[-empyre-] queer cooptation and cooptation loops

[dj lotu5]

hello all,

this week i finished reading Paolo Virno's "A Grammar of the Multitude"
and i want to share a quote from it, because i think that it would be a
mistake to not discuss RA in the context of post-fordist cooptation of
earlier strategies of resistance.

Virno writes:

"When hired labor involves the desire for action, for a relational
capacity, for the presence of others--all things that the preceding
generation was trying out within the local party headquarters--we can
say that some distinguishing traits of the human animal, above all the
posession of a language, are subsumed within capitalistic production.
The inclusion of the very anthropogenesis in the existing mode of
production is an extreme event. Forget the Heideggerian chatter about
the "technical era"... This event does not assuage, but radicalizes,
instead the antinomies of economic-social capitalistic formation. Nobody
is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of
others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own
possession of a language, reduced to wage labor."

and also

"This is one role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has
become fully entrenched: an industry of the means communication."

In this way, I think we can see Relational Aesthetics as a cooptation
and commercialization of earlier, more radical, art practices based on
social processes and presence. Surely, Kaprow and Fluxus happenings were
aimed at getting people together in live, unregulated situations where
they could interact, but outside of the profit system of galleries and
museums.

One could see RA as a cooptation of many queer artistic and biopolitical
strategies as well. I think that in Jack Smith's flaming creatures and
in kenneth anger's pleasuredome, one can see on screen, a rich social
process. While RA claims to want to reclaim social interaction as an
artistic domain, it is actually reclaiming the kind of queer community
building practices that are so necessary for queer people to live safely
and happily, but reclaiming them for the profit making art industry. RA
can be seen as heteronormative in that it is normative, taking the kind
of collective, social artistic process of earlier artists and putting it
on the tongues of artforum readers everywhere as something totally hip.
  It's like a feminist consciousness raising meeting for the art elite.

Looking at Tara's work, particularly the Men With Missing Parts makes me
think of how this process of cooptation and recuperation flips over and
goes through a constantly resonating feedback loop, with queer drag
performers coopting mainstream icons like Dorothy for drag performance,
and then later Drag performance being turned into hollywood
productions... Even "putting the balls away" is a great example of the
culture industry coopting and profiting off of feminist the gender
liberation movements of the 60s-70s and the ensuing social tension.

ok, thats all for now...

  micha


-- 
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