Postcapital Archive (1989-2001)

Edited by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, texts by  Iris Dressler, Iván de la Nuez, Valentín Roma, graphic design by Nieves und Mario Berenguer Ros

German/English

2011. 344 pp., 523 ills.

17.00 x 24.00 cm clothbound

pub. date: September 2011 by Hatje Cantz

ISBN 978-3-7757-3170-6

Price: 35 Euro (Amazon Online)

In conjunction with the exhibition Postcapital Archive (1989-2011). Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

| A political art project in the form of a multimedia installation, open database, and interactive laboratory

The project Postcapital Archive 1989–2001 by Spanish artist Daniel García Andújar centers on the profound changes that have occurred around the world on social, political, economic, and cultural levels. Key issues are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. Here, Andújar examines developments after the collapse of the Wall not from the aspect of postcommunism, but postcapitalism. He is concerned with the question of how “Western” societies have changed without their former counterpart, communism, and what kinds of new walls were built through global politics after 1989 and 2001. The foundation of the project is a digital archive containing over 2,500 files the artist has gathered from the Internet over the course of the past decade.

| Ein politisches Kunstprojekt als multimediale Installation, offene Datenbank und interaktives Labor

Das Projekt Postcapital. Archive 1989–2001 des spanischen Künstlers Daniel García Andújar kreist um die tief greifenden Veränderungen, die sich in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten weltweit auf gesellschaftlicher, politischer, ökonomischer und kultureller Ebene ereignet haben und als deren Eckpunkte der Fall der Berliner Mauer sowie der Terroranschlag auf das World Trade Center am 11. September 2001 gelten. Dabei betrachtet Andújar die Entwicklungen nach dem Mauerfall nicht unter Aspekten des Postkommunismus, sondern des Postkapitalismus. Es geht ihm um die Frage, inwiefern sich die »westlichen« Gesellschaften ohne ihr ehemaliges Gegenstück – den Kommunismus – verändert haben und welche neuen Mauern durch die globale Politik nach 1989 und 2001 gezogen wurden. Das Projekt basiert auf einem digitalen Archiv mit über 2500 Dateien, die der Künstler in den letzten zehn Jahren aus dem Internet zusammengetragen hat.

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Daniel García Andújar describes the condition and the period after the “fall of the Berlin Wall” as an aspect of post-capitalism, rather than of post-communism. That condition, the period covered in Andújar’s project “Postcapital. Archive 1989-2001” also features the advance in information technologies and the phenomenon of the Internet.

When the students began ripping of the paving stones to throw them to the police during the events of May 1968 in Paris, they realized the yellow sand underneath the paving stones; the cobblestones. And when they also turned on the water pumps, the sand got wet. Yes, this was the “beach”. The beach of freedom, covered up by the pavement of the modern civilization of property and control. The “beach” was the “another world”, ”under the paving stones”.

In his 1998 essay “Cyber-communism”, Richard Barbrook stated “the Americans are superseding capitalism in cyberspace”. This was also the time Andújar describes as an aspect of post-capitalism. According to Barbrook, the Americans were having a different experience than that of capitalism in their daily Internet practice. This experience, which he relates to that of communism, was a consequence, an aspect of capitalism. According to Barbrook, it was capitalism itself which made the “digerati” a powerful class with high salaries, and it was the digerati who developed the information technologies, the Internet and the idea of free/open source software, as well as many other possibilities that enabled the individuals to “supersede” capitalism in “cyberspace”. Just like the scenario Karl Marx proposed for the end of the capitalism: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”  

The Internet, which used to be a “beach” (for a very brief period) for those who believed in the “possibility of another world” (if we happen to use the slogan of today), is not a different space than the “Babylon” we live in. Not anymore. It used to be a beach which was only visible to those with a vision, but also  to those who became aware of this vision and tried invading this beach to make the possibilities invisible by filling the holes in the pavement covering the beach; the holes that enabled those to be aware of the beach.

The Internet used to a “beach”!

For some, the Internet used to be a beach when we had another life there other than our daily lives.

The Internet used to be a beach for some when we were all anonymous on the Internet with the nicks we chose for ourselves. When we had our peers with their nicks they had chosen for themselves in our contact lists, instead of our high school friends and families with their ID names they didn’t even choose.

For some, the Internet used to be a beach until the time when netizens became masses that needed to be tracked, controlled and censored when “needed”.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until we became valuable customers on the Internet that needed to be “personalized” for Internet advertising while our “data bodies” were being tracked , captured and traded for this “personalization”, completely ignoring our privacy.

For some, the Internet used to be a beach when sharing our wireless Internet connection with our neighbors was regarded as a “new form of hospitality”. Until the time that we were frightened by the threat that everybody, even our neighbors, could be “criminals” who would exploit this connection we share for “illegal” actions such as “p2p file sharing” and put the blame on us.

