# Colophon
Theory on Demand #17
**The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital**
**Editors:** Šefik Tatlić, Gordana Nikolić
**Copy-editing:** Josip Batinić, Inte Gloerich, Léna Robin, Nina Živančević
**Editorial support:** Miriam Rasch
**Translation:** Novica Petrović (for ‘The Art of New Class Geography of the City’)
**Design:** Josip Batinić, Léna Robin
**EPUB development:** Josip Batinić, Léna Robin
**Printer:** Print on Demand
**Publisher:** Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2015
**ISBN:** 978-94-92302-03-8
**Contact**
Institute of Network Cultures
Phone: +3120 5951865
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web:
This publication is available through various print on demand services.
For more information, and a freely downloadable PDF:
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
# Contents
The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital: Introduction
Within the Image
Neutralizing Engaged Subjects in the Creative City
The Agency of Art in the Unconscious
The Art of New Class Geography of the City: Culture-Guided
Urban Regeneration Serving the Modernization of the Periphery
The Creative Factory: Collective Creativity and Autonomy
in the Neoliberal Machine of Creative Industries
Neoliberalism and the Autonomy of Art:
The Culture of Power, the Power of Culture
Biographies
# The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital: Introduction#
### Šefik Tatlić and Gordana Nikolić###
The initial idea that led to the preparation of this publication was not
a reflection of the editors’ wish to merely add another publication
focusing on a critique of the relationship between creative industries
and capital to the huge corpus of similar publications taking a critical
stance towards the process of co-optation of creativity, creative
industries, art or the domain of abstraction in general by capital. Even
though, precisely through the logic of the mass production of critical
texts dealing with the above-mentioned context, this publication as well
will ultimately exist in such a register, the distinctive feature of
this publication is its aspiration to place the relationship between
creativity and capital in the context of an analysis wherein capitalism
is treated as the framework of a broader relationship of domination,
which to a great degree goes beyond the currently popular critical niche
focused on analyzing the relationship between creativity, abstraction or
representation in general and capital.
The vast majority of such publications are characterized by such a
perception of the relationship between creativity and capital, which
implies that the co-optation and exploitation of work, creativity and
attention occurs in a post-class, post-ideological or post-colonial
context of the so-called ‘networked world or networked democracy’,
wherein all subjects and their actions are reportedly subjected to the
logic of capital in the same way. Regardless of whether we speak of the
ideological use of the concept of creativity in the name of
rationalization of the neoliberal strategies of transforming the city
into ghettoized class and racial apartheids, whether we speak of the
exploitation of attention (the economy of attention) by financial
capital or generally about the epistemological positioning of
creativity, abstraction or the domain of representation within the
dominant form of rationalization and reproduction of capitalism, this
publication strives to retain a critical view that sees these processes
as forms of the perpetuation of the hegemony of capitalism in the
so-called contemporary era.
As regards the temporal framework encompassed in this publication,
although certain texts, through the logic of the necessity of
historicization of specific strategies and practices refer to historical
periods preceding the 21st century, the majority of the texts contained
in this publication refer to social and political processes from the end
of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, that is, the current
period. In this sense, the dominant ideological discourses, strategies
and power relations of today constitute the focus of attention of the
topics of this publication.
This publication, then, occupies a position that treats ‘the networked
world’, its democracies, cognitivities, attention and culture as domains
wherein, or with help of which, forms of the reproduction of capitalism
as a heterogeneous form of hegemony, primarily of the First World of
capital or the West, are reorganized, ‘modernized’. The title ‘The Gray
Zones of Creativity and Capital’ does not, therefore, point primarily to
instances of vagueness and dichotomy in the analysis of the social
meaning of the cooperation between creativity and capital, but assumes a
critical stance towards ‘gray areas’ in those dominant interpretations
of capitalism that try to view it as a post-ideological, post-class or
post-bloc system.
Before shortly introducing the texts it should be noted that this
publication in its iteration in Serbian language contained one article
that is not featured in this English iteration. The text had to be left
out because of copyright contraints that don’t allow this text to be
featured in an online publication. The text in question was written by
Santiago Castro-Gómez and it is entitled ‘The Missing Chapter of Empire
– Postmodern reorganization of coloniality and post-Fordist capitalism’
(*Cultural Studies Volume 21*, Issue 2-3, 2007).[^1] This text, by
critically refering to the book *Empire* by Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt, criticized the view of capitalism as a system of equal
exploitation of all. Castro-Gómez saw the capitalism of today as a
modernized form of the colonial division of the world, in which the
First World of capital, the West, still retains a monopoly on defining
progress, and in which that same world retains a surplus of privileges
within the framework of the unbalanced distribution of global wealth.
This text’s role was to position this publication in decolonial register
which is still the register in which this publication continues to
reside.
The text by Jonathan Beller entitled ‘Within the Image’ analyses in a
similar manner, but from a different perspective, the socio-political
meaning and the ideological effects of the capitalist exploitation of
the image and attention. From a structuralist position, Beller analyses
the role which the commodification of the image, attention and
abstraction plays in the neoliberal free market and its ideologies, but
in those same contemporary forms of capitalism the author also detects a
specific colonial and racial relationship of domination.
Josephine Berry Slater’s text ‘Neutralizing Engaged Subjects in the
Creative City’, relying on Foucault’s theoretical apparatus, criticizes
the biopolitical and repressive character of the neoliberal strategies
of transforming urban Great Britain in the post-Thatcher era. Even
though Slater locates the roots of the neoliberal strategies of social
engineering and the *laissez-faire* concept of organizing society and
the economy in Thatcher’s attack on the role of society in the
regulation of society, the author links the roots of the derogation of
subversive social engagement with the contemporary forms of organization
of capitalism, in an alliance with the modern art mainstream.
Marc James Léger’s text ‘The Agency of Art in the Unconscious’
critically addresses contemporary art as a form of reproducing the
nullity of social significance contained in the domain of creativity in
capitalism. Relying to a large extent on the psychoanalytic theories of
Lacan and Žižek, Leger structurally links contemporary art and the
domain of creativity in general to modern political economy a way that sees contemporary art as a form of neutralization of radical
fiction that antagonizes the above-mentioned relationship with
capitalist economy.
‘The Art of New Class Geography of the City – Culture-guided urban
regeneration serving the modernization of the periphery’ is a text by
Ana Vilenica wherein she critically addresses the practices and
principles contained in the neoliberal establishment of a class
geography of urban environments in Serbia. Vilenica’s text does not
remain at the level of analyzing the neoliberal strategies of
contemporary capitalism, but also deals with the broader meaning of
class and racial principles invested in the processes of modernization
in general. In this sense, Vilenica analyzes the effects of an alliance
of sorts between capital and creative industries, emphasizing the role
of art and culture in contemporary capitalist ideological rhetorics.
Sandi Abram’s text ‘The Creative Factory: Collective Creativity and
Autonomy in the Neoliberal Machine of Creative Industries’ analyzes the
effects of post-Fordist cognitive capitalism on the social scene in
Ljubljana, Slovenia. Abram assumes a critical stance towards the
public-private partnership model invested in the processes of producing
a new class geography of urban environments, which is a model that Abram
sees as a part of a broader pan-European paradigm of gentrification.
Analyzing the transformation of the Rog factory in Ljubljana, Abram sees
the processes of gentrification as parts of a broader capitalist
strategy of turning the entire society into a factory and/or a specific
commodified niche in the hierarchies of capitalist exploitation.
The text by Irmgard Emmelheinz, entitled ‘Neoliberalism and the Autonomy
of Art: The Culture of Power, the Power of Culture’ analyses the effects
of reconfiguring the social-political role of the figure of ‘the Other’ in
the context of Mexico and/or the broader region of Latin America.
Emmelheinz takes a critical position in relation to postmodern
democratic culture and the institutions of contemporary art than she
sees to be a part of the broader process of the utilization of culture
by capitalism. The author concludes that within the space of division of
political and aesthetic representation occurs a paradigmatic change in
the role of culture in neoliberal capitalism, whose autonomy no longer
points to its ability to produce a radical criticism of the system, but
precisely the opposite –to its total depoliticization.
First of all, the function of all these texts within the context of this
publication is to expand the critique of capitalism to include a
critique of all the normative practices contained in capitalism as a
hegemonic power structure, primarily of the First World of capital, and
then also of all the other actors involved in maintaining the
hierarchies of exploitation.
Since the region of the former Yugoslavia is still undergoing the
obscene process of the so-called transition to a free market economy,
dictated by the colonial centre in the West and carried out by a
politically impotent ethnocentric nation state, the role of this
publication is to contribute to the interpretation of these processes as
processes of a devastating derogation of the political role of the
state, the concept of political control of society and devastation of
society in general as a collective which transcends, that is, which
should transcend the centrality of ethnicity. This publication, then,
establishes a structural connection between the reportedly separated
concepts of modernization and the establishment of capitalist
hierarchies of exploitation.
In this sense, all those processes –such as the depoliticization of
culture, subjecting culture and art to the logic of the free market,
that is, separating the state from culture– which are presented in the
public discourse by the ruling elites and free market proponents as
strategies and ideological principles necessary for a transformation of
society, politics and the economy into functional modern societies –are
viewed in this publication as strategies and ideological principles
serving to establish capitalist modernity only. This publication, then,
positions itself radically against the imposition and legitimization of
such an ideological supernarrative wherein only the hierarchies of
exploitation, radical class and ethnic divisions and the impotence of
politics reduced to an administrative professional category will be
functional to the detriment of society which has yet to be politicized
and/or reinvented as a collective whose needs surpass the needs of the
free market and the specific actors who profit the most from its logics.
[^1]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502380601162639
# Within the Image
### Jonathan Beller
*Portions of this essay were originally published as ‘Wagers Within the
Image: Rise of Visuality, Transformation of Labour, Aesthetic Regimes’
in Culture Machine, vol. 12, 2012; http://www.culturemachine.net.*
Let us examine a few consequences of the industrialization of the
visual. As IPO[^1] after IPO seem to demonstrate, to look is to labor:
looking itself is posited as value-productive labor. We know this now.
In the cinematic mode of production this generalizes to what I called
‘the attention theory of value’.[^2] Today, after the internet
revolution (or, perhaps equally, counter-revolution), this relation
between screen-time and social production is increasingly pre-supposed.
Of course the energy levels, control modules and digitized metrics of
interactivity have been vertiginously intensified. Here we must remark
that with the digitization of the screen as socio-biological interface,
with the ramification of both its functionality and the intensive
development of a metrics of attention, the stock prices of media
companies such as Google are what they are because they are exploits:
schemas for the expropriation of value produced by the users (and
therefore the used). Early dot.com markets picked up on this shift
before it was widely understood. Today, this arrangement of
screen-cybernetics along with an increasingly precise metrics of
attention has its sights on nearly every aspect of lived and to-be-lived
time, even those forms of time that are engaged in an organized struggle
against capitalist forms of domination. As has been remarked, the
perception of Facebook’s and Twitter’s future monetization potential
increases with every ‘Twitter revolution’: unrests in Tunisia, Cairo,
Madrid and New York become bankable events for new media corporations in
a way at once departing from and analogous to what news has long been for
print and television.
This interface between spectator and social machinery, realized as ‘the
image’ (which received rigorous critical analysis by the Frankfurt
School, the ‘situationists’ (Debord) and feminist film theory), has been
generalized to the omnipresent screen and is also being extended to the
other platforms and senses: ‘the computer,’ ‘the tablet,’ and ‘the
cellphone’ —all of which appear to be increasingly similar. Now, of course,
the program is being extended to sound, smell, touch and taste —music
and game sounds, obviously, but also programmed shopping environments
(which themselves extend into the urban fabric) organized by
architecture, texture, scent, and arguably salt, sugar and fat. These
innovations and their convergence (towards the omnipresent, omnivorous
and indeed omniscient cyber-spatialized
mall-military-prison-post-industrial cosmopoplex) bring about new levels
of interactivity as well as new and ever more elaborate metrics for the
organization and parsing of attention-production.
Such a transformation of the role of visuality, sensuality and their
media technologies in social production and reproduction necessitated
the formulation of the above mentioned attention theory of value, which
reduces to the labor theory of value at sub-light (sub-cinematic) speeds
but allows value formations to persist for a while in the electronic
matrix in non-monetized forms. The theory posits that attention produces
value in at least three ways:
1. Attention valorizes media bytes and pathways in ways that can be
monetized —paintings, films, war propaganda, advertisements— and
monetized on spec: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon (these
are all forms of expropriation through privatization of
the commons). While there are various levels and/or strategies for
the valorization of attentional labor (from ticket sales, to the
sale of advertising, to the IPO), what needs to be remarked upon is
the still intensifying capitalist ramification of the domain of the
visual and, more generally, the sensual. This domain (remember the
shared institution called privacy?), formerly part of the commons,
is now pitted, furrowed and trolled by the avatars of private
entities bent upon the capture of formerly extra-economic
activities: from accessing water, to looking around, to thought. The
extent of this transformation that amalgamates attention with
privately owned mediation has completely reorganized the logistics
of perception, along with the mental functions that have perception
as their basis (which is to say all conscious, and arguably the
majority of unconscious processes, including language-function) on a
planetary scale.
2. Thus we can say that the techno-economic shifts marked by cinema and
its legacy technologies utilize attention to retool spectators,
reworking on a minute-by-minute basis forms of social know-how, of
needs, of semiotic and affective capacities, and demanding a
constant revamping of ‘the soul’ (or of soullessness – as the case
often seems to be). Workers, prosumers, playborers and those
described by Flusser in a different context as ‘functionaries’
(those who work within the program of the camera) ready themselves
and are thereby readied for the developing exigencies of the
market.[^2]
3. Over time visuo-attentional transformations as indexed by emerging
media technologies reorganize (i.e., reprogram) language-function
along with the imaginary and performativity such that the daily
retoolings can be dialectically incorporated into, or functionalized
by the daily advances in technical interfaces. Althusserian
‘know-how’, the capacity to work for capital produced in schools and
other ‘ideological state apparatuses’,[^4] receives ever more
penetrating and subtle elaboration through the techno-capitalist
capture of the ‘cognitive-linguistic’. It thus participates in what
Virno, giving new life to a term from Marx, effectively identifies
as the subsumption of ‘the general intellect’.[^5] In a recent
remark, Žižek has noted that what Bill Gates accomplished with
proprietary software was the privatization of part of the general
intellect, which we now rent.[^6] The result is that privatized
media are omnipresent in the praxis of consciousness, never more
than a couple of interfaces away from any and all attentional
practices, such that attention to any aspect of life becomes a form
of production in the social factory of capitalism.
Most of the relations discussed above could be, and indeed were,
derived, in one form or another, pre-internet: they were already
inherent in cinema and television, even though they have become fully
manifest only in the so-called digital age. However, given that capital
itself imposed a relentless digitization of life beginning in the
fifteenth century, it is more accurate to think of today’s ‘digital
revolution’ as Digitality 2.0. These relations of communication and
social cooperation were therefore incipient in the first digital
revolution, that of capital itself.
Thus, early in the twentieth century, one could already see that the
extension of media pathways was, in fact, the further ramification of
the life-world by capital-logic. The communist revolutionary filmmakers
marked capital’s encroachment on the visual as a site of struggle; Third
Cinema (the cinema of decolonization), in Solanas’ and Getino’s
manifesto, famously asserted that for the purposes of colonialism
Hollywood was more effective than napalm (2000). Today the habitation of
the senses by the logic of capitalized visuality is widespread,
structuring desire, performance, perception and self-perception on a
world scale, even in the most unlikely of places. For example, a recent
essay by Danny Hoffman entitled ‘Violent Virtuosity: Visual Labour in
West Africa’s Mano River War’ argues that the spectacular crimes against
others in the region are precisely that: spectacles of maiming and mass
murder designed to garner attention in a world-media system (which
includes broadcast news, the internet and the U.N.) that rewards Africa
for specific kinds of self-production.[^7] As Hoffman demonstrates
through a close analysis of photographic and videographic materials,
‘This was a war structured by the economy of attention. To profit in
this economy, combatants and non-combatants were required to play to an
audience that they knew was there, but often could only sense or
apprehend in the most abstract way’.[^8] Although this should be obvious
it bears emphasizing: just because there is no computer in the room does
not mean that one escapes its program.
One sees two significant factors in this global distribution of the
logistics of the image interface: first, that the struggle for attention
is a struggle for existence at many levels, and second, that restricting
ourselves to categories that are marked only as politico-economic ones
does not allow us to resolve the specific aspects of this struggle. Very
simply, race, gender, nationality and other ‘socio-historical’
categories must therefore be thought of in their economic determinations
within (and in excess of) the attention economy.
## Within the Image / The System of Global Apartheid
The increasing power of visual and digital media gave rise to new forms
of cultural imperialism (which, in case there was ever any doubt, is
actually real imperialism by other or additional means). Martin Jay has
identified various ‘scopic regimes of modernity,’ Regis Debray analyzes
the emergence of what he calls the ‘videosphere’ which overtakes the
‘logosphere’ in the 19th century and Nick Mirzoeff in *The Right to Look*
identifies complexes of visuality spanning the plantation (1660-1865),
imperialism (1857-1947), and military industrialism (1945-present,
Mirzoeff’s periodizations).[^9] We can clearly grasp from this
intensification of the visual (however periodized and parsed) that
capital targets not just territory but also consciousness, visual
relations and the imagination itself in its struggle to organize
production —which is to say, value-productive labor, and therefore
corporeal performance. Capital’s geographical expansion outwards is
accompanied by a corporeal corkscrewing inward. Therefore, the visual,
the cultural, the imaginal and the digital —as the
de/re-terriorialization of plantation and factory dressage, Protestant
ethics, manners and the like— are functionalized as gradients of
control over production and therefore necessarily of struggle. This
struggle for shares of social wealth is at once over images and within
images.
The movement from print and semiotics to visuality and affect, which
could broadly be said to characterize the current politico-economic
transition from the paradigm of the factory to that of the social
factory, dialectically produces the increasing slippage of the signifier
from the signified. This slippage and the consequent vanishing of the
Real should be historicized and thus understood as a result of the
penetration of the life-world by images; the increasing gap between
signifier and signified indexes technical degrees of social
cyberneticization and real subsumption. In historical order,
linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, deconstruction, postmodernism,
virtual reality and reality-TV are all symptoms and accommodations of
the scrambling of traditional language function by the intensification
and increasing omnipresence of images. As argued in *The Cinematic Mode
of Production*, the rise of late-19th and 20th century humanistic
disciplines can be characterized by innovations in their treatment of
language and therefore can be used to index or periodize the
quantitative intensification of visuality.[^10] Each intensification of
the disruption of linguistic function by images along with the
consequent denaturing of ‘natural’ language requires a new discipline
capable of negotiating a receding Real; the sheer quantity of visual
processing required by techno-capitalism inaugurates changes in the
qualities of thought. The linguistic commons along with its ability to
slow down images and configure the Real is put under siege by visual and
then digital culture. This siege results in a continuous and radical
re-programming of the cognitive-linguistic. The structure, functions and
capacities of words themselves today bear the mark of digitization.
Though this hypothesis remains to be demonstrated in detail, we might
glean from the mutations in the form of literature during modernity and
post-modernity the breadth and consequences of such transformations. A
line drawn from the fragmentation of narrative at the turn of the 20th
century to the veritable demise of English departments at the turn of
the 21st pretty much tells the recent story of language’s purchase on
the world. If we were serious about taking the measure of linguistic
decay, the withering of the Real, the absolute failure of semiotics and,
more generally, of representation we could ruefully add to the evidence
the 2012 U.S. Republican primary debates.
If capital expands through the development of visuality and the
consequences of visuality include the evisceration, or at the very
least, the reprogramming of linguistic capacity, then it is clear that
socio-historical categories, themselves nothing other than the
organization and semioticization of appearances, are also economic ones.
While there is significant work tracking the interpenetration of
economic vectors and those of race, nation and gender, disappointingly,
it has also been possible for a self-identified leftist political
economy to view racial and gendered formations as somehow epiphenomenal.
This is a political as well as an analytical error. ‘Race’ and ‘gender’ are from (at least) the early
modern period onward ineluctably tied to scopic regimes and therefore to
economic ones. In other words, these dynamics are constitutive of
technologies themselves. Thus it is incorrect to just state, for
example, that photography objectifies women or racial minorities.
Rather, one has to see the social role of the media platform as also
constitutive of the platform. What photography ‘is’ has everything to do
with its social functions, meaning that the objectification of women is
part of what photography is, and the legacies of colonialism and slavery
are embedded in its history and technical form.[^11] Otherwise, one
grasps a platform fetishistically, as a reification of social relations.
IBM developed the punch card to cross-reference German populations for
Nazis looking for Jews, gypsies and homosexuals during the Holocaust and
this development was a precursor to modern computing.[^12] The social
function is embedded in the machine, just as the role of computation in
financialization and in the organizing of labor practices in China is
also part of the meaning of the computer. Race and gender are endemic to
technological form and technological form is endemic to political
economy. To argue otherwise is to engage in technological determinism
and fetishistic abstraction.
The investor consolidation of major industrial media platforms, from
photography through cinema, video, reality-TV (which, for a decade at
least, has made the hyphen between ‘reality’ and ‘TV’ mandatory) and the
ambient computer is to be understood in part as a series of endeavors to
profitably manage the transformed and transforming situation of
language, race and gender vis-à-vis real transformations in
techno-social mediations. Here we might identify four fundamental visual
media shifts along with their disciplinary consequences: the visual
marking and promulgation of race and gender differences alongside modern
sociology (Stage 1: the art of photography); Hollywood’s splicings of
black musical talent onto white faces and the generalization of montage
alongside psychoanalytic attention to language’s break-down products and
the dream as rebus (Stage 2: the rise of cinema); the promulgation of a
mythically all-white, consumerist world bent on denying racism and
imperialism on U.S. television alongside deconstruction’s placing of the
signified, experience, the Real and ‘being’ under erasure (Stage 3:
television/video); the emergence of virtuality alongside the imperative
to virtuosity (Stage 4: digitality). Taken together these periodized
clusters assemble techniques of subjectivity, of profitably re-mounting
a worker-subject able to function in a political economy characterized
by the long movement of value extraction from the scene of the
plantation and factory floor to that of the deterritorialized factory,
aka the scene of the screen and the social factory. Together these
stages create the conditions of possibility for the current regime of
Global Apartheid.
Clarity about the reconfiguration of subjectivity, language function and
of interiority by the intensification of visuality, along with the
consequent recession (devaluation) of the signified (Real) vis-à-vis the
inflation of the sign (image) reveals that there is not a single
iteration of social form that is separable from political-economic
history. This dialectic further insists that we consider the
mediological basis, that is, the system of support-apparatus-procedure
that Regis Debray argues underpins ‘mediological’ transmissions (in his
view incorrectly identified for the better part of a century as
‘communication’), of some other recent endeavors to treat the
transformation of the value form and the transformed situation of
labor.[^13]
In *Empire*, for example, Hardt and Negri return to Marx’s idea of social
cooperation as endemic to production and argue for the real subsumption
of society by capital. This real subsumption is stated as a fact, but we
might ask how is it accomplished? What is the material basis of
subsumption? What are the media of Empire? Paolo Virno (2004) has argued
convincingly that capital has captured the cognitive-linguistic
capacities of the species. Pointedly, he argues that we are now all
virtuosos who perform speech acts in accord with ‘the score’
orchestrated by capital – this, precisely, is the operation of the
general intellect. Post-Fordist production requires virtuosity for the
maintenance of capital expansion. Our cognitive-linguistic abilities
have been conscripted and expropriated. But again, what are the
mediological conditions of possibility of post-Fordism, and what are the
raced and gendered dimensions of the ‘servility’ that Virno identifies?
Relatedly, we also have the work of Maurizio Lazzarato (1996), Christian
Marazzi (2010),Tiziana Terranova (2003) on ‘free labor’ and ‘cognitive
capitalism,’ providing us with a set of post-Fordist variants in which,
given the sublime expansion of the financial system, virtuosos, by and
large, accommodate themselves and their situations to the requisites of
capitalist society in the performance of cognitive labor in a way which,
according to some of these theorists, renders value immeasurable and the
significance of post-Fordist input potentially undecidable.
One might identify in these innovative modes of conceptualization a
relatively unacknowledged debt to the apparatus theory of Louis
Althusser (1971), to feminism (Kristeva 1982, Cixous, 1994, Haraway
1991) and Marxist feminism (Fortunati, 2007; Maria Mies, 1999), to
de/post-colonial and critical race theory (Fanon, 2008; Spillers, 1987;
Spivak, 1999), and to media theory. However, the dominant post-Marxist
arguments could be more cognisant of their conditions of possibility,
both in terms of the history of raced and gendered labor (the
socio-political *tekhnè*) that inaugurated the very changes in the mode of
production being theorized, and in terms of the intellectual debts owed
for their own theoretical formulations. This debt is a matter of
citational politics, clearly, but not in any simple sense. These
theories have been built upon the labor of long suffering communities as
well as on their labor of insurrection and insurrectionary critique.
