PARSE journal issue 5 by anders wennerström

05 Issue

issue e ditors He nric Be ne sch E r l i ng Bjö rgv i n s s o n Andrea Phillips

Management M a r k F i s h e r , A n d r e a F r a n c k e , Ro s s Ja r d i n e , Ch r i st o ph e r N e w f i e l d, Ka r i n H a n s s o n, Ca r l a C r u z , Kha l d u n B s ha r a , E r l i ng Bjö r gv i n s s o n, Da r i B a e , A p o l o n i j a Š u št e r š i c, B a r ba r a C z a r n i aw s k a

Platform for Artistic Research Sweden PARSE Journal Issue #5 Management Spring 2017

PARSE Journal

Issue Editorial Team

Working Group

Henric Benesch

Dave Beech

Billes tryckeri

Erling Björgvinsson

Andrea Phillips

Kanchan Burathoki

Publisher

Ingrid Elam

University of Gothenburg

Editors-in-chief

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

ISSN 2002-0511

Andrea Phillips

Anders Hultqvist

Online edition

Mick Wilson

Markus Miessen

www.parsejournal.com/journal

Andrea Phillips

Advisory Board

Mick Wilson

Simon Critchley

Front cover image Sheldon Adelson Casino, Marina Bay

Darla Crispin

Project Manager

Sands, Singapore. Photograph by

Vinca Kruk

Kanchan Burathoki

Christopher Newfield.

Bruno Latour

Copy Valérie Pihet Henk Slager

Edit

Gerrie van Noord

Layout Anders Wennerström, Spiro

Table of contents

Introduction Henric Benesch, Erling Björgvinsson, Andrea Phillips

“Save our Library!”: Social Action, Austerity and The Big Society Carla Cruz

Accelerate Management Mark Fisher

Biennales in Palestine: Thinking Art and Making Art

Bureaucracy’s Labour: The administrator as subject

Khaldun Bshara

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

Managing Collaborative Critique in Times of Financialisation Capitalism

Arts and Humanities Education as Neoliberalism Comes Unglued

Erling Björgvinsson

Christopher Newfield

Master Plan for Duamdong Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršič

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Online: Between Alienation and Belonging Karin Hansson

After Practice: A Personal Reflection Barbara Czarniawska

PARSE Journal

This issue of PARSE Journal is dedicated to the memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017). A brilliant thinker and writer, a comrade and a friend.

Introduction

Henric Benesch

Erling Björgvinsson

Henric Benesch is an architect, designer, educator and researcher, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, whose work explores interdisciplinary intersections between critical spatial practice and critical heritage in terms of the situated and intersectional character of knowledge production within education, research and urban development. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at HDK – Academy of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg (UGOT), as well as co-coordinator for a research cluster – Curating the City - within the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) at UGOT. He is the co-editor of Heritage-as-Commons – Common(s)-as-Heritage (2015), Growing with Design (2016) as well as an upcoming issue of Co-Design – Co-Design and the Public Realm (2017).

Erling Björgvinsson is PARSE Professor of Design at the Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg. A central topic of research is participatory politics in design and art, in particular in relation to urban spaces and the interaction between public institutions and citizens. He currently heads the artand design-led research project “City Fables” that focuses on the relationship between urban space, narratives and counter narratives.

Andrea Phillips Dr Andrea Phillips is PARSE Professor of Art at the Valand Academy and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the PARSE platform, University of Gothenburg. Andrea lectures and writes on the economic and social construction of publics within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganisation within artistic and curatorial culture.

PARSE Journal

1. See Moten, Fred and Harney, Stefano. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York, NY: Minor Compositions. 2013.

anagement is usually treated as

undercommons collaborator, they leave no space for the policy-

a separate domain to the field of contempo-

maker. What of the policymaker; are they not capable of

rary creative practice in the sense that those

redesignating forms and hierarchies of working power too?1

employed to manage and administrate institutions and those who supply the “content” to or in those institutions (be they

In his article “Accelerate Management!” Mark Fisher asks the

artists, musicians, performers or, perhaps to a lesser extent,

pertinent question: “… what if the problem with contemporary

designers) are separated not simply through the virtues of

capitalism is not that there is too much management, but too

culture, but also logistically, financially, spatially, in terms of

little?” Management, he argues, should not be confused with

rights and freedoms. How does such a political and social

contemporary managerialism. Managerialism, a neo-liberal

separation of the tasks of “making” and “managing” inhere to

capitalist product that pervades all institutions and ideology

an isolationist mechanism, in which management is seen as

in its desire to optimise workers output, has striven to micro-

both an oppressive and lower status form of “doing”? Histories

control and accelerate work, partially by subjugating workers

of modernism suggest that the artist/ performer/ crafter/

to self-surveillance and a 24/7 work presence and availability

designer/ actor/ composer/ musician/ writer is managed

enabled by communication technologies. Current subjugation

and at the same time resists – or refuses to take responsibility

of workers is achieved through the linking of libidinal, commu-

for – their own management. Is this refusal and/or resistance

nicational and technological infrastructure, which Fisher calls

a survival mechanism, and a performative critique of the

“communicative capitalist realism”. The effect is addiction to

governmentalisation and privatisation of the cultural industries?

work and a pathological sense of never being able to live up

Or is it a naive calling upon art’s possessive autonomy – a

to ever-increasing demands. The extreme individualisation of

resistance in fact to the responsibility of care of the self within

work prevents any form of collective agency and solidarity. A

an administered world? Conceptualising management as

way out of managerialism, Fisher suggests, is not neo-anarchist

troublesome and uncreative allows us to externalise the rhythms

folk politics in the form of horizontal self-organisation that sees

and protocols of macro-politics against our own (mythologised,

trade unions and political parties as obsolete. Rather than with-

personalised) micro-politics. But, in fact, and increasingly

drawing and opting out, what is needed is that workplaces of

within the gig economy, many of us spend most of our time

all kinds need to become better at management.

managing our administrative as well as aesthetic relations to the world. Cultural processes and productions are situations

In their feminist reading of the critique of administration,

that not only require personal management, but also depend

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine show how the administra-

upon cooperation, coproduction, delegation and various

tor tends to be de-subjectified and made invisible, how she

collective efforts. In the often cited words of Fred Moten and

is also seen as blocking the artist or the teacher and their

Stefano Harney, it is in the administration of our own affairs,

perceived meritocratic position. Francke and Jardine highlight

situated in communities, co-operations, organisations and

the commonality between discourses on administrative and

institutions and saturated by practice, teaching, researching in

domestic labour. In both cases the work – most often carried

the “planning” – where forms of aesthetic solidarity between

out by women – is made invisible, downgraded, excluded

organisers may lie. But while Moten and Harney ennoble

from the public sphere, denying the political potential of such

the planner as possessing the sly civility of a co-worker, an

work. Justice 4 Domestic Workers (J4DW), a mostly female-run

Introduction

migrant domestic workers grassroots organisation, Francke

independence”. If liberal arts education is to escape the

and Jardine point out, provide “an [political] arena in which to

nightmare of “Punitive Neo-liberalism”, which attacks its own

create and discuss counter discourses to those their employers

staff’s job security and control within the educational system, it

and governments have given them” precisely through their way

needs to gain control over the policy and financial educational

of organising and administrating. Subaltern counter-publics

structure by managing joint, rather than divisive, initiatives

are enabled through conversations, workshops and dance

between art and financial issues.

classes, which in turn gives J4DW members the opportunity to reformulate their identities, needs and interests, which can

Taking up the other end of the educational spectrum in

then be brought into the dominant political sphere. Central to

the form of student experiences of self-management, Karin

the work is the unpacking of and countering of the employers’

Hansson analyses how emerging artists at the Royal Institute

language. As long as immigrant domestic worker are not seen

of Art in Stockholm self-manage through monitoring their

as valid subjects by the state system, legal bodies and the

identity, promotion, communication and networking online in

media they will be treated as pets that have no access to the

“The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Online: Between

public sphere.

Alienation and Belonging”. This effort demands that they understand how to position their professional self in the field

Christopher Newfield asks if under the current economic

of art and strike a balance between their reputation and

regime liberal arts education can claim “real intellectual or

economic capital. Interviews conducted by the author are

ethical autonomy” by comparing and contrasting the newly

analysed in relation to Marx’s theory of alienation “to explore

established Yale-National University of Singapore in Southeast

how a process of alienation and dis-alienation takes place in

Asia and Yale, New Haven. He describes how several

practice”. Hansson identifies a number of ways of acting, from

episodes at Yale-NUS have “placed on trial” whether the

“competing” and “performing” to “belonging”. What strategies

college can guarantee “freedom of speech as exercised by

are deployed depend on the students’ background. Students

those in New Haven”. Both Singapore and North America

without a previous connection to the art world hope that

have seen the emergence of educational policies that have

their art will “speak for itself in an open market”, taking their

forced the liberal arts to become part of the knowledge

online presence more seriously, while students from families of

economy. In Singapore, this form of knowledge economy

artists and cultural workers rely more heavily on face-to-face

sees problems foremost as technical while downplaying their

encounters.

political and ethical dimensions. Education in such a situation asserts creative freedom over financial and political contextual

In her article “‘Save our Library’: Social Action, Austerity and

knowledge production. The neo-liberal student in this

the Big Society”, Carla Cruz emphasises the managerialism at

knowledge regime is neither a “homo oeconomicus seeking

work in local and national authority cultural service provision

to maximise his self-interest” nor a political subject engaged in

in the UK. She takes the example of The Mill, a community

defining “life in common”. Instead, what is desired is a citizen

initiative that emerged from a campaign to save a local library

who maximises their human capital in order to contribute the

in East London in 2007. Through detailed analysis with a

most to the contemporary economy of Singapore. To students

community campaign to save the building which housed the

“creative license”, it appears, is more important than “critical

library for community use using interviews and local press

PARSE Journal

reports, Cruz identifies the ambivalent relation between

City Fables: Follow the Money – is a process of negating,

community action and the then UK Prime Minister David

delinking and disaffirming as empowering strategies for the

Cameron’s idea of the “Big Society” in which previously state-

development of new formations, which in turn can challenge

funded welfare institutions and services are expropriated to the

different political-aesthetic regimes beyond reformist imaginar-

care and goodwill of willing citizens.

ies. Such an understanding urges us to rethink the sites of intervention beyond the micro-political and foregrounds meso and

The Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation, the Riwaq

macro frames and forms of violence which follow such frames.

Biennale and the Qalandiya International, are analysed in Khaldun Bshara’s “Biennales in Palestine: Thinking Art and

Apolonija Šušteršič and Dari Bae’s “Master Plan for

Making Art”. The article foregrounds challenges and possibili-

Duamdong” describes their working in the city suburb

ties in the intersection between heritage work, community and

Duamdong, as part of the 2016 Gwangju Biennial, in which

capacity building, artistic practice and institutional frameworks

high-rise housing development has not yet occurred, in contrast

and platforms. Moreover, it addresses how these modalities

to much of the rest of the city. The artists collaborated with

may be developed and managed in relation to each other

the managers of a local community centre to develop an

in order to produce crossover possibilities, inaccessible within

interactive table game for local residents in which a form of

each of the modalities as such, which might challenge the

unregistered micro-political action began to emerge as people

frames of conservation practice, community work, artistic

formed solidarities and neighbourliness over cooking, rooftop

production and biennial platforms. In doing so, Bshara hopes

gardening and the organisation of rubbish collection. What

to render “visible the structures that shape lives and practices of

does it mean for such micro-managerial practices to appear

people”, engaging more broadly in managerial structures and

as part of an international biennial? Is such a gift workable,

strategies, such as “inside-out”, “outside-in” and “inside-outside-

legible, sustainable?

in” for producing events in the public sphere, both as modes of thinking and of making.

Barbara Czarniawska’s republished article “After Practice: A Personal Reflection” addresses the gap between theory and

In his article “Managing Collaborative Critique in Times

practice in Management Studies. Practice, she suggests, can

of Financialisation Capitalism” Erling Björgvinsson in turn

best be understood as a form of complex sociality, materially

addresses how co-design and collaborative critique is in

mediated and guided by moral values. A central issue related

urgent need of being rethought outside dominant regimes and

to theory and practice is how (management) practices can be

social systems. The additive and affirmative strategies of such

critiqued and improved. Why do practitioners prefer consult-

regimes, which seek to account for a broader spectrum of

ants and ignore academic critique even though consult-

experiences, tends to colonise rather than empower those in

ants and managers of practices are unable to understand

marginalised positions, producing “minor reformist aesthetic-

each other since they operate in two distinct closed

political changes” rather than challenging the status-quo as

autopoetic communicative systems? The answer can be

such. What is proposed and discussed through two case

found in that consultants “do not point to blind spots in

studies – the collaborative production of a feature film titled

clients’ observations, as researchers often attempt to do,

Nasty Old People and the practice-based research project

but emphasise the difference between their observations

Introduction

and those of the clients”. In other words, the consultant’s

public sphere and considered unproductive and stifling. If

aim is to develop the client’s practice without stating it

carried out by men, it enables the constitution of power and

explicitly by “mask[ing] the logic of practice according to

authority over workers.

the representation rules sanctioned by a given social order…” Thus consultants “not so much help to improve

We consider it essential to reposition how we understand

the practice of management, as to engage in a common

and criticise management, albeit in acknowledgement of

practice of legitimization”. Researchers, on the other

the long history of workers’ resistance to being managed.

hand, aim to describe how practical sense making is

Central to such repositioning is the acknowledgment of

produced, scrutinise processes of legitimisation, which

the political agency of management work, not the least if

they hope will improve a “client’s” practice, but which

political transformation is to be achieved. In particular, and

only annoys them. Management studies, asserts Czar-

central to the concerns of PARSE, is how artistic research

niawska, may be better off not to continue to produce

figures in such a realignment. Rather than fostering an

“company doctors” or focus on reflections on practice,

expectation of managerial provision for the gifted excep-

but instead redefine the field researcher that is an irritant

tional worker, we would like to assert, through these pages

that facilitates the practitioners’ self-reflection.

and along with our contributors, the artistic and educational imperative to take responsibility.

Many of the contributions point to how management is entangled in contemporary economics that engage in managerial micro-control. In particular, the management of public institutions, cultural or educational, is under attack, and so are its workers (and if not existing under the threat of closure, they operate under enforced austerity and selfmonitoring, especially but not only in the West). The result is a hyper-individualised isolated student or worker who is addicted to work and pathologically tired and numbed. Such an individual is expected to contribute to the current economy, rather than maximise their interests, or, and more importantly, engage in productions of solidarity that mobilise critical thinking and creativity. The position of critique in relation to discourses on management, theory and practice, and wider social systems is raised. In relation to discourse it is argued that a fundamental problem with management discourse itself is that it is highly gendered. Management work, if carried out by women, is made invisible, downgraded, excluded from the

PARSE Journal

Abstract What if – contrary to all carefully constructed appearances – the problem in neo-liberal culture is that there isn’t enough management? Although neo-liberalism presents itself as an economic programme, it is better understood as a massive control apparatus designed to thwart the democratic socialist and libertarian communist experiments that effloresced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The systemic anti-productive inefficiency engendered by neo-liberal managerialism is neither a mistake nor a failure: it has precisely succeeded in its aim of producing a generalised resubordination of workers, and a disabling of former “red bases” such as universities and art colleges. The route to overcoming this consists neither in the (capitalist) realist accommodation to managerialism nor in the fantasy of exit from institutions. Democratic socialism has always been about the promise of a better managed society (where management is precisely not synonymous with top-down control). In order to assert democratic control over our lives and work, we must therefore reclaim management from managerialism.

Accelerate Management

Mark Fisher Mark Fisher (1968-2017), was a British writer, critic, cultural theorist, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on politics, music, and popular culture. He contributed significantly and uniquely to the radical reimagining of cultural production against neo-liberalism and wrote about and alongside many artists, musicians and writers.

In 2009, Fisher edited The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, a collection of critical essays on the career and death of Michael Jackson, and published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, an analysis of the ideological effects of neoliberalism on contemporary culture. In 2014, Fisher published Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a collection of essays on similar themes viewed through the prisms of music, film, and Jacques Derrida’s idea of hauntology. In 2016, Fisher co-edited a critical anthology on the post-punk era with Kodwo Eshun and Gavin Butt entitled Postpunk Then and Now for Repeater Books, of which he was a co-founder and editor.

PARSE Journal

“Life is too exciting to sleep” “I usually get up at 5 or 5.15am. Historically, I would start sending emails when I got up. But not everyone is on my time schedule, so I have tried to wait until 7am. Before I email, I work out, read, and use our products… I am not a big sleeper and never have been. Life is too exciting to sleep.” “I quickly scan my emails while my son is taking over my bed and having his milk. Urgent ones I reply to there and then. I flag others to follow up on my commute into work… I receive an average of 500 emails a day, so I email throughout the day.”1 These two quotations from “top CEOs” – the first from Tim Armstrong of AOL, the second from Karen Blackett of MediaCom UK – point to what seems to be a massive intensification of work and management in contemporary capitalist culture. The two CEOs’ remarks confirm the entrenchment of the much-discussed Post-Fordist paradigm of work – with work no longer confined to the office or the factory, but invading all areas of life and practically all times of the day. Indeed, Armstrong’s comments vindicate the analysis of Jonathan Crary in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep that capitalism is now in the process of eroding one of the final barriers to perpetual circulation: sleep. The sleeping body is the quintessential example of the nonproductive, non-communicative body and as such it constitutes an obstacle to the perpetual expansion of capitalist circulation. The form that capitalist circulation now takes rests on more than the Post-Fordist restructuring of work: it depends on a technological, communicational and libidinal infrastructure, a system called communicative capitalism by Jodi Dean and semio-capitalism by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. In the context of communicative capitalism – which for the purposes of this piece I am treating as roughly equivalent to Berardi’s semio-capitalism – individual messages function as “mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinions and information, to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold

attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another.”2 Berardi’s work has consistently emphasised the psychopathological consequences of the constant subjecting of the nervous system to the imperatives of capitalist cyberspace. In his book Precarious Rhapsody, he wrote of the way in which the “acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind,” “Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious… The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.”3 In a more recent piece, Berardi has argued that “Acceleration is one of the features of capitalist subjugation. The Unconscious is submitted to the ever increasing pace of the Infosphere, and this form of subsumption is painful.”4 Yet Tim Armstrong’s comments above suggest that this submitting of the unconscious to capitalist cyberspace is not only painful – at least not for everyone. For the masters of cyber-spatialised capitalism, there is an enjoyment, a manic glee, to be derived from submitting to – or surfing on top of – the ceaseless flows of semio-capitalism. This libidinal dividend has to be reckoned within any adequate account of contemporary capitalist subjugation. For it is not as if the CEO simply imposes subjugation on her or his subordinates. Rather, the CEO offers their own near-total submission to work as an example for subordinates to follow – an example not so much of self-sacrifice in the name of duty (although the spectre of such a position is never far away), as the kind of sacrifice necessary to experience intense enjoyment. For these CEOs, work is best understood as kind of an addiction – an addiction which they understand in

Mark Fisher

beneficent and productive terms. The asceticism ascribed to the protestant work ethic in an earlier moment of capitalism now explicitly coincides with a kind of hedonic compulsion. (I say explicitly because, for all its “official” position as an anti-libidinal mode of repression, asceticism has always been a libidinal formation, a form of enjoyment.)

Everyone is Peggy Now To appreciate what is specific about contemporary capitalism’s approach to management and work, let’s consider two scenes from the first season of the television series Mad Men. In thinking through the contrast between the world depicted in the first season of Mad Men and now, we will be able to apprehend the difference between a form of capitalism which merely parasited and exploited creativity – the capitalism of the early 1960s – and a form of capitalism which makes creativity almost impossible – the neo-liberal (or nihiliberal) capitalism that dominates now. In the first scene, we see Cooper, the boss of the advertising agency in which the series is set, go into the office of the agency’s leading “creative”, Don Draper. Cooper says that he finds it difficult to adjust to the fact that he never seems to see Draper doing very much. And that’s correct: there are many scenes in which we see Draper reclining in his chair, staring blankly, apparently doing nothing. The contemporary viewer is liable to relate to Cooper’s bafflement – what this same viewer will find surprising is the fact that Cooper makes no further comment, turns on his heel, and leaves the office. Imagine how that scene would play out

in a contemporary workplace. Instead of trusting that Draper’s methods are effective, and leaving him to it, as Cooper does, a modern boss would foist a whole series of pointless tasks on Draper to ensure that there wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t seen to be working. For this is what so much of the frenzied inertia of contemporary work in the West amounts to – a simulation of productivity. One of the reasons that the concept of “cognitive work” is so unsatisfactory is that thinking is the last thing one is permitted to do at work now. Work only counts as work if you can be seen doing it, and if it is quantifiable: so answering emails feels like real work whereas “just” thinking doesn’t. It’s worse even that one of the most obvious ways to be seen working is to make work for others: to send out surveys, quality documents, self-surveillance log-books etc. And of course email is itself. And so the spiral of pointlessness goes vicious. In the other scene from Mad Men I wish to draw attention to, Draper is advising his secretary, Peggy, who is aspiring to be a copywriter. Peggy is stuck on some copy, and Draper tells her to think very deeply about the subject, then forget about it – the solution will come to her. Today, this possibility of “forgetting about it”, of allowing the unconscious to process a problem while we are doing other things, is as rare as the opportunity to just sit in a room thinking. Brains are not allowed to idle any more than they are allowed to be absorbed very deeply in something. Instead, the brain is bombarded by an unrelenting blitz of stimuli. If it isn’t our employers forcing us to multi-task, it is our own addiction to capitalist cyberspace which constantly

1. Dowling, Tim, Barnett, Laura and Kingsley, Patrick. “What Time Do Top CEOS Wake Up”. The Guardian. 1 April 2013. https://www. theguardian.com/money/2013/apr/01/what-timeceos-start-day (Accessed 2016-30-06.) 2. Berardi, Franco. Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. London and New York: Duke University Press. 2009. p. 24. 3. Berardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the PostAlpha Generation. London: Minor Compositions. 2009. p. 41. 4. Berardi, Franco. “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body”. e-flux Journal. #46. June 2013 (Accessed 2016-06-30.)

PARSE Journal

overloads our brain and nervous system. (I say “our own”, but this addiction is not a moral failing on our parts; it has been deliberately cultivated by those forces that want to deny us agency and the capacity to reflect.) The conditions that allowed the Don Drapers of the world to just sit in an office thinking involved massive exploitation. Part of this, of course, was the exploitation of women such as Peggy, or Draper’s wife, Betty, consigned to the home while Draper stays late at work and conducts multiple affairs. But neo-liberal capitalism’s version of equality has had the effect, not of giving everyone the opportunity to be a Don, but making us all like Peggy is in the early part of the first season – forced to spend most of the day doing administration, and to squeeze time for our creativity and our thinking in the hours after the official working day has finished. The bind is exacerbated by the fact that, as we have already seen, under the current conditions of capitalism, there is increasingly no such thing as an official working day. Drudgery expands without limits. There is no space for thinking outside the office, never mind inside it, and no manager who would protect such a space even if it existed.

Managerialism and Communicative Capitalist Realism In these conditions, how could it be possible to construe the demand to accelerate management as in any way progressive? If Berardi is correct, the problem with contemporary capitalist work culture is that it is already far too accelerated and far too managed. When our lives are subject to micro-control, over-management and self-surveillance then, Berardi argues, the line of escape consists in some form of deceleration and withdrawal. But what if the problem with contemporary capitalism is not that there is too much management, but too little? The neo-liberal takeover of institutions and ideology has forced us to equate management with managerial-

ism. However, managerialism is best understood as a specific set of strategies whose overall aim is the embedding of neo-liberal concepts and practices, as Kathleen Lynch explains: New managerialism represents the organisational arm of neoliberalism… While it would be a mistake to view new managerialism as a unitary whole, implemented consistently across differing cultural and economic contexts, nevertheless in the redesign of public service provision key features of managerialism include: an emphasis on outputs over inputs; the close monitoring of employee performance and the encouragement of self-monitoring through the widespread use of performance indicators, rankings, league tables and performance management. The decentralisation of budgetary and personal authority to line managers, combined with the retention of power and control at central level, and the introduction of new and more casualised contractual employment arrangements, are all key features that serve to reduce costs and exercise control.5 As Lynch further points out, the introduction of managerialism into public services has played a central role in the displacing of any concept of public good in favour of market mechanisms. More broadly, I would argue that managerialism has been crucial to the installation of what I have called capitalist realism – the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism. The introduction of market-based languages and practices from business serves to naturalise neo-liberalism, and to position business as the “reality” to which the “ivory towers” of public services must adjust and adapt. Capitalist realism positions any alternatives to capitalism as obsolete relics of the past. The combination of communicative capitalism with managerialism has engendered what we might call communicative capitalist realism. The new centrality of handheld electronic devices, and a widespread acquiescence in the idea that the future is to be

Mark Fisher

fundamentally shaped by digital communicative technology, has allowed managerialist imperatives to penetrate consciousness and time to an unprecedented degree. Management by iPhone allows commands to be quickly disseminated with minimal reflection. Email itself is a technology that is extremely well adapted to managerialist purposes – it allows commands to be issued to multiple, spatially dispersed individuals in a single moment. Individuals accessing work email by means of smartphones are typically physically isolated, denied any prospect of solidarity with others. PDF attachments also obfuscate the amount of labour that workers are required to do – a document that runs to hundreds of pages can be attached as a single document. Transferring work tasks from physical form into a cyberspatialised form typically has the effect of intensifying the feeling of inundation pointed to by Berardi. A pile of papers that one could work through becomes an indefinite set of digital tasks. Accessing work tasks through screens – especially the screens of handheld devices – denies workers any sense of overview in respect of their work. There is instead a perpetual feeling of “underview” – of being overwhelmed by an endless stream of demands, over which it is impossible to feel any sense of control. Underlying all this is the claim that any objection to the capitalist cyberspatialisation of work is nostalgic, an attempt to resist the digital future. None of this is liable to increase the efficiency of the worker; on the contrary. The worker embedded in communicative capitalist realism is likely to be more anxious and less able to focus on tasks than their forebears. If the goal of

the implementation of communicative capitalist realism was an increase in productivity, then it would have to count as a failure. But this is not the real aim of this system, nor is it the aim of managerialism and neo-liberalism more widely. It is important that we do not take neo-liberalism at its own word. According to its own propaganda, neo-liberalism has been about the increase of individual freedom and economic efficiency – as individuals are liberated from bureaucratic interference and market mechanisms increasingly replace allegedly dysfunctional public services. But, as David Graeber has persuasively argued, neo-liberalism is best seen as a form of governance that has subordinated the aim of increasing economic growth to its real goal, which is the subjugation of workers. The shibboleth of individual freedom has obfuscated the way in which neo-liberalism has systematically sought to thwart the capacity for collective agency. “Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system,” Graeber writes, “neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative – an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties… But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future.”6

5. Lynch, Kathleen. “‘New Managerialism’ in Education: the Organisational Form of Neoliberalism”. OpenDemocracy. 16 September 2014. https://www. opendemocracy.net/kathleen-lynch/’new-managerialism’-in-education-organisational-form-of-neoliberalism (Accessed 2016-06-14.) 6. Graeber, David. “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”. The Baffler. No. 19. 2012. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flyingcars-and-the-decliningrate-of-profit (Accessed 2016-06-16.)

PARSE Journal

Accelerationism Reviewed Graeber makes this point in the context of a discussion of the ways in which neo-liberal capitalism has systematically failed to deliver on the promises of “flying cars… force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars” which seemed to be on offer at a certain point in the twentieth century. Graeber’s claim – which echoes and expands some of the central arguments of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – is that the rise of neoliberalism has coincided with the displacement of the kinds of technologies that enabled space exploration by simulation technologies. “The postmodern sensibility,” Graeber writes, “the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche – all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocketsize nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this.” 7 It is at this point that we can review the recent debates around the term accelerationism.8 Part of the importance of the accelerationist discourse is that it has sought to build a politics around the problem that Graeber identifies: namely, the tendency of a neo-liberal/postmodern capitalism to obstruct the very technological, social and economic forces that it both depends upon and makes possible. Some critics have positioned accelerationism as a heretical form of Marxism, but the key claims of the major left accelerationist thinkers are in tune with Marx’s idea

that capitalism necessarily thwarts the productive potentials to which it gives rise. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish three waves of accelerationist theory. (Although there are clearly precursors: Marx himself of course, but The Accelerationist Reader also identifies Nikolai Fedorov, Samuel Butler and Thorstein Veblen as “anticipators” of later accelerationist positions.) The first wave is associated primarily with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. Deleuze and Guattari’s position is rooted in their analysis of capitalism, which understands capitalism to be characterised by a tension between “deterritorialising” and “retteritorialising” forces. Deterritorialising forces push against established identities, limits, and vested interests; they open up new spaces and potentials. Reterritorialising forces work in the opposite direction, seeking to re-establish settled boundaries and archaic forms of (religious, nationalistic, authoritarian) power. Deleuze and Guattari’s argument is that capitalism is defined by this tension, which means that it cannot but include archaic elements. We could say that capitalism is fundamentally anachronistic – that it is best understood as a kind of steampunk collage, in which the technologically new will combine with the socially regressive: much as in twenty-first-century austerity UK, where food banks co-exist with iPhones. From this perspective, the accelerationist gambit, then, is clear: the revolutionary path is the one that allies with deterritorialising forces of modernisation against the reactionary energies of reterritorialisation. A corollary of this is the claim that there is no (cultural, political, psychological) region untouched by capitalism. There is no pure outside of capitalism, from which the attack on capitalism can be launched. Equally, however, there is very little in the capitalist world that necessarily belongs to capitalism. On the contrary, the effort that capital has to go to contain and obstruct the technological and social potentials which arise under its rule is a testament to the fact that it is easy to imagine those potentials being actualised under very different

Mark Fisher

political-economic conditions. Indeed, you could say that it is only possible to imagine these potentials being actualised in very different conditions. The second wave of accelerationist thinking is particularly associated with the work of Nick Land in the 1990s. Written in the context of 1990s cyberculture, Land’s key texts offered a kind of cybergothic or technihilistic remix of Deleuze and Guattari. Land’s work has been described as neo-liberal, but it is perhaps best understood as a kind of libertarianism, in which the forces whose autonomy is being celebrated are not human. There is little space for human freedom in Land’s vision, which instead aligns with forces of revolutionary deterritorialisation for which humans are mere puppets, or better, machine parts. In effect, Land ignores Deleuze and Guattari’s claim about the tension between deterritorialising and reterritorialising forces in capitalism, and construes capital as a straightforwardly revolutionary agent which is driven to escape what he calls the “human security system”. The importance of Land’s thought to the third wave of accelerationist thought is precisely the challenge it poses to contemporary left-wing thought. Land taunts the left for being regressive, technophobic and oriented towards the negative attractors of resistance and critique. Capital, by contrast, becomes figured, in Land’s terms, as a quasivitalistic energetic system which is always seeking to overcome any actuallyexisting limits, including its own. The third wave of accelerationist theory has sought to overturn this understanding, in part by enumerating and rejecting those

features of contemporary anti-capitalist struggle which most resonate with Land’s attack on the left. “We believe”, wrote Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in “#Accelerate: Manifesto For an Accelerationist Politics”, which has become the founding document of the new leftist accelerationism, “the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” 9 The significance of Srnicek and Williams’s intervention for our purposes here concerns just this opposition: between a politics of immediacy, spontaneity and authentic experience and a politics which is centred on the (virtual and actual) infrastructures necessary for sustained social transformation. The “folk political” tendencies that Srnicek and Williams identify came to the fore in the Occupy movement, with its emphasis on direct democracy and assemblies, and its hostility towards parliamentary politics and mass media (and indeed mediation of all kind). However, those tendencies did not originate with the Occupy movement. Rather, Occupy was merely the culmination of a number of activist and discursive currents that had been in place at least since the anti-capitalism of the 1990s. The dominant mood of folk politics is neo-anarchist: it declares the age of the political party and the trade union to be over, embracing the selforganising and horizontal dynamics of the network against what it characterises as oppressive (and obsolete) hierarchical structures.

7. Ibid. 8. For a detailed discussion of the history of the term, see the introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay (eds.). Falmouth: Urbanomic. 2014. 9. Srnicek, Nick and Williams, Alex. “#Accelerate: Manifesto For an Accelerationist Politics”. In Avanessian and Mackay, p. 354.

PARSE Journal

In practical terms, this has led to a politics based on a mixture of protest (against particular injustices) and prefiguration (an anticipation of a new society). This combination is incoherent, philosophically, libidinally and strategically. For one thing, the rationales of protest and prefiguration contradict one another. Protest presupposes a big Other, a commanding authority, who can hear the protest and respond to its demands. Prefiguration is supposed to do away with the need for this authority, to abandon demands, and immediately to enact a new set of social relations. Between these two strategies is so-called direct action – but too often this has amounted not to any action that will disrupt the logistical operations of Capital, but to a symbolic destruction of property, as easily ignored on a practical level as it is recuperated on a propagandistic level. In contrast to this somewhat confused melange of strategies and orientations, left accelerationism draws attention to the need for indirect action: action which will target the hegemonic and ideological infrastructures that frame what is experienced as reality. Here we can return to the question of management, which is liable to be construed by neo-anarchism as necessarily oppressive. Yet the focus on management precisely entails an appreciation of the difference between political agency and its conditions, between what is immediate and the virtual machineries that shape experience. It also entails shifting the left from the model of rebellion which has dominated activism since the 1960s and instead asks the left to imagine what it would do – what it will do – when it seizes control of social, cultural and economic resources. In addition, the left accelerationist perspective allows us to reclaim management as a fundamental communist and socialist value. What is a communist society if not a managed society? But management here need not – indeed cannot – mean authoritarian command. In fact, it is neo-liberal managerialism that has combined authoritarianism with social and political chaos, as it surrenders all agency to the blind automatism of capital. To appreciate this, it is worth

turning to Francis Spufford’s extraordinary work – I hesitate to call it a novel – Red Plenty. Red Plenty is a kind of retro-speculative fictionalisation of the moment in the post-Stalinist USSR when the Soviet economy was growing faster than its American counterpart, and the dream of full communism seemed as if it could actually be realised in the near future. The point is neither to deny that this dream failed, nor to offer any sort of apologia for the Soviet system (even in this post-Stalinist moment, in which authoritarianism and repression declined). The point, rather, is to recover something of the sense of ambition that left-wing politics once possessed. The rise of folk politics and neo-anarchism on the left can be correlated with a decline in ambition: where once the left aimed to construct a managed society, now it is reduced to offering temporary autonomous zones, small spaces of withdrawal from capitalism. The perspective offered by Red Plenty is properly accelerationist, in the sense that it conceives of capitalism – and all its undeniable wonders – as merely a way station en route to communism. The good things produced by capitalism arise in a haphazard fashion, whereas, under communism, they will be delivered in a designed and managed – a rationally-co-ordinated – way. The sentiments of one character early in the book are typical: He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, only here had people escaped this black nonsense, and made themselves reality’s deliberate designers rather than its playthings.10 The left accelerationist position has produced so many misunderstandings that in their recent book, Inventing the Future: Folk Politics and the Left, Srnicek and Williams have abandoned the term altogether. In particular, left accelerationism has been dogged by two persistent fallacies. The first is the idea that accelerationism is about “making things worse in order ultimately to make

Mark Fisher

them better”: intensifying the misery of capitalism to the point that it becomes unbearable, and revolution becomes inevitable. As should already be clear from the rough sketch I have offered above, this is not the left accelerationist position, which insists instead on intensifying those processes which will lead to the dissolution of capitalist power and hegemony. It is not about accelerating capitalism tout court, and certainly not about accelerating the most egregious aspects of capitalism. The second fallacy concerns the idea that the acceleration being sought is a phenomenological acceleration. It is easy to see how this misunderstanding can arise, and the equation of acceleration with an ever-more accelerated experience underlies the critique which Franco Berardi offers, and that I cited above. But the acceleration that left accelerationism wants concerns processes and tendencies, not experience. Indeed, one could argue that the inundating of the individual and collective psyche with stimuli that Berardi describes has led precisely to a deceleration at the political and cultural level. Overloaded minds do not have the existential resources necessary to innovate. Moreover, brains constantly subject to the flows of communicative capitalism – like the brains of the CEOs discussed at the beginning of this article – do not have the capacity to plan ahead or to offer any kind of effective overview. Instead, they can only spread panic and draw others into their reactive urgency fields. The result is a kind of frenzied inertia, which can be overcome only by a radically different way of managing time and resources. It should be clear by now that the call to accelerate management here is also a

call to wrest the concept of management from its being held hostage by neoliberal managerialism. Particularly in the context of culture and creative work, it is crucial that we re-imagine the role of the manager. As Jeremy Gilbert and I have argued elsewhere, “wouldn’t most managers really prefer to think of themselves as the Brian Epsteins and Tony Wilsons of public service, rather than the latter-day Gradgrinds which neoliberalism insist they become?” 11 Instead of managers who overload us with work – using their own addiction to work as an example – can we not imagine managers who protect us from overwork? In place of managers who inundate us with micro-demands, can’t we imagine managers who see their role as providing us with a space to think? The aim to allocate resources rationally, the desire to make ourselves “reality’s deliberate designers rather than its playthings” – the restoration of a collectively deliberated human agency – this is fundamentally a management problem, and the left must retain its confidence that only it can manage society properly.

