As the occupy movement in the US this week shifts its attention from the shiny crystallisations of high finance to the hubs of material circulation, Chris Wright reviews Paul Mattick Jr.'s book, Business as Usual, and asks: what is missed by shouting down only one aspect of capitalism?
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations which have sprung up around the United States express in their very name the common sense analysis of the economic crisis which began in 2007-8. Wall Street (aka finance capital) is out of control and the regulatory mechanisms in place aren't working. And it is not just in the US. The debt crisis in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland threatens the stability of the entire eurozone and has engendered its own massive strikes and demonstrations. Speculative and credit instruments are to blame, cut off from the real production of real goods. Bad fictitious capital is undermining good real capital. Swimming against the current is Paul Mattick, Jr.'s book Business as Usual. Couched in a popular style, a bit too much so when he glosses over hotly contested ideas, it nevertheless represents a major improvement over more widely read works like David Harvey's Neoliberalism: A Brief History. If the style is popular, the analysis is not and it provides a necessary rejoinder to both left and right populism.
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Image: 'Populism not Corporate Facism' - Occupation of Zuccotti Park New York, 2011
The book begins with some overview of the inadequate and obfuscatory concepts employed to understand the current crisis through professional economics. His main concern is to show that economic crisis is not caused by external factors, but is built into the functioning of capital. Most specifically, he makes the case, briefly and without sufficient development, that among views which see crisis as endogenous to capitalism, the problem is not one of underconsumption, disproportionality, or overproduction, which all amount to the same complaint about insufficient or imbalanced consumption. Mattick targets the tendency of falling profitability. This is one of those contentious moments, where a citation of relevant discussions in an endnote would have been appropriate, since this is a claim with a long history.
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Image: Poster at occupation in Oakland, 2011
The best part of this argument, however, is not in his popular presentation of a particularly contentious theoretical analysis, but his simple reflection on what drives the economy. Economists of all stripes, left as well as right, seem to operate under the assumption, consciously or unconsciously, that the economy is about the distribution of (scarce) resources to meet needs. However, this is not how capitalism operates. That it distributes resources to meet needs is a side effect of production for the sake of profit. Although this is a somewhat imprecise formulation, it sheds light on many of modern economics’ fallacies. For example, the idea that lower taxes will mean more investment and job growth is simply false if investment in production is not profitable enough. If higher profits can be garnered elsewhere, such as the pilfering of corporate assets by mergers and acquisitions, raiding workers’ retirement funds, reducing benefits, raising fees from workers and consumers, lowering wages, moving production overseas and/or replacing human labour with machines, then no amount of tax decreases will be an incentive to invest in new production and to hire workers.i
Mattick also takes up the problem that government spending does not increase profits either. This is because the government uses money from taxes, that is, value which has been produced elsewhere and appropriated by the government without an equivalent amount of value being created. This has not stopped government spending from being an increasingly important part of capitalist prosperity. Since the early 20th century there has been continual growth in government spending and when it has decreased, recession almost inevitably follows. What that spending is on may change. Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt by increasing military spending and decreasing taxes, while cutting transfer payments to the poor, elderly, children, students, etc. George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have all effectively done the same thing. Mattick is careful to show that matters were not better when a reverse policy was pursued by Francois Mitterand in the early 1980's. This led to Mitterand being forced to turn to the same neoliberal policies as the other heads of state by the end of 1983.
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Image: One Dollar Bill distributed at Occupation of Zuccotti Park, New York
In this way the book works to address all of the fundamental apologies for the current crisis: it's not a new phenomenon; it's not the outcome of external factors; government spending is integral to the post-WWI economy; government spending or policy is not a means to end the crisis, but at best a means to mitigate crisis and extend spending; the current prosperity enjoyed in the wealthy countries, especially the US, was predicated on a hitherto unimagined expansion of credit and debt at the level of households, corporations and states; capitalism can't avoid paying the debts it has accrued and it can only escape the current crisis of profitability by a wholesale depreciation of existing wealth.
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Image: 'Labour Strife in Financial District', Wall Street Strike leads to a short-lived occupation, March, 1948.
These last two points hit hardest.
Firstly, eventually the piper must be paid. The evaporation in the last two years of the previous 10 years of accumulated wealth is a pretty clear indication that that wealth was largely illusory, or as the popular term has it, fictitious. Even worse, if Mattick is correct a large part of the foundation of ‘Western prosperity’, especially in the US and England where private household debt is well over 100 percent of yearly income, is built on quicksand. The mortgage crisis strikes deeply at the center of that edifice, especially as private home ownership has been the means to the equity which ensured access to loans to cover college for the kids, a high standard of living on cheap credit, low cost loans for a car, etc. The entirety of suburbanism as a development model is exposed to tremendous risk, especially as it always depended on extensive government subsidisation, directly and indirectly.ii
Secondly, getting out of the broader, long-term stagnation that began in the 1970’s will require a catastrophic devaluation and destruction of assets, wages, benefits, and the collapse of many, many companies, as well as probably a restructuring of the global political order in the face of the decline of the dollar. In other words, a renewal of productive investment would require a devaluation on a scale that would re-enable investment at a level of profitability exceeding the current pilfering and gambling. The last such devaluation and destruction of assets was called World War II. In suggesting that government spending can't get us out of this crisis, Mattick breaks sharply with writers like David Harvey who have suggested a ‘New New Deal’ is possible. If Mattick is right, there is no ‘New New Deal’. That avenue existed when government spending was a quite small proportion of GDP. Today, in all of the developed countries, government spending varies from 15 percent to over 50 percent, but in the countries where this appears to be lower, the debt to GDP ratio can be enormous, which is recognised uniformly as not good. Japan, with its mere 15 percent of GDP from government spending, has a public debt that is 225.8 percent of GDP.iii The US public debt to GDP was 62.3 percent, but gross (public and private), it was 92.3 percent, indicating the extremely high private debt load in the US Debt to GDP ratios for all of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, that is, the most developed nations accounting for the vast majority of global wealth production and income, is almost uniformly over 60 percent, and that was in 2009. In the last two years, matters have gotten worse. Even if a ‘New New Deal’ were possible, which seems nearly impossible, it overlooks the politically reactionary character of the ‘New Deal’ internationally. The nationalism implicit in such an affair goes hand in hand with a more aggressive global financial stance and the decline of the dollar under conditions where no obvious replacement presents itself and where even if it did, it would entail the collapse of the United States as the dollar ceased to effectively be world money.
Image: Flyer distributed at the occupation of Zuccotti Park, New York, 2011
This does not mean that Business as Usual is a perfect book. Aside from the defects previously mentioned due to its popular style, the book is limited on several points.
Mattick is mistaken on the question of whether or not state expenditure is simply a redistribution of wealth because he overlooks the fact that the state can own and operate production facilities which produce commodities and which sells them. The distribution of profit may not go to private individuals or investors, but at that point there is no difference between the state as capitalist and a private or corporate capitalist. In fact, there is little difference between the internal accounting between units in a state run capitalist economy and the internal accounting between business units within a modern corporation. The market may not be open, but everything is paid for nonetheless as if it were purchased on an open market. However, distortions of the sort one has come to associate with the former ‘socialist states’ do occur because competition on a more or less open market is a critical regulatory mechanism. That is all, however. The state could take over enterprises and run them as a typical commodity producer where particular capitals refused to invest. In the case of needing to restart capital accumulation, it is certainly not impossible to imagine the state taking over certain industries that could then be operated in a market-priced manner at near zero profit for the benefit of total capital, such as energy production, transportation infrastructure and even most commercial and mass transportation systems, retirement, insurance, and healthcare. These are areas where immediate reduction in cost would improve the profitability of all other businesses across the board by dramatically reducing their direct costs. Whether or not this is possible politically is another matter.
The replacement of living labour with dead labour, with machinery, is pointed to as a progressive tendency of capitalist society and Mattick provides some very interesting data backing this up. Yet this point, which has enormous implications for the problem of restarting a new cycle of accumulation, is underplayed. The progressive displacement of living labour by dead is a key reason that each crisis of valorisation is harder to overcome than the last because the relative surplus value created shrinks relative to the overall investment, and today arguably, the absolute amount, of living labour shrinks. Each crisis of valorisation is also a crisis of devalorisation, of how much devalorisation is required for a new cycle of accumulation to begin and limiting how long it will last.
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Image: Banner from 30 November strike and march, London, 2011
The same problem of the crisis of the valorisation process also leads to changes in the labour process. The replacement of living by dead labour is also the replacement of an older labour process with a new labour process. Mattick recognises that the old working class identity and the old working class organisations are gone, but he fails to grasp the root of why this is so. The problem resides in the transformation of the labour process. Not merely the replacement of living labour with dead, but the actual transformation of the relation of living labour to living labour, of dead labour to dead labour, and of living labour to dead labour. The handloom weaver who was replaced by an automatic loom saw her own labour process mechanised and she could completely comprehend the operation of the new machine. The farmer who used to use his seed corn for next year's crop knows nothing about and could not reproduce the genetic manipulation of seed corn by a team of agricultural bioengineers. A highly skilled computer programmer or hardware technician could not produce or design a core processing unit, much less the millions of people who rely on a computer everyday for their work. The tendency is for the labour process to be the direct product and application of scientific knowledge and technique, not a mechanical extrapolation of the labourer driven labour process.
The conclusion is tentative about what can be done, if not what needs to be done, and understandably so in a period where the most radical popular idea about the current crisis seems to be held by both left and right wing populism: blame greedy financiers and regulatory mismanagement. The book is a valuable and eminently readable contribution that goes against the stream not only of apologists for capitalism, but against the stream of angry populisms which miss the mark because they lack a fundamental critique of capitalist production.
Chris Wright <cwright666 AT comcast.net> is a person living (too little) and working (too much) in Baltimore, MD in the USA
Footnotes
i On retirement funds see Ellen E. Schultz, Retirement Heist, 2011. Bank of America is currently facing a class action lawsuit over its unethical handling of account debits and credits which was designed to maximise customer penalties and levy the maximum number of overdraft fees.
ii Suburbanism is the term I use to describe the spatial development of capitalism which began to supersede urbanism (c.f. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, chapter 7, New York: Zone Books, 1995) after WWII.
With a mass default on US student debt threatening to create the next subprime crisis, Angela Mitropoulos dissects the pious injunction to ‘live within ones means', reminding us that to do so has always implied the back-breaking, often immeasurable work of others
In the United States, student debt has outstripped credit card debt, nervously edging toward the one trillion dollar mark and tracked by escalating commentary, protest and defaults. Indeed, student debt has surfaced as one of the abiding themes of #occupy in recent months, foregrounding the already systemic alignment of those protests with university occupations, the anti-austerity campaigns in Europe, campaigns against foreclosures resulting from the collapse of the subprime housing market in the US which, it might be added, emerged a decade or so after the debt-elicited Structural Adjustment Programmes that spurred the anti-summit protests.
Facing one of the highest rates of unemployment in recent times, an unprecedented two thirds of 2010 graduates in the US held debts above the $25,000 mark. Moreover, the number of graduates carrying debt from the more Draconian private loans schemes leapt from just over 930,000 in 2003-04 to slightly under 3 million in 2007-08, and (leaving aside federal loans) is currently estimated at around six billion dollars. Pointing, as it does, to the possibility of large scale default, the growing gap between student debt and (potential) income is not only the financialised trace of conflicts over the expansion of contingent labour, of sharply declining wages and access to welfare, and of an increasingly privatised, costly education system. It is also the signal of the deeply racialised appearance of subprime loans schemes which are adjudicated by variable interest rates and unprecedented limits on the discharging of debts.
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Image: Gustave Doré, illustration for Canto XII of Dante Alighieri's The Vision of Purgatory, Part 3, 1861-1868
To be sure, debt became the means of deferring declining incomes and, particularly in the case of recent student debt, the source of brief respites from - or hopes of escaping - increasingly precarious work. As education was privatised and tuition costs rose by six hundred per cent from 1980 (in the main to provision corporate managements and real estate value), by 2007 a thriving (and, it might be added, prescient) private loans industry was furnished with legislation that made it impossible to discharge debts through recourse to bankruptcy. Tightening restrictions on the bankruptcy provisions of student loans that began - perhaps unsurprising - in 1978, student debt is situated in the exceptional legal zone of debts accrued through fraud or crime. More recently, while President Obama promised debt relief, he excluded the private loan sector. Though its profits remain enormous, its earnings have fallen in recent times between 10 and 40 percent depending on the company, and so the private loan industry continues to spend heavily on political lobbying to stem further decline by ensuring the constant renegotiation of unbreakable contracts. While the greater proportion of loans remain federally-funded and guaranteed, the biggest increase in student debt has been in the subprime market. That is, private loans for smaller initial debts bearing more onerous conditions: over half of such loans are for attendance at institutions charging less than $10,000; they have few, if any, provisions for hardship; interest rates are not fixed, and they are almost impossible to discharge. That the expansion of student debt has been a lever for the increasing enrolment of poorer students is indicated by the rise in the numbers of African-American undergraduates taking out private loans, quadrupling between 2003-04 and 2007-08. Some of this went to supplementing insufficient federal loans, a further index of rising costs and declining incomes.
Rates of default, late payment and evasion continue to climb and are predicted to worsen. An estimated 50 billion dollars worth of federal loans are already in default. And, as with the subprime housing market, there are those who would denounce not the injunction to repay what could have been made available, but the fleeting avoidance of austerity in increasingly cramped conditions. There is talk of a speculative ‘bubble' in education, in readiness for a bust. Speculation, it seems, is the prerogative of Wall Street. As is debt, since it should go without saying that stock exchanges are involved in raising money for corporate use in the form of shares. Bailouts perform a similar function. For everyone else, debt and speculation remain morally suspect, the chance of deferring the settling of accounts and determinations of value, a dangerous break in the logic of commensurability, representation and right that ostensibly links income and labour, yet construes surplus labour as a type of indebtedness. That is to say, workers are assumed to owe employers more work than is reckoned necessary for their own renewal. This transactional modification of the sentimentalised, unmeasured ways in which domestic labour is often rendered as obligation, and that slaves were considered to be fugitives until they performed the labour regarded as due their masters,i continues to be understood as a variant of indebtedness. In its increasingly precarious forms, that indebtedness troubles the boundaries of recognition and recompense that apparently connect the wage to the ‘normal working day', returning us to the question of the allocation of the surplus rather than the assignment of right.
So, while these figures surrounding student debt are striking, they detail the larger questions campaigns against debt have to confront. Debt is, above all, the reach for a future that might be other than the present, or just a bit better. These student debts are contractual projections of financial obligation into the prospective time of the future. They forge intense links by way of interest rates, repayments and rescheduling between the speculative present and a calculable tomorrow. Yet it is in this distance, however fine, between speculation and calculation, between the bold gambling on possibilities and the settling of accounts, or between immeasurable uncertainty and calculable risk, that capitalist futurity becomes recomposed less as an inexorable necessity than a question of whether and how the restoration of austerity might proceed.
Generalised indebtedness holds open possibilities. If debt has become the prominent motif of protests around the world, this is not to suggest that all critiques of debt are anti-capitalist. Or, this is not to imply that all opposition to debt is concerned with the interlocking questions of debt, right and recognition that, for centuries, have made unpaid labour (whether as surplus labour or without pay at all) appear as a more or less naturalised form of indebtedness to capitalists. In other words, insofar as the expansion of debt marks a crisis of social reproduction (financially expressed as a gap between income and expenditure, but nevertheless articulated as a brazen reaching beyond the austerities obliged by this decreasing income), the political question to be posed of various critiques of debt is of the extent of their opposition to (or complicity with) the re-imposition of the injunction: ‘live within one's means'.
Do denunciations of debt servitude imply a critique of the indentured labour that debt obliges or do they merely demand its reallocation according to the seemingly natural lines of race, gender and class? Debt includes a salient instance of speculation (however cynical, foolhardy or prudent) that for conservative critics should only be the prerogative of those who can command the labour of others. Debt is legitimated by its connection to productivity. If debt is not to result in a diminution of income during repayment, it presumes a rising income. Either labour is extended, intensified or acquired from others. This, crudely, is the formula of capital. It is also the logic of investment in human capital that, as it turns out, must be outfitted with moral and legal limits in the form of the unbreakable contracts of student debt, lest the sequestered surplus of capital be misconstrued as general abundance.
Of course, these dynamics have a much longer history than that of recent student debt in the US. Before the much touted turn to neoliberalism in the US, the UK and elsewhere, with their increasingly privatised schema of social reproduction (education, welfare, housing, health care and so on) and the expansion of personal and household debt that this precipitated, the Keynesian welfare state that emerged in the wake of the Second World War was premised on deficit spending. That debt was underwritten by the below-the-line labour in the colonies, by former slaves faring a little better than before, recent migrants and unpaid domestic work. It was guaranteed by imperial force, the credibility of the US dollar as the de facto global currency and that combination of racism, sexism and nationalism that makes below-the-line labour appear natural or obligatory.
But the second half of the 20th century was also the history of the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and struggles around unpaid domestic work, the unprecedented reversal of colonial flows, the emergence of migrant workers' movements and more. In this, the boundaries that had limited the demands on the Keynesian state to the family wage claims of citizens gave way to fiscal crisis, switching the displacement of debt from the geographic, racialised and gendered architectures of Fordism to those of post-Fordism. This, in turn, entailed the spread of contingent labour, the relocation of debt from the state to households, and an emphasis on human capital formation. The post-Fordist financialisation of daily life, the indistinction between the time of work and that of life ushered in by the expansion of precarious work, and the personalisation of debt are, in this regard, less a signal of the appearance of a new epoch than of the collapse of the Fordist compromise between sections of the working class and capital in the wake of its challenge by those who were not deemed to be parties to the deal, but nevertheless made it possible.
If all this raises the question of just who is indebted to whom, it might also trouble the moral injunction against debt, reanimated during times of crisis, that was written into the historically pivotal pact between ecclesiastical authorities and merchant capitalists at capitalism's inauguration. Threatened by the anti-feudal struggles, the Scholastics turned to Aristotle to both enable speculation and limit it to its specifically capitalist (i.e., re-/productive) forms. In their insistences that income should only be accumulated by labour, just as sex should only be for the purpose of women going into labour, the Scholastic tirades against debt were always intended for the lower classes. Surplus was, is, reserved for capitalists. Church prohibitions against usury were invented at around the same time as purgatory and the introduction of indulgences. Just as sermons against gambling, sex and excessive pleasure reached a crescendo in the Middle Ages, the Church invented the space of purgatory situated between heaven and hell where one could pay off one's debts, and it fabricated the means by which one could literally buy one's way into heaven with a donation. These apparently anti-capitalist decrees, with significant caveats for capitalists themselves, remain the hallmark of conservative critiques of debt. They are the Middle Ages version of lobbying and bailout. Moreover, the current resort to the unbreakable contract (the neo-contractualism of welfare, student debt and more) returns to early forms of contract as it emerged from theological understandings of covenant: absolutely binding, transcendental and infinite. For conservatives today, the expansion of debt is a problem because the crisis of reproduction it signals can, with widespread default, segue into a crisis of capitalist futurity more generally.
Unpaid debt, very simply put, holds out the possibility of ‘living beyond one's means' when the means of re-/production are no longer in one's easy reach. The revival of Aristotelianism at the very moment of its historical obsolescence during capitalism's rise - something a little more complex than what Marx nevertheless grasped through his insight into the historically momentous separation of the worker from the means of production - marks a persistent feature of attempts to reimpose the demarcations that makes capitalism what it is. If the Scholastics borrowed Aristotle's understanding of language, with its stress on commensurability and representation, at a time when value had become speculative and uncertain, the recourse to an Aristotelian distinction between politics and economics today indicates a similarly anachronistic move in far from critical understandings of the conditions of capitalism. Aristotelian equality, as Marx notes, cannot conceive a specifically capitalist equivalence, the commensurability of the qualitatively incommensurate, just as (I would add) his realist theory of language has difficulty admitting the future-contingent that defines the contractual, and his understanding of logical axioms can only assume the representation of natural rather than contingent value.
As fleeting as Marx's remarks on Aristotle were, he nevertheless noted that this limit to Aristotle's thinking relates to the situation of slavery in ancient times. In other words, the neo-Aristotelian emphasis on a repartitioning of politics and economics - more or less explicit in the arguments of Polanyi, Foucault and Arendt, as well as in calls for a return to ‘real democracy' - rely on a crucial fudging. For Aristotle, the egalitarianism between free men in the polis (city) was necessarily predicated on the slavery that was relegated to the oikos (household). Leaving aside the question of whether the logic of democracy partakes of the sense of capitalist equivalence rather than equality as Aristotle could have understood it (as with Arendt's idealisation of ancient democracy), the resort to neo-Aristotelianism either romanticises the oikos (as do Polanyi and Foucault), or it sidesteps the decisive question posed by the expansion of debt at this particular time, and as the issue makes an appearance in the occupations.
In doing so, it abandons the critical conjuncture of default and occupation that points not to a revival of democracy (since the models of decision making are not democratic but take their cues from decentralised networking), but instead to experiments with ‘promiscuous infrastructures' that have been ongoing in protest camps for more than a decade, from Seattle to Tahrir and beyond.ii In the seemingly tangential arguments over how to organise the labour that goes in to sustaining the occupations, how to arrange kitchens, energy, medical care, shelter, communications and more, in the correlations between homelessness and the #occupy encampments, in the very question posed of how to take care of each other in conditions of palpable uncertainty, live the pertinent issues of the oikos in these times. It is not surprising, then, that in her discussion of the occupations at the University of California, Amanda Armstrong begins with foreclosures and the transformation of universities into real estate in order to go on to highlight the centrality of ‘bonds of care' to both the protests and the creation of a different kind of university.iii If debt marks a crisis of social reproduction, then the question surely becomes how to generate forms of life beyond its specifically capitalist forms?
The boundary between economics and politics is mutually constitutive. It has been constantly reconfigured not by capitalists but in the process of their pursuit of fugitive slaves from modern sites of oiko-nomics: the flight of women from the home, working class children from the factories their parents laboured in, the middle classes from increasingly precarious labour, the great grandchildren of slaves from the servitude of workfare, migrants from impoverishment and devastation. To dream of returning to a fanciful time of self-sufficiency and independence is to yearn for the conditions that made the subject of politics or the head of the household possible, and so for the reconstruction of the boundaries erected against this flight. Debt made this flight viable, but it is for the most part the debt that might be understood in terms of the irreducible, incalculable inter-dependence of sharing a world if not always a circumstance. As Annie McClanahan put it, the growing calls for mass student default mark a challenge to ‘the temporal logic of indebtedness', the discovery of ‘a present in which our debts are only to one another.'iv
In this sense, the increasingly common predicament of financial debt bondage calls not for the restoration of a common identity as the demos (the fantasy of a return to the putative nobility of politics untainted by slavery); nor for a rallying of the university as an apparently meritorious machinery of credit and value unsullied by the presence of (former) slaves; nor, still, for the re-imposition of what it might mean to ‘live within one's means' for those deprived of the means of life without labouring (not alongside but) for another. It calls instead for the political consolidation of student debt with all the other forms of debt that dare to venture beyond austerity, for the transformation of infinite debt into endless credit, and a break with the capitalist limits on speculation. As the implications of student indebtedness unfold into already-uncertain financial circuitry, or are quarantined by the wall of the unbreakable contract, debt may well serve as the projection of the present into a calculable, foreclosed future. Or, in the congruence of default and occupation, it just might wander beyond the intimate reckonings of human capital's self-imposed imperatives into the creation of infrastructures of another kind of indebtedness and conjecture.
Angela Mitropoulos <s0metim3s AT gmail.com> is presently in Sydney. Her most recent writings are 'Legal, Tender: The Genealogical Economy of Pride, Debt and Origin' (Social Text, 29:3), 'Uncanny Robots and Affective Labour in the Oikonomia (Cultural Studies Review, forthcoming 18:1), and Contract and Contagion (forthcoming) on which much of the above analysis is based.
Footnotes
iOn this last point, see Stephen Best's The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
iiThe phrase is borrowed from Anna Feigenbaum and the Creative Resistance Research Network's studies of protest camps.
iiiAmanda Armstrong, ‘States of Indebtedness: Care Work in the Struggle against Educational Privatization,' South Atlantic Quarterly 110:2, 2011.
ivAnnie McClanahan, ‘Coming Due: Accounting for Debt, Counting on Crisis', South Atlantic Quarterly 110:2, 544.
The image's mediation of the past is far from nostalgically comforting, writes Benedict Seymour in his review of Les Marques Aveugles at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. If the visual returns of the show prove that modernist film tropes still have life in them, they nevertheless also evoke the painful loops of post-Fordist restructuring and its futureless futures
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain the image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History'
In a week in which the speed of light was wobbling and the Euro along with it, I visited a show in Geneva - capital of banks, clocks, and nuclear physics. Les Marques Aveugle at the Centre d'Art Contemporain pivoted on forms of what Freud called ‘Nachträglichkeit' (deferred or retroactive action), and explored the temporality of traumatism as played out in images conceived as ‘marks' and traces. Many of the 17, mostly contemporary, works in the show featured narratives in which cause and effect are reversed, image and sound diverge, run out of sequence or are superimposed. In Les Marques Aveugles (Blind Marks) - as in the now notorious neutrino jokes virally replicating across the internet (‘Who's there?' ‘Neutrino'. ‘Knock knock.') - the premise and the punchline often change places, and time is tied in more or less elegant, but generally thought provoking, knots.
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Image: Still from Rosa Barba's A Private Tableaux, 2010
Around the potentially over-familiar lodestars of Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) and Hollis Frampton's wonderful Nostalgia (1971), several contemporary works of interest were constellated. The curators, Katya García-Antón and Emilie Bujès', conception of the image as a ‘blind mark' derives directly from the premise of Marker's film:
‘La Jetée' (‘The Jetty', 1962) opens with a still image of Orly airport, followed by this sentence, almost as seminal as Chris Marker's film itself: ‘This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood'.
Here it is the hold the image has over the protagonist that makes his time-travel possible, the condition both of his love, and his doom. This narrative device enables a refunctioning of the image archive inherited from the trauma of World War II and, in the process, sees the invention of what will become the most exciting sci-fi film tropes of neoliberal cinema. Frampton's film represents its own kind of reworking of the (personal) archive, with its own pattern of superimposition and retroactive action.
Marker and Frampton's films were not necessarily direct influences on the more recent film works in the show, but as the curator's statement makes clear, they did provide ‘a point of departure' for the show's research into the image as ‘mark' or, indeed, marker. The idea that historical events are the Real of artistic production (and reproduction) was very present, even as most of the works simultaneously emphasised their fictive or ‘performative' aspects. This was not a merely formal or psychological engagement with the image as a mark that marks those who mark it. The social, political and economic stakes of the image market - of the circulation of images - were at issue, too.
Particularly interesting in this light was Wendelien van Oldenborgh's slideshow/sound piece Après la reprise, la prise (2009). The artist arranged for two women, ex-workers and strikers at a Belgian jeans factory now working as actresses, to visit a class of secondary school pupils. This 15-minute work was assembled from the artist's documentation of the encounter. Sharing their experiences of Fordist and post-Fordist work and struggle with the younger generation, the piece reminded me of Paolo Virno's notion of virtuosic labour and ‘communicative capitalism': the women workers whose words and images constitute much of the artwork literally went from silent stitchers in the jeans factory to vocal (if intermittent) actors on the stage via the medium of the strike and its very articulate political speech/action. From secure muteness to a life of precarious volubility, their trajectory could be read as exemplifying a wider social movement or restructuring. The form of the artwork emphasised this thesis, presenting a contrast of overlapping and articulate voices, luminous and sometimes layered images. During the course of the slideshow, we discover that the recently closed down sewing area of the school in which this inter-generational exchange took place had exactly the same model of sewing machine the women used to use in the now closed down Levi's factory. One emptied workshop stood in for another, a kind of accidental reconstruction of the space in which the women went from workers to strikers to actors of a different kind. Here trauma was present as that which returns, not to mention as the ongoing shock of closures and foreclosures.
The image both testified to this and, through the disjunct relation to the soundtrack, posed the question of articulation in its own form. The combination of discrete and flowing slide images projected on the wall - La Jetée style fragments from an absent continuum - and a sound track woven of voices, combined different styles of articulacy from the two generations of post-workers. The ex-strikers' were distinct and clear, the teenagers an ebullient babble itself framed by one of the two actresses' injunction, ‘you have to articulate.' The viewer/listener was invited to do the same, to reconcile the images with the soundtrack's flow of words as parallel but distinct sequences of doubling and mirroring which ran through from singing off-screen at the beginning to comments on the actresses' current condition as 'intermittents du spectacles' performing precarious labour at the end: ‘We're not Sophie Marceau.' ‘Then again she hasn't done much lately.' 'She's wealthy enough she doesn't have to'. The loop structure of the work was more than a mere convenience here, implying both the persistence of alienation in work, old and new, and possibilities of inter-generational solidarity for les enfants de Levi's et Michael Jackson.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Still from Chris Marker's, La Jetée, 1962
The title of the piece - Après la reprise, la prise - alludes to Jacques Willemont's famous document of 1968 ‘La reprise du travail aux usines Wonder' (‘The Return to Workat the WonderFactory'). 'Reprise' means both 'return to work' and 'retake' as in the cinematic take, so one might translate the title as ‘After the retake, the take'. Among other things this refers to the history of artists taking up the Willemont film again (Reprise by Hervé le Roux, 1995), but also obviously the sense in which work becomes a kind of re-make of work. Further the title intimates a reversal of temporal sequence that resonates with others in the exhibition. As the artist explained in an email: ‘My take was to do something which is a "take" again, something in the present, referring to the present... but it comes after the retake.' As a work on work it presented its disjunctions intact for the viewer to work through (Nachträglichkeit as dreamwork, the delayed processing of events?) rather than as a spectacle of far-off activity. As such it spoke to our present conjuncture and invited reflection on the necessity (and forms) of communication between generations, and between workers and non-workers, in the present. If an increasing number of us are now beyond the return to work and indeed work itself, what new forms of speech and action are necessary (and not just for survival)? As one of the women (ex-)workers says, ‘I gave my presentation and they understood', but clearly her mode of address, as actress and striker, was quite different from the everyone-speaking-at-once of the youth. What dialectical or disjunctive synthesis is possible in this meeting of voices and images?
The pensions strike in the UK last November raised similar questions of articulation and resistance, precipitating both solidarities and tensions between generations. Questions of striking, marking and indeed trauma, are not going away in the current showdown between capital and post/workers. Is a one-day strike any more than a striking image? Is a purely symbolic strike effective? Will something ‘real' build out of such gestures? And what effect would an escalation from symbolic action into real shows of force have on proletarians who do not conceive themselves as workers? Here again the striking image, the clear alignment of voice and action or us against them was complicated, requiring further work (within, against, or without, work).
Advancing the curator's research into images as marks without losing its own distinctive voice was Rosa Barba's film A Private Tableaux (2010). It treats the hermetic and hieratic marks left by road engineers on the ceiling of subterranean service tunnels as traces of a vanished civilisation, a Lascaux cave of the modern era. Poetically precise and economical in 'reading' the signs by means of textual inter-titles, functional marks are revealed by torch-light to a shaky handheld camera and reinscribed: the dreaming of a lost civilisation, a diagram of an alien cosmology. Barba manages to avoid whimsy, instead suggesting the mythical qualities of scientific knowledge itself. Like La Jetée, this is a trip into our own antiquity, an archaeology of the present. As such it was a useful corrective to the visitor centre at the nearby CERN institute of nuclear physics which I visited during my time in Geneva. Such absence of poetry at the epicentre of global research into the neutrino was striking in another way. While engaged in undermining the fundamentals of modern science, CERN shrouds itself in an aesthetic straight out of the '80s ‘Innovations' catalogue, with a dash of ‘Terminator 2' for the entrance foyer. Perhaps Barba's film is the last (displaced) redoubt of ‘the wonders of micro-physics' such outreach projects strain but fail to convey. A Private Tableaux recognisably follows in Marker's footsteps, forced to leave the high road of advanced science to find more suggestive material in the unconscious of the engineers' mundane underworlds. No neutrino will be shot through these service corridors to outrace light in pitch darkness, but they have the feeling of Egyptian tombs, of codes and secrets to be deciphered. Barba's camera catches the auratic afterglow of a purely practical activity, the antithesis of Herzog's recent 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams which made the sublime ridiculous with sonic and visual supplements, selling its ancient sources short. As opposed to stereo-optic enhancement and deflation of the ancient marks, a spiral of specular bubble and bust, here the flatness of the sign opened up a (semantically and acoustically) resonant space of much greater depth and suggestiveness.
This trip into the underworld was also a journey across time. Watching it returned me to Marker's piece with fresh eyes. La Jetée, video projected from 35mm but itself originally a 16mm production, seemed an even more deft and beautiful reframing of the traumatic past. Here it is World War II that provides much of the visual material for projection of a post-apocalyptic future, though it is clearly also mediating the Cold War moment in which it was made. The story's central convolution involves scientists sending the captive protagonist back to a period before the World War and then forward into a technologised future (‘Paris reconstructed. 2,000 incomprehensible streets') in an attempt to save humanity - or at least ‘human industry'. Famously it is because the hero remains obsessed by ‘an image from his childhood' that his captors are able to target him at a particular moment in his life with the precision of nuclear physicists aiming a neutrino. In the process however they unleash a destiny at once anticipated and obscured by its own image. The protagonist meets and falls in love with the woman of his childhood memory, an ante-bellum idyll, but then is parted from her as the scientists send him into the far future to bring back the energy packs needed to regenerate society. On return to the present, attempting to escape execution by his captors, he asks the people of the future to send him back into the past so he can rejoin the woman he loves. He finds her but is followed and killed by one of the captors, realising at the last moment that he has become the object of his own childhood gaze. The image which ‘marked' him for life will have been that of his own death. The protagonist follows his fixation on an image to the point of incarnation, fulfilling it as a destiny by entering it, becoming simultaneously subject and object at the point of annihilation. The image here is not merely representational or descriptive but performative, it casts a spell, and unravels into love story and death sentence. La Jetée is a (modern) tragedy, in which narrative is predestination, action self-erasure, and the choice of humanity and love over ‘social regeneration' is paid for with death; the project of happiness ends with an execution. The film's implications are endless, contradictory, but seen in this constellation and at this conjuncture a timely reading suggested itself: that ‘sacrifice' is the price demanded for renewed ‘growth', and that society continues to use our memories and desires as ‘bait', trading our lives for a few more years of dominion.[1]
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Still from Robert-Jan Lacombe's Au revoir Mandima, 2010
The work most evidently influenced by Marker's technique in La Jetée was a video by a young Swiss artist, Robert-Jan Lacombe which likewise revisited a haunting childhood image. Au revoir Mandima (2010, video, 10') renarrated a photograph of the artist as a young (white, European) boy taking leave of the Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) of his childhood, saying goodbye to his (black, African) friends and disappearing into the consumerism and cartoons of far away Europe. Lacombe's work literally and lucidly scans every section of the picture of his young self, preparing to embark on the journey to the North, to adulthood, and away from incipient civil war. Here, as in La Jetée, the image source is static - a colour photograph of the boy and his doctor parents preparing to climb onto a small plane, surrounded by their former friends, neighbours, and patients. The film dissects the central image and journeys out from it on divergent image chains, opening the family archive to reveal other scenes, the young boy at play with his cousins in France or with his friends in Zaire. Once again the protagonist of this story is displaced, sent across space and time (i.e. ‘combined and uneven development' means that all our journeys involve time travel), separated and reassembled for life in a richer, whiter society. ‘You're already thinking of Europe' says the voice over, addressing his childhood image, ‘You think of ice cream, Nutella, fresh milk, elevators, your cousins, cartoons at grandmas...' But the narrator is also losing something, almost everything: ‘But do you realise what is happening? Do you realise you wont come back?' It's goodbye to the old gang, to Swahili, to the people with whom 'you' learned to speak, ‘full stop'. Like the image of childhood in La Jetée we begin to understand this scene of departure as a kind of death, a kind of instant real subsumption under the future. The film itself is quietly devastating, successfully reanimating and reactivating an otherwise mute and private image. And one is acutely aware of other stories not narrated here that end in literal deaths, trauma of a different order.
As a whole (of fragments) Les Marques Aveugle sustained this level of coherence, each work engaging others in a productive play of resemblance and difference. There was evidence of both the continuing legacy of Marker and Frampton and, beyond the categories of authorship and the canon, the persistence of the image as a mark, a wound, in a supposedly virtualised reality. The show reminded one of the sting and burn of images. Not only those which, as in Frampton's film, are literally incinerated, or which burn in the memory (‘nostalgia' as an overblotting of images, a condition in which one instant is being over-written by the memory of the previous and the preview of the next), but also, as in Gitte Villesen's photocollage and video interviews with participants in the first Auschwitz trial, which hurt because of the ambivalence as well as the awfulness of their testimony: Authentic. Objective. Subjective. Or Which Rules Does one Follow? (2004) - the work's title raises the question of scientific standards of truth, a rather different but still related approach to that in Rosa Barba's archaeology. Here the reconstruction of a historical trauma was at issue. The occasion for the enquiry - the restaging of the trial as an art exhibition - provoked an insistence by the artist on her own part in the epistemological process, emphasising (in Heisenbergian fashion?) the interplay between subject and object: ‘the one asking the questions always affect[s] the answer and the reaction.'[2] This in turn raised questions about the whole process of re-enacting the trial, and what it says about contemporary society's potential to stop repeating its violent marking of us all. However solicitous to the past, to the truth, the obscenity of the system is perhaps most pungent where the effort is made to ‘do justice' to a particular atrocity.
