Lazzarato_Maurizio – what's next?

The Trend Is Your Friend!1 Design Your Self-Colonisation as Human Resource – Micro Brand and Consume Your Awareness – You are Not as Rare as Reality2

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:43 +0000

Männer und Frauen für gefährliche Unternehmung gesucht. Schlechte Aussichten, bitteres Leid, Sekundenbruchteile völliger Ungewissheit, ständige Gefahr, Ausstiegsszenarien ungewiss. Ehre und Anerkennung zweifelhaft. Hohe Gehälter, auch im Fall von Misserfolg.
Diese Paraphrase der legendären Anzeige³, die Ernest H. Shackleton zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Times schalten ließ, um Mitstreiter für eine seiner Antarktis-Expeditionen anzuwerben, illustriert, wie sich der Beruf des Börsenhändlers heute für viele darstellt. Risiko, Ungewissheit, Ehrgeiz, spekulatives Unternehmertum bis hin zur Rücksichtslosigkeit stehen auf der einen Seite der Medaille. Auf der anderen findet sich ein globales Netzwerk, in dem sich Zeit und Raum zunehmend annähern, Institutionen, die miteinander aufs engste real und virtuell verbunden sind und enorme Summen großteils virtuellen Geldes. Ein luxuriöser Lebensstil (der sich etwa auch im Sammeln von zeitgenössischer Kunst zeigt) sowie die berüchtigten Bonuszahlungen, die im Boulevard wie in Qualitätszeitungen genüsslich ausgeweidet werden, runden das Bild ab. Trotz ihrer der Moderne verpflichteten Neigung zu Risiko und unternehmerischem Wagemut liegen Welten zwischen den Explorationen eines Entdeckers und Unternehmers wie Shackleton und jenen der Helden im Zeitalter des Finanzmarkt-Kapitalismus. Die Ausstrahlung, die von den Masters of the Universe (wie Tom Wolfe sie in seinem 1987 erschienen Roman „Fegefeuer der Eitelkeiten“ beschrieb) ausgeht, scheint auch für einige ihrer Apologeten nicht unbedingt ein apollinisches Licht der Aufklärung zu verbreiten. Eher wirkt es, als haben wir es mit computergestützten Expertisen zu filigranen Schattierungen zu tun, die in Handelsabläufen in Sekundenbruchteilen neues Risiko aus dem Dunkel des Ungewissen produzieren, um Geld und Renditen zu schaffen. Man möchte meinen, dass sich sogar die Finsternis der Antarktis darin zu einer Ressource verwerten ließe. Was aber diese einer unsicheren Zukunft und deren Wagnis verpflichteten Individuen verbindet, ist ein profundes Wissen um die Bedeutung der Pole Ungewissheit und Risiko. Und nicht nur metaphorisch hängen Zukunft, Existenz und nicht selten das Leben vieler von den Überlegungen und Entscheidungen dieser Personen ab – von der aktuellen Schuldenkrise in der westlichen Welt bis hin zu den Spekulationen auf seltene Erde in Afrika und anderen Erdteilen oder den Reispreisen in Indien. Shackletons Nachfahren, die heute die Virtualität im Realen erobern, bezahlen im Ernstfall ihren Wagemut nicht mehr mit dem eigenen Leben (bzw. ihren Gewinnen), sie outsourcen und diversifizieren auch dieses Risiko auf Individuen und auf planetarer Ebene. Dennoch ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Shackleton „erst zur Jahrtausendwende […] als vorbildhafte Führungspersönlichkeit wiederentdeckt [wurde], die es in extremen Situationen vermochte, ihre Untergebenen zu außergewöhnlichen Leistungen zu motivieren.“⁴
Seit dem Erscheinen der Anzeige zu Beginn des 20. Jh. hat die Idee des Individuums einen ausgesprochen volatilen Weg genommen. Erinnert sie in der Anzeige noch im Stil an einen Romanauszug – nicht von ungefähr bildete sich das Individuum im Zeitalter der großen Romane im 18. und 19. Jh. heraus – trifft und verbindet sie sich im Laufe des Jahrhunderts mit so unterschiedlichen Ausformungen wie Robotern, Cyborgs, künstlicher Intelligenz, kybernetischen Agenten, unternehmerischen Körperschaften und juridischen Personen, Dingen, Tieren, Organisationssystemen oder Schwarmintelligenzen, wobei diese Aufzählung gewiss keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit erhebt. Sie veranschaulicht allerdings, dass das Individuum und mithin die Person keine separate Einheit ist, sondern Teil eines Feldes, einer Macht und somit eine Ressource. Was als das Selbst bezeichnet wird, hat im Laufe des 20. Jh. enorme Aufmerksamkeit erlangt (man denke nur an die Dokumentarserie „The Century of the Self“ von Adam Curtis, welche die Erfindung der Public Relations durch Edward Bernays in den 1920er Jahren und ihre Entwicklung von der Beeinflussung und Kontrolle großer Gruppen politisch-ökonomischer Subjekte hin zu den fein abgestimmten Strategien, die auf individuelle Konsumenten zielen, eindrucksvoll nachzeichnet). Auch heute stehen wir, wenn wir unter anderem den Kognitionswissenschaften und der Neurowissenschaft Glauben schenken, vor einer Revolution unserer Konzeption des Selbst und des Individuums.
Bereits 1975 sagte Michel Foucault in einer seinen Vorlesungen am Collège de France: „Die Macht wird nicht auf Individuen angewandt, sie geht durch sie hindurch.“⁵ Vernetzung, Durchdringung und systemische Einbindung, Kategorisierung nach übergreifenden Schemata, die sowohl durch individuelle Handlungsfähigkeit wie Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse (als Beispiel sei etwa Maslows Bedürftigkeitspyramide genannt) definiert werden, haben die Grenzen zwischen Entitäten verschwimmen lassen beziehungsweise gezeigt, dass diese konstruiert sind. Von der Politikwissenschaft bis hin zur Verbraucherforschung wurde ein endlos scheinender Strom an Methoden in Stellung gebracht, um daraus entweder Vorteil zu ziehen oder auf die Gefahren hinzuweisen, die sich darin im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes verkörpern. Für jeden Lobbyisten wie Unternehmer ist es von essentieller Bedeutung, Wissen zu erwerben und Strategien zu entwickeln, wie nicht nur auf Vorstellungen, sondern auf deren Träger selbst Einfluss genommen werden kann. Hier sind weitreichende Einflussmöglichkeiten und größte Gewinnaussichten zu finden, insbesondere, wenn es gelingt, sie unterhalb der Wahrnehmungsschwelle der Konsumenten zu platzieren.