10. Spufford, Francis. Red Plenty. London: Faber and Faber. 2010. p. 11. 11. Fisher, Mark and Gilbert, Jeremy. Reclaim Modernity: Beyond Markets, Beyond Machines, Compass pamphlet. October 2014. Available at http://www. compassonline.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/ Compass-Reclaiming-Modernity-Beyond-markets_-2. pdf (Accessed February 2017.)

PARSE Journal

Abstract This paper will argue that current critiques of bureaucracy often either render the figure of the administrator invisible or define them as objects that slow down, disrupt or block. Such constructions fail to acknowledge the subject that performs the administrative labour and portray that figure in a predominantly negative way. The authors will question whether lessons from feminist readings of domestic and maintenance work could be used to subjectify the administrator. In addition to bringing together existing research on domestic and administrative labour, the authors will use findings from their work with the campaign group Justice 4 Domestic Workers (J4DW) undertaken in January 2016.1 Feminist theory around domestic labour is well established and wide-ranging. Theories that examine the invisibility of reproductive labour seek to subjectify the figure of the domestic worker to politicise the domestic. We will map the commonalities between domestic and administrative labour, namely: (in)visibility; the gendered and objectified nature of both types of work; and the perceived placement of administration and domestic labour within the hierarchy of organisational or household priorities. 1. More information and contact details for Justice 4 Domestic Workers can be found on its website http://www.j4dw.com (Accessed 2016-02-20.)

Bureaucracy’s Labour: The Administrator as Subject

Andrea Francke

Ross Jardine

Andrea Francke (1978) is an artist who was born in Peru and is currently based in London. Long-term projects include: Invisible Spaces of Parenthood, a collaboration with Kim Dhillon exploring the legacies of Second Wave feminism and their implications within art and its infrastructures, labour, and care; and Wish You’d Been Here, organising and reflecting on hosting as an artistic and feminist method along with Eva Rowson. She is currently a PhD candidate in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research attempts to develop a decolonised alternative genealogy for social practice in Peruvian Art.

Ross Jardine’s work is located somewhere between art and administration. He uses a research-based approach to examine the places we live and work in and the policies, labour and symbolic frameworks that create and maintain them. He co-organises Radio Anti, a radio project which has worked with the Serpentine Gallery (London), Bloc Projects (Sheffield) and the Art Licks Festival (London). He is an experienced policy researcher and has been working with the campaign group Justice 4 Domestic Workers to examine health and safety provision for domestic workers.

PARSE Journal

1. This paper is written in the context of the United Kingdom. 2. See, for example, Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. New York: Melville House. 2015; Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books. 2009; Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, 2nd edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books. 2015. 3. Administrative labour can be split into three categories: that of the “unskilled” administrator – the data entry clerk, the filing clerk; the personal assistant position that substituted the secretary; and the manager. For the purposes of this essay administrative labour will be considered separate from managerial labour. 4. Graham, Stephen and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order”. Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 24. No. 3. 2007. pp. 1-25 .p. 17. doi: 10.1177/0263276407075954. 5. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. 2014. 6. Graeber, op. cit. 7. Toscano, Alberto. “Logistics and Opposition”. Mute, August 2011. See http://www.metamute.org/ editorial/articles/logisticsand-opposition (Accessed 2017-01-23.) 8. Graeber, op. cit.

Introduction: The Administrator as Infrastructure Administration surrounds us: it is an infrastructure that generates, sustains and controls the flows of capital that shape our daily existence. This can be seen in how administrative processes and jargon are increasing presences in our everyday lives, imposed by both public and private institutions. As the public sector struggles to manage the UK Conservative Party’s regime of unrelenting funding cuts and the private sector continues to seek new ways to exploit profit, a common strategy to manage with fewer resources is to shift the labour of administration onto the employee, the customer or the service user.1 Think, for example, about the amount of time spent by the average worker on paperwork or employee self-assessments, the time that consumers spend arranging deliveries, or the completing of application forms by users of the welfare system. Current critiques of administration – such as those of David Graeber, Mark Fisher and Dean Spade – are a reaction to the administration of the body and the way bureaucracy is used to control the flows of our everyday life.2 From passport control to binary gender categories on job application forms, administration gently pushes us into ideologically assigned roles and positions and then traps us there. We are consistently expected to self-manage, to self-assess and to apply administrative techniques to our personal and work lives. Our paper does not dispute this impression but seeks to add a different perspective to it. Critiques of these power

relations are often positioned from the perspective of the administered body. But what of the administrator?3 What of the worker who transfers information from the form to the database, who checks the form for completeness, who minutes the meeting that decides on the form’s design and then generates the form? Administration renders these figures invisible. To be deemed successful in their task the administrator must adhere to a range of standards and style guides that masks their identity with that of the institution through policies of best practice and standardisation. In their essay on the importance of maintenance, Nigel Thrift and Stephen Graham describe infrastructure systems as being physically and metaphorically veiled beneath the surface of urban life, only made visible by the sudden absence of infrastructural flow. The smoothness of the road’s maintained surface is only made present the moment we hit a pothole, for example.4 Keller Easterling expands the definition of infrastructure to include policies and systems that enable flows of global capital, for example the standardisation of the width of credit cards.5 We propose to extend this definition of infrastructure further to include the labour that enables these flows. Just as with the physical infrastructure described by Thrift and Graham, as we are swamped by avalanches of paperwork and forms to complete, the administrator is hidden from sight, only to reappear through an error – either made by the system or the user. The administrator’s appearance is often unwelcome, unhelpful: it delays, blocks and exacerbates. In a strikingly sprawling personal

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

anecdote, David Graeber describes feeling stupid as he moves through administrative systems, trying to deal with the disembodied voices of, almost entirely, women workers in banks and hospitals. They block, they slow down and they disrupt his path.6 However, by disembodying and removing the subjectivity of these workers, formulating them into only infrastructure, we miss an opportunity; it is in this potential to produce frustration that we might find the potential to slow and regulate flows of capital. Alberto Toscano has pointed to how studies of logistics workers (delivery drivers, postal workers, dock workers or rail workers) have shown that they hold choke points over the flow of capital.7 So too can administrators, who often work in intimate proximity to the leadership decisions they record, communicate and implement. Because administrators are seen as infrastructural, they are often witness to decisions and processes that might expose or undermine flows of capital. Confidentiality is secured through legal agreements or by removing the administrator’s agency through the precarious nature of the work – even administrators on permanent contracts are consistently under threat of restructure or redundancy as lower-grade staff are often the first to go.

Heroes and Free Men: The Making of Infrastructure The administrator becomes infrastructure through the erosion of the value and expertise of their labour. Language is key in this process, although administrative labour seems close to an intellectual practice this wrongly implies a level of freedom and recognition for the subject performing the labour. The truth is that most administrative jobs are constructed to be a reduction of the alienated parts of a sum. They involve tasks related to reading and writing, which might seem intellectual but whose constitution has been broken into parts that can be performed after what is suggested to be minimal training. Despite often being highly trained or educated, administra-

tors can find themselves on assignments in a wide range of organisations and industries, from local councils to investment banks. No knowledge of the industry is necessary as the mechanics of the job are the same and continuity is provided by standard software for databases or finance systems, such as Microsoft Office or Sage. Organisational policies and guidelines make it easier to replace workers who are reduced to cogs in the machine rather than function as individuals with valued knowledge. Administrative documents elude authorship through the use of templates, past versions, and best practice – document histories expose the layers of change, a canon produced through the combined labour of the historic bodies that have updated and tailored the document over time. Workers are partially absolved from personal responsibility through best practice standards that aim to transfer decisions to a third party, a party that hides its ideology under the pretence of technical and factual knowledge. Actions become attached to roles instead of individuals. Administrators become infrastructure not only through how their work is constructed and described, but also by how institutions are organised and narrated around an individual leader or hero. Administrative systems are collective by nature. Collective systems without shared aims, authorship or intent are as much of a challenge to organisations as they are to discourse. In order to attribute intention and purpose to a group, we either create competitive structures that elevate protagonists, heroes and leaders, or we institutionalise the collective so that it behaves like a coherent individual – attributing it ownership of its actions and products. Autobiographically constructed critiques of bureaucracy such as David Graeber’s are valuable, but they also risk reproducing these narrative models.8 Such critiques choose a hero, often the author themselves, and narrate their battles against a mass of nameless and interchangeable administrators who stand between them and their goals. Hero narratives need to make

PARSE Journal

9. Arendt, Hannah. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1998. 10. For an in-depth analysis of different readings of Arendt in feminist theory consult Dietz, Mary G. “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt”. In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Bonnie Honig (ed.). University Park, PA: Penn State Press. 2010. pp. 17-50. 11. Veltman, Andrea. “Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt on Labor”. Hypatia. No. 25. 2010. pp. 55-78. doi: 10.1111/j.15272001.2009.01084.x; Benhabib, Seyla. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Modernity and Political Thought Series No. 10. London: Sage. 1996. 12. Federici, Silvia. “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint”. In the Middle of a Whirlwind. 2008. See https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/ precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/ (Accessed 2017-01-23.) 13. Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press Books. 2006. pp.3-12. 14. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text. 1990. p. 61. doi: 10.2307/466240. 15. Arendt, Hannah. op. cit. 16. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press Books. 2014.

the support structures around the individual invisible and unnamed in order to construct the myth of meritocracy, talent and authorship – i.e. the deserving subject. A consequence of the process is the creation of an ocean of unnamed, undeserving non-subjects. What such critiques therefore partially do is reinforce the authorial, meritocratic, deserving nature not only of the author but also their profession. The role of academic, teacher or artist, for example, is perceived as a specialised position. They are understood as a combination of natural talent and academic validation. The unnamed producers who support these positions are separated from the individual authors/heroes. We propose a reading of the author/ hero figure as Hannah Arendt’s free man. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt describes the “Free Man” – an individual who is free from having to perform the tasks related to the drudgeries of maintaining life in order to be free for political action.9 This perceived de-valuation of reproductive labour parallels the processes used today to justify the erasure of the administrator’s position as a subject. The administrative worker functions as an object, a piece of infrastructure, invisible until something goes wrong. Administrators are only allowed some semblance of humanity when made to embody the physical barrier blocking the way of a goal: this fleeting invisibility culminates in descriptions filled with the animosity we feel towards road bumps. The administrator becomes the incompetent, the petty dictator inebriated on what little power they have, the embodiment of the failures of

the system. What this narrative fails to acknowledge is the number of invisible roads travelled to get to the point where the hero encounters the bump. Using Hannah Arendt’s categories of work, labour and action, we can analyse the separation of values, and the potential for liberation of different occupations. These categories can be crudely summarised: labour sustains the biological conditions for human life; work builds and maintains the world, making it fit for human use; and action defines man as a free agent in the world among other free agents. Feminists have historically problematised Arendt’s categories, especially how she fails to acknowledge they are gendered through their situatedness in certain types of spaces – private and domestic space being limited to labour while action occurs in public.10 In our analysis, Arendt’s categories are useful in making visible how the perception of certain jobs and the subject who performs them are paramount in enabling those same subjects to enter the public sphere and into the political space for debate. Feminist theorist Andrea Veltman’s defence of The Human Condition shows how Arendt didn’t justify the oppression of certain subjects but described how “subordinate or second-class social status is often borne out in practice” through the “relegation of chores that one would rather have someone else perform.” 11 Thus, we can start to see how administrators are defined and de-valued for their performing of both the labour that sustains the life of the political and the work that builds the forum itself.

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

Maintaining Life and Reproductive Labour – Mapping the Similarities of Administrative and Domestic Labour The refusal to recognise the administrative subject as a full individual excludes them from the public sphere and from fulfilling their political potential – this mirrors how a similar refusal to recognise the subject that performs domestic labour, usually women, has excluded those individuals from the political sphere. This recalls the lack of recognition for domestic labour that was so strongly denounced in second-wave feminism. Feminist intellectuals, such as Silvia Federici, have commented on the vagueness of Marx’s descriptions of reproductive labour – the work performed in the private sphere that reproduces the labour power required for capitalism to survive.12 This is illustrated in Sara Ahmed’s description of the different phenomenological experiences of a domestic setting. She recounts the relationship between the writer and his writing table described in other phenomenological readings by white heterosexual cis-males. As he sits at the table focused on his writing he is unaware of his family, the housework and the structures of privilege that enable him to be there. Domestic labour then easily becomes infrastructural for those subjects, revealed only as a bump – when the baby cries, when dinner is not ready or when the papers on his table are found disarranged after someone cleaned it.13 Thus labour performed in the domestic sphere is made invisible not only by spatial properties. Migrant domestic workers, such as the members of J4DW, are a case in point. Because such workers work behind closed doors, it makes them particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation at the hands of their employers. However, this situation is exasperated by government legislation: for example, visas that tie workers to their employers and processes at immigration control that leave the passports of domestic workers in the possession of employers. Such policies deny migrant domestic

workers citizenship and therefore exclude them from the sphere of public discourse and policymaking. Furthermore, Nancy Fraser’s analysis of frameworks with systematic inequalities shows that the terms private and public are frequently deployed to delegitimise some interests, views and topics and to valorise others. The privateness of domestic space is not natural, but is constructed through the bodies that inhabit it. Fraser states that what makes a space public or private rests on a class and gender-biased notion of publicity, which we propose, could be expanded to include issues of race, ableism, sexual and immigrant status.14 Some types of labour are made valueless through their connection with certain subjects and vice versa. It is not just the spatial qualities of certain types of labour that make them invisible but the fact that society constructs conditions of space and property, which make the work of certain bodies invisible. Arendt traces a historical connection between ownership of private property and access to the public sphere.15 We propose that the hero/author operates in the public sphere using the private ownership/authorship of their intellectual labour as an entry ticket, while the mass of unnamed administrators provide the infrastructure for his adventure. The administrator’s lack of authorship and ownership of their intellectual property re-enacts the same strategy that has historically been used to undervalue domestic labour – which has always been perceived as un-authored, unskilled and performed for the head of the household. Lisa Gitelman’s historical analysis demonstrates how the class and gender composition attached to categories of documents identifies them as authored and thus constituting intellectual property.16 Although current copyright definitions automatically assign authorship to new documents, authorship in clerical work is still mostly ignored. Corporations now include copyright clauses in all contracts to ensure that the institution retains ownership of any intellectual production performed by workers. This is not simply a legal consideration: socially we prefer to

PARSE Journal

17. See Fraser, op. cit. 18. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and James, Selma. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 1972. See http://libcom.org/ library/power-women-subversion-community-dellacosta-selma-james (Accessed 2017-01-23.) 19. Hochschild, Arlie. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, 2nd edition. London: Penguin. 2003. 20. The study included controlling for education and skill. 21. Levanon, A., England, P. and Allison, Paul. “Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950–2000 U.S. Census Data”. Social Forces. Vol. 88. No. 2. 2009. pp. 865-891. doi:10.1353/ sof.0.0264. 22. Nadasen, Premilla. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Reprint edition. Boston: Beacon Press. 2016. p. 19. 23. Fraser, , op.cit. p. 67.

imagine that the form we are completing was never authored. Administrative systems are put in place to pretend that these documents are generated through automated technical procedures that erase any trace of humanity or responsibility from them. Documents, forms and templates are constructed on top of each other, each time by a different unnamed worker. Absent from the document is a signature, responsibility but also credit. Such documents are not objects that can be used as an entry pass into the public sphere. The process of denying authorship (in the sense of denying the subjectivity expressed in the construction of a form or Excel spread sheet, not in the copyright transforming it into an asset) is, in itself, a process of de-subjectification.17 It creates a hierarchy of work and labour, categorising the administrator as maintainer instead of a creator. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s feminist reading of Marx in 1972 focused on the lack of wages as the main instrument for making domestic labour invisible and thus allowing capitalism to exploit its surplus labour at no cost. However, in their essay’s footnotes there is a prescient quote from the Financial Times in 1971 suggesting that many capitalists are missing the opportunity to use women in positions of middle management; “being grateful outsiders, women would not only lower the pay structure...”18 Through purposeful deskilling and modularisation, administrative labour has now become poorly remunerated and invisible. Women have been pushed to enter the workforce, not through the recognition of domestic labour as work, but by adding a second shift on top of their reproductive labour.

In this process they have been used to lower wages, to bring invisibility and to reduce the social recognition of certain jobs and professions.19 Women render spaces oblique or removed from public discourse through their participation, a process mirrored in the effects they have on the valuation of certain types of labour. “Occupational Feminization and Pay”, a study of the US labour market analysing census figures between 1950 and 2000, showed that occupations with a greater share of female workers pay less than those with a lower share.20 The study attributes this pay gap to a cultural devaluation of types of work when performed by women. It is not the case that women simply do work of low value, rather that the work has a low value because it is performed by women – in a similar way that spaces are private because of the bodies that inhabit them. For example, wages for designers in the US fell by 34 per cent when women entered the industry in large numbers, such as in housekeepers (21 per cent) and biologists (18 per cent). However, when male computer programmers began to outnumber female, in what was once seen as a relatively menial occupation, the job gained more prestige and a higher wage.21

Subjectifying the Administrator: Learning from Domestic Workers The workplace is changing. Increasing privatisation, decentralised management and a growing un-contracted workforce pose new challenges for workplace organisation. Furthermore, the shift

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

of work from the factory to the office, and more recently the home, often means that work is no longer dirty or dangerous – though it could certainly be considered demeaning. In our experience, a lack of what are perceived to be single big issues – like worker or consumer safety – can make it harder to make the case for organising the workforce. This is compounded by an increase of new managerial techniques such as employee self-assessment, health care initiatives, and resilience training that seek to further individualise the worker and their issues. Employees often don’t recognise that stress and ill-health are caused by the nature of their work, and when they do it is something to “get over” or become more resilient towards, rather than something to organise against. In the previous section we mapped a series of points where domestic and administrative labour meet, not only through the invisible nature of the work, but also in how they both maintain, support and reproduce more valued types of labour. We believe that these similarities make it possible to look to successful campaigns around domestic labour to find new ways of organising and politicising administrative workers. Justice 4 Domestic Workers is a grassroots organisation of, mainly female, migrant domestic workers who are often exploited in conditions of slavery under the supervision of the UK Government through immigration and employment laws described in previous sections. While the group is affiliated to Unite, a major UK trade union, it operates in radically different ways to traditional trade unions. A particular characteristic of migrant domestic workers is that they often live in the homes of their employer, which not only increases their vulnerability to exploitation but also makes it much harder for them to organise. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that domestic work is by its nature performed by lone workers across multiple sites, with little opportunity to build solidarity other than around the employment agency, if at all. As such, members of the group meet on weekends, often at the Unite offices or

The Showroom Gallery in central London, and meetings take on a more social nature: members cook for each other, celebrate birthdays, christenings and other milestones, and listen to one another’s problems – an extension of care, for the carers. As well as campaigning for workers’ rights and changes to immigration and employment laws, J4DW gives its members support in many areas, such as health care, training and visa counselling. Premilla Nadsen points to how African American domestic workers who supported the Civil Rights movement in the US used their employers’ domestic spaces as tools for political emancipation, for example through using their kitchens to cook food that could be sold to fund the movement while bringing knowledge they acquired through their political practices back to the workplace.22 This acknowledgement of the potential to shape and utilise the space of production could offer some insight to what is possible if administrators embrace informing their practices through their political engagement and also recognising the production potential of the administrative space. Not only in its world-making capacities, but also in the practical using-the-copy-machine-to-publishpamphlets way. J4DW also pays particular attention to how it represents itself and how others represent it. Members of the group are trained in public speaking and turns are taken to present publicly, often in public forums reserved for the initiated, such as the House of Commons, party or trade union conferences or the media. This way of organising provides workers with an arena in which to create and discuss counter discourses to those their employers and governments have given them. Nancy Fraser defines subaltern counter-publics as “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs”.23 We see here how J4DW successfully manages to take its counter discourse, constructed in the subaltern, through workshops, conversations and dance classes, into the

PARSE Journal

24. Albin, Einat and Mantouvalou, Virginia. “The ILO Convention on Domestic Workers: From the Shadows to the Light”. Industrial Law Journal. Vo. 41. No. 1. 2012. pp. 67-78. doi: 10.1093/indlaw/dws001. 25. Words That Lie Between Love and Work was part of the Communal Knowledge programme developed by The Showroom Gallery for the “Now You Can Go” conference held in London in 2016. 26. See http://www.werkermagazine.org/domesticwork/ (Accessed February 2017.) 27. Morgall, Janine. “Typing Our Way to Freedom: Is It True That New Office Technology Can Liberate Women?”. Feminist Review. 1981. pp. 87-101. p. 89. doi: 10.2307/1394917. 28. Morgall, ibid. p. 89. 29. Spade, op. cit.

dominant political sphere, allowing its members to speak in otherwise unreachable forums. One of the tools used by employers to disempower the members of J4DW is the language used to describe what they do. Domestic workers are told they should love the children they take care of: they should care for the family as if it was their own. But they should not expect to be loved back. They are expected to stay up all night if a child is sick, as a worried parent would, but if they get sick they should carry on working because they are workers. The relevance of being a worker in this context, instead of a family member, is that a worker is not recognised as a subject. Just like the administrator, the worker is an infrastructural object that should not be visible. It should not become a bump in the road. A sick domestic worker is a bump on the household’s path, unable to undertake the tasks they have been (sub)contracted to perform in order to liberate other individuals to pursue more important, more subjectifying paths. Yet the expectation of love is used to limit their legal rights for “if treated as family members domestic workers are exempted from the Minimum Wage Act altogether”.24 The employer’s ability to control how and when love and work are used de-subjectify the domestic worker. In our workshop “Words That Lie Between Love and Work” we worked with J4DW members to map the different words used by the state and employers to describe what they do.25 The workshop focused on generating a new language to describe the labour conditions and attributes of domestic workers, with the

aim of them entering the public sphere armed with their own terms and definitions. During the workshop members of J4DW produced sets of words under the headings love, work and words between love and work (Fig. 1). From those words the members produced posters using a photographic archive of their daily lives made over the previous few years, a project initiated in collaboration with Werker Magazine (Fig. 2).26 As we untangled the words used to describe love and work, three spheres emerged: the workers’ own domestic sphere, from which they are absent but which their families still inhabit; the domestic sphere where they are employed; and J4DW, a space between the two where the workers are brought together through their work but also find friendship, solidarity and authorship. The space between love and work emerged as an Arendtian space of action, populated by words such as solidarity, struggle, education, organising. On the posters these words were associated with images of the group’s political activities with J4DW.

An Invisible and Unnamed Army of Administrators Institutes the World as You Read This For subjects to be fully present in the public sphere we need a symbolic order that reflects their position as subjects. Until legal, media and state systems reform their discourse to reflect immigrant domestic workers as valid subjects we will encounter policies such as the current visa applications for domestic workers that frame them

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

as appendages of their employers, broadly similar to their pets. This essay proposes that much of the contemporary discourse directly on, or around, administration, is guilty of a similar mistake. By not recognising the administrative subject as a full individual it excludes them from the public sphere and from fulfilling their political potential. In a text published in the Feminist Review in 1981, Janine Morgall mapped the feminisation of administrative labour in her call to arms for the women who had become the administrative workers: Women did not improve their position in society by entering into office work. They were paid less than men, there was no career ladder for them and they were given the routine and less responsible tasks. [...] It became women’s work to transform, store and send information and men’s work to acquire information, assimilate and manipulate existing information to generate new information.27 Morgall calls for technology in the office to be used for liberation, so that “women must be made to see they can be authors”.28 In his book Normal Life, queer activist and legal scholar Dean Spade argues that policy and administrative systems are the invisible disciplinary forces that generate our experiences as subjects, thus they are key areas for enacting political transformation. By reflecting on the usually anonymous subjects that generate and enforce those systems we aim to unleash awareness of their political power and potential to enact change.29 There are moments in time where the solidity of the systems we recognise as everyday life start to flicker, when opportunities for change and for a redefining of our shared understanding of the world become possible. If change is going to happen it will inevitably depend on the development of radically different administrative and bureaucratic systems. By recognising the subjects that author, perform and enact them and their implication in the construction of the world, we can discuss these processes with all their ideological implications. For revolution to happen we need administrators on our side.

PARSE Journal

“Words That Lie Between Love and Work”. Poster by the following J4DW members: Mary Gold Balquen, Eliza B. Lizardo, Annalyn A. Alarcio, Sylvana P. Sierte, Salvacao Mendes, Dotty Fernandes, Aisha Bose and Zaida Cenzon.

Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine

“Words That Lie Between Love and Work”. Workshop documentation.

PARSE Journal

Abstract Taking as his theme the management of higher education as it is increasingly transformed by administrative rather than academic professionals, Newfield examines the establishment of a partnership between leadership groups at Yale University in the United States and the National University of Singapore (NUS), in which a new college for East-West liberal arts and sciences instruction was formed outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. The creation was a two-step process. First, the institutional deal was negotiated and signed, with nearly no prior participation from the faculty members of either institution, and with later fierce opposition from some Yale faculty members inspired by their critique of a managerialist exclusion of faculty and their collegium-based traditions of self-governance. Second, the first group of permanent Yale-NUS faculty members spent a fully-paid year designing the curriculum from scratch. Form and financing were established by management, and then curricular content was provided by faculty. The division of labour reflects the traditional structure of American university management, in which professorial authority extends to teaching, non-sponsored research, the departmental governance that supports these activities, and nothing more. Is this divided authority good enough to enable academic freedom at Yale-NUS in the traditional sense? Could it overcome the initial Yale faculty opposition to the project as complicit with Singaporeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s restrictions on speech and sexual identity?

Arts and Humanities Education as Neo-liberalism Comes Unglued

Christopher Newfield Christopher Newfield is Professor of Literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of his research is in Critical University Studies, which links his enduring concern with humanities teaching to the study of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces. His most recent books on this subject are Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003). A new book on the post-2008 struggles of public universities to rebuild their social missions, called The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, was

published by Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2016. He also writes about American intellectual and social history (The Emerson Effect, University of Chicago Press, 1996), and has co-edited Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) with Avery F. Gordon. He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University, and writes for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches courses in Detective Fiction, Noir California, Contemporary US Literature, Innovation Theory, and English Majoring After College.

PARSE Journal

Sheldon Adelson Casino, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Photograph by Christopher Newfield.

arts university be like if it is instituted as a collaboration among donors, top government officials, and senior managers with only post facto input from professors and practitioners? hat will a new liberal

This paper is about one such experiment, in which the leadership teams of Yale University in the US and the National University of Singapore (NUS) created a new college for East-West liberal arts and sciences instruction that rejected some traditional disciplinary boundaries. The creation was a two-step process. First, the institutional deal was negotiated and signed with almost no prior participation from the faculty members of either institution, followed by fierce opposition from some Yale faculty members inspired by their critique of a managerialist exclusion of faculty and their collegiumbased traditions of self-governance.1 Second, the first group of permanent Yale-NUS faculty members spent a fully-paid year designing the curriculum from scratch. Form and financing was established by management, and then curricular content was provided by faculty.

The division of labour reflects the traditional structure of American university management, in which professorial authority extends to teaching, non-sponsored research, the departmental governance that supports these activities, and nothing more. Financing and budgeting are generally held to be a function of senior administrative expertise, where senior administrators may consult with faculty bodies at their discretion. In the case of Yale-NUS, the governing academic ideology, or at least ethos, was also decided on in advance of the work of the faculty members on the curriculum as such. Faculty members would design the curriculum and then administer their own daily affairs, as is the US tradition. But they had not established the collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ground rules, either financial or educational. Would this divided authority be good enough to enable academic freedom at Yale-NUS in the traditional sense? Could it overcome initial Yale faculty opposition to the project as complicit with Singaporeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s restrictions on speech and sexual identity?

Christopher Newfield

To see whether faculty could make a managerial difference, two colleagues and I spent a fortnight interviewing higher education officials in Singapore. We arrived there in the summer of 2013, just as the liberal arts college Yale-NUS was welcoming its first cohort. Before I arrived, I was aware of at least two things. First, I would witness the results of a royal marriage: Yale is one of the two or three most prestigious universities in the United States, and about the most exclusive, with a regular undergraduate application acceptance rate of only 5.3 per cent.2 The National University of Singapore is commonly ranked among the top three in Asia and is in the Times Higher Education’s top 25 global universities. Rankings are bunk, but along with selectivity rates they do signal status. The union of Yale and NUS produced a college that is even more exclusive than either parent, with a claimed 3 per cent acceptance rate in 2015.3 Second, Yale-NUS formally rejected the model of the American overseas campus made infamous by New York University and other elite private universities. That model is to open a foreign campus staffed by a few tenured faculty from the home campus and large majorities of contingent faculty from elsewhere. The elite brand would veil educational quality problems, and both labour exploitation and academic freedom restrictions would be excused on the grounds that they reflected local politics and 1. Sleeper, Jim. “Yale has gone to Singapore, but can it come back?” The Huffington Post. 4 May 2012. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/yale-hasgone-to-singapor_b_1476532.html (Accessed 2017-04-12.) 2. See https://www.ivycoach.com/2016-ivy-league-admissions-statistics/ (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 3. See https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/newsroom/yale-nus-college-welcomesmore-than-170-new-students-to-the-class-of-2018/ (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 4. Marans, Daniel. “What One Professor’s Travel Ban Says About The UAE’s Influence On U.S. Universities”. The Huffington Post. 3 September 2015. Section Politics. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/andrew-ross-nyu-uae_ us_55e6419ce4b0b7a9633acc8e (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 5. Kaminer, Ariel, and O’Driscoll, Sean. “Workers at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi Site Faced Harsh Conditions”. The New York Times. 18 May 2014. See https://www.

culture.4 In the case of NYU-Abu Dhabi, the press discovered that labour exploitation was the hallmark of the physical construction of the campus, where migrant workers toiled under appalling conditions for little pay while confined to labour camps.5 When confronted with a report documenting the exempting of one-third of NYU’s subcontracted employees from local labour regulations, NYU president John Sexton pleaded ignorance.6 Concerns about the campus’s lack of academic autonomy were confirmed when the UAE government prevented a prominent critic of the overseas campus, NYU American Studies professor Andrew Ross, from travelling there. Students were not exempt from the rip-off ethos either: the overseas campuses reflected an enrolment management strategy in which NYU would admit first-year students but not allow them to attend NYU, the actual university located in New York City, and charge them full tuition as though they were in New York while in reality they studied for their first two years overseas. NYU was effectively offshoring half of its BA instruction for many of its students. NYU did in fact get sued by its former students – for breach of contract at its Singapore arts campus.7 Never mind: Yale-NUS would be the opposite of all this. It would a premium American-style liberal arts college, where education would be conducted with regular tenuretrack faculty, working in a purpose-built campus with moderate teaching loads to enable active research, in order to deliver the ideal student experience. nytimes.com/2014/05/19/nyregion/workers-at-nyus-abu-dhabi-site-face-harshconditions.html (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 6. Nardello & Co., “Report of the Independent Investigator into Allegations of Labor and Compliance Issues During the Construction of the NYU Abu Dhabi Campus on Saadiyat Island, United Arab Emirates, n.d. See http://www. nardelloandco.com/pdf/NYU%20Abu%20Dhabi%20Campus%20Investigative%20Report.pdf (Accessed 2017-02-20.); Saul, Stephanie. “N.Y.U. Labor Guidelines Failed to Protect 10,000 Workers in Abu Dhabi, Report Says”. The New York Times. 16 April 2015. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/ nyregion/nyu-labor-rules-failed-to-protect-10000-workers-in-abu-dhabi.html (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 7. Redden, Elizabeth. “Ex-Students at Singapore Branch Campus Sue NYU”. Inside Higher Ed. 6 October 2016. See https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/10/06/ex-students-singapore-branch-campus-sue-nyu (Accessed 2017-02-20.)

PARSE Journal

I On site, we were struck by the continuous presence of Yale-NUS’s mission statement: “A community of learning, founded by two great universities, in Asia, for the world.” The College, which in the American sense is a university focused on undergraduate instruction and bachelor’s degrees, would combine East and West, offer arts, humanities and sciences together, combined with a low student-faculty ratio that would allow continuous individual feedback to maximise student development. It would also offer that distinctive feature of the residential liberal arts college – the intellectual intensities of a “community of learning” descended from monasteries and the medieval university through the church-founded seventeenth- and eighteenth- century US colleges that evolved into the present model, represented by such selective, insufficiently diverse, intellectually effective places as Amherst College, Oberlin College and Reed College. Yale-NUS was to be the best of all these possible educational worlds – multilingual, interdisciplinary, and cosmopolitan, offering cross-training in a variety of qualitative and quantitative skills of the kind urgently needed to face the enormous challenges of the contemporary world. The faculty had gone through a year of curricular planning in which a wide range of differences and possibilities had been carefully worked through. The result was a kind of best-case liberal arts powerhouse. If Yale-NUS could not push back the darkness, what could? By darkness I refer to a political and an economic force, each considered the opponent of liberal arts Bildung and social progressivism. The first consists of Singapore’s restrictions on freedom of speech and expression, including expression of homosexuality. The second is neo-liberal capitalism, in which 8. Sleeper, op. cit. 9. Liu, Petrus and Lye, Colleen . “Liberal Arts for Asians”. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies No. 2. 2015. doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2015.1126194. 10. Schiermeier, Quirin. “Sacking of Prominent Geoscientist Rocks Community”. Nature News. (Accessed 2016-12-11.) doi: 10.1038/nature.2016.21095; Roth-

All images of Yale-NUS campus and its construction by Christopher Newfield.

the political sphere submits to economic factors, among other things I’ll examine in more detail. The question on most observers’ minds was whether a liberal arts college could have a real intellectual or ethical autonomy in contemporary Southeast Asia – or North America. Could it steer its own course? Regarding the first force, many Yale faculty members felt that Yale-NUS was a standing violation of core principles of academic freedom and self-governance because it was the project of a state that had proven itself hostile to academic freedom in particular, and freedom of expression in general.8 These concerns were confirmed, as my colleagues on that visit, Petrus Liu and Colleen Lye have reported. In the short time since the college’s opening, a series of episodes has placed on trial Yale-NUS’s pledge to guarantee its students and faculty the same freedom of speech as exercised by those in New Haven. These events include criticisms of the Yale-NUS administration’s effort to secure permission to screen Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, With Love, a documentary banned in the country for “national security” reasons; enquiries from the Media Development Association about the proposed use of The berg, Michael. “Essay on the Salaita Controversy after One Year and Continuing Concerns about Academic Freedom”. Inside Higher Ed. 31 July 2015. See https:// www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/07/31/essay-salaita-controversy-after-oneyear-and-continuing-concerns-about-academic (Accessed 2017-02-20.) 11. Personal interview, National University of Singapore, 8 July 2013. 12. Ibid., p. 4.

