bolo’bolo is a utopian novel written in 1983 by the anonymous Swiss author and activist p.m. (a name taken from the most common initials in the Swiss phonebook). One amazon reviewer describes the book as having “No tedious sermons on recycling, condom use, or literacy. Instead, the Magus of Zurich talks about a possible world of duels, sprouting micro-religions, bizarre local cuisines, the transformation of bland existing buildings into bohemian funhouses, dramatic suicides, wild barter economics, and Tarkovskyesque railway systems.”

Central to the brief novel is an invented auxillary language. By simply inventing new terms, p.m. is able to group together concepts in simple, succinct ways. “Pili,” for instance, means “communication, education, language, media,” whereas “vudo” means “city, county, trading area, bioregion.” Each word has a corresponding abstract glyph, and the language has an interesting and elegant grammar system.

p.m. himself speaks of his motivation for creating a new language:

“The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics - retirement cuts - and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as ’solidarity,’ ‘community,’ they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them. […] I want to emphasize that there is not one single idea in this book that is new. Everything in it is something that I found.”

<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 1: Diagnosis)
<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 2: Remedy?)

This post has been a very very very long time coming. It’s a little embarrassing. Nine and a half months since I posted Part 2 and one year exactly since I posted Part 1.

Largely, the reason for that is that it’s spiraled out of control. The core ideas of what began a year ago as an attempt to briefly sketch some corollaries between a film I’d recently watched and three books I’d recently read quickly grew to become an anchor point for my own personal philosophy of art and social change, and to which much of what I thought about on a daily basis could be related back to.

Initially I had intended for this “third and final part” to describe contemporary tendencies similar to those described in Part 2. Giving anything close to a comprehensive survey, however, would be impossible.

And so rather than delaying this posting any further by attempting to make it “complete” (and winding up producing something so long that it wouldn’t be read by anyone anyway) I’ve decided instead to treat it as a series of notes, and to break it up into smaller, more digestible chunks, which I’ll be posting periodically.

If you recall, this entire series was kicked off by my reading a post by blogger Momus, in which he offered a series of notes drawing parallels between Adam Curtis’ condemnations of game theory in The Trap and Nicolas Bourriaud’s acclamations of socially-based art in Relational Aesthetics. In the conversation that followed Momus’ post, he cited one art critic’s criticism of the relational art trend: “Relational aesthetics, once probing and complex, is becoming a cul-de-sac of fun effects, momentary experiences, and comfy playhouses.” It sounds like a convincing condemnation. But one commenter offers an even more convincing rebuttal: “And the problem is… what, exactly? That people are drawing inspiration from the immediate pleasures of being alive rather than floating around in arid abstractions that yield even more sickly offspring? ‘Probing’ and ‘complex’ my foot–those with an allegiance to life’s joys are the ones I trust first; the rest have to make their case, no matter how clever. Get your empty sleeves out of my pho, you gaggle of ghosts!”

This dialog offers a demonstration of three of the primary obstacles preventing contemporary art from being a productive, utopian force:

1) its fixation on content and concept to the detriment of considering more tangible effects on the world at large (I’ll get to that later),

2) the inevitability of its commodification (as Bourriaud himself writes, “wherever art proposes ‘life possibilities,’ [’Integrated World Capitalism’] presents us with the bill” (RA p95).),

and 3) its obsession with originality. Granted utmost importance in the art world, this obsession becomes extremely harmful when it comes to effecting anything outside of it. If it’s a good idea, what’s wrong with doing it again? If it can make the world a better place, why ignore it simply because it’s been done before?

And that’s not the only reason RA won’t save the world. The Radical Culture Research Collective presents a far more biting critique of Relational Aesthetics than those commonly made from within the art world:

“Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. […] While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses. Undoubtedly, the avant-garde tradition continues to be transformed by its own process of self-critique. But it does not give up the radical, macro-historical aim of a real world beyond capitalist relations. And it doesn’t settle for the experience of gallery simulations.

