[-empyre-] queer cooptation and cooptation loops

Judith Rodenbeck jrodenbe at slc.edu
Fri Jul 24 11:11:42 EST 2009


Ahh, that feels good! After finishing reading Paolo Virno's "A Grammar of
the Multitude" djlotu5 wrote this:

> i think that it would be a
> mistake to not discuss RA in the context of post-fordist cooptation of
> earlier strategies of resistance.

And this

> 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.

Yes yes yes. This is exactly why it is a problem that "viewer/participants"
are (re)coded as "extras": because this very "participatory" terminology
reveals their subsumption into a culture industry as its disposable,
unskilled lumpen. 

> 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.

Those projects were explicit in their critique of the gallery system and its
archaeo/advanced capitalization of art making and objects. When Maciunas
said being an "artist" was NOT a job he meant it. But the works they made
weren't exactly about "unregulated situations where [people] could
interact," and that's the interesting and much-misunderstood part. The
scores (or, for Kaprow, recipes) were regulations internal to events while
participation itself was, at least by the early 1960s and for AK, almost
Habermasian in its acknowledgement of mutual respect and obligation. So: not
a free-for-all space for free-for-all behavior, but an agreed-upon set of
actions that were radically open to interpretation, a dialectic of control
and freedom. I like to think about Gramsci's evocation of typesetting here
as a model:

"If one thinks about it, it is clear that in these trades the process of
adaptation to mechanisation is more difficult than elsewhere. Why? Because
it is so hard to reach the height of professional qualification when this
requires of the worker that he should Œforget¹ or not think about the
intellectual content of the text he is reproducing: this in order to be
able, if he is a scribe, to fix his attention exclusively on the
calligraphic form of the single letters; or to be able to break down phrases
into Œabstract¹ words and then words into characters, and rapidly select the
pieces of lead in the cases; or to be able to break down not single words
but groups of words, in the context of discourse, and group them
mechanically into shorthand notation; or to acquire speed in typing, etc.
The worker¹s interest in the intellectual content of the text can be
measured from his mistakes. In other words, it is a professional failing.
Conversely his qualification is commensurate with his lack of intellectual
interest, i.e. the extent to which he has become Œmechanised.¹"

The passage continues:
 
"Š.. Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens
is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state
of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanised is the
physical gesture; the memory of the trade, reduced to simple gestures
repeated at an intense rhythm, Œnestles¹ in the muscular and nervous centres
and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupationsŠ."
 
[Antonio Gramsci, ³Americanism and Fordism,² in Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, 308-310.] Note the suggestion that for productivity to increase
³fascinating intellectual content² must decrease‹a succinct preemptive
rejoinder to millenial celebrations of network culture and the ³creative
economy" of Richard Florida and whomever else.

> 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. 

Yes, and I'd like to queer this becoming-canonical litany with Barbara
Rubin's Christmas on Earth, a project that, astonishingly, manages to be far
queerer than either Flaming Creatures or Pleasuredome. Rubin's 1963 film is
presented as a double-screen projection [bi-labial relocation of the
singular filmic image; recoding of the classic Ken Jacobs axial dual-screen
pussy shot] and...well, if you don't know it you can read about it here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_93/ai_n15979875/

>  It's like a feminist consciousness raising meeting for the art elite.

Uhm, yes. But worse, because feminist consciousness never really "nestled"
into that art discourse in the first place, whereas a highly flexible but
clearly male homosociality isn't just nestled but in fact defines the
artworld comfort zone. The straight mind, as it were.

Judith




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