|
Art
institutions and art projects of today, produced in the
capitalist First World, function on the basis of unbearable
abstraction. This means that an enormous quantity of creativity
is being released, however, it remains cut off from that
which is most important, namely, resistance. In other words,
artistic strategies and tactics that generate different
forms of resistance have been evacuated. Artistic forms
entail a lot of innovation and creation – but where are
the forms of resistance? How to engender resistance that
opens up the possibilities of change?
It is my argument that the experience of this void in the
First World is different from the one in the Second or the
Third World, for almost nothing that has been produced in
the Second or the Third World is reflected consistently
in the First World of capitalism, let alone included in
the genealogy of the latter. His[s]tory is being written
for the First World of capitalism, things are being capitalized
for the First World, and whatever resists this process is
left out of this (his)story. What is more important though
is are we going to articulate a new space, a space of our
own?
Every history is a struggle. Have we formed another space?
Who or what then is the driving force that rearticulates
the social and the political space in a given context, and
adopts art as its mode of expression and fight, which, at
the end of the day, is the gist of radical art and radical
cultural practices. Giorgio Agamben observes that every
living being assumes a certain form, which means that if
you do not have a form of life you do not have a life either.
The issue at stake is the question of what kind of form
is still capable of rendering things visible and politically
revolutionary. Perhaps it is the images, the method of work
or the process; perhaps it is speech, the so-called performative
politics. This is why we talk about processuality, about
production of knowledge, or about theory, which is not written
but rather spoken in a public space.
It is perfectly clear that in the present day we are dealing
with more than just a gesture of exchange and production;
we are dealing with a delineation of political lines within
a certain space, with a codification of this space and with
the establishment of power relations. Once that line is
crossed, once things become contaminated, the radical and
political ideas from those coming from the Second and Third
World(s) are put apart, projects and people are removed
or sucked into the system of friendships and obscure collaborations.
The second key moment is the economic moment, the art market,
which today, more than ever before, exerts influence on
what acquires visibility and what is included in other interpretations.
Some projects question art as a repressive institution and
search for answers to questions how this institution is
codified, how it is perceived, how it is structured and
who holds sway over it. The third key aspect I would like
to point out is in the relations of ownership as exhibitions
and projects belong to someone, they have specific owners,
economic (multinational) as well as symbolic. Fathers do
exist, and I am talking not only about patriarchy but also
about the so-called institution of masculinity; the latter
is disseminated by various individuals and institutions
or groups that present themselves as the owners of contemporary
art, cultural and political terminology. When we touch upon
such relations and the institutions of power that govern
a specific space, all relations of lightness come to an
end.
Donna Haraway stated: it is perfectly clear who the players
are, who has a voice and who is relevant to every area.
There are only a few chosen ones; everyone else is excluded
from this story. In these relations, the patriarchal institution
of masculinity and power is still central. This is when
things become complicated for what is at stake is not only
the construction of a system but also the fact that, by
constructing a proper system, we point out the weak spots
of the other system, the one that is supposedly ideal. Accordingly,
things deteriorate: the other party feels threatened.
Capitalism is a cannibal and in order to be able to “devour”
everything and everyone it is ready to transform itself
into an inventive or even social [capital], if the need
be such. The matrix it relies on is not a utilitarian but
a cannibalistic one. The capitalist engine has an inherent
need to possess new forms of production and expressions
of creativity, because the capitalist logic survives by
continually producing a surplus value of goods, including
works of art.
Suely Rolnik, a psychoanalyst and professor at the Catholic
University of Sao Paulo, and head of the Centre for Research
on Subjectivity, identifies similar implications. In her
essay “The Twilight of the Victim: Creation Quits Its Pimp,
to Rejoin Resistance”[2]
she exposes the purpose behind the need for the continual
production of new forms of art and life, which is to ensure
a subjective consistency for structures such as theory,
criticism and official institutions, while in the same breath
other artistic and cultural production may be swept off
the stage of the “world,” along with all other deactivated
sectors of the economy. Or, in other words, that which is
happily shared by today’s art, criticism and official institutions
is creativity, but this is creativity without resistance.
For modern capitalism, this wellspring of “free” invention
power and inexhaustible artistic creativity is a virgin
resource, an untapped vein of values that should be exploited.
Rolnik describes this process of the fresh blood supply
for the capitalist (cannibalistic and blood-sucking) system
– which coincides with the deactivation of entire sectors
not trendy enough and too demanding artistic, cultural and
social strategies – using the expression “kidnapped inventions,”
whereby the task of the kidnappers is accomplished by various
systems, theories, criticism, institutions and practices.[3]
Yet here we are not referring merely to the necessity of
re-establishing a link between art and life that characterizes
modernity, since, as Rolnik says, if life and art are still
divided the reason is the deactivation of creation within
the broader sweep of social life and its confinement to
the artistic ghetto. This situation has already been resolved
by capitalism and incomparably more effectively than by
art.[4]
To remain in the artistic ghetto as a separate sphere (so-called
“autonomy of art”), which in the previous system served
to imprison the power of creation, means to keep art separate
from the power of resistance and restrict it to being the
source of (surplus) value representing an easy means of
survival for the pimp – the capital (machine).
1. Contamination of creativeness and politics
We no longer work, but create. This is the process of subjectivisation
through production in the time of post-Fordist global capitalism.
