways of inhabiting and critically engaging with it, not because manufacturing and the political economy that organized it had vanished, but because they were forced to share space with emerging immaterial means of generating and moving capital, with spectacle and mass media, with increased leisure time and the proliferation of a gadget industry, with changing social mores and cultural conditions—the rise and commodification of information technologies and the new demands that social movements made on the mainstream.
Who’s Afraid of Decor?
In contemporary design, we may see this reflexive current not in the super-integrated interior, the complete environment, whereby everything becomes product, whereby brand, like some living and invasive plant, weaves itself right into the walls, into the display structures, into the doorknobs, into the cash registers, into the hairstyles of the employees, with its spores seeping into the very oxygen particles in the room, turning air into ambiance, life into look. Not even when this is done to such a degree of excess that it is rendered jolting or parodic. We may see it, instead, in negative iterations: in the interior as cancelled structure, as an allegory of so many foreclosed possibilities. Something that may happen, for instance, when Jerszy Seymour floods the room where all his products are displayed (Being There, “River Workshop” at the Villa Noailles, 2009). He creates an interior while negating the interior. It’s a mise en scène of the interior not happening, where what is usually employed to stimulate desire now unmotivates it, creating not a moment of total immersion but one of impenetrability or conceptual slippage.
▴ Jerszy Seymour Design Workshop, Being there, Jeu de Palme, Polycapralactone wax.
Fleshing out this anti-interior, Seymour remains within the series of relations needed for the interior to materialize by very deliberately refusing to address them. Architecture, program, function, fashion, and so on, are all metaphorically crossed out; the framing discourse of design, however, is the ground on which this is done. (Other systems of relations—institutional support, DIY politics—provide the “lateral” spaces from which to articulate his oppositional stance.) It is only in this explicit negation that his flooded room can be read as that imaginary liquid state of the interior, as a typology still untouched by the many elements that put profit before well-being and ultimately determine the character of the interior in general in our moment. As he has done before by applying pressure to conventional typologies, Seymour is conjuring that bracketed space or moment where we can still imagine a history of design that didn’t turn out the way it has.
It may be in trying things that the designer won’t try (one is spared any sense of obligation to the discipline or its history not intrinsic to the situation), in debilitating some of the protocols indigenous to the field she or he often adheres to (even if unwittingly or through oppositional stances), in remaining insensible to “the chase for the new” that guarantees success in the commercial world, that the use of the interior in an art context may be of interest. One could engage things in a tactical way, understanding “tactics” in Michel de Certeau’s sense—as actions or modes of behavior that have no legitimate institutional ground and don’t aim to make advances in any field. They use, opportunistically, the spaces opened by established practices and institutions in order to unleash unexpected performative elements and to address needs that fall outside the conventional parameters that these practices and institutions adhere to.7
Treating the interior in this way allows us not only to work against the relations of which the interior is both a relay point and a morphological manifestation, but also to alter the relations’ variables—habit may dress them up as immutable, but they don’t need to be. In other words, the art context would allow us to invent programs and alter conventional functions; to introduce value systems usually absent from the equation; to rely on decorative languages or sign systems that may not have an outlet in design institutions and histories, or simply to apply lethal doses of ambiguity to the very idea of a signature language; to tap new infrastructures and propose new routines; to politicize parts of the process through calculated decisions and infuse things with increased self-reflexivity and the complex understanding of site-specificity inherited from Institutional Critique and similar practices; to complicate mediatic representation and representation in general; to practice an amnesia in order to wrest away permission to mix incongruous elements and ferment strange brews of seemingly incommensurable materials; to shift the points of stress and strain and torque the list of expectations (maybe the call for clarity in terms of brand identity becomes its opposite); and so on.
Andrea Branzi, 1969, Research for “No-Stop City” theoretical project of a diffuse metropolitan system.
We can be promiscuous with the unexpected. We can run interference by introducing dirty data into the interface. Models need no longer be drawn from the same sphere that they have always come from. The indeterminate home-restaurant in an immigrant neighborhood could be as good a starting point as Karim Rashid’s Kurve; the Tuareg tent as available as the proliferating blob-teriors supposedly signaling the most advanced practices out there; the generic languages of the mobile home designer as rich with potential as the sophisticated vocabularies that are taught at the Royal College of Art; Marcel Broodthaers’ inanimate stage sets (strange and perverse simulacra of the bourgeois apartment) as legitimate a source as any of interior design’s favorite textbook cases.
For instance, what of the interior as a vector or active (diagrammatic) stage, where the transmission of information and human interaction happen not against a purely aesthetic or graphic backdrop, but, on the contrary, in an interior, thematized and activated, that becomes part of the information transmitted, affecting the interaction it shelters? The Double Club was this—or, at least, approximated this. In such a situation, the very idea of a backdrop ceases to make much sense. The very morphologies and graphics that determine the “look” of the interior begin to articulate the flows—of ideas, of interests, of money, of ideology—that cross them, as they diagram their very own structural realities.
And this may afford the possibility for another autonomous but interconnected layer of possibilities to be annexed to the artist’s project. In this layer, deliberate discontinuity, productive dissonance, deformity, indeterminacy, mutation, modification, growth, and instability could generate increasingly transformative articulations that exist in a state of mutual animation with the rest of her project. In an art context, one can practice a kind of interior-design teratology with impunity.
Andrea Branzi, 1969, Research for “No-Stop City” theoretical project of a diffuse metropolitan system.
We can also consider the interior as an active tool, independent of the need for it to function in relation to other art objects, activities, or fictional dressing up. The interior itself is—or can be—a diagram of so many relationships that it needs little supplement. And switching the variables within those relations introduces new information, unexpected and foreign material that generates instability at the structural level and is bound to speed the processes of differentiation whereby a thing—the interior—becomes different than itself, allowing new morphologies to emerge, expanding the range of things it can become or how it comes to be, cracking open tightly sealed conventions so that unexpected concerns and positions can sneak in. It could be a matter of working at the level of the interior’s constitutive parts in order to render it a more complex and tactical tool of articulation—a matter, on the one hand, of attempting to chart topographies that still don’t assume physical form, that lie latent in the framework of the interior, where virtual possibilities, not yet pressured into actual forms, sit suspended; and, on the other hand, of placing the interior at the service of concerns that are usually foreign to it (although there is no necessary reason why they should be).
In the end, one is left with questions that invite testing: Can working the interior from an art context open a new dimension for it or in it, just as video and filmic art opened a critical dimension in the cinematic remake? Can shifts at the level of the variables that make up the relations that provide the necessary conditions for the interior have exciting repercussions in spatial articulation? Do their potential ramifications generate morphologies unexpected enough to be worth the effort? Can the interior be tactically inhabited in such a way that, operating on its structural substrate, we can articulate urgent and relevant things—things perhaps not always falling within the scope of design—through tweaked morphologies, unexpected decors, typological deformations, and complex deployments of space?
▴ Ettore Sottsass, The Planet as Festival: Study for a Dispenser of Incense, LSD, Marijuana, Opium, Laughing Gas. 1972-73. Graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 13 3/8" (38.4 x 34 cm).
Text by Gean Moreno
1 China Miéville, The City & The City (New York: Del Rey, 2009), 22.
2 Tobias Rehberger in “Does Venice still matter? Matthew Slotover, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tobias Rehberger and others on the Biennale,” The Art Newspaper, May 29, 2009 (emphasis added), →.
3 Tomas Maldonado, “Diseño Industrial, Presente y Futuro,” in Es la Arquitectura un Texto? y otros escritos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2004), 95. Author’s translation.
4 Andrea Branzi, “Radical Architecture,” in Andrea Branzi: The Complete Works (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 38.