For some, the Internet used to be a beach when people were asking for “free, public wireless Internet connection” for everybody from local governments as a social service. Until the time that we were targeted as customers for personal broadband Internet (wireless high-speed Internet access) by GSM operators, which also simplified the tracking and personalization process for them to capture our “data body” and match it with our identity. We are even being charged separately for this Internet usage which is matched one to one with our identity.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until the time when Metallica sued Napster for enabling illegal file sharing of their songs.

The Internet used to be a beach for some when there was an alternative to what Derrida calls “the impossible possibility of the gift”, for kids on the p2p networks, who were “incriminated, accused, charged and busted” for sharing the “digital gifts” (which are not subject to scarcity), without even knowing who their peers were.

For some, the Internet used to be a beach until the kids who share their photos online were targeted for selling convenient products of “printer docks” to “easyshare” their digital photographs by “printing” them.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until the time when some young people who had innovative ideas and projects for the Internet began realizing these projects not to “realize themselves”, but with the “American dream” of becoming rich by selling these projects one day to big corporations that were already monopolizing the Internet.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until software engineering students at the universities (the universities which are also encouraged to cooperate with the industry to get patents instead of creating free/open standards and knowledge for the public) were depoliticized and educated to become capitalist entrepreneurs, without having any idea of what “GNU General Public License (GNU GPL)” is.

For some, the Internet used to be a beach until the time when the idea of “open source” arrogated the idea of “free software” and depoliticized its social context and rendered the idea and the promise of “free software” invisible.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until the Creative Commons arrogated the idea of “free culture” overlooking the importance of the “share alike” and the “derivative works” approaches of the “copyleft” attitude and the economic model of the “free software” based on creating added value that also enabled the work’s commercial use.

The Internet used to be a beach for some until the “crowdsourcing” approach depoliticized the idea of “commons-based peer production” by reducing the social, economical and political context of being “peers” to the idea of being “crowded” and until the time when the idea of p2p was reduced to bare “pirate file sharing”.

For some, the Internet used to be a “beach” until the time when the “sand” was covered with the “pavement”.

It may be too late for the possibility of another world in the capitalist world we live in. It is too difficult to throw away all the paving stones on the beach without the aid of some “technology” such as a political approach to information technologies. But we can start with struggling for the “possibility of another Internet”. A “free, p2p distributed Internet” where we can be “anonymous” if we want. A free Internet like that of the “Freenet”. A free Internet where we have the right to produce, distribute, access, appropriate and share information to “build culture”. “Free culture”, not the open “source” culture. Not culture as a bare “source” of “crowdsourcing” for profit, but culture as the “commons” for peers. Not with “commons without commonality” like the Creative Commons but with copyleft commons.

Political approach to information technologies is crucial to render its potentials visible for making another world possible. If the “base”, which is the “mode of production”, determines the “superstructure”, which is culture, then “the commons based peer production” as defined by Yochai Benkler offers “a new mode of production” as stated by Michel Bauwens. Also for the case of individual production, an artist, who no longer needs the capitalistic relations of the “culture industry” to produce, reproduce and share/distribute her/his productions, provides an alternative to the capitalist mode of production based on the financial capital.  Because the artist can produce using information technology tools such as “digital duplication” (even using other “digital multiplication” methods of “digitizing” and “transcoding”) and “distributed p2p networks” that democratize the production, multiplication and sharing of that production. This “base” can determine the “superstructure” of free culture.

If “the superstructure can determine the base”, then we can begin to consider the “free culture” movement, which is influencing more and more artists to make their productions “free” (as in freedom). This also forces the “culture industry” to change the way it operates. A culture based on “donation” with free will can also constitute the real “use value” of cultural productions instead of their “exchange values”.

No matter if “the base determines the superstructure” or “the superstructure can determine the base”, we are witnessing a change in both the “base” and the “superstructure” in certain areas.

The promise of capitalism that advocates for itself through the economic problem of distributing limited resources among unlimited human desires is being attacked by both sides of the equation. First of all, the sources are not limited anymore in terms of information (once it is produced). The digital information on the Internet, which can be duplicated in infinite numbers with a “marginal cost approaching zero”, also abolishes the problem of “scarcity”, except for “artificial scarcity”. On the other hand, the idea that the human desires are unlimited is nonsense for the “commons based peer production”, where peers contribute to the production with their free will according to their own capabilities and they also benefit from the production according to their needs. Because peers do not consume more than they need. Joseph Beuys says that everybody can be an artist; everybody can be productive if they have economical and political freedom to decide what and how to produce. Both of those freedoms are granted by information technologies, if they are interpreted politically. Capitalism itself gave the economic freedom to the “digerati” that enabled them to decide what to produce and they produced the tools and ideas that constituted the “digital culture”.

