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Communiqués

San Precario on the West Coast

source: http://publicaddresslosangeles.org/

The San Precario network, an Italian group of activists, collectives, social centers and workers which is one of the main organizers of the Milan EuroMayDay Parade, is hitting the West Coast. We will present our campaigns, screen some videos and discuss about labor, social movements, job insecurity and precarity, and radical politics.

Born in 2001, the Italian MayDay has become the most attended First of May demonstration in Europe: 120.000 people took the streets of Milan and danced until dawn in 2010 under the slogan “Precarious of the world, let’s fight!” And since 2004 San Precario is the patron saint of precarious European workers. The San Precario network is devoted to defend the workers rights but we also strife to imagine a new set of rights, a new welfare that matches the needs and lives of this precarious generation. Born within the Italian social centers movement, our collective provides legal support, tactical help and social-media skills, let alone brand subverting and political blabbing.

Our more recent campaigns are: Cash & Crash, a series of actions against evil companies’ wallets and brands; Welfare for Life! A campaign to guarantee fix income and free access to services; the Etats-General of Precarity, a general assembly of Italian and European movements which will be held in October; and of course, the EuroMayDay Parade. We’ll present our political vision, our campaigns and the EuroMayDay Parade through the North American West Coast in October. Check out the dates!

Co-presented by Insane Dialectical Posse and Llano Del Rio Speakers Burea

http://ldrg.wordpress.com/

http://www.flyingpicket.org/

Hosted through PUBLIC ADDRESS LOS ANGELES VÍA PÚBLICA

Thursday, December 9th, 2010 at 7:30pm

at Outpost for Contemporary Art
1268 N. Ave 50
Los Angeles, 90042

Doors open at 7:30pm, Event starts at 8:00 pm

FREE

Categories
Communiqués

The University and the Ruins of the Present

http://wearethecrisis.blogspot.com/

From Comrades at UCLA:
—-

Our $800 fee hike is the direct result of an unstable global financial system.

As of the Regent’s meeting vote on November 18th, UC tuition has gone up over $800. A year at UCLA, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Davis and Irvine now costs over $11,000 when in 2000 it cost $3,429. That means if you make $10 an hour, you’ll have to work 80 more hours next year, or if you’re a Freshman, take out $2,400 more in debt before you graduate. The tremors of the economic crisis continues to spread, and our chances of getting a job we want with our degrees becomes more and more slim. This is our future…

How can we understand this tuition hike in the context of broader social conditions? We find ourselves in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. 2008 was a shock to the economy as a whole and will no doubt render the world we lived in before unrecognizable. Overproduction of and speculation on real estate, the creation of unsustainable financial tools to be invested in, rising mortgage, credit card and student loan debt — all of these created a crisis in which banks couldn’t lend, people couldn’t pay their bills and abandoned their homes, and states and governments ran out of money to spend. In order to cope with the massive problems caused by the financial crisis, governments around the world have responded in two major ways: austerity measures and debt financing.

Austerity: the Dialectic of Too Much and Not Enough

A certain narrative frames tuition hikes as the result of problems with the university budget and the lack of money coming in from the State of California. At one level, the problem is not a lack of money, but a question of how it is prioritized. Billions of dollars flow through the UC system. This money gets directed away from raises for workers and undergraduate education and goes to executive bonuses, new police stations and expensive graduate student housing. Let’s also not forget that the State of California spends more money on prisons than education. Public spending in general has expanded over the neoliberal period, funding such endeavors as bailouts for the largest banks and war in the Middle East. The logic that would posit the budget cuts and fee hikes as the necessary results of the economic crisis are therefore false. The University has, from this perspective “too much.”

Yet at another level, we can see a long term-trend towards a defunding of the public sector by governments and the implementation of austerity measures. These measures involve cutting funding to social services, such as hospitals and libraries, public transportation, and of course, education in order to compensate for a lack of money coming in from elsewhere. What this means is that in order to deal with the problems caused by bankers, speculators and stock brokers – those who brought on the financial crisis – governments place the burden on students, forcing them to pay more for their education. The university seen from this perspective, will continue to have “not enough.”

