[-empyre-] on re-thinking our practices

Sun Mar 18 00:24:44 EST 2012

Dear Aristide, Teddy again, Johannes, Alicia, Sabela, Ethel and all writing
those passionated and smart arguments: I think we are all conscient about
the difficulties of achieving real changes (not cosmetic or superficial
changes) without finding new forms. The change is maybe the form. The
anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres is one of my housegods. He spent
many years with the Guarani indians in Paraguay and developed a thesis
where he found the notion of state was not so universal as many
philosophers and political theorists from the West thought.
In his major book "Society against the State" he argued that the Guarani
indians were familiar with the need of a structure who regulated their
societies but to avoid the need of such a structure they divided their
groups in smaller groups.
He stated as well their uses of rotationary leadership where the most
fitted leader took them to the war, par example, but as soon as the war was
over they took another leader more fitted to civilian life, maybe the best
agricultor or the best negotiator.

Clastres was a member of Socialism ou Barbarie, a French revolutionary
group started among others by another of my housegods, the Greek-French
philosopher and psychoanalyzer Cornelius Castoriadis. Socialism ou Barbarie
was crucial as movement for the 1968 riots and for find other forms of
revolt. They were stern antistalinists and they were near Guy Debord and
the Situationist International.
My point to make real changes we must put in question the political
structures of ruling ad gestioning we have been using for generations and
make a transitiont to new social forms which are not yet tested as workable.
For me utopy is not only a dream but also a motor in my life and I am
willing to subordinate all my other needs to it.

