To look
deeper into this question, consider the work of Anthony Davies
and Simon Ford, who observed how artistic practice was being
integrated to the finance economy of London during the late
1990s. These critics pointed to the establishment of
convergence zones, "culture clubs" sponsored by private
enterprise and the state. In these clubs, so-called
"culturepreneurs" could seek new forms of sponsorship for
their ideas, while businessmen sought clues on how to
restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative
teams of creative, autonomous individuals. Basing themselves
on the new culture clubs, Davies and Ford claimed that "we are
witnessing the birth of an alliance culture that collapses the
distinctions between companies, nation states, governments,
private individuals - even the protest movement." For unlike
most commentators from the mainstream artworld, these two
critics had immediately identified a relation between the
activism of the late 1990s and contemporary forms of artistic
practice. But what they saw in this new activism was the
expression of a conflict between the "old" and the "new"
economy:
"Demonstrations such as J18 represent new types of conflict
and contestation. On the one hand you have a networked
coalition of semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the
hierarchical command and control structure of the City of
London police force. Informal networks are also replacing
older political groups based on formal rules and fixed
organisational structures and chains of command. The emergence
of a decentralised transnational network-based protest
movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that
are slow in shifting from local and centralised hierarchical
bureaucracies to flat, networked organisations."
The alliance theory of Davies and Ford combines the notion
of a network paradigm, promoted by people like Manuel
Castells, with an anthropological description of the
culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural
studies. But what they portray is more like an "economization
of culture." In fact their network theory draws no significant
distinction between contemporary protest groups and the most
advanced forms of capitalist organization. As they conclude:
"In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of
'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As
all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out,
form alliances and dispense with tangible centres, the
oppositionality that has characterised previous forms of
protest and resistance is finished as a useful model."
These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were
already quite confusing for the movement. But they took on an
even more troubling light when the Al Quaeda network literally
exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the
unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove
the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command
hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.
But at the same time, if any position could now be called
"oppositional," it was that of the Islamic fundamentalists.
Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory
of a decisive transformation in organizational structures, and
Samuel Huntington's culturalist theory of the "clash of
civilizations." Suddenly the protest movement could identify
neither with the revolutionary form of the network, nor with
the oppositional refusal of the capitalist system. Loud voices
from the right immediately seized the opportunity to
assimilate the movement to terrorism. And to make matters
worse, the financial collapse the movement had predicted
effectively happened, from the summer of 2000 onwards, casting
suspicion over everything associated with the dot-com bubble
and making it easier for society at large to accept the
policing of electronic communication, whose formerly inflated
prestige drastically plummeted. The difficulty of situating a
networked resistance to capitalism within a broader spectrum
of social forces became enormous -- as it still is today.
Now, this difficulty has not stopped the mobilizations.
What has come to a halt, or rather, splintered into a state of
extreme dispersal, are the theoretical attempts to explain
them in a way that can contribute something to their
capacities of self-organization. What I want to do here is to
make a fresh try at this kind of explanation, from the
viewpoint of an economic anthropology that specifically
distinguishes between the market and what we call "culture."
From this viewpoint I will try to show why a resistance to
capitalism has arisen, how this resistance operates in a
networked society, and where art fits into it. Now, if you are
specifically interested in the field of art, the gain you may
expect at the end of this reflection is an understanding of
the way that conceptual practice has come to have its full
effect -- or to take its revenge -- in the context of a
networked society. But I hope this understanding will also
help you to realize that the promise of contemporary art can
only be fulfilled outside the institutional frame that
specifies it, and claims to separate it from its cultural
context. I think it would be interesting, in a show about
"geography" and "mobility," to ask about the most productive
relations that could be maintained between a museum and
artistic practices whose destination lies outside.
I.
Let's begin with some considerations of the
subjective reasons why a networked resistance to globalization
has arisen in the Western societies. It is well known that we
are increasingly coming beneath the gaze of an intensifying
surveillance regime. The most obvious example is DARPA -- the
American military entity that created the Internet. They are
now interested in things like "bio surveillance," "human ID at
a distance," "translingual information detection," "evidence
extraction and link discovery," "future mapping" (for which
they want to use "market techniques"), and the so-called
"Genoa program," which aims at a better fit between human
beings and machines, providing "the means to rapidly and
seamlessly cut across -- and complement -- existing
stove-piped hierarchical organizational structures by creating
dynamic, adaptable, peer-to-peer collaborative networks."
