Call for contributors: /seconds issue 5: Handbook for Disobedience:
Multitude
/seconds: Call for contributors:
an open invitation to respond to the topics of network, art and multitude-
issue 5:
Handbook for Disobedience: Multitude
All media formats accepted
Material to be considered should be sent to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
References, notes and background material can be accessed at
www.reduxart.org.uk
'Art aside, Art Basel Miami is all about seeing and being seen, spending
time with old friends and new friends and networking like crazy...'
From 'Notes from Miami Beach, Basel Art Fair 2006', Steven Psyllos
'Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us to
protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in retrospect, various forms
of danger.'
Paolo Virno MULTITUDE
'We can say that this destiny of marginality has now come to an end. The
Multitude, rather than constituting a 'natural' ante-fact, presents
itself as a historical result, a mature arrival point of the
transformations that have taken place within the productive process and
the forms of life. The 'Many' are erupting onto the scene, and they
stand there as absolute protagonists while the crisis of the society of
Work is being played out. Post-Fordist social cooperation, in
eliminating the frontier between production time and personal time, not
to mention the distinction between professional qualities and political
aptitudes, creates a new species, which makes the old dichotomies of
'public/private' and 'collective/individual' sound farcical. Neither
'producers' nor 'citizens', the modern virtuosi attain at last the rank
of Multitude.' From 'Virtuosity and Revolution', Paolo Virno'
'...Hardt and Negri [on 'Multitude'] are often uncritical and credulous
in the face of orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality
... They assert that 'immaterial labour' - service work, basically - now
prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don't cite any
statistics: you'd never expect that far more Americans are truck-drivers
than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling
that three billion of us, half the earth's population, live in the rural
Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.'
[Henwood, D. (2003) After the New Economy. New York: New Press,
pp.184-5] From an essay by Steve Wright, in Metamute.com
Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World? M30:: 14.12.05 'The
protocols of representative legitimisation attempt to render continuous
what is not, to give disparate sequences a unique name, such as the
‘great proletarian leader’ or the ‘great founder of artistic modernity’,
names that are actually borrowed from fictional objectivities.' Alain Badiou
A question is posed in the contradictions of an antagonism between
'belonging', and 'conforming': to the mechanics of conformity that
uphold the opposition friend/enemy, to ambivalence in solutions
inscribed in the attempted tactic to move through the threshold of an
opposition: resistant 'refusal'[dread] to accommodating
'acceptance'[refuge]. The once 'marginal' China Art Objects Galleries in
Chinatown, Los Angeles, predicated 'refuge' by winning the Basel Art
Fair's prestigious award [Best Booth] whilst, as Chris Kraus has also
written [in eulogistic prose for the work of the late Giovanni Intra,
its founder], at the same time raising the real estate value of a poor
area through the sign of 'regeneration' and failing subjective and
objective intentions. Intra's precocious, intellectually and
artistically ambitious practice would bring a 'new' nexus of concerns
and strategies into play: L.A subculture, as exemplified by its
appropriation of unhealthy forms of surrealism, situationism and punk,
injected a dose of disorder into the local art world's protocols of
representative legitimisation. All good things come to an end. Any real
exit from the art traffic in desire [for autonomy] is better read in an
indifference to the double-edged 'belonging' [being safe] imposed by the
'dread / refuge' coupling. As the work/leisure dynamic plays out the
possibility of a new generic form of angst is being hi-jacked,
formalised and reconstituted as the new legitimate [global] aesthetic
model. ['disobedient' art fairs, off the map biennales, 'political'
symposia, social interventions etcetera ] Or, in other words, everything
that is 'permitted' inside [except,in the uncanny sense, what is true]
is only by an injunction to art's non-antagonistic contradictions; what
is, or not, made and done, is accorded to visibility. Art's pluralities,
aesthetic transformations, technological bifurcations and virtual
simulations might apply a radical in-difference, or an uncanny
separation from within the system, infinitely reproducible in singular
moments. As a new aesthetic possibility it is 'at home' in
discontinuity, a user of the subversive capability of networks, a screen
for a hidden and anonymous netwar within capital. The governmental and
aesthetic 'home' of the Multitude is two-fold, the same: 'everywhere',
in specific, discontinuous, bio-political acts of revolt, and at the
same time, invisible, emerging uncannily 'elsewhere' as art, not in
contradiction, negation but as separation. In the rupture of obedience
to and disobedience from the market's mechanisms, [from which unity of
opposition the art world accumulates value, projected and authorised
through the public/private, collective/individual sphere] is Multitude
to be aroused from slumber in a 'call to arms'? Is it not that the call
to arms has 'always-already' arrived in the discomfiting of all
affective pedagogy?
In the phantom 'Handbook for Disobedience'? 'My name is Nobody...' Homer
/seconds. is an online publishing project initiated and edited by Derek
Horton and Peter Lewis, designed by Graham Hibbert and supported by an
international editorial and advisory board of academics, artists and
curators. The project acknowledges support from Leeds Metropolitan
University. A new issue of /seconds. will be published every three
months and will include text, visual material (including moving image)
and sound-based work. General enquiries should be made to
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] executive editors Derek Horton
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Martin David Mollin Sarah Wilson advisory board Steve Arguelles Richard
Caldicott Mark Harris Melanie Manchot Makiko Nagaya Michael Nyman Annie
Ratti Dimitra Vamiali Paul Violi Mark Arial Waller Steven Wong /seconds
is published by Derek Horton and Peter Lewis. The views published in
/seconds are are not necessarily those of the individual writers and
artists who contribute, nor of the publishers, editors, editorial and
advisory board members or funders.
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