The beach of “cyber-communism” as discussed by Richard Barbrook was a consequence, an aspect of capitalism. “Cyber-communism” of Barbrook was also a period of “inter-capitalism”; a period when only those with a vision realized the holes in the pavement and saw the beach underneath. It was an invisible communist interval in the period Andújar describes as an aspect of postcapitalism. But our Internet experience today is no longer what it used to be when Barbrook wrote about its potential (even practice) of cyber-communism in 1998. The Internet is being utilized by capitalism day by day. The holes in the pavement are being filled one by one. The promise of the possibility of another world on the Internet, the “beach”, is being rendered invisible again. This state of the Internet we are experiencing now is the consequence of the post-”post-capitalism”. The potential of a communist interval in “post-capitalism”; the potential of the “cyber-communism”, the beach, which has been buried under the pavement, has not been evaluated politically.

First of all,  “another Internet is possible” both as a “base” and an “infrastructure” to determine the “possibility of another world” that would be inspired by the holes in the pavement and the veiled promise of “cyber-communism”.

Even though there are still unfilled holes in the pavement, our captured “life on the networked archives” now is post_cyber-communism.

This printed version of this text contains no references since the reader may search on the Internet for any word and concept that s/he is not familiar with if s/he wants to have more information. However, online version(s) of this text that the reader can also find by searching on the Internet, are hyperlinked to the references and may have also been improved.

.copyleft!_ , 31.03.2010

.you are free to appropriate the related content as you wish, as long as you use a copyleft license to redistribute_ .however giving credits and choosing free/open formats are nice_

http://httpdot.net/copyleft_

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From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.
The messages are being broadcast to the global community “live”, sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message is from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences.
An index of messages released so far is available here.

Twitter users should refer to #911txts. We will give status updates at twitter.com/wikileaks.

Observations should be posted here.

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www.contretemps.eu
Le philosophe Giorgio Agamben présente Contributions à la guerre en cours de Tiqqun, aux Editions La Fabrique, un livre qui rassemble trois textes écrits il y a près de dix ans : “Introduction à la guerre civile”, “Une métaphysique critique pourraît naître comme science des dispositifs” et “Comment faire ?”.

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Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ We continue on the subject of the financial crisis with a man the National Review calls “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West.” The New York Times calls him “the Elvis of cultural theory.” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory. His latest, just out from Verso, is called First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. It analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

Žižek’s latest offering, also excerpted in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, opens with the words, quote, “The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable.” He goes on to recall how the demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank over the past decade all protested the ways in which banks were playing with money and warned of an impending crash. They were met with tear gas and mass arrests.

AMY GOODMAN: The message, he writes, was, quote, “loud and clear, and the police were used to literally stifle the truth.”

Well, Slavoj Žižek addressed a full house at Cooper Union here in New York City on Wednesday night and joins us now in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Thanks very much. It’s my pleasure.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Relate the protest to the—

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You are even better than Fox News, which I usually watch. More amusing.

AMY GOODMAN: Relate the protests to the meltdown and why—how it was predictable.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, what interests me is, for example, Paul—sorry, Paul Krugman said basically the same thing, which tells us a lot about how ideology works today. He said, what if we make a mental experiment, and all the leading bank people, managers and so on, were to know how it would end two years ago? He said, let’s not delude ourselves; there would have been no change. They would have acted in exactly the same way.

This brings me, as a psychoanalyst, into the play, because I think this makes us aware as to what extent our everyday dealing is controlled by what in psychoanalysis we call the mechanism of fetishist disavowal. “Je sais bien, mais quand même…” “I know very well, but…” You know, we can know very well the possible catastrophic consequences, but somehow you trust the market, you think things will somehow work out, and so on and so on. It’s absolutely crucial to analyze this, not only in economy, but generally. This is the focus of my work: how beliefs function today. What do we mean when we say that someone believes?

So that I don’t get lost, let me tell you a wonderful story, which is my favorite story. I quote it also in the book. You know Niels Bohr, Copenhagen, quantum physics guy. You know, once he was visited in his country house by a friend who saw above the entrance a horseshoe, you know, in Europe, the superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the house. And the friend, also a scientist, asked him, “But listen, do you really believe in this?” Niels Bohr said, “Of course not. I’m not an idiot. I’m a scientist.” Then the friend asked him, “But why do you have it there?” You know what Niels Borh answered? He said, “I don’t believe in it, but I have it there, horseshoe, because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody. You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no? Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean? You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

JUAN GONZALEZ Well, I’d like to ask you, you say you are also critical of the progressive or the left response here. You say in your article in Harper’s, “There is a real possibility that the primary victim of the ongoing crisis will not be capitalism but the left itself, insofar as its inability to offer a viable global alternative was again made visible to everyone.” Could you elaborate?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I am a radical leftist. I like to call myself, in a very conditional way, a communist even. But I think one should, as a leftist, really concede the amount of the defeat of the left in the last twenty years. That’s the sine qua non condition of a possible review. So, yes, apart from very sympathetic things suggested by people like Stiglitz, Krugman, which are basically a return to Keynesian welfare state, and apart from some interesting—but I don’t think they are the solution—economic ideas, like the basic income or so-called renta básica in Brazil, basic rent, which is a utopia of its own, I think, I sometimes, apart from this, have a strange paranoiac idea that maybe this crisis was manufactured so that people will see that even if there is a crisis, the left really doesn’t have a global answer.

