“We started OneCity because we don’t believe in dividing Vancouver into us versus them. Many Voices, One City isn’t just a slogan, it’s an organizing principle and it has informed our electoral strategy and our policies.” –OneCity (October, 2014)
“The One is not.” –Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988)
“The church, I mean the Catholic Church, is so evidently theatrical in its pomp, the décor that we would try in vain to improve, the purple hangings, the central actor in his white and gold costume flanked by fair-haired side-kicks marked with rouge, the thunderous music or the insidious birdsongs flowing from the organ pipes, tragic or subjugated choruses, a public brought to its knees by the central scene…” –Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise (1990)
“The mandate to provide affordable housing has been co-opted by people who can afford to buy property in Vancouver.”
–Julie Okot Bitek, statement to City of Vancouver and Metro Vancouver officials (July 21, 2011)
The Temporary Gallery of Reproduced presents
Toronto’s vast, unseen network of aqueducts and waterworks was famously documented in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987). The aquatic labyrinths, moving through the city as anonymously as the migrant laborers that built them, stop at sites that become settings for the book: an intake tunnel below Lake Ontario; a water main along the underside of the Bloor Viaduct; the waterworks filtration building, whose atriums would at nights host immigrant workers gathered there illegally to attend theatre performances and plan labour actions and strikes.
By the 1930s, in the midst of militant labour unrest, Government officials would plan for possible threats to the urban infrastructure, including the filtration station. The passage of the Public Works Protection Act in 1939 would invest the government with ‘emergency powers’ in order to guard public buildings from sabotage by the Germans at the opening of the Second War, but more fundamentally in the context of anarchist and communist agitation. It became precisely this 1939 Act that the Toronto Police would use as grounds for martial law and the suspension of the Canadian Charter in downtown Toronto during the G20 meetings in June, 2010.[i] The policed Toronto of 2010 thus opens backwards onto 1938, when “the rich and powerful close[d] ranks. Troops were in evidence everywhere.”[ii]
In the Skin of a Lion tells overlapping personal stories of love, primarily through the young-but-aging figure of Patrick. This montage of personal fragments, however, opens onto a set of radical truths. Ideas are de-personalized and unbound, transmitted to Patrick by his lover, Alice Gull, not as secrets or mementos, but in a way that allows for the emergence of the principle. Alice is the messenger of a universality that becomes, with the novel itself, an ode to the idea.
It is in this sense that the novel becomes a meditation on the “grand cause,” the singular emergence of a shared experience stretched across a “gap of love” (157). Under the banner of a common idea, the grand cause becomes a name for what can occur in moments of emancipation marked by love. For Ondaatje, to love is to be seized by love, in the way that one is seized by the abstraction of an Idea. Love is supported by Alice and Patrick even while it simultaneously seizes hold of them at the point of an irreducible encounter. Depicted poetically, it might read: “From the utmost tip / and limit of your lips / a sliver of justice / kissed us unbeknownst.”[iii]
“Alice had an idea, a cause in her eye about wealth and power” (165). This romantic egalitarianism is stark. It is both sentimental while being intensely profaned. It is rough, so that Patrick must come to know the wealthy “the way a dog before battling with cows rolls in the shit of the enemy” (132). No doubt it is this sympathetic and difficult depiction of axiomatic commitment, pure yet unclean, that excludes the novel from entering into discussions both during and after the recent G8/G20, even while In the Skin of a Lion remains the most famous prose written to date about Toronto and its anarchists.
Fenced-in
“I’ll tell you about the rich. They do not toil or spin. Remember that…Understand what they will always refuse to let go of. There are a hundred fences…between the rich and you” (132). Part of the success of In the Skin of a Lion is its attention to architectural, geographical and urban realities. Skin of a Lion is the story not only of the events of a political past, but also the ways in which they come to form the urban landscape itself. Events can possess the built environment, as we are used to imagining in the sense of city as a canvas, backdrop or stage. But they can also be possessed by it, embedded in everyday spaces of segregation, literally built into the city. Here fences become a political touchstone, emerging not only in open moments of authority and urban militarization (i.e. 1938 at the waterworks), but with the internal barriers and uneven spaces of a city on its gridded plan.
