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Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War: Anti-Capitalist

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Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War: Anti-Capitalist Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War: Anti-Capitalist Vectors and Rhizomes By Gene Ray Kurfürstenstr. 4A D-10785 Berlin Email: [email protected] Ku’e! out to the comrades on the occupied island of O’ahu. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Preface: Is Another Art World Possible? v Part I: The One into Two 1 1. Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War 2 2. Tactical Media and the End of the End of History 64 3. Avant-Gardes as Anti-Capitalist Vector 94 Part II: The Two into... X [“V,” “R,” “M,” “C,”...] 131 4. Flag Rage: Responding to John Sims’s Recoloration Proclamation 132 5. “Everything for Everyone, and For Free, Too!”: A Conversation with Berlin Umsonst 152 6. Something Like That 175 Notes 188 Acknowledgments As ever, these textual traces of a thinking in process only became possible through a process of thinking with others. Many warm thanks to the friends who at various times have read all or parts of the manuscript and have generously shared their responses and criticisms: Iain Boal, Rozalinda Borcila, Gaye Chan, Steven Corcoran, Theodore Harris, Brian Holmes, Henrik Lebuhn, Thomas Pepper, Csaba Polony, Gregory Sholette, Joni Spigler, Ursula Tax and Dan Wang. And thanks to Antje, Kalle and Peter for the guided glimpse into their part of the rhizomes. With this book as with the last one, my wife Gaby has been nothing less than the necessary condition of my own possibility; now as then, my gratitude for that gift is more than I can bring to words. Earlier versions of the first two chapters were published previously as follows: chapter one in Left Curve 30 (2006); chapter two in Afterimage (Summer 2006). Preface: Is Another Art World Possible? It is June 2006: nine months into the fifth year of the dirty little “war on terror.” The crisis of neo-liberal globalization that this war was meant to dissemble and bring under control appears to be deepening and drifting toward a global crisis of liberal governance. In the nation-state of exception, corruption and abuse of power scandals have engulfed the Bush administration, and public support for the occupation of Iraq has crumbled. For its part, the Democratic pseudo-opposition remains helplessly in thrall to the conventions of corporate politics and habitual, mimicking triangulation to the right. South of the Plantation House of Freedom, however, Latin America continues its rebellious reach for autonomy and social justice, serving up belated blowback for a century of vi miseries and repressions imposed by counter-revolutionary US interference. In France, labor market “reforms” conceived as a response to weeks of rioting in the suburbs have in turn provoked massive protests and civil disobedience by French students and young people in the largest campus eruptions since May 1968. On May Day, immigrants and Latinos protesting enforced precarity, restricted mobility and the militarization of the US- Mexican border poured into the streets in cities across America, in some of the largest linked demonstrations, strikes and boycotts in US history. The agony of the Middle East and the malign neglect of Africa continue, as does our collective failure to search honestly and imaginatively for the conditions of real mutual security. The intensified militarization of police functions worldwide since September 11, 2001, has resulted in a spectacular increase in the imagery of repressive intimidation: digital video streams from urban centers all over the planet have made familiar the new phalanxes of “robocops” in riot gear deployed to discipline unruly citizens. But far from enforcing official fictions of social harmony, these deployments now seem to be necessitated, as if in perverse self-fulfillment, by increasingly open manifestations of popular unrest and vii impatience. And the criminalization of dissent – including the legal reduction of all forms of politically motivated militancy and direct action to the category of “terrorism” – seems to be reaching its current limit, as the contradictions of “national security” collide too openly against the liberal rhetoric of civil and human rights. In sum, it goes not well for Empire. If it is still too early to say that things are heating up, it is undeniable that the situation has warmed considerably: the global warming of second nature is now a verifiable social fact. The anti-capitalist rhizomes – the global movement of movements that dares to insist “another world is possible” – has refused to be cowed, blocked or managed by the politics of fear. The moment is over, in which capitalism in combination with the conventions of liberal governance could claim to be uncontested historical destiny. This world system is again in question, the problems of systemic transformation have again become urgent. Astonishingly enough, we once again belong to