“It’s not that experiments in forms and models of sociability are not needed today – they certainly are. But to be politically relevant and effective, such experiments need to be grounded in (or at least actively linked to) social movements and struggles. (And there is no social progress without contestation and struggle: this for us is a basic materialist truth that makes any blanket refusal of “conflict” problematic.) As a gallery-based game, relational practices are cut off by an institutional divide from those who could use them. Who are the consumers of relational art? The cultural élite of the dominant classes, primarily, supplemented by the socially ambitious layers of a de-classed general public* […] In general, this audience does not tend to overlap with the people actively attempting to generate pressure for deep social change. There are exceptions, we know. But this is how the disruptive utopian energies that do exist in relational art are managed and kept within tolerable limits: the social separations, stratifications and (self-)selections of the art system enact a liberalization – that is, a de-radicalization – of social desire.”

*The subject of why galleries and museums tend to be so class-specific is worthy of an entirely separate post. Two footnotes worth briefly mentioning here, however: 1. The phenomena of “free days” at museums - most notably, MOMA - is neither ahistorical nor simply a generous gesture. In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition was successful in pressuring MOMA and several other museums to implement such free days in an attempt to broaden access (race and class were chief concerns of the group, both in terms of access and representation). Some museums have since rolled back this policy. MOMA is today able to continue operating “free Fridays” only under the sponsorship of Target. 2. Similarly, when Bourriaud co-founded the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, he insisted that the operating hours be noon to midnight. The reason for this, of course, was to broaden access to working people whose hours likely conflicted with those of most museums, which tend to close in the early evening or late afternoon.

In the next part of this post, before moving on, I’ll stop for a moment to define the “the avant-garde tradition” and “project of radical transformation” referred to in The RCRC’s critique - the antecedents to Relational Aesthetics that may help to point toward current manifestations and future trajectories of social art.

“When the world is sick / can’t no one be well / but I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong”
- A Silver Mt. Zion, “God Bless Our Dead Marines”

“In our sick society everyone is sick. A human being averages 4,000 orgasms per lifetime. Do not turn off this pulsating motor of joy and life energy. The bioelectric charge and discharge produced by the genital embrace causes the orgasmic reflex - supremely pleasurable muscular contractions. Subjection to social disciplines may cause gastric ulcers, respiratory, coronary, and vascular diseases.
“Comrade lovers, for your health’s sake, fuck freely. 4,000 liberating orgasms in every woman’s and man’s life are 4,000 explosions of liberated life energy. Only by liberating both love and labor can we create a self-regulating workers’ society.
“Body tissue deprived of life energy turns cancerous. Cancer is the hysteria of cells condemned to death. Cancer and fascism are closely related. Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples. The swastika owes its magnetism to being a symbol of two bodies locked in genital embrace. It all stems from a longing for love.
“Comrades, make love joyously and without fear. Let the current flow sweetly up your spine. Let your hips roll and your mouth water. Saliva is good. Let us reactivate the natural vibrations within ourselves and society. Let the current stream sweetly through your muscles. Feel free to tremble and cry. Let yourself enjoy your body.
“As revolutionaries whose revolution renounces love, we feel very uncomfortable. What is happening to the revolution?”
- W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism

“Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life.”
- Michel Foucault

“Every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features.”
- Theodor Adorno

Every once in a while, between all the promos for tacky clubs and bad stand-up comedy, FreeNYC lists something that sounds really cool. I can’t go to this ’cause I’m at work, but I’ll probably be listening to the free live stream available on their website…

Location: The Change You Want to See, 84 Havemeyer Street, Williamsburg
Date: Mon, Mar 29th
Time: 7:30pm
Cost: Free

“Story telling is an ancient and powerful form of human expression. Today, however the power of story is mainly used by advertisers, PR flacks and political propagandists. In order to make change, social movements must tell new stories that challenge assumptions and shape new possibilities for action and change.