Trends oder die vergegenwärtigte Zukunft
Das Individuum hat sich somit zumindest seit Gary Beckers einflussreicher Beschäftigung mit den Begriffen „human capital“ und „human resource“⁶ zu einem lohnenden und einträglichen Feld der Ökonomisierung entwickelt – ein Tatbestand, für den ihm 1992 u. a. der Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften verliehen wurde. Der Einbettung individualisierter Arbeit in den Wirtschaftskreislauf (die ökonomischen Normierungen unterliegt, wie etwa Maurizio Lazzarato aufzeigte⁷) folgten computerbasierte Verfahren wie Data Mining, aber auch Bonuskarten, mit deren Hilfe jede erdenkliche Information gesammelt wird, um die erratischen Verhaltensweisen von Individuen zu erklären und daraus Gewinn zu schlagen. In diesem Zusammenhang kommen etwa auch Trends ins Spiel, deren Erforschung Risiken minimieren, Gewinne optimieren und eine gewisse Planungssicherheit für die Zukunft gewährleisten sollen. Die avanciertesten Methoden etwa der Informationstechnologie, der Mathematik, Spieltheorie, Biologie, Psychologie oder Kognitionswissenschaften werden heute vernetzt, um die komplexen Vorgänge der Natur und das partizipative Verhalten der Menschen zu ergründen. Der utopischen Idee des freien Marktes und seinen rationalen individuellen Agenten folgend, geschieht dies jedoch weniger, um politische Formen der Mitwirkung zu ermöglichen, sondern um die Durchsetzung des Marktes als soziales Paradigma zu organisieren und die Risiken der Wetteinsätze auf antizipierte Gewinne zu reduzieren. Trendfolger sind weniger risikoaffin als Trendsetter, beide versuchen jedoch, Zugang zu nur scheinbar paradoxen Formen von Massenproduktion, -design und -branding von Individualität zu finden. Die Individualitätsformen, die als Wahlmöglichkeiten zur Verfügung stehen, können als Verhaltensgesten und -artikulationen beschrieben und in der Folge identifiziert werden. Als Fluchtlinien in Richtung der nächsten Zukunft und zur Sicherung unternehmerischer wie politischer Existenz beziehen sie sich aber letztendlich mehr auf Organisationsformen als auf einzelne Personen.