5 Andrea Branzi, “A Homeless Country: Experimental Models for the Domestic Space,” in Italy: Contemporary Domestic Landscapes 1945–2000, ed. Giampiero Bosoni (Milan: Skira, 2001), 157.
6 For this notion of moving from the sphere of production (with the factory as a governing metaphor) to the sphere of reception, see Herbert Muschamp’s “Reception Rooms,” in The Work of Ettore Sottsass and Associates, ed. Milco Carboni (New York: Universe Publishing, 1999).
7 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Source: e-flux 15
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Controversial “African Renaissance” Statue Rises in Senegal
On April 3, the West African nation of Senegal officially inaugurated one of the strangest statues in the history of Africa. Costing $28 million and built by North Korean labourers, the 160-foot “African Renaissance” statue is made of copper and has been embroiled in controversy since it was announced in 2006.
Designed by Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby and promoted as a money-generating tourist attraction, the monument continues to be a sore point in a country struggling with high unemployment and chronic economic problems.
The “African Renaissance” statue during its construction in August 2009
New Tang Dynasty Television reported that the inauguration ceremony was attended by about 30 African and other heads of state, though The Scotsman reported only a dozen heads of state attended the event, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo. According to NewsOne and allAfrica.com, the event was also going to be attended by Senegalese-American rapper Akon, US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, and Dr. Julius W. Garvey, son of African American nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.
During the ceremony, Senegalese President Aboulaye Wade said he hoped the statue would be a symbol of African unity and declared:
Five centuries of ordeals and human tragedy, and yet Africa has arrived in the 21st century standing tall and more ready than ever to take its destiny into its hands.
But the controversy continues … one imam in the mainly Muslim nation issued a fatwa on Friday condemning the statue as idolatrous for showing a woman’s bare leg and last year many in Senegal’s Christian community were offended when the president likening the statue to Christ. President Wade has since apologized to the country’s Christian minority for the comparison.
According to BBC, what has shocked most people in Senegal is President Wade’s plan to charge visitors to the monument and pocket 35% of the income for himself. “The president says he helped design the statue, so he should share some of the revenue,” explains BBC’s Caspar Leighton.
by Hrag Vartanian on April 6, 2010
Source: hyperallergic.com
Designed by Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby and promoted as a money-generating tourist attraction, the monument continues to be a sore point in a country struggling with high unemployment and chronic economic problems.
The “African Renaissance” statue during its construction in August 2009
New Tang Dynasty Television reported that the inauguration ceremony was attended by about 30 African and other heads of state, though The Scotsman reported only a dozen heads of state attended the event, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo. According to NewsOne and allAfrica.com, the event was also going to be attended by Senegalese-American rapper Akon, US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, and Dr. Julius W. Garvey, son of African American nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.
During the ceremony, Senegalese President Aboulaye Wade said he hoped the statue would be a symbol of African unity and declared:
Five centuries of ordeals and human tragedy, and yet Africa has arrived in the 21st century standing tall and more ready than ever to take its destiny into its hands.
But the controversy continues … one imam in the mainly Muslim nation issued a fatwa on Friday condemning the statue as idolatrous for showing a woman’s bare leg and last year many in Senegal’s Christian community were offended when the president likening the statue to Christ. President Wade has since apologized to the country’s Christian minority for the comparison.
According to BBC, what has shocked most people in Senegal is President Wade’s plan to charge visitors to the monument and pocket 35% of the income for himself. “The president says he helped design the statue, so he should share some of the revenue,” explains BBC’s Caspar Leighton.
by Hrag Vartanian on April 6, 2010
Source: hyperallergic.com
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Dialectica
Vti hominem ratione docet dialectica quare
merito artium apicem magnus hanc plato vocat
engraved by Cornelis Cort (after Frans Floris) and published in Antwerp in 1565 by Hieronymous Cock
Thursday, April 1, 2010
A life in politics: New Left Review at 50
New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of "celebration" smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an ¬anniversary, more an over-determined conjuncture.
It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate. One's relation to it conjugates as an irregular verb: I wish I knew more about industrialisation in China; you ought to have a better grasp of Brenner's analysis of global turbulence; he, she, or it needs to understand the significance of community-based activism in Latin America. For many Guardian readers (and others), the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to – more serious, better informed, better travelled, stronger, irreplaceable. Well, maybe a tiny bit solemn at times (we could draw lots for who gets the job of telling Perry Anderson to lighten up), and perhaps when we were out of touch for longish stretches, life seemed a bit easier. But then we meet up and it's a case of respect at first sight, all over again.
It hasn't always been like this: even older brothers had rocky periods in their youth – misguided enthusiasms, failed relationships, moody withdrawals. Some readers may remember times when NLR seemed hell-bent on sectarian purism, theoretical slavishness and a wilful opacity. It has been through several changes of identity in the past 50 years, and memories of some of these earlier phases may hamper the efforts that it has made recently to reach out to a more diverse readership. But there is a lot in that history to be proud of. The journal has, in its own unbending fashion, registered and responded to huge changes in the world during this half-century, and in doing so has made a stock of ideas available well beyond the ranks of those who may at any point have shared its particular form, or forms, of Marxism (an allegiance that has itself modulated, perhaps even attenuated somewhat, over the decades). Some things about the journal, however, don't change. What other publication would take out a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper announcing its "quinquagenary issue"? NLR has been accused of many things, but never of populist dumbing-down.
The biography of the review cannot be reduced to a formula: its experience so far has been too rich and too contradictory. But it would be fair to say that a journal that began life hoping to animate and express organised popular movements on the left soon became a more emphatically theoretical enterprise, albeit with certain Leninist or Trotskyist longings held in reserve. Then, in the 1980s, it began to interpret its intellectual task in more expansive terms, and since 2000 it has been self-consciously a "journal of ideas" – on the left, to be sure, but distant from radical movements in the present or any worked-out political blueprint for the future.
As a severely intellectual journal committed, in principle, to the radical transformation of society, NLR had few models to draw on in British history – and the journal grew out of and was for a long time rooted in British culture, however internationalist it has since become. There had been a lot of small, usually transient, journals of the left, such as William Morris's Commonweal (1885-90) or the original Left Review (1934-38); there were political periodicals closer to the parliamentary fray, such as the New Statesman (1913- ) or Tribune (1937- ); and there had been more eclectic, radical-leaning reviews of art, culture and politics, such as the New Age (1907-22). But to find another successful journal of ideas conducted at the highest intellectual level by a self-consciously radical group we may have to go back to the Westminster Review, the journal of the Philosophic Radicals of the early 19th century. In the present, the publication closest in spirit, despite all the obvious differences of form, may be the London ¬Review of Books (there is some overlap in contributors), but NLR is less literary, even more political, and committed to more systematic economic analysis and theoretical construction. It also concerns itself very little with British politics and culture these days.
In so far as there was a conscious model in the early years, it was Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, and an idealised version of Parisian intellectual life in the 1950s seems to have retained something of a hold over several of the review's leading spirits. It takes quintessential black-polo-neck subjects such as philosophy and film very seriously indeed; other art forms, and more or less all of popular culture, come a long, long way behind. Although there have been periodic shake-ups of the editorial board, complete with affirmations of the need to bring in new blood, the core group are now all around 70 and so date their formation to those heady days of bringing the news from Paris in the decade from 1958 to 1968.
The 50th-anniversary issue includes articles by several of the NLR's long-serving stalwarts – Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Mike Davis – as well as interviews or reprinted pieces by noted figures of the intellectual left such as Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall. These names signify a quite striking element of continuity. Anderson and Blackburn were at the head of the younger group who took over direction of the journal in 1962, after two years of Hall's editorship, and they, together with Ali, Davis and a handful of others, have been constant or recurrent members of the editorial board since the 1960s. Anderson was nominally the editor from 1962-83 (the journal has always emphasised its collective ethos, and from the outside it has not been clear how responsibility has been divided between editor and editorial board); Blackburn then took over until the end of 1999, at which point a new series of the journal was relaunched, initially under Anderson's editorship once more; Susan Watkins has been the editor since 2003. Exact circulation figures have always been hard to come by, as has any reliable information about its inner workings, but its bi-monthly issues are said currently to sell around 10,000 each. Its finances remain mysterious: rumour has repeatedly suggested that it has been subsidised by the inherited wealth of the Anderson family.