Ana

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 1:18 PM, ARISTIDE ANTONAS
<antonasoffice at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Teddy Cruz, dear Ana Valdés,
>
> Strategy is the topic to discuss, because the phenomena we are into can
> only keep a continuity to the past through the inertness that you described
> as the last important refuge of capitalism: a transformation of the left
> rhetorics to a banal way of capitalistic "lessez faire", or what happens
> when the only possible way to enter a political discourse becomes similar
> to the way we withdraw from it. Art and architecture form fields of
> interrogation that transcend the normal understanding of their limits; they
> can now be perceived as as platforms of action. I believe that the
> transformation you describe as this shift of rhetorics is done through an
> operation of dividing the community; it could never happen top down: it
> occurred bottom up, through the Internet and with a work done by the
> communities "themselves". Virno, Negri and Hardt capture this moment as the
> moment of the multitude; I understand this historical moment as an
> acceptance of inoperative resistance to anything. The multitude first and
> foremost describe an inability to think about resistance to hegemonic
> schemata, because such schemata are not obvious in the condition of the
> multitude. In this condition of the multitude the negation of any theory,
> the opposition to any concrete policy enters the same sphere of the policy
> itself and is similar to many other policies; resistance loses its meaning,
> it becomes a post about resistance in the internet archive. It is operated
> as an entry in a dictionary, as an archive function, between many other
> archived  and categorized acts of resistance. The multitude is the name of
> the political condition after the Internet, a realized deconstruction, even
> if deconstruction could never be realized; its work would be to decode and
> sabotage this hidden homogeneity of the internet archive from inside the
> archive and also from its outside. We can either act in this field through
> a strategical insistence on details, accepting to answer in an entry level
> organizing a resilience to parts of it or by adding to a heavy live archive
> another more or less unimportant entry. The means, even if made to promote
> distinct identities is now working to burry them into controlled super
> platforms such as google, facebook and all the other web 2 structures that
> organize a person as a function of the uses done within their frames.
> Resistance as a system of major opposition to hegemonic structures seem to
> lose its meaning if included in this frame. It organizes the community as a
> republic system of different, distinct isolated plural meeting points, that
> are grounded in such predetermined platforms. Between the platforms we
> encounter a growing desert. The more these platform communities become
> active the more the background on which they grow seems empty. Division
> will more emphatically be the rule of the future governance. The
> description of capitalism will tend to be identified with this desert: the
> only unifying factor of everything a concept of empty religion as Agamben
> puts it and also a place where no right is reserved for any "real" person.
> In this frame the current state legislations and the rights they preserve
> for citizens will lose their meaning. We will gradually stop thinking that
> we share some common human attributes as persons living in the same planet.
> A person can be identified, categorized, understood when he or she enters
> some of the communities that wait for him or her. The concept of the gated
> community (fake paradise or ghetto) is the operative concept of the city of
> the future. A congregation of such islands and a mode of coexistence with
> the less of  interaction between parts seems to be the most easy way to
> keep the city's unity in a strategy of separation. From this point of view
> we observe that Mouffe's concept of agonism reinforces the separatist
> tension of the society and as well as the description of Virno, Negri and
> Hardt. The relation between parts is in neither of those two readings the
> emphasis: they both glorify the distinct existence of different social
> particles, more or less related between them but always distinct and, in
> the case of Mouffe, claiming the determination of their constitutive
> structure. Merging different cultures without dividing seems to be now the
> most difficult task; even an agonistic "model" of the society asks for
> better determination of its parts: a republican constitution of isolated
> social units will then form a stratification that is now under realization
> in Athens: this is where capitalism is driving its problematic future. Our
> local acts are to be seen, discussed and repeated all over the world. And
> as you write, Teddy, it will be urban planning policies and legislations
> that can be paradigmatic writings on the urban fabric in many senses. The
> question will be how can we inspire or invent more general views in such a
> fragmented field. And how can we elaborate the difference between the
> specific and the general in this condition. The regulation of the specific
> and the general needs in any case an architectonic elaboration.
>
> Aristide Antonas
>
> On 16 March 2012 23:31, Teddy Cruz <cruzroe at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> Dear Ana,
>> Thanks for inviting to be part of this conversation! I had not been able
>> to participate until now. I have been reading the postings and also have
>> been taking notes, so wanted to share a few thoughts in response to a few
>> issues that have come up. I have delineated them as a series of fragments
>> and provocations below.
>> Thanks again for making part of this particular topic's discussion.
>> Abrazos,
>> Teddy
>>
>> -We are all aware of how the institutionalization of greedy capitalism in
>> the last decades not only widened the gap between wealth and poverty so
>> dramatically, but also defined a radically conservative socio-economic
>> agenda, impacting urban planning policy and legislation.
>> -We are all aware of how this situation ultimately has incrementally
>> yielded the erosion of public culture, infrastructure and education,
>> polarizing communities and jurisdictions everywhere.
>> -We are all aware of how the many crises of the last decades recur and
>> recur, and while these crises have always prompted the search for
>> fundamental institutional ‘change,’ we now know how that ‘change’ only
>> sought the status quo, yielding more of the same.
>> -While all of this is obviously clear, the question remains: How are we
>> to re-organize as artists, communities, to perform a more *effective
>> project* that can enable institutional modifications? (I will get to
>> this later- because you might ask: why modifications? If, in fact,
>> comprehensive change is what we are clamoring for).
>> -And yes, I underlined -effective project- because what we need is a more
>> *functional* set of operations that can reconnect art to the urgency of
>> the everyday and the re-thinking of the institutions. Or as Tania Brugera
>> said to me a while back: This is the time to restore Duchamp’s urinal back
>> to the bathroom.