For, let us agree to consider it a fact that revolutionary energies
large and small have advanced planetary intersubjectivity in their quest
for liberation even if these same energies have been domesticated by the
financialization of media platforms. We must therefore be relentlessly
critical when we observe that in spite of the mass basis of mediological
transformations, some critical micro-cultures now proceed as if the only
people worth having a conversation with are those avid readers of Badiou
and Agamben, a posture that belies the highly circumscribed standpoint
of the Franco-Italian insights. This insularity, palpable to readers
with roots and affinities in queer, of color, and global south
communities, underscores a widespread if disavowed complicity with
racism, sexism and eurocentrism in still all too Western theory.
The dearth of awareness of these multiple debts and of the historicity
of practices that form the new economic order of Empire is least true
for Tiziana Terranova, who draws on feminism, cyber-feminism and critical race
theory. Because of this she is sometimes wrongly perceived as being less
original and innovative than her male counterparts. However, in arguing
that ‘the digital economy \[i\]s a specific mechanism of internal
“capture” of larger pools of social and cultural knowledge \[and that
t\]he digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value
and free cultural/affective labor’, Terranova is clear that the exploit
of digital capitalism draws upon practices and inequalities that were
‘always and already capitalism’.[^14] In other words, for her at least,
racism and sexism are embroiled in capitalism, and it would seem
senseless to talk about (or critique) the latter in the absence of the
former.
Given these observations, one should see that the concrete elements of
the social: the ideological state apparatus, racial formations, the
visual turn, the cultural turn, the feminization of labor and the
servility and virtuosity of cognitive capitalism as part of the same
equation. This is one in which the capitalized image reconfigures
cultural praxis as a wholesale production site in ways that impose
servility and would delimit and even foreclose the emergence of
practicable anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist and
anti-imperialist speech-acts. Material formations precisely delimit
speech-acts thus, because, generally speaking, the post-Fordist
attention economy still depends upon the patriarchal, white-supremacist, imperialist organization of the global imaginary to
maximize returns. The ambient machines of the social, be they concrete
machines (cameras, cell phones, networks) or abstract machines (races,
laws, nations) are in fact real abstractions, that is, cut-n-mixable
instruments available for the virtuosic configuration of social
relations such that they adhere to the requisites of raced and gendered
capitalist exploitation.
To give but one example here of how a critique cognisant of these
relations might take form, Cindy Gao (2012) examines a series of videos
by Asian-American YouTube celebrities, including vlogs of NigaHiga and
KevJumba, and Wong Fu’s Yellow Fever, and characterizes their practice
of performing race as ‘virtuosic virtuality’.[^15] Without
essentializing identity (Gao sees the term Asian-American as itself a
form of virtuality), the construct ‘virtuosic virtuality’ cranks up the
stakes of the virtual and suggests that, here at least, these
technologically enabled performances of ethnicity are subsumed by a
capitalism that still requires and indeed develops the racial regimes
that are the legacy of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Indeed
Gao shows that one can investigate this subsumption without insisting
that Marxism trumps critical race theory. It is rather that in making
the critique of a narrowly empowering Asian-American performativity
(narrow because achieved through the trafficking in gendered and racist
stereotypes), anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique go together. To
be a bit reductive, it is arguable that in the absence of anti-racist,
anti-capitalist critique the cultural movement is inevitably towards a
system of structural inequality that invents and indeed requires new
forms of racism – which is precisely what is going on with many of the
popular Asian-American YouTube celebrities (there are certain advances
but somebody has to pay, e.g., women, South Asians); or, the movement is
towards a critique of capitalism that sees racism as epiphenomenal
rather than constitutive and therefore uncritically replicates the
racist and Eurocentric assumptions of the era.
Thus equipped we must confront the fact that increasingly, every ad we
see, every page we browse, every email we send, every word we say, every
thought we think and every dream we have is part of the production and
reproduction of capitalist society – sensuous labor 2.0. The various
media platforms, social categories, and imaginal iterations are one with
capital and these *would* script our participation in order to allow
capital to think in us and through us. I italicize ‘would’ here because
this point is both complex and contentious and appears to be moving
towards a genuine crisis. The dialectic requires that we have it both
ways. On the one hand, capitalist expropriation has never lain so
closely upon thought, utterance, the imagination and bodily practices –
it has engineered a networked cybernetic matrix of control, an
occupation that has seized the bio-social commons. Anti-racist,
anti-capitalist critique is ever more difficult to launch effectively,
since the general intellect, increasingly expropriated, thinks for
capital. On the other hand, and without doubt, real subsumption can
never be complete if it is to matter at all, which it does, if the thoughts (and indeed the material connections to life)
for example in this essay are to be anything more than a means by which you
advance your career. And whilst non-proprietary file sharing, p2p,
creative commons, copy-left, etc., are laudable endeavors, and
‘gateways’[^16] that may open to a post-capitalist society, it seems
premature to claim for any of these innovations that the medium is the
message. For these practices at present do not contain within themselves
a genuinely revolutionary critique or message (anti-racist,
anti-imperialist, prison abolitionist, environmentalist, feminist,
queer). It is not even clear that some of them are anti-capitalist.
With our language de-fanged, our critical theory suspect, and our
machines and imaginations complicit, where to turn? I suggest below that
there are discursive and aesthetic dimensions to contemporary life that
are incompletely explored. Here we must reconsider the third world, its
legacies of survival and heritable corporeal commons and the possible
non-capitalist transmission of these resources. The reconstitution of
consciousness in post-Fordism materially links each to all in ever more
intensive ways and raises question of solidarity, democracy and social
justice in new domains. As I will show, the attention economy induces a
movement from the wage to the wager, and with this shift demands an
analysis of the politics of the utterance and aesthetics of survival.
Experience teaches me that when discussing the logistics of the image
and social production/reproduction through digital interactivity and
human attention, I am obliged to add that none of these statements
regarding the violence of media-capitalism and its subsuming of the
life-world as well as many of its ‘alternatives’, means to say that
‘prior’ forms of exploitation that are characteristic of feudal serfdom,
slavery, proletarianization, prostitution, domestic work, migrant labor,
or the labor of survival in either camps or the postmodern slum have
ceased to exist. Rather these persisting modes should be viewed as
conditions of dispossession which are coordinated and legitimated,
marginalized or made unrepresentable by the command-control apparatus of
the digital-visual via a calculus of the image that enlists our
for-profit participation in the capitalist
military-media-prison-industrial complex. From a macro-structural point
of view, human becoming is bent toward two dialectically identical ends:
capital accumulation and radical dispossession. The overall result is
the immeasurable violence of the worldwide suppression of democratic
becoming. We participate in this totalitarian systemic practice despite
the relatively clear facts that the earth is headed towards
environmental catastrophe and that two billion people (the entire
population of Earth in 1929) are even now laboring to survive actually
existing Armageddon. Given their intimate and indeed inescapable
connection to the world media-system and the attention economy, the
dispossessed have thus become the living substrate of contemporary
systems of representation.[^17] We write our revolutionary tracts on the
backs of slaves. Radical dispossession as the other side of a
world-media system is in the most literal sense the condition of
possibility for our contemporary thought and writing. It bears asking,
under what image or images do the radically dispossessed labor? And
also, what’s it to you?
The questions I pose at this point concern the images written over and
on the historically produced informatic black hole smothering the bottom
two billion denizens of postmodern globality. They are questions about
subalterns whom I have come to think should never be designated by the
sign bare life, but, at the very least, by the sign ‘bare life’, now in
quotation marks. The quotation marks are there so that the
signifier registers its own constitutive performativity in relation to
those who are being signified upon. ‘Bare life’ neither merely exists
nor merely appears but by virtue of a signifying process – a signifying
industrial complex – that codifies its messages on bodies presumed to be
incapacitated and unaccommodated to such an extent that they are beyond
the reach of dialogue. These bodies are thereby made to signify the
limit of sociality and presumed to exist in a condition of social death.
My point here is that whether it is Agamben selling philosophy books or
bankers and policy-makers selling bailouts and weapons, we find bodies
and populations being constituted as surfaces of inscription: bodies
whose living labor of survival serves to make them fodder for
philosophy, statistics, political theory, entrepreneurs, militaries,
banks and states. Subalterns are actively configured as the living
substrate of representation for capitalist mediation. In other words,
the unceasing disfiguration of the masses is the price of success, but
the success belongs to someone else: the celebrity capitalists,
militarized nations, and some of their aspirant followers. Such is the
enclosure wrought by the world of technical images. Squatters,
trash-pickers, illegals, displaced populations, post-modern slaves, and
billions for whom we here have no names and whose deaths will not appear
in any newspaper, attend to the historically imposed exigencies of life.
Their attention to the world-machine of survival, their endeavors to
constitute themselves in myriad ways, underpin the spectacular-digital
of meaning, agency, and global citizenship. For the world-media system,
subaltern survival or death is mere raw material for semiotics, affect
and intensity. As threat, tragedy, irrational irruption or non-entity,
entire populations are bundled and sold, converted into semiotic and
affective chits for capital’s master-gamers.
We must register the violence endemic to the conversion of historically
dispossessed others into images and signs —in addition to objects (a
concern central to the work of the young urban photo-graffiti artist
JR)— because in being figured as bare life, multitudes, refugees,
tribes, slum-dwellers, or terrorists, and even when not being figured at
all, the capitalized universe of images and signs constitutes and
de-constitutes these beings (this flesh, to borrow from Hortense
Spillers, 1987) for its own purposes. As entity, non-entity, iPad,
auto-part, rare earth metal, securitized population or void, the now
doubly dispossessed are materially and symbolically disappeared for
politico-economic ends. In other words, not only global commodity-chain
production (which relies on disappeared labor 1.0) but planetary
semiosis and affect-formation (which relies on disappeared labor 2.0)
are rooted in the biomass of a planet of persons excluded not just from
meaningful dialogue, but from dialogue. It should be underscored that
the movement from 1.0 to 2.0 is a movement that took place over a matter
of centuries of racialization and gendered violence but is today
‘noticeable’ which is to say ‘theorizeable’ because the chickens are
coming home to roost. As Aimé Césaire remarked, what was unforgiveable about
the Holocaust, was not the brutality, torture and murder, what was
unforgiveable was that the techniques of colonization were applied to
white people.[^18] People of the Global South were the first ‘content
providers’. Now the situation is generalized.
Understood in this way, it would appear that the result of not just
history, but also of the history of representation – representation now
‘fully’ captured by capital, and shunted into an informatics matrix in
which capital structures images and images structure sign function, and
sign function is endemic to social production and reproduction – has
been to make democracy structurally impossible. Such is the ‘reality’
for which the recession of the Real stands as symptom. The material
foreclosure of the logic endemic to the conceit of human being is the
technical achievement that provides the historical explanation for
‘being’ being placed under erasure in the realm of the sign.
Understanding philosophically, as it were, that with the expiration of
Western metaphysics one also confronts the expiration of humanism and
the conceits pertaining to ‘the human’ follows logically; however
understanding mediologically that this emptying out of tradition called
post-structuralism is consequent upon the historico-material conversion
and therefore demotion of ‘natural language’ into one medium among media
requires a materialist approach to the totality of informatic networks
that avowedly post-dialectical and post-historical thought cannot easily
accommodate. Admittedly, it might take a book-length study to properly
historicize Jacques Derrida’s *Of Grammatology* and to methodologically
‘comprehend’ the moment in intellectual history known as
‘deconstruction’ as a specific symptom of and in the long historical
process of uprooting and eviscerating language. Nonetheless, one might
speculate that the ‘being’ under erasure there was formerly assumed to
be part of the commons. As Kwame Anthony Appiah question indicated in
‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ there is an
intimate connection between the erosion of the birthrights of colonized
peoples and the erosion of the Western birthright purportedly guaranteed
by Western metaphysics. For our purposes here we may grasp that in both
the material and philosophical domains the basis and the rationale for
democracy have been steadily eroded. This somewhat controversial
hypothesis affirms what has been discernible at least since the onset of
post-modernity: because of shifts in the matrix of representation and
its material underpinnings, under advanced capitalism neither reality
nor being can be adequately mounted and sustained and thus neither
democratic representation nor perhaps democracy is possible. From a
technical perspective this is an advance. Dialectically speaking, from
this historically achieved and instrumental condition of generalized
simulation there is no return.
Put another way, having reached historically the general fulfillment of
what Marx saw clearly as the specific experience of the wage-laborer,
namely ‘the loss of reality,’ the real is gone and thus the
aestheticization of politics is complete. It would seem that Communism
must respond by politicizing simulation, which is to say, the universe
of appearances mediated by abstraction, which is to say, in short,
everything, however we must leave the very question of ‘the political’
along with the transformed ontology of ‘politics’ itself for another
time.
### References
Althusser, L. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,*’ Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays*, trans. B. Brewster, Monthly Review Press,
1971.
Beller, J. *The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the
Society of the Spectacle*, Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth University Press,
2006.
Beller, J. ‘Paying Attention’, *Cabinet* 24, 2008,
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/beller.php.
Beller, J. ‘Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing With Light’, in
Jonathan Beller (ed.) *The Scholar and Feminist Online, Special Issue:
Feminist Media Theory, Iterations of Social Difference*, 2012.
Black, E. *IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi
Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation*, Washington, D.C.:
Dialog Press, 2012.
Césaire, A. *Discourse on Colonialism*, trans. J. Pinkham, New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Cixous, H. *The Helene Cixous Reader*, New York and London: Routledge,
1994.
Cubitt, S. ‘The Political Economy of Cosmopolis’ in T. Scholz (ed.)
*Digital Labor*, New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
Debray, R. *Media Manifestos*, London: Verso, 1996.
Fanon, F. *Black Skin, White Masks*, New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Fortunati, L. ‘Immaterial Labor and Its Mechanisation’ in *ephemera*
7(1, 2007): 139-157.
Flusser, V. *Towards a Philosophy of Photography*, trans. A. Matthews,
London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
Gao, C. ‘Virtuosic Virtuality of Asian American Youtube Stars,’ in
Jonathan Beller (ed.) *The Scholar and Feminist Online, Special Issue:
Feminist Media Theory, Iterations of Social Difference*, 2012.
Haraway, D. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ in *Simians, Cyborgs and Women*. New
York and London: Routledge, 1991.
Hoffman, D. ‘Violent Virtuosity: Visual Labor in West Africa’s Mano
River War,’ *Anthropological Quarterly*, Vol. 84, no. 4 (Fall, 2011):
949-976.
Jay, M. ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in *Vision and Visuality*, New
York: The New Press, 1988.
Kristeva, J. *Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection*, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lazzarato, M. ‘Immaterial Labour’ in M. Hardt. & P. Virno (eds),
*Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics*, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 133-147.
Marazzi, C. *The Violence of Financial Capitalism*, New York:
Semiotext(e), 2010.
Mies, M. *Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale*, London: Zed
Books, 1999.
Spillers, H. ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’
*diacritics* 17: 2 (Summer, 1987): 65-81.
Spivak, G. *A Critique of Postcolonial Reason*, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Terranova, T. ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’,
2003,
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary.
Virno, P. *A Grammar of the Multitude*, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Zizek, S. ‘The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie’, *London Review of
Books*, Vol. 34 No. 2, (26 January, 2012): 9-10.
[^1]: Editor's Note: IPO stands for Initial Public Offering or the launch of a company on the stock market.
[^2]: J. Beller, *The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy
and the Society of the Spectacle*, Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth University
Press, 2006.
[^3]: V. Flusser, *Towards a Philosophy of Photography*, trans. A.
Matthews. London: Reaktion Books, 2000, p. 27.
[^4]: L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,*’ Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays*, trans. B. Brewster, Monthly Review
Press, 1971.
[^5]: P. Virno, *A Grammar of the Multitude*, Cambridge: MIT Press,
2004.
[^6]: S. Zizek, ‘The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie’, *London Review
of Books*, Vol. 34 No. 2, (26 January, 2012): 9-10.
[^7]: D. Hoffman, ‘Violent Virtuosity: Visual Labor in West Africa’s
Mano River War,’ *Anthropological Quarterly*, Vol. 84, no. 4 (Fall,
2011): 949-976.
[^8]: Hoffman, ‘Violent Virtuosity’, p. 952
[^9]: First source: M. Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity,’ In *Vision
and Visuality*, New York: The New Press, 1988. Second source:
Debray, R. *Media Manifestos*. London: Verso, 1996.
[^10]: J. Beller, *The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy
and the Society of the Spectacle*, Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth University
Press, 2006.
[^11]: J. Beller, ‘Camera Obscura After All: The Racist Writing With
Light,’ In Jonathan Beller (ed.) *The Scholar and Feminist Online,
Special Issue: Feminist Media Theory, Iterations of Social
Difference*, 2012.
[^12]: E. Black, *IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between
Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation*, Washington,
D.C.: Dialog Press, 2012.
[^13]: R. Debray, *Media Manifestos*.
[^14]: T. Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy’, 2003,
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary.
[^15]: C. Gao, ‘Virtuosic Virtuality of Asian American Youtube Stars,’
In Jonathan Beller (ed.) *The Scholar and Feminist Online, Special
Issue: Feminist Media Theory, Iterations of Social Difference*,
2012.
[^16]: S. Cubitt, ‘The Political Economy of Cosmopolis’ in T. Scholz.
(ed.) *Digital Labor*, New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
[^17]: J. Beller, ‘Paying Attention’, *Cabinet 24* (2008),
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/beller.php.
[^18]: A. Césaire, *Discourse on Colonialism*, trans. J. Pinkham, New
York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
#Neutralizing Engaged Subjects in the Creative City
###Josephine Berry Slater
*This article is a version of a lecture given by the author in the
course ‘Biopolitics and Aesthetics’, Centre for Cultural Studies at
Goldsmiths University.*
During the Blair government, a new criminal offence was passed for
nearly every day spent in office —this period saw the biggest expansion
in the legal regulation of conduct of any time since the end of WW2.
This was also a period which saw an explosion in the commissioning of
public art across Britain— a commissioning frenzy, buoyed by the
liquidity of the financial bubble, which has consequently been called
‘the public art bubble’. I think these phenomena can be linked, because
what they represent are two prongs of a pincer that form a
governmentality that acts to engage and activate subjects with the one
prong, while neutralizing them with the other. Or put another way, it
acts to engage certain capacities, conducts and valorizable behaviors —not least the participation in aesthetic spectatorship— while at the
same time disabling, discouraging and disallowing other forms of conduct
deemed disruptive to the smooth functioning of the state and some of its
principle activities; namely the production of a large enough, healthy,
peaceable, active and economically productive population. These two
phenomena —the offense bubble and the public art bubble— can also be
linked as governmental strategies for managing the antagonisms and
painful inequalities of neoliberal capitalism as it comes to bear upon
the everyday spaces of life in post-industrial urban society.
We are looking at a complicated conjunction of issues —neoliberal urban
development, the legal regulation of behavior, and the role of public
art within the post-industrial city— each has its own specificities,
developmental history and extensive body of knowledge attached. But what
I want to do here is to thread them together according to certain
‘regulatory ideas’, as Michel Foucault would say, which intersect and
bind together aesthetic, governmental and economic fields. The first
ones I want to think about are the concepts of ‘event’ and ‘milieu’. The
act-painting of the ’40s and ’50s, and the Happenings of the ’60s swept
the artwork clean first of representation, and then more broadly of
‘retinality’ as art departed pictorial and sculptural frameworks, in a
bid to convene a space in which something, an ‘act’ and later an
‘event’, could occur. These twinned notions of ‘act’ and ‘event’ are
deeply implicated in the multiple breaching of the art/life divide
undertaken by neo-avant-garde artists of this period, and presuppose
art’s ability to reach out of itself to effect some kind of wider
transformation of life and the world around it, whether that be: the
life of the artist or the viewer as it coincides with a set of
materials, ideas or conditions during the act of creation; the way parts
of the sensorium and cognitive apparatus become newly open and
differently sensitized through an encounter with art —what Rancière
calls the ‘redistribution of the sensible’— ; or art’s wider, subtle and
unknowable infection of the social and physical environment,
‘indirectly, as a stored code’, as Kaprow put it.
Essential to the myriad possible manifestations of the ‘event’ is the
notion that it takes place in an ‘expanded field’ that entails a
potentially infinite series of elements; a field that admits new
contextual, environmental, social, sensual, emotional, institutional,
political and material dimensions into the conception of the artwork.
This expansion could be understood as a growing reflection on and
recursive folding inwards of the artwork’s relationality. This folding
inwards of the world, and unfurling outwards of the artwork, leads in
numerous directions, from minimalism, to conceptualism to institutional
critique, from body art, to performance to media art and net art, and so
on. However, we need to maintain our focus on the notion of ‘event’ as a
specific aspect of the artwork’s expanded field of signification in
order to induce an understanding of how developments in art are
reflective of those of biopolitical governmentality and, for our
purposes here, within the neoliberal moment of urban development. We
also need to think about how the extension and flexibilization of the
artwork makes itself newly available to deployment within a governmental
and economic expansion that operates upon ever finer fissures of
subjectivity.
In his lecture series *Security, Territory, Population* (1977-78),
Foucault discusses —in the context of the development of the modern
state and its governmental rationality— the mid-17th century production
of a new spatial relationship of sovereignty to its territory, one in
which the capital city comes to the fore. He concentrates on a text
called *La Métropolitée*, written by a French protestant *émigré* called
Alexandre Le Maître, for the protestant kind of Sweden. In it Le Maître
puts forwards general recommendations for the good spatial layout of a
territory; one which will open up the territory to the ‘general network
of the sovereign’s orders and controls’. Without getting too distracted
by the detail of his schema, what Foucault seizes on is how he draws
together the problems of sovereignty with a set of specifically urban
problematics. He writes,
> In short, the interesting thing is Le Maître dreams of connecting the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution. A good sovereign, be it a collective or individual sovereign, is someone well placed within a territory, and a territory that is well policed in terms of its obedience to the sovereign is a territory that has a good spatial layout.[^1]
For Le Maître, the capital city is the ultimate arena for the production
of an ideal set of spatial conditions of sovereignty, and the exemplary
life it will induce and that will act as a model for the entire
territory. Foucault then tracks the changing relationship between the
development of towns and cities in the context of the production of a
new ‘*raison d’État*’, or state reason, which began to see the
population as the state’s defining strength and, in response, developed
a whole series of techniques to safeguard, nurture and monitor
populations. Towns and cities, naturally, became a focal point for these
developing techniques as a new rationality of the state met the demands
for growth, increased production and circulation imposed by a burgeoning
capitalism. And here, with this new ‘securitized’, expanded and
speculative approach to city planning, is where we connect back to the
notion of the event.
Looking at the development of French cities such as Nantes and Vigny in
the 18th century, Foucault identifies not only a response to the
requirement to open up cities in order to better connect them to
external routes, to deal with overcrowding and to eliminate dangerous
elements and so-called miasmas, but also a new consideration of possible
future events that are not precisely knowable or controllable. The
calculation with and management of an indefinite series of accumulating
and mobile units —‘circulation, x number of carts, x number of
passers-by, x number of thieves, x number of miasmas, and so on’— is,
he says, the essential characteristic of the mechanism of security. As
opposed to the ‘disciplinary’ structuring of space (here he means, the
hierarchical spatial orderings of the Middle Ages) the securitized
structuring of space ‘will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or
series of events or possible elements, \[…\] that will have to be
regulated within a multivalent and transformable network’.[^2] He
ventures a further definition: ‘The space in which a series of uncertain
elements unfold is, I think, roughly what one can call the milieu’.[^3]
Borrowing the concept of ‘milieu’ from biology, and imposing it
retrospectively onto the problem of city planning in this era of 17th
century *Raison d’État*, Foucault continues,
> The milieu is a certain number of combined overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes[…] More disease will obviously mean more deaths. More deaths will mean more cadavers and consequently more miasmas, and so on. \[…\] Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions \[…\] or as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances – one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live. \[…\] What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, population, and groups and quasi natural events which occur around them.[^4]
In this lecture series, Foucault goes on to argue and demonstrate how
this urban model of sovereignty, one that he says is extended
paradigmatically to the whole territory in the form of the police state,
will give way to a more agriculturally focused model of governmentality
in the 18^th^ century. His argument here is subtle: the mode of state
rationality developed in the 17^th^ century, that he identifies as
*raison d’État*, entails a logic that concedes that the state is its own
manifest destiny —it no longer imagines itself as becoming an empire,
or ultimately as merging with the cosmic unity and temporality of the
heavens. It is held in a balance of power, after the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648, with the other European states, and now turns
inwards, discovering the utility of its own population which it starts
to police in the interests of population expansion (which promised the
freedom to pay lower wages), increased activity, greater levels of
commodity production, higher levels of export and hence growing revenues
to the treasury coffers.