This process transcends dualism and focuses on the shaping
of subjectivity, but not through work – rather it employs
creation as an activity that re-defines work and literally
hides abstract exploitation. Because of this, the explanation
of immaterial labour is of key importance for the explanation
of the process of subjectivisation in our contemporaneity.
Understanding these processes necessitates the re-connection
of creation and the power of resistance, and the freeing
of both from the grip of the pimp, i.e. the capitalist system.
As Suely Rolnik explains in her essay “...[w]e need to place
ourselves in an area where politics and art are intertwined,
where the resistant force of politics and the creative forces
of art mutually affect each other, blurring the frontiers
between them.”[5]
This is an attempt to place us in a thoroughly contaminated
area, “first on the side of politics contaminated by its
proximity to art, then on the side of art contaminated by
its proximity to politics.”[6]
Rolnik further observes that “[a]t present, certain artistic
practices seem to be particularly effective in dealing with
these problems [relating to the dissociation of creation
from resistance]. Their strategy consists of precise and
subtle insertions at certain points where the social structure
is unravelling, where tension is pulsating due to the pressure
of a new composition of forces seeking passage. It is a
mode of insertion mobilized by the desire to expose oneself
to the other and to run the risk of such an exposure, instead
of opting for the guarantee of a politically correct position
that confines the other to a representation and protects
subjectivity from any affective contagion. The ‘work’ consists
in bringing the forces and the tension they provoke into
existence, which entails the connection of the power of
creation to a piece of the world grasped as energy-matter
by the resonant body of the artist; and it consists at the
same time in activating the power of resistance.”[7]
I would like to emphasize that we have to think in a much
broader sense about the pimp, capital, and take into account
its linkages with the art market, art institutions, theory,
criticism, tourism and educational institutions, from art
academies to universities. What is, in fact, happening today
in contemporary art is the formation of a specific set of
technologies for de- and/or re-territorializing capital,
which puts into process the rearticulating of hierarchised
structures that include people as a component and which
exclude art and cultural practices in accord with institutional
models.
The new vocabulary proposed by Rolnik – which in addition
to “kidnapped invention” includes such terms as “contamination
of art and politics,” “contagious art practices,” “radicalised
theory” – has rarely been used previously in the field of
art and culture. But if we consider certain events in the
art, cultural and social-political arenas of Slovenia, on
the local level, and more broadly in relation to Documenta
and the various biennials, Manifestas and big Balkan shows,
we can see the importance of using such paradigms to name
in precise terms the processes of expropriation and exhaustion,
abstraction and evacuation that are taking place in contemporary
art and culture.
What Rolnik calls “kidnapped inventions” is exactly what
happened to the underground or “Ljubljana alternative movement”
that developed in the 1980s in Slovenia. This movement was
literally kidnapped, taken hostage, and released when it
was already symbolically dead, abstracted from interpretations
and segregated by academic writings and theoretical non-writings,
at the beginning of the 1990s and continuing until today.
Throughout the 1980s, the whole underground, or alternative
culture in Ljubljana was kept under harsh political and
economic censorship, a hostage of the communist political
party in power, and which was cut off from any kind of civil-society
space. Although this same underground was of crucial importance
in the formation of the civil society towards the end of
the 1980s in Slovenia, which supported the emergence of
numerous heavily marginalized sexual, political and cultural
minorities, it has not yet received a single serious theoretical
or critical review by the official theoretical and political
structures in Slovenia.
Which is that form of struggle that can make things visible
and politically revolutionary? It is not sufficient to restrict
the consideration of art to creativity only.
The 1980s saw the emergence of political art in Slovenia
– political not by virtue of its content but owing to the
emergence of the political subject within the field of contemporary
art that was precisely the underground or the alternative
movement. This spelled a great difference compared to the
1970s or earlier periods, when formal art dominated culture
in Slovenia. The 1980s underground production cut through
and fought the emptied tradition of formalism that prevailed
throughout the 1970s and therefore encountered vast resistance
and obstacles also regarding its reinterpretation. Insisting
on such genealogy means disrupting the abstract struggle
for the old form of expression and counteracts it by introducing
a rearticulation of art, culture and social productions
completely excluded from History. This denotes an act of
cutting into specific space. An act that compels this space
that has been living happily its own “abstract” story to
re-establish itself. As Alain Badiou would say, this is
indeed an “event.”
What is more, the alternative practices in Slovenia were
not merely evacuated and abstracted, they were literally
“kidnapped” – excluded and completely marginalized – at
least twice and in very blatant ways. The first time was
in 1997, when the city of Ljubljana was declared the “Cultural
Capital of Europe” – precisely because of its reputation
in the 1980s and early 1990s for its non-institutional strategies
that were, for the most part, conceptualised, produced and
organized within the alternative and, later, independent
spaces. The event Ljubljana – “Cultural Capital of Europe”
(for one month) proved to be a disaster for the independent
scene, which was left without any infrastructural investments
or a substantial program.
The second “kidnapping” took place in 2000, when Manifesta
3 was held in Ljubljana. Although proclaimed as a pure act
of transnational and global artistic vision, Manifesta 3
was, in fact, commissioned by the Slovene state, government
and the Ministry of Culture, along with the main managerial
artistic and culture institutions in Ljubljana, and not
the other way around. Manifesta 3, with its outside reinforcements,
legitimised on an international scale the power of the major
national institutions of art and culture in Ljubljana (led
by Cankarjev dom, Cultural and Artistic Center in Ljubljana).
