editorial

JORINDE SEIJDEL duction system as worked out by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor is A PRECARIOUS EXISTENCE no longer dominant. This system was characterized by the mass production Vulnerability in the Public Domain of homogeneous, standardized goods for a mass market. Since the 1970s, With the international credit however, there has been a shift of crisis there is more and more talk emphasis within the organization of of the crumbling of the neolib- labour to the immaterial production eral hegemony. Whatever this may of information and services and to mean exactly, in relation to the continuous fl exibility. Both systems theory and practice of art and refl ect different social and economic public space this very crumbling value systems – the mainstays of also seems to be revealing implica- post-Fordism are physical and mental tions and effects of neoliberalism mobility, creativity, labour as that were previously suppressed, potential, communication, virtuos- at least in mainstream discourse. ity and opportunism – and have their Assuming that neoliberalism, con- own forms of control sciously or unconsciously, is more The political philosopher Paolo or less internalized in the policy Virno sees a direct connection and programmes of art and public between post-Fordism and precarity, space, a crisis of market thinking which refers to the relationship is also affecting the core of these between temporary and fl exible labour domains. In other words, if neolib- arrangements and a ‘precarious’ eralism fails economically, socially existence – an everyday life without and politically, what are the symp- predictability and security – which toms of this within art and public is determining the living conditions space? And how should we be dealing of ever larger groups in society with this? (part-timers, fl ex workers, migrant Two concepts resonate in this workers, contract workers, black- issue of Open – ‘post-Fordism’ economy workers, etcetera). This and ‘precarity’ – the fi rst being structural discontinuity and per- something that can be called a manent fragility also occurs in the manifestation of neoliberalism and ‘creative class’: art, cultural and the second an effect. The premise communication businesses in which is that post-Fordist society has there is talk of fl exible production supplanted the Fordist order: the and outsourcing of work. Through the hierarchical and bureaucratic pro- agency of European social movements

4 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence and activists, and philosophers which social issues are subordi- such as Virno, precarity has been nated to the demands of the labour a political issue for some years market and the production of value. already in countries like Spain, Matteo Pasquinelli, in particular, France and Italy. directly addresses the role played Brian Holmes writes in this issue by the creative scene in making (im) about the video series Entre Sueños, material infrastructures fi nancially in which artist Marcelo Expósito profi table and susceptible to specu- reports on this ‘new social issue’. lation. The architect and activist Merijn Oudenampsen deals very con- Santiago Cirugeda has made a poster cretely with the response of Dutch with a selection of urban interven- cleaners to their precarious situa- tions created in recent years by his tion. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter offi ce Recetas Urbanas, which are contend that the rise of precarity aimed at regaining public space for as an object of academic analy- citizens within the precarity of the sis coincides with its decline as a urban environment. political concept capable of incit- Nicolas Bourriaud argues that ing social action. They sound out the essential content of contempo- the power of precarity to bring rary art’s political programme is about new forms of connection, not an indictment of the ‘politi- subjectivity and political organi- cal’ circumstances inherent to zation. Gerald Raunig poses the current affairs, but should consist question as to whether the post- in ‘maintaining the world in a pre- industrial addiction to acceleration carious situation’. Sonja Lavaert can create strategies that give and Pascal Gielen interviewed Paolo new meaning to communication and Virno in Rome about such matters as connectivity. aesthetics and social struggle, the What can notions like post-Ford- disproportion of art and the need to ism and precarity bring to light invent institutions for a new public when they are related to the current sphere. Gielen describes in another conditions of, and thinking about, article how the international art urban space and about art and the scene embodies and indulges the art world? In the context of the post-Fordist value system, and asks city, the ‘creative city’ thrusts to what extent its informality and itself forward as a post-Fordist ethics of freedom can be exploited urban model par excellence, whereby and managed biopolitically. From the creativity and culture are seen as heart of the art scene Jan Verwoert the motor for economic develop- resists the imperative to perform ment. The creative city is also an creatively and socially, and calls entrepreneurial city in which city for a different ethics, one that marketing and processes of gen- all of us should be able to take trifi cation go hand in hand, and in to heart.

Editorial 5 Pascal Gielen society and thus worthy of serious e Art Scene research. Were the current success AAnn IIdealdeal of the creative PProductionroduction UUnitnit industry to result fforor EEconomicconomic in the exploitation EExploitation?xploitation? of the creative scene, however, In sociology, the the level of ‘scene’ is barely freedom enjoyed taken seriously as could quickly a form of social become a lack of organization, but freedom. sociologist Pascal Gielen sees the scene as a highly functional part of our contempo- rary networking

8 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence When a Kunsthalle, an experimen- and fl exibility; and special interest tal theatre, an international dance in creativity and performance – the school, an alternative cinema, a scene is a highly functional social- couple of fusion restaurants and organizational form. Moreover, it lounge bars – not to mention a suf- is a popular temporary haven for fi cient number of gays – are con- hordes of enthusiastic globetrotters. centrated in a place marked by high Why is the scene such a good social social density and mobility, the result binding agent nowadays? To fi nd a is an art scene. ‘What’s there? Who’s satisfactory answer, we should start there? And what’s going on?’ are by taking a good look at the curious what American social geographer mode of production known as ‘post- Richard Florida calls the three ‘W Fordism’. questions’ (Florida is a fan of man- agement jargon). ese questions PPaoloaolo VVirno-Styleirno-Style PPost-Fordismost-Fordism have to be answered if we want to know if ours is a ‘place to be’.1 A e transition from a Fordist to a creative scene like 1. Richard Florida, Cities post-Fordist (that is, Toyota-ist) and the Creative Class the one described (New York: Routledge, manufacturing process is marked is good for the 2005). primarily by the transition from mate- economy, the image of a city and rial to immaterial labour and produc- intercultural tolerance, it would seem. tion, and from material to immaterial Although the art scene has become goods. In the case of the latter, the an important economic variable and symbolic value is greater than the a popular subject of study, the term is practical value. Design and aesthetics not exactly thriving in the sociologi- – in other words, external signs and cal context. e classic sociologist symbols – are major driving forces in does know how to cope with con- today’s economy, because they con- cepts like ‘the group’, ‘the category’, stantly heighten consumer interest. ‘the network’ and ‘the subculture’, We are all too familiar with this point but ‘the social scene’ is relatively of view, which has been propagated unexplored as an area of research. by countless postmodern psycholo- Obviously, there are exceptions, gists, sociologists and philosophers such as work done by Alan Blum.2 since the 1970s. Yet the lack of 2. See, for example, Alan But how does an industry based Blum, ‘Scenes’, in: Janine scholarly inter- Marchessault and Will on signs and symbols aff ect the est is surprising, Straw (eds.), ‘Scenes and workplace and the manufacturing the City’, Public (2001), since the scene nos. 22/23. process? What characterizes immate- is perhaps the format best suited to rial labour? According to Italian phi- social intercourse. Within the pre- losopher Paolo Virno, current focal vailing post-Fordist economy – with points are mobility, fl exible working its fl uid working hours; high levels hours, communication and language of mobility, hyper-communication (knowledge-sharing), interplay,

e Art Scene 9 detachment (the ability to disengage factory or offi ce where he works but and to delegate) and adaptability.3 moves regularly – as a result of pro- Consequently, the 3. Paolo Virno, A motion or relocation – not only from Grammar of the Multitude. person performing For an Analysis of Contem- one workplace to another but also immaterial labour porary Forms of Life (New from one house to another. York: Semiotext(e), can be ‘plugged 2004). Apart from the growth of physical in’ at all times and in all places. mobility, mental mobility is becom- Yet Virno’s conception of immate- ing an increasingly essential part of rial labour is surprisingly refresh- our present-day working conditions. ing when he links it to such notions A er all, the immaterial worker works as power, subjectivity (including primarily with her head, a head that informality and aff ection), curiosity, can – and must – accompany her eve- virtuosity, the personifi cation of the rywhere. Immaterial labour does not product, opportunism, cynicism and cease when the employee shuts the endless chatter. Admittedly, his con- offi ce door behind her. It is easy for ception initially appears to relate to the worker who performs immaterial a string of seemingly heterogeneous labour to take work-related problems characteristics applicable to immate- home, to bed and, in the worst-case rial labour. Presumably, the idea is scenario, on holiday. e worker can to select with care a few key aspects always be reached, by mobile phone from the list. Virno starts with the or email, and summoned back to the better-known aspects of the social workplace within the moment or two phenomenon before adding his per- it takes to log on. Mental mobility sonal adaptation. makes working hours not only fl ex- ible but fl uid, blurring the bound- PPhysicalhysical aandnd MMentalental MobilityMobility ary between private and working domains. e burden of responsibil- A brief summary – as found in the ity for drawing the boundary rests paragraph above – makes us forget almost entirely on the shoulders of what immaterial labour actually the employee. requires from people and, accord- e foregoing outline makes ingly, what drastic consequences rather a depressing impression, but the new form of production has for many a person who does immate- contemporary society. For instance, rial work experiences it as such, as mobility is o en defi ned as increas- evidenced by the increase in work- ing physical mobility, the negative related stress and depressions. One aspects of which we encounter fre- cause of depression is an ongoing quently: traffi c jams, overcrowded sense of having too much on one’s trains and pollution caused by, mind and of being constantly among other things, a vast number reminded of this fact by the working of planes in the skies. e employee environment. Perhaps a creative idea no longer lives his entire life near the is still nestling somewhere in the

10 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence brain: a conclusion based more on a unseen, and in this case invisibility socially conditioned criterion than on can be taken literally. anything psychological. e knowl- edge that you can go on looking, PPowerower aandnd BBiopoliticsiopolitics that you may be failing to utilize a possibility still lodged in your brain, Clearly, the employer of immaterial can lead to psychosis. Burnout is labour no longer invests in eff ective not necessarily the result of a person labour but more in working power, feeling that his ideas have not been in potential or promise, because the fully exploited. On the contrary, it person who performs immaterial is rooted in the frustration that an work comes with a supply of as-yet- unused, passive zone exists within the untapped and unforeseen capabili- cranium that can still be activated. ties. Perhaps the brilliant designer, e worker who can no longer stop engineer, manager or programmer, the introspective quest for inventive- who had been acquired for a great ness may fi nd himself falling into an deal of money, is burnt out. Or abyss or looking for escape routes, perhaps he’s in love and focused on such as intoxication, to momentar- something other than work. Maybe ily halt the thinking process. He his latest brilliant idea was the last, or deliberately switches off his creative it will take another ten years before potential. another follows. Who can say? However, contrasting with this e paradoxical characteristics of very one-sided and sombre picture that working power – that potential of the eff ects of immaterial labour, which is bought and sold as if it were it must be said that it can also liber- a material commodity – presuppose ate a form of mental labour. A er ‘biopolitical’ practices, according to all, no-one can look inside the head Virno. e employer, preferably aided of the designer, artist, engineer, ict by the government, has to develop programmer or manager to check ingenious mechanisms for optimizing, whether he is actually thinking or at least guaranteeing, immaterial productively – that is, in the inter- labour. Since physical and intellec- ests of the business. It’s diffi cult to tual powers are inseparable, these measure the development of ideas. mechanisms should focus on the life A good idea or an attractive design of the immaterial worker: hence the may escape from the brilliant mind term ‘biopolitics’. ‘When something is of the immaterial worker in a matter sold that exists merely as a possibility, of seconds, or it might take months. it cannot be separated from the living What’s more, the same employee may person of the seller. e worker’s living be saving his best ideas until he’s body is the substrate of the working accumulated suffi cient capital to set power, which in isolation has no up his own business. Anyone possess- independent existence. “Life”, pure ing immaterial capital can participate and simple “bios”, acquires special

e Art Scene 11 importance since it is the tabernacle with virtuoso linguistic skills invari- of dynamis, of the more-or-less pos- ably gets more done. Virtuosity has sible. Capitalists are only interested shi ed from making – as evident in for an indirect reason in the worker’s the work of the artisan – to speaking. life: that life, that body, contains the Linguistic virtuosity, says Virno, has talent, the possibility, the dynamis. two characteristics: it fi nds satisfac- e living body becomes an object tion in itself, without attaining any to be managed. . . . Life is situated at objectifi ed goal; and it presupposes the centre of politics as the prize to be the presence of others, of an audi- won and is the immaterial (and not ence. In other words, the immaterial present in itself) 4. Virno, A Grammer worker is a good performer. If he is 4 of the Multitude, op. cit working force.’ (note 1), 83. to convince colleagues that he has a good idea, he must take a verbal, or CCommunication,ommunication, LLinguisticinguistic at least a linguistically logical, course. VVirtuosityirtuosity aandnd IInformalitynformality Even if no idea exists, the immaterial worker counts on his linguistic skills Virno comments, somewhat ironi- to keep on implying that he’s think- cally, that on the good old Fordist ing hard or ruminating in a positive shop fl oor there would o en be a way. Others either confi rm or contra- sign saying: ‘Silence, people at work’. dict him during the process. He believes it could be replaced Communication, in Virno’s today with: ‘People at work. Speak!’ opinion, assumes something in addi- In the post-Fordist setting, commu- tion to virtuosity. Or rather, com- nication has become all important. munication has a specifi c eff ect on is conclusion would seem fairly relationships among immaterial obvious, as immaterial labour relies workers. If nothing else, it requires heavily on sharing know-how and relational skills that have little to do ideas. Communication is productive with production. Workers must get within the contemporary working on with one another in a workplace environment, whereas it was once in which the human aspect plays an considered counterproductive for increasingly greater role. Virno refers the ‘traditional’ worker. e latter is to ‘the inclusion of anthropogenesis a ‘doer’, working manually, even if in the existing mode of production’. his job is only a matter of pressing a When the human aspect enters the button at regular intervals. Chatter, offi ce or factory, it carries with it an therefore, is a form of distraction or air of informality. e ability to get entertainment. on well with others – and daring to When communication is the key try out ideas on colleagues – involves focus in the workplace, the bottom a degree of trust. line is negotiation and persuasion. Although that idea goes beyond us rhetorical powers play a special Virno, it’s one worth analysing. A er role in the workplace. Someone all, one can question whether infor-

12 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence mality plays a productive role in the place, to encroach upon the body in immaterial workplace, which extends a subjective fashion. e following further than achieving good com- section substantiates the argument munication and a useful exchange that biopower can develop within of information. Informal association the scene extremely well as a form of with others also means knowing more social organization. about one another. About family life, children and, in some cases, ‘extra- SScenecene ttoo BBee SSeeneen curricular’ relationships. Private information can be a good way of In everyday usage, the word ‘scene’ checking whether an employee is invariably prevails in alternative dis- still ‘on the ball’ and, consequently, cursive settings. For example, ‘scene’ whether he’s working productively is rarely used to indicate socially and in the interests of the business. appropriate professions or groups. In fact, and more speculatively, isn’t We do not refer to ‘the scene’ in a more informal working environ- relation to civil servants, bankers, ment the ultimate tool of biopolitics? the police or heterosexuals; but we An informal conversation is a way do refer to the art scene, the theatre of evaluating an employee’s brain- scene, the gay scene and, not to be power without her being aware of forgotten, the drug or criminal scene. it. ‘A good work climate’ – which Creativity and criminality seem to can mean, for example, that it’s pos- occur to a notable extent in the same sible to have a pleasant conversa- semantic circles. ey have at least tion in the corridor or to go out for one characteristic in common within lunch or have a beer a er work with society: both creative and crimi- a colleague – has a dual purpose. It nal networks stand for innovation. can increase productivity, because Regardless of whether it’s a network employees enjoy being at work involving innovative cultural prac- (even if the work is not necessarily tices, alternative lifestyles or illegal interesting, good colleagues are a fi nancial transactions, it serves as an compensation); but it can also be a alternative to what is socially accept- highly ingenious means of control: able or commonsensical. Until now, the control of life itself. Informaliza- the word ‘scene’ has always been tion can mean, therefore, that the available to accommodate heterodox immaterial worker in all his subjec- forms in the discursive sense. Yet tivity is biopolitically ‘nabbed’ or recent decades have seen a remark- ‘caught out’ in his situational inabil- able advance of the discursive fringe ity to develop productive ideas. is towards the centre, making the is genuine biopower: not power set ‘alternative scene’ a quality label at down in formalized rules but power the heart of society. Today, labels present in a vetting process that can like ‘alternative’, ‘independent’ and steal round corners, any time and any ‘avant-garde’ rank as welcome brands

e Art Scene 13 in the economic epicentre. Hence the London, Berlin or Brussels, you fi nd word ‘scene’ cannot lag behind, as a familiar frame of reference despite Richard Florida clearly understands. what may be a totally diff erent cul- e scene as a form of social tural context. If, six months ago, you organization meets a number of cri- had mentioned the name Damien teria that fi t relatively recent social Hirst in any of these art scenes, developments. In a world in which you would have instantly created individuality and authenticity are a common ground for socializing, highly prized, in leisure activities as whether participating in an intel- well as in the workplace, the scene lectual debate or chatting in a pub. constitutes a comfortable setting. e e scene provides a safe, familiar, scene is a form of social organiza- yet admittedly temporary home in a tion that generates the freedom of globalized world. Or, as Alan Blum temporary and fl exible relations una- puts it: it off ers a kind of urban inti- vailable in a group (with relatively macy that enables a person to survive closed membership), for instance. in a chilly urban environment and e scene produces social cohesion anonymous global time. e reason, and a shared identity unknown in a to some extent, is that professional social category like an age-related or and public activities within a scene professional group. Relations within aff ect the domestic domain. Profes- the scene are relatively free of obliga- sional and private activities, work and tions, but not without rules. Someone personal relationships, o en merge wishing to enter the art scene, for seamlessly. Although it may sound example, must comply with certain facetious, the hotel lounge, vernis- rules or social codes, but these are far sage and fusion restaurant are set- less specifi c than the admission codes tings for both informal chatter and of a football club, youth movement professional deals. But professional or lodge. What’s more, one scene can deals may well depend on gossip, and easily be exchanged for another. is informal chatter may prompt profes- is where it diff ers from a subculture, sional deals. us the scene is the which requires a specifi c, almost rigid place where formality and informality identity. eff ortlessly intersect. And, proceeding ese are the very characteristics in that vein, the scene is the ultimate that make the scene an ideal form place for biopolitical control. of social organization in the present e foregoing inventory of public network society. Local scenes are and semi-public spaces that fi t com- proving to be familiar focal points fortably into the scene uncovers within a worldwide network. ey another aspect of this form of social generate just enough, but not too organization. It creates a Foucault- much, intimacy for global nomads. ian panoptical décor for the visual Whether you enter the art scene control of seeing and being seen. If in Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, anything: whoever is not seen ‘on the

14 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence scene’ does not belong to the scene, FFreiheitreiheit machtmacht ArbeitArbeit: FFreedomreedom and the scene which is not seen is a CCreatesreates WorkWork non-scene. And so the notion remains very close to its original etymologi- Events like biennials and buildings cal meaning. e Greek skènè was like a Kunsthalle or museum are ideal actually a tent: the hut or wooden semi-public venues for the art scene structure from which actors emerged. and for the circulation of creative eatricality plays an important con- ideas. You could say they form the stituent part in ‘the scene’. In other concrete infrastructure of the scene words, the scene always implies a or make the scene more visible: the mise en scène. And, by extension, it non-seen scene becomes the seen ties in seamlessly with the demands scene. is applies primarily to made of the present-day post-Fordist artists whose work is displayed by worker. As we have seen, he depends the organizations in question or is on largely on the performance of his display in the buildings. e concrete creative ideas. In so doing, he has infrastructure literally scenarizes the much to gain from these ideas being art scene, thus making it a more or communicated to the widest (and less permanent creative scene. is most international) audience possi- displaying of the scene, incidentally, ble. Foreign is chic on the scene. But takes place in complete accordance he gains only if the audience is reli- with the rules of post-Fordist art. As able. A er all, an idea can be easily a result, a person works under a tem- ridiculed but easily stolen, too. e porary contract or, in the art world public – international yet intimate – itself, o en without a contract in environment is the perfect place for what is always a vitalist, project-based promoting the social conditions that setting; the work – fl exible and invar- enable the relatively safe exchange of iably at night – is done with irrepress- ideas. Anyone stealing ideas within ible creative enthusiasm. In short, it the scene receives at least a verbal involves a work ethic in which work sanction. A claim that an original is always enjoyable, or should be; in thought has been copied elsewhere is which dynamism is boosted uncon- an option only if witnesses exist and ditionally by young talent; and in the thought has been aired in public. which commitment outstrips money. e originality or authenticity of an ese factors determine the spirit of idea can be measured recursively, the art scene. If you try to rational- therefore, if that idea was ever ‘put on ize this great, spontaneous desire the stage’. and freedom to work (by means of rigid contracts or labour agreements, for instance) or to bureaucratize or routinize it, you are in danger of letting the metaphorical creative genie out of the bottle. However, we

e Art Scene 15 should not forget that creative work from a well-defi ned (or un-free) fi nal- as described here is always a form of ity, primarily the pursuit of profi t. cheap, unstable work, which makes e fact that Richard Florida and the art scene of great interest to out- his ilk are perfectly happy with this siders like company managers and scene, as viewed from their neolib- politicians. Not only does it boost eral perspective, is suspect, to say the local economy and introduce the the least. Of course, an interest in city to the world market; it also, and the art scene from politicians and especially, reveals a biopolitical ethic managers need not lead to paranoia. that benefi ts today’s economy. Rather eir focus does demonstrate to some than believing that Arbeit macht frei, extent, a er all, that artistic phenom- as announced on gates to Nazi con- ena have considerable social support. centration camps, protagonists of If and when this focus causes the the creative scene seem to think that exploitation of the creative scene, Freiheit macht Arbeit (freedom creates owing to its informality and ethic of work). e type of accepted fl ex- freedom – a shi that would restruc- ible work that marks artistic projects ture biopolitics, bringing about a real would make gratifying advertising lack of freedom – the art scene will for a temp agency. Considering the have good reason for concern. rhetorical reversal, it is better to off er no opinion as to whether or not the concentration camp has become the central social structure of all society, as Giorgio Agamben claims.5 If the crossover 5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign involving profes- Power and Bare Life sional, public and (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). domestic activi- ties – and particularly the interplay between formality and informality, on the one hand, and seeing and being seen, on the other – is exploited on a rationally economic basis, the culti- vated freedom of the art scene edges uncomfortably close to the inhuman lack of freedom of the camp. Making a link between scene and camp is undoubtedly going a step too far. e point, however, is that the freedom of the art scene within the capitalist mise en scène can be no more than a false freedom, because it inevitably stems

16 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence FREI

HEIT MACHT ARBEIT

e Art Scene 17 Nicolas Bourriaud the political pro- gramme of con- PPrecariousrecarious temporary art is its CConstructionsonstructions recognition of the precarious condi- AAnswernswer toto JJacquesacques tion of the world. RRancièreancière oonn AArtrt He elaborates aandnd PoliticsPolitics this theme in his recently published In the follow- book The Radicant.1 ing essay, Nicolas 1. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York/ Berlin: Sternberg Press, Bourriaud reacts to 2009). Jacques Rancière’s claim that his ‘esthétique rela- tionelle’ is little more than a moral revival in the arts. According to Bourriaud, the signifi cance of