This logic changes, however, to some degree in the 18th century, with
the advent of the physiocrats and the *économistes*. While *raison
d’État* is retained in so far as the state still regards itself, its
continuation, as its aim and destiny, nevertheless it is filled with a
different content. This involves a refinement of its method of
governmentality, from one of state intervention and control (the police
state), to one of *laissez-faire*. So instead of extending the spatial
model of the city to the entire territory —because it is in the city
that the techniques of security and policing are developed— the idea is
to ‘let nature take its course’. In regards to grain production, for
example, the idea was to get rid of price controls and the control of
import and export. This way production would be self-regulating,
responding more agilely to the market value of grain, and ultimately
better avoid the grain shortages and famines that were a frequent result
of state intervention. The peasants would be better off, better fed and
more productive.
Without wishing to go too deeply into this historical sequence, what is
important is that Foucault argues both in *Security, Territory,
Population* and *The Birth of Biopolitics* that from the 18th century an ‘art of government’ came to replace the more disciplinary and
interventionist governmental reason that preceded it, and that this
later art of government would retain the population as its focus, but
strive to fulfil the interests of the state (higher levels of
production, greater circulation and export of goods etc.) through an
*economic* reason. This economic art of government is based on the
notion, formulated by Adam Smith, of the ‘secret hand of the market’; a
quasi-natural force that can better settle the balance of competing
interests than any more rigid and partial intervention of the state.
However, what is important here, and for our thinking about the links
between the aesthetic blurring of art and life and biopower, is that the
economic governmental reason retains the centrality of the ‘event’ and
the ‘milieu’, the speculative balancing of a set of variables, which is
expanded outwards from the setting of the town and its conditions, to
the whole complexion of factors, interests and conditions that it needs
to balance —one that would increasingly resolve into what we call ‘the
economy’. Perhaps we can even go as far as to say that *the economy is
‘the event’ par excellence* of this governmental rationality. As
Foucault states many times, this entails a population-scale thinking —one which departs from earlier, religious or pastoral models of
sovereignty in which the entire flock must be sacrificed to save a
single soul, and conversely, the single soul must be sacrificed for the
salvation of the flock— an economy of souls in which every individual
matters. With biopower, what we see is the state intervening only
>To regulate, or rather to allow the well-being, the interest of each to adjust itself in such a way that it can actually serve all. The state is envisioned as the regulator of interests and no longer as the transcendent and synthetic principle of the transformation of the happiness of each into the happiness of all.[^5]
In this respect, the individual ceases to be important, and of interest;
but the conditions affecting the mass of interactions between
individuals, the ‘multiplicity of individuals’, indeed the population,
becomes the site of state intervention. I want to take a bit of a leap
of argumentative faith, and suggest that we can plot a related
development in art from the presiding concern with the individual object
—the ‘hard object’— as it is sometimes called with reference to
sculpture, to an increasingly distributed aesthetic field of attention
and concern. It is interesting to consider this shift in terms of a
movement from the depth model of the Christian and enlightenment
subject, in which all orders of experience are of moral if not economic
importance, to a flattened model of the secular and biopolitical subject
in which the individual becomes a moment, or the centre of a contingent
set of effects, within a mobile series of interactions. We must, of
course, be careful to distinguish between the objectives of a
governmental reason concerned primarily with the economic and its
attendant, opportune conditions of life, and the motivating forces
behind this diffusion of the artwork into a relational field. Or, put
another way, the reorientation of the aesthetic field of attention from
the single object often involves a critique of individuality which heads
in a very different direction from the biopolitical reconception of
individuality as a unit of interaction within a field of forces and
effects; one of a variety of mobile units that comprise the ‘milieu’ and
the ‘event’.
Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’ and the ‘birth of
the reader’ can be related to the notion of ‘singularity’ —that which
defies the opposition between universal and particular, general and
individual, to grasp a sense by which all universalities are
particularized, given as such, but only in so far as the particular
occurs this way, but could always occur otherwise; the characteristics
of the particular are both being as it is, as it has occurred, but
neither are they all that could potentially occur. This balance, and
refusal of the general and the particular, one that allows for all the
potential unrealized forms of Being in so far as it embraces Being as
such, is what Giorgio Agamben calls the ‘whatever singularity’. The
relinquishing of the author, or the hard object, or representation, or
technique, or retinality are all maneuvers through which a space is
cleared, or rather a milieu is opened, grasped and excavated within
which there is potential for something, the *whatever*, to occur within
—call it an ‘act’, an ‘event’ or a ‘singularity’. This potential to be
otherwise, or merely this *potential for potential*, is related but
antithetical to Foucault’s concept of governmental securization in which
potential occurrences are speculated on and allowed for within a system
or plan that must be able to accommodate, respond to, neutralize or make
use of a spectrum of potential events. For the security state the event
is *pre*cuperated into a social and economic equilibrium; in the best
relational artworks, the event’s effects resist being put to work —they
may even resist being consciously identified or understood— and operate
more as a ‘stored code’, an unspent power with unknowable potential
future manifestations —a whatever singularity.
Returning to the problematic of the city in its neoliberal mode of
development —it is important to note the transition that occurred in
the 1980s from the process of ‘gentrification’ to the state-led
stimulation of ‘urban regeneration’. Gentrification is a term coined by
sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the movement of affluent
individuals into lower class areas of the city. The state simulation of
this apparently ad hoc activity is what has been named ‘regeneration’. I
want to think about how this governmental simulation, or forced
stimulation of a process deemed natural, bears all the hallmarks of
neoliberalism’s schizophrenic need to posit the naturalness of the
market’s ordering of social and economic processes on the one hand,
while constantly needing to intervene to produce the correct conditions
within which ‘nature’ can take its course. Here we will consider the
role that creativity and public art is given in the production of a set
of conditions which not only apparently stimulate growth, but also
affect the behavior of subjects, of city dwellers, rendering them
compatible with the desired trajectory of growth, productivity, and
active social participation. How, in other words, the public display of
creativity helps valorize life within an economic and biopolitical
rationality. Part of this process of valorization is also, of course, to
pre-empt, drive out and mask over those subjects and behaviors that
cannot be put to use. In this sense, we can think about how
securitization extends to creativity —perhaps we can call this the
‘securitization of creativity’.
So, as noted, initially considered an ad hoc, *natural* phenomenon,
gentrification has increasingly been engineered by first local and now
global networks of real estate developers and speculators in step with
local governments. It should immediately be said that the outcome of
gentrification is usually one of increased property prices, increased
revenue to local governments from property taxes and the displacement of
lower income populations. The advent of ‘urban regeneration’ in the
early 1980s was largely a state-led response to the blighting of the
inner city in the wake of the twin phenomena of deindustrialization and
suburbanization.[^6] In the UK, it was also part of a governmental
response to a virulent wave of riots that erupted across Britain’s
streets in the summer of 1981, from London’s Brixton, Liverpool’s
Toxteth, Birmingham’s Handsworth, to Leeds’ Chapeltown. During this hot
summer, dispossessed populations vented their rage and contempt for a
system that treated them as surplus to requirement; both neglecting and
harassing them by turns. These riots —often cast as race riots— were
not only a response to high unemployment (or Thatcher’s planned
unemployment), biting poverty and the degenerating of housing stock, but
also the aggressive policing of the non-white working class population
who were subjected to discriminatory and heavy-handed policing, under
‘sus’ law —the police power to stop and search preemptively, purely on
the basis of suspicion. Poet Levi Tafari put it this way:
> Living inna Liverpool is living in hell look pon the places where we have fe dwell them have we under a political spell bad housing unemployment and the depression as well.[^7]
And how did the British state respond to the uprising and discontent of
significant pockets of its population? Then Secretary of the
Environment, Michael Heseltine, was dispatched around the country in a
helicopter, to consult with so-called community leaders. The outcome? A
series of ‘Garden Festivals’ around the UK, which offer an early model
of ‘cultural’ regeneration. These festivals combined the production of a
series of ornamental gardens with pop-cultural hagiography —in
Liverpool, for instance, the festival included a yellow submarine and a
statue of John Lennon. They were typically placed in derelict industrial
sites near to working class areas, and unlocked large tranches of public
money to clear sites, purify land, improve transport links and
eventually transfer land to private developers. At each of the Garden
Festival sites, special agencies such as the Merseyside Development
Corporation were established to attract private capital investment and
lead regeneration in areas undergoing post-industrial decline; these
QUANGOs were directly appointed by the minister and overrode local
authority planning controls —a measure which would pre-empt later
large-scale redevelopment projects of the 90s and 00s.
This mode of addressing social unrest and infrastructural decline
exhibits several characteristics of the biopolitical governmentality we
have been discussing. The decision to clear, purify and deregulate
public lands constitutes a massive subsidy to the private sector which
is courted and effectively underwritten to take over the state’s
previous role of city development. (Soon after the festivals had ended,
most of the expensively treated land they occupied was sold off to
developers – an outcome that made the entire cultural experiment seem
like mere foreplay). This is a prime example of the schizophrenic
genuflecting to and artificial stimulation of market activity which is
apparently better able to regulate social and economic activity than the
state. This is also what David Harvey has termed the ‘entrepreneurial’
mode of municipal government which no longer directly addresses the
material and social needs of inhabitants through the provision of
services and the planning, building and maintenance of infrastructure,
but which instead presents cities and city districts as attractive
commodities whose inhabitants provide ‘social and cultural capital’ —effectively, just another business opportunity competing against others
for inward investment from portfolio capitalists. Cultural events and
signature art and architecture are of course key to this branding and
selling of the city —a familiar strategy which explains much of the
state subsidized public art bubble of the boom years.
Another key biopolitical characteristic witnessed in the response of the
Thatcher government to the misery and desperation of inner-city
populations is the use of the ‘state of exception’ witnessed through the
suspension of local planning laws within designated parts of the city.
Actions such as these expose the state’s ultimate externality to its own
laws which must, Foucault argues, be temporarily suspended in order to
attain the very ends of the state, namely its perpetuation. (We should
note, however, that Agamben sees the state of exception as having become
sovereignty’s permanent condition of operation within capitalism).[^8]
Quoting Chemnitz, the 17th century political theorist, Foucault
describes the relationship of the state to its own laws thus:
> In fact, *raison d’État* must command, not by ‘sticking to the laws,’ but, if necessary, it must command ‘the laws themselves, which must adapt to the present state of the republic’. So, the *coup d’État* does not break with *raison d’État*. It is an element, an event, a way of doing things that, as something that breaches the laws \[…\] falls entirely within the general horizon, the general form of *raison d’État*.[^9]
The *coup d’État* itself must happen almost without the population
knowing, under the blanket of darkness and secrecy, presenting it with a
*fait accompli*. It is interesting to consider the role of culture as
part of the theatrical *mise-en-scène* that allows this micro-*coup
d’État* to occur. The yellow submarine blinds us from the real,
underlying economic exchanges.
A further biopolitically paradigmatic aspect of the Thatcher
government’s response was its attempt to intervene in the conditions of
life to produce effects of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ as a way of
maintaining control and boosting the co-operation and productive
activity of its subjects. Speaking of the development of policing in the
17th century, during the emergence of *raison d’État*, Foucault writes,
> So with the police there is a circle that starts from the state as a power of rational and calculated intervention on individuals and comes back to the state as a growing set of forces, or forces to be developed, passing through the life of individuals, which will now be precious to the state simply as life.[^10]
He goes on to say that this circle will pass through more than just the
life of individuals, but through their ‘convenience’, their ‘amenity’,
something which amounts to ‘more than just living’ —all of which the
police were charged with ensuring through their surveillance, regulation
and control of the dense interactions between individuals, especially in
the towns and cities. This concern for the individual’s ‘better than
just living’ he writes,
> Must in some way be drawn on and constituted into state utility: making men’s happiness the state’s utility, making men’s happiness the very strength of the state.[^11]
Although Foucault describes the police state as a 17th century
phenomenon, something which recedes firstly within the ideology of
*laissez-faire*, and later neoliberalism’s apparent deregulatory
activity, I think it is clear that the conjunction of what we could call
population optimization, short-handed as the ‘nanny state’ and its
proliferating interventions into life, and the utilitarian deployment of
happiness, shorthanded as the culture industry, suggest that this
correlation of police work and the manufacture of happiness hasn’t
disappeared but only shifted form. The roll out of an alternating
sequence of either mega-sculptures (Gormley’s *Angel of the North*,
Wallinger’s proposed *White Horse* at Ebbsfleet, and Kapoor’s
*ArcelorMittal Orbit* tower for the Olympic site), or relational and
ephemeral urban interventions, reveals something of the uneasy marriage
of agendas that conspire around public art to help deliver the effects
of happiness the state so badly needs to gain the acquiescence and
self-regulation of subjects within the context of large-scale urban
change.
It is precisely this conjunction of happiness and control that
philosopher Maria Muhle wants to emphasize through her rejection of
those characterizations of biopower that cast it as an aggressive
takeover of life. Instead, she argues, it is a modality that possesses a
positive and not merely repressive relation to life. ‘My claim’, she
writes, ‘is that biopolitics is defined by the fact that rather than
merely relating to life, it takes on the way life itself functions; that
it functions like life in order to be better able to regulate it’.[^12]
So there are positive and pleasurable aspects to the governmental
subsumption of life —its life-like activity— that relate to art’s
desire to be more like-life and less like the moribund objects within
the museum. Indeed, the production of this ‘positive’ relation, often
entails the deployment of art for governmental and economic ends —as
has been amply demonstrated by the paradigm of the Creative City. The
general aestheticization of urban spaces certainly helps mark off the
disciplinary city of factory work from the securitized city of
immaterial production and consumption. The pain, filth and graft of
production is increasingly purged from our cities (or at least from
view), and with it the workers who performed this graft. In its place
comes the illusion of our general conversion to a pleasurable,
weightless form of production, and the accompanying figure of what in
German is called the ‘*Bummler’*, the ambler, the Bourgeois enjoyer of
the city as a playground rich in cultural and retail diversions. No
longer the austere streets of factory towns, but the slick and
virtualized pedestrian zones of creative quarters, in which people’s
happiness is catered to, life is deemed ‘more than just lived’, and art
contributes invaluably to a cultivation and passification of public
space. But it is not just the use of art for the production of happiness
effects and place branding, I would argue, that creates discomfort for
the more conscious practitioners, but the sharing of certain
characteristics by aesthetic and governmental regimes. Beyond a shared
orientation towards the event and the milieu —complex fields of
interrelation between life, activity and environment which entail a
speculative approach to potential effects— there are other key
‘regulatory ideas’ operative in both realms, namely the concepts of
‘engagement’ and ‘openness’.
In a recent interview about making art in the context of regeneration
with the artist Alberto Duman, Anthony Iles and I discussed how the ‘hard object’ had
been relegated in public art practice over the last decade or so.[^13]
He drew attention to how the sculptural tradition in public art has
given way to ‘a situation where everything but the object is the way to
do public art’, the normativity of which he finds disturbing. According
to art historian Miwon Kwon, in her book *One Place After Another*, this
normative switchover came with the critical reception of the public art
exhibition *Culture in Action*, curated by Jane Jacob, in Chicago in
1993. It is worth quoting the curator’s assessment of the trajectory
from the site-specific object to the community-oriented public artwork
to be reminded of how this development was unequivocally linked to
progressive social effects, and actively delinked from the development
agendas we now see harnessing it. She writes,
> As public art shifted away from large-scale objects, to physically or conceptually site specific projects, to audience specific concerns (work made in response to those who occupy a given site), it moved from an aesthetic function, to a design function, to a social function. Rather than serving to promote the economic development of American cities, as did public art beginning in the late 1960s, it is now being viewed as a means of stabilizing community development through urban centers. In the 1990s the role of public art has shifted from that of renewing the physical environment to that of improving society, from promoting aesthetic quality to contributing to the quality of life, from enriching lives to saving lives.[^14]
What is interesting here is not only how she counters socially-oriented
public art to economic development, but also how governmental her
language sounds when she cites the objectives of this kind of work:
‘stabilizing community development’ and ‘improving society’ and
‘improving the quality of life’, not to mention the extraordinary
grandiosity of her claim that art can save lives. Running through this
equation of art’s social orientation with ameliorating social effects is
the implicit idea that the art can serve to activate members of the
‘community’, to ‘engage’ them in constructive dialogues, to alter their
behavior. This conception of activated spectatorship, and its coupling
to the blurring of art and life, presents a crucial isomorphism between
aesthetics and the self-management of the subject that biopolitical
info-capitalism attempts to stage. Present here is also a kind of crass
identification between notions of engaged spectatorship and a
literalization of activity that attempts to draw out aesthetic
contemplation into immediate behavioral and social effects. In his book
*The Emancipated Spectator*, Jacques Rancière exposes what he considers
the *cul-de-sac* of avant-garde notions of activating the audience, from
Bertolt Brecht to Guy Debord, for the imposition, finally, of a
prescriptive and ‘sovereign’ notion of what counts as activity onto an
audience contemptuously imagined as unrelentingly passive, as victims of
the spectacle. Speaking of the wish to abolish the separation of active
performers from passive spectators, or between the spaces of art and
everyday life, in avant-garde theater he says,
> But the redistribution of places is one thing; the requirement that
theatre assign itself the goal of assembling a community which ends
the separation of the spectacle is quite another. The first involves
the invention of new intellectual adventures, the second a new form
of allocating bodies to their rightful place, which, in the event, is their place of communion.[^15]
Rejecting the self-imposed necessity of theatre to literalize the
‘community’ of spectators occupying the theater at any one time,
Rancière argues that, to the contrary,
>In a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them.[^16]
Art, he argues, need not and should not strive to create a collectivity
of its spectators. Art that attempts this fails to recognize the
capacity that has always already joined people across boundaries,
namely, the ‘shared power of the equality of intelligence’ which ‘makes
them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them
separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone
has to plot her own path’.[^17] It is easy to see the potential overlaps
between the community creating desires of avant-gardism which neglect
the singularity of the viewer’s experience and thought, and the desire
of the New Labour government to create a stakeholder society, a series
of communities in which a place and activity is allocated to each and
every one, but which takes no soul into account.
I think Anthony Gormley’s public art exemplifies the stakes of this
institutional takeover of engagement and participation – we see its
machinations whirring around most nakedly in his 2009 work for Trafalgar
Square’s fourth column titled, *One and Other*. This piece entailed the
rotation of a volunteer living occupant of the plinth on an hourly
basis; an occupation which was filmed and archived on its associated
website. In a grotesque bureaucratic aping of avant-garde notions of the
audience’s co-production of the work, the volunteer needed to obtain the
right to participate by applying, via a website, and having their
intended action vetted in advance before being given a time slot. The
performances, by and large, became a theater of civil society
initiatives, exaggerated presentations of identity and narcissistic
exhibitionism. This work, it seems to me, operates according to the
Agambanian logic of ‘inclusive exclusion’, a logic that uses the very
act of inclusion as a means to exclude subjects from the scene of the
political or the aesthetic. The artwork becomes a microcosm of the
inclusive exclusion of the democratic process itself; participants, like
voters, are fairly and evenly, if impersonally and bureaucratically
treated, given a voice within the narrowly constructed terms of a
permissible utterance and, in so doing, denied the ability to be heard,
act collectively or engage in any ‘act’ that might rupture the normal
functioning of things. They are effectively engaged in order to be
neutralized, in the interests of the self-perpetuation of the state or
the state-like power of Gormley’s signature branding of high-profile
public space.
This stake of institutionalized engagement – its logic of inclusive
exclusion – is often discussed by artists who have worked within the
context of regeneration as a tactic of ‘soft policing’ performed on
those populations who will be most dramatically affected by development.
Alberto Duman has described the consultative work of public artists in
regeneration or ‘social conflict zones’ as that of appeasement. He says,
‘The artist, very often is called in with a fairly backward idea that
art has the capacity to negotiate, be a meeting place, art is a space
where differences are negotiated because it can transcend the specifics
of the situation, of time and space’.[^18] And yet, he is keen to point
out, this negotiating capacity of art is wielded from one side, namely
by those who are driving the process of regeneration. As with the Big
Society, public engagement is solicited just at the moment when the
conditions which nurture and sustain community are being dismantled,
through the generalized enclosures and sell-offs of public assets, the
privatization and shrinkage of public services and the ‘social
cleansing’ of non-productive life from the inner city. Far from ‘saving
lives’, socially-oriented artworks such as Gormley’s often provide the
image of what Boris Groys has called the regime of ‘aesthetic equal
rights’ as a cover for the reduction of the working class population’s
rights of access to the means of subsistence.
With a sharp sense of this double-sided, or as he calls it ‘two-faced’,
character of much participatory public art, Duman submitted a highly
sarcastic proposal to the Spitalfields Sculpture Prize in 2009. The
sculpture was intended to be sited in the conflict zone of a relatively
new corporate plaza that had been laid over the now demolished site of
one half of Spitalfields Market in East London. The prize is funded by
Hammerson, the developers behind the commercial development of the area
over the last 15 years. Playing a ‘two-faced’ game himself, Duman
submitted plans for a giant, 10m high ‘Cleaning in Progress’ sign that
would be both eye-catching, amusing and provide shelter for shoppers and
amblers from the elements. Of course the sting in the tail of this
apparently innocuous object was that the cleaning it makes reference to
is both social and literal; it commemorates those who have been purged
from the area in order to make way for the high real estate and rental
values it can now command, and flags up the relegation of those working
class occupants who remain to the ancillary role of cleaners and service
workers; the ghosts who maintain the space but for whom it isn’t
intended. The giant sign acts in solidarity with these ghosts who haunt
and preserve the spaces of pleasure and consumption, whilst allowing the
new occupants to shelter under its protective mantle.
For Boris Groys, avant-garde art’s development of a regime of ‘equal
aesthetic rights’ hinges on the idea, linked to the blurring of art and
life, that the classical avant-garde ‘has struggled to achieve
recognition of all signs, forms, and things as legitimate objects of
artistic desire and, hence, also as legitimate objects of representation
in art’.[^19] He sees a parallel between the aesthetic struggle for
recognition, and the political struggle for the recognition and
inclusion of all minorities. Within art, however, the thought that
anything can potentially be recognized as art potentially leads to an
entropic game where each artwork appears to be simply an arbitrary and
unnecessary extension or iteration of this field of equal rights.
However, he argues, art today ‘operates in the gap between the formal
equality of all art forms and their factual inequality’.[^20] So, while
recognizing the potential legitimacy of anything as art, in reality not
everything is considered as such and admitted into the museum or the
canon. ‘The good artwork’, he continues, ‘is precisely that work which
affirms the formal equality of all images under the conditions of their
factual inequality. This gesture is always contextual and historically
specific, but it also has paradigmatic importance as a model for further
repetition of the gesture.’[^21] I think Duman’s work strikes just such
a balance, elevating the readymade plastic sign to a higher power which
implies the potential elevation of any profane object, whilst mobilizing
this banal object to signify the factual exclusion of former inhabitants
who become the ‘revenants’ of this apparent space of open, democratic
enjoyment. Put another way, the participation of the banal object in the
aesthetic regime of equal rights becomes a cipher for the factual
impossibility of participation within a wider regime of participatory
aesthetics.
Earlier I mentioned that ‘openness’ was another regulatory idea that
intersects governmental, economic and aesthetic terrains. As with the
regime of equal aesthetic rights, the principle of openness can also
happily co-exist with and co-produce factual inequalities and closed or
proprietary systems. We see this everywhere from the deployment of the
open standards of the web, such as HTML and HTTP to run proprietary
software or for private profit, to the double standards of free market
capitalism where developing countries are compelled to open up their
markets and allow inward investment while economic giants like the US
are able to maintain trade barriers and subsidies for domestic
production. Openness itself is a kind of conceptual medium along which,
as chairman for the US Business Committee for the Arts in the 80s Winton
Blount once said, business can also travel. Fighting trade regulations,
taxation and overt government control was not just a civic duty, he
argued, but a means of keeping ‘open those avenues of freedom along
which art and commerce both travel’.[^22]
Roman Vasseur, Lead Artist appointed to oversee the redevelopment of
Harlow New Town, has argued, this reversibility of openness can also
extend to who might be considered an artist in the context of
creative-led regeneration. ‘One can envisage a future’ he says, ‘where
artists, or individuals with an extensive training in the visual arts
and art history will be slowly moved out of this new economy in favor of
“creatives” able to privilege deliverability and consultation over other
concerns’.[^23] It is worth considering how the energies that drive the
privileging of openness as an aesthetic, technical, economic and social
form waver between the political horizon of inclusion and the degraded,
flattening equivalence of the value form. This has the interesting
effect of driving the Beuysian claim that ‘everyone is an artist’ in at
least two directions at once: the death of the author also presides over
the birth of the professionalized creative. What this final example
reveals is the extent to which governmental and economic calculation and
the social engineering of happiness can move along similar trajectories
as the life-oriented activities of art. But in keeping with Groys’
remarks about the good artwork, the artistic attempt to promote a life
which is ‘more than just lived’ cannot take place under the monocultural
regime of human capital, or under the logic of biopolitical happiness,
if it does not draw attention to the way biopolitical capitalism
mobilizes individuals to create optimum effects within its own paradigm
of population optimization. The good artwork that aims to act upon life
takes into account the more radical horizons of openness, event, act,
milieu, engagement and participation, admitting as much to the factual
absence of these realities as to the potential for their potential in a
wholly unspecified future form.