Other works in the show engaged with the mark as historical record at drastically less momentous levels while, in their minimalist attention to their means, sharing a certain reference to film. At the entrance to the exhibition there was Pavel Büchler's conceptual piece The Shadow of its Disappearance, 30 September 2011, Sunrise/Sunset, 2011. Two framed sketches with the stubs of the pencils that made them, the work presented the indexical and representational trace of the two pencils' gradual consumption in the process of recording their own shadows over the course of a particular sunny day. A feedback loop of sorts producing a graph of the means of representation's progressive depletion. In his introduction to the work at the launch, Büchler was acute about its relation to Frampton's performance script, A Lecture, in which the film-maker (and retired photographer) demonstrated that the essence of cinema is not celluloid but the projector, and the creation of obstructions between it and the screen. ‘Our white rectangle is not "nothing at all". It is, in the end, all we have. ... So if we want to see what we call more, which is actually less, we must devise ways of subtracting, of removing, one thing and another, more or less, from our white rectangle.'[3]
Katja Mater's Density Drawing (polaroids), (2011) produced something out of the ‘nothing' of a corner of the exhibition space, putting the photographic image into a kind of representational relay with painting and installation. The process began with a white triangular wedge on the floor (still present) and ended with a series of polaroids of a monochrome painting pinned to the wall. Like the highest stage of a formal reification, the photos evidenced the vanishing mediator of the painting, which seems to have been altered progressively and rephotographed at different stages between two extremes of blankness - black and white. Like Büchler's work, this sequence could be read as a kind of film liberated from the condition of movement, a series of stills, like La Jetée. Minimalism's legacy here seemed to be a continued attention to the material/institutional support, but not one of institutional critique; Villesen's work was closer to this kind of enquiry into its conditions.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Avant le monde, et après (sérial), 2011 Courtesy: the artists and Marcelle Alix, Paris. Photo: Annik Wetter
On the other side of the exhibition, which it should be mentioned took place in the former warehouse space that constitutes the Centre d'Art Contemporain (the gallery itself is always the most material example of refunctioning and retroactive action ‘in' any show), was Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet's new work Avant le monde, et après (serial) (2011). A translucent scroll of responses to Bachofen's hypothesis of prehistoric matriarchy or ‘Le droit maternel' developed in the mid 19th century, this particular ‘film' would be unrolled gradually over the course of the exhibition. Interspersed with scraps of advertising blurb instancing the fascination for ‘Prehistoric women', their ‘Savage struggle!' and ‘Primitive passions!' in pulp movies of the 1950s, this work of ‘Serial' archaeology placed two (or more) different texts in parallel to create another kind of (typographic/textual) ‘movie'. It read as an unscientific (playful, interested), but serious, enquiry into a primal scene rather different from, but related to, that which structures La Jetée or Au revoir Mandima. One could connect the historical constellation presented here to the post-WW2 ‘consumer society' as a new phase of primitive accumulation and struggle for recognition of women's labour, with its own reminting of myths and counter-myths. Or consider the present crisis through the prism of the lost maternal abundance which structures both Bachofen (and Marker's) narratives of social alienation. Can we go back? If we did, would She be there? Does idealised matriarchy only exist by virtue of the obstructions of (capitalist) patriarchy, a mythical back projection? (Chris Knight and Camille Power - please take note). As the carefully inked transparency with its montage of textual fragments made clear, Bachofen's influential theories emerged from this Swiss jurist's descent into the antique tombs below Rome, to the ancient city. As the artists point out, Walter Benjamin - whose ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History' link retroactive action with a materialist historiological principle of engagement (epistemological subject and object are mutually constituting, effect produces cause) - admired Bachofen. In the Arcades Project, he held up the notion that the ‘mother right' excavated by the jurist, and the conception of ‘nature as a ministering mother' could oppose capitalism's ‘murderous idea of the exploitation of nature.' On the other hand, Benjamin also suggested that the conditions of a mythical primal origin are ‘installed in the heart of commodity capitalism itself.'[4] No communism, polyamory and nomadism without domination - or at least, not yet.
Hervé & Maillet's work's own dialectical montage technique (antiquarian mythology intercut with pulp primitivism) emphasised the contradictions involved in a return to myths of matriarchy as a counter to techno-scientific domination. Barba's and Villesen's scepticism toward scientific mythology reverberated with this elegant piece of philological ‘cinema'. One wondered where the unrolling of the textual montage might lead over the course of the show, but clearly there was an attempt here to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of primitivism and patriarchy.
By emphasising the multiple valences of the ‘mark', Les Marques Aveugle reminded one of Adorno's conception of art as sedimented suffering. The aesthetic is always marked by social violence, every document of civilisation a document of barbarism. Along with its carefully structured correlation of art works and themes, it was also clear that this constellation itself is only possible because trauma remains abundant; the one raw material we don't seem to be running out of. Art's energy packs come not from the technologically perfected future, but as Benjamin saw, its ruinous past and crisis stricken present. To discover the persistence or resonance of some of Marker and Frampton's concerns and techniques evidenced through something more than mere recycling or reproduction indicates signs of life, or at least vigor mortis, in the culture of an undead capitalism. Les Marques Aveugles was encouraging in that it took a potentially hackneyed curatorial trope and made it remarkable once more.
Benedict Seymour <ben AT kein.org> is a contributing editor to Mute
Info
Also featured in the show: Hito Steyerl November, 2004, video, 25'; Margaret Salmon Untitled (Colour Line), 2011, 16mm film transferred to video, 3'; and Akram Zaatari, Red Chewing Gum, 2000, video, 10'. The project includes a four-screenings cycle presented at the Grütli cinemas. (19.01 - 22.01.2012): Chantal Akerman, James Benning, Brent Green, Isidore Isou, William E. Jones. Curators: Katya García-Antón and Emilie Bujès. The show is part of the project ‘Spirales. Fragments d'une mémoire collective autour de Chris Marker' (25.11 - 4.12.2011) developed in collaboration with various cultural partners in Geneva.
Footnotes
[1] Like Rosa Barba’s film, with ‘La Jetée’ we are again in the tunnels, though this time underneath the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. This is just up the avenue from the Palais de Tokyo and the Musee d’Art Moderne. The project to send a sensitive and memorious protagonist through time to save the world would, in an alter-modern future, be run not by aesthetically challenged scientists but by a curator like Nicolas Bourriaud. Cultural regeneration had the same utopian-technocratic temporal and economic logic, exploited the same ruse of history, though the scheming scientists were displaced by culturepreneurs. Artists took the bait, marked by an image from their childhoods, restoring a facsimile of ‘industry’ but ending up displaced and erased. The temporal convolutions always ended in coffeeshops.
[2] Gitte Villesen in an interview with Lotte Møller, here: http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/texts.php?action=details&id=11
[3] Hollis Frampton, ‘A Lecture’, http://hollisframpton.org.uk/frampton18.pdf
[4] Peter J. Davies, Myth, Matriarchy, and modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German culture 1860 - 1945, p.399. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2010.
The exhibition, Home of Metal, celebrates forty years of heavy metal music while foregrounding Birmingham’s industrial past. In an act of ‘dedicated mining’, Cameron Bain follows metal from its birthplace in heavy production to sonic home for vital antagonisms
Birmingham’s claim to be the ‘Home of Metal’ hinges primarily on the generally accepted notion that Black Sabbath, from Aston, were the founders of the genre. Certainly within metal circles this is standard lore. (Also hailing from Birmingham and its environs, Judas Priest and Napalm Death, too, play prominent roles in the evolution of metal and thus in the exhibition, but more on them later.) Plausible cases can be made for earlier manifestations of the metallic form, say, Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ (1958), with its epochal, soundbreaking (sorry) deployment of the power chord, or the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ (1964), with its foregrounding of two features that would become key sonic components of metal, namely: DISTORTION and the bludgeoning, repetitive primacy of the RIFF.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath album cover, 1970
It was with Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album, though, (released February 1970), that many of the elements that would become enduring metal tropes, even signifiers of the genre, were distilled into an uncanny, potent brew for the first time: the creepy tritone intro riff (the Devil’s interval) of the opening track 'Black Sabbath'; spooky rain sounds and tolling bells; lyrical themes dealing with being hounded or seduced to damnation by satanic forces (‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘N.I.B’ respectively); Lovecraft-referencing/paraphrasing song titles (‘Behind the Wall of Sleep’); a desolate acoustic interlude sounding more menacing than pastoral (‘Sleeping Village’); and cover art redolent of a Hammer Horror, complete with morbid symbolist poetry framed by an inverted crucifix in the gatefold. Interestingly, the band had no involvement in the sleeve design; the designers presumably latched onto the same commercial impulse as the band itself when they appropriated the name Black Sabbath from Mario Bava’s 1963 horror (the original Italian title was I Tre volti della paura – The Three Faces of Fear), having speculated that if people were prepared to pay money to be scared in the cinema, perhaps they would also pay to listen to ‘scary music’; metal bands, for all that they may relish their underground, outsider cachet, have, in the main, always wanted to actually sell records.
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Image: Godflesh, Streetcleaner album cover, 1989
The story as told by the exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, however, begins with the city itself and the influence of its sonic and material environment on the nascent musical form. A pair of wall quotes introducing the exhibition paint a picture of the city as heroically doomed to labour, a hellish crucible of raw, elemental heavy production:
Birmingham began with the production of the anvil and probably will end with them. The sons of the hammer were once her chief inhabitants.
– William Hutton, First Historian of Birmingham, b.1723
Black by day, red by night…
– Elihu Burritt, American consul, 1862
Part of the formative myth of metal is that the insistent pounding of Birmingham’s foundries had a direct influence on the unrelenting martial rhythms of the music, as well as informing a bleak, pessimistic outlook born of reflection upon the fate of those consigned to live out their lives amidst the remorseless grind of the urban industrial environment. It’s a thread that runs through the reminiscences of many musicians in the Birmingham lineage, from the video interviews with the members of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest included in the exhibition to a recent interview given by Justin Broadrick to Terrorizer magazine, recalling the psychic ambience surrounding the making of Godflesh’s 1989 album, Streetcleaner:
At night, in the summer with your windows open in the flat that I lived in, you could hear deliveries to these shops, and in the background were these factories. The smell in the air was industry and the sound was literally of grinding machines all night – it was like living in Eraserhead! I obviously felt at odds with that urban hell and Streetcleaner was definitely me trying to articulate what I had been through and harbouring that sort of hate and negativity.
The first room of the exhibition includes a display of some of the machine tools responsible for generating the city’s unholy permanoise, as well as interview recordings with the men who used to operate them – (I liked that this crucial industrial background to the emergence of the music was treated more than just tokenistically, that some effort was made to communicate the grain and grit of what it was like to actually labour in one of these factories in this place and at that time). This display, complete with time clock, could also perhaps be seen as a stark summation of working class youth’s horizon of expectation: manufacturing machine as implacable destiny and memento mori. In addition it serves as an oblique allusion to another element in Sabbath’s (and thus metal’s) sonic template: it was a similar kind of machine that removed the tips of two of Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi’s fretting fingers; the result being that, having ingeniously fashioned a pair of prosthetic fingertips out of washing-up bottle tops and scraps of leather, he ended up downtuning his guitar, finding the slacker strings easier to negotiate with his artificial fingertips. With the downtuning Sabbath acquired their signature ‘doomy’ sound. An interesting lecture that I attended as part of the exhibition touched on the importance of local amplification technology (Laney amps) in the formation of this sound also, but I will pass over that, uncertain as I am of the casual reader’s interest in such guitar geek tech specs.
The next room in the exhibition is a mock-up of a ’60s sitting room, featuring such retro curios as period television set and cigarettes. The room, besides offering somewhere cosy to screen the video interviews mentioned above, functions as one pole in a juxtaposition between the low-key, domestic escapism of lounge and TV on the one hand and the flamboyant, grandiose escapism represented later in the exhibition by displays of Judas Priest’s guitars and stage outfits and extravagant stage props, like the giant cross from Sabbath’s 1981 ‘Mob Rules’ tour. Metal is often derided for this grandiose escapism, ridiculed for its rich proliferation and dedicated mining of ‘ludicrous’ Tolkienesque/Lovecraftian/medieval/Viking/horror/sci-fi themes, but to denigrate metal’s presentation and thematic material as mere escapism is to miss a couple of important points. Firstly, for the working class youth (as was) comprising the membership of bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, metal’s ‘escapism’ represented a literal escape from what appeared to be an ineluctable, stultifying factory fate. As the members of Judas Priest tell it in one of the interviews, regardless of any academic promise you might have shown in school, the question was not ‘what do you want to do?’, but ‘which foundry do you want to work in?’ (Incidentally, there is a refreshing lack of tedious pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps cant in their musings on where they find themselves now as compared to where they could have been – the connection to the ‘real’ life of the community and its history still seems very strong, another justification for the inclusion of the humble sitting room, I think.) In fact, one of metal’s tacit, more laudable themes might be ‘Escape more! Escape better!’
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Image: Judas Priest, Sad Wings of Destiny album cover, 1976
The second point I would make with respect to the accusation of mere escapism, is that for all that metal certainly does rely heavily on the exploitation of fantastic themes, it has always (or at least since Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid) also explicitly tackled political themes, often vividly and insightfully. War, the threat of nuclear annihilation (admittedly more in currency during the Cold War), the destruction of the environment, genocide, existential despair rooted in grotesque social inequalities, the creeping pathologisation of ‘awkward’ ‘personalities’ (for want of a far better term) and drug (ab)use are all amongst the ‘issues’ that have become perennially ingrained in metal’s lyrical DNA.1 One of my favourite metal diatribes against the iniquities and anxiety that seem to characterise ‘modern life’ is Sabbath’s ‘Hole in the Sky’ (echoes of depictions of the medieval ‘abominable fancy’?), from their 1980 album Sabotage, wherein we find a pithy analysis of the band’s own compromised role in the industrial production of art: ‘the food of love became the greed of our time / and now we’re living on the profits of crime’, giving the lie to the popular myth that, because metal bands seem to exist on a plane of ludicrous, ‘escapist’ excess, they are somehow bereft of any sense of self-awareness.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Napalm Death, 'Scum' album cover, 1987
Metal’s most explicit and ferocious exercise in political engagement and critique arguably reaches its apogee with Napalm Death, the third major band forming the backbone of the exhibition. Napalm Death’s metal influences (Celtic Frost, Possessed) combined with more political hardcore punk (Discharge, Siege) and post/crust punk (Killing Joke, Crass, Amebix) to essentially form a new genre: grindcore (the name being coined by Napalm Death’s insanely fast drummer, Mick Harris). The resulting music is truly avant-garde in its condensation of speed, volume, concision and fury. ‘You Suffer’ (the shortest song ever recorded (1.316 seconds long), according to that magnificent compendium of spell-bindingly useful information, The Guinness Book of Records), from the debut album Scum is a detonation, a one-off sock in the gut that manages to both pose a question still painfully relevant and to be an exhortation to liberatory analysis: ‘you suffer / but why?’
The section of the exhibition illustrating the (ongoing) Napalm Death episode in Birmingham’s metal story contained what was probably my single favourite display, a huge collection of memorabilia from the milieu from which they emerged, loaned from the personal archives of members of the band(s): handwritten Napalm Death setlists (’83-’86) and lyrics; handmade gig flyers and posters for multi-band bills (the band names highlighting just how remarkably connected nationally and internationally the obscure local scene was); myriad anarcho-punk zines; and demo tapes and mixtapes with song titles in faded biro. Everything in fact, that constituted the distinctive verbal, visual and audio aesthetic fabric of the time, a microhistory of mass communication of an underground movement in the pre-internet age. The fact that such a wonderful proliferation of lovingly preserved self-documentation exists speaks volumes, I think, for the conviction and sheer enthusiasm of those involved, an eloquent and enduring testimony to youth’s dedication to being righteously (and rightfully!) pissed off. How you have fun (how you ‘escape’) counts and, given the state of things, the attitude celebrated here seems more vital and necessary than ever. Nostalgia doesn’t come into it.
Cameron Bain <cameronbain AT hotmail.com> works in the library for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, writes sometimes and sometimes plays music in the bands Vukojebina and the Hung Jury
Info
The Home of Metal Exhibition was held at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 18 June to 25 September 2011
Further Reading
Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, London: Harper Collins, 2004.
Ozzy Osbourne, I am Ozzy, London: Sphere, 2009.
Albert Mudrian, Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore, Washington: Feral House, 2004.
Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, New York: Da Capo Press, 1998 (NB. Eddy’s definition of what constitutes heavy metal is tendentious and notoriously catholic – basically it’s anything with loud guitars – but the book’s full of sharp, funny writing about loads of good music, metal or not).
Footnotes
1http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59SdjZuhekk Black Sabbath performing ‘Hand of Doom’, live in Paris, 1970. Despite (or because of) the band’s own proclivities at the time, they manage to come across not as hypocrites, but as sincerely furious and compassionate.
The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8
Introduction
Building on the success of Signal:Noise I in January 2011, the second iteration of Signal:Noise is produced in collaboration with Mute and Queen Mary School of Business and Management.
Feedback can be seen as an operational mode that overrides distinctions between form and content. Cybernetic ideas of self-regulation – whether in the workplace or within processes of government – have often involved harnessing the means of autonomy in order to increase control. This has proceeded by and large through techniques of participation and feedback.
But these same techniques and forms are also key to certain progressive social and aesthetic projects – from anti-psychiatry and radical pedagogy, to post-humanist philosophy and aesthetics. Troubling issues of agency, intention and consciousness, they have been used to produce new relations of power, truth and aesthetics.
From the schematising of these processes in art, design and urban planning, to the constant relay between emancipation and control in the social logic of participation, feedback will act as a prism for reading history and our present through presentations, screenings, performances and workshops in distributed and militant pedagogy.
More information, including speaker abstracts and biographies, will be available here and on The Showroom Gallery’s website (www.theshowroom.org) in early January 2012.
Signal:Noise II is supported by LCACE, Queen Mary School of Business and Management, Arts Council England and members of The Showroom’s Supporters Scheme.
Admission free, no bookings taken - places allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Programme
Friday 20 January, 7-9pm
Aesthetics, Feedback and the Agency of Things
Presentations by Luciana Parisi and Florian Cramer
Moderator: Robert Jackson
Saturday 21 January, 11-7pm
Participation and Feedback
11.00 Presentation by Suzanne Treister
11.45 Presentation by Axel John Wieder
Responses from Marina Vishmidt and Emily Pethick
13.00 Break
13.30 Reading by Ricardo Basbaum
14.30 A selection of Jef Cornelis' Ijsbrekers introduced by Koen Brams
15.30 Break
16.00 Discussion on feedback and self-organisation with Marina Vishmidt, Stefano Harney and Ultra-red.
17.00 Break
17.15 Screening of Anja Kirschner and David Panos's Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances
18.00 Performance by Mattin.
NB: Mattin will also take part in a public lecture at Goldsmiths on Friday 20 January 2012, 2pm. Read more.
Programme times act as a guide, and may be subject to change. Admission free, no bookings taken - places allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Signal:Noise is an experimental cross-disciplinary research project that aims to explore the influence of cybernetics and information theory on contemporary cultural life by testing out its central idiom, ‘feedback’, through debates, performances, and events.
Through the application of mechanical and scientific models for the understanding of social and political life, cybernetic theory – in particular notions of feedback – informed the development of many early conceptual and participatory artistic practices in the 1960s/70s, yet its influence is still under-recognized. Signal:Noise aims to bring together people who are working with these ideas in the fields of art, design, architecture and theory in order to re-open discussion around this discourse, looking at how it has informed cultural, social and political life, in the past and present.
Programme Notes
Luciana Parisi’s talk on ‘The speculative reason of algorithmic objects’ will discuss how algorithms have become actual objects that prehend external data and in doing so, determine computational spatio-temporality. Algorithms therefore are not simply executors of programs, but are prehensive agencies that evaluate data and create space-time. Algorithms use feedback systems of control to change over time. These prehensive agencies have come to subtend a neoliberal order of aesthetics corresponding to the topological surfaces at the core of digital architecture. Luciana Parisi is the Convenor of the MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research draws on information theories and the life sciences (from cybernetics to computation, from evolutionary to complexity theories) to examine the significance of digital technologies and biotechnologies for a cybernetic understanding of culture. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). Most recently, she has completed a monograph Contagious Architecture with MIT Press (forthcoming).
Florian Cramer is a researcher and theorist based in the Netherlands
Robert Jackson is an MPhil/PhD student at Plymouth University, an artist and software developer based in the UK. Currently entitled 'Algorithm and Contingency', his thesis entangles Computational Algorithmic Artworks and Art Formalism together with Speculative Realist Philosophy, to identify an occluded history of computational art that privileges recursive configurable units of necessity rather than networked systems of contingency. Robert is an editor of the independent journal Speculations: a graduate student-run, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to speculative realist philosophy and an associate editor of the O-Zone Journal (both supported by Punctum Books). He blogs regularly at http://www.robertjackson.info/index
Suzanne Treister is a London based artist and will present five diagrams from her project 'HEXEN 2.0'. These diagrams chart, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. 'HEXEN 2.0' specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The project simultaneously looks at critics of technological society such as Theodore Kaczynski/The Unabomber, the claims of Anarcho-Primitivism and Post Leftism, Technogaianism and Transhumanism and traces precursory ideas of Thoreau, Heidegger, Adorno and others in relation to visions of utopic/dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film.
Ricardo Basbaum is an artist and writer based in Rio de Janeiro
Axel J. Wieder’s presentation on Social Diagrams will focus on the late 1960s when architects and planners made increasing efforts to develop methodologies for a scientifically improved design process. Informed by early cybernetics and information theory, the role of the designer and the future user of buildings and cities became the subject of critical self-reflection. The talk will discuss a series of projects, such as an early example of interactive television and different planning games, in relation to their potential for broader participation, but also new forms of social control.
Axel J. Wieder, born 1971 in Stuttgart, is a curator and writer living in Berlin. 2007-2010 he was the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and 2010 a visiting curator at Ludlow 38, Goethe-Institut New York. In 1999, he co-founded together with Katja Reichard and Jesko Fezer the bookshop Pro qm, which also serves as an experimental platform for events and presentations in art and urbanism. For the 3rd Berlin Biennale 2004, he organized a thematic section about the urban development in Berlin after the fall of the wall (together with Jesko Fezer). 2004-2005 he was project manager for the exhibition project "Now and ten years ago" for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and 2004 a research fellow at the Peabody-Essex-Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He is lecturing and publishing widely. Most recent publication: Casco Issues XII: Generous Structures (eds, together with Binna Choi), Berlin 2011.
Marina Vishmidt is a writer based in London.
Jef Cornelis (1941) worked as executor, director and scriptwriter for the VRT, the Dutch-language Belgian public broadcasting corporation, from 1963 until 1998. Over those 35 years Cornelis accomplished an impressive body of work. It comprises over 200 titles and is generally considered as groundbreaking, artistically and cultural-historically.
In 1983 and 1984 Cornelis and his colleagues of the newly erected Art Issues Service of the then BRT realised the monthly TV programme IJsbreker, of which a total of 22 episodes were produced. Each episode of IJsbreker featured a cultural topic, in the widest sense of the word, ranging from 'culture in the papers' to 'computer art, from 'fashion' to 'tattoos'. IJsbreker was a live programme, with speakers on different locations. Various locations were connected with each other and the studio. Communication – or the lack of it – could only be accomplished using countless cameras and TV monitors.
Ultra-red is a sound art collective that includes artists, researchers and organisers from a range of social movements.
Stefano Harney joined Queen Mary, University of London, in September 2006. He is an expert on business ethics, corporate governance, and responsible management education, and a frequent commentator in the media on banking regulation and ethics.He is founder of Finance Watch, a research NGO dedicated to banking reform, and he is current Chair of the European Business Ethics Network (UK). Stefano Harney's new book, Business World (Routledge, forthcoming) focuses on the borderless business school and the rise of extreme neo-liberalism. His last book, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke, 2002) was a phenomenology of labour in the state aiming to rethink the contemporary state-form. He is part of the editorial collectives at the journals Social Text and Lateral. His first book was a study of postcolonial Trinidad. He is also co-founder of the NGO Clinic, a pro bono organisational development and change service for not-for-profits.
Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ living truthfully under imaginary circumstances is a two-channel video that explores the acting exercises developed by Sanford Meisner. Meisner's techniques paradoxically deploy an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate 'authentic' emotion and spontaneity in performance. Analytic yet hypnotic it interrogates the meaning of 'emotional truthfulness' in post-modern naturalism and dominant assumptions about the nature of human behavior.
Mattin is an artist who works with noise and improvisation, often in collaboration with others. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and the constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.He has produced records, performs internationally and runs two labels: w.m.o/r and Free Software Series and the chaotic net-label desetxea. Together with Anthony Iles, Mattin was editor of the book Noise & Capitalism (2009). Taumaturgia and CAC Brétigny are about to publish Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting most of Mattin's writings plus reviews by other people of performances and concerts that he has been involved in.
For Signal:Noise II Mattin will produce: A collective evacuation of the voice in an assembly line of liberation while
addressing the sound of indifference.
Mattin will also take part in a public lecture at Goldsmiths on Friday 20 January 2012, 2pm. Read more.
Signal:Noise was originated by Steve Rushton, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Marina Vishmidt, Rod Dickinson and Emily Pethick, and the first event at The Showroom took place in January 2011.
The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Introduction
Building on the success of Signal:Noise I in January 2011, the second iteration of Signal:Noise is produced in collaboration with Mute and Queen Mary School of Business and Management.
Feedback can be seen as an operational mode that overrides distinctions between form and content. Cybernetic ideas of self-regulation – whether in the workplace or within processes of government – have often involved harnessing the means of autonomy in order to increase control. This has proceeded by and large through techniques of participation and feedback.
But these same techniques and forms are also key to certain progressive social and aesthetic projects – from anti-psychiatry and radical pedagogy, to post-humanist philosophy and aesthetics. Troubling issues of agency, intention and consciousness, they have been used to produce new relations of power, truth and aesthetics.
From the schematising of these processes in art, design and urban planning, to the constant relay between emancipation and control in the social logic of participation, feedback will act as a prism for reading history and our present through presentations, screenings, performances and workshops in distributed and militant pedagogy.
More information, including speaker abstracts and biographies, will be available here and on The Showroom Gallery’s website (www.theshowroom.org) in early January 2012.
Signal:Noise II is supported by LCACE, Queen Mary School of Business and Management, Arts Council England and members of The Showroom’s Supporters Scheme.
Admission free, no bookings taken - places allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Programme
Friday 20 January, 7-9pm
Aesthetics, Feedback and the Agency of Things
Presentations by Luciana Parisi and Florian Cramer
Moderator: Robert Jackson
Saturday 21 January, 11-7pm
Participation and Feedback
11.00 Presentation by Suzanne Treister
11.45 Presentation by Axel John Wieder
Responses from Marina Vishmidt and Emily Pethick
13.00 Break
13.30 Reading by Ricardo Basbaum
14.30 A selection of Jef Cornelis' Ijsbrekers introduced by Koen Brams
15.30 Break
16.00 Discussion on feedback and self-organisation with Marina Vishmidt, Stefano Harney and Ultra-red.
17.00 Break
17.15 Screening of Anja Kirschner and David Panos's Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances
18.00 Performance by Mattin.
NB: Mattin will also take part in a public lecture at Goldsmiths on Friday 20 January 2012, 2pm. Read more.
Programme times act as a guide, and may be subject to change. Admission free, no bookings taken - places allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Signal:Noise is an experimental cross-disciplinary research project that aims to explore the influence of cybernetics and information theory on contemporary cultural life by testing out its central idiom, ‘feedback’, through debates, performances, and events.
Through the application of mechanical and scientific models for the understanding of social and political life, cybernetic theory – in particular notions of feedback – informed the development of many early conceptual and participatory artistic practices in the 1960s/70s, yet its influence is still under-recognized. Signal:Noise aims to bring together people who are working with these ideas in the fields of art, design, architecture and theory in order to re-open discussion around this discourse, looking at how it has informed cultural, social and political life, in the past and present.
Programme Notes
Luciana Parisi’s talk on ‘The speculative reason of algorithmic objects’ will discuss how algorithms have become actual objects that prehend external data and in doing so, determine computational spatio-temporality. Algorithms therefore are not simply executors of programs, but are prehensive agencies that evaluate data and create space-time. Algorithms use feedback systems of control to change over time. These prehensive agencies have come to subtend a neoliberal order of aesthetics corresponding to the topological surfaces at the core of digital architecture.
Luciana Parisi is the Convenor of the MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research draws on information theories and the life sciences (from cybernetics to computation, from evolutionary to complexity theories) to examine the significance of digital technologies and biotechnologies for a cybernetic understanding of culture. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). Most recently, she has completed a monograph Contagious Architecture with MIT Press (forthcoming).
Florian Cramer is a researcher and theorist based in the Netherlands
Robert Jackson is an MPhil/PhD student at Plymouth University, an artist and software developer based in the UK. Currently entitled 'Algorithm and Contingency', his thesis entangles Computational Algorithmic Artworks and Art Formalism together with Speculative Realist Philosophy, to identify an occluded history of computational art that privileges recursive configurable units of necessity rather than networked systems of contingency. Robert is an editor of the independent journal Speculations: a graduate student-run, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to speculative realist philosophy and an associate editor of the O-Zone Journal (both supported by Punctum Books). He blogs regularly at http://www.robertjackson.info/index
Suzanne Treister is a London based artist and will present five diagrams from her project 'HEXEN 2.0'. These diagrams chart, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. 'HEXEN 2.0' specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The project simultaneously looks at critics of technological society such as Theodore Kaczynski/The Unabomber, the claims of Anarcho-Primitivism and Post Leftism, Technogaianism and Transhumanism and traces precursory ideas of Thoreau, Heidegger, Adorno and others in relation to visions of utopic/dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film.
Ricardo Basbaum is an artist and writer based in Rio de Janeiro
Axel J. Wieder’s presentation on Social Diagrams will focus on the late 1960s when architects and planners made increasing efforts to develop methodologies for a scientifically improved design process. Informed by early cybernetics and information theory, the role of the designer and the future user of buildings and cities became the subject of critical self-reflection. The talk will discuss a series of projects, such as an early example of interactive television and different planning games, in relation to their potential for broader participation, but also new forms of social control.
Axel J. Wieder, born 1971 in Stuttgart, is a curator and writer living in Berlin. 2007-2010 he was the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and 2010 a visiting curator at Ludlow 38, Goethe-Institut New York. In 1999, he co-founded together with Katja Reichard and Jesko Fezer the bookshop Pro qm, which also serves as an experimental platform for events and presentations in art and urbanism. For the 3rd Berlin Biennale 2004, he organized a thematic section about the urban development in Berlin after the fall of the wall (together with Jesko Fezer). 2004-2005 he was project manager for the exhibition project "Now and ten years ago" for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and 2004 a research fellow at the Peabody-Essex-Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He is lecturing and publishing widely. Most recent publication: Casco Issues XII: Generous Structures (eds, together with Binna Choi), Berlin 2011.
Marina Vishmidt is a writer based in London.
Jef Cornelis (1941) worked as executor, director and scriptwriter for the VRT, the Dutch-language Belgian public broadcasting corporation, from 1963 until 1998. Over those 35 years Cornelis accomplished an impressive body of work. It comprises over 200 titles and is generally considered as groundbreaking, artistically and cultural-historically.
In 1983 and 1984 Cornelis and his colleagues of the newly erected Art Issues Service of the then BRT realised the monthly TV programme IJsbreker, of which a total of 22 episodes were produced. Each episode of IJsbreker featured a cultural topic, in the widest sense of the word, ranging from 'culture in the papers' to 'computer art, from 'fashion' to 'tattoos'. IJsbreker was a live programme, with speakers on different locations. Various locations were connected with each other and the studio. Communication – or the lack of it – could only be accomplished using countless cameras and TV monitors.
Ultra-red is a sound art collective that includes artists, researchers and organisers from a range of social movements.
Stefano Harney joined Queen Mary, University of London, in September 2006. He is an expert on business ethics, corporate governance, and responsible management education, and a frequent commentator in the media on banking regulation and ethics.He is founder of Finance Watch, a research NGO dedicated to banking reform, and he is current Chair of the European Business Ethics Network (UK). Stefano Harney's new book, Business World (Routledge, forthcoming) focuses on the borderless business school and the rise of extreme neo-liberalism. His last book, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke, 2002) was a phenomenology of labour in the state aiming to rethink the contemporary state-form. He is part of the editorial collectives at the journals Social Text and Lateral. His first book was a study of postcolonial Trinidad. He is also co-founder of the NGO Clinic, a pro bono organisational development and change service for not-for-profits.
Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ living truthfully under imaginary circumstances is a two-channel video that explores the acting exercises developed by Sanford Meisner. Meisner's techniques paradoxically deploy an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate 'authentic' emotion and spontaneity in performance. Analytic yet hypnotic it interrogates the meaning of 'emotional truthfulness' in post-modern naturalism and dominant assumptions about the nature of human behavior.
Mattin is an artist who works with noise and improvisation, often in collaboration with others. His work seeks to address the social and economic
structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and the constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.He has produced records, performs internationally and runs two labels: w.m.o/r and Free Software Series and the chaotic net-label desetxea. Together with Anthony Iles, Mattin was editor of the book Noise & Capitalism (2009). Taumaturgia and CAC Brétigny are about to publish Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting most of Mattin's writings plus reviews by other people of performances and concerts that he has been involved in.
For Signal:Noise II Mattin will produce: A collective evacuation of the voice in an assembly line of liberation while
addressing the sound of indifference.
Mattin will also take part in a public lecture at Goldsmiths on Friday 20 January 2012, 2pm.
Signal:Noise was originated by Steve Rushton, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Marina Vishmidt, Rod Dickinson and Emily Pethick, and the first event at The Showroom took place in January 2011.
Howard Slater's 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings'
Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 7-9pm.
Møllegades Boghandel, Møllegade 8A, 2200 Kbh. N, Denmark
About the Book
In this collection of writings, Howard Slater improvises around what Walter Benjamin could have meant by the phrase 'affective classes'. This 'messianic shard' and its possible implications leads Slater to develop a therapeutic micro-politics by way of a mourning for the Workers' Movement and a grappling with the 'becomings of capital'. The essay 'Anomie/Bonhomie' is the keystone of this book which also features tributary texts and poems drawn from the past ten years. These supplementary texts approach such themes as exodus, species-being, surrealist precedents, poetic language and the possibilities for collective 'affective' practices to combat capitalism's colonisation of the psyche.
Howard Slater is a volunteer play therapist, sometime writer and ex-housing worker who lives in East London. Whilst he has been writing since the early 1980s he has mainly been published in small press magazines, independent publishing initiatives and web sites.
Objectively pessimistic or just plain grouchy? Schopenhauer’s ethics, which threw out positive conceptions of freedom and the human will, might put anyone in a bad mood. But, writes Eugene Thacker, standing on the brink of manifold disasters we ‘humans’ have much to learn from this dismal world view
Do pessimists have an ethics? If they do, do they always expect the worst, even in the face of well intentioned actions? For that matter, wouldn’t the true pessimist be unethical, precisely in the sense that they would be incapable of action?
The problem is that pessimists still do things, even if all they do is complain. This is the double bind of a pessimist ethics – decision without efficacy, acting without believing, the abiding sense that, ultimately, everything will turn out for the worst, all will be for naught. We could peruse the highbrow halls of literature and philosophy for exemplars of pessimism, but perhaps this is the wrong place to look. Take the case of Glum, one of the characters in The Adventures of Gulliver, a cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s. In the cartoon, Glum was notorious for his pessimistic outlook, expressed in his monotone, droll phraseology: ‘We’ll never make it...’ or simply ‘We’re doomed...’ Glum not only stood out from his more optimistic, idealistic and chivalric counterparts (which was basically everyone else in Gulliver’s crew), but he often had the knack of delivering his pessimistic proclamations just when they would be the most unhelpful, (when taken prisoner, when drowning at sea, even when free-falling from a cliff) that is, when the gloomy fate of the adventurers seemed to be obvious beyond stating. Never mind that Gulliver’s crew seemed to be miraculously saved at the end of each episode; even the miracle itself was not enough to convert Glum, who never ceased to remark the futility of all action.
But Glum is not just a pessimist, he is also a part of Gulliver’s roving band of do-gooders. In other words, even though he never seems to tire of reminding us that ‘we’ll never make it’, Glum goes along with things all the same. A contradiction presents itself – in spite of his pessimistic attitude, Glum not only states the futility of all action, but he then goes on to act anyway. He does not leave Gulliver’s group, he does not shut himself up in a desert cave, he does not enjoy his solitude and write existential meditations on the virtues of suicide. Of course, there may be an eminently practical reason for this: to whom would Glum complain if he were alone? Yet nobody wants to hear him. In a sense, Glum’s droll pronouncements are a challenge to the ethical world view of Gulliver and his crew – that there is good and evil, that the difference between them can be discerned, that action can be moral and have moral effects, that the ‘healthy’ attitude for any adventurer in life is to be positive and try your best, that life is ‘out there’ to be lived. Glum is the dark stain on the glossy veneer of an ethics reduced to self-help. And yet he continues to go along with things.
At first glance, Schopenhauer – that arch-pessimist of philosophers – presents a similar case. Judging by his rather curmudgeonly outlook, it would appear that for Schopenhauer, ethics would be about as necessary to philosophy as self-consciousness to a stone. In fact, Schopenhauer often cited an analogy borrowed from Spinoza: if a stone thrown through the air were conscious, it would fancy that it moved itself through the air of its own will and of its own accord.
Until recently, readers would have had to look to Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, for anything like a pessimist ethics. In it one would find statements here and there about the suffering of the world, about how it is better not to have been born at all, and so on. But there is little in the way of a sustained, critical examination of the topic. Thankfully, a new English language series of Schopenhauer’s work will help to diversify the image of the pessimist philosopher; at long last, readers of Schopenhauer will have scholarly editions of his works available to them.i
The ‘Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer’, edited by Christopher Janaway, published its first volume in 2009: The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, also edited and translated by Janaway, and comprising two long essays by Schopenhauer written several years after his better known work, The World as Will and Representation.ii The ethics essays not only build upon this latter work, but they also isolate a fascinating lacuna within Schopenhauer’s darkly cosmic metaphysics – in a world bereft of foundation or meaning, a world constituted by an indifferent, inhuman ‘Will’, how should one act?
Schopenhauer published The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics in book form in 1841. However the two texts in it were originally submitted to essay competitions. The first competition was hosted by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, for which Schopenhauer submitted his essay ‘On the Freedom of the Human Will’. The second competition was hosted by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences, for which Schopenhauer wrote the essay ‘On the Basis of Morals’. To his delight, Schopenhauer was awarded the top prize for the first essay. As Janaway notes in his introduction, this recognition was a boost for the now middle-aged Schopenhauer, struggling to gain recognition in the shadow of his more popular contemporaries Hegel, Fichte and Schelling – for whom Schopenhauer felt nothing but spite.