20 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence In a recent book, Jacques Rancière however, in accordance with Rancière, questioned ‘the pedagogical model that their areas of application are not for the eff ectiveness of art’, seeing in confused with each other. At no time today’s most socially engaged works are the artistic positions analysed in of art the validation of a model for ‘Relational Aesthetics’ described as relations between art and the political social relations that are not mediatised that has been outdated for 200 years. by forms, nor do any of them answer to We agree with him that the political this description, although social rela- eff ectiveness of art ‘does not reside tions can constitute the living material in transmitting messages’, but ‘in the for some of the practices in question. fi rst place consists of dispositions of It seems that the debates that have bodies, the partitioning of singular been raised by the ‘relational’ in art spaces and times that defi ne ways of since the publication of the book being together or apart, in front or at essentially revolve around the respec- the centre of, within or without, nearby tive positions of ethics, the political or far away’.2 However, it is in fact the and aesthetics in the artistic practices approach to this 2. Jacques Rancière, Le that are described. These practices spectateur émancipé (Paris: formal problem La Fabrique, 2008), 61. have been suspected of putting morals that is shared by above form, generating a purely ‘social’ the artists who are discussed in my or even ‘Christian’ or ‘compassionate’ essay ‘Relational Aesthetics’, which art; they have been accused of propos- Rancière misunderstands, seeing it ‘as ing an angelic ethical model, masking arrangements of art [that] immediately the existing confl icts in society. This present themselves as social relations’.3 misunderstanding was all the more We are appar- 3. Ibid., 77. perplexing because the book discusses ently confronted here with an optical the emergence of a new state of the deformation that is quite common form (or new ‘formations’, if we insist among contemporary philosophers, on the dynamic character of the ele- who do not recognize the concepts ments in question, which actually that art reveals through its visual reality include precisely ‘the disposition of because they make the wrong connec- bodies’ within their fi eld of defi nition) tion between the library from which and hardly ventures into the domain of they observe the world and the artists’ ethics, which is considered as a kalei- studios. So let’s put things straight: doscopic backdrop reserved for the these repartitionings of time-space not interpersonal dimension that connects only constitute the link between for the viewer to the work he encounters. example Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit In short, it isn’t the ethical dimension of Tiravanija, which is after all clearly the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija or Liam explained in the book, but in fact also Gillick that is put forward in ‘Relational delineate the actual locus where the Aesthetics’, but their capacity to invent relations between art and politics innovative ways of exhibiting on an are redistributed. On the condition, interpersonal level. Besides, the works

Precarious Constructions 21 of the artists who are discussed in my which lies at the heart of Tiravanija’s essay display very heterogenic relations practice. Yet, by inducing the idea that with the spheres of politics and ethics those structures are meant for ‘action, and do not lead to a global theory. dialogue, or collective discussion’, Ran- Which ethics do Vanessa Beecroft and cière implicitly gives the work of the Christine Hill have in common? What artist a political dimension. Tiravanija is their shared relation to politics? does not construct meeting rooms, The problem primarily resides in and for him the function of usability the web of relations between words and represents a backdrop that is more images. Rancière’s description of the formalized and abstract than Rancière work of Tiravanija overlooks its formal might think. dimension from the start: its arrange- Thus, the question is asked today ment, he writes, ‘presents the visitors in its full amplitude: Can we derive of an exhibition with a camping-gas an ethics from contemporary art? stove, a water cooker and packets of Considering the heterogeneous char- dried soup, intended to involve them acter of artistic production and the in action, dialogue and collective dis- large variety of theoretical sources cussion . . .’4 This does not really take on which the artists can draw, this into account the 4. Ibid., 78. demand may seem totally absurd. concrete reality of Furthermore, you would be right to the work: what about the colours, the ask what would be the ‘holder’ of that disposition of elements in space, the ethical philosophy in art today: The dialogue with the exhibition space, the work of art itself? The modalities of its formal structure of the installation, the reception? The materials it uses? Its protocol for its use? In fact, Tiravanija’s production process? However, certain exhibitions have never limited them- dominant traits in the contemporary selves to such a summary arrange- formal landscape, certain invariables ment as that which is ‘described’ by in the exploitation and management Rancière, who here seems to sketch a of signs by artists enable us to outline general, vague outline of a work rather an answer to this complex question. A than giving an exact idea of what it is fragmentary answer, of course, and just actually like. You might just as well say as precarious as the objects to which that Vermeer is a painter who depicts it is attached: moreover, precarious- domestic interiors in which women ness constitutes the dominant trait and perform trivial activities, or reduce the ‘reality’ of these ethics. By placing Joseph Beuys to a shamanic fi gure who this word between quotation marks, I speaks with animals. Here the stale- am referring to the Lacanian real, that mate fi nds its origin in formal models focal point around which all the ele- that underlie artistic arrangements, in ments of the visible are organized, that the importance of architectural struc- hollow form that can only be appre- tures, in philosophical references, and hended through its anamorphoses or mostly in the issue of the use of forms its shadows. On that basis: fi rst, every

22 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence ethical refl ection on contemporary art encounters that are the principle of is inextricably bound with its defi ni- all reality: in short, capitalism was just tion of reality. Second, let us postulate a chance encounter between agents that the real of contemporary art is that otherwise may have never found situated in precariousness, whose dif- themselves in the same space. As for ferent fi gures interconnect the works Foucault, he defi ned the enunciations of Maurizio Cattelan and Thomas Hir- that make human thought function as schhorn, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Domin- events that appear and insert them- ique Gonzalez-Foerster, Kelley Walker, selves in a given historical fi eld before Wolfgang Tillmans and Thomas Ruff . disappearing just as rapidly as they have arrived, fi ltered out by a new con- A PPrecariousrecarious WorldWorld fi guration of knowledge. Endurance, whether it concerns Zygmunt Bauman defi nes our period objects or relations, has become a as one of ‘liquid modernity’, a society rare thing. When we look at artistic of generalized disposability, driven ‘by production today, we see that in the the horror of expiry’, where nothing is heart of the global economic machine more decried than ‘the steadfastness, that favours unbridled consumer- stickiness, viscosity of things inanimate ism and undermines everything that and animate alike’.5 The constellation is durable, a culture is developing of the precarious, 5. Zygmunt Bauman, from the bankruptcy of endurance Liquid Life (Oxford/Cam- notably from the bridge: Polity, 2005), 3. that is based on that which threatens point of view of the it most, namely precariousness. My renewable, is the invisible motor of con- hypothesis is that art not only seems sumer ideology. Placing himself on the to have found the means to resist this level of the collective psyche, Michel new, instable environment, but has Maff esoli describes individual iden- also derived specifi c means from it. tity as eclectic and diff use: ‘A fragile A precarious regime of aesthetics is identity, an identity which is no longer, developing, based on speed, intermit- as was the case during modernity, the tence, blurring and fragility. Today, we only solid foundation of individual need to reconsider culture (and ethics) and social life.’6 Here, the observations on the basis of a positive idea of the of the sociolo- 6. Michel Maff esoli, Du transitory, instead of holding on to the Nomadisme (Paris: Livre gist appear to be de Poche, 1997), 109. opposition between the ephemeral in keeping with and the durable and seeing the latter certain philosophical intuitions about as the touchstone of true art and the precariousness. In order to produce the former as a sign of barbarism. Hannah philosophy that Marx never had the Arendt: ‘An object is cultural to the time to write, Louis Althusser places extent that it can endure; its durability himself in the ‘line of Democritus’, who is the very opposite of functionality, said that the world is made up of a rain which is the quality which makes it of atoms whose deviations produces disappear again from the phenomenal

Precarious Constructions 23 Kelley Walker, Black Star Press, triptych, 2006. Silkscreen print using brown and white chocolate, digital print on linen. Courtesy Saatchi Gallery, London. © Kelley Walker, 2006

24 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Precarious Constructions 25 Cerith Wyn Evans, chandelier in the A.A.Hijmans van den Bergh Building in Utrecht, commissioned by the University of Utrecht in collaboration with SKOR. Photo Jannes Linders

26 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Philippe Parreno, Atlas of Clouds, 2005. © Philippe Parreno and Pilar Corrias Gallery

Precarious Constructions 27 Thomas Ruff, jpeg bb01 (Bagdad Bombing), 2004. (c/o Pictoright, Amsterdam 2009)

28 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Precarious Constructions 29 Philippe Parreno, The Boy from Mars, 2003-2006. © Tate 2006

30 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Precarious Constructions 31 world by being 7. Hannah Arendt, ‘The no absolute rights as to their concep- Crisis in Culture: Its used and used Social and Its Political tual status. In the end, the question up.’7 In this new Signifi cance’, in: Hannah amounts to an interrogation: what Arendt, Between Past confi guration, the and Future (New York: gives you the right to set foot on physical duration Penguin, 1993), 209. artistic soil? Do you have the correct of the artwork is dissociated from its papers, the deeds that give you the duration as information and its con- right to occupy the land? From the ceptual and/or material precarious- perspective of a precarious aesthetic, ness is associated with new ethical and the question runs diff erently: what aesthetic values that establish a new matters is to know whether the object approach to culture and art. generates activity, communication, This precarious state, on which in thought, what its degree of productiv- my view truly innovative relational ity is within the aesthetic sphere. Here practices are based, is largely confused agrarian thought (the durable bond with the immaterial or ephemeral with the land) is replaced by concepts character of the artwork. However, of trade (the cross-border encounter the former is a philosophical notion, between an object and its users). The while the latter are merely formal or contemporary artwork does not right- even demonstrative properties that fully occupy a position in a fi eld, but only refer to their outward appear- presents itself as an object of negotia- ance. The precarious represents a fun- tion, caught up in a cross-border trade damental instability, not a longer or which confronts diff erent disciplines, shorter material duration: it inscribes traditions or concepts. It is this onto- itself into the structure of the work logical precariousness that is the foun- itself and refl ects a general state of dation of contemporary aesthetics. aesthetics. Thus, contemporary art assumes this double status of crossing borders PPrecariousrecarious ArtArt and precariousness, by the undiff er- entiated use of diff erent ‘mediums’ Etymologically, the term precarious – something that Rosalind Krauss, means: ‘that which only exists thanks from a very critical perspective, calls to a reversible authorization.’ The the ‘postmedia condition’ of contem- precaria was the fi eld cultivated for porary art, following in the footsteps a set period of time, independently of Marcel Broodthaers’s fi ctional of the laws that govern property. An museum. We can only acknowledge object is said to be precarious if it that the great works of art today has no defi nitive status and an uncer- present themselves in the form of tain future or fi nal destiny: it is held trajectories or synopses: the works of in abeyance, waiting, surrounded by Pierre Huyghe, for example, each con- irresolution. It occupies a transitory stitute a ‘building site’ with at its centre territory. Generally speaking, we could tools for production and diff usion say that contemporary artworks have that spread their eff ects in subsequent

32 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence projects through collaboration with a. Permanent Transcoding: Formal various interlocutors. The functional Nomadism model for these projects is precarious: In the works of Kelley Walker, Wade like in the fi lm by Jacques Tati, Jour de Guyton and Seth Price, forms are dis- fête (1949), a tent is put in place, dis- played in the shape of copies, forever in poses its eff ects, and then withdraws. a transitory state; the images are insta- Thus, precariousness cannot be ble, waiting between two translations, reduced to the use of fragile materials perpetually transcoded. The practice or short durations, because it impreg- of these three artists dissuades us from nates the whole of artistic production, giving their works a precise place in the constituting a substratum of refl ection production and processing chain of the and playing the role of an ideological image, because the same patterns are support for passing forms. In short, repeated with greater or lesser variants precariousness now impregnates the in distinct works. whole of contemporary aesthetics, Kelley Walker operates by linking in its negative as well as its positive visual objects: he depicts an uprooted versions. This includes managing the reality in works that are only ‘freeze duration of the exhibition; the huge frames’ of an enunciation in a continu- installations of Thomas Hirschhorn ous state of development, constantly dedicated to Deleuze and Bataille only incorporating earlier stages of his work. last the limited time of an exhibition, As for Wade Guyton, he leaves it to and sometimes only 24 hours, as was mechanical reproduction techniques to the case with his homage to Michel generate form variables that he intro- Foucault. The work of Tris Vonna- duces in his work. Mitchell is emblematic for this new Taken from magazines, television type of relation with the precarious: or Google search, they seem ready based on oral performances of the to return there, instable, spectral. artist talking about his travels with Every original form is negated, or the support of a complex slideshow, rather, abolished. Navigating through his exhibitions accumulate disparate a network made up of photocopies, materials, referring to other, simul- prints, screens or photographic repro- taneous or past exhibitions, none of ductions, forms surface as just so many which constitute a real conclusion. transitory incarnations. The visible The slide and video projectors, photo- appears here as a nomad by defi nition, graphs and rare objects that constitute a collection of iconographic ghosts; the them only weave an endlessly fl icker- work of art presents itself in the form ing circuit of signs in space. of a USB-stick that can be plugged into Besides the mode of production every support. itself, we can distinguish three main patterns in precarious aesthetics, b. Flickering: Intermittences namely transcoding, fl ickering and The phosphorescent drawings of blurring: Philippe Parreno fade every minute

Precarious Constructions 33 and only become clearly visible again place millions of years ago – and that once they have been reloaded by a is exactly how art functions, as a ‘delay’ spotlight; the candelabras of Cerith through which we can see the world. Wyn Evans deliver messages in Morse This new distribution between the code; Maurizio Cattelan develops a direct, the deferred and the archive is strategy of the ‘fl ash’, his works are a seedbed for certain contemporary governed by the surprise eff ect. These practices that insist on the unique, are all modes of fl ickering, the specifi c singular character of the artwork, on regime of the visible that is marked by its status as a non-reproducible event. intermittence, the programmed fading Tino Sehgal’s minimalist scenarios, of what is presented to our eyes or which he has staged with actors, or to our perception. Something mani- Trish Donnelly’s performances do not fests itself and then disappears from generate any visible traces a posteriori. sight: here the precarious is suggested, This insistence on the ‘here-and-now’ inscribed in time as the condition of quality of the artistic event and the the work. A work by Philippe Parreno, refusal to record it other than as an Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the indirect archival work, represent both a Year It’s an Artwork and in December It’s challenge to the art world (whose insti- Christmas (October) (2008), consisting tutional nature from now is confused of a decorated aluminium Christmas with a mighty archival apparatus) and tree that has the status of an artwork for the affi rmation of a positive precarious- eleven months of the year, but changes ness that consists of an unburdening into a real Christmas tree at the begin- – in keeping with the famous statement ning of December, is thus structured made by Douglas Huebler that the by the concept of intermittence. In world is already full of objects and that Carsten Höller’s case, the fl ickering he doesn’t wish to add any more. light that is present in a large number of his works makes us question our c. Blurring: The Indiscernible perception of reality: it functions as a In a number of photo series, notably major signal in the grammar of doubt in the jpegs, Thomas Ruff outlines a This art of fl ickering (as a function- typology of blurring: jpeg bb01 (Bagdad ing mode of the artwork) is associated Bombing) (2004) shows an aerial view with a vision of a reality that also fl ick- of an arid zone dotted with buildings ers: the present lags behind itself, as connected by roads. The title indicates is pointed out by Marcel Duchamp that we are dealing with the war in Iraq, (the Bride Stripped Bare described as and that the irregularities in the terrain a ‘delay in glass’) and later by Jacques are bomb craters. The dimensions Derrida (Diff erence as the gap between of the photo (188 x 311 cm) reveal the being and meaning). As it is delayed, pixels that make up the image taken we only perceive its shards, like those from the Internet, as the title suggests: supernovas of which our eyes only everything is enunciated, but every- record the explosion that has taken thing is blurred. In the Substrat series,

34 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Ruff blows up the original document EEthicsthics ooff NNon-Finitude:on-Finitude: to the point of abstraction, while on the TThehe PPrecariousrecarious PoliticsPolitics ofof ArtAr other hand, in a collection of photos of pornographic scenes, the original The social body as it appears in con- image is only slightly veiled. The aes- temporary art production does not thetic of the permanent zoom: reality is constitute an organic whole that needs mediatised by the Internet, then medi- to be changed from the bottom up, atised again by the blow-up. Like with as was the case with the framework of Kelley Walker, the image is presented modernist dramaturgy, but a dispa- in an instable, precarious state: it is no rate collection of structures, institu- longer a matter of framing, but a ques- tions and social practices that can be tion of the distance that is taken with detached from one another and that regard to the object. The work of Wolf- diff er from one society to the next. For gang Tillmans is also infl uenced by late twentieth-century artists, the social the issue of focus: Freischwimmer #82 body is divided into lobbies, quotas or (2005) is an abstract photo (we will call communities: it is a catalogue of narra- it that for convenience’s sake, because tive frameworks surmounted by tools of our doubt about its ‘identity’), which for home production (home technol- at his exhibitions hangs side by side ogy) or professional production. In with life-size pictures or close-ups of short, what we traditionally call reality still lives. What is striking about these is in fact a simple montage. On the few examples is not the nature of the basis of that conclusion, the aesthetic images, but the total equivalence that challenge of contemporary art resides these artists establish between the dif- in recomposing that montage: art is ferent modalities of ‘making visible’. an editing computer that enables us The world that they depict is indiscern- to realize alternative, temporary ver- ible and already pixellated from the sions of reality with the same material outset. (everyday life). Thus, contemporary art In the works of Mike Kelley, blurring presents itself as an editing console that is an indication of a displacement of manipulates social forms, reorganizes signs: the mise-en-scène of the form- them and incorporates them in original less is blurred in works such as Framed scenarios, deconstructing the script and Frame . . . (1999): the colours are on which their illusory legitimacy was applied on the sculpture (with paint grounded. The artist de-programmes from a spray can) so that they do not in order to re-programme, suggesting coincide with the form that they cover. that there are other possible usages There is an underlying project: as for techniques, tools and spaces at Kelley explains: ‘The meaning is con- our disposition. The cultural or social fused spatiality, framed.’ The meaning structures in which we live are nothing is blurred because it results from a more for art than items of clothing that displacement. we should slip into, objects that must examined and put to the test. It is a

Precarious Constructions 35 question of postproducing social reality artifi ce alive and productive, under- or, in other words, of confi rming, in a mine all the material and immaterial negative form, its 8. See Nicolas Bourriaud, edifi ces that constitute our decor. It is Postproduction (New York: ontologically pre- Sternberg Press, 2002). because our social reality has proven carious nature.8 to be artifi cial that we can envisage That, to my mind, is the essential to change it; and contemporary art, content (beyond the anecdotal) of as a producer of representations and the political programme of contem- counter models that subvert this reality porary art: maintaining the world in by exposing its intrinsic fragility, also a precarious state or, in other words, encompasses a political programme permanently affi rming the transitory, that is much more eff ective (in the circumstantial nature of the institutions sense that it generates real eff ects) that partition the state and of the rules and ambitious (insofar as it refers to that govern individual or collective every aspect of political reality) than behaviour. The main function of the all the messages and slogans it uses to instruments of communication of capi- comment on daily events. talism is to repeat a message: we live in Opening those channels of speech a fi nite, immovable and defi nitive polit- that are ‘blocked’ by the media, invent- ical framework, only the decor must ing alternative modes of sociability, change at high speed. The relational creating or recreating connections scale models of Pierre Huyghe or Liam between distant signs, representing Gillick, the videos of Doug Aitken and the abstractions of global capitalism the sign linkages of Kelley Walker each through concrete singularities: just as in their own way present the reverse many precarious constructions with postulate: the world in which we live incendiary eff ects that today open is a pure construct, a mise-en-scène, a avenues to a truly political art. montage, a composition, a story and it is the function of art to analyse and re- narrate it, and adapt it in images or by any other means. Rancière arrives at a similar conclusion when he writes that ‘the relation between art and politics [is not] a passage from fi ction to reality, but a relation 9. Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, op. cit. (note between two ways 2), 84. of making fi ction’.9 Thus, the political substratum of contemporary art is not a denunciation of the ‘political’ circumstances that are immanent to actuality, but the persist- ence of a gesture: spread the precarious almost everywhere, keep the idea of

36 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Kelley Walker, Schema; Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitening Expressions (Trina), 2006. © The Saatchi Gallery

Precarious Constructions 37 Jan Verwoert today’s culture. Acknowledging I Can, I Can’t, that you care Who Cares? about something makes it easier to From a person- make conscious ally felt necessity, decisions about Jan Verwoert whether or calls on artists to not you want search for a new to participate. form of ethics in this pamphlet- like text. An ethics that makes it possible to adopt a diff erent position concern ing the current demand to perform that characterizes

40 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence How can we address the current wisdom of grammar). So which side of changes in our societies and lives? the barricades are we on then? Where Some have said that we have come to do the barricades stand today, anyway? inhabit the post-industrial condition. We are the avant-garde, but we are also But what could that mean? One thing the job slaves. We serve the customers seems to be sure: aft er the disappear- who consume the communication and ance of factory work from the lives of sociability that we produce. We work most people in the Western world, we in the kitchens and call centres of the have entered into a culture where we no newly opened restaurants and com- longer just work, we perform. We need panies of the prospectively burgeon- to perform because to do so is what ing new urban centres of the service is asked of us. If we choose to make society. To off er our services we are our living on the basis of doing what willing to travel. Being mobile is part we want to do, we need to get our act of our performance. So we travel, we go together, we need to get things done, west to work, we go north to work, we everywhere and at any time. Are you are all around, we fi x the minds, houses ready? I ask you and I am sure that you and cars of those who stay in their will be as ready as you will ever be to offi ces. What do we feel about ourselves perform, do things and go places. and our lives? Are we happy? Are we in Who are we? Th is group is ever charge? What pain and what pleasure expanding. It is us, the creative types are we experiencing in the lives we have who have created jobs for ourselves by created for ourselves? exploring and exploiting our talents to perform small artistic and intel- I Can’t lectual miracles. It is us, the socially engaged who create communal spaces What would it mean to put up resist- for others and ourselves by perform- ance against a social order in which ing the roles of interlocutors in and performativity has become a growing facilitators or instigators of processes demand, if not the norm? What would of social exchange. When we perform it mean to resist the need to perform? we create concepts and ideas as well Is ‘resistance’ even a concept that would as social bonds and forms of commu- be useful to evoke in this context? Aft er nication and communality. Th ereby all, the forms of resistance we know are we create the values that our society in fact usually dramatic performances is supposed to be based on today. Th e themselves. Or maybe we should con- Deutsche Bank currently sums up sider other, more subtle forms of not its company philosophy in a simple performing, of staging, as the Slovakian slogan (formulated in a symptomati- conceptual artist Julius Koller called cally a-grammatical international them, ‘anti-happenings’. What silent but English): A Passion to Perform (you eff ective forms of unwillingness, non- have a passion for something but never compliance, uncooperativeness, reluc- to realize an end through actions, the tance or non-alignment do we fi nd in

