As the final scene of Moon Palace suggests, ‘finding one’s final place’ is only a temporal illusion. The subject is searching for its place in the world, but as a speaking subject, it is forever alienated from its being: always already ‘out of place,’ the subject by definition is a “discontinuity in the real” (Écrits 299, Lacan).

AN ART OF DESIRE
READING PAUL AUSTER

Bernd Herzogenrath

 

 

 

РЕФЕРЕНЦИАЛНА НЕСТАБИЛНОСТ

Истини
За нестабилните неща изпадат
В лингвистерия

 

ТАНАТО-ГРАФИИ

Маркс
В обменен курс с марксисти и Сорос
Със соросоиди

 

DIE ROSE IST OHNE WARUM

Любувай се
Случайната природа няма
Контрагенти

 

 

РОМАНИСТИ

Дозатори
Се програмират в жертви
На стила си

 

 

ИСТИНСКА МОДЕРНОСТ

Да блееш с Джойс
Когато óвците на Вазов излизаха
На паша

 

 

СИЛИКОНОВО МОМИЧЕ

Дъждът
Изплита актуални екстеншъни
В съня й

 

 

ВЪРХЪТ НА СЛАДОЛЕДА

Лимити
На езика стапящи се в стил
Макиавели

 

 

CAMERA OBSCURA

Вътрешният мрак
Сканира светове със структура
На фикции

 

 

РЕВОЛЮЦИЯ

Тълпи
Скопяват шанса в позлатени
Фалоси

 

 

 

ВИЗИЯ-В-ЕДНО

О неопрашената
Орхидея на вярата
В отделните неща

 

ИДЕАЛЕН ИНДО-ЕВРОПЕИЗЪМ

Фонтаните
На анаграми бликат в абсолютна
Изотопия

 

ЕДИНЕН ИНТЕРФЕЙС

Животни
Без лица в блокирано
Богоявление

 

НАСТАВНИКЪТ ПОПИТА

Кой ще промени
Играта без да се замесва
В нея

 

ДЗЕН-КОСМОС

Суверенното
Без суверен е скъсано
Хвърчило

Why and for whom is contemporary art so attractive? One guess: the production of art presents a mirror image of post-democratic forms of hypercapitalism that look set to become the dominant political post-Cold War paradigm. It seems unpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant, mercurial, moody, guided by inspiration and genius. Just as any oligarch aspiring to dictatorship might want to see himself. The traditional conception of the artist’s role corresponds all too well with the self-image of wannabe autocrats who see government potentially—and dangerously—as an art form.
Post-democratic government is very much related to this erratic type of male-genius-artist behavior. It is opaque, corrupt, and completely unaccountable. Both models operate within male bonding structures that are as democratic as your local mafia chapter. Rule of law? Why don’t we just leave it to taste? Checks and balances? Cheques and balances! Good governance? Bad curating! You see why the contemporary oligarch loves contemporary art: it’s just what works for him. Thus, traditional art production may be a role model for the nouveaux riches created by privatization, expropriation, and speculation. But the actual production of art is simultaneously a workshop for many of the nouveaux poor, trying their luck as jpeg virtuosos and conceptual impostors, as gallerinas and overdrive content providers. Because art also means work, more precisely, strike work. It is produced as spectacle, on post-Fordist all-you-can-work conveyor belts.

Strike or shock work is affective labor at insane speeds—enthusiastic, hyperactive, and deeply compromised. Originally, strike workers were excess laborers in the early Soviet Union. The term is derived from the expression udarny trud for “superproductive, enthusiastic labor” (udar for “shock, strike, blow”). Now, transferred to present-day cultural factories, strike work relates to the sensual dimension of shock. Rather than painting, welding, and molding, artistic strike work consists of ripping, chatting, and posing. This accelerated form of artistic production creates punch and glitz, sensation and impact. Its historical origin as format for Stalinist model brigades brings an additional edge to the paradigm of hyperproductivity. Strike workers churn out feelings, perception, and distinction in all possible sizes and variations. Intensity or evacuation, sublime or crap, readymade or readymade reality—strike work supplies consumers with all they never knew they wanted. Strike work feeds on exhaustion and tempo, on deadlines and curatorial bullshit, on small talk and fine print. It also thrives on accelerated exploitation.