Delight soon gave way to chagrin, however, in the case of the second essay. Schopenhauer was the only person to submit an essay, and yet the Royal Danish Society refused to grant him a prize – or for that matter, any recognition at all. They pretended he didn’t exist. To add insult to injury, in their comments on Schopenhauer’s essay, the Royal Danish Society members would also reference ‘distinguished philosophers’ such as Hegel. One can only imagine the absurdity of the situation for the pessimist from Danzig. When Schopenhauer published both essays in book form in 1841, he made sure to note that the second essay was ‘not awarded a prize’, and added lengthy retorts and rants against the Royal Danish Society’s comments on the essay. He would also make incisive remarks concerning ‘journal writers sworn to the glorification of the bad’, of ‘paid professors of Hegelry’, of Hegel’s philosophy as a ‘colossal mystification that will provide even posterity with the inexhaustible theme of ridiculing our age’, and of German Idealism generally as a ‘pseudo-philosophy that cripples all mental powers.’
Fisticuffs aside, it is important to note that in the case of both essays, Schopenhauer was in effect prompted to write about ethics; he was prompted by the announcement of the competition itself, but also by the particular questions to which contestants were to reply. The questions posed by the organisers in each case provides Schopenhauer with something to push against, and I would argue that it is this kind of philosophical ‘resistance’ in his writing that makes The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics still relevant today.
In the first prize essay, the question (originally posed in Latin) was, ‘Can the freedom of the human will be proved from self-consciousness?’ For the second prize essay, the question, this time longer, was, ‘Is the source and basis of morals to be sought in an idea of morality that resides in consciousness, and in an analysis of the remaining basic moral concepts that arise out of it, or in another cognitive ground?’ To both questions Schopenhauer answers in the negative. No, he says, the human will is free only insofar as the ground of human will is free – that is, only insofar as a more fundamental, abstract, and non-human Will is free. For the second question Schopenhauer also answers no, and he even goes so far as to question the presumption that human morality has anything to do with reason at all, choosing to instead explore the concept of compassion (Mitleid) and the vaguely Eastern notion of loving kindness (Menschenliebe) as the basis for morality.
In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer had attempted to radicalise Kant, presenting a two-sided view of the world. On the one hand the phenomenal world of appearances, bodies, objects and nature – the world of Representation; on the other hand, that which grounds that phenomenal world, but which is itself not any Representation, and is instead an anonymous, indifferent, blind striving – the world of Will. Schopenhauer remained convinced that, even though the world as Will remained inaccessible to us as human beings in the world of Representation, there was a connection between them, particularly in the living body. The body and life were, for Schopenhauer, this nexus of the Will in Representation, of an undifferentiated Will in an individuated human will, of the non-human in the human.
While this would seem to steer things inevitably towards an ethical philosophy, The World as Will and Representation does something altogether different. It is, of course, concerned with the human world and the human capacity for making sense of the world, but by the funereal fourth book of The World as Will and Representation, ethics drops away in favor of discussions on mysticism, Eastern philosophy, pessimism and the enigmatic idea of not-willing or ‘Willlessness’. To be more precise, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics highlights a gap within The World as Will and Representation – how to connect the indifferent and inhuman world of Will with the all-too-human world of Representation?iii
In the first essay – ‘On the Freedom of the Will’ – Schopenhauer breaks down the long-standing debate in ethical philosophy over freedom and necessity. He distinguishes between different types of freedom (physical, intellectual, and moral), arguing that freedom is essentially a negative concept, the absence or removal of an obstacle to action. Schopenhauer’s primary target is the illusion of purely self-conscious acts, the presumption that freedom derives directly from willing (the notion that, as Schopenhauer says, ‘I am free if I can do what I will’). But what grounds this isomorphism of freedom and will? As Schopenhauer notes, one would have to inquire not just into the doing based on willing, but the willing of the willing of doing, and so on. One either follows this question to infinity, or one must presume a paradoxical groundless ground, a Will for all willing that does not itself will anything.
Likewise, Schopenhauer distinguishes three types of necessity (logical, mathematical, and physical). While he maintains the freedom-necessity pair, he also attempts to show that they can only be properly related outside the sphere of the human subject. If, as Schopenhauer argues, freedom is a negative concept, then it is also the absence of necessity. But the absence of necessity, taken to its logical conclusion, entails a notion of ‘absolute contingency’: ‘So the free, as absence of necessity is its distinguishing mark, would have to be that which simply depended on no cause whatsoever, and would have to be defined as absolutely contingent; a highly problematical concept, whose thinkability I do not vouch for, but which in a strange way coincides with that of freedom.’iv Passages like these betray, in an interesting way, Schopenhauer’s ongoing ambiguity surrounding ethics – particularly the investment of good faith in the human that Schopenhauer thinks he needs in order to think about ethics at all. In an analogy he develops later on, Schopenhauer likens the human being’s bloated over-reliance on free will and choice as being as absurd as a self-conscious pool of water: ‘That is exactly as if water were to speak: “I can strike up high waves (yes! in the sea and storm), I can rush down in a hurry (yes! in the bed of a stream), I can fall down foaming and spraying (yes! in a fountain)… and yet I am doing none of that now, but I am staying with free will calm and clear in the mirroring pond.”’v
If the first essay is primarily concerned with critiquing the individuationist and humanist notion of ethical action (freedom vs. necessity), then the second essay – ‘On the Basis of Morality’ – tackles the broader question of the ground of ethics itself. It is no wonder Schopenhauer was not granted a prize for this essay – from the start he contentiously implies the stupidity of the question, while also noting the ‘exuberant difficulty’ of the problem of grounds. Here Schopenhauer’s target is Kant; but his extended critique of Kant is also laced with admiration. As Schopenhauer notes, Kant’s greatest contribution to ethical philosophy was to tear it away from eudaimonia (happiness, well-being). Whereas for the ancients virtue and happiness were identical, for the moderns virtue and happiness are related as ground and result. The axiomatic approach of Kant focuses less on eudaimonia and more on the practical aspect of ethical action. But here Schopenhauer is quite critical, for Kant’s categorical imperative, with its emphasis on the ‘ought’, can only lead to the absurd idea of a totalising ‘ought’:
In a practical philosophy we have to do not with providing grounds for what happens but rather laws for what ought to happen even if it never does… Who tells you that what never happens ought to happen?vi
In short, Schopenhauer sees in Kant’s categorical imperative a church masquerading as a court of law: ‘Conceiving ethics in an imperative form, as doctrine of duty, and thinking of the moral worth or unworthiness of human actions as fulfilment or dereliction of duties, undeniably stems, together with the ought, solely from theological morals, and in turn from the Decalogue.’vii Schopenhauer later riffs on Kant’s ethics as having a mystical, ‘hyperphysical’ core:
[…] in the Kantian school practical reason with its categorical imperative appears as a hyperphysical fact, as a Delphic temple in the human mind, from whose murky sanctuary oracular utterances announce without fail not, unfortunately, what will happen, but what ought to happen.viii
And here we see Schopenhauer directly attempting to build a bridge between the ontological claims of The World as Will and Representation and the ethical claims of The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The upshot of this, as Schopenhauer chooses to state with some subtlety, is that ‘in this the human being is no exception to the rest of nature.’ix That is, insofar as freedom is impersonal and unhuman, the human is simply part of a larger field that is at once metaphysical and ethical. Paradoxically, Schopenhauer’s thinking moves towards something we can only call an unhuman ethics.
Of course, the major challenge is how to re-conceive of ethics given this unhuman metaphysics. In the second essaySchopenhauer gives us hints of such an ethics, setting up two pairs of ethical concepts: the poles of self-oriented action and other-oriented action, and the poles of well-being and woe. From this he derives his two key ‘positive’ concepts that close the essay: that of compassion (Mitleid) and that of loving-kindness (Menschenliebe). He shifts the debate away from the preoccupation with human reason and law. At the same time, his discussion on compassion remains open-ended; one senses that for Schopenhauer compassion is not limited to the feeling of one human being for another, but that it can be open to perhaps, strange, unhuman compassions – with the animal, the plant, the rock, the ocean, the cloud, the swarm, the number, the concept, or what have you. Such compassions, such instances of ‘suffering-with’, can range from sentiments of dread and horror to sentiments of affinity and the loss of self. Similarly, Schopenhauer’s ever-eccentric appropriation of Eastern thought, and his concept of loving-kindness is not simply a love of the human for the human, but quite the opposite – one loves the human only as a starting point for loving the unhuman.
Here it is important to note that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is of a particular type. Philosophical pessimism is generally of two types: a moral pessimism and a metaphysical pessimism. In moral pessimism, one expresses an attitude about the world that takes the worst possible view of things. The moral pessimist at his or her height can take any phenomenon, no matter how apparently joyful, beneficial, or happy, and turn it into the worst possible scenario (even if only to note that every positive only paves the way for a negative). This is the typical view of the glass being half-empty. Note that moral pessimism is pessimistic because its view is pessimistic, irrespective of what is happening in the world. The tendency to take the worst view of things, or the tendency to always expect the worst, is about an interpretation of the world, not about the world in itself.
This changes once one moves from moral pessimism to metaphysical pessimism. In the former one expresses an attitude about the world, whereas in the latter one makes claims about the world itself. This is the view that it is the objective property of all glass in itself to be partially empty. Metaphysical pessimism is more than just a bad attitude, it makes claims about the way in which the world in itself is structured or ordered. For the metaphysical pessimist, the world itself is ordered in the worst possible way and is structured such that it always leads to the worst possible ends. For the metaphysical pessimist, saying that this is the worst of all possible worlds is less a case of being grumpy and more a statement about the radical antagonism between the world itself and our wants and desires.
While Schopenhauer expresses both of these types of pessimism, he remains dissatisfied with both, for both rely on a stable division between a human subject and a non-human world within which the subject is embedded. The only difference is that with moral pessimism, we have a subjective attitude about the worst of all possible worlds, and with metaphysical pessimism we have an objective claim about the worst of all possible worlds. But both views, being concerned with ‘the worst’, implicitly rely on an anthropocentric view – either one is stuck with a bad attitude or one is stuck in a bad world. (As Sid Waterman once noted, ‘I see the glass half full, but full of poison.’)
So, while Schopenhauer himself was a curmudgeon, and while he does state that this is the worst of all possible worlds, his philosophy ultimately moves towards a third type of pessimism, one that he never names but which perhaps we can christen: a cosmicpessimism.x For Schopenhauer, the logical endpoint of pessimism is to question the self-world dichotomy that enables pessimism to exist at all. But such a move would entail a shift away from the relation and difference between self and world, human and non-human, subjective attitude and objective claim. Instead, it would entail a move towards an indifference, an indifference of the world to the self, even of the self to the self. Cosmic pessimism would therefore question even the misanthropy of moral and metaphysical pessimism, for even this leaves us as human beings with a residual consolation – at least the world cares enough to be ‘against’ us. Schopenhauer’s cosmic pessimism questions ethical philosophy’s principle of sufficient reason – that there is an inherent order to the world that is the ground that enables reliable judgements to be made regarding moral and ethical action. It also questions the fundamental relation between ethics and action, whether of the Aristotelian first principles type, the Kantian-axiomatic type, or the modern cognitivist-affectivist type. Cosmic pessimism seems to move towards an uncanny zone of passivity, ‘letting be’, even a kind of liminal quietism in which non-being is the main category. In cosmic pessimism, this ‘indifference’ is the horizon of all ethics. As an ethics, this is, surely, absurd. And this is perhaps why Schopenhauer’s ethics ultimately ‘fails’.
Despite their different orientations, The World as Will and Representation and The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics are united by a common approach, and that is an inversion of metaphysics and ethics. Schopenhauer tends to begin with human experience, even and especially if that experience is one that mitigates against the illusory coherence of the subject. All of Schopenhauer’s rants concerning pessimism and the limits of human knowledge dovetail on this strange counter-experience, the experience that the subject is not a subject, the experience of the dissolving of the principum individuationis. Part of Schopenhauer’s strategy is to undo the notion that the subject is separate from the world it experiences, that it relates to, and that it produces knowledge about. Part of his strategy is also to prod the notion, which he inherits from Kant, that there is an inaccessible, unknowable, noumenal world ‘in itself’ from which we are forever barred access. Both of these issues deal with the problematic category of the human – the human being as living in a human-centric world, accessible or not, that always exists ‘for us’ as human beings.
The question of ethics becomes especially pertinent here. Schopenhauer’s essays refuse relying on either the human individual or the group as its foundation, much less any discussion on human nature, the state of nature, or what have you. Schopenhauer also refuses relying on either intuition (or any innate, moral faculty) or law (as in the axiomatism of Kant). Instead, Schopenhauer zooms-out from the traditional, humanist ethical discourse to the larger issues of ethics as the self-world relation – or, really, ethics as the impossibility of this relation. In fact, while Schopenhauer does not go this far, I am tempted to suggest that The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, when read alongside The World as Will and Representation, poses the problem of an ethics without the human. Given our current concerns with climate change and global disasters, the time would seem ripe for an exploration into such an ethics. But an unhuman ethics would have to avoid both the pole of an all-too-human ethics (in which ethics takes place exclusively and solely within the spheres of law and policy), and the pole of a romantic ethics (in which the ethics of animals or the environment presumes a naïve notion of nature).
The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics puts forth some key philosophical points that resonate deeply with our so-called posthuman era. The first is that Schopenhauer displaces the ethical discourse of free will by externalising human will as an unhuman Will. He does this through a questioning of the basis of human will and his negative concept of freedom. Though he does not name the anonymous, abstract Will as such, his critique of the human-ethical subject points in this direction. And this leads to another point, which is that Schopenhauer constantly shifts the scale of his discussion of ethics beyond the human institutions of religion, law or politics. This is a contentious point, for, as Schopenhauer well knows, this non-human aspect of the world can never be proved as such (nor would any such proof prove anything). But in his criticisms of the traditional terms of ethical philosophy, one senses Schopenhauer’s ontological commitment to some metaphysical principle in excess of the human. And it is here that The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics comes into focus. Schopenhauer does not divide the unhuman Will from the human, all-too-human will, but is constantly at pains to show their immanence to each other, the Will in the will (or Will-in-will), as it were. The individuated human being is what he wills, but this will is also the Will, the human also the unhuman.
Eugene Thacker <thackere AT newschool.edu> is a New York based writer and the author of In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol 1 published by Zero Books. He teaches at The New School and is a scholar-in-residence at the Miskatonic University Colloquy for Shoggothic Atheology
Info
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, (trans.) Christopher Janaway, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-87140-2
Footnotes
i For years, those reading Schopenhauer in English have had to make do with the Dover editions which, while important, left something to be desired for the student and scholar. In addition, the advent of inexpensive, print-on-demand technologies has issued in a flurry of Schopenhauer reprints, but with varying degrees of editorial quality – many are marred by poor copy editing, uneven translation and even poor page layout and design. Given this, this series is a welcome intervention.
ii The bibliophile in me cannot help but make some rather unctuous comments on the book itself. In a publishing climate afflicted by successive cutbacks, Cambridge has, thankfully, spared no expense – the cloth edition is printed on thick, high quality paper, along with a minimal yet classy jacket design. Janaway, a leading Schopenhauer scholar, editor and translator, has included an informative introduction, along with bibliography, varia from different editions, a glossary and other elements one expects to find in scholarly editions.
iii Schopenhauer wrote the two ethics essays after the first edition of The World as Will and Representation; but he would also produce two further editions following The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. In a sense, then, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics stands in between the early and later Schopenhauer.
iv Schopenhauer, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, Christopher Janaway, (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 36.
viii Ibid., p. 148. Given this critique, Schopenhauer does rescue certain elements of Kant’s ethical philosophy. In particular, Schopenhauer does something interesting with the freedom-necessity pair he had already examined in the first essay. Necessity, as sufficient ground, is an extension of the phenomenal world of appearance, the domain of the individuated human will, what Schopenhauer calls the ‘empirical character’ of the human being. To this is contrasted freedom, which Schopenhauer had already defined in terms of absolute contingency, and which he allies with the Kantian noumenal world, the Will in itself that is nevertheless manifest in the human being, what Schopenhauer calls the ‘intelligible character’.
Nearly a year after the attenuation of a wave of further and higher education struggles against state-led ‘decomposition’, Danny Hayward looks back at the faultlines within this resistance and the future which follows its defeat
Decomposing Higher Education: Stage One
During the 1990s, as the transition of the British economy to a giant services station continued apace, and as British manufacturing shriveled into a kind of nostalgic mantelpiece ornament, British politicians and ‘independent observers’ cast about in search of a new ‘driver’ for long term British economic growth.1
In their quixotic quest for a saviour, or at least for a convenient footstool for the financial services sector, the politicians turned to the universities. And the British universities seemed the perfect solution to Britain’s long term macro-economic discontents. Their mix of dreamy spires and robust benchmarking in international league tables offered the kind of synergy that management consultants are willing to die for. On the one hand, cutting edge global competitiveness; on the other, feudal nostalgia. The State had found what it needed. Quicker than a stock market flash crash, a thousand thousand page reports were commissioned on how best to exploit this invaluable national resource. The future seemed golden. A ‘high-skill economy’ would revolutionise domestic production. In the tiny but overheated imaginations of public policy planners, the ‘stream’ of British university graduates would meet a stream of capital credit from the booming financial services industry, and these together would make up a river which would fertilise the fields of national capital accumulation. Dynamic entrepreneurs would live together in harmony in this bucolic postindustrial paradise. And then the dotcom bubble burst. And then growth failed to accelerate during the upturn in the business cycle. And then the credit crisis happened.
The slow death of this particular accumulation fantasy concluded on 12 October 2010 with the publication of a report on university ‘sustainability’. The Browne Report – named after the ex -BP Chief Executive who chaired the review leading to its publication – advised that the State withdraw almost its entire financial subsidy to university teaching. The report advocated a new system of financing in which the degree holder rather than the State would be liable for the costs of her education. English students, who since 1998 had been required to pay a ‘top-up’ fee to complement the State’s inadequate student subsidy per capita, were now to acknowledge that, as the ‘primary beneficiaries’ of their degree in view of projected future earnings, it was their responsibility to bear the majority of the costs.2
Exploiting the crisis rhetoric which had echoed and re-echoed in the bourgeois media since 2007, this moral argument was immediately desublimated into an argument about economic necessity. As Browne wrote in his Executive Summary, a degree is of benefit both to the holder, through higher levels of social contribution and higher lifetime earnings, and to the nation, through higher economic growth rates and the improved health of society. Getting the balance of funding appropriate to reflect these benefits is essential if funding is to be sustainable.3
The new ‘balance’ which Browne proposed would involve the removal of the cap on university fees, set in 2010 at £3,290. The cap would be raised to £9,000 on the understanding that state subsidies for teaching in English universities – still £4.4 billion in 2011-2012 – would be scaled down to near zero, with a continuing (though in absolute terms equally reduced) subsidy only for those students in disciplines where education is more capital intensive. These were the so called ‘STEM’ subjects: Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Because even the one time Chief Executive of BP is aware that most students cannot afford to pay £9,000 per annum plus monies for accommodation and maintenance, Browne’s proposal was that the new fees would be financed in the first instance by an expanded system of state loan provision. Education would be ‘free at point of access’ in the sense that students would be guaranteed access to credit both for their fees and for their living costs. These students once graduated and earning more than £21,000 per annum would repay their loans at either rates of interest fixed to inflation or at the rate of inflation plus 2.2 percent, depending on how far above the repayment threshold their wages fell. On the specifics, Browne’s report adopted a kind of studious evasiveness: it was not clear (nor is it now) what level of earnings would constitute a high earner, and readers of the report were expected to accept its myriad bullet points and graphs as a comforting proxy for detail as yet plainly undecided.
One month later, while several thousand students celebrated in the courtyard, the windows of the Conservative Party headquarters – now referred to, after the area in Westminster it was situated in, as ‘Millbank’ – were kicked in. While police looked more or less helplessly on, the building was trashed. It was the riotous opening ceremony for several months of unusually intense domestic education struggle. The following analysis, focusing on the period from late 2010 to mid-2011, will dwell at length on what one gentleman correspondent in the London Review of Books called, in reference to the Browne Review and the state policy which it partially inspired, ‘the tired debate on class’. It will do so because the possibility for effective linkage between a narrowly ‘education-based’ and a broader class struggle seems to me to derive from the failure of the process of domestic capital recomposition which growth in the university sector was intended to ‘drive’. This includes the signal failure of university expansion to produce an extensive ‘high-skill’ service sector, or, in other words, its failure to assure anything other than highly- policed jobless or at best ‘casualised’ misery for most of its graduates; and because I’m unconvinced that there is much of interest to be said about the function or structure of British Higher Education or about the Humanities without reference to class organisation and class values; and because with the benefit of a half-inch of hindsight it is easier to itemise the class foundations of many of the most widely canvassed arguments against increased fees and university ‘marketisation’.
And so the following will attempt an anatomy. Since I assume that the majority of its readers will not be working class teenagers but will instead be the ‘kind’ (the class) of person who might be apt to make a case for Higher Education as a ‘social good’ or for the value of academic ‘autonomy’, its objective (insofar as it has one) is to call for a materialist reevaluation of those categories.
The Timid (‘Anti-Market’) Battle Cry of the Professoriate
Much indecorous intellectual mud wrestling followed the publication of Browne’s Report. Disgruntled academics jostled in their in house organs (the Times Higher Education, the London Review of Books) to complain about the declension from social democratic principle. The official complaints of the liberal academics were several. Their arguments were initially provided with a great deal of airtime. They might be worth summarising at the outset. Firstly, Higher Education is a ‘social’ and not as Lord Browne’s report implies a ‘private’ good. Secondly, higher education is a noble practice, requiring time for ‘reflection’ and ‘contemplation’ and unable to thrive where a report on research productivity has to be mailed to the oiks in human resources every fifteen seconds on weekdays (or, if not to them, then to their bureaucratic imagos assigned to the assessment of research ‘impact’). Thirdly, students and lecturers ought to possess a collaborative relationship in which each party is entitled to challenge the other, and this relationship cannot survive after student-consumers have been raised onto a throne made of cheap beer and unfinished essays and declared sovereign. Fourthly, the State’s athletic genuflection before the golden calf of ‘market-discipline’ is asinine, because closer inspection reveals that it is forced to build into its new funding system checks and safeguards to prevent student choice from perverting the supply of labour-commodities to employers. In short, quoth the enlightened professors, human calculators like Lord Browne were welcome to perform their tricks in the private sector kennel assigned to them – and the Orphic journalists of the Financial Times were welcome to sing their praiseful rhapsodies – but the wholesale supervention of market logic on the sweet cloisters of English Higher Education was a gross imposition not to be tolerated. There are, the professors argued, values which cannot ‘flourish’ in the sprit vacuum of a market, and whether those markets are ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, these high values must be preserved against the ‘consumer relativism’ to which idiotic political beefcakes like David ‘two brains’ Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, are likely to defer, as surely as Pavlov’s dog to its bell.
Some of these complaints were borne out by later developments (to be discussed below); but in any case these were popular arguments, aired in well circulated journals and often dressed up with close textual reference to the relevant state policy documents. The documents were routinely sneered at for their febrile adherence to basic standards in business speak, ripped off from superannuated management textbooks now patiently gathering dust in the Sale sections of university bookshops. The cool and careful periods of State paternalists of the distant past – I.e., of the mid-1960s, from an era before Thatcherism, the destruction of the coal mining industry and the wholesale degeneration of the educated English of the enlightened bourgeoisie – were reconstructed and elegised.
Nevertheless the arguments suffer from an obvious explanatory deficit. Accounting for the changes in Higher Education, Stefan Collini writes that
British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms. Such a campaign would not have been successful, of course, had it not been working with the grain of other changes in British society and the wider world. Very broadly speaking, the extension of democratic and egalitarian social attitudes has been accompanied by the growth of a kind of consumerist relativism.4
It is surely necessary to resist this account. On its terms, a business ideology, supported by a heterodox or confused alliance of free market think tanks and ‘democratic and egalitarian social attitudes’, has marched its rag-tag banner into the heart of the British State. The enemy and victim of this alliance is the University, which relies on a strict hierarchy of values and on the ‘educational judgment’ which (it is implied) is exclusively competent to arbitrate between them. It is the characteristic feature of this kind of argument that it demands the restitution of a paternalist social democratic system whose internal decline was what accelerated the ‘privatisation’ of formerly public institutions in the first place: the argument takes a prurient interest in the inability of markets to assure their own self-reproduction not, as it might at first appear, in order to demonstrate the deep relationship between UK Higher Education and the full market system in its crisis, but in order to convince markets that its contradictions are amenable to resolution if only academic counsel is heeded. The real relationship of English Higher Education to the wider British ‘business climate’ – in whose toxic environs new graduates are currently expected to suffocate – and the relationship of the wider British business climate to the total global capital – is therefore perfectly obfuscated. This is not surprising, since academics have not until now been the principal victims of large scale economic crisis.
Student Struggle: November 2010 – March 2011
The 2010-2011 cycle of UK student protest began with the smashed windows of the Conservative Party HQ in Millbank; accelerated into a long sequence of occupations alternately (and often simultaneously) serious and farcical; dwindled into the introspective political manoeuvrings of an activist core during the long sequence of marches and demonstrations which culminated in late February; and, at last, sublated itself in the black bloc which formed at the Trades Union Congress demonstration on 26 March.5
During that time its composition underwent a sharp expansion and contraction, as its initial – pre-eminently white and middle class – formation expanded to incorporate black and Asian inner and outer city youths, only then to dwindle again, to the agonised puzzlement of the students who were therefore denuded of their ‘movement’.
For those whose last recollection of a domestic popular protest was the anti-war march in 2003, the spontaneous redesign of conservative party HQ was, if nothing else, refreshing. All those chairs forever doomed to be used as seating, how tedious – why not hurl them through this window. The riot also put a swift end to the ideological hegemony of the National Union of Students – which, stocked as it was (and is and will forever be) with vapid centre-left aspirants with designs on a parliamentary career – proved unwilling to endorse any campaign demand which might get up the noses of the politicians whose endorsement could their prospects at future party political meet and greets. At the beginning of the academic year in October 2010 the NUS was conducting a gloriously lacklustre campaign to ‘freeze’ the fees, I.e., to maintain 2010 fee levels for all future students, beating its chest and demanding a reversion to Labour Party endorsed social misery. This was a compromise oddly inconsonant with the destruction of the Tory Party headquarters. The NUS’s (then) president Aaron Porter, who, whatever his failings, was just about cunning enough to know when he might be stepping on the toes of his future benefactors, instantly squirmed into the arms of the national media to denounce the actions of the 2000-4000 participants in the ‘splinter demo’ at Millbank. The splinter demo, Porter declared, was ‘despicable’. The NUS was committed to peaceful protest and orderliness and the rapid introduction into students of diversified repertoires of soft skills; interested viewers could read its policy documents online.
All this had occurred by 12 or 13 November. The ideology of what might distastefully be called the organising core of the student movement was not as visibly reactionary as the NUS’s, though, as the above ought to suggest, it would be hard to be more prodigiously reactionary than Aaron Porter. The germane features of that ideology (and allowing of course for significant individual departures from it) can be worked out of a narrative of events running from aftermath of the Millbank demonstration until the protest planned for the day of the Commons vote on 9 December.
The standard metaphorical vocabulary for the emerging student movement is now as fixed as the new fee regime: during the weeks of November, a ‘wave’ of university occupations ‘spread’ or ‘swept’ across the country. The spirit of ‘68 was reborn, before being farmed out for a photo shoot in Vogue and used to sell some T-shirts. Already this phraseology is very disgusting and boring. The occupations were of course in fact waves, big and small, long and short, depending to a large extent on the class profile and region of the institution in which an occupation took place; its physical infrastructure; and the (shall we say) quasi-autonomous ideological commitments of the most active participants. There were long occupations at UCL, Cambridge, SOAS, Bradford and the Slade, a short, strategic occupation at London Met, abortive occupations in Camberwell and Birmingham, a Deleuzian occupation at Edinburgh.6
The list could continue. There were, nonetheless, enough marked continuities in the statements issued by occupying students to attempt a brief sketch.
First, University occupations tended to demand that their managements resist cuts to state provision for British Higher Education.7 The argument was often framed in terms of imprescriptible rights, in this respect pace the endless avowals to the contrary in the commemorative headstones quickly erected by radical publishers – less 1968 than 1789.8
As one of the more imperiously insipid student slogans ran, Education is a right, is a right, is a right, education is a right, not a privilege. Most students in the English university system have of course always had most of the things which they have a right to (which isn’t to say that life is sweet) – but it is this which above all and unstoppably invests the word ‘rights’ with its magic aura. In their ‘Education is a Duty’ – which includes in its footnotes its own representative smattering of quotation from student occupation communiqués – The Wine and Cheese Society of Greater London suggested that the materialism of the student movement was ‘a strangely mediated and submissive materialism’, which is to say that it tended to accept that the principal function of ‘UK HE’ is to generate economic growth; and also to agree that finding yourself stuck between the contracting mandibles of the ‘labour market’ after the ‘free’ champagne at the graduation party has run dry was not, after all, so bad.9
In the months following the occupations, large numbers of student ‘activists’ generated whole data nests of thrilling online gossip about the availability of new ‘horizontal’ organisational media, at last superseding such inherently totalitarian technologies as the telephone and the human mouth. This particular circle of indulgent introspection was squared by enthusiastic nothings about ‘generational’ divides, including especially polemics against the elder ‘generations’, living it up with their totalitarian landlines and cars and their plunging private sector pensions, in a position invidiously contrasted to the impecunious underfunded British student of 2011, whose part time call centre job and 1/267 prospects of graduate employment were the result of insufficient abstemiousness by ‘baby boomers’ in – one assumes; the argument was always vague – the 1980s. Like most transiently appealing forms of social analysis, this one was obviously generalised from the social circumstances of whichever student chose to voice it. Few students with access to column inches – and this itself is often if not always a function of social privilege – said much about the closure of elderly people’s day centres and other state resourced institutions then being retrenched from under the feet of the proleterian retiree, but then the users of elderly people’s days centres cannot often be fruitfully accused of implicit totalitarianism (nor, for that matter, do they often appear to boom).10
All this first person plural posturing about ‘networked resistance’ would have been more laughable had it not had a social guarantor. This is to say that, unlike the liberal ‘anti-market’ professors, the students did pay attention to some basic facts of social exclusion. At about the same time as the Browne Report was thumping onto the desk of every education journalist in the country, the Schools Minister Michael Gove announced that the State would be cutting the so-called ‘Education Maintenance Allowance’. This was a derisory grant paid out to students over the age of sixteen conditional on attendance. The grant was means tested and set to between £10–30 per week. (A note: since the maximum pay out was set around £20 per week below the monies paid out to British unemployed benefits claimants of comparable age, EMA would be better known as Education Below Subsistence Allowance, but we’ll stick with the recognised designation in what follows.) Student activists regarded the cuts to EMA as a means of forging cross class solidarity with expropriated college students. In this respect they were not exactly incorrect.
If you type ‘We’re From The Slums Of London’ into the search bar on YouTube you can watch a video from 9 December. It’s very short. In it an Asian teenager, hat on and masked up, makes his case: ‘We’re from the slums of London, yeah? How do they expect us to pay £9,000 for uni fees? And EMA, the only thing that’s keeping us in college – what’s stopping us from doing drug deals on the street anymore? Nothing.’ He doesn’t look like one of the ‘youths’ that left parties like to use as props to invest their campaigns with some local colour. Nor does the transcription do justice to the statement, which is not muttered from a crib sheet but spat out in hot disgust. This might in part be because the speaker is addressing a camera held by a white bourgeois journalist. The footage is not untypical. When I arrived late for a demonstration at Westminster Bridge at the end of November, a kettle had been put in place. Those who had travelled south from the University of London Union building in Bloomsbury were safely ‘contained’. As I walked down the street the first group of people whom I noticed on my side of the police lines were a dozen black and Asian teenagers, male and female, all in school uniform. One of the kids, standing about five yards from the police line, leaned down to pick up a discarded Socialist Workers Party placard. The police watched him as he placed the sign under his foot and, nonchalantly enough, snapped off the stick. This was not the way that most students used placards.
At the demonstration on 9 December this kind of low level readiness for confrontation determined a much wider arc of collective action. Fighting between ‘protestors’ and police was ferocious: temporary fencing was ripped up and used as barricades or as shields as appropriate; groups of teenagers masked and hooded then used the bent and torn remnants of this fencing to smash out the windows of the Treasury; and in the square where the main kettle had been fixed in place, police lines were broken repeatedly. A friend providing legal observer functions in the kettle in Parliament Square spoke to a kid who had somehow acquired one of the larger police issue riot shields. He advised the kid that if he was going to carry the shield then he should for fuck’s sake cover his face. The kid replied that he’d rather go to prison than spend £9,000 a year going to uni.
This sort of anecdotalism is obviously pressingly limited as social analysis, but without the self-willed and emphatic arrival of working class teenagers in ‘the movement’, the student discourse would have degenerated into polite badinage about the emancipatory potential of open source and web 2.0, I.e., it would have become nothing more than the public witterings of the self-anointed representatives of moderately disgruntled middleclass twenty-somethings, who if anything were likely to benefit from the new fee regime, since one of its effects would likely be a longterm reduction in the uptake of Higher Education degree-commodities, and therefore a (statistical if not perceptible) easing of competitive pressures in the graduate labour market. Because working class teenagers did, fleetingly, ‘enter the movement’, I.e., burst out into the streets, the demonstrations from late November onwards were more defiantly and generally disruptive than the demonstration in early November, despite Millbank and despite much more enthusiastic brutality on the part of the Metropolitan police and its specialist public order units.11
Wanton press releases from the Met confirmed this fact, as the authoritarian PR service pumped out anxious declarations about how ‘extremely disappointed’ the service was ‘with the actions of many protestors’, who were evidently becoming more confrontational, quicker and more spirited, more prepared to abandon routes and disregard ‘advice’ issued by frantic ‘organisers’ wherever the balance of forced on the ground demanded it.
Rapid diversification in class composition also meant (for a moment at least) an expansion in the geography of confrontation. Out in the provinces, college students began to mobilise, and their actions were often taut with energy, in some respects more akin to the Bristol riots which flared up in April than the banner waving exercises which NUS Executive Officers like to fantasise as they vegetate with their desk toys. A report from the Brighton demonstration gives a good feel for the pulse of a mob intelligence acting without any prompt from a Guattari-citing Masters student:
2000 people, 90 percent school and college students, marched: they ignored the designated end point for the demo and set off on a volatile and cheerful meander, with periodical attempts to block roads. When the police attempted a kettle it was broken: of those who broke the kettle and didn’t disperse, 200 went to take refuge in the new occupation at the other, less ‘political’ university [Brighton], where they were refused entry – then went into the bobo shopping streets and got kettled. 400 (school and college kids mainly, with a few, cheerful homeless guys) went off mob form to attack Vodafone, then looted Poundland (’I got three Toblerone’), before arriving cheerfully at the other, kettled group. The police crumpled under the strategic pressure – they were outnumbered and uncertain – and released the group they were holding. The 400 then set off expressly to block roads and cause maximum disruption, launching an attempted attack on the police station before heading to the roundabout at the pier to block it. There, the momentum failed and the police successfully kettled 100 of the slowest.
Students who urged ‘EMA kids’ to join their demonstrations and whose political organisations printed placards that said ‘defend EMA’ did understand that it was working class teenagers who would suffer in truth from the imposition of fees, much like the youngest of them would suffer in truth from the retraction of exiguous below subsistence bursaries for impoverished college students. But what the students in their descants on cross class solidarity didn’t much mention was that it was working class kids who were likely to suffer in truth from the whole exercise in the conversion of ‘stagnant’ state welfare into ‘dynamic’ private sector policing; and from the imperious drudgery of wage labour which it is no longer accurate to say is ‘on offer’, when increasingly it is compelled on threat of starvation; and from the long convulsive contraction of British capitalism in general. Drifting right through the discourse on ‘building the movement’ was the stench of class contempt. Its principal form was the assumption that ‘deprived’ working class College students wanted nothing more than to be like ‘us’. It assumed that they wanted to be like us in a particular sense. Working class students might be strung up on a different (lower) rung of the labour market, but we would delegate to them our own snuff of social aspiration. Did we not have a universal right to it?
Such a view of social aspiration is inherently appealing to bourgeois students, because the contradiction in its ideal of universal bourgeoisification is always resolved in their favour. The formal right of access to degrees – in this respect like the formal right of access to citizenship or to legal representation – makes no specification of what the content of a degree is or ought to be: but training can be dire and suffocating whether it goes on in a call centre or the University of Sussex or an asylum. And yet the bourgeois conception of educational justice is not only ineffectual in resolving the contradictions of class, soothingly renamed ‘relations of exclusion’ as per the official lexicon of top down social management. The conception generates another limitation. By imputing to working class teenagers the desire to ‘protest’ up to the point where they resemble us in the cracked mirror of our own (bourgeois) sociological concepts (I.e., up to the point when they possess the minimal resources required to compete with us – at a safe disadvantage – in education and labour markets), the conception tells us nothing about the real complexity of class based impulses or aversions or about how they might be put to work ‘on the ground’ in the production of a real movement against capital and its servant institutions. I’ll come back to this point, as they say, in conclusion.
Decomposing Higher Education: Stage Two
While the student movement stumbled into exam season and expired, the State attempted to problem shoot its malfunctioning reforms. Its first error was almost amusing. The Browne report had assumed that, once ‘freed’ to set their own fee level, smaller and less prestigious institutions would scale down their prices in order to remain competitive. Instead, desperate not to besmirch or otherwise tar their pristine brand equity, almost all of the universities set their fees at near to the £9,000 p/a maximum. This act of herd insubordination compelled the State to revise its forecasts for the cost of loan provision, with the result that it could no longer afford to remove the ‘supply side’ recruitment caps whose removal had been one of the principal justifications for fee ‘flexibility’ in the first place. If this doesn’t get you going, just imagine David Willets falling over a banana skin.
As the academic year drew to a close, the government published its White Paper on Higher Education, which, among other exercises in sidetracking and obfuscation, proposed a convoluted quick fix to the above ‘supply side’ problem. The quick fix operates a ‘core/margin’ model which ‘allows’ (translated out of bureaucratese and into English, this means forces) universities to compete for students above the State imposed quota. These are drawn from ‘pools’ of students of a certain type – for example, high ranking schoolleavers. Evidently this model has little to do with the creation of a free market without supply side restrictions and much to do with stuffing yet more competitive pressure into the Higher Education turkey.