But these continuities of personnel mask some dramatic shifts of direction and changes in character. The review was founded in 1960 out of a merger of two existing journals, Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner, the former representing an upsurge of political and cultural radicalism in the late 1950s, especially strong in universities, that repudiated the reformism of the Labour party, while the latter provided a rallying ground for those communists and ex-communists who, post-1956, disowned orthodox Stalinism. New Left clubs were formed around the country, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided a mobilising and unifying focus. For a brief period, the review was part of a wider movement. But after the 1962 changeover, it focused more exclusively on preparing the theoretical ground for "revolution" (it can be hard now to remember what an everyday term "revolution" was in the 1960s and 1970s). One of the NLR's most notable services was in importing and disseminating European ideas, especially the rich tradition of Hegelianised Marxisms, but also other styles of work in, for example, sociology and psychoanalysis. In 1970 a publishing house was set up – New Left Books, which mutated into Verso – and this helped to make many classic works of European social thought available in English at a time when the expanding system of higher education was hungry for such texts. Established socialist thinkers such as Isaac Deutscher and Raymond Williams were important to the review in its early years; for a while the example of the Belgian Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel was influential; at various points there was particularly sustained engagement with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.
In the course of the 1980s, the political imagination of the left had to be re-fashioned to acknowledge the dramatic transformations of that decade, including the end of "actually existing socialism". This and the following decade saw ructions and resignations at the review itself, as well as attempts to remedy its comparative neglect of now prominent issues such as feminism and the environment. Its denunciation of "the American empire", especially through the so-called humanitarian wars of the 1990s, was one constant; its attempts to uncover the global operation of the new forms of capitalism were another. But questions about what it now meant to be committed to "a socialist future" became more insistent and invited a more fundamental rethinking of the function of the journal itself. NLR 238, published at the end of 1999, was to be the last of the original series.
The first issue of the new series appeared at the beginning of 2000, with a dramatically improved layout and appearance (high-minded left asceticism had tended to favour journals that looked like cyclostyled parish magazines), a regular book review section and signed editorials. The first of these consisted of a stern, unsparing assessment by Anderson of the challenges facing the left at the start of the new century. Some readers were shocked by its Olympian bleakness. "The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat." (I can't help admiring the sentence as well as the sentiment here, especially that last phrase with its indomitable commitment to lucidity about the wreck of one's dreams.) Anderson found "neoliberalism" triumphant across the globe: no effective countervailing radical force existed. But that, it was implied, is all the more reason to seek a properly explanatory understanding of the forces at work in the world today. Only on that basis – a systematic, deeply informed, international analysis – could even the most tentative steps be taken towards formulating a viable alternative. The message may have been bleak, but the tone was resolute: the guiding principle for the review should be "the refusal of any accommodation with the ruling system, as of any understatement of its power".
Over the years, NLR had shown a proper regard for Gramsci's celebrated motto "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will", but many readers thought Anderson's 2000 editorial overdid the pessimism and gave precious little nourishment to the optimism. A French critic, in a reproach that must have stung the famously nonparochial and francophile Anderson, accused him of viewing things too narrowly from one side of la Manche: various forms of resistance, it was suggested, were much more visible in France, while others felt that forms of protest elsewhere in the world were similarly being undervalued. But, a decade on, Anderson's pessimism on this score scarcely seems exaggerated: in so far as the imperium of neoliberalism is being curbed, which is not far, it does not appear to be primarily the outcome of organised and politically effective opposition.
Anderson also announced another kind of change in the character of the journal, which was henceforth to be open to a greater variety of voices. Again, there were murmurs about betrayal and elitism – NLR as a virtual club for global intellectuals rather than a getting-its-hands-dirty helper in local struggles – but perhaps such objections mistake what a progressive journal of ideas can and should do. Personally, as a relative outsider to this milieu, I much prefer the hospitable pessimism of the current NLR to the excluding optimism of its more sectarian days. But there's no doubt that its present character raises again the question of what a journal of "the left" should be aiming at when it is not in constructive relations with any organised radical or progressive movements beyond its pages.
Now, in this anniversary issue, the editorial by Susan Watkins takes stock once more. Attention focuses on the financial crash of 2008 and on the banks' subsequent recovery. The former might have seemed to offer the left some hope: the "system" was imploding, as in Marxist or post-Marxist theory it was meant to do. Those famous "contradictions of capitalism" were coming home to roost. Except, as Watkins coolly insists, they haven't; so far there has been adjustment rather than apocalypse. Moreover, this convulsion of the world's financial system seems to have generated precious little political turmoil or popular insurgency. In one of those steely sentences that the modern NLR is so good at, she writes: "That neoliberalism's crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic, in contrast to the bitter battles over its installation, is a sobering measure of its triumph."
So what is there left to do – and what is there to do that is left? Plenty, it turns out. There may be no "immediate practical project", so the concern has to be with the longue durée. "To attend to the development of actually existing capitalism remains a first duty for a journal like NLR." Or again: "A priority for the Review in the coming years should be a new typology of development outcomes in the age of global finance. Another is a map of the global proletariat – locations, sectors, differentials – alive to contemporary makings and unmakings of class."
To some, this may seem like little more than keeping that "registration of defeat" up to date, but the commitment to information and understanding seems admirable to me. In the final paragraph of her editorial, Watkins appears momentarily tempted by a form of optimism: "But perhaps the very rarity of a serious left forum in these times makes a journal like NLR more valued." I think that's true, but a forum is, precisely, a space in which to meet and talk, an agreed place in which to disagree. The metaphor signifies a distance from political action, as well as the distance the journal has travelled from the hopes of the 60s. "Can a left intellectual project hope to thrive in the absence of a political movement?", she asks. "That remains to be seen." Even "thriving" may be a lot to ask for. "Fail better" may be as high as the mark should be set for now, with an unblinking awareness of the piquancy that attends the conjunction of political allegiance and Beckettian motto.
Perhaps a sense of having been chastened by world history is becoming to a journal in middle age. Just occasionally, I still feel queasy when confronted by the familiar abstractions, confidently used in the singular. When I'm told, for example, that "the thought-world of the west" is increasingly determined by "Atlantic-centred structures of wealth and power", dragging academic disciplines in tow, I find myself feeling that the search for pattern and causation is starting to lose sight of something no less important – the uneven, awkward diversity that is apparent when viewed from a little closer. All intellectual inquiry is a see-sawing between abstraction and particularity, and NLR's inheritance can still make it seem more indulgent of the former than the latter. Interestingly, the language of "determinants" and "system" falls away when it comes to self-description. "NLR stands outside this world," Watkins writes, "defines its own agenda." Excellent, but might not some other elements in "the thought-world of the west" be doing the same, in their own way? Still, the audacity is admirable: I like the thought that a specially unillusioned, independent, global perspective on what's happening is to be had from a side street in Soho.
When so much of even the so-called "serious" media is given over to celebrity-fuelled ephemera and the recycling of press releases and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the worst effects of funding-driven overproduction and careerist modishness; and when national and international politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of "the market" while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a "forum" like NLR. It is up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing. Despite its self-description in its guidelines for contributors, the journal is not in any obvious sense "lively". It is downright difficult (but none the worse for that), because what it tries to analyse is complex and its preferred intellectual tools are often conceptually sophisticated. It is difficult where being easy would be no virtue, difficult where aiming to be "accessible" would mean patronising its readers, difficult where ideas need to be chewed rather than simply swallowed. That's what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness – its magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyse, to theorise.
