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Masks, or The Illusion of Power

The following text is a script for a participatory performance. Copies of the text are handed out to the audience and volunteers are asked to read aloud the questions that are underlined along with the performer. The script was first performed at the UCIRA conference State of the Arts at UCSD on 11/20/2010.

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down. –Ellwood Cubberly, Public School Administration, 1916 quoted in School is a Factory by Allan Sekula, 1980.

The students’ movement in California and around the US is a real opening for radical politics. It raises basic questions about what society has become and where it is going. I am a long-term critic of neoliberalism, I am convinced that this form of capitalism is totally unsustainable and unlivable. Since, however, it is squarely installed in the realms of knowledge, culture and information — since it is cognitive capitalism — it seems there is no more strategic point for opposition than the universities. That doesn’t mean that every point of opposition is not important, just that this one could become crucial if enough people would raise the basic questions of value, what’s society good for, how am I participating, which consequences does that have on others, etc. Those kinds of questions form the basis of the practical philosophy that interests me. –Brian Holmes in an interview by Michael Wilson  (http://occupyeverything.com/features/interview-with-brian-holmes-steps-toward-a-cultural-strategy/)

“a) The struggle for public education is a struggle against privatization throughout the economy, against the exclusions of the marketplace, and finally against an economy based on private resources.

b) The defense of staff and adjunct teachers is part of a program against the precaritization of workers’ lives in every sector.

c) The student (witness the recent revelations about the scope of student debt) is not a privileged case but a true subject of the market in its credit-fueled plunderings of the future — and the fight against capitalism will necessarily happen on campuses, among other places. –via facebook by Joshua Clover

“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic.” -Joseph Brodsky


Thanks everyone for coming and thanks to the organizers of the conference. I would like to dedicate my time today to reflecting on my engagement – both individually and collectively – with the struggles around the meaning of public education over the past year and in doing so I hope to consider what I see as an unresolved tensions within this struggle that are both productive and debilitating. And those are, in part, the tensions around symbolic action and modes of engagement – The tensions that surround the meaning of public education when what constitutes ‘the public’ is itself a contested term full of the sorts of antagonisms that animate collective fictions. By focusing on the arc of my own involvement in this struggle I hope not to engage in a kind of narcissistic blow by blow of the last year or so but rather to re-examine my experiences in light of questions that faced and still face those of us who seek to link the struggles around public education with a broad social, political and economic climate and the ways that the university administration manages various forms of resistance to privatization.

I warn you in advance that some listeners may find a certain naivete and redundancy in what follows but what I would like to say, without a hint of anti-intellectualism, is that I’m looking to avoid further mystification without oversimplifying the complexity of our predicament. I should also say by way of introduction something about my format. When I proposed this talk for the conference I was under investigation by Labor relations at UCR for my involvement with the website which announced Mark Yudof’s resignation last March. I’ve structured this presentation in an intentionally open ended way so that we might have a conversation and really use the experiences and questions that I present as a starting point. I don’t want to preach to the choir here and I do think that we have to ask difficult questions of ourselves so that as the administration puts the final touches on dismantling the UC system as we know it, this conference does not become hamstrung by hand wringing OR by patting ourselves on the back. The question is not only WHAT TO DO NOW but also how do we move from protest to action, from managed, reactionary politics towards spaces of potential?

On september 24th last year, after making a number of protest signs and teaching an abridged version of my web-based art class at UCR, I encouraged my class to attend the rally together which was beginning to form just outside of the art building. I had already spent a large portion of the class explaining the so-called crisis as I understood it then, the logic of the walk-out and I made what I thought was a rational appeal to my students: namely that the interests of staff, faculty and students were being undermined in the name of austerity and efficiency. This logic, I explained, could only be countered by a large demonstration of refusal. Most of my students wandered off sheepishly and the rally, though organized with good intentions and a sense of commitment, was poorly attended and felt more like a rehearsal than an event. Meanwhile other campuses saw rallies attended by thousands and the building occupations that have given this “struggle” such as it is, its real meaning and charge. One of the questions I faced was how to activate meaningful struggle on a campus that seemed and still seems almost oblivious to the gravity of the present-day dynamics of the university.

Between that September day and the regents meeting at UCLA in November was a crucial germination period in terms of my own thinking about what the stakes of this particular struggle represent. A teach-in in Berkeley – still available on youtube – set out very clearly that in fact everything was and is at stake. Wendy Brown, the renowned political scientist, suggested the legacy of prop 13 and 30 years of right wing propaganda have ushered in a political moment in which we risk absolutely every aspect of human experience being reduced to equations of dollars and cents. And I probably don’t need to tell all of you that we are fighting, to put it very bluntly, to stop the utter commodification of absolutely everything. The 50,000 students marching in London last week and the relatively timid actions in CA this week, are loud reminders that this is only the beginning of that struggle…

The day of the November regents meeting at UCLA last year was perhaps the decisive moment in my understanding of this struggle… I recall vividly walking between a large confrontational protest in front of the building where the regents were approving the 32% fee hike with students linking arms defiantly in front of cops in full riot gear. The scene was tense and vital but also predictable. Both the cops and those of us protesting had rehearsed our roles many time before… if not literally then in some cinematic, phantasmagorically inflected dream. On the other side of campus, students had occupied a building, issued a beautifully open statement, and renamed the building after two murdered black panthers bunchy carter and John Huggins. The space around the building was mysteriously quiet. I tried to enter but was not allowed in… I stood outside in solidarity and argued with the odd passerby who was willing to engage with me about the merits of the occupation. Towards the end of the day I drove home in the blank and contorted traffic of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the place that Jason Brown describes as “a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities…” So… when our actions become too rehearsed, we search for ways to re-animate our own sense of what constitutes collective, direct action. We try to shake off the distracted paralysis and the tormented mask. We look for ways to inject into our cynical narratives moments of off kilter gestures, we try to most of all to surprise ourselves. But on that November day I wrote: “Some say the economy is shattered. I say the economy shatters us all. At least for today. Today is an economy of shatters. Or, shattering, today is an economy of alternative economies.”