But the most important role of the White Paper was to open the UK HE field to ‘new providers’. Describing this process in detail would be exhausting, so the following will offer a stylised sketch. The State proposes to withdraw from the sullen and corporate universities their monopoly on degree issuing powers, distributing this faculty to dynamic, thrusting ‘independent’ institutions promising step changes in efficiency on the intensification/pile-em-high model. These changes in tandem with a steady decline in the resourcing of now existing institutions are likely to lead to the collapse of at least some traditional universities, who, once stranded in administration, can be swept up into the steroidal bosom of privateproviders like the US Apollo Group, whose market leadership in IT solutions allows them to drive down costs by dispensing with previously ‘sticky’ overheads like (e.g.) wages for lecturers. As the CEOs mount their white horses and descend from the sky to bestow the blessings of market efficiency on ‘underperforming’ working class institutions like London Metropolitan and Liverpool John Moores, research in the humanities will be increasingly concentrated in a handful of elite institutions, each with a handful of ‘elite’ (translated out of bureaucratese and into English, this means bourgeois) students. The ‘practical’ vocationalisation of all other institutions will work itself out on a model similar to the one currently ‘operating’ (I.e., churning profit) in the US, where capital intensive advertising campaigns lure working class students into programmes of study which issue in devalued degrees, sub-zero job prospects and an insupportable debt burden which bulges further with each passing year until like a monstrous paunch it fills the whole horizon. It is a fact well enough known that almost half of ‘propriety’ students at Apollo Group institutions ultimately default.
But these are not new processes. What Andrew McGettigan calls the ‘deliberate underresourcing’ of UK University’s began perhaps as early as the late nineteen seventies and has accelerated up until now. By a war of attrition, the senior managers of English Higher Education institutions have been reduced to pathological (if fabulously well remunerated) brand custodians, dreaming of founding new campuses in the growth sectors of the Middle East which until now have provided Britain with oil commodities and which today in consequence of that export industry offer up a new resource, I.e., untapped fields of undereducated bourgeois teenagers, ripe for harvesting. This global context is significant. The decline in per capita funding for English university students might be lamentable, and it might even be ideological in the contemporary sense of that word, I.e., voluntary and not fiscally exigent; but it isn’t clear that maintaining levels of student funding would mean better lives for students. As British capital has ferociously restructured itself there has been a precipitous decline in the number of ‘good’ jobs for which qualified students might apply. This may in part be due to ‘the destruction of manufacturing’ (and most readers will know intimately this caricature of the rise of ‘neoliberalism’) but it is also attributable to the increase in global competition in the upper echelons of the value chain, in the misty realms where university graduates with bulky flexible skill sets are expected to thrive most emphatically. This is to say that it isn’t clear that the production of ‘more skills’ by the maintenance of high levels of university resourcing is at all likely to lead to more or better jobs. Between 1995 and 2003 the global supply of university enrolments doubled to 63 million. As a report by the State financed Economic and Social Research Council put it in 2007 – note: in 2007, I.e., before the crisis had caused investors to become doubtful of their own omnipotence – ‘Many... companies were increasing the proportion of university graduates within the workforce. But it was difficult to assess whether this reflected an increase in the proportion of jobs involving technically difficult roles or ‘over-qualification’... because ‘anyone half decent has now got a degree’.’ Though employers continue to yammer about a ‘skills gap’, the skills which are referred to are not ‘hard’ (I.e., technical) skills but ‘soft’ skills, which include competencies which could well be programmed into students at secondary school level – IT skills is the primary example – but which are defined above all by repressive pseudo-categories like ‘self-management’, ‘customer-facing skills’ and (best of all) ‘high-end empathy’. In other words, what British capitalism lacks is not educated students but obeisant employees. The employer’s tribal dance to the gods of skill acquisition is nothing more than a prayer that their human resources will acquiesce voluntarily to intensified degradation, and, what is more offensive, recognise in that degradation the continued acquisition of ‘skills’. Skill acquisition along these lines is just virtualised accumulation for the exploited.
In 2008, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech on the skills race. Jetting as he then was around the globe to ‘coordinate’ and ‘problem solve’ the global credit crisis, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brown was nurturing some high fantasies. ‘A generation ago,’ Brown rambled, ‘a British prime minister had to worry about the global arms race.’ But no longer, because today, instead, ‘a British prime minister has to worry about the global skills race’. Brown’s comparison was both accurate and inaccurate. It was accurate because like commodities produced during the arms race the commodities which a British skills race is likely to produce are non-productive, by which I mean in economic terms a waste; but the comparison was inaccurate also, because unlike (say) the commodity called a Thales lightweight multirole missile, a highly skilled student is likely to become infuriated if he or she isn’t ‘used’. ‘Used’ in this instance of course means ‘paid’. This was not, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s point, as anyone attending one of his after dinner speeches is of course welcome to ask him.
The Future: What Not to Do and How Not to Not Do It
The point of this sketch is to carry us back to what I called above the liberal ‘anti-market’ ideology. I have argued that that ideology appears by virtue of its enlightened sneering to oppose ‘markets’ and to resist their undesirable ‘social outcomes’; but that in fact the ideology does not oppose markets but instead contents itself with a polite request that the university be cordoned off from their operations. This doesn’t work. The ideology does not deserve to be repudiated because it is ‘reformist’ but because it has a class basis. That is to say, it assumes that the ‘values’ which it wishes to protect ought to be protected only within the University and therefore (if implicitly) only on behalf of those who have access to it. And there is a second problem. Conducting a reified tirade against the stupefactions of interested exchange and the idiot grunting of its public policy slaves is surely all well and good, and it might well be a noble thing to prevent the market from encroaching too far into Higher Education, where, who knows, it might wreak all sorts of havoc on the life of the mind, but the limitation of this safeguard is that however much money might in principle be canalised into the swag bags and current account of the UK University Research Councils – students will continue to graduate. (Professors, of course, do not.) And while it might seem somewhat impertinent to conclude an analysis of UK student struggle in 2010-11 with a discussion of life outside of the university, or to slough off to the footnotes and margins all discussion of the good things that do go on in UK Higher Education institutions, the exercise of analytic tact is misguided. The market decrees that students will be thrown out of the university (with or without their certification) even if ‘analysis’ of student struggle remains fixed there, in ascetic restraint, paring its fingernails and hoping vainly for a research grant. What is the future of Humanities Education in the UK? There isn’t any point in asking this question in this forum: if humanities education is worth anything then it will not die after ‘students’ and other members of the proletariat new and old fight for the life resources which provide the precondition for that education. And yet the riposte swells up: doesn’t ‘higher’ education (as in education finer and more spiritual) require independence from the ‘social’? Doesn’t it require autonomy? But this doesn’t mean very much. There must be better forms of autonomy than the type required for the production of ‘basic’ research which – we learn from a University lobby group – contributes vastly more to the haemorrhaging value of HE licensing and spin-outs (the sector specific jargon for commercial enterprise) than so-called ‘applied’ research. These forms would be better worked out spontaneously in the process of collective action than ‘in principle’ at the end of an article. While it might be true that contemplative reflection can in certain respects contribute to the cultivation of social antagonisms, the moment that the struggle for ‘autonomy’ lapses into demands for ‘blue sky thinking’ it becomes the inalienable possession of the official management theory which invented that category and which is stabilised by its propagation.
It is now 31 August. Two or three minutes ago I received an email which states that 87 departments in Greek universities are now under occupation. The Greek students are acting in protest against a recent education bill, part of the imposing edifice of ‘austerity’ (the word is in this case infinitely euphemistic) now being hammered through the country’s fine and democratic parliament. In the last week, two Chilean students have been murdered by state police; both were participants in a much older and more mature student struggle than the one currently in remission in the UK. In other words, the UK student struggle from 2010-2011, with all of its smashed glass and all of its waves and networks, is already very much old news, as indeed are all of the associated acronyms – NCAFC, NUS, EMA, EAN. Even in the national context the domestic spokespersons of capital are much more hotly concerned with the riots which took place between 6 and 10 August. On the ‘left’ those riots are still treated with a stunned confusion: who among the hordes of those who looted during those five days can be selected as a spokesperson? And how can we communicate our ideas to a political subject who has about as much interest in being the ‘new’ 1968 as Guy Debord had in being the new Burger King? In response to this quandary, and in conclusion, one lesson of late 2010 stands out. As was argued above, students repudiated the suggestion that their ‘rebellion’ was no more than a paroxysm of middle class discontent by pointing to the working class teenagers who attended the street demonstrations which they organised. These teenagers were the ‘EMA kids’. The label did more than stick: it implied an analysis. The analysis in turn implied that what the ‘kids’ had to protest against was the withdrawal of their below-subsistence grant. This was of course in part a claim of convenience, necessary for a practical politics structured around ‘inclusive’ demands. It was, in other words, the sort of thing that could be crammed into a press release and floated out into the media ether to fuel the enmity of proto-fascist newspaper columnists. But it was also an honest assumption. What the ‘middle class’ students had to offer the ‘working class’ college kids was an organisational framework in which those college kids could protest against a particular act of state-led resource withdrawal. And in fact when the college kids acted ‘disruptively’ or violently the middle class students often became perturbed and spoke in wounded tones of their beautiful pacifism and their high ideals, and tugged dolorously at their keffiyehs. That the EMA scheme was a pathetic crust tossed by the State to ‘lower income’ teenagers in compensation for a lifetime spent being churned through an underresourced and overcrowded state education sector (and for a thousand other iniquities better known to EMA recipients than to their bourgeois comrades) was not on the collective bargaining cards.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
But what student demonstrations offered to the working class teenagers in fact was not an ‘organisational framework’. What the demonstrations offered was a material setting in which working class students could partake in aggressive and confrontational collective action in conditions of relative security. It is difficult to make this point without sounding as if one is speaking through a mouthful of Habermasian ideal speech situation. The students did not offer to the working class college kids an ideal speech situation (more than this: all the execrable sign waving and sloganeering at the demos ensured that the students didn’t offer even a passable one): but in spite of the assumption that working class kids just wanted to keep their EMA, it is nevertheless true that the student demonstrations and the middle class demonstrators did offer to working class college kids something for which they had a use. This was not the rhetorical straitjacket of a sensible demand politics, and nor was it thirty quid a week and the promise, sometimes in the future, of a certificate qualifying you to trim the ornamental hedges in the gardens of some of the idealist students you went on the march with, or in any case it was not just these, because the ‘student’ demonstrations also offered to the college protestors the material suspension of the balance of forces whose permanent imparity is active in determining the results of working class struggle. What that material suspension provided for a lot of ‘kids’, in other words, was the opportunity for an intense collective expression of social agency whose object was not peremptorily confined to an inadequate programme of state provision but which could outstrip the limits defined by everyday (isolated) struggle against repressive authority, and which moreover could know each time that it clattered against a riot shield exactly who was on its side. And as the left toils to imagine what ideas it could ‘offer’ to the inscrutable young men and women who went rioting in early august, and as the job market continues to stagnate, and the profits of McDonalds and Tesco to rise, and as the academics continue to bid for a role on the market steering committee and to dream, not of 1968, but of 1965, and as the EMA scheme ends and the housing benefits plunge, and as new students begin to arrive on bright autumn mornings at the campuses of their chosen training camps – this is something which might yet be worth learning.
For so long as the material conditions in the universities have not been equalised, ‘access’ to university, whether or not it is universal, and whether it costs £9,000 per year or nothing, will continue to mean access to educational commodities of wildly discrepant value, distributed across institutions whose ‘diversity of missions’ at last promotes nothing besides a diversity of class positions. Shall we ask then, access to what? And access to what with what exit onto what? These are questions, in good Beckettian prosody, which will have to be asked in Beckettian fashion, which is to say, again and again. Middle class students might piously hope that working class teenagers will be allowed to ‘access’ universities and become more like them; but in fact the similarity is more likely to become visible not at the ‘point of access’ to universities, but, instead, at their exits. And it’s the view from the exit, from which can be seen the greatest expanse of nothing at all, which will perhaps give the clearest indication of how UK education struggle ought to proceed.
Danny Hayward <dannyjhayward AT yahoo.co.uk> lives and writes in London
Footnotes
1 Thanks are owed to JBR for György Kurtág and other critical inputs.
2 It’s important to note that the reforms did not apply to Scottish students, where Higher Education continues to be ‘free’ in the limited sense that the State covers student fees.
6 The website http://occupations.org.uk/ lists the first occupations: a rough count gives eight ex-polytechnics to fourteen ‘post-1992’ universities, which provides in turn some (extremely rough) suggestion of the class bias within the student movement in its first pulse of activity. Edinburgh’s occupation was the most energetic in disseminating propaganda about the ‘swarm’ quality of the student movement.
7 Therefore the first demand of most student occupiers was that senior management issue on behalf of the institution ‘a statement condemning all cuts to higher education and the rise in tuition fees.’ See: http://blog.ucloccupation.com/demands/ The second – more general – demand was often that ‘[t]hat the University use its influence to fight for free education for all’, http://www.defendeducation.co.uk/old-schools-occupation/our-demands
8 Cf. the already very dusty looking Verso anthology Springtime, which in accordance with party political principles selected as its textual 'flashbacks' to '68 texts by Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Mandel, doyens of the CPGB and the Fourth International respectively (Mandel, the younger of the two, was 45 at the time, but as a social critic he was thoroughly superannuated).
10 For a rich mine of student activist consciousness, see Fightback!: A Reader on the Winter of Protest, Dan Hancox et al (eds.), London: OpenDemocracy, 2011. Other favourite themes included 'information', policing, and kettles. 'Kettling' – the tactic of containment used so regularly (and so effectively) by the Metropolitan police during the student demonstrations –was a particular favourite: the Fightback! reader asserts pointedly that all eight of its editors had been 'kettled' in the course of the student protests. These themes describe social objects which middle class protestors had had occasion to experience at first hand. The class basis of the topics of preference was not generally acknowledged.
11 None of this should be taken to imply that there were no working class students in the student movement. The point is only that the ideological production of the ‘student movement’ was overwhelmingly ‘middle class’ in its structure of interests. A large student campaign did take place at London Metropolitan, which has a large working class intake, but not until after their senior managements began to announce heavy cuts in late June 2011. In consequence London Met was not a focus of the earliest upsurge of contestation.
The act of smashing glass can reveal the material's most troubling quality: its transparency may invite us to look, but not necessarily to enter. Mark Crinson considers the smashed shop fronts of last year's riots not as the collateral of mass disorder, but part of the material conditions that provoked them
They broke every window in our street… You have to hammer at the window glass for twenty minutes to get an impression. They were able to batter them to such an extent they were able to break through the glass.i
More than 130 people, many youths, were arrested in a night of turmoil which saw £500,000 of damage caused when the mob descended on the exclusive Emporio Armani.ii
The rioters vandalised the centre of the city and have destroyed everything that came in their way. Fire bombs were thrown at shops and windows were smashed. The police was overwhelmed by the huge number of rioters that reached 2000 persons… After they have destroyed the shops, the looters have stolen electrical items, jewellery, designer clothes, mobile phones and alcohol. They have trashed high street shops and banks and smashed them to pieces and banks too.iii
Was architecture merely incidental to last summer’s riots? Did it seem not only to contain the things desired or reviled, but in itself to be loathed: the complacent bank and the sleek boutique, as much as the decorated sheds of retail parks? Could not some of the damage be seen as an attack – if often blurred and mis-targeted – on the architectural forms of our ‘rampantly feral’ capitalism?iv Images of burning buildings and broken glass certainly played a notable part in the media coverage, acting as both trace and symbol of broken Britain. Because this damage was largely to shops and high streets, however, it was easily subsumed to the politicians’ view that the riots were not symptoms of social breakdown but opportunistic outbreaks of acquisitive criminality. Yet, in such a complex sequence of events and causes, could not some of this building bashing be interpreted in a different way?
That the immediate target of much of the rioting, the membrane to break through, was glass, has not been commented on in the numerous blogs and articles on the riots. In a sense it’s too obvious and therefore ignored in the search for reasons and causes. Of course people smash windows when they riot, it’s much easier than smashing concrete or brick. Along with fire, the shattering of glass offers the most direct challenge to the materials of urban order. And now there is an awful lot more glass around – glass walls and floors, the aquaria of offices and shops, the time-denying gleam of glass towers. By extension, then, this smashing can be understood to deal a different kind of violence to a history of modern urban and architectural thinking. Glass was never just glass, never a mere building material – there was a poetics and theoretics to it.v Glass embodied many of the symbolic properties of modernity, including the interpenetrating magic of space-time itself. It meant intoxicating forms of living through the dematerialisation of walls and the exposure of previously hidden interiors. It would revitalise experience, offer a ‘new vision’, and promise new states of consciousness. It would clad the Stadtkrone and other crystalline fantasies. It promised a new reconciliation of man and nature, a new oneness facilitated by modernity, and a life leaving behind old habits and traces. If it had once shown people glimpses of paradise and let in God’s light, now it enabled the panoptic gaze, ‘[spawning] new paranoias’ and new forms of ungodly exhibitionism.vi Its taut skins seemed to supersede oppositions of the mechanical and organic. It evidenced democracy and promised egalitarianism, a new social transparency, the open society, accessible government: as contemporary architects like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster still repetitiously insist, glazed walls signal ‘democratic values of openness and participation… [or] the accessibility of a judicial system’, ‘the transparency and openness of the democratic process’, ‘dignity, transparency and openness’.vii In all this glass was always closely bound into modernism’s dialectics of the rational and the enchanting.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Spinningfields – Emporio Armani (No 1 The Avenue)
If such is the rhetoric of modern architects and their clients, for others glass may not and may never have signified in these ways; it may actually be about false accessibility, about temptation and leading astray. One of the original arguments, for instance, against building the Crystal Palace – that free trade utopia, icon of modernist pre-histories, and paean to glazed showcasing – was that it would inevitably be stoned by the mob.viii 2011’s glass smashing might be seen, then, as an appropriation of the architects’ view of it, and if it was sometimes a refusal of that kind of rhetoric it was also a way of taking it literally. What is inside is desirable and must be got at even using illegitimate means? Democracy is just another means of delusion? Transparency is finally recognised as obfuscation? If so, then this doesn’t mean the end of a now long history of utopian glass thinking but another chapter in it. After all, even some architects might continue to welcome riots as ‘the awakening of cleanliness’.ix
Suggestive parallels to the recent riots can be found in Isobel Armstrong’s fascinating book Victorian Glassworlds (2008).The breaking of glass in riots leading up to the 1832 Reform Act and then during the Chartist-linked Birmingham Bull Ring riots of 1839, were clearly demonstrations of alienation from political process: ‘[the crowds] affirmed something about the specificity of their own experiences as well as, or through, shattering glass’.x The patrician attitude of establishment figures like the Duke of Wellington (whose houses and tours were a frequent target for stone throwers) was that such smashing up demonstrated the endemically irrational behaviour of the lower classes, justifying their exclusion from legitimate politics.xi Although those riots did not have an element of material acquisition to them, it is the cathartic fury directed at glass that parallels the recent riots. Breaking glass generates a visceral excitement as barriers are broken and the building’s orifices penetrated: the façade can demonstratively be cracked, defenestrated. Armstrong suggests that the sound of glass breaking was more than the accompaniment to this somatic release, but also an ‘insistence of being heard… [being] redeemed from anonymity’, challenging the insulation of privilege through the direct agency of body against building. This kind of corporeal assertion contrasts with the property-owner’s order, ‘demonstrating that his are literally constructed categories, bound up as they are in his very buildings.’xii
Like E. P. Thompson’s famous argument for the ‘moral economy’ of 18th century rioting against the economy of the free market, Armstrong insists on the self-discipline and idealism of her Victorian rioters, their refusal to loot. This may not sit easy with comparisons to the summer of 2011, let alone to other crystal nights. A glib way to express this is to say that the commodification of labour has been replaced by the commodification of desire – a demand for change by a demand for trainers. However, this distinction overlooks the origins of the August riots – the sense of deep injustice around stop-and-search and the killing of Mark Duggan. That there were protesters and there were looters, and sometimes the two were indistinguishable, is what makes the riots of 2011 too complex, too diverse in cause and effect, for us to reach easy conclusions about. But there are some parallels with Armstrong’s account. Among its drives, rioting is about a taking over of space, an ownership of it and a sense of power through owning it, however briefly. Such was certainly behind the spontaneous taking to the streets of the powerless and the disaffected after Duggan’s death. And the group action of rioting, its ‘performative unity’,xiii raises the prospect not of the spectral rabble but of an urban collectivity acting on its disenchantment – as indicated by those instances of co-operative looting among rioters, even between members of different gangs (as observed in the recent Guardian/LSE report ‘Reading the Riots’). Is to riot in this way to reverse the expected behaviour of the disempowered subject and the individual consumer?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Notice in the Manchester Metro, 10 August 2011
It’s clear that in Manchester’s case the spaces in which riots took place were the same spaces as the city’s much acclaimed ‘regeneration’; that’s to say, at the centre of the Victorian industrial city in those areas revamped in response to the 1996 IRA bomb and the threat of out of town shopping in the Trafford Centre. The post-1990s regeneration has been uneven, and largely focused on the city centre. A new urban order has been created which seems mainly to be about the rebranding of central Manchester. Yet although it does not use shops to hide slums from the bourgeoisie, as in Friedrich Engels’s canonical account, it does share much with Engels’s notion of a ‘hypocritical plan’. The conspicuous demonstration of the resources and pleasures of affluence are narrowly bestowed on certain areas of the city, leaving the ‘underclass’ as marginal onlookers. In this context, then, we might adapt Armstrong’s idea that her Victorian rioting constitutes its own style or aesthetic into an understanding of the 2011 rioting as a form of architectural criticism. Was this an ironic way of dealing with the spaces of consumerism as disqualified consumers seized hold and upturned the effects and meanings of transparency? To put it differently, how does the shattering of glass sit with the hermeneutics of glass? Let’s look at one – admittedly limited – instance.
Among the areas of Manchester’s city centre attacked on the evening of 10 August was Spinningfields. The name is redolent of Manchester’s Cottonopolis past and the area, midway along Deansgate and between it and the River Irwell, was one of the most notorious slums of the Victorian city, one selected by Engels for particular attention. Spinningfields was re-zoned in Manchester’s postwar city plan as an area for Manchester’s courts and its legal profession, and it is this legal architecture that has been updated in the last five years, linking it to a considerably expanded business quarter. Two of the features of this form of regeneration are particularly important for the argument here. One is the extraordinary vista of glazed buildings that have taken over the area. The other is a new kind of mixed zoning that has deliberately been built into this as the area touches Deansgate itself, for long one of Manchester’s main shopping streets.
One of the shops targeted by the 2011 rioters was Emporio Armani, fronting Spinningfields on Deansgate. (Emporio Armani was also a particular target of the looting in Birmingham, as one of the quotes at the head of this article shows.) Apparently, rioters were baulked here by a line of security guards and only smashed one large window before heading off to easier targets. The shop fills the ground floor of No 1 The Avenue, an entirely glazed building but of a specifically 21st century type. It was designed by the London-based architectural firm Sheppard Robson and opened two years ago. Sheppard Robson is one of the many middling practices (though of large size) that diffuse (and defuse) vanguard styles for mainstream clients. In this case the building is a near-parody of late deconstructivism mixed with high tech, Daniel Libeskind crossed with Norman Foster. Such buildings must have a ‘concept’, and here this is based on a simple-minded game of slicing a parallelogram, flipping it and then misaligning the two blocks. The cantilever created by this misalignment provides a wedge-shaped canopy for shoppers, with a sharp-edged arris of glass panes pointing at the street. One detects that recent concerns about architecture and security have entered many architects’ unconscious – even in a shop like this there is a strange combination of vulnerability and aggression, come-hitherness and repulsion. Across the whole building and reinforcing its strident geometry is a jazzy diagonal cladding of trapezoidal glass panels. The skill of the architects here, if it can be called that, is to tantalise and enthral. We look into the darkened windows to see the displays but also see beyond them to view parts of the shop’s interior. Perhaps it’s meant to flatter the consumer with a sense of discretion, entitlement, and hipped up slickness. Transparency as obfuscation, then: as teasing glamour, a heightening of emulative desire, with more than a hint of those intoxicating qualities that some modernists perceived in the potential of glass.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Spinningfields – looking back towards Deansgate from the Manchester Magistrates Court and Coroner's Court, with Rylands Library extension (left) and No 1 The Avenue (right)
No 1 The Avenue is a local if not very distinguished example of a widespread phenomenon, named by Owen Hatherley as ‘pseudomodernism’.xiv Here, in a reactionary metamorphosis, the postmodernist love of the building as sign has now turned back to the surface effects of modernism – a veneer of its good taste or even of its political associations – so providing the boosterist built logos of our neoliberal age, its glass shards, obelisks and gherkins. As Hal Foster has suggested, the old transparency of modernism has become ‘spaces that are not only opaque, but that are illusionistic… [such space] purports to be about perceptual experience, but in many ways it does the perceiving for us.’xv One cannot argue that these glazed buildings were the particular target of rioters; in fact many styles and periods of buildings were attacked. But there was a particular poignancy at Spinningfields that would emerge only a few days later.
In the week following the riots across British cities many of the perpetrators of both righteous protest and opportunistic shopping were hastily brought to court as part of the avenging government’s attempt to show that it was in control. One of the busiest courts was the Manchester City Magistrates Court and Coroners' Court located, as it happens, in Spinningfields just behind the Emporio Armani shop. The court building’s entrance façade is clad to its full height in glass and displays a multi-level escalator within, implying a kind of vaguely efficient and, of course, ‘transparent’ disposal of functions. On one side the court building turns a corner and becomes a menswear shop, on the other it terminates a wide pedestrian passage – while Armani is on the left, the new extension to the John Rylands Library is on the right (the library also fronts onto Deansgate). This passage is parallel with The Avenue, which houses several more luxury clothes shops, but the link between the courts and The Avenue is barred by a glazed wall, clearly an ad hoc measure to separate a restaurant’s outdoor space from court attendees snatching time for a last cigarette. The passage can’t be described as a street nor is ‘pedestrianised way’ quite right – too old fashioned for one thing – though it certainly evokes vague associations with older planning fantasies. Such passages are designed for shopping and certain other leisure activities deemed legitimate, a ‘right to the city’ is the thinnest of its effects. Manchester has quite a few of them, and quite a few were also the places where the rioting happened – in the pedestrianised Market Street, for instance, and in New Cathedral Street. The latter is not as cloistered as it sounds but actually a group of high-end shops on an elevated curve of walkway leading to the ersatz environment that is Manchester’s version of a cathedral close.
With these spaces, seductive and absurd by turn, the city attempts to ward off the rivalry of the out of town shopping centre, offering an urban density of commerce close by the cultural, civic and religious institutions of the traditional city. In Spinningfields the uniform material of different building types signals a uniform rhetoric of accessibility – whether of the judicial system (transparent justice), of a library (access to learning), or even of an ‘exclusive’ menswear shop (‘modern lifestyle… with a sense of classic sophistication’). Cynical and insensitive in social terms, the development is alternately ‘sensitive’ and ‘cutting edge’ in the terms of architects and developers’ jargon, the commercial and cultural cream for the business quarter beyond. In Sheppard Robson’s own publicity No 1 The Avenue is described as pivotal in form and location, ‘tying Manchester’s retail and business district with its civic core,’ and the building itself embodies this mixed-use, combining Armani with offices, a roof terrace, and a basement nightclub.xvi (Another example, that epitomises the absurd end of this fad for mixed-use, is close by – the oast house-style pub, clad in faux-distressed materials, that now fills the square in front of the older court building.)
Emporio Armani benefits, then, from its proximity to the Rylands Library and the courts. And they all benefit from an extraordinary CCTV concentration inside and outside the buildings, the vehicle of a new social contract assuring security and inviting affluent exhibitionism. We are in the heart of a 21st century panopticon here, one intersected by the complementary practices of shopping, surveillance and punishment, and coterminous with an immaterial architecture of data formation and retrieval.xvii And like most previous panopticons, of course, it courts failure, reproducing the conditions that brought it into being, its pleasures and disciplines emptied out and turned perverse because of the lack of a complementary political space.
In its great wisdom Manchester University in 2007 saw fit to build a minimalist glass box to house a café and shop as the most public face of the Rylands Library’s extension in Spinningfields. Sitting in the café one can take a table right beside the glazed wall and, eating one’s carrot cake, observe the human traffic into and out of the courts, as well as into and out of Emporio Armani. The rioters apparently sniffed at attacking this extension, probably because it had nothing obvious that could be looted and perhaps also because a library had no evident recognition factor – it clearly wasn’t a bank or Starbucks or Miss Selfridge. One might complacently say this confirms the marginality of learning in these our neoliberal times, but if so it is a marginality the university itself had already played into with the architectural appearance and the very function of its new extension. The original Victorian library’s glory, now made into a mere appendix by the new extension, was the way it addressed the street directly and then absorbed the visitor in its evocative entrance spaces. It used the gloom of neo-Gothic tectonics to suggest the special mysteries of learning; access here was a matter of passing through successive spatial densities. Now the hidden structures of contemporary architecture suggest nothing but the lightness of modern being.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: The Oast House (bar and restaurant) in Crown Square, outside the old Manchester Magistrates' Court
So, there is this extraordinary conjunction of functions more or less cheek by jowl in Spinningfields – designer clothes shop, magistrates' court, and academic library. And in between these buildings, as if to cap the conjunction, is a mini glass shard, an enigmatic transparent pyramid that turns out to be the entrance to the underground nightclub – not so enigmatic after being boarded up following the night of 10 August. So in this 21st century corridor we run the gauntlet or we take to the catwalk. Glass is used to different ends, but the glazing also unites these institutions in a common play on a now meaningless accessibility. Part of the lost potential of this area might have been in the very dissonance of these institutions; that there might be something interesting about the clash of their values. But, post-riot, the levelling transparency had become guilty spectacle. This was where Manchester’s regeneration got differently confrontational, where the contemporary glassworlds of the law, security, consumerism and learning were newly exposed in terms of who is entitled to use these streets in the manner for which they had been designed.
Georges Bataille defined architecture as the physiognomy of a society’s authority, and saw such events as the storming of the Bastille as a way of transgressing against the very nature of architecture: ‘it is difficult to explain this impulse of the mob other than by the animosity the people hold against the monuments which are their true masters.’xviii It is perhaps no more than an interesting fantasy to imagine the riots as an uprising against our present phantasmagoric forms of transparency. But even to say ‘this shattered window is the work of my hands’ is to reveal a certain kind of meaning in the moments of madness.
Mark Crinson <mark.w.crinson AT manchester.ac.uk> teaches art history at the University of Manchester
Footnotes
iJohn Henn, owner of a shop in Wolverhampton, as reported in The Guardian, 5 December 2011.
ivDavid Harvey, ‘Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets’, The Bullet (Socialist Project e-bulletin), 535, 12 August 2011, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/535.php accessed 10 November 2011.
vFor the various mythologies that follow see Detlef Mertins, Modernity Unbound: Other Histories of Architectural Modernity, London: Architectural Association, 2011.
viThe architectural practice Diller, Scofidio & Renfrew, as quoted in Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, London: Verso, 2011, p.98.
viiThe first quote is Richard Rogers, the second and third are by Norman Foster: as quoted in Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, pp. 29, p.48.
viiiIsobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p.11.
ixLe Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of our Machine-Age Cvilization (1935), New York: Orion, 1967, p.23.
xviiiGeorges Bataille, ‘Architecture’ (1929), as republished in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 1997, p.21.
Gregory Sholette’s book, Dark Matter, provides a useful collectivising term for those artists who produce the art world from below. But, wonders Stefan Szczelkun, how can we talk about cultural exclusion without thinking seriously about class?
When the excluded are made visible, when they demand visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and a rethinking of history. This is often the case with artists collectives.
– Gregory Sholette
The ‘dark matter’ in the title of Gregory Sholette’s book refers to all the human creativity that is excluded from the mainstream art world. The book is a dense interweaving of political contexts, theory, accounts of radical art activity and considerations of the archive, mainly in a US context. The structure of the book is loosely related to Sholette’s involvement in a series of political manoeuvres – the first of which is the Political Art Documentation/Distribution group that was set up after a call from Lucy R. Lippard in 1980. The PAD/D collection was donated to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) archive in 1989. For its author, the subversive implications of this donation provides a recurrent fascination throughout the book.
Following his account of this earlier history is a chapter based on Sholette’s involvement in a group called REPOhistory in New York. Initiated with a series of triangles put up in public in 1994 to mark the death of Marsha P. Johnson, a leading LGBT activist, it subsequently led to the erection of a series of nine similar triangles under the project Queer Spaces.
Sholette then discusses the over-abundance of signs, creativity and collections heightened by our present level of commodity accumulation. Two artists’ groups that worked critically in this area were Public Collectors and Temporary Services. Public Collectors recognise and bring attention to:
The inventiveness of the everyday, the commonplace, and the nondescript multitude. In the age of deregulated aesthetic practice such dark matter inevitably intervenes within the valorisation process of official artistic production.1
Temporary Services ‘seeks to generate a non-market, non-accumulative economy of generosity.’2 The account of their Chicago based project of 2000, Free for All, reminds me of the Free Stuff Parties organised by UK artist Mark Pawson at around the same time. This section ends with a discussion of the more confrontational actions of Etcetera in Argentina in 2002: the anti-BP actions of Liberate Tate in London in 2010 and Yomango’s surrealist theft actions from 2003 in Barcelona, Spain, which seem especially relevant now in the light of the recent rioting in Britain. The collective gesture of Yomango, which means simply ‘I steal’ in Spanish, clarifies the symbolic dimension of looting.
Sholette goes on to examine Critical Art Ensemble as one of the leading ‘tactical media’ groups of the last decade. Sholette himself was involved in supporting the defence of CAE member, Steve Kurtz, who was charged with biochemical terrorism following 9/11. Kurtz was finally acquitted in 2008 after a long, hard court battle, but Sholette does not discuss his own support role here. He claims that CAE’s artwork, Molecular Food Invasion, used the art gallery as a platform for public discussion.
Finally a chapter entitled ‘Mockstitutions’ on organisational forms and mock institutions focuses on The Yes Men and other artists’ groups. This includes some original survey research into 67 of these groups, which I’ll come back to.
A recurrent theme in Dark Matter is that of subverting dominant cultural values from within the archives. What do the mainstream museum archives like MoMA’s gain from taking records of artists’ dissent into their care? Sholette’s idea is that these stored materials are ‘a mark or bruise within the body of high art. The system must wear this mark of difference in order to legitimate its very dominance. Absolute exclusion is out of the question.’ Sholette suggests that these ingested materials will undermine the system and what starts with a ‘bruise’ can lead to an ‘infection’ of the whole body:
The perforation of a once suppressed archive exposes the wounds of political exclusions, redundancies, and other repeated acts of blockage that wholly or partially shape this emerging sphere of dark-matter social production.3
London’s Tate Gallery archive has a mission that is informed by the scale of its immense funding base and position as the national flagship museum of contemporary art. It assumes that it is best placed to interpret radical art history. Who else could take proper care of the archived originals? Who else could attract such esteemed and learned writers to interpret this material and produce a reliably normative view of the past? What they ‘forget’ is that, as an organ of the State, Tate is of necessity embedded in its ideological apparatuses, self-serving rituals and practices. At the end of the day, it is fundamentally unable to critique its paymaster – the system – except by way of mild chastisement or warning, so that the Leviathan can adapt, modernise and survive. Not only that but the difficulties of access that result from professional archive practices mean that the radical cognoscenti themselves find it hard to get their filthy hands on the material. Once ensconced in such a vault, radical material is unlikely to be activated in the revolutionary, or at least, playful and irreverent way that was often intended by the original sources. Sholette, however, takes a more optimistic viewpoint and states that:
These bits and pieces of generalised dissent resist easy visualisation, forming instead a murky submarine world of affects, ideas, histories, and technologies that shift in and out of visibility like a half submerged reef.4
In my experience, art world institutions will tend to intuitively reject anything which could undermine their wellbeing, or only accept an inoculating dose of such material.5But Sholette allows the ‘dark matter’ that has sneaked through these portals much more power:
The archive is consuming its host, brandishing all the malicious resentment of the profaned, the philistine, the exile.
A materialising dark matter now confronts this so-called future as a grinning archive and antagonistic corpse.
[dark matter] directs our attention towards an ellipsis within the historical record where none is supposed to exist.
Image: Liberate Tate's action marking the first anniversary of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico at Tate Britain, 21 April 2011.
Dangerous Material
Is PAD/D dangerous material? Or is it enclosed, de-activated, isolated and neutralised material? Is not the stuff donated to these vaults only given for lack of any other more open activist-run alternative? What we need is more in-depth and independent studies of initiatives that put their material firmly and independently into the public domain. At the same time we need to demand better access to, and digital publication of, collections that the State would probably rather keep buried. This means a lot more clamour needs to be made about the importance of initiatives such as artists’ collectives.
I should now admit that I have long pursued an engagement with dark matter, mostly of different genres to those considered in this book – mostly relating to larger collectives. In the last 15 years I have even tried to drag these things into the light of formal knowledges: from my 2002 doctoral study of Exploding Cinema at the Royal College of Art to my current active archiving, with many others, of the Brixton Artists Collective, 1983-86, as Brixton Calling!7 The material traces of which are, in spite of my reservations, heading to the Tate archive.8
Whilst doing the Exploding Cinema research, I became aware that the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London collection was thin with regard to amateur home movies on standard and Super 8, the technology that took filming to the masses from the ’60s onwards. When I approached them about housing archive material from Exploding Cinema, I was told that they did not take VHS tapes as they weren’t of professional quality. Of the 1,000 or more film-makers that had shown films in Exploding Cinema in the pre-digital period of my study, many left copies of their works with collective members on VHS cassettes. So, inflexible adherence to that rule meant that the films shown at Exploding Cinema are by and large not archived and likely to be lost to posterity. Whilst such rules are ostensibly about objective professional standards and so on, in fact they act as a filter on dark matter – in this case the zero budget self-made films of the 1990s. My study of the collective and its material traces and events are now archived but the actual works shown, the heart of what Exploding Cinema was about, are not included in the national archive of the moving image. My overall experience is that very little material from radical artists’ collectives is in public archives and what is there is hidden by unfriendly index terminology or other means.