So, no balloons, and definitely no party lines. No cheap consolation, ¬either. But hey, respect: no question.
Text by Stefan Collini
Source: Guardian, 13 Feb 2010.
It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate. One's relation to it conjugates as an irregular verb: I wish I knew more about industrialisation in China; you ought to have a better grasp of Brenner's analysis of global turbulence; he, she, or it needs to understand the significance of community-based activism in Latin America. For many Guardian readers (and others), the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to – more serious, better informed, better travelled, stronger, irreplaceable. Well, maybe a tiny bit solemn at times (we could draw lots for who gets the job of telling Perry Anderson to lighten up), and perhaps when we were out of touch for longish stretches, life seemed a bit easier. But then we meet up and it's a case of respect at first sight, all over again.
It hasn't always been like this: even older brothers had rocky periods in their youth – misguided enthusiasms, failed relationships, moody withdrawals. Some readers may remember times when NLR seemed hell-bent on sectarian purism, theoretical slavishness and a wilful opacity. It has been through several changes of identity in the past 50 years, and memories of some of these earlier phases may hamper the efforts that it has made recently to reach out to a more diverse readership. But there is a lot in that history to be proud of. The journal has, in its own unbending fashion, registered and responded to huge changes in the world during this half-century, and in doing so has made a stock of ideas available well beyond the ranks of those who may at any point have shared its particular form, or forms, of Marxism (an allegiance that has itself modulated, perhaps even attenuated somewhat, over the decades). Some things about the journal, however, don't change. What other publication would take out a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper announcing its "quinquagenary issue"? NLR has been accused of many things, but never of populist dumbing-down.
The biography of the review cannot be reduced to a formula: its experience so far has been too rich and too contradictory. But it would be fair to say that a journal that began life hoping to animate and express organised popular movements on the left soon became a more emphatically theoretical enterprise, albeit with certain Leninist or Trotskyist longings held in reserve. Then, in the 1980s, it began to interpret its intellectual task in more expansive terms, and since 2000 it has been self-consciously a "journal of ideas" – on the left, to be sure, but distant from radical movements in the present or any worked-out political blueprint for the future.
As a severely intellectual journal committed, in principle, to the radical transformation of society, NLR had few models to draw on in British history – and the journal grew out of and was for a long time rooted in British culture, however internationalist it has since become. There had been a lot of small, usually transient, journals of the left, such as William Morris's Commonweal (1885-90) or the original Left Review (1934-38); there were political periodicals closer to the parliamentary fray, such as the New Statesman (1913- ) or Tribune (1937- ); and there had been more eclectic, radical-leaning reviews of art, culture and politics, such as the New Age (1907-22). But to find another successful journal of ideas conducted at the highest intellectual level by a self-consciously radical group we may have to go back to the Westminster Review, the journal of the Philosophic Radicals of the early 19th century. In the present, the publication closest in spirit, despite all the obvious differences of form, may be the London ¬Review of Books (there is some overlap in contributors), but NLR is less literary, even more political, and committed to more systematic economic analysis and theoretical construction. It also concerns itself very little with British politics and culture these days.
In so far as there was a conscious model in the early years, it was Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, and an idealised version of Parisian intellectual life in the 1950s seems to have retained something of a hold over several of the review's leading spirits. It takes quintessential black-polo-neck subjects such as philosophy and film very seriously indeed; other art forms, and more or less all of popular culture, come a long, long way behind. Although there have been periodic shake-ups of the editorial board, complete with affirmations of the need to bring in new blood, the core group are now all around 70 and so date their formation to those heady days of bringing the news from Paris in the decade from 1958 to 1968.
The 50th-anniversary issue includes articles by several of the NLR's long-serving stalwarts – Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Mike Davis – as well as interviews or reprinted pieces by noted figures of the intellectual left such as Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall. These names signify a quite striking element of continuity. Anderson and Blackburn were at the head of the younger group who took over direction of the journal in 1962, after two years of Hall's editorship, and they, together with Ali, Davis and a handful of others, have been constant or recurrent members of the editorial board since the 1960s. Anderson was nominally the editor from 1962-83 (the journal has always emphasised its collective ethos, and from the outside it has not been clear how responsibility has been divided between editor and editorial board); Blackburn then took over until the end of 1999, at which point a new series of the journal was relaunched, initially under Anderson's editorship once more; Susan Watkins has been the editor since 2003. Exact circulation figures have always been hard to come by, as has any reliable information about its inner workings, but its bi-monthly issues are said currently to sell around 10,000 each. Its finances remain mysterious: rumour has repeatedly suggested that it has been subsidised by the inherited wealth of the Anderson family.
But these continuities of personnel mask some dramatic shifts of direction and changes in character. The review was founded in 1960 out of a merger of two existing journals, Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner, the former representing an upsurge of political and cultural radicalism in the late 1950s, especially strong in universities, that repudiated the reformism of the Labour party, while the latter provided a rallying ground for those communists and ex-communists who, post-1956, disowned orthodox Stalinism. New Left clubs were formed around the country, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided a mobilising and unifying focus. For a brief period, the review was part of a wider movement. But after the 1962 changeover, it focused more exclusively on preparing the theoretical ground for "revolution" (it can be hard now to remember what an everyday term "revolution" was in the 1960s and 1970s). One of the NLR's most notable services was in importing and disseminating European ideas, especially the rich tradition of Hegelianised Marxisms, but also other styles of work in, for example, sociology and psychoanalysis. In 1970 a publishing house was set up – New Left Books, which mutated into Verso – and this helped to make many classic works of European social thought available in English at a time when the expanding system of higher education was hungry for such texts. Established socialist thinkers such as Isaac Deutscher and Raymond Williams were important to the review in its early years; for a while the example of the Belgian Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel was influential; at various points there was particularly sustained engagement with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.
In the course of the 1980s, the political imagination of the left had to be re-fashioned to acknowledge the dramatic transformations of that decade, including the end of "actually existing socialism". This and the following decade saw ructions and resignations at the review itself, as well as attempts to remedy its comparative neglect of now prominent issues such as feminism and the environment. Its denunciation of "the American empire", especially through the so-called humanitarian wars of the 1990s, was one constant; its attempts to uncover the global operation of the new forms of capitalism were another. But questions about what it now meant to be committed to "a socialist future" became more insistent and invited a more fundamental rethinking of the function of the journal itself. NLR 238, published at the end of 1999, was to be the last of the original series.
The first issue of the new series appeared at the beginning of 2000, with a dramatically improved layout and appearance (high-minded left asceticism had tended to favour journals that looked like cyclostyled parish magazines), a regular book review section and signed editorials. The first of these consisted of a stern, unsparing assessment by Anderson of the challenges facing the left at the start of the new century. Some readers were shocked by its Olympian bleakness. "The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat." (I can't help admiring the sentence as well as the sentiment here, especially that last phrase with its indomitable commitment to lucidity about the wreck of one's dreams.) Anderson found "neoliberalism" triumphant across the globe: no effective countervailing radical force existed. But that, it was implied, is all the more reason to seek a properly explanatory understanding of the forces at work in the world today. Only on that basis – a systematic, deeply informed, international analysis – could even the most tentative steps be taken towards formulating a viable alternative. The message may have been bleak, but the tone was resolute: the guiding principle for the review should be "the refusal of any accommodation with the ruling system, as of any understatement of its power".