### References
Agamben, Giorgio. *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life*, Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. *Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France 1977-1978*, New York: Picador / Palgrave Macmillan,
2007.
Groys, Boris. *Art Power*, Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 2008.
Kwon, Miwon. *One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational
Identity*, Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Muhle, Maria. ‘“Qu-est-ce Que la Biopolitique”’ A Conversation on
Theories of Biopolitics between Thomas Lemke and Maria Muhle, moderated
by André Rottman”, *Texte Zur Kunst*, 73 (March 2009).
Rancière, Jacques. *The Emancipated Spectator*, London: Verso, 2011.
Slater, Josephine Berry and Anthony Iles. *No Room to Move: Radical Art
and the Regenerate City*, Berlin: Mute Books, 2010.
Tafari, Levi. *Liverpool Experience*, \[Germany\]: Michael Schwinn,
1989.
Wu, Chin-Tao. ‘Embracing the Enterprise Culture’, *New Left Review* 230
(1998).
[^1]: Michel Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France 1977-1978*, New York: Picador / Palgrave
Macmillan: 2007, p. 14.
[^2]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 20.
[^3]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 20.
[^4]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 21.
[^5]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 346.
[^6]: For a longer development of these arguments and history see,
Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles, *No Room to Move: Radical
Art and the Regenerate City*, Berlin: Mute Books, 2010
[^7]: Levi Tafari, *Liverpool Experience*, \[Germany\]: Michael Schwinn,
1989.
[^8]: Cf. Giorgio Agamben, *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life*,
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998.
[^9]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, pp. 261-262.
[^10]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 327.
[^11]: Foucault, *Security, Territory, Population*, p. 327.
[^12]: Maria Muhle in ‘“Qu-est-ce Que la Biopolitique?”: A Conversation
on Theories of Biopolitics between Thomas Lemke and Maria Muhle,
moderated by André Rottman’, *Texte Zur Kunst*, 73 (March, 2009), p.
136.
[^13]: Cf. ‘Interview with Alberto Duman’, in Slater and Iles, *No Room
to Move*, pp.58-79.
[^14]: Jane Jacob, cited in Miwon Kwon, *One Place After Another: Site
Specific Art and Locational Identity*, Cambridge, Massachussetts:
MIT Press, 2004, p. 111.
[^15]: Jacques Rancière, *The Emancipated Spectator*, London: Verso,
2011, p. 15.
[^16]: Rancière, *The Emancipated Spectator*, p. 15.
[^17]: Rancière, *The Emancipated Spectator*, p.17.
[^18]: Alberto Duman, in Slater and Iles, *No Room to Move*.
[^19]: Boris Groys, ‘Equal Aesthetic Rights’, in *Art Power*, Cambridge,
Massachussetts: 2008, p. 14.
[^20]: Groys, *Art Power*, p. 16.
[^21]: Groys, *Art Power*, p. 16.
[^22]: Cited in Chin-Tao Wu, ‘Embracing the Enterprise Culture’, *New
Left Review* 230 (1998): 30.
[^23]: Roman Vasseur in ‘Interview with Roman Vasseur’, in Slater and
Iles, *No Room to Move*, p. 114.
#The Agency of Art in the Unconscious
###Marc James Léger
How can we explain the gray zone, the minimum distance between
creativity and capitalist demand? How can we understand creative
autonomy and resistance in the context of renewed expectations for art
to have a direct social and political utility? What can psychoanalysis
contribute to art criticism as it relates to the field of politicized
visual art, now more commonly referred to as socially engaged art? What
does the notion of the *avant-garde* mean for cultural production in a
world of networked connectivity, participatory ideology and creative
industry dispossession? According to Slavoj Žižek, when art production
is increasingly subjected to commodification, and when commodities are
increasingly aestheticized, artworks are no longer able to sustain the
lack in the *big Other*, understood here as the agency of belief in
art’s social and cultural significance.[^1] One symptom of this
phenomenon is the view that art today has collapsed directly into
political economy. In the words of the editors of *e-flux* journal,
‘contemporary art *is* neoliberalism in its most purified form’.[^2] The
truth of this assertion is that artworks are particularly apt as
signifiers of castration. As creativity marks ever more aspects of daily
life, almost any kind of work not only can, but in a kind of frenetic
hysteria, must be elevated to the place of Art.[^3] While this may seem
a standard postmodern argument for the breakdown of the distinction
between high art and mass culture, postmodernism tends nevertheless to
leave belief in the aesthetic intact, proliferating through the fields
of discourse it comes into contact with. In the following, I argue
against postmodern relativism, however, and wish to consider instead, to
paraphrase Žižek in his thinking on Christianity, ‘the perverse core’ of
avant-garde art production.
## Art for Imbeciles
In an essay on what he calls ‘enclave theory’, John Roberts made the
somewhat startling assertion that many of the most progressive art
theories of recent years (those attributed to Nicolas Bourriaud, Gregory
Sholette, Grant Kester, Stephen Wright, and even theorists like Jean-Luc
Nancy, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Bruno Bosteels, Felix Guattari, Toni
Negri, and Michael Hardt) represent the ‘invariant core of a communist
programme’ that is ‘largely divorced from the past’, in particular, from
its Stalinist Communist party organizations, and is committed rather to
‘culturally aestheticized \[…\] autonomous forms of productive,
intellectual and creative community’.[^4] What is surprising in this
claim is the idea that these are invariant forms, and not significantly
different. Roberts asks us to consider what all of these theorists’
perspectives on radical culture have in common rather than what
distinguishes them. This gesture might not be such a bad way to
understand the so-called ‘crisis’ of art and art criticism in a world of
cultural corporatization and neoliberal engineering of creative capital.
Whatever contemporary art’s failings in terms of pursuing revolutionary
class struggle, it represents, according to Roberts, a kind of leftist
bloc against what Sholette terms enterprise culture. Perhaps one of the
most acerbic depictions of the art world as a rigged system of economic
and social exploitation is Bruce Barber’s 2008 drawing titled *Artworld
Ponzi Scheme*, which shows a pyramid comprized of payers, prayers, and
players, all of them trapped within a hierarchically inegalitarian
system. The intrigue in this drawing, especially as it comes after the
biggest financial debacle since the 1970s, is that the currency of art
is premised on false claims, or even ‘toxic assets’.
Fig. Bruce Barber, *Artworld Ponzi Scheme*, drawing, 2008. Courtesy of
the artist.
The idea that art has no socially agreed upon justifications has been
addressed by anthropologist David Graeber, who wonders why contemporary
theorists attending an art symposium at the Tate Museum should explain
the 2008 fiasco by taking recourse to avant-garde art created between
1916 and 1922.[^5] His point is that we are potentially once again
living a revolutionary moment, but that epistemological subversion
through culture and post-structuralist theory seems to satisfy only
liberal academics. The return to avant-gardism, he argues, effects
> a subtle form of conservatism—or, perhaps one should say conservative radicalism, if such were possible—a nostalgia for the days when it was possible to put on a tin-foil suit, shout nonsense verse, and watch staid bourgeois audiences turn into outraged lynch mobs.
These days are gone, he argues, replaced by the immaterial labor and
service economy analysis of people like Maurizio Lazzarato and Toni
Negri. The art of the rich, he goes on, has more to do with the analysis
of products than of social processes, floating above the mire of
ordinary existence. Art today appears to contemporary political
philosophers to belong to the immaterial domain, a fact that exacerbates
its condition of crisis. The art world, for Graeber, is the apparatus of
people who manage this crisis. Unable to define the category of art in
any way that is adequate beyond its quality as something that only rich
people and museums can afford to buy, the art world cannot establish its
own legitimacy. Graeber then argues that the essence of politics in
social life is to make people believe. Things become true if you can
convince enough people to believe them. In order to play the game
effectively, one must not oneself know the essence of things. He
concludes from this that if the art world was to recognize itself as a
form of politics, it would also need to ‘recognize itself as something
both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam’.[^6] Insofar as
the art world has become an appendage to financial capital, fictive
capital explains fictive cultural value as well. All the players, he
argues, cynics and idealists alike, draw on outmoded nineteenth-century
notions of art, even those who create ‘enclaves’ where they can
experiment with new forms of life.
Where Graeber gets at the issue is when he later argues that for all of
the fictionalization that takes place across the social field, the
magically created value of art is no less real. This assertion confirms
the Lacanian emphasis on the reality of illusion, which contrasts to
transgressions that merely try to escape the Real. In this regard, Žižek
agrees with Badiou, who argues that art is a medium of truth. This also
relates to the Marxist understanding of commodity fetishism, which
states that even if capitalists understand that workers produce the
value of their merchandize, they nevertheless continue to believe in the
miracle of exchange. The famous Žižekian example, of course, is the
anecdote about Niels Bohr, who when asked if he believed in the good
luck derived from a horse shoe, replied he did not, but that apparently
it works even if one does not believe in it. Rather than payer, player,
and prayer, then, categories that Barber leaves undefined, I would like
to propose the set of three subject positions that Žižek outlines at the
start of *Less Than Nothing*: the idiot, the moron, and the
imbecile.[^7] All three positions are premized on the Lacanian theory of
the *big Other*, which stands for the heterogeneous social rules that
together comprize what Lacan defines as the social symbolic. As an
impersonal social agency, the *big Other* stands in for those rules that
shape the unconscious of the social subject.
The first of the three is the idiot, defined by Žižek as someone who is
‘too intelligent to process implicit social rules’.[^8] The idiot
imagines himself beyond the influence of the *big Other* and knows the
rules (of art) all too well to be able to process them in a way beyond
his hyper-intellectuality. As the first of two examples of idiots within
contemporary art theory, both colleagues of mine, we have Sholette and
his concept of ‘dark matter’. According to Sholette, dark matter
describes the ‘shadowy social productivity’ that haunts the high art
world. The great many excluded practices and failed artists who keep the
world of galleries, collections, and magazines going, Sholette argues,
are today threatening this pyramidal system as their dark energy becomes
increasingly visible. The book *Dark Matter* thus presents itself as a
‘lumpenography’ of this invisible mass of makeshift, amateur, informal,
unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, and self-organized
practices.[^9] Sholette argues that art critics, art historians, arts
administrators, collectors and dealers typically have little interest in
creative dark matter. There is no question that the art world is made up
not only of what is known about art, but involves a complex division of
labor and specialized tasks that work to keep a multi-billion-dollar
industry operating for the benefit of a minority of high profile
artists. This system keeps the vast majority of professionally trained
artists in a state of subservience and underdevelopment. The first and
most general question that is asked by Sholette is what would happen if
this superfluous majority went on permanent strike and gave up on the
art system’s means of legitimation. Contemporary high art is thoroughly
connected, he says, to Art Inc. and does not hide its profit
motivations. It is only those dark practices at the margins that still
hold on to this former (avant-garde) task of art to challenge commercial
goals. While Sholette does appreciate the labor theory of value, he
suspends the understanding that most forms of culture are non-productive
and rather dependent in complex ways on profits collected elsewhere in
the proletarianized global marketplace. Bourdieu’s sociology of art, in
contrast, benefited from its use of the concept of social totality. The
absence of the use of the concept of totality in Sholette’s book
prevents him from offering a class analysis of culture that would go
beyond redistributive justice. Also, dark matter seems to share very
little common ground with the avant-garde tradition of revolutionary
art, whose distinct purpose is to represent the social function of art
in class society. As Žižek has argued, an ideological identification
exerts the greatest pressure on us when we fool ourselves into believing
we are not fully identical to it. The epistemological crisis in the arts
that is mentioned in Sholette’s introduction to *Dark Matter* should
therefore not be thought to directly reflect the crisis in global
capital, though the connections between these spheres do indeed need to
be drawn.
A second idiot in this set is Brian Holmes and his theory of ‘liar’s
poker’. Holmes is one of the sharpest analysts of artistic resistance
within societies of control and is also, like so many contemporary
theorists, skeptical of avant-garde modes of contestation. Within the
new flexible regimes of accumulation and casual freelance culture, the
demands for autonomy, he argues, are diverted into new modes of
control.[^10] The premise of liar’s poker, as he puts it, is that ‘when
people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they’re lying’.[^11]
Cultural institutions, he argues, constantly demand that artists
‘picture politics’, playing the art game and representing those who are
excluded to those who are safely nestled inside, especially
transnational corporations, who then support the realm of art as a
sphere that is separate from abstract financial decisions. Anti-art
artists who work directly in the public sphere or on the terrain of
everyday life, or within new technological and scientific landscapes,
only pretend to leave behind the artistic frame. In reality they collude
with curators and directors to show images of political reality. Because
the latter are averse to such realism, the artist has to bluff their way
through. Holmes assumes, however, that an artist involved with a social
movement is an artist that has successfully challenged the guilt
relations of the art system. Because of this he is deeply suspicious of
the function of belief, which, he argues, is a powerful or interesting
fetish, an illusion that gets players caught in the game rather than
directly confronting power, as in the case of artworks that deepen the
links between art activism and social movements. What distinguishes
Holmes from Žižek, however, is that he does not ask us to believe even
more in art and to directly assume the lack in the *big Other*—a small
distinction, but a crucial one if we are to see art institutions as
anything more than duplicitous. Like Sholette, Holmes is concerned that
institutions seek cultural capital among ‘the more radical fractions of
the artistic field’.[^12] The artist has to produce the ace of politics,
he argues, while proving all the while that the ace is merely a joker,
thereby undermining the reality of the illusion. Like so many leftists,
Holmes assumes that the big Other is or can be occupied.
The second subject position outlined by Žižek is the moron, defined by
‘the stupidity of those who fully identify with common sense, who fully
stand for the big Other of appearances’.[^13] Two notable cultural
theorists who might in some ways fill this description are Grant Kester
and Claire Bishop. Kester is a seasoned art critic with a long track
record of insightful writing on the shift from public art and identity
politics in the 1980s and 90s to the new phenomenon of community art in
the 90s and 2000s. The type of site-specific collaborative work that he
champions unfolds, he says, through an extended interaction with local
communities. Like many proponents of the new tendencies, he has worked
to anchor his theory of ‘dialogical aesthetics’ in both social and
political history as well as the philosophy of aesthetics. While erudite
and knowledgeable, Kester’s polemic, as presented in his book *The One
and the Many*, is intensely prescriptive.[^14] For the sake of artist
groups like Park Fiction, Ala Plastica, and Dialogue, all avant-garde
tactics (reduced to formalist modernism) are proscribed, including the
work of leading cultural theorists like Barthes, Derrida, de Certeau,
Lyotard, Kristeva, Blanchot, Badiou, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben,
Nancy, Levinas, and Rancière—anyone associated with the post-May 68
generation of postmodern pessimism and who programmatically guard
against premature totalizations.
> We are witnessing today a certain disenchantment with the existing parameters of avant-garde art and an attempt to rearticulate the specificity of the aesthetic in relationship to both the viewer and to other cultural and political practices.[^15]
The leitmotif of avant-garde and theoretical post-structuralism, he
argues, is the impossibility of social cohesion.[^16] In contrast,
Kester is interested in the global phenomenon and success of
collaborative modes of production, as found for instance in the work of
Border Arts Workshop, Group Material, REPOhistory, Gran Fury, Platform,
WochenKlausur, and Groupo Etcetera, where emphasis is placed on multiple
authorship, participatory relation to audience, and process-based
activist intervention.[^17] Despite his critique of what he calls the
‘intellectual baroque’, Kester’s dialogical aesthetics retains many of
the typical leitmotifs of postmodernism, especially the distinctions
that are made between pluralism and an older avant-garde notion of
culture that retained some links to the class politics of socialism.
With globalization, I would argue, social forms have channeled culture
in such a way as to give it a privileged role in economic development.
According to George Yúdice, culture is today treated as an expedient,
construed as a resource for sociopolitical ameliorism and job creation,
a process that coincides with capitalist ideology and biopolitical
regulation.[^18] The role of culture, Yúdice argues, ‘has expanded in an
unprecedented way into the political and economic at the same time that
conventional notions of culture have been emptied out’.[^19] Unlike
Sholette and Holmes, Kester tends to underplay this problem of
institutional mediation, leaving actually existing institutions all the
more operative in the administration of socially engaged art.
Another critic we could add to the group of morons is Claire Bishop.
Bishop is well-known for her 2004 *October* essay in which she
criticized Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics for its rhetoric of
democracy and emancipation.[^20] The open works advocated by
contemporary critics like Bourriaud foreground interaction rather than
contemplation and engagement rather than passivity and disengagement,
assuming that these former modalities are inherently political and
emancipatory. She argues that Bourriaud wants to equate aesthetic
judgement with political judgement. ‘But how’, she asks, ‘do we measure
or compare these relationships?’.[^21] Dialogue, she says, is assumed in
advance to be democratic, excluding other modalities, like autonomy,
antagonism, oppositionality, destabilization, and artworks that
recognize the limits of ‘society’s ability to fully constitute
itself’.[^22] She defines the autonomy of the artwork in terms of the
social antagonism that is mirrored in the tension between art and
society. Bishop insists that we should be better able to judge art
itself and not merely better politics, and therefore acknowledge the
limits of what art can do. One of the problems here is the return to the
function of criticism and the assumption that art, by itself, can be the
object of objective assessment. In this gesture Bishop obviates the
notion of antagonism that she otherwise recognizes. While she exposes
what is repressed in the idea of social harmony, she ignores how art
itself acts as this agent of repression. In this regard, *Artificial
Hells*, her latest treatment of participatory art, mostly expands the
number of examples rather than improve the initial theory.[^23] She
worries about the instrumentalization of participatory art, something
Kester is less troubled by, but perhaps misses the point that this
apprehension is misplaced insofar as it concerns itself with art *per
se* and art criticism as a means of institutional legitimation (perhaps
to satisfy critics like Graeber). She very correctly recognizes that the
new European cultural policies enacted under *New Labour* in the U.K.
are a form of social engineering but fails to produce a theory that
addresses how and why art eludes such institutionalization.
I would argue, in contrast, that it is quite possible for an artwork to
be valid as an autonomous and critical work and at the same time to defy
institutional capture, and this, without denying the incompleteness of
the social. For me to say this, I should think that I belong to the
third group in Žižek’s series: the imbeciles. An imbecile is someone
whose mental retardation causes him to be aware of the need for a *big
Other*, but who does not rely on it. The imbecile is somewhere between
the idiot and the moron, who recognizes the function of language but who
distrusts it.[^24] The *big Other* exists, but is inconsistent. The
question for aesthetics, then, is to consider in theoretical and not
only sociological terms the ways in which the art world guarantees the
consistency of the rules of art, allowing for dark matter to be
distinguished from consecrated artists. What unites the idiot, the moron
and the imbecile is the inconsistency of their belief in the *big Other*
of art and, as I argue further on, this inconsistency represents the
‘perverse core’ of aesthetics as such.
## The Reality of the Fiction
What is the significance of critical art in the context of contemporary
cultural theory, within the space of culture in general, and as it is
being reengineered to conform ever more tightly with the needs of
accumulation—leading many to presume that avant-garde artworks and
films have been made obsolete by new social relations and by the new
regimes of production? Here I would like to pursue the path of the
imbecile with reference to Žižek’s chapter on Christianity in the
opening ‘Drink Before’ section of *Less Than Nothing*. The trick is to
not reduce theory to empiricism and to focus on the negative energy of
art rather than the positivity of the social causes that artists are
being increasingly expected to deal with directly. While I do not agree
with those who argue that art and reparative social work or political
propaganda are inherently separate activities, I do think that socially
engaged art benefits from some aesthetic theorizing that goes beyond
German idealism.
Žižek’s attention to Hegel in *Less Than Nothing* is largely due to the
overlap with Lacan and Žižek’s view that among the German idealists,
Hegel alone is able to sustain the idea of the lack in the *big Other*
and the dialectical reversal that occurs when an epistemological
obstacle is transposed directly into the Thing itself—here the work of
art.[^25] ‘Our inability to know the thing indicates a crack in the
thing itself, so that our very failure to reach the full truth is the
indicator of truth.’[^26] No wonder then that dark matter, to take up
the metaphor, is obviated by the obsession with the celebrity star
system: Picasso, Van Gogh, Ai Weiwei, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, what
have you. One problem in the structure of ideology, Žižek explains, is
that there is no public, no symbolic agency that is there to register or
witness the disasters of capitalism. What is missing is the *big Other*,
the space of symbolic inscription and ideological suture. In contrast to
Claire Bishop’s quest to determine institutional criteria for judging
participatory art, Žižek writes:
> Schoenberg still hoped that somewhere there would be at least one listener who would truly understand his atonal music. It was only his greatest pupil, Anton Webern, who accepted the fact that there is no listener, no big Other to receive the work and properly recognize its value.[^27]
There are no guarantees for art and this becomes one of the principal
axioms of the notion of creativity. Those who worry that all creativity
is today harnessed by capital miss an important point: the form of
illusory appearance remains on the surface of things and is thus closer
to the Real than historical reality itself. The concern of political
moralists and reformists is often to escape from the Real of illusion
through some kind of transgression that seeks to show the true,
so-called ‘phenomenal’ reality, usually by pointing to some token of
reality: bodily affect, group interaction, S&P indicators, the haptic
qualities of new media, etc. The idea that art criticism should be more
global in scope, representing a greater diversity of experiences, is one
way among many to avoid the Real of illusion.[^28] What then can
artworks tell us about the changing parameters of what Peter Bürger
defined as the ‘institution art’?[^29]
The unique quality of art is that more than most other things in our
social universe it can express the reality of illusion through any
random object. This illusory quality is a secret, in Marx the commodity
fetish, or in Lacan, the ineffable *objet a* that allows anything to be
elevated to the concept of Art and allows it to be installed in the
symbolic order. The artist comes closest to this understanding when he
or she intervenes through the neutral position of the analyst.[^30] The
artist’s neutrality cannot be socially localized since the art thing has
no ontological reality but is a virtual point. This is what Lacan refers
to in the notion of *le père ou le pire*—the oedipal father or the
worse, the choice of art as the worse option, which more effectively
undermines the entire symbolic field. Avant-garde works represent a
negative force against the organic unity of community and as such are
vital to emancipatory politics.[^31] Strict egalitarian emancipation
cancels rather than preserves the organic unity of the hierarchical
social order. Radical art operates as the obscene disavowed underside of
the art world ponzi scheme. How so?
Almost every artwork preserves some aspect of the idea of art as a
reserve, or background against which we can measure deviations. Art’s
non-art status is therefore inscribed into the idea of Art—something
that Duchamp was perhaps the first artist to expound. Art is deeply
atheistic, to put things in terms of belief, and perversion is at the
core of the aesthetic. The obsession with the ineffable *big Other* is
sublated into acts of creation, something that Lacan defines as drive.
Creativity can therefore be defined as the eruption of a new form that
reorganizes the social field, imposing itself as a new necessity through
an act of ungrounded subjective decision, abandoned by Art and with no
guarantee of aesthetic value or art world consecration.[^32] The
inscrutability of the aesthetic *big Other*, even as blue chip
investment, is the certitude of creativity, the condition of its
ecstatic production. Since art is dead and the author is dead and since
therefore the function of the critic is nullified, art making and art
judgments are sacrificed to a pure Otherness of subjective destitution.
Art making is a scandal that undermines art from within. Such work has a
tragic self-effacing quality that socially engaged art sometimes refuses
in its resentment and narcissistic hatred of the ‘no’ of Art. It
denounces art in favor of ethics but it does so through the disavowal of
the love of art. It proffers the socially networked artist as the better
of the avant-garde artist but it is the latter who properly betrays the
extorsion of creativity. The revolutionary artist acts unconditionally
and therefore comes closest to art’s expression of freedom and
emancipation, insisting, much like Antigone, on symbolic demand. The
creative artist is consequently excluded from the community of humans.
Holmes’ notion of ‘liar’s poker’ can be explained as the insistence on
aesthetic sublimation rather than the insistence on the refusal of
co-optation; it implies an awareness of the monstrosity of the game
since the game is not only fixed in the symbolic order, but more
radically, since through his or her act the artist believes in the game
more than s/he is aware. The artist acts as though he or she is not
aware of capitalist recuperation, observing the appearances, the
virtuality of the illusion of the real. In the case of Barber’s pyramid,
the ‘prayer’ in the set represents a transitive function; he or she does
not have to believe since belief is presupposed by the artwork as
virtual entity. No wonder then that so many artists today are attempting
to go beyond the making of objects, taking social interaction itself as
the direct instantiation of art. This becomes possible due to the
perverse core of art and is an indication of the transitivity of belief.