I’d guess that—apart from domestic and care work—art is the industry with the most unpaid labor around. It sustains itself on the time and energy of unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on pretty much every level and in almost every function. Free labor and rampant exploitation are the invisible dark matter that keeps the cultural sector going. Free-floating strike workers plus new (and old) elites and oligarchies equal the framework of the contemporary politics of art.

But what does this situation actually indicate? Nothing but the ways in which contemporary art is implicated in transforming global power patterns. Contemporary art’s workforce consists largely of people who, despite working constantly, do not correspond to any traditional image of labor. They stubbornly resist settling into any entity recognizable enough to be identified as a class. While the easy way out would be to classify this constituency as multitude or crowd, it might be less romantic to ask whether they are not global lumpen-freelancers, deterritorialized and ideologically free-floating: a reserve army of imagination communicating via Google Translate.

Instead of shaping up as a new class, this fragile constituency may well consist—as Hannah Arendt once spitefully formulated—of the “refuse of all classes.” These dispossessed adventurers described by Arendt, the urban pimps and hoodlums ready to be hired as colonial mercenaries and exploiters, are faintly (and quite distortedly) mirrored in the brigades of creative strike workers propelled into the global sphere of circulation known today as the art world.

If we acknowledge that current strike workers might inhabit similarly shifting grounds—the opaque disaster zones of shock capitalism—a decidedly un-heroic, conflicted, and ambivalent picture of artistic labor emerges. We have to face up to the fact that there is no automatically available road to resistance and organization for artistic labor. That opportunism and competition are not a deviation of this form of labor but its inherent structure. That this workforce is not ever going to march in unison, except perhaps while dancing to a viral Lady Gaga imitation video. The international is over. Now let’s get on with the global.

Here is the bad news: political art routinely shies away from discussing all these matters.  Addressing the intrinsic conditions of the art field, as well as the blatant corruption within it—think of bribes to get this or that large-scale biennial into one peripheral region or another—is a taboo even on the agenda of most artists who consider themselves political. Even though political art manages to represent so-called local situations from all over the globe, and routinely packages injustice and destitution, the conditions of its own production and display remain pretty much unexplored. One could even say that the politics of art are the blind spot of much contemporary political art.

One example, which is a quite absurd but also common phenomenon, is that radical art is nowadays very often sponsored by the most predatory banks or arms traders and completely embedded in rhetorics of city marketing, branding, and social engineering. For very obvious reasons, this condition is rarely explored within political art, which is in many cases content to offer exotic self-ethnicization, pithy gestures, and militant nostalgia.

I am certainly not arguing for a position of innocence.  It is at best illusory, at worst just another selling point. Most of all it is very boring. But I do think that political artists could become more relevant if they were to confront these issues instead of safely parade as Stalinist realists, CNN situationists, or Jamie Oliver-meets-probation officer social engineers. It’s time to kick the hammerand-sickle souvenir art into the dustbin. If politics is thought of as the Other, happening somewhere else, always belonging to disenfranchised communities in whose name no one can speak, we end up missing what makes art intrinsically political nowadays: its function as a place for labor, conflict, and … fun—a site of condensation of the contradictions of capital and of extremely entertaining and sometimes devastating misunderstandings between the global and the local.
The art field is a space of wild contradiction and phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of power mongering, speculation, financial engineering, and massive and crooked manipulation. But it is also a site of commonality, movement, energy, and desire. In its best iterations it is a terrific cosmopolitan arena populated by mobile strike workers, itinerant salesmen of self, tech whiz kids, budget tricksters, supersonic translators, PhD interns, and other digital vagrants and day laborers. It’s hardwired, thin-skinned, plastic-fantastic. A potential commonplace where competition is ruthless and solidarity remains the only foreign expression. A hive of affective labor under close scrutiny and controlled by capital, woven tightly into its multiple contradictions.