In the wake of the Toronto G8/G20 events, an anonymous writer conveyed precisely this aspect of everyday control in the city. “The dismantlement of the fence’s evidently oppressive architecture, provides the convenient illusion that the exclusionary walls of the state apparatus are temporary rather than inherent.”[iv] In reality, there are visible and invisible fences that structure our cities and their architectures on a daily basis. In fact, writing in the wake of the 2001 G8 summit, Giorgio Agamben captured precisely this aspect of the city: “I remember Genoa 2001. I thought it was an experiment to treat the historical centre of an old city, still characterised by an ancient architectural structure, to see how in this centre one could suddenly create walls, gates that not only had the function of excluding and separating but were also there to articulate different spaces and individualise spaces and subjects.”[v] We can begin to identify a difference between a kind of ‘disposable’ state of exception, on the one hand, and something like an everyday ‘architectural’ state of exception, on the other – both are present during a spectacle or a super-emergency, yet one outlasts it’s supposedly exceptional purpose. “This fence does not only represent the militarization of Toronto,” said Harsha Walia, “but also the ways in which people are divided on a daily basis.”[vi]
Harsha’s statement was made at a time when 1,000 people were being arrested in a $1 billion dollar operation to enforce a heightened ‘state of exception’ backed by the pure violence of the Toronto Police.[vii] Harsha’s statement is not an appeal to abstract humanity, in which divisions are dissolved into an overall harmony, imaginary or real. And here the final confrontation in Skin of a Lion is crucial, where Harris the city’s planner baron attempts to reason with Patrick by stressing their equal share in the imagined urban whole. “Think about it, Patrick,” says the master planner in the novel, “You’re as much of the fabric as the alderman and the millionaires” (238). Harris’ organic vision assigns human activity to a single plane of fate. We might, for a moment, try to imagine this in the concept of what philosopher Alain Badiou calls Oneness. The One is, for Badiou, the force that reduces human activity to repetition within a unified “clamour of being.” It is the force that produces order, hierarchy, and nature. Oneness derives from a diminished concept of love, preventing love from ever being true by constantly guiding it back into repeated clichés and conservative tropes.[viii] We should consider Patrick’s counter-response to Harris. In the memory of Alice and against Harris’ paternal hierarchy, Patrick enjoins love. He becomes filled with a desire to throw light on the world and prescribe the situation, to invent a politics of confrontation with authority. The words of Alice, transmitted through Patrick, are uncompromising: “She [Alice] had…an old saying: In a rich man’s house there is nowhere to spit except in his face” (239). This is the name of love? Yes, if we have to courage to give life to the romantic and profaned clarity of the irreducible limit that moves us in struggle, this difficult “gap of love.”
Afterthoughts
“The bourgeois finds himself in contradiction with the citoyen, like the contradiction between the member of civil society and his political lion’s skin.”
–Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844)
In the wake of the mass arrests and the attack on even the most basic civil liberties in Toronto, it is now more than ever that we should pay attention to a distinction made by Marx early on between two forms of political emancipation: ‘civic’ emancipation and ‘human’ emancipation. The distinction is today reproducible in the difference between a defense of civil liberties, on the one hand, and a political confrontation with capitalist inequality, on the other. The two must be thought in tandem. To follow only the former, Marx said, is to wear only a shell of politics – a political lion’s skin.