Debt and its False Master

The other pole of austerity is debt financing, meaning the use of bonds and loans in order to pay for an economic system in ruins. This occurs at a national level – the US government deficit has expanded exponentially since the Clinton years – and at the level of the individual seen in the expansion of consumer debt.

Because of this economic crisis, we have seen how governments, even with austerity measures in place, still can’t afford to fund the public sector fully. Therefore, they prop it up artificially by selling bonds (to countries such as China, Japan or Germany). In other words, the public sector continues to rely on an increasing amount of debt and growing national budget deficits.

Furthermore, the lack of public spending that comes with austerity measures displaces the financial costs of an education onto students, and this often means increased personal debt – student loans, credit cards. In turn, student loan and credit card debt become complex financial instruments that investors speculate on, recreating the very dynamics that created the 2008 collapse in the first place.

The University as a Ruin to Come

How does the university function within this economic collapse? A university degree used to promise a middle class wage for those who could get in and graduate. Tuition could be seen as an investment in a secure future. Whereas once the university specialized workers for a growing economy, in the era of postfordism and the eclipse of full-time salaried jobs, the promise of a university degree is breaking down. The university prepares us for jobs that have vanished. The university becomes more and more about labor discipline, the need to create a subjectivity which internalizes the demand to be hirable, the self-fashioning of human capital. We learn to become adaptable workers, capable of entering into the changing needs of the system, people who see social life through the lens of adding all our experiences to a CV.

Against the Wall

While these disciplining forces are at work, we have seen a different type of trend within the university: the emergence of vibrant student struggles all over the world. Since 2008, there have been waves of student occupations and blockades against austerity measures and other key student issues. This November we have seen occupations at British universities against the tripling of student fees and the closure of high schools across France in support of the general strike against pension reform.

One might say that once the economy “recovers,” all will return to normal – fees go back down, and austerity measures be reversed. But what if, as thinkers such as Gopal Balakrishnan, David Harvey and Robert Brenner have argued, we have reached the limits of capital? Debt, austerity and the fluctuations of the economy show us that the kind of growth we have known since the end of World War II in America is no longer sustainable. It is the private sector itself that is now propped up by consumer and government debt: a permanent bubble economy, an unsustainable economics. What if this is not one more crisis to add to the ash heap of time, but the burning away of the ashes themselves?

The Situation is Excellent

Students have historically catalyzed and supported broader movements: in May 68 in France, in Mexico City in 2000 and in Greece in 2008. Student struggles are indicative of larger social and economic dynamics, bound to them and capable of transforming them.

One path to take is retrenchment – to pull of the cap over one’s eyes so as to not see the monster, walk dejectedly across the ruins This is no option. There are no easy answers for how to resist; we have no idea what to do, but we will do it. Reworking our struggle will be our education, the ruins will be our friend. Because of this, we say: “there is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

http://wearethecrisis.blogspot.com/

Categories
Communiqués

Journal of Aesthetics & Protest website redesign

Major Journal of Aesthetics & Protest website redesign is done!
www.joaap.org

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Features

I/we/they/you/my/your

OE SITE Comments <http://occupyeverything.com/features/our-art-world-toward-actualizing-a-post-fordist-bohemia/comment-page-1/#comment-1275 >


1. micha <http://transreal.org/ > says:

October 11, 2010 at 7:20 pm

Hi Marc, thanks for writing this, its really stimulating in lots of ways. As a semi-outsider, semi-insider, as someone who lives in the more southern part of socal, I have attended only two public school events, the beyond the UC strikes classes. I do think that there is some engagement of questions Of race, class and gender of the public school, but mostly outside of the school itself, I suppose. And surely by the focuses of dialog and channels of outreach the public school uses create a particular constitution of participants. I don’t know that I have anything useful to contribute to this other than to say that I’m fully on board for the project of imagining possible futures and working towards ones I find more desirable, although my attendance will surely continue to be light until elle and I move up there in another 6 months or so. I also think that in light of recent things I’ve been reading like Escape Routes, and generally my thinking about the contemporary project of moving beyond identity through various means like thinking transition, intersubjectivity, desire, etc, that a fuzzy definition for our political project suits it well. Though maybe we need a reading group around “the tyranny of structurelessness” in comparison with Escape Routes, haha…