Class and Exclusion
Sholette sees the new explosion of dark matter’s visibility via the internet as characterised by:
a lack of interest in abstraction coupled with a fondness for everything that was once considered inferior, low and discardable. Qualities that were anathema to modernist notions of serious art.9
He thinks that digital technologies have put much informal social production into the public sphere. Frustratingly, he does not theorise the relation of ‘low’ material and ‘informal’ production to class and in fact, at one point seems explicitly to reject a class analysis.
Tactical Media is [...] a rejection of most nineteenth and early twentieth-century leftist movements and of the idea that the working class is a unique and ontologically privileged force of social and historical transformation.10
On the other hand, he thinks that tactical media groups have emerged from a situation of ‘surplus talent’ and a what he calls, ‘prickly, working-class imagination’. He doesn’t go on to detail what he means by this prickly quality of imagination; instead, he goes back to a roll call of ’60s counter-cultural influences and somewhat loses his way in the process of considering ‘right wing’ dark matter.
Prickly Filters
In another prematurely aborted theoretical analysis, Sholette discusses the concept of the public sphere through Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics.11 He refers to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s concept of a ‘counter-public sphere’ suggesting that a discourse on dark matter would mean, ‘constructing filters contrary to those of the market.’12 A good point, and it’s a pity there is no further discussion of what such ‘prickly’ friendly filters might look like.
One of the most interesting ideas the book puts forward is that dark matter, although deprecated, is essential to high culture. He claims that it plays ‘an essential role in the symbolic economy of art.’13 This is a claim that reappears through the book:
What is not recognised, what cannot be admitted by the maintenance crews of the high culture industry, is the degree to which not only the art world’s imaginary but also its economy is stabilised by the invisible labour of this far larger shadow economy. The material and symbolic sides of these economies endlessly amplify each other.14
He makes the point that all our informal conversations about figurehead art institutions help to maintain and reinforce their credibility and power. I feel this dependence of the art world on dark matter is true, in the same way that the owning class has a dependence on labour (which is magically reversed in their ideology). However, I don’t find Sholette provides the evidence to take this argument forward to the point that it could be used convincingly to argue for a radical redistribution of resources within culture.15
Art Glut
A set of unobtrusive art world institutions and practices by art critics, historians, collectors, dealers and administrators have ‘inscribed’ the antagonism shown by early modern artists and are themselves increasingly programmed, as if on rails, with little critical self-awareness. This results in an art world that is ‘afraid to admit that it is comatose’.
The book considers the mystery of the ‘glut’ of artists; ‘the normal condition of the art market’, as Carol Duncan pointed out in 1983.16 Sholette provides some useful information on this overproduction. For example, in the USA between 1970 and 1990 the number of artists doubled. In the EU, the numbers of artists is the same as the working populations of Eire and Greece. In London, the number of self-described artists comes second only to the number of people employed in the city’s business sector.17
Drawing on these insights, Sholette poses the following evergreen questions:
1. If this glut is commonplace and enduring, then what ‘material benefit’ does the art world get from this ‘redundant workforce’?
2. Inequality between artists’ incomes has increased in recent years; what would it take to politicise these excluded artists? And what action might it lead to?
3. Is self-organisation an effective counter to the ‘exclusionary mechanisms of the art market’?18
Sholette has no answers to these questions and only comes to the conclusion that ‘artists gain improved social legitimacy within the neoliberal economy while capital gains a profitable cultural paradigm in which to promote a new work ethic of creativity and personal risk taking.’19 Artists currently voluntarily contribute to the symbolic system, even though they must be aware that, in most cases, it guarantees their own ‘failure’.20 Later, he calls this a ‘managed system of political underdevelopment’.21
Group Stigma
His survey of artists’ groups leads him to draw two conclusions. Firstly, in spite of the efforts of the management theorists, there is still an art world stigma against ‘multiple authorship’, or presenting as a collective or group, although this is decreasing. This stigma may be mainly due to group membership usually being in flux; regular self-terminations happen for all kinds of reasons including internal disputes, resignations of key members, or even commercial success. Sholette’s survey shows that groups are (or appear to be) marginal players in the art world.22Secondly, in the 1960s and 1970s groups were taking on organisational forms that mirrored the structure of the organisations that provided them with financial support. This has shifted since the 1980s and there is now less interest in organisational conformity:
Perfunctory compliance with official cultural regulators may have been a sporadic though unspoken practice by artist groups in the past, but today in an age of deregulation and semiotic warfare, such tactics are becoming pervasive, even amongst groups who, at least on paper, appear to be commercial enterprises.23
This is a mildly encouraging sign, but, due to the lack of ontological refinement of the differences between types of artists’ groups, Sholette’s conclusions about the nature of collectives as typical dark matter seem weak. In particular, there is no distinction drawn between a group of two or three people working together and larger, open collectives with internally democratic structures.
In terms of defining collectives as more or less autonomous, more or less radical, and more or less dark matter, the two most important things, as far as I am concerned, are these: the extent to which the collective is permeable to oral culture and working class people and the extent of independence it can maintain from commercial and state run institutions. Several of the larger collectives in my experience had an open door to new members – the currency of membership was the labour put into the project. They also had a clear no selection policy when it came to what work was shown. ‘NO STARS, NO SELECTION, NO TASTE’ was one Exploding Cinema slogan. Brixton Artists Collective 1983-86 decided upon shows at open public meetings. Membership was open to all for a few pounds. Both these collectives had a certain style in their spaces that was orientated towards the general public rather than an elite art audience. This kind of thing is anathema to the art world, where selection and the creation of exclusivity and the celebration of the possession of elite skills and knowledge is their raison d'être.24
Conclusions
What is really needed in this book is a class conscious theory of how culture works. The use of the categories ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ is unsatisfyingly vague. I’d prefer to use the historical separation of literary culture from oral culture (in Europe) as the dynamic that drives dark matter away from the light of publicity. This could help bring some clarity to the question of class.
I’m using ‘oral culture’ here in a quite specific way, one which I’ve been reminded by Mute editors is not yet in common parlance. The meaning I like to inflect oral culture with is a global one that encompasses all the processes by which we come to agreements on meanings, or by which we beg to differ, from time immemorial. As the zone of direct and relatively unmediated communications, oral culture is the main forge of human language and I don’t believe, for instance, that Shakespeare invented the word ‘bubbles’. Oral culture is the seat of judgement for the plethora of meanings that soak our environment. Oral culture is the pool in which all the sense media of our communication thrive.25 Any new meanings have to be taken on within these fluid and common spaces of communication. Just like the production of goods, the production of cultural meanings depends on the multitude.
Literary culture is of relatively recent origin, and, from where I sit, expresses a localised European geography that can be traced back a thousand years to the humanist break from the writings of the Christian monks, using their discovery of Arabic translations of the ancient classics (and particularly Aristotle). This formation, embedded in the early city states, received a tremendous boost with the invention of printing with moveable type in 1450. The whole publishing apparatus became a means to power for the new bourgeois class who usurped the publicity of the aristocratic spectacle with their own literary discourses and knowledge.26 Literary culture became closely identified with bourgeois being. They still hold on to it as their birthright. The bourgeoisie tries desperately to control meanings and communication, to police oral culture, to put us each in a mind cage. But this domination is ultimately an illusion. The meanings we hold in common are, at the end of the day, decided and reaffirmed in the oral realm. This means there is tremendous power in attending to it, and how to direct it.27
Sholette seems to veer from a passionate belief in the disturbing, if not revolutionary, power of dark matter: ‘self-organised dark matter inserting itself into the ripped fabric of neoliberal cities, from below’, to ambivalent feelings that perhaps these practices ‘subvert, and yet reinstate’. He seems unsure if these ‘emerging aesthetics of resistance’ are any more than ‘tepid acts of delinquency or even bitter gestures of discontent’. He hopes that they at least provide ‘an expectation’ – but of what?
This is really a diary or compilation of his efforts, thoughts and various involvements, and I think I had hoped for his own subjective engagements to be more explicit and less academicised. The reason for this focus on a very particular stratum of dark matter would then be more organic and less arbitrary. A global study of dark matter would take the kind of team effort and resources that go into compiling a major dictionary or encyclopaedia. The key question may be how any such institution could maintain its revolutionary integrity and class consciousness whilst carrying out such a task.
Sholette has invented a useful term that might well be taken up, and gives us a sporadic view of resistance through political art, but his style of authorship in Dark Matter is too conventional. I feel the style on the whole mutes his own analysis to occasional whispers, rather than making oppression and its exclusions the key definer of the ‘from below’ of cultural production. Cultural resistance is no new thing.28
Sholette thinks that ‘dark matter is getting brighter.’29 This may simply be a function of media technologies making all kinds of knowledge more visible, or it may signify a huge groundswell of demand for more democratic societies. Or, perhaps, these are two sides of the will to power in the oral realm, the struggle from below. This book certainly allows us to give a name to, and begin to focus on, the creativity and cultural resistance that exists outside the art world proper. It may be flawed and partial, but it represents a good start towards developing a discourse that I think needs to embed itself outside of the academy – within the fields of dark matter itself.
Stefan Szczelkun <szczels@ukonline.co.uk> is an artist, living in South London, with an interest in open artists’ collectives and networks
Info
Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London: Pluto Press, 2011.
5 There are of course always exceptions to what is accepted. It can come down to personalities. When Simon Ford worked at the National Art Library he bought in a load of scurrilous zines and mail art. He never seemed intimidated by the institution whatsoever. Further back, Meg Duff at the Tate Library was very approachable and openminded, which might have been due largely to the liberal left support of ARLIS, a very well organised art librarians’ union, which both Simon and Meg were leading members of.
11 Sholette, op. cit., p.168. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Conversation in Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. See also his The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
12 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, 1993, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. This was a response to the perceived elitism or at least limitations of Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere. Habermas does indeed privilege the literary over sense media in what I have read of his work. See footnote 20 below and Jürgen Harbemas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1981. The quote is from Negt and Kluge, ibid, p.188.
15 For a classic exploration of art as collective action see, Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
16 Carol Duncan, ‘Who Rules the Art World?’ in Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.172.
19 Ibid, p.117. Dark Matteris good on how creativity and collaboration have become part of the new liberal management speak from Tom Peters to John Howkins. Artists who work collectively are seen by these people to have powerful problem solving skills, in contrast to the individualistic way in which art discourses have previously upheld genius and feared collective authorship. Perversely, it is by these business theorists that the idea that culture is inherently collective is being most successfully promoted.
20 I’d prefer a blunt talk about artist’s oppression. See my self-published pamphlet ‘Artists Liberation’, 1986.
24 An 18-minute long oral history documentary on Brixton Artists Collective is available on DVD from 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning as part of it Brixton Calling! Archive show 29 October to 17 December 2011.
25 Let’s not get distracted by things like all the working class people in literary studies, or, more widely, all those commoners who have gone through university in the last 40 years, or even by the achievement of mass literacy in the last century. Let’s not be confused by the oral aspects of bourgeois culture. This is a theoretical idea somewhat like the distinction between lifeworld and system.
26 This history can be followed in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity (1962 trans. 1989) and can be read alongside Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: the impact of Printing 1450 - 1800, translated by David Gerard, London: New Left Books, 1976.
27 I might owe a debt here to Hannah Arendt’s idea of power. I have to admit to reading Arendt indirectly, through e.g. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. http://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com/2010_02
28 E.P. Thompson’s Customs in Common and work on the construction of ‘folk’ music by people like Dave Harker and Bob Pegg in the 1980s, showed that cultural resistance was always a response to the imposition of power. Another heroic effort, within a very different stratum of dark matter in view, was made by Emmanuel Cooper in People’s Art: Working Class Art from 1750 to the Present Day, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1994. We could even trace the idea back to Jean Dubuffet’s use of the term Art Brut, or ‘Outsider Art’, as it came to be known in the English speaking world thanks to Roger Cardinal’s work of 1972. See, Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, London: Studio Vista and New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972.
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency deploying peer-to-peer networking to enable secure and anonymous transactions without a central bank. Unlike many economic commentators, The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society and Scott Len take the currency seriously but ask, how exactly does it differ from 'real' money?
In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto designed a new electronic or virtual currency called Bitcoin, the goal of which was to provide the equivalent of cash on the internet.i Rather than using bank or credit cards to buy stuff online, a Bitcoin user will install a piece of software, the Bitcoin client, on his computer and send Bitcoin to other users directly under a pseudonym. One simply enters into the software the pseudonym of the person one wishes to send Bitcoin, the amount to send, and the transaction will be transmitted through a peer-to-peer network.ii What one can specifically obtain with Bitcoin is somewhat limited to the few hundred websites which accept them, but includes other currencies, web hosting, server hosting, web design, DVDs, coffee in some coffee shops and classified adverts, as well as the ability to donate to Wikileaks and to use online gambling sites despite being a US citizen.iii However, what allowed Bitcoin to break into the mainstream – if only for a short period of time – is the Craigslist-style website ‘Silk Road’ which allows anyone to trade Bitcoin for prohibited drugs.iv On 11 February, 1 BTC exchanged for 5.85 USD, 8.31M BTC were issued so far, 0.3 Million BTC were used in 8,600 transactions in the last 24 hours and about 800 Bitcoin clients were connected to the network. Thus, it is not only some idea or proposal of a new payment system but an idea put into practice, although its volume is still somewhat short of the New York Stock Exchange.
The three features of cash which Bitcoin tries to emulate are anonymity, directness and lack of transaction costs, all of which are wanting in the dominant way of going about e-commerce using credit or debit cards or bank transfers. It's purely peer-to-peer just like cash is peer-to-peer. So far, so general. What makes the project so ambitious is its attempt to provide a new currency. Bitcoin is not a way to move Euros, Pounds or Dollars around, it is meant as a new money in itself – it is denominated as BTC not GBP. In fact, Bitcoin is even meant as a money based on different principles to modern credit monies. Most prominently, there is no ‘trusted third party’, no central bank in the Bitcoin economy and there is a ceiling limiting supply to the final figure of 21 million.v As a result, Bitcoin appeals to libertarians who appreciate the free market but are sceptical of the state and, in particular, state intervention in the market.
Because Bitcoin attempts to accomplish something well-known – money – using a different approach, it allows for a fresh perspective of this ordinary thing, money. Since the Bitcoin project chose to avoid a trusted third party in its construction, it needs to solve several ‘technical’ problems or issues in order to make it viable as money. Hence, it points to the social requirements and properties which money must have in order to function as such.
In the first part of this text we want to explain how Bitcoin works using as little technical jargon as possible and also what Bitcoin teaches us about a society where free and equal exchange is the dominant form of economic interaction. From this follows a critique of the libertarian ideology behind it.
The first thing one can learn from Bitcoin is that the characterisation of the free market economy by some (libertarian) Bitcoin adherents (and most other people) is incorrect; namely, that exchange implies: mutual benefit, cooperation and harmony.
Indeed, at first sight, an economy based on free and equal exchange might seem like a rather harmonious endeavour. People produce stuff in a division of labour such that both the coffee producer and the shoemaker get both shoes and coffee; and that coffee and those shoes reach their consumers via money. The activity of producers is to their mutual benefit or even to the benefit of all members of society. In the words of one Bitcoin partisan:
If we're both self-interested rational creatures and if I offer you my X for your Y and you accept the trade then, necessarily, I value your Y more than my X and you value my X more than your Y. By voluntarily trading we each come away with something we find more valuable, at that time, than what we originally had. We are both better off. That's not exploitative. That's cooperative.vi
In fact, it is consensus in the economic mainstream that co-operation requires money and the Bitcoin community does not deviate from this position: ‘A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money)...’’vii Hence, in their perspective on markets, the Bitcoin community agrees with the consensus among modern economists: free and equal exchange is co-operation and money is a means to facilitate mutual accommodation. They paint an idyllic picture of a ‘free market’ whose ills are attributed to misguided state intervention and sometimes the misguided interventions of banks and their monopolies.viii
Cash
One such state intervention is the provision of money and here lies one of Bitcoin's main features: its function does not rely on a trusted third party or even a state to issue and maintain it. Instead, Bitcoin is directly peer-to-peer not only in its handling of money – like cash – but also in the maintenance and creation of money, as if there were no Bank of England but instead in its place a protocol by which all people engaged in the British economy collectively printed sterling and watched over its distribution. For such a system to accomplish this, some ‘technical’ challenges have to be resolved. Some of which are trivial, some of which are not. For example, money needs to be divisible, two five pound notes must be the same as one ten pound note, and each token of money must be as good as another, it can’t make a difference which ten pound note one holds. These features are trivial to accomplish when dealing with a bunch of numbers on computers, but two qualities of money present themselves as non-trivial.
Digital Signatures: Guarantors of Mutual Harm
Transfer of ownership of money is so obvious when dealing with cash that it’s almost not worth mentioning or thinking about. If Alice hands a tenner to Bob, then Bob has the tenner and not Alice. After an exchange (or robbery, for that matter) it is evident who holds the money and who does not. After payment there is no way for Alice to claim she did not pay Bob, because she did. Nor can Bob transfer the tenner to his wallet without Alice’s consent except by force. When dealing with bank transfers etc., it is the banks who enforce this relationship, and in the last instance it is the police.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Bill of credit issued by Hall and Sellers, 1775
One cannot take this for granted online. A banknote is now represented by nothing but a number or a string of bits. For example, let’s say 0xABCD represents 1 BTC (Bitcoin).ix One can copy it easily and it's impossible to prove that one does not have this string stored anywhere, i.e., that one does not have it anymore. Furthermore, once Bob has seen Alice's note he can simply copy it. Transfer is tricky: how do I make sure you really give your Bitcoin to me?x This is the first issue virtual currencies have to address and indeed it is addressed in the Bitcoin network.
To prove that Alice really gave 0xABCD to Bob, she digitally signs a contract stating that this string now belongs to Bob and not herself. A digital signature is also nothing more than a string or large number. However, this string/number has special cryptographic/mathematical properties which make it – as far as we can ascertain – impossible to forge. Hence, just as people normally transfer ownership, say a title to a piece of land, money in the Bitcoin network has its ownership transferred by digitally signing contracts. It’s not the note that counts but a contract stating who owns the note. This problem and its solution – digital signatures – is by now so well established that it hardly receives any attention, even in the Bitcoin design document.xi
Yet, the question of who owns which Bitcoin in itself already problematises the idea of harmonic cooperation held by people about economy and Bitcoin. It indicates that in a Bitcoin transaction, or any act of exchange for that matter, it is not enough that Alice, who makes coffee, wants shoes made by Bob and vice versa. If things were as simple as that, they would discuss how many shoes and much coffee was needed, produce it and hand it over. Everybody happy.
Instead, what Alice does is to exchange her stuff for Bob's stuff. She uses her coffee as a lever to get access to Bob's stuff. Bob, on the other hand, uses his shoes as a leverage against Alice. Their respective products are their means to get access to the products they actually want to consume. That is, they produce their products not to fulfill their own or somebody else's need, but to sell their products such that they can buy what they need. When Alice buys shoes off Bob, she uses her money as leverage to make Bob give her his shoes; in other words, she uses his dependency on money to get his shoes. And vice versa, Bob uses Alice's dependence on shoes to make her give him money.xii Hence, it only makes sense for each to want more of the other’s for less of their own, which means depriving the other of her means: what I do not need immediately is still good for future trades. At the same time, one wants to keep as much of one's own means as possible: buy cheap, sell dear. In other words, they are not expressing this harmonious division of labour for the mutual benefit at all, but seeking to gain an advantage in exchange, because they have to. It isn't only that one seeks an advantage for oneself, but that one party’s advantage is the other party’s disadvantage: a low price for shoes means less money for Bob and more product for her money for Alice. This conflict of interest is not suspended in exchange but only mediated: they come to an agreement because they must, but that does not mean it would not be preferable to just take what they need.xiii This relation they have with each other produces an incentive to cheat, rob and steal.xiv Under these conditions – a systematic incentive to cross each other – answering the question who holds the tenner is very important: it’s a matter of getting what one needs or not.
This systemic production of circumstances where one party’s advantage is the other party’s disadvantage, also produces the need for the state’s monopoly on violence. Exchange as the dominant medium of economic interaction, and on a mass scale, is only possible if parties in general are limited to the realm of exchange and cannot simply take what they need and what they want. The libertarians behind Bitcoin might detest state intervention, but a market economy presupposes it. When Wei Dai describes the online community as:
a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.xv
he not only acknowledges that people in the virtual economy have good reasons to harm each other but also that this economy only works because people do not actually engage with each other. Protected by state violence in the physical world, they can engage in the limited realm of the internet without the fear of violence.
The fact that ‘unbreakable’ digital signatures – or law enforced by the police – are needed to secure such simple transactions as goods being transferred from the producer to the consumer implies a fundamental enmity of interest of the parties involved. If the libertarian picture of the free market as harmonious co-operation for the mutual benefit of all was true, they would not need these signatures to secure it. The Bitcoin construction – their own construction – shows their theory to be wrong.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Bill of credit issued by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall, 1760
Against this, one could object that while by and large trade is a harmonious endeavour, there is always be some black sheep in the flock. In that case, however, one would still have to inquire into the relationship between effort (the police, digital signatures, etc.) and the outcome. The amount of work spent on putting those black sheep in their place demonstrates rather vividly the expectation is that there would be many more without these countermeasures. Some people go still further and object on the principal that it’s all down to human nature, that it's just how humans are. However, by proposing such a view, one first of all agrees that this society cannot be characterised as harmonious. Secondly, the statement ‘that’s just how it is’ is no explanation, even though it claims to be one. At any rate, we have tried above to make some arguments as to why people have good reason to engage with each other the way they do.
Purchasing Power
With digital signatures, only those qualities of Bitcoin which affect the relation between Alice and Bob are treated, but in terms of money the relation of Alice to the rest of society is of equal importance. The question needs to be answered – how much purchasing power does Alice have? When dealing with physical money, Alice cannot use the same banknote to pay two different people. There is no double spending, her spending power is limited to what she owns.
When using virtual currencies with digital signatures, on the other hand, nothing prevents Alice from digitally signing many contracts transferring ownership to different people: it is an operation she does by herself.xvi She would sign contracts stating that 0xABCD is now owned by Bob, Charley, Eve etc.
The key technical innovation of the Bitcoin protocol is that it solves this double spending problem without relying on a central authority. All previous attempts at digital money relied on some sort of central clearing house which would ensure that Alice cannot spend her money more than once. In the Bitcoin network this problem is addressed by making all transactions public.xvii Thus, instead of handing the signed contract to Bob, it is published on the network by Alice's software. Then, the software of some other participant on the network signs that they have seen this contract certifying the transfer of Bitcoin from Alice to Bob. That is, someone acts as notary and signs Alice’s signature and thereby witnesses Alice’s signature. Honest witnesses will only sign the first spending of one Bitcoin and will refuse to sign later attempts to spend the same coin by the same person (unless the coin has arrived in that person’s wallet again through the normal means). They verify that Alice owns the coin she spends. The witness’ signature again is published (all this is handled automatically in the background by the client software).
Yet, Alice could simply collude with Charley and ask Charley to sign all her double spending contracts. She could get a false testimony from a crooked witness. In the Bitcoin network, this is prevented by selecting one witness at random for all transactions at a given moment. Instead of Alice picking a witness, it is randomly assigned. This random choice is organised as a kind of lottery where participants attempt to win the ability to be witness for the current time interval. One can increase one's chances of being selected by investing more computer resources, but to have a decent chance one would need computer resources as great as the rest of the network combined.xviii As a side effect, many nodes on the network waste computational resources solving some mathematical puzzle by trying random solutions to win this witness lottery. In any case, for Alice and Charley to cheat they would have to win the lottery by investing considerable computational resources, too much to be worthwhile – at least that's the hope. Thus, cheating is considered improbable since honest random witnesses will reject forgeries.
But what is a forgery and why is it so bad that so much effort is spent, computational resources wasted, in order to prevent it? On an immediate, individual level a forged bank note behaves no differently from a real one: it can be used to buy stuff and pay bills. In fact, the problem with a forgery is precisely that it is indistinguishable from real money, that it does not make a difference to its users: otherwise people would not accept it. Since it is indistinguishable from real money it functions just as normal money and more money confronts the same amount of commodities and as a result the value of money might diminish.
So what is this value of money, then? What does it mean? Purchasing power. Recall, that Alice and Bob both insist on their right to their own stuff when they engage in exchange and refuse to give up their goods just because somebody needs them. They insist on their exclusive right to dispose of their stuff, their private property. Under these conditions, money is the only way to get access to each other people's stuff, because it convinces the other party to consent to the transaction. On the basis of private property, the only way to get access to somebody else's private property is to offer one's own in exchange. Hence, money indicates how much wealth in society one can get access to. Money measures private property as such. Money expresses how much wealth as such one can make use of: not only coffee or shoes but coffee, shoes, buildings, services, labour power, anything. On the other hand, money counts how much wealth as such my coffee is worth: coffee is not only coffee but a means to get access to all the other commodities on the market: it is exchanged for money such that one can buy stuff with this money. The price of coffee signifies how much thereof. All in all, numbers on my bank statement tell me how much I can afford, the limit of my purchasing power and hence – reversing the perspective – from how much wealth I am excluded.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Bill of credit issued by John Dunlap, 1777
From this it is also clear that under these social conditions – free and equal exchange – those who have nothing will not get anything, that the poor stay poor. Of course, free agents in a free market never have anything, they always own themselves and can sell themselves – their labour power – to others. Yet, their situation is not adequately characterised by pointing out that nature condemns us to work for the products we wish to consume, as the libertarians have it. Unemployed workers can only find work if somebody else offers them a job, if somebody else deems it profitable to employ them. Workers cannot change which product they offer, they only have one. That this situation is no pony farm can be verified by taking a look at the living conditions of workers and people out of work worldwide.
Money is power one can carry in one's pockets; it expresses how much control over land, people, machines, products I have. Thus, a forgery defeats the purpose of money: it turns this limit, this magnitude into an infinity of possibilities, anything is – in principle – up for grabs just because I want it. If everyone has infinity power, it loses all meaning. It would not be effective demand that counts, but simply the fact that there is demand, which is not to say that would be a bad thing, necessarily.
In summary, money is an expression of social conditions where private property separates means and needs. For money to have this quality it is imperative that I can only spend that which is mine. This quality and hence this separation of need and means, with all its ignorance and brutality towards need, must be violently enforced by the police and on the Bitcoin network – where what people can do to each other is limited – by an elaborate protocol of witnesses, randomness and hard mathematical problems.
The Value of Money
Now, two problems remain: how is new currency introduced into the system (so far we only handled the transfer of money) and how are participants convinced to do all this hard computational work, i.e., to volunteer to be a witness. In Bitcoin the latter problem is solved using the former.
In order to motivate participants to spend computational resources on verifying transactions they are rewarded with a certain amount of Bitcoin if they are chosen as a witness. Currently, each win earns 50 BTC plus a small transaction fee for each transaction they witness. This also answers the question of how new coins are created: they are 'mined' when verifying transactions. In the Bitcoin network money is created 'out of thin air', by solving a pretty pointless problem. That is, the puzzle whose solution allows one to be a witness. The only point of this puzzle is that it is hard, that's all.xix What counts is that other commodities/merchants relate to money as money and use it as such, not how it comes into the world.
Thin Air: Bitcoin, Credit Money and Capitalism
However, the amount of Bitcoin one earns for being a witness will decrease in the future – the amount is cut in half every four years. From 2012 a witness will only earn 25 BTC and so forth. Eventually there will be 21 million BTCs in total and no more.
There is no a priori technical reason for the hard limit of Bitcoin; neither for a limit in general nor the particular magnitude of 21 million. One could simply keep generating Bitcoin at the same rate, a rate that is based on recent economic activity in the Bitcoin network or the age of the lead developer or whatever. It is an arbitrary choice from a technical perspective. However, it is fair to assume that the choice made for Bitcoin is based on the assumption that a limited supply of money would allow for a better economy; where 'better' means 'fairer', more stable and devoid of state intervention. Libertarian Bitcoin adherents and developers claim that by 'printing money' states – via their central banks – devalue currencies and hence deprive their subjects of their assets.xx They claim that the state's (and sometimes the banks') ability of creating money 'out of thin air' would violate the principles of free market because they are based on monopoly instead of competition. Inspired by natural resources such as gold, Satoshi Nakamoto chose to fix a ceiling for the total amount of Bitcoin to some fixed value.xxi From this fact most pundits quickly make the transition to the 'deflationary spiral' and whether it is going to happen or not; i.e., whether this choice means doom for the currency by exponentially fast deflation – the value of the currency rising compared to all commodities – or not. Indeed, for these pundits the question why modern currencies are credit money hardly deserves attention. Consequently, they miss what would likely happen if Bitcoin were to become successful: a new credit system would develop.
Credit
Capitalist enterprises invest money to make more money, to make a profit. They buy stuff such as goods and labour power, put these 'to work' and sell the result for more money than they initially spent. For a capitalist enterprise, money is a means and more wealth – counted in money – is the end: growth.
If money is a means for growth, a lack of money is not a sufficient reason for the augmentation of money to fail to happen. With the availability of credit money, banks and fractional reserve banking, it is evident that this is the case. However, assume, for the sake of argument, that these things did not exist. Even then, at any given moment, some companies have money which they cannot spend yet while other companies need money to spend now (to buy new machines, say). Hence, both the need and means for credit appear. If growth is demanded, having money sitting idly in one's vaults while someone else could invest and augment it is a poor business decision. This simple form of credit hence develops spontaneously under free market conditions.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Bill of credit issued by Benjamin Franklin, 1739
Furthermore, under the dictates of the free market, success itself is a question of how much money one can mobilise. The more money a company can invest the better its chances of success and the higher the yield on the market. Better technologies, production methods, distribution deals and training of workers, all these things are available – at a price. Now, with the possibility of credit the necessity for credit arises as well. If money is all that is needed for success and if the right to dispose over money is available for interest then any company has to anticipate its competitors borrowing money for the next round of investments, rolling up the market. The right choice under these conditions is to apply for credit and to start the next round of investment oneself; which – again – pushes the competition towards doing the same. This way, the availability of money not only provides the possibility for credit but also the basis for a large scale credit business, since the demand for credit motivates further demand.
Even without fractional reserve banking or credit money, e.g., within the Bitcoin economy, two observations can be made about the relation of capital to money and the money supply.
If some company A lends some other company B money, the supply of means of payment increases. Money that would otherwise be petrified into a hoard, kept away from the market, used for nothing, is activated and used in circulation. More money confronts the same amount of commodities, without printing a single new banknote or mining a single BTC. That means: the amount of money active in a given society is not fixed, even if Bitcoin was the standard form of money.
Instead, capital itself regulates the money supply in accordance with its business needs. Businesses 'activate' more purchasing power if they expect a particular investment to be advantageous. For them, the right amount of money is that amount of money which is worth investing. This is capital's demand for money.
Growth Guarantees Money
When one puts money in a bank account or simply lends it to some other business, to earn interest, the value of that money is guaranteed by the success of the debtor to turn it into growth. If the debtor goes bankrupt that money is gone. No matter what the substance of money, credit is guaranteed by success.
In order to secure against such defaults creditors may demand securities, some sort of asset which has to be handed over in case of a default. On the other hand, if on average a credit relation means successful business, an IOU itself is such an asset. If Alice owes Bob and Bob is short on cash but wants to buy from Charley he can use the IOU issued by Alice as a means of payment: Charley gets whatever Alice owes Bob. If credit fulfils its purpose and stimulates growth then debt itself becomes an asset, almost as good as already earned money. After all, it should be earned in the future. Promises of payment can assume – and have assumed in the past – the quality of means of payment.
Charley can then spend Alice's IOU when buying from Eve, and so forth. Thus, the amount of means of payment in society may grow much larger than the official money, simply by exchanging promises of payment of this money. And this happens without fractional reserve banks or credit money issued by a central bank. Instead, this credit system develops spontaneously under free market conditions and the only way to prevent it from happening is to ban this practice: to regulate the market, which is what the libertarians do not want to do.
Systematic enmity of interests, exclusion from social wealth, subjection of everything to capitalist growth – that is what an economy looks like where exchange, money and private property determine production and consumption. This does not change if the substance of money is gold or Bitcoin. This society produces poverty not because there is credit money but because it is based on exchange, money and economic growth. The libertarians might not mind this poverty, but those who discovered Bitcoin as a new alternative to the status quo perhaps should.
The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London <wineandcheese AT hush.com> is part of the Junge Linke gegen Kapital und Nation network. Its writings can be found at http://www.junge-linke.org/en
iThe key white paper on Bitcoin is Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakomoto, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
iiA peer-to-peer network is a network where nodes connect directly, without the need of central servers (although some functions might be reserved to servers). Famous examples include Napster, BitTorrent and Skype.
iiiProbably due to pressure from the US government, all major online payment services stopped processing donations to the Wikileaks project, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11938320. Also, most US credit card provides prohibit the use of their cards for online gambling.
v‘Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is approximately constant over time: 6 per hour. The number of Bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 4 years. The result is that the number of Bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21 million.’ http://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3366.msg47522#msg47522
vii Wei Dai, 'bmoney.txt', http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt. This text outlines the general idea on which Satoshi Nakamoto based his Bitcoin protocol.
viii ' The real problem with Bitcoin is not that it will enable people to avoid taxes or launder money, but that it threatens the elites’ stranglehold on the creation and distribution of money. If people start using Bitcoin, it will become obvious to them how much their wage is going down every year and how much of their savings is being stolen from them to line the pockets of banksters and politicians and keep them in power by paying off with bread and circuses those who would otherwise take to the streets.' http://undergroundeconomist.com/post/6112579823
ix For those who know a few technical details of Bitcoin: we are aware that Bitcoin are not represented by anything but a history of transactions. However, for ease of presentation we assume there is some unique representation – like the serial number on a five pound note.
x ' Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. [...] Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. [...] With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.' – Satoshi Nakomoto, op. Cit.
xiFor an overview of the academic state-of-the-art on digital cash see Burton Rosenberg (Ed.), Handbook of Financial Cryptography and Security, CRC Press, 2011.
xiiTo avoid a possible misunderstanding,that money mediates this exchange is not the point here. What causes this relationship is that Alice and Bob engage in exchange. Money is simply an expression of this particular social relation.
xiiiOf course, people do shy away from stealing from each other. Yet, this does not mean that it would not be advantageous to do so.
xiv' Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.' Satoshi Nakomoto, op. Cit.
xvi' The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of the owners did not double-spend the coin.' – Satoshi Nakomoto, op. Cit.
xvii' We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. For our purposes, the earliest transaction is the one that counts, so we don't care about later attempts to double-spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions.' – Ibid.. Note that this also means that Bitcoin is far from anonymous. Anyone can see all transactions happening in the network. However, Bitcoin transactions are between pseudonyms which provides some weaker form of anonymity.
xviiiOn the Bitcoin network anyone can pretend to be many people by creating many pseudonyms. Hence, this lottery is organised in such a way that one has to solve a mathematical puzzle by trying random solutions which requires considerable computational resources (big computers). This way, being 'more people' on the network requires more financial investment in computer hardware and electricity. It is similar to an ordinary lottery: those who buy many tickets have a higher chance of winning.
xix'The only conditions are that it must be easy to determine how much computing effort it took to solve the problem and the solution must otherwise have no value, either practical or intellectual' – Wei Dai, op. Cit.
xx' The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.'– Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, quoted in Jashua Davis, 'The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin and Its Mysterious Inventor', The New Yorker, 10 October, 2011.p. 62.
xxi' The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.' Satoshi Nakomoto, op. Cit. Furthermore, the distribution of how Bitcoin are generated is inspired by gold. In the beginning it is easy to 'mine' but it becomes harder and harder over time. Bitcoin's mining concept is an attempt to translate the return to gold money to the Internet.
Artistic actions outside the gallery may vary widely in their approach to social space as material, but, as Sophie Schasiepen argues in this review, their representation inside the gallery rarely does
This exhibition, featuring work by 30 artists, groups and collectives, deals with the question of artistic strategies, practices and modes of intervening in the everyday. Compiled by a team of 16 people (all students from one of the first programmes with tuition fees at an art academy in Vienna, the ‘ECM: Educating, Curating and Managing Masters Programme’), the selection contains contributions from artists living in Vienna, London and South-East Europe. A programme of discussions, lectures, guided tours and a series of five interventions also took place in or around the exhibition space throughout the duration of the show.
An Everyday Approach to an Exhibition
The project space of the Kunsthalle Wien is located at the Karlsplatz on a traffic island in the middle of a busy junction. For some reason, it always seemed a non-space to me, possibly because its transparent and flat architecture make it relatively inconspicuous despite towering between the traffic lanes. Whoever wants to can catch a glimpse of the current exhibitions through one of the wide glass fronts. In the case of With Immediate Effect - Artistic Interventions in the Everyday, that onlooker would have seen nothing especially unusual, nothing that would have interrupted the ordinariness of the everyday.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Upon entering the exhibition space, this impression is reinforced. Not only is nothing awaiting the viewer that she hadn’t been expecting but, quite to the contrary, the sight of a few presentation boards displaying near identical arrangements of images and texts is so ordinary that it is almost insulting. The boards – which are distributed evenly but apparently at random through the room – are punctuated by two tables each with four video monitors, positioned on one wall. The layout of the space can thus be taken in quickly: in the middle, an archive of image and text material; on the side, moving images; and in the remaining space, a social area for sitting, discussing, participating in the exhibition’s blog and making tea and coffee.1
Strolling through the Material
With a little self-discipline, the stroll through the boards may begin. It is difficult not be distracted by the short, overly simplistic texts which accompany the works and reference other pieces in the room. That aside, with each work it becomes more entertaining to try to understand the various approaches which quite automatically coalesce into a very loosely linked but, due to the heterogeneity, also substantial, network of material for thought. The spectrum ranges from pieces like Ben Wilson’s reconfigurations of squelched chewing gum in public spaces, to Werner Reiterer’s Sculpture for the Advancement of Free Speech, to the documentation of the Voina group’s Dick Captured by the FSB action. While Wilson’s reconfigurations are a very inconspicuous, aesthetically conducted reinterpretation and reassessment of perception in public space involving the meticulous painting of chewing gum, they don’t address any political implications or discussions beyond the possible disruption of the aesthetic order. On the other hand Reiterer’s speaker construction literally announces its political intention. His sculpture was installed on a village square and twice a day, using an intercom, invites pedestrians to make use of their (democratic) right to free speech. The fact that it is unclear if Reiterer really intended the sarcasm of a call for speech in such a desolate space, how he reflected upon the impossibility of equal access to the amplifier and the extreme improbability of its use, not to mention if he ever questioned his affirmative usage of the term ‘democracy’, can hardly be seen as a productive ambiguity. Rather, this must only be read as a missing contextualisation by the artist and curators. The approach of the Voina Group is quite different in this regard. Their action, during which they break through the barrier of the Litenjny drawbridge in the early morning and draw a 65 meter tall and 20 meter wide phallus on the bridge, which is then raised soon after exactly opposite the Russian secret service headquarters, requires no further explanation.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Voina, Dick Captured by FSB, 2010
The Everyday, Public Space and the Political
The clear majority of the pieces, including all of the interventions staged on site, take place on a level similar to Wilson’s chewing gum. Without wishing to deny the possible effects of such small ‘interventions in the everyday’, it remains unclear if and how the exhibition organisers grasp them theoretically and politically. In the introductory text of the catalogue, public space is described as a ‘place’ that ‘belongs to nobody and everybody’, ‘[is] demure and politically correct and also not personal’. That poses questions: if public space is not seen as a battlefield at all, and terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘citizens’ are used in exhibition texts without being questioned, then how is it that pieces such as Voina's, but also Günter Brus’s Viennese City Stroll or Schlingensief’s container action, Please Love Austria, are displayed here? The obviated basis for an examination of power relations (not only) in public space is joined to a similarly clueless way of dealing with the field of the everyday and of art. The suspicion that arises while visiting the exhibition, namely that ‘artistic interventions’ are seen as provocative and thus critical contributions to the ideation and questioning of the public and social order, regardless of form and content, is strengthened once again in the catalogue text. The potential of art is contrasted with the everyday as being ‘a state of emergency, a stumbling block, at best the ideal nemesis of stiff structures’. That artistic provocation and 'states of emergency' are necessary components of a contemporary (neoliberal) everyday and therefore don’t irritate social order in themselves is never put in to question.