Over the years, NLR had shown a proper regard for Gramsci's celebrated motto "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will", but many readers thought Anderson's 2000 editorial overdid the pessimism and gave precious little nourishment to the optimism. A French critic, in a reproach that must have stung the famously nonparochial and francophile Anderson, accused him of viewing things too narrowly from one side of la Manche: various forms of resistance, it was suggested, were much more visible in France, while others felt that forms of protest elsewhere in the world were similarly being undervalued. But, a decade on, Anderson's pessimism on this score scarcely seems exaggerated: in so far as the imperium of neoliberalism is being curbed, which is not far, it does not appear to be primarily the outcome of organised and politically effective opposition.
Anderson also announced another kind of change in the character of the journal, which was henceforth to be open to a greater variety of voices. Again, there were murmurs about betrayal and elitism – NLR as a virtual club for global intellectuals rather than a getting-its-hands-dirty helper in local struggles – but perhaps such objections mistake what a progressive journal of ideas can and should do. Personally, as a relative outsider to this milieu, I much prefer the hospitable pessimism of the current NLR to the excluding optimism of its more sectarian days. But there's no doubt that its present character raises again the question of what a journal of "the left" should be aiming at when it is not in constructive relations with any organised radical or progressive movements beyond its pages.
Now, in this anniversary issue, the editorial by Susan Watkins takes stock once more. Attention focuses on the financial crash of 2008 and on the banks' subsequent recovery. The former might have seemed to offer the left some hope: the "system" was imploding, as in Marxist or post-Marxist theory it was meant to do. Those famous "contradictions of capitalism" were coming home to roost. Except, as Watkins coolly insists, they haven't; so far there has been adjustment rather than apocalypse. Moreover, this convulsion of the world's financial system seems to have generated precious little political turmoil or popular insurgency. In one of those steely sentences that the modern NLR is so good at, she writes: "That neoliberalism's crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic, in contrast to the bitter battles over its installation, is a sobering measure of its triumph."
So what is there left to do – and what is there to do that is left? Plenty, it turns out. There may be no "immediate practical project", so the concern has to be with the longue durée. "To attend to the development of actually existing capitalism remains a first duty for a journal like NLR." Or again: "A priority for the Review in the coming years should be a new typology of development outcomes in the age of global finance. Another is a map of the global proletariat – locations, sectors, differentials – alive to contemporary makings and unmakings of class."
To some, this may seem like little more than keeping that "registration of defeat" up to date, but the commitment to information and understanding seems admirable to me. In the final paragraph of her editorial, Watkins appears momentarily tempted by a form of optimism: "But perhaps the very rarity of a serious left forum in these times makes a journal like NLR more valued." I think that's true, but a forum is, precisely, a space in which to meet and talk, an agreed place in which to disagree. The metaphor signifies a distance from political action, as well as the distance the journal has travelled from the hopes of the 60s. "Can a left intellectual project hope to thrive in the absence of a political movement?", she asks. "That remains to be seen." Even "thriving" may be a lot to ask for. "Fail better" may be as high as the mark should be set for now, with an unblinking awareness of the piquancy that attends the conjunction of political allegiance and Beckettian motto.
Perhaps a sense of having been chastened by world history is becoming to a journal in middle age. Just occasionally, I still feel queasy when confronted by the familiar abstractions, confidently used in the singular. When I'm told, for example, that "the thought-world of the west" is increasingly determined by "Atlantic-centred structures of wealth and power", dragging academic disciplines in tow, I find myself feeling that the search for pattern and causation is starting to lose sight of something no less important – the uneven, awkward diversity that is apparent when viewed from a little closer. All intellectual inquiry is a see-sawing between abstraction and particularity, and NLR's inheritance can still make it seem more indulgent of the former than the latter. Interestingly, the language of "determinants" and "system" falls away when it comes to self-description. "NLR stands outside this world," Watkins writes, "defines its own agenda." Excellent, but might not some other elements in "the thought-world of the west" be doing the same, in their own way? Still, the audacity is admirable: I like the thought that a specially unillusioned, independent, global perspective on what's happening is to be had from a side street in Soho.
When so much of even the so-called "serious" media is given over to celebrity-fuelled ephemera and the recycling of press releases and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the worst effects of funding-driven overproduction and careerist modishness; and when national and international politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of "the market" while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a "forum" like NLR. It is up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing. Despite its self-description in its guidelines for contributors, the journal is not in any obvious sense "lively". It is downright difficult (but none the worse for that), because what it tries to analyse is complex and its preferred intellectual tools are often conceptually sophisticated. It is difficult where being easy would be no virtue, difficult where aiming to be "accessible" would mean patronising its readers, difficult where ideas need to be chewed rather than simply swallowed. That's what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness – its magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyse, to theorise.
So, no balloons, and definitely no party lines. No cheap consolation, ¬either. But hey, respect: no question.
Text by Stefan Collini
Source: Guardian, 13 Feb 2010.
Rogue urinals
Critics tend to declare that Marcel Duchamp's urinal, entitled “Fountain”, is the most important artwork of the 20th century. Yet its standing as a collectable object has always lagged behind its value as an idea. The work questioned notions of authenticity when Duchamp first purchased the mass-produced plumbing fixture and signed it “R. Mutt” in 1917. Now, over 40 years after the artist's death, the problem of legitimacy remains relevant as unauthorised urinals have been discovered circulating in Italy. The art world loves paradoxical conceptual gestures, but it seems that someone might be taking the piss.
“Fountain” was the first ready-made that Duchamp engineered for scandal. The artist was a member of the board of the Society of Independent Artists, whose exhibition had no jury and was set to be the largest in America. He knew that most people would perceive the work as a prank, particularly if submitted by an unknown Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. When the board duly voted against it, Duchamp and his chief patron, Walter Arensberg, resigned in protest—a story that was swiftly leaked to the New York papers.
The ready-made had its public debut a few weeks later in an art magazine called the Blind Man. A photo of the urinal by Alfred Stieglitz was published alongside the founding manifesto of conceptual art, which included the words: “Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.” The urinal then went the way of many of Duchamp's early ready-mades; it was smashed or trashed. So insignificant was the porcelain pissoir at the time that no one can remember exactly what happened to it.
“Fountain” was not a coveted art object until well after the second world war, when Duchamp became a cult figure among Pop artists. In response to the art world's desire to see his legendary lavatory, Duchamp authorised curators to purchase urinals in his name in 1950, 1953 and 1963. (The first is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the second is lost and the third sits in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) Then in 1964, in association with Arturo Schwarz, a Milan art dealer, historian and collector, the artist made the momentous decision to issue 12 replicas (an edition of eight with four proofs) of his most important ready-mades, including the urinal. Mr Schwarz, now 86, went on to write the artist’s catalogue raisonné—a scholarly book meant to document the complete works of Duchamp.
As one who had painted moustaches on postcards of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp understood the power of reproductions to render a work iconic and consolidate an artist’s international reputation. Indeed, nine of the 12 official Schwarz “Fountains” have been included in museum collections around the world. Of the three in private hands, one is in Bel Air, California, another is in Manhattan with the Mugrabi family, and the last, owned by Dimitris Daskalopoulos in Athens, will be exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London this summer.
One of the many ironies of the Schwarz urinals is that they are carefully crafted earthenware sculptures modelled on the Stieglitz photo of the “original”. Every edition has a story, but there is no beating the provenance of the 13th one. Dubbed “the prototype” and bearing Duchamp's signature, it slipped quietly onto the market in 1973 at the then fledgling gallery of Ronald Feldman in New York. Andy Warhol, who visited the gallery repeatedly, pressed Mr Feldman to trade the urinal for some of his own portraits. “Duchamp didn't sell well in those days,” says Mr Feldman, “but Andy knew what multiples meant because he made them.”