2. Cara Baldwin says:

October 18, 2010 at 10:24 am

Micha, I think it’s interesting that you propose the Jo Freeman Tyranny of Structurelessness text because it is one that Marc and I have referred to over the past several years, in fact.

That said, I also think the comparison is salient and the history suppressed/unknown so I’m adding a link to Freeman’s essay here:

http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/joreen/tyranny.htm

I am reading through what Marc wrote here again because I read it first (and with uncertainty) as a sort of performance of failure in collective imagination.

A parody of collectivity as subjectivity

The I that subsumes the we and all that…


3. Marc says:

October 19, 2010 at 2:45 pm

Cara, I am very serious in my parody. and the intention is not to parody but to inspire towards the possibility of tragedy. This IS the artworld we have, and it does have its strengths in its present formation. So let’s take it for what it is and see how to best make of it. This artworld (here written to address a scene far wider then the public school) is one of our social movements. If it is humorous to confuse the I with the we, then it is a joke that institutional players say all the time as well.

At the most simple level, audience attendance rates are constitutive of programming and funding decisions. The we makes the I. The I finds meaning in the we. So I am not deluded here. And you know that this gets much more complicated as levels of familiarity between creator and scene get tighter.

As per the Escape Routes comment—I do not know the book, but having read this…

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/04/21/escape-routes-control-and-subversion-in-the-21st-century/, I am skeptical.

I am skeptical not of the idea of culture having potential, but in the idea that the act of escaping is political. I think the majority of power is more then happy with people escaping- another marketing possibility. It is only when the escapees have actual coalitions and demands that they constitute a threat to power (that is, besides powerful forces that ally themselves with reactionary social values.)

What I hope to inspire in this essay is an honest evaluation of what our broad movement, our broad escape sees as its general course so that this course can be better realized and expressed.


4. Marc says:

October 19, 2010 at 2:51 pm

though in reading more of the book’s synopsis, I probably rush to judgment. I like how the reviewer frames migrants he is looking at writes…”It has never been the primary interest of migrants to change the society they migrate to or aspects of its political system. Instead migrants have been concerned with prolonging their stay by earning a living in the clandestine labor market, renting apartments using their friends’ papers, evade racism by building communities of support, by using doctors who offer medical treatment without demanding insurance cards or finding a partner for a fake marriage. These daily practices of migrants led to the construction of ‘material realities’ which can no longer be ignored by mainstream migration research.

In their book Worlds in Motion, which became part of the canon of migration theory, Douglas Massey and his colleges acknowledge the fact, that all western European societies have become multicultural immigration countries ‘without any popular referendum or explicit decision on the matter’.”


FB WALL

Cara Baldwin via Marc Allen Herbst: so, michael smartly suggested marc and i discuss this from last week. funny thing is, i don’t even where to begin. thoughts?

Towards a Post-Fordist Shop floor Ethic or, ‘What the Fuck Was That?’ «

OCCUPYEVERYTHING<http://occupyeverything.com/features/towards-a-post-fordist-shop-floor-ethic-2/ > occupyeverything.com

The publicity suggested the event would focus on a project that works off notions of antiwar activism and media. The expectant crowd was hungry for something. When the artist playfully shared candy as part of a pre-screening quiz, it seemed curious. But by the time the self-indulgent reel began

October 25 at 10:29am

Marc Allen Herbst  likes this.


Cara Baldwin

I plan on taking up the thread on Situationist recuperation as it seems to be floating around a bit… and then… the idea of a scene. That puzzles me…what else?