All of this makes it relevant to contemporary reality. Art affects this reality precisely because it is entangled into all of its aspects. It’s messy, embedded, troubled, irresistible. We could try to understand its space as a political one instead of trying to represent a politics that is always happening elsewhere. Art is not outside politics, but politics resides within its production, its distribution, and its reception. If we take this on, we might surpass the plane of a politics of representation and embark on a politics that is there, in front of our eyes, ready to embrace.

Hito Steyerl
The Wretched of the Screen

 

The territory of occupation is not a single physical place, and is certainly not to be found within any existing occupied territory. It is a space of affect, materially supported by ripped reality. It  can actualize anywhere, at any time. It exists as a possible experience. It may consist of a composite and montaged sequence of movements through sampled checkpoints, airport security checks, cash tills, aerial viewpoints, body scanners, scattered labor, revolving glass doors, duty-free stores. How do I know? Remember the beginning of this text? I asked you to record a few seconds each day on your cellphone. Well, this is the sequence that accumulated in my phone; walking the territory of occupation, for months on end. Walking through cold winter sun and fading insurrections sustained and amplified by mobile phones. Sharing hope with crowds yearning for spring. A spring that feels necessary, vital, unavoidable. But spring didn’t come this year. It didn’t come in summer, nor in autumn. Winter came around again, yet spring wouldn’t draw any closer. Occupations came and froze, were trampled under, drowned in gas, shot at. In that year people courageously, desperately, passionately fought to achieve spring. But it remained elusive. And while spring was violently kept at bay, this sequence accumulated in my cellphone. A sequence powered by tear gas, heartbreak, and permanent transition. Recording the pursuit of spring.

Jump cut to Cobra helicopters hovering over mass graves, zebra wipe to shopping malls, mosaic to spam filters, SIM cards, nomad weavers; spiral effect to border detention, child care, and digital exhaustion. Gas clouds dissolving between highrise buildings. Exasperation. The territory of occupation is a place of enclosure, extraction, hedging, and constant harassment, of getting pushed, patronized, surveilled, deadlined, detained, delayed, hurried— it encourages a condition that is always too late, too early, arrested, overwhelmed, lost, falling.
Your phone is driving you through this journey, driving you mad, extracting value, whining like a baby, purring like a lover, bombarding you with deadening, maddening, embarrassing, outrageous claims for time, space, attention, credit card numbers. It copy-pastes your life to countless unintelligible pictures that have no meaning, no audience, no purpose, but do have impact, punch, and speed. It accumulates love letters, insults, invoices, drafts, endless communication. It is being tracked and scanned, turning you into transparent digits, into motion as a blur. A digital eye as your heart in hand. It is witness and informer. If it gives away your position, it means you’ll retroactively have had one. If you film the sniper that shoots at you, the phone will have faced his aim. He will have been framed and fixed, a faceless pixel composition. Your phone is your brain in corporate design, your heart as a product, the Apple of your eye. Your life condenses into an object in the palm of your hand, ready to be slammed into a wall and still grinning at you, shattered, dictating deadlines, recording, interrupting. The territory of occupation is a green-screened territory, madly assembled and conjectured by zapping, copy-paste operations, incongruously keyed in, ripped, ripping apart, breaking lives and heart. It is a space governed not only by 3-D sovereignty, but 4-D sovereignty because it occupies time, a 5-D sovereignty because it governs from the virtual, and an n-D sovereignty from above, beyond, across—in Dolby Surround.

Time asynchronously crashes into space; accumulating by spasms of capital, despair, and desire running wild. Here and elsewhere, now and then, delay and echo, past and future, day and night nest within each other like unrendered digital effects. Both temporal  and spatial occupation intersect to produce individualized timelines, intensified by fragmented circuits of production and augmented military realities. They can be recorded, objectified, and thus made tangible and real. A matter in motion, made of poor images, lending flow to material reality. It is important to emphasize that these are not just passive remnants of individual or subjective movements. Rather, they are sequences that create individuals by means of occupation. They also subject them to occupation. As material condensations of conflictive forces, they catalyze resistance, opportunism, resignation. They trigger full stops and passionate abandon. They steer, shock, and seduce.