Frederic Jameson, writing in 1977, made a useful insight in this direction: “it is precisely the distinction between anti-fascist and anti-capitalist strategy that seems less easy to maintain today and less immediately attractive a political programme over wide areas of a ‘free word’ in which military dictatorships and ‘emergency regimes’ are the order of the day.”[ix] What Jameson added is that our militarized ‘emergency regimes’ are today “multiplying precisely to the degree that genuine social revolution becomes a real possibility.” Is it not true that today the state is beginning to accumulate weapons and militarize our cities precisely in anticipation of potential disorder, a possible response in the streets to their economic policies (policies like the G8’s agreement to brutally halve national deficits by 2013 in the wake of the financial crisis)? If so, new forms of state repression should not be seen as separate from the current course of proliferating privileges, in which the latter would in some way become an enlightened liberal basis for a defense against barbaric militarism. Rather, militarization and the suspension of civil rights is becoming an internal condition of capitalism at this historical moment of crisis, replicating in its own way what Agamben identified in the “parallelism between military and economic emergencies that characterize[d] the politics of the twentieth century.”[x]
There is both a question of historical origins and a question of historical redemption. Origins convey the innumerable inequalities that shape our past, while redemption presents the emancipatory potential embedded in the very same history. The answer to how these two are conjoined lies, if anywhere, in In the Skin of a Lion. Ondaatje once called the film viewer a “reader.”[xi] If the viewer is a reader, what is the actual reader? The reader, in fact, engages as a historian.[xii] In the coming year, most of us will experience what happened in Toronto during the G8/G20 summit through film and image media, through the posted fragments and visual condensations of a city’s experience with a security state. Rather than consuming innumerable visual images, increasingly overdetermined in their immediacy, we should engage with literary depictions of Toronto as a city in history. Acts of fiction can provide the submerged tales of a living, subaltern past that becomes suddenly redeemable through poetic representations that are neither nostalgic nor properly historical, but that act as a means of foreseeing the present.
[ii] Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage Canada, 1996) p. 220. All future quotes in brackets in text.
[iii] Unpublished poem by Andrew C. Witt
[iv] “G20 Toronto: An Exception that Confirmed the Rule”, Anonymous author, Toronto Media Co-op, July 6, 2010 http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/story/g8g20-exception-confirmed-rule/4076
[v] Giorgio Agamben, “Metropolis” transl. Arianna Bove (2006) http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm
[vi] “At the G20 Fence: Harsha Walia, No One is Illegal Vancouver” BChannel News, June 25, 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAOhCdWsb2M&feature=related
[vii] ‘Pure’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense as a form of suspended practice without law as its immediate end. See his Critique of Violence.
[viii] For a case study in cliches, the short film ‘Love versus the G20’, where we find such statements of “love”: “…this is a message to the police, we are not against you, you are human beings just like we are, we are all One.” Fierce Light Films posted July 8, 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN51Ma1mQek
[ix] Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion” (1977) in Aesthetics and Politics (London; New York: Verso, 2007) p. 203
[x] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, transl. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005) p. 22
[xi] Gary Kamiya, “Delirious in a different kind of way: An interview with Michael Ondaatje” Salon, November 1996 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/int/1996/11/18/ondaatje961118
[xii] In the same conversation, Ondaatje suggests, “there’s a sense of history which a book can catch, but…film almost can’t.”
Talk delivered January 27, 2010 at the University of British Columbia, conference hosted by the Social Justice Centre, ‘Rethinking the Olympics’.
*
“The law is applied differently in the Downtown Eastside.” -Douglas King (Pivot Legal Society)[i]
In the context of a dual intensification of policing and local real-estate gentrification, a concentrated state of emergency or ‘state of exception’ has been applied to the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Today I want to use the concept of the ‘state of exception’ in the way it has emerged in aspects of 20th century juridical and political theory, surrounding in particular a triangle of figures – Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben. The first two are from the early part of the century, one a revolutionary and one a reactionary, while Agamben is our contemporary, writing in the emancipatory tradition of Benjamin.
The theory of the state of exception emphasizes the construction of a legal framework that subjects humans to the practice of a sovereign or statist gap. This gap is an exceptional space in which the sovereign state is placed outside or beyond the law. The exception is paradoxical because it refers not to a general lawlessness but rather to a space without law constructed within the application of the law itself. It is in this sense that the exception occurs not in spite of the law but as one of its supports as a precondition to the law’s application. As a consequence of the exception, human beings are found reduced to a “bare” existence, marginalized and stripped of dignity in the face of the law. The exception is twofold, because the state inflicts the exception on its subjects. Both are made symmetrically exceptional: the state is above and the subjects are below the law.