Derivatisierung
Es stellt sich die Frage, ob das Individuum hier nicht zum Produkt im Sinne einer Wette auf die Zukunft wird. Es bringt sich selbst in immer neuen derivativen Formen hervor, die nahezu ausschließlich auf Basis ökonomischer Parameter definiert werden – dies gilt für alle Varianten, die sich heute unter dem Begriff der Karriere subsumieren lassen, angefangen von der Kindeserziehung über die Wahl der Schul- und Universitäts(aus)bildung, und die Eingliederung in den Arbeitsmarkt bis hin zu weiteren Optionen einer (nicht selten scheinindividuellen) Kompetenz- und Persönlichkeitsausbildung. All dies begleitet von spezialisierten Industrien, deren Geschäftsmodell die Produktion von Risikopotentialen ist, die innovativ verwertet werden. Individuen lassen sich mithin als Optionen auf Zukünfte interpretieren, die adaptierte Module ihrer Individualität nach Marktregeln und mit fallendem Zeitwert selbsttätig (wobei der Begriffsgehalt „selbstständig“ im aktuellen Rahmen computergesteuerter Handelsabwicklungen gegenüber „automatisch“ abnimmt) anbieten, sich also zum Kauf (ask) und Verkauf (bid) rüsten – wobei für die meisten die Betonung auf Kauf (ask) liegt. Wird die Durchdringung individueller als auch gemeinschaftlicher Organisationsweisen durch finanzwirtschaftliche Verfahren und Sprachformen als Finanzialisierung beschrieben (wie beispielsweise durch Christian Marazzi⁸), kann die Einschreibung von Personen in ökonomische Muster und Methoden mit dem Ziel, sich „autonom“ als Zukunftsressource am (Arbeits-)Markt zu handeln, als Derivatisierung von Subjektivität beschrieben werden (und zeigt sich damit als schierer Widerspruch zu jeglicher Autonomie). Der Mensch ist hier Risiko, jedoch nicht im Sinne einer negativ interpretierten Unabwägbarkeit. Ganz im Gegenteil, er ist als informiertes und normiertes Ungewisses ein Versprechen auf profitable Subjektivität. Das Subjekt wird hier nicht nur zum Objekt ökonomischer Macht, die – wie Foucault schreibt – durch die Individuen hindurchgeht. Es wird vielmehr selbst zum Human Derivative (Nestler), zur sich immer neu erfindenden (erfinden müssenden) Wette auf die eigene Zukunft, deren Zeitwert immer schneller gegen Null tendiert. Ihr „underlying“ – also ihre Basis – ist ein ökonomisches Zeit- und Wertregime, ausgedrückt in Schuldverschreibungen und Preisen (wozu Löhne zählen).
Dass dieses allerdings nicht fundamental ist, zeigt sich, wenn der Trendverlauf scharf nach unten kippt und die Blase platzt, wie in der aktuelle Krise, in der die Wetteinsätze/Derivate plötzlich wieder zu Subjekten werden – beispielsweise als bankrotte Hauseigentümer oder genereller als Steuerzahler, die letztendlich für die gigantischen Verluste aus den Spekulationsblasen aufzukommen haben. Damit wird die Person und ihre Einbindung in den politischen Raum als eigentliches underlying aller auch noch so komplexen Finanzprodukte sichtbar, in die hinein das Wettsystem implodiert. Die häufig als Chance beschriebene Krisenhaftigkeit des Kapitalismus zeigt hier nicht ihr aus Zerstörung heraus schöpferisches Antlitz (wie Schumpeter es beschrieben hat). Vielmehr erkennen wir seine Verfasstheit als eine auf die Subjekte der jeweiligen politischen Gesellschaftsform aufsitzende, die – wie wir meinen – über jene Ausweitung finanzwirtschaftlicher Methoden, die als Finanzialisierung bezeichnet wird, hinausgeht. Zusätzlich zeigt sich der Kapitalismus in der Krise selbst als derivativ, als Wette auf jene „society“, die noch vor gar nicht langer Zeit als inexistent erklärt wurde – und nun als eigentlicher Basiswert erkennbar ist. Der Zugangscode, um diese Derivatisierung sozialer Felder zu gewährleisten und so genannte Externalities nun in Risikopotentiale und Profitmöglichkeiten zu verwandeln, ist jene Recodierung, durch die Anerkennung (credit) zu Schuld(en) wird (debt). Menschliche Handlungsfähigkeit (action/agency) wird durch den zeitinflationären Raum der „Finanzdienstleistung“ geschluckt (transaction).
In einer computergesteuerten, in Millisekunden ablaufenden Kommunikationsgesellschaft (die man als „Econociety“ bezeichnen könnte) sind die Dämonen nicht mehr Gestalten einer religiösen Fantasie. Sie sind jene daemons⁹, welche die systemischen Zirkel der Informations- und Handelsabwicklung als Programmabläufe im Hintergrund betreuen. Bei einer aktuell etwa 80%igen Abwicklung von US-Börsengeschäften durch Algorithmen (High Frequency Trading), deren Zeitschwelle bei 3,3 Millisekunden liegt (ein Mausklick benötigt 30 Millisekunden – siehe etwa Kevin Slavins TED Talk zum Thema¹⁰) kann man von einer wahrlich daemonischen Kultur sprechen, in deren Realität der virtuellen Figur der Person als Derivat die wesentliche Funktion des Nährwerts zukommt. Die Wette und ihre Optionen, die Shackleton in seiner Anzeige für das halsbrecherische Experiment einer Antarktis-Expedition angeboten hat, lässt sich heute auf ganze Gesellschaften und ihre Institutionen beziehungsweise deren möglichen Ruinen umlegen (passend zu diesen Metaphern werden die hyperschnellen Glasfaser-Kapazitäten, die etwa Algo-trading in annähernd Lichtgeschwindigkeit ermöglichen, als Dark Fiber bezeichnet und intransparente bank- und börseninterne Handelsplattformen als Dark Pools). Die „Kälte“ und „Finsternis“, in der die ökonomisierten Derivate plötzlich wieder als politische Subjekte auferstehen, hat nun, nachdem dies in den letzten 20 Jahren in Lateinamerika und Asien erlebt wurde, auch Europa und die USA erreicht. „Ehre“ und „Anerkennung“ im „Erfolgsfall“ scheinen jedoch, abgesehen von den ominösen Bonuszahlungen der Banken, jene prekäre Lebensrealität noch zu vertiefen, die wir bereits während der Boomphase dieser Ideologie auskosten durften. „Wir“ sind heute nicht nur Zeugen, sondern häufig auch Opfer einer ökonomischen Politik, welche weite Teile der europäischen Gesellschaft nicht nur prekarisiert, sondern auslagert. Die Frage ist, aus welcher Gesellschaft „wir“ entfernt werden, wenn die „Wetten auf“ eine Inklusion in diese, die mit enormem persönlichem Aufwand betrieben wurden und werden, absolut verloren gehen. Offensichtlich geht vor die Hunde, was wir als Gesellschaft bezeichnen und wofür Generationen vor uns gekämpft haben. Definitiv benötigt es neben einer radikalen Kritik eines Zeitregimes, das menschliche Wahrnehmungsschwellen völlig ad absurdum führt, einer Umschreibung und Aufladung von Begriffen, die heute fast ausschließlich ökonomisch definiert sind. Der Sinngehalt von Begriffen wie Spekulation, Risiko oder Kredit geht nicht nur weit über diese Interpretationshegemonie hinaus. Er geht dieser in lebendigem Denken und Handeln historisch weit voraus und erlaubt die Schaffung von Möglichkeitsräumen und Produktionsmitteln für eine auf Gemeinschaft aufbauende Anerkennung und Welterzeugung in unterschiedlichsten Facetten ohne die Einschränkungen eines finanzwirtschaftlich-mathematischen Diktats, dem sich die europäische Politik heute unterordnet (mit der Wahl zwischen britischer und deutscher Austeritätspolitik). Gerade die Kunst – wenn wir sie jenseits der Moden des Kunstmarkts betrachten – kann individuelle und gemeinschaftliche Potenziale sichtbar machen, Gestaltungsvorschläge aufwerfen und zur Diskussion stellen.
Dass diese und andere Fragen, die Verfasstheit von Menschen in finanzökonomischen Zusammenhängen betreffend, selbstverständlich nicht neu sind, beweist die vielfältige Beschäftigung von Künstlern mit der Thematik. Ökonomie bzw. Kapitalismus wird darin häufig direkt in Frage gestellt (wie etwa in den kapitalismuskritischen Arbeiten von Oliver Ressler) oder ironisch umgedeutet und gegen das Prinzip gewendet (wie in der Arbeit Google Eats Itself von UBERMORGEN.COM – lizvlx/Hans Bernhard). Thomas Locher wiederum beschäftigt sich intensiv mit dem Verhältnis von Sprache und Ökonomie, dem Überschuss an Dingen bzw. Bedeutungen. Santiago Serra setzt politische und ökonomische Einschreibungen, Normierungen und Zwänge in seiner Arbeit 250 cm Line tattooed on six paid People direkt auf den Körpern bezahlter Performer um, während Francis Alÿs in When Faith Moves Mountains gegen ökonomische Sinnbehauptungen anschaufeln lässt, um eine Poesie gemeinsamer Zeit zu erzeugen. Maria Eichhorn dringt direkt in ökonomische Strukturen ein und konterkariert sie, indem sie etwa eine Aktiengesellschaft gründet, die keinen Kapitalzuwachs zulässt. Mika Rottenberg widmet sich in ihrem Werk Squeeze der Ausbeutung speziell weiblicher Arbeit. Eine Methode der Ausweitung von Kunst ins Leben wendet Timm Ulrichs mit seiner Totalkunst an, in der er sich selbst bereits 1961 als „Erstes lebendes Kunstwerk“ bezeichnete und beim Patentamt eintragen ließ, während Thomas Feuerstein unter anderem Laboratorien der Kunst schafft, in denen Verflechtungen zwischen Sprache, Bildern, molekularen Strukturen sowie biologische, ökonomische und soziale Bedingungen des Lebens untersucht werden. Die genannten Künstler und ihre Arbeiten zeigen nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt einer intensiv geführten Auseinandersetzung, die auch vor dem heutigen Kunstmarkt nicht Halt machen wie etwa Damien Hirsts umstrittene Rolle bei der Auktion seiner Arbeit For the Love of God belegt.¹¹
Neben künstlerischen Positionen zeigen auch die vielfältigen und zum Teil ganz unterschiedlichen Debatten, die etwa Giorgio Agamben, Dirk Baecker, David Harvey, Brian Holmes, Bruno Latour, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno und viele andere in den letzten Jahren führen, Wege auf, wie die Einschreibung in den Raum der Ökonomie nicht nur als Kritik möglich ist, sondern wie darüber hinaus Alternativen gestaltbar werden. Es sollte auch im Interesse der Wirtschaft sein, sich nicht allein als Zentrum gesellschaftlicher Realität zu wähnen, sondern eine breitere Diskussion und offenere Entscheidungsfindungen zu ermöglichen. Auch den Lobbyisten der Finanzwirtschaft darf nun langsam dämmern, dass ihre Utopie des freien und rationalen Marktes – die letzte der großen Utopien, die nun vor bereits drei Jahren grandios gescheitert ist, ohne allerdings zusammenzubrechen – keine Lösung ist, um die offen vor uns liegenden Probleme anzugehen. Gleichzeitig wird es aber notwendig sein, dass die Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft Verantwortung übernehmen und diese nicht bequem auslagern – man könnte dies als eine essentielle Re-Aktualisierung von Aktion gegenüber Transaktion bezeichnen. Der Konsument als „Entscheidungsträger“ ist keine Alternative zu vernetzter, politischer Teilhabe. Und es ist kein Schaden, sich zu erinnern, was bereits Kant in Hinsicht auf das einzelne Subjekt formulierte: Dass es eben in der Verantwortung von uns allen liegt, Verantwortung zu übernehmen.¹² Darüber hinaus bieten sich heute Technologien an, um die individualistisch-konsumistische Sackgasse zu verlassen und in intelligentere gemeinsame Aktionen überzuführen. In einer globalen Welt sind die Vernetzungen zu eng geknüpft, als dass ein singulärer Teil, welcher auch immer, für sich stehen könnte bzw. müsste. Positiv formuliert könnte man sagen, wir sind nicht allein (oder wie es die Bewegung Occupy Wallstreet formuliert: „We are the 99%“), wobei diese Verbundenheit sich nicht nur über Personen ausdrückt, sondern Dinge und Technologien mit einschließt. Die partizipativ angelegte Installation The Trend Is Your Friend! ist ein Beispiel einer Reflexion, die sich dem Individuum und seiner derivativ vernetzten, daemonischen Realität widmet.

