In August I will participate/co-facilitate the NYC conference on ‘fleeing as an act of non-passive political resistance’, organized by volunteers of The Public School.  Fleeing, exodus, withdrawal, invisibility (as opposed to confrontation, protest, insurrection); in the scope of our conference, the genealogy of thought begins with Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, and later Paolo Virno, though of course many people contributed to, lived, this topic avant-la-lettre.  Here is one of the prompt excerpts which we will use as a point of departure for the sessions:

The Italian/French legacy of the exodus, even if it no longer allows dreaming of a completely different outside, is not at all to be understood as harmless, individualist, or escapist-esoteric. “There is nothing more active than a flight!” as Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet wrote in the 1970s, and as Virno repeats almost literally in 2001: “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.” What this form of innovation-as-exit involves is a dangerous, positive form of defection, a fleeing that enables one to look for a weapon as one goes. Instead of presupposing relationships of domination as an immovable horizon and yet still fighting against them, this flight changes the conditions under which the presupposition occurs. The exodus transforms the context in which a problem has emerged, instead of treating the problem by deciding between given alternatives. As joke and as innovative action, exodus—the nonpassive, nondialectical, nonindividualist form of defection—opens up a side road, uncharted on political maps, “to modify the very ‘grammar’ which determines the selection of all possible choices.”

From Modifying the Grammar. Paolo Virno’s Works on Virtuosity and Exodus
by Gerald Raunig and translated by Aileen Derieg
[First published in Artforum January 2008]

In mid July it occurred to me that the scope of the discussion needed some articulation, so I wrote an admittedly hastily executed remark about the scope of the ‘fleeing’ we were to be discussing:

July 17

…I’ve been thinking about the scope of fleeing in this context of mainly exodus projects, but your comment with the Virno text seems (please correct me if I’m misreading it) to exclude a profound and probably much more practiced form of fleeing, which IS that of the escapist kind. Think of beach bums, ski bums, permanent expats in Phuket or similar, the homeless, of course suicide; these operate on individualist terms – they are individually made decisions, often, in the mind of the doer, apolitical, and not related to the more formalized exodus projects laid out by some of the other writers here. Yet still, as a whole, in a materialist sense of, say, population migrations, they constitute something political and non passive. They are “life techniques”, as my recent professor Wolfgang Schirmacher might put it.One of the reasons I like Kracauer’s boredom essay is that in a way it doesn’t target any political structure (though some are going to tie that to the ubiquity of media), such as Empire for Tiqqun for example, but to the simple fact that the presymbolic world is interested in us whether we are interested in it or not in the very fact that we are here (perhaps foisted here into this life), and always are aware that we are sensing. The world does to us.

Someone took issue with the casualness with which I seemed to lump together, commensurate matter-of-factly, homelessness and suicide with other individualistic forms of turning away, of which there are more than I can think of if we wish to be expansive in our definition.  I agree, there’s no negligible difference there whatsoever, but here was my defense:

July 22

To preface, I want to upgrade our conception of the implications of an act like ‘moving to Berlin to be an artist’, or ‘going to live in Ibitha’, rather than downplay the seriousness of suicide, or imply that homelessness is usually a happily, freely made choice.

Perhaps I was too hasty in lumping them together without articulation in between, and I would be ready to agree that on the face, suicide and homelessness seem to belong to a different strain of ‘fleeing’, if they can be categorized that way at all. But I do not think they are incommensurable with the other escapes I listed; suicide, as an escape from the harsh realities of the Universe, as well a response to the failings of the human project, is well established territory in philosophy, especially in the tradition of antinatalism (stop having children, effectively species suicide), and misotheism, from Durkheim, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schirmacher, Hume, Appel, Crawford, and others. Suicide in real life is still widely understood as taboo, as accident, as tragedy (which it is), but I would not shy away from implying that everyone, even the mentally unstable, bring to suicide a personal ethics (not in the sense of what ought I to do, but in the posthumanist sense of what can I do?); is suicide also not somehow a fleeing from the world, a turning inward or otherward? The obvious rebuttal, “but then your dead” is too anthropocentric for my tastes.
Homelessness I would be more willing to agree I erred with. But, for example, I was recently told by a medical anthropologist that 3/4 of the homeless people in the US are gay teenagers; their running away from bad homes, abusive or non-present parents must be brought into a comprehensive discussion of fleeing as non-passive resistance, in this case (in the U.S.) a critique of the indoctrinated Christian notions of the family and home. I also think of the West Coast and Northern span railroad culture of homelessness going back to the Depression but possessing its own developed, autonomous, non-state governed ethics; I am reading William Vollmann’s ‘Riding Toward Everywhere’ on the subject and of how the train riding hobos eventually come to view their space as privileged over that of mere ‘citizens’.

I’ll stop there for now since I need to think about this more, but I’ll also add willful ignorance to my list; e.e. cummings once wrote, kisses are a far better fate than wisdom, and every thinking person knows what he meant.

These remarks just touch the surface and I need to spend a lot of time considering them further, but the sessions should be fruitful in this way.  The first will be on August 4, and the primary text will consist of excerpts from Tiqqun’s Introduction To Civil War, recently published by MIT Press for Semitotext(e).