When Warhol died in 1987, his urinal was consigned to Sotheby's as part of his giant five-volume estate sale. “Fountain” was buried in a volume devoted to prints and given a lowly estimate of $2,000-2,500. It sold for $65,750 to Dakis Joannou, a Greek-Cypriot construction tycoon, and is now enshrined in the front hall of his main home in Athens. “I couldn't believe that we could actually own it,” says Mr Joannou. “People didn't appreciate its historical importance, so we got a bargain.” In the following decade, Duchamp's renown increased yet again, as did the marketing of his work. In 1999 Sotheby's put an official Schwarz urinal on the cover of its Contemporary Art evening sale catalogue; it commanded $1.8m.
Collectors of contemporary art are comfortable acquiring individual works in series, but they don't relish unlimited editions or dodgy authorship. Some may be dismayed to learn that there are at least three more “Duchamp urinals”. Gio di Maggio, a collector whose Fondazione Mudima is in Milan, and Luisella Zignone, a Duchamp collector based in Biella, both have “Fountains” that Mr Schwarz says he gave as gifts. Sergio Casoli, a Milan dealer, is also thought to own one. (He declined to comment.)
Mr Schwarz claims that these works were made in 1964 under Duchamp's direction, but were not included in the original edition due to “imperfections”. (It is unlikely that more than 17 urinals could have survived from this edition, but only Mr Schwarz knows for sure.) None of the newly discovered pieces have the “Marcel Duchamp” signature of official ready-mades. Nevertheless, the “Fountains” owned by Mr Di Maggio and Mrs Zignone have been shown in public institutions in Basel and Buenos Aires. In interview, Mr Schwarz reluctantly confirmed that he is trying to sell a fourth “Fountain” for an undisclosed sum, which one source says is $2.5m. (When pressed, Mr Schwarz says the asking price depends on whether the purchaser is a museum, a well-reputed collector or a speculator.)
The artist’s estate is not pleased. Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, the head of the Association for the Protection and Conservation of works by Marcel Duchamp, says that “neither my mother nor I ever sanctioned the sale of unauthorised ready-mades.” Mrs Monnier’s mother, “Teeny”, was married to Pierre Matisse, the dealer son of the Henri, before she married Duchamp, making her an heir to both the Henri Matisse and Duchamp estates. She sees Mr Schwarz's activities as curious given that “Arturo was a great friend of Marcel.”
Some Duchamp connoisseurs are outraged. Francis M. Naumann, a scholar and dealer who has published widely on Duchamp, argues that these urinals cannot be considered Duchamps at all. “For Duchamp, the signature was everything,” he argues. “It is the single most important element in the process of transforming an ordinary everyday object into a work of art.”
Others appear more ambivalent. Daniella Luxembourg, co-owner of Luxembourg & Dayan, a New York gallery that recently held a Duchamp mini-retrospective, says the artist's market has “the atmosphere of relics in a religion,” adding that “with globalisation, the differences between what was signed by Duchamp and what was in his vicinity will become smaller and smaller.”
Duchamp's relationship to commerce was not naive. Although he preferred to give away his work rather than sell it, he made a living as an art dealer for many years. Duchamp was also an able chess player who could think a good few moves ahead. One wonders whether the Dada master, who challenged the notion of the authentic artwork, might not be amused by the way these questionable “Fountains” muddy the waters of his current market. “My production,” he once said, “has no right to be speculated upon.”
Source : From The Economist /Mar 24th 2010.
World of Suzie Wong Tien Huong Singer
World of Suzie Wong Tien Huong Singer, 1961
Photographer: Boris Lipnitzki
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
House of Integration
Architects: FORM/Kouichi Kimura Architects
Location: Shiga, Japan, 2010
Site Area: 166,21 sqm
Photograph by Takumi Ota
www.archdaily.com
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fair on the Vorobyev Mountains
Nikolai Petrov
Fair on the Vorobyev Mountains (later Lenin Mountains).1930s
The Dover Bitch
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London , and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.
Anthony Hecht
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London , and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.
Anthony Hecht
The William Penn Dining Room
The William Penn Diner, U.S. Routes 13 and 40,
six miles south of Wilmington, Delaware, ca 1939.
Institutional Attitudes
The Comité van Roosendaal is proud to announce its first public activity, the two-day conference Institutional Attitudes to take place on 24 and 25 April in de Beursschouwburg in Brussels, coinciding with Art Brussels.
Institutional Attitudes looks at a founding premise of the Comité van Roosendaal: the shared conviction that contemporary art institutions may be an important voice in society. Within this premise, key questions include: What kind of contemporary society must be envisioned, given the recent economic crisis and the ecological state of emergency? How can existing art institutions adjust to the current paradigm shifts? In full confidence that institutions are not only products of their society, but also constitute active agents capable of shaping society in return, what novel public potential exists for the art institution? These research questions are stimulated by recent proposals engaging with notions of commons and of the commonwealth, such as Italian philosopher Paolo Virno's call to consider a non-representative democracy that might be expressed through "a galaxy of foundations, a network of institutes."
The Comité van Roosendaal has invited a range of esteemed art professionals and academics, as well as public figures from outside the art world, to critically evaluate recent events and sketch scenarios for the near future and beyond, in a program of three chapters.
Chapter 1: Institutional Domains
Bart De Baere, Miroslaw Balka, Alex Farquharson, Ann Goldstein, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Marc Jacobs, Simon Sheikh, Frans Timmermans
Chapter 2: Beyond Criticality
Bassam El Baroni, Ann Demeester, Nataša Ilić, Marta Kuzma, Julia Moritz, Vanessa Joan Müller, Irit Rogoff, Michael Turner
Chapter 3: Dismeasurement and Public Responsibility
Zdenka Badovinac, Manu Claeys, Charles Esche, Pascal Gielen, Anselm Franke, Maurizio Lazzarato, Dieter Lesage, Dieter Roelstraete, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Location: de Beursschouwburg, Auguste Ortsstraat 20 – 28, Brussel.
http://www.beursschouwburg.be
Source : http://www.comitevanroosendaal.eu
Institutional Attitudes looks at a founding premise of the Comité van Roosendaal: the shared conviction that contemporary art institutions may be an important voice in society. Within this premise, key questions include: What kind of contemporary society must be envisioned, given the recent economic crisis and the ecological state of emergency? How can existing art institutions adjust to the current paradigm shifts? In full confidence that institutions are not only products of their society, but also constitute active agents capable of shaping society in return, what novel public potential exists for the art institution? These research questions are stimulated by recent proposals engaging with notions of commons and of the commonwealth, such as Italian philosopher Paolo Virno's call to consider a non-representative democracy that might be expressed through "a galaxy of foundations, a network of institutes."
The Comité van Roosendaal has invited a range of esteemed art professionals and academics, as well as public figures from outside the art world, to critically evaluate recent events and sketch scenarios for the near future and beyond, in a program of three chapters.
Chapter 1: Institutional Domains
Bart De Baere, Miroslaw Balka, Alex Farquharson, Ann Goldstein, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Marc Jacobs, Simon Sheikh, Frans Timmermans
Chapter 2: Beyond Criticality
Bassam El Baroni, Ann Demeester, Nataša Ilić, Marta Kuzma, Julia Moritz, Vanessa Joan Müller, Irit Rogoff, Michael Turner
Chapter 3: Dismeasurement and Public Responsibility
Zdenka Badovinac, Manu Claeys, Charles Esche, Pascal Gielen, Anselm Franke, Maurizio Lazzarato, Dieter Lesage, Dieter Roelstraete, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Location: de Beursschouwburg, Auguste Ortsstraat 20 – 28, Brussel.
http://www.beursschouwburg.be
Source : http://www.comitevanroosendaal.eu
Chapel
Architect: Paul Rudolph (drawing) 1960.
Tuskegee Institute. Interdenominational Chapel. Longitudinal section. Rendering
Friday, March 12, 2010
Swimming club
Photography by Martin Parr, Brighton: David Sawyers, member of the Brighton sea swimming club, some of whose members swim in the sea all year round. David is disabled and loves his swimming, where he can experience total freedom both physically and mentally.