I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares? 41 contemporary culture when it comes to inability by physically stopping you? inventing ways to not perform how and How could we restore dignity to the ‘I when you are asked to perform? can’t’? What ways of living and acting Can we ever embrace these forms of out the ‘I can’t’ do we fi nd in art and non-performance in art and thinking music? Was that not what Punk, for as forms of art and thinking? Or will instance, was all about? To transgress we always fi nd ourselves on the other your (musical) capacities by rigor- side of the barricade, with the perform- ously embracing your incapacities? ers and those who want to get things To rise above demands by frustrating done and get enraged by people who all expectations? When the Sex Pistols stand in their way by being slow, slug- were on one of their last gigs, when it gish and uncooperative? Aft er all, is not was practically all over already and the uncooperativeness the revenge uncrea- band simply could no longer get their tive people take on the society of the act together, Johnny Rotten turned to creative by stubbornly stopping it in its the audience and asked: ‘Do you ever tracks? Have you ever found yourself feel you have been cheated?’ Would that screaming (or wanting to scream) at an be a question to rephrase today? If so, uncooperative clerk behind a counter: how? Th ere are ways of confronting ‘I haven’t got time for this’ – only to people with the ‘I can’t’ that put it right realize that, yes, he has time for this, in their face. But maybe there are also an entire lifetime dedicated to the other means of making the ‘I can’t’ part project of stopping other people from of a work, of putting it to work, means getting things done? Th ese people work that art and poetry have always used, hard to protect society from change namely by creating moments where by inventing ever new subtle ways to meaning remains latent. To embrace stop those in their tracks who want to latency goes against the grain of the revolutionize it. Are they the enemy? logic of compulsive performativity Or are they today maybe the strongest because it is all about leaving things allies you can fi nd if you want to put up unsaid, unshown, unrevealed, it is defences against a culture of compul- about refraining from actualizing and sive performativity? thereby exhausting all your potentials But does it have to take other in the moment of your performance. people to make you stop performing? We have to re-think and learn to re- When and how do you give up on the experience the beauty of latency. demand and need to perform? What could make you utter the magic words What Is the Time? ‘I can’t’? Does it take a breakdown to stop you? Do the words ‘I can’t’ Performance is all about the right already imply the acknowledgment timing. A comedian with a bad sense of of a breakdown, a failure to perform, timing is not funny, a musician useless. a failure that would not be justifi able Career opportunities, we are told, are if your body didn’t authenticate your all about being in the right place at the

42 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence right time. Finding a lover to love may time pushing the ‘developing’ countries also be. Is there a right time for love? centuries back in time by outsourcing Stressed out, overworked couples are work to them and thereby also impos- advised these days to reserve ‘quality ing working conditions on them that time’ for each other to prevent their basically date back to the days of early relationship from losing its substance. industrialization? Sometimes the time What is quality time? ‘Is it a good time gap doesn’t even have to span centuries, for you to talk?’ people ask when they it might be just years, as in some of the reach you on your mobile. When is a countries of the former Eastern Bloc good time to talk? We live and work (like Poland for instance) are rapidly in economies based on the concept of catching up to the speed of advanced ‘just in-time-production’ and ‘just in capitalism, but still not fast enough. time’ usually means things have to be Migrant workers bridge this gap in ready in no time at all, urgency is the time. Th ey travel ahead in time to work norm. ‘I haven’t got time for this!’ the in the fast cities of the West and North. just-in-time producer will shout at you Yet they face the risk of any time travel- when you are not on time and make ler as they lose touch with the time that him wait. passes while they are away. Will they To be in synch with the timing of ever fi nd their way back into their time just-in-time production you have to or learn to inhabit the new time of the be ready to perform all the time. Th is other country? How many time zones is the question you must be prepared can you inhabit? Who is to set the clock to answer positively: Are you ready? and make the pace according to which Always. Ready when you are. As ready all others are measuring their progress? as I will ever be. Always up for it. Stay ‘Que hora son en Washington?’ sings on the scene. Porn is pure perform- Manu Chao and it may very well be ance. Impotence is out of the question. the crucial political question of this ‘Get on the fucking block and fuck!’ is moment. the formula for getting things done. Frances Stark recently quoted it to I Can me when we talked about the culture of performance. She got the sentence But would to embrace the ‘I can’t’ mean from Henry Miller and included it in to vilify the ‘I can’? Why would we ever one of her collages. want to do that? Aft er all , the joy of art, What happens when there is a lapse writing and performing freely lies in of time, when time is out of joint? the realization that you can, a sense of Are we not living in times now when empowerment through creativity that time is always radically disjointed as in ecstatic moments of creative per- the ‘developed’ countries of the fi rst formance can fl ood your body with the world push ahead into a science-fi ction force of an adrenaline rush. And then economy of dematerialized labour living out the ‘I can’ is not just a cheap and virtual capital? While at the same thrill. To face up to your own potential

I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares? 43 might be one of the most challeng- again. Disconnected from work and ing tasks of your life if not even your freed by love, all of the family members responsibility. Giorgio Agamben speaks start to perform: Th e son acknowl- about the pleasure and terror of the ‘I edges he is gay and becomes a painter. can’ in this way. He refers to an account Th e daughter decides to never move by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova nor speak again. Th e mother cruises who describes how it came about that the streets and sleeps with strangers. she became a writer. Standing outside Th e housemaid decides to not commit a Leningrad prison in 1930 where her suicide, instead she becomes a saint, son was a political prisoner, another starts to levitate and cure sick children. woman whose son was also impris- Th e factory owner himself decides to oned, asked her: Can you write about take his clothes off in the main train this? She found that she had to respond station and walk off into a nearby that yes, indeed she could and in this volcano. None of these actions are com- moment found herself both empow- mented upon and they are presented ered and indebted. as all having the same value as they are Today it seems most crucial to equally possible and the possibility of really understand this link between each of these performances does not the empowerment and the debt at the equalize or relativize the possibility of heart of the experience of creative per- any other. Pasolini thus describes a sit- formance. In what way are we always uation where the end of work and the already indebted to others when we arrival of love create the possibility for perform? In what way is it precisely a radical coexistence and co-presence this indebtedness to others that enables of liberated performances that are not us to perform in the fi rst place? Could forced under the yoke of any single an ethics of a diff erent type of per- dominant imperative to perform in a formance – one that acknowledges the particular way. How could we create debt to the other instead of overruling and inhabit such a condition of undis- it hectically to improve the effi cacy ciplined performativity? of performance – be developed on the basis of this understanding? How Who Cares? could we perform diff erently? Freely? In his fi lm Teorema Pasolini draws up To recognize the indebtedness to the a scenario of unleashed performativ- other as that which empowers per- ity. A factory owner hands over the formance also means to acknowledge factory to the workers. His obligations the importance of care. You perform to work have thereby come to an end. because you care. When you care A young man arrives at the villa of the for someone or something this care factory owner, he has no personality enables you to act because you feel or features except for the fact that he is that you must act, not least because a charming lover. He sleeps with all of when you really care to not act is out of the members of the family and leaves the question. In conversation Annika

44 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Eriksson recently summed this point up by saying that, as a mother, when your child is in need of you ‘there is no no’. You have to be able to act and react and you will fi nd that ‘you can’ even if you thought you couldn’t. Paradoxically though, the ‘I care’ can generate the ‘I can’, but it can also radi- cally delimit it. Because when you care for yourself and others, this obliga- tion might in fact force you to turn down off ers to work and perform for others, in other places, on other occa- sions. When the need to take care of your friends, family, children or lover comes between you and the demand to perform, to profess the ‘I can’t’ (work now, come to the event . . .) may then be the only justifi ed way to show that you care. Likewise, the recogni- tion that you are exhausting yourself and need to take care of yourself can constitute a reason to turn down an off er to perform and utter the ‘I can’t’. So both the ‘I can’ and the ‘I can’t’ may originate from the ‘I care’. Th e ‘I care’ is the question of welfare. In the histori- cal moment of the dismantling of the welfare state this is a pressing question. In a talk Jimmy Durham cited two people he had met in Italy as saying: ‘We are liberated. What we need now is a better life.’ Maybe this is indeed the question: How do we want to deal with the potential of living life caring for yourself and others by negotiating the freedom and demands of the ‘I can’ and ‘I can’t’ in a way that would make another form, another ethics, another attitude to creative and social perform- ance possible?

I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares? 45 Brett Neilson ity, according to and Ned Rossiter Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter. PPrecarityrecarity aass a But precarity as PPoliticalolitical CConceptoncept an experience has not disappeared. NNewew FormsForms ofof By interrelating CConnectiononnection, its various regis- SSubjectivationubjectivation ters and bounda- aandnd OrganizationOrganization ries, precarity can be seen as an The emergence aspect of a of precarity as common space. an object of academic analysis corresponds with its decline as a political concept motivating social movement activ-

48 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence In 2003, the concept of precarity rigorous intellectual debate, particularly emerged as the central organizing in online, open-access publications that platform for a series of social strug- carry nothing like the intellectual prop- gles that would spread across the space erty arrangements or impact factors of of Europe. Four years later, almost as most prestigious scholarly journals. We suddenly as the precarity movement have in mind the materials published in appeared, so it would enter into crisis. venues such as Mute, Fibreculture Jour- To understand precarity as a political nal and ephemera: theory & politics in concept it is necessary to go beyond organization, not to mention the prodi- economistic approaches that see social gious writing on the topic in non-English conditions determined by the mode of language journals such as Multitudes production. Such a move requires us to and Posse. see Fordism as exception and precar- The debate that unfolded in these ity as the norm. The political concept contexts was often fractious but, in and practice of translation enables us to retrospect, we can identify some com- frame the precarity of creative labour in mon elements. At base was an attempt a broader historical and geographical to identify or imagine precarious, con- perspective, shedding light on its contes- tingent or fl exible workers as a new tation and relation to the concept of the kind of political subject, replete with common. Our interest is in the potential their own forms of collective organiza- for novel forms of connection, subjec- tion and modes of expression. In some tivization and political organization. cases, for instance among groups such as Such processes of translation are them- Chainworkers or Molleindustria work- selves inherently precarious, transborder ing out of Milan, this involved an effort undertakings. to mobilize youth with little political experience through striking works of WWhathat WasWas Precarity?Precarity? graphic and web design as well as pub- licity stunts at fashion parades, in super- There is by now a considerable body of markets and the like. But the question of research, in both academic and activist precarity remained a serious issue that, idioms, that confronts the prevalence in its theoretical and political concep- of contingent, fl exible or precarious tion, would extend well beyond young employment in contemporary societies. people employed in the creative or new Encompassing at once sociological and media sectors. In its most ambitious for- ethnographic studies as well as incorpo- mulation it would encompass not only rating some of the most innovative theo- the condition of precarious workers but retical work being produced in Italy and a more general existential state, under- France, there is little doubt that research stood at once as a source of ‘political on this topic has gathered pace. Yet it is subjection, of economic exploitation and also the case that the critique surround- of opportunities to 1. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The 1 Political Form of Coordina- ing precarity, to use the English language be grasped’. Not tion’, transversal (2004), neologism, has already enjoyed quite only the disappear- http://eipcp.net/transversal/ 0707/lazzarato/en.

Precarity as a Political Concept 49 ance of stable jobs but also the ques- predate the growing scholarly interest tions of housing, debt, welfare provision in precarious labour. Nor is our own and the availability of time for build- involvement with some of these initia- ing affective personal relations would tives the sole determining factor for this become aspects of precarity. Life itself account. It is well known that academic was declared a resource put to work and work suffers from a time-lag and it there emerged demands for a social wage would be disingenuous to claim that or citizen’s income that would compen- this disqualifi es its validity or political sate subjects for the contribution made effect. In the case of the debates con- by their communicative capacities, adap- cerning precarity, however, the period tive abilities and affective relations to the of this lag coincides with the demise of general social wealth. This led to a fur- this concept as a platform for radical ther series of debates regarding the sta- political activity, at least in the Euro- tus of non-citizen migrants as precarious pean context. To register this tendency workers.2 Related to this was the ques- it is suffi cient to recall the fate of the tion of the gendered nature of precari- EuroMayDay protests. This annual ous work. Groups 2. Agir ensemble contre day of action against precarity, which le chômage, ‘Precarity such as the Madrid and Migration’ (2004), began in Milan in 2001 and spread to based Precarias a http://www.ac.eu.org/spip. 18 European cities by 2005, had entered php?article734. la deriva began to a crisis by 2006. Similarly, militant 3. Precarias a la deriva, focus their research ‘Bodies, Lies and Video research groups linked to the EuroMay- and politics on the Tape: Between the Logic of Day process, such as the European Ring Security and the Logic of affective labour Care’ (2005), http://www. for Collaborative Research on Precari- sindominio.net/karakola/ of female migrant precarias/cuidados/bodies- ousness, Creation of Subjectivity and care workers.3 liesandvideo.htm. New Confl icts, had reached conceptual Others began to 4. Vassilis Tsianos and Dim- impasses and begun to fragment across itris Papadopoulos, ‘Who’s approach precarity Afraid of Immaterial Work- this same period. as an experience of ers? Embodied Capitalism, Whether we are witnessing the Precarity, Imperceptibility’ ‘embodied capital- (2006), http://www.preclab. untimely exhaustion of a political proc- 4 net/text/06-TsianosPapado- ism’. Others again Precarity.pdf. ess or its timely absorption into offi cial drifted towards policy circles, the point we want to 5. See edu-factory collective investigating the (eds), L’università globale make remains the same. The emergence (Roma: Manifestolibri, transformations 2008), http://edu-factory. of precarity as an object of academic to the university org and Carlo Vercellone analysis corresponds with its decline (ed.), Capitalismo cogni- and related issues tivo: Conoscenza e fi nanza as a political concept motivating social nell’ epoca postfordista of ‘cognitive (Roma: Manifestolibri, movement activity. For us, however, this capitalism’.5 2006). observation has to be qualifi ed, not least Doubtless this is an idiosyncratic and because our own global trajectories (in selective memory of the debates sparked and out of Europe through Australia by the European precarity movement. and China) alert us to wider applica- We fi nd it important to remember these tions of the concept, or, perhaps more antecedents not simply because they accurately, wider instances of its dif-

50 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence fi culty in gaining traction as means of in the city where and infrastructure made possible by cheap migrant organizing radical political activity. we conducted our labour. In Australia, the 2005 conservative research, Beijing.7 government labour reforms known as At stake here is something more than Work Choices brought job security to differences in language, expression or the forefront of offi cial political debate, the limited uptake of travelling theories. contributing to the electoral defeat of The brief emergence of precarity as a this same government in late 2007. But platform for political movements in the concept of precarity did not feature Western Europe has to do with the rela- in the many debates and campaigns, tive longevity, in this context, of social which frequently highlighted economic state models in the face of neoliberal and existential experiences of risk and labour reforms. Precarity appears as an uncertainty. If one compares Italy, irregular phenomenon only when set where, in 2006, the Democratici di Sin- against a Fordist or Keynesian norm. To istra (ds) campaigned against Berlusconi this we can add other factors, such as under the slogan ‘Oggi precarietà, dom- the overproduction of university gradu- ani lavoro’ (Today precarity, tomorrow ates in Europe or the rise of China and work), the difference is marked. Like- India as economic ‘superpowers’ in wise, in China, where we have both been which skilled work can be performed at involved in critical research concerning, lower cost. But the point remains. If we among other issues, labour conditions look at capitalism in a wider historical in the creative industries, the concept and geographical scope, it is precar- of precarity has not fi gured largely.6 ity that is the norm and not Fordist While it might accu- 6. A project in Beijing that economic organization. Thus in regula- we participated in during rately describe the the summer of 2007 began tory contexts where the social state has work conditions to investigate conditions maintained less grip, and here neoliberal and practices overlooked of internal Chinese in studies and policy on Britain is a case in point, precarity has the creative industries. migrants who fuel As a counter-mapping of not seemed an exceptional condition the growth in this creative industries, this that can spark social antagonism. To transdisciplinary project sector, and has been foregrounded practices of understand precarity as a political con- collaborative constitution used by Hong Kong that registered the ‘consti- cept we must revisit the whole Fordist based academics tutive outside’ of creative episode, its modes of labour organiza- industries (http://orgnets. and labour organ- net). Material from this tion, welfare support, technological project was published in a izers to describe the bi-lingual issue of Urban innovation and political contestation. working lives of China (2008) magazine. Far from the talk of ‘neoliberalism as female migrants in 7. It may seem unusual to exception’,8 a deep political considera- connect migrant workers the Shenzhen spe- with the creative indus- tion of the concept 8. See Aihwa Ong, Neo- cial economic zone, tries; however, in the case of precarity requires liberalism as Exception: of China (if not elsewhere), Mutations in Sovereignty it was decidedly migrant labour supplies us to see Fordism as and Citizenship (Durham: the creative industries Duke University Press, absent from the dis- with its primary economy: exception. 2006). courses surround- real-estate speculation predicated on the rapid ing creative labour construction of buildings

Precarity as a Political Concept 51 Democratici di Sinistra (DS) 2006 Election poster, detail. OGGI PRECA DOM

52 LAV Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence O RIETÀ MANI

OPrecarityRO. as a Political Concept 53 NNetworks,etworks, MMigrantigrant LLabourabour aandnd tthehe housing circumstances, just as the corpo- IInventionnvention ooff NNewew IInstitutionsnstitutions rate absorption of new digital social net- working technologies promises a second In an earlier article, we worried that web boom. Our focus is on deeper shifts the European precarity movement, in to the relation between the fi gures of the some of its manifestations, tended to citizen and the worker. address the state as an institution that Both the fi gures of the citizen and the might resolve the problems of security worker have been invested by diffuse at work.9 This was implicit in many practices of multiplication and division.11 demands for the 9. Brett Neilson and Ned Within the creative 11. See Sandro Mezzadra Rossiter, ‘From Precarity and Brett Neilson, ‘Border social wage or to Precariousness and Back industries, regimes as Method, or, the Multi- measures of fl exi- Again: Labour, Life and of intellectual prop- plication of Labor’, trans- Unstable Networks’, Fibre- versal (2008), http://eipcp. curity. Who, we culture Journal 5 (2005), erty operate as an net/transversal/ 0608/ http://journal.fi breculture. mezzadraneilson/en. asked, might fi nance org/issue 5/neilson rossiter. architecture of divi- such initiatives if html. sion: predominantly copyright in the not the state or cultural industries, but also patents that some federation of states? It could be arise through technological innovation taken as a given that such welfare assist- in the it sector and trademarks in the ance was not assumed of the private advertising industry and its production sector. At the time, our concern was that of brands. McKenzie Wark considers such appeals might play into the securi- the extension of intellectual property tization of state discourses and political regimes with the advent of commercial- language that was one of the hallmarks ized computer networks – what is gener- of the fi rst half of the present decade. ally understood as the Internet – to have We were interested in the effects of a produced a new class relation special to possible convergence between precarity the information age.12 The antagonism at work and the ontological precarious- between ‘hackers’ 12. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cam- ness that Judith Butler associates with and ‘vectoralists’ bridge, MA: Harvard Uni- the vulnerability and susceptibility to moves around a versity Press, 2004). injury of the human animal.10 Now we property relation. Hackers are produc- want to extend this 10. Judith Butler, Precari- ers of intellectual property. Such activity ous Life: The Powers of argument further by Mourning and Violence is predicated on the self-organization rethinking the vexed (New York: Verso, 2004). of labour and a value system of shar- relation between capital and the state. ing that arises through social coopera- This is not simply because the redirec- tion and an informational commons. tion of public investment to the security Vectoralists, on the other hand, are industries following the dot.com crash understood by Wark as the ruling class of April 2000 is a tendency by now of the ‘vectoral society’. Their power is fully played out. Nor is it because the built around ownership and control of global economy is currently absorbing both the media of transmission and the the effects of a credit crisis based on sub- information of expression. Intellectual prime lending to those with precarious property regimes will always divide the

54 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence experience of precarity between vecto- usa and Germany.14 14. A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Program- ralists and hackers. Precarity, while an Such governance of ming of Globalization ontological condition or experience that transnational labour (Durham and London: Duke University Press, cuts across class and other divisions, and citizenship is 2006), 32-40. can never (or, better, not alone) offer a complemented by the materiality or new political subject or ‘common cause’, technics of production which, in the case as Andrew Ross argued at the London of informational labour, allows for the School of Economics seminar from high-speed transmission of digital data. which this text derives. The structure of it labour is fl exible Intellectual property, however, is not and typical of much post-Fordist work, the only dividing factor. With division in other words. The circumstances of comes the possibility of multiplication. labour in architecture offi ces located in The informatization of social relations Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou would constitutes, as many commentators be other cases to consider among many. note, an intensifi cation in processes of The example of creative labour is one abstraction. The transnational nature we fi nd useful in elaborating the consti- of much work within information tutive potential the practice of transla- and knowledge economies is now well tion holds for political organization. documented.13 That 13. See Biao Xiang, Glo- As mentioned at the start of this essay bal ‘Body Shopping’: An labour in many Indian Labor System in and discussed below, the varied work instances should the Information Technol- of migrant labour – from the imported ogy Industry (Princeton: become unhinged Princeton University Press, foreign expertise of programmers and from worker’s rights 2007). architects to the multi-skilled capaci- accorded to the citizen-subject is symp- ties of the peasant farmer who becomes tomatic of informatization (and hardly a construction worker and later a taxi exclusive to it). Despite the increasing driver – points to the highly diverse com- power of governance by supranational position of precarity gathered around institutions, the nation-state and its the sign of creative labour. How connec- legal organs retain a monopoly on the tion is built across these seeming social adjudication of rights, especially in and class incommensurabilities is con- the domains of labour and migration. tingent upon translation. Again, we are While informational labour is typically not proposing a new political subject or carried out in the space of the nation common cause here. Rather, our empha- (it also comprises modes of work in sis is on translation as a social practice maritime and aviation industries), the that brings differences into relation. To conditions of employment and mate- reduce labour within the creative indus- riality of production frequently sever tries to a separation between vectoralists the citizen-worker relation. Short-term and hackers is to attribute a determin- work visas granted to Indian program- ing role to the property relation at the mers in the it sector, for example, allow expense of complex forces and condi- temporary migration to countries in tions that vary across and within geocul- need of high-skilled labour such as the tural and affective spaces. The supposed