The Trend Is Your Friend!
Eine performative und interaktive Installation von Sylvia Eckermann und Gerald Nestler

The Trend is your Friend! ist eine Bild- und Klangmaschine, die durch autonome Roboter algorithmisch getriggert wird. Die Besucher sind eingeladen zu partizipieren und tauchen in einen virtuellen Marktplatz ein. TIYF! ist eine experimentelle Übersetzung des Marktes als ein Modell, das Teil unserer sozialen Lebensumgebung ist. Welche Rolle spielen wir in diesem „Spiel“?
Diese von uns erschaffene Maschine funktioniert als „selbst-zufriedenes“ System: Wir Menschen müssen nicht aktiv eingreifen, damit sie sich „am Leben“ erhält, passive Teilhabe ist ausreichend. Wir können zusehen, beobachten, aber wir können auch teilnehmen. Die Besucher schlüpfen im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes in die Rolle von Tradern und versuchen, den Markt in eine Richtung zu bewegen – obwohl der Trend, der aus allen Transaktionen der Handelsakteure (menschlichen wie algorithmischen Agenten) resultiert, stärker ist und die User feststellen müssen, dass sie kaum in der Position sind, als Individuen das System direkt zu manipulieren. Die Erfahrung, in welcher Form dies gemeinsam möglich ist, ist optional und sowohl Teil der Nutzenkalkulation als auch der emotionalen Einlassung der Humanakteure.
TIYF! ist eine künstlerische Installation, die unsere Vorstellungen von Individualität und Gemeinschaftlichkeit herausfordert. Inwieweit wir hier Zeugen einer Veränderung gesellschaftlich verankerter Definitionen sind, die uns als Individuen und in unserer sozialen Umwelt betreffen, ist die Frage, die The Trend is Your Friend stellt: Werden wir, in dem wir Trends „richtig“ erkennen und auf sie setzen, Teil einer Ökonomisierung, die uns zwar Gewinn verspricht, uns aber gleichzeitig absorbiert? Wird jenes widerständige Individuum, das bewusst oder unbewusst gegen den Trend „setzt“, gesellschaftlich als „Loser“ ausgesondert? Ist Partizipation überhaupt noch wertfrei möglich oder wird jedes teilnehmende Verhalten heute ökonomisiert? Wäre also der titelgebende „Freund“ in einer wissensbasierten Gesellschaft jener große Bruder, den Orwell für ein technisches Zeitalter gezeichnet hat, und in dem sich eine neue, wenn auch komplexere Gleichförmigkeit der Kontrolle einstellt, die uns die Zukunft in ihrer Hybris der Berechenbarkeit nimmt? Und werden die Freiheitsgrade, die eine demokratische Gesellschaftsordnung gewährleisten soll, durch das Verlangen nach Zukunft und Wachstum ersetzt, die individuell versprochen, aber nur mehr derivativ erzeugt werden?
In TIYF! sind die Besucher eingeladen, diese, aber auch eigene Fragen in performativer Weise durchzuspielen. Das bildmächtige dreiteilige Szenario ist nach der Anordnung eines spieltheoretischen Modells (Double Auction) aufgebaut und ist somit ein Marktmodell, mit dessen Hilfe subtile Formen ökonomisierter Disziplinierung und konsumistischer Selbstkontrolle thematisiert werden können. Die Besucher tauchen mit ihrem sinnlichen Wahrnehmungsapparat aus dem realen Raum in einen virtuellen, wobei ihre Körper sichtbar in der realen Welt zurückbleiben. Eine „Membran“ teilt Body und Mind, die User werden zum Joystick. Durch individuelle Entscheidungen affirmieren (Kaufsignal) bzw. negieren (Verkaufssignal) sie Handlungen, die vor ihren Augen ablaufen. Sie beeinflussen direkt und unmittelbar das Geschehen, lassen somit Trends entstehen bzw. abflauen, ohne dass sie mit Sicherheit wissen können, inwieweit ihre Affirmation bzw. Negation des Geschehens direkte Auswirkung hat.
„Autonome“ Roboter übernehmen die Rolle der Market Maker. Ihr Ineinandergreifen simuliert die Komplexität der Märkte insoweit, als dass der Einzelne im Geschehen verschwindet – anders gesagt, sie werden Teil einer fluktuierenden, komplexen Welt, die ein Einzelner weder kontrollieren noch bestimmen kann. Erst die „Abrechnung“ der Handelsentscheidungen fördert das individuelle Ergebnis zu Tage: Verlust oder Gewinn als trendförmige Auslese. Gleichzeitig wird das Dilemma all jener Verfahrensmuster spürbar, die individuelle Handlungsfreiheit (agency) postulieren, aber dabei vergessen, dass diese in einen Kontext gemeinsamer Verhandlung und Umsetzung einfließen müssen, soll ein Regime umgeschrieben und ausgehebelt werden.

Wiederabdruck
Gekürzte Version eines Beitrags in: Bertram, Ursula (Hg.): Kunst fördert Wirtschaft. Zur Innovationskraft des künstlerischen Denkens. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012.

1.) Titel einer Arbeit von Sylvia Eckermann und Gerald Nestler, auf die unten näher eingegangen wird.
2.) Gerald Nestler, Textarbeit aus „Deriviative Bond Emissions“.
3.) Die Originalanzeige lautet: „Männer für gefährliche Reise gesucht. Geringer Lohn, bittere Kälte, lange Monate völliger Dunkelheit, ständige Gefahr, sichere Rückkehr ungewiss. Ehre und Anerkennung im Erfolgsfall.“
4.) Siehe: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton [4.3.2013].
5.) Michel Foucault: Dispositive der Macht, Berlin 1978, S. 82f.
6.) Gary s. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, Chicago 1964.
7.) Maurizio Lazzarato: „Immaterial Labour“, in Hardt, Michael & Virno, Paolo (Eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis1996.
8.) Seit seiner Schrift Il Posto dei calzini. La svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti nella politica (1994), die 2013 unter dem Titel Capital and Affect. The Politics of the Language Economy bei Semiotexte(e) neu aufgelegt wurde.
9.) siehe etwa Thomas Feuerstein: http://daimon.myzel.net/Daimon:Portal [4.3.2013].
10.) siehe: Kevin Slavin: How Algorithms Shape our World unter http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html [4.3.2013].
11.) Eine ausführlichere Erörterung mit dem Thema Kunst und Wirtschaft konnte beispielsweise in den Bänden 200 und 201 der Kunstzeitschrift Kunstforum International 2010 vorgelegt werden (Herausgeber: Dieter Buchhart und Gerald Nestler).
12.) „Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines andern zu bedienen…“ Immanuel Kant: Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? In: Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784), S. 481–494.

Immaterial Labor

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:41 +0000

A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.
An initial synthesis of these results – framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class – can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work” – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as “mass intellectuality.” The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce – the organization of production – but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society.
The “great transformation” that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as “intellectual,” and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new “mass intellectuality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of “self-valorization” that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between “mental and manual labor,” or between “material labor and immaterial labor,” risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labor process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization.”

