To clarify, my position is rhetorical. I am merely meditating on what I see in the media and being generated by the millennials. It isn’t so much a “will to abjection”, but a question to where the real potentials are for positive social change through forms of art today. For example, I only say this because I’m close to it, is the Yes Lab’s Action Switchboard is very positive, as well as ArtisOpenSource’s Near Future Lab.
Part of my rhetorical position comes from someone who sees increases in real precarity over the past five years in my students. I have remained positive or I would not be here. However, the positivity I see in the Millennials, is at least an acceptance of abjection, or the system’s ubiquity and an embrace of their complicity as a sort of benign nihilism. Or at least, this is what I see in the Midwest and parts of the East Coast and Europe. *And what I see that is different today from the First Wave Avants is the lack of cohesive ideology for world/political change, which is replaced by what I posit as brand-position-movements whose function is solely to attain visibility and market share in the art world with no real political position.* Ian Bogost wrote about this pretty aptly in a reflection in the Atlantic. More of what I am fighting for is the recognition of the increasing position of precarity (especially among the youth drowning in debt and poor job prospects, some of whom I have had to feed for short periods) both as the potential of the traditional artist’s place for creativity, but also living a breath from the abyss and ways to have them seen, heard, and a subject of advocacy. I feel this is the birthplace of great work, but also I just want to point out the rising tide of adjuncting, minimum-wage and just-in-time jobs and so on. Discursively, I am probably more in the position of Sholette, Thompson, and even Adorno. I am more an adherent to the necessity of committed art than a pessimist. So, please don’t see my rhetoric as necessarily pessimistic, but more a position of advocacy for a slipping demographic that is fighting in the trenches in a world where the media of those areas bombard with profound negativity about future prospects, both micro and macro. I don’t want to put up a website and say that’s going to make it all better, but I truly enjoy projects like Joseph DeLappe’s Drone Projects which bring communities together to fight for the foregrounding of and actioning on critical subjects. Another great body of work is Morehshin Allahyari’s Dark Matter which uses new technologies to contest national politics. And lastly, it isn’t i who is necessarily pessimistic, but I see a more profound short-term sense of it in the youth in my regions of interaction. What frames our culture is that currently we are headed (at this time) for the next Great Extinction and Collapse of the Anthropocene in the next 1-200 years, and I still hold onto the hope that we as artists can still hold onto the idea that we can somehow help prevent it so that humanity can be a galactic civilization. Pragmatism, not pessimism. So, how can we use art to fight back the coming Monty Python-esque celestial foot? From: helen varley jamieson <[email protected]> Reply-To: <[email protected]>, NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Date: Friday, March 6, 2015 at 6:45 AM To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Lines of Communication i am very optimistic about alternatives :) On 5/03/15 10:14 10PM, Randall Packer wrote: > > @Patrick >>>>>> "What if capitalism has become so ubiquitous that the > Foucauldian system of power is so pervasive that there is nowhere to go.² > > I can see that it is rather futile to be an optimist on this list. > However, I hang on to the notion there is power in words, power in art, > power in communication, it just doesn¹t have the same kind of immediate + > dramatic effect as a nuclear bomb. However, if you take a broader > perspective on time + history, I think you can see that art + the artist > has in fact changed the course of cultural and political thought, time and > time again, however glacial it may occur. > > On 3/5/15, 5:19 AM, "Patrick Lichty" <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> >>> >>> We have to speak in order to be heard. >>> >> >> Rhetorically speaking, being heard as voices of alterity predicates other >> places than we are now/alternate worlds. What if capitalism has become >> so ubiquitous that the Foucauldian system of power is so pervasive that >> there is nowhere to go. As Rita Raley wrote, the best Tactical Media can >> do is nip at the heels of the behemoth, and Hannah Hurr's letter to Mask >> Magazine offers a bleak Millennialist view, which I include so, as >> Randall mentioned, we are to learn from the younger generation. This was >> referred to me my Ken Wark. >> >> http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-demo-tape-issue/style/makes-no-difference >> >> I believe that one thing we are doing is attempting to locate that which >> is specific to our time, and this might be a signpost. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> NetBehaviour mailing list >> [email protected]http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/net >> behaviour >> > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected]http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netb > ehaviour > -- helen varley jamieson [email protected] http://www.creative-catalyst.com http://www.talesfromthetowpath.net http://www.upstage.org.nz _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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