Once more, the leading independent (!) institutions, such
as ŠKUC Gallery, Metelkova, and Kapelica Gallery, which
had been crucial in constructing the paradigm of contemporary
political and radical art and culture and new media productions
in Slovenia, were not included in the Manifesta 3 project.
Manifesta offered a perfect camouflage for the codification
and acceptance of fake and abstract internationalism in
the so-called Slovenian national realm.
Rolnik cites the example of Bilbao with its Guggenheim museum
building to illustrate the operation of evacuating resistance
from creativity, which transforms the object of art into
a pure trademark. For Slovenes, this is precisely what occurred
in 1997 and 2000 in Ljubljana. “At issue here is an operation
of great complexity that can intervene at different stages
in the process of creation, and not only at the end. Its
effect at that point is just more obvious, because it coincides
with the moment when the dissociation makes itself felt
on art’s products, reifying them in two ways: either transforming
them into ‘art objects’ separated from the vital process
whereby the creation was carried out, or treating them as
sources of a surplus glamour-value, attached to the logos
of businesses and even of cities, like Bilbao, for instance.”[8]
The case of Metelkova represents an intermediary point in
this genealogy of dissociation of creativity from resistance.
The situation may be summarized as follows. Metelkova is
the name of a street in Ljubljana on which the barracks
of the Yugoslav People’s Army had been located. After Slovenia’s
Ten-Day War for independence, in June-July 1991, the Yugoslav
army withdrew from Slovenia. The new generation of underground
hard-core punk activists, independent artists and activist
groups asked the City Council of Ljubljana in 1991 to give
this former military complex of empty buildings to independent
artistic and cultural organizations. After promising to
do this, the Ljubljana City Council secretly began the demolition
of the Metelkova buildings with the aim of constructing
a commercial centre on the site. Activists, intellectuals
and artists then occupied the area as a squat in 1993, and
to this day it remains a site of conflict between the independent
art and cultural scene and the Ljubljana City Council. In
1993, municipal authorities cut off the water and electricity
supply to Metelkova in an attempt to put a stop to the cultural
activities and force the activists, intellectuals and artists
to leave the squat. By depriving the activists and artists
of basic services, the city essentially took Metelkova hostage.
The city of Ljubljana then “kidnapped” the Metelkova invention
of organizing the area as a central cultural and artistic
space in Ljubljana for the new millennium. In fact, the
city is now financially supporting the development of the
Metelkova site by constructing a complex of museums there.
It is necessary to rethink Metelkova within the context
of a biopolitics through which the state produces and administers
the life of its citizens. Giorgio Agamben argues that global
states today play with and against two entities of life:
modal life and bare (non-modal, naked) life. Modal life
exists in Western democratic states in the form of life-which-chooses,
life with style, and consumer life. Bare life is, on the
other hand, life that serves only as the foundation of sovereignty.
According to Agamben, the foundation of sovereignty is,
then, based on a concept of bare life; the sovereign body
fulfils its role of being sovereign based on its right to
take or give/permit life (rights or style) to citizens.[9]
This is what happened with Metelkova when, in the 1990s,
the city of Ljubljana cut off the electricity and water
supply. The kidnapped Metelkova citizens were transformed
through this clear biopolitical action into denizens, or
‘denied citizens’, to borrow a term from Tomas Hammar.[10]
Šefik Šeki Tatliæ, a theoretician and media activist from
Sarajevo, helps us to develop this even further: “(…) what
displays sovereignty is a model where bare-life is not destroyed,
but converted, exposed as a cultural practice of life-with-modality
in cases where Western pop and heavy metal music allegedly
have been used to torture prisoners and may serve as a banal
example or a display of the power of sovereignty where cultural
practice is displayed as a weapon by exposing differentiation.”[11]
In the process of global capitalist production, bare life
is a primary source of labour force. Our subjection to the
capitalist machine takes place through uncertainty, marginality,
and permanent fear for one’s life circumstances and through
the absence of a firm employment option, i.e. through precariousness.
The uncertainty of life is connected with the uncertainty
of work, and this is a topic that is central not only for
modern biopolitics but modern radical artistic practices
as well.
2. Performative politics of formalized values
We live in a realm of immaterial production of ideas, images
and communication, connections and emotional relationships.
These processes do not provide the meaning of life, but
life itself. An example of performative politics is provided
by everyday advertisements that continually instruct us
about our intimate lives and fears. In such a situation,
it is a commodity that speaks, and as Antonio Conti says,
it does not talk about its content but about our lives,
needs and social relations.[12]
Commodities talk about the form of our lives, and about
how we should think, where we should travel, and about what
we should buy regularly if we want to live well. Obsession
with communication, talk and language is obvious today,
since all three are subjected to information and communications
technologies, and the time has come, as Conti argues, to
re-conquer their potential. This re-conquest is, for example,
the “counter-cultural” production of information relying
on the theory and practice of an open code and on the principle
of “creative commons.”
This is also an act of dematerialization of the art object;
it is a process of destabilization of meaning through action
rather than through the production of objects. It is also
an act of destabilizing perception and meaning through naming.