October 25 at 10:34am • Like


Caleb Waldorf

a close reading of the words I/WE/US/THEY

October 25 at 10:43am • Unlike • ** 1


Marc Allen Herbst

I’d be interested in talking about socialization of ideas but even more curious as to where you’d start. Also embarrassed that you don’t know where to begin.

October 25 at 11:46am • Like


Cara Baldwin

I’m inclined to start with the for instance:

When “blue chip” artists sell the image of collective history without giving back, this is theft. When theorists publicly poo-poo our collective potential to give comfort to power or stasis, this is a theft of our potential for collective dreaming. When academics sell radical theory while being complicit in structurally conservative departments they sell all our radicality short.’

and then form some questions around the idea of a scene, a close read of I/WE/US/THEY which would touch on recuperation in the sense of socialization of ideas-perhaps in particular relation to Situationist and performative ideologies/histories— and mos def in relation to privatization.

But for now, I need to go face an administrator that frightens the shit out of me.

Chicken. I feel like chicken.

October 25 at 12:03pm • Like


FB EMAIL

Marc Allen Herbst October 26 at 8:18am

sounds like a good way to approach this. I’ll wait for a kick off? What is our goal time-wise, feeling wise, etc. what would you want out of this?

M


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 9:27am

time-wise and feeling wise i’d like to begin our conversation now and also include some of our wall posts here by way of introduction.

it’s seven thereish now, right? i just woke up.

to discuss current structural and ideological shifts in relation to and from ‘the commons’ in a way that is critical and compassionate, and temporally speaking—mostly in the present.


Marc Allen Herbst  October 26 at 10:47am

It’s nineish… are we doing this over the course of days? tonight? I have to put anselm to bed. It’s 9.00 now. I think doing it over a few days would be better, and we do it as a chat? “‘the commons’ in a way that is critical and compassionate, and temporally speaking—mostly in the present.” this is your goal / interests current.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 10:57am

cool. i’ll get a little coffee for now. let me know when you’d like to begin. and over the next few days is fine. good actually. time-wise tomorrow is going to be a bit thin on my end (i have a 13 hour day w/1 break) but thur-and fri i should be able to make up for it hopefully


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 1:18pm

what you wrote and retracted about tiqqun and badiou being the junior and senior respectively, that was funny. why did you take it down? at any rate, the following phrase came to mind: “taking disaffected to a whole new level.” and then i thought it might be time to go for a walk. is anselm to bed by now?


Marc Allen Herbst October 26 at 1:31pm

yeah, but I gotta sleep. maybe you can kick something off without me if we begin. I’m pooped. I don’t think concurrent writing as we planned will work. cheers


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 1:51pm

that works. sleep tight.


Marc Allen Herbst  October 26 at 10:48pm

Good morning here in Germany, I drop Anselm off and am back by 1 am your time…. Anyway, I took it down because I don’t want to take too many digs at Sean. The first essay I did for the website has some focus on the public school, nothing I haven’t said before in print… and I don’t think its cruel… but you know.

I liked that Galloway article because it framed our distaste for tiqqun – showing (unintentionally) that they are clearly a romanticization, a commodification of French theory. Fake-quoting  (I think they call it paraphrasing) “From France, where the most important theory comes from”.  Really?


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:15pm

good morning. this week, i was surprised by the emotion the images of protest in france evoked. people wept. http://liensjournal.wordpress.com/

this was particularly interesting when set side by side with the ‘neo-situationist’ impulse he refers to.

there is this iconoclastic (protestant) distrust of images among the situationists and conceptualists in general. badiou’s fascination with the static, or set, object that is also spectral like a horizon is frustrating to me in that it doesn’t allow for the promiscuity sean refers to. In simple terms, he has some very old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes an artwork. the problem is that he uses these as cognitive armatures to hang philosophical (cultural and spiritual) creative possibilities on.

my problem with tiqqun, and with badiou, is a nihlism that lets them off the hook too easily.  and then, particularly with tiqqun, a fixation with the family romance—that is predictably, and blatantly chauvinistic—ultimately conservative.

what is it about these closed, modular forms that is so appealing?