Some visual associations:

Gigi Scaria

Cosmia von Bonin

It is becoming more and more popularly acknowledged that the art exhibition as a specific experiential format has played a large role in enabling art’s maintained, perhaps rising status, often more so than then content of the artworks within.  In a paper delivered at Serpentine Gallery in 2009, Dorothea von Hantelmann argued that the exhibition format, from the salon to the biennial, has ‘performed’ a crucial favor (the word favor being my particular elaboration on her idea) for art, of creating a psychologically empathetic relationship between audience and artwork, in which the audience has an expectation of democratic subjectivity, and therein affords the work automatic value.  There is plenty of precedent, of course, to the idea that meaning in art is constructed at least partially by the expectations the audience brings to the work, going back at least to Hans-Robert Jauss’ reception theory of the 1960s.  It has become fashionable, at least in curatorial circles, to place emphasis on the role of the curator in helming the viewer’s experience with an exhibition – and to remind others, as Boris Groys notably has done, that the word curate originates from the Latin verb, curare, to heal, it is a more specific development to examine how the multiple experiential characteristics of the exhibition as a device in itself, can perpetuate art’s economic, political, and social status.

In view of this, selfportrait will launch a new project, beginning next week, that aims to respond to the often overlooked experiential nuances of the contemporary art exhibition.

Recommended Reading:

The Triangulation of Value – Nav Haq – Afterall 23

Politics of Installation – Boris Groys – e-flux 2

David Carrier on Art Power

Reception History, from U. Toronto

Doug Wada - Untitled (Bags, Winter) - 2008 - oil on linen, from Look Again at Marlborough Chelsea

16 Beaver Group wishes more art were instrumentalized to serve radical politics … but it’s not.  And so, because we are all complicit, we should go and watch a dozen or so films screened this Sunday, recontextualized “to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.”  Here is the information from their website:

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/

What: Site a specific film performance
When: Sunday 1.24.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This sunday will be the third in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performance and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last two events, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.

Continuing our investigation of linkages between politics and abstraction, tonight will examine the critical category of narcissism.

Using Harari’s text on the late Lacan, and Krauss’ seminal essay from the first October on Video – The Aesthetics of Narcissism as touchstones, this sunday we will investigate the complex interaction between “narcissism” and the political. In previous evenings abstraction has been considered according to Bataille’s categories of the informe (formlessness) and the sacred, and Agamben’s analysis of The Open, with the political necessity of keeping open the spaces exemplified (and intensified) by the abstract Image as a primary theme. Here narcissism (the mirror) figures as a kind of short-circuit, which tonight’s performance-based videos evocatively display. Performance/improvisation – as a strategy of conceptual liberation, as a tool for creating radical intuitive (abstract) spaces, versus a kind of “mimetic narcissism” – as a product of radical devolution. The work of surrealist Jacques Vache (and the fourth dimension of (h)umour) and Duchampian irony will be utilized. Krauss’ essay will be considered but creatively reconfigured in order to take video performance out of its historicized context and set it to work for political activity.

Works to be included tonight (Jonas’s hypnotic meditation on self-reflexivity and alter-ego Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Trecartin’s synaptic, digitally manipulated psychedelia What’s the Love Making Babies For?, Charles M. Jones’ classic short Duck Amuck, and Joe Gibbons’ acerbic take on emergence Sabotaging Spring, among others) will be employed to develop the theme.

In order to refigure video performance strategies to their purely abstract/structural dimension, performance works tonight will be interposed with the work of
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito.

___________________________________________________
2. Films to be screened

Joan Jonas Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy 15 min.
Takashi Ito Venus 8 min.
Chris Burden Big Wrench 16 min.
Takashi Ito Box 4 min.
Leslie Thornton She Had He So He Do He To Her 5 min.
Takashi Ito Ghost 6 min.
Ryan Trecartin What’s the Love Making Babies For? 20 min.
Charles M. Jones Duck Amuck 7 min.
Takashi Ito Drill 5 min.
Tony Oursler Selected Early Work [excerpt] 10 min.
Takashi Ito Spacy 10 min.
Joe Gibbons Sabotaging Spring 15 min.

Daniel Birnbaum put Semiotext(e), Sylvere Lotringer’s perennially relevant publishing company, as number 10 in his list of the Best of 2009, in Artforum.  This year, Semiotext(e) picked up The Coming Insurrection, by The Invisible Committee, originally published in French by La Fabrique in 2007.  Notably, this book has been recommended (in an antiphrastical sense) by Glenn Beck because its “dangerous”.  This is, in my mind, a landmark moment.  Not because this book is actually dangerous, although it might be, but because for the first time in a long time French philosophy appears explicitly on mainstream American television!

(Note: that is actually technically untrue if we count Matthieu Laurette’s holding up of a sign reading ‘Ranciere Is So Cool’ in the crowd at The Today Show, last month)

Coming from America, where the idea of radical provocateur for many ends at Michael Moore, I found The Coming Insurrection to be truly startling.  The prose is more angry, alienated, and calls for more direct action than anything published mainstream recently in the US, to my knowledge (except maybe Joel Kovel’s recent books).  The language and tone share much with the tradition of what has been called “the violent left”, in the tradition of late Marxism, to Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, the terroristic implications of the Situationists, the key texts of 1968, to the writings of the RAF.  For The Invisible Committee, society is but “a vague aggregate of social millieus … there is no longer any language for common experience”  For them, “the present offers no way out.”