Thus there are three theoretical points to follow, which so far are merely claims: 1) there is an exception within the law that is necessary for the application of the law itself, 2) there is a position beyond the law, occupied by the sovereign authority of the state, 3) there are human subjects placed in the space of the exception, reduced to bare life and stripped of dignity.
As an initial example, I would like to talk about a recent law passed in the province of British Columbia: the Assistance to Shelter Act. This Act, recently passed by the British Columbia legislature, would seem to be a strange starting point in light of the fact that it remains unapplied to date. It rests at the level of a threat, whereas other concrete forms of policing have already been at work on the lives of the poor. I propose, however, that practices already in place to criminalize poverty in the city of Vancouver – which include a raft of police strategies surrounding the Safe Streets Act and Project Civil City (see Appendix, below) – can be best understood by reading backwards from the Assistance to Shelter Act. There have been recent assurance by the Vancouver police to not enforce the Act. Far from making the Act irrelevant, I will try to show that it is precisely this indeterminacy – an exceptional decision by the police in spite of the exact word of law – that underpins the state of exception itself. A cornerstone of the state of exception is the gap between the law and its implementation or suspension; between legislation and enforcement.
There is a space that separates the abstraction of the code, on the one hand, and the particularities of the situation, on the other. The upshot of this is that the use of police force in the name of a law must always exceed, in the particularity of its implementation, the generality of that law. A law must be sutured to its condition, bringing the gap into effect. What fills the space of the gap is a form of practice Giorgio Agamben terms ‘pure violence.’ ‘Pure violence,’ following Benjamin, denotes less the fact of raw force commonly understood by the term violence, although it encompasses that. Rather, ‘pure’ denotes a form of suspended practice that does not have the law as its immediate end. It places sovereignty outside the law, since the law sets in motion the suspended decision of the sovereign police, a decision necessary for the successful crossing of the legal zone of indeterminacy between the code and its effectuation.[ii] What is at stake in this process is a state that represents both the embodiment of the law and the embodiment of what is beyond it.[iii]
Homo Sacer
Out of exceptional process are created exceptional subjects, legally symmetrical. Like the state that rules them, exceptional subjects stand outside the law proper. Agamben terms these subjects homo sacer, borrowed from a category of Roman law designating those who are sacred, partly as a result of their transcendence of the law, yet whose lives can be destroyed or sacrificed with impunity.
Who is homo sacer? Or rather we could ask: From what legal structures do homo sacer emerge? For a moment, consider the Assistance to Shelter Act with an eye on its ‘state of emergency’ (and I remind you that the Act is specific to “extreme weather emergencies”). The Act, passed just in time for the Olympics, gives police the right clean the streets by using force against the will of anyone perceived to be homeless during a weather emergency, regardless of whether or not they have committed a chargeable offense. What exactly qualifies as “extreme weather conditions”?: “Temperatures near zero with rainfall that makes it difficult to remain dry, and/or sleet, freezing rain; and/or snow accumulation; and/or sustained high winds.”[iv]
With the Safe Streets Act and Project Civil City, we had a legal situation in which general rules were established.[v] Importantly, the rules themselves did not give specific criteria. These laws did not say, “target the poor of the DTES,” for example. Rather, as codes, they are neutral. Yet they work out their logic in specific ways. Like any other, their rules require the exceptional practice of the police. It is at the level of this exceptional practice that we find the most violence. In the case of Project Civil City and the Safe Streets Act, the rules resulted (and continue to result in) the targeted criminalization of the poor because of the exceptional practices of the police. The same applies for the Assistance to Shelter Act, which makes explicit what was latent in the Safe Streets Act and Project Civil City. However, what is significant is that the Assistance to Shelter Act goes a step beyond them both, since the code of the Act is itself inscribed as exceptional. There is a double exceptionality. First, there is the gap between the law and its effectuation. Secondly, this gap is re-inscribed into the formal codes themselves. This takes place to the extreme extent that, for example, the Assistance to Shelter becomes both a law and not a law. I will quote Minister Rich Coleman, responsible for the Assistance to Shelter Act:
“This will be a piece of legislation. It will be a law.”[vi]
“I’ll repeat myself. They’re [the police] not enforcing a law or an offence but providing assistance.”[vii]
As Benjamin showed, the exception has paradoxically become the rule.[viii] Schmitt himself, the great opponent of Benjamin, writes in this precise sense of the inscription of “general indeterminate clauses” into the law, often surrounding the usage of such ambiguous early century legal concepts as “good morals,” “proper security and order,” “state of danger,” etc. What occurs is that with the support of indeterminate clauses, the exception is itself legislated into being, securing the exception as literally a state of exception.