The paradox, however, is that if we take away whatever stands in for
belief, we lose the reality of the illusion and so any claim to
emancipation through the community of believers is equally annulled. The
function of the art world, therefore—critics, museums, magazines, even
this essay—is to maintain appearances, in particular, against any
agency or Master who would pretend to know everything. The master artist
is the person who possesses an almost God-like ability to both make art
and to simultaneously prohibit the making of art. This prohibition takes
the form in capitalist society of symbolic castration through surplus
value. A provisional definition of the avant-garde artist can therefore
be the condition of the acceptance of the inexistence of aesthetic
criteria. There are no guarantees for the social importance of artworks,
only the passage from creativity to consequences. For things to happen,
creation must be a condition of the truth of illusion.
### References
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*e-flux journal 21* (2010),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/editorial-18.
Bishop, Claire. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, *October 110*
(2004): 51-79.
Bishop, Claire. *Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of
Spectatorship*, London: Verso, 2012.
Bürger, Peter. *Theory of the Avant-Garde*, trans. Michael Shaw,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Graeber, David. ‘“The Sadness of Post-Workerism”, or, “Art and
Immaterial Labour” Conference: A Sort of Review’, 2008,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38093582/The-Sadness-of-Post-Workerism-David-Graeber.
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Imagineering*, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008.
Kester, Grant. *The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in
a Global Context*, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Léger, Marc James. ‘Art and Art History After Globalization’, *Third
Text* 26:5 (2012): 515-527.
Léger, Marc James. ‘The Subject Supposed to Over-Identify: BAVO and the
Fundamental Fantasy of a Cultural Avant Garde’, in Léger (ed.) *Brave
New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics*, Winchester,
UK: Zero Books, 2012.
Raunig, Gerald, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds). *Critique of
Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative
Industries’*, London: MayFly Books, 2011.
Roberts, John. ‘Art, “Enclave Theory” and the Communist Imaginary’,
*Third Text* 23:4 (2009): 353-367.
Sholette, Gregory. *Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of
Enterprise Culture*, London: Pluto, 2011.
Yúdice, George. *The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the
Global Era*, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Žižek, Slavoj. *The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy
Worth Fighting For?,* London: Verso, 2000.
Žižek, Slavoj. *Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism*, London: Verso, 2012.
[^1]: Slavoj Žižek, *The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian
Legacy Worth Fighting For?*, London: Verso, 2000, pp. 31-32.
[^2]: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle (eds),
‘Editorial’, *e-flux journal* 21 (2010),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/editorial-18.
[^3]: See Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds), *Critique of
Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative
Industries’*, London: MayFly Books, 2011.
[^4]: John Roberts, ‘Art, “Enclave Theory” and the Communist Imaginary’,
*Third Text* 23:4 (2009): 353, 358.
[^5]: David Graeber, ‘“The Sadness of Post-Workerism”, or “Art and
Immaterial Labour” Conference: A Sort of Review’, 2008,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38093582/The-Sadness-of-Post-Workerism-David-Graeber.
[^6]: Graeber, ‘“The Sadness of Post-Workerism”’.
[^7]: Slavoj Žižek, *Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism*, London: Verso, 2012, pp. 1-2.
[^8]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 1.
[^9]: Gregory Sholette, *Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of
Enterprise Culture*, London: Pluto, 2011, p. 1.
[^10]: Brian Holmes, *Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in
Reverse Imagineering*, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2008, p. 19.
[^11]: Holmes, *Unleashing the Collective Phantoms*, p. 81.
[^12]: Holmes, *Unleashing the Collective Phantoms*, p. 91.
[^13]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 1.
[^14]: Grant Kester, *The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative
Art in a Global Context*, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
[^15]: Kester, *The One and the Many*, pp. 36-37.
[^16]: Kester, *The One and the Many*, p. 49.
[^17]: Kester, *The One and the Many*, p. 4.
[^18]: George Yúdice, *The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the
Global Era*, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
[^19]: Yúdice, *The Expediency of Culture*, p. 9.
[^20]: Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, *October*
110 (2004): 51-79.
[^21]: Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’: 65.
[^22]: Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’: 67.
[^23]: Claire Bishop, *Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the
Politics of Spectatorship*, London: Verso, 2012.
[^24]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 2.
[^25]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 17.
[^26]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 17.
[^27]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 29.
[^28]: Marc James Léger, ‘Art and Art History After Globalization’,
*Third Text* 26:5 (2012): 515-527.
[^29]: Peter Bürger, *Theory of the Avant-Garde*, trans. Michael Shaw,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
[^30]: Marc James Léger, ‘The Subject Supposed to Over-Identify: BAVO
and the Fundamental Fantasy of a Cultural Avant Garde’, in Léger
(ed.), *Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and
Politics*, Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012.
[^31]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, p. 70.
[^32]: Žižek, *Less than Nothing*, pp. 106-11.
# The Art of New Class Geography of the City: Culture-Guided Urban Regeneration Serving the Modernization of the Periphery
### Ana Vilenica
*This text was written within the framework of the project ‘Creative
Work and Urban Regenerations’, financed by the Secretariat for Science
and Technological Development of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina,
as part of a campaign entitled ‘The Right to a First Chance’. One
version of this text was published in a collection of papers of the
Institute for Researching Art in Novi Sad: Vilenica, Ana, ‘Umetnost
regeneracije grada—Predu(z)metništvo kao biznis model novih
geopolitičkih konstelacija \[The Art of City Regeneration:
Artepreneurship as a Business Model of New Geopolitical
Constellations\]’.*
The capitalization of cultural resources has become a central issue of
post-industrial urban rule, and in capitalist societies art and culture
has become an important instrument in the processes of creating new
spatial and geopolitical constellations. Creative armies of designers
and artists are employed as a resource for cosmetic renovations of
cities, production of simulacra of authenticity and symbolic capital in
the process of creating a new class geography of the city. In the
context of Serbia, such a structural connection between culture, art and
capital is practiced within the framework of the project of
*cultivating* the capitalist periphery through the practices of
culture-guided urban regenerations wherein the art establishment,
cultural and creative industries and social-entrepreneurial art take
part. In the local context, culture-guided urban regenerations are most
often presented uncritically, as an always positive contribution of the
processes of city *development*, the shaping of its *identity*, its
*modernization* and *progress*, both in public narratives and in the
academic discourse. Such a discursive practice acts as an accomplice to
the attempts at smoothly carrying out aggressive processes of
transformation in cities that merely continue to produce the unendurable
state of enormous social disparities, the degradation of workers’ and
social rights and the environment, as well as the all-round
discrimination of all those who do not belong to the desirable higher
classes, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation. Understanding this state
of affairs, as well as the role of culture and art, in a situation of
constant production of manipulative images and false promises, turns out
to be an important perspective towards articulating possible future
forms of struggle and creation of ‘new territories’.[^1]
## Urban Regenerations and the Role of Art and Culture
In capitalist societies, the connection between art and urban
regenerations is established as a model of producing a new class
geography of the city.[^2] Such connections have been made possible
through the interpenetration of art and the entire social and cultural
production mechanism under the conditions of the cultural colonization
of life effected by capitalist production.[^3] Under these
circumstances, art has become a resource and one of the important places
when it comes to constructing power. The historical genesis of the
connection between art and the transformation of cities is linked to the
context of the USA and the 1970’s, when art created the preconditions
for the increase of real estate prices in reindustrialized cities[^4]
and thus for a new class recomposition of the city. In the districts
where artists came to live, art studios and art galleries proliferated,
and their symbolic capital increased the level of the rent, so that
poorer inhabitants of such districts tended to move out, and were
eventually followed by the artists themselves, who were replaced by
richer city dwellers. Today, the processes of class recomposition of
cities have been generalized at the global level, and their mechanisms
include manipulating *collective symbolic capital* as a new apparatus of
capitalist accumulation.[^5]
In the local context, the establishment of connections between art and
urban regenerations became possible with the forcible transformation of
socialist Yugoslavia after the 1990s and the establishment of new
capitalist relations. This change was accompanied by the wartime
destruction of cities—urbicide, the transformation of ownership
structure from social to private ownership, the switch from
self-management relations to capitalist-exploitative relations, the
development of corruption mechanisms and the absence of regulations when
it came to the acquisition of capital, deindustrialization, the
pauperization of the population, as well as the destruction of the
existing mechanisms for work in the domain of culture and art, and the
implementation of a new art/entrepreneurial model. In the era of
socialism, the development of cities was based on central urban
planning, and the state was the chief investor and planner of the new
modern socialist city, aimed at fulfilling the needs of the new
socialist man. Today, the new initiators of *urban development* are
private and corporate investors, acting in cooperation with the state,
city administration, global financial institutions, civil society
organizations, and also with artists and workers in the sphere of
culture.[^6] This kind of *investor planning* is characterized by a
continual search for a profitable terrain where a surplus of value can
be achieved, which is controlled by particular elites. In such a
situation, urban regenerations no longer represent merely an act of
repairing the neglected parts of the city, but most often constitute a
radical act of pulling down the existing buildings and building new
ones. Such processes are no longer a part of systematic thinking about
cities. The idea and role of a general urban planning design almost
matter not at all, for an investor who purchases a cheap plot of land,
having previously deliberately lowered the building costs, will not have
any great difficulties when it comes to changing the regulated function
of that particular area. In this way, the city stops being a space where
one strives to establish at least a nominal equality of its inhabitants,
and becomes a space of drastic social and economic inequalities and
tensions. The development of cities is promoted through new optimistic
visions promising benefits for all. This urban optimism simultaneously
hides the process of the creation of new class topography of the city,
and a revengeful attitude towards those inhabitants who are not among
the privileged ones.[^7]
Art and culture become an instrument and accomplices in such processes
through the inclusion of creativity as applied imagination in the
processes of producing optimistic urban visions. That is what
metanarratives about creative industries, creative cities and creative
economy are all about.[^8] In these narratives, culture and art are
reduced to their economic function in the project of attracting
investors, tourism and stimulating the economy through a reduction of
labor costs and social contributions, giving a boost to the
entrepreneurial model of work, privatization of culture and maximizing
profit. On the one hand, it is an urban mantra, and on the other, it
constitutes a social-economic and cultural policy. What is at work here
is a complex mechanism that absorbs all the aspects of life in
exercising control and exploitation in cities. In the local context and
in other so-called transitional societies, the introduction of the
cultural industry and the implementation of ideas about creative economy
and creative city are viewed as an act of modernizing a *backward*
society. The insufficient presence of such practices is explained by the
incompatibility of the administrative, legal, banking and business
systems in post-socialist countries with those of ‘advanced
economies’.[^9] In countries of South-Eastern Europe, this
*modernization model* is implemented through state policies, the
policies of cultural institutions and missions such as the British
Council or the Goethe Institute, and also as a business strategy of
private investors. Thus big cities in Serbia are regenerated through
European and local *policies* about creative cities, such as the
*Belgradisation of Belgrade* project and Belgrade’s bid for a European
Capital of Culture in 2020,[^10] as well as the latest EU cultural
project entitled *Creative Europe*. Also, regeneration is carried out by
organizing cultural, entertainment or sports events such as the
*Universiade* or the *Eurovision Song Contest*, and through individual
projects promoting cultural industries and art as a generator of urban
regeneration processes[^11] and a guarantor of social inclusion in their
implementation. Such practices are aimed at creating an image of the
city as an innovative, exciting, creative and safe place for living,
playing and consumption, promising benefits for all, whereas what is, in
fact, being planned is a city of walled fortresses wherein the elite and
its way of life are to be reproduced.
In the local context, since the 1990’s culture and art have become an
instrument of *progressive* *EU* *policies* aimed at creating an
environment conducive to effecting a transition to neoliberal capitalism
by way of carrying out the so-called *democratization of culture*, the
proclaimed goal of which was to free art and culture from the patronage
of the state and the Party, as a system which, allegedly, *a priori*
jeopardizes the basic human rights and the potential for creative
expression of individuals. What was produced in this process was a new
entrepreneurial subject of the artist, one no longer protected through
public financing but struggling for him/herself on the market.[^12] In
this way, art was used as a convenient tool for *cultivating* people on
the capitalist periphery. This neo-colonial process has not been
finished yet. Today, it is reproduced in the sphere of the
implementation of cultural industries and social-entrepreneurial art
used in the project of a *new modernization* of local society, which is
viewed as backward, and is particularly in evidence in the cases of
instrumentalization of art in the processes of urban regenerations. A
new profile of the artist that is promoted in this way is the
entrepreneurial artist-artepreneur[^13] who resolves problems in a
non-linear and creative manner. He/she is a precarious worker who
manages his/her human capital through self-employment from one project
to another. The figure of artepreneur assumes a particularly important
role in times of crisis, when it emerges, on the one hand, as a victim
of the macroeconomic situation, and on the other, as a force that brings
salvation.[^14] In contemporary art, the very idea of emancipation and
activism has become an issue related to entrepreneurship, and thereby,
being placed in the service of capital, normalized to a great extent.
## Art-guided Urban Regenerations in Belgrade
In Serbia, culture- and art-guided urban regenerations have been
promoted over the course of the past decade, and the realization of such
ideas has only intensified in the last few years. We find examples of
practices of culture- and art-guided urban regenerations in Serbia in
big cities, mostly in Belgrade, where the political, economic and
cultural life of Serbia is centralized. The epicenter of such activities
is in the area of Belgrade’s riverbanks, which is currently the most
exclusive and profitable location in Belgrade. There has been interest
in the areas on the banks of the Sava and Danube rivers for a number of
years, and various projects prepared for that part of the city have
reflected the political, economic and cultural climate in the newly
established state. In early 1990, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and
Arts called an internal tender, within the framework of which the
project ‘Water City’ emerged, and in 1996 the Socialist Party of Serbia
commissioned the project *Europolis*.[^15] These projects have never
been realized, but that part of the city has never stopped attracting
the attention of new investors and the political parties in power, most
often during the course of pre-election campaigns.
The interest shown in Belgrade’s riverbanks is not accidental and does
not concern only the attractiveness of the actual location. It also has
to do with the systematic work aimed at creating a new identity for
Serbia and Belgrade, in a place which, during the pre-socialist period,
in the first half of the 19th century, was projected to become the
economic centre of the city.[^16] It was there that the history of
capitalist Serbia was made, aiming to establish a continuity through a
systematic erasure of the socialist history and the industrial
development of this area. What is worrying about this is the fact that
this old Belgrade was a city of enormous class differences, where more
than 80% of the population lived in extreme poverty.[^17] The riverbanks
are also a place of memory engineering, connected with the recent
history of the wars fought in the 1990’s on the territory of the former
Yugoslavia, which represents a continuation of the processes of
historical revisionism in Serbia, without which a projection of Belgrade
as a new European-Serbian urban centre for the higher classes is not
possible. One of the first great state projects of the regeneration of
that area was the renovation of Sava Square[^18], which began by the
expulsion of female sexual workers from the area, whose place was taken
over by a new revisionist monument to all war victims and defenders of
the homeland in the 1990-1999 period, thus equating victims and
executioners, and continuing the tradition of forgetting the fact that
the role of Serbia in those wars was that of an aggressor.
Today, that profitable area has become a battlefield where two
megaprojects vie for power: the project launched by the privately owned
company the Port of Belgrade entitled *Water City*, and the project
initiated by the Government of Serbia entitled *Belgrade on Water*.
*Water City* is an elite settlement occupying an area of 96 hectares of
land, whereas *Belgrade on Water* occupies a considerably larger area of
around 950 hectares of land, for which, apart from housing, the building
of business parks and a new port for yachts are also planned.[^19] By
planning the processes of urban regenerations and involving art and
cultural industries in the local strategic plans, the new creators of
optimistic visions wish to make Belgrade a part of the world market of
cities and make up for the decline of economic activities in the city.
The main social trump card of these projects is their promise to resolve
the problem of unemployment by creating new jobs in the sphere of
construction work during the realization phase, in the service sector of
the new walled communities, and also in the sector of cultural
industries, whereas what is happening in practice is a flexibilization
and deregulation of the procedures for investors and undertakers,
coupled with a degradation of workers’ rights, which means an
increasingly frantic exploitation of all those engaged on the projects.
Experienced engineers of urban transformations, such as renowned world
architects, as well as mayors of cities wherein such processes have been
practiced, have already been involved in the initiation of urban
regeneration processes through the projects *Water City* and *Belgrade
on Water*. Thus the main designer of the *Water City* project is the
studio of Daniel Libeskind, whose biography includes numerous projects
through which similar processes have been initiated in other cities, and
the main consultant of the *Belgrade on Water* project is the well-known
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose brutal class and racist cleansing
of New York in the 1990’s is well known.[^20] The initial phases of both
projects involve the use of art and cultural industries, which play the
key role in the preparatory phase of changing the function of the area
in question. They are a part of the marketing strategy for promoting its
transformation, as well as a *guarantor of* *the social awareness* of
new spatial transformations. These involve the projects *Soho in
Belgrade*, *Mixer* and *Urban Incubator*.
The project ‘Soho in Belgrade’ was initiated by the Port of Belgrade
company in 2012, as part of preparations for the realization of *Water
City*. The project presupposed enabling artists with well-established
reputations to use studios, free of charge, in one of the warehouses
inside the port, located in Dunavska Street, which formerly belonged to
the *Srbijateks* company. The aim of this joint initiative of tycoons
and the art establishment was the creation of the so-called *Soho
effect*. Over the past several years, this term has become a synonym for
urban regenerations in a number of instances involving the relocation of
art studios and artists’ flats to derelict part of cities in the hope of
producing additional symbolic capital and thus initiating the
accumulation of capital. In the case of the project *Soho in Belgrade*,
the bringing of artists to the warehouse had another function in
addition to the aforementioned one, namely, participation in the process
of changing the purpose of the space where the port operator is
located.[^21] What this is all about are the efforts of the *Worldfin*
company to close down the port through a drastic reduction of its scope
of business operations, and to effect a symbolic and legal change of its
function, so as to be able to build a new luxury settlement on that plot
of land. From the very start, the new owner wanted to hide the fact
that, according to the general urban plan, that plot of land was
designated to have an economic function, and that its privatization
involved a port operator only. Through corruptive arrangements between
political parties and tycoons, a change of the general urban plan was
brought about, so that the function of that part of the city was changed
from an economic one to a housing-commercial one. Further room for
maneuvering was provided by the problem that arose over entering the
city in the registry book as the owner of the said plot of land. To put
it more precisely, the new owners made use of the fact that the city
failed to observe the deadline and submitted incomplete documentation,
and proclaimed that plot of land to be theirs. Apart from the change of
the general urban plan, manipulation over entering the owner in the
registry book and the reduction of the operative capacity of the port
operator, art was also involved in the process of changing the function
of that plot of land through the project *Soho in Belgrade*.
That artists are activists operating in the service of local tycoons is
evidenced by the situation that arose after the Ministry of
Infrastructure and Energy, acting upon a request submitted by the
Anti-Corruption Council, passed a decision on evicting artists from the
Port of Belgrade on account of irregularities in the procedure of
allocating studios to artists. Artists from Soho mobilized themselves in
defense of the owner of the Port, whom they presented to the public as a
new patron of the arts who, as opposed to the state, provided artists
with a *roof above their heads.*[^22] It is a fact that the working
conditions of artists, after the degradation of the socialist-era
mechanisms that enabled artists to obtain a studio, had become almost
unendurable. However, the artists in question here are not a part of the
class of artists who do need help. These are successful
artists-entrepreneurs, who are favorably positioned on the world art
market, most of whom do have their own working space, whereas some of
them do not live in Belgrade. These *Sohoite* artists constitute the
embodiment of everything that the new art establishment represents
today. These are positions that are defended through a return to
aestheticism and individual expression as the main criterion of art.
Within the framework of this kind of positioning, opportunism and
commercialism become desirable characteristics and a generator of
success. What is at work here is a reactionary artistic practice that is
articulated in opposition to the domain of critical and contextual
practices, with which it enters into an open conflict through its
insistence on being separated from sociability as the measure of true
art. In Belgrade’s Soho, studios were allocated to select elite artists,
without anything in the nature of a public competition, which resulted
in the exclusion of those artists who are engaged in non-market-oriented
artistic practices, who are dependent on public financing and who do
need a working space. This resulted in an unbridgeable gap on the art
scene, which became visible to the public when the *Sohoites* organized
a panel discussion at the Kolarac People’s University, in the course of
which public interest was defended by a group of artists presenting
themselves as *The World Communal Heritage*. [^23]
To the present day, the artists in the service of tycoons have not been
evicted from the studios in the *Srbijateks* warehouse, for the
commission that is supposed to carry out their eviction has never
inspected the site, which, once again, serves to hide the corruptive
mechanisms in the state. The epilogue of the story about the Port of
Belgrade commenced in August 2013, through the initiation of the
bankruptcy procedure. Parallel with this, the Government of Serbia,
through the representatives of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party,
embarked on a new campaign of promoting the project *Belgrade on
Water*.[^24] It is important to point out that a part of the project
*Belgrade on Water* is being planned on the plot of land held by the
operator of the Port of Belgrade, which sheds more light on why the
bankruptcy procedure is being initiated right now, despite the efforts
of the Anti-Corruption Agency of many years to point out the
irregularities surrounding the privatization and operation of that
company. In this case, it would appear that the more powerful
bureaucrats have used the tycoons to close down the port operations in
order to take over a part of the land already prepared for this purpose.
Even though the project *Belgrade on Water* was presented to the public
only midway through 2013, systematic preparations for its implementation
have been carried out for several years, by engaging art and cultural
industries in the district which, by means of the fabrication of
tradition, has become known again under the name of Savamala. The model
of regeneration being implemented in Savamala today is based on an
attempt to introduce a creative economy through creative industries,
within the framework of a project of increasing the symbolic capital of
the place and resolving the problem of economic deficit through
*creativization* and artistic-communal-participatory-social
entrepreneurship with a view to normalizing the situation of social
dissatisfaction, as well as a new legitimization of the history of the
place. These processes were not initiated by the city authorities but by
*independent* cultural initiatives, in cooperation with business groups
and with the German cultural mission—the Goethe Institute. Still, the
city and municipal authorities support the initiatives undertaken
through budget financing, allowing the use of space owned by the city,
and through affirmation by means of projects of establishing creative
economies and producing a creative city such as *Belgrade 2020*, which
accompanies Belgrade’s bid for a European Capital of Culture.
The introduction and affirmation of cultural industries and stimulation
of the development of entrepreneurial creative economy as a form of
social activism and struggle for the revitalization of Savamala is a
task set by the project *Mixer*, which includes the eponymous festival
and the newly opened venue *Mixer House*.[^25] Even though *Mixer*
proposes a model of partnership with the business sector, as a practice
of the *de-etatization* of the creative sector and its *liberation*, in
a parallel development public budget funds are invested in the project
through a number of public companies and funds, which clearly shows a
switch in the domain of public financing—from support given to
critical practices to support given to commercial initiatives. The idea
of *Mixer* is to turn Belgrade into a Balkan creative centre and
incubator for young creative talents by developing the concept of the
creative city with a nucleus in the industrial zone that is losing its
function. What is at work here are efforts aimed at the accumulation of
symbolic capital in Savamala through the promotion of established
creators and entertainers, and through a frantic exploitation of all
those who are not privileged. The ethics of entrepreneurial
inventiveness is used to hide the issue of the precarious work
conditions of those who do not belong to the top echelon, their enforced
volunteer work and the imposition of hierarchical models, and often the
investment of the personal funds of young artists during the realization
of works that are featured in the programs of ‘Mixer’. On the other
hand, ‘Mixer’ is also a form of incubator for producing an army of
creative workers who are supposed to set the creative industry in
motion, as a sphere that is broader than cultural industries, in the
domain of a new urbanization of Belgrade. *Mixer* is deeply involved in
the processes of the so-called ‘creative destruction [^26] through
initiating new mechanisms for the accumulation of capital in the course
of paving the way for the arrival of investors and the building of
*Water City*. It is one of those entrepreneurial tactics that glorifies
the successes of individuals and neglects the failures of the majority,
and instead of new social networks, it offers alienated consumerism.
What is created in this way is a false promise of creating new
*authentic* relations, paving the way for capitalist uniformity at all
levels.