I see—what worries me is two things about the left. First, it’s more and more legalistic moralization. You know, it’s kind of a pure form of protest against injustice. Then the only thing you can do is legal forums and so on. In this sense, many of the ex-leftists are getting depoliticized. They no longer ask the truly basic questions. Like even now, all the outcry was, “Oh, those bank profiteers,” and so on. I totally agree with what we just heard. But don’t you think that the truth is a little bit more complex, in the sense of—you know much more about this than me, but the way I see it is that one of the roots of the present crisis is not just greed. It’s that after the digital bubble at the beginning of our millennium, the idea was how to keep prosperity, how to keep economy alive. And it was, as far as I remember, even a little bit of a really bipartisan decision: let’s make it easier in real estate, and so on, to keep it moving. So, you know, there is a structural problem beneath all this psychological topic of the greedy bankers, which is, that’s how capitalism works, my God, which is why even concerning our beloved model—Bernard Madoff, no?—I didn’t like it how they focused on him. Wait a minute. He was just the radical version of where the system is pushing you. Now, I’m not saying—I’m not crazy—“which is why we need to nationalize all banks and introduce immediately socialist dictatorship” or what. What I’m just saying is, let’s not get rid of the problem by too easily making it into a psychological problem. You know, you can be an evil guy, but there must be very precise institutional, economic, and so on, coordinates, background, which allows you to do what you do.

The second thing, I also didn’t like the cry shared by left and right-wing populists of “help the Main Street, not the Wall Street.” Well, sorry, but those bank managers who emphasized, in capitalism there is no Main Street without Wall Street. In today’s industry, because of the competition and immense investment into new inventions and so on, without large accessibility, availability of credits, there is no prosperous Main Street. So this is a false choice. So, again, with all respect for the left and so on, I think we should avoid quick moralization, if we mean it seriously.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, “Is the bailout then really a ‘socialist’ measure? If it is, it takes a peculiar form: a ‘socialist’ measure whose primary aim is to help not the poor but the rich, not those who borrow but those who lend.”

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah. I mean, this is my whole thesis, that capitalism always was socialism for those who are on the top. This is the basic paradox of it, no?

AMY GOODMAN: What about healthcare?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Oh, now you touch my favorite topic. You know why? Because I think that here we see, when people—when I write on ideology, and people laugh at me—“Haha, didn’t you know this? We live in post-ideological era.” No, here you see ideology in its material force. We can—we should distinguish here two levels. On the one hand are those ridiculous right-wing paranoias, which, incidentally, I like to listen. They amuse me, you know, like that Sarah Palin idea of death panels. Some mysterious bureaucracy will decide, does your uncle live or not. That’s funny, I hope; at least for the time being, we can laugh at it. But then—

JUAN GONZALEZ Not in a big part of America, unfortunately.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then the real problem, where the Republican critique of healthcare plan really works is by appealing to this basic gut notion of freedom of choice. And I think this is a problem; we have to confront it. The first we should make it clear is that in order to exercise the freedom of choice—one has to repeat this again and again—an extremely—to really exercise this, an extremely complex network of social, legal regulations, even, I would say, ethical rules, which are somehow accepted, and so on, has to be—have to be here. In other words, often less choice, at least less public choice, at a certain level means more choice at a different level.

Let me return precisely to healthcare. My idea is that healthcare should be at a certain level, like water and electricity. You can also say that you usually don’t choose your water supplier, no? OK, now we can play the Republican game and say, “What a horrible terror! They are depriving us of the fundamental choice to choose the water supply.” But we somehow accept that there are some things where it is much more practical that you are able to count on them. Sorry, but I gladly refuse the big freedom to choose my water supplier, the same as for electricity, although there things can get more tricky. Why not add to this series health? Europe demonstrates it can be done effectively, not to diminish our freedom, but to leave you much more space of much more greater actual freedom, and so on.

So, you see, this is the danger of this ideology of choice, because, you know, this is, in one sense, a central category today. There is an old Marxist card, which is played again and again, of we are only offered false choices, not real choices, like Pepsi or Coke, whatever, instead of the real choices. OK, there is a truth in it. But there is also another problem of ideology of choice, that often we are bombarded by choices—you really are free to choose—without being given the proper background to make a reasonable choice. John Gray, the British cynical skeptic, whom I otherwise admire, wrote very nicely that we are today more and more forced to act as if we are free. And this causes a lot of anxiety and so on. You know, one should be very specific apropos of choices. I’m all for the freedom of choice. I would just like to see the small—those, you know, in the footnote, the small print, what are the precise conditions of choice, and so on and so on.