“How can activist and artists use story-based strategies to design “image events”: actions, images or stories that simultaneously destroy and construct new meaning? How can we either replace existing sets of symbols or re-define their meaning? Can we connect organizing struggles with the ethereal world of culture, media and narrative?

“The story-based strategy approach is grounded in a narrative analysis of power––the recognition that humans understand the world and their role in it through stories and thus all power relations have a narrative component. Every issue already has a web of existing stories and cultural assumptions that frame public understanding. Story-based strategy provides a process to understand the current story around an issue and identify opportunities to change that story with the right framing, messages, messengers and creative interventions.”

(more here)

Before finding out about this event, I had never heard of this space before. It seems really cool, and I’m very excited to see that the proliferation of this type of alternative space is becoming more and more common, both in this city and elsewhere (more on that topic soon). From the blurb on the side panel of their website:

“The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.”

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what events they’ll be offering in the future.

Another similar space I only just recently found out about: 16 Beaver Group. Thanks to Marc Fischer of Public Collectors, Temporary Services, Half-Letter Press, and Art and Work for tipping me off to that one.

“Parallel to the evolution of physiological methods, a new form of artistic creation will appear that will aim for the species. […] At that stage in its evolution, man will tend to transform himself in a pure esthetical product, becoming himself a work of art. In this way he will return to the sole object that is both idea and effect, i.e. a fabricated human being, developed and transcended by man. In this way we have closed the loop, from object to non-object, and from non-object to man as object-idea-effect. We have demonstrated that art has far from exhausted its possibilities, and has just opened the road to a development of prodigious complexity that will be fundamental and crucial for the blossoming and perfection of mankind.”
- Nicolas Schöffer, La Ville Cybernétique

“Fourier developed a type of utopian socialism based on the idea that the natural passions of human beings, if properly channeled, would result in social harmony. [… He] predicted that human beings would evolve until they attained a height of seven feet, developed an archibras (a powerful tail tipped with a hand-like claw) and lived for 144 years. He foresaw his ideal world enduring for 80,000 years, of which eight thousand would be an era of ‘Perfect Harmony’ in which androgynous plants would copulate, six moons would orbit the earth; the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean; the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade; the world would contain approximately 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière; and every woman would have four husbands simultaneously.”
- New World Encyclopedia entry on Charles Fourier

“Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. […] The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.”
- “Human species ‘may split in two,’” BBC News

“Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support.”
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“The trick […] is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors — and where possible to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.”
- Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Too many people still believe Margaret Thatcher’s TINA, There Is No Alternative, whereas we should say TATA, There Are Thousands of Alternatives”
- Susan George

“The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.”
- C.S. “Buzz” Holling, From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds

“Against practicality we Futurists therefore disdain the example and admonition of tradition in order to invent at any cost something new which everyone considers crazy. […] Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win, we Futurists have injected agility into world literature with words-in-liberty and simultaneity. We have generated surprises with illogical syntheses and dramas of inanimate objects that have purged the theatre of boredom. Having enlarged sculptural possibility with anti-realism, having created geometric architectonic splendour without decorativism and made cinematography and photography abstract, we will now establish the way of eating best suited to an ever more high speed, airborne life.”
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking

I think when things get kinda slow on this blog I’m going to start posting more little brain fart things like this. I have an enormous collection of quotes sitting in a folder on my desktop that I never share with anyone, so I may as well post them here.

“Digital communication is a dissipative, boundary-disrupting tool. I won’t bore you repeating the old arguments about how the net—and mediated communications culture itself—puts intellectual property, the nation state, the money system, even the well-defined self, into crisis. You can read the back issues of Mondo 2000 and Wired yourselves. It should be enough to simply remind people that just because a situational description has grown tiresome through repetition, or has been adapted by people whose political leanings you don’t particularly like, that doesn’t make it untrue. And I apologize to all of the writers who, like myself, are struggling within the economics of digital capitalism, but you are going to have to struggle for an end to society being organized around economics, not for greater copyright protection! (When photographers for 24 Hours in Cyberspace took pictures of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos thought the pictures should belong to the photographer’s subject.). You can’t count beans in a flood, and you shouldn’t want to, all right?

