This is the pilot, this is the final episode
Our latest artist-run TV Episode, _Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession_, is in full production mode getting ready for the broadcast on the 9th June at 7pm.
In the meantime, we would like to share a selection of some of our favourite works from artists who have worked in television broadcast from Chris Burden, Katya Sander, Robert Ashley, Peter Greenaway and the TV series produced by CAC, Vilnius that was broadcast on a national commercial channel across Lithuania from 2004-2007. All these artists and filmmakers are working in different times and contexts but there are some common threads and issues which emerge from them which explore TV as a specific platform for distribution which creates a unique ‘space’ for artists to work.
Chris Burden, The TV Commercials 1973-1977
“I would like to be the first artist to make a public financial disclosure – Chris Burden”
Starting with Chris Burden’s intervention in television commercials between 1973-1977, one of his most intriguing provocations is his attempt to position himself like a politician, wanting to be the first artist to make a public financial disclosure. It is done in a parodic style and the figures are comedic in scale but it raises an interesting question as to what an artist might have to disclose on television and what could an artist be accountable for in the commercial/public space of the television broadcast?
CAC: TV (2004-2007) “Possible subjects of a program: What could be the role of such television? How should it be made? What kind of issues it should address? Can artists offer television anything except of a set of entertaining postures? How far do we have to believe in audience in order to have it completely open source? Is it possible to retain one’s agenda while collaborating with a commercial TV? Could it be an unpopular TV?” Started in 2004, CAC TV was a project produced by Raimundas Malasauskas that emerged from a new commercial channel launching in Lithuania asking the contemporary Art Centre to produce a weekly programme. The way that this project was approached and the questions that CAC Vilnius had to ask themselves were fascinating and represented an almost ‘ground-zero’ for how artists could work within the medium. Part of the approach to producing this series, which ran for 3 years, included considering how artists might interface with TV as a commercial space. Alongside many of the exciting and novel propositions that the team came up with this idea of the a new commercial channel suddenly becoming a ‘place’ to make new work introduces the fundamental idea that we are not only looking at it as a distribution method but also as a context for the presentation of art work alongside the artists themselves.
Televised I: the Anchor, the I, and the Studio (2006) by Katya Sander
_“Do you use the word “I” when you are on screen? _Beginning with this question, each news anchor is engaged in a conversation about their own role in the news they present — whether they see themselves as _a part of_ or _apart_ _from_ this news, as _in_ the story or _outside_ of it. If outside of it, then where exactly is this outside located?
_ Where is the “I” located?”_
Although not a work made for broadcast, Katya Sander’s project explores the physical realm that television presents to its viewers. This work, which simply asks ‘Where is the I located?’ is an example of how unstable the relationship is between representation and reality when information is presented on television. Perhaps echoing some of the effects of Burden’s disclosure it is interesting to consider who is being represented and what space is the speaker inhabiting – if TV is already a distortion of a real space or an illusion then what does it mean for artists to work within this space? Are artists able to represent themselves on television, and if they work with performers, where is the author located?
Television Documentary on Robert Ashley’s Perfect Live, directed by Peter Greenaway (1983)
“Know your own desires. Everybody works to be part of the industry. To be a part of industry is to be real. You are a part of the industry both due to your industriousness and the nature of your work. There is a chance that everybody will like your work because it is a part of the industry. Things that are not a part of industry are not possible to like.” – Robert Ashley Perfect Lives Episode 4: The Bar (1983).
Finally, this documentary on Robert Ashley’s television opera ‘Perfect Lives’ includes clips from the original broadcast alongside interviews with the team that worked to produce it. the quote above is taken from _Episode 4: The Bar_ and responds to some of the idea outlined above. What is able to appear, be liked by others, and the context in which artists work is located is to be ‘real’. Realness is dependent on the circulation of the work within what Ashley refers to as the ‘industry’. But what about television as this unstable space? Is an artist or their work ever able to appear real, is the “I” authentic and, considering _Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession_ is being broadcast over the internet, which industry is it circulating in? http://dlvr.it/1f16n2
Il Trasloco (Moving out of the Future) at Live in your Head, Geneva
On the 19th May 2012, Through Europe‘s Federico Campagna and Auto Italia’s Richard John Jones travelled to Geneva to present Il Trasloco (Moving out if the Future). The film, which was originally translated by Campagna and subtitled by Jones produced through a collaboration between Auto Italia and Through Europe back in 2010, documents the ‘moving out’ of one of the key places where the Autonomia movement took place in 1970s Bologna. To find out more about the original translation project please visit the project page HERE.
The screening was included in the events programme of La Radio Siamo Noi, an exhibition covering self-organised media, media activism, radio magic and related artistic practices during and around the 1970s in Italy. The project, organised by Laurent Schmid and the students of HEAD, Geneva, was reflecting on the regular pirate Autonomist broadcast called Radio Alice which was made from the house documented in Il Trasloco (Moving Out of the Future). The exhibition also features neons by Maurizio Nannucci, Stefan Brüggemann, Cerith Wyn Evans and Alan Vega.
The poster of La Radio Siamo Noi, featuring documentation of Radio Alice.
Franco Berardi in Il Trasloco (Moving Out of the Future)
“More than meets the eye” by Maurizio Nannucci http://dlvr.it/1cG5Zr
Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession
Auto Italia South East presents _Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession_, an artist-run Live TV show performed before a studio audience and broadcast over the internet. Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, artists are developing new work in collaboration for this one-off episode which engages directly with the format of live television.
The episode will be broadcast live from the ICA Theatre on Saturday June 9th at 7pm. For more information and to book tickets, click HERE.
_Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession _is commissioned by the ICA as part of Remote Control – 3 April 2012 – 10 June 2012. Supported by Arts Council England. http://dlvr.it/1ZFDZK
Goodbye Glengall Road
Our old Auto Italia warehouse on Glengall Road has now been completely demolished and the site is empty awaiting re-development. Glengall Road was home to Auto Italia from 2008 to 2010 and housed a wide-range of projects with a huge number of collaborators.
We’d like to take a moment to delve into the archive, re-visit some of the projects that took place in that space and say a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in making them happen.
Simon Leahy and Ansis Kirmuzs rehearsing for PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER.
Auto Italia illuminated with a copy of Andreas Slominski’s _Christmas Decoration for Spring_ as part of A History of Two Mountains II.
The interior of the Glengall Road warehouse after the move-in and a huge cleaning and renovation push from our amazing team of volunteers.
Lucky Dragons perform ‘Making a Baby’.
A piece by Danielle Dean in the Panda Malin-Head show.
Veronica from Teeth crowd-surfs at YES WAY! 2009.
The shop at 2010′s YES WAY! event.