The Velvet Philosophical Revolution
On the evening of November 9, 1989, the wall of shame was breached. The next morning, I took off for Berlin; shortly afterward, I experienced the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and finally the fall of Ceauşescu in Bucharest. The year 1990 opened joyfully for the human race. But I was struck by the difference in the emotions felt in the East and in the West. Representative of the West was Francis Fukuyama and his idea, which caused a sensation, that history had just come to an end. But those in the East realized that this was far from the case. Less than a month before the Berlin Wall fell, I had given a speech in front of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the cream of the Federal Republic of Germany in honor of Czech dissident Václav Havel, who was receiving the Frankfurt Book Fair’s prestigious Peace Prize while still a prisoner in his own country. I entitled the speech “To Leave Communism Is to Enter History”—the view of those emerging from behind the Iron Curtain.
The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.
As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate. Providence had at last spoken, chance was abolished, the terrible parenthesis of the twentieth century had closed. Forgotten, erased, transcended, surpassed were 1914–1989, the bloodiest and cruelest 75 years of the human adventure to date. Tocquevilleans rediscovered the ineluctable movement of universal democracy; Saint-Simonians passed on to ecologists the promise that the administration of things would replace the government of men; Hegelians like Fukuyama celebrated the End of History and of history’s wars; Social Democrats promised that understanding among peoples would grow. We were entering the peaceful, postmodern Promised Land, where great heroes, great dangers, great peoples, and great goals would all disappear, as Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, notoriously argued. The end of the Cold War plunged the “free world,” as it had been called, into a boundless euphoria. Western Europe immediately eliminated its military budgets, while Washington announced a “new world order.”
The other Europe, just emancipated from Moscow’s domination, did not share this optimism. The peoples extricating themselves from totalitarian despotism were at the same time rejoining history as freely choosing agents.
And they found before them two possible futures. One is symbolized today by Havel and Lech Walesa, Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity; the other by Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin.
Czechs and Serbs faced the same post-1989 challenges as they confronted the dismantling of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In Prague, widespread poverty and corruption tempted the antitotalitarian dissidents whom the Velvet Revolution brought to power to choose repression rather than democracy. Their ultimate decision, though, was decisive: freedom would be the highest priority. Slovakia and the Czech Republic separated without conflict, and in the end, both entered the European Union. In Belgrade, by contrast, a sly and corrupt Communist bureaucrat seized power. Milošević forged an alliance of various forces of repression against the contagion of liberty. While he set aside Marxist ideology, he preserved its coercive methods. Wars and waves of ethnic cleansing ravaged Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999. Milošević proved ready to spill blood in order to regain lost territories, and he ended up in The Hague, facing charges of crimes against humanity.
Ecstatic Westerners dreamed that the period of totalitarian cruelty was over, as if former Soviet bureaucrats could somehow emerge as new men, despite 70 years of brainwashing, or as if the chaos of radically nationalist dictatorships would easily resolve itself. But no great political savior awaited, Havel argued; Czechs were left to their own responsibilities, to “the power of the powerless,” to what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who inspired Havel, called the “solidarity of the shaken”—of those, that is, shaken by totalitarian regimes and devoted to opposing them.
More recently, we have seen this solidarity in the democratic uprisings in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004, which should have drawn the attention of those who remained deaf through 12 years and 200,000 deaths in the martyrdom of Chechnya. In Ukraine, President Putin intervened shamelessly in the affairs of a state whose independence he refused to recognize. In Georgia, he sent in the tanks. Responding to the international press, Putin denounced the peaceful uprisings that swept away post-Soviet puppets in Tbilisi and Kiev as “permanent revolution” and “its dangerous disorders.” Thus he defamed a liberating uprising of long duration, one that started in the blood of East Berlin in 1953; continued in Poznań and Budapest in 1956, in Russia with the dissidence of the sixties, in Prague in 1968, and in the struggle of Solidarity in the 1980s; and was crowned by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is an uprising that in Poland brought together Catholics and freethinkers, at odds for more than a century, who together founded Solidarity. In Russia, moderns like Andrey Sakharov and traditional believers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn worked side by side. In Prague and Bratislava, university professors, instead of teaching the official lies, chose to be window washers or furnace repairmen, and Charter 77 brought together the Left and the Right, skeptics and the religious. Antitotalitarianism cultivates its own convictions, without sectarianism; dissidence does not attempt to replace the official dogma with another one but instead introduces an intellectual revolution that precedes—and that alone makes possible—the social and political changes that will remake the map of Europe.
This revolution has not ended, which is why the Kremlin does not appreciate insurrections in Georgia and Ukraine. Europe’s new frontier is at stake on the uncertain terrain of history, and the alternatives are still these: Havel and Milošević.
Text by André Glucksmann, Translation by Alexis Cornel.
Source: City Journal, Winter 2010, vol.20, no.1
The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.
As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate. Providence had at last spoken, chance was abolished, the terrible parenthesis of the twentieth century had closed. Forgotten, erased, transcended, surpassed were 1914–1989, the bloodiest and cruelest 75 years of the human adventure to date. Tocquevilleans rediscovered the ineluctable movement of universal democracy; Saint-Simonians passed on to ecologists the promise that the administration of things would replace the government of men; Hegelians like Fukuyama celebrated the End of History and of history’s wars; Social Democrats promised that understanding among peoples would grow. We were entering the peaceful, postmodern Promised Land, where great heroes, great dangers, great peoples, and great goals would all disappear, as Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, notoriously argued. The end of the Cold War plunged the “free world,” as it had been called, into a boundless euphoria. Western Europe immediately eliminated its military budgets, while Washington announced a “new world order.”
The other Europe, just emancipated from Moscow’s domination, did not share this optimism. The peoples extricating themselves from totalitarian despotism were at the same time rejoining history as freely choosing agents.
And they found before them two possible futures. One is symbolized today by Havel and Lech Walesa, Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity; the other by Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin.
Czechs and Serbs faced the same post-1989 challenges as they confronted the dismantling of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In Prague, widespread poverty and corruption tempted the antitotalitarian dissidents whom the Velvet Revolution brought to power to choose repression rather than democracy. Their ultimate decision, though, was decisive: freedom would be the highest priority. Slovakia and the Czech Republic separated without conflict, and in the end, both entered the European Union. In Belgrade, by contrast, a sly and corrupt Communist bureaucrat seized power. Milošević forged an alliance of various forces of repression against the contagion of liberty. While he set aside Marxist ideology, he preserved its coercive methods. Wars and waves of ethnic cleansing ravaged Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999. Milošević proved ready to spill blood in order to regain lost territories, and he ended up in The Hague, facing charges of crimes against humanity.
Ecstatic Westerners dreamed that the period of totalitarian cruelty was over, as if former Soviet bureaucrats could somehow emerge as new men, despite 70 years of brainwashing, or as if the chaos of radically nationalist dictatorships would easily resolve itself. But no great political savior awaited, Havel argued; Czechs were left to their own responsibilities, to “the power of the powerless,” to what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who inspired Havel, called the “solidarity of the shaken”—of those, that is, shaken by totalitarian regimes and devoted to opposing them.