Christopher Newfield

Satanic Verses after the college library added the title to its collection; an open letter from Yale-NUS faculty in response to NUS Professor Khairudin Aljunied’s posting of two Facebook blogs likening lesbianism and “ liberal Islam” to “cancers” that must be cured “through education and reasoned arguments”; protests against the perceived political motivations behind the negative tenure decision of Cherian George (an outspoken government critic) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU); Yale-NUS Professor Robin Hemley’s resignation from the panel of judges in protest at the National Library Board’s removal of three children’s books “with homosexual content” ; and concerns that Yale-NUS College’s academic freedom was under attack when the Office of Housing Services removed student-created posters in support of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, news of which spread “ like wildfire” among the student body “within minutes”.9 These episodes are very troubling, and can inhibit intellectual and artistic development. Although some may see these issues as growing pains, they are most likely constitutive and structural. Western democracy is not Singapore’s model or destination. That said, we should remember that adopting Western-style academic freedom would not usher in unqualified freedom of speech or inquiry. The Western versions of these freedoms are also contingent, qualified, and in continuous danger. Leaving aside national security and surveillance issues, the North Atlantic version of academic freedom has been impaired by managerial authority, as in the recent rescinded hire of an American scholar for tweets critical of Israel and of a firing of a senior Danish geological scientist for what appears to be acts of encouraging candid assessment of his university’s management.10 It has also been impaired by a subtler “chilling effect” in which criticism is discouraged by subtle forms of internal retaliation and shunning, in which taking the wrong attitude towards department chairs or deans can mean being left out during the secretive distribution of resources

and influence. This is not to let the Singapore system off the hook, but we should recognise that the liberal arts in both East and West exist within variable regimes of managed speech. Liberal arts universities do not have the power – and their leaders seem not to have the will – to exist as exceptions. The second force the liberal arts confront is economic. Decades ago, the Singapore government began to shift economic policy towards a knowledge economy model, and the Ministry of Education (MOE) has aligned educational policy towards the enlargement of a “creative class”. One senior official was particularly explicit about this: We no longer think that all our highest-testing students should go into the Big Four professions [law, business, medicine, and engineering]; we realize that we need strengths in the arts, humanities, design, and related fields. Yale-NUS is an experiment in this line. We will learn from it, and learn what we want – I can tell you that I don’t know exactly what we are looking for. We will see how the experiment turns out.11 This official might also have said “experiments” plural: the Yale partnership is part of an extensive long-term state strategy that included joint operations with other leading American universities like MIT, Duke, and Johns Hopkins, as well as the creation of a fully-developed art and design educational sector.12 Our interviews with senior policymakers in Singapore confirmed their interest in the

PARSE Journal

“Sinic” qualities of New Asia’s capitalist identity; this was the romance of “network” (guanxi) capitalism. Even high aesthetic culture was incorporated (admittedly slowly) as part of the state’s development agenda formally from 1989. While an Asian modernity was asserted, the state simultaneously supported a universal form of free-tradist and neo-liberal economics that became dominant after the USSR’s collapse.14 liberal arts as a next generation economic strategy, which has been under discussion since the 1990s. A major policy decision in 2008 finally ushered in the generous but small-scaled investment in Yale-NUS in one piece of NUS’s real estate holdings on the tiny island. II Singapore has inspired some particularly good research on the relationship between culture and economics, including the interaction between culture and neo-liberal forms of globalisation.13 This research explains how the liberal arts could be embraced and encompassed by and for neo-liberal economic management. C.J.W.-L. Wee notes that Singapore’s first phase of industrialisation assumed that culture was not economic and irrelevant to economic development, but that this began to change, particularly after Deng Xiaoping’s policy changes in mainland China in the late 1970s. In that period, top Singaporean officials increasingly stressed the

Since “modernisation theory from the 1960s already contains, within its conceptual framework, the possibility of sociocultural difference and thus creative adaptation in the modernizing process,” 15 state cultural policy could support or even accelerate economic growth. The Singaporean government tried Confucianism as a cultural framework in the schools in the 1980s, but withdrew the policy when it turned out to be divisive in Singapore’s diverse society, and came to support more complex cultural experimentation. By the mid 2000s, Wee was describing an artistic “double consciousness of being local-global inside a statist local-globalism with a more narrowly functional economic outlook.” 16 He argued that “in the place of state-sanctioned passivity is now a new official desire for ‘messy’ creativity, for something less conformist that can spur Singaporeans’ ability to maintain the city-state’s ‘hub’ status within global capitalism.” 17 Yale-NUS is likely to make exactly this kind of contribution to a paradoxically functionalist creativity. The liberal arts can help finesse local-global identity tensions with a flexible polyglot, multicultural consciousness.

13. In addition to Liu and Lye, I’ve benefited particularly from Chua, BengHuat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London and New York: Routledge. 1995; Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2006; Wee, C.J. W.-L., The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2007; Kong, Lily. “From Precarious Labor to Precarious Economy: Planning for Precarity in Singapore’s Creative Economy”. City, Culture and Society. No. 2. 2011. pp. 55-64; and, in a different register, Waterson, Roxana, and Kwok, Kian-Woon (eds.). Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. 2012.

15. Wee, kindle location 455.

14. Wee, kindle location 328.

20. Liu and Lye, op. cit. pp. 13-14.

16. Wee, kindle location 2222. 17. Ibid., kindle location 2331. 18. Ong, cited in Liu and Lye, op. cit. p. 6. 19. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. 2015. p. 84.

Christopher Newfield

Another key point is that functionalist creativity is not actually paradoxical in neo-liberal capitalism. On the contrary: it expresses precisely what Aihwa Ong has dubbed “technopreneurial citizenship” as demanded by a post-industrial, service-oriented, tech-design-based economy.18 Neo-liberalism uses knowledge in an economically defined governmentality that strips problems of political dimensions in order to define them as technical. The neo-liberal actor is not a rights bearing political subject engaged in a participatory definition of a life in common, or even a liberal homo oeconomicus seeking to maximise his self-interest. On the contrary, neo-liberalism requires that the subject adapt his or her interests to the economy’s interests. In Wendy Brown’s terms: Rather than each individual pursuing his or her own interest and unwittingly generating collective benefit, today, it is the project of macroeconomic growth and credit enhancement to which neoliberal individuals are tethered and with which their existence as human capital must align if they are to thrive. When individuals… constitute a drag on this good… they may be legitimately cast off or reconfigured – through downsizing, furloughs, outsourcing, benefits cuts, [etc.] At this point, the throne of interest has vanished and at the extreme is replaced with the throne of sacrifice.19 Singapore policy appears to implement this project of encouraging each citizen to contribute to the contemporary economy by maximising their own human capital (rather than autonomous self-interest), and to understand this maximisation as often requiring liberal-arts style creativity. Liberal arts education and creative capabilities lead to the expansion of a “creative class” that advances economic development. Yale-NUS could be seen as an important tool in the neo-liberal creativity box. We have some preliminary evidence that the College is functioning in this way for its students. When Petrus Liu, one of the authors of Liberal Arts for Asians, taught a course on “Modern Chinese film

and literature” that included a trip to an underground queer cinema festival in the Dutch embassy in Beijing, he was somewhat nonplussed to discover that the students’ interest in “creative license”, which they exercised in their final projects, was not matched by a stress on “critical independence”. It seems that “nurturing precocious and creative minds through ‘liberal arts practice’” does not as such generate critiques of global capitalism or neo-liberal subjectivity. On the contrary, the liberal arts may actively encourage the idea that global capitalism is free self-expression’s greatest support. Perhaps this leads to the conclusion that Yale-NUS students “were sold on a liberal arts education not despite New Economy discourse but because of it.” 20 In other words, they did see Yale-NUS as a site to cultivate their personal creativity, but this did not lead to criticising the technocratic or neo-liberal premises of the New Economy but to adapting to them. Is this a good resting place for my argument – that neo-liberalism has managed to extract innovative capacities from the social and cultural critique previous central to small-scale liberal arts education? III Pulling back from the Yale-NUS and Singapore contexts, I would like to ask about the roles literature and instruction in literature play in this story of neoliberal absorption of higher education. I think Liu and Lye have identified a central institutional role for literary study, in which it produces creative capabilities that fit well with normative modes of economic performance and assessment. This institutional role reflects explicit policy design and perhaps university administrative goals. And yet the texts of literature and critical theory go in quite different directions. First, critical theory long ago rejected the traditional base-superstructure model of the relation between economics and culture that saw economics determining culture and subjectivity in a fairly linear way. Second, theory also established that an entity like

PARSE Journal

“neo-liberal subjectivity” is an unstable construction that must be continuously made and remade. Third, many forms of literature, particularly the Western novel that includes ample tracts of free indirect discourse, offer what I think of as literature’s equivalent of Big Data about psychology: “subjective empiricism”, in which an individual’s consciousness is detailed on the basis of the author’s almost unlimited number of experiences, conscious and unconscious. Fourth, literature is particularly good at what Fredric Jameson termed structural causality, which includes multiple, contradictory, and indirect causes. Literary knowledge unveils internally contradictory forms of structural causality, in preference to the reduction of forces to linear causality as may occur in other disciplines. Literary knowledge helps people through all the entanglements, and so to explain to someone the economics of our weak recovery – or the Syrian civil war – you find yourself, pretty soon, speaking some kind of novel. Finally, literary knowledge of the economy will analyse and express the economy’s internal contradictions. It will unveil incommensurabilities – for example, the incommensurability between the economic demand that one adapt one’s human capital to the economy and the subjective process of forming that human capital itself. In other words, a liberal arts student may consciously seek to develop her creative capabilities to better fit with the knowledge economy, and yet have an intellectual life that does not fit this, except when coerced through direct economic pressure. A prime example is a novel about neo-liberalism in the music industry, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). It returns us to the Western version of the crisis of creativity in the contemporary economy – the Yale side of the equation, if not exactly NUS. I apologise for being unable to identify the relevant Southeast Asian literary example. This reflects the limits of my own knowledge. I do think Egan’s novel could be taught in a Singapore-based course for students interested in entering a creative

industry upon graduation. Egan’s novel analyses the experience of writers, musicians and their professional colleagues before and after neo-liberalism’s entrenchment in the 1980s. The hallmark of the music industry in this work is the failure of anyone in authority to nurture any musician, ever. There is no university-style cultivation of talent anywhere in view. Most of the main characters grow up together in San Francisco in the 1980s, after the social movement basis of the music scene has disappeared. The “real musician” in the group spends most of his adult life as a low-income outsider. The big success story from the group, named Bennie, is an agent and executive, in a state of deep confusion bordering on self-loathing, and in any case not a “creative” at all. Bennie’s brother-in-law, Jules, is a serious journalist who gets shunted into celebrity coverage as newspapers get disrupted by Internet-based new media. One day he is forced to take a 19-year old rising star named Kitty Jackson to a fancy lunch to interview her for a puff piece. After a completely empty interview, he decides to get her out of the restaurant for a walk in Central Park, one block away, in what he calls “an attempt to salvage this assignment and, in a larger sense, my once-promising, now-dwindling literary reputation.” Jules’s effort to rescue some non-commercial artistry leads to an impulsive sexual assault on Kitty Jackson, which also fails. Jules is arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned, his career and identity both permanently destroyed. At one point in prison, he describes his sexualised homicidal rage against a young woman whom he could have read as something of a fellow-victim of neo-liberalism: the celebrity order is neo-liberalism in action, requiring the maximisation of the self ’s human capital for the industry’s process of translating artistry into a quantified return on investment. But Egan goes out of her way, in a couple of violent passages, to describe the extremity of Jules’s inability to consent to doing his job in this sense. His identity is essentially annihilated in the presence of a celebrity like Kitty Jackson, in which he becomes “indistinguish-

Christopher Newfield

able (…) from every other non-Kitty Jackson” – a pure nonentity.21 Jules has killed his neo-liberal self. Egan, the author, seems to be saying that the artist can escape neo-liberalism by insuring that he will never be allowed to function as an artist again. Obviously this is a stupid solution. But Goon Squad is full of stupid solutions – attempted rape, recorded death through self-induced illness, homelessness, kleptomania, serial betrayal – which all signal determined attempts to evade neo-liberal subjectivity. Egan would seem to agree with Brown, Ong, Wee, and others on the basic parameters of neo-liberal subjectivity. She then focuses on the incommensurability between the system’s demands and a liveable self. The effect of the novel, judging from my experience of having taught it five times to undergraduates, is to assure the reader that neo-liberalism is an imposed identity. Where identity has something to do with creative aspiration, it is not an identity at all. IV And yet at this point in the history of capitalism and critical theory, incommensurability may strike most of us as an inadequate strategy. It points out that creativity and human capital are not the same, and are for most people mutually exclusive, without providing grounds for an alternative. Goon Squad does offer few characters creating their own homo non-oeconomicus. For example, Sasha, Bennie’s former kleptomaniacal executive secretary, stages a successful escape to a largely self-made world as an artist and mother in the California desert.22 Scotty, the real musician, having played in obscurity his whole life, finally gets an audience for his outsider music and is at least temporarily celebrated for his genius. But none of these solutions are particularly satisfying, and none will work outside of individual contexts. Whether intentionally or not, Jennifer Egan has written a novel about creativity without criticism. It is about creativity in a neo-liberalised culture industry, which means that the traditional demand

for continuous competition – assessed by revenues – is accompanied by a newer demand for continuous self-development without industry support. But Goon Squad’s characters never discuss the business structure or neo-liberal rules of the music industry. None of the characters has an analysis. The partial exception is Jules, and his critique is driven by the need to explain the sexual assault that ensured his self-destruction. The novel avoids putting psychological, artistic, and economic issues together. Because it does not introduce what I would call literary knowledge of economy, the novel offers two spheres in static juxtaposition: a culture industry focused on discovering (not cultivating) individual talent, and the individual miseries of the people who either do or don’t succeed. But artistic and economic issues work together as they help form the socio-political world. Splitting them in serious fiction makes as little sense now as it ever did. Although there are many reasons for this artificial bifurcation, one we shouldn’t overlook is an operational branch of neo-liberalism: the steady privatisation of higher education institutions in the US, UK, and elsewhere. Privatisation’s key premise is that a bachelor’s degree is a private good that increases individual salary, and any spillovers to society are incidental. This is factually incorrect: the non-market, indirect, and social value of higher education is somewhere between a half and two-thirds of its value, and the salary increment on which policymakers focus is the (large) tail that wags the dog, and not the dog itself.23 The private-good understanding of the university is the proximate cause of the student notion of personal creativity that Petrus Liu encountered at Yale-NUS. 21. Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. London: Random House. Kindle Edition. (2010-06-03.) 22. Cohen, Margaret. “Gothic Marxism”. In Profane Illumination. Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1993. pp. 1-16. 23. McMahon, Walter W. Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.

PARSE Journal

It is not only that Yale-NUS is an exclusive private college charging very high tuition, but also that it is a prominent new member of a global sector, higher education, whose leaders have pushed the publicgood understanding of learning to the margins. For several decades, universities have sold their value to policymakers via metrics such as number of discoveries they patent and commercialise, the size and growth rate of their fundraising programmes, the gross revenues from their research contracts, and the return on investment represented by their graduates’ adult incomes. They have lost interest in explaining the most basic feature of thought itself: very little of its added value is internalisable by the university that created it, and nearly all of it exists as “spillovers” to society as a whole. A simple example was the polio vaccine, which Jonas Salk put directly into the public domain, which allowed tens of millions of units to be administered not many months later. Selling universities as private goods for graduates (via greater human capital) and business (via licensed intellectual property) is the great mistake in university policy of the past half century.24 It naturally trains students to misrecognise their learning as an investment in marketable skills, leading to uncritical personal creativity as a function of self-advancement. V And yet, this is not where the story ends. The private good model is being unravelled by three international developments. The first appears in Singapore: the creation of Yale-NUS reflects public higher education policy rather than a business initiative. The policy makes explicit the value of Yale-NUS to Singaporean society and to the wider region. The resulting College thus enters the realm of politics as such. Though little of the government’s real thinking and strategising has seen the light of day, and though the experiment seems an elite sidelight to major national issues, the principle of Yale-NUS’s public value ushers in the potential for excavation and national debate, and new future directions for the College.

The second development involves arts and humanities instruction, where “liberal arts” are increasingly seen as “practical arts” that must be taught in immersive and interdisciplinary modes. Art and humanities students should develop their skills in a sufficiently intense or well organised university course, and also understand the industry that they want to enter: its rules, its main institutions, its current players, it past and current trends and the systems that make those trends. I have been teaching “business culture” to literature students for many years, which allows me to introduce some basics of neoclassical economics coupled with analysis of new economic conditions and their impacts on culture industries. Recently I taught the Egan novel in conjunction with Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash (2015), about the financial world’s destruction of decently-paying stable cultural jobs, Rana Foroohar’s Makers and Takers (2016), about financialisation’s war on productive enterprise, and Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (2016), about the need to transcend the terrible limits of financialisation as expressed in monopoly-oriented digital capitalism.25 The students’ final individual paper was to use these works to diagnose a central problem in a sector they wanted to enter and then to do a collaborative project to come up with a solution. The collaborative projects all involved institutional redesign. In other words, the literature students took their artistic ambitions, asked what kind of economic and political structure they required, and then offered models of structures that would work better. This meant a comic book industry freed of its current monopoly distributer, an online magazine for unpublished writers who would give and receive feedback as they are starting out, a taxation scheme to put Silicon Valley windfall profits in the service of the public arts, among others. In short, once literature students make neo-liberal economics visible to themselves, they could think coherently and interestingly about how to extract non-neoliberal institutions from their current situation.26 It

Christopher Newfield

is one step at a time, but literature students are able to take these steps. The third development returns us to the question of neo-liberalism as a formation that needs continuous reinforcement to survive. The political theorist William Davies has helpfully broken neo-liberalism down into three phases, the most recent, starting around 2008, being “Punitive neo-liberalism”. The system now seems to be operating outside of the norms of rational discourse, with the core symptom being support for policies like health-care austerity that function less as a stabilisation programme than as punishment for programme recipients. “Neoliberalism has become incredible,” Davies writes, “but that is partly because it is a system that no longer seeks credibility in the way that hegemonies used to do, through a degree of cultural or normative consensus.” Instead, he concludes, neo-liberalism increasingly operates as an exercise in sovereign power.27 I interpret this resort to sovereignty as an act of desperation. As neo-liberalism becomes increasingly unglued, it attacks its professional and artistic personnel rather than hegemonising them (with secure jobs, increased funding, and the like). Arts and humanities programmes will not be postneo-liberal until the administration of everyday education extends to collaborative control over financial and policy systems. Western higher education offers tenure-track faculty members a range of professional freedoms whose scope it

sharply restricts. The years of austerity that coincide with the transition from Davies’s “hegemonic” to “punitive” neo-liberalism have severed immediate educational practice, which carries on, from the financial management that defines its scope, quality, and effects. Yale-NUS was an interesting experiment in that it combined high liberal arts ambitions with the denial of constitutive power to its academics. More accurately, it assumed a sharp divide between two kinds of constitutive power: one the immediate curriculum for undergraduates, the other the financial and institutional systems that would define the college’s relation to society (and control its official image). This division between managerial and academic authority has been in place since the nineteenth century, in part because it has worked equally well with industrial and flexible post-industrial modes of knowledge production. But the division has no conceptual necessity, and it is not particularly efficient. In my experience, there is no natural division of competence between artistic and financial institutional issues. Teaching across it is clearly possible, meaning that one can teach financial and artistic competence at the same time to the same people. There are no guarantees about where such teaching would lead, but there are obvious pleasures in seeing the connections between specific artistic competencies and intervention in education’s political economy. We can use that pleasure as a guide in exactly these kinds of interventions. 24. Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2016. 25. Timberg, Scott. Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2016; Foroohar, Rana. Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. New York: Crown Business. 2016; Timberg, Scott. Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class. New edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2016. 26. To put this another way, the economic lesson of the course is that students will be required to engage in lifetime Bildung, but this Bildung will be collaborative and, ideally, democratic. 27. Davies, William. “The New Neoliberalism”. New Left Review. No. 101. September-October 2016. p. 134.

PARSE Journal

Abstract When considering how relations are handled in social media applications, these technologies can further alienate people as their relations become commodified, but they can also bring about the possibility of reducing alienation in certain areas by connecting multiple intersecting self-managed networks of people. This “Multitude” has led Marxist scholars to claim that the network-based creative economy can be seen as a form of communism. The purpose with this article is to explore how a process of alienation and disalienation takes place in practice, taking young artists’ online communication as a case, drawing from comprehensive sources on the internet such as blogs, web pages, networking sites and digital magazines, as well as interview data. The results shows different strategies for handling the tension between communication technologies used as tools to strengthen relations and destabilise hegemonic identities, or as a tool that commodify relations, enabling self-exploitation and user surveillance. The article contributes to critical internet studies by conceptualising Marx’s theory of alienation into a framework for describing communication practices as relational modes of production; from using communication technologies for becoming visible and accessible on an open market, to performing a trustworthy persona online, to using it for maintaining bonds with a community.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Online: Between Alienation and Belonging

Karin Hansson Karin Hansson is an artist and media researcher based in Stockholm. She currently works as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and at the Department of Computer & Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Her research focus is on participatory processes online and the social production of data. She is also interested in artistic methodologies and participatory research methods. Her current research project “Work a work”, in collaboration with artists and union activists, explores the ongoing transformation of work relations from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work is published in international

journals and at conferences such as CHI, CSCW, HICSS, ISEA, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, First Monday and Footprint, among others. She was one of the founders of the Association for Temporary Art, an experimental platform for art in Stockholm, and of the media lab CRAC – Creative Room For Computing.

PARSE Journal

Introduction Today I seldom answer my mobile with my name. I just assume the person calling knows who they are calling and I might expect that they already checked my online profile. My identity is not only something I have learned to constantly pitch, but also to manage online, disseminated on several platforms and in multiple modes of communication. My persona has become a commodity on display and something that I am constantly developing, managing, and remaking, as a work of art. For the so-called precariat, for whom work is something temporary, flexible, and unpredictable, it is important to uphold a credible, easily identified self in order not to get lost in an ever-changing market.1 Visual artists can be seen as role models for this type of identity-management, as they have been managing their identities in an unsecure job market for a long time.2 On the other hand, art and artists can also be seen as challenging the logic of capitalism, “advancing a different logic”.3 Self-management means to have the full responsibil-

1. The cultural theorist Angela McRobbie describes how it is not only artists of various types who operate in an uncertain and ever-changing labour market, or who are constantly forced to transform and express their identity to be recognided. Promoting a personal brand is central to every career in an insecure and flexible labour market, not just in the creative sector. McRobbie, Angela. “Clubs To Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds”. Cultural Studies. Vol. 16. No. 4. 2002. pp. 516–531. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380210139098; McRobbie, Angela. “Everyone Is Creative: Artists as Pioneers of the New Economy”. In Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life. Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva and Tony Bennett (eds.). Vol. 53. Durham: Sociology Press. 2004. pp. 1689-1699. 2. According to Chris Mathieu, the editor of an anthology of research on the creative industries, particular features of the art field make for distinct conditions for artistic production. First, there are no real permanent jobs, but a life-long competition in which the rules are constantly changed. Moreover, it is not a competition in an open market: instead, participation is determined by the relationships you have, and how close or far there are work opportunities in the production network of relationships. Mathieu, Chris (ed.). Careers in Creative Industries. New York: Routledge. 2012.

ity for career-making activities like promoting oneself and networking. It also means to have both an understanding of one’s own professional self and how to position it in the field. Research in art sociology shows how important it can be to balance reputation in the field of art with economic capital, and how the rules change from one field of art to another.4 The rules also change from one period to another, as the elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are produced and preserved.5 In the visual arts, the communication systems have always constrained the work of art.6 Since modernism, due to changes in how art is produced, reproduced and distributed, the artist has increasingly become the artwork and it is no longer the work of art which mainly has cult status but the artist,7 famously exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade The Bottle Rack (1914) that was turned into a piece of art without any actual modifications by the artist. Today, being an artist is not something one does, but something one is.8 It is not something that you sell like an egg, but rather a long-term investment that you milk like a cow. The art sociologist Olav Velthuis’ study of gallery owners

3. Fuchs, Christian. “Towards Marxian Internet studies”. In Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism. Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco (eds.). Leiden: Brill. 2015. p. 58. See also the discussion about the distinction between artists and workers in Beech, Dave. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Leiden: Brill. 2015. 4. Eikhof, Doris Ruth and Haunschild, Axel. “For Art’s Sake! Artistic and Economic Logics in Creative Production”. Journal of Organizational Behavior. No. 28. 2007. pp. 523-538. DOI: 10.1002/job.462; Grugulis, Irena and Stoyanova, Dimitrinka. “’I Don’t Know Where You Learn Them’: Skills in Film and TV”. In Creative Labour: Working in the Creative Industries. Alan McKinlay and Chris Smith (eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009; Randle, Keith and Culkin, Nigel. “Getting in and Getting out in Hollywood: Freelance Careers in an Uncertain Industry” in Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Olav Velthuis (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2013; Aspers, Patrik. Markets in Fashion: A Phenomenological Approach. Stockholm: City University Press. 2001; Craig, Ailsa and Dubois, Sébastien. “Between Art and Money: The Social Space of Public Readings in Contemporary Poetry Economies and Careers”. Poetics. Vol. 38. No. 5. 2010. pp. 441–460. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2010.07.003; Taylor, Stephanie and Littleton, Karen. “Art Work or Money: Conflicts in the Construction of a Creative Identity”. The Sociological Review. Vol. 56. No. 2. 2008. pp. 275-292. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2008.00788.x.

Karin Hansson

and art dealers shows how maintaining the value of the artist on a stable level becomes an important function of the actors in the art world.9 Current research on the Swedish art world also shows that social and cultural capital is more important than economic capital for the long-term survival of an artist.10 Today, this process of making and maintaining the artist’s identity is a work that takes place and is monitored online. Art critic Boris Groys suggests that the role of today’s artist therefore is that of the blogger, which together with all other actors in the arts such as gallery owners, museums and academia, is collaborating in networks of actors, producing the information that confirms that the artist is the artist.11

networks between producers and consumers of this identity production.

The idea of identity as managed or relationally performed is not new and has been thoroughly described in sociology, from Irving Goffman’s impression management, emphasising actor’s agency, to Judith Butler’s post-structural approach to identity as constrained by language and norms and developed arbitrarily.12 It is therefore interesting to look at how this production is organised and enabled through different technologies and in collaborative

From a political science perspective, when considering how relations are handled in social media applications, these technologies can further alienate people as their relations become commodified.13 On the other hand they can also bring about the possibility of reducing the alienation between producer and consumer in certain areas of production, by establishing direct links without any tangible intermediary and thus providing tools that destabilise capitalism as these relations undermine the market mechanisms.14 This relational aspect of the networkbased creative economy has led Marxist scholars such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to claim that this can be seen as a form of communism, in the way Marx defined communism in his theory of alienation.15 This “Multitude” can be described as a networked model for resistance against global capitalism, consisting of collectives of individuals working together in multiple networks rather than sharing single identities.16 On the other hand, this could also be seen as a liberal manifesto. Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello demonstrate

5. Peterson, Richard A. and Anand, Narasimhan. “The Production of Culture Perspective”. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 30. No. 1. 2004. pp. 900-907.

11. Groys, Boris. “Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive”. e-flux Journal. #45. May 2013.

6. Alexander, Victoria D. Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms. Wiley-Blackwell. 2003.

12. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books. 1959; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Kim Atkins (ed.). 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. 1999 [1990].

7. Thompson, Donald N. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark : The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses. London: Aurum, 2008; Thornton, Sarah. Seven Days in the Art World. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton. 2008; Heinich, Natalie. The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1997.

13. See for instance the discussion about communicative capitalism in Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”. Cultural Politics. Vol. 1. No. 1. 2005. pp. 51-74. DOI: 10.2752/174321905778054845.

8. Lindström, Sofia. “Constructions of Professional Subjectivity at the Fine Arts College”. Professions and Professionalism. Vol. 5. No. 2. 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7577/pp.869.

14. Stacey, Paul. “‘Wikivism’: From Communicative Capitalism to Organized Networks”. Cultural Politics: an International Journal. Vol. 4. No. 1. 2008. pp. 73-99. DOI: 10.2752/175174308X266406.

9. Velthuis, op.cit.

15. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2000.

10. Gustavsson, Martin et al. “Utbildnings- Och Kultursociologiska Studier Av Konstnärer Och Konstutbildningar I Sverige 1945-2007” [Educational and Cultural Sociological Studies of Artists and Arts Education in Sweden 19452007]. Praktiske Grunde 1. 2008.

16. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2004; Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton. 2005.

PARSE Journal

how this relational communism can just as well turn into a “new spirit of capitalism”, where the workers are commodifying their relations and self-managing their affective labour.17 Despite what management literature proclaims, creative labour is still underpaid and part of a fast growing precariat.18 The Marxist theorist Franco Berardi claims that this changing nature of labour requires a shift in our thinking about alienation.19 The divisions between the owner of the means of production and the workers remain, but because labour is increasingly mental, the concept of alienation needs to be reinterpreted.20 In industrial capitalism, the work is contained in physical objects controlled by the owner of the factory. But in the semi-capitalist economy, it is according to Berardi instead one’s ideas, one’s “soul”, which are controlled by the capitalist economy. However, in the creative collaborative data production online participants are not forced to labour and the activity can take the form of an expression of their interest and subjectivity. This self-exploitation can be seen as a weaker form of exploitation. On the other hand, the labour is thanks to market monitoring exploited twice, which is why the media theorist Mark Andrejevic claims social media practices require a new way of looking at exploitation and alienation, as it on the one hand facilitates online commons and creativity, while on the other hand the data it generates (e.g. online surveillance of user behaviour) is mined and alienated from the users.21 The concept of hegemony is also important when interpreting online communication practices, which complicates Marx’s dichotomy between objectification and subjectification; as long as human subjectivities confirm hegemonic practices, they are not autonomous.22 In line with this, the media theorist Christian Fuchs suggests that social media platforms can be seen as expressions of a liberal ideology celebrating free speech, creativity and

individuality, which is, however, mostly powerless and leading to a form of alienation that he calls “the total commodification of human creativity”.23 Obviously the changing conditions for capitalism and its transformation due to new production conditions demands new strategies from a leftist activist perspective. However, the distinction that is often being made here between body and soul, physical and mental, creates a dangerous dichotomy between different types of work and workers. Instead I argue that Marx’s theory of alienation is still useful as a way of reflecting on power and control over work, both physical and mental. We just have to be open-minded in our definition of what is considered “work”, regardless of whether this is something we do, something we desire, or something we are. In this paper I have therefore used Marx’s original theory of alienation to explore how a process of alienation and dis-alienation takes place in practice, in artists’ self-management online. I build on my previous research of art students’ communication practices, where I studied young artists’ identity management at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.24 In this article I go deeper into these interviews and online material, revisiting the cases, exploring some examples of how artists are using different platforms online to manage their work, balancing the need to maintain a broad network of people with the need to control their work.

Theory, Methods and Data Marx formulated his theories in a society that was changing rapidly due to an unregulated industrial capitalism that was able to control and exploit labour in a wholly new way. The difference between the class of industrial owners with political and economic power and the class of workers without political rights was enormous compared to preindustrial work relations. Marx argued that this industrial capitalism created alienation: between

Karin Hansson

the producer and the consumer, between the producer and the product of the work, and between producers.25 According to Marx, this capitalist society, with its division of classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat, stands in contrast to his ideal communist society. To Marx a “communist society” is a society in which everyone is linked in a mutual interdependency with others and nature, self-actualisation is the driving force, and production is a mutual exchange that strengthens individuals.26 Expressing themselves through their work strengthens the producers’ identities, and the product is an expression of their subject position, and thus communicates their power and range. When this self-expression is put into use, and used by others, the producer also gets the satisfaction of seeing their products in use as a response to human needs. But what happens if this self is expressed online, and the self-expression is disseminated in a broad network of friends of friends, or consumed by an anonymous public? To formulate it in Marx’s terms: if the product that is produced is the presentation of self, how can this production alienate the producer (the self) from the work (the self-presentation), or how can it strengthen the relation between the self and the self-presentation?

17. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. 2005. 18. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural Employment”. In Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the “Creative Industries”. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, and Ulf Wuggenig (eds.). London: MayFlyBooks. 2011. 19. Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 2009. 20. Ibid. 21. Andrejevic, Mark B. “Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy”. Surveillance & Society. No. 8. 2011. pp. 278-287. 22. Nygren, Katarina Giritli and Gidlund, Katarina L. “The Pastoral Power of Technology: Rethinking alienation in digital culture”. Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, 2015. pp. 396-412. DOI: 0.1163/9789004291393_013.

To answer these questions I have been exploring artists’ self-expression online, focusing on relations between different actors such as “the artist”, “the artwork”, and “the art consumer”, and how the different tools and practices online might support or hinder these relations. “Art” in this context is, following an institutional perspective on art, something defined and developed collaboratively by all the institutions in the arts from art consumers, to critics, to artists. In my ethnographic study that took place at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 2009 to 2013, consisting of content analysis, participant observations and interviews, I have looked at how 50 young artists and art students at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm communicate through speech acts, clothing and online style. The focus is not so much on the singular artefact or practice, rather on how artefacts and practices are used, organised, and understood in a larger context. I not only look at how these communication acts are used, but also at their symbolic meaning when expressing identity.27 The art school gathers students from a large diversity of backgrounds, and they all try to make sense of the field, but also change it to make place for their own perspective. The Royal Institute of Art

23. Fuchs, Christian. “Class, Knowledge and New Media”. Media Culture and Society. Vol. 32. No. 1. 2010. pp.141-150. p. 149. DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350375. 24. Hansson, Karin. “Controlling Singularity: The Role of Online Communication for Young Visual Artists’ Identity Management”. First Monday. Vol. 20. No. 5. 2015. DOI:10.5210/fm.v20i5.5626. 25. Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Programme”. Marxist.org used Marx/ Engels Selected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970) as a source, first published/abridged in Die Neue Zeit. Vol. 1, No. 18. 1890-1891. URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ (Accessed 2015-12-24.) 26. Marx, Karl. “Comments on James Mill”. N.p., 1844. URL: http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/ (Accessed 2015-08-20.) 27. For a more thorough description of methodology see Hansson, Karen. Accommodating differences: Power, belonging, and representation online. PhD thesis Stockholm: Stockholm University. 2015.

PARSE Journal

is also one of the most prestigious art schools in Sweden: most students here have studied at several art schools before, and some of them are already established or upcoming artists. The school accepts about 25 students each year, and the pool of students is usually around 25 years of age, with slightly more women than men. I have chosen to study two groups, first-year and fifth-year students, in order to obtain a variation in age and at the same time an opportunity to make comparisons between students who have just entered the school and those who have completed four years. This material has then been the starting point for the 12 additional semistructured 40-minute interviews that are the focus in this article.

Result To explore how the art students handle the tension between social media as a way to establish direct relations, and as a way to further alienate, I have in the interviews focused on how they look at the idea of communicating their professional self online, and how they use different tools in this process of self-management and the specific tools and practices in use, to reflect on how these in general can be seen as supporting or hindering relations. By using Marx’s definitions of alienation as a framework to interpret the interview material I have conceptualised three distinct but often parallel ideologies in the material, or what I prefer to call modes of production as they represent different ways of looking at the production of art and artists. I call these production modes Competing, Performing, and Belonging. In the following I present these modes of production using examples from the interviews.

Competing Visual art is interesting as it attracts both art lovers and financial investors, and this tension between humanistic value and economic value gives the

visual arts a special energy. But to navigate this social sphere can be very confusing. The younger students especially found it difficult to understand the rules of the game, and the majority of younger students also generally believed that the system was not very fair. This is just what I think. [laughs] I think it is very much about contacts and suchlike, and I don’t really like it and so. But I think it is like that. [Why don’t you like it then?] I actually think that it should be so that good things find their own path in some way, and that they become picked up and presented and go further as well. But I don’t really believe that it is so. But the fact is that when someone talks with the right people and someone has the right contacts, it is their art that is seen. (Ella, first-year student) This quote can be seen as expression of a liberal ideology, an idea that everyone should be treated equally, and that it should be what one achieves that counts, not who you know or who you are. The artwork is seen as something that can be alienated from oneself and that can be judged objectively. That means that you can compete to see who is best, and then be compared on an easily accessible market where the rules are transparent. There is also an idea that you should not have to “sell” your art yourself, but that this should be done by someone else. There is a clear division between the artist, the artwork, and the consumer. Though the work of art is an expression of oneself, it is also something that can be separated and sold. The artist is seen almost as a passive object, an oracle, a prisoner in her own creative anxiety, almost reluctantly producing artwork that she can neither speak for nor take responsibility for. Ideally, the artist should have a gallery that takes care of all contacts with potential buyers and that can package and make the art accessible in a market. Thus alienation between the artist and the work of art is seen as something desirable. Even though

Karin Hansson

many of the students have their own websites that they themselves designed, it looks as if they were made by someone else, as if it is an art gallery’s sparsely designed website, and the texts that are posted are usually not written in the first person but in the third person, as if it were someone other than the artist who made the presentation. The artist is usually presented as an individual outside any collective context. Especially the younger students, who had just entered the school through fierce competition, used this mode of discourse. At the school, they were met by a contradictory discourse, in which being an artist is about creating context and networking, and that can be seen as conflicting with the idea of competing with other artists and let others sell the artworks. Here they talk a lot about networking, it’s like it is missing out on the work itself. There is much talk about the network, network. It’s like an extra job, and I do not know if it is always what is best. I’d rather be noticed for doing good stuff than because I’m a good networker. (Lilly, first-year student) Several students talked about the difficulty of finding information about artists they were really interested in. The following example refers to an older artist, which may be one reason that there is not much information digitally, but artists from the generation that grew up with the Internet are also fastidious about what they publish online. Art should preferably be communicated through means other than through one’s own website. Yes, right now I have trouble finding pictures of an artist, which makes me feel very frustrated. And then it’s like this: where is his website and where can I see all of his stuff? He is not like this very established artist and he is not Swedish. I keep on chasing, picking up traces that could lead me to more pictures. Then I feel that it is an incredible job. Of course it requires a huge interest in a person in order to make such a survey of his stuff. (Lilly, first-year student)

Although students complained about the lack of communication by others, they themselves communicate very reluctantly, and primarily showed interest in finding others who are just like them, or important to them, rather than reaching a wide audience. The idea of themselves publishing their art online for anyone to see was rather seen as something negative, a kind of failure. This form of evil, but necessary commercialisation of art should preferably be handled by someone else, for example a gallery owner. If the goal with their work would be to make money they should have invested in a different profession. The teacher at the school in Germany was very clear about it, that you did not win the war by sitting at home, and that it was pretty important to get out and meet people. One thing leads to another, and then you will get to exhibit and so, it’s nice of course. But I would not [...], If I would have pictures or anything that I want to show, and I do not land on a gallery where I want to be on, then I guess I print a book or something. Then probably that personal webpage would come quickly. [laugh] (Lars, first-year student) Thus, broad promotion and popularisation, what many of the artists and art students call “commercialisation”, for example through a publicly available selfpublished website, is seen as a sign of lack of relationships, that the artist has failed to establish reciprocal relationships with the right people. This approach, that the artist sells her art online to a potentially broad market, most frequently occurred as a negative description of the artists, and can with Marxist terminology be described as if art producers and art consumers are alienated. The artist is also alienated from their work, which can be sold on a market as a commodity regardless of the artist. The artist is also an object, alienated from her self as she does not really take responsibility for her own expression, but leaves the actual knowledge-making and contextualising of the work to others, at least officially, while in reality this is often orchestrated by the artist. The artist

PARSE Journal

is also alienated from other artists in that they are competing instead of cooperating.

