[P2P-F] Fwd: <nettime> The Art of the Undercommons

Fri Feb 25 10:02:43 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:37 PM
Subject: Fwd: <nettime> The Art of the Undercommons
To:

http://eipcp.net/projects/creatingworlds/files/about

"*Creating Worlds* is a multi-annual research project that investigates the
relationship between art production and knowledge production in the context
of the transformations and crises of contemporary capitalism. Creativity
becomes an ambivalent term here, “creating worlds” meaning a modulating
procedure in cognitive capitalism and societies of control, but also an
emerging political dimension of creativity as political imagination and
invention of new lines of flight, new struggles, new worlds.

*Creating Worlds* will be developed in the years 2009 to 2012, involve
research, publication and artistic projects and is structured around three
thematic plateaus"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen at autonomedia.org>
Date: Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 1:08 PM
Subject: <nettime> The Art of the Undercommons
To: Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>

> The above is some truly lovely prose and evokes (though only faintly I'm
> afraid) the master of this genre to the nth degree, Konrad Becker, in
> his Strategic Reality Dictionary -- which however has the immense
> advantage of working back to the like of Giordano Bruno and John Dee as
> the original 16th-century psychowarriors whose black arts still make the
> unitiated tremble.

Since Brian has mentioned the work of Konrad Becker, I'll take that as en
excuse to post an essay that I just wrote about Konrad's work in relation to
questions of strategy, which appeared as part of EIPCP's 'creating worlds
program: http://eipcp.net/projects/creatingworlds

Hopefully it is amusing and/or useful...

cheers
stevphen

The Wisdom to Make Worlds: Strategic Reality & the Art of the Undercommons
Stevphen Shukaitis
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0211/shukaitis/en

Walking through Vienna one night last November, I asked Konrad Becker what
he meant when he used the word strategy. What indeed, for cultural politics,
media arts and interventions, is strategy? To ask the question so bluntly is
to walk into ‘elephant in the room’ territory, for while the question of
what is to be done, how to do it, and its effectiveness (or lack of it) is a
constant obsession for those involved in arts and media politics, there is
also a general taboo of these discussions openly occurring. Strategy: to use
the word itself perhaps carries with it too many connotations of a moribund
Leninism, of an enforced separation between conceptualization and the body
of social antagonism in motion.  To speak of strategy carries the risk of
falling back into an older style of hierarchical politics, although it is
debatable whether this guilt by association is sensible. Perhaps this
removal of strategic questions from open discussion itself does more harm
than good to movement building and the prevention of ossified hierarchies.

But I digress, for this is not Konrad’s style or his conceptualization of
the political. If it were, there would be no need to discuss or rethink it,
just to implement the pre-given strategic project. But if there is somewhere
to turn for a fresh perspective on what strategy, then surely it would be
found by asking Konrad, who has pursued this question through numerous
publications and projects: the Tactical Reality Dictionary (2002), the
Strategic Reality Dictionary (2009), and an edited collection-conversation
based on a symposium in New York, Critical Strategies in Art and Media
(2010). Having spent the earlier section of the evening in discussion around
the power and limitations of the radical imagination, it was now time to cut
through to the kernel of the meta-question: what is to be done with what it
is to be done?

Konrad paused, and then answered that by strategy he means something closer
to wisdom.

This was unexpected, to say the least. Discussions of wisdom within
artistic-political milieus are encountered even less then of strategy. What
could it mean that strategy was a question of wisdom? The more I thought
about this since that night the sensible it seems, but why? Perhaps wisdom
as strategy is a way to re-approach matters of understanding and
discernment, distinguishing appearances from underlying situations, and how
these relate to the ongoing shaping of the political. And it is through this
recasting of these simple but important questions that the ongoing project
of Konrad’s interventions and thinking has the potential for intervening in
the broader questions of the relation between art and knowledge production:
the wisdom to make worlds from within an art of the undercommons.