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/just-what-is-it/


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:18pm

speaking of closed, modular forms- i like that i was surprised by the affective power of an image—again.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:21pm

i’ve also been teaching and reading cultural theory and the history of the french revolutionary period. in doing so, it seems apparent that French theory has had little to do with revolutionary movements while material conditions have. theory is sort of the clean up crew. sopping up the blood.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:24pm

or, in the case of badiou the courtier of capital.  and this is not to be anti-intellectual, by any means. it is only to say that when we speak of form and content we look to how people eat.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:30pm

and so the family is a closed, modular form. a bourgeois capitalist form with a cultural history. that is quite interesting in relation to these relations—relevant and somehow invisible. the bar, the basement, the bedroom.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:31pm

the family business. the shop.


Cara Baldwin October 26 at 11:41pm

okay, i’m going to leave it there for now. i want to hear what you have to say.


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 8:23am

I’ve been reading into Badiou this day to try and understand your distate for him which I have solidarity with. I’m reading his takes not on art but on general philosophy. And what I see so far, I actually dig it. I like his take on truth-I have been going with George Lakoff’s rewriting of Plato, but this is good too. more soon.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 9:20am

i don’t want to talk about badiou.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 9:20am

but okay. and yes on the lakoff.


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 9:21am

Good. I love talking about Lakoff. later


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 9:28am

I/we/they/you/our/my/your

i want to talk about systems of individual registration in relation to territories of propriety.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 9:29am

sorry, i can’t shut up. my mind is going too fast. i will now be quiet. promise.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 9:30am

stan allen’s field conditions—have you read it?

http://www.crisisfronts.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/stan-allen_field-conditions.pdf


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 10:55am

No, I haven’t and I’m curious. Why don’t you start with that and then I’ll respond with why I think George LAkoff’s take on metaphor and truth are key to ideas of change and of a sense of public and we. I can then counter whatever you write by saying how dumb Situationists are when read today.


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 10:57am

In that we have a beginning that makes some sense while having none and Being true to the text we are supposedly discussing. I mean it. I don’t know who Allen is, but I think that doesn’t matter and I’m sure it will be a good read. I’m present on and off for some time now.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 11:03am

i just want to clarify that the conversation we’re currently having (in this form) is what i’d like to transcribe, rather directly. so, we’re in it. we’ve begun. can we agree on that?


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 11:08am

that is my understanding of what i am doing, and i think it relates to how we say we. In other words, you can construct a history out of fragments (Benjamin) but there is a kind of project in the recombining of that information.

i am interested in the critique of the artist as a neoliberal subject. i am not interested in badiou, or any figure head simply because i find the approach here and our focus on the him (them) is divisive rather than generative.


Cara Baldwiin October 27 at 11:10am

and i can send a pdf of the stan allen essay but it isn’t necessary, I think, except to locate ideas. in this case, about dynamics of systems and crowds.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 11:18am

and so what i am gesturing to here is a shift that occurred in the 90’s from a figural to spatial orientation that is related to the political economy of images and the situtationists’ critique. which i don’t find stupid. i find it protestant.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 11:27am

and badiou seems to be a lapsed catholic. a lot of theory that has cultural capital now is catholic for some reason. but a recuperation of the reformation, too, is too reductive/divisive.


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 11:29am

Agreed then. Not stupid, protestant. Purist and looking for an impossible state of representation to be real.

And agreed then regarding the format. I agreed in precognition, though I am caught off guard to know we have begun in earnest. I have a desire to roll with it. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of being interviewed by a peer (you) who I know has a lot to offer at the table.

Lets start somewhere. I suggested, with Allen, if you will, and then I make statement on truth. Truth is metaphors and poetry and a system of learning about the physical realities (Lakoff). Truth is in practice of the experienced and sensible.

This, I think you agree, is one of the first systems… systems of understanding, of knowledge and constructions of knowledge. So, when I talk about our scene, I am talking about a loose group of people who are already involved in some vague and loose project of collectively effecting a world-view.