It was a desire to overcome the stale habits of protest, retaining of course a spark of that oppositional spirit, that led me to think about strategic ways to push the meaning of the struggle elsewhere… or everywhere. Conversations and communication with Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Sean Dockray, Micha Cardenas, Michael Wilson, Brett Stalbaum and Ricardo Dominguez gave me the impetus and the inspiration to buy the domain name markyufof.com and begin thinking “what to do?” How best to use this site and when? How best intervene in and interfere with the impoverished symbolic logic and economy of the university? How best to target those who turn a crisis of priorities into a budget crisis? How to extend the logic and spirit of the building occupations? How to “occupy everything?” as we decided to put it…
The thing that surprised me most on the morning of March 3, when yudof’s resignation site was made public was the speed with which events unfolded. Threads began to circulate on discussion boards:

– this is a gag, right. probably would be a good idea to hold the jokes for a while. too many jokers around who don’t know when something is not funny.(ucsd)

– This is funny. “I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements.” as if…

–Is this a joke? I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone? Is it April 1st?

– Read it more closely…. and see links to “occupy everything ” , “destroy capitalism ” and the like……??Well done, authors! You had me going

– If ONLY it was true. And in this hyper-reality, who knows, who knows?

And it was only a couple of hours before I received an e-mail from the office of strategic communications at UCR, cc’d to the chair of the art department Charles Long:


Hi to both,
We have a problem. A Web site pretending to say that Yudof has resigned can
be traced back to Ken Ehrlich and the UC art department.

Anything we can do about getting that down?

We have one media request already and we are likely to see more….

Thanks, Kris

Kris Lovekin
Director of Media Relations
Office of Strategic Communications

The question of anonymity, or the potential for certain forms of digital masking, quickly came to the foreground. When I purchased the domain name, I chose not make the domain information private. This was a quick decision, not without consideration, but also not entirely cognizant of the ramifications of this choice. Even though the site was hosted through the BANGLAB server here at UCSD with the support and encouragement of Ricardo and Micha and Brett, a quick web search revealed me as the owner of the domain. As the gesture played out in the media, I was trying to strike a delicate balance: I did not want to claim sole credit for the project in a way that would take away from the idea of using yudof’s “power’ in the media and directing it towards the actions in support of public education scheduled for March 4. I also felt that the longer the gesture played ambiguously in the media, the more attention it would generate. In an effort to strike the right balance, when media relations asked me “if there was anything I could do about getting it down” I changed the domain registration to private and wrote back, saying that the site should no longer be connected to me or UCR. Later when the investigation was underway, and I went public asking for support and citing Ricardo’s idea of radical transparency, this caused some confusion. The fact is that I never explicitly denied my involvement, I simply attempted to mask it slightly in an attempt to give the gesture more legs.

The local chapter of the AFT, the union that represents lecturers and librarians across the campuses, was completely supportive and immediately and assertively working with me to end the labor relations investigation as soon as it began. Letters of support poured in from around the country and all over the world. As amazing as the showing of support was, the question quickly became: How to use the energy and organizing around the investigations and turn it towards a continued activation of the struggle to re-imagine public education? The administration seemed to be using investigations as a means to suppress dissent. Was the goal of the investigation meant to have a chilling effect on protest as much as it was to persecute my individual actions? Certainly potentially losing my job was consequence I could not take lightly – and the criminal investigation that ricardo, micha, brett and bang lab were facing even more so – but the investigations became a distraction from many people using creative energy and time from organizing, agitating and articulating ways forward in the face of a bureaucratic and managerial structure whose main purpose it seems is to reinforce the narrow logic of administration and by extension, capital accumulation for the few and massive debt for the many. In this way, the investigations themselves became mired in the machinations of endless memos, meetings, conference calls and corporate communications. There might be an argument to be made that if the university were so bogged down by endless investigations into similar activities, the bureaucratic structure might fall in on itself in some sort of Kafkaesque joke, but as we’ve seen, so far the university has proven remarkably fluent at maintaining high levels of managerial gravitas and public relations flim flam.

After one tense meeting and months of waiting, anticipation and silence from the administration, I finally in July received a counseling memo. I definitely need counseling of all sorts, but I couldn’t help wonder about the semiotic implications of declaring me the counseled one. I suppose it’s better than rehabilitated. The memo encouraged me, in the course of my research, to be careful to abide by University policy and cited two specific violations of that policy. One was impersonating a university official. Clearly satire is not impersonation. Second, I improperly used the seal of the university. The authenticating image that ironically enough reads “let there be light” is of course meant to be used after receiving proper approval and signifies the real in the domain of the University.