The restructured worker
Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The various different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of the Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever increasingly intellectualized) living labor within production. In today’s large restructured company, a worker’s work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making. The concept of “interface” used by communications sociologists provides a fair definition of the activities of this kind of worker – as an interface between different functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is for “the worker’s soul to become part of the factory.” The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transformation of working-class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity, affects workers in varying ways according to their positions within the factory hierarchy, but it is nevertheless present as an irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to become “active subjects” in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.
The problem, however, of subjectivity and its collective form, its constitution and its development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash between social classes within the organization of work. I should point out that what I am describing is not some utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real terrain and conditions of the conflict between social classes. The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all “become subjects”. Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the “subjective processes.” As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject’s competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of “production for production’s sake.” Thus the slogan “become subjects,” far from eliminating the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The “tone” is that of the people who were in executive command under Taylorization; all that has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and specify jobs and responsibilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with “scientific” studies of work), but if, on the contrary, jobs now require cooperation and collective coordination, then the subjects of that production must be capable of communication – they must be active participants within a work team. The communicational relationship (both vertically and horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and content; it is subordinated to the “circulation of information” and is not expected to be anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodification, whose transmitted messages must be “clear and free of ambiguity,” within a communications context that has been completely normalized by management. The necessity of imposing command and the violence that goes along with it here take on a normative communicative form.
The management mandate to “become subjects of communication” threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing to intervene, and the foreman’s role is redefined into that of a facilitator. In fact, employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the same time, they are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to “redistribute” the power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply. Today’s management thinking takes workers’ subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production. And once again this phase of transformation succeeds in concealing the fact that the individual and collective interests of workers and those of the company are not identical.
I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, I should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the “communicational model” is already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the young worker, however, the “precarious” worker, and the unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical origins and antecedents the “struggle against work” of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.
This transformation of the world of work appears even more evident when one studies the social cycle of production: the “diffuse factory” and decentralization of production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiarization on the other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial labor has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of production. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management of human resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary activities, are organized within computerized and multimedia networks. These are the terms in which we have to understand the cycle of production and the organization of labor. The integration of scientific labor into industrial and tertiary labor has become one of the principal sources of productivity, and it is becoming a growing factor in the cycles of production that organize it.

“Immaterial Labor” in the Classic Definition
All the characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society as a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of “immaterial” production: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of this kind of immaterial labor force us to question the classic definitions of work and workforce, because they combine the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryist prejudices – a cycle of production) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a territorial level that we could call “the basin of immaterial labor.” Small and sometimes very small “productive units” (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the independent “self-employed” worker, what we actually find is an intellectual proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work. This labor form is also characterized by real managerial functions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations and (2) the eliciting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin of immaterial labor.
The quality of this kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities (which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational content of the commodity), but also by its ability to “manage” its own activity and act as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and management of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of “living labor.” Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of organization.
Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The activation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the “ideological“ and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social relationship“ (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had “hidden,“ namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies of Immaterial Labor
My working hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its starting point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it. Industry’s control over this new labor power presupposes the independent organization and “free entrepreneurial activity” of the labor power. Advancing further on this terrain brings us into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of labor. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be expressed in a single statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of organization that the centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis, there are two differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical analysis; the other is that of systems theory. In the former, the attempt to solve the problem comes through a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is suggested that in order to explain the phenomena of communication and the new dimensions of organization one should introduce not only cooperation and intensity of labor, but also other analytic variables (anthropological variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this basis one might introduce other objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact, the neoclassical model has considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence constraints imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labor, the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the independence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were indispensable.
Today, with the new data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against the macroeconomy, and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible anthropological reality.
Systems theory, by eliminating the constraint of the market and giving pride of place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labor and in particular to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed systemic theories, organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both material and immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group to reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible to look at things from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial labor can be taken on board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints, however, are still tied to an image of the organization of work and its social territory within which effective activity from an economic viewpoint (in other words, the activity conforming to the objective) must inevitably be considered as a surplus in relation to collective cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and labor economics, being systemic disciplines, are both incapable of detaching themselves from this position.
I believe that an analysis of immaterial labor and a description of its organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of business theory – whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school. It can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor. We can thus move against the old schools of thought to establish, decisively, the viewpoint of an “anthropo-sociology” that is constitutive.
Once this viewpoint comes to dominate within social production, we find that we have an interruption in the continuity of models of production. By this I mean that, unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, I do not believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction. This labor power is the product of a “silent revolution” taking place within the anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of its meanings. Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker. A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of “intellectual worker” who is him or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.

The cycle of immaterial production
Up to this point I have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial labor from a point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as “microeconomic.” If now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle, of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of characteristics of post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into consideration.
I want to demonstrate in particular how the process of valorization tends to be identified with the process of the production of social communication and how the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a social and territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity.
If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the “virtuous Keynesian circle” as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling of “supply and demand,” we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the “realization” of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Large-scale industry and services
To recognize the new characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor, we should compare it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the cycle of immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of post-Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the social relationship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be interesting to examine how these new social relationships innervate even industry and services, and how they oblige us to reformulate and reorganize even the classical forms of “production.”

Large-scale industry
The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as 19th century enterprises did) the surveillance of the inner workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in “heavy” industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only after the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and consumption of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist systems of production, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized commodities, Ford could still say that the consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and another black model T5. “Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe to success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the champion of the great ‘low price’ series, would want to boast about having become a neoindustry of singularization” – and quality.¹ For the majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer subordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems then that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer.

Services
If from industry proper we move on to the “services” sector (large banking services, insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I have described appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth of services, but rather a development of the “relations of service.” The move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product “service” becomes a social construction and a social process of “conception” and innovation. In service industries, the “back-office” tasks (the classic work of services) have diminished and the tasks of the “front office” (the relationship with clients) have grown. There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer part of business. As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product handled by the service sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the more it distances itself from the model of industrial organization of the relationship between production and consumption. The change in this relationship between production and consumption has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of production of services, because it draws into question both the contents of labor and the division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the consumer, and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more difficult to define the norms of the production of services and establish an “objective” measure of productivity.

Immaterial Labor
All of these characteristics of postindustrial economics (present both in large-scale industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of properly “immaterial” production. Audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, software, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined by means of the particular relationship between production and its market or consumers. Here we are at the furthest point from the Taylorist model. Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consumption. As I noted earlier, immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social relation – it produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation.
If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the “ideological” environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as “active.” Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand. The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge. The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it “produces” production. The process by which the “social” (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so forth) becomes “economic” has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive “process” specific to a “relation to the self with respect to the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in the 1980s a network of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian postworkerist tradition) developed an extensive analysis of the “social form of production,” but that analysis does not integrate sufficiently the production of subjectivity as the content of valorization. Now, the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the “cultural” contents of commodities.

The aesthetic model
But how is the production process of social communication formed? How does the production of subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production of subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capacities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the production of communication tends to become immediately the process of valorization. If in the past communication was organized fundamentally by means of language and the institutions of ideological and literary/artistic production, today, because it is invested with industrial production, communication is reproduced by means of specific technological schemes (knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction technologies) and by means of forms of organization and “management” that are bearers of a new mode of production.
It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the formation of social communication and its subsumption within the “economic,“ to use, rather than the “material“ model of production, the “aesthetic“ model that involves author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that traditional economic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show, constitute the “specific differences“ of the post-Taylorist means of production.² The “aesthetic/ideological“ model of production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with all the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation: in the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be immediately characterized by their social form; in the second place, the three stages must be understood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle.³
The “author” must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth), “reproduction” becomes a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience (“reception”) tends to become the consumer/communicator. In this process of socialization and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the “ideological” product tends to assume the form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however, that the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and the transformation of its products into commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic production, that is to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.