“Throughout the 20th century, starting with the Dada/Surrealists, individuals who were too alive and imaginative to stomach horseshit have argued for an end to wage slavery, This was premature in the 1930’s. In the digital age, it’s absolutely necessary. The solid, secure, agricultural/industrial era, production-oriented forms of labor have been displaced by automation and dissipated by the global work force. There has never before been a time in history where a majority of people have been forced to hustle so pointlessly, toiling the fields of hype, poisoning the real and conceptual environment with utterly bogus product, desperately servicing invented needs, building massive unnecessary arsenals, clearcutting the forests, and always demanding that their self-interests, however obsolete, be protected, instead of demanding the transformation of a social system that will make them do anything for money, even ask Big Brother to reach into the privacy of individual homes to make sure nobody is copying anything for free, which is the only way to carry traditions of intellectual property into the high tech world. I’ll say it once more, straight out: The whole situation around information as property isn’t resolvable. We need a social system that doesn’t require artists and software writers (or anybody) to make money.”

- R.U. Sirius, “The Technosurrealist Manifesto”

I’ve been writing lately about Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey. Well here are some more tidbits of incendiary insight from the poet laureate of “ontological anarchy”…

First up, an incredible interview from 2005 where he speaks his mind about peak oil, gentrification, organic food corporatism, the sad state of the anti-war movement and more. There’s so much here I find myself agreeing with, and to hear Wilson talk plainly and lucidly about current events - a topic he doesn’t usually address but which is obviously unavoidable - is very refreshing. A taste:

“I went to a Peace March yesterday – it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60s again: same clothes, same slogans […] We’ve been saying this for 40 years and we still haven’t realized that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action! And this is even better: there was a counter-demonstration, and the anti-demonstrators were yelling at us that we were communists! This is like a civil war reenactment; it’s like people in medieval costumes pretending to be knights and ladies. Totally bizarre. […] And this is it! You go, you have a march, you say: ‘Not in my name!’ And then you go home and watch TV. You don’t then go out and start an alternative institution: a church, a farm, a commune…”

Having just spent part of my weekend in Woodstock, NY, I can wholly sympathize with that sentiment. Secluded in the woods of upstate New York, swamped with peace poles, aging folk musicians, and overpriced Bob Dylan t-shirts, it’s hard to imagine these people actually think that their endless chants of “peace peace peace” are actually accomplishing anything. Just as Bey’s experience with peace marches felt to him like a civil war re-enactment, I couldn’t help feeling as if the entire town of Woodstock was part of some new kind of Renaissance Fair or living museum - a Colonial Williamsburg for the 20th century; historical interpreters acting out the summer of love in miniature for all eternity, now surrounded by camera-clad tourists and yuppies in their country homes. (Coincidentally, Momus wrote a blog entry about a very similar phenomenon of cultural time warp just last week.)

Moving on… this essay by Bey, originally published in The Fifth Estate, was such a mindfuck the first time I read it that many of its ideas have now formed (in part) the basis for a film I’m currently working on. The essay’s main thesis posits the invention of money as “humanity’s one really totally successful experiment in magic”:

“In the form of money, the exterior soul, shattered into fragments, so to speak, can be put into circulation ([exchanged for desire, passed on to heirs like an immortal virus, or, rather like a dead thing that magically contains life and “begets” itself endlessly in usury]) but also stolen, monopolized, guarded by dragons, so that some unlucky humans can be stripped of all soul, while others gorge or hoard up soul-bits of ancestors and victims in their goulish caves or ‘banks,’ etc.”

In exploring this idea, he touches upon Proudhon, Midas, cargo cults, Mauss’ gift economy, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Also intimately related is this lecture on the history of money he gave less than a year ago. I haven’t been able to find any transcriptions or recordings of it, so the summary given on that blog will have to do.