Speech serves not only to convey commands and instruction
for labour operations, but allows denoting processes as
well. As Paolo Virno argues, language is not just an artefact
of real life that conveys our relationship with nature,
but it is also part of our biological matrix co-substantial
and specific to human nature.[13]
The tongue is a biological organ in an intermediary place
between thinking and political action. Or, as Franco Berardi
Bifo maintains, any resistance or disobedience in the communication
process is a process of marking and producing various denotations.[14]
Communication also lies at the root of the production process
in which it plays a crucial role. The work process today
relies on words, transmitting through language and speech
labour commands and instructions that is, as Antonio Negro
argues, something completely different from the “Habermasian
reconciliation with communication.”[15]
Virno noted that in the present day the boundaries separating
intellectual activity, political action and work are blurred.
The Post-Fordist type of (precarious) labour itself absorbed
much of that which is understood as political action. And
this fusion of politics and work represents a new physiognomy
of the modern crowd.[16]
Instead of radical politics, an abstract formalization of
labour processes and art activities is what is at work.
It is possible within such a context to state that the political,
due to processes of performativity (that engage only and
solely in describing the logic of the speech act, being
evacuated from any content), leads to an abstract formalization
of art and cultural activities. What is taking part is a
transition from the politics of memory to the memory of
that what used to be a political act.
Using “paradigmatic forms of the human,” Agamben establishes
the genealogy of the human represented as an arrangement
of animal-like figures escalating and ending in headless
and thoughtless snobbish figures. These are not just metaphorical
but political figures of human development within the capitalist
First World’s genealogy administered by the capitalist anthropological
machine that is clearly moving in the direction of an increasing
emptying, abstraction and formalization of what is to be
perceived as the human. In his book The Open. Man and
Animal (2002), Agamben writes about such an increasing
abstracted formalization within the genealogy of the human,
depicting in such a way the development of the human toward
a mere form or a snobbish gesture without content.
How do these relationships appear on the level of art and
culture? There is an almost axiomatic work of art – a sentence
uttered by Mladen Stilinoviæ from Zagreb who in 1997 accurately
defined the initial multiculturalism as an ideological matrix
of global capitalism: An artist who does not speak English
is not an artist! This sentence, a work of art of the
1990s, synthesizes capital’s “social sensitivity” to all
those multicultural identities that should reveal themselves
in the 1990s to the world (to be read: of global capitalism)
and begin to talk in that world – in English, no matter
how broken this English be. However, today’s performative
logic which is in perfect harmony with the abstraction and
evacuation of global capitalism and which is working toward
an emptying of any content, requires the correction of this
sentence: An artist who does not speak English
well is not an artist! This is the grand performative
and snobbish lecture of 2000 within the first capitalist
world that we still have (although never good enough) to
master! As a result of these processes of evacuation, the
alternative scene was literally swallowed up and exhausted
by the over-institutionalised (official) culture in Slovenia,
while theory was usurped and commercialised by the capitalist
system (a pimp indeed, as Rolnik puts it), becoming part
of the theory industry.
If we consider the construction of the youth hostel Celica
(“the prison cell”) in 2003 in Metelkova – whereby the former
Yugoslav army barracks prison was renovated, with financial
support from the city of Ljubljana, into a shiny youth-hostel
theme park, painted in hues of red, yellow and orange –
we see just such a turnover. This can be understood as the
city re-establishing subtle control over partially autonomous
spaces without the open use of force and in a way that is
directly related to the systematic gentrification politics
of contemporary cities and states.[17]
Rolnik theorises such processes in precise terms:
In order to extract maximum profitability from this inventive
power, capitalism pushes it even further than it would go
by means of its own internal logic, but only to make an
ever more perverse use of it: like a pimp, it exploits the
force of invention at the service of an accumulation of
surplus value, taking advantage of it and thus reiterating
its alienation with respect to the life process that engendered
it – an alienation that separates it from the force of resistance.
On the one hand, you have a turbo-charged inventive power
freed of its relation to resistance, and on the other, a
tension. Easy-to-assimilate ‘ready-to-wear identities’ are
accompanied by a powerful marketing operation concocted
and distributed by the media, so as to make us believe that
identifying with these idiotic images and consuming them
is the only way to succeed in reconfiguring a territory,
and even more, that this is the only channel by which one
can belong to the sought-after territory of a ‘luxury subjectivity’.
And this is no trivial matter, for outside such a territory
one runs the risk of social death, by exclusion, humiliation,
destitution, or even the risk of literally dying – the risk
of falling into the sewer of ‘trash subjectivities’, with
their horror scenarios made up of war, slums, drug trafficking,
kidnapping, hospital queues, undernourished children, the
homeless, the landless, the shirtless, the paperless, those
people who can only be less, an ever-expanding territory.
If trash subjectivity continuously experiences the distressing
humiliation of an existence without value, luxury subjectivity
for its part continuously experiences the threat of falling
outside, into sewer-territory, a fall which may be irreversible.
The prospect terrifies it and leaves it agitated and anxious,
desperately seeking recognition.[18]
Are not the stories we receive daily through the mass media
evidence enough of the deepening gap between these two subjectivities?
In Slovenia, for example, we witness the horrors of life
and sheer chaos endured by the Roma people, as well as by
others such as the “erased.”[19]
Abroad, in the world at large, we see the horrors of wars
supposedly intended to preserve civilisation, as well as
such atrocities as decapitations, and many other kinds of
misery.