Parallel with *Mixer*, the processes of urban regenerations in Savamala
are also initiated using a somewhat different method, through the
practices of communal-participative-social art, as a subgroup of the
creative sector, which are realized within the framework of the Goethe
Institute project *Urban Incubator*.[^27] *Urban Incubator* was
presented as a participative model of urban development, whose aim is to
improve the quality of life of the local population and to *democratize*
the process of decision-making by means of a higher degree of
involvement of the inhabitants of the district. The project is a
short-term one, will last one year, and during that time it should
accumulate symbolic capital and increase the market value of the
district, following which the artists will withdraw, leaving room for
the coming of investors and the development of tourism. *Urban
Incubator* represents an attempt at implementing the *Western model* of
culture-guided urban regeneration in the local context (of the eleven
projects that were accepted in the competition, only two were initiated
by local artists and architects), and has been recognized as such by the
local city authorities and the municipality of Savski venac—as having
potential for the *development* of Savamala.
Realizing projects within the framework of *Urban Incubator*, the
artists engaged assume the competencies of urban planners, social
workers, ethnographers and researchers, and pass themselves off as
experts when it comes to reinventing the space of Savamala through
interventions in public space, collecting personal stories from the
community, participative design, *crowdsourcing*, designing small
businesses and micro factories with a view to enlivening the area and
engaging people from the local community in order to establish a
continuity with the entrepreneurial history of the place. Such an
artistic practice represents a specific architecture of the community
that includes economic exchange, civic life, public property and the
establishment of various new connections. What is evident about this
project is that it privileges participative art as a tool for cosmetic
interventions aimed at resolving the systemic problems of Savamala, or
even resorting to enforced participation or imposing parameters of art
projects onto the inhabitants of Savamala with the intention of
‘beautifying their living space and increasing the market value of their
flats’.[^28] This coupling points to the ideological subtext of
participative-social-entrepreneurial artistic practices, which can be
defined as a *culturalization of politics* or a dislocation of discourse
on complex and provocative social and political topics into the sphere
of culture and art.[^29] ‘Urban Incubator’ is a symptom of social
architects’ *paranoid fear* of social unrest, and they engage art as a
*dependable means* of pacifying the accumulated dissatisfaction of the
inhabitants of Savamala, offering them a promise of a better life, all
the while, in fact, paving the way for the arrival of real estate
traders and opening more and more nightclubs and cafés.
## Conclusion
The transformation of the existing socialist structures and mechanisms
of cultural and artistic production, as well as the abandonment of
certain projects of sociability, the diminishing and increasingly
non-transparent public financing and the devastation of cultural
institutions, as well as giving in to the operation of the market
forces, have created conditions that are unendurable for the vast
majority of artists and workers in the sphere of culture. Seemingly
paradoxically, the public and investors give their support to the art
establishment and initiatives that promote *apolitical* entrepreneurial
artistic-designer practices. The creation of such conditions has
produced a fertile soil for manipulation and instrumentalization of art
by the state and its powerful bureaucrats, tycoons and their firms and
corporations, the cultural missions of national European states and the
broader EU policies, as well as local cultural entrepreneurs who believe
that they are on their way to becoming capitalists.
As has been shown in the local context and in countries of the
periphery, what is at work here is practicing certain creative-economic
models of regeneration of cities in the name of the *modernization* and
*democratization* of local society and its economy, within the framework
of which are intertwined *national and neo-colonial modernization*,
which act as accomplices in the process of producing the spaces of
capitalist periphery. What this is about is the implementation of new
neoliberal regimes of producing cities and creating conditions for
producing a new class geography in spaces where there are still
populations of different social and economic status living together,
and, naturally enough, the production of new mechanisms of
flexibilization of work and legislation in a project wherein the local
environment continues to be produced as a resource for *the developed
world*, and which is kept under control by means of carefully measured
loans which create a condition of *debt slavery*. Through the use of
art, culture and the cultural industry, *Western models* of urban
regenerations are implemented, the intention being to produce a quick
effect of changing the function of the given space, increasing its
symbolic capital, producing a new *identity* of the city, introducing
new forms of capitalist economy, as well as normalizing potential social
conflicts.
Still, despite their above-mentioned instrumental function in the
processes of reshaping cities, art, creativity and culture can also
represent significant factors of the destabilization of such *smooth*
processes of capital-guided urban transformation, and can participate in
producing a city based on different and more egalitarian relations,
outside the proven exploitative relations of power and division of
labor. For them to be established as such, it is necessary, to begin
with, to articulate a radical class critique of the (newly established)
capitalist relations in formerly socialist cities in Serbia, as well as
a critique of the use of art and culture, and also to be engaged in
continual theoretical-activistic-political work on producing different
relations, which are anxiously articulated today through certain local
practices in a state of *insobriety* produced by the social
transformation and the new rules of the game wherein (artistic and
cultural) activism becomes an instrument of capital.
### References
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Vilenica, Ana. *Teorije i prakse aktivizma u umetnosti u drugoj polovini XX veka* \[*Theories and Practices of Activism in Art in the Second Half of the 20th Century*\], PhD thesis, The University of the Arts, University of Belgrade, 2012.
Vilenica, Ana and kuda.org. ‘Preuzmimo grad! Kako? \[Let’s Take Over the City! How?\], in Vilenica, Ana, kuda.org, *Na ruševinama kreativnog grada*, Novi Sad: kuda.org, 2012.
Vilenica, Ana. ‘Soho u Beogradu: Umetnička elita u službi tajkuna \[Soho in Belgrade: The Art Elite in the Service of Tycoons\], in nsparentnost *2012*, 14 September 2011.
Vuksanović-Macura, Zlata. *Život na ivici: Stanovanje sirotinje u Beogradu 1919-1941* \[*Living on the Edge: The Housing of the Poor in Belgrade 1919-1941*\], Belgrade: Orion Art, 2012.
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[^1]: Raúl Zibechi, *Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements*, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2012.
[^2]: David Harvey, *Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution*, London: Verso, 2012; Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles, *No Room to Move: Radical Art and Regenerate City*, London: Mute, 2010; Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Kreativna sabotaža u fabrici kulture: umetnost, džentrifikacija i metropola \[Creative Sabotage in the Culture Factory: Art, Gentrification and the Metropolis\], in Ana Vilenica and kuda.org. *Na ruševinama kreativnog grada*, Novi Sad: kuda.org, 2012.
[^3]: Fredric Jameson, *Postmodernizam u kasnom kapitalizmu* \[*Postmodernism in Late Capitalism*\], Belgrade: KIZ Art Press, 1995; Ana Vilenica, *Teorije i prakse aktivizma u umetnosti u drugoj polovini XX veka* \[*Theories and Practices of Activism in Art in the Second Half of the 20th Century*\], PhD thesis, The University of the Arts, University of Belgrade, 2012.
[^4]: Rosalyn Deutsche and Gandel Cara Rian, ‘The Fine Art of Gentrification’, *October* 31 (Winter, 1984): 91-111.
[^5]: David Harvey, *Rebel Cities*.
[^6]: Ana Vilenica and kuda.org, ‘Preuzmimo grad! Kako? \[Let’s Take Over the City! How?\], in Vilenica, Ana, kuda.org, *Na ruševinama kreativnog grada*, Novi Sad: kuda.org, 2012.
[^7]: Neil Smith, *New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City*, London: Routledge, 1996.
[^8]: Richard Florida, *Cities and the Creative Class*, London: Routledge, 2005; UN CER. United Nations Creative Economy Report (UN CER), United Nations, 2008,
http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditc20082cer\_en.pdf; Nada Švob-Đokić (ed.) *The Emerging Creative industries in Southeastern Europe*, Zagreb: Institute for International Relations, 2005.
[^9]: Inga Tomić-Koludrović, Mirko Petrić, ‘Creative Industries in Transition: Towards a Creative Economy?’, in Nada Švob-Đokić (ed.), *The Emerging Creative industries in Southeastern Europe*.
[^10]: Vida Knežević, Marko Miletić, ‘Beograd 2020: Grad čuda, nova kulturna politika u Srbiji i prostori borbe \[Belgrade 2020: A City of Wonder, the New Cultural Policy in Serbia and the Spaces of Struggle\]’ in Ana Vilenica, kuda.org, *Na ruševinama kreativnog grada* \[*On the Ruins of the Creative City*\], Novi Sad: kuda.org, 2012.
[^11]: Vilenica and kuda.org, ‘Preuzmimo grad! Kako? \[Let’s Take Over the City! How?\]’.
[^12]: Dušan Grlja, ‘Antinomies of Post-Socialist Autonomy’, *Red Thread*, 2009, http://www.red-thread.org/en/article.asp?a=16.
[^13]: Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, ‘Organising Reality Machines: Artepreneurs and the New Aesthetic Enlightenment’, in Daniel Hjorth (ed.), *Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship*, Northampton:Edward Elgar, 2012.
[^14]: Campbell Jones and Anna-Maria Murtola, ‘Entrepreneurship, Crisis, Critique’, in Daniel Hjorth (ed.), *Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship*.
[^15]: ‘Beograd na vodi ili političari u kampanji \[Belgrade on Water or Politicians Campaigning\], *Politika*, 11 August 2013, http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Beograd/Beograd-na-vodi-ili-politicari-u-kampanji.lt.html.
[^16]: Miloš Jovanović, *Constructing the National Capital*, master diss., CEU, Budapest, 2008.
[^17]: Zlata Vuksanović-Macura, *Život na ivici: Stanovanje sirotinje u Beogradu 1919-1941* \[*Living on the Edge: The Housing of the Poor in Belgrade 1919-1941*\], Belgrade: Orion Art, 2012.
[^18]: ‘Uskoro novo lice Savskog trga \[Soon, a New Look of Sava Square\], *Blic*, 28 November 2011,
[^19]: Večernje novosti, 14 October 2013, Politika, 11 August 2013, ‘Water City’: the Port of Belgrade, 2010.
[^20]: Smith, 1996, Politika, 11 September 2012.
[^21]: Ana Vilenica, ‘Soho u Beogradu: Umetnička elita u službi tajkuna \[Soho in Belgrade: The Art Elite in the Service of Tycoons\], in *Maribor 2012*, 14 September 2011, http://82.149.22.226/\~mobcinamb/index.php?ptype=8&menu=0&id=220&Pid=617.
[^22]: Vilenica, ‘Soho u Beogradu’.
[^23]: Vilenica, ‘Soho u Beogradu’.
[^24]: ‘Pokrenut stečaj Luke Beograd \[The Bankruptcy Procedure Initiated for the Port of Belgrade\], *Vreme*, 6 August 2013, http://www.vreme.rs/cms/view.php?id=1130342.
[^25]: Mikser \[Mixer\], 4 August 2013, http://blog.mikser.rs/o-mikseru.
[^26]: Marshall Berman, *All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity*, Ringwood: Viking Penguin. 1988; David Harvey, *The Condition of Postmodernity*. Cambridge MA and Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1992.
[^27]: Urban Incubator Belgrade, http://www.goethe.de/ins/cs/bel/prj/uic/enindex.htm.
[^28]: C5, School of Urban Practices, http://projectc5.blogspot.it/ (http://www.academia.edu/771895/On_participatory_art_Interview_with_Claire_Bishop).
[^29]: George Yudice, *The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era*, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
# The Creative Factory: Collective Creativity and Autonomy in the Neoliberal Machine of Creative Industries
### Sandi Abram
## Introduction: Genteel Capital Courtship
A maxim constantly repeated by the Ljubljana Mayor in the last few years
has been ‘Ljubljana – the most beautiful city in the world’. The
sentence condenses the dominant urbanistic managerial ideology of the
Municipality of Ljubljana (hereafter MOL): the ideology of consumerist
attractiveness. The grandiose urban plans following this directive are
transforming the city into a postcard in order to send it and sell it,
especially to the urban tourism industry which clings to the public
image-making as well as to other formations of capital. The
straightjacketing of the public space into lucrative, sterile, and
disciplinary logic is not anything new. Yet some strategies of the
neoliberal urbanism in city espoused with the reproduction of capital
seem to be the new ones. Whereas the cultural consumption was fuelling
the city’s symbolic economy[^1] for quite a while, the cities in the
21st century strain themselves to become areas of peculiar multifaceted
production closely intertwined with consumption once again. This time
they are shaping a pervasive marketing coalition between the cultural
and art establishments, real estate speculators, service business, and
city councils.
The contemporary urban tourism industry ceases to have the privileged
sole position of the producer of surplus value in the metropolis.
Instead, the neoliberal capital colonization is invading new spheres and
ways of surplus extraction, while mimicking the ideological processes of
gentrification under ‘new planetary vulgates,’[^2] such as the
territorial ‘creative milieu’[^3] or the metropolitan ‘creative
city.’[^4] The proponents of such ‘new urban economy’[^5] tend to
blindly follow Florida’s nostrum of the new paradigm for urban planning
that can be found his all-encompassing predicament: ‘Human creativity is
the ultimate source of economic growth.’[^6] The territorial intertwines
with the cognitive colonization only to become a situated ‘creative
economy’ in the era of cognitive capitalism.
We can witness the entire trajectory of these processes through the case
of a former bicycle factory in Ljubljana. Located in immediate vicinity
of the city centre, the Rog factory operated until 1991, then remained
closed and abandoned until 2006,[^7] when, after 15 long years of
stagnation, the group TEMP, along with a conglomerate of other praxes
and realities,[^8] reclaimed the factory for temporary use and brought
the Fordist Frankenstein back to life. From 2010 onwards, the
reappropriation of the commons was claimed. Ever since their liberation
and reanimation, the spaces in Rog² present an open cultural, social,
and political hub giving shelter to a multitude of autonomous collective
political subjects[^9] as well as to a broad range of artists and sports
enthusiasts practicing horizontal organization and communication on a
daily basis.
In order to demonstrate how the paradigmatic shift to postfordist
cognitive capitalism is taking place and form in Ljubljana, I divided
the article into three sections. It starts by introducing the project
based on a public-private partnership bearing the name *Second Chance*,
then highlighting its initial intentions with the autonomous Rog and the
neoliberal discourse while advocating creative industries, urban
regeneration etc. After problematizing the premises of the ‘new urban
economy’ and of the designed emplacement of cognitive capitalism, the
article focuses on pilot project RogLab which is seen as a pervasive
creation of creative industries installed in the interim phase between
the unveiling of the megalomaniac plans and their implementation by the
owner of the factory, MOL. The third and concluding instance deals with
the changed spatial design, showing the proposed publically financed
gradual construction, or rather demolition, of the liberated Rog factory
which has, in fact, the purpose of neutralization and eradication of the
autonomous collective creativity in Rog, giving space to gentrification.
## The Public-Private Partnership Model as a Pan-European Paradigm of Gentrification: Second Chance
Starting with the year 2010, MOL’s endeavour to castrate Rog was wrapped
inside a benevolent cellophane, launched under the name the Second
Chance. The former Rog factory joined other postindustrial sites
including the former AEG factory (Nuremberg), HALLE 14 of the former
Cotton Spinning Mill (Leipzig), the tram depot (Krakow) and the Arsenale
(Venice). In order to understand the vulgar slogan of *Second Chance*
‘from industrial use to creative impulse’ we shall dwell directly on the
project’s description:
> \[The slogan\] \[i\]t is a vision of five European cities to transform
> a disused industrial site into a cultural and creative work and living
> space and continuing their revitalization with sustainable concepts.
> \[…\] Nuremberg, Leipzig, Venice, Krakow and Ljubljana work
> together[^10] to develop innovative strategies and concepts to upgrade
> their former industrial site to a key cultural linchpin of the city’s
> district. The cities face the same challenges of developing a heritage
> and former industrial sites. Even though the revitalization process is
> at different stages in the five cities, the partners share the same
> questions, challenges, opportunities and goals. \[…\][^11]
According to the initial plan, and through the private-public
partnership model, the buildings would be levelled first to the ground,
and then, once the ruins were cleaned up, the Centre of Contemporary
Arts was to be planned on top. To complement this grotesque picture, the
entire Rog’s surface (around 7,000 square meter) was to be split into
private (80.69%) and public (19.31%) ownership, whereby the private
‘content’ would comprise a residential (apartments, underground
garages), hotel and business section, while the public part were to be
exclusively reserved for *creative industries* (multi-purpose halls,
exhibition surfaces, studios etc.).[^12] The logic behind the two
bedfellows under neoliberalism is that the public would finance the
private and the private would parasite on public benefits. The
ideological premises nesting in the plan were in the apparent
satisfaction of both sectors: the private sector with profit-making
spaces and pseudopublic spaces as non-profit contents were to be
designed for the public.
However, the unveiled case of the expropriation of the commons is far
from being satisfactory. It is necessary to scale the whole problem on
the level of new urban regime which does not necessarily cling any
longer on the art world, as it symptomatically proposes to erect the
Centre of Contemporary Arts as well as spaces for arts and culture to be
featured inside. To expand a Hannah Arendt’s thought into the milieu of
‘creative capitalism’, the privatization of the public *and* the commons
is intimately connected to the privatization of the political. And to
put it differently, gentrification through art was complemented with the
gentrification through ‘creativity’. The culturalization of capital
under a new panacea for post-industrial sites means: creative
‘revitalization through arts and culture’.[^13]
Generally speaking, gentrification can manifest in three forms:
traditional, modern, and artificial.[^14] The traditional one is
produced by exploiting historical and social ‘guardians of collective
symbolic and cultural capital (the museums, the universities, the class
of benefactors, and the state apparatus)’.[^15] The modern one is
produced by exploiting the art world and urban subcultures as the
artificial gentrification is a strategy generated by city councils
through public campaigns which promote the creative city in order to
attract investments and highly skilled workers.[^16] Concomitantly, the
‘\[q\]uality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city
itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and
knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban
political economy’.[^17]
What remains overshadowed is the mode of accumulation of the *collective
symbolic capital*. This capital, after Slovenia’s transition to
neoliberalism, was not exploited due to MOL’s active negation of the
autonomous cultural production in Rog today. In this sense, neither
squatters nor artists or other users of the postindustrial Rog had the
role of ‘bridge gentrifiers’[^18], i.e. transitional tenants, who would
be tolerated only until they raised property value. For example, in
Lower East Side (New York City) ‘\[t\]he artists were pioneers of
gentrification in this new frontier for the middle class, by creating an
art scene and community, combining the use of their space for living,
producing, performing and exhibiting.’[^19]
Instead of what Zukin[^20] termed ‘artistic mode of production’, the
parasitism through which the *Second Chance* has been building upon its
campaign, is availing to the emplaced and sediment collective symbolic
capital. It also accumulated during the socialistic industrial era and
strongly underlined the embedded collective memory. The ‘unique cultural
assets’[^21] of the former Rog industrial complex are in fact just
‘\[…\] special marks of distinction that attach to some place, as they
have a significant drawing power upon the flows of capital more
generally.’[^22] Concisely, claims to the uniqueness yield monopoly
rent.[^23]
I shall underline here another passage from the project’s description:
‘The cities face the same challenges of *developing a heritage and
landmarked former industrial sites*’.[^24] The claim indicates that the
accumulation of the *collective symbolic capital* would combine a
symbolic musealization of the localized ‘unique’ socialist remains
*with* the outlined cultural capital (the projected art spaces and
institutions) *in order to*, lastly, pave the way for capital
accumulation under the banner of creative industries. Thus, the
traditional way of gentrification will intertwine the (pseudo)modern and
the artificial form.
One of the premises of the pan-European *Second Chance* is therefore
purely teleological: the cognitariat would superimpose the bygone
proletariat which once laboured in these spaces spanning from
shipbuilders to bicycle factory workers. What is a better way to
illuminate the triumph of the bright ‘progressive’ capitalism over the
obscure ‘archaic’ socialism? Here also could fit the statement of the
MOL’s Head of Department for Culture expressed at the unveiling of the
new plans (which will be discussed in more detail later). According to
her, Rog will become a point of interest for the new generation of young
architects and designers, which will ‘get in the city centre a space and
tools for entering the labor market’.[^25]
Moreover, by perpetually referring to the *disused* and *(former) Rog
factory* the *Second Chance* is not only imaginarily discarding the
emplaced collective body from the past of a Yugoslav industrial
flagship, but rather the recuperation is broadened onto the semantic
level with a metonymy, castling the factory’s original denomination
(i.e. Rog) and by continuously repeating the Rog’s (distorted)
condition. The capitalist exploitation coated itself in ‘creativity’
abandoning the division between former/present, as the case of Rog
shows. The denial of this binarity is necessary, or else the legitimacy
of subjectivities present within Rog would be acknowledged.
In this view, an left-out part of the *Second Chance* description is to be
understood: ‘\[These postindustrial sites are\] the industrial estates
who deserve this 2nd chance.’[^26] The positioning of the *Second Chance*
in the linear continuation of the paternalistic logic of urbanism (the
anthropomorphized discourse of giving estates a second opportunity)[^27]
is actively denying the collective reappropiation of the space in 2006
as well as it is denying the ongoing manifold autonomous cultural,
social, and political production being housed in the buildings.[^28]
This attempt to revive a space already revived[^29] can signal only one
thing: creative industries will lie on the ashes of autonomous
collective creativity. One could go that far to delineate the latter as
a fetishist urban necrophilia: the compulsive reuse of the moribund
object-factory as a stimulus of capital consolation (or better yet,
accumulation). It is an object to which either any of the current
vivacity is apathetically negated, either to which the emancipating
collective creativity will be institutionally euthanatized by turning it
into an urban corpse – or only to be repossessed later. Once the
collective creative capital failed to undergo capitalist valorization,
the only attraction left to the capital and managerial establishment is
to cling to the cadaveric proletarian collective ‘body’.
Pointed out by Pasquinelli, Harvey’s *collective symbolic capital* can
be conceived as another name for the ‘*capitalist exploitation of the
commons* – a form of exploitation that does not need violent
enclosures’.[^30] Here the notion of violence deserves further
attention. Ever since Rog’s reappropriation, MOL is intentionally
leaving Rog in deficient circumstances, without the minimal material
conditions; ever since the reappropriation the whole complex is
functioning in abstraction of electricity.[^31] Rog’s users are
quotidianly experiencing systematic exhaustion, longitudinal vegetation
on their bodies, and, generally, the menace of eviction – all instances
of subtle structural violence strongly calling into question the
presumed no-violence-policy of capital exploitation.
Now I can focus on the postulation regarding the *exploitation of the
commons.* We are faced with the notion of the exploited commons, which
is easily applicable to the enunciated capitalistic mode of production
as immaterial, pertaining to cognitive, affective labour. This appears
be the position after the implementation of *Second Chance*, turning Rog
from a closedown factory into an immaterial social factory. Again,
according to the description the project’s intention is: ‘\[…\] to
transform a disused industrial site in a *cultural and creative* *work
and living space* \[…\]’.[^32] The phrase quintessentially comprises
the concept of bio-political production, in which all spheres of social
life are produced: ‘\[…\] post-Fordism and the immaterial paradigm of
production adopt performativity, communication, and collaboration as
central characteristics’.[^33] Perhaps this is an opportune time to
fasten more particularly the pervasive creation of the creative
industries.
## In the White Cube, a Simulacrum of the Creative Industries: RogLab Centre Pilot Project
The capital’s colonization of the public spaces and the commons once was
exemplified in 2012 with the so called RogLab Centre Pilot Project.
Installed as a plot investment of the *Second Chance* project and located
on the embankment directly across the street from Rog, RogLab takes a
shape of an entirely white cargo container. Here we have a double
interpretation of an object pioneering the local creative industries,
offering itself. The white container cannot be seen only as the advocate
of the White Cube and thus flagging the penetration of the new
‘creative’ urban economy; the container is simultaneously a prime
example of a boxed up neoliberalism through which the mantra of free
movements of goods, capital, services and people, is transmitted around
the globe. By analogy with Giddens’ the conceptualization of the state
as a territorial (bordered) power-container, RogLab strains in
presenting itself as an unconfined ‘creative’ power container and a
dynamo for the creative economy:
> RogLab is conceived as a production, educational and presentation
> space in a 30 m²‑container object. It is dedicated to activities in
> the fields of architecture, design and contemporary art, their mutual
> connecting and cross-sector collaboration (economy, education,
> science, environment, space…) as well as international
> networking.[^34]
RogLab’s spatial separation from the Rog building by being *outside* yet
*in face of* it, does not mean its contents are hermetically
encapsulated or, at first glance, antithetic to those nourished in
Rog.[^35] Quite to the contrary: this act of colonization of the public
space means as well the colonization of creativity by being the
epistemological and material forerunner of the creative industries in
the area. For example, RogLab is openly acknowledging the devastation of
Rog; it promotes to be ‘an attractive mobile architecture \[…\]
marking the beginning of the renovation of the former Rog factory. The
pilot project will function as a small scale model of the future Rog
Centre’.[^36]
Further, on the external surface of RogLab an imprinted characterization
reads: ‘In the 3D workshop for fast prototyping, we help you *develop
ideas into tangible products*.’[^37] Thus, the neoliberal capitalist
paradigm of productive knowledge is canalized into an applicable and
vendible market form. ‘Neoliberalism,’ asserts Harvey[^38] ‘\[…\]
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets,
and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an
institutional framework appropriate to such practices.’