Richard John Jones, Carlos Monleon Gendall and Josh Love performing in outfits designed by Craig Green at YES WAY!
Inking the windows of Auto Italia with Sumi Ink Club.
Rachel Pimm talks to camera (manned by Theo Cook) as part of the first Auto Italia LIVE project in 2010. http://dlvr.it/1T9Xg1
Counter (Re-) Productive Labour
Following on from our re-publication of Mark Fisher’s examination of autonomy and post-capitalism, we’re excited to present Marina Vishmidt’s text _Counter (Re-)Productive Labour__, _also commissioned during ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’ for the accompanying publication.
Marina Vishmidt is a writer, editor and Ph.D. candidate at Queen Mary, University of London – whose discussion with Mark Fisher as to whether art work – as comparable to housework – provides a possibility for a post-capitalist future closed the first day of events during the Time and Motion project. Here we revisit her article, which examines similar questions surrounding domestic and immaterial labour, and present the piece in full.
Counter (Re-)Productive Labour
Marina Vishmidt
_This text is modified from a paper delivered at the ‘Beyond Re/Production: MOTHERING – Dimensionen der sozialen Reproduktion im Neoliberalismus’ exhibition, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 30 March 2011_
This text proposes to situate the debate about the management of social reproduction in the historical framework of Marxist feminisms that redefined domestic labour as a question of critical political economy and class struggle, as well as in the present state of activist and theoretical practice. The starting point of my approach consists of inquiring into what it means to inscribe social practices which do not produce market commodities into the wage-form, more narrowly, and into the value-form more broadly. Another aspect to this would be the production of subjectivity that arises out of struggles that necessarily include both moments of identification with and negation of, or, the consolidation and dispersion of, of a social category or identity, and feminist politics as well as communist politics are two examples which I have worked with for some time (although the same paradoxes, or, rather, dialectics, can be found in any social movement that has to invoke a group identity which marginalizes in order both to overcome the oppressions of that identity and to change the social conditions that make it possible, that is, the totality).
What these two sides of the inquiry have in common, for me, is the question of strategy. There is the truism that whatever doesn’t kill capital only makes it stronger, and that also goes for ‘excessive demands’ such as Wages for Housework or the basic income which have been implemented only to the degree that they enhance the surveillance capacities of the state on behalf of capital’s ability to exploit the recipients of such ‘benefits’. Thus ‘excessive demands’ meant to raise social struggles to another plane tend to bear the paradoxical character that their real practical goals are so contrary to the profit motive that far from posing demands to capital that it cannot fulfil (or, as Silvia Federici once wrote, ‘Wages Against Housework’), they could only be realized in a revolutionary situation where capital and the state have been eliminated from the equation. As Marx put it in the first notebook of the _Grundrisse_ when writing about the socialist proposals for ‘labour-money’, ‘This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised.’ Much the same can be said for social democratic demands made in a militant spirit like many of the arguments and demands posed by the education movements in the current period, such as ‘education must be free’: as demands, they seem to be addressed in an advisory spirit to a capitalist state which has lost its way, or to a political subject which can only be addressed in a reflexive capacity, like the subject of Kant’s aesthetic judgement. But it is not to be discounted that such invocations may yet develop real power, looking at the severely curtailed horizons for capital at present, certainly in Europe and the United States.
So, to begin historically, I would like to take the experience of Italian Autonomist Marxism, or Operaismo as it is also called, from two standpoints: one, the negation of labour, and the other the redefinition of unproductive as productive labour. The negation of labour standpoint of the period is often summed up by Mario Tronti’s thinking on the ‘refusal of work’ and the refusal of political identity stemming from the worker’s place in the social and technical relations of capital: ”’To struggle against capital, the working class must fight against itself insofar as it is capital.”’ In this sense, what is discussed as ‘workerism’ does, from the very start, at least as far as Tronti or e.g. Raniero Panzieri were concerned, entail a rejection of work as constituted in capitalist social relations rather than a valorisation of a productivity severed from capitalist control: this is capital understood as a social relation, not as a parasitic power the way that much subsequent post-autonomist writing has figured it. Though it can’t be avoided that this latter does follow from the autonomist ‘Copernican turn’, initiated also by Tronti, that is, labour is the primary rather than the dependent variable in the development of capital. The other standpoint is the redefinition of housework, care work, etc. as productive labour by the autonomist feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, etc. which is the perspective that underlay the Wages for Housework demand.
These feminist activists and theorists in the 1970s were responsible for pointing out the necessity of unpaid labour to the system of production centred on waged labour. This argument can be seen as addressing surplus value production (the dependence of profit on unpaid labour) from the viewpoint of divisions within the working class: the labour-power of waged workers is dependent on the unwaged labour of housewives. The revolutionary perspective here was one that aimed to consolidate fractions of the class exploited in very different ways by showing a unity of interests against exploitation – making the question of the wage ancillary rather than definitive for determining the political subject of class struggle. The wage divides workers from one another and produces a form of discipline and identification between the interests of labour and capital (though it should be noted, that the wage preserves a dialectical mismatch between those interests, while the prevalence of debt today, for ex., coercively closes the gap where that mismatch can become a site of struggle). The solution of collectivising housework and care work would here also be insufficient, so long as the gendered division of waged and unwaged labour and its place in the larger capital-labour relation remained unchanged.
The strategic importance of re-defining ‘women’s work’ as productive work in terms of capital in this way was that since male ‘productive workers’ were the most radical and mobilized part of the Italian worker’s movement, this was a way both to unite the feminist movement with them – to bring together the feminist and the worker’s movement on the ground of exploitation – and to expand the worker’s movement into social reproduction, as also seen from the practices of self-reduction, proletarian shopping, mass squatting, and so forth. It also enacted the discourse of ‘refusal of work’, while pointing out that a housewives’ strike had a very different meaning from a strike in the factory: a housework strike would inevitably be more radical, since the withdrawal of labour at the factory relied in great measure on continued labour in the home.
Yet, Wages for Housework was always contradictory, since by proposing that yet another ‘social program’ or ‘entitlement’ (as they’re called in the U.S.) be introduced, they were tactically confusing the ‘social wage’ (welfare state concessions by capital for the part of the population it does not require for its self-valorisation or which it has exhausted) with the wage as it was paid to the formally employed. This kind of social wage was counterpoised to what was even then an increasingly fictitious ‘family wage’ which implied one salary by a male breadwinner would be enough to cover the needs of a family of non-employed dependents – a powerful fiction, since it had been used to keep working women’s wages artificially low from the time of the Industrial Revolution up to the present, and excluded women from the mainstream, as well as the radical, workers’ organizations. Also, the idea of ‘wages for housework’, when not enacted in the grotesque outcome of the return of commodified housework, namely migrant domestic labour to the homes of the global middle class, can be readily recuperated by the state as a form of management of populations inactive in the formal economy.