And so, again, although I have no illusions about what Obama can do and so on, I am still proud that already before elections I supported him, although this had no great impact here, of course. But in contrast to my very more radical leftist friends whose motto was “he’s just a nice human face on the same imperialism,” “he will even serve better the interest of capitalism,” or whatever, no, I think we see now, apropos the healthcare reform, that we are fighting the central battle here.

JUAN GONZALEZ I’d like to ask you, in terms of the somewhat pessimistic view you have of how the response to the crisis has been, there seems to be, continues to be, an entire continent that is heading in a somewhat different direction, South America and Latin America, in general.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Here comes my critical leftism.

JUAN GONZALEZ Well, I’d love hear it, in terms—because there does seem to be in many of these areas, while the rest of the world is—the gap is increasing, at least there are governments throughout Latin America that are trying to decrease the gap and take a different role.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: They are trying. Are they really doing it? You know, I am—this is my skeptic. Some people already accuse me of being a covert neoconservative for what I will say now. Let’s not have any illusions. I claim that much of the attraction of the recent wave, Hugo Chavez and so on, of Latin American populism comes from this old desire of the left. Let’s be clear, many leftists today in the United States are relatively well-paid academics who fight all the dirty department career war, but they like to feel warm in their hearts. So it’s good to have as far away as possible another country where you can sympathize. “Oh, but things are really happening there.” You know, at some point in the ‘30s it was Soviet Union, Cuba, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Nicaragua. I’m afraid now that it is Venezuela a little bit. And I don’t buy the standard liberal critique, Chavez dictator and so on.

I just think Chavez started well. He did something of world historical importance. As far as I know, he was the first one of truly trying to mobilize people who were in favelas and so on, who were excluded from the public domain. He really tried to bring them into the political process. I claim if we don’t find a way to do this, we are slowly approaching a kind of a new apartheid society, where we will live in a kind of a permanent low-level civil war, where we will have some kind of irrational explosions like in France, the car burning in the Paris suburbs.

On the other hand, I’m a little bit more pessimistic as to what in the long term he will really achieve. I think he is now losing his way approaching this standard Latin American populism, where he, because of the oil wealth, is allowed to play the game of fiddle with oil, fiddle with money. I think, if you ask me, a much more interesting phenomenon is Bolivia. It’s much more authentic. They’re really being forced to invent something new. I always think that the genuinely utopian moments are not when you are doing OK and why not even better, are when you are in a deadlock. Then, in order even to survive normally, you are forced to invent something. But I thought you would say entire—so, no, I don’t see too much hope in Latin America.

But I see more hope at this moment with you in United States than with Europe. Europe is now, I think, in great decline. I had some hopes about Europe. Why? Because, to put it very simply, it still looks that we have two models now which are in competition, if I simplify the analysis very much: the Anglo-Saxon liberal market model and what we poetically call capitalism with Asian values, which means authoritarian capitalism. This is what every leftist, as I repeat it, should worry about, because let’s concede to the devil what belongs to the devil. Wasn’t it that, ’til recently—I’m sorry to tell you again, as a strange communist, you will say—there was one good argument for capitalism? After. It may have been that capitalism needed dictatorship for ten, twenty years—Chile, South Korea—but when things started to move, capitalism always engendered a push toward some kind of democracy. No longer. I claim that what is now emerging in the Far East started—it started in Singapore, this kind of so-called, again, authoritarian capitalism. I think something new is emerging: a capitalism even more dynamic—

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: —than our own, but which, even in long term, doesn’t need democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural theorist. His latest book is First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

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Franco Volpi, 57 anni, ordinario di Storia della filosofia a Padova, è morto ieri all’ospedale San Bortolo di Vicenza, dove era ricoverato da lunedì pomeriggio in seguito a un incidente stradale. Era stato travolto da un’auto a San Germano dei Berici, mentre si trovava in sella alla sua bici. La conferma del decesso è giunta in tarda serata dal nosocomio vicentino, che dalle 15 aveva fatto partire le sei ore di osservazione per la dichiarazione di morte cerebrale.

Lungo i dolci pendii di San Germano dei Berici, il professor Franco Volpi amava scendere in sella alla sua bicicletta. Di solito non portava con sé i documenti: corre­va libero, solo. E un po’ era così nella vita. Perché lui, che nel 1972, appena ventenne, aveva av­vicinato il maestro Enrico Berti, per chiedere la tesi — che diede vita, per altro, alla sua prima pub­blicazione: Heidegger e Brentano: l’aristotelismo e il problema del­l’univocità dell’essere nella forma­zione filosofica del giovane Mar­tin Heidegger —-, ormai cammi­nava davanti a tutti: Volpi aveva tradotto e curato le opere di Gada­mer, Schopenauer, Carl Schmitt, Rosa Luxemburg e Heidegger, di cui è stato, probabilmente, il mas­simo interprete italiano. «La no­stra Università perde uno dei suoi pezzi migliori, siamo tutti co­sternati », ha dichiarato il rettore del Bo Vincenzo Milanesi.