More recently, we have seen this solidarity in the democratic uprisings in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004, which should have drawn the attention of those who remained deaf through 12 years and 200,000 deaths in the martyrdom of Chechnya. In Ukraine, President Putin intervened shamelessly in the affairs of a state whose independence he refused to recognize. In Georgia, he sent in the tanks. Responding to the international press, Putin denounced the peaceful uprisings that swept away post-Soviet puppets in Tbilisi and Kiev as “permanent revolution” and “its dangerous disorders.” Thus he defamed a liberating uprising of long duration, one that started in the blood of East Berlin in 1953; continued in Poznań and Budapest in 1956, in Russia with the dissidence of the sixties, in Prague in 1968, and in the struggle of Solidarity in the 1980s; and was crowned by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is an uprising that in Poland brought together Catholics and freethinkers, at odds for more than a century, who together founded Solidarity. In Russia, moderns like Andrey Sakharov and traditional believers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn worked side by side. In Prague and Bratislava, university professors, instead of teaching the official lies, chose to be window washers or furnace repairmen, and Charter 77 brought together the Left and the Right, skeptics and the religious. Antitotalitarianism cultivates its own convictions, without sectarianism; dissidence does not attempt to replace the official dogma with another one but instead introduces an intellectual revolution that precedes—and that alone makes possible—the social and political changes that will remake the map of Europe.
This revolution has not ended, which is why the Kremlin does not appreciate insurrections in Georgia and Ukraine. Europe’s new frontier is at stake on the uncertain terrain of history, and the alternatives are still these: Havel and Milošević.
Text by André Glucksmann, Translation by Alexis Cornel.
Source: City Journal, Winter 2010, vol.20, no.1
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Shelter/ Haiti
In just a short period of time since the earthquake hit Haiti, designers have been proposing possible housing solutions for the country. We will share a variety of these housing schemes with you throughout the week, with the hope that they will encourage more people to get involved to help not only Haiti, but also Chile. The first proposal is designed by Andres Duany, a Miami architect. Duany, with the help of sociologists and anthropologists, has designed four different versions of a temporary structure to relieve the urgent need for housing in Haiti. The differences in the homes respond to the varying ways Haitians live, so that each home is tailored to their specific needs.
Architect: Andres Duany
www.archdaily.com
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Cell floor decorated with torn strips of cloth
Marie Lieb, cell floor decorated with torn strips of cloth, 1894
We have no detailed information about Marie Lieb’s life. We only know that she was hospitalized in the Heidelberg clinic in 1894 diagnosed with “periodic mania”. Only two photographs survive as evidence of her distinctive style. Wilhelm Weygandt, the former assistant of Emil Kraepelin, published them in his book Atlas und Grundriss der Psychiatrie. The caption said: “...Patterns ripped out from bed sheets by a manic woman, spread on the floor of her room.” Marie Lieb grouped cyclic motifs of flowers, stars and circles (as well as writing) into orderly ornaments that resemble the magical patterns of medicine men. It is likely that she created these installations in order to delineate her personal space.
Source : www.artbrut.cz
Alice in Wonderland (1903)
At 800ft, Alice in Wonderland was the longest film yet produced in Britain, running about 12 minutes. Its unusual length meant that it was not suitable for all film showings, where a variety of short subjects was considered ideal, so all the scenes were sold individually. A showman need only buy and show a single sequence, such as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, not the whole film, which was less a self-contained story than an illustration of key moments from the book.
In 1903, there were two directors working at the Hepworth studio in Walton-on-Thames, Cecil Hepworth himself and Percy Stow. Hepworth was responsible for the studio's non-fiction films, while Stow made all the fiction films. This was such a large production that the two men worked together.
The film required an unusual amount of planning for its day. Hepworth was insistent that the images stay faithful to the drawings of Sir John Tenniel, the original illustrator of Lewis Carroll's story, and so before filming could begin, a large number of costumes had to be made, including several dozen playing card costumes, and flats painted to Tenniel's original designs. The film was made on the small wooden stage in the garden of the villa housing Hepworth's company, with exteriors shot in the lavish gardens of Mount Felix, a local estate which until recently had been owned by the son of Thomas Cook the travel agent.
Alice was played by Mabel Clark, who as well as acting also ran errands and acted as a kind of studio secretary. There were no professional actors at the studio, so all of the staff pitched in and played parts. Hepworth played the frog footman and his wife played the White Rabbit and the Queen. The film also featured an early appearance by the family dog, Blair, who would become famous as the star of Rescued by Rover (1905).
35mm, black and white, silent, 800 feet
Directors Percy Stow
Cecil M.Hepworth
Production Company Hepworth & Co.
Source: www.screenonline.org.uk
Monday, March 1, 2010
The Ways of White Folks and others
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The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes, 1934
Fine Clothes to the Jew by Langston Hughes, 1927
Don't You Want to Be Free? (1938) by Langston Hughes
was performed for his Harlem Suitcase Theatre in Harlem, New York City.
Revolutionary Time
In his most recent book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek blames the failure of contemporary activism on our assumption that time is a one-way line from past to future. He argues that activism is failing to avert the coming catastrophe because it subscribes to the same notions of linear time as industrial society. According to Zizek, a regeneration of activism must begin with a change in our understanding of temporality. Paraphrasing Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Zizek explains that “if we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this ‘historical’ notion of temporality: We have to introduce a new notion of time.” This new notion of time is a shift of perspective from historical progress to the timelessness of a revolutionary moment.
The new role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. “This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of ‘divine violence’ would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress,” writes Zizek. Accomplishing this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present looking forward to the future looking backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Zizek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dreaded catastrophic event – sudden climate catastrophe, a “gray goo” nano-crisis, the widespread adoption of cyborg technologies – has already happened and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. “We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny – and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” Only by assuming the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would be necessary to prevent its occurrence. We could then take these steps. “Paradoxically,” Zizek concludes, “the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.”
Zizek is right to suggest that activism is at a crossroads. Any honest culture jammer will admit that our signature moves have lately failed to arouse more than a few tepid responses. The fact is that our present is being swallowed by the future we dreaded: a dystopian sci-fi nightmare of enforced consumerism and planet-wide degradation. Activism now faces the dilemma of how to walk the line between false hope and pessimistic resignation. It is no longer tenable to hold the nostalgic belief that educating the population, recycling and composting and advocating for “green capitalism” will save us from the brink. Likewise, it is difficult to muster the courage to act when the collapse of civilization seems unavoidable, imminent and, in our most misanthropic moments, potentially desirable. Zizek’s shift in temporality offers us a way to balance the paralyzing realization that our demise is inevitable with the motivating belief that we can change our destiny. By accepting that we are doomed, we free ourselves to break from normalcy and act with the revolutionary fervor needed to achieve the impossible.
Text by Micah White
Source : adbusters.org
The new role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. “This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of ‘divine violence’ would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress,” writes Zizek. Accomplishing this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present looking forward to the future looking backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Zizek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dreaded catastrophic event – sudden climate catastrophe, a “gray goo” nano-crisis, the widespread adoption of cyborg technologies – has already happened and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. “We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny – and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act that will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” Only by assuming the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would be necessary to prevent its occurrence. We could then take these steps. “Paradoxically,” Zizek concludes, “the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.”
Zizek is right to suggest that activism is at a crossroads. Any honest culture jammer will admit that our signature moves have lately failed to arouse more than a few tepid responses. The fact is that our present is being swallowed by the future we dreaded: a dystopian sci-fi nightmare of enforced consumerism and planet-wide degradation. Activism now faces the dilemma of how to walk the line between false hope and pessimistic resignation. It is no longer tenable to hold the nostalgic belief that educating the population, recycling and composting and advocating for “green capitalism” will save us from the brink. Likewise, it is difficult to muster the courage to act when the collapse of civilization seems unavoidable, imminent and, in our most misanthropic moments, potentially desirable. Zizek’s shift in temporality offers us a way to balance the paralyzing realization that our demise is inevitable with the motivating belief that we can change our destiny. By accepting that we are doomed, we free ourselves to break from normalcy and act with the revolutionary fervor needed to achieve the impossible.
Text by Micah White
Source : adbusters.org
Liberty
Photograph of products for home and modern furniture for advertisement, Liberty and Co. Ltd, c.1952.
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