Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

288 Brian Holmes
so. 30 Acting as labor organizers without any particular artistic pretensions,
they sought to build an iconic language that could reach out simultaneously
to kids doing service jobs in chain-stores, temp workers, and freelance intellectual
laborers, the so-called cognitariat, who are sometimes better paid but
face similarly precarious conditions. They did illegal demonstrations and
banner-drops inside shopping malls where all rights to assembly in public are
curtailed. Their Web site, www.chainworkers.org, was conceived as a legal
information resource and a way to create collective consciousness. But their
best tactic proved to be a reinvention of the traditional Mayday parade,
around the theme of casual labor conditions. The event quickly outstripped
anything the unions could muster; by the third year, in 2004, it brought together
Wfty thousand people in Milan and had also spread to Barcelona. What
you see in the streets at these events is a new kind of mapping, not just of
power but of subjective and collective agency, which means affects, ideas,
life energy. It is a popular, militant cartography of living conditions in the
postmodern information economy, created by the people who produce that
economy on a day-to-day basis. This cartography is conveyed in living images:
dancers in pink feather boas disrupting the fashion trade in a Zara store;
African workers wearing bright white masks that say “invisible” on them; a
giant puppet representing different kinds of burnout temp jobs (call-center
slaves, pizza ponies, day-labor construction workers). A huge green banner
drapes the side of a truck hauling a sound-system through the crowd: “the
metropolis is a beast: cultivate micropolitics for resistance.” One of
the posters for the event shows a contortionist from an old-fashioned circus—
an allegory of the Xexible worker in the spectacle society.
The Mayday parades are an assertion of biopolitics, against all the
sophisticated methods currently employed for physical and psychic control.
They develop an aesthetic language of the event for its own sake, as a territory
of expression. But the same event formulates a political demand for
the basic guarantees that could make a Xexible working existence viable: an
unpolluted urban environment; socialized health care and lodging; highquality
public education; access to the tools of information production, but
also to the spaces and free time necessary for social and affective production,
or what theorists call the production of subjectivity. 31 This last is vital for
psychic health, because otherwise one will fall prey to all the consumer and
professional worlds that are explicitly designed to vampirize the isolated individual
and feed on his or her desire. In this sense, the political struggle is
directly artistic; it is a struggle for the aesthetics of everyday life. The pressure
of hyperindividualism, or what I have called “the Xexible personality,” 32
is undoubtedly what has given rise to the widespread desire to construct