Performing An art school is an interesting place to study artists’ identity building as it brings together, and is divided by, several conflicting ideas of what art can be, and it is a place that is both about developing artists and defining what an artist actually is. In the students’ practices and interviews, the performative aspects of the arts were very dominant: how the artist is enacted in different situations and the collaborative “making” of the art. This is not surprising as an art school is foremost about becoming an artist, and to understand what an artist is and how to perform a trustworthy one. Here is one student’s description of what you do to become known as an artist: This is the way you market yourself: going to an art school; making art exhibitions in general; exposing yourself in an art world, that is pretty much the best ways. [Pause] Therefore, if you are exposed to the art world, you show that you are at home in the art world. Though perhaps not everyone will accept you, your name will be associated with the art world, and then you are positioned in the art world, and then you will be known in the art world, and then you’re there. (Anders, fifth-year student) This quote exemplifies one of the ideologies in the interview material. In this perspective to manage an artistic identity is about mimicking other artists’ behaviour. The self becomes a mirror of what the self desires: to become part of a larger community of artists by performing as if you are part of this community. However, it sounds easier than it might be. Understanding and mastering what is needed is not always easy, not everyone can perform the artist. For example, it is difficult to be accepted at the Royal Institute of Art, and they might need to show a certain craftsmanship or competence.

The question is also what this action of “to be exposed in an art world” actually entails. Especially online it is difficult to understand where different art worlds begin and end, as there are no physical boundaries to the art worlds online, as it is when you walk into a gallery or go to a concert, for example. Instead there are very subtle signs that signal that the art is real art, and not an unintentional mistake. The signs can be how the photo is taken and the typeface and colour of the page. It can be in the way the art is described, or where it is described, or who it is that describes it. It is like a dialect that signals a belonging to a certain interest. This aesthetic online thus becomes a tool that performs an identity-position. Not having a website and not using more popular social media tools like Facebook was also considered a symbolic capital. This kind of instrumentalisation of relations was seen as something opposed to the values an artist should maintain, and if you used social media it was something you used sparsely (or at least they said so). Even though many admitted a website could be useful, it was something they did not feel pressure to acquire, at least not from their teachers: There’s some who do not think that one should have websites, some older, but they think that it is enough with a portfolio and so. Some people here at the school and all that, I think, teachers and so. It was well he [name] who are here at the school now. […] I do not think he has a website, but perhaps he has, but he did not think we needed it. (Annelie, fifth-year student) However, despite what older artist thought about it, most of the students believed a web presence was necessary, at least to start with. One first-year student admitted that this was what she planned to do, but reluctantly, as she had no need to show herself to a mass audience. Her strategy was instead to turn this project of maintaining an artist persona into an artwork as a performance. In this way she could get recognition as an artist on a larger commercial art scene, while exploring this identity-

Karin Hansson

position as a research project and thus creating a distance to the role. To use the theory of alienation to interpret this mode of identity production: the relation between the producer of this artwork and the consumer is established by repetition. If the artist repeats what previous artists have done, they will become artists. The product can be seen as an ideal of how art is performed, and the artist’s work is to interpret and contribute to this ideal. The artist can be seen as an instrument that expresses this ideal, and recognises others with shared beliefs. The artwork is a way to contact consumers who share this belief. Most importantly, this is not for everyone, the audience is not a mass of people, but a specific group that believes in the same thing: the art.

Belonging In this group of like-minded believers in art there are also differences, and not least power differences. For your own survival’s sake, you have to connect with the right “friends”. It is also about getting enough space and a position in a context that you feel you belong to. Aesthetics is about recognition and esteem: it shows that you don’t want to be treated as just anyone but acknowledged for being a certain being with a certain knowledge. One student, active on an alternative music scene and with a strong online presence, used his art as a way to find other people like himself, rather than trying to communicate the art broadly or to the established art scene: It can [instead] be alternative art scenes on which many are, or it is just many others who like a special form of expression. Since it is a question about the boundaries of what is artistic and what is something else, it could be very unclear. (Bo, fifth-year student) This student often used an alias. For this artist the work was a means to be recognised by others with

similar interests, rather than something he wanted to distribute broadly. The internet functioned as a tool to find “his” group, a public that could be globally distributed, and as a way to create a personal art world rather than to establish relations with actors on the more established art scenes. In practice, when he communicated about an art event, for instance, he mainly used Facebook or email to contact people he already knew. He also looked at the school as an important way to connect. [Do you go to art exhibitions and art openings?] Randomly. You get so much of it anyway when you go here. And it is such a closed world also, at least the Stockholm art world. Actually, I may not meet as many still who are older and so, but in the younger generation, those who go to art schools and so, where everyone meets everyone at parties and such. There is always someone who has studied with someone earlier on at some preparatory school and so, so it’s a very small world. (Bo, fifth-year student) The art world that dominated the school may therefore also be seen as an alternative art world, separated from wider popular culture and alive in art contexts such as art schools. The internet can be used to find alternative art worlds or contexts to one’s own local context, an opportunity to find other like-minded people. One of the students was very much involved in a musical genre that was not particularly big in Stockholm, but through the internet it was still possible to find others with a similar taste in music. Another student was active in a narrow but internationally fairly large performance area, and another was partially active in modern dance as a set designer. They had increased their opportunity to be in multiple parallel rooms, with different discourses and ideas about art, through the internet. Therefore, they might have been less stressed about the demands of performing correctly according to the dominant norm and about art as something sold at a market through an art gallery, as they also had identities in other contexts.

PARSE Journal

I think it is much about the [Internet] culture that I grew up with. The fact that what I mostly listen to are smaller bands. I don’t think they earn any big money, but they still keep on with their thing. It is above all about trying to find your own niche. It is perhaps something the Internet has helped with too. Finding others who are doing similar things as you. (Bo, fifth-year student) This artist’s position was something he could identify with and which he saw as a way to keep up with art as an alternative to “succeeding” commercially or establish himself in a prestigious gallery. This student did not feel quite at home in the art scene that was the most prominent in the school; circulating around some Stockholm galleries with international connections and a global art scene manifested in events like Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Not surprisingly, it was the students who had the best family ties to the art world who also felt that they belonged there, and they also had the best relationships and the most realistic approach. These children of culture workers or artists were certain about their place and that everything probably would work out. Money was no problem. They had seen their parents and their friends get along despite uncertain conditions, without money, and saw this as a possible lifestyle. Although money clearly made things easier when they were travelling, for example, it was not the main thing. The main thing was to connect with people with similar beliefs who could help if needed. Yes, but as you, yeah, look [at art exhibitions when travelling], that is also where you make friends. Although I’m pretty bad at keeping in contact with people as I am not involved in those forums or great at writing emails, but I think if I, for example, would land in New York, I would have someone I could contact, and it’s the same thing in Berlin and in different parts of Germany. (Anders, fifth-year student) If you only have a network, things will work out. There are a number of students who testify about

how the study trips and exchange with other art schools abroad they had made during their school years had been important. Important partly for establishing international networks and to see art, but perhaps primarily because this enabled them to get to know the professors and other students better. To hang with the older artists, colleagues and artists from other countries, is an important way to transfer and develop ideas about art, and not least a way to transfer how to be in different kinds of situations. It can be about going to see an exhibition, to hang on at an art opening, or in a bar, or simply just to have breakfast. Important information is conveyed in this type of informal settings. These more interesting events were primarily advertised in exclusive circles. One of the fifth-year students I interviewed was almost invisible online, and represented the fifth generation of artists in his family. He was of the opinion that he should mainly devote himself to finding out what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say this, and that art was a means to finding one’s own voice. So the art was a means to self-fulfilment, not a goal in itself. To possibly reach out with this art was no problem if he had something to say. There is no conscious strategy... I do not mean that I think it is not nice to promote oneself, it’s just pointless. When I know what the fuck I want, I will not have any trouble getting people to see it. [How does one do then, when you know what you want?] It feels like it’s going to be pretty obvious when you face the problem and have done something you think is really important, but no one is looking. I have no idea. (Anders, fifth-year student) From the outside, this statement sounds very bold and a bit ignorant. After five years of college education you might expect the students to have a more thought-out plan for how to make a living. But in reality the student knew exactly how to

Karin Hansson

communicate his art and manage his self. Six years after this interview, he was well established on the international art scene. But still without his own website. This student, like many others, avoided communicating their persona clearly in a public place, although he used social media, but like other art students this was done reluctantly. Facebook was not something you wanted to be associated with. However, these types of tools were useful even considering the drawbacks. Networking tools online gave the student a simple way to keep track of relationships with people he might not be meeting regularly, and who were in other places. But he used it mainly as a way to facilitate face-to-face meetings. Thus, to use the theory of alienation to interpret this process of self-management; there is a direct relation between the producer of this work and the consumer: if the artists have good relations with other players in the art world they will be able to be artists. The product can be seen as a voice, a clear vision or agenda. The producer can be seen as a subject with agency, someone who expresses her self, and belongs to a community.

Three Intersecting Modes of Production What was valued by the students foremost was the creation of stronger relationships but also to get recognition, or at least a reputation. Students also expressed a wish to be able to compete in a market of artists, even though they were ambivalent about this and really didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe such a free market existed. I divided these differences in three different modes of production: The first mode is Competing: in this mode the art producer and the art consumer are separated, there are no bonds, and everyone is equal. Instead of producing something for another person, the artist produces for money, alienated from others and competing with other artists on a market. The artist

is also alienated from her own work, as she does not take responsibility for her own work but depends on others to do the contextualisation and communication of the work, as well as the capitalisation. In this production mode the technology is mainly used to make the artist and the art visible and accessible in the market, however, ideally someone else does this. The artist only provides the raw material. The second mode is Performing. The relation between the producer and the consumer is established by repetition. If the artists perform like previous artists they will be recognised as artists. The work can be seen as an ideal image of art, and the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is to interpret and contribute to this ideal. The artist is an instrument that expresses this ideal and recognises other actors with shared beliefs. Here the technology is used as a fashion, and as a way to perform an artist persona online, expressed in the right style. The third mode of production is Belonging. In this mode recognition between the artist and the art consumer is important, to connect with people that you recognise and that also give you esteem, and to get involved in a dialogue with others in a public sphere. The artwork is a way to establish a voice in this alternative public, to be a subject with agency and autonomy who knows how to express her self and to bond with her community. The communication technology is used to maintain the bonds with one or several communities, as an address list, or as a shared file library. As the interview samples shows, these contradictory modes of production sometimes intersect, creating confusions and tensions but also strategies to balance the roles. For instance, the need to perform a trustworthy persona online could become a piece of art, recognised and acknowledged by other artists, as a way to hide behind a mask while at the same time functioning as a valid artist brand in the commercial art market.

PARSE Journal

Conclusion and Discussion Marx formulated his theory in an era of great social changes due to new production and communication methods. Today we live in a hyper-capitalist era, and most of us are largely alienated from the globally dispersed people who work together to produce the material basis we take for granted. I rarely have contact with any of the people who produce what I need on a daily basis; from the components of the building I live in, to the clothes I wear, to the food I eat – and they have no contact with me. Allegedly, products such as visual artworks are different from ordinary products as the artwork is an artwork just because it is linked to a person, unlike most consumer products. This may be a person I esteem, and that I perhaps even know, who recognises me and what I stand for. It can be a drawing from my child directly to me. Alternatively, it can be a reproduction of a painting by Miró. They are both manifestations of my subjectivity and the relationships I have or want to have. Just as these works are an expression of a specific person, they reflect me and show in this way that I too am a special person. To formulate this with the help of Marx’s theory of alienation; in the ideal art world, the mode of production will strengthen relations: • The relationships between the producer and the consumer. Instead of producing works for money, you produce for another human and a direct relation to another person is developed. • The relationship between the producer and the product of the work. As the work is an expression for and by the producer, the producer has total control over her own work and can feel proud of this work. • The relationship with the self. When production is mainly about expressing oneself and creating one’s own community of followers, the producer is no longer a stranger to herself. • Relationships between producers. By not

competing for a salary, but working together for the common network that everyone depends on, relationships are strengthened. In this perspective no one can own anyone else’s work, or even their own work, as their own subject is dependent on all the others, and cannot therefore exist outside of this relationship. But in practice the artist exists within a capitalist system (where communicating “belonging” is how brands operate), far from the communist utopia of self-realisation and interdependency. Art exists in the paradox between these two principles, the market’s objective and the relational and subjective, alienation and relation, competing and belonging. The result of the content analysis and interviews shows how the students handle this paradox in different ways, and the role information and communication technologies play in this. In order to manage their relationships with others in the art world, such as colleagues, gallery owners and audiences, they feel a need to have control over who they communicate with, which they do not have if they are easily accessible, as they then will be vulnerable to eventual “stalkers”, ignorant criticism, surveillance, or that people simply do not understand. When managing their self online, it is important to control that their self-expression isn’t consumed by an anonymous public, but is directed exclusively to known friends. They therefore use the technology mainly to communicate with those they already know, and that they have encountered in art context as art openings, while travelling, and at art schools. People they therefore already have confidence in. Perhaps most importantly, the relationship should be reciprocal. The technology can help to facilitate maintaining this relationship and destabilise capitalism by avoiding an anonymous market, and serve as a portfolio where people who already know them can get to know them better.28 They use social media reluctantly, well aware of the potential surveillance that Andrejevic sees as a new form alienation, as this data is controlled by someone else.29

Karin Hansson

Communication technology can also strengthen the relation between the self and self-communication, (the worker and the result of the work), when the communication becomes more mediated and thus more clearly a piece of art. Just as the artist’s clothing style (or lack of style) at an art opening is a manifestation of a belonging to certain values, his or her online presence is carefully designed to adhere to the world of fine art. In a way this can, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, be seen as a way to commodify relations, as they turn their persona into an artwork in the public realm, becoming targets for others’ projected belonging.30 This persona also needs to conform to a hegemonic artist ideal to be recognised easily in a globalised context. Most students were reluctant to having a public web presence and preferred technologies that supported mutual relations rather than mass communication to a broad audience. This is similar to Velthuis’ study of art dealers, where maintaining long-term relations and a stable value was more important than instant economic success.31 However, the technology is used not only to maintain the art world, but also to find new art worlds that acknowledge students’ self-expression if they feel alienated in the dominating art world. In this way they strengthen their own voice by getting it confirmed by others with similar expressions. This practice can be described as a networked model for resistance against a powerful global art world, supporting what Paolo Virno, and Hardt & Negri call the Multitude, consisting of multiple intersecting collectives of individuals working together in networks based on mutual relations.32 To express this in Marx’s terminology: by getting their own expression confirmed by others, they receive a direct confirmation that they are human, that is, that through expressing their particular voice, their singularity, they become part of a larger group. In Marx’s words: 28. Stacey, op. cit.

31. Velthuis, op. cit.

29. Andrejevic, op. cit.

32. Virno, op cit.; Hardt and Negri, op. cit.

30. Boltanski and Chiapello, op. cit.

In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.33 This communist utopia might lack different classes, but difference between people in terms of belongings is a central feature of this “multitude”. This way of lumping together individuals, in collectives based on their interest rather than location, age or economy, like in a guild system, is something that nowadays is made possible on a global scale. Previous research on the Swedish art context has also pointed to how being an artist is something that is inherited, just like a guild, from one generation to the next.34 Students’ motivation to use the technology and their communication strategies also corresponded with these findings. Students from families of culture workers and artists foremost relied on face-to-face meetings and personal encounters. Students without established contacts in the arts took a public online presence more serious, hoping that their work would speak for itself in an open market. However, between these different modes of production, of on the one hand competition in a market, and on the other hand reproducing a role that is inherited, there were students whose motivation to communicate online provided the possibility to simultaneously connect to several contexts. The ability to easily move from one context to the other, with different sets of rules and aesthetics, might undermine and displace rules and social norms, and thus enable a multitude that is not reduced to a single collective or hegemonic identity position.35 Or maybe this is just a new factory, enslaving our souls in a production of multiple belongings. The control over the technology, the capital that enables the multitude, is still situated somewhere else. 33. Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow. 1959.

34. Gustavsson, op. cit. 35. Hardt and Negri, op. cit.

PARSE Journal

Abstract The Mill is a community initiative that emerged from a campaign to save a local library closed without public consultation, in the London borough of Waltham Forest. After four years of campaigning and pushed by the local authority’s decision to sell the building, the community group shifted their focus to keeping it in public hands. A good dose of determination kept the group going, and the coincidental alignment of events and skilled people allowed them to take over the building to provide space and resources for local people to come together and organise interest groups, events and activities in a friendly environment. The events took place between 2007 and 2011, during the global financial crisis, the subsequent change of government in the UK and the country’s deficit reduction programme. Thus, The Mill is an extraordinary example that delineates the connection between the withdrawal of public funding for culture, and the emergence of private/collective initiatives that attempt to fill in cultural demands locally. These initiatives are led mostly by volunteers, and were briefly collectively called the “Big Society”. In this paper, I consider the relationship between community forms of management and austerity policies, exploring how such policies influence the emerging forms of community management.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Save our Library!â&#x20AC;?: Social Action, Austerity and The Big Society

Carla Cruz Carla Cruz is a London-based artist and independent researcher. She has a PhD in art practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her ongoing research experiments with forms of collectivity, the erasure of authorship and practices that take place outside and in defiance of the mainstream art system. Recently, Carla was an artist in residency at Gasworks/Open School East London with the artist Antonio Contador, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where they developed Finding Money, London and Paris Diary. She was awarded

an AHRC Cultural Engagement grant as Research Associate for Goldsmiths Art Department, based at the community centre The Mill, of which she is currently a Trustee. Carla is a member of Tottenham Hale International Studios, an artist-run organisation that provides affordable working spaces for artists, where she co-organises the outreach programme. She is currently developing the project Finding Money, The Wish with Antonio Contador at Lindre-Basse, France.

PARSE Journal

that emerged from a campaign to save a local library that was closed without public consultation, in the London borough of Waltham Forest. After four years of campaigning and pushed by the local authority’s decision to sell the building, the community group shifted its focus to keeping it in public hands. A good dose of determination kept the group going, and the coincidental alignment of events and skilled people allowed them to take over the building to provide space and resources for local people to come together and organise interest groups, events and activities in a friendly environment. he Mill is a community initiative

The events took place between 2007 and 2011, during the global financial crisis, the subsequent change of Government in the UK and the country’s deficit reduction programme.1 Thus, The Mill is an extraordinary example that delineates the connection between the withdrawal of public funding for culture, and the emergence of private/collective initiatives that attempt to respond to cultural demands locally. These initiatives are led mostly by volunteers, and were briefly collectively called the “Big Society” by the UK’s then Prime Minister David Cameron. That is, “a society where people come together to solve problems and improve life for themselves and their communities”.2 The Big Society slogan has come and gone, but the effect of its rhetoric and accompanying cuts to public spending are alive and well in the form of social capital and the individuals’ “responsibility, in which ‘people’ take ownership of tasks that they might previously have assumed to be the responsibility of government.” 3 In this paper, I consider the relationship between community forms of management and austerity policies, exploring how such policies influence the emerging forms of community management. Moreover, what are the consequences of stepping in to fill in the State’s responsibilities? Is The Mill generating something altogether different from what became known as the Big Society? Can this case be a model for public cultural organisations post-public funding?

April Fool’s Day On the first of April 2007, London Waltham Forest Council’s St James Street Library closed down. For a week its users kept returning books by pushing them through the letterbox, but soon they realised this wasn’t a short-term closure for refurbishment, as many initially believed. On the contrary, the closure was part of the local council’s continuing money-saving plan.4 Since 2004-05 the Labour Government implemented an efficiency programme to reduce public spending, named in the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review as the Value for Money Savings Programme.5 The concealed decision infuriated local resident Phaik Tan, who initiated the Save St James Street Library campaign. I started Save St James Street Library Campaign because I wanted to save a beloved 30-year-old library and to rectify an injustice. Phaik Tan 6 Tan casually met her local councillor and got to know that the library had been closed for good and without any popular opposition. “How can locals raise their objections when they were not aware of the closure in the first place?” 7 Going around her neighbourhood, Tan quickly raised 200 signatures for a petition against the closure of the library. A group of local people with very specific skills joined Tan, including journalists, activists, IT specialists etc. Having scheduled a photo shoot with the local newspaper, the Waltham Forest Guardian, the group distributed posters in the vicinity of the closed library to get people to gather outside the building on the photo shoot day holding banners and placards.8 It was a tricky campaign because the library was already closed. […] The books were here, everything was here, it was just shut. Siobhan Hawthorne 9 Soon after, the Blackhorse Action Group and the Keep Our Museums Open campaign joined forces

Carla Cruz

1. See https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/2010to-2015-government-policy-deficit-reduction/2010-to-2015-government-policy-deficit-reduction (Accessed 2016-09-28.) 2. The Conservative Party’s 2010 General Election Manifesto, in Slocock, Caroline. The Big Society Audit 2012. London: Civil Exchange. 2013, p. 23. 3. Rowson, Jonathan et al. Beyond the Big Society: psychological foundations of active citizenship. London: RSA. 2012, p. 20. 4. Waltham Forest Council was run by a coalition between Labour and Liberal Democrats between 2006 and 2010.

“Save St James Street Library Campaign”, 2007. Courtesy of The Mill.

in demonstrations and protest actions to save St James Street Library.10 At the beginning Waltham Forest Council rejected claims that locals had not been consulted. That turned out to be incorrect. Cabinet member for Leisure, Arts and Culture, councillor Geraldine Reardon, later apologised for the lack of consultation and “admitted there had been ‘virtually no consultation’ on the closure” of the library. 11 This was a tiny library, what it did have was a great children’s section, and a meeting space that lots of community groups used, and it was also, as we uncovered much later in the campaign, used by a lot of children to do their homework. Siobhan Hawthorne 12

5. “During the 2004-05 to 2007-08 Spending Review period an efficiency programme across government achieved £21.5 billion of annual efficiency gains, reduced the civil service by 70,600 posts and reallocated 13,500 posts to the front line of public services.” The Comprehensive Spending Review Value for Money Savings Programme, covering 2008-09 to 2010-11, follows this line designed to improve the efficiency of government operations, where departments were required to commit to save 3% of their spending. See Comptroller and auditor-general. Independent review of reported CSR07 value for money savings. London: The Stationery Office. (2010-07-20.) 6. Tan, Phaik, Save St James Street Library campaign initiator. E-mail interview. (2016-03-18.) 7. Ibid. 8. For original photo see Cosgrove, Sarah. “Residents campaign for re-opening of St James’s Street Library. Waltham Forest Guardian. 2007-05-30. http://www. guardian-series.co.uk/news/1435391. Residents_campaign_for_re_opening_of_St_James___s_Street_Library/ (Accessed 2016-04-12.) 9. Hawthorne, Siobhan. Save St James Street Library campaign

initiator. Interview at The Mill (2016-04-27.) 10. The Blackhorse Action Group is a residents association constituted in 2006 that has been primarily set up to oppose a project for building residential tower blocks on what is now the Willowfield School site by Black Horse road. The group mobilised community opposition to this project and since then its role is to work with local groups to encourage and support them by making videos, helping with their campaigns, and featuring them in BAG’s website. Meads, Neil. Blackhorse Action Group member. Interview. (2016-07-03.) See http://www.blackhorseactiongroup.org.uk/ (Accessed 2016-04-10.) Keep Our Museums Open was a campaign set up by local residents to prevent the cutting of the opening hours in half and reducing the staff of the William Morris Gallery and the Vestry House Museum, and later to prevent council plans to sell William Morris collection and the transformation of the Gallery premises into a function space for hire. Gallaccio, Mo. Save St James Street Library campaign member and leader of Art Works. Interview at The Mill. (201604-27.) See http://www.antiscrap. co.uk/ (Accessed 2016-04-10.) 11. Cosgrove, Sarah and Crown, Hannah. “Apology over library debate”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2007-07-19.) 12. Hawthorne, op.cit.

PARSE Journal

Cllr Reardon justified to the papers that of the borough’s eleven libraries, “St James Street was the least used and with very low visitor numbers and very low levels of borrowing”, 13 and told the campaigners that continued service would have required capital investment to improve the building and to ensure Disability Discrimination Act compliance. Moreover, £3.5 million had been invested in nearby Walthamstow Library, and “the Council required the service to contribute to policy review savings for 2007/08.” 14 I have been a resident of Walthamstow for 35 years and I have six children who have been and are using the library. […] We will not stop campaigning until the library is re-opened. Mazhar Iqbal 15 In 2006 the Cabinet agreed on a range of saving, and the closure of St James Street Library was one of them. Value for money was reaffirmed at that meeting, cuts were necessary, and the council “aimed to make cuts where they would have the least impact on the Service overall.” 16 In the meantime, the council was answering accusations from the public of incinerating 250,000 books from all libraries, but mainly from the newly refurbished central library.17 “SWAP SHOP: Library campaigners get ready for the new open air library”, 23 January 2008. Photograph by Roy Tillett, Yellow Advertiser. Courtesy of The Mill.

There was a bit of a view that people don’t need libraries anymore. […] the sort of things that were said to us about the library [by the council, was] that people don’t need libraries, they have Google. Siobhan Hawthorne 18 By holding several community meetings, urging people to sign the petition and to write to their local councillor showing their disapproval, the campaign started to gain traction. In November 2007, the group announced a big public meeting and invited Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen to discuss the future of the borough’s libraries.19 I think about 200 people came to that meeting. We began to gather quite a lot of local support […] and to expose the council and how they were operating at the time. Siobhan Hawthorne 20 The second campaign year started with an open-air library to mark the National Year of Reading, and since then the campaigners held a book swap in front of the old library building once a month over a period of three years. “Waltham Forest’s literacy rate is dropping, and the government is trying to increase reading outside school” said the campaigners, urging the council to acknowledge the value of libraries.21 We were into public services provided by the council. We wanted people to have jobs, and a group of volunteers can’t take over a library. That is the council’s responsibility. Siobhan Hawthorne 22 Local councillors offered the campaigners the opportunity to run the library voluntarily. They refused. The council then started a consultation into the future of Library Provision in the St James Street Area. 23 This in itself was seen as one of the successes of the campaign: that the council “had to acknowledge that they hadn’t followed process in terms of consulting the population.” 24 Around 2009, the building was falling into disrepair, and

Carla Cruz

the concerned campaigners planned to occupy it. However, suddenly an anti-squat company, AD HOC Property Protection, was hired by the council to take over the building with a live-in security scheme. Soon after, news circulated that the council was giving the building to Waltham Forest Primary Care Trust to re-open as a drug rehabilitation centre.25 The news gave a new boost of energy to the campaigners. Backed by citizens enraged at the plan of having Class A drug users at their doorstep, and supported by the local ward Liberal Democrat councillor James O’Rourke, the campaigners once again reclaimed community usage for the building.26 Shortly after the plan was shelved “the council decided to withdraw funding following pressure from residents.” 27 Following this loss, the council decided to sell the building, “effectively ending the hopes of campaigners who want[ed] the building re-opened as a library or other community facility.” 28 Then the nature of the campaign changed, it wasn’t any more about getting the library back but about saving the building, keeping it as a community building. Mo Gallaccio 29 At that moment, the campaigners knew they’d lost the library, and the fight was now to keep it as a community space. The auction of the building galvanised the local community, and “different people, with a different set of skills and interests came in.” 30 At the time, Labour and the Liberal Democrats – the latter in fact chaired the meeting that decided on the closure of the library – disagreed about the future of the building, with the Lib Dems supporting the campaigners’ cause. The popularity of the campaign, together with the nearing of the general and local elections of May 2010, forced all parties to position themselves regarding the future of the building. Labour council leader Cllr Robbins attempted to appease the campaigners by saying that “[n]o council property I’m responsible for will be sold until the review is complete.” Conservative group leader Matt Davis, sustained: “It is a shame that there is to be this knee-jerk sale of the property, at a time when its value is so low, when it ought to be returned to being a library as local people want.” 31 Liberal Democrat Cllr John Macklin affirmed: “[w]e want to make sure the possibility of community use has not been excluded.” 32

13. Dolton, Martyn. “Campaigners received boost in library battle”. Yellow Advertiser. (2010-11-04.) 14. London Borough of Waltham Forest Minutes of the meeting of overview and scrutiny management committee. 2007-07-04. 15. Save St James Street Library. 2007. 16. Ibid. 17. The council later admitted to have destroyed thousands of books, more specifically “the number of library items fell by 239,344 between 2005 and March 2007.” During these two years library staff were told to remove anything that had not been borrowed for three years. The council’s defence consisted mainly of the argument that the books had not been incinerated, as campaigners suggested, but pulped in a recycle centre. Cosgrove, Sarah. “Council admits it destroyed books”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2007-11-29.)

22. Hawthorne. op. cit. 23. Paralleled with a campaigner’s own consultation. See https://stjamesstlibrary. wordpress.com (Accessed February 2017.) 24. Hawthorne. op. cit. 25. Brown, Carl. “Old Library ‘will be centre for addicts’”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2009-02.12.) 26. Dolton, Martyn. “Residents Against Drug Centre Plan”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2009-02-19.) 27. Brown, Carl. “Cautions victory won in shelving of rehab centre”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2009-03-05.) 28. Brown, Carl. “Waltham Forest Council’s leader Chris Robbins’ plan to sell the former St James St library building, in Coppermill Lane, has caused a new row.” Waltham Forest Guardian. (2009-07-02.) 29. Gallaccio, op. cit.

18. Hawthorne. op.cit.

30. Hawthorne, op. cit.

19. “The role of Children’s Laureate is awarded once every two years to an eminent writer or illustrator of children’s books to celebrate outstanding achievement in their field.” Michael Rosen was a Laureate between 2007 and 2009. See http:// www.childrenslaureate. org.uk (Accessed February 2017.). The meeting was supported by WF Trades Council with £50 for room hire and leaflet printing, and was held at Blackhorse Road Baptist Church Hall.

31. Ibid.

20. Hawthorne. op. cit. 21. Dolton, Martyn. “We’re Open”. Yellow Advertiser. (2008-01-23.)

32. Brown, Carl. “Labour push to sell off library”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2009-10-08.)

PARSE Journal

Selling it is a crazy idea. We would lose the one community centre in a huge area without facilities. Janet Wright 33 In April 2010, the Lib Dem local councillor invited the local community to visit the building in a charm offensive. The campaigners, who were then looking into a way to revert the sale, visited the building in order to envisage a new usage. A few weeks later, the result of the general and local elections saw the Liberal Democrats both virtually wiped out of the local council and in a coalition with the Conservative Party in the National Government. The Labour Party was from then on running Waltham Forest Council. Two weeks later the Conservative Party’s Big Society initiative was launched, with three key aims: give more power to local councils and neighbourhoods, reform public services, and encourage people to play a more active role in communities, while “drastically reducing financial and organisational support”.34 In October 2010, Cllr Coghill arranged a meeting with the council member responsible for the sale, and the campaigners asked him “what can we do to

save the building?”35 Cllr Afzal Akram told them that if a long-lease tenant or a buyer for the building were found, it might not be auctioned. Akram gave them until the beginning of January to “put together a viable business plan.” 36 Walthamstow campaigners are racing against the clock to save their former library. And they’re calling on David Cameron’s planned Big Society Bank to back them.37 MP Stella Creasy “lobbied government officials to meet with the group and urged them to see what can be done to reopen the site as a community facility.”38 The concept of the Big Society, which had been the Conservative Party’s campaign motto, was put to use by the campaigners. They met with Communities Minister Greg Clark, who was overseeing the Big Society Bank. “A local supporter, working in Brussels, Haroon Khan recommended the group to apply ambitiously to be part of the NESTA [UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts] Neighbourhood Challenge”.39 Campaigner Alison Griffin, who had a fundraising background,

“Inauguration of ‘The Mill’ Community Centre”, 9 September 2011, http://mahmoodhussain.mycouncillor.org.uk. Photograph by Cllr Mahmood Hussain of High Street ward in Walthamstow, London. Courtesy of Mahmood Hussain.

Carla Cruz

took on the task of “appropriating the new governmental language of the Big Society, such as social capital, public assets, community building, etc.”40 The group put in a bid in the name of Blackhorse Action Group (BAG), a constituted Resident’s Association, while urging the community to lobby councillor Akram not to sell the building.41 In December 2011, BAG and Save St James Street Library Campaign were shortlisted for the NESTA grant. Cllr Akram agreed to postpone the sale until the final decision was made, and the charity Alert Ltd, which owned a community space in Leyton, agreed to sublet the building for at least five years, creating the required partnership. In February 2011, “St James’s Street was recognised by NESTA as having low social capital, particularly due to the loss of the library – a free public space for people and groups to meet”,42 and Alison Griffin, in disbelief, called BAG’s members, informing them they’d won £150,000 to take over part of the library building for a year to build relationships and improve the wellbeing of their neighbourhood.

The Rise and Fall of The Big Society The first step must be a new focus on empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives so we create the avenues through which responsibility and opportunity can develop. But I also want to argue that the reimagined state […] must actively help people take advantage of this new freedom. This means a new role for the state: actively helping to create the big society; directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal. David Cameron 43 UK Prime Minister David Cameron first used the phrase Big Society at the annual Hugo Young lecture organised by The Guardian in November 2009.44 The rationale behind the idea had been in the making for a number of years, and “Labour Government’s Third Way under Tony Blair and policy of ‘civic renewal’ under Gordon Brown […] had strikingly similar objectives.”45 In September 2007, Gordon Brown stated the following, in a speech at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations Annual Conference: “Call it community, call it civic patriotism, call it the giving age, or call it the new active citizenship, call it the great British society – it is Britain becoming Britain again.”46

33. Macfarlane, Mhairi. “St James Street Library Campaign access former library”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2010-04-26.) 34. Milbourne, Linda and Cushman, Mike. “From the Third Sector to The Big Society: How Changing UK Government Policies Have Eroded Third Sector Trust”. Volutas: International journal of voluntary and nonprofit organisations. 2012, p. 3. 35. Gallaccio, op. cit. 36. Dolton, Martyn. Glimmer of Hope for old Library Building. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2010-10-21.) 37. St James Street Library Campaign press release 7 November 2010. See https:// stjamesstlibrary.wordpress. com (Accessed February 2017.) 38. Dolton, Martyn. “Campaigners received boost in library battle”. Yellow Advertiser. (2010-11-04.) 39. Griffin, Alison. The founding of The Mill. See http://themill-coppermill. org/ (Accessed February 2017.) 40. Gallaccio, op. cit. 41. BAG is “A Residents Association for the Blackhorse Road area, E17 – from St James Street to Blackhorse Rd tube.” See http://www. blackhorseactiongroup. org.uk (Accessed February 2017.) 42. Jackson-Obot, Ima. “New Chapter for library after group secure grant”. Waltham Forest Guardian. (2011-02-24.)

43. Cameron, David. Hugo Young Lecture, November 2009. In Slocock, Caroline, The Big Society Audit 2012. London: Civic Exchange. 2013, p. 5. 44. David Cameron, Leader of the Conservative Party from December 2005 to July 2016, was UK’s Prime Minister from May 2010 to July 2016. 45. Slocock, op. cit p. 21. 46. Brown, Gordon. Speech at the NCVO Annual Conference, 3 September 2007. In Slocock, ibid., p. 5.