Leggendo un libro: il modus vivendi di Franco Volpi
E nemmeno lunedì, quando po­co dopo l’ora di pranzo un’auto ha travolto la sua bicicletta, il pro­fessore aveva in tasca la carta d’identità: un elemento che nelle prime ore ha reso difficile il rico­noscimento. Una telefonata ha poi avvertito in Germania la mo­glie Otte Ruth, conosciuta a Wurz­burg, e la figlia Laura, 22 anni, lau­reatasi a Ca’ Foscari e ora in Sco­zia. «Era impossibile collocare Volpi all’interno di uno dei due approcci teoretici che ormai han­no fossilizzato la storiografia filo­sofica contemporanea — ha spie­gato commosso il collega e amico Umberto Curi, ordinario di Storia della filosofia moderna —. Volpi si era allontanato dalla sterile con­trapposizione storiografica e si era contraddistinto per la vivaci­tà del suo pensiero. Aveva saputo incidere in modo decisivo sullo sviluppo della filosofia italiana degli ultimi decenni. La perdita di Volpi è davvero irreparabile».

Professore di Storia della Filo­sofia a Padova, visiting professor a Laval in Québec (1989), a Poi­tiers (1990) e a Nizza (1993), Fran­co Volpi aveva tenuto conferenze e seminari in tutto il mondo. Con la camicia arrotolata sulle mani­che e lo sguardo buono e pungen­te, difeso dagli occhiali tondi, Vol­pi aveva saputo imporsi infatti a livello internazionale. Parlava per­fettamente cinque lingue e aveva tradotto dal tedesco l’opera di Heidegger su Nietzsche, in spa­gnolo aveva pubblicato la masto­dontica Enciclopedia delle opere filosofiche. In italiano aveva fir­mato centinaia di articoli, libri, saggi – dal Dizionario delle opere filosofiche di Mondadori, fino al­le ultime opere, come il Manuale di Storia della Filosofia (Laterza) per i licei, scritto assieme al suo maestro, Enrico Berti. Che ieri aveva un filo di voce. «Datemi sue notizie — ha ripetuto incredu­lo il Decano del Bo per tutto il po­meriggio —: Franco era il mio mi­gliore allievo, il migliore. E la sua morte è qualcosa di sconvolgen­te: come quella di un figlio per il padre».

Puntuale e generoso, Volpi ave­va dedicato quest’anno il corso istituzionale a Nietzsche anziché ad Heidegger. «Aveva una cultura e una conoscenza sterminate — ha raccontato sottovoce Pietro Gori, trentaduenne assegnista a Filosofia, uno degli ultimi laurea­ti con Volpi —. E non era un baro­ne: nonostante la sua carriera non era riuscito ad avere nemme­no un ricercatore». Ma lui era co­sì. Venerdì su La Repubblica, quo­tidiano per cui collaborava, è ap­parso il suo ultimo pezzo: un com­mento alle dichiarazioni del Papa su Nietzsche, che ora assume un significato diverso. «Anche se la vita non è bella, sta a noi cercare di renderla tale — scriveva il pro­fessore —. Uno dei problemi del­la Chiesa attuale è che la produ­zione della felicità le è sfuggita di mano. Ma non è colpa di Nietz­sche se la forza dei Vangeli svani­sce e la condizione dell’uomo oc­cidentale è sempre più paganizza­ta».

Giovanni Viafora
15 aprile 2009

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The practical aspect of this research is a new software being specifically developed to release, license, and catalogue digital files. This system, transforming the traditional approach towards metadata, is based on the idea that any file is an independent creation living its own life and experiencing various levels of transformation and progressive generation (of meaning, shape, and entities) in the course of its virtual existence. This way digital resources, interpreted as cultural units, are considered the main actors of the web.

Virtual Entity constructs in parallel a theoretical mythical world and its functional technical counterpart; it is, in this sense, a physical and metaphysical metadata. Its (viral) diffusion may generate a decentralized archive characterized by spontaneous and uncontrollable growth. Read about concept and development, and see the project documentation.

Digital entities are like nature, they do not belong to anyone. The net is a morphing distributed body mirroring current human culture. Any digital immaterial creation can be instantiated in infinite number of copies identical to the original native file. Culture does not have owners.

Ongoing questions:

• what is a digital entity?
• what are the characteristics of a minimal unit to be considered a digital resource?
• can the concept of ‘non-property’ be a positive alternative to the stigmatized idea of ‘Piracy’?
• meta-data: what words are really descriptive?
• what is the best balance in a language that is machine and human understandable?
• tagging vs metadata: what system can give the most interesting results?
• singularity and doubt: what is virtual?
• can we start doubting of the very chair we are sitting on?

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E.F Schumacher: “…there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.”

The awe which may have once greeted any one excellent work of art, is today more likely to be generated by the price it fetched when sold than anything to do with the work’s visual affect. How do we account for this apparent reversal?

