The Post-political Context and the Role of the Artist

Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s public intervention titled “Questions, Questions” (Barcelona, 2009).

Autonomist Marxists refer to our present situation as post-political (e.g., Lotringer, Marazzi and Bowman). Within this post-political context, Santiago López Petit, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, argues that the often repeated question “who has the right to the city?” (Lefebvre 1968: reformulated in Mitchell 2003) no longer makes sense:

[…] en la medida en que la afirmación “el espacio es político” se hace problemática…la propia lucha en el marco del derecho—en nuestro caso “el derecho a la ciudad”—se hace también problemática. (“Espacio público o espacios del anonimato”)

[[…] in the extent to which the assertion “space is political” becomes problematic…the very struggle within the framework of rights—in our case “the right to the city”—also becomes problematic.]

The urban movements that attempt to fight for certain rights in the public space of cognitive capitalism, like the fight for the right to decent housing in Barcelona, no longer are able to give their collective speech public meaning because their speech constantly passes through mediating institutions (state and corporate forms).

Against this particular state of society, Brian Holmes, in his book Escape the Overcode, argues that the role of the artist is “to mark a possible or real shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we may relate to each other at a given time and in a given place” (13-14). Critical Art Ensemble, a U.S. collective that explores the relationships between art and political activism, agrees and adds that “sign manipulation with the purpose of keeping the interpretive field open is the primary critical function of the cultural worker” (The Electronic Disturbance 139). Paris-based sociologist and social theorist Mauricio Lazzarato takes the position that “the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity’s power of articulation…” All three describe how creativity can be used as a line of flight from neoliberal control.

Works cited

The Electronic Disturbance. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Créer des mondes: Capitalisme contemporain et guerres ‘esthétiques’.”Multitudes 15 2004.

López Petit, Santiago. “Espacio público o espacios del anonimato.” Barcelona Metropolis: Revista de información y pensamiento urbanos.

Lotringer, Sylvère, Christian Marazzi, and Betsy Bowman. Autonomia: Post-political Politics. New York: Columbia University, 1980.

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York:Guilford Press, 2003.

Deleuze’s Pure Event, Real Democracy, and the Robin Hood of the Banks

For Brian Holmes, real democracy cannot be obtained without a specific type of societal concern with the production of the sensible that is based on Deleuze’s concept of the pure event. Paul Patton describes Deleuze’s pure event as “a virtual structure whose nature is never entirely captured in any given specification or determination of its conditions” (“The World Seen From Within”). Holmes argues for a production of the sensible that “is maintained at the level of a forever unresolved but constantly open and intensely debated question” (Unleashing 102). In other words, the sensible world should never be accepted as self-evident and closed. Cognitive capitalism’s distribution of the sensible, like any dominant semiotic system, attempts such a closure and self-evidence by limiting self-reflection and collective questioning.

Catalan activist Enric Duran constantly questions. Can we live without capitalism? Can we live without banks? What role do banks, credit, and indebtedness play in our lives? In 2008, Duran opened 68 lines of credit from 39 banks equaling 492,000 euros. He did so to demonstrate the ease with which one could become indebted. There is no crime in that. However, he also decided that he would never repay the loans. Instead, Duran used the money to fund social movements and to publish 200,000 copies of Crisis? Podemos! (PODEMOSCAST), a newspaper of articles in Spanish that explains how to create alternatives to capitalism. Duran was charged with swindling money from the banks and with falsifying documents. He spent two months in prison (March 20, 2009 – May 22, 2009) until he was released on a 50,000 euro bail.

Duran’s creative activism was not recognized as activism. His act of asking for loans looked like any other person’s act of asking for money. His performance was read as a normal action. What we can learn from Duran is not to mark activism as activism, but to hide activism within the everyday. In so doing, we can make holes in capitalist reality. Once those holes are made, we, like him, can then go public to expose them.

In the following video (with English subtitles), Duran explains his creative activism.

Duran’s exploits triggered a debate in 2008-2009 over his methods. Articles such as Robin Hood o farsante or Robin Hood heroe o villano questioned whether he was a hero or a villain.

He is in the news again because the criminal trial was set to begin on February 12, 2013. However, Duran asked for the trial to be suspended because he was notified by his lawyer of the date only three weeks ago despite having been set 4 months ago. Duran is calling this judicial farce. In an act of civil disobedience, he did not show up for the court date, and released this message (in English).

To find out more or to show support, check out his blog.

Works cited

Holmes, Brian. Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2008. Print.

Patton, Paul. “The World Seen From Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events.” Theory &  Event 1.1 (1997)

Capitalism: Return of the Subjectivity Snatcher

In order to prevent the potential autonomy of labor, Paolo Virno asserts that capital employs precisely “that which is common, that is, the intellect and language” (68). Suely Rolnik colorfully states that capital has become creativity’s pimp (“The Geopolitics of Pimping”). By moving away from the Fordist assembly line to a networked organization, capital provides what Brian Holmes terms the “flexible personality” of social laborers the creative space for self-valorization (“The Flexible Personality”). In a network where social laborers are given the freedom to manage their own projects, Holmes argues, “individuals aspire to mix their labor with their leisure” (“The Flexible Personality”). Sylvère Lotringer notes that the surplus value extracted by the network stems from “the idle time of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of immaterial labor” (Forward). The industrial factory has been replaced by Mario Tronti’s “social factory” (“Social Capital”) and Antonio Negri’s “factory without walls” (The Politics of Subversion 204) creating the current situation in which “the temporal measure of exploitation has become not the working day but the life-span” (Dyer-Witheford).

Yikes! It seems our subjectivity, as Félix Guattari would say, has been snatched by capitalism!

Works cited

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society.” Multitudes 3 June 2004. Web.

Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Jan 2002. Web.

Lotringer, Sylvère. “We, the Multitude.” Forward. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. By Paolo Virno. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. 7-19. Print.

Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005. Print.

Rolnik, Suely. “The Geopolitics of Pimping.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Oct 2006. Web.

Tronti, Mario. “Social Capital.” Telos 17 (1973): 98-121. Print.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. Print.

Photo from http://www.examiner.com/review/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-made-waves-as-the-first-great-horror-remake