Here, at the cutting edge of military surveillance, you have a
program for a networked repression, integrating humans into a
machinic web.
These innovations in military technology have been
extensively covered by exhibitions like World Information.
There has also been a large mobilization by No Border against
at least one police database, the Schengen Information System
in Strasbourg; and a very interesting map on the subject was
done by Bureau d'Ètudes, under the title Refuse the Biopolice.
What is not so well understood is the fact that many of these
surveillance systems have been implemented for years,
particularly in the workplace, with the omnipresence of CCTV
cameras, radio tracking badges, workstation monitors,
telephone service observation, remote vehicle monitoring, etc.
And even less apparent is the way this coercive surveillance
is mirrored, as it were, by data gathering techniques which
have adapted military technology to the job of building
profiles on one's individual desire, so as to inform product
design, targeted advertising, consumer architecture, etc.
So-called "one-segment" marketing companies such as
KnowledgeBase sell detailed lists of individuals with
specifically catagorized "consumer attitudes." They also offer
"Digital Neighborhood" lists, where, as they say, "we combined
online intelligence gleaned from click stream data with
demographic, lifestyle and transaction data from our
AmeriLINKÆ national consumer database to segment consumers
into clusters that describe their digital behavior -- not just
what they are doing online but why they are using this
channel." This behavior-specific information is supposed to
guide retailers to "the best ways to develop an e-relationship
(or not!) with each segment." As the authors of The Harvard
Guide to Shopping explains, "the aim is no longer to control
the consumer, but to follow his every whim with perfect
flexibility."
"Flexibility" is the key word. Elsewhere I have theorized
the development of the "flexible personality," whereby the
quest for personal development and unique experience, carried
out by individuals employed within loosely networked
structures, serves to mask the intensified exploitation of a
so-called "flexible" labor force. With this concept, I wanted
to show the ways that creatives in the semiotic economy --
including the so-called "culturepreneurs" -- actually
participate in the new regime of domination. In effect, labor
patterns, managerial techniques and consumer desire are all
being mobilized under increasingly tight regimes of monitoring
and control, guided from a distance by the imperatives of
transnational financial speculation. What we are seeing in
this process of mobilization is an economization of
subjectivity -- ushering human existence into the accelerating
circuits of networked capitalism, and over-coding every form
of behavior with a monetary calculus. Now, I don't want to
reiterate all the details of that argument, but rather to
suggest that there are limits to the flexible personality.
Perhaps our first consciousness of them in the affluent
societies comes through the intensification of the
surveillance regime; but ultimately they are anthropological,
they have to do with humanity's very capacity for survival,
for self-reproduction. To understand them we shall have to
take a detour through the work of Karl Polanyi, an economic
anthropologist who in 1944 published a book called The Great
Transformation.
II.
Polanyi's concern was to explain the collapse of the
free-market economy in the early twentieth century. He begins
by establishing the coordinating role that international
financiers, or so-called haute finance, had played in ensuring
the century of relative peace that lasted up to 1914.
"Independent of single governments, even of the most powerful,
[haute finance] was in touch with all; independent of the
central banks, even of the Bank of England, it was closely
connected with them," he explains. The paradigmatic example is
the international banking firm constituted in the late
eighteenth century by Nathan Rothschild and his four sons:
"The Rothschilds were subject to no one government; as a
family they embodied the abstract principle of
internationalism; their loyalty was to a firm, the credit of
which had become the only supranational link between political
government and industrial effort in a swiftly growing world
economy. In the last resort, their independence sprang from
the needs of the time, which demanded a sovereign agent
commanding the confidence of national statesmen and of the
international investor alike." The system of haute finance,
coordinating national values through the universal equivalent
of gold, allowed for the functioning of a world economy whose
benefits, in turn, were a powerful argument for peace -- or at
least, a powerful argument against any conflict on a scale
large enough to disrupt international trade. The gradual
abandonment of the system, culminating in 1933 when the United
States went off the gold standard, then led to the
organization of purely national economies characterized by
large, integrated industrial conglomerates, which could find a
positive interest in the unleashing of war.
