Reading Summaryhttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/159
"...a broad and ambitious reformulation of how we might still rethink resistance and emancipation both within, and without capitalism."
rethinking relations between people, as well as possible roles for art in society
obscured by the commercial activity and dysfunctional official art institutions
emancipatory capacities inherent to their project have since been foreclosed upon
prevailing sense of rapidly diminishing possibilities in the face of capitalist economy
whether the
(cultural) Left is still capable of thinking and acting beyond the analysis of
overwhelming power structures or working within
the neoliberal consensus model
What is meant by "neoliberal consensus model"?
cultural producers are already
in the process of creating and reflecting new discourses and practices in the
current climate of zombie neoliberalism
capitalism as a self-perpetuating structure
ignores on the one hand the
heterogeneity of multiple economies, including household activities and pre- or
postcapitalist economies, already existing inside Western and non-Western
contexts alike.
anti-capitalist tradition
social asymmetries and gender and ethnic segregation occurring in formal and
informal contexts due to patriarchy, discourses of modernization, and
capitalism itself
feminist understanding
“the personal is political”
offer a foundation for
insights that challenge the common conception that in late or “cognitive”
capitalism, all activities at work and in one’s spare time are subordinate to
capitalist accumulation and ultimately lead to commodification.
positivist view
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt
biopolitical labor
creates not only material and immaterial goods, but also social conditions—and
thereby social life itself.
distinctions
between the economic, the political, the social, and the cultural have become
increasingly blurred.
“biopolitical”
culture increasingly operates within the political arena.
How so? Please follow up. (See for example Michael Hardt in Artforum, December 2008, →; or the many examples in Isabell Lorey’s article of how post-operaist thought has been negotiated in the cultural field.)
How can cultural production
act in relation to the productions of its time and change them from within
Walter Benjamin
capital accumulation
must attend to the needs of a variety of social actors and groups, and at
the same time make sure that these needs, desires, and value practices,
manifesting themselves in terms of struggles, do not break away from its
ordering principles, but, on the contrary, become moments of its reproduction.
two possible ends
social cooperation—which, as social beings, we
cannot avoid—including the creation of sociality at work and in the home and in all
forms of cultural or activist knowledge-production, becomes an alien force
under the laws of market competition
we are social
beings, that we possess an ability to produce
commonness, and not only common goods, needs to be understood as a
contradiction within capitalism’s own relations of production, especially as
this relates to its need for enclosure and scarcity
the social factory
does not appear to
have a clear spatial or social boundary
seems unable to provide
the same conditions for a common political movement
new
concept of the common and of the communal
an idea of “becoming
common” or “being-in-common” versus the idea of community as an identitarian
and homogenous group.
how the political is constituted in postidentitarian and transnational ways
under common, but also diverse conditions.
commonness and possible politics are constituted not just as harmonious forms
of identification, but also as a process of negotiation, and in conflict and
confrontation with changes in statehood and global governance, flexible border
regimes, and new means of accumulating wealth.
It is not the fictional
model of the white male factory worker that forms a political subject today; due
to the many social struggles and movements taking place in the world, this
subject can only be a heterogeneous multitude of singular forms of experience,
diverse economies, and subjectivities from diverse but concrete places.
It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful, but that
they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine. This conceptual
interpenetration is radically altering the established spatiotemporal frame of
progressive politics, reconfiguring the position and role of the subject, as
well as shifting the grounds for assessing the efficacy of political movements
and initiatives.
Gibson-Graham
If, as they suggest throughout their work, the economy has always acted on
political, cultural, and social levels, then there is no big “other,” no
abstract and totalizing capitalism outside of us: there are but acting subjects
who accept and implement the telos of competition, exclusiveness, and
efficiency.
cultural producers are not
the most prepared to engage with these issues, that an activist approach would
be more appropriate
Does this mean that there are other agencies of change other than cultural producers? is an activist not a cultural producer? whats the difference
constant privatization and capitalization of urban space
ideas and concrete proposals of (urban) design as an aesthetic and
spatial practice integrating manual and cognitive abilities, and in such a way
that merits consideration through a postcapitalist lens.
It is not a call for a
telos
telos (from the Greek Ï„Îλοϛ for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle.
or a proclamation of
the need for a new, completely different political design that asks, “What has
to be done?” Rather, the contributions to this issue seek to promote a more
empirical relationship to the presence of the political—one embedded in
the genealogies of ongoing social struggles and postidentitarian subjectivity—and
ask instead, “What has been done already? And how do we go on?”
questions it attempts to ask: genealogies of ongoing social struggles and postidentitarian subjectivity
"beyond good and evil"
ongoing social struggles and postidentitarian subjectivity