It is precisely out of this juridical order that human lives are reduced to a bare legal function, animalized and effectively subjected to the arbitrary advances of armed authority. I have given examples, and there are countless more: the routine discarding of people’s personal possessions by the City’s engineering department; cycles of perpetual imprisonment that grow from offenses as minor as jaywalking; police beatings and daily harassment.
Gentrification
The practices just listed are what sustain the class divisions in the context of gentrification, the true topic of concern for residents of the Downtown Eastside. Gentrification is a process that includes not only heightened police activity, but also increased private security and surveillance in the community, self-segregated exclusive gentrifier areas, and widespread poor-bashing. In the last year, gentrifiers have thrown bricks, bags of shit, and whole television sets at residents of the Downtown Eastside, and of course they have gone unpunished. The gaps in the law are filled by class interest, which is obvious enough, but what needs to be stressed is that these ad hoc forms of gentrification – rents and bags of shit – cannot succeed without a legal framework for the state of exception. It has to be understood that gentrification is a common form of class domination, but also a particular unique form requiring particular forms of violence. It asks the state to perform a kind of human displacement that evictions and real-estate markets alone cannot carry out. Gentrification displacement – the clearing out of our neighborhoods for the settlement of the middle classes – requires the creation of the legal category of homo sacer, the subject reduced to bare life and stripped of human dignity, criminalized for being poor with no standing.
Conclusion (Concluding remarks)
While I have depicted aspects of the concreteness of the situation, I would also say that I’ve presented a problem for activism: the question of how we are to engage in the class struggle and side with the poor. Do we entangle ourselves in the legal triangle of sovereign-police-subject? I have suggested that in a class society, the gaps in the law – the spaces of exception – are occupied by dominant interests. The challenge should not be to bring the law ever closer to the police, as the dream would appear in liberal aspirations for a legal narrowing, however noble those dreams are. Rather, in the context of the heightened policing and criminalization of the poor, we must work on solutions that in themselves exceed the logics of sovereignty, law and police. For the people who live in the neighborhood this is almost too obvious to mention. The community says it everyday, if we are willing to listen: the truest solutions will have no relation to the logic of Policing.
Nate Crompton
[i] ‘Judge raps Vancouver police tactics’ CBC February 18, 2010 http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/02/17/bc-legal-rights-downtown-eastside.html
[ii] Schmitt’s famous definition of the sovereign reads simply, “he who decides on the exception.” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: MIT Press, 1988) p. 5
[iii] I would like to give a stark illustration. Thanks to the tireless work of advocates and a few journalists, the police have been for the past twelve months asked repeatedly if they would be willing to give a public promise not to use agents provocateurs during the Vancouver Olympic Games. After these painful months, the police have given a certain assurance not to use agents provocateurs. However, they retain the right to take over and direct activist groups from within, as well as the right to commit illegal acts once inside these groups. see, ‘Police reserve the right to take over activist groups for 2010’ BC Civil Liberties Association, December 22, 2009 http://www.bccla.org/pressreleases/0912ISU.html
[iv] Minister Rich Coleman, Third Reading of parliamentary Bill 18, ‘Assistance to Shelter Act’, Page 2434: http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/39th1st/h91117p.htm
[v] see Appendix: Legislation Timeline
[vi] Minister Rich Coleman, Third Reading of parliamentary Bill 18, ‘Assistance to Shelter Act’, Page 2449: http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/39th1st/h91117p.htm
[vii] Minister Rich Coleman, Third Reading of parliamentary Bill 18, ‘Assistance to Shelter Act’, Page 2448: http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/39th1st/h91117p.htm
[viii] “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
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APPENDIX: Legislation Timeline
2005: Safe Streets Act
-changes in the Trespass Act, targeted to the practices of the poor
-restrictions on panhandling
-spearheaded by the DVBIA, with the aim of, “making Downtown Vancouver North America’s number one business-friendly downtown core.”