The specific differences of the immaterial labor cycle
Allow me to underline briefly the specific differences of the “stages” that make up the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself, its “ideological/commodity products,” and the “public/consumer”) in relation to the classical forms of the reproduction of “capital.”
As far as immaterial labor being an “author” is concerned, it is necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have seen, immaterial labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce, because it results from a synthesis of different types of knowhow: intellectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subjugation of this form of cooperation and the “use value” of these skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immaterial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a “new form of exposition.”
The “ideological product” becomes in every respect a commodity. The term ideological does not characterize the product as a “reflection” of reality, as false or true consciousness of reality. Ideological products produce, on the contrary, new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing. These ideological products are completely internal to the processes of the formation of social communication; that is, they are at once the results and the prerequisites of these processes. The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the human ideological environment. Ideological products are transformed into commodities without ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to someone, they are “ideally signifying,” and thus they pose the problem of “meaning.”
The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user – the reader, the music listener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product “a place in life” (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of “creativity”; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.
What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is established between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication. If the innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual renewal, will be constrained to draw from the “values” that the public/consumer produces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life that support them. From these considerations there emerge two principal consequences. First, values are “put to work.” The transformation of the ideological product into a commodity distorts or deflects the social imaginary that is produced in the forms of life, but at the same time, commodity production must recognize itself as powerless as far as its own production is concerned. The second consequence is that the forms of life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now the source of innovation.
The analysis of the different “stages” of the cycle of immaterial labor permits me to advance the hypothesis that what is “productive” is the whole of the social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship) according to modalities that directly bring into play the “meaning.” The specificity of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the “form” of the process of production by establishing a new relationship between production and consumption, but it also poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process. This cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because it deals with the very life of society. “Economics” can only appropriate the forms and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them. The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation. For economics there remains only the possibility of managing and regulating the activity of immaterial labor and creating some devices for the control and creation of the public/consumer by means of the control of communication and information technologies and their organizational processes.

Creation and intellectual labor
These brief considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation and diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of creativity as an expression of “individuality” or as the patrimony of the “superior” classes. The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become “productive,” present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel’s, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin’s, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of “fashion” by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its end the regulation and “mystification” of the social process of creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between “material labor and intellectual labor” and demonstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on “aesthetic production” of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad Circle has this same social focus.
This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production.

Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery
Notes
1. Yves Clot, “Renouveau de 1’industrialisme et activité philosophique,» Futur antérieur, no. 10(1992);
2. Both the creative and the social elements of this production encourage me to venture the use of the «aesthetic model.» It is interesting to see how one could arrive at this new concept of labor by starting either from artistic activity (following the situationists) or from the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian workerist theories), both relying on the very Marxist concept of “living labor.“
3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and reproduction, along with its perception, have assumed collective forms. I cannot pause here to consider his works, but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of immaterial labor and its forms of reproduction.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien in Englisch unter http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm [6.9.2013].
In deutscher Übersetzung erschien er in: Toni Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato und Paolo Virno: Umherschweifende Produzenten. Immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion, ID-Verlag, 1998, S. 39–52.

Das Künstlerprekariat sitzt in der Falle

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

Wir kuratieren uns zu Tode: Chris Dercon über das Elend der Projektemacher, die Ghettos der Kreativen – und über die Frage, ob wir eine Revolution brauchen

HL: Kreativ sind wir alle: Sind Künstler, die ihre Ideen ohne existenzielle Absicherung zu Markte tragen, heute Rollenmodelle? In einer Gesellschaft ohne feste Löhne, mit einem Heer freier Dienstleister?
CD: Exakt. Man nennt sie Enthusiasten: eine Armee sogenannter kreativer Dienstleister. Man spricht von creative industries, aber das ist nur ein Trick, um das ökonomische Modell der kostenlosen Arbeit salonfähig zu machen. Man will Enthusiasten erzeugen, ihren Input nutzen, ohne Löhne zu zahlen. Im Mai feierte die Tate Modern zehnjährigen Geburtstag – ein gigantisches Fest mit etwa 90 000 Besuchern. Das Projekt heißt „No Soul For Sale“. Dutzende von unabhängigen Projektemachern stellen sich vor. Sie haben nichts zu verkaufen, bieten nur ihre Dienste und ihre Ideen an. Oft ist die Hoffnung auf Festanstellung die Motivation für das kostenlose Anbieten der eigenen Dienste. Das nennt sich heute auch Kreativwirtschaft, worunter eine stille Übereinkunft der politischen Parteien von links wie rechts verstanden wird, Selbstausbeutung zu stimulieren. In Frankreich heißen diese Selbstausbeuter les intermittents, woanders digitale Bohemiens – es gibt inzwischen jede Menge theoretischer Schriften über sie, von Maurizio Lazzaratos Essay „Immaterielle Arbeit“ über Luc Boltanskis „Leben als Projekt“, Brian Holmes’ „The Flexible Personality“, außerdem Texte von Matteo Pasquinelli, Paolo Virno, Toni Negri und Tony Judt, kürzlich noch Jan Verwoert, Merijn Oudenampsen oder Lars Bang Larsen. Auf diese Ansätze beziehe ich mich.

Wird unbezahlte Arbeit zum Standard?
Ja. Es geht aber nicht nur um Künstler, sondern auch um Kunstvermittler, um Akademiker, Designer, um junge Pseudourbanisten, Fotografen, Herausgeber, Journalisten und ihren Nachwuchs, die free bloggers. Interessanterweise werden Letztere immer jünger. Mit nicht einmal 15 werden Blogger zu Modenschauen eingeladen. Mittlerweile haben wir ein Millionenheer von Enthusiasten, von sieben bis 77 – wie die Zielgruppe der Ravensburger Gesellschaftsspiele –, die nicht wissen, welcher gesellschaftlichen Gruppe sie angehören, für die es keine parteipolitischen Programme gibt. Diese Gruppe wächst an, und man hofft, dass sie selbst nicht erkennt, wie groß sie ist. Dass sie sich selbst weiter ausbeutet unter dem Schirm von Events, Kongressen, Partys und so weiter.

Was heißt das im Rückschluss für die Künstler? Müssen die sich andere Formen suchen, wie sie ihre Ideen verwirklichen?
Das Problem ist, dass die Künstler, um ihre Selbstverwirklichung weiterzutreiben, sich andere Jobs suchen. Damit sie den kreativen Teil ihres Lebens fortsetzen können. Das bedeutet, man lebt von Projekt zu Projekt. Nun werden die Phasen zwischen den Projekten, die Übergänge, immer schmerzhafter. Luc Boltanski nennt das die „Prekarisierung des Privatlebens“. Auch das Private kann ein Projekt sein, man denke an Madame Bovary, die um des sozialen Aufstiegs willen ihr Privatleben durchökonomisiert, die Affären werden aber immer kürzer und schmerzvoller. Heute werden diese Projektübergänge bereits berechnet, sodass man eine Art Kontrolle anbieten kann.