The point about the return of a domestic servant class is crucial, of course, as it reflects so many shifts in global capitalist accumulation – transnational migration and its regulation in Western countries and the feminization of that migration. There is also the dramatic increase in the numbers of women entering the workplace – partially as a result of equal-rights legislation in the West – who are not in a position to do double-duty in the home as well, especially not with young children and the costs of child-care. This narrative is in fact an allegory of the fortunes of liberal or equality feminism which succeeded in many cases in removing gender from the terms of workplace exploitation, only to displace it to a raced and illegalized class of ‘other women’ as the welfare state melted away in the neoliberal era. In this sense, the commodification of domestic labour violently enforces the class relations, and class divisions, of feminism, but should be seen as one of the series of defeats suffered by working-class social movements in neoliberalism, which has turned back the clock for women in specific ways as in line with a general social regression, rather than a defeat to be laid at the door of the limited vision held by liberal mainstream feminism – and the power of the latter may be read strictly as a symptom of the power of the former.
One of numerous lessons of Wages for Housework is the relationship of a contestation over how the value-form, here the wage, is applied to social relations, specifically social reproduction, to a turning-point in the mode of capitalist accumulation, to a moment of crisis (with the Italian Autonomist and Wages for Housework episodes occurring from the late 60s/early 70s onwards, around the events which were setting the stage for the neoliberal era). The wage there became a contested category, a lever for interrogating a whole mode of production from the standpoint of gender, and a way to link workplace struggles to social or ‘community’ struggles. This discussion could also link into the present day through what it might mean to consider debt in terms of the wage, that is as a site of class struggle, both in terms of the erosion of class antagonism, and its reconstitution on different grounds. But also, importantly, how debt has been used_ _instead of the wage for access to goods as services, as well as the self-development (entrepreneurial and education life projects) implied in the figure of “human capital” which has become objectively unavoidable as a form of life. In this sense, debt now, as the “discovery” of unpaid labour did then, signals the erosion of prospects for collective working-class activity based in the workplace. This is not only because so much, if not most, capitalist work happens outside the official workplace, as the Italian autonomist feminists pointed out, but because debt-fuelled accumulation produces identities tied to consumption, not production – this could be seen as one of the key subjective political consequences of the post-1970s restructuring of the labour-capital relation – even as surplus-value extraction has intensified drastically over this time. This is not to naturalize the distinction between consumption and production; the whole structure of economies running on asset bubbles and service industries make that untenable. Such a naturalization also has specific political consequences, as is plainly in evidence in coverage of the recent riots: the label of ‘consumerism’ is used to isolate, pathologize and de-politicize looting, as distinct from the productive ‘politics’ of protest, or attacking ‘legitimate’ targets.1 Going back to the first point, the negation of labour, we can refer to a quote from Theorie Communiste: ‘The social character of production does not prefigure anything: it merely renders the basis of value contradictory.’ The reason that the basis of value is rendered contradictory by the social character of capitalist production is that it creates the possibilities for infinitely various and expansive forms of human co-operation, expands the spheres of needs, desires, enables the technological development that could make the ‘general intellect’ a really effective force, a commons, etc. yet contracts all these capacities to the miserable format of self-expanding value and private property (technically, it could also be added that the basis of value is contradictory since this basis is labour yet capital has to constantly expel labour from the production process), which are further reduced by periodic crises and war. Writers working on ‘communisation’, that is, the immediate and unmediated turn to communism following the tendential breakdown in the capital-labour relation and the decay of any politics based on the affirmation of work or workers’ identity, which they call programmatism, link the negation or abolition of labour to the abolition of use-value, not being content with the elimination of abstract labour and exchange value only as denoting the capitalist functions of the otherwise innocent terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’, as so much pre-critical Left analysis continues to do even now. As Bruno Astarian writes:
But then, if use value is considered identical to utility, the abolition of value is limited to the abolition of exchange value. And it is true that communist theory in its programmatic forms offers various versions of the abolition of value that, in the end, are limited to the elimination of exchange through planning. The activity stays the same (work, separated from consumption and from the rest of life), and planning guarantees justice, equality and the satisfaction of needs, considered exogenous, almost natural givens. On the contrary, as soon as communization is understood as a radical transformation of activity, of all activities, as a personalization of life due to the abolition of classes, use value reveals its abstract dimension of utility for a (solvent) demand unknown in its peculiarities and thus average, abstract.’
But what happens if we think reproduction with or inside the social character of production which renders value contradictory, put reproduction into the term ‘counterproductive labour’ – a term used by Chris Arthur to indicate the independent subjectivity of labour within and against its subsumption by the subject of capital (apologies for the unexplicated Hegelian idiom here)? As Silvia Federici has written, the political significance of re-defining reproductive labour was twofold – not only did it undermine the self-sufficient and natural status of productive labour as a synonym with industrial waged work -not because not all waged work is productive in Marx’s terms but because waged labour relied on an invisible supplement of unwaged labour – but it turned reproductive labour into a site of contestation _because _it was seen as inscribed into the circuits of accumulation:
…by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle, and, very important, conceive of an anti-capitalist struggle against reproductive labor that would not destroy ourselves or our communities. ..This has allowed a re-thinking of every aspect of everyday life — child-raising, relationships between men and women, homosexual relationships, sexuality in general– in relation to capitalist exploitation and accumulation.
as well as
The ability to say that sexuality for women has been work has led to a whole new way of thinking about sexual relationships, including gay relations. Because of the feminist movement and the gay movement we have begun to think about the ways in which capitalism has exploited our sexuality, and made it “productive.”
But with all these redefinitions of production and reproduction, which arose in different historical circumstances and thus cannot just be considered from our historical or theoretical vantage to be an ‘error’, we still face the contradiction that expanding the definition of productive labour in this way is to turn it into an affirmation of labour and a demand for a wage – which is of course a dialectical demand (Wages Against Housework), an ‘impossible demand’ and a strategic demand, which is also how the Guaranteed Basic Income is framed in some of the Marxist arguments favouring it. But it pre-empts a politics based on the analysis of the spread of real subsumption/commodity relations, of financialization, as in the generalization of debt in increasingly privatised and for-profit social reproduction, as well as turning a blind eye to the biopolitical ends of expanding the sphere of the state into the private household made private by capital’s economic needs. Likewise, on the face of it, it validated and consolidated the wage relation; as well as, turning the home into a workplace for women (or whoever is not working outside it) rather than challenging the gendered division of labour, and its intimate correlation with the form of the wage. So in a way the wages for housework concept counters the premises it starts from, which is the demolition of the class relation by means of the demolition of the position of women within it. Ultimately, although positioned in its historical context and political moment, ‘excessive demands’ and Wages for Housework in particular here, confront us as inadequate then and more so now, when it is the disjuncture between labour and the means of reproduction, from the side of capital as well as labour, which needs to be pushed rather than resolved in a way inevitably favourable to capital and state. The subjective dis-identification with labour and gender cannot take on a positive valence of ‘excess’ (if we claim the promise of the system which is not intended for us, we will expose the lie of the system), which can only be normalizing under the current conditions of normalized disaster, but can help disclose the imperative of negation as a practical politics. It is not simply that the particular strategy of ‘excess (wage-) demands’ worked in some fashion as a radical politics in the welfare-state Fordist era and is no longer capable of doing so; it is that capital is confronting us with these demands now, demands that presuppose ‘conditions where [they] can no longer be raised’.