Such expressions of dominance over bare (naked) lives allow
the political oligarchy in transitional societies to constitute
itself as sovereign, to demonstrate the practice of sovereignty
to the nation. As Tatliæ explains:
Post-socialist and former Eastern European societies perceive
global capitalism not through future inequalities, class
divisions, but with a willingness to prepare their states/economies
to adopt global capitalism. European Union demands from
transitional societies are seen as an implementation of
several extremes, such as, for example, the implementation
of an information society, but with the false predisposition
that it is a mere technological structure, followed by extreme
economic imbalances, extreme class divisions, fascistic
nationalistic regimes decoded as mere figures in endless
political games, with the following unequal distribution
of knowledge to certain local social structures which conduct
the whole process.[20]
The biopolitical in Slovenia decodes itself in a way that,
as Tatliæ stated, “it firstly patches its own linear progress
toward modal civilizations by accepting a ‘non-repressive’
democracy, but only as a countermeasure to the former, ‘repressive’,
communism. Functioning as a fictional platform, which if
read through post-modernist practices, works as a collective
phantasm: the West should accept us, because we were oppressed
by communism.”[21]
The process is completed, first, by taking advantage of
the deepening gap and, then, by strengthening different
political positions and developing fake solutions, which
are ultimately processed through the mass media.
3. The state of emergency and its visual codes
The abstraction processes (the processes of evacuation,
performative formalization etc.) pointed out earlier in
the text have gained currency in the very heart of representation
politics. They can be defined as the disintegration of oppositions
within the image, for example, representation of politics
that erases differences between the subjective and the objective,
or between the national, nationalistic and the space of
resistance; disintegration taking place at the very centre
of the “space” of the image. This is one of the results
as well of the current new media technology processing techniques
onto the visual system of images.
Jonathan L. Beller[22]
in his attempt to formulate a political economy of vision
also explores the processes of abstraction. He connects
the growing abstraction of the medium of money in capitalism
and the evolution of image production in post-modern times.
Therefore, we can link the abstraction of money in capitalism
with abstraction procedures in the fields of contemporary
art, culture and theory. This comparison between the money
economy on the one hand and the visual "economy” on the
other brings out the alienating effects of image making
in a techno-capitalist society. According to Jonathan L.
Beller, I can say that we are today confronted not so much
with the abstraction of our senses (this being a typically
modern phenomenon), but with the absolute sensualisation
of abstraction, i.e. of the contemporary emptiness of the
neo-liberal individual within global capitalism.
This is a new turn in the genealogy of capitalist abstraction
that cannot be treated in an old way, as a matter of alienation
of our senses (Adorno).[23]
The current state is just the opposite: it is characterized
by the full sensualisation of the capitalist processes of
abstraction; it is characterized by the full sensualisation
of emptiness and of totally formalized values that are becoming
completely empty of all content in the “historical” sense
(Agamben). A good illustration is two art movies that are
not ordinary Hollywood blockbusters. One is Lost in
Translation (2003), by Sofia Coppola, and the other
Broken Flowers (2005), by Jim Jarmusch. In both
films, the image of white capitalist emptiness, hollowness
and a disinterest in any kind of engagement, politics or
action reaches a maximum. The white kind (portrayed through
Bill Murray, the main actor in both films) is engaged only
in elevating its own hollowness to a dimension of sensuous
delight, that the Second and Third World will never be “capable”
of reaching. In this process we can again observe Agamben’s
genealogy of the human from animal to snob.
Processes of abstraction and evacuation are used as well
in the depiction of public space. Tom Holert names these
processes that aim at reduction and abstraction of differences
in a public space as “visual programming of the political
space.”[24]
With such visual programming, the public space is transformed
from a political public space of action and confrontation
into an apolitical performative spectacle of posing for
the camera. In order to establish a precise logic of such
processes, Holert engaged in an analysis of three distinctive
events in Great Britain in the summer of 2005: the Live
8 concert, the G8 summit and the terrorist attack on the
London tube.
Visual programming of the political space in the case of
Great Britain events in 2005 involved precisely the difference
between the representation of the crowd as something positive,
creative and above all non-problematic on the one hand,
and on the other, as something negative, or a protesting
mob. If we consider the difference between the representation
of the crowd at the two events, the Live 8 concerts and
the G8 summit, we encounter, as Tom Holert points out, a
completely different story. While the Live 8 crowd was presented
as important – including from the viewpoint of the UN Secretary
General – when it comes to aid for Africa, every voice is
significant and it is necessary to gather as many people
as possible and inform and educate them, the role of the
crowd at the G8 summit in Edinburgh was presented as negative.
The story that evolved there was indeed different, although
it was part of the same framework – the struggle for justice.
Crowds in Edinburgh were presented as an aggressive mob.
Cameras waited by passively, and owing to special circumstances,
when protesters found themselves entrapped between the town
and the repressive forces maintaining public order, the
cameras captured only the images of the brawl, and rioting
was then presented as a cause leading to the intervention
of police forces. This was an example of the coding of the
political act that has almost become a rule.[25]
Mass media exploited the Live 8 concerts to the utmost.
Their manner of depiction combined the images of anonymous
individuals with the crowd behind them and images shot from
camera cranes or helicopters that alternately reminded one
of a survey camera and of the visualization employed by
casting agencies when presenting faces and portraits of
models to appear in new fashion catalogues. A similar approach
was employed even after the terrorist attacks: one or two
bloodstained Londoners, as two actors in an apocalyptic
game, says Holert. The description of such procedures enables
us to consider the issue of visual programming of the political
space with greater accuracy. What is of great importance
as well is the process of isolation and theatralisation
of the individual set against the crowd. It is more and
more turned into an actor playing in a movie about the end
of the world.