Wie ist die Lage der Kreativwirtschaft in Berlin?
Sie wird als Lösung aller Probleme angeboten. Und das ist gefährlich. Es entstehen Kreativghettos, in denen die Erfolgreichen mit dem Prekariat zusammenleben. Berlin wurde zum nationalen oder internationalen Hoffnungsgebiet ausgerufen. Vielleicht überlegen sich ja viele Museen, nach Abu Dhabi jetzt in diesem Entwicklungsgebiet Franchise-Museen zu gründen – den Louvre an der Spree sozusagen. Berlin ist das ultimative Bild für die creative industries. Hier droht auch kein Aufstand, denn es leben keine Banker und reichen Leute hier, die man attackieren könnte. Die sind nur am Wochenende da, zu Besuch, wenn sie Homo ludens spielen wollen. Kultur wird nicht mehr als gesellschaftlicher Gegenentwurf eingesetzt, weil die Kultur sich nicht mehr auseinandersetzt mit einer traditionellen Form von Potenzialität: Unsicherheit, Angst und so weiter, das sind keine Themen mehr. Stattdessen bedeutet Kultur: mitmachen. Der Wowereit-Slogan „Arm, aber sexy“ könnte schnell zu einem „Arm, aber noch am Leben“ führen: In Berlin wird der Homo ludens, das künstlerische Prekariat, früher oder später in seiner eigenen Stadt in der Falle sitzen wie in einem Militärkessel – man wird weder hinein- noch hinauskönnen. Das heißt, man kann sich finanziell nicht an andere städtische Umgebungen und Lebensstandards anpassen, die sich von den eigenen unterscheiden. Wir werden Zeugen einer Ausdehnung des wirtschaftlichen Bereichs in den kreativen, die synchron mit dem „Creative City“-Diskurs der Politiker und Stadtentwickler verläuft.

Sie haben Mitte April in einem Vortrag für die Evangelische Akademie Tutzing für das Kulturprekariat das Bild der Zombies oder Vampire gewählt. Warum?
Der Zombie oder der Untote ist nicht in erster Linie eine Verkörperung des Bösen, sondern ein Leidender, der seine Opfer mit einer bizarren Beharrlichkeit verfolgt, gefärbt von einer Art unendlicher Traurigkeit. Die melancholischen Toten kehren zurück, weil sie nicht richtig begraben wurden. Wenn ich an Geister oder Zombies denke, denke ich an ältere, erfolglose kreative Individuen wie Schriftsteller, DJs, Webdesigner oder Innenarchitekten. Ihre Rückkehr – die Rückkehr der Toten – belegt, dass sie nicht ihren Platz in der Tradition finden können. Bezeichnend ist, dass die Beliebtheit von Zombiefilmen in jüngerer Zeit durch die von Vampirfilmen ersetzt wurde: Nach den Zombies, den Sammlern unbezahlter, symbolischer Schuld, kommen jetzt die Vampire, die die Ideen von Unsterblichkeit und ewiger Jugend transportieren. Man sieht das an der grassierenden Vampirmode unter Teenies. Vampire sind die jungen Blogger und Kreativen. Sie erinnern uns an unsere Angst vor dem Älterwerden und den Preis, den wir für diese ewige Jugend und Unsterblichkeit zahlen müssen. Übrigens sind ja Zombie- und Vampirfilme selbst unter prekären Bedingungen entstanden: Es sind meist Billigprodukte, B- oder C-Filme … man findet sie auf YouTube. Meine Kinder lieben sie. Die spielen das ganze Jahr Halloween.

Wird sich das Prekariat noch ausbreiten?
Es kann natürlich nicht so weitergehen. Der niederländische Avantgardekünstler Constant Nieuwenhuys war 1957 Mitbegründer der internationalen situationistischen Bewegung und schrieb mit Guy Debord ein Traktat über den unitären Urbanismus. 1959 rief er ein visionäres Architekturprojekt ins Leben, eine utopische Stadt namens „New Babylon“: eine explizite Metapher für die „Creative City“. „Entgegen der Meinung der Funktionalisten befindet sich Kultur dort, wo Nützlichkeit endet“, schrieb Constant. Der Homo ludens, der spielende Mensch, war ein Gestalter seiner eigenen „spielerischen Stadt“. Heute ist dieser positive Hedonismus umgeschlagen; aus dem Homo ludens ist entweder ein Homo faber oder ein Homo precarius geworden. Man wurschtelt sich durch und tut so, als wäre man so frei wie der Homo ludens.

In der Avantgarde waren noch Utopien möglich, es entstanden Gegenentwürfe. Wenn es jetzt eine große Mitmachkultur gibt, wo bleibt das Andere der Kunst?
Die Kunst im sogenannten öffentlichen Raum wird jetzt zu einer Kunst des Öffentlichen. Ästhetische Kompetenz übersetzt sich in Handlungs- und Kommunikationsstrategien. Es gibt in der bildenden Kunst zurzeit immer mehr coffee breaks, immer mehr Gespräche, Symposien, Kongresse. Und man redet über Handlungs- und Kommunikationsstrategien: Jeder will ein Kurator sein, möglichst sein eigener Kurator. Ich kuratiere meine Freizeit. Die ersten Kuratoren waren im 16. Jahrhundert die Mönche, die die Reliquien in der Kirche zählten. Sie zündeten für die Priester die Kerzen an. Heute haben wir Kuratoren als Manager und Pseudokreativwirtschaftsspezialisten …

… die für die immateriell Arbeitenden Kerzen anzünden?
Ja, deshalb halte ich Michael Sailstorfers Aktion „Pulheim gräbt“ für eine der treffendsten Aktionen der vergangenen Jahre: Er kuratierte ein Glücksversprechen. Er vergrub Goldbarren und ließ die Leute nach ihrem eigenen Glück graben. Die Grabenden sind Künstler in spe mit geringer Aussicht auf Erfolg. Ein großer Unterschied zu den Happenings etwa eines Allan Kaprow. Da gibt es noch die Idee des Homo ludens: Wir machen alle etwas zusammen; Partizipation als Selbstermächtigung, Emanzipation. Bei Sailstorfer gibt es nur ein Versprechen, es geht nicht um Emanzipation, sondern um die Frage, wo ist das Ding, das 1000 Euro wert ist. Und was kann man mit 1000 Euro machen? Das ist noch nicht einmal ein BMW-Reifen.

Heute ist jeder sein eigener Kurator – aber auch Lebenskünstler, vielmehr: Überlebenskünstler?
Natürlich. So wie jedermann bloggt. Jedermann ist Journalist geworden, jedermann ist auch Webdesigner. Das home office ist das perfekte Bild der Gegenwart. Man kreiert seine eigene Pornografie, seine eigene Kunst, sein eigenes Web, man designt sein eigenes Haus, aber niemand verdient etwas. Es geht um Überlebensstrategien, die geknüpft sind an Virtuositätskonzepte. Lauter verarmte Intellektuelle.

Kommt das alles nicht einem Staat entgegen, der damit beschäftigt ist, den Euro zu retten und sich über Generationen zu verschulden, und auf der anderen Seite Sozialleistungen kürzt?
Absolut. Die Selbstausbeutung findet nicht statt innerhalb eines Produktionsprozesses, sondern über Kooperation. Das größte Problem ist die Disponibilität der Leute. Man ist disponibel, man stellt sich zur Verfügung. Wer das kontrollieren kann durch ein parteipolitisches Programm oder durch ein ökonomisches Modell, hat die Macht. Ich warne vor einer Revolution oder einem Kinderkreuzzug à la „Mad Max“. Was passiert, wenn sich diese Tausenden von Selbstausbeutern und Enthusiasten, die an ihrer Disponibilität leiden, an den 24 Stunden pro Tag im home office, in ein ökonomisches Modell eingepasst werden? Man muss auch mal lernen, Nein zu sagen, die Disponibilität infrage zu stellen. Nein zu kostenlosen Katalogtexten, obwohl hundert andere es machen. Oder Schlaf als eine Art Subversion – Ruth Noacks geplante Ausstellung „Sleeping with a vengeance, dreaming of a life“ behandelt genau dieses Thema. Irgendwo muss man anfangen, wenn man kein Zombie werden will. Warum fallen eigentlich alle vom Stuhl, wenn man das sagt?