PARSE Journal

The early 1990s saw the development of a marketmaking strategy in the third sector in the UK, “in which an expanded role was envisaged for voluntary agencies and private companies in delivering services as part of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’.” 47 The changing economic climate in the wake of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards saw the debate about the third sector focusing on the capacity of the sector, with the Conservative Party arguing that it was underused, and in 2008 a green paper on civil society was released,48 proposing “policies designed to encourage voluntarism, altruism, and the independence and diversity of civil society in the task of tackling social breakdown.”49 Note that Third Sector – which is a contested definition and is here understood broadly as “charities, voluntary organisations, informal community groups and social enterprises” 50 – is re-characterised by the Conservative Party as “civil society”. The Party’s 2010 General Election manifesto reads: Our alternative to big government is the Big Society: a society with much higher levels of personal, professional, civic and corporate responsibility; a society where people come together to solve problems and improve life for themselves and their communities; a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control. 51 After the 2010 UK General Election, which saw a change in government from Labour to a Coalition between the Conservative and the Liberal Democrats parties, the Big Society became a key element of the Coalition Government policy platform. Although the vision was never entirely clear, “the concept of ‘Big Society’ taps into a powerful tradition of mutualism, co-operatives and the social economy”.52 According to Angus McCabe, elements of the Big Society have a long history within conservative political thinking, particularly when looking back to an era pre-welfare state and in search of a private alternative to it. If there were connections between the Coalition Government agenda and the previous New Labour policies on

community engagement, there are substantial discontinuities too – the main being funding. However, the most important was a change of vocabulary. Concepts of social justice have been replaced by the use of words such as “ fair” or “ fairness” alongside terms such as “ liberation” and “ freedom” […] Concepts of fairness are much harder to define and therefore legislate for and may, actually, only be in the eye of the beholder rather than based on a rigorous social analysis.53 A change of the language was not only an attempt to dissociate Big Society from previous New Labour policies; it was also a rhetorical intervention designed to re-brand the Conservative Party. The latter “rather than relying purely on familiar conservative ideological tropes around defence, law and order and free markets”, mobilised the language of social and community “to counter the negative association with fiscal contraction and public spending cuts”, proposed by the Coalition Government.54 The state’s withdrawal, not just from service delivery, but also from responsibility for welfare provision, was part of a massive ideological shift.55 The Big Society intended to give communities more power, encourage people to take an active role in their communities, transfer power from central to local government, and support co-ops, mutuals, charities and social enterprises.56 The plans included setting up a Big Society Bank and a Big Society Network to fund projects.57 The Coalition Government’s “new” initiatives for the community and social sector were as follows: the Community Organisers Programme, a national training programme in the grass-roots movement for social action;58 Community First, offering small grants for community projects;59 the Community Assets Programme, supporting the transfer of assets from local authorities to communities;60 Community Budgets, aiming to simplify funding systems from central to local government; 61 the National Citizen Service, encouraging young people to volunteer; 62

Carla Cruz

and more importantly, the Localism Act, which among other things, “provided a ‘right to challenge’ current arrangements for the delivery of local services, a ‘right to buy’ local authority assets such as unused buildings, and a ‘right to provide’ for public sector employees to establish alternative employee-owned delivery agencies.” 63 None of these were new; the international trend towards neoliberal political-economic practices and

47. Macmillan, Rob. “The third sector delivering public services: an evidence review”. July 2010. Working paper Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. 2010, p. 5. 48. Green Papers are consultation documents produced by the Government. The aim is to allow people both inside and outside Parliament to give feedback on policy or legislative proposals. See http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/ green-papers/ (Accessed February 2017.) 49. Macmillan, op. cit. p. 8. 50. Macmillan, Rob and McLaren, Vic. “Third sector leadership: the power of narrative”. March 2012. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 2. 51. The Conservative Party’s 2010 General Election Manifesto. In Slocock, op. cit. p.23. 52. McCabe, Angus. “Bellow the radar in a Big Society?: reflections on community engagement, empowerment and social action in a changing policy context”. December 2010. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 4. 53. McCabe, ibid., p. 6. 54. Macmillan, Rob. “Making Sense of the Big Society: perspectives from the third sector”. January 2013. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 5. 55. Milbourne and Cushman, op. cit. p. 31. 56. Cabinet Office. “Building the Big Society”. Policy Paper. London: Cabinet Office. (2010-05-18.) 57. “Both Labour and the Conservatives supported the long campaigned for Social Investment Bank for the sector, utilizing the balances in dormant bank accounts – although the Conservatives promised to give this a new name, the Big Society Bank.” See Alcock, Pete. “The Big Society a new policy environment for the third sector?” June 2012. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 4. The Society Network Foundation was a social enterprise charity that run the Big Society Network and the Big Society Awards. 58. The role of the community organisers was to listen to people and help them achieve their goals through democratic structures. The first 500 were paid, full-time for 51 weeks, the next 4,500 were volunteers recruited and trained by the original

thinking has been growing steadily since the 1970s and was brought about with “deregulation, privatization and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision.” 64 Under Labour’s government there was already a trend “for outsourcing to third sector providers who secured a level of public trust as acting in the public good.” 65 But the resources to support the above ideas were drastically reduced under the Coalition Government.66

500. Cameron, David and Rennick. Kimberley. “Community Organisers Programme: Evaluation Summary Report”. March 2015. London: Ipsos MORI. p. 2. 59. “A £80 million government funded initiative to provide small grants to community groups and local social action projects.” In Slocock, op. cit p. 22. 60. “£30 million programme to provide capital grants for refurbishment and to help develop the transfer of assets from local authorities to the community sector.” Ibid. 61. “It gives local public service partners the freedom to work together to redesign services around the needs of citizens, improving outcomes, reducing duplication and waste.” Ibid. 62. “A programme of activities for 16 years old during the summer including community activities.” Ibid. 63. Alcock, op. cit. p. 7. 64. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005, p. 3. According to Harvey, large sectors of the economy that were in public ownership were privatised in the UK under Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. “State-run enterprises had to be adequately prepared for privatization, and this meant paring down their debt and improving their efficiency and cost structures, often through shedding labour.” Harvey, p. 60. The legitimacy of this programme was supported through the extensive selling off of public housing to tenants. Harvey suggests that this “satisfied a traditional ideal of individual property ownership as a working-class dream.” Ibid., p.61. This ideal of social mobility will continue through the 1990s onwards in the steadily destruction of the working class, through a double movement of aspiration and vilification. See Jones, Owen. Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso. 2011. 65. Milbourne, op. cit. p. 12. 66. In the same field the Labour Government had the following programmes: Grassroots Grant, “A £130 million government funded initiative to support the voluntary sector to build stronger more active communities through small grants.” Advancing Assets for Communities, a “£1m per annum programme to facilitate programmes to transfer assets from local authorities to the community sector.” Total Place for “13 pilots ‘putting citizens at the heart of service and design and working together to improve outcomes and eliminate waste and duplication.” National Community Service “the creation of British national community service: engaging and rewarding a new generation of young people from all backgrounds to serve their communities; demonstrating our practical commitment to cohesive and strong society.” See Slocock, op. cit. p. 22.

PARSE Journal

In a sense the big society has gone sideways now, it didn’t work. But I think it was dishonest of the Conservative Party, because people would always volunteer, they didn’t create the Big Society. Siobhan Hawthorne 67 The Big Society never really gained traction. According to Rob Macmillan this is partly because the vision itself was never totally clear, and because it immediately enticed severe criticism from third sector organisations and the media. The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee pointed out that “the idea that a sector that is just 2.3% of the workforce can replace the welfare state is not so much fanciful as downright dishonest.” 68 In the meantime the concept of the Big Society was “inexorably linked in the public mind with ‘deficit reduction’, the delivery of services ‘on the cheap’ and the rolling back of the welfare state to a residual role where consumers with resources have more access to quality choices whilst services for the poor become poor services.” 69 Even with its vague contours, most definitions of the Big Society agreed “it implies a greater role of voluntarism and voluntary organisations […] and the transfer of public assets and services to the voluntary sector.”70 If there was already an element of voluntarism regarding policy towards communities in the Labour governments, the Coalition’s Government introduced “a language of ‘aspirational compulsion […] creating more responsible and active communities where people play a part in making society a better place”.71 Pete Alcock stresses that in fact third sector activity had prospered alongside the welfare support from government, and the reduction of expenditure with the Coalition and now Conservative governments, rather than “promoting further growth […] could lead to division and decline.”72 Not everyone can volunteer. If people are worried about not having money for the basic things, such as rent, and food on the table, how can they sit at reception [at The Mill]? People need stability [to be able to volunteer on a regular basis]. Mo Gallaccio 73

Implicit in the idea of the Big Society is the view that “communities will be the first port of call in responding to social needs.” 74 However, there are concerns that this will be much easier in some communities than others. “It is well-known that charitable organisations are unevenly distributed,” 75 and that voluntarism is done mainly by a “civic core”,76 i.e. a “small group of people contribute a disproportionate share of voluntary effort.” 77 Moreover, the UK is already the second most charitable country in the world, thus it is unlikely that charitable giving will rise.78 Cameron’s vision of the future based upon the emergence of an army of volunteers was illusory, and the Big Society catchphrase has now, late 2016, more or less been completely eradicated.79 However, notions of social capital, and the assumptions of what it can deliver, have not. 80

Surfing the Waves of the Big Society: The Replication of The Mill Experience We don’t agree with the Big Society, there are lots of issues with it, but it was where the funding was, and we needed the money. There is a point where we have to be pragmatic about it. I think we made it work for us. Siobhan Hawthorne 81 The Big Society project attempted to engineer social action. But could the experience of The Mill have been engineered? How did it really happen? It is useful here to examine the process by which The Mill came about through the lens of the residual notion of social capital, in interaction with other types of capital. Jenny Phillimore and Angus McCabe argue that a number of ingredients need to be available at the same time for a successful social action to emerge: “the right people, in the right place, at the right time – with a shared cause.” 82 The different access that communities may

Carla Cruz

have to social, human, physical and economical capital will make all the difference, regardless of the presence of a strong emotional attachment to a cause and very motivated individuals. Phillimore and McCabe argue that, on the one hand, strong emotional reactions cannot be manufactured, and that these are paramount for social action to happen. On the other hand they argue that without access to free facilities to meet, free expertise and funds, even if the need to act is present, a successful outcome will be accidental.83 I was prepared to stand up to the council – it felt like David fighting the Goliath. Phaik Tan 84 The library campaign was initiated, as were many others, because of a strong sense of injustice. Emotions play a big part in triggering social action, and they were present throughout the Save the St James Street Library Campaign. Phaik Tan, the passionate initiator, quickly gathered a group of highly skilled people around her. Tan can be seen as a “community bricoleur”, or a person involved with a wide range of groups at the same time and capable of connecting and recruiting skilful individuals into the group.85 Save St James Street Library campaign stated on their NESTA bid that their community had low social capital. According to Bourdieu, social capital is “differential access to resources via the possession of more or less durable relationships, constructed through an endless effort at institution.” 86 The amount of social capital depends on the volume of human capital that individuals within the network possess. Human capital, is the “knowledge, information, ideas, skills and health of individuals” gained via schooling, training, or work experience.87 The area might have been lacking in social capital, but the campaigners did not. The campaigners, for various reasons, had time available. 88 Time is both human and economic capital, because only those who can afford time will invest it. Moreover, the campaigners had access to resources by overlapping with other campaigns and organisations, which counts as social capital. The campaigners utilised a combination of triggering emotional capital (anger) their economical capital (time), and their social capital (networks), to recruit support from the outset. Later, they used affective emotions towards the community and their lost asset to keep the campaign going. Phillimore and McCabe also consider personal traits, such as being determined, assertive, enthusiastic, to be important, and

67. Hawthorne, op. cit.

81. Hawthorne, op. cit.

68. Toynbee, Polly. In McCabe, op. cit p. 9.

82. Phillimore, Jenny and McCabe, Angus. “Luck, passion, networks and skills: the recipe for action below the radar?”. January 2015. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 22.

69. McCabe, op. cit p. 14. 70. Mohan, John. “Mapping the Big Society: perspectives from the Third Sector Research Centre, July 2011 working paper”. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. 2011, p. 3. 71. McCabe, op.cit. p.5. 72. Alcock, op.cit. p.9. 73. Gallaccio, op. cit. 74. Mohan, op.cit. p. 2. 75. Ibid., p. 6. 76. “The civic core is composed of people who are more likely... to be middleaged, have higher education qualifications, are owner occupiers, actively practice their religion, and have lived in the same neighbourhood for at least 10 years.” According to Mohan, 31% of the population provide 87% of volunteer hours, 79% of charitable giving, and 72% of civic participation. See Mohan, ibid., p. 9. 77. Mohan, ibid., p. 3. 78. ACEVO. Powerful People, Responsible Society: The Report of the Commission on Big Society. London: ACEVO. 2011, p. 19. 79. David Cameron left office as Prime Minister on 13 July 2016, after the UK voted to leave the European Union in 23 June 2016 EU referendum, being substituted by the new Leader of the Conservative Party, Theresa May. 80. Milbourne and Cushman, op.cit. p.34.

83. Ibid. 84. Tan, op. cit. 85. Soteri-Proctor, Andri. “Little big societies: micromapping of organisations operating below the radar”. November 2011. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 6. 86. Phillimore and McCabe, op. cit. p. 4. 87. Ibid. 88. Some of the reasons are: being on maternity leave, being a stay-at-home parent, being a free-lancer, being a post-degree student, and being retired.

PARSE Journal

affirm that it is critical to have the right communication skills. The fact that three journalists were part of the initial campaign group, which fed the local and national press with constant press releases, was then paramount to the success of this campaign. Later on, access to “vertical” networks with politicians, and local people with specific skills, such as fundraising, administrative, research and IT skills were instrumental in turning the campaign around, from reopening the library to keeping the building in public hands. The campaigners lacked financial capital, but due to their wealth in human capital, they managed to secure a partnership and a large public grant to prevent the sale of the building.

That the key ingredients for success were present at The Mill’s emergence, is more accidental than not, and can hardly be seen to be engineered by the Big Society programme. Rather, it was the community taking advantage of new policies and terminology. We didn’t really want to set up a community centre. Part of the NESTA opportunity […] was to take the building back to the community and to keep it in public hands. We didn’t necessarily believe in it [the bid], but we just thought, if we can get our hands on the building, we’d bought time. Alison Griffin 89

Carla Cruz, “The Mill Stories”, 2016, http://the-mill-stories.carlacruz.net/about. Courtesy of the artist.

Carla Cruz

Learning from The Mill As with other public services, the privatisation of the arts that has been effected by reductions in public funding means that many small-scale cultural organisations have seen their public programmes reduced and their human resources redirected to fundraising activities. The pressure on such organisations – just like The Mill after NESTA’s money was gone – to meet existing public funding imperatives and adapt to pre-established organisational models means that they struggle to earn public funding. Many people involved with UK-based small-scale arts organisations have discussed the nature of their existence on a post-public funding future.90 What can art organisations and funding bodies learn from The Mill’s case? After St James Street Library had been lost, what mattered most for the campaigners was keeping the building as public property. Realising this is in itself a success, since reversing privatisation is extremely unlikely. If today The Mill is a tenant of Waltham Forest Council, the campaigners saved the building with the hope for future use with public funding. Although they have lost the public service, through The Mill the campaigners kept something of its essence: just like the library, The Mill is now a non-market oriented public space.

89. Griffin, op.cit. 90. See Common Practice’s Research papers on this matter, available from http://www.commonpractice.org.uk/research-papers/ (Accessed February 2017.) Common Practice is an advocacy group working for the recognition and fostering of the small-scale contemporary visual arts sector. 91. Macmillan, Rob. “Making Sense of the Big Society: perspectives from the third sector”. January 2013. Working paper. Birmingham: Third Sector Research Centre. p. 7.

Despite its success, The Mill cannot constitute a model to survive the financial crisis. As discussed earlier, the mechanisms that led to the rescue of this building for use by the local community are not necessarily duplicable. Likewise, expecting non-profit cultural organisations to become suddenly independent of public funding without losing their central mission is equally naive. This makes the struggle for the maintenance and financing of public services and spaces increasingly important, for its future outside a purely market oriented setting is increasingly under threat. The future of The Mill and the compromises the group may have to make to keep the public building public are still unknown. However, as public spaces consultant Julian Dobson says: In a world where we have to be more self-reliant, it’s more important than ever that we are not only self-reliant but find ways to help each other. You could call it the Big Society. You could call it cooperation. I prefer the concept of solidarity, because it is about people coming together from shared experiences and hopes rather than out of a sense of duty or philanthropy.91 In the meantime, different forms of management, caring and of being together are rehearsed.92

92. I thank Andrea Phillips for the idea of rehearsing. In her article “Remaking the Arts Centre”, Phillips argues that arts centre can be the stage for “other forms of thought and action” in opposition to the dominant neoliberal culture. Phillips, Andrea. “Remaking the Arts Centre”. In Cluster: Dialectionary. Binna Choi, Maria Lind, Emily Pethick and Nataša Petrešsin-Bachelez (eds.). Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2014. p. 230.

PARSE Journal

Abstract The Riwaq Biennale marked Riwaqâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new approach and image of openness, networking and dialogue, not only with cultural heritage organisations, but also with the community at large, locally and internationally. This essay sheds light on the biennales in Palestine that have a responsive/radical perception of space (where things happen) and time (when things happen and for how long), and against the practices of artistic production and biennales that lend themselves to already formulated agendas. I critically engage with the Riwaq Biennale (RB) and Qalandiya International (Qi) to further speculate on the role of biennales and art in changing not only the content and form, but also the management modalities and the managerial structures of events in the public sphere. Biennales in Palestine, I claim, have a management twist to the artistic events and artistic production, and are therefore permanently oscillating between creative (thinking) and non-creative (making) artistic work. This twist acknowledges the inherent dialectical relation in the field of artistic production that strives to alternately celebrate and conceal the art and the practical world behind it. This turn also tries to make visible the structures that shape the lives and the practices of people, while making use of symbolic enterprise to point at the debilitating conditions that the artists, the managers and the audiences alike have to endure.

Biennales in Palestine: Thinking Art and Making Art

Khaldun Bshara Khaldun Bshara is an architect, restorer and anthropologist. Bshara is currently the Director of Riwaq Centre, Ramallah, Palestine, where he has worked since 1994. He received his BSc in Architectural Engineering from Birzeit University (1996) and his MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (2000). On a Fulbright scholarship, Bshara joined the University of California, Irvine, where he obtained his MA in Anthropology in 2009 and a PhD in 2012.

Bshara has carried out many architectural design and architectural restoration projects in Palestine. In addition, he is the editor of Riwaq’s Monograph Series on Architectural History of Palestine (2010-present), and the author and co-author of a number of books and articles, including: “The Structures and Fractures of Heritage Protection in Palestine” (2016), “Spatial Memories: The Palestinian Refugee Camps as Time Machine” (2015), and “Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse” (2013).

PARSE Journal

Introduction In 2005, Riwaq – Centre for Architectural Conservation launched the first edition of the biennale that was named after the institution itself. The Riwaq Biennale marked the NGO’s new approach and new image of openness, networking and dialoguing, not only with cultural heritage organisations, but also with a community at large, locally and internationally. This essay sheds light on biennales in Palestine that have a flexible/radical perception of space and time, and against the practices of artistic production. In other words, biennales that lend themselves to already formulated agendas, and biennales that implicitly and sometimes explicitly are complicit in politics/Politics locally and internationally. I critically engage with Riwaq Biennale (RB) and Qalandiya International (QI) as a medium to further speculate on the role of the biennale, civil society and art in changing not only the content but also the form and managerial structures of events in the public sphere.

Riwaq Centre and Mainstreaming Heritage in Palestine In Palestine, most cultural projects are carried out by civil society organisations. The long years of Israeli occupation left Palestine with vibrant and active non-governmental bodies that functioned as a shadow government in the absence of a formal political body. Heritage conservation is part of these projects: Riwaq, and similar NGOs throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, implement most of the historical preservation initiatives. The lack of human and financial resources within the newly established Palestinian National Authority (PNA) created a fertile environment for civil society to intervene and establish itself as the main player in heritage discourse. Since 1991, Riwaq has recognised the challenging complexities of preserving Palestinian collective memory through projects that document and restore

architectural heritage sites across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Between 1994 and 2004, Riwaq embarked on the “Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine” project, resulting in the publication of detailed histories, maps, and photos of over 400 villages and towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Parallel to these documentation efforts, Riwaq has been exploring ways through which heritage could be part of everyday life in Palestine. Riwaq’s “Job Creation Through Conservation” programme, for example, shifted the concept of architectural conservation from an activity exclusive to affluence, to one that provides skill-building opportunities and development of local economies. Realising the needs of communities and challenges to heritage (most importantly the lack of legal protection, the lack of human and financial resources, and the lack of heritage awareness among average Palestinians), Riwaq shifted its efforts from the conservation of single historic buildings to an integrated approach that engages entire sites and communities. This new approach has been manifested through “50 Historic Centres”, a project that aims at protecting 50 per cent of the 50,230 historic buildings in Palestine by rationalising resources and prioritising 50 villages in Palestine.1 Acknowledging the importance of the public sphere 2 as a means for communal interaction and arenas for social change, Riwaq initiated the Riwaq Biennale (RB) in 2005 and co-founded Qalandiya International (Qi) in 2012 as multidisciplinary platforms that address urgent topics and community concerns. Now in their fifth and third editions respectively, these platforms triggered a multitude of collaborations within and beyond Palestine. Riwaq’s approach integrates a combination of interventions – physical (restoration, adaptive reuse, rehabilitation…), non-physical (documentation, research, publications…) and cultural (RB, Qi, workshops…) – aims at mainstreaming cultural heritage among the general public. Cultural interventions in the public sphere, such as the RB and the Qi, aspire to

Khaldun Bshara

produce caring and culturally conscious individuals, who will have a higher appreciation of the historical built environment and therefore contribute to the protection and conservation of heritage in Palestine.

Biennale: Unconventional Entry Point to a Conventional Question Large-scale exhibitions are often defined as “biennales” regardless of their periodicity, in honour of the Venice Biennale (initiated in 1895). Since its establishment as a format, biennales have striven to exhibit art of the present and to narrate places and cultural contexts in which art is created, emphasising the questions and discussions presiding over the production of art. According to Timothy Michel though, biennales risk the reduction of the world to a system of objects, but they still have the capacity of condensing and connecting places and works of art, as well as diverse ideas about nations and cultural identity, in an exhibition context.3 In her article “Looking at Biennials”, Marieke van Hal asks: “Where does Riwaq Biennial belong in the landscape of biennials?” And she concludes: “The Riwaq Biennial doesn’t fit into any categorisation. Perhaps categories [as Charles Esche, the co-curator of the 3RB suggests] are tragedies, in the end”.4 Khalil Rabah, the director of four RB editions (the first, second, third and fifth) in an interview with Mai Abu El-Dahab (for Bidoun, in autumn 2006), puts his intentions behind the making of the RB as follows:

One of the things I am trying to do and the reason I am trying to have a biennale in Palestine, is because maybe we will recognize the urgent need for such an industry, cultural production, knowledge dissemination, and participation. You know when we started to establish the al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, people were asking us what a contemporary art foundation was in the first place.5 (emphasis added by author) In internal discussions with the Riwaq team, Rabah insists on the possibilities inherent in a structure like that of the biennale to help Riwaq achieve its goals. He always asserts, “What can Riwaq do with the biennial that Riwaq cannot do without?” In other words, it is concerned with the offerings of a biennale platform that can help Riwaq pursue or advance its “non-artistic” agenda. Riwaq’s agenda is part of the civil society heritage organisations’ agenda, which has been the documentation, protection and conservation of built historic environment, and to use it as a resource to draw on in its socio-economic politico-cultural development project. In this way the heritage agenda fundamentally coincides with the nation-building process in post-Oslo era Palestine. Therefore there are implicit and explicit goals attached to the RB; for artist Rabah, it is “the urgent need for such an industry.” For Riwaq, it is to set the institution’s agenda closer to that of average Palestinians. Therefore, the RB is in effect an unconventional entry point (art) to an essentially conventional question (heritage).

1. A historic centre is considered one of the most significant centres in Palestine if its fabric is still intact, the concentration of historic buildings is great, the architectural and historical value of the centre is evident, and it has the possibility of serving as part of socio-economic-cultural clusters in Palestine. 2. I use public sphere, following Jürgen Habermas, to note the area where individuals can come together and freely discuss societal problems, and through these discussions influence political action and change. Habermas argues that public sphere can be constituted in “discussions (lexis)… or in common action (praxis)”. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1991. p. 3. 3. Martini, Federica. “One Biennale, Many Biennials”. In Just another Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials. Vittoria Martini and Federica Martini (eds.). Milan: Postmedia Books. pp. 99-100. 4. Rabah, Khalil (ed.). Geography 102: Biennale. Ramallah: Riwaq. 2009. pp. 130-131. 5. Rabah, Khalil. “Geography 403: with Mai Abu El-Dahab”. In Rabah, ibid. p. 113.

PARSE Journal

Riwaq Biennale: Historical Background The RB was launched in 2005 as a way to bring in audiences to Riwaq’s sites of intervention. The biennale put forward to create awareness about Riwaq’s agenda predicated upon the importance of heritage protection and development among the general Palestinian public, which knows very little about Riwaq, or about heritage in Palestine for that matter. By then, Riwaq had been working for fourteen years, compiling the registry of historic buildings in Palestine, and had implemented the creation of tens of jobs through restoration projects that touched upon the lives of the marginalised sectors of Palestinian communities in the most vulnerable areas of rural Palestine.

The First Riwaq Biennale The first Riwaq Biennale, which took place between 9 June and 6 September 2005 focused on “architecture: installations and interventions”, evolving around talks, walks, and interventions, and paved the grounds for the coming RBs. The first RB, remembered with a colourful logo on T-shirts and gigantic banners in historic centres 6 (see Figs. 1-3) aimed at opening up the heritage sites for Palestinians to appreciate, enjoy, and rethink their relation to the built and unbuilt environment. The first RB can be called an “in-side-in” platform, in other words it drove Palestinians through Palestine and led them through curated visits to villages where Riwaq has been able to create jobs through restoration projects.

Fig 2 T-shirt-1RB-2005

Fig 1 Banner at al Mazraa Historic Centre-1RB-2005

Fig 3 Gathering at Dair Ghassana Historic Centre-1RB-2005

Khaldun Bshara

The Second Riwaq Biennale The second Riwaq Biennale was titled “To set in motion” and ran from 17 until 24 October 2007 in various venues throughout the West Bank and aimed at challenging the perceptions and expectations of what a biennale can be – other than monumental spectacles and eyecatching installations. The second RB brought creative forces from beyond Palestine into the bounded territories, and momentarily and temporally engaged with debates and knowledge exchange that cut across disciplines and

perhaps had impact beyond Palestine. Politically speaking, it undermined colonial measures and put forward a new reading of a falsified history and fragmented geography by considering Palestinian practices as part of broader heritage and art industry. The second RB can be described as an “outside-in” platform, as it brought experts, artists and planners from outside Palestine into formal and informal settings (such as seminars, symposiums, tours, hikes…) to discuss Riwaq’s approach and the state of heritage, art and architecture in Palestine (see Figs. 4-6).

Fig 5 Coference at Birzeit University-2RB-2007

Fig 4 Logo-2RB-2007

Fig 6 Tour in Ramallah Historic Centre-2RB-2007

6. Charles Esche, co-curator of the third RB comically writes, “Was the first Riwaq Biennial already fully formed? All we have of it, as far as I know, is a T-shirt”. Esche, Charles. “Dissemblance or Sincerity?” In Rabah, ibid., p. 33.

PARSE Journal

The Third Riwaq Biennale “A Geography: 50 Villages” ran from 3 June until 30 September 2009, at the Palestine pavilion in Venice and from 12 until 16 October 2009 at various venues in Palestine. I had a speculative spirit about the biennale identity itself – a biennale as an artwork, an artistic imaginary of the concrete agenda of connecting the fragmented enclaves of Palestine, by way of a new reading of territory and landscape, coupled with Riwaq’s large-scale plan for regenerating the 50 most significant historic centres in Palestine (see Figs. 7-9). “What if ”, co-curator of the third RB Reem Fadda writes, “this idea can be understood as an artwork itself, leaving room to speculate on its own conception, validity and continuity?” This radical and controversial understanding of the biennale as an artwork rather than a home to artworks made the biennale into a structure that questions itself. Riwaq’s concrete takes on heritage preservation were translated into “A Geography: 50 Villages” – an artwork by artist

Khalil Rabah.7 The shift (from the concrete goal of restoring 50 villages to the symbolic representation of this imaginary in “A Geography: 50 Villages”) allowed for multiple readings of the project itself. It put the offerings of the biennale at the service of an already established agenda, defying the artistic production business as usual (claiming to be free from agendas or limitations). The performing of the third RB within the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art created this tension; of what it means to be a biennale that functions outside the normative structures and yet is incorporated within the structures that it claims to depart from. Or as Reem Fadda eloquently put it: “Can we think outside the box while being immersed within it?”8 The third RB can be described as an “inside-outside-in” platform, by which I mean the nomadic identity the biennale occupied in its third edition, moving agents and actors across borders, constructing (a new geography of 50 villages), and dismantling fictitious boundaries and geographies (colonial measures).

Fig 8 PNA Prime Minister at Birzeit University Conference-3RB-2009

Fig 7 Logo-3RB-2009

Fig 9 50 villages postcards-installation by Khalil Rabah in Beirut

Khaldun Bshara

The Fourth Riwaq Biennale and Qalandiya International The fourth RB merged with the Jerusalem Show VI to produce “Gestures in Time”, which ran between 1 and 15 November 2012, as part of the first Qalandiya International (Qi) (see Figs. 10-12). While the first three editions of RB celebrated networking and partnership with other local institutions that served as sites for the RB’s interventions, installations and activities, “Gestures in Time”, curated by Jack Persekian, gestured towards celebrating a more rigorous partnership and collaboration with sister organisations. And while maintaining the autonomy of partners’ programmes, the Qi served as a platform where these autonomous programmes were brought together within one large coordinated programme with a unifying theme – echoing the 1976 Venice Biennale.9 In doing so, the individual programmes gained wider publicity, more exposure and a larger audience. In terms of management, Qi departed from the “mothership” figure (of a biennale structure) to a more participatory horizontal structure. Qi’s structure can be described as “practical sociocracy”10

or “sociocracy in practice” where all partners get heard, their needs met, and decisions are collectively made. Rather than rationalising power in terms of magnitude and centralisation, power is diffused and hierarchy is dismantled to allow new models of governance to emerge. The collective selection of a theme and the production/write up of the curatorial statement for example hinted towards the possibility of co-creation of the otherwise individualistic faculty (of the curator). The involvement of all partners in the making of the statement and the selection of the theme and the visual identity of the Qi blurred boundaries between those who envision and those who create the artistic platform, the biennale. The implementation of the fourth RB within the Qi was the end of the autonomy of the RB from the perspective of the ecology of cultural production structures in Palestine. The RB, which has been connected to heritage via Riwaq’s agenda, has become part of a larger event concerned more with visual arts, and that gathers more audiences and resources, and that, moreover, appealed to sister institutions in terms of concrete collaboration. 7. Artist Khalil Rabah participated with “A Geography: 50 villages”, as an artwork, in the collateral event of Palestine, within the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art. 8. Rabah, op. cit., p. 56.

Fig 11 Opening at Qalandyia village-1Qi-2012

Fig 10 Qi visuals-1Qi-2012

Fig 12 Gestures in Time -Dhahiriyya underground cave museum and performance-4RB-2012

9. The 1976 Biennale was the point of rupture in the history of the Venice Biennale as it marked the beginning of theme-based exhibitions as a solution to the fragmented exhibition space brought about by national pavilions. See Martini and Martini, op. cit. p. 98. 10. Sociocracy: a theoretical system of government in which the interests of all members of society are served equally. Dictionary. com Unabridged. Random House Inc. See http://www.dictionary. com/browse/sociocracy (Accessed 2016-12-28.)

PARSE Journal

Riwaq, Riwaq Biennale and Qi In 2014, while exploring the possibility of re-institutionalising the RB as an autonomous entity, Riwaq (the institution) partnered with the second Qi with “In Situ” – an event that, like the previous four editions of the RB, drove masses through towns in the southern West Bank enjoying curated visits to recently restored structures (see Figs. 13-15). In these events, Riwaq’s architects and site engineers were, in effect, the artists and performers of these interventions, perhaps to further complicate notions of artwork/biennale, and artist/maker. This “new set-up” would leave an impact on the future of the RB, as I will show later. In the second Qi, Riwaq as institution was part of two competitive happenings: the fourth RB and the second Qi. This doublebind relation enunciated an uncomfortable subject position for Riwaq, which on the one hand wanted to reconstitute the RB anew, and on the other hand found it awkward to depart from an initiative that Riwaq co-founded.

went hand in hand and made up the biennale: the content of the biennale and the form through which the biennale manifested itself. That is to say, the underlying premise of the biennale and the activities that made this premise visible. By content I do not mean what happens with a specific edition of RB in terms of talks, walks and interventions, but Riwaq’s agenda or the RB’s agenda itself. Content and form were brought together in the person of the artist Khalil Rabah who envisaged the RB and served as its director or artistic director for four editions. Rabah had a double identity: he was an architect and an artist. He acknowledges Riwaq’s politics and intentions and at the same time insists on his identity as an artist (fannan, as he used to say), and by extension pursues his artistic stake through the RB. It is only by the third RB (2009) that the biennale content and form took an explicit and intentional

Art and Art Production: The Realms of the Real and Unreal Throughout the different RB editions, there were always two complementary components that

Fig 14 in situ tour in Hebron-2Qi-2014

Fig 13 in situ activity logo-2Qi-2014

Fig 15 In Situ activity at Dhahiriyya-2Qi-2014

Khaldun Bshara

artistic direction. The RB itself had become an art project. Charles Esche, the co-curator of the third RB, writes: “[The RBs] loosen their ties to known conditions and assume another kind of life – a life of the artwork perhaps but even this is never explicitly clarified.” 11 Reem Fadda, the co-curator of the third RB, writes: What if this idea [the biennale] can be understood as an art project itself, leaving urgent room to speculate on its own conception, validity and continuity?12 […] So there becomes a conflation between the unreal institution (i.e. the biennale) and the very real one, which is Riwaq, and a hybrid that also is quite fascinating, which is the merger of the two together.13 Having a biennale that is already tied to a predefined agenda seemed to be limiting, and therefore the co-curators of the third RB found a way out of the impasse by thinking of RB as an unreal institution or an artwork that leaves the door wide open for speculation. The curators’ statements show that there are limits inherent to the real world compared to the liberating artistic world. Therefore, a tension – a dialectical relation – was created between creative and “uncreative” forces. But Riwaq and RB are equally real, they operate within the world, and have certain goals to achieve. It follows, then, that the division, though artistically liberating, is artificial and leads to confusion about the concreteness of the whole field. In spite of the artificiality of the division,

there are certain implications to such an artistic turn for both the real institution (Riwaq) and for the unreal one (Riwaq Biennale). Riwaq gained more exposure, beyond the heritage world. Riwaq also gained more support for its heritage agenda since the RB opened new funding possibilities.14 The RB itself enjoyed a more relaxed and comfortable subject position that is closer to its intentions (outlined by artist Khalil Rabah in Bidoun in 2006). The conflation of (or interplay between) the real and unreal 15 produced an emancipatory environment and gave Riwaq, the real institution, a speculative spirit allowing it to venture into new possibilities and approaches towards its concrete agenda. The negotiations and the superimposition of the creative forces vis-à-vis the concrete forces and practices have become part of everyday discourse within the RB field of production. The third RB influenced the future of the RB and its relation to Riwaq and to the broader ecology (such as the Qi). Institutionalising the RB as living art did not pass without resistance within Riwaq, and as a result there was no fourth RB in 2011. Who is the mind, who is the muscle, who owns the RB? Is the RB an artwork? If yes, who is the author? Who does the dirty administration and funding applications and who makes the inaugural speech? Who gets mentioned and in what order? Where and when does collective ownership give way to individual artists? What is a director, artistic director, curator, coordinator, artist, consultant, discussant, assistant and technical assistant…? These questions were directed at the structure of the biennale itself, and whether it

11. Esche, op. cit. p. 33. 12. Fadda, Reem. “3rd Riwaq Biennale: History, the Imaginary/Nation and Living Art”. In Rabah, op. cit., p. 51. 13. Ibid., p. 56. 14. For example, the then Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, addressed the third RB and pledged financial support to the “national plan” of renovating the 50 most significant historic centres. 15. Rabah’s artworks usually play around the realfactual and unreal-fictional enterprises trying to find new entry points to existing problems. “The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Human Kind” is but one of his exemplary artworks that make use of such interplay.