Another, perhaps even more telling example of such “visual
programming of the political space” is revealed in the video
by Austrian artist Oliver Ressler entitled This is what
democracy looks like![26]
This is what democracy looks like! records the
first Austrian anti-globalisation demonstrations on the
occasion of the World Economic Forum on July 1, 2001 in
Salzburg. The demonstrations against the World Economic
Forum (a private lobbying organization of major world capital)
in Salzburg were ferociously handled by the Austrian police:
919 demonstrators were encircled and held captive by the
police in the open space of the City of Salzburg for more
than seven hours. The video film consists of visual material
from the demonstrations, edited and spliced together with
the additional reflections of six demonstrators on the events
in Salzburg.[27]
The video is a precise re-articulation of the event that
also shows how mass media and the general public are caught
up in a process of falsification and the misinterpretation
of facts, relations and positions. The importance of the
video work is multi-levelled.
First, the video is an accurate analysis and representation
of the anti-global and anti-capitalist demonstrations in
the heart of what is considered to be Western liberal democracy.
The analysis of the media, state repression forces, i.e.,
the police, the public expression of calls for civil rights
to be upheld and the whole structure of the clash between
the repressive state apparatus and the civil rights demonstrators
is recorded here, edited and voiced from the centre(s) of
the capitalist Empire and not from somewhere else, where
basic democratic rights are under heavy attack anyway.
In short, from the way the video is structured it is possible
to discern some of the key elements of contemporary capitalism,
state repressive forces and how these conspire to cause
what are supposed to be Western liberal democratic rights
to disintegrate – and simultaneously to be reconstituted,
albeit always in a different manner. When processes of the
inalienable basic right to demonstrate, to criticize and
to demonstrate publicly ostensibly threaten the fabric of
the capitalist machine, they are immediately transformed
(in other words, without delay) into a state of exception,
at the place of intervention. At such a place, liberal democratic
rights are simply reduced to paper tigers with no teeth
at all. The video therefore presents/encodes democracy in
contemporary capitalistic states as a point of deadlock
between two blocks. And what is waiting to be put into action?
It is precisely the “state of exception.” Giorgio Agamben,
the Italian philosopher, stated in the mid-1990s that the
juridical norm of 20th century capitalist democracy is precisely
the law of exception, and what we witness in the video is
likewise the complete and terminal fusion of the biological
body, but without the polis.
Indeed, the encircled demonstrators, detained for several
hours in an open space, actually embody the paradigm of
the (concentration) camp rather than that of the open public
space of the City of Salzburg. This is again something that
Agamben formulated, saying that the bio-political paradigm
today in Western civilization is the (concentration) camp
and not the City. Power is not simply in the hands of the
sovereign, nor in the hands of a single class or group,
and cannot therefore be articulated only at the level of
a consciousness, as a case of distorted consciousness. The
materialistic paradigm is not enough here. That is why for
Ressler power in the video is not the “obscure camera of
ideology,” but through an analysis of movements, density
of moods, body approaches in the contexts of the demonstration,
Ressler produces a lucidity that can almost blind us, the
viewers. For here power can be identified at the level of
investment in the body. According to Foucault, nothing is
more material than the exercise of power; Ressler takes
precisely this path toward visualization, to quote Foucault,
showing “the architecture, anatomy, economy and mechanism
of how the body is disciplined.” [28]
This can be clearly seen in the structure of the video,
which shows us the architecture of the body-body relationship
(the encircled process of pressure); the economy of deprivation
(the hours of immobility) and the mechanism of fear and
anxiety. And what is more important, here we see the structure
of power in the field of vision – the power of surveillance
and the eye of the power, the video codes in the most current
way.
There is a certain backdrop of visuality, a sorting of bodies,
scales, lights and gazes, in the mass media, especially
in corporate television. And it is trying to convince us
by means of its purported general objectivity of the balance
of forces in the field of active demarcation. What is hidden
in such (TV) programs is the space between the eye and the
gaze or the image of vision. The image of vision, as is
consistently illustrated by Ressler’s video, is something
other than the eye, it comes from the outside, emanates
from the field of the Other. The gaze is always something
precarious, contingent, dependent, and unstable. In general
we can say that looking is something contingent. The excess,
the surplus of the gaze that surpasses the naked eye is
something that is structured around a manqué, a lack, and
a disfiguration.
An objective camera eye simply does not exist, which is
why the camera angle in Ressler’s video blends with the
perspective of the demonstrators. As viewers, we are in
direct relation to the events by seeing them through the
demonstrators’ viewpoint. The place of the image of vision
and its reversal are crucial. And as regards the image of
vision, it is more important to include the third element
between the body and that image, namely power. The way the
visual materials (visual documentation) and the statements/interviews
of the six demonstrators are spliced together is not one
of illustration. The images do not illustrate the statements
or vice versa. The interviews in Ressler’s video are specifically
designed to encode what is at stake in the visual field
of power.
What is clearly presented here is that the relationship
between the visual and the discursive is not one of correspondence.
There is no common territory, as it were, in which image
and word happily meet; instead, they meet each other in
a “non-space,” but with a relation to power, as Foucault
would say. This is exactly Ressler’s video (medium) of power.
Oliver Ressler’s video is a masquerade about democracy.
Under the mask of democracy in the capitalistic liberal
democratic systems of today we encounter the (Scmittian/Agamben)
– “state of exception.”