>> -Can conflict itself become a tool to enable a more critical debate
>> beyond our clichés and the clichés of the other, as well as the retooling
>> of artistic practices?
>> -What I mean is that while we debate the ‘differences’ between
>> ‘resistance’ and ‘resilience,’ capitalism has stolen those terms from ‘us’
>> already, a long, long time ago.
>> -And I say ‘stolen’ because those and many other terms in the last two
>> decades initially emerged from the ‘left,’ in our attempt to ‘resist’
>> binary thought: ‘fluidity,’ ‘multiplicity,’ ‘hybridity,’
>> ‘self-organization,’ ‘anti-centralization, and beyond. But, as Micah White
>> pointed out a while back, soon these concepts were instrumentalized by
>> digitalized capitalism itself, as the devices for installing the hegemony
>> of a borderless and wireless ‘new economy.’
>> -Now we weep! We let ‘them’ steal them is because those concepts remained
>> sheltered statically either as symbolic representations or simply as
>> academic categories inside our cultural institutions; either wrapped as
>> ‘poetic’ devices or metaphorically isolated; i.e., I cannot help but to
>> think of the performance described in one of the postings last week:
>> artists staying in their beds as act of resistance!
>> -So, while we debate the ‘meanings’ of those terms, or the
>> incorrectedness of ‘using’ them because we might be risking sounding like
>> the ‘enemy,’ capitalism has enabled them operationally, defining a
>> different set of strategies to camouflage and re-deploy itself once again,
>> muddling the distinctions between resistance and complicity.
>> -Much has been written about this, so I just wanted to bring the topic
>> back to our conversation: The urgency to re-take those terms and uphold
>> them not metaphorically but ‘performatively,’ as ways to infiltrate
>> ourselves into existing institutional protocols. In other words, I am less
>> interested on what those terms ‘mean’ to us and more on what they can ‘do’
>> to the institutions.
>> -So, as a gesture of self critique: we need to transcend our
>> self-entitled position as artists, pretending to exist outside the
>> institutions. The institutions have in fact defined our practices and the
>> roles we play in the world in the last decades.
>> -In my mind, this has been extremely problematic: to think that the
>> ‘avant-garde’ project has always needed a ‘critical distance’ from the
>> hegemony of the insitutions in order to critique the institutions. Today,
>> more than ever, we need to engage a project of ‘critical proximity,’ to
>> these institutions; in fact, re-organize ourselves as we infiltrate the
>> institution’s own logics of organization. As Jean Genet’s posting reminded
>> us through Zizek: ‘Let’s look at how hegemoic response organizes itself’
>> –as a point of departure.
>> - in this context two references come to mind: One is Zizek’s statement
>> that it is easier to imagine the end of the world by a climatic disaster or
>> a cosmic collision than to imagine modest changes in Capitalism. Even if I
>> am pissed right now and  I also demand comprehensive change, I am coming
>> to reflect that the most persuasive change is incremental, small, tactical
>> and agile. I am interested in this idea of ‘modest alterations,’ not only
>> in terms of the city, but of existing institutional processes. With this
>> thought he also points out the need to re-imagine ‘utopia,’ less idealized
>> as a ‘promised land’ and more as an emergent set of conditions that can
>> only be engaged by the present sense of urgency. Only an urgent imagination
>> –not a free imagination- can push us to construct alterations of the
>> existing real, the now. It is within this immediacy where utopia dwells.
>> -The other reference is from Chantal Mouffe. Her notion of ‘agonism’ has
>> transformed reductive ways of thinking about public space. Public space for
>> Mouffe is a battle ground where the hegemony of institutional power is
>> exposed and visualized. An ‘agonistic’ model here opens a different role
>> for art in engaging interventions in the ‘debate’ itself. By amplifying its
>> mediatory role to advance a more critical conversation across polarized
>> actors and institutions, an agonistic model of art complicates the facile
>> relationship between ‘friend and enemy.’ These ideas begin to forward a new
>> way of facilitating critical urban pedagogical models that intervene
>> directly in the gap that has unfortunately divided urban policy and a
>> collective imagination in our time.
>> -In fact, this is how one of the most critical sites for artistic
>> investigation and practice today is the gap itself that currently exists
>> between institutions and publics. How to produce critical interfaces with
>> the public to debate the conditions that have produced environmental,
>> economic and social crises in the first place? How to reconnect public
>> policy, social justice and civic imagination?
>> -Finally, through my own interests in terms of my work at the Tijuana-San
>> Diego border, I am realizing the need to take ‘detours’ from architecture
>> in order to contact the domains that have remained peripheral to design
>> itself, namely economy and policy. Only the knowledge of the protocols
>> embedded in stupid urban policy and discriminating economic models can give
>> ‘us’ the ammunition to present counter models.
>> -Only by understanding –very well- the conditions that produced the
>> current crises can we advance the conversation: those conditions themselves
>> must be the material for artists today.
>> -With this, I am suggesting that
>> -‘We’ need to be the developers of our own housing (the site of
>> intervention is the developer’s spreadsheet),
>> -We need to be the producers of new political processes and economic
>> models (the site of intervention is the very politics and economics that
>> have perpetuated a selfish urbanization in our time),
>> -We need to be the enablers of new models of political representation and
>> participation (the site of intervention is education itself and the very
>> notion of community: who represents who during this period of
>> transformation)
>> -We need to be the ones who visualize and expose institutional conflict
>> (the site of intervention is educational processes themselves, at the scale
>> of the urban)
>> -This does not mean that we will ‘escape’ the city into an autonomous
>> ‘alternative village-commune’ where we will compost ourselves to death. If
>> we retreat like this, we will end up being another enclave in the
>> compendium of enclaves that have atomized the city into isolated and
>> fragmented parts. At this moment this means that our work needs to
>> complicate itself by infiltrating existing institutional protocols,
>> negotiating modest alterations, and being persuasive enough so that
>> stealth, bottom up urban resiliency can become the agile device to
>> transform top down policy and economy.
>> -We need to re-think our practices, our procedures, not only to enable
>> such bottom up creative intelligence to scale up but to also participate
>> more meaningfully in the retrofitting of existing political and economic
>> systems.
>>
>> ****
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
>
> --
> ANTONAS office
> emm. Benaki 118
> Exarcheia, Athens 11473
> Greece
>
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