Art, because of its uniqueness, and because it is the result of irreducible, complex human labour, never fitted into the Marxian conception of value and work – based as it was on factory production and its particular type of discipline. But in escaping that dreary paradigm, artists themselves have long struggled over the problem of authenticity and the commodity form and in so doing sought to challenge the separation between art and life.

Western capitalist societies have gradually overcome the division between mental and manual labour, the time of productive work has been extended beyond the workplace; the production of commodities no longer involves the reduction of the worker to part of the machine, but mobilises their total creative abilities as a social human being. Whether employed or not, whether successful or not, all members of society create and transmit value.

At the same time much of the precariousness, irregularity, flexibility and types of free labour that previously characterised artistic practice has been generalised to all working lives; to make a living today means to mould and shape personhood in a perverse play of changing identities. Conversely, artists’ practice has come to involve more and more profane and mundane elements that belong to the business world and have very little to do with art.

All social activity is now imbued with immaterial and affective elements and it is impossible to think of aesthetic communication as an extra-economic category. The nature of capital has changed; originally mere alienated human labour in quantity, its forms of being have qualitatively proliferated. Finance capital, social capital, creative capital, cultural capital all exercise discrete dispositifs of control over the whole gamut of human social activity even though they are all still the result of the estrangement of human energies into private hands. Thus, whether private or public, work in general is increasing returning to its organic unity with life. Unfortunately this life continues to be, for the most part, unpleasant.

The reason we find the costs of certain works of art so incredulous is because art, like no other ‘commodity’, increases its value by being consumed. This has always been true of it no matter the economic system. But today because the consumption is driven by soulless banknotes, aesthetic value and economic value collide into a troubled unity. So long as this approbation is dictated by who has more capital (financial, cultural or otherwise) rather than by the whole society of producers whose energies and activities, sensibilities and inclinations make meaningful art possible, this collision of values cannot be resolved.

One of the current effects of this is the creation of a spectacular gulf between haves and have-nots within the art world, reproducing (albeit seemingly arbitrarily) the wider inequality in society at large. Golden geese artists are a conduit for the primitive accumulation and valorisation of the total aesthetic energies of mankind. And there is no better figure for this expropriation than that obscenity of a diamond encrusted skull. The success of one equals the dispossession of thousands; and seeing no alternative the craven pander to this elitism.

But even in its distorted, profane capitalist integument, the question of what it means to own a piece of art (how the consumption of another’s labour augments value), allows us an insight into the immutable and universal nature of what art is.

Art is the self-valorisation of society, and a key to the nature of sociability itself. That concatenation produces more value rather than less, is itself the very possibility of society.

Ultimately, economic systems are successful only because of the energies that are invested in them. Capital is not dynamic, people are, and art is the key to the perpetual motion of society. This is why it is sacred. The excess intrinsic to the value of art yet so debased by the art market can be recovered. And that would mean that to enjoy art would also be to profit from it; having pleasure not squandering but augmenting the wealth of social experience. The difficulty is new, but the solution an old one. Society’s problem is not that it produces a surplus but what it does with it.

Text written for The Free Art Fair, London, October 2008 – see the whole catalogue here

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Trapped in Amber curators in conversation with the artists: Sunday 21 February 2009, 3 p.m.

Artists: Daniel Garcia Andujar (ESP), Hamdi Attia (EGY/USA), Bodil Furu (NO), Assefa Gebrekidan (ETH), Iman Issa (EGY/USA), Mahmoud Khaled (EGY), Magnus Monfeldt (SWE/NDL), and Harwood/Wright/Yokokoji (UK)

Curated by: Bassam El Baroni and Helga-Marie Nordby

The exhibition is part of the project Africa in Oslo initiated by The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, which also involves Stenersen Museum, Oslo Museum: International Cultural Centre and Museum, Oslo Fine Art Society and Kunstnernes hus (more info below)

Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade is an exhibition that draws on Oslo’s art history, specifically the city’s tradition of northern European ‘Angst’ demonstrated in the oeuvres of such pivotal figures as Edvard Munch. The exhibition aims to test the limits of cultural industry stereotypes by creating a contemporary comparative to the phenomenon of Fin de siècle angst-ridden artistic production. Through the works of the invited artists, Trapped in Amber considers angst’s possible post-continental existence today in contemporary artistic formats. Of particular interest is the way angst can live on and express itself in a different world and age, experiencing different problems and in the midst of new cultural, socio-economic, and information dynamics.

Most narratives written by the cannon on the Fin de siècle symbolists and expressionists, point out that these artists aimed at capturing and portraying some sort of universal angst, a border-crossing scream of human emotional intensity; the metaphors are plentiful. Universality back then seems to have lacked a common cultural denominator, and to have been defined mostly in relation to nature, spirituality, and in some cases creative egotism. If the Fin de siècle artists reflected what was to them the ‘universal angst’ of their time, what kind of images, cultural processes, critical perspectives, or icons, if any, can reflect and be involved with a ‘universal angst’ in today’s world? How can one engage with terms such as “Universal” and “Angst” in a narrative of the here and now? Trapped in Amber aims to engineer a critical and spatial context where the works articulate different trajectories cutting through the main issues of angst and/or universality.