Taken together, Rog*Lab* can indeed be viewed as *labor-*atorial, a
laboratorial materialization reflecting the intertwined processes of the
capitalist rent parasiting on the productive commons,[^39] incorporation
of existent subversion, commodification of autonomous collective
creativity, and the (forerunner and justifier of) spatial
usurpation.[^40] The paradigmatic workshop/art project ‘Socialdress’
carried out in RogLab might be the utmost illustration of these
processes *in vitro*. Championing the creative industries, the workshop
sucked out the labour of unemployed women who were voluntarily
embroidering clothes for several days:
> This art project \[…\] takes place in the form of a clothes and
> household fabrics fashion collection. The collection incorporates
> slogans from the recent Slovenian protests[^41] – the expression of
> the general public’s rebellion and dissatisfaction with the existing
> system. Modern embroidery machines will be used to embroider the
> selected slogans onto fabrics and clothes, thus empowering them.
> Traditional craft skills, modern technology, fashion, social
> engagement, activism and social entrepreneurship all join forces in
> this new interdisciplinary art project \[…\].[^42]
The machine of commodification, which mimics under the coat of
benevolence and social responsibility, attempted to decontextualize and
castrate the collective subversive potentiality of the uprisings by
aestheticization and banalization, vampirizing the free labour: ‘The
\[Socialdress\] project promotes and supports sewing e.g. dress
home-making. It transforms the sewing into an entertaining and useful
social activity’.[^43] Here, the unpaid social cooperation, the mutual
production, and interdisciplinary collaboration all go a step further
from the individualism inherent to the anatomized precariat. The
neoliberal machine does not base its agenda anymore on explicit
exclusion, but rather on the controlled inclusion – preferably the
collective one. In this vein, it is necessary to mention the emphasis of
the *Second Chance* on the newly incarnated neoliberal species, who do not
go under the name stockholders or shareholders but stakeholders instead.
According to Marx’s general intellect or to Kropotkin’s mutual aid, a
neoliberal counterpart is allocated and linked with the fabrication of
consent through a Habermassian ideal communication and rational
discourse. Throughout the practice of the *Second Chance*, the
colonization of the commons goes hand in hand with the adoption of the
formalized ‘inclusive bottom-up participatory’ smokescreen.
## Gentrification Goes Public
What was to be witnessed in 2013 was another twist in the neoliberal
municipal urban policies. In the explication of the changed spatial plan
for Rog, under the heading ‘*Assessment of the situation, causes and
aims why the document is necessary*’ the scenario runs: since the
initial blueprint was approved, the situation, especially economic, has
been changing and the arrangement of Rog’s area to the extent of the
previous spatial plan was no longer possible. In reality, no private
investor was willing to take part in the *Second Chance*, thereby
decelerating the entire process of the execution; indeed, an irony
derived directly out of the global financial crisis. Neither the
downfall of a private-public partnership or the subsequent resignation
of capital did not bury the peculiar spatial voracity. Notwithstanding
the financial deficit and the public debt, the construction pretence is
now to be orchestrated by the municipality independently of the
investments from the private sector.
Therefore, a changed spatial plan was proposed enabling the construction
in several stages. More accurately, a seven-phased (re)construction is
now being designed. In the first stage of the construction, the
blueprint includes two crucial interventions: the ‘outside arrangement’
around the central building *and* an underground garage overlapping with
the position of almost all buildings on the territory of Rog.[^44] In
all likelihood, the planned besiegement of the central building and the
‘outside arrangement’ will manifest itself directly in the form of an
internal reconstruction of the main factory outbuilding, leaving behind
another ‘late capitalist hollow space’[^45]
As for the surrounding buildings without the historical
preservation,[^46] which itself allows façadism— and the demolishment of
the building’s interior yet leaving its exterior intact— these will be
levelled to the ground, causing another symptomatic fenced urban void,
filled at the best with gravelled parking spaces, as this profitable
emptiness is the *modus operandi* for architectural shortfalls in the
city. What would evidently distinguish it from other urban voids caused
by the lack of investments is contained in the intention of transforming
the building into a politically silent urban phantom. The eviction of
users, the fencing off potential occupants, and seclusion are all
practical strategies of de-politization. In other words, the complete
resignation from the project remains unimaginable since gentrification
operates in a broader urban context. With the restructuration into a
‘postindustrial creative site’ though, the refashioned Rog factory will,
at best, become the situated gravitational field for gentrification, as
the process of gentrification will inevitably include the entire
surrounding neighbourhood.
## ‘Gentrification is class war’
The fundamental reason behind the repeatedly converted plans of
demolishment of the liberated Rog factory area seems simple;[^47]
communities ‘that swarm in Rog, are not dangerous for MOL because of the
revitalization of \[…\] abandoned spaces, but because of the swarming
of new and different forms of social activities, connections and
collaboration’.[^48] The eradication and neutralization, discursive or
violently material, of autonomous collective creativity, troubling the
flows of capital, are inevitably inherent to wider processes of capital
accumulation. For once, in the current condition, the extraction of
monopoly rent as the business model in cognitive capitalism (Pasquinelli
2010) is obstructed. In the hegemonic notion of the collective
creativity, we run into the creativity as ideological substitution for
labour. The creativity as understood by the apologist of corporative
creative industries has not become the Deleuzian becoming, but an
ideological superstructure of labour and therefore exploitation.
Beuys’ famous claim fulfils itself in an odd manner – in the age of
cognitive capitalism, elevating each and every individual into divinity,
everyone is not an artist, but a *creator*. Fortunately, the
repolitization of creativity and its emancipation from the neoliberal
colonial deadlock are being collectively produced in factories of the
Foucauldian insurrectional subjugated knowledge. The remaining question
is whether one will hop on the moving train rushing through the
urbanscape moved by these machines.
### References
Anonymous. 1989. *The Occupation of art and gentrification*. Internet
source:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-occupation-of-art-and-gentrification\#fn\_back7,
reviewed October 1, 2013.
Bloch, Ernst. ‘Building in Empty Spaces,’ in Bloch, Ernst: *The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature*. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1959/1996, pp. 185-198.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. ‘NewLiberalSpeak. Notes on the new
planetary vulgate.’ *Radical Philosophy* 105 (2001) pp. 1-5.
Florida, Richard. *Cities and the Creative Class*. London, New York:
Routledge, 2005.
Gregorčič, Marta. ‘Rog – presenečanja, iz katerih rojijo multitude.’
*Časopis za kritiko znanosti*, 34 -223 (2006) pp. 7-10.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. *Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire*. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
Harvey, David. ‘The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the
Commodification of Culture’ (2001).
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc\_rent1.htm
Harvey, David. *A Brief History of Neoliberalism*. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Harvey, David. ‘The Right to the City.’ *New Left Review*, 53 Sept. Oct
(2008): 23-40.
Institute for Civilisation and Culture. *SWOT Analysis for the Purposes
of the Revitalisation of the Former Rog Factory with the Establishment
of the Rog — Centre of Contemporary Arts*. (2011) Internet source:
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/SWOT\_Analysis\_Ljubljana.pdf
Jelesijević, Nenad. Rog med razlastitvijo in prilastitvijo skupnega.
Radio Študent (5 April 2012). Internet source:
http://radiostudent.si/kultura/dlako-z-jezika/rog-med-razlastitvijo-in-prilastitvijo-skupnega
Krajčinović, Nina. Rog kot politični projekt brez zagotovljenih
sredstev. *Delo* (5 September 2013)
http://www.delo.si/novice/ljubljana/rog-kot-politicni-projekt-brez-zagotovljenih-sredstev.html
Katrin Fischer et al. *Revitalisation through arts and culture: new
developments for 5 European industrial complexes.* Nürnberg: Second
Chance (2012)
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SECOND-CHANCE\_Mid-Project-Brochure\_online\_final.pdf,
reviewed 1 October, 2013.
Kurnik, Andrej and Barbara Beznec. ‘Resident Alien: The Rog Experience
on the Margin,’ in Radical Education Collective (eds) *New public
spaces: dissensual political and artistic practices in the post-Yugoslav
context*. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2009, pp. 45-62.
http://radical.temp.si/reader/AndrejBarbara.pdf
Kurnik, Andrej. *Vzamimo si mesto!* (2013),
http://www.njetwork.org/Vzamimo-si-mesto
Landry, Charles. *The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators*.
London: Earthscan, 2000.
Mihelič, Breda et al. *Les anciennes usines ‘Rog’/Ljubljana : exemple
Européen de mise en valeur du patrimoine architectural abandonné : actes
du 4ème Colloque Eurocultures, Ljubljana: 29 mai—2 juin* (1995),
Brussels: Institut Supérieur d’Architecture Saint-Luc.
MOL. 2013. *Dopolnjeni osnutek Odloka o spremembah in dopolnitvah Odloka
o občinskem podrobnem prostorskem načrtu za del območja urejanja CI 5/6
Rog*, http://www.ljubljana.si/file/1351552/dop\_osn\_spr\_oppn\_ci56.pdf
Pasquinelli, Matteo. ‘Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City: Berlin’s
Factory of Culture and the Sabotage of Rent’, in KUNSTrePUBLIK (eds),
*Skulpturenpark Berlin\_Zentrum*. Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2010.
Pungerčar, Marija Mojca. ND, http://www.3via.org/index.php?htm=mojca
Rog Centre Pilot Project. *About*, (2013) http://www.roglab.si/en/about
Rog Centre Pilot Project. *Socialdress – Power to the People* (2013),
http://www.roglab.si/en/fresh/2013/socialdress\_empowering\_people
Sassen, Saskia. ‘Locating cities on global circuits.’ *Environment &
Urbanization* 14 (2002): 13-30.
http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/urban/euv14n1p13.pdf
Second Chance. *Project Description* (2013). Internet source:
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=26.
Second Chance. The Former Rog Factory (2013) Internet source:
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=16
Second Chance. Rog Centre of Contemporary Arts (2013). Internet source:
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=94
Second Chance. Can Culture Alone Regenerate Places? (2012),
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?p=1112
TEMP. ‘TEMP about TEMP, or a quick and unsystematic retrospective of the
workings of one temporary and informal multidisciplinary group.’ In:
Radical Education Collective (eds.): *New public spaces: dissensual
political and artistic practices in the post-Yugoslav context*.
Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie (2009): 144-158,
http://radical.temp.si/reader/TEMP.pdf
The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia
*STROKOVNE ZASNOVE VARSTVA KULTURNE DEDIŠČINE za območje MESTNE OBČINE
LJUBLJANA* (2008),
http://giskd2s.situla.org/evrdd/SZ/eVRD\_SZ\_Ljubljana\_2008\_02\_00.pdf
Vercellone, Carlo. *The New Articulation of Wages, Rent and Profit in
Cognitive Capitalism* (2008).,
http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/26/55/84/PDF/The\_new\_
articulation\_of\_wagesHall1.pdf
Zukin, Sharon. *Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change*,
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Zukin, Sharon. *Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World*,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Zukin, Sharon. *The Cultures of Cities*, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
[^1]: Sharon Zukin, *Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World*.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Sharon Zukin, *The
Cultures of Cities*, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
[^2]: Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, ‘NewLiberalSpeak. Notes on the
new planetary vulgate’, *Radical Philosophy* 105 (2001): 1-5.
[^3]: Charles Landry, *The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban
Innovators*, London: Earthscan, 2000.
[^4]: Richard Florida, *Cities and the Creative Class*, London, New
York: Routledge, 2005.
[^5]: Saskia Sassen, ‘Locating cities on global circuits,’ *Environment
& Urbanization* 14 (2002): 22.
http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/urban/euv14n1p13.pdf
[^6]: Richard Florida, *Cities and the Creative Class*, London, New
York: Routledge, 2005, p. 22.
[^7]: For a more detailed history of Rog from the second part of the
19th century onwards see Mihelič et al. (1995) or the historical
digest available on Tovarna Rog website
(http://tovarna.org/node/131); for a sociopolitical analysis see
Kurnik and Beznec (2009); Kurnik (2013).
[^8]: Cf. TEMP. ‘TEMP about TEMP, or a quick and unsystematic
retrospective of the workings of one temporary and informal
multidisciplinary group.’ In: Radical Education Collective (eds.):
*New public spaces: dissensual political and artistic practices in
the post-Yugoslav context*, Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie
(2009): 144-158. Internet source:
http://radical.temp.si/reader/TEMP.pdf
[^9]: To name some*: Invisible Workers of the World, World for Everyone,
Civil Initiative of the Erased Activists, Front of the Precarious,
Iz-hod* (Walk-out) movement for the deinstitutionalization from
total institutions, Occupy Movement \#15o, Anti-Capitalist Block
etc.
[^10]: Together work, of course, the city managers and the appurtenant
administration.
[^11]: Second Chance, *Project Description* (2013), pp. 4,
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=26
[^12]: Institute for Civilisation and Culture. *SWOT Analysis for the
Purposes of the Revitalisation of the Former Rog Factory with the
Establishment of the Rog – Centre of Contemporary Arts* (2011).
Internet source:
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/SWOT\_Analysis\_Ljubljana.pdf
[^13]: See the homonymous brochure, Katrin Fischer et al.
*Revitalisation through arts and culture: new developments for 5
European industrial complexes.* Nürnberg: Second Chance (2012)
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SECOND-CHANCE\_Mid-Project-Brochure\_online\_final.pdf,
reviewed 1 October, 2013.
[^14]: Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City:
Berlin’s Factory of Culture and the Sabotage of Rent,’ KUNSTrePUBLIK
(eds), *Skulpturenpark Berlin\_Zentrum*. Berlin: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König (2010)
[^15]: David Harvey, ‘The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the
Commodification of Culture’ (2001).
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc\_rent1.htm
[^16]: Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City:
Berlin’s Factory of Culture and the Sabotage of Rent,’ KUNSTrePUBLIK
(eds.): *Skulpturenpark Berlin\_Zentrum*. Berlin: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König (2010).
[^17]: David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City.’ *New Left Review* 53
(September-October 2008): 31.
[^18]: Sharon Zukin, *The Cultures of Cities*, Cambridge: Blackwell,
1995, p. 111.
[^19]: Anonymous. *The Occupation of art and gentrification* (1989)
pp.7.
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-occupation-of-art-and-gentrification\#fn\_back7
[^20]: Sharon Zukin, *Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change*,
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
[^21]: The phrase is taken from the announcement of the public
presentation carried out by Lia Ghilardi in the City Museum at MOL’s
invitation (see Second Chance 2012).
[^22]: David Harvey, ‘The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the
Commodification of Culture’ (2001).
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc\_rent1.htm
[^23]: Ibid.
[^24]: Second Chance, *Project Description* (2013) Emphasis mine.
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=26.
[^25]: Demšič in Krajčinović. Nina Krajčinović, ‘Rog kot politični
projekt brez zagotovljenih sredstev’, *Delo* 5^th^ September 2013,
http://www.delo.si/novice/ljubljana/rog-kot-politicni-projekt-brez-zagotovljenih-sredstev.html
[^26]: Second Chance, *Project Description* (2013).
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=26.
[^27]: A topic deserving its own Foucauldian analysis is not just the
inflation of euphemisms for gentrification but also the medical,
anthropomorphized, and biopolitical urbanistic discourses (e.g.
revitalisation, regeneration, reanimation, rehabilitation,
sustainable, degraded, sanitation).
[^28]: Initially the entire multitude in Rog was nonchalantly ignored
from any description whatsoever. However, the current and updated
version of the project’s website is recognizing the contemporary
murmurings in the Rog’s building – altogether in one sentence:
“Since 2006 the building is being used on a daily basis by temporary
users who developed cultural, artistic, sport and social activities
on site” (Second Chance 2013).
[^29]: Nenad Jelesijević, Rog med razlastitvijo in prilastitvijo
skupnega. Radio Študent (5 April 2012).
http://radiostudent.si/kultura/dlako-z-jezika/rog-med-razlastitvijo-in-prilastitvijo-skupnega
[^30]: Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City:
Berlin’s Factory of Culture and the Sabotage of Rent,’ KUNSTrePUBLIK
(eds): *Skulpturenpark Berlin\_Zentrum*. Berlin: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König (2010)
[^31]: This situation is somewhat being compensated by relying on the
usage of electricity generators that require an increasingly larger
amount of money for each organized event.
[^32]: Second Chance, *Project Description* (2013). Emphasis mine.
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=26
[^33]: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, *Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire*, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, p. 200.
[^34]: Rog Centre Pilot Project, *About* (2013)
http://www.roglab.si/en/about
[^35]: This separation is also an uncanny physical evidence of not
accepting the present situation of the living self-organized
communities in Rog.
[^36]: Second Chance, Rog Centre of Contemporary Arts (2013),
http://www.secondchanceproject.eu/wp/?page\_id=94
[^37]: Ibid. Emphasis mine.
[^38]: David Harvey, *A Brief History of Neoliberalism*, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005, p.2.
[^39]: Carlo Vercellone, *The New Articulation of Wages, Rent and Profit
in Cognitive Capitalism* (2008).
http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/26/55/84/PDF/The\_new\_
articulation\_of\_wagesHall1.pdf
[^40]: Such intents were already detectable during the proposal to erect
the Centre of Contemporary Arts.
[^41]: To give few examples of protest slogans coined by the popular
anger to be later embroidered: **“***gotof si*” (you are finished!),
“*fertik je*” (it’s over), “*vse jih bomo nesli vun*” (we’ll take
them all out), “*ulice so naše*” (the streets are ours), “*lopovi!*”
(crooks!), “*moč ljudem, ne strankam*” (power to the people, not to
parties).
[^42]: Rog Centre Pilot Project. *Socialdress – Power to the People*
(2013),
http://www.roglab.si/en/fresh/2013/socialdress\_empowering\_people
[^43]: Marija Mojca Pungerčar, ND (2013),
http://www.3via.org/index.php?htm=mojca
[^44]: MOL 2013.
[^45]: Ernst Bloch, ‘Building in Empty Spaces’, in Bloch, Ernst: *The
Utopian Function of Art and Literature* Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press (1959/1996): 185-198.
[^46]: The urbanistic taxidermy sparing the main factory outbuilding
will be performed because it falls under the cultural heritage
protection (cf. The Institute for the Protection of Cultural
Heritage of Slovenia 2008, 45).
[^47]: The urban plans of MOL can be, to some extent, seen as the tactic
response to the claims during the temporal occupation: the problem
of empty premises, the lack of a clear strategy with Rog, the need
of spaces for sociocultural production etc.
[^48]: Marta Gregorčič, ‘Rog – presenečanja, iz katerih rojijo
multitude.’ *Časopis za kritiko znanosti*, 34 / 223 (2006): 7-10.
# Neoliberalism and the Autonomy of Art: The Culture of Power, the Power of Culture[^1]
### Irmgard Emmelheinz
In Mexico, advanced neoliberal reforms are taking place at a much faster
pace than in other parts of the world. These reforms have not only
delivered new forms of life and making a living, but also created new
sensibilities. The erosion of the social contract brought on by these
reforms, has had tangible, negative effects on the social tissue. This
has materialized, for example, in what is known as the most violent and
dangerous city in the world, Ciudad Juárez, where in 2010 alone 3000
people were killed. Bearing this in mind, I define neoliberalism as a
*sensibility* that shapes subjectivities, permeates art and culture,
differentiates and homogenizes people, molds lives and desires, mistakes
information for knowledge, gives shape to space and thus to social
relations, normalizes violence, creates ways of seeing the world that
justify destruction and dispossession with notions progress and
development, or that tries to solve economic precarity through self-help
and permanent education. I argue that neoliberalism is more than a
system that is ruled by a free market economy, which implies the
privatization of the welfare state and an array of government services
(for example: education, health, energy), subcontracting to the private
sector and changes in labor laws and worker’s rights as well as a
transnational division of labor. The system of control under
neoliberalism combines a militarized police regime with repressive
tolerance, the logic of securitization with granting freedom of
expression and ‘quality of life’. The political figures, molded and
governed by the neoliberal regime itself are: the *homo oeconomicus*
(the entrepreneur responsible for his own well-being and manager of his
own human capital) and the subject of rights (the State is in charge of
guaranteeing that his human rights are respected). Aside from an
economic-political system, I see neoliberalism as a way of relating to
the world, to nature, to things and beings, which presupposes unlimited
growth and development. It is also a way of living and working: human
beings are put to work beyond their capacities, erasing the distinction
between leisure and work time. Neoliberalism is also a sensibility that
establishes the terms of empathy and sympathy and has outlined a new
notion of alterity. Configured as ‘social responsibility’ or social
work, to ‘help’ the Other means to focus on the (so-called) ‘secondary
malfunctions’ of the current capitalist system by disseminating personal
and managerial practices such as tolerance, showing respect, nurturing
dialogue, transparency and social collaboration. In this sense, the ‘Other’ is a ‘community to come’, the ‘subject of rights’ (to ethical
restitution: refugees, displaced, immigrants, those who live under a
‘state of exception’), the *underclass*, that is, he or she who will be
permanently outside globalizing processes, including access to
education, jobs and consumption. The category of the ‘Other’ encompasses
political and religious fundamentalists as well: fanatics who are
outside globalizing and modernizing processes by choice. These *Others*
are sometimes given faces in the media or in art by spectacularizing
their subjectivity but obviating the processes that render their lives
precarious and endangered in the first place.
What has this got to do with the autonomy of art? As we will see,
postmodernism put art and culture at the center of social, political and
economic processes. They are now inextricable from work, production,
consumption and subjectivity: in the neoliberal regime, art in
particular and culture in general are used actively as compensation and
improvement of tools, all the while normalizing and spreading the
antithesis of autonomous art, that is, ‘useful art’. Subsumed to
political action, much of contemporary art has taken up a political role
as either ‘sensible politics’ or ‘socially engaged artwork’. This is
tied to the fact that in our current world order, as Marina Vishmidt and
Kerstin Stakemeier point out, ‘art no longer designates a reproductive
and representational realm, but one of productivity and social power’
and thus the autonomy of art itself has become a problem – in so far as
it has become a realm for the production of added value.[^2]
In the September 2013 editorial of *e-flux journal*, editors Juliete
Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle stated that art is produced at
a double bind: while art can be complicit in or instrumentalized by
power, its autonomy is located in an imaginary space. What do they mean
by this? First, that art, in order to be *seen*, depends on a platform –
an institution – and thus needs to be part of some art world. Second,
that the autonomy of art – as a separate regime or an isolated sphere –
is a fantasy. In order to consider the autonomy of art outside of this
double bind, Clement Greenberg tied the autonomy of art – as art’s for
art’s sake – to the avant-garde situating criticality within the
discipline or medium of art itself. In Greenberg’s definition,
avant-garde (modernist) painting clearly takes a position against
socialist realist painting and those debates of the 1930s that rely on
the relationship between art and politics (embodied for example by
Mexican muralist painting, which was very popular in New York in the
1930s). He characterizes avant-garde by its self-critique in the sense
that its formal expression is a meditation on the qualities of the
medium of painting. This meant extricating figuration from the arts, and
an essentialist understanding of the mediums of art: for Greenberg,
‘purity’ was political – especially if it was seen as an embodiment of a
free nation versus the authoritarian Soviet Union.