2006: Mayor Sam Sullivan’s reports to council on “public disorder” lead to Project Civil City
-how can we keep the class gap wide without having poor people decrease the property values of the downtown core
-VPD votes unanimously to endorse Project Civil City, adopting quotas and a “results-based” commitment to the project. 20% increase in charges falling under the Safe Streets Act between 2007 and 2008 (see 2008 Annual Business Plan, VPD)
2007: the City approves more money for Project Civil City.
–MTI (Municipal Ticket Information) project give police the ability bypass court processes in issuing tickets: spitting and defacating, $100; dog off leash or no dog license, $250; objectionable noise, $150; jaywalking, $100
“The new gentrification package for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside”, published January 20 by Rabble.ca (article here)
Caption: “Gendefecation: The upper classes shitting on the lower classes by forcing them out of their neighborhoods through a system of increased property values.”
NEWS: Gentrifiers throw bags of shit at Vancouver homeless shelter.
The following piece was published in the Spring 2009 (No. 128) issue of October, in which readers were invited to submit responses to seven questions on the subject of art and the financial crisis.
1) What will the effects of the recession be on the social role of the artist?
Our contemporary vernacular of recessions and temporary crashes implies a normal state of activity somehow visited by momentary disturbances. Yet nothing is further from the reality of capitalism, whose difficult secret is the self-moving commotion of permanent crisis. A collective politics could never take the form of an emergency response to a particular crisis of capital accumulation. Artists are not generated by the difficulties of profit-making. The artist becomes active, rather, through a subjective decision. Such a decision is not an occurrence along the way, but an act in spite of the world; not a symptomatic prompting by the world, but a decision against its automaticity. Militant decisions are always subtracted from objective determinants: reality, economy, incorporated situations. The social role of the artist is grounded in the decision to work on a new possibility inexistent within the coordinates of the contemporary world, no less the art world.
2) Is the art museum of the neoliberal era sustainable?
Today, the neoliberal art museum is sustained by its very unsustainability, much like the museum’s larger economic milieu. Faced with ever-increasing cuts to funding, combined with the exorbitant cost of exhibiting, art museums are driven to find funding, and art itself, elsewhere. In this environment, financial instability operates as the pretext for collective collusion with all unstable agents (psychologically and otherwise): banks, corporations and philanthropists. For us, it is not a question of finding an alternative model of funding to the current neoliberal model, or even making presentation more ‘sustainable’ within late capitalism. Instead it is a matter of discovering an inoperative model vis-a-vis the neoliberal museum. Our task is similar to the one once outlined by Walter Benjamin: in addition to discovering an art that would be useless to fascism, we must produce an art utterly useless to neoliberalism and its capitalist relatives.
If what comes of unflinching decisions is the endangering of existing spaces, it should be clarified that collective artist spaces should and must thrive. This is a fundamental point to hold on to – studios and other communal art spaces should be nurtured, supported and squatted if necessary. Public institutions should not be justified or defended through the antique distinction of “public” vs. “private,” but rather re-articulated in the fundamental tension between the “public” (co-dependent with the “private”) and the common. For us, the question today is how to turn a public museum into an artistic space for the common.
3) Might art biennials (and related exhibitions) wither away?
Should art biennials wither away? – Yes. Will they now? – Not necessarily, but remain hopeful, they will soon! The survival or extinction of our global biennials is in the hands a radical decision: Should art remain bound and confined to cultural tourism, private sponsorship, brand promotion; or should it seek out alternative forms of presentation that force such modes into a state of inoperativity?
4) How will art schools adapt?
Today, the question we should ask ourselves is not how to continue teaching as such – adaptation is the logic of survivalists. The challenge is to altogether re-evaluate our pedagogy so as to effectuate the common. The most profound challenge to the thoughtless professional vitalism promoted in our art schools is the commitment to an idea. Only through our collective strength can we contest the unmoving victory of ‘interests’ that has somehow overtaken the force of the Idea.