And if you’re looking for more, I’d hope you’d ignore the god-awful web design and take a look at deoxy, leftbank.org, and gyw.com where a ton of his writings are available for free. Icing on the cake: it seems like that last one is hidden within the website of some Finnish chemical processing risk assessment firm - how subversive!

<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 1: Diagnosis)

I apologize for taking so long to post this second part. You may want to refresh your memory of Part 1, as I pretty much jump right in. I’ve also realized that this post is still going to be too long, even in two parts, and so there will be a third part additional parts forthcoming.

Raoul Vaneigem’s book The Revolution of Everyday Life is split into two parts: “Part one: Power’s perspective” and “Part Two: Reversal of Perspective.” Similarly, in Part 1 of this post I set up Adam Curtis and R.D. Laing’s near-dystopian interpretation of history and society. In this second part, I will outline a few strains of thought which offer tools for combating/transforming this dystopia - tools for reversing the perspective of power they’ve described.

Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics begins with the line, “Artistic practice is a game.” Yet whereas John Nash’s game theory imagined all human interaction to be a competitive game, where the most rational way to “play” (exist) was to be constantly plotting against everyone around you, the art that Bourriaud champions embodies a radically different type of game playing, one that emphasizes the exact opposite values from those of Nash.

In the book, Bourriaud defines relational aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” Although the term is used to cover a diverse range of artists, all with widely divergent politics and practices, many of them have in common a desire to create democratic spaces of conviviality, dialog, and play.

Some examples…

Rirkrit Tiravanija is most famous for his (mostly untitled) mid-’90s installations in which he created makeshift kitchens and dining rooms within gallery spaces and served free Pad Thai, Vegetable Curry, and other meals to visitors. In his 2002 piece Apartment 21 he constructed a replica of his apartment (complete with working bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, living room and outside area) in a gallery and lived inside, keeping it open 24 hours a day and encouraging visitors “to drop in for tea and a chat.” As part of the 2003 Venice Biennale, in collaboration with curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit, he created Utopia Station, a hub for a number of projects “striv[ing] to orient individuals of varying perspectives toward collective action” - “a scene of both organized and spontaneous performances, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and film screenings” and “at different times, a space for discussion, argumentation, relaxation, refreshment, meditation, and celebration.” [reference]

Between October 2006 and April 2007, Carsten Höller placed gigantic, metallic slides (up to 5-stories tall) inside the Tate Modern and allowed visitors to slide down them (Test Site).

In Gillian Wearing’s 1992-3 work Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, she stopped random individuals on the street and asked them to spontaneously write something on a piece of paper. Photographs of them holding their “signs” were displayed in the gallery not as the work itself, but as documentation.

Jeremy Deller’s work Risk Assessment for the Folkstone Trienale consisted of, in his words, “a series of slapstick interventions performed unannounced around the town” by local actors - real world homages to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, like getting caught in a beach chair or tripping over themselves. This past year, in a project called It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, he brought together “a revolving cast of participants including veterans, journalists, scholars, and Iraqi nationals who have expertise in a particular aspect of the region and/or first-hand experience of Iraq” and had them “take up residence in the New Museum’s gallery space with the express purpose of encouraging discussion with visitors to the Museum.” Also present in the gallery was the remnants of a car destroyed in Iraq. Later, he brought along several of the participants (and the wrecked car) on a cross-country tour, occupying galleries and museums and engaging in conversations with visitors.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the now deceased artist to whom Bourriaud devotes an entire chapter of Relational Aesthetics to, was most well known for his (again, mostly untitled) installations in which he placed large piles of wrapped candies in the corners of galleries and invited visitors to take them. Similar works replaced the candies with stacks of posters, often political in nature (such as this one, documenting the 464 people who died gun-related deaths during one week in the United States). In a brilliant 1995 interview with critic Robert Storr, he spoke about his interactions with the security guards in the institutions displaying his work: “In my recent show at the Hirshhorn, which is one of the best experiences I have had in a long time, the guards were really in it. Because I talked to them, I dealt with them. They’re going to be here eight hours with this stuff. And I never see guards as guards, I see guards as the public. […] In Washington people asked me, ‘Did I train the guards, did I give them a lecture?’ I said, ‘No, I just talk to them when I’m doing the work.’ They said, ‘You know we have never been to an exhibit where the guards go up to the viewers and tell them what to do, and where to go, what to look at, what it means.’ But again, that division of labor, that division of function is always there in place to serve someone’s agenda.”