Following this ambivalent thread, I’d like to end with an open question about the troubled dialectic between affirmation and negation in feminist and communist politics. The dialectic of the affirmative and negative is perhaps the most interesting legacy of the strain of autonomist marxism I’ve been discussing here. The Wages for Housework campaign, extended in some measure to any ‘defensive’ campaigns on behalf of the social wage could be seen as one of the clearest examples of this. The choice to affirm an identity as a worker with a view towards dismantling the whole labour-capital relation through an impossibly expansive and immeasurable concept of labour parallels the move of affirming membership of a subjugated class within the capital:labour relation in order to claw back some of the wealth produced by labour to expand the autonomy/latitude for action of the working class beyond being a working class. To claim how useful you are to capital in order to wrest a measure of independence from it is the classic gesture of all welfare struggles. This then resonates with the feminist affirmation of a collectivity of women in order to eventually to show up the impossibility and injustice of gender (including gendered divisions of labour, as in Wages for Housework and most other materialist variants of feminism) as it is promulgated by the heterosexual re/productive matrix, gender as naturalizing logic of atomisation and control. Here it might be worth adding a concept of ‘gender’ as a real abstraction in capital and revisiting some of Shulamith Firestone’s ‘sex-class’ arguments from _The Dialectic of Sex _among other articulations as in Foucault, Melia or Hocquenghem that square the logic of sexual preference and the commodity,_ _or in the work of Denise Riley on the problematic category of ‘women’ in feminism. The history of the feminist movements raises a lot of questions about identification and dis-identification, i.e. what are the problems and potentials of identifying collectively as an oppressed group in order to overcome both that oppression and the group identity that perpetuates it – this of course links to Marx’s idea about the working class having to not be the working class anymore if capitalist class society is to be overcome. The structure of ‘radical identification’ thus seems to traverse both identity politics and class politics, but this will have to be taken up further another time.
—-
1 ‘Riot Polit-Econ’, a text delivered in the form of a ‘Joint Report’ not quite authored by the ‘Khalid Qureshi Foundation’ and the ‘Chelsea Ives Youth Centre’, makes a related point very succinctly: “Now more than ever the interface of ‘work’ and ‘consumerism’ in our society is rotten: it is the loop by which long term structural unemployment recreates the market for low-end consumer commodities and by that means _recreates also the jobs which the long term structurally unemployed are expected to aspire to._”
Auto Italia LIVE at the ICA
We’re very excited to announce that Auto Italia will be producing a new episode of Auto Italia LIVE as part of the ICA’s _Remote Control_ exhibition (April 3rd – June 10th 2012) as well as exhibiting the three 2011 episodes in the Reading Room. The new episode will be filmed in front of a studio audience and streamed live on the Internet on June 9th at 7pm.
Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, artists will produce all aspects of the broadcast and create a space for producing and distributing work whilst also engaging critically with the medium of live TV itself. Framed by the ICA’s survey of artistic engagement with television, Auto Italia LIVE will explore new possibilities of working with contemporary broadcast and Internet culture.
Click through to watch 2011′s Episode 1: Talking Objects in Space, Episode 2: Cosmosis and Episode 3: C2C P2P.
For more information about the event, and to book tickets, click HERE.
The Future is Still Ours
As the economic and political landscape around us still seems to be in free-fall, it is becoming a matter of urgency to struggle against the stagnation of our working conditions and well rehearsed rhetoric of emancipatory change from above. Last August, we produced a project called ’We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’ Over four days of activity, including discussions, workshops and an onsite printing press we considered the role of self-organisation within our current conditions but with a focus on our own position - not only talking but also ‘working through’ these ideas. There was a lot of discussion around the project at the time which has continued through the rest of our programme. Six months on, we want to re-visit some of the material, open up the project as a resource and keep the conversation going. We’re excited to re-publish Mark Fisher’s text The Future is still ours: autonomy and post-capitalism, originally comissioned to accompany the project. As the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009), Fisher writes regularly for Film Quarterly, Sight&Sound and The Wire, and on his own weblog, k-punk. In this text Mark introduces his framework for examining contemporary leftist political organisation and considers future possibilities for these networks. To listen to Mark in conversation with Marina Vishmidt, recorded on the first day of Time and Motion, click HERE.
The Future is still ours: autonomy and post-capitalism
Mark Fisher
Adam Curtis’s recent documentary series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace argued that discourses of self-organisation, which had formerly been associated with the counterculture, were now absorbed into dominant ideology. Hierarchy was bad; networks were good. Organisation itself – held to be synonymous with “top-down control” – was both oppressive and inefficient. There is clearly something in Curtis’s arguments. Practically all mainstream political discourse is suspicious of, and sceptical towards, the state, planning and the possibilities of organised political change. This feeds into the ideological framework that I have called capitalist realism: if systemic change can never happen, all we can do is make the best of capitalism.
There’s no doubt that the right has been able to profit from identifying the left with an allegedly superseded ‘top down’ version of politics. Neoliberalism imposed a model of historical time which places bureaucratic centralisation in the past, by contrast with a “modernisation” that is held to be synonymous with “flexibility” and “individual choice”. More recently, the much derided idea of the Big Society is, in effect, a right wing version of autonomism. The work of Phillip Blond, one of the architects of the “Big Society” concept, is saturated with the rhetoric of self-organisation. In the report “The Ownership State” which he wrote for the ResPublica think-tank, Blond writes of “open systems” which “recognise that uncertainty and change render traditional command-and-control ineffective.” While Blond’s ideas have been seen by many as obfuscatory justifications for the neoliberal privatisation agenda, Blond himself positions them as critical of neoliberalism. Blond notes a paradox that I also discuss in Capitalist Realism: rather than eliminating bureaucracy, as it promised to, neoliberalism has led to its proliferation. Since public services can never function as “proper” markets, the imposition of the “market solution” in healthcare and education “generates a huge and costly bureaucracy of accountants, examiners, inspectors, assessors and auditors, all concerned with assuring quality and asserting control that hinder innovation and experiment and lock in high cost.” Such systems, Blond writes, are “organic rather than mechanistic, and require a completely different management mindset to run them. Strategy and feedback from action are more significant than detailed planning (‘Fire – ready – aim!’ as Tom Peters wrote); hierarchies give way to networks; the periphery is as important as the centre; self-interest and competition are balanced by trust and cooperation; initiative and inventiveness are required rather than compliance; smartening up rather than dumbing down.” Since the right is now prepared to talk in these terms, it is clear that networks and open systems are not enough in themselves to save us. Rather, as Gilles Deleuze argued in his crucial essay “Postscripts on Societies of Control”, networks are simply the mode in which power operates in the “control” societies that have superseded the old “disciplinary” structures.
