For some time now we have been facing the new modulations and regulations of work in the field of culture, i.e. the unequal proportions between paid and unpaid work, work and free time, and the increasing fragmentation of the work experience, but also the self-precarization[1], which is happening on all levels of life, and the lack of class consciousness and solidarity among those working in the field of culture[2] / the new proletariat. This lack of solidarity is even more apparent when we look beyond the confines of the sphere of culture[3]; cultural workers rarely act politically when one has to risk one’s reputation or life for a political cause.
The question that comes to mind is: Why class-consciousness? The new proletariat has not achieved any improvement in working conditions since the 1980s, under the illusion that capitalism was developing towards a higher form of labour and production, despite the fact that in some parts of the world immaterial labor has replaced industrial work. Contrary to expectations, the working class has not disappeared; it only expanded to include this new class of “overeducated and underemployed,” which subsequently led to new forms of exploitation in the social fabric. Divisions within the working class have deepened, and the so-called cognitariat has become its most privileged section. What is more, the new hierarchy of struggle has given rise to another conflict which “fail[s] to anticipate the strategic moves by which capitalism can restructure the accumulation process by taking advantage of the inequalities within the global workforce,”[4] leading to friction within the working class, particularity of struggles, and the inability to interconnect.
Can our (cultural workers’) speaking be heard? To whom are we speaking? And what are we speaking about? Is institutional critique the most radical position cultural workers can adopt?
At the same time, however, we should not replace action with speech; as Althusser reminds us, we should ascertain the effects that our speech produces, which means all the effects, both the internal and external. Another question to ask ourselves is what the responsibilities of cultural workers are, especially those of us who are professionally linked to institutions. How can we actually make the transition from merely saying something to having one’s words effecting any real political impact?
Institutions consist not only of collections of art, archives, all manner of objects and other material as well as immaterial sources governed by the structural norms prescribing research, evaluation procedures, educational policies (and consequently their political and ideological dimensions), and displays of objects and documents (in this way constructing certain histories and values). They are also subjects, a work force, human machines with real bodies and emotions that are behind these processes. These subjects consist not only of the immaterial workers, but also of the very people who contribute to the development of both “weightless commodities” and material objects. To formulate this in traditional jargon: while some are enjoying the products of their work, others, within the same work process, feel alienated from the products of their labor.
What is missing in most discourses on this subject today is concrete and radical proposals on how to separate culture from ideology, and an understanding of how the different levels of hegemony, exploitation and power relations manifest themselves in culture. The problem is primarily how to identify these issues in a way that would allow the multiple struggles in one field (i.e., culture) to connect with the struggles in other parts of the social factory. Or, as the students of the UC Santa Cruz put it in their manifesto: a free university in an unfree world is worthless; it can hardly exist. That is why cultural workers must address, in addition to the particular issues concerning their status, also the broader social issues surrounding the revolution of the everyday.[5]
Another topic about which a great deal has been written lately is the new institutions[6]: what they should and could be and where their alliances lie. Art institutions, for example, have been reconsidering their constituent practices and possible associations between movements and institutions, reexamining their role in society, and promoting openness, transversality, critique, fluidity etc. What raises some doubt, however, is the fact that in so doing they have not only effortlessly adopted certain Deleuzian terminology but also obfuscated, particularly in the form of institutional critique, the potential for political transformation in the field of culture. There have been attempts in the sphere of arts to create a form of social configuration that extends beyond existing social forms, such as the many participatory-multicultural projects proposing different social relations and new communities but, at the same time, unable to extend to the “real” work environment of the place where the projects took place. However, such temporary solidarities, identifications between minorities, marginalized and other groups – “[the] projections of politics as other and outside [only] detract from a politics of here and now”[7]. Do we then believe that the new institutions could eventually become a field of “politics of experimentation”?
Such obfuscations as those described above enable capital to mobilize our unconscious potentials (ideas, creativity, affects etc.) and neutralize the “politics of potential” within the field of culture. What we need, here and now, is a new vocabulary for the constitution of political subjects with both social and political responsibilities: subjects that would not simply constitute an apolitical, narcissistic elite producing critical theory only to justify their disregard of the need for radical change in the social fabric, always waiting for some kind of authority to grant them “the power and the truth of experience”; but subjects that would be able to recognize the hegemony and power and to question the political status quo in the institutions, as well as to employ a kind of “strategic essentialism”[8] for common social action. We often hear about dissident subjectivities, about counter behaviors and the like, but do we really know how to become such dissidents? Political subjectivities that have arisen in recent years (within the alter-globalist movement, for example) are in crisis. This crisis results from drastic transformations in the production process and the (re)composition of the labor force, in the new modulations of work, the increasing criminalization of political subjects and, last but not least, in the speed with which capitalism foresees and forestalls any deviations in the ”molar machine”.
Cultural workers can speak. But in order for our speaking to be heard we should try and disentangle ourselves from the comfortable positions we maintain, from the safe places behind the institutional walls where we hide, from the calculable rationalism that we put on every time we go to our temporary or permanent job, and which is favored by every institution and every system in the world. Perhaps it is more emotion that we require, more enjoyment, which can be achieved only when we direct our creativity, our minds and our bodies - all our potentials - from our work back to our everyday life. And perhaps the bodies that resist, the dissident subjectivities and the protesting unconsciousness are to be found in those not so far away landscapes, where “everything we've been sold as facts, all of our bewildered times”[9], the social alienation and the loss of solidarity, is cleared for a different truth about our times in history that is not yet.
This is a modified version of the longer text Can we, the cultural workers, speak? which was written together with the Workers’ Inquiry Group from Madrid.
Bojana Piškur is a member of Radical Education Collective (http://radical.temp.si) and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
[1] See: Isabell Lorey, 2006, Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the normalization of cultural producers, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en#redir; (accessed on November 1, 2010)
[2] Cultural workers are usually considered those who are involved in “cultural production”. We would like to expand this notion to the whole field of culture, therefore including all the workers in cultural institutions, such as service workers, staff workers, technicians, security etc.
[3] What we mean here is the lack of solidarity between cultural workers and other “workers in struggle”.
[4] George Caffentzis / Silvia Federici, 2007, Notes on edu-factory and Cognitive Capitalism, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0809/caffentzisfederici/en
[5] Thanks to Tjaša Pureber for pointing out this to me.
[6] For best compilation of such texts see http://www.eipcp.net/transversal
[7] Hal Foster, The Artist as Etnographer, in The return of the real, MIT Press, 1996, p. 175?
[8] See Gayatri Spivak. The concept refers to using the group identity as a basis of struggle to achieve certain goals.
[9] Jasna Koteska, 2006, Against the pre-Archival Mentality, http://jasnakoteska.blogspot.com/2008/06/5622-2006-314.html
No comments:
Post a Comment