It is dizzying to consider the contemporary role of the
American dollar, or more precisely, of the negotiated balance
between the yen, the euro and the dollar, as the guarantor of
peace and prosperity in what Rem Koolhaas calls "the world of
YES." The yen, euro and dollar signs form the symbolic
language of exchange under globalization, which has abandoned
the stability of gold for the fluctuating balances of a
computer-linked value-system. But I would like to confront the
flexible world of YES with Polanyi's basic thesis as to
reasons for collapse of the entire laissez-faire system in the
1930s. For his argument is that the basis of this system --
the notion of a self-regulating market, the "magic of the
marketplace" that dazzled the world again in the 1980s -- was
actually a fiction. In reality, the exchanges of the
self-regulating market depended on social institutions foreign
to it, institutions which its operations would ultimately tear
apart. The Great Transformation retraces the gradual
destruction the cultural institutions of exchange into which
the natural environment, human production, and the various
national monetary systems themselves were embedded. Land,
labor and money -- the symbolic language of exchange -- were
reduced to the status of commodities, to be bought and sold on
markets regulated by short-term profit. The result of
market-governed exchange was to wreck the patterns of
reciprocity that had made it possible for society to reproduce
itself over time. The fascism of the 1930s, in Polanyi's
explanation, was a failed and disastrous effort to restore
these institutional balances.
Now, the point I want to make will become obvious when you
consider that in the late 1990s, the desperate attempt to
maintain the exchange value of the Argentine peso against the
international standard represented by the US dollar and the
currencies of ?§$ led to the exclusion of increasing numbers
of Argentineans from access to work, to food and basic
services, and then even to their own money, when limits were
placed on the possibility of bank withdrawals. The
reproduction of society became impossible in neoliberal
Argentina. This ultimately resulted in an insurrection which
has paralyzed the Argentine state. Of course, Argentina is the
most extreme case so far of the social disaster wrought by the
dominance of the self-regulating market. But to return to the
question of the flexible personality, I think the artistic
insurrections against neoliberalism in Europe and North
America can be understood as advance reactions against the
imposition of a market-based regulation upon subjectivity
itself. This is why the notions of freedom, gratuity and of
the gift economy are so prominent in the movement, to the
point where they seem to form its specific culture. To give
things away at the demonstrations is a way to publicly
reinstate other patterns of exchange, while opposing the
dominance of money. And these kinds of give-aways, like
potlatch itself, are not only extraordinarily playful. For
example, a scathing satire of the language of YES was carried
out by the group known precisely as the Yes Men, when they
posed as the WTO to offer a neoliberal solution to world
famine. They suggested that the poorest countries could
commercialize hamburgers, which indeed were being given away
to the audience as they spoke; the meat, they said, could be
recycled as many as ten times through the use of a cheap,
charitable defecation filter, a so-called "Personal Dietary
Assistant" (PDA)... Finally they intimated that the modern
food business could even learn something from the Aztecs, who
had found an ingenious way to supplement the lack of protein
in their diet - by sacrificing their neighbors! Could there be
a more precise analogy for the life-destructive nature of the
neoliberal economy?
Rarely have the protests attained such extremes of black
humor. But the networked resistance continually theatricalizes
Polanyi's basic insight, that economic exchange is embedded
within cultural patterns of reciprocity. And this theater, the
entire carnavalesque dimension that is so characteristic, is
clearly a way of reaching back or forward to a culture that
cannot be identified with capitalism. The idea would seem to
be confirmed by the important place that indigenous cultures
hold in the mythology of the counterglobalization movement,
such as the Mayans of Chiapas or the Ogoni tribes facing up to
the transnational oil companies in Nigeria. What then should
we make of Manuel Castells' opposition of the Net and the
Self, of progressive mobility and regressive identity as two
contradictory figures of the contemporary world? Or again,
what then should one make of Toni Negri's notion of the real
subsumption of labor by capital -- that means, the penetration
of all the aspects of life by the processes of extraction,
circulation and accumulation of abstract value -- whereby
market-based exchanges effectively bring all other social
relationships beneath their transformatory empire? What I
think is that the real subsumption of traditional culture by
capitalist relations of production almost immediately creates
an imperious need to invent new forms of non-monetary
exchange, so as to escape from the constrictive and sterile
realm of pure commodity relations. Therefore the Net is always
accompanied by figures of the Self, and a progressive, mobile
subjectivity seeking to reinvent patterns of exchange always
feels a kinship with the bearers of ancient cultures, who in
the case of the Zapatistas at least, and probably in very many
cases, do not cultivate the regressive identity that Castells
suggests, but instead try actively to transform their
traditional heritage into something emancipatory in the
present.