Anyone who calls what I’ve said “is a lie,” that our scene is not possible because of what the Situationists told us or whatever, I’d argue that they are shilling for either Debord’s book publisher or indirectly the capitalist powers that be. Criticism in political context today should have solutions even if there are no solutions. Especially if there are none.

I’m also very aware that words and social attention are fleeting—and so while I know we have begun, I want to experiment with rigorous writing.

Rigorous meaning, rigorous creativity. I have just now understood completely that we have really begun.

If the stage is already set, then I have only just begun to be aware, active, responsive.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 11:32am

this is what i am thinking of in relation to all of this:

the construction of partitions between individuals and collectives

the very nature of behavior as practice institutional / phenomenological

setting up the conditions that will alter the medium itself

the construction of environments and institutions

embedded in the protocols of exchange is where the project dwells

in what other ways can objects be distributed?


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 12:20pm

sorry, i sent that last message before i received yours had registered.


Cara Baldwin October 27 at 12:27pm

but i see now, it bears relevance to what you were saying. thinking now.


Marc Allen Herbst October 27 at 2:09pm

“embedded in the protocols of exchange is where the project dwells”

I agree exactly. We can collectively write and act out the possibility for our future when we realize we are doing that. Nothing but our conservative elements say we can’t. Not social history, not science, not capitalist practice. Its very simple, really. Many of the structures our economies have given us are institutions of  discipline… or facilitate the possibility of discipline. For example, the interaction with curator or curator-type is a requisite if one wants to participate in cultural field. The implicit power relationship is such that they either make you bend ot the institution of capitalist or facilitate the collective becoming. Many of our peers and ourselves internalize this disciplinary nature in disallowing affective protocols.

I am curious that you go into talking about distributing objects. I assume you are not talking about art objects, but I don’t know what you are. In filling the space that I imagine you are saying, the follow-up comment I’d have made to: embedding in the protocols of exchange…” is In what other ways do we create movements?

This is the question that follows for me because this is my goal…facilitating movement-movements being defined as the constitution/social construction (on the psychological and social level) of radical politicized subjectivity.


Marc Allen Herbst October 28 at 3:42pm

The ideal space between I and we is the space between needing to look out for one’s own needs and the collective needs.

The ideal space between I and they is the space between us and folks who aren’t riding the train.


Cara Baldwin October 29 at 10:15am

looking our exchanges over and rereading your two texts today and i so, I think we’re about ‘there.’ (there being a site to open up our conversation). do you feel we’re in a good spot too? i really enjoyed and the excuse to spend time thinking about and talking with you all through the week.

i’m home working off and on all day today-meeting with a student from 10am-1pm my time. and will come back after to see if you’ve responded w/questions and clarifications.


Marc Allen Herbst October 30 at 12:02am

seems good. Do we edit this or what?

I guess I could push it to say something, but in the context, It seems like a closed bottle and a good way to end.


Marc Allen Herbst October 30 at 12:02am

there’s always more.

for another time, I guess


Cara Baldwin October 30 at 9:26am

i think we should cut and paste it (copy edit if there are spelling mistakes) but leave the time registration and disclose the medium, or mediatic form so that becomes a consideration.

i also think we should begin it with the comments that follow your first post on the occupy everything site. this shows one of the many ways in which form can be a structurally / culturally significant thing.

in that context, how great that it includes a link to the jo freeman tyranny of structurelessness essay we’ve been inspired by and working through for several years now? maybe this gesture back to form will encourage even more engagement with our discussion.


Cara Baldwin: October 30 at 10:01am

And http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/posts/post34.html


Categories
Features

Towards a Post-Fordist Shop Floor Ethic or, ‘What the Fuck Was That?’


The publicity suggested the event would focus on a project that works off of notions of antiwar activism and media. The expectant crowd was hungry for something. When the artist playfully shared candy as part of a pre-screening quiz, it seemed curious. But by the time the self-indulgent reel began playing, the audience saw clearly that they’d been had.