The Avant-Garde Which is not One
The history of the relations between political parties and aesthetic
movements is first of all a history of a confusion… between these two ideas
of the avant-garde, which are in fact two different ideas of political
subjectivity… the very idea of a political avant-garde is divided between
the strategic conception and the aesthetic conception of the avant-garde. –
Jacques Ranciere

Gazing back on the history of the avant-garde, as angels on mounting
wreckage, what we find is the refuse of ruptures and manifestos. From
bravado filled declarations on detached and depotentialized status of the
arts that call for a merging of art with everyday life, to equally irate
denunciations of when this merging takes less than ideal forms (advertising
techniques, culture led gentrification, museum based legitimation for dodgy
petro producers, etc.) From the first Futurist manifestos, the avant-garde
style of provocation has centered on brazen interventions into the politics
conjoining art and knowledge production. To use Ranciere’s wording, the
avant-garde manifesto takes the form of announcing a new distribution of the
sensible, the task of which the practices of the announced movement will
embody (even if this is assumed to already have occurred). And thus there is
a history of practices, from social sculpture to the crafting of unitary
ambiances, through which these declarations about the reshaping of
art-knowledge-politics proliferated. There is such a strong connection
developed between the avant-garde and these public declarations it becomes
difficult to conceive of it without them. What would that mean? An artistic
movement dedicated to the reshaping of art, life, and politics that did not
announce this to as many who would listen but rather went about affecting
its method of transformation on a minor scale?

The problem is that by declaring openly intents and methods to reshape art,
life, and the relations of production, the avant-garde has tended to give
away too much, to let its hand be shown too early. In other words, to leave
it open to processes of decomposition and recuperation, where radical ideas
are put to service within forms of social control and domination. If the
tradition of autonomist politics and analysis shows us that it is working
class insubordination and resistance to capital that is the driving factor
shaping economic and social development, then an autonomist understanding of
the history of the avant-garde would show us something else. What an
autonomist conceptualization of these histories would uncover, rather than a
disconnected series of movements and formal relations, is how the
avant-garde opens up new possibilities for reshaping social relations that
is then seized upon by mechanisms of control and capital accumulation. As
Jacques Attali  argues, music, rather than being a superstructural
reflection of underlying conditions, precedes and prophesizes these broader
changes in social and economic relations. Thus the avant-garde is the parrot
in the mineshaft of history: its death signaling coming transformations,
when submerged veins of creativity are brought to the surface.

It is this history that Konrad’s work has persistently gestured towards and
explored: the techniques of reality engineering, libidinal bonding,
consensus construction, and infopolitical subterfuge. This is a history
perhaps the psychogeographic equivalent of the Tyburn gallows, where drifts
of history are marked by the bodies of dead ideas. And as Konrad observes,
it was the moment before execution at Tyburn where the condemned was granted
to freedom to speak whatever was on his mind, for what was there to lose?
 But this would not be the question of strategy, for there is always
something to lose. The moment of freedom that appears before the condemned
is only possible because of the structure of unfreedom, a literal
thanatocracy, which underpins it, whether in the form of the gallows, or the
integration of mechanisms of death, desire, and manipulation within
practices of statecraft.

The Situationist International was quite fond of arguing that looking back
on this appropriation of the avant-garde, its rendering into corpses and
fodder for the spectacular mechanisms of domination, you could detect two
different methods of execution: Dada tried to negate the status art of
without realizing it, while Surrealism wanted to realize art without
negating it. Therefore the task of the Situationists, in a supremely
Hegelian manner, would to be create tactical means for the simultaneous
realization and negation of art, expressed as the “communication of
incommunicable” and crafting of situations for realization of the insurgent
desires and ideas they alleged were already in everyone’s heads. One might
suspect that behind such paradoxical sounding and typically cavalier
phrasing this is more of a triumphalist declaration (all the failures of
previous avant-gardes will be solved by our intervention!) than anything
else.