One of the most successful aspects of the gesture, admittedly quite limited in scope given the dynamics at hand, was that it forced the members of my department to have a series of difficult conversations about the website and ultimately come out in public either in support of me and the work (as most chose to do) or implicitly identify themselves as complicit with the corporate logic of the University. With some notable exceptions, in the last year faculty across the campuses have been remarkably complacent and uncreative in responding to this series of assaults on public education that have now resulted in a 40% fee hike, furloughs, layoffs, etc.. The question is why? Have faculty members either fully internalized the corporate logic of the university or do they imagine that they can hold onto whatever position thru this storm without causing a fuss? What else goes on in the minds of faculty members who are disengaged and silent?? Do faculty and students perceive engagement in the terrain of education as just another demand? Be more rigorous, more political, more engaged, funnier, more media savvy, more politically adroit, more sensitive to race, gender and sexuality. Since rebellion is packaged and re-packaged as a refusal to submit to demands, whether they are familial, cultural or political, do faculty and students imagine disengagement itself as a form of protest? Part of what I wanted to say with the website, either symbolically or otherwise, was that Yudof does not have power unless we reaffirm it. The mask he wears is one that we help sustain…. I had little faith that yudof or the regents or the stunted bureaucracy of the administration would respond favorably to protest… But masks are ambiguous. Unmasking power does not reveal some formerly unseen truth, it reveals hidden or partially eclipsed potential. Students and faculty absolutely have the potential to structure the terms of the battle and, again with a few exceptions, we have failed to do so… How then, playfully, absurdly or otherwise, to transform masks of power?

Now I would like to step back to ask a series of questions specifically in relation to the arts. Given that traditionally and historically images have always had a charged relationship to truth claims, how can we possibly frame or understand critical image making in relation to the utterly fragmented and spectacular information overload that is endemic to cognitive or cultural capitalism? As the cops and students compete to analyze video and photographs of tense standoffs are we once again, as artists, caught up in debates about the relativism of meaning in relation to images? Does the political landscape of the university itself become a series of abstract images?

An artist whose own work is instructive in thinking through these problems is Allan Sekula. In particular his 1978 project School is a Factory points out some of the historical remnants of critical image making in relation to the politics of education. As a scholar of photography and an image maker, Sekula uses sophisticated prose to situate and problemitize his own photographs, relying on language to lift images out of the abstract and ambiguous space in which they circulate culturally.

Part of Sekula’s strategy in school is a factory is polemic, perhaps one that underestimates the complexities and nuances of power, for strategic ends. And here I will quote Sekula at length:

We have been led by the champions of corporate liberalism to believe that schooling and the media are instruments of freedom. Accordingly, these institutions are seen to fulfill the democratic promise of the enlightenment by bringing knowledge and upward social mobility within reach of everyone, by allowing each individual to reach his or her own limits. This ideology hides the relentless sorting function performed by school and the media. Both institutions serve to legitimate and reproduce a strict hierarchy of power relations, tracking individuals into places in a complex social division of labor while suggesting that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures. School and the media effectively situate most people in a culture and economy over which they have no control, and thus are mechanisms by which an “enlightened” few promote the subtle silencing of the many.


School and the media are inherently discursive institutions, sites within which discourse becomes a locus of symbolic force, of symbolic violence. A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official “truths,” exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge. Resistance is almost always limited only to the possibility of tuning out. Domination depends on a monologue of sorts, a “conversation” in which one party names and directs the other, while the the other listens deferentially, docilely, resentfully, perhaps full of suppressed rage. When the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master. This is the dynamic of of all oppressions of race, gender and class. All dominating power functions semiotically through the naming of the other as subordinate, dependent, incomplete as a human being without the master’s discipline and support. Clearly such relationships can be overthrown; the discourse of domination finds its dialectical antagonist in a discourse and practice of liberation. Like home, factory, prison and city streets, school and the media are sites of an intense, if often covert, daily struggle in which language and power are inextricably connected.

Sekula’s positioning of education as central to “the sorting function” under capitalism echoes the current demand that we understand the fight for public education in the broadest possible context. Do we defend public education in its current problematic form or do we see the organizing around public education as an opening for an other kind of politics? Certainly we can also draw on Sekula’s strategy here to produce an engaged critique. The work in question was made while Sekula was teaching at a southern CA community college and part of its success and long term meaning is based on his own self implication: For Sekula this is not a detached analysis, but a provocation. A set of questions about institutions from within.

In context, this kind of politically minded artistic work constitutes a move from representation to engagement. While many readings of most so called political art might justifiably render an artwork a simple illustration of nuanced political questions, Sekula’s work demonstrates the potential to imagine forms of artistic engagement that oscillate across aesthetic, subjective and social spheres. Sekula’s practice circulates around the documentary form; while the gesture of a satirical website that plays with the conventions of authenticity is situated in the domain of hyperreality (or whatever other awful term we’ve come up with to describe the contemporary digital landscape). Sekula’s work and this gesture, as different as they might be, both traffic in forms of text and image making in which verifiability and abstraction are central. At the end of the essay that accompanies these images, it is precisely forms of abstraction that Sekula critiques.