I might have sent something to you from my phone. See it spreading. See it become invaded by other sequences, many sequences, see it being re-montaged, rearticulated, reedited. Let’s merge and rip apart our scenarios of occupation. Break continuity. Juxtapose. Edit in parallel. Jump the axe. Build suspense. Pause. Countershoot. Keep chasing spring. These are our territories of occupation, forcefully kept apart from each other, each in his and her own corporate enclosure. Let’s reedit them. Rebuild. Rearrange. Wreck. Articulate. Alienate. Unfreeze. Accelerate. Inhabit. Occupy.

Hito Steyerl
The Wretched of the Screen

 

If the origin of artistic autonomy lies in the refusal of the division of labor (and the alienation and subjection that accompany it), this refusal has now been reintegrated into neoliberal modes of production to set free dormant potentials for financial expansion. In this way, the logic of autonomy spread to the point where it tipped into new dominant ideologies of flexibility and self-entrepreneurship, acquiring new political meanings as well. Workers, feminists, and youth movements of the 1970s started claiming autonomy from labor and the regime of the factory. Capital reacted to this flight by designing its own version of autonomy: the autonomy of capital from workers. The rebellious, autonomous force of those various struggles became a catalyst for the capitalist reinvention of labor relations as such. Desire for self-determination was rearticulated as a self-entrepreneurial business model, the hope to overcome alienation was transformed into serial narcissism and overidentification with one’s occupation.Only in this context can we understand why contemporary occupations that promise an unalienated lifestyle are somehow believed to contain their own gratification. But the relief from alienation they suggest takes on the form of a more pervasive self-oppression, which arguably could be much worse than traditional alienation.
The struggles around autonomy, and above all capital’s response to them are thus deeply ingrained into the transition from work to occupation. As we have seen, this transition is based on the role model of the artist as a person who refuses the division of labor and leads an unalienated lifestyle. This is one of the templates for new occupational forms of life that are all-encompassing, passionate, self-oppressive, and narcissistic to the bone. To paraphrase Allan Kaprow: life in a gallery is like fucking in a cemetery.

We could add that things become even worse as the gallery spills back into life: as the gallery/cemetery invades life, one begins to feel unable to fuck anywhere else.

The Wretched of the Screen

Hito Steyerl

Sometimes the West is obsessed with the idea of progress, sometimes
with the idea of decline, and sometimes both notions fall
off the radar entirely. The bakery that served my neighborhood
in the small Italian town where I grew up was called, I remember
vividly, Il Forno Moderno (The Modern Bakery). Italy was highly
confident of its future in the late fifties and sixties; that general
optimism evidently included the expectation that modern technology
would deliver more and better bread. Later the mood
changed. As far as I can remember, the bakery went out of business
in the early eighties, and after a while someone reopened
it under a new name—L’Antico Forno (The Old Bakery). When I
last visited the place the bakery had disappeared, and the site was
occupied by a cell phone store. It wasn’t called either modern or
old; the apparent name of the business, or at least the only visible
name in the shop window, was “Global Roaming” (in English).

 

 

The Alphabet and the Algorithm

Mario Carpo

 

Essentially, however, Coca-Cola is a standard product
and it is expected to have a standard taste. When it does not, we
know that the product is not the real thing. Unlike wine, Coca-Cola
admits no nuances and no debate: either a glass of Coke is Coke,
or it is not. If Heidegger had ever considered that something like
Coca-Cola might exist, the quintessential Gegenstaendigkeit of this
American drink would have supplied him with an endless source
of inspiration for his musings on the debasement of the modern
technical object (or, by contrast, on the “thingly” worth of Bavarian
beer).

The Alphabet and the
Algorithm

Mario Carpo

… when in 1954 I asked Dr. Suzuki point-blank whether someone who had passed through a true Zen experience could have become a Nazi, he flatly denied this possibility. At the same time, however, he also denied having known any Westerner who – in his opinion – had achieved true Zen illumination or satori. This left me not a little baffled – which of course may be just the right state of mind for a student of Zen, or for that matter, for any student of the history of mysticism in general.
GERSHOM SCHOLEM