However, this pairing together of the necessity of everyone knowing and not
knowing at the same time, of communication (of the incommunicable) as the
key dynamic, runs through all the work of the SI. It brings together all the
strands constituting their politics of communication, of the spectacle as
condition one is immersed in and struggles through. And it is at this
juncture the framing of strategy as wisdom comes to make the most sense. For
if it true, as Debord comments on the gypsies, that they “rightly contend
that one is never compelled to speak the truth except in one’s language; in
the enemy’s language, the lie must reign,”  what is this other than a very
direct question of strategy-as-wisdom? And in that sense also a fundamental
question about the relation between art and knowledge production for
subversive currents. When language and media politics become sites of
informational warfare, having the the wisdom to know whether it one should
be expressing one’s goals openly, in a language of lies, or an encoded and
partially concealed manner… this becomes a central, if not the central
question of strategy.

This is what thinking about strategy as a question of wisdom opens up, and
this is precisely the line of thought that Konrad has pursued through his
work. Take for instance the way he describes the process of rendering dead
movements and subversion into material for renewed capital accumulation:

The process of cooptation, typical of art-market logic, exploits the visual
alphabet and cultural codes of autonomous positions and infiltrates its
agents into the parallel worlds of hidden cultural practice. Debates on
strategies regarding this takeover and the mirroring of symbolic language of
opposition movements have continued for generations, but concepts of
authenticity do not seem to offer valid options of cultural self-defense.

This reframes recuperation through a materialist politics of communication.
It is recuperation through exploiting the visual codes of autonomous
practices, and through that to work into the underground, submerged realm of
communication and relations. Too much given away too openly. As Konrad
argues, the accelerating co-optation of cultural expression creates both a
market around it and “strategies dealing with this phenomenon of ever-faster
appropriation of artistic expression by corporate business involve tactical
invisibility and an immersion in the age of biocybernetic
self-reproduction.”  This is precisely why that returning to a notion of
authenticity, of the collapse between the said and what is really meant, is
not a valid strategy for working through, in, or against this dynamic. What
is needed instead is a discerning sense of strategic, the wisdom of someone
like Debord, of the gypsies, of infrapolitical communication and subterfuge:
the tools to develop an art of the undercommons. What tools does a text like
Strategic Reality Dictionary and Konrad’s work more generally offer us for
such a task?

The Place of Strategy, the Strategy of Place
The artist as a reality hacker is a cultural intelligence and
counterintelligence operator for what should more appropriately be
considered parallel or hidden cultures instead of the common terms
“underground” or “marginal”… Pre-existing elements in society can be used to
evoke a meaning that was not originally intended in these elements and by
transformation bring about an entirely new message that reveals the
underlying absurdity of the spectacle – Konrad Becker

To the degree that there has been any sustained strategic discussion within
autonomous artistic-political milieus, it generally has taken a large degree
of inspiration from the work of Michel de Certeau. De Certeau takes up a
line of inquiry coming out of post-68 French political thinkers. His
distinction between strategy and tactics in everyday life has become
particularly influential, attaining an almost ubiquitous status. It is the
sort of insight that informs and enriches research done within cultural
studies and beyond: to take seriously these everyday interactions as sites
of political contestation and tactical maneuvering.  Ironically enough it is
de Certeau’s distinction that makes it difficult to discuss strategy
precisely because of how he identifies strategy with mechanisms of power and
tactics with resistance. For de Certeau “a tactic is determined by the
absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of
power.”

The problem is in this framework social movement politics are precluded from
the formation of strategies and spaces of their own precisely because this
does not fit the model. Oppositional politics, in so far as they are
tactical, could not be understood to create spaces of their own or to
operate on a strategic level. There are no strategies of resistance, only
domination. This overstates the operations of strategic fields of power and
underestimates the ability of oppositional politics and tactics to congeal a
level of strategic interaction precisely because they do create strategic
spaces and orientations, even if not within the sense understood by de
Certeau. This framing leads to an uncritical valorization of micropolitical
subversion, but one that is without any means to articulate connections
between antagonisms without that articulation being viewed as an act of
domination. And that is why there is very little discussion of strategy. But
this does not seem at all like an orientation to strategic questions founded
upon wisdom. How does does Konrad’s work approach take us somewhere else?