Another problem is that the backdrop of different economic and social situations against which these works were originally carried out is not really taken in to consideration. Thus, documentation of actions such as that by King Mob – who in 1968 distributed pamphlets entitled It Was Meant to Be Great But It’s Horrible: Confessions, S. Claus at Christmas time in London while a person dressed as Santa Claus took wares from the shelves and handed them out to children who were later forced to both return the wares and watch Santa being arrested – is placed beside documentation of the action HAPPSOC I which Stano Filko, Zita Kostrová and Alex Mlynárcik carried out in Bratislava in 1965. The group distributed invitations to a ‘Series of Realities’, in which they listed excerpts of statistical information about Bratislava (138,936 women, 142,090 street lamps, etc.) as participating objects and whose implementation period ran from 2 May, Labor Day, to 8 May, Day of the Celebration of the End of World War II. That both the use of the statistics and the time period between two such different national holidays presumably suggests criticism of the dominant social system is, in some ways, obvious but remains neglected by the curators. Their most significant characteristic remains the tangibility of non-stylised reality – postulated by the artists in an accompanying manifesto – and the expansion of the concept of art, not only in public spaces, but also in terms of the conversion of viewers into exhibits.
Whoever Said that it was Going to be Political?
Despite these criticisms, the question of how artists intervene in the everyday, which strategies and forms of action they employ, is substantially answered in this widely diverse arrangement of works. After all, the exhibition announcement didn’t promise any more than that. That the team then decided to choose a rather archival approach to presentation and thus to impart the immediacy of the questions not via the exhibited pieces, but rather via an abundance of information and discussion programmes, as well as additional interventions during the course of the exhibition, may be a surprisingly conservative and hardly adventurous solution. Yet it allows for an unburdened viewing of the works – a stroll through material homogenised in form which couldn’t be any more different in terms of approach, context and possible interpretation.
Sophie Schasiepen does waged work as personal assistant to a dis/abled woman, part of the editorial collective MALMOE (malmoe.org) and the collective FC Feminista, running a dykes/womyn/inter/trans-space (frauencafe.com) in Vienna
Credit
Thanks to Sam Osborn for the assistance translating this text
Info
Mit sofortiger Wirkung – künstlerische Eingriffe in den Alltag / With Immediate Effect - Artistic Interventions in the Everyday took place at Kunsthalle Wien project space, January 14th – January 29th, 2012
Footnotes
1 The fact that the coffee is sponsored by, of all people, the coffee provider who is under heavy criticism for its use of a stylized ‘Moor head’ as a logo is a political misstep that is not to be underestimated.
An exhibition at Gasworks singled out the thematic of 'management' as a lens through which to examine multiple artistic approaches to labour, organisation, communication and measurement. Marina Vishmidt gives the show an evaluative performance review
No, it has to be done again, it is always to be done. Never done. As if there was no longer any movement, nor any effective gestures, nor any change, but instead an absurd simulacrum of work. Work which effaces itself as soon as it is completed as if under the effect of some curse.
What is the object of management? And who is asking? Management is first of all exerted upon resources, be these temporal or human, rather than upon autonomous entities that can either be reasoned with or present their own reasons. Or, perhaps the autonomy of the entity is expressed through its striving to fulfil its potential as a resource, as inculcated by the homilies of human capital. As the line goes in the Stewart Marshall piece which lends the exhibition its name, 'all I can see is the management' (the context of the statement is that the protagonist cannot see 'the workers' or anything else), because management gets in our eyes. Management has set itself to measure all things, and it finds them manageable. Like its corollary 'governance', it is weakly totalising; it is the perpetual calibration of accommodation and control when all contestation over fundamentals has been eliminated from the scene. The double character of being both totalising and infinitely adjustable makes it the perfect emblem of the capital relation, whether carried out by bosses, trade unions or individuals upon themselves. At the same time, its role as the mediator of processes of valorisation brings it into ideological and actual proximity with religion and therapy, concerned as they all are with human perfectibility. But it must also be averred that the extension and elasticity of management occurs in a specific historical moment, one which is analytically punctual despite seeming experientially perpetual. And as we situate the extension of management in its historical moment, the same needs to be done for the various heuristics which we use to estrange it from us or ourselves from it, such as an art exhibition about management.
If the unthought of management is perhaps most iridescently the redundancy of thought, and the upcycling of politics as logistics, then the curt survey just set out above runs the risk of contenting itself with truism when more careful optics are solicited. And working with the premise that the exhibition itself is the occasion if not the source of this demand, the optic could initially be put in this way: what is the relationship between the art object (and its most tireless familiar, the artistic subject) and the object of management? Which amounts to saying, is it possible to build a show around the themes of management, work and the entrepreneur – particularly in the era anointed as 'communicative capitalism' – without situating art as at least a potential addressee of management's claims, not to mention their enthusiastic referee since the era of Art & Language, the Artist Placement Group, or Mierle Laderman Ukeles? The poles of the aestheticisation of a study object located in a vitrine in the middle distance and a benign topos of reflexivity are equally dangerous for an aesthetic encounter with political economy. All I Can See is the Management intends to showcase 'artworks that consider how late capitalist approaches to working life play out at work, in education and at home'. But the exhibition does so with a sense of excluding the immanent mimesis of the managerial role performed by culture itself from its purview (advisedly 'immanent' since management theory has for decades embraced creativity, flux, singularity and improvisation as its passepartouts). Does the press release's talk of a 'pervasiveness of management' include itself? Does the show take into account or see itself reflected in the culture of management within the sphere of culture itself or is this 'culture of management' just an eccentric ritual practised by 'workers', 'entrepreneurs' and 'managers' as the exotic others to artists? Management and art of course have a lot in common, perhaps most obviously that both of them make labour disappear, only later, if at all, to re-introduce it in the guise of a 'resource'. It could be that the exhibition sees but does not speak 'management' and the works it has assembled seem to be 'about' management. 'Management' is then an object found and summoned into a gallery space where it is expected to behave as a native informant.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Normal Work, 2007
But if the contention here is a certain neglect of the immanence of object to concept, then the contention must be specified a bit better. Rather than identifying a 'blind spot' in the show's thinking, it should be more interesting to see how the exhibition can or should 'perform' the logic of management, and not just see it everywhere, that is, nowhere. It might be proposed that the characteristic problem management has with locating its object – management is notoriously autotelic, that is, formalist and concerned with the control of processes, thoroughly immersed in its own logic – is paralleled in the exhibition's trouble deciding on a curatorial object.2 It holds up and puts down management, work, and the mediating figure of the entrepreneur, but declines to put them into relation or posit a thesis that could guide the viewer in such assembling. Perhaps here sits the common misapprehension that an argument when made by an exhibition is bound to be didactic or illustrative, and definitely semantic. Yet fostering a productive ambiguity (rather than the doxa entailed by most iterations of artistic ambiguity) itself requires a strong curatorial conceit which an exhibition put together with this degree of diffidence willingly forsakes. What may be fostered in its stead is the perception of an arbitrariness resolving into aestheticisation on the one hand, and its corollary, nostalgia, on the other. The result may be an occlusion of insights into the contemporary dynamics of management, which would have to include the communalised management of austerity, along with the management of the business 'in' us, as the Department of Trade and Industry's new slogan would have it, painting its dazzling future of mass unemployment. But if it should be said that the remit of an art exhibition that cites work, management and entrepreneurship is to be suggestive and not topical, there would still be the questions of focus and the deliberate sidestepping of the immanence of the object to the inquiry. But supposing this operation had been performed successfully, would it still fall under the rubric of reflexivity?
One dramatisation of this question was supplied by Filipa César's video Rapport (2007, 15 min.) in an installation which dominated the Gasworks space both visually (it was a large projection on standing screens which diagonally bisected the space) and auditorily. The video watched a group of aspiring German managers take part in an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) session.3 This work evoked Harun Farocki's videogrammes of 'modern life' in its impassive scrutiny and incidental emotiveness, although César's editing preferences are more aleatory and nervous. Reflexivity here, as in most therapeutic regimes, was clearly acting as homeopathy and training for heteronomous goals ('success') which had been internalised to the point where any change to behaviour would be not just strictly personal but totally homeostatic.
Desist, Desist: Reflexivity as Total Quality Management
Reflexivity is a highly-valorised term in critical art production and mediation, signalling an awareness of tradition, contradiction, situatedness and responsibility. It may be an agonised awareness or an ironic one, an emblem of complicity or militancy, and it has numberless affective and political sources. However, against a wider backdrop of massified consumption of critical cultural practice, it is also a highly normative term and technology. One need only look at the prominence of 'criticality' in art school curricula to recognise it as the bureaucratic form of critique, and that such a training in criticality nearly always marks the spot from whence critique has been expunged.
As such, its constative is critical, while its performative is virtuous. In this respect, it functions in analogy with instruments of feedback and measure which signal management in other spheres, like consultation, evaluation, or assessment – it is the internal standard operating procedure of the field. And it is in this way that we would have to qualify the demand for reflexivity from an art exhibition about management, before we can hope to distinguish from this demand another desire, that for immanence of object to inquiry. Which is to say, the demand for reflexivity is a product of the necessity of situating the exhibition itself in the 'pervasiveness' of management seen and unseen, but this demand may issue from the same field it wants to survey.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Allan Sekula, School is a Factory, 1978-80
A demonstration of 'reflexivity' here could take the form of seeing if Gasworks' or any comparable organisation's (and the whole gist would be in determining what is meant by 'comparable') own administrative structure and relationships constitute an object for a show about management? If, as is likely, this would fall fairly within the exhibitions' conceptual limits, what would be the practical implications of situating its own operations within the field of management? Its own funding applications in a vitrine, its own over-educated invigilators and administrators enunciating their subjectivities in a video? Wouldn't this capture the double (-bind) prize of not only being 'about' management but also being reflexive about the role of small publicly-funded arts organisations in reproducing the managerial paradigms they query? This critique could instantaneously be generalised to represent the formation of the neoliberal subject per se through the tangled idioms of self-expression and submission. Such a configuration is of course familiar from mid-decade and pre-crisis critical art discourse centring on the cultural producer as the model subject of precarity, and one which animated practices such as Berlin's kpD (kleines postfordistisches Drama), prominently featured in the last exhibition project at Gasworks comparable to All I Can See ..., 2007's Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie. The latter was a much more psychoanalytic affair, tracing an 'internal' object, and thereby worrying the symptomatic rather than taxonomic mode: its scrutiny was into how class structured the dimmed background of artistic careers. Here, the demand for reflexivity was anticipated, and, if memory serves, diverted and defused. The press release noted that '[t]he participating artists have not necessarily been chosen for a specific engagement with issues of class within their work' but hoped instead to 'ask whether the traditional analytical tools at our disposal are helpful in such an examination of the art world today.'
Now might be the time to pause and take stock of the traction of the 'hypothesis': that the logic of management is already cultural; or, how it has been sung in art's own dialect as the Modernist principle of self-reflexivity. If modernism is the self-awareness of modernity (the notion of art as the research & development branch of society), what makes this reflexivity impossible now, what kind of self-awareness is required now, when the modernist temporal horizon is no longer a viable frame of reference and all we can do is manage the present? In order to show how the modernist self-reflexivity that art cannot help but perpetually engage, be it in the mode of denial or affirmation as 'criticality', is both like and unlike the closed loop of managerial auditing, a history of art's own self-definition as and against the available economic subjects of social labour is required – a history which constitutes a substantial part of the self-reflexivity or 'autonomy' of artistic production. Art, when it reflects on 'management', is not just reflecting on its outside; it is defined and traversed by its antagonism with productive relations, with abstract labour.4 Artists have continually identified and misidentified their labour and their social relations with work, management and entrepreneurship. An exhibition that talks about management without alluding to the cybernetic social-engineering baroque of Stephen Willats, the Saint-Simonian consultancy schemes of the Artist Placement Group, or even – to take a current practice – the marketing training psy-ops of Pilvi Takala, might as well be talking about botany as about management, not to say handling its works as specimens. An even more prosaic way of staging the immanence of management to the field of art production would be a glance at the labour relations in its midst: the curators as managers, artists as workers and entrepreneurs. This kind of distinction itself obtains less and less. When it is the capacity to consume with distinction and sensitivity that qualifies curators and artists alike as managers of experience such profiles are tendentially subsumed into the managerial.5 Viewers, then, are the unpaid work placements in this valorisation scheme. Another and related schema could inspect the determinations of speech and performance as emblematic of success in both management and art production: the iterability of practices, that they be original – 'visionary' – yet amenable to be reproduced and adapted in disparate contexts, which is to say, commodified, is another binding thread or shared structure.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Eulàlia, Discriminació de la dona / Discrimination Against Women, 1977
Management, or 'the conduct of conduct', is operational, and reflexive in an instrumental way, not an immanent one; it can never 'revolutionise' its own telos – the dominance of capitalist accounting and the unchallenged legitimacy of this ontology. The structure of reflexivity in art and the structure of assessment native to management have such different genealogies, though optimised for compatibility in today's managerial dogma as it inflects and infects the 'governance' of the realm of freedom (culture) as much as it does the realm of necessity (industry). Perhaps a more generative lens to juxtapose or align them is the currently voguish curatorial rubric of 'fiction' – the fiction of management, and the fictions mobilised in contemporary art.6 Could we call the artist/curator a manager of 'fictional' resources? This could potentially open up the whole managerial ontology to an understanding of 'purposiveness' very different to the formalism of management without end.
Specimens
In some ways, the exhibition presents one with a less than straightforward task when it comes to discussing the works, since there isn't a thesis to measure them against. The diffuseness of the focus – work, management and entrepreneurship – also creates some opacity. Management is rendered as training (in works by Amy Feneck, Darcy Lange, Filipa César, and to some extent Allan Sekula's); as an anecdote of irrationality prompted by the cultishness of much 'guru-centred' management theory and ritual (Pil and Galia Kollektiv's video), and that eternally elusive object of management, the Seele und Gefühl eines Arbeiters (Soul and Feelings of a Worker). This set of works by KP Brehmer was made in 1978-1980, and they disclose how the mimesis of measure produces a spooky and sublime abstraction.7 Sublimed into human capital, the fictitious analogy between employee creativity and the boundlessness of self-valorising value is here turned into a minimal chromatic allegory, implying an absent manager to survey these charts and scry the runes of exploitation. Brought up to date, the key here may be that the secret of the value of both fictitious capital and labour-power is not just unpaid labour (surplus-value) but the speculation on labour that has not been done, and will not be; not just because of propensities for 'human strike' but due to the systemically senseless nature of such labour.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Amy Feneck, Government Workers, 16mm transferred to DVD, 2010
Darcy Lange and Amy Feneck are interesting choices insofar as their work accentuates state (and in Lange's case, also private) education as a dimension of 'governance' in the present and recent past, while also indexing the show's signifiers to yet another domain of modular control i.e. 'management' in its broadest sense. However, Feneck only has her title, Government Workers (2010, 6 min.) to bear this out in what is otherwise a very rote documentation of institutional space (a Hackney primary school) that does not speak for itself. The old critique of artistic objectivity or its innocuous character mask, 'observation', such as that made by Brecht in The Threepenny Trial about the image of the thing as incapable of speaking for itself, targeting the rough pieties of Neue Sachlichkeit, arises here.8 Lange's films, in the meantime, are presented very much as an object: their length and durational quality lend them vitality as documents, but are needlessly reified as the incidental qualities of an art object, and prove forbidding to the viewer's engagement, rather than leaving them open to the comparison and analysis which Lange's archive sought to enable. Going into so many classrooms and interviewing pupils and instructors at such length, itself a component of a longer term audiovisual research into workplace relations, enacts an intriguing mimesis of industrial sociology; at least its porosity to such uses raises a question for art's relationship to management which is not taken up. Pil and Galia Kollektiv's piece Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organisational Design and Personnel Management (2010, 23 min.) can be seen as metonymic for the world view of the entire show – its fascinated, fabulating approach to found material echoes the show's approach to its 'object' at its best, but also exemplifies the noticeable though not overpowering 'wrong-end-of-a-telescope' impulse of nostalgia. Allan Sekula's School is a Factory (1978-80) is, on the other hand, perhaps the best synthesis of the show's stated concerns, with its critical realist diagramming of class, education, shifts in accumulation, and the de-skilling which management nearly always favours in its drive to submit the hard-won autonomy of labour to the automatism of the organisation. Stewart Marshall's video Distinct (1979, 38 min.) is a finely honed absurdist parlour drama depicting standardisation as the ineluctable drift of all human projects, from a couple's relationship to the productive relations on made-for-television film sets.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Darcy Lange, Study of Three Birmingham Schools (Mr Perks Animal Farm English Class, Ladywood Comprehensive School), 1976,
The diversity of All I Can See is the Management's excellent talks programme understandably could not be emulated within the exhibition.9 As the exhibition is not a discursive medium, such a multi-layered constellation of topics and tropes was bound to suffer in the absence of a strong curatorial argument, and this was embodied by oblique or tenuous curatorial choices. One such was the Normal Work (2007) video and photograph suite by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. It might well be about work, but it is 'about' a number of other things as well, and none of them seem discernibly germane to 'management'. Arbitrary-seeming also was the inclusion of a buoyantly punk collage series by Eulàlia entitled Discriminació de la dona (Discrimination Against Women,1977) . To give an art exhibition the task of unfolding the subsumption, or redefinition, of work by management, while concomitantly charting the emergence of the entrepreneurial subjectivities dictated by this shift, is perhaps unrealistic, and the show's eschewing of didacticism underscores its appreciation that this is the case. Yet the concatenation of, at times painfully, unrelated work reflecting on different aspects of this unwieldy proposition could perhaps been avoided, or alleviated, had the telescope been turned in on itself and created an object in its own image.
Marina Vishmidt <maviss AT gmail.com> is a writer who is based both in London and at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London
Info
All I Can See is the Management took place at Gasworks Gallery, London, 7 October 2011 - 11 December 2011
Footnotes
1 Robert Linhart, L'etabli, (Paris: Les éditions des minuit, 1981, pp 13-14); quoted in Diane Morgan, ‘Are you working enthusiastically? Fourier, Proudhon and The Serial Organisation of the Workplace’, Parallax, 2011, vol. 17, no. 2, pp.36-48; 42.
2 The focus on 'outcomes' in the 'managerial regime' can be deceptive – 'outcomes' are the final stage in a sequence of processes, and thus cannot be analysed as normative or practical goals. 'Outcomes' can only be sought in the conditionality of management, that is, the environment which makes its processes tenable and operable.
3 The talks programme also offered an NLP session, with an explanation of its principles by a practitioner.
4 ‘Yet it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labor, that they [artworks] also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, 2004. p 5.
5 I owe the terms of the decidedly incipient analysis here to discussions with Stefano Harney, who proposes that the management of attention is an imperative shared by cultural workers (artists and art professionals) and 'regular' workers, a signal mode of the local subsumption of labour to the 'managerial'. In this framework, art becomes internal to labour as the suspension or diversion of attention.
6 As the significantly abridged article 'The Conduct of Management and the Management of Conduct: Contemporary Managerial Discourse and the Constitution of the ‘Competent’ Manager' by Paul du Gay, Graeme Salaman and Bronwen Rees, included in Gasworks' 'Pipeline' reading resource for the exhibition, has it, 'It is perfectly possible and legitimate to conceive of the ‘manager’ as a fiction, for example, because that category of person has not always existed.' http://pipeline.gasworks.org.uk/2011/08/04/constituting-the-%E2%80%98competent%E2%80%99-manager/
7 See note 5. With regard to Brehmer, he is noted as an exponent of the early 1970s West German art movement Kapitalistschen Realismus, somewhat prior to Mark Fisher's coinage. Like his contemporary Marianne Wex, Brehmer was concerned with the behavioural effects of visual communication, abstracting and staging these motifs, so that their disciplinary character might be better revealed.
8 'For the situation is complicated by the fact that less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupps works or GEC yields almost nothing about these institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relationships, signalled by the factory, can no longer be revealed by the photograph. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up. For this reason, art is indeed necessary. But the old concept of art, the one that rests on experience, is superseded. For whoever represents that which is experienceable in reality, also does not capture it. Reality is no longer experienceable in its totality.' Bertolt Brecht, Schriften: Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werner Hecht et al (eds.), 1, vol. 21, Berlin 1988, p. 469; quoted in Esther Leslie, 'Happy Knowledge', (unpublished).
9 The programme was not only illustrious but unusually considered, with the participation of critical organisation theorist Peter Fleming, Marxist anti-work and feminist political theorist Kathi Weeks, artist and trade union activist Fred Lonidier, and a screening of Joaquim Jordà's Numax Presenta… (1980, 105 min.), a documentary about an occupation of a textile factory in Franco-era Barcelona.
While experimentation and activism often focus on art school education or education as art, there is a tendency to ignore the creeping influence of corporate public pedagogy which is poisoning the roots of art education in the UK’s schools. Art pedagogy can only be radical, writes Dean Kenning, if it takes on the exclusions and market bias which are impoverishing educational culture
The discussions we have witnessed over the past few years around art education, as well as proposals for, and experiments towards its renewal, transformation or re-conception, have taken their impetus from developments in the distinct fields of art and formal education. In the field of art we have seen the rise of curating as a kind of art production in itself, alongside what we can loosely term ‘relational’ and ‘participatory’ practices. Such practices have sought to move beyond any delineated object in order to locate art within the wider, inter-human, relational situation. But unlike community art, for example, such encounters take place within – or at least end up back at – institutional art spaces. On the one hand, educational forms and materials such as desks, blackboards, over-head projectors, collections of books etc., are presented within the exhibition format in a way that mimics conventional learning environments.1 On the other hand, educational initiatives – such as marathon lecture events, participatory workshops or alternative art schools – take place at, or with the backing of, galleries, museums and biennials, or within the bounds of art world networks, and are often presented as artworks in their own right. Pedagogical forms and initiatives such as these have been much discussed under the rubric of the ‘educational turn’ in art and curating. The trope of ‘turning’ suggests a dynamic process enabling art to move beyond its established limits. As the editors of one of the foremost collections on the subject write: ‘there is an invocation of flux and the shifting of territories, stabilities and normative positions.’2 The move towards education, meanwhile, appears to connect art to a more general social arena, and one, moreover, that indicates a functional role for art. We should also add a further dimension to the UK situation, where funding arrangements for public galleries since the late '90s have made education departments a central part of the institutionalised artistic landscape. While budgets for gallery education have increased, and artistic and curatorial practices directed towards schools and community projects have proliferated, the paradoxical effect of the pedagogical turn in art and curating discourses has in certain respects been to hijack these more hidden practices, and thus perpetuate the low status of many involved – for example, when high profile artists are brought in to a school's project.3
In the field of university-level art education, debates tend to be both more urgent and more local, originating, as it were, from the factory floor. Nevertheless, it is clear that the neoliberal push towards a privatised student-as-consumer model of education is a global phenomenon; a fact rendered visible by student struggles for free and universal access to education in cities across the world. In the UK, loss of independence for art departments amidst a growing instrumentality had been exacerbated in recent years by increased standardisation, an oppressive assessment culture and the transformation of education into a commodity – up to the point of the current, accelerated crisis unleashed by the Tory-led coalition government.
Rather than rehearsing the various pedagogical experiments in curating, alternative art schools models, conference debates etc., or examining in detail policy changes that have afflicted universities and art departments, as well as the protests that have arisen in response to them, I would like to put the developments outlined above into relation with more general ideological forces and structures that are effecting art education as a symptom of wider social disfigurement.4 The field of art and the field of education are conceptually distinct, but they are mutually interactive when it comes to these debates. Sometimes education-related practices and discourses occur as if what is happening in formal art education is not their concern. A different approach, but one which may simply be the other side of the same coin, is to see art-based experimental modes of education as, to some extent, an alternative to formal university-based models of education for artists and, therefore, a means to solve or sidestep the problems besetting the latter. What I want to focus on is the tipping point between art-related educational practices which confront social mechanisms of conformity and exclusion in order to offer real alternatives, and those which slide back into education-themed art events. The issue revolves around whether artistic experiments occur with the wider social picture in view, or whether they remain contained within pre-established cultural and institutional limits.
Conformity and Exclusion
My basic position is that the ‘trouble with art school’ lies not primarily with the validity or otherwise of the various methods by which future artists might be taught, but with who those artists might be, and how what they do might be affected by constraints they will be placed under.5 In other words, the ‘trouble’ lies with the potential destruction of art school as a critical and heterogeneous space due to the government’s dismantling of the (already battered) welfare state model of free and inclusive public education. As students are expected to take on the burden of massive personal debt, and as universities become ‘providers’ in a competitive global marketplace – with the inevitable consequences of course closures and a two-tier system – a higher level art education is heading towards increasing corporate conformity and increasing exclusivity.6 The danger is that the study of art as a practical discipline will become not only more professionalised and acquiescent as onerous debt encourages the demand to succeed financially, but a luxury available only to the well off and to those with enough existing cultural capital to think the gamble on a precarious future is one worth taking. A factor little commented on in the discourses around art education is the way this exclusionary mechanism is exacerbated by the diminution or phasing out of art in many secondary schools, a consequence both of a narrowing in the way performance is measured for national league tables since the introduction of the EBac certificate and the proliferation of new academy and ‘free’ schools which are run beyond local authority control with freedom to impose their own curriculum.7 In both cases it is poorer students who will be deprived of the benefits of art classes and exposure to a wider culture of art they may otherwise not have access to. (We must not let the urgent need to address particular deficiencies in the art curriculum or lack of resources blind us to the way the availability of art as a subject at school provides a pathway to study at further and higher levels.)8 Quite apart from the effect on particular individuals, the consequences of an increasingly homogeneous upper and middle class student body can only be detrimental for future art practice itself, and the critical social role art can play. In an article which addresses this issue with rare clarity, John Beagles has highlighted how prevailing discourses on art education have failed to account for the way class exclusion itself effects art schools. For Beagles, pedagogical innovation will not get us very far if it does not operate in conjunction with efforts to enable access for a broader range of students: ‘Tackling exclusion and transforming the culture of art schools are two inextricable sides of the same coin.’9
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Image: Céline Condorelli, Revision Part II, an adjustable spatial setting for ARTSCHOOL/UK 2010
Given the assault both on the democratic ideal of education as a necessary sphere of free thinking, and on the comprehensive ideal of equal access and opportunity to study, it is incumbent upon those engaged with issues of education from the perspective of art, and who believe in art’s ability to contribute concretely to the wider cultural landscape, to address these fundamental structural transformations. Alternative art school models and educational forms and events taking place in an art contexts are in danger of becoming a pseudo-critical pose or smokescreen, unless they are capable of confronting real conditions on the level of the social space in which they are carried out, of acting to stop processes detrimental to the expansion of art as a critical practice, and of challenging the ideology that underlies these processes. At its worst, and in spite of all radical content and non-hierarchical student-tutor relations etc., alternative art educational models risk exacerbating exclusion and instituting what might be called a pedagogy of privilege.
From Art as Education to Education as Art
The pedagogical turn in art appears to promise openness, genuine engagement and a breaking down of boundaries. One of the things Anton Vidokle suggests is that artists who adopt the school as their modus operandi have the capacity to turn the passive ‘audience’ back into an active ‘public’, and thus engender the socially transformative function of art which inspired predecessors such as Courbet and Manet to institute the very notion of art as a critical practice.10 Vidokle’s own unitednationsplaza, ‘the exhibition as school’, is one of the most celebrated reference points in discussions about art’s turn to education. Infamously it did not take place as intended in 2006 when Manifesta6 was cancelled (following political interference by the Cypriot authorities), but was realised later in Berlin, and then at the New Museum in New York under the name NightSchool. Without wishing to judge the entirety of an extensive, multi-event project such as this (and one I was not party to), I would nevertheless like to point to the way Vidokle’s school was set up (indicative of many similar projects), and consider how these conditioning factors might allow us to question some of critical claims being made. Firstly, those involved closely with the project are big, international art names: Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Walid Raad, and others. Whilst various of these artists and writers may be inspiring and raise public interest, it does feed straight into the art world validation system, justifying publicity and debate within the circles of art discourse (art magazines, and so on, will pay it attention), and attracting a largely readymade public who can self-identify through the shared recognition of these names. Secondly, there was a selection process: one hundred artists, musicians, designers etc., out of the several thousand who applied, were chosen to join the ‘core group’ of the programme.11 Whatever the outcome, the whole idea of selection relating to a field or institutional apparatus – education, schools – whose purpose, from one perspective, is always to maintain and reproduce class divisions precisely through processes of selection and hence exclusion should, at the very least, raise questions.12 Depending on the channels of dissemination, the process used could already be viewed as a form of selection, ruling out those who were not aware of the call. How much, then, is this really about opening art up, breaking down borders, and engaging a wider public? Outside of the regulatory confines of formal educational establishments, are there not opportunities for artists and curators to invent structures that refuseselection, and so encourage the interchange of what Beagles calls ‘distinct subjectivities’ – the mark of a genuinely democratic public sphere?13 As Beagles implies, it is the introduction of voices able to challenge art’s claims to neutral universality that allows for forms of dissensus which cannot be manufactured simply through the introduction of a set of texts and topics for debate. Thirdly, although the project is described in terms of turning the space of art into a learning process, with the implication of a breaking down of the artist-audience relation, and the idea of a contingent, fluid, and unframable process, unitednationsplaza, as Vidokle himself says, ‘functioned very much as an artwork in its own setting’.14 This is not simply a matter of dialectical inversions – school as art as school, etc. There is something more at stake: the way that art, in becoming a platform for more open, collaborative processes, gets returned as a distinct, authored work, with all the symbolic capital that accrues to the artist as author.15 We seem to have moved from ‘exhibition as school’ to ‘school as exhibition’; or, to put it another way, from art-as-education to education-as-art. I would simply for now want to make a plea for the anonymity of the great teacher or tutor, wherever they exist within the vast machine of education, including art education. Why should art practices remain tied to value systems premised almost entirely on visibility?16
I want to move to another event that took place in October 2011 at the Slade School of Art, something I did participate in called ItStartedWithACarCrash:AlternativeEducationalRoadTour.17 The location for the event was significant as less than a year before, Slade students from the BA Fine Art course were in occupation in protest at the planned implementation of the Government’s (misnamed) education ‘reforms’. The event had been organised by the IMT gallery as part of an exhibition by TheBruceHighQualityFoundation, an art group who had taken their own self-run ‘university’ on a tour of various educational establishments in the US, and were now making a stop-over in London. But where did this ‘educational tour’ take those of us gathered at the Slade symposium? For me it seemed to take us both outside and inside – outside of the institutionalised spaces of art education, but only in order to take us safely back within art world confines.
TheKurtSchwittersDIYSchool was made up of Slade Fine Art students who had been part of the earlier college occupation, plus some others (including two young children). The collective had formed out of a residency they undertook on the site of Schwitters’ Merz Barn in Cumbria. Their performances on the day reminded me of techniques used during the 2010 occupations, seeming to articulate horizontal relations, consensual decision-making and equal status within the group through a method whereby each member of the collective, standing in a row, would take their turn to speak or enact something. One got a sense of the intimacy of the group and the empowerment felt at the experience of creating something beyond the limits of the self. It was a reminder of the freedom that getting away from one’s usual surroundings can inspire, and the necessity of that. At the same time the performances seemed inward-looking, an expression of wilful disengagement from others in the room due to the fact that what was spoken about, whilst probably making sense to group members, seemed to withdraw from the possibility of communication with anyone else.
Without wanting to refute the potential of such experiments, the contrast between different modes of collaboration and group formation manifested, firstly, through the education protest, and secondly, through the residency are striking. On the one hand we have an art college occupation, formed and carried out in an act of broad-based social solidarity against a common enemy – a formation which amongst other things was instrumental in the creation of the umbrella protest group ArtsAgainstCuts. On the other, a ‘DIY School’, made up of students who had taken part in the occupation, but whose extra-curricula art community grew from a rural residency, and was limited to the small number of people who took part in it.18 Whilst it is not an either/or question, on this occasion the balance of criticality tips in favour of the art institution itself as a site of contestation and social engagement. The question would then be about how the powers of distinct, artistic forms, arising from the collective imagination of collaborative formations – whose value may indeed lie with a certain level of non-communication and non-recognition – might operate in a politically charged mode.19
The New International School also delivered us to a rural location, this time a residency programme in France. The project was framed in terms of it offering an alternative to over-bureaucratised formal art institutions, and its discourse-based art pedagogy of self-examination was celebrated, with the marginality of the NIS’s location regarded a means toward this end. The impression, garnered from the screening of a collaborative video produced at the school, was one of almost total isolation, and a solipsistic introspection. There was also the unspoken issue of what type of artist was able to travel to France and support themselves on an unfunded residency of this sort. Again, in spite of the value individual artists may have derived from their experience, it is certain that even the most bureaucratised university art course had the advantage over this School in terms of a heterogeneous social cohort – regardless, or probably more accurately because of, its ‘international’ make-up.
A final incident seemed to epitomise the problems of an event which offered a journey outward, beyond the normative realities of gallery-based art and institutionalised art education, only in order to turn back and entrench us ever more deeply in those conditions. One of the members of TheBruceHighQualityFoundation made a rather off-the-cuff remark to the effect that alternative art schools have the advantage of being much more flexible when it comes to being able to get rid of dead-weight faculty tutors. When I pointed out that in the UK at least we have been experiencing a period of massive staff cuts on many Fine Art courses, and that a similar language of dynamism and flexibility was often adopted by senior management to justify cuts to teaching, the curator of IMT interjected on the grounds that it wasn’t very productive to go down this politically-charged road. Clearly the promised ‘debate around alternative networks of education’ that headlined the event had its limits, and this limit seemed to be any antagonistic injection of the reality of what was happening around us, that is to say, outside the boundaries of individual art projects. A bland consensus is the consequence of collaboration for its own sake – a method of learning now commonly applied in fine art schools where tutors are thin on the ground. But there is another issue – the way that art events around education are always in danger of becoming another curated art event, adopting education as a theme but avoiding the bigger picture, and so contributing little in the way of social influence or action towards change. If we maintain a hope that artists, galleries and other arts institutions can be a lever for social change, or a brake on regressive measures, then this is a danger we need to be wary of.20
When art turns in on itself, things begin to curdle. This, then, is another sense of the educational turn: art appears to move outward towards the social terrain of education – a deeply political terrain which cannot but confront the reality of art’s own exclusions, hierarchies and value systems – but only for education to be recuperated and turned back into art, appropriated, mimicked, aestheticised. A turning inward, then, which is simultaneously a separating out from the common medium, so that education – which everyone has experienced, and so understands in one way or another – is reconstituted into recognisable artworks, exhibitions, or curated events.21 When those engaged in open-ended discussion more and more resemble each other in terms of background, cultural tastes and lifestyles, things have also turned inward. The purpose in this case seems to be less about art’s potential to enter into the most pressing battles and debates, and more about producing a kind of super-artistic subject; someone, for example, who learns all about TheIgnorantSchoolmaster, but knows nothing about why the school down their road is now sponsored by an investment bank.