I left early mumbling under my breath, “what the fuck was that.” I was angry because I had the sense that I’d been robbed. Not only was my time stolen, but also a little of my capacity to make meaningful anti-war artwork, to do detailed and philosophical media projects.

This essay is not about cultural criticism. Instead of looking at what is, this essay leans forward to posit what could be.

We should demand more from our scenes.

Often, when we go out to an art event, we are going to work in the office known as “our scene.” Our scenes gather around public wellsprings of ideals. Though impossible to specifically define, I do know that I’ve meditated with 200 people around the possibility of expanded human consciousness and more just and pleasant societies at the Hammer Museum. With 1000 others, I have gazed upon the collective expression of the desire for borderless states – on display at a Culver City gallery. In Chinatown, I joined a small group of thinkers drinking from the fountain of liberatory possibility for intellectual culture when tied to criticism of specific capitalist regimes.

And though each instance draws from its particular tap, I am pretty sure that our scene’s visionary infrastructure is broad and finds release at multiple spigots. This water metaphor is useful – our scene is constructed from pre-histories (extant water sources and geography or general wider social histories) infrastructures (aqueducts or funding sources and venues) and distribution points (spigots or exhibitions).

Like water, the greatest constituent parts of our scenes are made of elements whose real ownership is next to impossible to define (imagine clouds as social history, cultural formations, and socio-political archipelagos). Secondarily, water like our scenes are a large public work (remember, water is serviced by the historic social movement known as the DWP.)

The scenes we participate in are our public resources. The accretion of intellectual dialogs and practices are among our finest collective tools.

Inside urban planning, cartography, public practice, sociology, cartography and curatorial studies, the nature of our scenes are generally discussed in terms of “public space.” Through these disciplines, we say that public space is in crisis within the current regime of the neoliberal “creative economy.”  This economy hungrily searches for previously public or non-valued resources to privatize and or/monetize. Our scene – this public space – is in crisis when its constituent balance between private and social interests gets tipped too far towards the private.

When “blue chip” artists sell the image of collective history without giving back, this is theft. When theorists publicly poo-poo our collective potential to give comfort to power or stasis, this is a theft of our potential for collective dreaming. When academics sell radical theory while being complicit in structurally conservative departments they sell all our radicality short.

Our scenes are our collective resource. They generate continuing streams of potential. Yet in our neoliberal economy, the scene works double. It is now even more – both a collective dream and a mundane workshop floor.

We use our public space to forge new identities and to egregiously crowdsource for cheap labor

Our scenes are public space. Yet in neoliberal economies, the scene has become a human resource office. From networking with peers to find exhibition spaces to procuring space for employing (often younger, often less-educated) skilled laborers to work as assistants.

Our scenes are public space – a location to present and discuss meanings. Historically, the role of discourse served public ideals. Either as a space of presentation at a project’s fruition or as an ongoing discourse. Yet in this neoliberal economy, public space has also become our propaganda office. Here I use the balanced definition of propaganda – the act of spreading a message as advertising or overt political messaging.

When our art scenes are overwhelmed by these (often necessary) neoliberal realities, that public resource, our scenes, are threatened. When the participants on a panel are chosen for institutional networking potential instead of the ability to hold a meaningful conversation, our scenes are threatened.

Today, more than ever, art and cultural workers do have the ability to harness institutional voices to raise the social and philosophical questions at the hearts of our scenes. The (collectively forged) language and rhetorics, iconography and social practices we employ around our works have the potential for deep resonance within a broader society. Amid collapsing social systems, we stand on stage – for the possibilities that our scenes maintain.

So the quite common act of drawing from the scene without paying back is unfortunate. Employing popular ideological aesthetics and rhetorics (“collaborative”, “activist”, “socio-economic”, “critical”, “open sourced”…) to sell their work. Employing historic strategies collectively scripted behavioral patterns, etc… without crediting the history and legacy in order to individually “advance”. These actions poison the well.