All of which is not to say, of course, that regressive
mentalities do not exist in the contemporary world. The stock
market crash of the year 2000, and the continuing menace of
deflation that haunts the world's leaders and financial elite
today, combines with the manipulated resurgence of archaic
social forms to paint an increasingly ugly and depressing
picture which no one can ignore. My own belief is that the
continuing imposition of networked capitalism, backed up
increasingly by military force as the symbolic language of
money loses its ability to integrate the world system, is
going to bring up waves of violent resistance whose nature we
cannot really understand from out positions here in the
Western world. But although these realities clearly exist,
what I want to do right now is not to talk extensively about
them, but rather to look first at the technological, and then
at the specifically artistic conditions of exchanges that do
not depend on the universal equivalency of globalization's
floating currencies.
III.
It is clear that "the oppositionality that has
characterised previous forms of protest and resistance" is in
no way "finished as a useful model." On the other hand, the
oppositional energies I have been pointing to are very much
entangled in networks, and even specifically electronic ones.
Now I will discuss the way that these networks operate outside
capitalist forms of exchange.
It is well known that the Linux operating-system kernel,
and free software generally, is made cooperatively without any
money changing hands. This is something that quickly caught
the attention of artists and culture critics, with the result
that in the early days of Nettime, for instance, there were a
lot of discussions about the "high-tech gift economy," to use
Richard Barbrook's phrase, or about "Cooking-Pot Markets," to
quote Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. Behind these discussions one
occasionally catches a glimpse of an anthropologist, not
Polanyi, but a figure of even greater importance: Marcel
Mauss, author of the famous essay on The Gift. As Barbrook
points out, Mauss was a living presence, his ideas having
inspired the Situationists, who passed them on to the
do-it-yourself media ethic of the Punk movement. But mostly
what fueled the discussion of the Internet gift economy was
the actual practice of adding information to the net. As Ghosh
writes, "the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast
tribal cooking-pot, surging with production to match
consumption, simply because everyone understands --
instinctively, perhaps -- that trade need not occur in single
transactions of barter, and that one product can be exchanged
for millions at a time. The cooking-pot keeps boiling because
people keep putting in things as they themselves, and others,
take things out."
Today, with the popular explosion of Napster, Gnutella, and
other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, these debates over
the high-tech gift economy are quite well-known indeed. Less
well-known, because of a denial which is characteristic of
economic liberalism, is the fact that non-monetary models of
exchange have been operating on a very large scale for as long
as one can remember, for instance in the realm of academic
publishing, where information is shared not for monetary value
but for the recognition it brings -- which itself is at least
partially dependent on the feeling of contributing something
to humanity or truth. Recently, an author named Yochai Benkler
has taken the twin examples of free software and academic
publishing as a foundation on which to build a general theory
of what he calls "commons-based peer production," by which he
means non-proprietary informational or cultural production,
based on materials which are extremely low cost or inherently
free. This ownerless, voluntary form of production depends, in
his words, "on very large aggregations of individuals
independently scouring their information environment in search
of opportunities to be creative in small or large increments.
These individuals then self-identify for tasks and perform
them for complex motivational reasons." Benkler's problem,
however, unlike Polanyi's or Mauss's, is not so much
describing the reasons for motivation, as the organizational
and technological conditions that make this self-motivated
scouring of the informational environment possible.
Benkler identifies four attributes of the networked
information economy that favor commons-based peer production.