Corporate Pedagogy
We can see how, while adopting the political rhetoric of social engagement, projects which contain education within institutionally, culturally and discursively demarcated art zones, can serve to reinforce art’s social separation and exclusivity. Earlier I stated that it was imperative that debates and practices around education and art contend not only with specific government attacks, but confront the ideologies that underlie them. The dominant ideology is encountered in the art world and anywhere else where we experience conformity to a neoliberal corporate agenda, and social and cultural exclusion under conditions of widening economic inequality. As I stated at the start, social conformity and exclusion are precisely the likely effects of the changes taking place in UK education. In this sense these changes are part of a much wider national and global ideological agenda to transfer what remains of the non-commodified public sphere into private hands. These processes are accompanied by, and are indeed part of, what educational theorist Henri Giroux has identified as ‘corporate public pedagogy’: ‘a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain.’22
Corporate public pedagogy is not simply a kind of hegemonic cultural wallpaper; it is something that is being built into the very architecture of our education systems. The democratic ideal of informed and equal citizens, whilst never being fully realised in practice, underlay comprehensive reforms throughout the 20th century. This ideal has now been replaced by a belief in entrepreneurial values and a faith in business methods. The government’s idea of corporate responsibility is to take state education out of democratic local authority control, and hand it over to much less accountable private companies and wealthy philanthropists.23 Melissa Benn writes of ‘the biggest trend in the edu-market […] the growth of “chains” […] a development many believe will soon dominate the education landscape.’24 She is speaking about organisations such as ARK, E-ACT, the Academies Enterprise Trust and the Harris Federation. ARK – Absolute Return for Kids (this kind of business jargon is omnipresent), set up by a group of hedgefund financiers and a billionaire CEO, currently runs 11 academies in the UK which operate according to strict discipline, a ‘behaviourist’ teacher-dominated pedagogy borrowed from KIPP (Knowledge is Power) US Charter Schools, and a curriculum which prioritises ‘depth before breadth’ (demoting ‘soft’ subjects like art). Its abiding ethos is that ‘business methods’ can ‘solve social problems.’25 But this is not the limit of corporate influence: many commentators believe that sponsored Academies and Free Schools are a means to a more extreme end: the entry of for-profit education providers into the state system. Pearson, which sells academic books, teacher training and tracking software to schools in the increasingly outsourced UK education market, is promoting ‘complete solutions’ for running schools, as part of a desired ‘fully privatised national strategy’ that is likely to follow the profitable US model of low-cost computer-based learning. It is alarming to note that if it were not for the News of the World phone hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson enquiry, Rupert Murdoch might already be embedded within UK state education, extending his recently acquired edu-division (run by anti-union, pro Charter School, former head of New York City education, Joel Klein), and beaming News International’s ‘large library of media content’ directly into classrooms.26 Whilst education businesses and private school operators such as Cognita and News Corps wait in the wings for a chance to colonise material and intellectual wealth built up over decades in the public sphere, an all-pervading ‘business ontology’, to use Mark Fisher’s apt term, is in danger of eclipsing any sense that alternative social formations are possible, or indeed ever existed. And so children’s minister Sarah Teather recently awarded UBS investment bank with a Big Society Award for allowing staff to volunteer at Bridge Academy in Hackney. According to the EveningStandard, Teather said that ‘bankers can provide state school pupils with the connections and networks students at top private schools benefit from […] and inspire pupils who might not otherwise be exposed to the corporate world.’27 More recently I have heard of a bank-sponsored school celebrating ‘enterprise week’, with all manner of Apprentice type activities for pupils.28
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Image: Arts Against Cuts stage a teach-in during the Turner Prize award ceremony, December 2010
This may seem a long way from art. Surely one enters art school in order to escape from such things as rote learning, authoritarian classes, rigid discipline, the segregation of knowledge, a positivistic culture of testing, an obsession with career plans, etc.? All of this is in fact questionable, and it would be productive to look at how the particular twist increasing privatisation gives to each of these things is mirrored in various ways at University level education, and on Fine Art courses. I want to make a more general point about the way corporate pedagogy permeates the field of art, a field in relation to which art schools increasingly seem to see themselves as providing their students with ‘training’ – with the effect that formal art education increasingly conforms to the ‘realities’ of this field, rather than enabling a critical distance from it, and therefore limits (or attempts to limit) the possibility for students to question or refuse its values.29 What, then, is the make-up of this field, within which artist and curator-led educational models have proliferated in recent times – offering what claim to be alternatives to the dominant ideological models of education? The sphere of art is, in fact, very far from being a natural zone of criticality and contestation, and in many ways embodies and promotes those very neoliberal values Giroux and Fisher speak about. Firstly exclusion is built into the art world’s hierarchical symbolic economy, where access to prestige, validation and funding is often dependent on elite networks of acquaintances and the financial resources necessary to engage in unpaid internships, etc. Secondly, conformity to a neoliberal definition of reality permeates an arena where ultra-individualism is encouraged by a culture of competition and personal promotion and by the corporatisation of public galleries through sponsorship, branding, franchising, exclusive hospitality events, etc. As with corporate influence in compulsory education, and the marketisation of higher education, what this corporate occupation of the public gallery does is to change its character and negate its ability to act in opposition to economic and cultural power. This influence may appear more subtle than the examples given above in relation to the privatisation of schools – corporate logos and their feel-good catchphrases in fact provide a kind of omnipresent, albeit perhaps ignorable, wallpaper within a sphere of life where it might be imagined one could be free of such things. But sponsors, patrons and collectors do exert all kinds of coercive authority in terms of what artists and curators rationally determine to be in their own better interests to do and avoid doing in their work – from the production of art, to where and the manner in which it gets shown, to what or whom one is able to criticise, challenge or refuse, etc. In the precarious, competitive, winner-takes-all field of art, where access to the right people plays such a massive part in success and visibility, the impulse of obedience is significant. Such obedience is in fact learnt behaviour, even if the effects of domination, being almost entirely negative (what is never made or proposed or spoken in the first place) are in reality felt as an absence, or else its confirmation rarely rises above casual art world gossip.30
There is, at the very least, a logical contradiction when art projects which claim to offer alternative models of education, fail to address the dominant corporate pedagogy that shapes the frame in which they operate. Critical pedagogy is nothing if it is not, amongst other things, a constant questioning of the relations which structure that pedagogy – and a mutation of that pedagogy in response to what has been learnt as a result of those questions raised. But the conclusion to draw is not the somewhat utopian notion that, without first establishing a truly democratic comprehensive, equal and dissenting sphere, critical and politically oriented practices will remain doomed to neutralisation and co-option towards opposite ends. Instead, what is crucial is that critical practices themselves can begin to alter notions of what the field can consist of, and what institutions may be capable of. In what follows I want to suggest two examples (both briefly touched on earlier) of ways this might occur in respect to art-education.
Art as Education & Protest Pedagogy
Education-as-art, education, that is, recuperated and returned as art capital, never fully escapes from an old fashioned version of autonomy premised on the institutional consecration that separates art from the disorienting sphere of social life. 31 A different version of autonomy is premised on contestation and dissent. Art identifies and then acts to change those forces – social, cultural, economic, aesthetic, etc. – which impede its freedom; it confronts, as a kind of material to be reshaped, the contextual frames which influence and determine its meanings and values.32 Whereas education-as-art models appear to change art’s form, but leave its basic structures untouched, art-as-education models, on the contrary, change not only art’s forms, but attempt to shift the structures which determine what art is capable of. In this way art does not become education in any simple transition; rather in turning to education as a field where art’s own limitations can be identified and exceeded (its various conformities and exclusions) art can act in a way which transforms the notion of what it can be. An example of what art-as-education could look like is Brecht’s theatre, particularly his learning-plays. In today’s context we might look to artists working in schools, operating, for example, through gallery education departments.33 When artists cross the threshold into schools, they are often afforded a degree of freedom way beyond that afforded to art teachers, in terms of such things as time, novelty, the ability to operate beyond lesson and curriculum constraints, etc. Artists in schools are therefore in a good position to introduce, through all kinds of forms and methods alien to the usual school environment, possibilities for critical and dissensual thinking. Such thinking could be directed towards, and viewed as a negation of corporate public pedagogy in its many manifestations, both as it is seen to encroach on the school itself, and as it pervades the wider culture – for example through mass media forms of news, sport, entertainment, advertising, etc. Autonomy here is not simply a case of the artist’s relative freedom to operate, nor does it reside wholly in the effect on pupils as they move briefly from consumer-subjects to thinking agents. Autonomy is also a consequence in this case of art pushing against the limits of its own exclusions and conformities – of entering a distinctly comprehensive arena, and releasing artworks from their usual cultural policing as precious objects directed towards certain individuals, and intended for certain audiences and/or publics. In this respect, whilst what goes on in gallery education departments is often derided as a (State-directed) instrumentalisation of art, or is subject to casual dismissal or disregard by many of those involved in the ‘pedagogical turn’ debates (a prejudice which is to a large extent status-driven), it may be more productive to think of these departments as trojan horses – smuggling in practices which threaten the hierarchies, exclusions, and economically valorising procedures of the gallery as a whole, and therefore the class interests which would like to maintain these conventions and relations.34 We might, then, further think about how the artwork, as it appears in different forms across many arenas (including within gallery exhibitions), might be reconceived as a resource, a teaching aid, or, as the dictionary has it, ‘an action or strategy that may be adopted in adverse circumstances’. In this way we get a sense of how art may be liberated from its passive, protected status, in order to operate in a more socially functional, and potentially political way.
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Image: Brecht's The Ocean Flight (Lindberflug), a Lehrstuck, 1927
Another way art could operate critically to confront both the exclusions and the corporate pedagogy being introduced into art education is through what John Cussans has termed ‘protest pedagogy’.35 Cussans is describing activities undertaken by Arts Against Cuts, which both he and myself were involved with. As already mentioned, AAC arose out of the education protests and college occupations of late 2010 and involved art students, lecturers, artists, writers, activists, student union officers, and others.36 At group gatherings and over the course of open access education and planning Weekends several teach-ins and occupations of cultural venues were proposed. Initially these took place at Tate Britain during the Turner Prize ceremony and the National Gallery on the evening of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees, coinciding with a major education demo.37 Further actions followed in early 2011, including at the British Museum on the day of another education demonstration, at Sotheby’s auction house, and the Whitechapel Gallery during the opening of the Government Art Collection. The people who took part in these events were mainly operating within the field of art and art education. But while the experience of lectures, communal chanting, spontaneous life drawing, and manifesto production during occupations and teach-ins, as well as the production of images for banners and stickers, and the various workshops and discussions at the planning weekends, all represented of itself a broad, transdisciplinary and experimental extra-formal model of education in action, this type of pedagogical practice was not insular and desirous of recognition as art, but directed in a practical way towards the reinstatement of free public education, and the collectivist and comprehensive values embodied by public sector provision. What is more, in fighting for those values, the art-as-protest pedagogy of AAC was able to challenge the corporate pedagogy and elitism current in the art world in the following, interconnected ways: 1. The actions were genuinely collective and non-authored, even while individuals brought particular ideas to the table, thus negating normative neoliberal models of social success: hierarchical structures of validation and prestige, and the general competitive individualism operating in the art world. 2. The occupations and teach-ins performed a symbolic reclamation of corporatised cultural space for the public sphere. In the midst of the actions at the Tate, National Gallery and British Museum, there was a sense of collective ownership – a sense that occupation was about asserting a common claim over something which had a different type of value from its institutionally engineered market value, one which belonged to us all: the public gallery not as a collection of ‘priceless’ treasures, but a democratic social space; and by extension, the necessity of art education as a critical and imaginative resource that should be available to everyone. 3. Coming from an art perspective, this form of education through protest challenged the exclusions of the art world by connecting with other groups – those within further education and school students, teachers, union members, gallery and museum workers, etc.
Refusal
I offer the above suggestions not as definitive solutions to the problems of conformity and exclusion in art and education, let alone to the wider social structures and ideological forces which underlie them, but as an indication of possible directions. There are many questions which could be raised, for example in respect to the permanence and strength of heterogeneous bonds formed during protests or residencies in schools, which are by nature delimited in time. However in the arena of art education where, as Marina Vishmidt argues, ‘individualised rebellion is obligatory [but] socialised rebellion is proscribed’, moves towards the social must surely be welcome.38 And in so far as such individualism reflects neoliberal ideals of competition and privatised being, the desire and ability to invent new forms of commonality are a matter of the utmost urgency. But I want nevertheless to end on a note of intransigence. In his essay ‘Education After Auschwitz’, Theodor Adorno defines autonomy as ‘the power of reflection, of self-determination, of notco-operating.’39 Adorno has in mind the fact that the Holocaust occurred because there were enough people willing to obey orders, to submit to an external power that was stronger than them. Adorno’s suspicion of collectives is perhaps understandable, but ultimately too limiting, and his vision of education too top-down. But I think it is essential to emphasise the importance of not co-operating, in an area of discussion where terms like collaboration, participation and co-operation operate as ‘positive’ signals designed to abstract us from any sense of the power relations they may be upholding. Just as consensus has a critical function when located within a wider antagonistic relation (adopted tactically to confront a common enemy), so collaborative situations in art set-ups have limited critical value unless they push against the conditions of domination and exclusion which define the contexts in which they exist. Resistance against common impediments to freedom is where true solidarities grow. In this respect artistic autonomy is also about learning to say no.
Dean Kenning <deankenning AT gmail.com> is an artist and writer. Exhibitions include Commonism (Five Years Gallery), and The Dulwich Horror: HP Lovecraft & the Crisis in British Housing (Space Station Sixty-Five). Also, recently, Reclaim the Mural (Whitechapel Gallery) as part of the group The Work in Progress. He has written many articles and reviews for Art Monthly, and has also published in ThirdText, ArtReview and ModernPainters. He is a visiting lecturer on the BA Fine Art course at Central St Martins, and is post-doctoral researcher at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University, where he is currently organising the Stanley Picker Public Lectures programme.
Footnotes
1 What Irit Rogoff has cautioningly called ‘pedagogical aesthetics.’ See ‘Turning’, in CuratingandtheEducationalTurn, Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson, (eds.), Amsterdam: De Appel, 2010, p. 42.
2 Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson, ‘Introduction’, ibid, p.15.
3 A case in point being Dis-assembly. See Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Andrea Philips, Lars Bang Larsen & Emily Pringle, Dis-assembly. FaisalAbdu'allah,ChristianBoltanski,YonaFriedman,RunaIslam:ASerpentineGalleryProjectwithNorthWestministerCommunitySchool, London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006.
5 I presented an embryonic version of this paper at TheTroubleWithArtSchool, an event held at the ICA, 30 November 2011. I would like to thank Corinna Till for all her valuable input regarding the present text.
6 The ConDems are in fact helping to engineer a stark two-tier system by imposing supply side limits, making up to 20,000 student places available to institutions who can set fees at below £7000 per year. Whilst David Willets will sell this as giving a better deal to student consumers, the real purpose of such market rigging is to encourage new providers to enter and compete with universities on cost. The multinational firm Pearson, who have also expressed an interest in running Academy and Free Schools, have claimed they can run a degree course for as little as £4000.
I garner these facts from a talk given by Andrew McGettigan for the Marxism in Culture Open Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London on 14 October 2011: ‘Financialisation, Monetisation, Privatisation: Creating the New Market in HE’. For up to date analysis of Higher Education developments see Andrew’s CriticalEducation blog: http://andrewmcgettigan.org/
7 The confusingly titled English Baccalaureate, introduced to state sector schools in November 2010, is awarded to pupils achieving A*-C in GCSE in the following subjects: Maths, English, Science, Foreign Language, and History/Geography. It immediately became the measure of quality for schools, with the consequence that in many places non-EBac subjects were squeezed to prioritise EBac subjects. From the start of 2011 many secondary schools decided to limit pupils’ choice of art’s subjects, to enable them to drop art a year early, to allot less time to arts subjects, and in some cases remove art as a GCSE option all together. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/07/gcse-arts-cut-english-baccalaureate and http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/13/ebacc-limited-choice-gcse-school-pupils A sign of the seemingly planned diminution in art provision is the 40 percent reduction last year in PGCE training places for art teachers compared with a 14 percent reduction in places over all. See http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6087624
In its determination to accelerate New Labour’s expansion of corporate and private sponsored education, the government has vastly expanded Academy Schools, largely by bribing comprehensives to convert with the promise of desperately needed funds. Many sponsors are charismatic entrepreneurs keen to impose a no-nonsense, three Rs, vocation-oriented curriculum, often in the name of ‘poorer students’. Whilst it is certain art will be considered an unnecessary ‘luxury’ in many inner city academies, art, music and drama are likely to thrive in some of the more affluent Free Schools, being seen by parents who themselves attended university as an essential part of a well-rounded education. Thus we see the likely divisions in degree study being reflected at compulsory level education prior to HE selection.
It is worth making the point that a major factor in the Tories’ education policies regarding Free and Academy Schools is to take schools out of the hands of local authority accountability, and to diminish workers' rights as the new employers are exempt from teachers’ pay and conditions agreements. For a thorough account of the ‘state-sponsored privatisation’ of compulsory education see Melissa Benn, SchoolWars.TheBattleforBritain’sEducation, Verso (London, New York), 2011
8 The abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a weekly sum paid to 16-19 year-old students from poorer families who remain in education, will also effect the take-up of art at pre-degree level (on Foundation and, especially, BTEC courses). In general the decision on EMA is likely to have consequences at least as significant (and more immediate since EMA is a payment, not a debt) for social mobility as the increase in university fees, and was a major source of anger expressed in the student demos of late 2010.
9 ‘It is clear to me that issues about exclusion need to be equally embedded alongside all curricula and pedagogic innovation. It is no longer forgivable or strategically appropriate to regard them as appendices to be dealt with by external WP programmes.’ John Beagles, ‘In a Class of Their Own. The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education’, Variant, Issue 39/40. http://www.variant.org.uk/39_40texts/comp39_40.html. I would concur completely with Beagles’ call for ‘a renewed, reimagined, core insertion of comprehensive education values’ into debates and struggles around art school education.
10 Anton Vidokle, ‘Exhibition to School: unitednationsplaza’, in CuratingandtheEducationalTurn, ibid.
11 Op. cit., p.153. A similar selection process occurred at the New Museum.
12 And this would include mechanisms of self-selection, such as the ability to pay private tuition fees, to afford to live in an affluent area near a good state school, to have professional connections, to have support which enables one to live away from home, in another city or country, etc.
13 John Beagles, ‘In a Class of Their Own: The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education’, Variant, issue 39/40, Winter 2010. http://www.variant.org.uk/39_40texts/comp39_40.html Beagles continues: ‘the often antagonistic debates between […] those whose subjectivity is often motivated by being bored or out of place, and those at home within culture, frequently leads to a questioning of dominant modes of thought.’
15 As Tirdad Zolghadr, one of the school’s core collaborators/tutors, writes, ‘the project, in and of itself, was discretely framed as an Anton Vidokle artwork.’ ‘The Angry Middle Aged: Romance and the Possibilities of Adult Education in the Art World’, in CuratingandtheEducationalTurn, p.161
16 On the question of artist visibility see my feature ‘The Artist as Artist’, ArtMonthly, June 2010
17 Several groups involved with extra-formal models of art education were invited to speak/perform. I was invited as part of FreeSchoolinaNewDarkAge, an informal art school initiated by John Cussans in 2008.
18 David Burrows, head of BA Fine Art at the Slade and host of the event, has pointed out to me that for many Slade students taking part, the gallery teach-ins still seemed tutor-led, and the residency was a means to pursue communal experiences in a way they could claim ownership over. It is also worth bearing in mind the exhaustion felt when collective action ends in defeat, and therefore the need to regroup, or to seek solitude, in order that energy can be generated again and directed into forms of art.
19 A case close to home might be the production of the NomadicHiveManifesto during the National Gallery teach-in/occupation of December 2010.
20 Immediately after the student demos, the occupations and smashed windows – which, along with groups such as UK Uncut, seemed to energise a whole wave of revolt across the country against austerity cuts, the privatisation of public wealth and attacks on public sector workers – galleries and other art organisations wanted a piece of the action, and there were many calls for protest groups and politically inclined artists to collaborate on exhibitions and speak at art events. Protest was so contemporary, but often the art context seemed to suck all political energy out of the most subversive content. An unfortunate example of this, despite its worthy objectives, was IfNot,ThenWhat? taking place at Chelsea College parade ground in March 2011, and described as ‘an anti-cuts project creating new visions of the future’ and as ‘coinciding with the Liberal Democrats conference (in Sheffield)’. A temporary wooden pavilion, designed by the artists Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann, was intended to house various political events – from talks by campaign groups to ‘alternative society workshops’. In addition to the likelihood of such events being completely neutralised given the particular context, the structure itself was classified as an artwork, and its walls and floors had then to be protected from potentially damaging elements such as sticky tape or muddy boots. Another revealing detail was that although the named artists were paid to participate, the protestors and campaigners who were meant to actually activate the event (including politically-inclined artists) were not.
21 At the Slade event John Cussans presented a paper which examines the way in which, according to the logic of university research assessment funding (the RAE, now the REF), everything from DIY free schools, to protest actions, are capable of being recuperated and turned into a validating research output for the institution. Unless, that is, one is careful, or in other words, knows how to refuse. See John Cussans, ‘Return This! The Paradoxes of Protest Pedagogy in a “Research Culture”’. Available at http://freefreeschool.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/after-the-car-crash/
22 Henri A. Giroux, BorderCrossings.CulturalWorkersandthePoliticsofEducation, New York & London: Routledge, 2005, p.4
23 At vast public expense, during a time of massive cuts to local council budgets, and when the Schools Building Programme for state schools has been scrapped. A report at a recent conference opposing Michael Gove’s Education Reform Act makes the link between subsidised privatisation and societal division (particularly in relation to Free Schools): ‘new schools are being funded to help the hard pressed middle class escape the poor. Gove’s new legislation has a really frightening objective: to lure “aspirational families” away from any commitment to a common educational project, at the risk of creating even greater social segregation.’ ‘Caught in the Act – Report on 19th November Conference’, p.2. http://www.campaignforstateeducation.org.uk/caughtintheact.html
25 Op. cit., pp. 123-124. See also ‘Caught in the Act’, p.4. Like many such chains, there’s a pervading philanthropic rhetoric of enabling bright but underprivileged students to rise above their circumstances. This sometimes reflects the individual sponsor’s own journey from rags to riches.
28 We should be under no illusion that the neoliberal methods being imposed in schools are done with the intention of creating an obedient, pliant and well disciplined workforce. Local businesses who sponsor schools are dealing literally with a captive future workforce when they have influence on what gets taught. Another worrying development is the increase of army cadets in schools, and now, following the US TroopstoTeachers programme (‘Proud to Serve Again’), plans to set up militarised Academy schools run by ex-soldiers. As Captain Burki, who hopes to establish a school in Oldham staffed entirely by ex-servicemen, said (referring to last summer’s riots) ‘The performance of our armed forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere stands in stark contrast to the mobs that have recently been roaming our streets.’ See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032890/UK-riots-Phoenix-School-open-teacher-soldier.html It should also be clear that, at another level, personalised student debt is a disciplinary mechanism for social obedience, particularly in regard to work relations.
29 This conception is in large part an effect of government stipulations, which came with the introduction of fees by New Labour in 1998, obliging courses to provide details of employability potential, thus explicitly equating quality with future earning capacity. Art departments even began talking about ‘T-shaped people’, meaning arts graduates whose multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills enabled them to claim flexibility in relation to the jobs market. I am speaking here, however, about training to be an artist in the art world. Hence the language of ‘emerging art professionals’, ‘early career artists’, and a focus on selling oneself as a creative individual through portfolio presentation, lectures on networking, DIY exhibitions as ‘professional development’ modules, etc.
30 Occasionally, in a more public arena, the limits tacitly imposed on art by corporate power are made manifest, as was the case when those limits were tested by a Tate Gallery workshop, out of which the anti-BP sponsorship group Liberate Tate was born: ‘When art activist group The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination were invited to run a workshop on art and civil disobedience, they were told by curators that they could not take any action against Tate and its sponsors and the workshop was policed by the curators to make sure the artists produced work ‘commensurate with the Tate’s mission’’. See http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/about/
31 Nicolas Bourriaud’s use of the term ‘micro-utopia’ to describe relational art practices is symptomatic here. For Bourriaud critical art that envisages alternative ways of living and new forms of relating to one another, cannot operate directly in the world (this would be utopian in a bad, totalising modernist sense), and so must remain in its own ‘micro’ aesthetic sphere.
32 I am influenced here by the dynamic conception of autonomy proposed by Dave Beech & John Roberts in their essay ‘Specters of the Aesthetic’. Unlike Peter Bürger, who offers a materialst interpretation of aestheticist ideology, but only then to condemn art to social exclusion in its ‘autonomous’ zone (on pain of its becoming commercial), Beech and Roberts conceive of autonomy as an agent-led process towards the elimination of factors which constrain freedom. They see autonomy as a fight for autonomy. Dave Beech & John Roberts, ThePhilistineControversy, London: Verso, 2002
33 I have developed my thoughts on art in schools both as part of ongoing research developed with the Schools and Teachers programme at Tate Modern, and through my involvement with the Portman Gallery located in Morpeth Secondary School, Bethnal Green.
34 Both Felicity Allen and Carmen Mörsch have commented on this tendency amongst exhibition curators and those writing about more high-profile education-oriented art to look down on education department curating. They both offer vigorous assertions of the value of gallery education practices. See Felicity Allen, ‘Situating Gallery Education’, TateEncounters, February 2008. Available here as a PDF http://felicityallen.co.uk/writing/situating-gallery-education. And Carmen Mörsch, ‘Alliances for Unlearning: On Gallery Education and Institutions of Critique’, Afterall 26, Spring 2011.
35 John Cussans, ‘Return This! The Paradoxes of Protest Pedagogy in a “Research Culture”’. Cussans describes protest pedagogy as: ‘pedagogy about protest, through protest and in protest‘ and, in relation to Arts Against Cuts planning weekends, ‘a combination of art school, alternative university, public assembly, and action planning.’He has related his concern that the term ‘protest pedagogy’ could become another fashionable label for the art world to pick up and hang on actions and events as a way of gaining symbolic capital by association. I therefore use it with caution.
36 Whilst my concern here is art and education, learning as and through protest of course applies to activities beyond the immediate field of art to include (to limit myself to the recent UK context) university occupations, teach-ins at banks organised by UK Uncut and other groups, the programmes run at the Really Free School in various squatted buildings, the Occupy LSX Tent City University and Bank/School of Ideas etc.
Travelling to the outer reaches of vocal performance, a recent event featuring noise artists Junko and Keiji Haino opened up the anti-political space of ‘unvoice’ – writes Eugene Thacker
In late February, the dead of winter, the arts organisation Arika held a three-day festival titled A Special Form of Darkness. Located in the Tramway, a former railway station in the South of Glasgow, Arika has been organising events like this for a number of years. Their events often have different themes, though they consistently pull together music, film, performance and ideas into an evocative, heady constellation.i
My reason for writing about the event has to do with the two vocal performances that closed the second and third nights. One was by Keiji Haino, a figure who needs no introduction for those interested in the noise and experimental music scenes. Influenced early on as much by Antonin Artaud as by Butoh theatre, Haino quickly carved out a highly eclectic and uncanny musical style, often focusing on voice and guitar (his 1973 performance MilkyWay is the sound of a weeping galaxy). An accomplished improviser, Haino’s many projects are evidence of his range, from free improv ensembles, to the avant-rock group Fushitsusha, to straight-up noise works such as TheBookof ‘EternitySetAflame’ , to black ambient projects such as Nijiumu. Haino has also performed on a range of instruments, from the hurdy-gurdy to the Theremin, and has collaborated with everyone from Toru Takemitsu to John Zorn.
The other performance was by Junko, a member of the legendary noise group Hijokaidan, which began as an extreme performance art collective in the 1970s, before focusing more on noise. Early Hijokaidan performances were notorious not only for their all-out sonic assaults, but for the way they would push the boundaries of music and performance into the material domain (there are stories of Hijokaidan performances culminating in vomit and piss on stage). In the 1980s and 1990s, Hijokaidan was at the forefront of the kind of ‘power electronics’ style often associated with Japanese noise, which favoured feedback, distortion, and all the desiderata of sound and hearing. Over the years, Junko herself has developed a unique and unparalleled vocal style, both in her many collaborations and in solo projects (the pinnacle of which is the vinyl record SleepingBeauty – a vocal noise performance on side A, and on side B the same track, in reverse).
Junko’s performance, which closed Saturday’s events, was so transparent it defies commentary. And yet, here I am, writing. In the main performance space of the Tramway – a large, cavernous, brick-lined hall, remnants of a long-gone railway station still in evidence – there is a bank of seats. In front of it, a modest stage, a diffuse spotlight, and a single microphone stand, flanked on either end by two towers of speakers, all black. In person Junko is unassuming, reserved and soft-spoken. On stage, things are different. Without further ado, Junko walks on stage and proceeds to shriek at full volume… for an hour. After which, she curtly bows and walks off the stage.
Now, it’s hard to impress anyone these days, and even harder to be sincere in your effort not-to-impress-anyone. And, in describing Junko’s performance, it’s hard to avoid the cynic’s reply that it’s just a conceptual piece, a one-liner. But, as old school as this sounds, something different happens when you’re there actually listening to Junko for the duration of an hour. At first the sheer cathartic intensity of her voice is what comes across. Junko’s shrieking is high-pitched and delivered in an unrelenting assault.
After this, you notice... subtleties in the shrieking. After all, not all screams are alike. Sometimes Junko seems to be speaking/screaming in a kind of made-up language, or a language spoken so loud that it breaks down into phonemes. At other times her voice trails off in a bizarre, frenetic vibrato, transforming the shrieking into a kind of ‘noise opera.’ And at other moments shrieking is simply that – a voice filling to absolute capacity the upper frequencies of hearing, a density that becomes so full that it is strangely flat, the space between your ears and Junko’s voice collapsed into a thick, aural, opacity. And all of this, by the way, without any effects or overdubbing – just a microphone and some very powerful lungs. Speaking, singing and screaming – all co-mingled and confused in a vocal cacophony that is at once self-effacing and defiant.
Haino’s performance, which closed Sunday’s events, takes up this theme of articulating and disarticulating the voice. In the same space, but in almost complete darkness, Haino presented a sequence of short vignettes, each one employing a different use of voice, at the limits of the voice. Proceeding methodically, Haino’s performance began with nearly inaudible, barely emitted squeaks, which evaporate as soon as they are heard, as light as smoke. Gradually these are interspersed with low, guttural rumblings that evoke those bass notes that you can feel in your stomach. This gives way to sections that employ stark contrasts in pitch and volume. Each time there is sound, there is also silence. Then, suddenly, a weird, falsetto supplication is shot forth, before dying away in the midst of the large, cavernous space of the Tramway.
With Haino, the result is to, in effect, undo the vocality of the voice; the voice does everything except vocalise as a voice, it does everything except sound like a voice, the voice becoming unhuman. Hanio’s vocal performances always elicit this idea of the voice as a form of unhuman expression, the voice extended beyond speaking, emoting or singing. Listening to this, in almost total darkness, along with everyone else in the audience, the effect is akin to visiting a planetarium – an acoustic planetarium with a stellar banshee as your tour guide. There are no planets or nebulae, but only sound on the verge of being emitted, or sound on the brink of dissipation.
In this performance, as in his other works, Haino makes no attempt to hide his fascination with mystical traditions, particularly those in which suffering is made manifest as sound. But in this case Haino’s supplications are interwoven with abrupt shifts in pitch, tone, or microphone feedback. The pleading voice is sometimes undermined by other sounds (feedback, distortion, sounds from the body), but these are themselves byproducts of the voice. In the end, the sonic drama Haino performs is that of the supplicating voice undermined by its own enunciation, by the innate fragility and dissipation of the voice’s failure to sustain itself. And so it tries again, and again it dissipates. Gradually Haino’s performance did take the voice into the terrain of noise, utilising a series of pedals to double back his voice on itself, eventually resulting in a wall of dense noise, where voice and feedback become the same. There was even a section where Haino appropriates elements of monophonic chant and the mantra, sounding like an eerie, forlorn, crooning monk. All of this gives the impression less of a performance or a musical composition, and more of the kind of askesis found in mystical traditions of the East and West – ‘voicing’ as a spiritual exercise, one in which the vocality of the voice is purged, in the process releasing strange, dissonant tones that are, in the end, only traces.
Different as they were, the performances by Haino and Junko remind us of the long-standing ambivalence of the voice in mystical traditions. In medieval mysticism, communication and mediation are all-important means of relating the divine to the human, often via a voice, a vision or the divine logos itself. These divine ‘messages’ or intermediaries are then transmuted into language, and codified in the form of confessions, spiritual guidebooks and scholastic treatises. But the communication of the divine doesn’t always proceed so smoothly. Often words break down into mere shards of sound, and the message that is mediated encounters only a horrific muteness and the incapacitation of grammar.
Angela of Foligno, for instance, expressed her experience of the divine through an unhuman shrieking. Around 1291, Angela received a divine vision on her way to a church in Assisi. When this vision ceased, the overwhelming experience caused Angela to fall to the ground and begin screaming (somewhat melodramatically, as several townspeople and friars come to watch the spectacle). Angela described this feeling of dereliction in her Memorial:
I began to shout and to cry out without any shame: ‘Love still unknown, why do you leave me?’ I could not nor did I scream out any other words than these: ‘Love still unknown, why? Why? Why?’ Furthermore, these screams were so choked up in my throat that the words were unintelligible... As I shouted I wanted to die. It was very painful for me not to die and to go on living. After this experience I felt my joints become dislocated.ii
Angela’s vision is not just a divine voice but, more accurately, an unhuman voice, a voice that cannot be heard, a voice that Angela describes as ‘in and with darkness’, a voice that is ultimately ‘unspeakable’. The moment she recounts this episode to her scribe, who then reads it back to her, Angela strangely claims not to recognise the text at all.
Angela’s case is not unique in medieval mysticism, though her account contains among the most intense meditations on the relation between voice, word and sound. Hearing an indescribable, divine voice, Angela herself is overcome in a confusion of speaking and screaming, words broken down into a vocal suffering that eventually takes over her whole body.
This breakdown of the voice not only occurs with the divine but also with the demonic. Over a century prior to Angela’s experiences, the monk Guibert of Nogent recounts his confrontations with demons in his Monodiae, or ‘solitary songs’:
One night (in winter I believe) I was awakened by an intense feeling of panic. I remained in my bed and felt assured by the light of a lamp close by, which threw off a bright light. Suddenly I heard, not far above me, the clamor of what seemed to me many voices coming out of the dark of night, voices without words. The violence of the clamor struck my temples. I fell unconscious, as if in sleep, and I thought I saw appearing to me a dead man... Terrified by the spectre I leapt out of the bed screaming, and as I did so I saw the lamp go out.iii
Guibert’s account, not without its own dramatic flair, reads like a passage from the ghost story tradition of Algernon Blackwood or M.R. James. But, like Angela, it also details a supernatural, sonic exchange – to the cacophony of demonic voices, these ‘voices without words,’ Guibert himself can only scream in reply.
With both Angela and Guibert we have the expression of a sound that cannot itself be vocalised, an unsound that can only be negatively expressed in the collapse of sound and sense, speaking and screaming. What is articulated is not simply the perfectibility of a divine sound, nor is it the elegiac confidence of a human sound, a human poetry singing the harmony of the world. Instead, what we find in cases like those of Angela and Guibert is the articulation of the failure of the voice, its failure to speak, to enunciate, to communicate. The frailty of the human voice is given voice, at the same time that it becomes strangely unhuman. All this gives the failure of voice, this unsound, a tragic tone – a tone of lamentation or mourning of the voice, by the voice.
The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this themourningvoice. Set apart from the more official, civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. Juxtaposed to State mourning, Loraux argues for an ‘anti-political’ mourning that is, at the same time, not just apolitical. This is the mourning of Electra, Antigone, Cassandra, Iphigenia. As Loraux notes, in Greek tragedy, these scenes of excessive mourning not only threaten the more constrained, civic mourning of a funeral, but they also unbind all the discourses that constitute the polis, such that speech becomes screaming, and tears become curses or condemnations:
In passages like these, which depict threnody as a melodic wailing, it appears impossible to reduce lamentation to moaning. In almost every case, even if the cry dominates, music, whether it be soft or loud, is evoked at the same time.iv
The mourning voice delineates all the forms of threnos – tears, weeping, crying, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to the degree zero of intelligibility. Loraux again: ‘...in the tragic world all moaning tends to consider itself music.’v
While they exist in very different contexts, all these examples present us with a basic form of musical negation – a voice that undoes itself in its being ‘voiced,’ a voice without vocality, an unhuman voice. The mourning voices of Keiji Haino and Junko, of Angela of Foligno and Guibert of Nogent, and of Greek tragedy, all vocalise a negation inherent in the voice itself – words disintegrating into phonemes, speech buried in the viscera of the throat, weeping itself rendered as a song. This is perhaps where we might discover an anti-music that is not simply that of silence or found sound. Such an anti-music would have to be predicated on a certain failure of voice, and above all the failure of the human voice to speak at all – let alone speak reasonably.vi This anti-music would have to be a kind of pessimism of music, a sorrowful and studied negation of music, its luminous disintegration into a quiet noise, an infrasonic cacophony. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, anti-music discovers its mourning voice. Between the failure of words and the song without lyrics, anti-music encounters the ultimate failure of sound and sense. In this form of sonic pessimism, sorrow, sighs and moaning become indistinguishable from music. And perhaps this aptly describes the core of what pessimism is: the disarticulation of phone and logos.
i While this isn’t an event review, it’s worth mentioning the participants, to give a sense of the range of work presented: an ‘abject noise’ performance by Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra, a sound and video installation by Walter Marchetti, a conversation between Ray Brassier and Thomas Metzinger, lectures by Mark Fisher and Alexi Kukuljevic, performances by Malin Arnell/Clara López/Imri Sandström (a re-enactment of a Gina Pane performance) and Dawn Kasper, a voice performance by Junko, a media lecture by Evan Calder Williams, an ‘inhuman Grand Guignol’ composition by Taku Unami, and a performance by Keiji Haino. I gave a reading of ‘Cosmic Pessimism.’ Throughout the event Iain Campbell also conducted a series of short performance pieces with audience participation.
ii Angela of Foligno, ‘The Memorial’, in TheCompleteWorks, Paul Lachance (trans.), Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993, p. 142.
iii Guibert of Nogent, AMonk’sConfession, Paul Archamabult (trans.), University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006, pp.51-52. Thanks to Nicola Masciandaro for introducing me to this work.
iv Nicole Loraux, TheMourningVoice:AnEssayonGreekTragedy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002, p.59. Thanks to Barry Salmon for his ongoing conversations about Loraux's book.
vi This calls for a more extensive cross-cultural examination. See, for instance, Howard Slater's recent review of the 'outernational' vocalist and musician Ghédalia Tazartès (http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/guttural-cultural), whose voice Slater at one point describes as 'gutteral sonorous inarticulacy.'
With art schools' integration into the university system, artists are required to present their work as written ‘exegesis’. Here, Danny Butt traces exegesis back to its origins as a form of knowledge production and considers its limiting effect on art’s own power of revelation
At the end of the 18th century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart academy, noting that ‘there is too much misery in art already; I do not want to increase it.’1 Wachter uttered his sullen epigram on art education well before the development of postgraduate programmes in studio art, but the weariness of his tone would have only increased if he had read the raft of ‘written components’ – usually in the form of an exegesis – that are now mandatory in art school submissions. Examiners do their best to maintain fresh eyes in front of works that groan under pointless descriptions of dull making processes, overblown and unconvincing attempts by artists to write their own work in an art historical tradition, or perhaps worst of all, interesting practices (de)formed into ‘research questions’ that the works are then supposed to answer. Duchamp did his best to dissuade such thinking, believing that ‘there is no solution, because there is no problem.’2 Now the need to find problems to satisfy a demand for academic rigour seems to be the problem.