Mirroring Laing’s opposition to schools of psychiatry which focus on the individual psyche as if in isolation, Relational Aesthetics shifts the focus of art away from solitary contemplation and introspection and toward the consideration of the group. Bourriaud even references anti-psychiatrist David Cooper, whose views closely resemble Laing’s: “According to Cooper, madness is not ‘inside’ a person, but in the system of relationships of which that person is involved. People don’t become ‘mad’ all on their own, because we never think all on our own” (RA p81). Relational aesthetics posits that art, likewise, should be considered within a social context.

But the way in which that social context is conceived is directly oppositional to the social contextualization of game theory. Play doesn’t fit into the game theory model. Nor does eating free pad Thai with strangers in a gallery. RA aims to create spaces where suspiciousness, selfishness, and social climbing can be set aside; where alternatives exist to the model of homo economicus. Bourriaud is abundantly clear in what he considers the ‘goal’ of this art: “The enemy we have to fight first and foremost is embodied in a social form: it is the spread of the supplier/client relations to every level of human life, from work to dwelling-place by way of all the tacit contracts which define our private life” (RA p83). This ‘enemy’ is as good a description of the game theory mindset as any.

According to Bourriaud, contemporary art rejects the idea of “sense” or “meaning” inherent in human activity (RA p53) - the cold rationality of game theory - in favor of a much more complex idea of human nature. It instead champions the imagination and the irrational (an approach inherited from Dada, etc?). Again channeling Cooper and Laing: “reality is what I talk about with a third party. It can only be defined as a product of negotiation. Escaping from reality is ‘mad.’ Somebody sees an orange rabbit on my shoulder, but I can’t see it. So discussion weakens and shrinks. To find a negotiating space, I must pretend to see this orange rabbit on my shoulder. Imagination seems like a prosthesis affixed to the real so as to produce more intercourse between interlocutors. So the goal of art is to reduce the mechanical share in us. Its aim is to destroy any a priori agreement about what is perceived” (RA p80).

“So art is opening up fluid social relations at precisely the time wider society is closing them down,” Momus summarizes, “Relational Aesthetics is what we do when machines take over. ‘The general mechanization of social processes gradually reduces the relational space.’ So art has to increase it again.”

Since writing Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud has coined a new term - “Altermodernism.” According to him, the utopian goals of modernism aren’t dead, but must be revised and approached differently in light of the failures of the 20th century. Instead of a grand plan for societal change, there are small experiments; instead of tearing down the old world and starting from scratch, we have to work with transforming and improving what we already have; and since there is no remaining undiscovered territory, these experiments and transformations must be temporary and dispersed - “interstices” or “islets of resistance.”

Terms such as these should sound familiar to anyone who’s read the work of Hakim Bey. Although Bourriaud has never once mentioned Bey in his writings, the similarities between the two are so uncanny that I’d hesitate to believe he had not read him. Bourriaud’s essay “‘Islets’ and Utopia…” in particular - a brief summation of his idea of the utopian interstice - has overt parallels to Bey’s work, right down to his referencing of the free party and rave movements.

Bey’s most well known work, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, is about exactly what Bourriaud is describing when he speaks of “islets of resistance.” Using the historical and fabled example of the ‘pirate utopia‘ - “whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, if only for a short but merry life” - as his template, he conceives of temporary spaces of total autonomy hidden within the existing world.