Does all this then mean that ideas of autonomy and self-organisation would inevitably be co-opted by the right, and that there is no further political potential in them for the left? Definitely not – far from indicating any deficiency in autonomist ideas, the co-option of these ideas by the right shows that they have continuing potency. Seeing what is wrong with Blond and his ilk’s appropriation of autonomism will also tell us something about what the difference between right and left might be in the future.
Curtis is right that the principal way in which autonomist ideas have been neutralised is by using them against the very idea of political organisation. Yet autonomist theories continue to be crucial because they give us some resources for constructing a model of what leftist political organisation could look like in the post-Fordist conditions of mandatory flexibility, globalisation and just-in-time production. We can no longer be in any doubt that the conditions which gave rise to the “old left” have collapsed in the global North, but we must have the courage not to be nostalgic for this lost Fordist world of boring factory work and a labour movement dominated by male industrial workers. As Antonio Negri so powerfully put it in one of the letters collected in the recently published Art And Multitude, “We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected. … The very blood in our veins had been replaced.” Even though the shift into so-called “cognitive” labour has been overstated - just because work involves talking doesn’t make it “cognitive”; the labour of a call centre worker mechanically repeating the same rote phrases all day is no more “cognitive” than that of someone on a production line – Antonio Negri is right that the liberation from repetitive industrial labour remains a victory. Yet, as Christian Marazzi has argued, workers have been like the Old Testament Jews: led out of the bondage of the Fordist factory, they are now marooned in the desert. As Franco Berardi has shown, precarious work brings with it new kinds of misery: the always-on pressure made possible by mobile telecommunications technology means that there is no longer any end to the working day. An always-on population lives in a state of insomniac depression, unable to ever switch off.
But what has to differentiate the left from the right is a commitment to the idea that liberation lies in the future, not the past. We have to believe that the currently collapsing neoliberal reality system is not the only possible modernity; that, on the contrary, it is a cybergothic form of barbarism, which uses the latest technology to reinforce the power of the oldest elites. It is possible for technology and work to be arranged in completely different ways to how they configured now. This belief in the future is our advantage over the right. Phillip Blond’s networked institutions may have a cybernetic sheen, but he argues that they must be situated in a social setting which is re-dedicated to “traditional values” coming from religion and the family. By strong contrast, we must celebrate the disintegration of these “values”, as the necessary precondition for new kinds of solidarity. This solidarity won’t emerge automatically. It will need the invention of new kinds of institutions, as well as the transformation of older bodies, such as trade unions. “One of the most important questions,” Deleuze wrote in the “Control” essay “will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?” Perhaps the lineaments of that future can be seen in Latin America, where left wing governments facilitate worker-run collectives. The issue is not any more of abandoning the state, government or planning, but making them part of new systems of feedback that will draw upon - and constitute - collective intelligence. A movement that can replace global capitalism does not need centralisation, but it will require co-ordination. What form will this co-ordination take? How can different autonomous struggles work together? These are the crucial questions we must ask as we begin to build the post-capitalist world.
The Scopophiliac Audience
Mystique Holloway, Richard John Jones, Barbara Hammer and Stuart Comer in discussion. (image courtesy of Zoe Holloway)
As part of Tate Modern’s ‘Babara Hammer: The Fearless Frame’ season, Auto Italia participated in Programme 15: The Scopophiliac Audience. Alongside Hammer’s Multiple Orgasm (1976) and Audience (1982) and a short film from the ‘X Marks the Spot’ research group, Auto Italia presented the performative screening It’s Like Staring Someone Out Who’s Not Even Looking At You by Kate Cooper, Leslie Kulesh and Jess Weisner. This was originally developed and performed within Bodies Assembling which was produced by Auto Italia in December 2011, you can find out more about the performance in our previous post here.
The screening was followed by a roundtable discussion with Barbara Hammer, Auto Italia’s Richard John Jones, ‘X Marks the Spot’ group member Mystique Holloway and Tate Film Curator, Stuart Comer. The event culminated in an involved audience discussion and saw Barbara infiltrating the audience in order to photograph the attendees.
We’d like to thank Barbara and Stuart Comer for inviting us to participate in the event, and to everyone who made it down to the screening.
To hear Barbara talking about her work and her collaboration with Tate, take a look at the TateShots film HERE.
(Re)performing Feminisms
Join us on Sunday 19 February at the Tate Modern Starr Auditorium for It’s Like Staring Someone Out Who’s Not Even Looking at You as part of Barbara Hammer The Fearless Frame, Programme 15: The Scopophiliac Audience [book tickets HERE].
First performed as part of Auto Italia’s collaborative project with Cinenova, Bodies Assembling, this performative screening by Kate Cooper, Leslie Kulesh and Jess Weisner - produced by Auto Italia - will be re-staged and re-contextualised within Tate Modern’s extensive Barbara Hammer programme. Developing dialogues initiated at Bodies Assembling, this screening re-examines questions of distribution and dispersion of the work - and the image - of female artists.
Newly framed within the Hammer Season’s critical reflections on feminist legacies, the work will consider the ‘place’ of women in contemporary mainstream culture and their control over their own image within this arena. The audience participates in this image exchange - encouraged to experience the work as voyeur, as active participant and as a ‘fan’ of feminism. Through a layering and re-working of archival footage and live performance from audience members, the screening engenders a space for interrogating both feminism and the image of the feminine in film-production and distribution today.
Shown alongside Hammer’s works Audience (1982) and Multiple Orgasm (1976), as well an intervention from the group that have been meeting at the Lambeth Women’s Group, the screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion including Auto Italia’s Richard John Jones. Programme 15 will raise questions relating to the changes in audience for feminist and queer feminist cinema. Looking back to the distribution of Hammer’s work in the late ‘70s and her largely queer, lesbian and women-only audiences, the event seeks to question what it means to re-situate Hammer’s practice alongside contemporary notions of community and network.