These crimes of writing committed in art schools are not the fault of artists, who know all too well that a written exegesis usually hinders great work. Students often evade supervision of these research reports – perhaps hoping that the requirement might slip away unnoticed. Not because they can’t write: visual artists can be formally gifted and inventive writers. But contemporary artists are reflexive critics of form in the most expanded sense, often unhappy with any institutional dictation of form or genre from above. As Dieter Lesage has argued, to require an artist to adopt a particular form of writing is precisely to fail to recognise their status as an artist.3 Artists also seem to recognise that the university exegesis yields little aesthetic or professional reward: the market seeks the artist as a producer of mystery, rather than an explainer. Ironically, the exegesis often fails to record the student’s learning through their reading, writing and talking about ideas and theory of various kinds, because this learning is precisely useful when it operates behind the scenes of an artistic work, rather than in front of it. In Foucauldian terms, art points to the emergence and decline of stable discourses, zones where the seeable moves into or out of the realm of the sayable. If a concept can be captured clearly in academic writing as a question, what would be the point of making art with it? The exegesis seems to become a particularly useless form both in the university and in the art world, existing only to allow a bureaucratic calculation of the student’s acceptability for an awarded degree.
In traditional theological practice, the exegesis carried God’s word to the world, a mission reflected in the term’s Greek etymology (ex - outward; hegeisthai - to lead or guide). God’s final word could not be directly accessed by humans, and so biblical lessons required interpretation so they could be applied to everyday life. During the medieval birth of the university, the scholastic methods of disputation and interpretation developed this analytical method of the critic, eventually extending from the holy book to other works, including works of art. The small, fixed stock of artistic examples copied in the academy reflected God’s design for the world, and these also required interpretive commentary to reach an imperfect broader society. Interpretation in the critical tradition relies on dialogue and debate – even today it is not customary for a contemporary artist to secure the interpretation of their own work. Such attempts – increasingly demanded by research-minded institutions – not only seem a little naff, but also impose upon the freedom of appreciation that Kantian aestheticians have understood to be at the centre of the art experience. This is not to say that the artist lacks critical knowledge of their work, but theirs is merely the first in a chain of interpretations that run from artist, to curator, to audience and beyond. Once the work reaches a public, the correct interpretation can no longer be the artist’s property if the audience is to find their own experience of the work.
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Image: Art critic Clement Greenberg
Science is the obvious culprit for the proprietisation and individualisation of interpretation in the university art school. In the modern universities from Berlin in 1810, science replaced theological scholasticism as the dominant European means of stabilising the natural world for analysis and calculation. Foucault described how the Renaissance era brought about the conditions for the spread of scientific thinking, where relations between name and order; how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy became the preoccupation of the day4. Access to truth was democratised, or more correctly transposed from the institution of the church to the bourgeois gentleman. Today, we think of science as opposed to religion, but Robert Merton showed that the transition from scientia as knowledge of God to scientia as knowledge of nature was not a revolutionary shift. Instead, under the Protestant ethic, scientific experimentation developed as a method for the pious discovery of God’s world, while nature’s religious underpinning moved from public to private language.5 In the 19th century, for example, it was impossible for the average scientist to suggest that scientific knowledge was incompatible with Christian thought. Natural philosophy was seen as a pious (if not religious) activity, proper for a gentleman precisely because it avoided the bitter arguments of scholasticism. Avoiding the interminable arguments about life and death, good and evil; the forward looking sciences bracketed such questions while pursuing ever more highly specialised modes of investigation, whose resulting knowledge of ‘what is’ would be held with the ‘expert’ individual.
As Haraway, Shapin and other historians of science have shown, the written account of experiments in the Republic of Letters became an exercise in the rhetoric of truth, which could be asserted by the writer without the transcendental-theoretical problems of theological argument.6 The scientific report would not be a set of instructions to be replicated or a set of arguments to be deconstructed, but a claim to significance by a ‘modest witness’, who must firmly position themselves in what Traweek calls a ‘culture of no culture.’7 Lorraine Daston describes this culture as reliant upon a moral economy of ‘gentlemanly honor, Protestant introspection, [and] bourgeois punctiliousness.’8 In this mode, the written report must be seen to ‘guarantee’ the validity and transferability of knowledge as a unit of truth. Ironically, this ‘transferability’ would be obtained through the suppression of both the written rhetorical skills of the creator and their tacit experimental knowledge. Science would philosophically appropriate writing as a supposedly neutral container for knowledge in general. To achieve credibility the scientist must suppress the subjective conditions of production to construct a blank neutral facticity, guarding against the dread errors of ‘idolatry, seduction, and projection’ that might compromise objectivity and breach decorum.9
Of course, the ‘errors’ of excessive belief and fantastic projection are precisely the mechanisms through which the Romantic artist would come to make their mark. Meanwhile, what Galison calls ‘conditions of possible comportment’ for the scientific researcher were emblematic of colonial patriarchy, with its well documented fears of the feminine body.10 In the 18th century, experimentalists became obsessed with development of ‘spiritual and bodily regimens [that should] be rigorously followed to rein in… dangerous inclinations.’11 Daston notes that the psychological and biophysical aspects of excessive belief were closely linked – the seductive lure of the imagination, in the eyes of the Cambridge philosopher More, could be avoided by steering clear of ‘hot and heightening meats and drinks’, by taking walks in the fresh air and by avoiding too much time in one’s own company.12 The scientific appropriation and regulation of the self takes on a moral flavour that is reflected today in science’s hierarchical modes of industrial organisation.
The modern avant-garde’s inventive and corrosive attacks on bourgeois morality were therefore not the kind of ‘creativity’ that led to their incorporation in to the research university. Bernard Darras describes the art education of the last two centuries as characterised by four competing philosophies of development: i) the patrimonials, seeking to uphold the great academic traditions; ii) the functionalists, seeking social and economic development through drawing; iii) the psychologists and educationalists, seeing art as a pathway to individual creative and cognitive development; and finally iv) the avant-garde, reflecting romantic modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy.13 Within the scientific university, the psychology influenced educationalists have generally had their hands closest to the rudder of curriculum, leading the development of ‘creative doctorates’ in US colleges of education throughout the 20th century, adapted from the emergent models of the social sciences. While many North American commentators today seek to defend the MFA against the incursion of UK-style studio art PhDs, it was actually the US creative doctorate that provided the model for the recoding of art as research in the UK universities during the 1980s and 1990s. These doctorates were supported in the mid-20th century by museum administrators such as MoMA’s Alfred Barr, who saw only positive things coming from the recognition of art as equivalent to scientific disciplines. The famous US educator Lester Longman, a notably conservative critic, wrote in 1946 that he wanted to develop
experimental work on a more advanced level so that we may contribute new ideas to the field of art as freely as New York or Paris… In the sciences it is generally expected that universities will be in the vanguard of experimentation. I want to be the first to do this in the field of art14.
Be careful what you wish for Lester! Instead of new laboratories to lead the arts, the incorporation of art into research degrees and science and technology policy funding has resulted in the hegemony of quasi-scientific modes of academic writing by art students. In this restricted vocabulary, artists are encouraged to stabilise their own work and explain its contribution in a highly unproductive ‘objective style’, reflecting the moral economies that have been the target of so many artistic movements. Artists are required to shut out the invitation to the critic, to secure the interpretation of their own work and justify its value. One is struck by the homologies with Foucault’s account of the stakes of neoliberalism, ‘the replacement every time of homoœconomicus as partner of exchange with a homoœconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.’15 The life of the producer of their own value is a lonely one.
If art offers anything to the university – which should be kept as an open question – it is perhaps located in its critical culture that deconstructs the self-authoring productive subject. The critic as interpreter – with the artist themselves being the first to adopt the role – plays a key role in the the work’s ethical character, where a work is understood to be more than a container for the intellectual property of its author. It is a heterogeneous social artefact that hovers ambivalently in the world, constructed of what Spivak describes as ‘figures, asking for dis-figuration’ in the meeting between work and viewer.16 This ambivalence brings into being space for the critical community which can allow the work to work; the social world where significance is debated and deliberated rather than protected by the individual and disseminated as an object. Any attempt to harness the criticality of the work in writing only paradoxically reduces its effectiveness as a work.
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Image: Friedrich Georg Weitsch's portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1806
The research university has long been a holding company for a raft of disciplines that fight for their own autonomous development. PhD regulations say very little about how a student will undertake their research, because every field or specialism has its own way of doing things. Through historical circumstances at the birth of the PhD, the written thesis was the only technical form that could hold the triple functions of demonstrating the disciplinary knowledge gained by a student, disseminating it geographically and archiving it through time.17 With the library no longer being the ideal form of archive or distribution, these written forms of the thesis as the sole container for knowledge are under pressure, even in the scientific disciplines, where various forms of ‘knowledge transfer’ are increasingly prevalent. In this context, it is hard to see how art’s own disciplinary strength will be enhanced by adopting the quasi-scientific report over the characteristic forms of writing (or non-writing) that already operate in the visual art world. Rather than simply adapting to 19th century models of scientific knowledge production, contemporary art could allow us to rethink material genres of knowledge production and dissemination in the university.18 But the only way this can occur is if the most valuable customary forms of practice in the visual arts are developed as the basis of the discipline’s ‘contribution to knowledge’, which will first and foremost be a critical analysis of knowledge’s form. The vampiric form of the exegesis only suppresses art’s potential in the future university.
Danny Butt <http://www.dannybutt.net> has taught in art and design schools for 15 years, currently at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is part of the Local Time collective and is currently working on a book on the art school in the research university
Footnotes
1 Quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner, AcademiesofArt,PastandPresent, New York: Da Capo, 1973 [1940], p.200.
2 ‘The Iconoclastic Opinions of M. Marcel Duchamp Concerning Art in America’, CurrentOpinion 59 (November 1915), pp.346-347. While I don’t fully endorse Duchamp’s renunciation of responsibility for problems, it is a statement that captures something fundamental about the attitudes of the avant-garde. For a more responsible but still usefully unscientific epigram on the status of art as problem solving, I thank Ken Hay for pointing me to Frank Stella’s statement: ‘There are two problems in painting: one is to find out what a painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting.’ In Robert Rosenblum, FrankStella, Harmondsworth: Baltimore, 1971, p.57.
3 Dieter Lesage, ‘On Supplementality’, in AgonisticAcademies, Jan Cools and Henk Slager (eds.), Brussels: Sint-Lukas Books, 2011. p.78. For a related argument on the auto-criticality of works using media theory, see Howard Slater, ‘Post-Media Operators: ‘Sovereign & Vague’ Datacide 7 (2000), http://datacide.c8.com/post-media-operators-’sovereign-vague’. The general lack of fit between the fine arts and research frameworks is discussed most extensively and entertainingly by Robert Nelson in his book TheJealousyofIdeas:ResearchMethodsintheCreativeArts, London: Ellikon, 2009, http://bit.ly/yG6wlG
4 Michel Foucault, TheOrderofThings:AnArchaeologyoftheHumanSciences. London and New York: Routledge, 2003 [1970]. p208
5 Robert Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England’, Osiris no. 4, 1938, pp.360-632. See Also Steven Harris, ‘Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540-1773’, Isis 96, no. 1, 2005, pp.71-79.
6 See for example Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman_Meets_Oncomouse:FeminismandTechnoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997; Steven Shapin, Understanding the Merton Thesis’, Isis 79, no. 4, 1988, pp.594-605; and Shapin, ‘A Scholar and a Gentleman’: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England’, HistoryofScience 29, no. 85, 1991, pp.279-327.
8 Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, Osiris 10, 1995, 3-24. p.24.
9 Lorraine Daston, ‘Scientific Error and the Ethos of Belief’, SocialResearch 72, no. 1, 2005, pp.1-28.
10 Peter Galison, ‘Judgement against Objectivity’, in PicturingScience,ProducingArt, Caroline A. Jones, Peter Galison & Amy Slaton (eds.), New York: Routledge, 1998, pp.327-359. Galison makes his most speculative and interesting argument along these lines in his essay ‘Objectivity is Romantic’, in TheHumanitiesandtheSciences, Billy Frye (ed.), Philadelphia, PA: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999, pp.15-43.
13 Darras is commenting on Mary Ann Stankiewicz, ‘Capitalizing Art Education: Mapping International Histories’, in InternationalHandbookofResearchinArtsEducation, edited by Liora Bresler, 16,. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2007, pp.7-38.
14 Quoted in Howard Singerman, ArtSubjects:MakingArtistsintheAmericanUniversity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p.208.
15 Michel Foucault, TheBirthofBiopolitics:LecturesattheCollègeDeFrance,1978-79, Michel Senellart and Graham Burchell (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. p.226.
16 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics 32, no. 3, 2002, 17-31. p21. Irit Rogoff helpfully points to ‘singularisation’ as the ethical potential of the critical attitude in the academy. See Rogoff, ‘Practicing Research / Singularising Knowledge’, in AgonisticAcademies (see n3), pp.69-74.
17 A seminar by Sally Jane Norman at the University of Auckland, ‘Art - Research - Values’, 6th March 2012, extended my understanding of this point.
18 To my knowledge this argument is first staged by Jacques Derrida in ‘The University without Condition’ in WithoutAlibi, Peggy Kamuf (trans.),Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. pp.202-37. I give a detailed reading of this piece in the essay ‘Neo-liberal and Future Universities’, written for the WearetheUniversity zine, published to accompany Nationwide Day of Student Action, University of Auckland, 26th September 2011, http://dannybutt.net/neo-liberal-and-future-universities
In a talk given by Nick Thoburn at the School of Ideas this February, some of the Occupy movement’s most hopeful qualities were magnified through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory. As Occupy May looms there are signs that the starburst beyond the conceptual and physical limits of the original camp, intuited by Thoburn, will appear
The following is the text of a talk given at Occupy London’s ‘School of Ideas’ as part of a workshop called ‘Deleuze and Guattari and Occupy’, 25 February 2012. A little context may be instructive. Having moved from the ‘Bank of Ideas’ in an occupied UBS office, the School of Ideas was situated in a spacious and attractive school building that had been left vacant for three years prior to its occupation. Two days after this talk the School of Ideas was evicted in a coordinated move with the eviction of the main Occupy London camp at St Paul’s Cathedral (at over four months, the world’s longest running of the 750 camps that sprung up in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, and the Arab Spring).i Upon eviction, the School of Ideas was immediately bulldozed – a fitting emblem of the wanton destruction that characterises the current round of neoliberal restructuring and public service cuts.
Westminster local authority, just down the road from the School of Ideas, encapsulated the swagger of the new culture in its account of the implementation of cuts to housing benefit: ‘To live in Westminster is a privilege, not a right’.1 Inner London is indeed to be the class-cleansed home of the privileged, a middle class enclave serviced by a newly suburbanised and ever more precarious working class – Westminster’s own figures project that 17 percent of primary school pupils could be forced to move out of the borough.2 Meanwhile, at the other pole, March’s ‘millionaire’s budget’ cut taxation for the rich – those on incomes of £1m will benefit annually to the tune of £42,500.3 No wonder the police and law courts have shifted up a gear in the discipline, punishment and brutalisation of student demonstrators, anti-cuts activists, and the young people involved in the August riots – a move undoubtedly driven by concern that the normalisation of this grotesque inequality can’t hold indefinitely.
In repurposing the vacant UBS office and abandoned school, Occupy London has spun such critical threads as these through neoliberalism, cuts, housing and the city, and has done so in ways both analytical and practical. But the ‘Bank’ then ‘School’ of Ideas has also had a distinct pedagogical dimension. In Chile, California, Britain and elsewhere, direct action against neoliberal education policy has been a leading edge of the current cycle of struggles. These struggles are largely defensive, fighting for the last remnants of a model of liberal education that is far from perfect, albeit that it is vastly superior to the emerging neoliberal model of debt-financed vocationalism. But the composition of this struggle has also been characterised by new critical knowledges and solidarities, as funding cuts in tertiary and higher education, creeping privatisation of educational institutions, student debt and graduate unemployment have drawn together a diverse range of actors that have interrogated the forms, functions and possibilities of education at a new level of intensity. The School of Ideas, like other autonomous educational endeavours, has been interlaced with these developments, due not least to the circulation of participants through educational struggles and Occupy. But it was also something that ‘stood up on its own’, to make use of an expression I discuss below. Equal parts co-learning school, workshop, community centre, organisational base, public interface and home, one might say that the School of Ideas amplified (not isolated) the critical intellectual function and culture of Occupy London. The School of Ideas has now gone; ‘Occupy May’ is around the corner.4
MinorPolitics
With the UK government itching to criminalise squatting, it’s a real pleasure to be speaking in a building that is undergoing ‘public repossession’, so I’d like to thank Andy Conio for organising this workshop and the School of Ideas for hosting us. What I want to do in this talk is work through three of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts that are helpful in thinking about Occupy. What do I mean by ‘helpful’? My aim is deliberately not to try and explain Occupy, to sew it up in a theory – that for Deleuze would be to negate what is inventive in a movement, but also to lose the inventive quality of theory, making it merely a representation of a state of affairs. Instead my approach will be to use theory to reflect upon certain themes or problems in Occupy, looking at how these problems can be approached with Deleuzian concepts in a way that might help shed light upon them and possibly aid their further development. It’s a recursive relation, for reflection upon Occupy’s themes or problems should also help extend Deleuzian concepts, lending them a contemporary vitality.
Given that this workshop is concerned in equal measure to bring Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts into relation with Occupy and to offer an introduction to Deleuze and Guattari as political thinkers, I’m going to try and strike a balance between concept and Occupy, leaving space for us to expand upon the points I make about Occupy in the discussion. The concepts and problems that I address in turn are: minor politics and the 99%, territory, expression and occupation; then, fabulation and agency.
I will start with minor politics and fold in some comments about the 99% – though bear with me, the relation may not at first be apparent. Running throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is the notion that politics arises not in the fullness of an identity – a nation, a people, a collective subject – but, rather, in ‘cramped spaces’, ‘choked passages’, and ‘impossible’ positions, that is, among those who feel constrained by social relations.5 This is at once a very immediate, structural experience – let’s say, the experience of poverty, debt, or racism – and also something that is actively affirmed, a continual deferral of subjective plenitude that occurs when people shrug off and deny the seductions of identity and open their perception to what is ‘intolerable’ in social relations; for example, when they ward off the identity of the democratic citizen, the racialised majority, the entrepreneurial self.6 So, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘major’ or ‘molar’ politics expresses and constitutes identities that are nurtured and facilitated by a social environment, whereas ‘minor politics’ is a breach with such identities, when the social environment is experienced as constraint, as intolerable.
If this is the case, what is the substance of politics? Well, it can no longer be a question of self-expression, of the unfurling of a subjectivity or a people, because in this formulation there is no identity to unfurl, the ‘people’ as Deleuze puts it, ‘aremissing’.7 Instead, minor politics is about engagement with the social relations that traverse us, the relations through which we experience life as ‘cramped’ and ‘impossible’. By social relations I mean the whole gamut of economic structures, urban architectures, gendered divisions of labour, personal and sovereign debt, national borders, housing, policing, workfare – whatever combination it might be in any particular situation. In this formulation, the ‘individual intrigue’, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, is ‘immediately’ political, for without an autonomous identity, even the most personal, individual situation is always already comprised of social relations, and vice versa. The deferral of identity is in no way a reduction of singularity, quite the reverse: ‘The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it’.8
Deleuze uses an appealing image to convey this. He says that to be on the Right is to perceive the world starting with identity, with self and family, and to move outward in concentric circles, to friends, city, nation, continent, world, with diminishing affective investment in each circle, and with an abiding sense that the centre needs defending against the periphery. On the contrary, to be on the Left is to start one’s perception on the periphery and to move inwards. It requires not the bolstering of the centre, but an appreciation that the centre is interlaced with the periphery, a process that undoes the distance between the two.9
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Image: Cover of The Occupied Times, Issue 5, 23 November 2011
Now, there is an important propulsive or motive aspect to this minor politics. For rather than allow the solidification of particular political and cultural routes, forms or habits, the practice of warding off identity works as a mechanism to induce continuous experimentation, drawing thought and practice back into a field of problematisation, where contestation, argument and engagement with social relations ever arises from the experience of cramped space. The constitutive sociality of this ‘incessant bustle’ dictates that there can be no easy demarcation between conceptual production, personal style, concrete intervention, tactical development or geopolitical events, and there is plenty of space for polemic.10 It is a vital environment apparent in Kafka’s seductive description of minor literature:
What in great literature goes on down below, constituting a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death.11
I want to make one more brief point before turning to Occupy. I gestured toward a (potentially infinite) range of social relations that minor politics might arise from and engage with, but for Deleuze and Guattari there is a dynamic internal to all of them, the dynamic of capital. Deleuze states:
Félix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital itself.12
As is abundantly clear in the quotation, Deleuze’s assertion of ‘Marxism’ is not the introduction of a transcendent explanation, but an insistence that we won’t understand the social field or develop effective politics without coming to grips with the contemporary modalities and dynamic structures of the capitalist mode of production, structures that set the conditions through which life is reproduced.
TheGridofthe99%
What has this account of minor politics got to do with Occupy? I want to consider that question through the theme or problem expressed in the Occupy slogan ‘We are the 99%’. It is a problem with a number of component parts. I’ll comment on just two here. ‘We are the 99%’ is an assertion that the vast majority of the world’s population are exploited by and for the wealth of the 1%. It names, in other words, a relationship of exploitation and inequality. And so, to refer to the point I just made about Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxism, the problematisation of capitalism is central. Second, ‘We are the 99%’ simultaneously designates a breach with this relationship of exploitation and inequality. Let me stress that in neither instance does the slogan name a substantial identity. Rather, it at once names and cuts the socialrelations of exploitation, among those who feel cramped by these relations, feel their intolerable pressure.
This naming and breach in capital is of course very general. ‘We are the 99%’ is something like a ‘formula’ or, to use a term with more spatial connotations, a ‘grid’. It lays out the abstract principle that can be taken up and extended by anyone who would embody or express it in their concrete specificity. In order to see how this grid functions, I want to compare it to one that Occupy is more or less directly opposed to, the grid of parliamentary democracy. Parliamentary democracy is, for Deleuze, a grid laid out across social space that seduces and channels political activity through its specific forms and structures:
Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back on this grid and gets warped as a result.13
Politics in this way gets ‘warped’ as he puts it because everything is reduced to and formatted by the status quo, to the perpetuation of that which gave rise to politics in the first place. A fundamental aspect of this warping is the filtering out of problems of inequality and exploitation from the realms of political interrogation. This was of course Marx’s insight, but the condition is currently so acute that it has widespread, even popular recognition, as Greece and Italy have unelected technocrats imposed on the populace to force through hitherto unknown assaults on living standards, as the ConDems slice up the NHS while claiming that it matters not ‘onejot’ whether it is run by the state or private capital.14 This is why Occupy’s much remarked upon refusal to make demands is so important and so much a product of our times. A demand is a mechanism of seduction into the grid of democratic politics, a means of channelling the political breach with capital right back into the institutions that perpetuate it.
In contrast, the grid that is constituted by the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ is very different. Rather than a mechanism of seduction into the status quo, it is a means of multiplyingpointsofantagonism, or, in more Deleuzian terms, it extends the process of perceiving the intolerable and politicising social relations. This does not occur ingeneral, but from people’s concrete and situated experience – it is a variegated field, where the points of problematisation are housing repossession, the laying waste of public services, privatisation of the commons, debt, police violence, workfare and so on, and the tactics range from occupying social space, through the Oakland general strike, to direct actions against eviction from foreclosed housing, non-payment of debt, the hacking activities of Anonymous, or ‘public repossessions’ as we have in this building. The grid is a catalyst across the social, not an aggregating body extending ever-outwards from Zuccotti Park but a zigzag, a discontinuous and emergent process. Again, it’s not a catalyst because people come to recognise themselves in it as an identity – even a collective identity – but because they come to embody and express its problematic.
Before moving on I want to directly address two points that are implicit in what I’ve said so far. First, it is not infrequently said by those involved in Occupy that it in some sense is creating the new world in the shell of old. That practices of collective decision, direct action, co-operation and care, global association and so on are a kind of communism in miniature. Certainly, all of these collective practices are crucial to understanding the unfurling of Occupy, to its effectivity and affective consistency, to the complex pleasures of being a part of it. But from a minor political perspective, the risk is that Occupy turn inwards, valorising its own cultural forms at the expense of self-problematisation and an ever-outward engagement in social relations. Occupy’s vitality lies in its extension and intensification of the problematic of the 99% through an open set of socio-political sites, in what is of course a highly segmented and stratified terrain. For it is in and through these sites that the world’s population exist, and from which an unknown set of possible futures will emerge. To limit those futures to the cultural forms discovered in Occupy camps would be naïve at the least, and risks a conservative reduction of the movement’s potential, a reduction to identity.
Second, refusing to make demands is not a refusal to speak, to formulate and express our anger, hopes and desires. On the contrary, to work through the problems of Occupy requires an incessant production of critical knowledge, knowledge that needs be circulated in the extension and development of these problems. The point is that this knowledge production is immanent to Occupy, not a pleading for recognition from an external power. We have seen Occupy developing slogans and concrete decisions that clearly define what the movement wants, as part of a reflection on how it’s going to get it – and this of course is encouraging. But such formulations need to have a minor political ‘efficiency’, they must be adequate to the specific and mutating problems of Occupy and its world, not reproduce themselves at the level of cliché. As Guattari has it, ‘either a minor language connects to minor issues [which should not be taken to mean ‘small’ or exclusively ‘local’ issues], producing particular results, or it remains isolated, vegetates, turns back on itself and produces nothing.’15 All this knowledge production will involve critique, contestation and the development of divergent positions. Deleuze and Guattari are certainly interested in the way group consistencies emerge from distributed decision – let’s say, the process of ‘consensus’ in Occupy’s General Assemblies – but a good problem is not best extended in thought and practice by pretending that we all agree: ‘The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept’.16
TerritoryandExpression
I will move now to my second main concept and problem – on this and my third point I will be more concise. I want to look at an aspect of the tactic of occupation, specifically the tent, and explore their relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘territory’ and ‘expression’.
The tent is first of all a practical object. It enables space to be taken and held for a certain duration. In this respect it has a family resemblance to the tripod as was used by Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s, an object that worked at once to cut the flow of traffic and act as a catalyst in the occupation of a road and the emergence of a street party. In Deleuzian terms, both tent and tripod play a part in ‘deterritorialising’ the space in which they operate – that is, in undoing the patterns of behaviour, laws, sensory structures and economic forms that determine that space as a road, stage for commerce or park. But if the tent and tripod deterritorialise in this way, they simultaneously generate a new territory, they re-territorialise into an Occupy camp or a street party.
To construct such a territory is of course difficult. It requires considerable knowledge of the territory that is to be undone: the law, movements of traffic, an intuition about likely police tactics, potential solidarities and enmities of the locale and so on. The constructed territory is thus a finely balanced constellation and can be easily botched. Things in London might have been different, for example, if Paternoster Square hadn’t been barred and Occupy had not instead ended up on land owned by the Church.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Anonymity keeps you warm
But let’s turn to consider the characteristics of Occupy’s territory. Deleuze and Guattari make a rather intriguing argument that the construction of territory goes hand in hand with art, that art is a question of home or habitat: ‘Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house.’ Such territory is functional, of course, but it is simultaneously sensory and expressive, that is, artful: ‘the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions.’17 One can see these tangled aspects of habitat and expression in the ‘art’ of the Bowerbird.
What are the components of this constructed territory? Well, they are drawn from the environment, from existent materials – in the case of the Bowerbird, twigs, berries, bottle-tops – but they are also qualities and forms that emerge in the process of construction:
This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out the territory. It is an outpouring of features, colours, and sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive.18
The St Paul’s Occupation is very much this kind of constructed territory. It comprises practical materials, the tent of course, items of furniture, cooking equipment – but also placards and signs, books, newspapers, drums, assemblies, hand signals, the people’s mic, photographic images, livestreams, YouTube clips, the OccupyLSX website and Twitter feed, and so on. My point is not to proclaim that Occupy is ‘art’ exactly, but to suggest that alongside the practical tactics of occupation, the construction of territory through these functional components also includes an expressive, sensory quality that becomes an inseparable aspect of the Occupation.19 This is one explanation, for instance, of the production of newspapers at the Occupy camps, when online production and distribution is clearly more practicable. As well as being an object of news and practical politics, the newspaper in this regard is also a blocofsensation, an aestheticexpression of Occupy.
TentasMonument
You might ask, ‘what’s the relation between this sensory or expressive quality of Occupy and its meaning or explicit politics?’ For Deleuze and Guattari the two are different modalities of composition that come into a mutually sustaining encounter. They sometimes use a peculiar word for these works of art or works of territory – they call them monuments:
the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that providetheeventwiththecompoundthatcelebratesit. The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation. … [It] confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their recreated protestations, their constantly resumed struggle.20
So, the monument, the bloc of sensation, celebrates the event of which it is a part. In our case, it celebrates the suffering and struggle that is named and enacted by the slogan or grid of the 99%.
I have mentioned the range of artefacts that constitute the work of territory, the monument, but the tent is a special case. It is of course a habitation, that’s what distinguishes it from the tripod I mentioned earlier. As habitation it has great tactical value in the endurance of Occupy, even through the winter. But it also comes with particular sensory associations or expressive qualities. A tent pitched in the inner city conveys something of the fragility of life, the precariousness of existence – ‘bare life’, if you will, an impersonal quality of all life. And this impersonal, precarious life is filtered in our time through the specific condition of homelessness, as soaring rents, mortgage foreclosures, evictions, benefit and wage cuts, debt and unemployment tip the home into a state of crisis. Indeed, as we’re seeing with the rise of ‘tent cities’ in the US, the tent has become a very real habitation for a considerable volume of displaced people – including people at Occupy St Paul’s and elsewhere: ‘a part of the homeless has become Occupy London, and a part of Occupy London has become the homeless.’21
This quality of life – fragile, impersonal, damaged – is central to the tent as monument, lifting ‘suffering’ to the level of aesthetic expression without losing any of its ‘struggle’. Even in its expression of suffering, then, the tent is not an abject object. But it also conveys a rather joyous quality of mobility. At risk of playing to a cliché, it is the dwelling of the nomad so dear to Deleuze and Guattari, where dwelling is part of an itinerant process, tied not to land but subordinated to the journey – the production of a ‘movable and moving ground’ through ‘pitching one’s tent’ (the deliberately processual quality of Occupy is plain for all to see).22 With the tent, then, we see something of the tactical or practical aspect of Occupy interlaced with its sensory or expressive quality, a tactic and a sensory bloc – both, for Deleuze and Guattari, are constitutive of its territorial form.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Image: Making a 'We are the 99%' banner at the School of Ideas
The nomadic tent orients our attention to a final aspect of the territory of Occupy. As well as constituting its territory, Occupy needs also to be open to a degree of deterritorialisation of its own. What does this mean? You can think of deterritorialisation here as the spatial dimension of that opening to the social that I began with, the process of warding off identity and problematising social relations. It is a central problem of Occupy, as perfectly expressed in an editorial of TheOccupiedTimes:
[The eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park] triggered a period of self-examination about how the Occupy movement might best move forward beyond its signature tents and into communities, enacting the movement’s core message through practical action rather than symbolism. It is a journey that has seen American occupiers leave tents behind in favour of defending the homes of those about to be foreclosed. […] Thanks to equal measures of adroitness and serendipity, Occupy London’s initial encampment at St Paul’s Churchyard has now far outlived Zuccotti Park in duration. … It would be a bitter irony – and a failure of enormous proportions – if we allowed our comparative security to stop us seeing some of our more distinctive tactics for what they are: a tool to be employed only for as long as they remain useful. Useful tactics generate change. They inspire others to act. To do that we must look outwards.23
This process of deterritorialisation concerns not only the dynamics of the one territory, but also the relation or reverberation with other territories. The obvious example is the relation with St Paul’s itself. There’s a clear sense in which Occupy subjected St Paul’s to a force of deterritorialisation, this minor monument undoing at the borders Wren’s rather more major monument and the Church’s structures of authority. Hence we witnessed Giles Fraser’s resignation and Occupy’s forcing of the Church to reflect upon the politics of Christianity and its relation to the City’s banks. In turn, this strange reverberation between Occupy and St Paul’s had some effect on the territory of the popular imagination, if we can call it that, even on its media representation. The obvious hypocrisy of the Church in its initial dealings with Occupy seemed to lift and project the image of Occupy in the popular imagination, lending Occupy a degree of sympathy and support that it may not have had if it had been in a straight face off with bankers and police (for despite all that we have witnessed since 2008, when the lines are drawn between police and resistance in this way, common sense, ever re-charged by news media, unfortunately still tends to prostrate itself to the truths of authority).
There are of course other points and possibilities of reverberation: other Occupy camps, the hacker cultures, precarious workers, rootless graduates, assailants of workfare, those involved in education campaigns, and so on. The aim of Deleuzian theory would be to consider the specific qualities or features of these interlaced points, all of them groping toward some sort of patchwork of politicised relations.
FabulationandAgency
Thus far I have worked through two sets of concepts and problems: minor politics and the 99%; and territory and occupation. I want to end now with a brief sketch of a third concept and problem. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of myth or fabulation and the problem of the collective agency of Occupy. In theory circles at the moment and in some commentary on Occupy there are indications of a return to voluntarism, with talk of the people’s ‘will’ as driver of change. From a Deleuzian perspective, voluntarism abstracts a pure subjectivity from what are in fact multiple levels of subjective determination (economic, libidinal, semiotic, organisational, etc.), and so fails to ascertain from where politics comes or to address why subjectivity – or ‘will’ – tends more usually to repress itself. Deleuze and Guattari would counter this voluntarism with the minor political emphasis on practical problematisation that was the focus of the first part of this talk – political composition not formed of a generic quality of human being, but arisen from the specific material conditions of ‘the present state of things’, as Marx has it. But there is an additional aspect of Deleuzian philosophy that is helpful for getting at the issues of collective agency or force that those who appeal to the people’s will are, rightly, interested in.
Concepts, problems, territories and so on are constructed by their participants in the kinds of ways that I have been discussing. But they also have a self-positing character – they are created by participants, and they simultaneously create themselves, they have a life of their own: ‘Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other because what is truly created, from the living being to the work of art, thereby enjoys a self-positing of itself, or an autopoetic characteristic by which it is recognized’.24
This isn’t easy; most created entities collapse without becoming self-positing. But if an entity does achieve this, if it can ‘stand up on its own’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, then you have something interesting, something with an agency all of its own.25 You have a revolution, an art-work, a concept, or in our case, you have the Occupy movement. What does it mean to say that Occupy is self-positing? It means that as well as being generated by the people, tactics, objects, slogans, sounds and so on that are a part of its territory, it also takes on a life of its own, a life that pulls its constituent parts along, creating them as parts of its event.
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Image: Occupy London poster
Now, when Deleuze and Guattari discuss this self-positing process in the context of politics, they sometimes describe it as a process of ‘fabulation’. It’s a word you might have noticed earlier in the quotation about the monument. Fabulation or myth-making occurs when the shock of an event – be it an earthquake, a work of art, a social upheaval – produces visions or hallucinatory images that substitute for routine patterns of perception and action and come to guide the event. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, fabulation is a weapon of the weak, a means of fabricating ‘giants’, as they put it – germinal agents with real world effects in the service of political change.26 What is perhaps most appealing in the context of Occupy is that these fabulations or myths are not so much located in individual people – the cults of personality, for instance, the Lenins, Maos, Churchills, what have you – but have a desubjectified or anonymous quality, generated and held in the fragmented bits of events, stories, medias, affects and material resources, and are associated as much with ‘mediocrity’ as with the grandiose.27 In this way Deleuze describes myth as a ‘monster’, it ‘hasalifeofitsown: an image that is always stitched together, patched up, continually growing along the way’.28
Occupy has something of this mythical quality, an agential power of its own that exists among and between us, and that pulls its particularities along. I’ll end by pointing to one small (and by no means unproblematic) artefact in this myth: the Guy Fawkes mask. Think how different these two images of political myth are. Mao, a concentrated myth centred on an individual and the truth of his infallible thought. And the Guy Fawkes mask, an anonymous, distributed power – a part of the myth of Occupy, open to anyone, signifying a resistance to closure in a leader, vaguely menacing, a little bit silly, mediocre even, and pop cultural to boot. The mask’s impersonal mythical power is well expressed in a cartoon in TheOccupiedTimes, a cartoon that takes its words from Subcomandante Marcos and so forms a red thread across to another political myth of our time: it’s not ‘who we are’ that’s important, but ‘whatwewant’, ‘everything for everyone’.29
Nick Thoburn <N.ThoburnATManchester.ac.uk> lectures in sociology at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Deleuze,MarxandPolitics (Routledge, 2003) and is currently writing a book on the forms and cultures of independent media.
5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka:TowardsaMinorLiterature, Dana Polan (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp.16-17; Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, Martin Joughin (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.133.
6 I develop this ‘minor politics’ at length in Deleuze,MarxandPolitics, London: Routledge, 2003.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema2:TheTime-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (trans.), London: Athlone, 1989, p.216.
13 Deleuze, TwoRegimesofMadness:TextsandInterviews1975-1995, David Lapoujade (ed.), Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (trans.), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p.143.
14 ‘To be honest I don’t think it should matter one jot whether a patient is looked after by a hospital or a medical professional from the public, private or charitable sector’, Tory health minister Lord Howe, quoted in Nick Triggle, ‘Private Sector Have Huge NHS Opportunity’, 7 September 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14821946
19 The Bowerbird is certainly not the last word on ‘art’ in Deleuze and Guattari. Despite possible indications to the contrary here, their writing on art is not best viewed through the avant-garde lens of the subsumption of art and everyday life, for they invest considerable import in the exacting forms and techniques of modernist practice, in painting and cinema especially. See Simon O’Sullivan, ArtEncountersDeleuzeandGuattari:ThoughtbeyondRepresentation, London: Palgrave, 2006, and Stephen Zepke, ArtasAbstractMachine:OntologyandAestheticsinDeleuzeandGuattari, London: Routledge, 2005.
22WhatIsPhilosophy?, ibid., p.105. Many thanks to John Bywater for pointing out this passage on the ‘English’ taste for camping, which helps counter any Orientalism in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadic dwelling.
28 Deleuze, Cinema2, ibid., p.150; Deleuze, EssaysCriticalandClinical, Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.118