Last but not least, it is necessary to read the apparatus
of repression in Ressler’s video as a mere semblance of
justice. Yet Oliver Ressler’s video is also an act of power;
it shows the internal power of the demonstrators, as they
are capable of articulating precisely what their own position
is, rethinking their moves, contemplating their present
position and their possible future defeats. With its proper
exhibitionism the anti-globalisation movement claims back
for itself a position of power. Because power is grounded
in the spectacle. The video is therefore also a process
of rendering the body of the anti-globalisation movement
spectacular (but without commercialisation!). To put it
in a nutshell: it is much better to exhibit power than to
be the instrument of power, such as the police are – the
apparatus of repression – in the final instance. Through
the video analysis, the anti-globalisation movement completes
a short circuit: it exhibits power embedded in its spectacular
function. It is a re-articulation of the proper position
as an emancipatory act.
Despite all qualms about civil society, the stereotypical
manner of showing its political manifestation is problematic.
When the mass media re-code these, civil society is, as
a rule, shown as uncivilized and its attitude towards the
government as uncultivated. Tom Holert emphasizes that the
images of the declarations of political will are acceptable
for the general public only if they come with a flavour
of entertainment and if they are not too complex. And when
the mass media, with the help of repressive state apparatuses,
re-shape these images transforming them into a threat to
the democratic global order, the view radically changes:
a discursive crowd turns into a group of confused and raging
elements expedient for portrayal. Ressler’s manner of presentation
and depiction is precisely the opposite.
What has to be stressed is the polarity of the mass media
depiction of demonstrations, which is an integral part of
the neoliberal ceremonial. In his excellent analysis Holert
defines these two poles as follows: on the one side stand
civilized forces of order and politics that are prudent
and pacifying in their dogmatism, and on the other miserable,
rhythmically swaying souls interested only in how to trigger
uncivilized disorder. The ceremonial is expedient for the
production of images that make possible the reshaping of
the space of political opposition and democratic representation
into the space of direct participation, which is in effect
the transformation of the political space into an apolitical
public space.
Robert Pfaller writes that today “we see democracy only
as something that we can be involved in ourselves,” as something
in which we see ourselves included directly or we cannot
think about democracy. Precisely this reduction represents
the neoliberal strategy for the elimination of the political
public.[29]
Therefore, what is at issue here is whether we are part
of the direct participation or that we do not know what
democracy is at all. According to Holert, this form of direct
participation is a process of the voluntary surrendering
of people to the great mass media gallery of faces, and
the process of manipulation and evacuation of the discursive
power of the crowd. Instead of ensuring democracy, “direct
participation” in fact represents precisely the opposite:
the loss of the political power of people and its immersion
into a shapeless collectivity.
Similar apparent interactivity is offered today by a number
of artistic performances conceptualised in such a way that
they carefully cultivate the possibility of eliminating
the dividing line between the stage and spectators, creating
the illusion that the actors and spectators, as in some
magical trance, can transcend the border and exchange places
by crossing the dividing line. In his critique of such an
approach to interactivity, Jean Baudrillard points out the
circularity and conversion of both of the sides which lose
their roles and specific places. This circularity actually
denotes the end of the political subject.
Insisting on difference is, therefore, no less important
than the political program itself.
(1) The following essay has
been (re)published with substantial changes and within a
different context in Marina Gržiniæ “Za repolitizacijo umetnosti:
ponovna povezava ustvarjalnosti in odpora” Maska,
Ljubljana 2004, year 19, no. 3-4 (86-87), pp. 30-45; Marina
Gržinic, “O repolitizaciji umetnosti skozi kontaminacijo.
Filozofski vestnik, 2005, year 26, no. 3, pp. 115-131 and
Marina Gržiniæ, “On the Repoliticisation of Art through
Contamination, ” in: IRWIN (ed.) East Art Map: Contemporary
Art and Eastern Europe, Afterall Book, London (forthcoming).
(2) Suely Rolnik, “The Twilight
of the Victim: Creation Quits Its Pimp, to Rejoin Resistance,”
Zehar, No. 51, 2003, p. 36.
(3) Ibid, p. 35.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid. p. 36.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid.
(9) See Giorgio Agamben, The
Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2004), originally published in Italian
as Aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
2002).
(10) Cf Tomas Hammar, Democracy
and the Nation State, Research and Ethnic Relations
Series, (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth, 1990), quoted
in Šefik Šeki Tatlic, “Post-Modal Reproduction of Power,”
in: Marina Gržinic (ed.), Art-e-Fact: Strategies of
Resistance, No. 3, 2004, published on line http://artefact.mi2.hr
(11) Cf. Šefik Šeki Tatliæ,
“Post-Modal Reproduction of Power,” in: Marina Gržinic (ed.),
Art-e-Fact: Strategies of Resistance, No. 3, 2004,
http://artefact.mi2.hr
(12) Cf. Antonio Conti, “Politiche
del linguaggio,” in: Insorgenze della communicazione, Posse,
Manifestolibri, Rome, January 2005.
(13) Cf. Paolo Virno, “Un movimento
performativo,” in: Insorgenze della communicazione, Posse,
Manifestolibri, Rome, January 2005.
(14) Cf. Franco Berardi Bifo,
“Interferenze media-attive,” in: Insorgenze della communicazione,
Posse, Manifestolibri, Rim, January 2005.