Auto Italia in Art Monthly
Pick up the February issue of Art Monthly to read Paul O’Kane’s article on redefining ‘outsider’ art. Featuring Auto Italia LIVE and the possibilities of online production…
Click HERE for PDF.
Radical content deserves radical form
Whether our interest has been ignited as a result of our recent collaboration with Cinenova – or whether a galvanizing of enthusiasm is happening more generally – there seems to be a plethora of re-visitings, re-stagings and re-imaginings of both seminal and peripheral works from women filmmakers taking place.
For a historical perspective, we enjoyed visiting the upper level of the Dara Birnbaum show at South London Gallery where some of her earliest single-channel video pieces – intimate investigations into her identity and self-depiction as well as documents of her experimental film practice.
We’ll be making sure we catch the upcoming Barbara Hammer and Joyce Wieland programmes at Tate Modern (Barbara Hammer ‘The Fearless Frame’ Feb. 3rd until Feb 26th). The Wieland programme will run from the 20th to the 22nd of January and will be also be accompanied by a study day at LUX.
The focus of these screenings, interventions and lectures shifts from documentations of individual contributions to filmmaking to more collaborative presentations that aim to challenge tropes and traditions of women in film and women as filmmakers.
Read more about Bodies Assembling, our recent collaboration with Cinenova HERE.
Image by Joyce Wieland.
Happy New Year from Auto Italia
HAPPY NEW YEAR - some of our favourite moments of 2011.
Celebrating Rob Carter’s birthday in the run up to Auto Italia LIVE
Charlie Woolley proudly exhibits his tape graffiti that appeared before We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion
Leslie Kulesh and Andrew Kerton strike a pose while rehearsing for Auto Italia LIVE
What we do without the amazing Matt Welch
A team meeting before Auto Italia LIVE with Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Theo Cook, Jamie Stevens and the amazing camera crew.
Kate Cooper reads about Auto Italia in LA
Aoife Flynn, Mikey and Amanda Dennis show off their first Riso prints.
Saying farewell to Aoife in style with the wonderful Mette Juhl and Marianne Forrest.
Bodies Assembling
Bodies Assembling consisted of 10 film screening events happening over 9 days each reflecting personal projects, responses and ideas relating to the films and videos distributed by Cinenova. Over the course of the screenings we covered a whole range of topics including the contemporary media representation of HIV, the creation of the image of women, the transgendered body and the affect of watching political film from the 1980s. Moments of history were brought to the fore by presentations of the first four films acquired by Circles (the fore-runner to Cinenova) presented by Felicity Sparrow and generations mixed in a screening of four 16mm films chosen by Kerstin Schroedinger which were screened after a hasty induction to the projector as the audience were then asked to take responsibility for each film. Through a mixture of screenings, discussions, interviews and performances relationships to the material distributed by Cinenova was revisited, recontextualised and new relationships and understandings formed through the temporary Cinema.
Kerstin Schroedinger’s 16mm workshop.
Felicity Sparrow introduces the screening ‘Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises’.
Working with an absence of vocabulary
Richard John Jones and Michael Oswell interview Terre Thaemlitz, 2011.
Terre Thaemlitz is a transgendered performer, house DJ and extremely articulate commentator on audio within its specific economic, political and social contexts. This interview was conducted when Thaemlitz was touring with her latest project entitled ‘Soulnessless’. It was printed to accompany a screening that was part of Bodies Assembling - a project organised by Auto Italia South East and Cinenova during December 2011. All images are stills from the Soulnessless project.
Richard John Jones: Michael and I wanted to start by referring to your work around house music and how it is ‘hyperspecific’. If the aural can only be understood as an intersection of a whole variety of specific contexts (including identity politics) we were interested as to whether there can be an implicit reading in that with the ‘universalisation’ of recent and current social movements?
Terre Thaemlitz: You could say my work has been mostly about anti-universalism. I’ve done a lot of work around critiquing universalism, including liberal humanism and the way that it implies a shared human experience. Of course, any time you have a universalism – which is a kind of theoretical hypothesis of community – these involve processes of homogenization, and of course we do compromise all the time to get along with people. We make steps to homogenise in order to get along in this shared way, but this harmony is always at some point a ‘fake’ and its always important to keep in mind that it’s a fake. Of course the dominant western model is that you want to have ‘authenticity’ and ‘real connection’ and a ‘true shared experience,’ and for me this is a real conflict of interests within any sort of critical field because to take a critical stance is instantly aggressive and antisocial – antisocial in that it is against the dominant consensus or that it takes a position against something. For me it is inherently negative, yet there is so much pressure to be optimistic. For example, you have to be focusing on ‘the future’ and on ‘your dreams’ and ‘where you want to go from here,’ and I’m much more interested in how you end the unbearable situations happening in the present rather than focusing on the Obama ‘hopenosis’ model of Yes We Can, which of course has been part of the queer agenda since the 80s and is really also pivotal to any sort of pride movement. Pride is also very much about optimism, very much about power sharing and very much about models of shared experience that have to do with conformity to the mainstream.
Michael Oswell: It’s interesting that you mention this circle of optimism which is primarily concerned with integration. Would you say that universalism is, from the very start, compromised?
T: It’s fascist. When taken to its extreme, humanism is also ultimately inherently fascist – and we live in a world where people are fundamentalist. So when you take it to the extreme, the ‘shared human experience’ is about a model of fascistic conformity that has nothing to do with the language of democratic diversity that it tries to exploit. But at the same time you have the post-humanist movement happening which is this kind of critique of it. Meanwhile, we are still in an era where so many people are still trying to be acknowledged as ‘human’ – especially within Women’s communities, Trans communities, and Lesbian and Gay culture although there is already much more acceptance around it. Like, now I would say we are culturally going through a kind of Trans boom, but these things are steps within the humanist legacy about recognizing who qualifies as ‘human.’ Laurence Rassel and I talk about this whole thing in the ‘Useless Movement’ project, and this is a cultural reality, so how do you then deal with this need to be simultaneous and duplicitous and also deceiving in terms of on the one hand having solidarity with people who do have a real material cultural and economic need to power-share while also knowing that putting energy into that kind of mainstream acceptance is also destructive to critical movements interested in divestments of power. That very necessary acceptance involves a concession to the dominant power structures needed to be changed in the first place. This is part of the transsexual movements and medical transitioning too – this conundrum of what is about power-sharing versus what is about unbecoming what was unbearable – and I think that this kind of tension will always come up when you mention something like universalisms, humanisms and these sort of things. Of course, people want to be optimistic, those are optimistic ideas which give people energy, but for me it is totally destructive. Totally alienating and depressing. This is a very old model where visibility and power are unquestioned.