Precarity as a Political Concept 55 security afforded by intellectual prop- the citizen-worker whose protection is erty rights can thus be seen to contain sedimented in the state form of sovereign its own element of uncertainty, beyond power. It’s at this point that both con- whether or not a potential commod- nections and distinctions can be made ity value is ever realized on the market. between networks of hacker and migrant While dominant as a regulatory system labour. of exchange within information econo- The potential for commonalities mies, intellectual property regimes do across labouring bodies is undoubtedly not, in other words, offer much analyti- a complex and often fraught subjective cal insight into practices of translation and institutional process or formation. within the creative industries. Nor do The fractured nature of working times, they tell us how the common is actively places and practices makes political constructed through, and in spite of, organization highly diffi cult. Where social and political technologies of divi- this does happen, there are often ethnic sion and multiplication. affi nities coalesced around specifi c sec- The recombinant nature of skills tors – here, we are thinking of examples in the creative sectors, the necessary such as the ‘Justice for Janitors’ move- dependency on collaborative practice, ment in the usa, a largely Latino immi- both produces and is enabled by a com- grant experience of self-organization.15 mon through which other registers of On the other hand, 15. See Florian Schneider, Organizing the Unor- connection and relation are possible. as Xiang Biao ganizables (2002), http:// Yet the common in itself offers no emphasizes in his wastun.org/v2v/Organiz- ing_the_Unorganizable. guarantees for collaboration. Non-col- study of Indian it laboration may just as easily eventuate. ‘body shop’ workers in Sydney, Aus- Intellectual property regimes simultane- tralia, the ethnicization of workforces ously constitute a technology of divi- is not necessarily based on pre-existing sion and connection between hackers closely-knit networks based on cultural and vectoralists. But such regimes are affi nities, but increasingly predicated just one among many barriers to col- on processes of transnationalization laboration and do not easily engender and individualization that insert work- invention. Our argument is that unex- ers into the market as ‘free atoms’ in pected forms of invention – primarily the the neoclassical sense. The coexistence instituting of networks – may arise from of seeming contradictions – cultural such constraints as a strategy of refusal. networks conjoined with processes of In the case of the hacker, such refusal individualization – is indicative of the takes the form of constructing an infor- complex of forces that constitute the mational commons through peer-to-peer body of labour as a subject of struggle. practices of collaborative constitution In Hong Kong, domestic workers of and self-organized labour. The transna- diverse ethnic and national provenance tional element of such practices makes it gather on Sundays within non-spaces highly diffi cult, however, for the creative such as road fl yovers, under pedestrian worker to claim any legal affi nity with bridges and in public parks. The domes-

56 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence tics are female workers for the most at least depart from how these spaces part, initially from the Philippines with usually function, there is a correspond- a new wave of workers in recent years ence here with what Grace calls a ‘hori- from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thai- zontal monumentality’, ‘making highly land. And as cultural critic Helen Grace visible – and public 17. Helen Grace, ‘Monu- ments and the Face of notes: ‘There are also mainland migrant – a particular aspect Time: Distortions of workers with limited rights, working in of otherwise pri- Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong’, all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving back- vatized labour and Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007), 469. wards and forwards 16. Helen Grace, e-mail domestic space’.17 correspondence, 15 and living with January 2008. Not described in tourist guides and great precarity.’16 absent from policy and corporate narra- The domestic workers transform tives of entrepreneurial innovation and the status of social-ethnic borders by development, the domestic worker is a occupying spaces from which they are public without a discourse. For many usually excluded due to the spatial and Hong Kong residents their visibility is temporal constraints of labour. Sunday undesirable, yet these workers make is the day off for domestic workers, and a signifi cant contribution to the city’s they don’t want to stay at home, nor do imaginary: their visibility on Sundays their employers wish to have them about signals that the lustre of entrepreneurial- the house. The Norman Foster designed ism is underpinned by highly insecure headquarters for hsbc bank located in and low-paid forms of work performed the city’s Central district nicely encap- by non-citizens. The domestic worker sulates the relation between domestic also instantiates less glamorous but workers and capital and the disconnec- nonetheless innovative forms of entre- tion between state and citizen. This bank preneurialism. An obvious example here is just one of many instances found glo- consists of the small business initiatives bally where the corporate sector makes such as restaurants, delis and small-scale available public spaces in the constitu- repairs and manufacturing that some tion of so-called ‘creative cities’. Yet the migrant workers go on to develop, mak- actions of undocumented workers mark ing way for new intakes of domestic a distinction from the entrepreneurial workers in the process and redefi ning city and its inter-scalar strategies of capi- the ethnic composition of the city. Such tal accumulation in the form of property industriousness provides an important development and business, fi nancial, it service to local residents and contributes and tourist services. With a fi rst fl oor of in key ways to the sociocultural fabric of public space, workers engage in pray- the city. ing and study groups reading the Koran, The competition for urban space – singing songs, labour organization, particularly the use of urban space – by cutting hair and dancing while fi nance the domestic worker also comprises an capital is transferred in fl oors above the especially innovative act: the invention fl oating ceiling of the hsbc bank. Used of a new institutional form, one that we in innovative ways that confl ict with or call the ‘organized network’.18 The tran-

Precarity as a Political Concept 57 snational dimension 18. See Ned Rossiter, nature: local as distinct from transna- Organized Networks: of the domestic Media Theory, Creative tional. For domestic workers, much of workers is both Labour, New Institutions this has to do with external conditions (Rotterdam: NAi Publish- external and inter- ers, 2006). over which they have little control: Sun- nal. External, in their return home every day is the day off work, exile from their year or two for a week or so – a passage country of origin is shaped by lack of determined by the time of labour and economic options and the forces of glo- festivity (there is little need for domestics bal capital, their status as undocumented during the Chinese New Year). Internal, or temporary workers prevents equiva- with respect to the composition of the lent freedom of movement and political group itself. In this case, there exists ‘a rights afforded to Hong Kong citizens, multiplicity of overlapping sites that are and so on. But within these constraints, themselves internally heterogeneous’.19 invention is possible. Here, we are think- 19. Mezzadra and Neilson, ‘Border as Method’, op. ing of the borders of cit. (note 11). PPrecarity,recarity, TranslationTranslation andand sociality that com- tthehe MMultiplicityultiplicity ofof thethe CommonCommon pose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or another – as mentioned Precarity, situated in this transversal above, some choose to sing, engage in manner, is not exclusive to the human labour organization, hold study groups, or human nature as such, but rather etcetera. Ethnic and linguistic differences becomes an experience from which dif- also underscore the internal borders of ferential capacities and regimes of value the group. emerge. If, as Boltanski and Chiapello Can the example of domestic workers argue, the demand for fl exibility on the in Hong Kong be understood in terms of part of workers in the 1970s precedes a transnational organized network? The the emergence of labour fl exibility as domestics only meet at particular times an important form of post-Fordist con- and in specifi c spaces (Sunday in urban trol, this does not mean that precarity non-spaces). Such a form of localization can be bound down to any single set obviously does not lend itself to tran- of experiences, social situations, geo- snational connection. Perhaps ngos and graphical sites or temporal rhythms.20 social movements that rally around the One witnesses, 20. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit conditions of domestic workers commu- in other words, a of Capitalism, translated nicate within a transnational network of contest over the by G. Elliott (London: Verso, 2005). organizations engaged in similar advo- semiotic and insti- cacy work. But if this is the case, then tutional territory of precarity: the crea- we are speaking of a different register tive worker or activist in Europe, the of subjectivity and labour – one defi ned migrant’s experience of labour and life, by the option of expanded choice and the ceo undergoing an existential cri- self-determination. In this sense, we can sis over repayments on a third holiday identify a hierarchy of networks whose home, the policymaker’s or academic’s incommensurabilities are of a scalar affi liation with a discursive meme, the

58 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence fi nance market whose fl uctuations are Only after translation has occurred can shaped by undulating forces, etcetera. we sense what has been translated or Played out over diverse and at times transferred. So to identify the untranslat- overlapping institutional fi elds, the sign able we must continue to translate. and experience of precarity is multiplied To think about translation as across competing regimes of value: sur- organization is to come to terms with plus value of precarious labour, scarcity this predicament. Only by continuing value of intellectual property rights, to translate can we discern the limits cultural and social values of individual of translation, and only by operating and group identities, legal and govern- within these limits can we distinguish the mental values of border control, and so instituting of one network of relations forth. The translation of precarity across from another. It is within these contours these variables registers the movement of that we can discern the emergence of the relations. common. What we term the organized Let us be clear that we do not see network, or the instituting of sociotech- precarity as furnishing a pre-given cause nical forms, is predicated on transversal for contemporary labour struggles. In relations that remain contingent and identifying this experience as the norm precarious. The common is not given as of capitalist production and reproduc- a fragile heritage to be protected against tion, we do not propose that it can the ravages of new forms of primitive simply merge or sew together experi- accumulation and enclosure. Rather, ences of contingency, vulnerability and it is something that must be actively risk across different historical periods constructed, and 22. See Ibid., and Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Living in Transi- and geographical spaces. Nor do we see this construction tion: Toward a Heterolingual translation, even when posited as an involves the crea- Theory of the Multitude’, transversal (2007), http:// interminable process, as a means of col- tion of ‘subjects in eipcp.net/transversal/1107/ lapsing the variations of precarity into transit’.22 mezzadra/en. some stable, undivided subject position Let us take the example of taxi driv- (the working class, the multitude, the ers, many of whom are from the Indian precariat, etcetera). Translation can be a state of the Punjab, in the Australian city mode of articulation, but it is also some- of Melbourne. In late April 2008, after thing more than this. Clearly, translation one of these drivers had been near fatally has its scopes and limits. Nobody would stabbed in an apparently racist attack, deny that some forms of precarity can- approximately one thousand of these not translate into others. But the deeper workers assembled to block one of the question concerns how this untranslat- city’s major intersections for a period of ability is constituted. As Naoki Sakai 22 hours. They chanted, removed their notes, untranslatability ‘does not exist shirts in the cold night weather, issued a before transla- 21. Naoki Sakai, Transla- set of demands to improve their safety tion and Subjectivity: tion: translation is On ‘Japan’ and Cultural and working conditions, refused the the a priori of the Nationalism (Minneapolis: directions of police and the ministrations University of Minnesota untranslatable’.21 Press, 1997), 6. of government, attracted the media spot-

Precarity as a Political Concept 59 light, and caused massive traffi c jams these students are present in the country and public discontent. There are two on visas that allow them to work only things that interest us about this event. 20 hours a week, they are forced to First is how the diffi culty experienced survive by accepting illegal, dangerous by police and government in dealing and highly exploitative working condi- with the blockade surfaced in the claim tions. The question thus arises as to that the drivers were not organized. whether the blockade should be read as ‘They are not an organised group,’ taxi driver politics, migrant politics or declared the relevant public transport student politics. We would suggest that minister Lynne Kosky, ‘which is actually one reason for the effectiveness of the very diffi cult.’ Presumably this meant strike (the government, which had only that the group, which had gathered recently refused to negotiate with unions partly as the result of the circulation of of teachers and health workers, ceded to SMS messages, was not organized as a the drivers’ demands) is the fact that it is trade union with recognizable spokes- all three of these at the same time. people and negotiators. Inspector Steve To analyse this event one really needs Beith of the Victoria Police explained: to consider the transversal relations ‘There doesn’t appear to be any structure between these different subject positions. or organizers. Every time we try to speak From here proliferates a whole series to anybody the shouting and the chants of questions surrounding issues such as start. It’s very diffi cult to hear what visa and residency regulations, border they’re trying to say. There appears to control, race relations, the structural be different groups with different organ- dependence of the Australian higher izers of those groups. It’s very hard to education sector on international student work out who’s who’ (quoted in Times fees, the increased precarity of academic of India, 2008). It is precisely because labour in this same sector, the role of the drivers did not organize along hier- recruitment agencies in countries like archical or representative lines that their India and China, their links to English protest proved so baffl ing and threaten- language testing services, and so on. The ing to the authorities. Clearly, the event organization of the event itself translates was something other than a spontaneous between these different issues and brings uprising. It was not without ‘structure them into novel relation. It is not a mat- or organizers’. Rather, the potency of the ter of building lasting alliances between, strike rested on its multiplicity and inter- say, taxi drivers, university students and nal divisions, which remained illegible to migrants. Indeed, the very translation at the state but instituted a network of rela- play in the strike reveals untranslatable tions that, while precarious, brought the elements here. That participants in the city to a halt. blockade were simultaneously workers, The second thing that interests us students and migrants does not mean about this taxi blockade is the fact that that these three groups, when constituted many of the drivers are also international separately, share interests, social out- university students. Because most of looks or experiences of precarity. Within

60 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence the moment of protest, however, political fl ictual relations that compose them we possibilities emerge. The organization have a similar vision in mind. and political creativity of these ‘subjects To return to our original remarks: we in transit’ institute new experiences of do not see such processes of composition the common, which suddenly fl ash up and transposition as possible without in political space and then seemingly struggle. In the current conjuncture there withdraw into a space of quiet suffer- are struggles not just about the owner- ing, remaining all the more threatening ship but also about the most basic design because they can only be known in, and architecture of networks. Only in through and for their unpredictability. the context of these struggles do we The common, in this sense, refuses believe it is possible to claim the organi- any straightforward transposition into zation of networks as the ‘strategic and state politics and cannot be confi ned enabling point’ in the construction of the within a single channel of political com- common. To insert the moment of pre- munication. This is not to say that the carity into these struggles is not to claim common, in all its possible manifesta- that it alone is the concept or experience tions, exists outside the ambit of the that translates across different struggles state. Nick Dyer-Witheford identifi es and enables political invention. Indeed, differing moments in the circulation of the overburdening of precarity, the the common.23 These include: ‘Terres- expectation that it might bear the load tial commons (the 23. Nick Dyer-Witheford, of a common cause, is one reason for its ‘The Circulation of the customary sharing Common’ (2006), http:// rapid expiry within social movements. of natural resources www.geocities.com/imma- Any concept that so quickly monopolizes teriallabour/withefordpa- in traditional socie- per2006.html. the political fi eld is bound just as quickly ties); planner commons (for example, to disappear, or, at least, to acquire command socialism and the liberal dem- merely academic connotations. The rem- ocratic welfare state); and networked edy to this situation is not necessarily an commons (the free associations [of] open abandonment of the concept. Precarity source software, peer-to-peer networks, as an experience is unlikely to go away. grid computing and the numerous other Rather, we have suggested a broadening socializations of technoscience).’ The of the debate and analytical perspective. question is about how these multiple By working through and across the dif- forms of the common come into relation. ferential registers and limits of precarity ‘A twenty-fi rst century communism,’ we can recognize that it is the norm – or Dyer-Witheford suggests, will involve an aspect of what we have been calling their ‘complex unity’, but ‘the strategic the common – and not the exception. and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons’, which depend A longer version of this text is published in: Brett on and even exist in ‘potential contradic- Neilson and Ned Rossiter, tion’ with ‘the other commons sectors’. ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as When we talk about organized networks Exception’ in: Theory, Culture & Society (2008), and the transversal but also often con- vol. 25, no. 7-8, 51-72.

Precarity as a Political Concept 61 Matteo will develop in the Pasquinelli coming years. It’s important that this TThehe AArtrt ooff RRuinsuins debate goes be- yond the position TThehe FFactoryactory ooff of the art scene CCultureulture tthroughhrough and the cultural tthehe CCrisisrisis industry and that it includes the Now that the ruins that the fi nancial world immaterial accu- seems to be mulation of value collapsing, writer has left behind. and researcher Matteo Pasquinelli thinks the time is ripe to think about how the creative city and its gentri- fi cation processes

64 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence TThehe UUndergroundnderground ooff tthehe CCrisisrisis of production centred on language) and the uprising of the new political sub- Political and artistic avant-gardes have ject of the multitude in the same year always had an intimate relation with of the punk explosion: ‘Post-Fordism the Zeitgeist of the crisis and with the (and with it the multitude) appeared, in spaces and technologies that incarnate Italy, with the social 2. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Mul- each paradigm shift. The most recent of unrest which is gen- titude. For an Analysis the epochal turns has been the passage erally remembered of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: from industrialism to informationalism, as the “movement Semiotext(e), 2004). that is the reorganization of the Fordist of 1977”.’2 factory by digital networks. As Rebecca Later on more subcultures and art Solnit points out, the punk movement movements continued to experiment was precisely that form of life coloniz- and grow along the new infrastructures ing the suburban ruins that Fordism left of production, along the invisible matrix behind in the Western world. ‘Coming of microchips and telecommunication of age in the heyday of punk, it was networks, bringing the information clear we were living at the end of some- guerrilla over the information high- thing – of modernism, of the American ways and hijacking the language of the dream, of the industrial economy, of a society of the spectacle itself. Today certain kind of urbanism. The evidence the fi nancial and energy crisis changes was all around us in the ruins of the cit- the coordinates once again, revealing ies . . . Urban ruins were the emblematic both the energetic unconscious beneath places for this era, the places that gave the Western economy and the abyss of punk part of its aesthetic, and like most value speculation beyond stock markets. aesthetics this one contained an ethic, Where is the underground today? a worldview with a mandate on how This ingenuous question is useful to to act, how to live . . . A city is built to condense a spatial disorientation spe- resemble a conscious mind, a network cifi c to recent decades. If traditional that can calculate, administrate, manu- avant-gardes have been growing along facture. Ruins become the unconscious the ruptures and interstices opened by of a city, its memory, unknown, dark- epochal transformations, which kind of ness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it ruins are the digital age and fi nancial to life . . . An urban ruin is a place that crisis going to leave behind? Which rel- has fallen outside the economic life of ics will be colonized in the near future? the city, and it is in some way an ideal Instead of indulging in the rhetoric of home for the art that also falls outside the crisis or in a self-victimizing theory the ordinary produc- 1. Rebecca Solnit, A Field of ‘precarity’, it might be better to fi g- Guide to Getting Lost tion and consump- (New York: Viking, 2005). ure out from now on how to colonize tion of the city.’1 those spaces affl icted by the crisis. Coincidently, in A Grammar of the Contrary to what Solnit suggests, a ruin Multitude, Paolo Virno as well marks never falls ‘outside the economic life of the rise of post-Fordism (the new mode the city’. Relics of a former economic

The Art of Ruins 65 power, colonies of new forms of life, nized a specifi c artistic mode of pro- ruins are never a virgin territory. duction at work in New York: through The notion of the underground obvi- the seductive power of the art scene, ously belongs to the age of industrial- industrial buildings became attractive ism, when society had a clear class for newcomers and construction compa- division and was not yet atomized into nies turned them into fashionable lofts. a multitude of precarious workers and Zukin was quite clear about this passage free-lancers.3 The self-assuring spatial from productive economy to fi nancial dimension of the 3. Rosalind Williams, speculation: ‘By an adroit manipula- Notes on the Underground: underground seems An Essay on Technology, tion of urban forms, the Artistic Mode somewhat nonsen- Society, and Imagination of Production transfers urban space (Cambridge, MA: MIT sical in an age of Press, 1990). from the “old” world of industry to the collaborative networks and among the “new” world of fi nance, or from the well-educated ‘creative’ commons and realm of productive 4. Sharon Zukin, Loft Liv- ing: Culture and Capital in Free Culture. What does it mean to be economy to that of Urban Change (Baltimore: underground, when there is no longer nonproductive eco- Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). an outside? However, despite the much nomic activity.’4 celebrated horizontal cooperation, the In 1984, Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara autonomous production of culture feeds Ryan explained similar techniques of a vertical accumulation of value that urban regeneration in their article ‘The emerges more clearly in the economy Fine Art of Gentrifi cation’, that fur- of contemporary cities. Apart from thermore pointed out how they were the culture industry, the art world and affecting the aesthetic canon itself.5 urban subcultures have been integrated The renovation 5. Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara G. Ryan, ‘The Fine in a more general social factory that of the Lower East Art of Gentrifi cation’, provides, for instance, symbolic capital Side of Manhattan October, vol. 31, (Winter, 1984). for processes of gentrifi cation and real came together with estate business. Between creative indus- a neo-expressionist wave and they rec- try and creative commons, the chimera ognized the exhibition ‘Minimalism to of the creative cities and their gentrifi ca- Expressionism’ at the Whitney Museum tion processes can represent case studies in 1983 as a key signal. According to of new modes of production and zones Deutsche and Ryan the art scene of min- of confl ict yet to be explored. imalism was more engaged and aware of the social context, while neo-expres- FFromrom thethe ‘‘ArtisticArtistic MModeode ooff PProduction’roduction’ sionism was paving the way for yuppie ttoo tthehe ‘‘ArtArt ooff RRent’ent’ individualism. After decades yuppies have turned into bobos and these local- The integration of the art world into the ized tactics became a global strategy economy of global cities and specifi - under the notorious label of ‘creative cally into gentrifi cation processes is an cities’. In East Berlin, for example, the old and widely covered phenomenon. gigantic project Media Spree is going Already in 1982, Sharon Zukin recog- to transform an area of 4 km along the

66 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence Spree River, renowned for its music and sociality, tolerance, artistic movements, art underground, into a new district for gastronomic traditions, natural heritage, global media corporations. Contrary etcetera.8 Harvey’s notion of collective to the basic understanding of ‘creative symbolic capital 8. David Harvey, ‘The Art of Rent: Globalization economy’ promoted by Richard Florida, underlines for the and the Commodifi cation the debate on gentrifi cation shows at fi rst time a political of Culture’, in: Spaces of Capital (New York: least how cultural production partakes asymmetry around Routledge, 2001). in processes of fi nancialization and the acclaimed cultural commons: the speculation of material infrastructures.6 intangible assets of culture are linked A new art of rent 6. Richard Florida, The to profi t accumulation along the para- Rise of the Creative Class: has overtaken the And How It’s Transforming sitic relation of rent and not through the old artistic mode of Work, Leisure, Community regime of intellectual property. and Everyday Life (New production. York: Basic Books, 2002). To understand the new business CCommonsommons IIncorporated,ncorporated, oorr tthehe models based on the exploitation of ‘‘CommunismCommunism ooff tthehe CCapital’apital’ the immaterial commons it is useful to contextualize the role of the art scene The notion of collective symbolic within the history of gentrifi cation capital shows the asymmetric vectors theory. Neil Smith was the fi rst to intro- through which a very material economy duce gentrifi cation as the new fault line exploits cultural production. While a between social classes in his seminal mainstream debate is hypnotized by the book The New Urban Frontier.7 How- issue of intellectual property and the ever, he describes 7. Neil Smith, The New opposition copyright/copyleft, cultural Urban Frontier. Gentrifi ca- the gentrifi cation tion and the Revanchist commons themselves are peacefully of New York prin- City (New York/London: integrated in fl ows of material produc- Routledge, 1996). cipally through the tion and value accumulation. What notion of rent gap: the circulation of gentrifi cation simply reveals are the a differential of ground value across new rent techniques over the commons the city triggers speculation when such on a city scale. Besides the corporate a value gap is profi table enough in a offensive on copyright, there are also specifi c area. David Harvey expanded business models that exploit cultural the theory of rent to include the collec- capital with no need for dramatic enclo- tive production of culture as a terrain sures – a sort of capitalism without the market needs to get new marks of intellectual property that many activ- distinctions for its commodities. In his ists of Free Culture refuse to recognize. infl uential essay ‘The Art of Rent’, Har- Someone calls 9. Don Tapscott and 9 Anthony D. Williams, vey introduces the notion of collective it: wikinomics. Wikinomics: How Mass symbolic capital to explain the gentri- I prefer: Commons Collaboration Changes Everything (New York, fi cation of Barcelona. Here the fortune Incorporated. Portfolio, 2006). of the real estate business is rooted in Long before the bailouts that de facto the cultural capital which the city has nationalized Western banks to rescue been gradually sedimenting thanks to its them from the 2008 credit bubble, Virno