There is first the abstraction inherent in what he calls the “supposedly realistic world picture of a bureaucratic, commodity centered society: the abstraction that emerges from the triumph of exchange value over use value, and so on.” And secondly, the abstraction that emerges from the separation of aesthetic culture from the rest of life, the imagined freedom of the disengaged play of signifiers. Against these forms of abstraction, Sekula argues for a kind of political geography. What does this political geography look like? Analyzing the interrelated dynamics of intellectual labor, cultural capital, the rise of a managerial class inextricably linked to the politics of education, Sekula’s designation of political geography is a prescient identification of the territory we currently inhabit. Produced at around the time of prop 13 and before the Reagan era set in, the work stands as both a critique of and a warning against the surge of cognitive capitalism witnessed since the time of it’s production. If Sekula seeks to move from representation to engagement through contextualizing his photographs with text, there are certainly other and perhaps more complex ways to consider engagement. So too must there be other ways of engaging the political geography of the university than creating a satirical website announcing the resignation of a corporate bureaucrat. Far from an exemplary example of a nuanced engagement with the political geography of the University, the yudof website represents an experiment: an attempt to find a form for that kind of engagement.

Directly connected to my teaching digital media the gesture was created at a time when many in the university are re-considering pedagogical strategies. If we are to fundamentally engage the political geography of this place – where we teach, study, learn, socialize, do research, and so many other things – we might begin by asking What constitutes our own assumptions about pedagogy? And how might we continue to integrate experiments in pedagogy into our efforts to dismantle the logic and the structure of a university that does not prioritize education in the broadest sense of the word.

2010 ken@kenehrlich.net

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knowledge commons, power, pedagogy, feminism and collective practices

Puerto Rican riot police stand behind students sitting in the road in front of University of Puerto Rico during 2009 strike to stop tuition hikes.

Conversation with Paula Cobo, CEMENT Graduate Journal, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), NOV 6, 2010

Q>Paula Cobo: At a moment where art institutions operate as corporations, where we are witnesses of an ongoing endogamy of interests, how do you feel about the role of the self-Institution, or the Anti-University?

A>Cara Baldwin: Art institutions have historically operated as corporations, with varying effects/affects. At this particular moment what interests me in terms of collective practices are those that are incredibly open. This is not anti-corporate necessarily.

I do not know what anti-university refers to exactly, but I think that it refers to forms of militant research and new, some radical, forms of pedagogy. I make this distinction because these all operate extra-instutionally. I think there is an important shift to recognize between the question you put to me and the one I choose to respond to.

In other words, I don’t recognize a space outside institutions even as I imagine and participate in the creation of slippages and movements that are formative and generative as well as defensive and critical.

A family is an institutional space. What kind of research is to be done here? Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati are advancing some incredibly critical and inspiring work on this subject.

And I think at the heart of your question there is an exploration of scale and subjectivity that I find very interesting.

>Paula Cobo: Yes, when I refer to spaces of self institution I’m thinking of projects as Copenhagen Free University. Where the everyday life becomes a space of research and self-revolutionary praxis evidencing an autonomy that frames itself outside the realm of capitalistic thought or activity and where thought is more creational and experimental than re-productional.

Do you think is necessary to self revolutionize (become other) or revolutionize the current institutional system?

>Cara Baldwin: I think it is important to recognize the compulsory flexibility imposed on us as artists, and moreover, as neoliberal subjects in a post-fordist or late-capitalist society. I mention Federici and Fortunati because they are denaturalizing space once perceived to be institutional and radically expanding this to include those in which much of our unwaged labor takes place (production and reproduction)— through an insidious form of capitalism now as self-management. Perhaps related to the phenomenon you are referring to in the phrase self-institution?

>Paula Cobo: Some of this (self)projects-particularly here in L.A- seem very dependent on the same institutions and in that sense there seems to be a conflict of interests, can you comment on this?

>Cara Baldwin: I take (self)projects to mean those cultural projects that are represented as singularly produced and distributed, authored and edited-or framed. In this case, I would ask where such a project exists? Indeed, where it has ever truly existed?

I think, though, that this is not what you mean. Perhaps you are referring to collectively run projects?

>Paula Cobo: Yes, I am pointing at collectively run projects which first of all operate on a plurality in order to achieve their singular goals (a nihilistic collectivity), undermining a set of desires that appeal to an inscription on a institutional framework (and that is OK). But I think that the interesting part of the experience of collective singularities is precisely their capacity of anti-inscription on a institutional framework. I mean by this creating new ways of thinking, new ways of presenting (exhibiting) and new ways of assembling radical subjectivities. I don´t know, but thinking on the lineage of Guy Debord and the SI, of course the Dadaists, and I know that this might sound a bit naive at this point, but I sincerely think art, as the place of disruption, permanent protest and poetical subjectivity and multitude. And if this means being out or in the margin of it, its fine!

I think the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is interesting precisely because of its autonomy toward the institution (becoming self institution), its generative and anti-hierarchical and that is free and open to the public “users”.

>Paula Cobo: So another question for you, do you think is important to exhibit? (take it traditionally/ individually/collectively/ but on the coordinates of the “artist show”. What do you think of exhibiting?

>Cara Baldwin:

>Paula Cobo: how did the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest operate?

>Cara Baldwin: The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest operated collectively. First, as a sort of family practice that extended out to friends as contributors and, by issue 2, as an editorial collective that included myself as a non-familial co-editor. Other co-editors followed including Ryan Griffis and Lize Mogel meeting to conceive of and create each issue. This flexible core group worked collaboratively with writers and editors internationally. These actively proposed and frequently made contributions to each issue in response to open calls that were distributed online through an email list that we built together and on various independent or autonomous media publishing sites. The project itself was not for profit (as opposed to non-profit) and relied on substantial community support through art auctions and purchase of print publication.