First, the fact that information serves as an inexhaustible or
indestructible raw material for products which share the same
characteristics. Second, the cost of production equipment,
high in the era of the printing press, has become low in the
age of the personal computer. Third, creative inspiration, the
main input to information production, is notoriously hard to
identify by anyone except the individual who experiences it.
Fourth, distribution of the results has become extremely
cheap. Under these conditions, quite complex tasks can be
imagined, divided into small modules, and thrown out into the
public realm where individuals will self-identify their
competency to meet any given challenge. The only remaining
requirement for large scale production is to be able to
perform quality checks and integrate all the individual
modules with relatively low effort into a completed whole --
but these tasks, it often turns out, can also be done on a
distributed basis. The fact that all of this is possible, and
actually happening today, allows Benkler to contradict Ronald
Coase's classic theory, and make the claim that commons-based
peer production has joined the market and the firm as one of
the viable ways for organizing and coordinating human
production. And this is a very large claim, because it means
that there is a productive economy outside the two major
organizing devices of capitalism as we know it.
Now, the examples Benkler uses to prove the existence of
voluntarily organized large-scale cultural production are
nethead favorites like the Wikipedia encyclopedia project, the
slashdot technews site, the Kuro5hin text-editing site, and so
on -- basically situations where publicly available text plus
creativity produces publicly available text. But perhaps it is
more existentially, socially and even visually impressive to
consider the peer-production of recent networked
demonstrations, where publicly available text and perception
about the increasingly deplorable state of our shared world,
plus human conviction, solidarity, creativity and courage are
able to touch off huge collective performances, media
irruptions, social and political crises, and of course, more
publicly available texts, as well as reverberating memories of
shared experience.
So -- if you're willing to concede that something like the
networked demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank in
Prague in September of the year 2000 are perhaps not more
noble, but anyway more socially and visually impressive than
Wikipedia, then I shall have to ask you to imagine about 15
thousand people from all around the Western world
self-selecting and self-motivating themselves for the
volunteer tasks of informing each other in advance, of
traveling across Europe to meet at specific dates, and then
upon arrival, preparing a convergence center, a
counter-summit, a festival of resistance, a networked media
unit, and above all, a massive and successful direct-action
demo, which itself was self-organized into three different
sections, namely: the blue line, which went to tangle with the
cops; the yellow line, which went to block an important bridge
with a very peculiar kind of theater; and the pink line, which
went to blow people's minds and basically show them that
anything is possible, including getting into the conference
center and stopping the meeting. I think if you have the
chance to look at the different kinds of actions undertaken by
the different lines, you'll realize two things: first of all,
that making the right decisions about what kind of module
you're up to working on is quite important, and second, that
the sheer fact of redundancy -- I mean, lots of people working
on the same module -- does in fact help get over the problem
of those little mistakes some people make about what they
really can accomplish.
Now, if it's still possible to be serious about such kooky
events, then there's just one more thing I'd like to say, in
terms of Benkler's thesis about peer production being a new
possibility for human organization. That one thing is that the
Global Days of Action in which I have been involved, far from
being the random, violent mass events that are portrayed in
the media, are in fact among the most complex, intelligent and
creative social productions that I know, precisely because of
their self-organization. The research of the Multiplicity
group, in particular, has gone a long way towards showing how
complex and innovative these kinds of self-organization can
be, and how far they escape previously known categories. I
would only add that situations like these demonstrations,
where conflict is expected over very high stakes, seem to take
self-organization to yet higher levels of complexity,
creativity and effective realization. This is a politics of
mobility, which has begun to operate at a world scale. And the
kinds of exchanges that take place during these events -- of
ideas, images, gestures, cultures and solidarities -- are very
intriguing indeed, for those who believe that cultural
innovation must now take place outside the established
institutions.
IV.
Finally I will try to use some of the familiar terms
of the art world to talk about the relationship between
concept and performance, as a cultural exchange within the
networked resistance to capitalism. It is well known that
conceptual art was a failure. The "escape strategies" that
Lucy Lippard talks about, in her famous book on The
Dematerialization of the Object of Art, were intended to free
artists from dependency on the gallery-magazine-museum circuit
as their sole means of distribution. But the escape led at
best from market-oriented New York to the museums of Europe.