The Art of Ruins 67 introduced the idea of an emerging talents of the multitudes, but has estab- communism of capital. Post-Fordism lished a whole fi ctional commonality ‘incorporated, and rewrote in its own that hides the material and confl ictual way, some aspects of the socialist expe- roots of value. In European ‘creative cit- rience’ and in particular the collective ies’ artists and activists complain about dimension of cultural production. He gentrifi cation driven by cultural capital, writes: ‘The metamorphosis of social but no exit strategy can be envisaged systems in the West, during the 1980s until the debate is hypnotized by the and 1990s, can be synthesized in a more issue of intellectual property rather than pertinent manner with the expression: value production. communism of capital . . . Post-Ford- ism, hinging as it does upon the general TThehe RRuinsuins ooff tthehe UUnsustainablensustainable aass intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in tthehe NNewew FFrontierrontier its own way, typical demands of com- munism (abolition 10. Virno, A Grammar Art underground and urban subcul- of the Multitude, op. cit. of work, dissolution (note 2). tures made fertile again the massive of the State, etc.).’10 spaces and urban areas that Fordism left Gentrifi cation is only one of the behind. After cultivating a workforce of many cases of a value chain gener- precarious and freelance workers, what ated by the general intellect of the art kind of ruins is post-Fordism preparing world, urban subcultures and digital for the post-fi nancial age? Google data networks. Free Software, for instance, centres storing petabytes of 404-not- helps IBM and other corporations to sell found pages? Carcasses of computers more proprietary hardware. File-sharing and LCD screens, dumping grounds of networks sabotaged the music indus- iPods and mobile phones? Shards of try and its copyright regime, but at the dismembered social networks? Behind same time gave life to a new generation any digital and culture commons the of fashionable devices, like iPods, and barbaric shadow of value crisis is loom- to the MP3 market, too. Contrary to the ing. Referring specifi cally to a new cheap interpretation of Free Culture wave of urbanism as a response to the inspired by Lawrence Lessig and Yochai crisis, Bruce Sterling has predicted for Benkler (‘information is nonrival’),11 2009 ‘the ruins of the unsustainable as the commons of 11. Lawrence Lessig, Free the new frontier’.12 The gentrifi cation of Culture: How Big Media culture are never an Uses Technology and the the ‘creative cities’ 12. Bruce Sterling, ‘State independent domain Law to Lock Down Culture is likely to come of the World 2009’, Beyond and Control Creativ- the Beyond, 2 January of pure cooperation ity (New York: Penguin, to a halt and slide 2009, http://blog.wired. 2004); Yochai Benkler, The com/sterling/2009/01/ and autonomy, they Wealth of Networks: How back into the spec- bruce-sterlings.html. instead constantly Social Production Trans- tre of degentrifi cation. In the scenario of forms Markets and Free- fall subject to the dom (New Haven: Yale fi nancial crisis, is it possible to imagine force fi eld of capi- University Press, 2006). a role for aesthetic and cultural produc- talism. The ‘communism of capital’ is tion outside the net of the corporate then not merely exploiting the creative parasites as well as outside the cages of

68 Open 2009/No. 17/A Precarious Existence the museum and its ‘art activism’? The factory of culture is described today mainly by the horizontal (appar- ently fl at and immaculate) plateau of the cultural commons. Nevertheless this dimension is always crossed by the ver- tical axis of value. The positive vertical of the surplus-value extracts and accu- mulates profi t from the horizontal plane through intellectual property, monopoly rent and gentrifi cation techniques. On the other side, the negative vertical is the incarnation of the negative surplus, that is, the multitude of precarious workers and artists that compose the culture industry and produce value. Here fi nally we fi nd the underground – underneath the ‘commons’! The coordinates of artistic and politi- cal practice in the age of cognitive and fi nancial capitalism must be found along these intangible vectors of value, reclaiming autonomous and productive spaces against the material ruins of the Creative City rather than contemplating the reassuring identity of the precari- ous workers. As the punk underground grew out of the ruins of the suburban factories and cyberpunk along the fi rst precarious Internet connections, it is time to imagine the factory of culture entering the ruins of the surplus-value that the fall of fi nancial Babel are about to leave behind.

The Art of Ruins 69 Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen

TThehe DDismeasureismeasure ooff AArtrt

AAnn interviewinterview wwithith PPaoloaolo VVirnoirno

In his home town Rome, Italian philosopher Paolo Virno talks with philosopher Sonja Lavaert and sociologist Pascal Gielen about the relation between creativity and today’s economics, and about exploitation and possible forms of resistance. Virno is known for his analysis of post-Fordism; his view that the disproportion of artistic standards runs parallel to communism, however, is new to the philosophy of art. He believes aesthetics and social resistance meet in a quest for new forms. Political art or not, the contents hardly matter.

72 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence The art world has displayed an avid interest in your work over the past few years; we ourselves are here to interview you for an art magazine. Yet you’ve hardly written anything explicitly about art. Where do you think this interest in your work comes from? It’s true. I sometimes get invited to talk about art at conferences or seminars organized by art academies and that always embar- rasses me a little, as if there has been some mistake, because my knowledge of modern art is actually very limited. I think that people involved in art being interested in my work has something to do with a concept I use, namely ‘virtuosity’. In my opinion, this concept is the common ground between my political and philosophical refl ec- tion and the fi eld of art. Virtuosity happens to the artist or performer who, after performing, does not leave a work of art behind. I have used the experience of the performing, virtuoso artist not so much to make statements about art, but rather to indicate what is typical of political action in general. Political action does not produce objects. It is an activity that does not result in an autonomous object. What strikes me is that today work, and not just work for a publishing company, for television or for a newspaper, but all present-day work, including the work done in the Volkswagen factory, or at Fiat or Renault, tends to be an activity that does not result in an autono- mous ‘work’, in a produced object. Of course the Volkswagen factory cranks out cars, but this is entirely subject to a system of automatic mechanized labour, while the duties of the individual Volkswagen factory workers consist of communication that leaves no objects behind: of this type of virtuoso activity. I see virtuosity as a model for post-Fordist work in general. And there is more: what strikes me is that the earliest type of virtuosity, the one that precedes all others, precedes the dance, the concert, the actor’s performance and so on, is typically the activity of our human kind, namely the use of language. Using human language is an activity that does not result in any autonomous and remaining ‘work’; it does not end in a material result, and this is the lesson De Saussure, Chomsky and Wittgenstein taught. Post-Fordist work is virtuoso and it became virtuoso when it became linguistic and communicative. What do I think about art? The only art of which I have a more than superfi cial knowledge is modern and contemporary poetry. I think that the experience of avant-garde art including poetry in the 20th century is one of disproportion and of ‘excess’, of lack of moderation. Great 20th-century avant-garde art – and poetry in particular – from Celan to Brecht and Montale, has demonstrated

The Dismeasure of Art 73 the crisis of experiential units of measure. It is as if the platinum metre bar kept in Paris to defi ne the standard length of a metre suddenly measured 90 or 110 centimetres. This emphasis on immod- eration, disproportion and the crisis in units of measure is to be credited greatly to avant-garde art and this is also where it edges up to communism. With regard to the crisis of measure, art is a lot like communism.

Only poetry, or other art as well? Art in general, I expect, but I know poetry best. It is about dispro- portion. In addition to explaining the crisis, poetry wants to fi nd new standards of measure and proportion. Along the same lines the major Italian poet and critic Franco Fortini has said that there is an objec- tive common ground between avant-garde art and poetry and the communist movement – and I do not use the term ‘communist’ in the sense of actual socialism. What’s more, I consider actual socialism as interpreted within the communist party and the Soviet Union as communism’s worst enemy. This emphasis on the disproportion or crisis of units of measure is present in the communist movement and they are looking for new criteria, too. The experience of the artist-performer can provide us with a general post-Fordist model.

What do you mean by ‘crisis of the unit of measure’? It is as if the metre, the standard set to measure cognitive and affective experience, no longer works. We see the same crisis in the fi elds of politics and history: social prosperity is no longer produced by labour time, but by knowledge, by a general knowing, by ‘general intellect’, and as a result social prosperity and labour time are no longer directly connected. The new standard to measure prosperity is within the domain of intelligence, language and collaboration. The problem is that social prosperity is still measured by the old standard of labour time, while realities have changed and it is actually deter- mined by ’general intellect’. We can see the same thing happening in 20th-century art. It demonstrates the inadequacy of the old standards and suggests, in the formal sphere and through the formal work of poetry, new standards for the appraisal of our cognitive and affec- tive experience. This is a point that brought the artistic avant-garde close to the radical social movement and in this sense there is a kind of brotherhood between the two: they would like to explain that the old standards are no longer valid and to look for what might be new standards. Another way to put the problem is: how can you locate a

74 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence new public sphere, which has nothing to do with the state? Avant- garde art proved the impotence, the inadequacy, the disproportion of the old standards through a formal investigation. The common ground of art and social movements is never about content. Art that relates to social resistance is beside the point, or rather art expressing views on social resistance is not relevant. The radical movement and avant-garde poetry touch on the formal investigation that yields an index of new forms denoting new ways of living and feeling, which results in new standards. All this is far removed from a substantive relation.

So you see only a formal parallel? Do you think there is a historic evolution in this formal parallelism and can there be any interac- tion between form and content? No. When it comes to content, there is no common ground. There is only contact with regard to form and the quest for forms. To me, it is purely a matter of a formal investigation. The form of the poem is like the form of a new public sphere, like the structure of a new idea. Looking for forms in the arts is like looking for new standards of what we may regard as society, power, and so on.

As new rules? Yes, exactly, it’s about new rules. This collapse of the old rules and anticipating new rules, even if only formal, is where aesthetics and social resistance meet: this is the common ground where a new society is anticipated that is based on ‘general intellect’ and not on the sovereignty of the state anymore.

Do you mean: rules to organize the standard? It is a matter of defi ning concepts: the concept of power, of work, of activity and so on. In connection with art I would like to add, and this perhaps goes without saying, that after Benjamin we cannot but wonder what the fate of technical ability to reproduce is going to be. In our present context we need, aesthetically and politically, a concept of ‘unicity without the aura’. You both know Benjamin’s concept of the unicity of a work of art involving the ‘aura’, a kind of religious cult surrounding the artwork as is for instance evident in the case of the Mona Lisa. Benjamin points out that the aura is destroyed by reproduction techniques: think about fi lm and photography. The problem we face today is the problem of the singularity of experience, which has nothing to do with aura or cult. To grasp the

The Dismeasure of Art 75 particularity of the experience we need a concept of unicity without aura, for that particularity or unicity no longer has the character of an aura. Nowadays it is all about fi nding the relation between the highest possible degree of communality or generality and the highest possible degree of singularity. In art forms, too, what matters is fi nding the relation between the most general and the most partic- ular. Art is a quest for unicity without any aura.

Art and philosophy face the same problem? Absolutely. Philosophy is supposed to formulate a critique against the universal on behalf of the general.1 The concepts of ‘universal’ and ‘general’ are constantly being mixed 1. We have in most cases translated the Italian ‘comune’ by ‘general’ up, while they are in fact opposites. The because of Virno’s moves in the fi eld ‘comune’ or ‘general’ is not that which we of logic, his wordplay on a principal level, his translational referrals encounter in you, in him, in me but that to Marx’s notion of ‘general intel- lect’. However, the Italian ‘comune’ which occurs, passes, between us. My brain also means ‘common’, ‘communal’, is general yet simultaneously particular ‘collective’. So please keep in mind that in each case, the logical because it is not like yours or his: only ‘general’ also echoes the English the universal aspects are. Aspects that ‘common’. are equally present in us all are universal. ‘General’ refers to what exists or occurs in the borderland, between you and me, in the rela- tion between you, him and me, and in that sense there is a constant movement between the particular and the general. Marx’s concept of ‘general intellect’ is general, just as the English language is general and not universal. Language serves as a model for the general that only exists within a community and that cannot exist apart from the community. Our mother tongue, the language we speak, does not exist apart from the relation with a community each of us has individually, whereas our bifocal eye sight does exist in each of us individually, apart from the community. There are things that only exist inside relationships. When Marx speaks of ‘general intellect’, he refers to collaboration and so to something like that, which only exists in the in between. This concept of Marx’s refers to the general good. Now I think that in modernity, the general in both art and philosophy is involved in a complex emancipatory struggle to get away from the universal. This is also how I interpret ‘other globaliza- tion’ or ‘new global’ movements: they represent the dimension of the general that criticizes the universal. Sovereignty, on the other hand, is a form of the universal. So the question we now face is: What aesthetic and political experiences can we develop to transfer from the universal to the general without consequently destroying the particular?

76 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence Or take what philosophers call the ‘individuation principle’, meaning the valuation of everything that is unique and unrepeatable in our lives. Speaking of individuation implies that you consider the individual a result, not a starting point. The individual is a result of a movement that is rooted in the ‘communal’ and yet is, or is becoming, particular. It is Marx who, for ‘general intellect’, uses the term ‘social individual’. We can postulate that the general is some- thing pre-individual, a kind of general consciousness that exists before individuals form, and from which they form. This general pre-individual is a ‘we’ that exists before the different I’s develop, so is not the sum of all I’s. This is also in perfect agreement with the view on human development of the Russian psychologist and linguist Vygotsky, who was actually heavily infl uenced by Marx: prior to anything else there exists a collective social context and only beyond and from that context does the child develop into a separate individual subject. Or remember the formidable discovery of the ‘mirror neurons’ by the neurosciences, which tells us there is a kind of general sensing, an empathy that precedes the constitution of the separate subject. The Italian scientist Gallese, who contributed to this discovery, speaks of a space in which the ‘we’ is central. I think all these expressions by Vygotsky, Marx and Gallese are different ways to grasp the concept of the general as opposed to the concept of the universal. I would like to highlight this contrast, which is a hard nut that both political movements and artistic research will have to crack. The alliance between the general and the singular opposes the state and its machinery. Today, movements that side with the multitudes carefully anticipate this alliance: the multi- tudes are individuals who nevertheless maintain strong ties with the general. On the other hand, the state and post-Fordist society transform the general into the universal; they transform the general intellect into a source of fi nancial gain and social collaboration, and virtuosity into patterns and structures of post-Fordist production.

Returning to the connection between art and politics: how do you feel about engaged art, for instance about what Brian Holmes does or Michelangelo Pistoletto and his Cittadelarte – Fondazione Pistoletto? How do you feel about art that takes up a substantive political standpoint as well? Is it relevant? In this context I would like to talk about the Situationists and Debord, for they provide an example of an artistic movement, Debord and Situationiste Internationale, turning into a political avant-garde. To me, engaged art is an integral part of political move-

The Dismeasure of Art 77 ments, one of its components. Political movements use a lot of tools, including means of communication like the Internet, and politically engaged art is one of those tools. It is a component of movements’ political capital. Yet I would once again like to underline that the most important effect of art is set in the formal sphere. In that sense, even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality. The two are not confl icting matters. They operate on different levels. The formal investigation produces criteria, units of measure, whereas the directly political engagement of the artist is a specifi c form of political mobilization.

Do you mean to say that even politically engaged art is still part of a formal investigation? Engagement is closely connected to a successful formal investigation? Yes, what I mean is that even artists who are remote from the political movement may, through their search for new forms and expressions and in spite of themselves, get in touch with the needs of such a political movement, and may be used by it. Brecht as well as poets much more remote from social realities, like Montale, real- ized a similar relation. The Situationists were very important when they became a political movement, but from that moment on they were no longer avant-garde art: it’s about two modes of existence. They clearly illustrate this double take. Before 1960 they were an artistic movement rooted in Dadaism and Surrealism, afterwards they participated in social resistance, making the same mistakes or gaining the same merits as other political activists. Another problem is that when language becomes the main principle according to which social reality is organized, social reality as a whole becomes aesthetic.

So where would you situate art within society from a sociological perspective? Or put the other way around: What would happen if art was cut away from society? What social role do you ascribe to fi ction in society? Well, I think that Enzensberger’s quip is appropriate here. He said poetry is no longer found in volumes of poetry but scattered over society like an effervescent tablet dissolved in a glass of water. You will fi nd art everywhere, even in commercials. There is no longer a monopolistic location for the production of art; the artistic experi- ence is molecularly disseminated. We also live in a time, the post- Fordist era, in which human nature has become an economic stake.

78 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence Every aspect of human nature (that we are linguistic beings, the effect of environment on the human species) constitutes raw mate- rial for production. The debate about human nature that took place between Foucault and Chomsky in Eindhoven in 1971 was very important to me. This debate was at the heart of the social move- ments’ deliberations from the moment its translation was published in Italy. You could say both parties were wrong. Foucault denied there was any such thing as innate human nature, whereas Chom- sky’s concept of this innate human nature was so rigid and determin- istic that he thought he could deduce a political programme from it. I believe this discussion ought to become the subject of renewed study and that we need to have it again, to fi nd new answers to contemporary questions about the relation between human nature and politics. You see, today aspects of human nature have become sociological categories. One example is fl exibility. Anthropologists like Gehlen teach that the hallmark of human nature is the absence of specialized instincts: we are the species without a specifi c milieu. Anthropology uses notions such as ‘natural, unchanging truth’ but, particularly in our day and age, such natural truths have become sociological truths and the phenomenon of fl exibility and sub- phenomena, like migration, along with them. Another example: we human beings always remain children, we hold on to certain child- like aspects our entire lives, we are chronically childlike. This, too, has always been true but only now has lifelong learning become an issue. Yet another example: the metahistorical aspect that we are highly potential creatures. In the present context, this potential has become labour power. From this perspective we can speak of bio- politics, because biological features have become a sociological cate- gory – that is to say, a sociological category of capitalism. In no way do I mean to say that fl exibility and capitalism are sociological laws of nature. Nothing stipulates that society has got to be organized in this way, on the contrary. There is an aesthetic base component in human nature which, in the present context, has become an aspect of economic production. That is why matters have to be dealt with on a fundamental level. The concept of labour power also includes an aesthetic component, beside a communicative and a linguistic aspect. The problem of and for art, both intrinsically and formally, is to show this aesthetic component of the production process. Does contemporary art indeed represent this widespread aesthetic dimen- sion of present-day production? I cannot answer this question, but I do think it needs to be asked. Human nature, aesthetic component, post-Fordism, labour power: the discussion about art needs to be

The Dismeasure of Art 79 held in this conceptual constellation. What is left of aesthetics in present-day production in the collaboration and in the communica- tion that have become production power? Something transformed the extraordinary position of the aesthetic experience within society, for it is no longer extraordinary, singular and separate but has, conversely, become an integral part of production.

Let’s go back a little, to Enzensberger’s quip and the place where art is produced, does something like artistic autonomy exist anymore? Do artistically autonomous places exist? I think so, but not as many as there used to be.

So is it still possible for art to remain disengaged? Can art be resistance and exodus? I think it can. Linking the terms I used before to this question: the land of the pharaoh, from which the exodus takes place, is the universal. The exodus is away from the universal towards the general, however this occurs among the phenomena of the present context. The exodus involves the transformation of those very present phenomena. Nothing is external, there is no outside. The exodus occurs within post-Fordist production where linguistic production and collaboration, as labour and production power, create a public dimension that is not identical to the dimension of the state. It is an exodus away from the state and its machinery and towards a new public space that makes use of general intellect and general knowledge. During the exodus the general intellect no longer has the power to produce profi t and surplus values but becomes a political institution. What comes to mind is the space in which a central ‘we’ is a realistic basis for a new political institution. I think the pre-individual dimension and the features of human nature that post-Fordism put to work and converted to cash (fl exibility, chroni- cally childlike, no instinctive orientation or specifi c milieu) also give us the opportunity to create new forms, but in a manner opposite to what happens in today’s institutions – an exodus that provides what we can see happening in post-Fordism with a new form. Flexibility therefore, but interpreted as freedom. The chronically childlike understood as prosperity, on condition that it stops transforming into the necessity to learn lifelong as described by Richard Sennett. An exodus within the present landscape.

It is generally understood that post-Fordism’s breakthrough as a global production principle took place in the 1960s and 1970s

80 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence together with the student revolts and the Fiat strikes. Do you think that prior to that time there were areas that ranked as kinds of social laboratories for this production process? You could say that immaterial labour commenced when Duchamp entered his urinal in the New York exhibition. Would you support the hypothesis that the laboratories of the present post-Fordism are to be found in artistic production itself, particularly in early modern readymade art? Max Weber showed that the spirit of capitalism is deeply rooted in Protestantism. Can you indi- cate locations (of an artistic, religious or subcultural nature) in society, in this Weberian or historical sense, where preparations are being made for post-Fordism as a mental structure? You mean a genealogy of post-Fordism? I would be very inter- ested in a genealogical perspective dating back further than the 1960s and 1970s. I think we could regard the culture industry of the 1930s and 1940s and onwards as the laboratory for post-Fordist production that anticipated that which was embodied in industry in general in the 1980s.

What would you consider examples of the 1930s culture industry? Radio, fi lm . . . to me, they anticipate post-Fordism for tech- nical reasons: at that time, the unexpected becomes an indispen- sable element in the culture industry. The unexpected, which later becomes the pivot of post-Fordist production in the form of the just- in-time inventory strategy. There is no culture industry without an outside-of-the-programme factor. And that reminds me of what the two great philosopher-sociologists Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in their chapter on culture industry of their Dialektik der Aufklärung: culture, too, became an industrial sector and a capitalist assembly line but one with a handicap, for it was not fully rational yet. It is this handicap, not being able to foresee and organize everything, which turns the culture industry into a post-Fordist laboratory. The culture industry is the antechamber of present-day production techniques. For what escapes programmes is, indeed, that element of fl exibility. And of course I also see that anticipation because the culture indus- try’s base materials are language and imagination.

Today, we see artistic expressions and activities simply being situated at the centre of post-Fordist economy. Think about, for instance, artistic expressions in commercials or advertising but also about the incredible growth of the cultural and crea- tive industries. Art, or at least creativity, has not been socially

The Dismeasure of Art 81 marginal, which was how Michel de Certeau saw them for a long time. Yet even Wittgenstein and you yourself place creative space in the margin or as you call it, on a sidetrack. Might the discrep- ancy between margin and centre not be obsolete? I see creativity as diffuse, without a privileged centre. As a no-matter-what creativity, under weak leadership if you can call it that, having no specifi c location, connected to the fact that we humans are linguistic beings: art is anybody’s.