Unlike dominant models of academic and artistic production and distribution that rely on scarcity to generate value we modeled ourselves as a site of commons, making all content free to any who wished to access it. The project continues to shift and change. It seems to be in a process of redefinition, contraction, and consolidation at the moment.

>Paula: It seems that talking openly about revolutionary politics today, particularly in the university system is somehow “outmoded” or just discussed on a theoretical level. From this post political plateau (in where all revolutionary attempts failed) how do you think is possible to think again politically, and what means to think politically for you today in current conditions of production?

>Cara: From my perspective this decidedly bourgeois aversion to radicalized speech (and thought) has been enthusiastically sustained since the industrial revolution. Before. This has been true in both public and private universities with respective claims to populist and radical ideologies with few exceptions and over a period of time that predates 1968.

Disinterestedness is a (western) cultural product with a material and philosophic (aesthetic) history. In other words, it is not an elevated or neutral ground to operate from.

What is meant by ‘post-political,’ particularly in this moment— ever? It seems as impossible as a post-conceptual—or post-cultural moment.

>Paula: I signify the “post-political” as this suspended time-space in which we are in the process of analyzing the events that signified as “political” in the second half of the last century and failed as attempts of change (1968,  the third world project, struggles of decolonization, popular movements in south america etc… ). Im not saying that current times are not political, and that the notion of “post-political” is not being political but, that the notion of political has slightly shifted in meaning and that in a way there is no way back, and that we are re signifying the political.

I am very interested in your critique of the artist as a neoliberal subject, and it came to my mind Ranciere´s “distribution of the sensible”, in which the artwork is supposed to present us a certain political engaged sensibility or more “socially engaged art”, but most of the artists ARE working on a neoliberal plateau …..(art market/museums) and showing this “socially engaged art”. What do you think on this? . It reminds me (and makes me laugh) of the statement of Nicolas Bourriaud in his “Relational Aesthetics” that Rirkrit Tiravanija is a precarious artist. What do you think of this? (I like to think of the statement: “The political is not the content, the political is the form.”

>Cara: I find the work of Nicolas Bourriaud and Rirkrit Tiravanija disgusting. I believe in the indivisibility of form and content but imagine it never ends. I am a student of Allan Sekula and Michael Asher among others. I am not insensible to poorly wrought work. It offends me. It oppresses us. It is not ‘convivial’. I can speak more about this, but I would prefer to be blunt.

And then, what is referred to in terms of current conditions of production? I think that this would refer to acting as a cultural producer in a late capitalist society. I do have quite a bit more to say about that. Perhaps I’ve already overdone my emphasis on labor and could focus on modes of distribution, diffusion and interfacialiity?

>Paula: Yes, I mean acting as a cultural producer (or knowledge producer) in late capitalist society and its relationship to labor. Can you comment on this notion? How can we make a living? (hahahaha)

>Cara: We can begin by working with one another to decide that ‘how to’ live piece. I am in the process of doing this with friends now, enacting a larger community/ies discursively.

In practice, this can operate as simply as a generating projects that shift according to the needs and abilities of those who contribute to it. Something as simple as a directory has a political and creative potential that are impossible to imagine, but realizable just the same.

This approach addresses the idea of self-project or institution as well as, in a critical sense, self-management. When asked by another artist what projects I had been thinking about/working on lately among them I mentioned that I had just decided that it would be worthwhile to create a reference page of links between collective, immaterial, critical or subversive practices / projects in Portland, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc… connecting them with existing projects elsewhere, particularly those in Central and South America. The response to this was ‘What kind of thinking is that?’ The critique went on to assume that this was a ‘dead’ or closed way of thinking. Thinking out of self-interest. Not creative in that it didn’t come from an open ‘blank’ or ‘white’ space.

I was struck by the modernism in this desire for a pure, white space. The desire for a pure, white space—and a transcendent moment thought all in the singular. I thought of the showers. This is not where I want to live (make a living). This is a horror. It’s a trauma.

What kind of thinking is it I am interested in? I am interested in compassionate, intellectual and interested thinking.

>Paula: In what are you working right now? Which are your main focuses of research?

>Cara: Revolutionary histories and systems of exchange. Latin American and feminist contemporary art. Autonomia, feminism, Marxism. Poetry. Performance. Political content in art that has not been perceived as such.

I am working on a book on critical pedagogy and another about writing as a form of reading and embodiment. Writing about de Certeau’s notion of flesh. Researching mound cultures. Writing about respective approaches to negative space in Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread’s work. Turning my studio into a reading room / micropublishing space that is open and creative, rather than hermetic and sealed.

>Paula: How would would you define your practice?

>Cara: Queerly operating from the belief that art is a field without discipline or measure. This is a practice that is at once dispersed and collective.

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A Socially Anti-Social, Dialogically Autonomous, Psychedelic Social Practice

Preamble:

Occupy Everything because everything has already been occupied.
Occupy Everything because everything is a site for contestation.

Now is an era of fracture. We are standing surrounded in constant collapse, trying to gather a meaningful life for ourselves.
Capital attempts to claim more and more for its own and is seemingly A-OK with letting what is outside of its sphere collapse. In this era of “the state” seemingly retreating from a “civic function”, when what was “public space” is more and more privatized, social practice becomes interesting because it can fill in that space of “the public” and meet “public needs”. In this era, social practice becomes interesting to radical practitioners because of its ability to organize its own reception within complicated and ambiguous spaces.