What is potentially “dangerous”, about The Coming Insurrection is the following: its authors are “predominantly graduate students from middle-class backgrounds, from 22 to 34 years old” (this range actually refers to The Tarnac Nine, a group of political activists led by Julien Coupat, the book’s alleged co-author).  Coupat went to the prestigious egare de l’ESSEC business school, and later wrote a dissertation on Guy Debord.  The potential danger, in my mind, comes in that much of today’s Western youth grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual relativism, of acknowledged relative value systems, and that this relativism is actually beginning to backfire in the form of a fetishization of radicalism.  This youth, seduced by terrorism as what Dieter Roelstraete calls a historical genre, is educated and deeply empathetic, but they carry one major naivete: they have only seen war on television.  They never saw the surreal wasteland that was Europe after World War II, or witnessed the dekulakization of Stalinist USSR.  They have, however, seen Godard’s La Chinoise. They find the Baader-Meinhoff and Action Directe, among other things, adventurous. This is something that separates them from the more experienced thinkers of a generation prior.  Radicalism, for a globally networked portion of today’s youth, is cargo cult.  That, if anything, is what makes this book potentially dangerous.

Don’t get me started on twenty-something activist artists from Brooklyn.  Bunch of puppy dogs.

I have read critiques that the philosophical logic behind The Coming Insurrection is B-grade.  I can’t speak to that, but I do see in it a central act of legerdemain committed: that is to lead readers to believe that the radical left is everywhere, on every street, akin to the repressed members of Palahniuk’s Fight Club (Palahniuk also frequently takes cues from a Marxist tradition of social satire).  The Invisible Committee writes that the European riots of 2005 occurred not just in the banlieues by an alienated, primarily North African male youth, but all over:

The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has stopped burning.

This book has other flaws that, in my little experience, I can see.  For one thing, it all but ignores major techno-economic paradigm shifts, like the open source, gift economy that pervades the web  (There is a fantastic newsletter on the very topic of digital labor and the “erotics of playbor”, over at the iDC, and another at thenextlayer.org).

Second, they have this peculiarly French way of honing in on singular artifacts of a wildly complex society and hinging their entire indictment around that… for the Situationists it was the dishwasher, for The Invisible Committee it’s anti-depressants.

I’ll stop there because I’m experiencing a wave of self-doubt.  Anybody up for ping-pong?

quoted from slashdot:

“In Denmark, it’s legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It’s also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about it. They promised him a response, then didn’t respond. So now he’s reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.”

http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-refuses-bait-drm-breaker-goes-to-the-police-091201/

So, I have been reading a lot of Boris Groys on contemporary art, religion, and politics lately (Art and Power, Medium Religion, and some e-flux essays).  Groys is exceptionally clear, accessible, advanced beyond almost everyone in his conception of art, and he says clever, provocative things like, “We all know Bin Laden as a video artist first and foremost.”¹

I have also been reading Creative Time’s A Guide to Democracy in America, kind of spuriously named after Alexis de Tocqueville’s excellent book of observations from 1835.  I usually like Nato Thompson, but I did not like this book, or its design.  Anyway, the reading and some hyperlinks brought me to Theo Watson, former fellow at Eyebeam Atelier, and thus to Graffiti Research Lab.  On their blog they discussed a documentary about their practice, and referred jokingly to it having been put on the Department of Homeland Security’s “No Fly List.”  I wikipedia No Fly List and learn about the contention surrounding it.

Graffiti Research Lab renames Verizon, "NSA" (2008)

Nato Thompson, austellungmacher and sometimes editor

Example:

• Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, reported that the following exchange took place at Newark on 1 March 2007, where he was denied a boarding pass “because I [Professor Murphy] was on the Terrorist Watch list.” The airline employee asked, “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” “I explained,” said professor Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.” To which the airline employee responded, “That’ll do it.” ((Naomi Wolf, The Guardian, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment))

Then, Bruce Schneier, cryptographer and security guru, wrote the following in an article for The Atlantic, as a simple way for people to defeat the No Fly List.  I don’t understand how this works, if it still does, and am wondering if anyone can help explain…

Use a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. Print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.²

Some quick art associations:

Benjamin Edwards

Charles Gute (2003)

Kevin Mitnick's business card

Mark Bradford - Los Moscos

Martin Creed - Work No. 227 (2001)

Brody Condon - Velvet Strike (2002)

Theo Watson + Graffiti Research Lab

Ethan Ham - Email Erosion (2006)

Yann Serandour

Tobias Putrih + MOS - Maximum Brick Overhang

Eva and Franco Mattes - United We Stand (2005)

1. Dieter Roelstraete, Art In and Out of The Age of Terror, Afterall 17, Spring 2008 – http://afterall.org/journal/issue.17/art_age_terror [↩]
2. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security/2 [↩]