To return to the autonomist tradition, if resistance comes first, and is a
prior and determining factor of social development, then it operates
precisely on a strategic field. In the ‘Copernican turn’ of understanding
resistance as the prior and primary factor, the autonomist tradition recasts
the strategy and tactics distinction.  The approach Konrad develops brings
together different insights from these approaches while discarding some of
their more questionable excesses. While on one hand it is ridiculous to work
from a notion of strategy where resistance is only tactical, operating from
a shifting no-place never of its own, from somewhere that cannot formulate a
tactical theater of operations without coalescing into a
transcendent-hierarchical form of strategy as domination, the alternative of
seeing all forms of social resistance as strategic likewise neglects the
specificity of how these strategic operations are composed. To grasp these
specificities what is needed is not reified conceptions of statecraft or
assumptions of the inherently strategic nature of autonomous
political-artistic activity. Konrad moves back toward a more classically
oriented approach to strategy, but with a number of critical differences,
perhaps akin to the way that Debord revisits the history of military
strategy and thinking precisely in order to learn from it and apply it
differently.

Strategy becomes not the planning of operations and tactical maneuvers based
on rational, abstract calculation, elaborated from a disembodied
transcendent perspective. Rather it is contextual and process-based, formed
around how particular strategic plans fit with and respond to their
environment. Translated politically, this is a process of constantly
adapting and transforming strategic planning and tactical operations in
relation to changing compositions of forces, antagonisms, and subjectivities
in motion at a given time, according to the shifting grounds of the
situation. This adaption to and from the environment is traditionally a
question of intelligence, of the military variety, an intelligence that is
“necessarily incomplete and depend upon simplified descriptions of
complexity.”  Strategic models leave out some elements, as all models do,
but the question is which elements and what effects their absence has. Or to
reframe that, what are the benefits of basing an analysis from what is
included? Take for instance the notion of psychogeography, which omits many
aspects integral to most understandings of territory and strategic
operations. What it does include, however, is closely attuned analysis of
emotional and affective dynamics, which is precisely the terrain of cultural
politics and infowar in cognitive capitalism. Psychogeography then in one
sense is nothing more than adapting the methods and approaches of military
strategy and cartography to the changing situation of spectral commodity
production and state power. It is the wisdom to formulate this re-adaption,
or how strategy “applies situational intelligence with available tactics and
their expected effects.”

Strategic frameworks and tactical maneuvers, connected through logistical
webs, finds themselves bound up in what Konrad aptly describes as an
“infinite spiral of reciprocal anticipation.”  Or to put in autonomist
terms, capital and the state work to anticipate new forms of subversion so
that their energies may rendered into new mechanisms for capital
accumulation and governance. Those who would sabotage that very process must
likewise anticipate the coming process of decomposition and recuperation to
divert and prevent it. This shielding and obfuscating of deductive
decision-making, the layering and encoding of strategic operations and
appearances, is the development of an art of the undercommons. It is an art
that does not give away all the subversive knowledge it holds through public
declaration, or declare a new regime of the sensible, as in the history of
avant-garde declarations. Thus, when Brian Holmes says that when someone is
talking about politics in an artistic frame they’re lying,  that is in some
sense not a critique, but also an admission to the potential of an artistic
politics formed around those dynamics of deception.

Under the Commons
The first act of self-organization in the undercommons is a refusal of
subjectivation through, and only through, self-organization.  This
disidentification through self-organization is also, for us, not a
prerequisite to what Toni Negri calls the common management (gestione) of
the commons, but the potential of that organization. – Stefano Harney and
Fred Moten

It is this strategic necessity to obfuscate and encode the intentions,
knowledges, and understanding of subversive activity approaching strategy as
a wisdom gestures towards. It is a necessity in particular for
artistic-political-media interventions, which as we have learned all to well
and paradoxically not well enough, are prime arenas for the decomposition
and recuperation of subversive energies. This would be not an art of the
public, of an assumed or pre-given audience, but an art of the undercommons:
a strategic reframing of artistic-political interventions around taking very
seriously the question of with whom and why one is communicating. One might
think of it as a relational aesthetics that rather being confined to the
gallery space operates through an infrapolitical and everyday realm, forming
immanent points of strategic convergence through the shaping of relations in
that space. Or better yet, it is the formation of the space itself.