Thus, this essay proposes how a different social practice might do more then patch up around the edges of this constant collapse.

In saying that social practice “organizes its own reception” I am identifying social art that can organically build its own fan base. It disseminates and reproduces and (partially) interprets itself through how it is composed – by how it happens. Social art happens when an an artist’s concept is realized through the public’s labor. This “artform” might occur in a museum or a front yard.

I call these times complicated and ambiguous. Here I am referring to the general spaces which people encounter on a daily basis. Our homes and offices, stores and cafes are a collection of intentionalities and histories. Within these spaces, there is the intention to make profits, but also to love, to grow, to pray, to act rebelliously etc., ad infinitum. In other words, our days are rich texts that naturally contain the whole contradictory nature of contemporary life.

Currently, social practice risks being drowned in its own generosity. This essay bases itself in some of these critiques below not to resurrect social practice, but to suggest radical praxis. I propose here how an unrealized social practice might work as a self-critical machine to directly participate in the constitution of a radical movement-machine. Imagine a social practice that manages to keep its most generative elements while building a critically autonomous fuck you to all those fuckers.

This essay pulls from the essay-based insights of Brian Holmes, Marc J. Leger and Chantel Mouffe and Lane Relyea regarding “relational aesthetics” (see the bibliography at the end).

This essay is realized with help of conversations with Christina Ulke, Cara Baldwin, Michael Wilson, Jannon Stein, Adam Overton, Solomon Bothwell, Gerald Raunig, and Nils Norman’s students of the MUR OG RUM School of the Royal Danish Academy among others.

Glossary:
Socially anti-social practice
What would a social practice be like if it worked hard to refuse the normalizing power of a smile and instead worked through more complex emotions? What if instead, social practice argumentatively though playfully built what was to be done.

Dialogically Autonomous Social Practice
The goal of this autonomous position is to maintain the possibility for a position in competition with accepted institutional logics and rules. A social practice that maintains the classically theorized autonomy (Kant and Shiller… I guess) of fine art while concurrently allowing for dialog and exchange. In other-words, a quasi-autonomous practice. An art that maintains an autonomous position vis-a-vis the rest of society but has a porous border with its viewers because its own production is social.

Psychedelic Social Practice
Similar to the socially anti-social practice, but here more focused on creating collectively mind-bending social constructs among viewer-participants. And with the viewer-participants gathered from an open script. Once the socially anti-social practice gets legs, it creates movement. This movement, if built around schizoid energies bends the direction of the social relations that construct it in wild manners. It also creates a wild interface to the outside. Thus, with the unique interface it gathers participants in unique ways. See Gerald Raunig’s A Thousand Machines (Semiotexte).

Body: The promise of Social Practice
When Fallen Fruit or Future Farmers helps us utilize hidden resources, we are gathering power. This is the power of a group of people unhinging themselves (ideologically, at least) from a capitalist market. They facilitate a culture of people coming together to find localized power. Remember, food gives us power to go through the day.

When Re-bar invents Parking Day and disperses it nationally, we are gathering powers. Parking Day provides a concrete tactic by which to actively re-imagine and demand new relationships within the city. They facilitate a culture of people coming together to find localized power- remember, controlling property gives us power.

When Adam Overton explores relationships through massage and group-work, we are gathering power. When we orient ourselves, and when we focus on health away from normative regimes of domination and discipline we reclaim ourselves. He facilitates a culture of people coming together to find localized power – remember, the personals are political.

Body: The problem of Social Practice.
As is now often discussed, it is notable that social practice rose to the fore in this era of urban neoliberal regimes. I am not saying that social practice is complicit with these regimes. However, what I claim is that these regimes have profited ideologically and financially from our work. Neoliberalism blatantly profits financially from social practice through marketing schemes, crowd sourcing and the direct marriage of social projects to development and redevelopment.

Neo-liberalism ideologically profits from social practice in a less direct manner. It is this ideological mechanism that we must be aware of to realize the radicalizing potential of social practice.

Neoliberalism and new forms of capitalist extraction (post-fordist production etc…) feast within the fluff of the creative city. From Wikipedia (December 2010), “The term “neoliberalism” has also come into wide use in cultural studies to describe an internationally prevailing ideological paradigm that leads to social, cultural, and political practices and policies that use the language of markets, efficiency, consumer choice, transactional thinking and individual autonomy to shift risk from governments and corporations onto individuals and to extend this kind of market logic into the realm of social and affective relationships.” (link)

Thus, while certain social practices have a liberatory potential in the immediate, their actions and forms often end up unwittingly reinforcing the status quo – creating an illusion of freedom, of solidarity, of collective action.

Yet often, this social practice, this particular cause of hope, has not actually completed the necessary work here to create solidarity (for real solidarity, the ability to work together to solve issues is the basis for any non-metaphysical hope). Instead, contemporary social practice relies on the potential for social organization that is already distributed through the current economic arrangement.

Social Practice: A metaphor as Interlude:

The cacophony of the 90’s globalization movement was built concurrently with the world wide web as a near pitch perfect metaphor to facilitate the movement’s deterritorializing idealism of an international solidarity beyond borders. The webbed network facilitated cross-platform exchange while necessitating semi-autonomous infrastructures of collectives, cells, media labs, and websites.