The concept of the T.A.Z. has many of the same roots and starting points as relational aesthetics and Bourriaud’s “interstices.” Like Bourriaud, Bey also writes of “the closure of the map”: “The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. […] Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed… in theory.” And just as Bourriaud looks to revise the goals of modernism by looking at its failures, so too does Bey ground his theory of T.A.Z. in the shortcomings of the revolutionary project: “revolution has never yet resulted in achieving [the anarchist] dream. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising - but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.” And it’s not only Bourriaud’s theory that shares an intellectual heritage with Bey - the actions of the artists he describes do as well. Tiravanija’s artist colony/”micro utopia” The Land is a clear inheritor to the dreams of utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier (an enormous influence on Bey’s ideas), yet is far more open than the communities they created or inspired.

The concrete definition of a T.A.Z. is left largely ambiguous, and we are left to fill in ourselves what such a space would look like. In fact, the term does not merely point to future possibilities, but can be used as a description for spaces existing in the past or present. It might be a squat. It might be a website or application used to bypass regional or national censorship laws (the “counter-Net” as Bey describes it) such as Wikileaks or Freenet. It might be a counter-cultural festival or temporary intentional community (like Burning Man or a Rainbow Gathering). Micronations might be T.A.Z.s. Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War most certainly was. In a nation with a highly oppressive state, a T.A.Z. might be a safehouse, used to provide shelter for dissidents or refuges. In a democratic, capitalist nation like the U.S. or France, it might be a space in which capitalism is excluded entirely, and systems of generosity form a hyper-localized alternate economy - a really really free market or a skillshare, for instance… or a Rirkrit Tiravanija or Felix Gonzalez-Torres work.

The T.A.Z. or “islet of resistance” could also potentially be conceived of as a place free from paranoid, dysfunctional normalcy or a place of psychic healing. This is the etymology of “psychiatry” - “a healing of the soul/mind” - which David Cooper aimed to recoup by labeling traditional psychiatry “anti-psychiatric.” Likewise, R.D. Laing wished to recoup the term “asylum” as a name for his Kingsley Hall experiment. Instead of its modern usage describing essentially a prison for the mad, it would once again revert to its original meaning: Greek for “refuge,” from the roots meaning “without right of seizure.” In other words, an autonomous zone.

Summarizing Guattari, Bourriaud writes: “Psychoanalysis and art? Two sorts of subjectivity production, interconnected, two operational systems, two preferred tool systems, which are joined together in the possible solution to the ‘Malaise of Civilization’” (RA p88).

But can art really accomplish all that Bourriaud seems to imply it can?

In the third and final part additional installments of this post, I will present a number of critiques of Bourriaud’s ideas, and drawing upon the antecedents, successors, and relatives of relational aesthetics, describe a broad range of projects with similar and perhaps more tenable utopian potential.

>> Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 3.1: Critique)

Bumped into this “tribe” while searching for something else…

“Utopian Flash Fiction Tribe: for the creation of flash fiction stories to create little open doorways into possible solutions to social problems in concise, entertaining narratives.

“I envision this group as a furtherance of my once and future project, to find visionaries who will take part in writing a series of flash fiction utopian pieces around an imaginary federation of diverse villages each working out their methods of community life. We can create little dramatic impacts imparting information about how the people of the community involved solve their social problems.

“A fictional project allows for social activist imaginings outside of the currently ‘possible’ to promote ideas in an easily digestible and enjoyable form, each person involved adding their bits to the overall project. It would be wonderful eventually to publish these stories into an inspirational book, but I am mostly interested to see what kinds of ideas for possible social structures result. I am hoping eventually to see a whole world of ideas created through these short bursts of fiction, little vignettes or as one person suggested, peeks into open doors. There is no set format to fit. What each participant writes would be helping to create the structure itself.”

Haven’t read any of them, so I don’t know if they’re any good, but it’s cool to know that stuff this specific and cool actually has people contributing to it.

Related: I’ve been getting really into science fiction all over again recently (both film & lit), and for the past few weeks I’ve been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It’s absolutely incredible - surpassing my expectations in every possible way. I’ll be sure to post a review here once I’m finished, which shouldn’t be long.