And even that was only a detour. In 1973, Seth Siegelaub said
in an interview: "Conceptual art, more than all previous types
of art, questions the fundamental nature of art. Unhappily,
the question is strictly limited to the exclusive domain of
the fine arts. There is still the potential of it authorizing
an examination of all that surrounds art, but in reality,
conceptual artists are dedicated only to exploring avant-garde
aesthetic problems.... Unhappily, the economic pattern
associated with conceptual art is remarkably similar to that
of other artistic movements: to purchase a work cheap and
resell it at a high price. In short, speculation." Lucy
Lippard, for her part, wrote in 1973 that the "ghetto
mentality predominant in the narrow and incestuous art
world... with its reliance on a very small group of dealers,
curators, editors and collectors who are all too frequently
and often unknowingly bound by invisible apron strings to the
'real world's' power structures... make[s] it unlikely that
conceptual art will be any better equipped to affect the world
any differently than, or even as much as, its less ephemeral
counterparts."
These admissions of defeat are well known. But it is also
very intriguing that quite recently, another history of
conceptual art has been coming back to light. It is a history
that unfolds in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina,
in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario. It would seem that
here, in the context of an authoritarian government and under
the pressure of American cultural imperialism, conceptual art
could only be received, or indeed, invented, as an invitation
to act antagonistically within the mass-media sphere, which
had already been thematized as an artistic medium by Argentine
pop. The most characteristic project in this respect was no
doubt Tucum·n Arde, or "Tucum·n is Burning," realized in 1968.
A group of some 30 Rosario artists researched the social
conditions in the province of Tucum·n, carrying out an
analysis of all the mass-media coverage of the region that was
currently available, and going out themselves to gather
first-hand information and to document the situation using
photography and film. They then staged a traveling exhibition
that was explicitly designed to feed their work back into the
national media, so as to counter the propaganda of the
government which had shut down the entire sugar-cane industry
in the province, and was now trying to paint an idyllic
picture of a region which in reality was wracked by poverty
and intense labor struggles. In this way, the artists sought
to work oppositionally within the media sphere, insofar as
that sphere directly affects social reality.
Now, to understand the differences from today, you must
realize that Tucum·n Arde was done with the support of the
Argentine CGT, that is, a labor union, and that the exhibition
was shown in union halls. In other words, to obtain the
funding and distribution of work that would not be supported
by the market, the Rosario group had to collaborate with a
bureaucratic structure, which despite being "workerist" is
essentially an outgrowth of the capitalist firm. This is where
Benkler's central remark, about the possibility of peer
production emerging only when the relevant equipment is widely
dispersed and densely interconnected, takes on its full
significance for a contemporary practice of conceptual art.
The communications and transportation network of today is the
precondition for the revenge of the concept. But the Rosario
group's relation to the CGT prompts another remark, which is
that after the anti-bureaucratic revolt of the New Left in the
Northern countries, from 1968 onward, it has become
practically impossible social movements, let alone artists, to
collaborate with bureaucratic structures, such as parties,
unions, etc. This is why the revolution must now be a
do-it-yourself affair, and why the concepts that work are
those that can be freely actualized, by each participant, as a
political performance. To roll it up in a phrase: "the revenge
of the concept = do-it-yourself geopolitics."
This is about to bring us full circle, back to June 18th,
1999. First I'd like tell you that an important share of the
preparation for the London performance of this global street
party and carnival against capitalism was done by artists.
They were apparently the ones who pointed to the LIFFE
building, the London International Financial Futures Exchange,
as a perfect instance and symbol of globalized finance
capitalism. Because they had read extensively about
Situationism and been part of its prolongations in England,
they were sure that a spontaneous mass action could succeed in
a district where large, sophisticated modern buildings were
laid out on a medieval street plan. Because they were Joseph
Beuys freaks, they were very curious about the fact that a
natural river still flowed beneath all the steel and stone of
the street where the LIFFE building is located. And because
they were contemporary artists, they knew that what they had
to do was to throw out ideas and metaphors and images, amid a
group of many more people doing the same, and then work
further with the ones that would start coming back to them,
transformed. To exemplify that, it seems that the idea of a
global street party rapidly went around the world, passing
from person to person through various networks, and was
eventually sent back to people at London Reclaim the Streets
by someone in Buenos Aires, saying this is a great idea, you
should really work on this!