Today, neoliberal and neoconservative economics run full-bore past any facsimile of the deterritorializing model which the movement presumed while disciplining (through legal and extra-legal action) and normalizing (by introducing price competition into its creative practices) its social structures.

Today’s web serves as a metaphor now for the near-antithesis of the globalization era’s hopes. The web now serves as a metaphor for what partially has captured this movement’s potentiality. Today the web is an always-on-machine, privileging us us to give our near-cost-free labor (in the form of myriad near-unique expressions) to a possibly global audience machine. The network is now always present while the autonomous cell has been leveled and replaced by a myriad of almost equal interfacers. The profit of this machine is extracted 24 hours a day, however it can, and this profit is almost gifted to a forever shrinking pool of people whose profiles might appear just like yours.

The potential for profit is immense, and is made potential by its mere presence. To be present, willing to exchange, to stand at the door of the network with a welcoming smile is today’s most notable affect. It is a smile that gambles, “I can fuck you before you fuck me.” Or it is a smile that says, “together we can get ours else before we’re all screwed.”

Standing on a corner, wanting to help carry people’s bags across the street for an art project ,this come-and-get-it smile is also one of social practices’ most common affects.

Body (continued): The problem of Social Practice.

So despite the very effective down-sourcing of power that results from the collective project of Fallen Fruit, Future Farmers and a thousand other projects on 127 Prince or the Groundswell Blog or the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, neoliberal markets have the capacity to ideologically re-appropriate these down-sourced potentialities back up into the market. In that both neoliberalism and our social practices are both facilitated by that smile, neoliberalism’s come-and-get-it smile is reinforced almost every time a social practitioner strikes that pose. 🙂

That smile, that shit eating, come have fun with me smile. It’ll be OK, we’ll have fun! Come have fun while we imagine how we imagine how we might live in a post-oil world!

That smile of the open network that opens up public space to social space is the same smile that neoliberalism likes within its creative cities, its self-realized contract workers, its glad to be hear immigrant labor, its virally-marketed, crowd-sourced production capacitors. 🙂

Marc J. Leger’s outlines this with delightful precision in his essay “Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle” for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #7.

This affected smile is the cruel tool of capitalist discipline that maintains this extended cultural moment.

Social Practice has (often unwittingly) facilitated this exploitation and is also uniquely positioned to end it.

Climax: Where the peasant throws off the overlord

For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it just has to stop smiling.

There are so many emotions we need to work through together besides “happy!”
For starters, how about dominated and dominator?
Or how about sadness?

Anchoring group explorations in clearly productive projects creates a safe and extremely meaningful way to collectively process the discipline we encounter as capitalist subjects.

For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it must stop using the affective communication tools which normalize interpersonal exchanges in order to create seemingly conflict-free social contracts.

Working through social conflict is a part of a movement. At least on the movement’s onset.

The radical social practitioner can also use an autonomous position from their audience to provocatively challenge audience-participants to build critical distance from their own collectivity.

This is key. Social practice must learn how to socialize an engaged criticality of how institutions and movements constitute and utilize social power. Neoliberal abuse of social practice is case study #1 of this utilization.

A radical social practice must facilitate the potential for its own critical deconstruction by its participants. Though this should smack of 90’s style institutional critique (see Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray editors) it isn’t. This criticality intends to model a critical practice outside of established institutions, and within the expanded field.

A critical social practice is aware of the enthusiasm and interest it builds in relationship to its own success. Yet instead of avoiding representation, it artistically moves to problematize its own performance and use this problematization as further medium between itself and its audience.

This project would then work in a two-fold manner. Within the traditional mode of social practice, it organizes people through desires to produce collective experiences or resources. Concurrently, the more critical element works to create a dialogical distance between participants and organizers so that the collective experience is not normalized as the result of a smoothing affect. Instead, the work becomes an act of negotiation and dialogue while autonomous power (in the form of food gathering, protest/performance, or healing) is produced.

Socially anti-social practice. Psychedelic Social Practice. Dialogically Autonomous Social Practice.

Creating a movement in exchange with broader society is an occupation.

……..
Bibliography

Check out these essays:

Brian Holmes
Schizoanalytic Cartographies

Marc J. Leger
Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle

Chantal Mouffe
Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces

Gerald Raunig
Instituent Practices, No. 2 :Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Institutional Critique,

Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray editors.

Lane Relyea
Your Art World, Or, the Limits of Connectivity

 

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A Counter-Conference: Strategies for Defending Higher Education

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The 2011 MLA Counter-Conference took place during the annual Modern Language Convention in Los Angeles, January 8th, 2011 at Loyola Law School.  While thousands of people were meeting at the traditional convention, this one-day event centered on discussing actual strategies for making higher education more just.  Speakers presented short papers on the death of tenure, the corporatization of the university, the possibilities of unionization, direct social action, the use and abuse of graduate students, organizing contingent faculty, and taking back shared governance.

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It Doesn’t Just Get Better, This is Political


“There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should be unleashed.

Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One must bring it down as well.”
– Preoccupied, The Logic of Occupation by the Occupiers of the New School

“A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange.”
– Points, Jacques Derrida

Update: Students at the University of Puerto Rico are about to begin a new student strike, amidst massive efforts by the university to stop them, including actually removing the gates of the university. [video]

Last week was the first Queering the Campus Mixer at UCSD, organized by SPACES and the Transnational Queer & Transgender Studies Research and Curriculum Group, including a large effort from Sarah Shim. I wanted to add a comment to the discussion in the open forum, but I left the event crying and didn’t really feel like talking to people at that point.