Does creativity transform when it is at the centre of the post- Fordist production system? Or, more concrete: is there a differ- ence between a creative thinker or artist and a web designer or a publicity expert at the centre of the economic process? Are these two kinds of creativity, or is it about the same kind of creativity? This is a complex dialectic. First, it is important to post-Fordist capitalism that creativity develops autonomously, so it can subse- quently catch it and appropriate it. Capitalism cannot organize refl ection and creativity, for then it would no longer be creativity. The form applied here is that of the ghetto: ‘You go on and make new music, and then we will go and commercialize that new music.’ It is important for creativity to have autonomy, because it forms in the collaboration that is general and consequently the opposite of universal. Creativity feeds off the general. I would like to elucidate this through the distinction Marx made between formal and real subsumption or subjection. In the case of formal subsumption, the capitalist appropriates a production cycle that already exists. In the case of real subsumption, the capitalist organizes the produc- tion cycle moment by moment. Now it seems to me that the existent post-Fordism in many cases implies that we have returned to formal subsumption. It is important for social collaboration to produce its intelligence and create its forms. Afterwards, that intelligence and those forms are captured and incorporated by the capitalist, who has no choice but to do so if he wants to acquire that which can only grow outside of him or outside his organization. So the capitalists want to seize autonomously and freely produced intelligence and forms: to realize a surplus value of course, not to realize greater freedom for the people. A certain degree of autonomy or freedom is necessary and there- fore permissible. Social collaboration has to be something with a certain degree of self-organization in order to be productive in a capitalist manner. If the work was organized directly by the capi- talist, it would be unprofi table. To yield a profi t and be useful from

82 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence the perspective of the capitalist, the work needs to some extent to be established through self-organization. It is diffi cult to grasp this complex dialectic by using theoretical categories. That which is really productive from an economic point of view is not the sum of the individual labourers’ output, but the context of collaboration and interaction – provided that it follows its own logic of growth, inves- tigation and invention to some extent. In other words, the process is subject to our own initiative. It is a condition for my exploitation that I produce intelligence and collaboration, and I can only do so when I am, to some degree, free. So I need to be granted a certain degree of autonomy in order to be exploited.

Can the myth of the autonomous artist be seen as a capitalist construction? First and foremost I think about the autonomy that is functional in creating surplus value, the autonomy that is essential to innovation and to the optimization and development of collaboration. This is a patented and therefore a regulated autonomy, which is absolutely vital when labour has become linguistic and communicative. At that time, speaker-workers must be permitted autonomy. In Witt- gensteinian terms it is a matter of ‘language games’ being used as a source of production. Language games do not just exist, they need to be developed and that is impossible within a rigid structure with all sentences and dialogues pre-recorded and scripted. Language games presume some degree of freedom or autonomy. However, I do not share the view that the present context includes more freedom and prosperity. A grinding poverty reigns in post-Fordism. The worst poverty you can imagine, for it is communication skills themselves that are claimed, exploited, and as capital, too.

Now that we are talking about exploitation perhaps we might address the question of how to fi ght it. Today in Rome we saw posters displayed by the opposition featuring the slogan ‘Il lavoro nobilita. Il precariato no’. Whether or not there is nobility in labour remains to be seen, but we all agree that the precariat is a condition to avoid, a grinding exploitation. We urgently need forms of resistance, developed by and for ‘precarious workers’ or precari. What is your take on such forms of resistance? Are they, in keeping with what you said earlier, forms of life? Can they be artistic expressions as well? Can you concretize this? Let’s take the example of someone who works for Italian televi- sion and radio: thousands of people with an unclear and insecure

The Dismeasure of Art 83 status . . . are being exploited. They form a so-called precariat. They have to work a lot, work hard, be inventive and focused all the time. They do not make a lot of money, are employed for three months and then unemployed for six more. How can these people organize? Not in the workplace: now you see them there, now you don’t. As a rule, TV and radio’s precari are well-educated creative people with a lot of cultural baggage, a rich cultural and social life: typical post- Fordist workers. However, what applies to them also applies to any example of a precariat, including Alitalia’s. Developing forms of resistance from, for and by the precari means doing so within the very broad context in which they live their lives. It means involving every aspect of their lives, their place of residence, the places they spend their leisure, their communication networks. You cannot organize television people without involving the districts they live in. You cannot abstract from the theatres they visit. In short, the whole problem concerns so many aspects and vital dimensions that devel- oping a form of resistance means inventing new institutions. How should I concretize this? How do we invent new institutions? What can the forms of resistance of the precari look like? This is of course the big X on the European political scene. Politics in Europe means fi nding the precariat forms of resistance. There is a prec- edent, an example perhaps for this problem, in the IWW, Industrial Workers of the World. At the beginning of the 20th century no-one knew how to organize the mobile migrant labourers in the USA, either. They were highly scattered, very mobile and their resistance did not look as if it could be organized. Yet for about ten years the IWW managed to put up their seemingly impossible struggle with some success. Their importance therefore should not be underrated, even if they did lose in the end and get massacred. Perhaps today, we ought to look in the same direction, to a new kind of union that will fi nd a new form of resistance. The strike no longer works. We need new forms that are much more linguistic and creative, much more collaborative. The precari are the extreme product of the big city experience and of post-Fordist capitalism. That is why they are a foothold for the onset of refl ection. Organizing them means organ- izing lives and there is no model for that. It cannot be done without investigating the districts they move around in, their circuits of cultural consumption, their collective habits. The precari are actu- ally the social individual, therefore they are always more than one, they are the counterpart of the ‘general intellect’. But organizing the social individual is very hard for, as I said, they are more than one, scattered, a brittle faction. We need research. Philosophy, including

84 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence the philosophy of language, has to concern itself with the issue of what resistance forms may be developed starting from the precari. This is not a technical problem, on the contrary, it is an ethical matter and also an artistic matter. It is an institutional problem. Organizing the precari will mean fi nding new institutions in the broad sense of the word and the opposite of state sovereignty. The measure of resistance today depends precisely on dedication to this major objective.

This is an abridged version of the interview with Paolo Virno. The complete text is available at www.opencahier.nl

The Dismeasure of Art 85 column

GERALD RAUNIG cheap drugs known in their users’ slang by that name. ‘Speed’, in SPEED! its narrower, drug-related sense in post-Fordist capitalism, no ‘The concept of post-Fordism is longer implies, as in the preced- invented for that which dawns as the ing century, an ambivalent accelera- future – a linguistic hereafter that tion, conditioner for the pressures seems to stand obtusely at the exit of professional life and resistant from the past, knocking timidly at medium of new subcultures. In an the door of the future because its astounding process of disambigua- old home no longer exists.’ Thus tion it is increasingly found only Hans-Christian Dany, describing on the affi rmative side, although the threshold from Fordism to post- now more strongly as an element of Fordism in his cultural history of caring for self. Controlled intoxi- amphetamines published by Nautilus- cation is more and more part of a Verlag Hamburg in 2008. And just as well-ordered relation to self, where the ‘linguistic hereafter’ has been getting high and consciousness-rais- peering round the corner into the ing are deliberate means of self- future now for a pretty long time, effectivization. In the cocktail of obtusely if not without curios- neoliberal-governmental modes of ity, so the linguistic labels for subjectivization the ‘speed’ family the social transformations taking of drugs has become one of a host of place since the late 1960s have gone components in a generalized style of on multiplying: post-industrial self-government. society, service society, infor- ‘Speed’, however, by no means mation society, network society, refers any longer exclusively to cognitive capitalism, knowledge drug use, but increasingly to all economy, and so forth. No matter areas of production and reproduc- what the perspective, however, it is tion. And in the sphere of produc- the acceleration, pace and speed of tion it not only concerns the accel- the currents fl owing through it that eration of material work processes defi ne the quality of the ‘future’ but also, and above all, the immate- whose door we have long since rial terrain of the cognitive, the passed through. communicative and the affective. It is not by chance that Dany’s Dany describes this in detail with book is titled Speed. Social trans- reference to a proto-post-Fordist formations are also central to the avant-garde that was already moving changes of function and use of the into the new era 40 years ago: Andy

88 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence Warhol’s Factory. In this factory – us, so the apparatuses adopt our much as in the completely different skills, technology and knowledge. political contexts of the fabbrica It is as if we had simply gone a step diffusa conceptually formulated by further in the incessant process of Italy’s operaist theoreticians and becoming machines, from a Fordist- put to the test in the struggles of industrial osmosis with the produc- the Autonomia at the start of the tion line to a post-Fordist-infor- 1970s – the time and space of its mational osmosis with computers. And subjects are diffuse. As ‘pioneers just as the nineteenth-century view of the new work’ they have no perma- of machines as something like the nent collective workplace and know extension of our arms was reductive, nothing of orderly Fordist time. And so too now there is the simplistic they no longer produce things but view of the computer as prosthetic atmospheres: ‘The majority of those brain. Involved here is not just a present are involved in activities one-sided extension of the human that aren’t immediately recogniz- body or the upgrading of the human able as work and mostly look like being by a machine, but as ever a the opposite, so that some think fl ow of machinic currents that perme- it’s a party.’ This new form of ate things, people and socialities employment is no longer based on the alike. separation of work and free time, Once the acceleration of these achievement and leisure, factory and currents tends to infi nity, however, home, sobriety and drug consumption, and that moreover on the basis of a but on the blurring of the for- machinic desire driving us, grave merly clear-cut boundaries between consequences ensue for living and these areas. working conditions. Some of the Speed shakes off its more or less worst excesses are the outsourcing intentional marginality and becomes of material dirty work to the global central to post-Fordist production, peripheries, recent interrelated extending far beyond peripheral drug forms of sexist and racist exploi- use as dependence on all forms of tation, and the development of new acceleration, especially depend- pathologies specifi c to the full- ence on being attached to acceler- speed subjects in the era of pre- ated communication and information caritization. But machinic desire, technologies. And in this dependent as a producer of wishes, also has a attachment the components of the revolutionary side. In combating the apparatuses traditionally referred new subjectivizations, the new atom- to as machines and our own machinic izing forms of individualization, subjectivizations intermingle. Just it is no use simply turning one’s as we adopt the modes of function- back on machines, or wrecking them, ing of the technical apparatuses or throwing clogs in the works. Nor that we operate and that operate are the current patterns of dealing

Column 89 with sociality any help, the yearn- ing for a state that parcels social space and for a closed community are losing all meaning. What we must rather ask is: What are these machines in which accelerated- accelerating singularities can link up together instead of returning to the identitary vessels of commu- nity and rasterization by the state apparatuses? What is the nature of this new irrepressible link among these singularities that cannot be understood in terms of homogenizing cohesion? How and where do offensive accelerative strategies emerge, as traffi c and concatenation, linked by the absence of any link?

90 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence RECETAS URBANAS

Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescrip- tions), an architecture fi rm based in Sevilla, was founded in 2001 by Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda. The fi rm is devoted to making interventions in the precarious nature of the urban environment. Their aim is to win back public space for the city’s inhabitants by creating ‘urban interventions and situations’, as they call them. Subversive occupations of public space are proposed in the form of portable architecture. These interventions are often on the borders of what is legal and what is not legal. The editors of Open asked the fi rm to make a contribution that gives

94 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence an idea of its practice. On the poster inserted as a separate supplement, Recetas Urbanas presents a selection of the urban interventions they have developed, which are intended to improve the social conditions of the city’s inhabitants in the hope that they can regain control of their environment. All Urban Prescriptions are at the disposal of the public on their website www.recetasurbanas.net.

(Olga Cordón Gironés)

Recetas Urbanas 95 96 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence Recetas Urbanas 97 Brian Holmes

MMarceloarcelo EExpósito’sxpósito’s EEntrentre SSueñosueños

TTowardsowards tthehe NewNew BBodyody

In the past few years, Spanish artist Marcelo Expósito real- ized a series of videos entitled Entre Sueños – his testimony of a new social confl ict. Art and culture critic Brian Holmes analyses these videos and shows that, besides carry- ing an activist message, they illustrate the history of its artistic expression.

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Upon opening my laptop to write this article I found an email text with the latest news from Greece, where night after night demon- strators had been facing off with the police, expressing their rage at the murder of the young Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Immense social issues, as pervasive as they are everywhere invisible, were thrust into the burning actuality of the streets by the bullet that pierced the boy’s heart. Th e text says this: ‘Th e youth is revolting because they want to live. With every last one of the meanings of the word “life”. Th ey want to live freely, they want space to create, to emancipate themselves, to play. Th ey don’t want to spend their adolescence in -hour days of school and extra courses, their fi rst adult years in the pointless chase of a university degree, the passport to a glorious -euro/-hours-a-week job in a boring offi ce. . . . We crave to construct our own, autonomous future . . . When you really want to live, a spark is enough to make you instinc- . Anonymous, ‘Th e Revenge of Life’,  December , at http:// tively attack anything that you think stands indy.gr/analysis/the-revenge-of-life. in your way.’ Th e corrupt politics and stagnant economy of Greece are unique, say the security offi cials. But in Europe and across the developed world, the neoliberal revolution has brought precarious working and living conditions to an entire generation. Meanwhile, city centres became glittering spectacles and skyrocketing levels of inequality were seen only from the viewpoint of the elites. Th e failure of the transnational fi nancial system now guarantees that the ‘unique’ con- ditions of Greece will be duplicated in country after country. Like life itself, like art at its best, the spark from the south of Europe is something you can feel in your own body. As the tension mounts and the demonstrations break out, how many museums and educational programmes will have the courage to explore the work of activist-artists who have dealt directly with the aff ects, the aspirations and the self-organization of this precari- ous generation? Th ose willing to erase the divide between politics and art will fi nd great interest in the production of the Spanish video maker Marcelo Expósito, who over the last fi ve years has been carrying out a multi-part evocation of the new social struggles under the name Entre Sueños (Between Waking and Dreams). Unlike con- ventional documentaries establishing the historical facts, this vid- eography records the nascent movements of history in the gestures and the stories, or indeed the imaginations, of those who attempt to make their own history in the streets. Th e series opens with First of May (Th e City-Factory), , a far-reaching video essay on the transformation of labouring and

Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  organizing conditions in northern Italy, culminating with the appearance of the Chainworkers collective and the EuroMayday parade in Milano. Following this rather complex overture is Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistance), also , as well as a third piece, co-authored with Nuria Vila (the editor of all three works) and entitled Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistance, . In the videos, a shift in the philosophical concep- . For screening and exhibition of the videos see http://www.hama- tion of the capital/labour relation is articu- caonline.net/autor.php?id=; for lated with the emergent forms of militant free download see http://www. archive.org/details/tacticalfrivolity. organization and with historical practices of audiovisual editing. But as these discursive and formal agendas are pursued, something unutterable is going on beneath the surface: the search for an unknown kind of life that can work a mind-numbing shift, dance in the face of the cops, click through computerized laby- rinths and care for a child in one continuous rhythm. Th e search for a new body.

CCity-Factoryity-Factory

Th e ambition of these videos is to be activist in their message, while actualizing the intricate histories of artistic expression. Th us First of May is all about organizing chain-store employees and freelance workers; but it begins with lines from the literary writer W.G. Sebald, a sequence from the silent-fi lm classic Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and a black-and-white clip of Glenn Gould at the piano, also strangely mute. Only a few moments later do we hear Gould’s elegantly phrased performance, which seems to orchestrate the movements of a temp worker watching over kids in an Italian mall. Th e central question is posed in these fi rst few seconds. If the cin- ematic montage of the s sought to develop a harmonious musi- cal score for the clashing social relations of the industrial city, then what kind of link could we hope for today between the virtuoso performances of artists and the highly scripted routines of workers caught in the production systems of the post-industrial metropolis? Th e video shows documentary clips of the Fiat automobile plant of Lingotto, in Turin, with its spectacular racetrack on the roof where buyers could test drive a car rolling directly off the assembly line. Next come scenes of that same building transformed into a conference centre and leisure complex, a symbol of the transition to communicative labour. Th e collective discipline of the factory has been vaporized into the omnipresent warp and weft of hyper-indi- vidualized economic relations. It is here that the temp girl rushes to

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence keep up with the activities of the corporate playground, chasing tod- dlers on plastic cars imported from China. Consumerism appears as a debilitating game where even the guardians don’t know the rules. Yet a dream is gathering amid the toys and balloons: the old leftist dream that artistic expression could become directly active in the struggle for emancipation. Th e philosopher Paolo Virno gives fresh voice to that dream in excerpts from a lecture where he describes the resemblance between virtuoso performance and communicational labour. Neither of them produces a fi nished object or work; both depend on improvi- sational sequences carried out before a public. Yet the same is true of politics. For Virno, the linguistic and performative turn of the economy tends to dissolve the boundaries between labour, inner contemplation and political action. Th e situation is confusing, but it brings new powers into everyone’s reach. He speaks enigmatically of an invisible notation, a hidden score: the sharable potential of a ‘general intellect’ that informs or even orchestrates the multifarious activity of today’s economy. Is that sheer mysticism? Waking life in the metropolis appears to be guided not by political virtuosity but by fi ne-grained proc- esses of control: combinations of motivational research, on-the-job surveillance, individualized seduction and credit assessment by the bankers. Managers and advertisers pull the strings. Activists have to occupy and undermine that terrain. Fascinating sequences of the fi lm show the founders of the Chainworkers group in Milano mounting an unheard-of campaign: a mobilization of the shit-job workers who staff your supermarket, sort your mail, deliver your pizza – and play your music, host your party, cuddle your kids, probably write your advertising too. Chiara Birattari clicks through a corporate image-bank, looking to pirate the perfect photo of a tattooed rocker from the squatted social centres. She fi nds one sorting boxes at a depot in the exurban sprawl. ‘Autonomous, or precarious?’ asks the fl ier she’s designing. Alex Foti recounts the desire to organize people who never dreamed of a union: the kids in the uniforms, the chain-store workers, who grew up on comics and fast food and American culture. Th e inter- view breaks up into scenes from a surprise action he coordinated in a giant mall – an environment strictly without freedom of speech or association, the archetype of what Virno calls ‘infi nite publicity without a public sphere’. Banners suddenly unfold on an upper fl oor; leafl ets sail through the kingdom of the commodity. A portable sound system cuts

Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  Marcelo Expósito, stills from the video Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistence), 60 min., 2004.

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  Marcelo Expósito, stills from the video First of May (The City Factory), 2 min., 2004.

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños   Open /No./A Precarious Existence Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  through the muzak with strong rock and political talk, while activ- ists hold off the burly security guards to open up a window of pos- sibility. Amazingly, the action lasts an hour. Th e video ends on the city streets, with the wild antics of the precarious Mayday demon- stration in Milano, gathering casual workers to protest for better conditions. ‘Rights or riots’ is the slogan on a demonstrator’s bright pink shirt. He smiles self-consciously under the camera’s eye, then looks frankly at us, tapping the words on his chest. With the launching of the EuroMayday parades in  and , the new social movements began raising the issues of life and labour on the urban territory. In a bewildering neoliberal environ- ment where workers are dispatched through the urban sprawl by computerized orders, activists use communication skills to change the score, to disrupt the orchestration of daily life and make a posi- tive move in the perpetually losing game that the corporations have imposed on the populace. Th is is the challenge of emancipation in our time: popular autonomy and ‘riots for rights’ depend on the communicational capacities of precarious expression within the frac- tured tissue of the metropolis.

SSwirlingwirling RhythmsRhythms

What the next two videos show is that emancipation really is a wak- ing dream, relayed across the generations. ‘Changes happen fi rst in the imagination,’ reads the opening caption of Tactical Frivolity. A faraway chant resounds in the air, then an extravagant creature appears on the screen, dressed in silver and pink with enormous wings, a feather duster in her upraised hand and a gas mask dan- gling at her side, twirling in front of the police. Cut to black-and- white scenes of suff ragette marches, with early feminists speaking to the crowd; then another cut to the eyepiece of a turn-of-the-century kinetoscope, through which we see the fl ickering image of a woman performing a modernist butterfl y dance on stage. Her fl owing white dress swirls in the air, tracing arabesques in three dimensions, while a samba drummer cuts into your rapt attention. One . . . two . . . three: the thunderous beat prepares the break into the present, into the streets. Using simpler discursive structures than First of May, the next two works of Entre Sueños plunge into specifi c events: the ‘Carnival against Capital’ of  June , and the invention of the ‘pink bloc’ protest aesthetic during the demonstration against the IMF/ World Bank in Prague on  September . Tactical Frivolity +

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Rhythms of Resistance, on which I’ll briefl y focus, combines video footage of the Prague events and retrospective interviews with the participants. What they reveal is how much consciously articulated desire goes into the collective gestures that can succeed in transmit- ting a political message to today’s polarized societies. Evolving under particularly repressive conditions, British social movements invented the most eff ective forms of resistance against neoliberal control. Yet as activist Kate Evans explains, they did not depend on violence but on feminine provocation. At the Mayday demonstration held by London Reclaim the Streets in , widely expected to mark the fi rst application of the new Terrorism Act, ‘Rosie was there, and she was wearing this ridiculous costume, with this tiny pink bikini and this headdress and these big pink tails, and she had a feather duster and she was tickling the police’. As Rosie herself continues: ‘I thought, well, if I’m gonna be legislated into being a terrorist, then I might as well be the most ridiculous kind of terrorist there is.’ Kate recounts the journey to Prague in two travellers’ vehicles, fi lled with  women, two men and vast quantities of silver and pink materials. Scenes at the convergence centre give a taste of the preparations with a larger group (mostly from the Peoples’ Global Action) who formed the ‘pink line’, one of three distinct approaches used to shut down the World Bank/IMF meetings. Samba echoes in your ears, and at this point another series of interviews begins, recounting the origins of the subversive music from black Brazilian carnival bands in the s. ‘Th e rhythms that we play originate from candomblé, so they’re actually used to call down deities of nature,’ explains Nicky. ‘Th e moment a break happens, the crowd goes mad. So I think there is really something powerful about those moments, and about those changes in rhythm.’ Th e Prague demon- strations as a whole formed such a break; and members of the pink bloc used the disarming force of surprise to enter the conference centre, closing the meetings and launching a new cycle of popular protest in Europe. Kate Evans, breast-feeding her baby during the interview, is quite lucid about the potential ambiguities of her tactics: ‘I have a bit of a problem with the idea that girls wear very small costumes and dance and men don’t,’ she explains, ‘because I don’t know exactly how lib- erating that is for people who don’t realize it’s meant to be ironic.’ Th is feminist look at the precarious protest aesthetic combines a grounded, direct-action approach with a rich exploration of the ways that popular mobilization sparks changes in lived experience.

Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  Marcelo Expósito and Nuria Vila, stills from the video Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistence, 39 min., 2007.