To see how well the frozen vocabularies of conceptual and
performance art in the museum applies to this outdoor art of
concept and performance, just look at this [or imagine the
images!]:
- ATTITUDE: "Our resistance is as transnational as
capital"
- FORM: Global street party
- AUTHOR: Crowd of
protestors at the tube station
- SEMANTIC MATERIAL: the
LIFFE building
- PERFORMANCE ACCESSORY: A golden mask
-
INFORMATION: Text on the mask, describing carnival
possibilities
- THEATRICALIZATION OF PUBLIC SPACE: People
dancing in the street
- RELATIONAL ART: Couple kissing
under the spouting fire hydrant
- SOCIAL CRITIQUE: A rear
guard of protestors fighting the police
- MEDIA
INFILTRATION: FT headline: Anti-Capitalists Lay Seige to
London
- TRACES: Smoke over St. Paul's catherdral,br> -
DOCUMENTATION: RTS webpage showing global map of J18 actions
(It's important that this documentation, rather than just
being some kind of contemplative archive, actually helped
inspire people to do what they did in Seattle about six months
later...).
V.
In conclusion, I'd like to both agree and disagree
with Eric Kluitenberg, who, by drawing on Manuel Castells, has
written a suggestive essay on what he calls "the negative
dialectics of the net." In phrases which seem like a
contemporary echo of the ideas of the Argentinean pop and
conceptual artists of the sixties, he explains:
"The logic of the digital network now informs all dominant
aspects of society. This fact on the one hand marks the end of
the virtual, a sphere that has become completely intertwined
with the real world. At the same time, however, every
significant social interaction can only become meaningful by
virtue of how it is mapped in the digital domain."
What this means is that if artistic resistance is now
entangled in the networks, it is because the networks are
thoroughly entangled in the real, just as television has been
since its massive deployment in the 1950s, or radio since the
1930s. Yet whereas television, like radio, could only be very
imperfectly made into a medium for art, the real virtuality of
computer networks has been far more open to autonomous uses,
which are in fact able to defy the systemic aspects of the
channels they invest. Thus Kluitenberg writes: "In this
paradoxical environment, dominant discourses of social,
political and economic power can be challenged at the level of
the representational systems they employ. The classical
avant-gardes provide a repository of ideas, tactics and
strategies that are now played out in a radically enlarged
context; no longer the context of art itself, but that of the
network society."
I see it pretty much that way. The interest of a
cartography of contemporary capitalism, for instance, is to
break the frame, not of art, but of domination as it is
exercised over society. But I have to add something: if the
strategies of vanguard art can function in this "paradoxical
environment," it is precisely because they have given up
vanguard privilege, or perhaps more exactly, extended it in a
kind of potlatch that destroys it. It is the capacity to
actualize the virtual - what I have so far called
"performance" -- that destroys the privilege of any vanguard.
And this capacity springs from an anthropological level of
resistance to domination about which there is still everything
to be learned.
For it is clear that "round one" of the revenge of the
concept is now over. For three reasons. On is that the initial
form of media penetration no longer works: it has succeeded in
publicly identifying the illegitimacy of the transnational
institutions -- a major victory. But what we have seen since
Genoa is nonetheless a containment strategy that successfully
minimizes and distorts the media coverage. Second, and more
importantly no doubt, the operative limits of the initial
discovery of self-organization in transnational space have
also been reached; and the "multitudes" must learn deeper
forms of coordination, without giving into the representative
fallacy that looks to create a new political party, ripe for
absorption and neutralization. But finally there is the
question of enlarging the struggle, and learning from those
who bear the brunt of capitalist exploitation today, in a
moment of impending Imperial war and devastation. All of the
people touched by the emergence of new capacities for
self-organization, for cultural production outside the
frameworks of the market and the firm, will have to decide, in
a thousand different and very diffuse ways, whether they want
to go further, whether they want to actualize an understanding
of what life is like, and of what resistance means -- outside
the spheres of privilege which are insured by contemporary
capitalism.