PARSE Journal

brought about democratic and fair conditions that recognised the contributions of a multitude of actors. With all RB’s efforts to make these recognitions visible, there is already a formal code that values the artistic and creative forces more than the concrete forces that render the artistic visions possible. The questioning of the biennale, as a structure, is in effect a questioning of the goals put forward by the biennale, since goals would not be achieved without a matching structure. Three important goals formed the skeleton of the RB’s different editions. First, to challenge the notion of what a biennale is and what it can be, and therefore providing alternative meaning to this structure called “biennale”. Second, to blur artificial disciplinary divides that so far hindered the possibility of bringing multiple perspectives to the table, and therefore increasing the complexity of sitespecific situations in search for renewed enquiries/ terminologies for emerging concerns. Third, to provide Riwaq – centre for architectural conservation – with tools, platforms and networks that were inaccessible otherwise. In short, it is about the biennale as a structure, about how things are carried out in different fields, including heritage, and about Riwaq’s approach to heritage. This was not the straightforward vision and mission of the biennale, rather it has been always an unfinished business, a work in progress and a medium for thinking through. Perplexed about such structure, Charles Esche, co-curator of the third RB writes:

Tabkha: Thinking Art and Making Art In relation to the fifth Riwaq Biennale, which took place between 1 June 2014 and 1 June 2016 it was

Fig 16 Logo-5RB-2014

Khalil [Rabah] has set a scene for characters who have yet to find the script and are thinking about writing one themselves if nothing else turns up. Meanwhile, the back stage announcer calls for positions and curtain up in 5 minutes.16 Such modality – the script that is not yet written – means that the RB is “managed” rather than “envisaged”. Further, this management is not well structured, rather it comes with an ad hoc spirit that allows for a multitude of possibilities.17 Fig 17 Tabkha Banner-5RB-2014

Khaldun Bshara

stated repeatedly that “it comes with an agenda (see Figs. 16-17). It is invested in Riwaq’s efforts to clarify the growing political and epistemic significance of architectural heritage in local towns and villages”. It also became explicitly “Political”, underscoring the conditions under which the biennale was implemented. It claims that the intentional tensions produced by the biennale between autonomy and history, art and language “mean something very different when the terms at hand are colonialism or ethnic cleansing”. While acknowledging the setbacks of political structures in Palestine, the fifth RB does not want to think “about” or “against” them, instead it wants to think “through”, to exemplify the agency of structures per se, and to help shape the audiences that these structures produce.20 In this renewed imaginary, the RB as a structure becomes a medium for thinking through. And to this end, the fifth RB focuses on bodies in space: who was here before, who is still around, and what could structures like Riwaq have to do with that? 21 The grand opening of the fifth RB was the Tabkha (meal) on 20 September 2014 in which Riwaq’s staff occupied a double (if not triple) function; first of all they were Riwaq architects, restorers, and staff present in this capacity. Then they were present in their capacity as the chefs/cooks who were, because of the potluck tradition that they so often practised, able to provide as they claimed “the best BBQ in Ramallah”. Then they were also interested in art in general and in RB’s offerings that took them outside their routine/comfort zone to different horizons while standing at stations named after the ingredients of the fifth RB. In such instant “who is

who” in the process of cultural production scene blurs. The brochure of the event introduced the event in a brief description of white text in a black box in the middle of a white page: Tabkha is an evening of food, conversation, and the five ingredients of the 5th Riwaq Biennale. It features contributions by Ranya Baramki, Etaf Barghouti, Alaa Khanjar, Aya Tahhan, Lanan Judeh, Michael al Far, Michel Salameh, Mohammad Subhi, Rania Al Djejab, Renad Shqeirat, Ruba Salim, Samah Daraghmeh, Tariq Dar Nasser, Yara Bamieh, Yousef Taha, and a projection of So Is This, by Michael Snow (1982). If we rewrite this description using the professions/occupations of the people contributing to this event, it looks like this: Tabkha is an evening of food, conversation, and the five ingredients of the 5th Riwaq Biennale. It features contributions by chef de dessert Ranya Baramki, neighbour/school teacher/ cook Etaf Barghouti, graphic designer Alaa Khanjar, architect Aya Tahhan, architect/planner Lana Judeh, financial manager Michael al Far, architect restorer Michel Salameh, office assistant Mohammad Subhi, architect intern Rania Al Djejab, environmental architect Renad Shqeirat, designer Ruba Salim, secretary Samah Daraghmeh, site engineer Tariq Dar Nasser, architect and illustrator Yara Bamieh, architect Yousef Taha, and a projection of So Is This, by Michael Snow (1982).

16. Esche, op. cit. p. 35. 17. By ad hoc I refer to a type of planning that is flexible, responsive, spontaneous and situation-specific. 18. The first RB curatorial statement, 2005. 19. Ibid. 20. “Our curatorial premise is to think ‘through’ the structures at our disposal. Thinking through structures is not the same as thinking ‘about’ or ‘against’ them. This project does not see structures as topics, or as objects of critique necessarily. It aims to exemplify the agency of structures per se, and to help shape the audiences these structures produce”. The fifth RB curatorial statement, 2014. 21. Ibid.

PARSE Journal

Fig 18 Cinema Sayyara Scene from the cars-5RB-2015

Fig 19 Traction 2 Beirut Tour-5RB-2015

Fig 20 Traction 2 Beirut Booklet-5RB-2015

Two things are happening at the same time in this Tabkha description: concealing and revealing. In the original Tabkha description the specificity of the contributions (other than that of Michael Snow) was concealed. It nevertheless revealed all individuals contributing to the event, but without mentioning in what capacity. For fifth RB artistic director Khalil Rabah and curator Tirdad Zolghadr, it seems that these were the architects/ artists of the event who are normally dropped from statements and declarations. For them, labelling neighbour/school teacher/cook Etaf Barghouti as a contributor to the event achieves their intentions to problematise the form and the content of the biennale’s kick-off events.22 This way of carrying out activities and performances implies the recognition of the makers/doers/administrators in the field of cultural and artistic production.

A similar experience was repeated in Phil Collins’ commissioned artwork Cinema Sayyara23 (drive-in cinema) in which architects, engineers, contractors, neighbours, local gangs, technicians and guards occupied a central space in the production and management of the one-month long artwork (see Fig. 18). Similarly, Traction 2: Beirut 24 introduced the activity and the fifth RB with a brochure that left room for audiences to personalise and take notes on, in a collaborative gesture that has a loose outline but allows for improvisations (see Figs. 19-20). Workshopping the biennale itself within a biennale activity designed by the biennale itself speaks to the fifth RB statement and the “thinking through structures… to help shape the audiences these structures produce.” In this way, the RB engaged the audiences, rather than feeding them, with currents of visual arts and performances.

Khaldun Bshara

Discussions According to Vittoria and Federica Martini, biennales have become the Esperanto and sometimes the newspeak of contemporary art due to their hybrid nature, halfway between a museum and an art fair.25 The authority of such structure cannot be challenged easily. The practitioners in the world of contemporary art cannot overlook their potency. On the contrary, participation in biennales has become the rite of passage for artists to be recognised internationally and locally, in this order. Therefore, the question “if it is possible to think outside the box while we are immersed within” is still a valid interrogation of the structure that structures our relation to the structure itself. A kind of discursive relation with the art scene needs to be uncovered. Pierre Bourdieu cautioned about the acceptance of dominant forms of taste referring to it as a form of “symbolic violence”.26 The naturalisation of this distinction of taste denies the dominated classes the means of defining their own world, which leads to the disadvantage of those with less overall capital. The Tabkha and other events of the fifth RB could be seen as defying such distinction by role-switching mechanism, which blurs the boundary between those who are already enjoying recognised cultural capital – those who according to Bourdieu “identify with the established (moral) order”27 – and those enjoying equally recognised capital, yet in other fields. In this way, who produces the artwork and who administers the production and the audiences become equally important to the whole biennale’s undertaking, and thus the cultural scene in Palestine and beyond. The second epic roundtable of the fifth RB took place at Riwaq’s meeting room on 27 March 2015 with the aim to workshop the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the field of art. The sexy Scarlet Johansson advertisement for SodaStream (a fizzy drink brand produced in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank) 28 decorated the only banner in the highly decorated meeting room (see Fig. 21). Earlier in the day, Riwaq received an email note from the artistic

22. In my opinion, it would have been even more provocative to drop the contribution of Michael Snow to achieve a higher level of confusion. Seemingly this could not be done because of the copyright rules. 23. “Cinema Sayyara! Rooftop drive-in cinema by artist Phil Collins, commissioned by the fifth Riwaq Biennale. It is the latest edition of Collins’ Auto-Kino!, a project which was rolled out in Berlin five years ago. Cinema Sayyara! thinks through existing structures in order to produce new forms of public display, and to create new audiences in the process. Its host venue, Beit Saa, is a 1910 edifice newly renovated by Riwaq. Eventually, Beit Saa is planned to join the ranks of the many ‘museums’ in Palestine. But instead of an homage to the past, in the name of some faraway future, Cinema Sayyara! proposes a celebration of the here and now. It suggests that contemporary art, architectural conservation and cultural policy need not be in conflict with dynamic local engagements. And it is ready to spark a sense of curiosity, enthusiasm and collective ownership, within the neighbourhood and beyond.” Excerpts from the final report on Cinema Sayyara!, Riwaq, August 2015. 24. “Traction 2 doubles as the 5th Riwaq Biennale’s contribution

(RB5) to Home Workspace Program 2014-15 at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. As a whole, the five days of the seminar will reflect all the key components of RB5. It begins with an introduction to the biennale program and the Riwaq agenda, and features extensive tours of sites that were pivotal to the Palestinian experience in and around Beirut. In an exploration of HWP and the RB5 educational program NADI, Traction 2 also addresses the promises and pitfalls of informal art education over recent decades. Finally, the seminar ends with a trans-regional investigation of the institutional memory of contemporary art since the 1990s.” Excerpts from the event brochure. Riwaq, 2015. 25. Martini and Martini, op.cit. p. 98. 26. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 512. 27. Ibid. p. 289. 28. For more on the controversial ad see Kalman, Matthew. “Oxfam under pressure to cut ties with Scarlett Johansson over SodaStream ad”. January 29, 2014. See http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/29/oxfam-pressurescarlett-johansson-sodastreamisrael (Accessed April 2016.)

Fig 21 BDS 2nd Epic Round Table roll up-5RB-2014

PARSE Journal

Fig 22 This Sea is Mine visual-3Qi-2016

Khaldun Bshara

director of the fifth RB, Khalil Rabah, saying, “I will be boycotting the boycott epic roundtable, and therefore I will not be returning to Ramallah to participate.” To this moment the Riwaq team does not know whether Khalil was serious or sarcastic. He did not talk about it later, adding to the confusion. Perhaps this was a performance, an artwork, or something that we will figure out in the future. However, the managerial implications were not as simple as the “performative” email itself: administrators, curators and coordinators had to deal with such provocation/performance. How could or would staff involved administer and produce something that had such a dialectical relation to the product itself? Would this be possible at the Venice Biennale or in similar structures? Perhaps this is the strength of less established biennales: they have the possibility to loosen their relation to the norms and to the undertaking itself. In 2016, Riwaq (the institution) partnered with 15 organisations to produce the third edition of the Qi, which evolved around “refugees’ right of return” and was entitled “This Sea

is Mine.” Following past experiences, Riwaq’s contribution took the form of a “series of un-curated events”29 and ran in various venues throughout Palestine between 6 and 26 October 2016. The “series of un-curated events” were envisaged collectively, produced and managed by Riwaq’s team, to further develop the relation between who comes up with the vision and who implements these artistic or non-artistic events. In the absence of an artistic director and curator, Riwaq countered this by management processes through which activities were discussed, described, written out, and implemented. The talks, hikes, and exhibitions partially engaged with the Qi’s theme and partially engaged with Riwaq’s heritage agenda (see Figs. 22-26). The interventions brought to the fore notions of space, mobility, memory and heritage, “questioning taken-for-granted concepts, and allowing for renewed meanings and relations to emerge”.30 The “un-curated” adventure pointed at the possibility of questioning not only the role of structure but also the role of certain actors within the biennale enterprise such as the artistic director and the curator and

Fig 23 Series of Uncurated Events exhibition at Birzeit historic centre-3Qi-2016

29. “In the geopolitical and historical circumstances we have been living and experiencing in Palestine, memory, heritage, mobility, space, home, and return are concepts loaded with multitude of meanings and significance. Their signification in Palestine context mainly stems from their concrete absence or the lack of concrete relations to these concepts. And like the catastrophe that had been producing and conditioning their meanings and signification, they cannot be objectively and systematically captured. The current discourses, approaches, and for that matter speculations, neither can capture nor conceal such absence. Within the 3rd Qalandiya International, Riwaq proposes a series of un-curated events in the form of hikes, sessions of knowledge exchange and exhibitions that question these taken-for-granted concepts, allowing for renewed meanings and relations to emerge and intermingle with the concrete landscapes of Palestine.” Riwaq Statement to third Qi, 2016. 30. Ibid.

Fig 24 Sarab 4by4 wheel drive to the Dead Sea-3Qi-2016

PARSE Journal

hinted at a managerial twist. “Who is the un-curator of the un-curated events?” curator Yazan Khalili sarcastically questioned. His question conveyed a hidden critique not only at the title of Riwaq’s contribution to the third Qi but also to the modality of cultural production in Palestine, which seems not ready to depart from acknowledged forms/formulas. Although the fifth RB statement insists on the contrary, defying structures seems to be the common thread that has evolved throughout the RB editions, including the biennale structure itself. Through the interplay between content and form and between structures and concrete practices, between the real and unreal institutions, the biennales in Palestine can hardly fit in stereotypical biennale models. The intentions of the RB and the Qi are to produce artistic events that can contribute to the making visible of webs of power while helping ordinary people visualise structures that have been shaping their lives. In the essay “Creative Heritage: Palestinian Heritage NGOs and Defiant Arts of Government” Chiara De Cesari persuasively argues that while the art biennales in Palestine highlight the creativity of a new generation of heritage NGOs, heritageinformed art, she points out, functions as a platform for performing the future Palestinian nation-state and therefore for engaging in non-state governmentality.31 While I agree with De Cesari’s premise, I

Fig 25 Sarab 4by4 wheel drive to the Dead Sea-3Qi-2016

believe that engaging in what rightly appears as the enacting/performing of non-state governmentality has multiple and complex meanings that amount to a contradictory claim, i.e. an anti-normalising processes. If governmentality – in the Foucauldian sense of the word – is characterised by defusing power and producing subjects through discursive processes,32 I see the biennales in Palestine as ways/ processes that uncover the webs of power by highlighting subjectivities and pointing out alternative ways of thinking about practices and about the subjects shaped by these practices/structures. Within the conditions of possibility created in the post-Oslo Agreement era (after 1993), 33 or those created in the 1990s in the region (as argued by the fifth RB curatorial statement), 34 I claim that the RB is part of Riwaq’s heritage practices. While they have an apolitical form (art and restoration), they have obvious political intentions – advancing the institution’s vision towards the heritage scene in Palestine triggering socio-economic-politicocultural developments. Of course it is possible that such politics are already entrenched in a discursive aestheticism that softly reproduces normalised subjects in normalised fields.35 However, I claim that the leftovers from the discursive reproduction of knowledge and the field itself are the actual surplus of the heritage practices in Palestine, and can have multiple emancipatory possibilities.36

Fig 26 School kids walking towards the Sea View exhibition at Rantis historic centre-3Qi-2016

Khaldun Bshara

By the end of the third Qi (2016), partners held an evaluation of that edition in the form of reflections and collective feedback. Some emerging issues were concerned with the quality of productions, the capacity to reach and sustain audiences, the responsiveness of contributions to the theme (the right of return), and whether Qi needs to have a theme. And whether it should focus more on visual art in the next edition? How could Qi best be managed, as it gets larger? These reflections bring to the fore questions about the structure of the biennale, notions of art and its relation to its context (themes and agendas), and management as part of art production in Palestine. For Riwaq’s team, the evaluation has to do with the responsiveness of the Riwaq activities within Qi in relation to Riwaq’s heritage agenda, more specifically, the regeneration of historic centres in rural Palestine. In other words, as long as Riwaq activities respond to Riwaq’s agenda, it is not important under which umbrella or management modality they are carried out, be it a mothership biennale structure or a more autonomous sociocratic enterprise. Biennales in Palestine are not solely about networks and artworks, “just another exhibition” or grand openings the form and the content of which can be only deciphered in the realm of the symbolic or understood as unreal institutions that furnish the present tense with speculative, perhaps, better futures. The field of artistic production and such speculative turns try to render visible the structures that shape lives and practices of people, while making use of the symbolic enterprise to highlight the debilitating conditions that shape the imaginaries of audiences, structures such as biennales produce – or so the fifth Riwaq Biennale claimed.

31. De Cesari, Chiara. “Creative Heritage: Palestinian Heritage NGOs and Defiant Arts of Government”. American Anthropologist. Vol. 112. No. 4. p. 625. 32. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality”. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: with two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1991 [1978]. 33. The Oslo Agreement (1993) was signed between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the State of Israel creating a quasi-autonomous Palestinian Authority. 34. “1990+: A series of informal conversations, some public, some private, all meticulously documented, with the aim of assembling a concise history of cultural production in and around Ramallah since the 1990s. The nineties mark a conspicuous generational shift among cultural producers and the institutions they created. A surprising number

of shared ideological, professional, even architectural parameters emerge, most of them under-examined. These commonalities seem to exist far beyond Ramallah - in Jerusalem, Beirut, Amman, Sharjah, Cairo and Istanbul alike. What were the key decisions leading to these common grounds, and vice versa? What are the ‘What If ’ scenarios here? With luck, an archive of amnesia will gradually emerge…” The fifth RB curatorial statement, 2014. 35. Bourdieu cf. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Random House, Inc. 1994 [1970]. 36. I have argued elsewhere that the practices of heritage NGOs in Palestine show that heritage has been used as a medium to bring about wholesale of actions and values beyond the celebrated normative heritage’s surpluses. See Bshara, Khaldun. “Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse”. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. Vol. 9. No. 2. p. 314.

PARSE Journal

Abstract Management is an integral aesthetic-political-economic aspect of design practices, whether conducted as research or as part of a professional practice. It includes situated coordination of partnerships made up of heterogeneous socio-material entities. Such coordination through modes of assembly and decision-making is essential when devising more democratic forms of co-design and collaborative critique. The article compares and contrasts assemblies that operate within dominant social systems through consensual processes with assemblies that operate outside of the dominant regime. Those that operate within dominant social systems through affirmative and additive critique have difficulty accounting for substantial change, and at best can engage in minor reformist aesthetic-political changes. Additive and affirmative ways of working also tend to hide the violence they produce. Those that operate outside of the dominant social system by negating, delinking and disaffirming established infrastructures through the development of new formations â&#x20AC;&#x201C; re-assembling and re-infrastructuring â&#x20AC;&#x201C; account for the violence of their critique and can empower marginalised positions. The article also contrasts collaborative critique through assemblies that focus on local dense actor-networks with those that acknowledge meso-level issues related to wider aestheticpolitical-economic relations. What type of assemblies are devised, how does the scope of the site of intervention and the level of analytical abstraction orient what aspects of the issue worked on can be re-made?

Managing Collaborative Critique in Times of Financialisation Capitalism

Erling Björgvinsson Erling Björgvinsson is PARSE Professor of Design at the Academy of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg. A central topic of his research is participatory politics in design and art, in particular in relation to urban spaces and the interaction between public

institutions and citizens. He currently heads the art- and design-led research project “City Fables” that focuses on the relationship between urban space, narratives and counter narratives.

PARSE Journal

“Stop making us into laboratory rats” writes Nabila Abdul Fattah in Etc on 16 December 2014.1 She continues: “I am tired of experimentally engaged people who exploit the system for their own profit, that can tick off that they done an asphalt safari and done ‘good’.” Fattah then refers to the Sydsvenskan article “Mycket babbel – lite verkstad”, which describes that between 2000 and 2011 a total of 345 research and development projects were started in Rosengård in Malmö, costing 319 million SEK without resulting in improved schools results and employment rates.2 The latest deadline for one such project was 18 November 2016, which was announced by the Van Alen Institute in collaboration with a host of Swedish housing and constructing companies, an energy company and the municipality of Malmö: Responding to Europe’s migration crisis, Opportunity Space is an international design-build competition to create a temporary mobile structure that will foster economic opportunity and social inclusion in Malmö, Sweden. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize and up to $25,000 to implement its proposal in and around Malmö’s Enskifteshagen Park. The competition will bring new and established residents together to produce a public space hub for education, job assistance, and social inclusion programs that benefit everyone in Malmö. Opportunity Space is the first in a new Van Alen Institute series of Flash Competitions: challenges that bring together multidisciplinary teams of designers and other experts for short, intense projects in cities around the world to take on urgent societal issues through design.3 Like any research and development, design- and art-based research and development is historically situated. They are entangled and dependent on complex collaborations through overlapping and intertwining infrastructures, as the call just described shows. In the above outline, who is in

need of participatory support and who can provide the solution by what means is made clear. The perspective put forward is that a set of benevolent partners in the form of an institute, together with a municipality and affluent companies will save migrants through competition and quick fixes. In short, what is announced and believed to solve the identified issue is a local market-driven assembly, without acknowledging how the issue addressed is produced by global economic forces entrenched in financialisation capitalism. Although the above call is in the form of a competition, it is reminiscent of many research and development announcements and partnerships. Every epoch inevitably produces specific relational material-discursive practices that affect how we see and orient ourselves in the world, intervene and produce in it, and narrate and depict those interventions and productions. Design productions of any sort are thus entangled and dependent on managed infrastructures, including the production and management of their own infrastructuring processes. On a general level, infrastructures can take the form of chains of production, chains of distribution and/ or dissemination, and selling and/or funding. These processes are socio-material and are made up of knowledge perspectives, institutional and economic arrangements and relations, norms, forms of communication, and technological assemblages. A central concern for any designer or artist is therefore what infrastructures one is forced to relate to and is framed by, what infrastructure to engage in and to what degree these infrastructures need to be reinfrastructured. Alternatively, what new infrastructure needs to be built? If a new infrastructure is created, it can either operate within an established paradigm of relations by building upon, extending and affirming established and dominant infrastructures, or challenge established infrastructural relations by disconnecting and disaffirming dominant and established relationships. A new infrastructure that comes about

Erling Björgvinsson

by disaffirming dominant relations is understood relationally as delinking and disaffirming from a specific dominant regime. Disaffirming can lead to the making of “minor” infrastructures that partially connect and intertwine with established infrastructures, and at times it can lead to dominant relations becoming subordinated and subsumed by a new infrastructure. It is precisely for that reason that practice-based researchers and designers have to consider how to position a new infrastructure and the work conducted in it in relation to existing local as well as meso-level infrastructures. What infrastructures and infrastructure arenas are acknowledged and included in the design work affects how the work is conducted. Attending only to local dense networks and infrastructures, as favoured by co-design, participatory design and Actor-Network-Theory, will lead to different productions than if meso-level issues are acknowledged. In addition, aiming to include all those who have a stake in the issue concerned, which participatory design has favoured, will result in different forms of design work than if a few partners work together and operate outside and in opposition to dominant partnerships and regimes. Participatory design has tended to operate within dominant infrastructure where marginalised partners and perspectives are brought into dialogue with dominant relationships to change them from within. Actor-Network-Theory, which has influenced design research and participatory design research in particular, has tended to focus on strong actors in processes of stabilisation. Both perspectives have therefore focused on and advocated for additive and affirmative strategies in relation to change.

Neither perspectives have focused on working with marginalised groups that create political agency that operate outside dominant regimes of power and put pressure from the outside on the normative and dominant ways of understanding and acting in the world in order for them to change. Acting from the outside should not be confused with the possibility of an objective and distanced position when it comes to knowledge. Instead, it should be understood as acknowledging the situatedness of knowledge and power and how they connect to wider social systems. Both are situated, but acting from within or from the outside are two distinct aestheticpolitical strategies. Thus the act of positioning is central to how collaborative critique is conducted, as the critical production and the infrastructure it is intertwined in, even framed by, cannot be separated from it.

1. Fattah, Nabila Abdul. “Sluta göra oss i förorten till labbråttor.” Etc. 16 December 2014. See http://www.etc.se/ledare/sluta-gora-oss-i-fororten-tilllabbrattor (Accessed 2017-02-23.)

3. See https://www.vanalen.org/projects/opportunity-space/ (Accessed 201702-23.)

2. Mikkelsen, Jens. ”Mycket babbel – lite verkstad”. Sydsvenskan. 5 April, 2012. See http://www.sydsvenskan.se/2012-04-04/mycket-babbel--lite-verkstad (Accessed 2017-02-23.)

Many of us within design research subscribe to the idea that design concerns historically constituted techno-cultural formations, as Anne Balsamo argues.4 Such formations, she states, come about through the interaction between people, artefacts, institutions, and due to economic and political change. Design and objects are never discrete or free-standing, but rather participate in assemblages of infrastructures. For design to be comprehensible it must build upon accumulated articulations, knowledge and existing connections between practices. Design and design research is thus always in a dynamic dialogue with an already articulated, assembled and infrastructured world. To make design therefore means to remake, redesign, reshape, reassemble, which also takes apart previous

4. Balsamo, Anne. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2011.

PARSE Journal

assemblies and connections, as Mahmoud Keshavarz argues.5 This means that, according to him, design always has a violent side to it, since it simultaneously affirms and disaffirms. That design is a collaborative effort distributed among various partners and competences has been explored and debated explicitly for a long time by co-design and participatory design researchers through investigating how various competences (and not only design ones) can explicitly participate in design processes and take over the design process through design after design.6 My design research colleagues and I started to explore how collaborative design could be conducted within the making or reforming issues in various public spheres in an effort to engage with wider social issues ten years ago in Malmö. Given the diversity of perspectives, concerns and interests in public spheres, we argued for the need to create common spaces where differences and conflicts related to an issue in a particular public sphere could be negotiated – be it the public sphere of urban development, film, music, or literature. This in turn demanded first of all a move from viewing “things” as discrete objects to “thinging” 7 or producing/ entering socio-material agonistic assemblies.8 Secondly, it implied moving away from discrete projects involving referenced and sampled participants to the long-term infrastructuring of design activities through active co-production. Central to the infrastructuring perspective was to move away from typical project structures with predefined partners and given aims and goals. Our aim was to establish a milieu where various partner constellations and productions could occur. Our hope was that this would allow us to get away from governmentalisation through projectification, which is the common way to govern research, economic activity, and social life where aims and goals are clearly defined. The fundamental question addressed was: who should have a say in forming new or reforming existing public spheres? We considered it important

and a democratic obligation to include a multiplicity of actors, not just the resourceful ones who have obtained resources and privileged positions in society.9 This work was done through an aestheticpolitical perspective, specifically the design-material-power relations and figurations devised, that favoured additive and affirmative ways of working, were marginalised perspectives where brought into partnerships with established strong actors. Given that I argue that design and collaborative design are historically constituted I want to point out briefly that engaging in collaborative artistic and design endeavours is entangled in a quite different political and economic landscape than co-design did in the 1970s and 1980s. Current collaborative design efforts are situated within the epoch of financialisation, where the size of the financial sector has grown massively in the last thirty years.10 It is also defined by a massive critique of centralised state bureaucracy, while we have seen the proliferation of decentralised private micro-control bureaucracy, deregulation of finance, increased shareholder power, monetisation, the spread of finance from banks to corporations, and the massive extension of credit and debt economics. It is a time of network fluidity and perpetual mobility where flexibility is believed to be good and has led to the increase of just-in-time labour contracts.

Managing Infrastructuring and Assembling of Critique: The Pirate Bay Collaboration How to form partner constellations, how to position your partnership and orient it in relation to other partners? How to handle the connecting of partners and deal with the ongoing configuration of power among partners when working together? These are fundamental questions facing anyone working with collaborative art and design processes.

Erling Björgvinsson

In 2009, after having put together and worked in coproduction constellations where it turned out that more powerful partners, typically large IT and media companies, would frame the direction of the work that diminished the decision-making power of cultural producers and NGOs, we changed how we would form partner constellations and position ourselves in relation to more powerful actors. It was a small cultural production research lab at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, which I was heading. The early co-productions clearly pointed to the limit or impossibility of combining consensus and dissensus perspectives.11 That more powerful partners decide the direction is to be expected and

5. Keshavarz, Mahmoud. Design-Politics. An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. Doctoral Dissertation New Media, Public Spheres and Forms of Expression, School of Arts and Communication, K3, Malmö University. 2016. 6. Participatory design was to begin with closely tied to the introduction of computer technology into workplaces where designers worked with workers on envisioning more democratic, just, and skilled future work practices through prototypes, partially in an effort to fight deskilling and automation. See, for example, Ehn, Pelle. Work-oriented design of computer artifacts. Stockholm: Arbetslivscentrum.1988; Greenbaum, Joan and Kyng, Mårten (eds.). Design at work: cooperative design of computer systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1991; Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (eds.). Participatory Design – Principles and Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.1993; Simonsen, J. and Robertson, T. (eds.). Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Oxford: Routledge. 2013. 7. Latour, Bruno. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2005. pp. 4-31: Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”. Critical Inquiry. No. 30. Winter 2004. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago. 2004. 8. Our research perspective drew heavily upon Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and in particular the notion of Thinging, infrastructuring, but also agonism. A “Thing” or socio-material assemblies where matters of concern were addressed we likened to workshops and public design interventions. Infrastructuring, we interpreted to connote the long-term building of partnerships and shared milieu, where multiple design processes could happen rather than one planned project, through ongoing negotiations and socio-material configurations where local needs, or each partner’s needs, are adjusted and aligned to overarching shared needs while maintaining local flexibility and certain autonomy, as explicated by Star and Bowker and Helena Karasti. Our belief was that both Thinging and infrastructuring were different

considered just in certain forms of consensus politics since those in majority, the largest party – or here, the largest partners in the initial co-productions conducted by the research environment – should have larger influence, which tends to force smaller partners to align to the majority agenda so as to reach consensus. In essence this is a view of justice where that which is just is that agreed by the largest number of people. Still, our approach wrongly believed that consensus and dissensus processes could be combined by gathering vastly unequal partners with different value systems, where, to some degree, local needs could be upheld while attending to shared needs as the partners gained in various degrees from the

forms that would allow for what Chantal Mouffe terms agonistic encounters, where passionate engagement with differences could play out and where each partner could maintain their local needs and perspective while working with others on a shared issue. The forms of critique we imagined to begin with thus assumed that consensus and dissensus perspectives could be combined. It also favoured conducting affirmative critique through local sites and micro-politics, as argued by Bruno Latour. See Björgvinsson, Erling, Ehn, Pelle and Hillgren, Per-Anders. “Design Things in Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges”. Design Issues. Vol. 28. No. 3 Summer 2012. 9. Björgvinsson, Erling, Ehn, Pelle, & Hillgren, Per-Anders. ”Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges.” Design Issues. Volume 28, Nr. 3, Summer 2012, 101-116. 2012. 10. Nigel Dodd states: “In Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, the largest three banks had assets worth 7 per cent of GDP; by mid-century, the figure reached 27 per cent, and by 2007, 200 per cent of GDP (See Haldane, A. “Control Rights (and Wrongs).” Wincott Annual Memorial Lecture, October 24. Economic Affairs 32 (2): 47–58. 2011; Haldane, A. “On Being the Right Size.” Speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs 22nd Annual Series, The 2012 Beesley Lectures, October 25. 2012). These changes form part of a broad underlying trend whereby the financial sector has grown significantly in size relative to the real economy.” Along the same lines Christian Marazzi states: “In order to account for this paradoxical anthropological metamorphosis of the postmodern citizen (almost to the level of mass self-affliction), and to explain the immense increase in financial flows (today for every dollar of goods exchanged there are 55 dollars of financial assets in circulation.” See Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Language. From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 2008. p. 22. 11. Björgvinsson, Erling. “Collaborative Design and Grassroots Journalism: Public Controversies and Controversial Publics”. In Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design and Democracy. Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, and Richard Topgaard (eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2014.

PARSE Journal

collaboration, including the smaller ones. A consensus-driven approach nevertheless led to a specific issue becoming drawn into the political order – an order that, as Jacques Rancière argues,12 defines what is right and polices and corrects trespassers of that order – and is therefore essentially politically reductive. Consensus-driven perspectives in art and design aiming for social cohesion through infrastructuring processes come at a price. Such an approach does not in my experience reduce hierarchies, which social cohesion is believed to be dependent on,13 but rather reduces politics to policing and destroys the possibility for political subjectivisation processes where “new ways of making sense of the sensible” are produced.14 Critically questioning existing social structures by rearranging them or by revealing a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, which involves both social and aesthetic processes, becomes therefore near impossible if a consensus driven approach is taken. Central to our infrastructuring approach was that a fundamental aspect of democracy is to attend to those in the minority and not only to cater to the majority rule. This led me to acknowledge the importance of creating spaces where smaller partners, engaged in film and literature, together with the researchers, would make their own spaces in subsequent collaborations, and if needed only connect to more powerful partners that shared similar values. Or, if not, that such partners were recruited later on, when most decisions were in place to guard the needs and wishes of the smaller partners. The first co-production to deploy a different aesthetic-political strategy of assembling was the formation of a partnership and subsequent collaboration between the small independent film company Tangram Film, the production company Good, The Pirate Bay, and researchers who explored a new form for film distribution.15 The collaboration happened because the researchers had worked with

Good for several years and Good thought that we could work with Tangram. Tangram had made an independent film, titled Nasty Old People, without any funding from the Swedish Film Institute (SFI). Given that the film was made outside the official funding system it had a difficult time getting distribution deals. Together with students, the researchers presented a number of distribution scenarios, one of which was to distribute the film through a peer-topeer file sharing service. The initial partners decided therefore to contact The Pirate Bay with the aim to have them distribute and promote the film through their peer-to-peer file-sharing service, which they agreed to do. The researchers and the students, in dialogue with Tangram, thereafter detailed and launched the online marketing and communication strategy and the donation campaign. Nasty Old People thus became the first Swedish feature film to be distributed for free under a Creative Commons license. Within five days, the film had been downloaded 14,000 times, translated by volunteers into thirteen languages, blogged about around the Western world, and was covered in traditional media channels a few weeks later. The exposure at The Pirate Bay and in the blogosphere, and a vivid social-media buzz, led to screenings in small theatres across Europe. A year later, Swedish public television (SVT) broadcast the film. In conjunction with the release, a donation campaign was launched that paid back the bank loan of 10,000 Euros the director had taken out to fund the production of the film. The collaboration tried out a new model for the financing and sharing of film, which is tightly connected to forms of ownership. It also suggested a concrete new form of infrastructure for the sharing of cultural products and knowledge in the form of cultural commons and thus it redistributed the sensible, as it bypassed traditional “bottlenecks” and gatekeepers such as film distributors, theatre owners, and film festivals. It also led to the founding of the Creative Commons Film Festival.

Erling Björgvinsson

Although I find consensus-oriented assemblies of value, I also value participation based on gathering people who share values and that acknowledges the need for “creating a room of their own”, where reassembling what is perceived to be sensible is possible. This means acknowledging that any form of gathering, as Keshvaraz points out, simultaneously puts together and partitions, as we decide who should and who should not be on board.16 In the film distribution collaboration we felt the need to make a room of our own, rather than to involve all those that the issue concerned through a consensus process. The likelihood of getting them together would have been minimal. Furthermore, it would have been undesirable since a consensus process would not work, as such participation would be far from equal or flat. Instead, as Keshavarz states, while building on Sara Ahmed’s “Willfulness Archive”,17 we need to acknowledge that any form of participation happens in a partitioned dynamic environment in which we need to decide what duty we are willing to take on to uphold the happiness of the whole body – be it in the form of a gathering or an assembly – so that we can frame the problem differently than those larger forces that want to involve us to suppress, exclude or dilute our political agency. As Ahmed states, parts become parts by being assigned the duty to preserve the whole body.18 This in turn demands that the different parts making up

12. Rancière, Jaques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum. 2010. 13. See, for example, Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2013. 14. Rancière, p. 139. 15. Björgvinsson, Erling. “The Making of Cultural Commons: Nasty Old Film Distribution and Funding.” In Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design and Democracy. Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, and Richard Topgaard (eds.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2014. 16. Keshavarz, op. cit. 17. Ahmed, Sara. “A Willfulness Archive”. Theory & Event. Vol. 15. No. 3. 2012.

the whole body need to be sympathetic and obedient to each other. Consequently, if a part refuses to be obedient and be governed by the whole, it threatens to break from other parts as well as break the whole body apart by refusing to take on duties demanded by the whole so that it can continue to produce fluid participation. A central concern before or during participating in any form of constellation is to identify in what way things are flowing and who perceives it to be fluid and who is considered to be going against the flow. In the collaboration on film distribution the agency of forces was not only made up of a local dense network, but connected to national and international cultural politics related to struggles over copyright and piracy. Nationally it was apparent that Swedish films were heavily state subsidised, yet that the Swedish film agreement favoured a few private companies that neglected their distribution obligations. Internationally the struggle over ownership was carried through various trade agreements and lobbying by strong film associations. This struggle, as Lobato shows,19 is defined mainly though occidental concerns related to ownership rather than how the locking down of knowledge and cultural products makes them inaccessible to poorer countries, as pointed out by postcolonial, legal and developmental studies.20 The collaboration

18. Ibid. 19. Lobato, Ramon. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. British Film Institute. 2012; Lobato, Ramon. “The Six Faces of Piracy: Global Media Distribution from Below”. In The Business of Entertainment. Vol. 1: Movies. R. C. Sickels. Greenwood (ed.). New Haven, CT: Greenwood Press. 2008. 20. See, for example, Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” In Sarai Reader 1: The Public Domain. New Delhi: Sarai/ CSDS. 2001; Philip, Kavita. “What Is a Technological Author? The Pirate Function and Intellectual Property.” Postcolonial Studies. Vol. 8. No. 2. pp. 199218. 2005.

100

PARSE Journal

on film distribution thus pointed at how our new infrastructure related to larger infrastructure arenas. It meant that we needed to work with reductions and larger abstractions through what Clarke and Star call infrastructure arena mapping.21 Such mapping locates the main discursive perspective and meso-level communities and organisation in order to identify commitments and how different actors frame and interpret an issue, which opens up to different political-aesthetic perspectives rather than dense local actor-networks.