The global financial crisis is taking its toll on many, another ‘great depression’ but this time born of hyper-deregulation, the resurgence of political and social ideologies that were quite hastily labeled ‘dead’, and a decade marking the deterioration of the world’s intercultural relationships. Perhaps the world is currently trapped in an amber traffic light switched on by a past epoch, still not able to make substantial moves forward on the socio-cultural and political levels despite great technological advances. Perhaps, the cultural economy we function in is verging on the archaic because our ideologies are too old to develop potent discourses and our post-ideological frames of mind are nothing but the pretty and fresh looking amber resin that encases old and untouched problems. In light of these metaphorical realizations, Trapped in Amber seeks to traverse between the very early modernist years, in which the art of Edvard Munch reached its peak, and the social, intellectual, and political conditions in which art has existed during the first decade of the 21st century.

One of the ways this traversing takes effect is through the introduction of a series of collectively rendered exhibition props that were co-created by the participating artists, the curators, and UKS staff. Visible throughout the exhibition, ‘the Frieze of life’ is a collective amalgam of imagery that was created by gathering images found on the World Wide Web. The participating artists contributed a number of images that were considered relative to the idea of a present day ‘Frieze of Life’; the images were then reconfigured into digital collages that reference the abundant hanging style of grand salon exhibitions. Elsewhere, visitors can take a seat on the specially redesigned circular pouf sofa, reminiscent of the sofa used in Munch’s Berlin solo show at the Equitable Palast (1892-1893), but with fabrics created by each of the exhibition’s artists.

Trapped in Amber attempts to construct a contemporary parallel to the Fin de siècle’s output on art, the artist, society, and politics. This could be a relational equation that senses some of the possible links and separators between this and that era, or it could be a pseudo-parallel that stimulates schemas, tactics, and discussions.  But ultimately, it is through setting up this spot where past and present are inseparable that latent frictions are activated.

Africa in Oslo:
Maputo: A Tale of One City
Berry Bickle, Ângela Ferreira, Pompílio Hilário Gemuce, Rafael Mouzinho, Emeka Okereke, Lourenço Dinis Pinto, Mauro Pinto
Kuratorer: Bisi Silva, Daniella van Dijk-Wennberg og Marianne Hultman
Part 1 opens 6 p.m. Oslo Museum; International Cultural Centre and Museum, Tøyenbekken 5
The exhibition opens at 6 p.m. by Ambassador Pedro Comissário from the Embassy
of The Republic of Mozambique in the Nordic countries and the Norwegian Ambassador in Maputo Tove Bruvik Westberg
Part 2 opens 7 p.m.  Oslo Fine Art Society, Rådhusgaten 19

Hypocrisy: the site specificity of morality
Georges Adéagbo, Birgir Andrésson, Olaf Breuning, El Parche,
Marianne Heier, Gunilla Klingberg, Moshekwa Langa, Steve McQueen,
George Osodi, Wilfredo Prieto, Pascale Marthine Tayou
Curators: Stina Högkvist and Koyo Kouoh
Opens 6 p.m.
National Museum – Museum of Contemporary, Bankplassen 4

Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art
Dineo Bopape, Andries Botha, Frances Goodman, Kay Hassan, Nicholas Hlobo, Lawrence Lemaoana, Langa Magwa, Senzeni Marasela, Nandipha Mntambo, Ahti Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Nontsikeleo Veleko
Curator: Selene Wendt
Opens 6 p.m.
Stenersenmuseet, Munkedamsveien 15

Looking Inside Out
Kader Attia, Dora Dhouib, Hala Elkoussy, Mounir Fatmi, Chourouk
Hriech, Bouchra Khalili, Nicène Kossentini, Driss Ouadahi, Younès
Rahmoun, Hans Hamid Rasmussen og Batoul Shimi
Curators: Maaretta Jaukkuri and Cristina Ricupero
Opens 6 p.m.
Kunstnernes Hus,Wergelandsveien 17

Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade
Daniel Garcia Andujar, Hamdi Attia, Bodil Furu, Assefa Gebrekidan, Iman Issa, Mahmoud Khaled, Magnus Monfeldt, Harwood/Wright/Yokokoji
Curators: Bassam El Baroni and Helga-Marie Nordby
Performance by Magnus Monfeldt 8 p.m.
Artist talk 21/02 3 p.m.
Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Lakkegata 55d

Offshore: George Osodi
Public Art Norway (KORO)
6-16 February 5 p.m.-10 a.m. in Vaterlandsparken and in Bjørvika

Africa in Oslo is supported by Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Fritt ord

UKS – Unge Kunstneres Samfund/Young Artists Society
Lakkegata 55d
0187 Oslo
e-mail: <mailto:info@uks.no>info@uks.no
Web: <http://www.uks.no>www.uks.no

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