R: Well this is really what I understand as essentialism. But then if we think about something like strategic essentialism, especially in queer activism, there is still a very real need for people to claim their humanity through, perhaps temporarily assuming a minority identity. This comes up often in a process of trying to politically organize. But is that conflict an eternal humanist/post-humanist struggle?
T: Well, I think that momentum is already on the side of the universal humanist argument, which makes it easier to play the over-critical asshole if you know it is the inherently weaker, losing position. I’m realistic about the fact that the struggle I’m invested in is something which is going to be lost, it will be swept to the side, so in this way it’s ok to be oppositional and confrontational with the understanding that it’s also futile. What is a problem for me – and what I’m about to say also shows that I have my own problems [laughs] – is that I would say most people think it’s healthy to try and reconcile with society, to feel accepted. It is healthy to find one’s place and go along with people in general, and this is the argument behind medical gender transitioning which in the majority of cases is about trying to take people out of a position of cultural and social alienation through body adjustments that allow them to fit into the cultural models around gender. Fitting in aims to minimize alienation and I think that for most people, regardless of their sexuality or gender, it is the expected thing for them to want to do. But for me, identifying as someone who is completely unable to do this, it is so grotesque and brutal that it would mean a bullet to my head. So then, how does one deal with this gap between an obviously real and political need to address the violence of universalisms and humanisms – which I am taught to think of in personal terms although they clearly go beyond just myself – and the realization that addressing that violence forces one into an antisocial stance that is destined to fail? Speaking from personal experience, this is very difficult to do, and I think a lot of my work is not only talking about these things but also working through them myself in terms of my own social interactions.
R: I was interested in your point which I think related to the appropriation of the queer body in relation to dominant power structures. Michael and I were talking before the interview about the use of humanitarian discourse as used for an imperialistic objective. The justification of invasion being that of rescuing homosexuals in Iraq. Or pink washing in Isreal painting Tel Aviv as some gay liberal utopia within the oppressive Islamic east. Then the humanitarian discourse becomes intrinsically linked to violence and essentially imperialism.
T: I think that this idea of ‘shared experience’ is what creates that. When someone hasn’t experienced that kind of violence it becomes instantly abstracted. They say, ‘Well it must exist somewhere, but it’s not my experience, and if we have a shared experience then we’ll just talk about it on an abstract level.’ What we are really talking about here are very specific, isolated acts of directed violence for which its true that most people do not experience these in the extreme. Even many people who are identified as Gay, Lesbian, Trans, etc., don’t experience violence either through the safety offered by closeting or because they are operating within Pride communities where they are isolated within these bubbles of safety. Perhaps because they inhabit ‘safe spaces’ where they are surrounded by their peers for example, there are a lot of people who do not experience these things on a physical level to the same degree as others. This leads to the abstraction of other experiences, which is why I think its very important to get away from universalisms and humanisms as a way of connecting to people because they do instantly abstract, dilute and diffuse the violence which is very real. It’s a very real thing to have some asshole spit on your face, for example.
M: I wanted to know more about the use of the word solidarity. A lot of your work is about isolation, working against pride communities, the circle of optimism and so on. Is there any possibility for the collective within this? Are networks of solidarity a possibility for you?
T: For me, I’ve lived my whole life without ever finding a community and I’m still alive, doing things constantly, yet without this need – or without worrying about fulfilling the need. Although when I was younger, and especially in my early 20s doing activist work in New York, you could say I had fled from the US Midwest to try and find a place to connect with people.
M: I moved to London from Northumberland so I can relate to that.
R: Yeah but that is interesting because that narrative is shared. It’s a totalizing queer narrative of urban migration and therefore I think people are inclined to share that and have a solidarity with one another but actually that flattens the interaction and there is a moment when you realize that potentially you don’t really have anything in common.
T: And again, I think this is an expression of the culture, to be optimistic. The reason we go to big cities is not because we really believe we are going to find this community to click with. We are aware that this is somehow delusional, and that we are really fleeing something. We are running away from something and this is a process of unbecoming one thing to become something else. But this unbecoming is overshadowed by the codes of authenticity applied to who has ‘really’ transitioned or ‘really’ come out.
R: To turn that idea on its head, I wondered whether through certain labour practices that domination could be challenged. I’m thinking about your approach to music production and performance – is that practice queering something?
T: I personally think not. I think the arts and media industries are ideologically exploiting this notion of the freedom of people within those fields. That somehow we exist in a labour market where we have, by our own choice, put ourselves in positions that others are forced into. So for me, even the way you’re framing your question is clouded by this ideological nuance that I think is symptomatic of the fields we are operating in.
R: Yes but I think this is something that happened very much in the UK in the late 90s with New Labour and the development of the “knowledge economy”. That governmental policy suggesting that everyone should be a creative worker, which actually forced the precarity and appalling working conditions of people within these fields on to other sectors and industries. So now everyone potentially experiences that alienation from production, instability etc. But I wonder whether, aside from that, these labour practices abstract the relationship between the wage and production to such an extent that this instability challenges the longevity of the current conditions?
T: The thing that comes up, of course, is what types of compensation are happening that don’t revolve around the economic model of payment? Huge amounts of people around the world are “unemployed” but still doing something every day (but at the same time I wouldn’t want to romanticise that).
M: It seems to be this wide scale imposition in terms of power – placing more and more of the burden on the worker within a larger programme of proleterianisation. Do you see it also in terms of class?
T: Yes, for sure.
R: I was thinking about how much the audience is expected to engage with your music and how much there is to engage with! This is clearly your intention, especially considering how much contextual research and material goes into your production process. Because there is an inherent expectation or intent that the audience should engage in that way, is there a community produced in response to your work?
T: But does motion have to result in community? Couldn’t it simply be about momentum? Does this momentum have to be about generating a community that is responding to the same things I am responding to, or can it be that all of our responses are completely random and dislocated by subjectivity, and that what we do share is not about community at all? What does it mean if its not about community? For me, I feel that even if I am responding from a position that uses an image of community, it is always dislocated. I assume that people listening to the work are the same. We use the language of community – to go right back to the beginning of this interview with regards to universalism and humanism and connectedness – we use this language without actually moving from that space. It’s like even within what you have said; ‘Couldn’t this be the production of this community’. Again, that is a projection, its not saying that the community exists, yet that existence is implied. You are saying ‘couldn’t this lead to community’ and again, we are left in this abstraction of a kind of futurism which is rooted in desire rather than materialism. This is a really tricky thing to unpack to rethink everything you say two or three times, even if the first thing was appropriate. Do you leave yourself open to idealistic interpretations? Perhaps the best thing is to say it and then in the next sentence counter it and express dissatisfaction. That’s what I try to do. There are very cynical moments in the things that I produce, but then also very romantic moments, and the idea is not to eliminate the functions of romance and desire but simply to identify them when they happen as something that is constructed and not natural nor innocent.