Let me be clear, I am not specifically focusing on artists with “successful careers.” Collaboration with capitalist institutions is an unfortunate necessity for many people. Collaboration with institutions currently provides a louder tool for propaganda, access to social relations, etc..

Our scene imagines itself as an autonomous sphere that can balance mutual collaboration and mutual aid with individual expression. Our scene desires us to actualize this potential. It calls upon us to imagine what is possible when we devote enough time and love to its beautification and adornment.

But Los Angeles doesn’t look like this today.

The ethical worker in Los Angeles’ art scene – no matter where they operate (within or outside of capitalist institutions) – protects the interest of the scene first. The ethical artist understands that the scene’s idealisms are their source of real value. The scene drives them to work and compels others to get to know the work. It messages desire. It provides meaning. The ethical worker does not fuck with this.

Protecting our scene from undue privatization has parallels with the struggle of the Bolivian people in protecting their water from privatization.

Hyper-capitalism wants our meaningful symbols to be emptied. But our strength as individual workers lies in our collective struggle – in our collective attempts to maintain meaning and to construct a collective legacy. Our scene is a non-human accretion – a highly socialized aggregate of collective anger, collective history, collective understanding that beauty (or ugliness) does matter. That which provides for what we call LA’s art scene – this is our strength. When someone empties this out for a byline in some lame blog, they cheapen our resource. This is serious business.

Cultural movements like San Precario have struggled to successfully socialize a post-fordist ethic of values. People have rights that lie outside of day-to-day income. San Precario holds this knowledge together as the source of strength, as a fountain of the possible.

The Escrache Movement in Argentina hold tightly to the collective ideal of justice outside of history. Justice is the driving force in Escrache’s workers’ attempt to return Argentina to history.

The Anti-Deutch autonomist-Marxist movements in Germany hold on to a post-humanist ideal of anti-Semitism as a necessity outside of rational discourse from which to anchor their actions.

In this globalized capitalist world, I am astounded that so much writing on public space does not hold out for a pragmatically ideological construction of public space. No, much of the writing does one of four things- 1) It usefully critiques the traditional notion of public space as innately exclusionary 2) It naively imagines the possibility of escape from a public, as if there was another space for pure interaction 3) It strategizes (in curatorial studies or business classes) ways to best reach and use publics 4) It acknowledges public space to be a complicated subject and makes nothing of it.

What the hell!? As our agency, health and security go down the tubes, is it too much to ask for a useful and reasonable fiction? A collectively narrated fiction that imagines our collective responsibility to nurture our ideals?

Through the socializing of our scene, we begin to gain practical political agency together. By expecting one another to respect the highest (or lowest if you’re a pagan) spirits of the LA Art Scene in a workerist mode, we will find a political language that amplifies even our most abstract projects. Our scene can discover ways to materially, aesthetically and intellectually support it and us.

What does this look like? It would start with a clear statement of expectation – to be treated fairly – in the way that Wage Artists and others articulate.   But beyond this – into speculative economies – it is the honoring of the scene by publicly and privately holding true to ideals in thought and action. Ones work (paid and especially unpaid) as fabricator, designer, theorist, curator, organizer, participant, viewer will not be sold out. We will not be ignored, fail to be credited, gloss over each other’s labor and legacies for a cheap capitalist buck. We must honestly assess our work and use appropriate language to characterize it, avoiding outrageous claims when outrageous goals are attempted. We will honestly appraise our work and how a given project’s dance between the scene and the institutions affects its reception. Ethical workers do not allow institutional desires to recklessly muddy the scene’s ideals for the institutions private profit.

This is not a call for infighting. Instead, I see the potential for socialization of the scene. I understand that this involves a lot of conscious (and half-conscious) socializing. This sensibility takes its time to build.

We cultural workers have far bigger issues.

What I am proposing is that through a collective raising of expectations and a socializing of the spheres of our production and reproduction, our hand as workers will be improved.


Thank you Michael Wilson, Christina Ulke, Cara Baldwin, Robby Herbst, Temporary Services and many others for inspiration and energy in writing this essay. I’m done now.