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Marcelo Expósito’s Entre Sueños  Th e videos are directly inspiring for people who want to put their bodies on the line, producing a new orchestration of urban gesture without falling into the traps laid by the authorities and the media. At the same time, they trace perspectives across a century. Th ose who are curious about vanguard art might remember Peter Wollen’s question in Raiding the Icebox: ‘What form of bodily movement would correspond to a process of production that displayed a dif- ferent, transformed rationality – and, of course, a transformed gen- der division and sexuality?’ Marcelo Expósito and Nuria Vila have given one answer. It is as though marginal . Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Refl ections on Twentieth-Century artistic and activist experiments of the past Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana had reawakened in the present, but with a University Press, ), . much broader and deeper embodiment, among people aware of the staggering opposition that any emancipatory movement faces. Now the relay will be passed to a younger generation. Th e fi lm ends with samba rhythms and an eyepiece-view of costumed protesters, cut- ting to another antiquated butterfl y-dance on stage. Th is time the swirling veils are tinted in electric pink.

 Open /No./A Precarious Existence Marcelo Expósito and Nuria Vila, opening still from the video Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistence, 39 min., 2007. Merijn Oudenampsen

PPrecariousnessrecariousness inin thethe CCleaningleaning BBusinessusiness

CCleanersleaners aass tthehe VVanguardanguard ooff a NNewew TTraderade UUnionnion RRevivalevival

Working conditions in virtually all sectors of the labour market are under pressure at the current time. Focusing on the developments in the cleaning industry, sociologist Merijn Oudenampsen shows how, following the American example, cleaners have successfully started to mobilize in the Netherlands and have thus given a new impulse to the revival of trade unionism.

118 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence On 6 November 2007, around 50 people resolutely exit the metro at the Amsterdam Amstelveenseweg station. The group is garbed in bright orange trade union shirts and clown outfi ts, and carries ban- ners, fl utes and drums. A little later they are standing in front of the closed doors of the huge glass palace that serves as the headquarters of the Dutch ING bank. Never mind. A back door is still open. The last hurdle is a dividing door, kept shut by a few panicky guards, but after a bit of pushing and shoving they have to admit defeat. The noise of 50 frenzied demonstrators fi lls the chic foyer of one of the world’s biggest banks. The absolute top and bottom of the Dutch labour market meet each other. For just a little while, roles are reversed. Cleaners express themselves and managers listen. What happened at the ING bank would soon be repeated in the nearby ABN AMRO headquarters, in the Schiphol airport terminal, at ministries in The Hague, at the Dutch Railways in Utrecht and at a long list of other companies. It was part of a campaign in the clean- ing industry, one of the sectors in which the position of employees has drastically deteriorated due to outsourcing and fl exibilization. A new campaign strategy is engaged to attempt to offer an answer to the weakened position of the trade union in the service sector which is characterized by fragmentation and temporariness. It is one of the most promising initiatives aimed at fi nding an answer to what has become known to some as the new social question. The social question dealt with in this essay is that of ‘precarity’. Pre- carity is a neologism, a translation of the French precarité. It is derived from the Latin precare, to beg. According to Webster’s dictionary one of the meanings of precarious is ‘depending on the will or pleasure of another’, in other words to possess something that is liable to be withdrawn at any moment. Precarity is a problem that has announced itself in Europe under many different guises. At fi rst sight, it presents itself in the media as a confl ict of generations. In Germany they talk about the Generation Praktikum, abbreviated as Generation P, a young generation that lives from one internship to the next but fails to gain structural entry to the German labour market. In France, there is a similar sentiment among the Génération Précaire, which led in 2005 to a general youth revolt against the further fl exibilization of the French labour market, the CPE (Contract de Premier Embauche). In Italy, Spain and Greece it is referred to by the average monthly incomes that are earned: the 1,000, 800, or 700 euro generation. In all cases it concerns a generation whose future prospects look grimmer than those of their parents. It is not surprising that the recent riots in Greece were rapidly assigned a

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 119 comparable meaning, with American social commentator Mike Davis noting a connection between the rage on the streets and a growing worldwide realization among young people that the credit crunch has surely robbed their future of any promise. According to these types of analysis, the feeling of a precarious life is pre-eminently that of a generation unfamiliar with the certainties of the 1960s and ’70s – a job for life, a fi xed contract – or even those during the years of crisis in the 1980s, when an unemployment benefi t was one of the few remain- ing certainties for young people. A new generation has grown up in Europe, which, in contrast to their parents, lives on the basis of tem- porary arrangements as regards to work, housing, education and social security. It is principally this version of precarity that has been seized upon by social movements in Europe, the most important example being the annual Euromayday protests that have taken place in dozens of European cities in recent years. Yet it is misleading to limit the issue to one generation. The impact of the restructuring of the labour market and welfare state retrench- ment is simply too great and too generalized. A much more extended reality of urban precarity lurks behind the newspaper headlines about integration, the working poor and the new underclass, behind the ten- dentious articles on the uprising of the banlieues and the situation in American inner cities. We can read about it in the work of the sociolo- gist Loïc Wacquant who has conducted research both in the USA and in France into what he calls ‘urban marginality’: an accumulation of deprivations that expresses itself via the convergence of class, ethnic- ity and living conditions. But the backgrounds of this social problem – which are often connected with education and the labour market – are outstripped and disguised by an all-pervasive problem of security and by the theme of ethnic/cultural segregation. In his book Punishing the Poor, Wacquant calls the current security policy in the USA a ‘new policy of social insecurity’. He explains: ‘The battle against street crimi- nality becomes the screen behind which the new social question is con- cealed: the generalization of uncertain, precarious wage labour and the impact thereof on the living conditions and survival strategies of the urban proletariat.’ He is not alone in this. Other American sociologists, such as Philippe Bourgeois and William Julius Wilson, see casualization as the underly- ing cause of the urban crisis in the USA, that is, the restructuring of the labour market. Prior to the crisis of the 1970s, the bottom of the labour market was fi lled with low-paid factory work, where the relative ease with which trade unions were able to organize led to the accumu- lation of a minimal number of rights and securities. In the 1980s the

120 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence service sector became the new motor of the economy, while industrial employment shrank drastically due to mechanization and outsourcing to low-wage countries. Previous certainties changed into uncertainties: low wages, inadequate contracts or none at all, fl exible working hours and unclear social rights. Migrants, almost by defi nition, had to endure the most severe conditions, as has often been the case historically. But since then a place at the bottom of the social ladder has started to mean something quite different. In his book The Corrosion of Charac- ter, Richard Sennet points out that the social ladder has lost its rungs. The American dream of unlimited social mobility changed in the 1980s into a reality of dead-end jobs. Instead of facing this problem, American public opinion has chosen to culturalize and moralize the issue. In brief, the core, according to the now dominant conservative discourse, is that the root cause of the problems of the urban poor is their sociocultural background, rather than structural social problems such as the labour market. An empha- sis on the inadequate norms and values of marginalized populations reduces the issue to one of personal responsibility: the deserving poor enter the scene. Although the situation in Europe and in the Nether- lands differs in many ways from that in the USA, the USA has had, as in many areas, a considerable infl uence on European policies. It is not strange, then, that Wacquant observes that European poverty is becom- ing Americanized. Not so much with regard to reality but certainly in perception. The plight of fi rst and second generation migrants in Europe is implicitly and explicitly compared to that of Afro-Americans and Latinos in the USA. Wacquant sees the entrance of the American concept of an ‘underclass’ in the European debate on urban poverty as a clear indication of this. Accompanying this concept are the culturalist and moralist biases that have also crossed the ocean. If we read Paul Scheffer, a prominent Dutch intellectual who has achieved consider- able fame with his plea for a renewed ‘offensive’ to ‘civilize’ the ethnic underclass, or UK-based Theodor Dalrymple, who points to the ‘culture of poverty’ in the English working class, then we can see what a dra- matic impact the USA has had on the European perception of poverty, and what a central position the ‘culturist’ vision has acquired in public opinion. Not for nothing, the credo of personal responsibility became one of the recurrent slogans of the Balkenende governments.

LLaboratoryaboratory

Fortunately, the USA does not only export the policies that are respon- sible for its most problematical social discrepancies. It also functions as

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 121 a laboratory of revolt from below, the results of which fi nd their way to other parts of the world as an antidote to dominant policy and business practices. One of the most important developments in this area is the organization of migrants in trade union campaigns that are totally dif- ferent from existing union practices. Until recently, American trade unions saw migrants and the fl ex- ible, atypical sort of jobs they are predominantly dependent upon for earning a living as unorganizable. Working in hotels, fast-food chains, grocery markets, cleaning companies and supermarkets, in domestic help and the many small convenience stores, dry cleaners and delis is an army of migrants whose working conditions seemed not to be an issue. Campaigns in the 1980s would drastically change this view. The Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign in Los Angeles was the most impor- tant example and has acquired an almost legendary reputation. The campaign was the subject of Ken Loach’s fi lm Bread & Roses, and Mike Davis described the miraculous transition from ‘pariah proletariat’ to ‘peaceful guerrilla army’ in his book Magical Realism. The context for the new campaign was a sharp decline in the labour conditions of cleaners throughout the USA. Whereas cleaning had previously been organized internally, in the sense that cleaners were simply on the payroll of the company concerned, or of the manager of the building in which they worked, in the 1980s cleaning was farmed out to specialized fi rms. The wages and working conditions of clean- ers became the main victim in the subsequent competition for clean- ing contracts. It was necessary to invent a new trade union strategy, now that the cleaners were no longer to be found in just one building, but were spread out, fl exibly, across the whole city. The answer of the Justice for Janitors campaign was closely linked to the specifi c social networks present in the Latino community of the cleaners. Visits were paid to churches and neighbourhood organizations, house calls were made and NGOs and political activists were involved in the campaign. An extended social network was mobilized. The background of the predominantly Latino cleaners played an important role. Many were veterans of social movements in Latin America, from El Salvador to Guatemala, and they were now implementing these experiences in the context of Los Angeles. The practice that emerged would later be called ‘social movement unionism’, in contrast to the dominant service model of ‘business unionism’, where the members have a passive role and the activity range of the trade union is largely confi ned to its own offi ce. The targets of the new campaign were not the cleaning fi rms but the clients, the contractors of cleaning services. Confrontational dem- onstrations and the practice of ‘Naming & Shaming’ replaced the sym-

122 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence bolic pickets that had previously been the usual repertoire of the trade union. The directors of the companies concerned were visited by clean- ers at high-profi le fundraising events and luxurious networking dinners. The parties were gate-crashed by hordes of cleaners brandishing their mops and vacuum cleaners and demanding a living wage. The invisibil- ity that had previously characterized the cleaners was replaced by their taking a role in the spotlight, particularly when in 1990 a cleaner pro- test was brutally crushed by the police, which was given full coverage in the media. It was not until 1995, fi ve years after that event, that the JfJ campaign was able to announce a resounding victory. With 90 per cent of cleaners part of the organization, a new model was born, and for the Service Employees International Union, the most important trade union in the service sector, this would be the overture to its growth into the biggest trade union in the USA.

PPrecarityrecarity iinn tthehe PPolderolder

In its earliest national iconography, used on coins, medals, pamphlets, building facades and seals, the Netherlands was symbolized by a gar- den of plenty, defended against foreign aggression by a roaring lion. Sometimes the garden alternated with a fat cow, but the message of prosperity was unchanging. That same period, the early seventeenth century, also contains the mythical origin of the Dutch political culture of consensus and division of power – the so-called polder model – aris- ing from the collective battle against the continuous threat of inunda- tion. It is these two elements, economic abundance and consensus culture, that have most likely resulted in the phenomenon of precarity being milder and more marginal in appearance in the Netherlands than elsewhere. This not does not mean, however, that no comparable trends have taken place. Most of the general forms of precarity have indeed passed the Netherlands by, to a large degree thanks to the restraining infl u- ence of trade unions on the implementation of neoliberal reforms. The pie is divided somewhat more evenly, and in the Netherlands there was simply more pie to be divided up than elsewhere. And yet in recent years there have been signs of a reversal. One of the defi ning moments was in the autumn of 2004, when the fi rst Balkenende cabinet became embroiled in a fi erce confl ict with the trade unions on pension reform and labour market fl exibilization. The then minister of social affairs, De Geus, proposed undoing the strongest instrument of the trade unions, making collective bargaining no longer nationally binding, thereby threatening to blow up the entire Dutch corporatist model. The degree

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 123 On 6 December 2007, the ING headquarters on the Zuidas is occupied for a short time. The demonstrators want ING to issue a statement in support of better working conditions for cleaners. Like the vast majority of Dutch businesses, ING outsources its cleaning. Photo Nico Jankowski

124 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence Photo Thijs Vissia

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 125 After the hall has been occupied for a while, a representative comes down who accepted a petition and made a noncommittal promise of improvement. Photo Nico Jankowski

On 13 December 2007, the ‘Drol D’Or’ is presented to NS direc- tor Blokland. The ‘Golden Turd’ trophy is awarded to the NS (Dutch Railway) by FNV Bondgenoten (Dutch Trade Union) because their subsidiary Nedtrain is the largest and worst-paying employer in the cleaning business. Photo Nico Jankowski

126 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence On 16 December 2007, a ‘guerilla’ concert is held at Schiphol Airport Plaza. About a hundred people occupy the plaza, bands play music, cleaners hold speeches, fl yers are handed out and the security guards clench their teeth. Photo Nico Jankowski

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 127 of representativeness and hence the legitimacy of the trade unions was publicly attacked by the government, with dwindling membership and an aging rank and fi le as the main arguments reiterated. Newspaper headlines like ‘Trade unions a thing of the past ten years from now’, ‘FNV [Federation Dutch Labour Movement] in danger of ending up as a museum piece’ and ‘What use are trade unions for employees?’ had already been typifying public opinion for some years. A big demonstra- tion on the Museumplein in Amsterdam in the autumn of 2004 saved the face of the trade union, as well as its negotiating position, after which the union restricted itself again to its customary role of bureau- cratic negotiator. Five years on, and the episode is almost forgotten. But the crisis was only temporarily averted. With the so-called ‘hot autumn’ of 2004, tensions came to light that continue to play a role today. The trade unions were being increasingly perceived as protecting the interests of the older, aging generation of babyboomers, that is, the insiders on the labour market. Shortly after the protests on the Museumplein, a new trade union was launched, AVV [an Alternative Labour Union], which to a signifi cant degree would articulate this criticism. The AVV talked about a confl ict of generations whereby younger workers have to pay for the rights of the already established older generation, certainties they themselves lacked. In theory, then, the AVV was standing up for the rights of outsiders, freelancers, fl ex workers, temps and others, whose interests were being sidelined by the trade unions in favour of the insiders on the labour market, the union membership. In this sense, the AVV was the Dutch instance of similar political movements of pre- carity elsewhere in Europe. The French Génération Précaire, for exam- ple, also declared that they were no longer willing to be burdened with the pension costs of the already established babyboomers. But while in France and other countries the further fl exibilization of the labour market was contested by the ‘precarious generation’, the Dutch AVV turned out to be an avid supporter of the labour market deregulation. For Mei Li Vos of the AVV, the magical balancing trick that would bring the rights of insiders and outsiders up to par was to sim- ply deregulate everything and everyone. The position of the AVV, not as an alternative to a trade union but as an anti-trade union, became even more clear through the explicit support it gained from employers and (neo)liberals. Since the AVV consisted of a group of media savvy, highly educated career makers, who projected their personal situation onto that of their entire generation, they systematically sided with the winners of fl exibilization, the highly educated job-hoppers who have little to fear from the wondrous world of the deregulated Dutch labour

128 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence market. This perhaps explains their blindness to the interests of poorly educated outsiders who have little or nothing to gain from a further deregulation of the labour market. The stance of the AVV is a clear illustration of why precarity in the Netherlands has never really been placed on the agenda. The labour shortage in the Netherlands, especially for the highly educated, has resulted in a totally different attitude with regard to fl exibility among the younger generation – jobs aplenty. At the bottom of the labour market, however, we see a different story. The cleaning sector example illustrates how fl exibility and precarity in the Netherlands are con- nected with both the problem of integration and that of the future of the trade union.

BBraverave NNewew WWorldorld iinn tthehe CCleaningleaning SSectorector

As an ABN AMRO report recently announced, the cleaning industry has the doubtful honour of being one of the fi rst sectors to ‘profi t’ from outsourcing. Since the 1980s, Dutch companies that previously employed their own cleaners under fi xed contracts have increasingly been outsourcing the work to specialized cleaning fi rms in order to save costs. This had led to extremely tough competition between the various cleaning fi rms in offering the lowest possible price – the reason clean- ing is also called a penny market or a fi ghting market. And, just like in the USA, it is ultimately the 200,000 cleaners themselves who appear to be the biggest losers in this fi ght, seeing as the fi rst item of expenses cleaning fi rms economize on are the terms of employment. That has happened in different ways. On the one hand, simply by paying lower wages; gross wages are now between 9 and 10 euros per hour and are among the lowest in the country. On the other hand, by increasing the work pressure – fewer cleaners per square metre – and by cutting the work up into short shifts. Many cleaners now travel several times a day from building to building. They work two hours here, three hours there, and they are not paid for the time in between. Absence through illness is restricted as much as possible since the cleaners have to pay the fi rst two days of sick leave out of their own pockets. Cleaners also largely work part-time, and at abnormal times. The result is invisibility: they work in the late evening and in the early morning and don’t see the rest of the (offi ce) personnel. The cleaners do not get to see much of each other either, which means that they build up few social relationships that could be helpful in demanding improvements. The legal status of cleaners is so uncertain that many do not dare to express themselves critically when at work. All this was

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 129 partly made possible because of the almost total absence of the trade union, which, with membership at 7 per cent, fulfi lled little more than a symbolic role. As a result, many cleaners are part of a new and grow- ing stratum of the Dutch working poor. Most cleaners are women and in the urban conglomeration the majority are fi rst or second generation migrants and very poorly educated: many have had no more than a basic education and often speak little or no Dutch. The cleaning sector has long been a sort of free haven in the Neth- erlands, a laboratory for implementing American business practices like fl exibilization and outsourcing. But the answer to this development also comes from the USA. A campaign by the Dutch Labour Federation is now copying – with success, it seems – the method of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Known as Organizing, this method breaks through the commonly held view that the trade union is a product that simply needs to improve its marketing techniques – the union as a bureau- cratic service provider. Organizing combines a return to the time- honoured trade union practice of organizing workers on the shop fl oor, with modern registration and management techniques derived from American election campaigns. In 2007, the Dutch Labour Federation started a national campaign for a new collective labour agreement. To start with, a number of stra- tegic companies and locations were identifi ed where a large number of cleaners were working. Then in various places – The Hague, Schiphol, Utrecht and Maastricht – trade union organizers were mobilized to actively contact and bring together dissatisfi ed cleaners. Buildings were visited, cleaners contacted, and meetings organized. In short, the cam- paign built up a social network of cleaners, and made efforts to involve local churches, neighbourhood organizations and activists. One of the problems of outsourcing is that the market conditions are such that cleaning fi rms are forced to keep wages low since they would otherwise lose contracts. Their clients have the power to change things, to increase the budget, but they almost always deny that they have any responsibility. Just as with Justice for Janitors, it is not the cleaning companies themselves that are the target of the actions in the cleaners’ campaign, but their clients. These actions make use of an escalation tactic whereby companies fi rst receive a letter requesting them to pub- licly support the cleaners’ wage demands. Rarely is a response given. The next step is a visit by a delegation of cleaners demanding a discus- sion with the management, who usually deny having any responsibility. Cleaners then start distributing fl yers outside the premises, followed not much later by small- and larger-scale actions: pickets, sit-ins and noise demonstrations. Examples include the aforementioned occupa-

130 Open 2009/No.17/A Precarious Existence tion of the ING headquarters, or the award of the ‘Golden Turd’ to the Dutch Railways as the worst employer in the cleaning business. Most of the companies that the campaign confronts are not aware that they bear some responsibility for the activities that they outsource. Even though they are doing it for such a low price that it is impossible for people to earn enough to live on. Some revelations are shocking. The Ministry of Social Affairs, for example, discovered that it had out- sourced its cleaning to a company that was violating basic human rights by refusing to grant cleaners the right to organize themselves. But the fundamental idea that the wages paid at the bottom of the labour mar- ket are impossible to sustain a reasonable standard of living was a new one for many people who were confronted with the campaign. After an escalation of actions taken in December 2007, an initial and unex- pected victory came in January 2008, in the form of a much improved collective labour agreement. That one of the aims achieved was the free provision of Dutch language lessons makes it clear that the sym- bolic meaning of the cleaners’ campaign goes further than just that of income. Like the American campaigns, the cleaners’ campaign in the Netherlands is thus also an attempt to shift the discussion around citi- zenship and integration from the cultural domain to that of the labour market. Cleaners have become a forerunner in the renewal of trade union activism, making it relevant for labour relations in the twenty-fi rst century. The campaigns have become a sort of social glue that binds together the most diverse ethnicities in circumstances of extreme frag- mentation. The motto of the anti-globalist movement ‘let our resistance be as transnational as capital’, has, for the cleaners’ campaigns, turned into an everyday practice.