R: I think it is also to do with vocabulary. We end up regurgitating a vocabulary that is inherent in the thing that you are responding to. I think it’s interesting that the vocabulary is insufficient especially when you talk about the idea of a transgendered perspective and how there is actually a physical lack of vocabulary.
T: That’s part of the Soulnessless project, actually, in terms of how the Left is functioning with a language taken from the Right and how, for example, with deconstruction and dissection you are still always deconstructing with the same language that is totally corrupted by what you critique. But, of course, to have this fantasy that you could make your own language is also stupid to me. So, the irony of the Soulnessless project is that it’s using the sounds of meditative music but combining that with leftist analysis. This is a metaphor for how we exist as non-believers, as atheists, as critics, as queers, as trans, as fuck-ups, as outsiders, etc., yet we must express our circumstances through languages of domination. This is an unavoidable tragedy. So, for example, I listen to a lot of music, I really like Erikah Badu, but politically, I’m sorry she is so fucking messed up. So what does it mean? We all have these things right? We all have people where we really enjoy their productions but we know we would never want to meet these people ever! This is not, then, about saying we have to approve or disapprove of people, but rather that we find ways to interpret and interact – all of us from any agenda – to find meanings within languages and movements that are alienating. This, in my mind, is how communication happens. It happens through discommunication and disconnection, and this is how society happens and how people interact. It’s not on the model of connectivity and collectivity and community. For example, you know how when you go to an activist meeting and you know you can’t stand this guy over there, and this person over there is on their own trip and then there is the Socialist Worker guy who’s turned up with his newspapers for sale, etc. No matter how deep you go into every community, the deeper you get the more fractious it becomes.
M: I think it’s very rose-tinted and its also to do with how memory works. We are very prone to thinking of golden ages. Even recently for example at Milbank, the big showdown outside the Tory headquarters, its already in the process of mythologisation and we are at risk of erasing the nuances which were part of that. So looking back it becomes recreated as this perfect community which perhaps didn’t include the SWP people etc. I wanted to ask you when you use the word ‘we’ is there a notion of radicalizing your anti-community to the point where there is some emancipatory potential to that?
T: I generally use ‘we’ to infer my own implication within the group I am criticizing – not in reference to something ‘other’ because the other is always within. I think there is no emancipatory potential in anything. Totally not. And my language of nihilism and pessimism does not have this undercurrent of ‘but Terre is still motivated to do something so there is something ideal behind what she is doing’. No, these actions are distractions that allow me to exist for another day within conditions that are unacceptable. If I’m truly honest, I think we are a total shit species, there is nothing redeemable about humanity. I think we are really a crap animal, but we exist like roaches and that existence is ongoing despite all these questions. That is the ultimate brutality of it all. And that brutality – not idealism – is what creates motion and momentum and response, if only dodging and ducking.
M: So would you say your Marxism as such is more rooted in the, shall we say, ruthless critique of everything?
T: I’m a Marxist up to the point of Historical Materialism, which means only seeing societies as the result of material actions, and not as manifestations of abstractions such as ‘human will’ or ‘divine will’. When you get to the point of projecting the future, for example the communist ideal or the idea of what society will look like in the future, instantly you’re talking about fantasies that are poisoned by the dominations of the present. We seek freedom from what dominates us now without simultaneously incorporating our freedoms that invariably arise from dominations we are numb but someone in some other situation is aware of, because we can never be conscious of all this stuff. I think all of these dreams and visions of where to go from here are so invested in desire. I don’t want to say that desire is bad, but it pollutes everything that we do. I really feel that, in terms of social strategisation, the world seems to move around the momentum of dreams – this is the rhetoric that almost every country uses and it’s part of religion in the sense that we are simply here on earth in order to get where we want to go in some fictional afterlife, etc. All of this stuff, although it does very easily create cultural movement and momentum, has radically different consequences than organizing from a position of misery that acknowledges that the motion is only in response to a need to end the unacceptable. This is something that is just too brutal for most people, it seems. You could not have Barack Obama elected on a campaign that instead of ‘Yes we can’ was simply ‘Stop it’, you know! And this relates to the whole thing about hope.
So a person like me operates in very minor, relatively unimportant, small economic and social fields that only have their importance in the fact that they really do not apply to most people – in fact they are irrelevant to the experiences of most people, although this does not mean they are not also affected by the issues at hand. What we’re talking about is only relevant to people who consciously identify with a particular type of suffering and domination, and who find a connection between dominations and the miseries within their own life. Whereas most people would try and use a language of optimism to attempt to transform this into something I would identify as cultic, saying ‘we have to create our own vision, we need to come up with a way to resolve these things, we need to come up with a way to make lives better and make sure this doesn’t happen again’ I’m simply saying that this fails to take into account the fact that domination is unavoidable, we suffer, life is shit, people are shit, the world is shit and at the same time we continue to live. So what the fuck do we do? If we reject the languages and ideologies of humanism and universalism and religion that allow us to be numb to this suffering while claiming we are overcoming it – which is like rejecting everything we are taught to know – how do we mediate our lives in the moment? How do we resist and reshape dominations to minimize violence and brutality today, with no delusions about humanity being on some teleological path of betterment in which some day the whole world will live in peace – which under globalization means living as completely equal bourgeois home-owning families regardless of being straight, queer, trans, indiginous or immigrant… what a nightmare fantasy born of sick fucks! For me, you couldn’t have society in general moving around this dreamless and visionless idea of simply putting an end to the unacceptable, without always leaping to that next step of implementing new institutions and systems of domination meant to ensure a ‘better tomorrow.’ The extraction of hope (‘hopenessless’?) just wouldn’t work as a dominant system – which is its point of interest to me, because inherent failure can be an indication that something subverts, threatens, or simply has not yet been fully assimilated into major systems of domination. By saying it wouldn’t work does not mean it’s not important to have these minor sects doing these minor things – it is important, it’s important to always have a critique of every critique happening. I consider myself a ‘left of left-field critic of the left’, and for some that means always being the asshole that’s pissing on everybody’s parade, but this is required by the present, it’s in response to the present, and there is an urgency to it. If you have a sense of urgency around something then you are immediately active, even if it is an unproductive form of activity and something that cannot become productive in the conventional sense – it cannot have mass appeal, it certainly cannot have the social function that the majority of media production would demand that it have in order to validate its existence, culturally nor economically, but that’s part of it.
Art Review features Auto Italia
Pick up a copy of the latest Art Review (December 2011) for Auto Italia’s feature in their ‘Off-Space Travels’ section. Finding strength through critical mass…