The Site of Intervention and the Level of Analytical Abstraction The level of analytical abstraction has politicalaesthetic implications, both when it comes to understanding what the scope of the site of intervention is and how the work conducted at the site can be understood. In his critique of Bruno Latour, Benjamin Noys shows how in Latour’s supposedly neutral stance (by upholding a view of the world as a flat ontology where everything is treated equally real), some entities such as critical left politics (focused on macro-explanations such as capitalism and general equivalents) are less real.22 Latour thus applies his valid critique of positivistic views of science (as neutral and universals) to Marxism. Accordingly, to Latour, Marxism and leftist thought in general, pays too little attention to the details of capital and operates with abstractions that are too large. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle point out that Latour does not think that capitalism exists.23 In fact, already in The Pasteurization of France he argued that capitalism does not exist and that we would soon discover that it was a fiction of the imagination.24 However, in Reassembling the Social he states that capitalism is the dominant mode of production, but that we should not focus on it.25 As Toscano and Kinkle claim, Latour simplifies too much when he asserts that critics of capitalism believe that capitalism has a command-and-control-centre. Marxism and leftist thought have had

problematic sides, as is widely acknowledged (for example, its focus on progress and universal explanations) but Marx and Marxists do not see abstraction as pure intellectual products, but as produced by social relations and social forces. What is at stake is thus both Latour’s dismissal of macro-explanations and the political force of abstractions, and how it translates into a dismissal of capitalism and the critique of it. The shift Latour makes from capitalism to capitalisms, co-authored with Callon, 26 leads to what Latour calls the “pixelisation of politics”.27 A shift of scale that, as Noys observes, at first may appear to deflate the power of capitalism and open up for political critique. However, the attention to micropolitics undermines critical interventions, since it does not acknowledge “the function of real abstractions and real subsumption in shaping forms of agency.” 28 Furthermore, the attention to dense actornetworks where objects operate and are actualised through networks makes it difficult for us to account for change, as Noys points out. Likewise, Graham Harman has shown that an internal problem to Actor-Network-Theory, is that given that actants exist due to the sum of actualised alliances, disengaging or separating becomes impossible.29 And as Harman argues, without separation we end up with a holistic cosmos. Noys similarly states that it results in a “… fantasmatic totalisation of the world”.30 What this view of the world leaves out, Noys claims, is “an immanent conception of negativity, which has been replaced by the flat world of ontological positivity and affirmation.” 31 Latour’s answer to this problem, which both Harman and Noys discuss, is to argue that reality has only to a small degree gelled into stabilised form, while most of reality consists of an ocean of unformatted uncertainties, which he calls plasma. Given that postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS), as Lucy Suchman points out, has shown that newness is a local concern located in particular regimes of capitalism, Latour’s gesture

Erling Björgvinsson

of primal emptiness is deeply problematic, as it disengages and dehistoricises landscapes and thus portrays the world as a vast unexplored frontier. This is a rhetorical gesture, as Suchman argues, frequently made in innovation discourse and practices.32 She states: Such projects involve, among other things, disengaging landscapes from already existing forms of life so that they can be figured as an emptiness waiting to be filled – a process that has been well documented with respect to earlier settlements of the American West.33 The additive and affirmative gesture upon a positive, new and innocent world is thus highly violent.34 And as Noys notes, Latour consistently occludes and supresses his own violence as he engages in reductive simplifications and reifications of mainly leftist thought and practices, which he associates with twentieth-century destructive aesthetics and politics, while the violence of science and technology is brushed over. Noys is worth quoting here at length:

21. Clarke, Adele E. and Star, Susan L. “The Social World Framework: A Theory/Method Package.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. E. Hackett et al. (eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. For more in-depth description see Clarke, Adele. Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. London: Sage. 2005. 22. Noys, Benjamin. The Persistence of the Negative. A Critique of Continental Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2010.

First, Latour’s work operates a suppression of social and intellectual violence in terms of its own intervention to re-shape the intellectual field, and in the “violence” necessary to its own segmentation and selection of networks. Second, the potential violence of networks is largely left to one side and we are encouraged, in an affirmationist vein, to simply accept the existence of networks whatever their violence. This is linked to the minimisation or dismissal of network forms of violence, as macro-networks such as capitalism or imperialism disappear into localisation. Third, the question of violence, in quite typical fashion, is displaced onto the political violence of “communist” terror.35 The accusation that critical thinking is fanatical and destructive has, as Toscano and Kinkle state, “a long and distinguished pedigree in the counterrevolutionary writings” of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century.36 An example can be found in the writings of Edmund Burke, when he “allegorised the evils of equality in the destruction of aristocratic buildings and their transformation into revolutionary nitre.” 37

28. Noys, op. cit. p. 86. 29. Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press. 2009. 30. Noys, op. cit. p. 88. 31. Ibid.

23. Toscano, Alberto and Kinkle, Jeff. Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester: Zero Books. 2015.

32. Suchman, Lucy. “Striking Likenesses to Difference”. Paper presented at annual meeting of Society for Social Studies of Science. Rotterdam. 2008.

24. Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993. p. 173.

33. Ibid.

25. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. p. 167.

34. Latour, Bruno. “The Enlightenment Without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres’ Philosophy”. In Contemporary French Philosophy. A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987. pp. 83-97.

26. Latour, Bruno and Callon, Michel. “’Thou shall not calculate!’ or How to Symmetricalize Gift and Capital”. Trans. Javier Krauel, from “Comment peuton être anticapitaliste?”. La Découverte, La revue du MAUSS. No. 9. 1997.

35. Noys, op. cit. p. 93.

27. Latour, Bruno. “We are all reactionaries today: interview to Konstantin Kastrissianakis”. In Re-public re-imaging democracy. 2007.

37. Ibid.

36. Toscano and Kinkle, op. cit. p. 94.

101

102

PARSE Journal

Fig. 1 “Plenty of space for fantasy”, the Western harbour, Malmö.

103

Fig. 2 Stills from the films “The Aid Party”, “The Frustrated Small Business Owner”, and “Is there Swedish Coffee in Panama?”

104

PARSE Journal

City Fables: Follow the Money In a current practice-based research project, City Fables: Follow the Money, a broader perspective on participation has been developed, including a wider analytical view of what a site is and what level of abstraction to operate on. We have considered elements from other places that influence, affect and contribute to our context. Furthermore, we have decided to engage in making an alternative chain of relations through ways of working in which academics, artist and an economic controller worked together and through the production of counter-narratives. When working we created a “room of our own” rather than an assembly in which all stakeholders having a claim upon the issue are present, because the world is not flat and having all on board would have meant that our rearrangements in the form of counter-narratives would have been considered too critical of companies, public and political institutions and therefore would most likely have been vetoed if representatives from those spheres had participated actively in producing the counter-narratives. In City Fables: Follow the Money we engaged in studying, exposing as well as counter-narrating the public and private narratives that frame city life. Using the “fable” as organising metaphor, we have inhabited the shadowland between fiction and documentary as the site for mapping strategies and counter-strategies to highlight critical phenomena in the contemporary computerised, digitised, and quantified proceduralised city. In Follow the Money we have shown interest in current capitalist place production and the language of capitalism (the latter not addressed here to any large extent) that is characterised by increased global flows of capital and people, segregation, mediation, data logging and quantification. Much media attention and research and development projects have focused on the so-called poor and troubled neighbourhoods of Malmö. Likewise,

many researchers focus on those that suffer under neo-liberal place production rather than studying those that profit from it. Very little critical research has been conducted on what produces the “successful” side of Malmö. If it has, such research has focused on the green and sustainable aspects of the Western harbour. The lack of analysis of the “successful” side of Malmö and what produces that success led us to study the finance and new media district, where a sizeable part of Malmö University is also located, which played a central role in reinventing Malmö after a post-industrial decline (see Fig. 1). When studying the “successful” side we have focused on corporate taxes, because corporate taxes are a central instrument for allocating and distributing financial resources and thus foundational for deciding what should belong and be funded by the state and belong to the common good.38 They form therefore a central intersection where politics and business economics meet. In the project we have conducted interviews with politicians, government agencies, companies, auditing companies, and activists in order to gather their voices on taxes. We have analysed economic data, in particular corporate taxes, from 2000 companies and 200 annual reports related to businesses located in Malmhattan, together with a few artists, journalists, an economic controller and concerned citizens in what we called a “taxathon” over one weekend. Later the company data was analysed in more detail together with the economic controller. We have also documented aggressive tax-planning products in our everyday lives. We have experimented with how to narrate our findings through blog posts, cut-out animation films and hand puppet play performances. What we did not want to do was copy the dramaturgical and visual language typically used when dealing with tax avoidance, which often uses a murky, mysterious and thriller-like language. Neither have we been interested in reverting to simple stereotypes – the

Erling Björgvinsson

evil corporate guy, the conjugal family marred by the latest financial crisis – or communicating that contemporary economics is incomprehensible, which many documentary and feature films do, as Toscano and Kinkle observe. Instead we have aimed to unearth the social life of money and taxes by connecting the abstraction of capital to the sense-data of everyday perception and experiences. Given that big companies engage in market analysis, transaction and restructuring analysis, mining data from customers and clients, one strategy has been to use their own tactics, namely engaging in data mining and analysis. Specifically, we have filtered, reshuffled, and restructured grey, dull, boring documents such as an economic spreadsheets bought from Alla Bolag, a Swedish company that sells company data, which gave us an overview of the companies’ economic activities and access to the companies’ annual reports. Our work builds partially on Fredric Jameson’s39 notion of cognitive mapping and is indebted to the work of William Bunge’s40 collective countermapping carried out by the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute that functioned as an alternative higher learning education space for researchers and African-American workers for the collective mapping of historical, spatial, graphic, biographical, and poetic aspects of an African-American resi-

38. We started working on our City Fables: Follow the Money before both the Luxembourg leaks and the Panama Papers leaks, but we were well read into the issue of aggressive tax planning. 39. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1995. 40. Bunge, William. Fitzgerald. Geography of a Revolution. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 2011. 41. In Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution Bunge and colleagues through their work in the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute show for example that the narratives on housing and rent in Detroit were racialised. The dominant narrative claimed that African-American neighbourhoods were sustained by the wealthy through their tax burden. Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute

dential neighbourhood in Detroit.41 Given that we live in a time dominated by capitalism, Jameson argues, any aesthetic, cultural and representational endeavours are based on social spaces and class relations generated by capitalism. He therefore argues for an aesthetics that addresses the legibility and imageability of such spaces and relations. Following Jameson we have asked ourselves how we can “connect the abstractions of capital to the sense-data of everyday perception,” as Toscano and Kinkle phrase it.42 Specifically, this means dealing with the rhythm and geographies of capital and the narrative disjunction between abstraction and everyday life full of inequalities as experienced by people. Like Toscano and Kinkle, our wish has been to make the capitalist systems intelligible while acknowledging that they are a “properly unrepresentable totality”.43 Toscano and Kinkle argue that such representation would need to be didactic and pedagogical – although not only – where we ask ourselves how such representations and political teaching can shape and affect political action by identifying “nerve-centres or weak links in the political anatomy of contemporary domination.”44 As Toscano and Kinkle argue, the difficulty is to attend to how we are puppets of value subjected to abstract forces, while avoiding treating this abstraction as mystification or as a natural force that cannot be narratively reversed.

counter-mapping showed, however, that African-American slum neighbourhoods commanded the highest rents per land unit and travel costs. The lowincome tenants, crammed into the area, were forced to live there, as the rent per acre was highest in Detroit while per individual the rent was the lowest. 42. Toscano and Kinkle, op. cit p. 7. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 8.

105

106

PARSE Journal

Put differently, there seem to be ideological forces located elsewhere that configure economic data and societal narratives so that they benefit the well-to-do and their affluent position. Toscano and Kinkle argue that materialist prosopopoeia can be an important rhetorical device to represent abstractions that are invisible and intangible and made up of complex relations that determine the actions of individuals and collectives. This task is not easy. In fact, many of the cultural depictions of capital that Toscano and Kinkle analyse are clichéd, flatten social relations, and fetishise capital while claiming to critique it, not least now with the explosion of Big Data visualisations.45 Over the past twenty years, the societal narrative on Malmö, be it on a local level, nationally, or internationally, has typically portrayed the city as either a vibrant and creative place or as a violent, criminal and dangerous place that is being overtaken by migrants, Muslims specifically at times. Like many harbour cities, the city of Malmö reinvented itself after post-industrial decline. The main ingredients of the city’s political solutions found in policy documents and marketing materials, contain two acknowledged and official positive substances and a few disturbed substances that are defined as problematic, although essential to the logic of neo-liberal economics and neo-liberal city place-making, as Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren has shown.46 The positive ingredients were: to increase knowledge-based entrepreneurial work and attract the well-educated; to build attractive ostentatious harbour houses; and to provide a vibrant multi-cultural city life and cheap services in the effort to compete with other cities to attract capital. Such cheap services are produced by a fragile informal service sector made up of precarious workers, mainly women migrants, as Saskia Sassen47 argues and as Rebecka Bohlin shows is the case in Sweden.48 This transformation came about, as is pointed out by Magnus Hörnqvist et al, at a time when state-run welfare institutions that once had been created to minimise social unrest and forced mobility diminished.49 Furthermore,

it was based on the idea that regional growth had become more important than the nation state. Two decades later Malmö has mainly seen the establishment of global corporate headquarters and service companies. The changes have been heavily policy-driven, which is reflected in policy documents, statements made by politicians, and marketing material geared to the affluent and well educated, as documented and analysed by MukhtarLandgren. The two elements that she identifies, which are consistently defined as problematic and typically blamed on migration, are increased unemployment and segregation. She exemplifies this by pointing out how the Malmö Mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, demanded that Malmö should be given the right to pause immigration to the city for five years and how Reepalu and Percy Liedholm demanded that the municipal tax allocation system should be revised, since Malmö had a higher percentage of immigrants compared with other municipalities, making municipal statements such as “… at the same time as the large ‘safe’ industries disappeared large groups of immigrants moved to the city and the number of unemployed increased.”50 Such statements contributed to cementing the view that increased unemployment and decreased growth was due to migration rather that national, regional and local failures to address changing global economic conditions. More recently, the document Malmös väg mot en hållbar framtid report (Malmö’s road to a sustainable future) acknowledges that Malmö is a highly unequal city, which is mirrored in the health of the population.51 Consequently, it states that the poorer and unhealthier part of Malmö need to be helped through participatory bottom-up processes. However, perhaps due to tactical reasons, it does not acknowledge that economic inequality and health issues are due to the distribution of prosperity. This produces again the sense that certain parts of the population have produced the problem and need to be taken care of. Malmö has thus seen increased social and economic

Erling Björgvinsson

gaps. This has led to, among other things, a sizeable increase of the service sector, whose precarious working conditions are addressed to a little extent, which has provided the middle classes with cheap services. These binaries reproduce and increase spatial differences and inequalities. Rosengård is thus seen as an immigration district and problematic, while the Western Harbour has come to stand for the bright future. They have become taken for granted truths, rather than political processes that produce the city, as Mukhtar-Landgren states, referring to Massey.52

Sensible Violence: The Infrastructure of Taxation

ingly been socialised, as we saw with quantitative easing and bailouts after the crash of 2008.53 Those willing to take large risks, and through it damage the economy, should pay for the cost, as Gunilla Andersson, Lars Pålsson Syll, Hans Abrahamsson, and Hervé Corvellec argue in Sydsvenskan.54 As they point out, this is closely related to more recent ideas, often termed the Tobin tax, which hark back to ideas John Maynard Keynes put forth after the crash in 1929.55 Namely, that general finance tax should be implemented so that the market would take responsibility for some of the instabilities and imbalances they produce themselves. We are also interested in the topic, because we noted in newspaper articles that tax evasion was a considerable problem, locally and internationally.

Our interest in corporate taxes, beside that we considered it an important nerve-centre, is because taxes could be a way to ensure that governments receive money from companies to pay for debts generated by companies, which have increas-

When approaching the topic of taxation we have struggled to understand contemporary economics and the workings of companies, accounting and tax laws. At times it felt incomprehensible and the complexity obfuscating, for example how companies

45. Toscano and Kinkle point out that with the advent of complex technologies we can with ever-greater precision and scale map atomic and molecular elements as well as map the earth through composites produced by GPS and satellite sensors viewed seamlessly through, for example, Google Maps and Google Earth. However, although some of these technologies can be highly useful for the military, they argue that we need to ask to what degree they give us an intelligible overview of social and economic conflicts. They also state that the art of dealing with global logistics often in the form of photographed containers that update minimalism, tends to make social relations invisible, which Rancière also argues in relation the container photographs of Frank Breuer. See Rancière, Jacques. “Notes on the Photographic Image”. Radical Philosophy. No. 156. 2009. p. 12.

51. Malmös väg mot en hållbar framtid. Hälsa, välfärd och rättvisa. Malmö: Kommission för ett socialt hållbart Malmö. 2013. 52. Massey, Doreen. Space, place and gender. Cambridge: Polity. 1994.

47. Sassen, Saskia. “Strategic Instantiation of Gendering: global cities and survival circuits”. In Managing Urban Frontiers: Sustainability and Urban Growth in Developing Countries. M. Keiner (ed.). Farnham: Ashgate. 2005.

53. Taxes, as Nigel Dodd points out, relate strongly to money’s social function and what social relations money should support. Intriguingly, Dodd points at how various myths of origin of money exist. One myth is closely tied to the notion that money came about due to taxation and thus to the need of creating institutions that would bind together social relations. This is in stark opposition to the prevailing origin-of-money-myth, which is taught in business schools and believed by most. This myth claims that money emerged out of bartering and therefore emphasises that money emerged out of human need independent of social institutions, which promotes the idea of little government interference, laissez-fair mercantilism and today’s financialisation capitalism. The taxation myth can be connected to a significant amount of historical and archeological evidence, while the bartering myth is based on shakier evidence. Dodd, Nigel. The Social Life of Money. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2014.

48. Bohlin, Rebecka. De osynliga: om Europas fattiga arbetarklass. Stockholm: Atlas. 2012.

54. Andersson, Gunilla, Syll, Lars Pålsson, Abrahamsson, Hans and Corvellec, Hervé. “Debattinlägg: ‘Återerövra demokratin’”. Sydvenskan. 21 October 2011.

49. Hörnqvist, Magnus, Hansen, Anders Lund, Pettersson, Hanna, Unsgaard, Olav and Wennerhag, Magnus. ”En öppen stad, ej en befäst stad”. Fronesis. No. 18. 2005. pp. 8-19.

55. Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 1936.

46. Mukhtar-Landgren, Dalia. “Den delade staden - Välfärd för alla i kunskapsstaden Malmö”. Fronesis. 2006. pp. 120 -132.

50. City of Malmö – a diversity of encounters and opportunities within Europe. Malmö stad. 2003. p. 7.

107

108

PARSE Journal

are structured and how transactions between mother and daughter companies flow, which generates complex geographies. At times it makes one wonder if part of the “game” some companies play is the production of sophisticated smokescreens. In counter-narrating and counter-mapping the data we aimed to redistribute both through practice and mediation the sensible, by devaluing and revaluing the elements that make up the unification of meaning and through it produce fissures and cracks in normative representations and practices. One of our films, titled the Aid Party, counter-narrates subsidies (see Fig. 2). Currently we think of the sick, the old and migrants as those receiving most subsidies from the state, draining our shared resources. As we all know the sick and the old are now pitted against the migrants. But what if corporations that put themselves cunningly into debt and thus lower their result and their corporate taxes can be seen as getting substantial subsidies from the state? This, we argue is similar to how individuals and families that have large house loans receive substantial subsidies from the state and through it make debt attractive. This counter-narrative coheres to an established discourse that has broadened what should be counted as welfare. Mimi Abramovitz argues that welfare should include not only social welfare, but also fiscal, occupational and corporate welfare.56 Her research on US welfare shows that social, fiscal and occupational welfare favours the middle and upper-middle classes, which receive higher benefits and face less cuts than the poorest segments of society that are viewed as draining the public purse, as they are seen as undeserving, lazy and immoral. Furthermore, these social policies reinforce ethnic and gender divides. Abramovitz shows how corporate welfare, which includes tax reductions, research and development funding and government grants and protection from competition, has dramatically increased since the 1950s and has led to what she calls a “shadow welfare state”. On the other hand, “Although ‘nearly everyone is on welfare’” as Abramovitz states, programmes for poor people and low-income working people are

more visible and more heavily criticised.57 Sweden differs quite a bit from the US, but its policies still favour the wealthier segments in society. Also, the visibility and criticism on welfare spend on low-income groups is reminiscent of the US perspective on welfare spending. The general picture held in Sweden is that it is a social welfare state. However, as Kevin Farnsworth shows, Sweden, as well as Denmark, Hungary, Norway, the Slovak Republic, and the UK, are social-corporate welfare states, since they spend equal amount on social and corporate funding.58 Corporate welfare states include the US, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, given that state policies in these countries spend sizeably more money on subsidising corporations than citizens. Austria, France, Greece, Germany, and Luxembourg are defined as socialwelfare states since they spend sizably more on social than corporate welfare. The film shows how mainly large IT, media and housing companies in the area we studied are able to lower their annual results through complex corporate structures, internal lending and borrowing, and at times through placing brands and IPRs in Luxembourg. Year after year 30 per cent of the 2000 companies in Malmö pay no corporate tax, and 60 per cent very low corporate tax. A few company trails lead to Guernsey, a well-known tax haven. The complex company structure, where a set of daughter companies are owned by a mother company that in turn is owned by a mother company placed in another country, allows the money to flow more freely between different jurisdictions and tax laws and internally between different companies. It also allows the companies to play a sophisticated game of internal lending and borrowing between companies and through acquisitions. And although recently a ban was placed on transfer mispricing, which means that the companies cannot deduct the interest rates generated by internal loans, the companies can still lend and borrow from each other, where the validity

Erling Björgvinsson

of such borrowing and lending is hard to trace and some companies appear to use this opportunity to aggressively lower their taxes. One company with revenue of 4.3 billion SEK, for example, paid back 89 million SEK in one year on a loan taken from the firm, lowering the annual result by 50 per cent, which lowered their annual tax considerably. Yet another company bluntly lists the same sum as a debt to a mother company as the annual result, which leads to zero taxes and heavy state subsidy. In another film, The Frustrated Small Business Owner (see Fig. 2), we play with the idea that advanced tax planning should be democratised so that even small companies can play on the same level as bigger corporations, with complex company structures and sizeable budgets for advanced accounting and legal advice. This would allow them to engage in trickery and manipulation of the complexities and grey areas of tax laws, which larger companies exploit. We have also considered starting a Democratic Neutral Taxation Service. In another film, Is There Swedish Coffee in Panama? (see Fig. 2), we make the counterargument that politicians are not in any sizeable manner fixing base erosion and profit shifting, which they claim to be doing for example through the OECD instigated project BEPS (Base Erosion Profit Shifting).59 Instead we argue that Swedish politicians support and enable profit shifting on municipal, national and international level. On a global level the Swedish government, through their Treasury, helps Swedish companies negotiate

56. Abramovitz, Mimi. “Everyone Is Still on Welfare: The Role of Redistribution in Social Policy.” Social Work. Vol. 46. No. 4. pp. 297-308. October 2001. 57. Ibid, p. 306. 58. Farnsworth, Kevin. Social Versus Corporate Welfare. Competing Needs and Interests within the Welfare State. London: Palgrave MacMillan. 2012.

tax agreements between governments. Eurodad has pointed out that Sweden, following the OECD recommendations rather than the UN’s recommendations, is one of the most aggressive OECD countries in negotiating low source taxes on the continent of Africa.60 In an interview we carried out, the Vice-President of the Swedish government tax committee (a Social Democrat) bemoans how big companies aggressively plan tax, and the lack of interest from journalists in covering tax issues. Furthermore, he makes the case for the need to address global tax justice, which aid organisations have brought to the attention of politicians. Regarding this issue, the Vice-President of the tax committee argues that Sweden – given that according to him the country has a high tax morale – could help developing countries that need to minimise tax dodging to build up their administration. Embarrassingly, it turns out that in a hearing arranged by the tax committee on global tax justice, the Vice President had not read the Eurodad report that was on the agenda and was therefore unaware of how the Swedish government has systematically negotiated low source tax deals, as was exposed by the Swedish public radio programme Kaliber. 61 In light of that, and if Swedish companies paid fair taxes in these countries where the sum of the tax revenues would diminish their dependence of aid considerably, his reasoning does not only show that he is badly informed, but that he adheres to a neocolonial way of thinking, in which Sweden is portrayed as a fair country with strong morals and willing to help through humanitarian aid, while pulling the rug from under these countries’ feet. Apparently, even politicians can be ill-informed and have a limited

59. This is also an argument that Gabriel Zucman makes in Zucman, Gabriel. The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2015. 60. Eurodad. Fifty Shades of Tax Dodging. The EU’s role in supporting an unjust global tax system. 2015. 61. Palm, Jesper. “Jakten på Afrikas försvunna skatt”. Kaliber. Sveriges Radio. 2015.

109

110

PARSE Journal

understanding of capital relations. It also shows the value of analysing and counter-narrating the workings of meso-level infrastructures rather than only focusing on the aesthetic-political sensibility of local dense actor-networks and their pixel politics. What has been put forth here is that management is an integral aesthetic-political aspect of design practices, whether conducted as research or as part of a professional practice. It includes situated coordination of partnerships made up of heterogeneous socio-material entities. Such coordination can be understood and analysed as a dynamic aesthetic-political management of infrastructures. The management of infrastructure, here termed infrastructuring, through modes of assembly and decision-making, is essential when devising more democratic forms of co-design. How such decisionmaking assemblies are devised – who participates and how decisions are made – affects how change is achieved. The devising orients what aspects of the issue worked on are acknowledged, how we understand it and how it can be re-made. A fundamental issue when it comes to who should participate, is if one should aim towards having all those a particular issue impacts on board or devise an assembly of selected partners which operate from outside the dominant regime and that delinks from and disaffirms established normative relations. Participatory design and Actor-Network-Theory, given their emphasis to working within established and dominant social systems through consensual processes rather than from the outside, introduce a reformist aesthetic-political stand. This way of working is additive – where marginalised voices are brought into established assemblies and affirm those in power, which dilutes the political agency of those marginalised. Change and critique at best is achieved through reformist socio-material aestheticpolitical gestures. Given the emphasis on collaborative critique as affirmation and addition, rather than delinking and disaf-

firming makes it difficult for Actor-Network-Theory and participatory design, which builds on ActorNetwork-Theory, to implement change. Additive and affirmative ways of working also tend to hide the violence they produce when marginalised partners are brought into established assemblies, as they affirm and legitimise through their participation established regimes of power. It is therefore important to ask if it is at all productive to engage marginalised parts of society to become part of the “whole” body, as it easily leads to policing, consensus and thus disempowerment of subjects’ political agency. The violence of critique and change and critique needs to be acknowledged, as well as the fact that it always involves a dynamic aesthetic-political relationship between assembling and disassembling, affirming and disaffirming. I argue that negating, delinking and disaffirming established infrastructures through the development of new formations, re-assembling and re-infrastructuring can be a productive strategy, since it can empower marginalised positions and does not dilute their political agency. It also opens up for different politicalaesthetic perspectives on how we are to understand a particular issue and how that issue can be changed through the re-making of socio-material relations. Participation and collaboration needs to be seen in the wider sense, as a question of the distribution of the sensible and not – as is so often done now – as a question of achieving and measuring the level of agency of particular social events or how local dense networks can be reformed. The devising of assemblies also needs to be understood in relation to wider social systems, not least in relation to aesthetic-political-economic systems they are entangled in, which produces particular class, gender and ethnic relations. Relations that privilege dominant systems and classes, where the scope of their privileges tend to remain invisible if not acknowledged, while they need to be made visible and legible through counter-narratives and counterpractices.

Erling Bjรถrgvinsson

111

112

PARSE Journal

Abstract Documenting their collaboration Master Plan for Duamdong, which took place as part of the 2016 Gwangju Biennial, Apolonija Šušteršič and Dari Bae accompany images of the project’s urban housing and community centre location with notes on the process they developed of working with inhabitants of an area of Gwangju that is relatively underdeveloped in the context of recent housing and communal facility provision in the city. Šušteršič and Bae’s contribution is contextualised by an introduction by Myung-Rae Cho.

113

Master Plan for Duamdong

Dari Bae

Myung-Rae Cho

Apolonija Šušteršic

Korean artist Dari Bae graduated with an MA from the University of the Arts, London, and continued at the doctoral programme at the Royal College of Art, London. Bae’s interdisciplinary practice is focused on socio-political subjects within urban environments. Her practice is research based – projects are formed through a dialogue and collaboration with participants. One of the current Urban Projects DASSI (founding culture centre for homeless / 2015 / Seoul) was composed of a series of workshops and activities co-operating with writers, architects, artists, social workers, homeless people and local dwellers. She is currently working in Seoul.

Myung-Rae Cho is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the College of Social Science, Dankook University, South Korea. He obtained his DPhil in Urban and Regional Studies from the University of Sussex, England, where he studied spatial political economy. He was Kookmin Bank Professor of Korean Studies, at KIMP, Kazakhstan, and a visiting professor at a number of universities including the University of Lancaster, the University of Carleton and the University of Sussex. He has engaged in advisory work for the public sector in Korea. Recent books include Reading Society by Space, Green Constructionism and Environmental Crisis, Beyond Creative Cities, Globalization: Looking Back and Forwards.

Operating across urban planning, environmentalism, activism, and academia, Šušteršič’s practice questions the relationship between public space and free-market politics in order to develop a contemporary notion of spatial justice and community. An example is The Hustadt Project: from 2008 until 2011, Šušteršič worked (and lived) in Hustadt, a translocal neighbourhood built in the 1960s framing the campus of the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. The project became a process that culminated in the building of a Community Pavilion – a never-planned public facility proposed by Aktionsteam, a group of Hustadt activists, relying on cooperation and user participation to create arguments for negotiation with local authorities.

114

PARSE Journal

Urban Commoning for the Human Flourishing of a City: an Introduction to Master Plan for Duamdong Myung-Rae Cho “Commoning” is a word used historically specifically within a Western context, and more recently more generally to connote the action-oriented process of making commons against enclosure. Urban commoning hence means urban dwellers’ organised acts to bring people together and share resources, to re-appropriate the city as a lived space for enhanced communal life. The acts of commoning are deliberately performed to pull together individual and community potential, whether material or immaterial, to overcome social, political and spatial divides that are deeply entrenched in contemporary neo-liberal cities. Through the endeavour of commoning, citizens explore self-organised, social and spatial configurations that may enable individuals and communities to thrive in the niches within market-based economy and state institutions.1 In East Asia, a large number of urban commoning cases have emerged as reactions to burgeoning economic and spatial enclosures that appear in the form of private public space, gated communities, enclaves of migrant workers and the like. In Seoul, a collection of urban commoning initiatives has been undertaken at a city-wide level. With the election of Mayor Park Won-soon, a long-time human rights lawyer, the Seoul Metropolitan Government launched the aggressive Sharing City initiatives in 2012 to address issues of housing, parking, transportation, and environmental issues through sharing policies.2 Car sharing, Shared Housing, Sharing Goods (Barter), Shared Space for Co-Working, etc. turned out to be a great success given the extent of citizens’ voluntary participation. Sharing policies such as Shared House have been introduced to facilitate the co-living in old detached houses of both the elderly as property owners and the young as tenants. The house with low market value is used as means for the commoning of two different generational needs and resources. However, unlike other cities in East Asia, Seoul’s commoning policy is more skewed towards the sharing economy as an alternative to the market economy, within

Type of work: Project Exhibition: Gwangju Biennial 2016 Location: Nuribom Community Centre, 845-8, Duam2-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju Year: 2016 Curator: Maria Lind Production: Gwangju Biennial 2016 Courtesy: Nuribom Community Center, the artists Photographs: Apolonija Šušteršič, Aeri Jeong, Dari Bae Participants: Kim Jung Won, Lee Soo Jung, Son Young Sun, Cho Ki Bum, Zee Yon Soon, Moon Byeoung Kyo, Kim Jae Il, Lee Chil Sung, Jung Moon Hee, Jung Hae Ryang, Yang Gun Joong, Kim Yong Soon, Park Ha Kyung, Jung Eun Ha, Ahn Eun Ha, Lee Young Joo, Kim Joo Hee, Cha Sang Jun, Yang Dong Soon, Ryu Hong Yeol, Kim Jae Chan, Ha Yong Ho, Jang Jong Joo, Jang Ho Soon, Ryu Tae Yim, Chae Soo Gwang, Ahn Pyung Hwan, Lee Young Ran, Jung You Mi, Yun Hye Jung, Jung Moon Hee, Lee Sook Ja, Cho Hyun Sook, Lee Bok Shin, Kang Young Mi… Technical data: Video – film 20:44 min, HDV-projection, Duamdong table game; table with benches 2.00 x 2.00 m, birch multiplex, table top printed with the Duamdong site plan, game instructions, plexi-glass box with flags and plexi-glass buttons with symbol of street elements, info display, and program of special events.

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

which citizens are more engaged in sharing the common good and the building of social relations. Urban planning at the level of a community like Duamdong should be approached through the concept of the resurrection and nesting of humanscale space within an extra-human scale city. Human scale means a time-space setting that allows people’s individual perception and that can be translated into dwellers’ corrective actions. Urban commoning is a process-based device to build social and spatial assets for human-scale interaction in the community. This is fostered by the sharing of individual and community resources such as land, facilities, skills and knowledge, which were previously separated. Commoning through sharing is embodied into the commons through

such activities as community gardening, spaces for co-working and co-living, public space, street landscapes, community enterprises, caring services for the socially weak, community governance and the like. Place-bound commons are entrenched in the social relations or networks woven from incessant commoning and work in the form of space in the community. The role of urban designers for place-making based on commoning should be integrated with the role of social designer for community-building through commoning. Duamdong seems to be a spatially and socially appropriate unit for the social and spatial experiment with the notion of urban commoning. At any rate, urban commoning at Duamdong should be conducive to let humans flourish.3

1. Hou, Jeffrey. “Urban Commoning Against City Divided”. Unpublished manuscript. 2016. p.2. 2. See Cho, Myung-Rae. “A progressive city in the making?: the Seoul experience”. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Progressive City, organised by The Seoul Institute, held in Seoul City Hall, Seoul, 15-16 October 2015. 3.Ibid.

115

116

PARSE Journal

Masterplan for Duamdong

117

he Master Plan for Duamdong was

an art project that ran for about a year, produced by the Gwangju Biennial 2016. The active part of the project started up in spring 2016 and ran until September 2016 in cooperation with the Nuribom Community Centre in Duamdong, on the outskirts of Gwangju. The project was set up through several workshops with local inhabitants, public talks and urban actions. The aim was to create a discursive platform for local inhabitants to raise awareness about the place as it is today, and to work on issues related to the neighbourhood in the near and possible future. Master Plan for Duamdong was composed as an action research project with several parts: 1. Learning from Duamdong: several workshops with residents from Duamdong. 2. Project Proposal: a video-film and a table game. 3. Public Presentation: meeting between artists, residents, politicians and city officials. 4. Public Lectures and Discussions on the subject of gentrification, eco-community and selforganisation.

Duamdong is an interesting neighbourhood, the only one at present in Gwangju without a development plan.4 It is situated within the Buk-gu District on the North side of the city, just next to Mudeungsan mountain. Duamdong was built in the 1980s on rice fields. It was built after the Gwangju uprising under the Chun Doo-hwan government as a low-rise housing area with various types of detached houses and family villas.5 Duamdong has never been a rich place, but not a very poor one either. We were told that several families had been sharing homes and lived very close to each other. People living in Duamdong are known as good craftsmen and good tradesmen. There is still quite a vivid traditional making of ricecakes, kimchi and bean paste production, as well as small carpentry and metal workshops. It is a very local place: people still know each other and live as a community. At the same time, Duamdong seems to be a forgotten place within the city of Gwangju: nobody would come to visit the area, as, unless you know somebody who lives there, there is no reason to. However being “forgotten” might just as well be part of the area’s development strategy. As the local MP said to us, “There is nothing going on in Duamdong at the moment. We need to wait until the place gets run down and then people will accept just about anything!”6

4. Gwangju is the sixth largest city in South Korea (1.5 million inhabitants). It is a designated metropolitan city under the direct control of the central government’s Home Minister. The city was also the capital of South Jeolla Province until the provincial office moved to the southern village of Namak in Muan County in 2005. Gwang (광, Chinese letter: 光) means “light” and Ju (주, Chinese letter: 州) means “province”. The city is located in the centre of the agricultural Jeolla region, and it is famous for its rich and diverse cuisine.

1980. Estimates suggest up to 606 people may have died. During this period, Gwangju citizens took up arms (by robbing local armories and police stations) when local Jeonnam University students – who were demonstrating against the Chun Doo-hwan government – were fired upon, killed, and beaten in an unprecedented attack by government troops. The uprising eventually ended in defeat on 27 May 27 1980. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising (Accessed 2017-02-34.)