Precariousness in the Cleaning Business 131 book reviews

Benda Hofmeyr (ed.), with Maastricht: Jan van Eyck contributions from BAVO, Academie, 2008 Hito Steyerl, Benda Hofmeyr, isbn: 978-90-72076-29-8, 160 Erik Swyngedouw, Daniël van pp, € 19,- der Velden, The Wal-Mart Phenomenon: Resisting Neo- Liberal Power through Art, Design and Theory

Willem van Weelden

The Wal-Mart Phenomenon: to competition. In every way, neoliberalism, and the con- Resisting Neo-Liberal Power it’s a situation that needs to be comitant sociocultural and through Art, Design and actively resisted! economic transformations, Theory was published in con- On closer inspection, how- are so broad, complex and nection with the colloquium ever, the book’s approach does comprehensive that it is dif- of the same name that was not seem to be entirely suc- fi cult to formulate a satisfying held at the Jan van Eyck cessful. Perhaps the ambitions defi nition. But the editor has Academy in Maastricht on 3 were too high for the amount made this crisis of defi nition November 2006. Set against of suff ering that can eff ectively even more diffi cult by trusting the background of a view- be shouldered. Despite all the in the interdisciplinary path ing and discussion of the care the editor has taken, one – apparently in the blind be- documentary fi lm Wal-Mart: of the book’s rather irritating lief that a crossover approach The High Costs of Low Price problems is that it is unable to could provide solace – without, (Robert Greenwald, 2005), a make clear to the reader what however, having felt the need persuasive appeal was made to is understood by the notion of to explain what the conditions formulate a form of resistance neoliberalism. Besides this, it are for such a grand tour to against the proliferation of is particularly annoying that operate eff ectively. Editorially, neoliberalism.1 it lacks any practical analysis then, this collection of es- The convener of the col- of how neoliberalism repre- says leaves a lot to be desired loquium, Benda Hofmeyr, sents a death-blow to the arts since nowhere is it explained holds the global economic and and public space. Is there not how the various perspectives social plague of neoliberalism something paradoxical in the (philosophy, social geography, responsible for the condition fact that the arts, architecture fi lm theory, art and design) of precarity. In general, what is and design have apparently ultimately relate to one other. meant by this is the increasing been able to exist with no no- Readers are, it seems, expected disappearance of the autono- ticeable problems for almost to negotiate and synthesize mous world of local econo- 30 years under totalitarian this multiplicity of perspectives mies, cultural production, cin- neoliberal conditions, and that themselves. ema, publishers, and so on, as only now, of all times, is there It becomes even more a result of the ‘neoliberal dis- a need for a discourse about a problematic when this same ruption of the economy’. For renewed commitment to the many-headed monster, the arts this then implies an re-politicization of intellectual partly through the link with impoverishment and losing out and creative work? Necessity Greenwald’s documentary, is of small-scale initiatives, often knows no laws, it seems. awkwardly brought into line involving local art production, Of course the practice of with the diabolical methods of

132 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence the multinational Wal-Mart. neoliberal, unproblematic rep- This hardly encouraging at- The weighty question that resentation of reality, and talks titude is particularly evident keeps resounding throughout about a ‘wal-martization of the in the fi nal piece in the book, the entire book and is nowhere documentary form’. in which careful thought made clear is: What, then, is Yet the perspective in this is given to ‘Public Art as this ‘Wal-Mart phenomenon’? actually too short essay con- Interruption or Anamorphosis That is a pity, since despite tinues to adhere too much to on the Possibility of a Creative the courageous attempt of the the conventional practice of Engagement with Present-Day authors to chart the destruc- art theory, where an overkill “Public Space”’. The title alone tive infl uence of neoliberalism of theoretical references and is enough to put the reader off on design, public space and views prevents it from really and to completely extinguish the arts, and how, on the basis getting down to initiating an any possible glimmer of hope. of a creative engagement, a ri- alternative practice of tactical This is the terrain that goes be- poste to it could be off ered, an media. The practice in ques- yond all ‘precarity’. The essay, important part of that critical tion not only feeds on a theory based on Benda Hofmeyr’s in- potential is negated in advance, about subjectivization, but also terview with design researcher precisely because of this short- actually eludes, as regards both Daniël van der Velden, is sub- coming. This is even more re- publication and tactical eff ect titled ‘an interview and (in) grettable considering that, now as well as distribution, every- conclusive remarks’. After the the après nous le déluge moral- thing that Steyerl claims to be theoretical bombast of the pre- ity of neoliberalism is imposing resisting. For despite all ap- ceding essays, the hesitant and itself massively by means of a peals for creative engagement not particularly determined global fi nancial crisis, all par- and opposition to the spectre tone that throbs in these intro- ties would benefi t from a book of neoliberalism, there is an ductory qualifi cations makes that could serve as a theoretical air of despondency and a lack it clear immediately that an and practical compass for sug- of imagination in many of the apologetic and patent disorien- gesting a new direction. essays. The book is left reeking tation lies at the bottom of the This crisis of orientation of a restless theoretical roam- discussion. This is a cause for could perhaps have been avoid- ing in an indescribable world concern, especially when one ed if the pretensions had been of text, rather than being a vital considers that the last chapter somewhat less and if the choice and creative appeal for action should actually be granting had been made to follow a and providing an idea of a tac- us a visionary and inspiring theoretical path more in line tical practice whereby all imag- look at a reestablishment and with Greenwald’s fi lm, in the inable means can be deployed, re-politicization of a practice tradition of tactical media and and not just text. It seems as that, whichever way you look media activism. The closest we though the writers no longer at it, fi nds itself in a precarious get to this is the essay by Hito actually believe that the arts position. Steyerl, which in fact sees con- and design can really provide ventional documentary fi lms, an adequate answer, whether 1. Background information can be found at: http://www.walmart- like Greenwald’s, precisely as a conventional or activist. movie.com/.

Book Reviews 133 Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Berlin/New York: Sternberg Graw (eds.) Press, 2008, Canvases and Careers Today: isbn 978-1-933128-47-4, Criticism and Its Markets 148 pp, € 15,00

Ilse van Rijn

Seldom has an introduction were not so much paintings as the production of the value of to a book of art theory con- careers. According to Graw, a work of art, is in no need of tained so many exclamation whose presentation at the dismantling today. Baker pre- marks. Isabelle Graw, who with symposium is included as an fers to discuss the autonomy Daniel Birnbaum co-edited essay in the series, the Whites of art criticism. Leaning on Canvases and Careers Today: remind us that the careers of the late writings of Theodor Criticism and Its Markets, be- individual artists are embed- Adorno and Edward Saïd, he gins with an exalted, ‘Es lebe ded in institutionalized systems argues in favour of what he die Kunstkritik!’ and concludes of organizations, rules and calls ‘late criticism’. It is only her introduction by enthusi- customs. Structural changes, through the notion of ‘late astically encouraging us into such as a new market economy criticism’, comparable with the activity: ‘Let’s get going!’ The for example, entail new divi- ‘late style’ of an artist which publication contains the results sions of tasks. Graw questions is characterized by anachro- of a symposium of the same the role of the critic in an age nisms and anomalies, that the title, organized in Frankfurt in which artists themselves as- discipline’s own historicity and am Main in December 2007 sume responsibility for supply- internal fragmentation, and by the Institut für Kunstkritik, ing the meaning of their works. criticism’s lack of self-regula- which was founded by What, asks Graw, should the tion, can be considered. Only Birnbaum and Graw in 2003. form, place and value of texts when art criticism is no longer The aim of the symposium be in a period in which infor- just preoccupied with its own was to discuss the art critic’s mation and communication time does it stand up as truly changed relationship with art have been declared the ‘queens autonomous. and the market. Canvases and of productive forces’? From Responding to Baker is Careers Today consists of fi ve a Marxist viewpoint, value is André Rottmann, the editor presentations aired at the sym- always relative and has to be of the German magazine Texte posium and each is followed by continually negotiated and de- zur Kunst. Rottmann wonders a critical response. termined anew, says Graw. whether this (self-)refl exive The title of the book and George Baker, editor of form of art criticism can only symposium is drawn from the infl uential journal October be employed in the ‘late phase’ a 1965 sociological study and the fi rst contributor, casts of work, in the margin, when called Canvases and Careers: doubt on the Whites’ (and death is in sight and one’s own Institutional Change in the therefore Graw’s) sweeping discipline is declared to be French Painting World, which sociological, (neo-)Marxist ‘old’ or ‘obsolescent’? How, served as the source of inspira- positioning of the artist. There Rottmann asks, do practices tion for the initiators of the is no foundation in the sug- like those of Andrea Fraser, symposium and as the starting gestion, he says, that a ‘dealer- who takes (self-)criticism as point for the speakers. The critic system’ has replaced the her point of departure, re- authors of the original study, time-honoured French acad- late to this idea? Is there not, Harrison and Cynthia White, emies and salons. Therefore, he says, despite – or thanks describe the changed world he continues, the structure, in to – the current ‘new spirit of of art in nineteenth-century which, according to the Whites, capitalism’ precise evidence of France. They concentrate art dealers, in close collabora- a revitalization, and hence a on Impressionism and argue tion with critics, are supposed Pyrrhic victory, of art criticism? that the commodities traded to have had a direct impact on After all, art criticism is ubiq-

134 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence uitous, from panels at art fairs is demanded of the critic. He Joseph’s contribution, art his- to articles in magazines and advertises as a gallery owner in torian and scholar Tom Holert monographs. There is no sign Artforum and also writes arti- endorses Carpenter’s commen- that the traditionally mediat- cles for the magazine. Kelsey tary to a certain extent. At the ing and judgmental role of the calls himself ‘the hack’. He same time, Holert manages to critic is in any way defi cient. describes the hack as someone skilfully avoid Carpenter’s ten- Baker’s presentation and who moves, plays, operates dency for destructive and de- Rottmann’s response to it and writes while in the middle featist discourse by beginning are an ideal illustration of of a business transaction. The his critical response to Branden the remarkable phenomenon hack has nothing special to say, W. Joseph with a careful analy- identifi ed somewhat hastily in says Kelsey, is no genius nor sis of the ‘performativity’ of the the foreword to Canvases and does he claim to have intel- criticism he directs at Joseph. Careers Today, namely that lectual property. The hack, he Transcending a nostalgic desire American critics tend to adhere says, is empty, an instrument, for the supposedly lost practice to a more pessimistic view of a post-Fordist virtuoso. The of art criticism, Holert looks the future than their European, hack appears to conform to the beyond the dichotomy of its that is to say German, counter- contemporary art system, but earlier status and the current parts. No explanation is given was already seen in artists like situation of society. What’s for this observation, but per- Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel more, he sets aside the occa- haps it lies in the fact that the Broodthaers and Pier Paolo sionally rather rigid framework tone of the discussion around Pasolini, says Kelsey. What he set-up by the symposium. The this theme was already set sev- fi nds appealing in all these ex- ‘past criticism’ that he refers to eral years ago in the usa. On amples is the degree to which is averse to prescribed codes of the occasion of the hundredth they are ‘instances of critical behaviour, ways of reading and issue of the journal October in language becoming performa- rationality. ‘Past criticism’ is the spring of 2002, a round tive in relation to the move- provisionally structured around table discussion was organized ment of capital’. Such a way of ‘performance spaces’, a tempo- to discuss the state of art criti- thinking and working creates rary convergence of moments cism which, it was suspected, possibilities for an immanent of ‘criticality’. In his reading was characterized by the fact critique, a critique from within of the position of art criticism, that it had, to a large extent, that deliberately alienates itself Holert does not opt for a com- become outdated and was no (through becoming performa- pulsory, visionary interpreta- longer current. Canvases and tive or fi ctitious) from the cul- tion of the practice, something Careers Today repeatedly re- ture of which it is a part, with- that many a conference partici- fers to the text version of this out cherishing the illusion that pant tended towards. Instead, discussion in which Baker also it can ever eff ectively change Holert concretizes what participated. the system. Andrea Fraser once called ‘site In his contribution, John Reacting with scepticism specifi c criticism’. Just like an Kelsey, a teacher, gallery to Kesley’s reading is artist artist, he says, a critic has the owner and member of the Merlin Carpenter. Carpenter responsibility of taking stock artists’ collective Bernadette is also sceptical of the incestu- of the surrounding contexts. Corporation, believes that the ous conspiracy of critics, which These contexts consist not artist has long ceased to exist; is how he sees Canvases and only of the sociological struc- by implication, the critic has Careers Today. They question ture in which, besides Graw, thus chosen to question his their own position, yet trans- Birnbaum and the Whites, the own specifi city rather late in parency is a farce, he contends. critic is also situated, but ap- the day. But perhaps the ‘real Every redefi nition contains a pear, judging by the contribu- fun’ of art criticism only begins hidden agenda. Perhaps, sug- tions to Canvases and Careers when it disappears, he says gests Carpenter, citing Lacan, Today, to be much more com- scornfully. Kelsey himself oper- we should ‘shatter discourse in plex and diverse. ates from a lack of distance, in order to bring forth speech’. contrast to the objectivity that In reaction to Branden W.

Book Reviews 135 Markus Miessen (ed.) Berlin/New York: Sternberg East Coast Europe Press, 2008, 352 pp, isbn 978-1-933128-49-8 Dieter Lesage € 12,--

East Coast Europe, edited Union. East Coast Europe has cussion only seems to dawn by Markus Miessen, is the become an enquiry among on them during the course of product of the East Coast political and cultural actors the interview, but by then it’s Europe project initiated by the who view Europe from this or too late. Slovenian Consulate General that ‘border’. A museum direc- A highly debatable assump- in New York in connection tor in Philadelphia; an artist tion carried by this collection with Slovenia’s Presidency of in Bucharest; a curator at the of interviews seems to be that the Council of the European Whitney Museum of American all the artists, curators and Union during the fi rst half Art; and a gallery owner in architects who happen to be in of 2008, the European Year Pristina; each of them has to your address book should by of Intercultural Dialogue. deal with Europe from the out- defi nition have something in- The initiative was funded in side, albeit from two diff erent teresting to say about Europe, part by the New York chapter sides. The tiresome thing about as long as they were born or of EUNIC, the network of this method though, which are working in East Europe or European Union National is the logical result of what live or work on the American Institutes for Culture founded is ultimately a banal play on East Coast. Greater selectiv- in 2006.1 Alenka Suhadolnik, words, is that it brings together ity, a bit more preliminary Slovenia’s Consulate General two completely heterogeneous research to fi nd voices that, in New York, asked Katharine groups of actors under one and like Ashdown’s and Misiano’s, Carl and Srdjan Jovanović the same denominator. The can speak expertly and knowl- Weiss of the School of Missing enquiry mainly takes the form edgably, would not have been Studies, which presents itself of conversations that Markus amiss. Furthermore, it is a pity as a ‘network for experimental Miessen had with various peo- that many of the interviews study of cities marked by or ple about Europe’s borders; evince a complete absence of currently undergoing abrupt about the most important any reference to the existing, transition’,2 to organize the characteristics of the European many-voiced discourse about project. They, in turn, then Union; and about the percep- Europe, whether it’s a question brought on board the promis- tions of Europe. of an opinion of philosophers ing young German architect Miessen’s interviews are such as Derrida, Habermas or Markus Miessen, editor of not all the same standard. Sloterdijk, or of the position the book The Violence of Some of them, like the con- of prominent politicians like Participation.3 versation with Jordan Wolfson Delors, Prodi or Verhofstadt. During one of the brain- and Nedko Solakov, have an Such a marked omission sug- storming sessions that in- unbearable lightness, while gests the book’s editor must evitably accompany such others, like the one with Eda have had a premise that West transnational, transatlantic Cufer and the Slovenian art- European opinions should not and public-private networking, ists’ collective IRWIN, provide be included, not even in the someone must have come up a lot of interesting information, most indirect sense, if only to with the cool expression ‘East but look suspiciously like care- permit ‘the other’ to have a say. Coast Europe’. While Europe fully written essays. Some of The Slovenian philosopher is the book’s main subject of those interviewed meanwhile, and cultural theorist Mladen research, ‘East Coast’ refers to like the British politician Paddy Dolar supplies an excellent the two borders of this Europe: Ashdown and the Russian cu- introduction to the book with on the one hand the geographi- rator Viktor Misiano, are well his essay ‘Kafka’s Europe’; cal East Coast of the usa, on aware of what they are talking while the academic and writer the other hand the political about. For other interviewees, Genevieve Maitland Hudson, ‘East Coast’ of the European however, the point under dis- and the Ankara-based ar-

136 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence chitect, artist, designer and political events, and the lack without any commentary is scholar Can Altay provide of any editorial commentary an innocent editorial slip or contributions of their own. on the reprint of the interview a sly dig at Slovenia’s Balkan Contained in one of the book’s leads to serious confusion. In neighbour. If only to preven- appendices is a conversation 2005 Le Goff was rejoicing tively quell a political furore, between Katharine Carl and in the ‘recent decision of the I suspect that ultimately it is Srdjan Jovanović Weiss with European Commission’ not nothing more than a question the Bosnian-American artist to allow Croatia to join the of a little ‘gesture’ by Markus Nebojša Šerić Shoba. The book European Union, while in the Miessen towards his fellow also includes a reprint of an course of 2008 the European interview specialist – and boss interview that the curator Hans Commission – through both – Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ulrich Obrist once conducted the President of the European with the French historian Commission, José Manuel 1 See www.eunic-europe.eu. 2 See www.schoolofmissingstud- Jacques Le Goff in connection Barroso, and the member of ies.net. with another project in January the European Commission re- 3 Markus Miessen (ed.), The 2005.4 If the intention of this sponsible for enlargement, OIli Violence of Participation (Berlin/ New York: Sternberg Press, reprint as appendix was to rec- Rehn – had repeatedly off ered 2007). tify the lack of West European Croatia the prospect of mem- 4 ‘Ever Le Goff . Hans Ulrich voices in the main texts, then I bership in 2011 (p. 298). The Obrist in conversation with Jacques Le Goff ’ (289-306) is a would have to register a protest technical negotiations, it was reprint of ‘Europe’s Past, Present against what is in fact the qua- even said, could be completed and Longue Durée’, in Barbara si-monopoly on West European in 2009. Seeing as East Coast Vanderlinden, Elena Filipovic (eds.), The Manifesta Decade. opinions that this visceral anti- Europe is an initiative of the Debates on Contemporary Art Turkish historian is momentar- Slovenian presidency, one can- Exhibitions and Biennials in ily allotted here. That dated in- not help but wonder whether Post-Wall Europe (Cambridge, terview looked at then-current the reprint of this old interview MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Michiel Dehaene, Lieven London: Routledge, 2008) De Cauter (eds.) isbn 978-0415-42288-8, Heterotopia and the City: Public approx. € 100,- Space in a Postcivil Society

Gijs van Oenen

Spatial concepts and ways of ‘fold’, spaces that are ‘grooved’ aimed at presenting Michel expression made their entry or ‘smooth’, and ‘(de)ter- Foucault himself as a spatial in philosophy some time ago, ritorialization’. In contrast to thinker. Or rather, ‘re-present’, partly inspired by, or in con- Foucault, Deleuze described since the textual basis for this nection with, architectural his own work as spatially- is already 40 years old. In the ideas. On the one hand, they oriented: it had to do with the late 1960s, Foucault gave a arrived via deconstruction- outside, the unthought, the lecture to a group of archi- ism, emerging from the notion superfi cial, the fold, all that, tects about ‘other spaces’, des of Abbau – literally demoli- in fact, remains strange or espaces autres, which, despite tion – in thoughts voiced by outside. – or perhaps precisely because Heidegger. On the other hand, The collection of essays of – their fragmentary and via Deleuze’s ‘nomadic’ or Heterotopia and the City: Public exploratory nature, began to ‘rhizomatic’ philosophy, in Space in a Postcivil Society, ed- form a source of inspiration for which the notion of spatiality ited by the Flemish philosophi- spatial thinking. The notion of is expressed in architectur- cal urbanists Lieven De Cauter heterotopia was central to this. ally appealing terms such as and Michiel Dehaene, is now Although only very tentatively

Book Reviews 137 indicated by Foucault, in the by the editors, there is a (new, protection in a post-sacral way. form of abstract principles that good) translation of Foucault’s They even see heterotopia as a did not hang together clearly, original text, with two short ac- potential counterforce or strat- the notion was meant to sug- counts of the biographical and egy against the proliferation gest something like ‘inversion, historical context of its crea- of ‘camp-like situations’, that contestation or representation tion; this is followed by 20 au- is, extra-legal spaces. On the of actual places’; ‘external thors who each shine their light other hand, Setha Low’s other- places’ that, although localiz- on a range of possible elabora- wise critical and very readable able, are ‘outside all places’ tions and interpretations of essay also typifi es the ‘gated (page 17). heterotopia, whereby it indeed community’ as a heterotopia. It seems to me that, with becomes evident that both the Both Low and Hugo Bartling the notion of heterotopia, concept itself and the practice emphasize the exploitation of Foucault’s intention was to it refers to are by their very na- gated communities as capital- translate his earlier analysis ture nowhere really ‘settled’. ist profi t-machines, in which of the structuring eff ect of Marco Cenzatti sup- citizenship is contracted out ‘discourses’ in terms of the plements Foucault’s quasi- to the project developer for an structuring principles of places historical distinction between exorbitant service fee. or living spaces, that is, ‘archi- ‘crisis heterotopias’ and ‘het- Bartling’s essay deals with tecture’. Whereas discourses, erotopias of deviation’ – the the Baudrillard-like project in their mutual confronta- fi rst referring to special places The Villages in Orlando, tion, worked in an ordering, in so-called primitive societies Florida, where one encounters exclusionary and regulatory where temporarily disordered offi cial fake signboards with in- way, it is now a question of a individuals can stay, the second vented stories about non-exist- comparable ‘contest’ in spa- to institutions where deviant ent (at least not existing there) tial terms. The heterotopia is individuals are placed – with a cultural heritage, purely so as the real place that shows that new period in which deviance to create a nostalgic colonial reality is an illusion, or indeed itself has once again become atmosphere amid the raked the perfect place that is better a controversial concept. Such over front gardens with streets ordered and more rational than new heterotopias, which fre- through which the predomi- normal space. In both cases quently form part of everyday nantly aged population prefer we can speak, with Christine life and are no longer neces- to travel in golf carts. Further Boyer (pages 54 and 58), of a sarily and literally distinguish- kaleidoscopic off erings include contestation with other spaces able spatially from it, acquire a David Adjaye’s Whitechapel with the normal spatial order. normative charge, in the sense Idea Store in Spitalfi elds Boyer’s skilful analysis shows of ‘empowerment’ of minori- Market in London, masculin- how this can be applied, for ties and resistance to dominant ity on Tel Aviv’s coast (Yael example, to Foucault’s famous practices. The price paid for Allwell and Rachel Kallus), the discussion of Velázquez’s Las this is that the notion of heter- embodiment of mobility in the Meninas. otopia loses even more spatial Yokohama Port Terminal and, As Heidi Sohn instructively defi nition. sure enough, the central sta- reveals in her contribution to Other essays further frag- tion in Arnhem (Lee Stickells). the book, Foucault derived ment – ‘heterotype’ – the no- Also discussed is heterotopia the notion of heterotopia from tion of heterotopia by continu- as a sort of negative projec- medicine, where it refers to ally undertaking other, new tion of everything that project ‘normal tissue in an abnormal ‘tissue transplants’. De Cauter developers and municipalities place in the body’. In spa- and Dehaene associate hetero- nowadays want to build on tial thought and philosophy, topia with the ‘inter’ between wasteland, or so-called ‘dead therefore, the heterotopia is public and private space, with zones’ (Gil Doron). itself heterotopian! And the play and the suspension of In a well considered af- concept clearly behaves in everyday economic life, and terword, Hilde Heynen takes such a way in this book as well. with ‘safe havens’ – ‘open’ stock of the various contribu- Following a short introduction spaces that still off er or enjoy tions. Given the very diverse

138 Open 2008/No. 17/A Precarious Existence nature of the subjects and ap- fi ts Foucault’s cryptic indica- together a fi ery, anarchistic proaches, she can do little more tions. Such an approach would pamphlet on the political and than draw a few informative also enable some of the quasi- social implications of het- dividing lines and illuminate in- paradoxes of spatial presence erotopia. The book at hand is teresting contrasts. She does the and absence to be better for- indeed a ‘heterotopic reversal’ same, in fact, as Foucault does mulated. Moreover, it is strange of this: imaginative, but above in his seminal but porous text at that references are made in all learned, handsomely bound the beginning of the book. the essays to various previous and richly illustrated. But this Surprisingly enough, what publications of Foucault’s text also means that the book is is missing from this wide range rather than to the new transla- exceptionally expensive – more of contributions is any consid- tion at the front of the book. than 100 euros. It would be a eration of heterotopia as virtual I could also imagine that pity if its distribution remained space – a topical notion par the same editors could have limited to traditional outlets excellence that almost perfectly used the same material to put because of this.

Book Reviews 139