a world of active struggles in which revolution is thinkable. It is to this event of reopening that these essays and texts attempt to respond. They try to rethink the heritage of the artistic avant-gardes in light of contemporary struggles and the current critical revival of the viii revolutionary tradition. Heritage, tradition: we reenact our own beginnings, in reaching to make our own history, but we don’t do so out of nothing. We are the heirs of a twentieth-century inheritance that is not of our own choosing. To think revolution, again, today, would be to receive this inheritance, not in order to repeat it, but in order to process and surpass it: to mourn it as past disaster and defeat even while gathering and resolving its unrealized promise for new performances and enunciations of collective autonomy and systemic reorganization. The autonomous impulses of “art” may be one form of the refusal of power. But if so, it is one that leaves the given power in place – where it does not affirm and reinforce it. Revolution – the generalization of autonomy – would need to be the destruction of power: an unpowering powerful enough to neutralize established power and to set up in its place only a permanent refusal and evacuation of power. This “event” of rupture and the paradoxical process of perpetual unfounding – or confounding – that it promises would not be able to avoid the violence that repels violence: the force required to defend the generalization of autonomy from the war machines of a given that refuses to change. The reach for an open history of qualitative moments always risks the worse: the leap beyond the given disaster is an opening to ix autonomy but also to more disaster, and it is impossible to know ahead of time which kind of arrival is arriving. The ordeals of ethics belong necessarily, yet irreducibly, to revolution and the radical reinvention of politics – and to the practices of an “art” that would leverage its restricted autonomy to the struggle for autonomy’s generalization. Loosely orienting these chapters is the assumption that we lack the radical culture (or more precisely, cultures, in the plural) needed to push the crisis of neo- liberal hegemony into a revolutionary crisis of capitalism as a world system. The radical culture that had painstakingly been invented and built up at different times in the past, most recently in the 1960s and 70s, has mostly been smashed or absorbed by the recuperative and neo- colonial processes of capital. The catastrophic loss of this culture in much of the world, outside remnants and resistant pockets of reproduction and transmission, belongs to the history we inherit. We will need to rebuild it, this profusion of contestational collectives and cooperatives, counter-institutions and oppositional “public spheres,” networks of radical bookstores and presses, coffee houses and alternative cinemas, anti-capitalist bars, workshops and youth centers, reading and working x groups, squats and pirate radio stations, communes and open universities. To be sure, some of this culture persists, here and there, as practices of solidarity: temporary autonomous zones under the names Reclaim the Streets, Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Kein Mensch Ist Illegal, hack labs and social forums, Peoples’ Global Action and Indymedia. But mostly it is missing, as the durable site of de-reified everyday life and as robust community bases for the sustained and face-to-face recovery and extension of revolutionary desire. It is up to us to rediscover the histories and forms of past radical culture, and together invent new ones. In this, the experimental uses of networked digital communications and virtual technologies will play a crucial role but can be no substitute for the real community of bodies. Such a culture would not be the appearance and accomplishment of revolution itself. Rather, it would be a multiform anticipation that may be a condition of the latter’s appearance and survival. It is in this kind radical culture that experiences of the political take place beyond and in opposition to the nation-state and the exhausted and depressing rituals of electoral-corporate party politics. It is there that anti-capitalist subjectivity emerges and claims its multitudinous voices xi and faces. There, that the inherited blockages of revolutionary theory and practice can be collectively processed and the ground prepared for the qualitative leaps and mutations that will leave them behind. And it is there that affective alternatives and effective resistance to the new forms of fascism and racism that are also on the horizon can be imagined and developed. In this, radical culture would continue and translate into daily practices the theoretical researches into the defense of singularities that have radically rewritten the tradition of ethics since 1945. Such a culture cannot be blind practice or the accumulated traces and artifacts of an unreflected process: revolution needs theory as a form of (self-)questioning, thinking, learning.
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