Early in the conversation, the group was discussing the need they feel for more queer and trans spaces on campus. One person in the circle, to paraphrase, said that they feel that this campus is the most homophobic environment they’ve ever been in. This person went on to say that they don’t know how the rest of us manage to do it, to come here day to day and face the coldness, the hostility, the feeling that everyone here is against you. Going on, they said that they feel like this campus is so cold that it goes beyond just homophobia, that everyone ignores each other, that the buildings feel like they are against you, the air, the cement. It’s like death, they said, this place is like death.

I hope I’m not sharing too much here about what was said, but I’m trying to share some it to get to my point. A number of people responding talking about the queer spaces that exist on campus and how they’re underused, or about how they share those feelings, or about how much work goes into creating queer and trans and People of Color (POC) spaces on campus that goes unnoticed. I raised my hand to say how grateful I am to have been able to teach, even if only for one quarter, in the Critical Gender Studies department, and how it’s the most amount of time I get to spend with other queer and trans people in my life. That’s when I started crying, embarrassed and trying to talk through it to get that last part out.

But what I wanted to say after that is that it’s important for us to understand our feelings about this place, UCSD and the space of University in general as political, not just as personal. As unwelcome as the person who spoke first at the Queering the Campus mixer feels, as unwelcome as you or I feel in this space, this feelings must be compared against the people we see on this campus everyday who look beyond comfortable, who look entitled to be here. The question I want us to ask is: who feels welcome here? And why? Certainly some people feel very welcome on this campus, from the looks of how they walk around. I’m sure you have someone in mind who you’ve seen on campus recently. Since the mixer, I’ve been haunted by this question, reconsidering what I see at this school.

The question of who feels welcome and comfortable here, who these universities offer their greatest hospitality to, leads me to think of the “It Gets Better” campaign in response to the large number of suicides of LGBT youth in the past few months. The framing of this campaign completely disavows any institutional responsibility for violence against LGBT people. If we consider the recent attack against Colle Carpenter, a transgender man at Cal State University Long Beach, and the recent incidents of hate across the UC, with openly racist gestures by students and attacks on LGBT centers, we can begin to look at the institutions we inhabit are wholly responsible for our safety. When I ask who is comfortable here and who is welcome, that question also results in considering who is unwelcome, uninvited and unsafe. Every communication by the university shapes their depiction of who is welcome here, from emails to architectural decisions, and the result to date is a very hostile environment for a lot of people, including myself. When we consider who is welcome and why we might feel unwelcome, I hope that people can then move on to imagining their own demands for how the university needs to be changed. For example, it’s clear that having more gender neutral restrooms on campus would reduce the number of violent attacks like the one Carpenter was the victim of, having the word “IT” carved into his chest with a knife. While the university wants to say that these are one off occurrences, I disagree. As long as I’ve been on this campus, I can remember incidences of sexual violence occurring. I argue that the very structure of the university, including the curricular decisions, creates the situation where these actions are permitted to happen. It doesn’t just get better, someone has to make it better. And “it” is not an it, but an action that someone does. Who is doing it, and how can we stop it. The university space is not urban or suburban, but a unique environment with demographics hand picked by administrators. The social dynamics on this campus are largely a product of choices made by the university to decide who is welcome here and who isn’t, on what kinds of merit, and who should be a 3% minority in this space and who should be a majority. If you feel that it’s hard to build community here because there are so few people like you, then that is because of choices made by the administration.

As I considered these issues, I realize more and more that those of us in academic, students, faculty and staff, live our lives inside of outdated institutions that do not represent us, much less welcome us. I realize that I live much of my life inside of this institution created and structured in 1960, in a time in which misogyny, homophobia and racism were far more accepted. Jorge Mariscal, a professor at UCSD, has researched the founding documents of the university and revealed a great deal of the actual language of institutional racism in the founding documents, such as in the decision about where to geographically place the campus. As we find ourselves to be aliens, or unwelcome monsters from the future, in these outdated institutions, it is up to us as participants in them to change them or leave them behind. Today I am still hoping that the dream of education can be served to some small degree in these outdated institutions and so I’m willing to put in the work to change them. Projects such as Agitprop’s upcoming 2837 University continue the long history of creating free universities to provide people with a space to imagine what education can and should be.

What finally motivated me to sit down and write this is the experience of watching myself, my friends and my loved ones scramble for jobs, experiencing all of the stress and sadness that come with economic uncertainty. In our department, 25% of the jobs for graduate students are being cut next quarter, quietly, without much fanfare or protest. I’m leaving my time as a temporary lecturer because the class I’ve been teaching is being cut in response to budget cuts, and I’m not sure if I’ll have employment next quarter. Again, the economic decisions that the university are shaping who is welcome and supported here and who isn’t. Again we can see the paradigms of state of exception discussed by Agamben playing themselves out, as any time of crisis and budget cuts is an opportunity for the university to get rid of people and projects and departments they find problematic. As my last post here stated, I am hugely inspired by the occupations currently occurring across the world, including the UK, Italy and tomorrow Puerto Rico. I just hope that as we all scramble for jobs or for a feeling of daily physical safety, that we can come together and talk about why we’re in this situation and keep in mind that maybe now is the time to stop scrambling until we get the changes we want. Hopefully we can create new environments and structures in which we can be safer and more supported, structures open to monstrous possible futures, but we have do it in a hurry.