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 19^th 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).¹⁰ 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 image s; 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 image s. As argued in The Cinematic Mode of Production, the rise of late-19^th and 20^th 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.¹¹ Each intensification of the disruption of linguistic function by image s 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 image s 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 20^th century to the veritable demise of English departments at the turn of the 21^st 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.¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴

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)¹⁵, to feminism (Kristeva, 1982,¹⁶ Cixous, 1994,¹⁷ Haraway, 1991)¹⁸ and Marxist feminism (Fortunati, 2007;¹⁹ Maria Mies, 1999)²⁰, to de/post-colonial and critical race theory (Fanon, 2008;²¹ Spillers, 1987;²² Spivak, 1999)²³, 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’.²⁴ 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)²⁵ 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’.²⁶ 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’²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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 image s do the radically dispossessed labor? And also, what’s it to you?

The questions I pose at this point concern the image s 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 image s. 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 image s 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 image s and signs constitutes and de-constitutes these beings (this flesh, to borrow from Hortense Spillers, 1987)²⁹ 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.³⁰ 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 image s and image s 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.

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’.⁵⁸ 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 1922.⁵⁹ 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’.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹ 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’.⁶² 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.⁶³ 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.⁶⁴ The premise of liar’s poker, as he puts it, is that ‘when people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they’re lying’.⁶⁵ 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’.⁶⁶ 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’.⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸ 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.⁶⁹

The leitmotif of avant-garde and theoretical post-structuralism, he argues, is the impossibility of social cohesion.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹ 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.⁷² 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’.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴ 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?’.⁷⁵ 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’.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷ 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.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ ‘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.’⁸⁰ 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.⁸¹

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.⁸² What then can artworks tell us about the changing parameters of what Peter Bürger defined as the ‘institution art’?⁸³

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.⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵ 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.⁸⁶ 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.

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.⁸⁸ 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.⁸⁹ 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 cities⁹⁰ 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.⁹¹

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.⁹² 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.⁹³

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.⁹⁴ 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’.⁹⁵ 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 2020,⁹⁶ 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 processes⁹⁷ 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.⁹⁸ 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-artepreneur⁹⁹ 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.¹⁰⁰ 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.¹⁰¹ 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 19^th century, was projected to become the economic centre of the city.¹⁰² 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.¹⁰³ 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 Square¹⁰⁴, 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.¹⁰⁵ 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.¹⁰⁶ 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.¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸ 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. ¹⁰⁹

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.¹¹⁰ 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.¹¹¹ 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 ¹¹² 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.¹¹³ 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’.¹¹⁴ 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.¹¹⁵ ‘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.

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 urbanplans following this directive are transforming the city into a postcard in order to send it and sell it, especially to the urbantourism 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 economy¹¹⁶ for quite a while, the cities in the 21^st 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 urbantourism 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,’¹¹⁷ such as the territorial ‘creative milieu’¹¹⁸ or the metropolitan ‘creative city.’¹¹⁹ The proponents of such ‘new urbaneconomy’¹²⁰ tend to blindly follow Florida’s nostrum of the new paradigm for urbanplanning that can be found his all-encompassing predicament: ‘Human creativity is the ultimate source of economic growth.’¹²¹ 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 2006,¹²² when, after 15 long years of stagnation, the group TEMP, along with a conglomerate of other praxes and realities,¹²³ 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 subjects¹²⁴ 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, urbanregeneration etc. After problematizing the premises of the ‘new urbaneconomy’ 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 public ally 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 together¹²⁵ 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. […]¹²⁶

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.).¹²⁷ 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 urbanregime 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’.¹²⁸

Generally speaking, gentrification can manifest in three forms: traditional, modern, and artificial.¹²⁹ 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)’.¹³⁰ The modern one is produced by exploiting the art world and urbansubcultures 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.¹³¹ Concomitantly, the ‘[q]uality of urbanlife 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 urbanpolitical economy’.¹³²

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’¹³³, 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.’¹³⁴

Instead of what Zukin¹³⁵ 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’¹³⁶ 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.’¹³⁷ Concisely, claims to the uniqueness yield monopoly rent.¹³⁸

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’.¹³⁹ 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’.¹⁴⁰

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.’¹⁴¹ 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)¹⁴² 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.¹⁴³ This attempt to revive a space already revived¹⁴⁴ 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 urbannecrophilia: 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 urbancorpse – 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’.¹⁴⁵ 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.¹⁴⁶ 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 […]’.¹⁴⁷ 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’.¹⁴⁸ 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’ urbaneconomy; 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.¹⁴⁹

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.¹⁵⁰ 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’.¹⁵¹

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.’¹⁵² Thus, the neoliberal capitalist paradigm of productive knowledge is canalized into an applicable and vendible market form. ‘Neoliberalism,’ asserts Harvey¹⁵³ ‘[…] 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, RogLab can indeed be viewed as labor-atorial, a laboratorial materialization reflecting the intertwined processes of the capitalist rent parasiting on the productive commons,¹⁵⁴ incorporation of existent subversion, commodification of autonomous collective creativity, and the (forerunner and justifier of) spatial usurpation.¹⁵⁵ 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 protests¹⁵⁶ – 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 […].¹⁵⁷

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’.¹⁵⁸ 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 urbanpolicies. 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.¹⁵⁹ 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’¹⁶⁰

As for the surrounding buildings without the historical preservation,¹⁶¹ 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 urbanvoid, 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 urbanvoids caused by the lack of investments is contained in the intention of transforming the building into a politically silent urbanphantom. 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 urbancontext. 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;¹⁶² 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’.¹⁶³ 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)¹⁶⁴ 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.