5. The Gwangju Uprising, alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO, and also known as Gwangju Democratisation Movement, was a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, that took place between18 and 27 May

6. Quote from video film by Apolonija Šušteršič and Dari Bae. Master Plan for Duamdong, HD, 20 min., 2016.

118

PARSE Journal

During our research we came across the Nuribom Community Centre situated in Duamdong. It is a new organisation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; having been open for only one and half years, financed through cooperation between the Buk-gu District Regeneration Office and the YMCA. It is run by Mr. Moon, who is a passionate gardener. He dreams about making the whole neighbourhood into a green garden by developing a green plant station on the terrace of the Community Centre, with the idea of sharing plants with his neighbours. One of the very specific architectural characteristics of Duamdong is that most of the roofs are flat and accessible, and with few adjustments suitable for developing a rooftop garden. The idea of Master Plan for Duamdong was to demonstrate an alternative to the conventional urban development plan, which usually imposes the future

of a place under the premise of the production of economic benefits rather than social relations. Master Plan for Duamdong tried to develop ideas for sustainability and resilience that originate in context. One could imagine a very particular kind of development in the Duamdong neighbourhood that is related to the knowledge already situated in the areaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inhabitants.7 The alternative we presented within Master Plan for Duamdong to the public (city officials and biennale public) was a suggestion, not a solution, and possibly a method. The project created a platform for an exchange between people and the place, between the residents, city officials and the biennial public, to question the idea of progress and development under the conditions of present economic realities. We organised several workshops, actions and events where we invited people from the neighbourhood as well as city officials to meet, talk and listen to each other. In Gwangju, space is given to fast and profitable solutions that are conditioned by the radical change of the urban fabric, particularly with regards to housing, which has shifted from mostly low-rise buildings to extreme high-rise, mainly situated on the edge of the city. High-rise housing is extremely popular in Korea. The economic development that has enchanted the city caused the growth of the population from the 1980s onwards by about 100 per cent. However, at this moment people talk about the stagnation and overflow of available housing, so places like Duamdong might get a chance to survive. (The housing industry has already produced more than the market in Gwangju needs. They will have to stop building housing projects for a while, therefore they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to tear down areas like Duamdong to build new housing.)

Invitation

In contradiction to the capitalism fuelling current urban growth stands the history and spirit of the Gwangju Uprising of 18 May 1980 that is still very present in the city. This history has formed a

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

Rooftop garden

very specific Gwangju character. The memories of the uprising reinforce belief in democracy and the power of people. When we talk about the process of democratisation in South Korea we cannot ignore the Minjung movement – Minjung meaning People.8 The Minjung movement has been a very strong force of democratisation since 1980. As part of it, thousands of students left university to work in the factories and mobilise people for change.

As Namhoe Lee states in Minjung. Democracy and Representation in South Korea, the movement managed to shape a true “counter-public sphere”.9 In 1987, Minjung managed to bring the country to a total standstill with mass demonstrations of such magnitude that even the army did not know where to start breaking up the protests.10 This kind of democratisation process is very elemental, as Jungwoon Choi would describe: that is mass-

7. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies. Vol. 14. No. 3. Autumn 1988. pp. 575-599.

9. According to Lee, Minjung activists “articulated their identities, interests, and the needs not only in opposition to the state but also as an emancipatory project for the whole society”. Lee, Namhoe. Minjung. Democracy and Representation in South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University press. 2007. p. 11.

8. Part of the democratisation movement in South Korea, as mentioned besides Minjung, is the Tonghak idea and literati movement (Choi, Jungwoon. The Gwangju Uprising. The Pivotal Democratic Movement That Changed the History of Modern Korea. Paramus, NJ: Homa & Sekey. 2005) p. 190.

10. Lamont, Christopher K., van der Harst, Jan, Gaenssmantel, Frank (eds.). Non-Western Encounters with Democratization: Imagining Democracy After the Arab Spring. London and New York: Routledge. 2016 [2015]. p. 184.

119

120

PARSE Journal

democracy at work during the period of “absolute community”.11 During the halcyon days following the expulsion of government troops on 21 May that year, Gwangju citizens sustained an autonomous, controlled, cooperative community.12 At present the news coming from South Korea is again of activating the Minjung against the present government, which makes everyone remember the history and the power of people. We invited Duamdong inhabitants to join our workshops. The invitation was disseminated through flyers and by talking to people in the shops and on the street. Nuribom Community Centre had just started and had not yet attracted many people, however, people who were involved invited their friends and word of mouth spread the invitation further.

During the workshops, residents talked about the history of Duamdong, which was built under the dictatorial regime of the Chun Doo-hwan government. Their accounts explained the complex composition of inhabitants and gradually growing population coming from various sites in South Korea. Most of the people now living in Duamdong came from rural regions such as Jangsung – from the agricultural areas. After moving to Duamdong, they worked in factories in Gwangju, or later established their own small business in Duamdong. According to the local fortune teller Mr. Park, the name Duamdong refers to a rock shaped like a cow’s head. He thinks of Duamdong as a mother cow, “feeding the progress but getting nothing out of it – being left alone and always there, a starting point for a better life.”13 Through our workshops we began to speak about the present and the possible future of Duamdong. None of the issues that participants at the workshops mentioned suggested major change of the place, but mainly shifts that would deal with very regular modes of operation that could be described as improvements.

Gwangju City, present. Courtesy of Gwangju City Hall.

Gwangju Duamdong, 1971. Courtesy of Gwangju City Hall.

Gwangju Uprising, 18 May 1980.

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

Fourth workshop at the Rooftop garden.

Duamdong streets

11. Choi, Jungwoon. op. cit. 12. Shin, Gi-Wook, Hwang, Kyung Moon. Contentious Kwangju: The May 18th Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present. New York, NY and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003.

13. Quote from video film by Apolonija Šušteršič and Dari Bae.

121

122

PARSE Journal

Master Plan for Duamdong – video-film My position as a non-Korean speaking person and as a complete foreigner to the culture was to observe and participate as an observer. I observed the talks and situations that I was part of at the same time through the lens of the camera. The intention was to create a film that would stimulate awareness through self-reflection as well as confrontation of different points of view for everyone involved reflecting on the same subject. The film presents these other views within dislocated interviews with a local politician, an urban planner and a fortune teller in Duamdong.

For the final presentation we designed a table game for everyone to play.14 The game attempted to stimulate thinking and discussion about the place and propose ideas for improvements.

Master Plan for Duamdong – table game

The table-top has a printed site plan of Duamdong and a box with game tools (flags and buttons marked with signs for rubbish, parking places, flowers, benches, street lights etc.). We placed flags on specific known orientation points, since the loose elements (buttons) should be placed on the plan during the discussion, designating the place for the collection of rubbish, paper, parking places, green spaces and community gardens as well as marking the possible sites of the roof top gardens. The idea of playing the game is not only to agree about the place for the rubbish collection and parking places but also discuss them.

We developed Master Plan for Duamdong as a process, not as a final product or a fixed document: a process that comprised workshops, discussions and urban actions.

14. Table games have a tradition in Korean culture: Baduk (Go) and Changgi’ or Janggi’ are traditional Korean games played nowadays everywhere even on TV channel 24 hours per day.

Discussions during the third workshop.

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

Duamdong Table Game

Duamdong Table Game, detail.

123

124

PARSE Journal

Public Presentation – a public meeting between artists, residents, politicians and representatives from Buk-gu Council Regeneration Office We invited people to this public event who had already participated in the workshops as well as the local MP and representatives from Buk-gu Council Regeneration Office. We demonstrated the use of the game and encouraged the local inhabitants to play the game together with the city officials and incidental visitors in order to find a solution to the issues presented in the workshops. The idea of the table game is that they would continue meeting

Duamdong Table Game, action.

and discussing around the table at the Nuribom Community Centre, also beyond the Gwangju Biennial. Why Master Plan for Duamdong? We think that a master plan is a document in trouble. Nowadays governments, especially in countries that have developed free-market economies, have a problem with it. Cities are facing rapid growth that is conditioned by the turnover of capital without having time to discuss, think and rethink. A master plan therefore seems to be a document in the making, a never-finished process that has a utopian ambition to predict the future of our living environments. However it is shaped and re-shaped by different policies under

Duamdong Table Game Rules

Public event, “Hands on Urbanism” with Elke Krasny’s text, 3 September 2016.

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

Public event, “Urban Commoning” by Professor Myung Rae Cho, 9 September 2016.

different governments, developers and investors – it is always in flux, catching up with the future. The origin of master plan is described as a process that determines community goals and aspirations in terms of community development. In many ways that seems to be forgotten, not only in Gwangju but in general, within the everyday practice of urban planning. Therefore Master Plan for Duamdong aimed to rethink and remind urban policymakers, and especially politicians who are nowadays designing our future (as we learned from the Duamdong fortune teller), that people living in the place have something to say too.

Public event, “Discussion for Gentrification” by Blaz Kriznik, Alban Mannisi and Taehee Lee, 17 September 2016.

There is much discussion about public participation in urban planning today, but do we really do it? And if so, how is it done? Is there really time and space for discussion, listening, learning, and changing the minds of urban planners and politicians? Is there any exchange on a human level between planners and citizens? Is the public interested in participating or is everyone too busy trying to survive, to pay the rent, to keep their job? Public participation is not just a given: it needs to be organised, and maintained. People in Gwangju remember past events well and the feeling of people’s power is still alive, however, at the same time that is in total contradiction with the hard-core development of the city in the spirit of the free-market economy. The money that is available for investment in urban development has no time to wait – to wait for the discussion, listening, and changing minds. Meanwhile community leaders have no time to get involved in projects with their communities. Talking to Mr. Moon, one gets the feeling that he is more and more involved in the bureaucratic processes of running the community centre instead of working with the community. He has no time to get engaged in projects and to share his ideas and plants with his neighbours, to develop his dream of roof-top garden plantations.

Filming Masterplan for Duamdong.

125

126

PARSE Journal

Through our workshops with local inhabitants we learned that the future doesn’t have to be grand – a total turnover; it doesn’t have to change the life of people living in this neighbourhood completely.15 It can just as well continue to grow and change organically – slowly adjusting to contemporary needs, finding small and smart solutions that serve

everyday life in the neighbourhood. Instead of making another heavy document as a Master Plan we demonstrated an alternative – an open process, a suggestion for the community that they can pick up and develop, without any obligation to follow it up.

15. Learning from Duamdong references Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, which created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common” people and less immodest in their erections of “heroic”, self-aggrandising monuments.

Dari Bae and Apolonija Šušteršic

Public event, Street Party, 27 August 2016.

127

128

PARSE Journal

Abstract My text contains more questions than answers, and the answers are only speculative. My first question is: “Whose turn to practice took place in 2001?” The text contains a short review of various meanings of the term in different disciplines. From there I move to the second question, which I find especially relevant for my discipline: management and organisation studies. “Is ‘reflective practitioner’ an oxymoron?” I set Niklas Luhmann against Donald Schön in my search for an answer. The third question is: “How can bridges between practitioners and theoreticians of management be (re)built?”

129

After Practice: A Personal Reflection

Barbara Czarniawska Barbara Czarniawska is a Senior Professor in Management Studies at the Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She takes a feminist and processual perspective on organising, recently exploring connections between popular culture and practice of management, and the organisation of the production of news.

She is interested in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to organisation studies. Recent books in English include: Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies (editor, 2016), Social Science Research From Field to Desk (2014) and A Theory of Organizing (second edition, 2014).

130

PARSE Journal

1. Beksiak, Janusz (ed.). Zarzadzanie przedsiebiorstwami – uczestnikami rynku dóbr kon sumpcyjnych [Managing enterprises acting on the consumers’ market]. Warsaw: PWN. 1978. 2. Beksiak, Janusz and Czarniawska, Barbara. “Enterprise Response Patterns Under the Socialist Management System”. Oeconomica Polona. No. 2. 1977. pp. 211-228. 3. Czarniawska, Barbara. Controlling Top Management in Large Organisations: Poland and U.S.A. Aldershot: Gower. 1985. 4. At the “Practice-based theory” seminar (Warwick Business School, 3-5 September 2014) where this text was first presented, Theodore Schatzki told me that the title of their book was chosen by the publisher, in spite of the protests of the editors. 5. Rabinow, Paul. “Science as a Practice. The Higher Indifference and Mediated Curiosity”. In Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (eds.). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. 1997. p. 195. 6. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 1981. p. 187. 7. Rabinow, op. cit. p. 195.

My First Encounter with “Practice” In the early 1970s, economists from the Warsaw School of Economics active within the research programme “Functioning, organization and further development of Polish retail”,1 established contacts with management scholars at the University of Gothenburg. (As usual, these contacts grew from personal connections and interests, which are of no relevance here.) It was partly this encounter that led the project director, Professor Janusz Beksiak, to the conclusion that economic models, this peculiar kind of science fiction, provide no information about the way economic decisions are made in practice. The Swedish colleagues were interested in these specific matters, and in order to continue contacts and exchanges, similar studies had to be made. Alien to fieldwork techniques, Professor Beksiak employed me, a psychologist trained in such approaches, as a methodological consultant.2 The results differed dramatically from the predictions of the theoretical models of (socialist) economies; the latter, surprisingly enough, were quite consistent with what was practised in large US corporations.3 For me, the future direction became obvious: since that first Polish project, I studied managerial practices in the USA, Italy, and Sweden. Imagine my surprise in 2001 when I encountered a volume edited by Theodore Schatzki et al., entitled The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory; it summarised contributions to the 1996 conference “Practices and Social Order” at the University of Bielefeld. As far as I could see, most of management and organisa-

tion researchers (with the few exceptions of scholars who still believed in the design of perfect structures) studied organising and management in practice. So what was the turn all about?

Whose Practice? Which Theory? I could see at least three explanations for this surprising “turn”. The first was linguistic. In Polish, as in Swedish, the term “practice” is used either as the opposite of “theory” or as a way of indicating activities of professionals, such as doctors and lawyers. The word “practices” in plural is a synonym in Polish for various acts of cheating, and in Swedish, depending on the accent, it means “practitioners”. Thus both Swedes and Poles often used the Latin-German “praxis” to describe what we studied. (Observe that in English common usages of the plural are quite similar.) Thus “the turn to practice” could be a linguistic turn in Anglo-Saxon social sciences, where the term would now be used as the equivalent of the German “praxis” (notice that the conference took place in Bielefeld, and one of the organisers and book editors was Karin Knorr Cetina).4 Another reason for announcing the turn could have been related to the fact that the conference participants were sociologists who, like economists, are fonder of theory than of practice. The contribution of a philosopher gave weight and legitimacy to the interest in practice, and French participants in particular had no difficulty in finding predecessors in the pragmatist French thought – from Bourdieu through Callon and Latour to

Barbara Czarniawska

Boltanski and Thévenot. Thus for the French scholars “the practice turn” was at least two decades old, but in 2001 it finally reached Anglo-Saxon waters. The third reason could be that most social sciences and writers in most languages have long used the term “practice” and “practices”, but with many different meanings, contributing to obfuscation rather than enlightenment. Such, at least, was the opinion of Paul Rabinow, which I found instructive: Although the theme of “practice” has been central to American cultural anthropology for almost a decade now, it is rarely defined with any rigor. Sherry Ortner (1984: 149) makes this point: “What is a practice? In principle, the answer to this question is almost unlimited: anything people do. Given the centrality of domination in the model, however, the most significant forms of practice are those with intentional or unintentional political implications. Then again, almost anything people do has such implications. So the study of practice is after all the study of all forms of human action, but from a particular – political – angle.” I take a different approach, one that is less general and that takes up practices from a different angle, the ethical rather than the political.5 In order to elaborate his ethical approach, Rabinow supported his argument with Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of practice: (…) any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tictac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess.6

Rabinow thus commented on MacIntyre’s definition: The language of the definition is full of terms (form, coherence, excellence, and so forth) one rarely if ever finds in contemporary social sciences. The reason for this unfamiliarity is that MacIntyre draws his terms from an older vocabulary and tradition, one that exists today as a minor current in moral philosophy, that of the virtues.7 Although I have some fear of stepping upon the high horses of a political and/or ethical stance (as a student of a practice of management – another way of limiting the term – I have neither a political nor a moral mandate to do so), I am fond of MacIntyre’s definition because it engages this aspect of the term “practice” that in fact has to do with striving for excellence – “You need to practice more”, “She must yet do her daily practice” – but sets it firmly in a social context (throwing a ball skilfully is not an example of a practice; the game of ball is). I use it in a shortened version: “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity.” But, one may ask, what about non-humans? Are they to be out of the picture once more?

A Turn to Practice in an ANT-ian Mode In the introduction to The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, Schatzki wrote: (…) there is no unified practice approach. Most thinkers who theorize practices conceive of them, minimally, as arrays of activity. Not only, however, do their conceptions of activity and what connects activities vary, but some theorists define practices as the skills, or tacit knowledges

131

132

PARSE Journal

8. Schatzki, Theodore R. “Introduction: Practice Theory”. In The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina and Elke von Savigny (eds.). London: Routledge. 2000. p. 2. 9. Ibid. 10. See for example Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993. 11. Lewin, Kurt. Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers by Kurt Lewin. London: Tavistock. p. 169. 12. See Argyris, Chris, and Schön, Donald. Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 1974; Argyris, Chris, Putnam, Robert W. and Smith, Diana M. Action Science: Concepts, Methods, and Skills for Research and Intervention. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass. 1985. Argyris et al. suggested an interesting distinction, which they did not develop further. Theories of action held by the actors are theories of control (“how to”), theories of action composed by observers are theories of explanation (“how do”). 13. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Manufacturing Knowledge. An Essay on Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1981. 14. Schön, Donald. The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. 1984. p. 243. 15. Ibid.

16. Luhmann, Niklas. Observations on Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998. 17. Schön, op. cit. p. 164. 18. Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1995. p. 360. Here, Schön would have disagreed, but he did notice the tendency of systems to self-reproduce. Thus the need for the special training – or for the consultants’ help. 19. Czarniawska, Barbara. Narrating the Organization. Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 1997. 20. Luhmann, Niklas. “Communication Barriers in Management Consulting”. In Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies. David Seidl and Kai Helge Becker (eds.). Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber/CBS Press. 2005 [1989]. pp. 351-364.

and presuppositions, that underpin activities (e.g. Turner 1994; Dreyfus 1991). Most theorists, moreover, above all those in philosophy and the traditional social sciences, identify the activities involved as those of persons: practices are arrays of human activity. A significant “posthumanist” minority centered in science and technology studies avers, however, that the activities bound into practices also include those of nonhumans such as machines and the objects of scientific investigation.8 In the remainder of the text, Schatzki acknowledged the point made by the “posthumanist minority”: “A central core (…) of practice theorists conceives of practices as embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding.” 9 And perhaps even MacIntyre’s definition can be reconciled with the precepts of scholars of science and technology that insist on a symmetric treatment of all “actants” – human and nonhuman agents – involved in an activity.10 As I see it, MacIntyre’s practice is certainly realised with the cooperation of things and machines; yet a question remains if the vocabulary of virtues can be applied to machines as well. It has certainly been used in this way in science fiction, where robots, avatars, and computers can be “excellent” and “evil”; ANT (Actor-Network Theory) has its roots in narratology, so why not? Notice also that MacIntyre (who demonstrated a great interest in the phenomenon of modern management) plays in his definition on the meaning of the word “goods”. A practice may produce concrete effects in terms of material products, even commodity “goods”, but these products also have a moral or aesthetic value: they must be “good”. It is the practitioners who define – and redefine through practice – the meaning of “good”. One can imagine that the concept of “good” as conceived by classical musicians differs from that shared by rappers. Machines can evaluate human performance, and vice versa. If the quest for betterment can be seen as human, certain aspects of performance – the ability to compute complex calculations instantly, for example – belong only to machines. Machines can be good, they can be excellent, they can be improved upon, they also can evaluate human performance in the same terms (although usually put in a numerical form). The symmetry is maintained, but symmetrical parts need not be identical. What is important is, on the one hand, MacIntyre’s emphasis on the necessary sociality of practice, an emphasis that is also central

Barbara Czarniawska

to ANT types of approaches, and, on the other, his introduction of the vocabulary of virtues, absent from ANT. Yet “goodness” and “excellence” are key aspects of the common human and non-human practices. As I pointed out at the outset, whereas the symmetry requirement was a novelty in management and organisation studies, the turn to practice was not. What plagues contemporary scholarship in my discipline is the growing chasm between theory and practice. To put it bluntly, the discipline (if this hybrid field deserves such a label) that was founded on the assumption of the utility of its theory to management practice is now increasingly ignored by the practitioners, who prefer to listen to consultants’ storytelling than to theories, no matter how practice oriented.

Is “Reflective Practitioner” an Oxymoron? As I see it, nothing announced such “turn away from theory”. Kurt Lewin’s dictum “there is nothing more practical than a good theory” began to be doubted.11 Was the statement wrong, or are theories not good enough? Argyris and Schön noted that, in practice, two kinds of theory may operate: “espoused theories” (those revealed in interviews with practitioners) and “theories-in-use” (those that can be deduced from observations of actual practices).12 While the espoused theories tend to be versions of, or at least allude to, rationalist models of decision making, theories-in-use are more or less descriptions of successful tinkering (in the vocabulary of Knorr Cetina),13 most often unverbalised by their practitioners. “Managers do reflect-in-action, but they seldom reflect on their reflection-in-action. Hence this crucially important dimension of their art tends to remain private and inaccessible to others.”14 Thus Schön suggested that such theories-in-use should be made explicit, and this can be achieved by educating reflexive practitioners.15

But can managers be taught to reflect on their reflection-in-action? According to Niklas Luhmann,16 only on the condition that the practitioners alternate between acting and reflecting; it is impossible to do both at the same time. The world as seen by actors is necessarily unlike the world seen by observers. Observers are able to see options – and to distinguish among them, but not enough for a decision to act. As many studies in my field have shown, the best way to paralyse action is to start a proper decision-making process. Actions stem from resolutions, not from decisions understood as acts of choice. Actors can see diverse options only in the moment of reflection, of observing, of not acting. Schön’s way out was the postulate that reflective practitioners must therefore develop “a double vision”.17 However, the very awareness of an alternative would be paralysing: “Even Buridan’s ass, placed, as it were, between two equally tempting bales of hay, will survive, even if it notices that it cannot decide, for that is why it decides nevertheless!”18 Contradiction – in life and in science – puts a stop to observation and demands action; observation can be made at a distance only, establishing distinctions until they become paradoxical; then it is time to come closer and start acting. But even if Luhmann was right and Schön was wrong, it would seem that a neat division of work is still possible: scholars observe, practitioners act; scholars point out paradoxes, practitioners deparadoxify;19 scholars offer feedback that helps practitioners to improve their action, to achieve “their standards of excellence”. So, why consultants instead of theoreticians? Are their theories “better”? Niklas Luhmann was one of the few theoretical sociologists who paid any serious attention to management consultants (perhaps because he experienced management practice himself?).20 Still, he doubted if the messages delivered by consultants arrive to clients in the form in which they were sent, whether they claim to deliver a theory or to instigate a practice. He questioned the possibility

133

134

PARSE Journal

21. Luhmann, op. cit. 1995. 22. Luhmann, op. cit. 2005 [1989]. 23. Ibid., p. 355. 24. Luhmann, op. cit. 1995. 25. Fernler, Karin. “The Reform Principle, Realities and Mediating Concepts”. In The Reforming Organization. R. Brunsson and J.P. Olssen (eds.). London: Routledge. 1993. pp. 88-108. 26. Luhmann, op. cit. 2005 [1989]. 27. Ibid., p. 364. 28. It needs to be pointed out that although the title of Bourdieu’s book in English is The Logic of Practice (1990), the French book has the title Le sens pratique (1980), quite another matter, in my reading. Thus it can be said that consultants do not instruct practitioners in the logic of practice, but train their practical sense. See Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 1990. 29. Czarniawska, Barbara. “Is It Possible to Be a Constructionist Consultant?”. Management Learning. Vol. 32. No. 2. pp. 253-266.

of a successful communication between consultants and their clients, as, in his view, their acts of communication form two distinct and closed systems. Such systems can only reproduce themselves, according to their blueprint, or “DNA” – thus the term “autopoiesis”. Although all energy systems are open systems (there is no perpetuum mobile), all communication systems are autopoietic.21 A communicative event consists of information, utterance, and meaning. Although the information transmitted and received may be identical, and although all parties may perceive the fact of the utterance, the meaning will be produced (a sense will be made of the utterance) within the system. Such internal communications can concern only what belongs to the system itself. Any communication arriving from the outside would become something else when internally processed.22 The systems can shout to each other, but what reaches them is but a reflection of their own voices. That a group of consultants […] cannot communicate itself completely (but is nonetheless capable of communicating internally about this impossibility of external communication) is due to the fact that communication is the operation by means of which the group carries its own autopoiesis, and thus the means by which it regenerates its own unity, as well as the difference between this unity and its environment.23 Seen from this viewpoint, managers and consultants are unable to understand one another; they live in two closed (communication) worlds that never intersect.

So, yes, consultants, who see themselves merely as observers of other actors, continue to plough through, unaware of the contradictions between their theories and their practices. They fail to see that they are actors rather than observers of their own practice.24 Karin Fernler reported that management consultants interviewed by her study were actually upset by the idea that they should apply their advice to their own company.25 Like every other actor, consultants have a blind spot where their own practice is concerned, but their practices are observed by their clients who, Luhmann has suggested, actually select them on the basis of their blind spots.26 In fact, the reform programme offered by consultants studied by Fernler sold very well. Furthermore, the unsuccessful communication does not mean that management consulting is useless. According to Luhmann, the attempts at communication produced by management consultants serve as an irritant to the client system. Consultants do not “know better”; they are able to observe the actors, and see them in another light than the actors when they try to observe themselves. It is this difference in the observation points that can become “irritating, stimulating, and eventually productive”.27 Left to themselves, clients would be enacting their own visions of the world, perhaps until some crisis stopped them. Irritated by consultants, the clients may themselves arrive at a new and brilliant solution to their problems – solutions that still conform to the main traits of the system. Luhmann has also suggested that successful consultants do not point out blind spots in client’s observations, as researchers often

Barbara Czarniawska

attempt to do, but merely emphasise the difference between their observations and those of the clients. Herein probably lies the difference in success between the two groups of observers: consultants and researchers. As I pointed out in another context, consultants engage in the “logic of practice”, 28 helping to develop it without ever stating it explicitly. Also, and this in my opinion is very important, they help to formulate representation statements, which actually mask the logic of practice according to the representation rules sanctioned by a given social order. It can be said that they deliver theories to be espoused, in Argyris and Schön’s vocabulary. Thus consultants not so much help to improve the practice of management, as to engage in a common practice of legitimisation. A great many researchers (a group to which I belong) do the opposite: attempt to describe what is meant by the practical sense and how it is arrived at (in the hope of provoking reflection that might help in its further development) and lay bare the process of legitimisation.29 The practitioners are not amused. Perhaps they are right at that: whereas the implicit knowledge can be made explicit, the explicit formulation of the tacit knowledge is not of much use (pace Schön). Whoever learned to swim by reading the manual? If so, what is the management and organisation theory good for?

Management Theory and Practice at the Crossroads Over a hundred years ago our forefathers (plus Mary Follet) began forming the subject that later acquired a variety of names; they did so on the promise to solve any problems that companies and administrative organisations might possibly have. Later, this role of “company doctor” was further developed, especially by the Tavistock Institute, which was given large sums of money by the British government to help all companies facing trouble in

post-war Great Britain. Researchers arrived, and like car mechanics or physicians, they examined the “body” of the organisation, made a diagnosis, and prescribed a cure. At the same time, however, this kind of knowledge was becoming a strictly academic subject, with PhDs and professors, refereed journals and international conferences. Where is management and organisation theory now? Is it a practical subject that produces practitioners and improves practice, or is it an academic discipline eager to establish for itself a decent position within social sciences? Once, when bemoaning a lack of interest from practitioners in front of an US audience, I met with the response that there was nothing to worry about: after all, there are so many doctoral students to teach! The scholars now seem to be divided in three groups: those who opt for the former (teaching practical skills and acting as consultants); those who opt for the latter (addressing themselves only to the academy); and a third group, perhaps the least numerous, comprising those who still have a vision of a hybrid discipline in close contact with practice – not with the purpose of dictating the order of things, but of reflecting and provoking via basic research and theory. Certainly, the “company doctor’s” role needs to be redefined. After all, it is a strange idea that researchers from outside an organisation can tell practitioners how to run their companies and how to be better managers – that these “experts” are expected to reform and reorganise living organisations. If researchers are so good at organisational action, one might well ask why they are wasting their talents on academia. And yet this assumption has persisted since the birth of this discipline. The discipline had, after all, made an oath to its practical utility. Does it still hold? When Plato laid the foundations for Western philosophy, he promised the Athenian politicians to solve any problem that might arise: from guidelines as to how to conquer Sparta to methods for raising

135

136

PARSE Journal

30. Czarniawska, Barbara. Writing Management. Organization Theory as a Literary Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. pp. 6-7. 31. Czarniawska, op. cit. 2001. 32. Latour, op. cit. 33. Knorr Cetina, op. cit.; Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve. Laboratory Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986 [1979]. 34. See http://encarta. msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/Dictionar- yResults.aspx? lextype=3&search=critical (Accessed February 2017.) 35. Czarniawska, Barbara. “How Critical Does the Management Research Need to Be?”. Critical Policy Studies. Vol. 4. No. 4. 2010. pp. 417-418. 36. Czarniawska, Barbara. The Three-Dimensional Organization. Lund: Studentlitteratur. 2006 [1993]. p. 44.

one’s sons (no feminist, our Plato). When Durkheim laid the foundations for modern sociology, he promised to solve every problem of French society, from German neighbours to poverty and crime. Both disciplines have ended up at an advanced theoretical stage while the practical problems have multiplied, if anything. Should one conclude that all those promises were hypocritical, made with the intention of justifying oneself to society on false premises? Indeed they were a means of justification (all practices must be legitimate in democratic societies), however, those promises were born not out of hypocrisy, but out of enthusiasm and naiveté – so typical of the coming into existence of new ways of thinking. That which once was enthusiasm and exalted optimism, with time turns into frustration if things go wrong, and wisdom if things go right. Full of optimism, I wrote on the subject in 1999: Things have gone rather well for business and management sciences, which means that we are now in the position to afford some reflection upon what we are doing and why. If we are a practical subject devoid of intellectual ambition, then it is time to stop wasting society’s funds: back to schools of commerce and to two-month correspondence courses in accounting and business techniques. If we are an academic discipline however, we must ask ourselves what could be our contribution to the general debate concerning the desired shape of our society in the twenty-first century.30

At that time, I believed that the desired direction lay in further legitimisation of the reflection on practice.31 After all, such reflection is already legitimate in art and literature, where insightful descriptions of the process of creation are as valid as stylised stories. Such legitimation, I believed, requires a further development of the theory of practice. I am no longer sure about this. “A further development of the theory of practice” may mean a further step away from the practice of management, towards increased abstraction and the continued autopoiesis of the practice of theory. While inevitable (science is as autopoietic as any other communication system), the increased abstraction does not have to be all there is. The DNA of the social sciences is richer than that. I still believe in my second recommendation from a decade ago – that of a redefinition of the role of the field researchers. When in the field, they could act as a kind of therapist, facilitating the practitioners’ selfreflection – possibly as irritants, just like professional consultants. Their reports, however, and herein lies the novelty, would not be targeted at the same group of practitioners. As Latour pointed out,32 if one’s fieldwork was done well, the practitioners already knew what was written, even if before this knowledge was only that tacit reflection Schön spoke about. The researchers’ aim would be to show how both the practical sense and the representations of a given practice are being constructed and/or acquired, so that other practitioners (including researchers) could learn from such “stories from afar”. It would obviously have a demystifying effect, but not all practitioners wish to remain mystified.

Barbara Czarniawska

The present irritation of practitioners seems to stem from their conviction that revealing the construction of representation would be damaging to their legitimation attempts. Such were the fears expressed by some natural scientists when the sociology of science and technology started to describe how they produce facts in their laboratories.33 It does not seem, however, that the financing of laboratories diminished after such works became accessible, while the general understanding of “laboratory work” significantly increased. There appears to exist a vicious circle of underestimating “the Other”: managers think politicians must remain under the illusion, politicians think the voters must remain under the illusion, researchers think practitioners should remain under the illusion, and journalists think we all should remain under the illusion that the world is simpler than it is. According to my proposal, theoreticians will be offering a picture of a practice that will enrich a general knowledge of that practice, rather than competing with consultants in trying to improve it directly. I am not sure that it will work. My hope lies still with the analogy to literature. I strongly doubt that writers learn to write better from reading literary criticism, but I know that readers reach for it seeking help and guidance in their choices. And as a “critical management theory” already exists, I need to specify what I mean by criticism. The adjective “critical” has in English two meanings:

We can opt for what we ourselves like best, or prompt the directors to keep the public happy, or to keep it on its toes. In the long run, however, we should be able to present some more systematic reflections on the organizational theatre. It would be interesting to be able to follow the rise and the fall of the “ favourites” in the social consciousness, to see when and how people reach into the repertoire of roles to exchange the last favorite for a new one. Organization research can try to evaluate contemporary performances and to build a theory of organizational theatre in a historical perspective.36 Such a stance requires a closeness to the practice of management, while keeping enough distance in order to be able to problematise it, rather than theorising it still further. Remember the non-negligible hostility of both writers and critics to “literary theory”. By offering “stories from afar”, management scholars may be of help – to managers and their subordinates – in shaking free from absurdities that are not of their making, and in justifying the seeming absurdities that are of their making. By presenting the accurate and detailed images of managerial practices taken from the field to the general public, management scholars may help young people to decide about their future careers – perhaps as worthy an achievement as striving to become a “company doctor” – if not as lucrative.

crit-i-cal (adj) 1. tending to find fault with a particular person or thing, or with people and things in general 2. containing or involving comments and opinions that analyze or judge something, especially in a detailed way34 I opt for the second meaning of the word.35 My favourite analogy is that between a management researcher and a theatre critic:

This article was originally published in the Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies: Volume 5. Number 3a. October 2015. DOI 10.19154/njwls.v5i3a.4836.

137

138

PARSE Journal

139

PARSE announces upcoming issues and conference

PARSE Journal Issue #6: Speculation Release: Summer

EXCLUSION: 2nd Biennial PARSE Conference

Contributors: Adam Dzidowski, Didier Debaise and Isabelle

Dates: November 15-17, 2017

Stengers, Costas Lapavitsas, Valérie Pihet, Fabien Siouffi, Jonas

Venue: Gothenburg, Sweden

Staal, Fabrizio Terranova, Ming Tsao, Krzysztof Wodiczko

Early registration: May 15 – June 30

Editors: Dave Beech, Anders Hultqvist and Valérie Pihet

How does exclusion operate at a local, national and interna-

This issue of PARSE addresses art and design practices under

tional level in the arts, in education and in cultural production?

a condition in which financial speculation and populist political

Within the arts, how can we improve access to learning and

visions sit uncomfortably with modes of critical action in probing

the formation of experience?

alternative futures.

Within and beyond the field of cultural production, individuals

Speculation has been suspect for its correlation with the logic

and groups of people are excluded from territorial, subjective,

of financial markets and dynamics of capital within which arts

environmental and imaginative spaces, be they national, institu-

and design practices are embedded. But speculation is also a

tional, or virtual. To what extent do strategies and infrastructures

characteristic of utopian thinking and revolutionary prefigurement.

of inclusion risk replicating and reinforcing individualised imagi-

Could ‘speculation’ in artistic practices be regarded as revi-

naries within broadly hierarchical social structures?

talising and redefining what risk and wealth can mean, what

How do images of exclusion circulate? What are the politics

agency can be? Could speculation be related to the creation

of access? What forms of research and which actions can be

of possibilities, rather than to the abstract logic of probabilities?

taken within the artistic and pedagogical environment that may open and provide spaces of contact and forms of rights?

GIBCA 2017 and PARSE Journal special issue on Secularity Release: Autumn

To register: PARSE2017@meetagain.se

Contributors include: Måns Wrange, Klas Grinell, Jonas

PARSE Journal employs a peer review process that is designed

Staal, Francesc Ruiz, Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, Anna

in order to: (i) establish suitability for publication in terms of

Petersson, Mi You and Eszter Szakacs, Prateek Vashist, Fahrettin

content, relevance and quality; and (ii) provide critical feedback

Ersin Alaca, Azadeh Fatehrad, Saba Mahmood, Ruba Katrib,

to enable contributors to finalise material for publication. Each

Simone Kotva, Maddie Leach

contribution submitted to PARSE Journal is reviewed by at least

Editors: Nav Haq, Andrea Phillips and Ola Sigurdson

three readers in the pre-publication process: a member of the

Secularity is based on the principle of a separation of

editorial team for the particular issue number (the article editor);

religious belief (and non-belief) from the state. Contemporary

a member of the editorial board; and an external reader.

Western liberal secularity strives to create conditions that protect

The peer review process is based on an open review

four civic cornerstones: political and social equality, minority

process (it is not double blind as normally employed in many

rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private

natural science journals for example). In all cases reviewers

and public domains.

and authors will be asked to disclose any possible conflict of

Yet, in the midst of geo-political upheavals secularity finds

interest. After approval for publication has been established

itself now in crisis. This issue of PARSE will examine how liberal

through the peer review process, a finalised version of the

secularity is now under acute pressure, part of an increasing

contribution will be provided by the author(s) in correspondence

global consciousness of fear, oppression, racism, insecurity

with the article editor.

and precarity. How can we sustain freedoms – social, sexual,

PARSE Journal accepts proposals for publication on a rolling

cultural or religious – in a situation of stark cultural differences?

basis and potential contributors are invited to consider the

Published in collaboration with the 2017 Gothenburg Interna-

open calls for material published on the PARSE Journal website:

tional Biennial for Contemporary Art, curated by Nav Haq.

www.parsejournal.com

About Peer-Review

140

PARSE Journal

University of Gothenburg ISSN 2002-0511