Postmodernism could be understood as an effort to break with Greenberg’s
disciplinary totalitarianism. Taking up the Dadaist and surrealist
avant-garde’s goals of unifying art and life, postmodernism thrived on
the advent of interdisciplinary strategies and the symbiosis of art with
everything else. Post-war art continued the vanguardist critique of the
bourgeois notions of autonomous art and expressive artists. It embraced
everyday objects, transformed the artist’s function, questioned the
institution of art and attacked it in an anarchist manner.[^3] Following
Hal Foster, art from the 1950s and 1960s represents the failure to
destroy the institution of art and the institutionalization of the
avant-garde.[^4] If Greenberg advocated aesthetic autonomy with the
purpose of resisting the illustrational meanings typical of kitsch and
commercial forces, post-modernist’s interdisciplinary strategies led
art, in Foster’s words, ‘to become embedded into life under the terms of
mass capitalism, while it became appropriated by the culture
industry’.[^5] Due to its ‘post-medium’ condition, as Rosalind Krauss
termed ‘postmodern interdisciplinarity’, art is enmeshed with reality,
and its materials can range from and beyond social interaction to
scientific research and montage. With postmodernism, the politics of the
autonomy of art meant breaking away from in Greenberg’s sense of purity
and thus art’s autonomy came to be conceived as ‘provisional, always
defined diacritically (as something supplemental to art) and situated
politically, always *semi*’.[^6]
Beyond postmodernism, parallel to an increase of corporate subsidies to
the arts, there has been a recent boom in private collecting and thus a
market boom. The value of art is speculative and reflects the logic of
finance-based economy (and risk): the economy and critical art share the
core value of ‘innovation’. In this regard, neoliberalism has meant
privatization for the arts or the collusion between the private and the
public sector in order to subsidize them. In the past decade or so (and
in the US long before that), corporations have played an important role
in investing in culture. Institutions and corporations have been seeking
to play an important role in communicating the point of view of the
private sector on an array of critical public topics.[^7] If art was
previously supported by the state, because culture was considered to be
an asset to the nation, today, corporations have appropriated this
function, as they sponsor and jury art shows, grant awards and funds and
collect artworks. Meanwhile, they promote their perspectives on critical
public topics.[^8] In a 1998 article, art historian Chin-tao Wu
highlighted how corporations appropriate the concept of innovation –
also known as innovative disruption or creative destruction – in order
to redefine its meaning in corporate terms. She quotes John Murphy,
executive vice-president of Philip Morris Inc – a U.S. cigarette company
– on their sponsorship of the 1969 exhibition, *When Attitudes Become
Form*:
>We feel it is appropriate that we participate in bringing these works to the attention of the public, for there is a key element in this ‘new art’ which has its counterpart in the business world. That element is innovation – without which it would be impossible for progress to be made in any segment in society.[^9]
Furthermore, in the context of neoliberal reforms and sensibilities,
there is a global tendency to subdue contemporary art to the politics of
culture administration, which implies ‘democratizing culture’ making it
accessible to the masses, using it as a tool for the well-being of
society, and the reconstruction or healing of a community or society
that has experienced violence. Cultural institutions subsidized by
corporations and individual patrons apparently follow progressive
agendas promoting political or socially minded art. For instance,
*Creative Time* in New York (funded by a mix of state and corporate
support) supports public and community art, with the goal of enabling
the politicization of social space with cultural intervention. This
organization sponsored Tania Bruguera’s *Immigrant Movement
International*, a project developed in Queens, New York in 2011, which
the artist describes as: a flexible community space and long-term
socio-political movement, public workshops, events, actions and
partnerships with immigrant and service organizations. The artist
further qualified her project as ‘useful art’.[^10] The problem is that
initiatives such as this one, render opaque the real economic conditions
that led to situations of immigrant precarity to begin with; immigrants
are local signs of complex global forces operating on conditions of life
and work at home and abroad. Many would argue that to subsidize a
project like Bruguera’s signals the transfer of social work to artistic
work funded by the private sector. Politics comes into the scene through
art as social work in the name of ‘public interest’, only to become
subject to administration, engineering and a technocratic way of
administering social problems, configuring the private version of the
welfare state.[^11] Furthermore, as corporate support to the
establishment of antagonistic spaces becomes gradually institutionalized
within society, the question rises, after Gregory Sholette, ‘Who owns
cultural capital and who has the right to use it?’ For him, corporate
involvement in the arts is akin, or perhaps integral, to the current
erosion of public space.[^12] Moreover, as cultural spaces become
institutional bastions of democratic self-expression and sites for
social reconciliation and self-help, dissent is criminalized and
forcefully punished worldwide.
It becomes evident that art and culture are central to neoliberal
processes that act as agents of globalization and as tools for
improvement and development, counterinsurgency and pacification. An
extreme example of this could be the ‘culturally sensible’ occupation of
Iraq as described by Nato Thompson (director of *Creative Time*). In
uncritical terms, Thompson recounts how General David Petraeus wrote a
field manual geared at changing people’s attitudes towards the American
occupation of Mosul:
>\[It is\] a story about counterinsurgency and community organizing, about getting to know people as an occupying force, and getting to know people as neighbors. It is a story about the military entering the terrain of that thing called culture.[^13]
In this regard, a ‘cultural approach’ to military occupation is akin to
artistic social and community practices, as both involve ‘getting to
know people to be able to change the landscapes of life and of
power’.[^14] In the case of civilians in Mosul, this is done by
obviating their experiences of being under attack. This cultural turn in
the U.S. military machinery took place a few years after theorist
Frederic Jameson diagnosed a ‘cultural turn’ in capitalism, arguing that
social space had been completely saturated with the image of culture.
This is because in professional and daily activities, as well as in the
various forms of entertainment we enjoy, society consumes cultural
products all the time. The postmodern ‘cultural turn’ diagnosed by
Jameson, was further elaborated by George Yúdice upon observing (in
2003) that the uses of culture had undergone an unprecedented expansion
not just in the marketplace but also along social, political, and
economic lines. According to Yúdice, since the state and corporations
already utilize culture as a tool as they search for economic and
sociopolitical betterment, culture has become a resource and a
compensatory device to the ravages neoliberal policies have caused on
social tissue: both give meaning and symbolic representations, provide
mechanisms of solace, as well as function as tools for re-invention and
amelioration.[^15] In this context, the line between public programs and
relational aesthetics or participative art appears to be increasingly
blurred. Former Mexican president Felipe Calderón made a public
appearance in February 2012 in Ciudad Juárez in front of a sign that
read: ‘No More Weapons’. The billboard measured 8×21 meters, and was
built by soldiers of the National Defense Department with 3 tons of
assault weapons that were confiscated at the Mexican border and molten
into bricks. During the ceremony in which the billboard was unveiled,
Calderón turned toward the Mexican-American border and begged the U.S.
(in bad English): ‘No more weapons! Dear friends of the United States,
Mexico needs your help to stop this terrible violence we are suffering’.
During this trip, Calderón also participated in the destruction of 6
thousand confiscated weapons, and planted a tree at a Community Center.
Calderon’s propagandistic gestures immediately recall the language of
socially engaged contemporary art, particularly, Pedro Reyes’
intervention, *Palas por Pistolas* in Culiacán in 2008 (also executed in
Juárez in the same week of Calderon’s visit). Reyes’ project of
exchanging shovels for weapons was subsidized by two predominant Mexican
corporations: Trupper, which produces hardware, and Coppel, which sells
appliances and other goods. For this project, Reyes devised a Television
campaign inviting citizens to give up their weapons in exchange for a
coupon for appliances. The artist collected 1527 weapons, which were
destroyed at a military zone in a public act. Giving his action a
further twist, Reyes sought to have the rests of the weapons welded
together to produce 1527 shovels carrying an inscription telling the
story of the weapon they represented (this was not possible due to
technical reasons, so Trupper ended up donating them). The engraved
shovels were distributed in art institutions and public schools. Adults
and children planted 1527 trees. To Reyes, this ritual had a pedagogical
purpose: ‘to show the people how an agent of death can become an agent
of life’.[^16] A similar public purge of weapons in exchange for
appliances (and tablets), is currently happening in Mexico City led by a
‘Pink Ladies Brigade’. These relational actions – both by General
Petraeus’ and by the Mexican government – show how the language of
contemporary art has been appropriated by propaganda for its purposes,
making politics and aesthetics indistinguishable, as both operate in the
realm of symbolic and perceptive work. These are also examples of the
predominant idea that violence can be eased – or appeased – through
cultural intervention and in the Mexican case, by giving away highly
desirable goods.
Aside from this ‘artistic approach’ to social, political and military
action, sensible production has taken up a political function. Political
work has been developed into a matter of codification using medial forms
with the purpose of creating a terrain for political acts, creating an
‘activist imaginary’ made of political fields constituted by images.
Political action embedded in cultural forms implies making things public
as a way of signs.[^17] An example could be Trevor Paglen’s (sometimes
abstract or blurry) photographs of top-secret governmental, nuclear and
military sites. Works such as Paglen’s, seek to make visible the
invisible under the premise that such an act is political. Yet, what
images such as Paglen’s represent is vague in political terms. What I
find problematic is that the gap between *political* representation and
*aesthetic* representation is now wider than ever. Representation means
‘making the absent present’, which is always an incomplete task because
totality is impossible to convey, and it works in two senses. As
*Vertreten* (or political representation) it means taking the place of
others in order to speak on their behalf, and as *Darstellen* (or
aesthetic representation) it is the form of representation that implies
describing the other in the first person. Representation was brought
into a crisis in the 1960s because it was accused of hiding the fact
that the speaker was occupying the place of the represented and thus,
workers and minorities were prompted to speak on their own behalf and in
the first person. Nowadays, however, the gap between political
(*Vertreten*) and aesthetic (*Darstellen*) representations is wider than
ever. Whatever political acts encoded in medial forms may represent,
they render it unstable, partly because politics have become
unrepresentable due to a lack of stable political subjects; they are
collective enunciations constantly ‘becoming’. In this context,
‘expressive’ politics is valued over representation because ‘it embodies
rebellious subjectivities expressing themselves without delegation and
they do so through formal and symbolic richness’.[^18] One of the issues
that rises is that there is lack of a common ground to universalize the
multiplicity of singular struggles and social movements scattered across
the world like archipelagos. There are just too many images in the
infosphere, and ‘sensible politics’ exists for and by its own public,
which is made up of social movements and politically minded cultural
producers. In this regard, cultural infrastructure functions as the
platform for ‘sensible politics,’ in which curators, museum directors
and board members (sometimes representing corporate interests) select
and contextualize artwork that presents certain events and social
actions, thus determining the boundaries of public thinking.
Aside from its compensatory role, culture (when it is ‘creativity’ and
cognitive production), is not only at the center of political action,
but is also embedded in production and consumption processes, and in
neoliberalism, at least insofar as it has thrived in post-Fordist
(flexible) forms and conditions of labor. Neoliberalism has taken up the
characteristics of aesthetic production. Signs and nascent meanings,
desires and projections meet in the market because the post-Fordist
economy is based on manufacturing experiences, signs and information.
The core of the knowledge economy is creativity. This is why qualities
of aesthetic production have become hegemonic and have transformed labor
and consumption processes as well as aesthetic experiences. Not only
sensations and feelings are trivialized and packaged for sale,
disinterestedness (the core of aesthetic experience as defined by Kant)
has also vanished.[^19] This arises as the result of aesthetic
experience that is enslaved for profit, as well as subsumed to
‘political’ efficiency in the sense of State and corporate strategic
investment in culture and the transformation of political action into
sensible forms – as opposed to action. These tendencies are a result of
what Stephen Shaviro describes as ‘the ruthless cognition of aesthetic
sensations and feelings’, as they are transformed into data and
exploited forms of labor which are marketed as fresh experiences,
exciting lifestyle choices, or as socially-responsible cultural
activities. In the political arena, thirty years of neoliberalism have
crushed any confidence that we might have had in the social contract. If
artists used to identify with the proletariat and social struggles,
nowadays, aesthetic production – which is lacking a reflexive program in
regards to the conditions of its own production – is geared just toward
the supplementing of the entertainment market with cultivated and
knowledgeable new experiences and sensations. Furthermore, through
subsidizing art and cultural projects, corporations, states and arts
patrons put into practice the following principle of the Prince Claus
Fund: ‘There can be no development without culture, and there can be no
cultural development without freedom of debate’.[^20] As this quote
becomes evermore evident, the public expects from culture and art
rigorous accountability, critical questioning, democratic access,
dialogue, openness and equal representation in the visual regime. This
is posited as the road to development. In this context, culture is
perceived as ‘a basic need’, as the founding principle of Prince Claus
Fund states. Thus, states, corporations, the private sector and society
attribute to art a decisive political, as they invest in culture with
the purpose of generating political and economic surplus value. Bearing
in mind that the autonomy of art is always a political matter, could art
be politicized beyond its autonomy as a site for added value?
The condition of possibility of autonomous, committed art under the new
neoliberal world order, is radically different from what we see as the
autonomy of art under modernism (as *l’art pour l’art*) and post-modern
interdisciplinarity. These imply the institutionalization of the
avant-garde and the subsumption of art to the market, bearing in mind
that the emancipatory promises of modernism (criticality, self-design,
creativity) are now located at the center of our everyday lives both via
consumption and production processes. Theodor Adorno’s take on the
autonomy of art in his 1962 essay entitled *Commitment*, can be helpful
here. In this essay, Adorno responds to Jean-Paul Sartre’s aesthetic
manifesto *What is Literature?* and elaborates a theoretical debate
about engaged literature and autonomous art. According to Adorno there
are two kinds artworks. On the one hand, there are works that ‘are
vulgarly assimilated to the existence against which they protest’.[^21]
These works ‘are content with being mere fetishes or a pastime, and thus
degenerate and become de-politicized cultural merchandise’.[^22] This
de-politicization, for Adorno is in fact, deeply political. A lot of
politically or socially-minded contemporary art would fit into this
category. On the other hand, there is *engaged autonomous art* which is
necessarily detached from reality. Adorno defines the autonomy of art
not in the sense of its strictly formalist aspect, although like Walter
Benjamin, Adorno also vouches for works of art that are both formally
and politically progressive. For Adorno, autonomous art negates a direct
connection to reality. The distance that autonomous art has from
reality, however, is mediated by reality itself. This means that a work
of art cannot come out of the blue: its origin is a reaction against
reality. Adorno, as does Benjamin, draws a distinction between
‘commitment’ and ‘tendency’. Committed art does not bear the intention
of generating betterment measures, legislative acts, practical
institutions (like propaganda) or even transmitting a concrete ideology.
It operates at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Adorno,
autonomous and engaged works of art operate at the level of abandoning
the social contract with reality and ‘cease to speak as if they were
reporting the facts: this is the moment in which a work of art makes
people’s hair stand up’.[^23] According to Adorno, the shock of the
unintelligible (or the ambiguous), is able to communicate more than what
is legible and explicit. In that sense, works of art are autonomous,
instead of heteronomous. Heteronomy implies that an artwork is subject
to a different power, a law that is external and foreign to art and its
formal logic. When it is autonomous, engaged art is neither subject to
empirical reality nor a correct political tendency. Art’s autonomy
protects it from popularization and adoption by the market. Its autonomy
implies liberating it from any other external purpose: from being
useful. In this manner, an autonomous work of art does not convey a
message nor does it need to convince the public or preach to the
converted. And although it opposes society, autonomous art is still part
of it.
If the autonomy of modern art implied considering art as a realm
distanced from reality, art’s post-medium condition now means that it
has become a niche within reality.[^24] What is at stake in autonomous
art nowadays, would be to posit it as an experience of reality that is
fundamentally foreign and antagonistic to the prevailing reality. If the
autonomy of art should be located in the realm of reproduction, as
Marina Vischmidt argues,[^25] it would oppose the realm of production of
the social, political and economic surplus value. It would go against
embodying power and the entrepreneurial model of work. Producing
difference and dragging out the laboring conditions hidden within it,
autonomous art would imply mimesis with distancing itself. Beyond being
used as a tool, autonomous art would refuse becoming an instrument
against its own illusions, as well as refusing to become a political
force, to be subjected to interests foreign to itself or simply becoming
a pleasing commodity. Overcoming self-censorship, it would cease to
participate in the economy of the globalized art world, especially in
the name of critical practices, political work or social justice,
abandoning its claim to become a progressive social force.[^26] Above
all, it would work against the power of culture and the culture of
power.
### References
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment’, *New Left Review* I (87088)
(September-December, 1974), http://newleftreview.org/I/87-88/theodor-adorno-commitment.
Emmelhainz, Irmgard. ‘Art and the Cultural Turn: Farewell to Committed
Autonomous Art?’, *e-flux journal* 42 (February, 2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-the-cultural-turn-farewell-to-committed-autonomous-art.
Espósito, Marcelo. ‘Lecciones de historia. El arte, entre la
experimentación institucional y las políticas del movimiento’, 2009.
SITAC lecture, http://marceloexposito.net/pdf/exposito_sitac.pdf.
Foster, Hal. ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’, *October*, Vol. 70
(Autumn, 1994): 5-32.
Fraser, Andrea. ‘Le 1% c’est moi’, 2011,
http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/9848/andreafraser_1_2012whitneybiennial.pdf.
Marchart, Oliver. ‘Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s)’, 2002,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en.
McLagan, Megan and McKee, Yates (eds). *Sensible Politics:* *The Visual
Culture of Nongovernmental Activism*. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books,
2012.
Shaviro, Stephen. ‘Accelerationist Aesthetics’, *e-flux journal* \#46
(Summer, 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption.
Sholette, Gregory. ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real Artworld’, *Oxford
Art Journal* 27 (2) (2004) pp. 260-261.
http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/07_welcome1.pdf.
Stakemeier, Kerstin and Vishmidt, Marina. ‘The Value of Autonomy: A
Conversation Between Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt About the
Reproduction of Art’, *Texte zur Kunst* 88 (December, 2012): 102-117.
Thompson, Nato. 2013, ‘The Insurgents Part I: Community-Based Practice
as Military Methodology,’ *e-flux journal* \# 47 (September, 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-insurgents-part-i-community-based-practice-as-military-methodology.
Vishmidt, Marina. ‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social
Practice as a Business Model’, *e-flux journal* \# 46 (March, 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/“mimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated”-social-practice-as-business-model.
Wu, Chin-tao. ‘Embracing the Enterprise Culture: Art Institutions Since
the 1980s’, *New Left Review* I 230 (July-August, 1998).
[^1]: Different versions of this essay were presented at Bureau Publik,
Copenhagen, 31 October 2013 and KHIB in Bergen, Norway, on 5
November 2013.
[^2]: Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Value of Autonomy: A
conversation between Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt about
the reproduction of art,’ *Texte zur Kunst* 88 (December 2012):
102-117.
[^3]: Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ *October*,
Vol. 70, The Duchamp Effect (Autumn 1994): 5-32.
[^4]: Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’.
[^5]: Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’.
[^6]: Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’.
[^7]: Gregory Sholette, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real Artworld,’
*Oxford Art Journal* 27.2, (2004), p. 259.
http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/07\_welcome1.pdf.
[^8]: Sholette, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real Artworld,’ pp.
260-261.
[^9]: Chin-Tao Wu, ‘Embracing the Enterprise Culture: Art Institutions
Since the 1980s’, *New Left Review* I/230, (July-August 1998): 31.
[^10]: See artist’s statement available at:
http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/486-0-Immigrant+Movement+International.htm.
[^11]: Oliver Marchart, ‘Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s)’, 2002,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en.
[^12]: Sholette, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real Artworld’.
[^13]: Nato Thompson, ‘The Insurgents Part I: Community-Based Practice
as Military Methodology,’ *e-flux journal* \# 47, (September 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-insurgents-part-i-community-based-practice-as-military-methodology.
In the second part of his essay, Thompson includes a disclaimer
about him glossing over U.S. military violence in Iraq. See:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-insurgents-part-ii-fighting-the-left-by-being-the-left.
[^14]: Thompson, ‘The Insurgents Part I’.
[^15]: See Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Art and the Cultural Turn: Farewell to
Committed Autonomous Art?’, *e-flux journal* N. 42 (February 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-the-cultural-turn-farewell-to-committed-autonomous-art.
[^16]: Artist’s statement available online:
http://pedroreyes.net/palasporpistolas.php(http://newleftreview.org/I/87-88/theodor-adorno-commitment).
[^17]: See Megan McLagan and Yates McKee (eds), ‘Introduction’,
*Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism*,
Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2012, pp. 9-22.
[^18]: Marcelo Espósito, ‘Lecciones de historia. El arte, entre la
experimentación institucional y las políticas del movimiento’, SITAC
2009.
http://marceloexposito.net/pdf/exposito\_sitac.pdf (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-the-cultural-turn-farewell-to-committed-autonomous-art).
[^19]: Stephen Shaviro, ‘Accelerationist Aesthetics,’ *e-flux journal*
\#46 (Summer 2013).
[^20]: From their website: “… The Prince Claus Fund’s mission is to
actively seek cultural collaborations founded on equality and trust,
with partners of excellence, in spaces where resources and
opportunities for cultural expression, creative production and
research are limited and cultural heritage is threatened. The Prince
Claus Fund is based in Amsterdam and is supported by the Dutch
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Dutch Postcode Lottery.” For
more information, visit their website:
http://www.princeclausfund.org/en/the-fund.
[^21]: Theodor Adorno, ‘Comittment’, *New Left Review* I/87088
(September-December 1974),
http://newleftreview.org/I/87-88/theodor-adorno-commitment (http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/9848/andreafraser_1_2012whitneybiennial.pdf).
[^22]: Adorno, ‘Comittment’.
[^23]: Adorno, ‘Comittment’.
[^24]: Marina Vishmidt, ‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social
Practice as a Business Model,’ *e-flux journal* 43 (March, 2013),
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/“mimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated”-social-practice-as-business-model (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en).
[^25]: Vishmidt, ‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated’.
[^26]: Andrea Fraser, ‘Le 1% c’est moi’, 2011: ‘Le gorille penseur est
un guerrier: le guerrier est un être pour la mort, puisque son
métier consiste à mourir. Ici, il pense un peu à la fin de son
espèce, ou à la fin de l’ère des — notre époque n’est plus
celle des guerriers, elle est celle des insectes, des animaux
insignifiants, plus capables de s’adapter…’
http://whitney.org/file\_columns/0002/9848/andreafraser\_1\_2012whitneybiennial.pdf (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption).
# Biographies
###Šefik Tatlić
Šefik Tatlić is a theorist from Bosnia-Herzegovina. He holds a PhD in sociology and his work focuses on political philosophy, decolonial theory and political sociology. Some of his recent publications include ‘The Emancipation of Necrocapitalism’ (in: Politics, Aesthetics and Democracy reader, Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ljubljana, 2015) and a book entitled *The Logic of Humanization of Capital — Legitimization of Oppression and Devaluation of the Function of Political Power* (Orion Art, Belgrade, 2015). Together with Marina Gržinić, he co-authored *Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life* (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). He writes regulary for *Reartikulacija publication* (Ljubljana, Slovenia), publishes theoretical texts in various countries and frequently gives public lectures.
###Gordana Nikolić
Gordana Nikolić is a curator and a theorist of contemporary art and media culture. She runs the Center for Film, Video and Photography in the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia. She has been involved with numerous projects including publishing, curating and lecturing in Serbia, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, Germany and Spain.
She co-edited the books *Artist at (non)work* (MCAV/kuda.org, Novi Sad, 2012, Serbian) and *Free and Souvereign. Art, Theory and Politics.* (Cenzura, Novi Sad, 2013, english).
She also co-authored the project ‘Technology to the People!’ (2013), presenting around 150 art films and video experiments from the 20st Century in Vojvodina region. She co-curated recent exhibitions in 2014 and 2015 such as ‘Absolutely Now: Death, Confusion, Sale’, ‘Archive and Power’, and ‘Jasmina Cibic: Building Desire’.
###Sandi Abram
Sandi Abram is an independent researcher from Ljubljana, Slovenia with a Bachelor in Social Informatics (Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana) and a Masters in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana). His research focuses on collective memory, reappropriations of public spaces, contemporary non-institutional practices of art, craft and artivism, and other forms of urban cultures. He is a member of the editorial board of the *Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination, and New Anthropology*. He has published various essays on graffiti and street art, squatting, tattoos, contemporary illustration, creative industries, and urban politics.
###Jonathan Beller
Jonathan Beller is professor of Humanities and Media Studies and director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, New York City. His books include *The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle* (Dartmouth College Press, 2006) and *Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System* (Ateneo University Press, 2006). He serves on the editorial board of several journals, such as *Social Text*, and is completing a book entitled *Computational Capital*.
###Josephine Berry Slater
Josephine Berry Slater is the editor of Mute magazine. She also teaches part-time at Goldsmiths, University of London on the Practices of the Culture Industry. Her current research interests are the transformation of public and community arts within the context of urban regeneration, and the urban politics of neoliberalism.
###Irmgard Emmelhainz
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Mexico City. In 2012, she published a collection of essays about art, culture, cinema and geopolitics, *Alotropías en la Trinchera Evanescente: Estética y Geopolítica en la Era
de la Guerra Total* (BUAP, Puebla). Her work on topics such as movies, the Palestinian situation, art, culture, and neoliberalism has been translated to German, Italian, Norwegian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew and Serbian. She is member of the editorial board of *Scapegoat Journal*, and her second book: *The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion*, is forthcoming in Spanish.
###Marc James Léger
Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. A longer version of his essay in this book was published as ‘Gordard’s Film Socialisme: The Agency of Art in the Unconscious’ in his latest book, *Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics* (2015). He is the editor of *The Idea of the Avant Garde — And What It Means Today* (2014) and the author of *Brave New Avant Garde* (2012) and *The Neoliberal Undead* (2013).
###Ana Vilenica
Ana Vilenica is a researcher, theorist and activist. She graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade and received her PhD at the Department of Theory of Art and Media at the University of Arts in Belgrade. She worked as a researcher in the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, investigating relations of urban regenerations, art and culture in local and regional context. She is the editor of the book *Becoming a Mother in Neoliberal Capitalism* (*uz)bu))na)))*, Belgrade, 2013), the co-editor of the book *On the Ruins of the Creative City* (www.kogradigrad.org, Novi Sad, 2013), and the chief editor of the *uz)bu))na)))* (www.uzbuna.org) journal for art, politics, theory and activism. She regularly publishes texts on social issues in anthologies, journals, catalogs and portals. She is a member of the Who Builds the City initiative (www.kogradigrad.org).