Our collective revision of pedagogy should be centered on three fundamental questions. First and foremost, how can we change the classroom so that it will produce subjects (artistic, political, scientific)? Secondly, how can we initiate novel aesthetic possibilities for the sensible? And lastly, how can we produce new innovative spaces of artistic potential at a distance from the structured dominance of the situation (university, global art market, gallery system)? Responses to these questions could never rest on a blueprint for their realization. Only within the situation, through struggle, will the means be realized. With that said, it must be stressed that any particular strategy must be guided by the axiomatic presupposition, without the guarantee of ‘proof’ or experiential data, of intellectual equality of all students (and professors), an equality that preserves the commitment to the elevation of ideas over opinions, including the hierarchical evaluation of received opinions in favor of emergent ideas and practices.
5) How might art criticism become relevant again?
By default, criticism is itself a corrupted practice, requiring all sorts of arbitrary masters, slaves, and powerless individuals for its sustenance. The critic is like a comfortable doctor for the terminally ill, simply administering patients on life support. The patient, of course, is the exceptionless enclosure of the contemporary art world.
To conceptualize an exceptional artistic practice, criticism must instead subtract itself from the status quo, a task not identical to critique. Art criticism should not be preoccupied with navigating the obscenities of this-or-that corrupted practice, this-or-that idiotic curator; on the contrary, it should break away from all intellectual servility through a subjective decision. Of course we still require a rigorous analysis of what there is, but we should also remain open to the compossibility of truths, the possibility of innovation, and the thinking of collective emancipation. Here the writer serves an indispensible role as a map-maker of innovation, investigator of novel experience, as well as a positive affirmationist – all forms of writing that can support notions of justice, emancipation, equality, and especially, profanation.
6) Does the art world bear any responsibility for the economic downturn?
Yes. Insider trading, money laundering, hyper-consumerism, professionalization, predatory practices of all kinds – these are not strictly characteristics of the ‘great rip off’, i.e. the crisis, but are also the naturalized practices of the contemporary art world. But while the art world best symptomizes and expresses the contemporary victory and conquest of capitalist ideology, this does not mean that an exceptional mode of life does not exist. If we remain vigilant, we will become incorruptible.
7) Whether the Obama stimulus package represents a break in the neoliberal regime, or simply a neo-Keynesian moment of public spending, might it reawaken a sense of common stake that might be extended, indeed insisted on, in other spheres like the artistic and the cultural?
A collective politics is the sharing of a common stake, today incommensurable to all State actions. The ineffective attempts by the Obama administration to rescue this system of thoughtless domination and extreme privilege should not be celebrated. By contrast, what is produced in collective action, at a distance from the State, is the very fabric of the common. To uphold an existence that thrives at a distance from stifling bureaucracy, beyond servility, besides professionalism, is the very texture of a form-of-life of the common. A meeting of artist, activist, intellectuals, workers of all ethnicities and social classes is infinitely more productive than any emergency re-distribution of funds by the Treasury. If the state’s circuit management is its means of survival, its productivity is only opposed to the production of the commons.
8 ) Are there historical examples of socioeconomic crisis that might guide art world responses to the current one?
Every moment of exceptional innovation arises when the logic of capital is thwarted; where aesthetic and sensible experience becomes maximal; where emancipation transforms from an inexistent impossibility to an existent possibility. It is not a matter of historicizing the present, but of foreseeing it. Not a matter of re-enacting revolutionary historical sequences, but redeeming their potential. For us, hope is not hidden in history, but in the eternal present of creation. At the level of artistic practice, there are collective examples in the mould of 16beaver, Raqs Media Collective, colourschool; individual practices such as that of Martha Rosler, Coco Fusco, and Paul Chan; and most importantly, a whole range of unknown practices that we are unaware of, preludes of a community to-come. There are reasons for collective hope because we are living in times of great experimentation.
Nathan Crompton, crompton.n@gmail.com
Andrew Witt, awlax10@yahoo.co.uk
Good Fortune................................fortnightly............................... 