(15) Cf. Toni Negri, “Communicazione
ed esercizio del comune,” in: Insorgenze della communicazione,
Posse, Manifestolibri, Rome, January 2005.
(16) Cf. Paolo Virno, Grammatica
dela moltitudine. Per una analisi delle forme di vita contemporanea,
Deriveapprodi, Rome, 2002, p. 41-42.
(17) Cf. Ralo Mayer, Katharina
Lampert and Moira Hille, “Example Celica, YOUTH HOSTEL,
Metelkova, Ljubljana,” in: Marina Gržinic (ed.), The
Future of Computers Arts, Maska and MKC, Ljubljana,
Maribor, 2004.
(18) Suely Rolnik, op. cit.,
p. 35.
(19) Erased residents or izbrisani
are a serious political issue in contemporary Slovenian
history and politcs. Jim Fussell reports on line, on February
26, 2004, the following accurate description of the case:
ťOn February 26, 1992, the newly independent state of Slovenia
deleted the names of some 30,000 residents from the nation's
civil registries. The targeted population, which came to
be known as izbrisani (erased residents) were not
of Slovenian ancestry, but were so-called ‘new minorities’
including ethnic Serbs, ethnic Croats and ethnic Bosnian
Muslims, ethnic Albanian Kosovars and ethnic Roma which
the government sought to force out of the country. Twelve
years later the Slovenian Government has still not yet acted
to fully redress this massive violation of human rights.
Critics of this radical action by the Slovenian government
have sometimes characterized the mass erasure as soft genocide
or administrative genocide. A more appropriate term is probably
‘administrative ethnic cleansing’or ‘civil death.’ In the
case of Slovenia, the izbrisani were targeted for
elimination solely on account of the non-Slovene groups
into which they were born. The policy must especially be
condemned because it was a partially successful policy,
causing over one-third (12,000 out of 30,000) of the targeted
population to leave Slovenia. When officials asked an izbrisani
for his old Yugoslav passport the top right corner would
be cut off, making the document useless and marking the
bearer for further discrimination. The izbrisani
(erased residents) were not forced out at gunpoint and their
homes were not burned down as in Bosnia, nevertheless they
lost their jobs, medical benefits and sometimes were deported
for minor offenses. Ultranationalist politicians characterized
the izbrisani as war criminals, swindlers and undesirables.Ť
http://www.preventgenocide.org/europe/slovenia/
(20) Šefik Šeki Tatlic, op.
cit.
(21) Ibid.
(22) Jonathan L. Beller, “Numismatics
of the Sensual, Calculus of the Image: The Pyrotechnics
of Control,” Image [&] Narrative, web magazine
on visual narration, No. 6, February 2003, http://www.imageandnarrative.be/mediumtheory/jonathanlbeller.htm;
this author is mentioned by Tom Holert, see next note.
(23) Cf. Tom Holert, “Mass-Media
Acts: On Visual Programming of the Political Space: Photo-Op-Effects,”
four texts published in Camera Austria, Graz, No.
88-91, 2004-2005.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Ibid.
(26) Cf. Marina Gržinic, “This
is what democracy looks like!, video by Oliver Ressler,
2002, Boygirl, video by Aurora Reinhard, 2002, Hostage:
The Bachar Tapes, video by Walid Ra’ad, 2001 = This is what
democracy looks like!, Video von Oliver Ressler, 2002, Boygirl,
Video von Aurora Reinhard, 2002, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes,
Video von Walid Ra’ad, 2001,” in, Barbara Könches (ed.),
Peter Weibel (ed.) Bilder codes, Karlsruhe: Zentrum
für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 2002, pp. 54-60. Cf. Marina
Gržinic “Oblikovanje in spodbijanje (dokumentarnega) pomena
v umetniškem delu,” Borec, No. 621–625, Ljubljana,
2005, pp. 318-330. This is what democracy looks like!
(38 min, Austria, 2002, English-German) was awarded by ZKM,
Karlsruhe at the International Media Art Award 2002. In
conceptualising the work, Ressler also drew on other anti-globalisation
demonstrations (in Seattle, Prague, Davos, Quebec and Gothenburg)
and on his video about Italian activist groups – Disobbedienti
(2002, with Dario Azzellini). In both videos the main emphasis
is placed on the active participation of protesters and
other activists, and on their narratives that are perceived
as “unofficial” comments on the events, as opposed to the
official comments communicated by the media and other “neutral”
or “objective” representatives and public opinion makers.
(27) In official comments,
protesters and (left-wing) activists are frequently stereotypically
depicted as chaotic violent persons, or as a (half)wild
mob brandishing slogans, or similar. This depiction serves,
among other things, as a justification for (brutal) police
intervention, but above all it is used to systematically
eliminate the essence of the violence perpetrated by the
repressive bodies and of the symbolic violence of state
and capital powers in general. Ressler hence exposed precisely
these relationships of subordination in the context of public
expression of opinion and with reference to the fundamental
right of free speech, expression and association. One important
fact is that the interviews were recorded several weeks
later in order to ensure distance and deliberation and avoid
momentary emotional states and responses.
(28) Michel Foucault, “Body/Power,”
in: C. Gordon (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge,
Harvester Press, Brighton, 1980, p. 57.
(29) See Robert Pfaller, “Die
philosophischen Irrtümer der Kunst” (an interview with Justin
Hoffmann), Kunstforum International, No. 164, March
- May 2003, p. 386, quoted in Tom Holert, op. cit.
|
