Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

284 Brian Holmes
The virtual freedom of Net-based distribution, the concrete experience
of temporary autonomous zones, and the analytic project of critical
mapping all come together in this reXection on the circuits of production
and distribution. The problem that emerges from an artistic engagement with
geopolitics is no longer just that of “naming the enemy,” or locating the
hierarchies of global power. It is also that of revealing the political potential
of world society, the potential to change the reigning hierarchies: “If we think
of a production line as a republic, then each object becomes a Xag, a global
sociopolitical assemblage: in other words, a symbol. But this symbol needs to
be resymbolized, its meaning must be extracted, the relations of production
must become visible. Only then would the most ordinary supermarket catalogue
appear for what it really is: a world social atlas, an atlas of possible
struggles and paths of exodus, a machine of planetary political recomposition.”
For artists, the resymbolization of everyday life appears as the highest
constructive ambition. But what does it entail? What kind of work would it
take to help transform society’s gaze on the relations of production?
COLLECTIVE INTERVENTIONS
The construction of global brands in the 1980s and 1990s entailed the integration
of countercultural and minority rhetorics, as well as the direct enlistment
into the workplace of “creatives” from all the domains of art and
culture, a process denounced by North American critics like Thomas Frank
or Naomi Klein. 25 A more sophisticated theoretical approach, emerging from
the Italian theorists of Autonomia, has recently shown how corporations
build “worlds” not only for their consumers, but also for their employees—
that is to say, imaginary systems of reference, both ethical and aesthetic, as
well as architectural environments, communications nets, security systems,
etc., all aimed at maintaining the coherency of the Wrm and its products
under conditions of extreme geographic dispersal. 26 The imposition of these
worlds as a set of competing frames for everyday life requires a cultural and
psychic violence that can lead to different forms of rejection: in this sense,
the trashing of Niketowns and McDonalds by anticorporate protestors or
the “Stop-pub” movement that defaced hundreds of advertisements in the
Paris metro in 2003 are direct, popular expressions of the critical stance taken
in a book like No Logo. Echoing these destructive acts, many of today’s media
artists seek symbolic disruption or “culture jamming”: détournement as a formalist
genre, Photoshop’s revenge on advertising. 27 But a deeper question is
how to initiate psychic deconditioning and disidentiWcation from the corporate
worlds—contemporary equivalents of the Dadaist drive to subvert
the repressive structures of the bourgeois ego.