The notion of the undercommons comes out of the writing of Fred Moten and
Stefano Harney, who take up the theorizing of figures such as Robin DG
Kelley and James Scott on the layers of encoding, deception and evasion
embedded within forms of resistance employed by peasants, escaped slaves,
and other populations who cannot afford the risks with saying openly their
intents or ideas.  While this is indeed quite a different position then from
where many political artists and media producers work (although not all)
there is still something to be learned from this approach. If the problem of
autonomous cultural and artistic production is that it gives away too much,
inadvertently opening itself up to the process of
recuperation-decomposition, then perhaps a strategic orientation to address
this dynamic would learn from the encoding and obfuscating dynamics of
infrapolitical intervention and the shaping of the undercommons. And while
the undercommons are from capital’s perspective the unacknowledged
self-organization of the despised, discounted, and anti-social, from an
autonomous perspective they are something else entirely: the
self-organization of the incommensurate.  They embody a process of
self-organized dis-identification where the knowledge of subversion is kept
within the parallel-submerged terrain, rather than becoming part of enforced
state hallucinatory patterns.

Konrad’s approach to strategy works through, in, and against this direction,
offering a few dead saints of his own crisscrossing the paths of the present
European wasteland. This analysis itself is dispersed across the unfolding
stream of his prose, but clearly marked at moments, for instance when he
quotes the Prussian soldier and military strategist Dietrich Heinrich von
Bülow when he says “a strategy is the science of military movements outside
of the enemy’s field of vision; tactics is within it.” Indeed, and this
makes the question of strategy reappear, literally, not as one where tactics
are component parts of the formation of overarching strategy (which they in
some ways are), or component parts inherently linked to dynamics of
domination or resistance (whichever direction is the dominant
characteristic), but a distinction rather based on fields of visibility and
apprehension. A strategic approach defined through a logic of
(in)visibility, of becoming imperceptible, is the condition of wisdom when,
as Konrad argues, power, bound by its very visibility, provides tactical
advantages to the conditions of the capacity to remain unseen. It is, as
Roger Farr has explored through its manifestations in anarchist poetics, a
strategy of concealment.

Strategy then is not necessarily directly concerned with the use of force
but rather an understanding of the force dynamics in motion, the movement of
becoming and unbecoming at play, and the application of these dynamics in
the immanent composition of political possibility. What Konrad’s work shows
is the strategic operation of the infrapolitical is also at work in the
heart of the state and within the logic of governance, in the continued
attempts to shore up the infopolitical and media spectacular mechanisms
holding together continued forms of domination. But these strategic forms of
statecraft are themselves ephemeral and precarious, and in need of constant
maintenance and shoring up through cultural engineering. Statecraft and
governance constantly need to recreate their own space (and perhaps in this
sense de Certeau is correct about the relation between strategy and space).
And thus governance is in constant need of a new fix for this problem,
whether through learning from Giordano Bruno’s techniques of libidinal
bonding and information modulation, from antagonistic social movements and
energies, or through the conjuring up around new conspiracy panics against
those who abide within the undercommons.

The Critical Art Ensemble, in their post-script to Strategic Reality
Dictionary, point to this contradiction: the class of reality engineers are
caught between the powers of the measurable and physical and the techniques
of modulating imagination, desire, and creativity that need to be
continuously controlled for apparatuses of governance to continue
functioning. Today in cognitive capitalism, the disease for which it
pretends to be the cure (surely the most apt characterization ever given),
these mechanisms urgently desire us to give away all that we know, whether
through having ‘fun at work,’ through participatory work teams, in cultural
quarters, through the former radicals who have become ‘reasonable’ and given
up the ghost of their former subversion, through the rendering of antagonism
into imaginal capital. An art of the undercommons reorients strategies of
media and cultural intervention around the wisdom to not give too much away
or to open up these knowledges to harvest. The art of the undercommons is
the wisdom to make worlds while obfuscating subversive knowledges from
recuperation. For subversive movements to retain their potential, we can
only hope that they do not fall into rituals of resistance and un-thought
through gestures which “transforms ambiguous streams of social continua into
discrete and processable categories.”  We can only hope to develop the
wisdom to know the difference.

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