Weiterführende Literatur
Maurizio Lazzarato, „Immaterielle Arbeit“. In: Negri, Antonio, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, und Thomas Atzert, Umherschweifende Produzenten: immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion, Berlin 1998, ID-Verlag, S. 39–52. Luc Boltanski, „Leben als Projekt. Prekarität in der schönen neuen Netzwerkwelt“, Zeitschrift Polar No. 2, 2007 S. 7.Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality. For a New Cultural Critique, 2001.

Wiederabdruck
Dieses Interview erschien zuerst in: Monopol– Magazin für Kunst und Leben, 9.7.2010; http://www.monopol-magazin.de/artikel/20101584/-chrisdercon-kuenstlerprekariat.html [8.9.2013].

Towards a Futurology of the Present: Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time1

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

‘Tomorrow never happens, man’ – Janis Joplin²

Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us.
What I would like to focus on most especially in this piece is the art of writing; more specifically, on the relationship between nonfiction writing and social movements. Movement produces writing which produces movement which produces writing, and so the loop turns; a constant feedback loop between action and reflection, experience and expression. To the relationship between writing and movement, I would like to introduce the added factor of time. Until very recently, radical writing practices have tended to operate in accordance with, and uncritically reproduce, some very particular ideas about time. One such idea is that it is compartmentalised into discrete units. Another is that it is linear and moves only in one direction. These understandings are part and parcel of Gottfried Hegel’s dialectical logic³, which, via Karl Marx, has become the unthinking, taken-for-granted folk theory of generations of activists. They are also part of Enlightenment, or modernist, rationality more broadly – that particular way of knowing that has predominated across the world for the past few centuries. Linear, compartmentalised time has meant that we have come to see past, present, and future as three separate things – a division that lies at the root of the means-ends distinction in traditional leftist politics. It is only when present and future are treated as mutually exclusive entities that means and ends can be regarded likewise. Furthermore, for Hegel and Marx, one must always negate in order to create; that is, the present must firstly be negated before the future is ever able to come into being.⁴ Revolutionary politics is therefore conceived of in purely negative terms, and the job of building a new world deferred until after the revolution. Social movements become equivalent to war rather than creation. When the ends justify the means, the present effectively becomes sacrificed at the altar of The Future – and this for the sake of utopian designs fabricated in the minds of a self-appointed few.
The kind of temporal sensibility outlined above lies at the heart of the manifesto genre.⁵ It seems today, however, that people have grown tired of manifestos. The same is true for any such exhortation from above of what people should or should not be doing. My argument is that the present context of postmodernity⁶ demands of radical writers a fundamental rethinking of their (our) modus operandi. I will, in this article, present a critique not just of the manifesto, but also of the jeremiad – another one of the literary forms most commonly produced by radical writers. Where the manifesto is concerned with the future, the jeremiad centres on the present. The intention of the latter, however, is usually only to serve as a diagnostic description upon which a prescription must be founded; an ‘is’ that must be followed by an ‘ought’. In this way, we are hence led back into the domain of the manifesto. But what happens to radical writing once we reject those dichotomies upon which the jeremiad-manifesto distinction is predicated – namely, those of is-ought, means-ends, and present-future? What happens when the writer treats the present and future not as two separate things, but as conjoined in an indivisible flow within which means and ends are consonant? What I would like to propose, then, is a new writerly practice; one which I have chosen to call the futurology of the present.
Such a practice would involve an unearthing of the many living futures constantly coming into being in the present. Unlike the jeremiad, it does not solely describe what is, but also what is becoming. In other words, it entails not simply ‘a negation of what exists, but also an affirmation of what springs forth’⁷. And it does not prescribe a single path forward, as with the manifesto, but tries instead to reveal the multifarious pathways fanning outwards from any given moment. It starts with the novel innovations and creative insurgencies happening everywhere in our midst, and from there works to build affinities between them. In this endeavour, I find inspiration in Rebecca Solnit’s assertion that ‘the revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities’⁸. This is, of course, an endeavour that necessarily requires a heightened sensitivity toward those ‘moments when things do not yet have a name’; in short, toward newness. The new here is not meant to mean the same thing as ‘fashionable’, but rather refers to those becomings that are constitutive of alternative realities.¹⁰ This kind of sensibility has become especially important of late, given that ours is an era of accelerated social change, pregnant with germinal, as-yet-unnamed phenomena. One cannot continue imposing anachronistic grids upon our ever-complexifying present without exacting an extremely violent and myopic reductionism. Instead, as Félix Guattari writes, the upheavals that define our current conditions of existence call for a method attuned ‘towards the future and the emergence of new social and aesthetic practices’¹¹. My proposal for a futurology of the present is one attempt to concretely think through what such a method might look like. I have certainly not been alone in these efforts. Besides Solnit, other fellow travellers include the members of Colectivo Situaciones whose practice of ‘militant research’ they characterise as the search for ‘emerging traces of a new sociability’¹². Consider too the mode of ethnographic practice proposed by the anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber. One role ‘for a radical intellectual’, he writes, might be ‘to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities – as gifts’¹³.
As has already been hinted at, the articulation of these ideas will necessarily require a confrontation with Hegelian dialectics and ‘the damage it has caused, and continues to cause in political movements’¹⁴. One of the principle reasons for this is that, to really understand the future appearing in the present, it is necessary to strip away the sedimented habits of thought under which becomings are subsumed or rendered invisible. As will be seen over the course of this essay, Hegel’s method could be considered as precisely one of these habits (certainly, capitalism an issue here too, but I take it for granted that my readers are already convinced of this). My contention is that even those who do not consider themselves as having anything to do with Marx or Hegel still unwittingly reproduce many of their assumptions. Indeed, as far as traditional forms of radical politics are concerned, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical schema has become the Sun around which all the other heavenly bodies orbit. For 150 years, we believed this Sun would give us clarity and deliver us from darkness to light. It turns out, however, that it has only served to obscure more than it has revealed. All those other stars, old and new, that have been shielded from view by the blinding, sun-soaked sky are today beginning to demand our attention and sparkle anew. This essay seeks to assist in this efflorescence, since, as Hardt suggests, we cannot hope to achieve any kind of liberation unless we first liberate ourselves from Hegel.¹⁵ One thing must be made clear, though, and that is that I confront Hegel’s legacy not purely by way of negation, which would only mean a perverse reproduction of his dialectical straightjacket, but by proposing and affirming an escape route. My goal is a re-imagining of radical politics and a re-tooling of radical writerly practice.
Having thus far skimmed the surface of my argument, what I would like to do now is go deeper. I will start out by introducing the concept of the ‘perpetual present’ – the temporality within which the futurology of the present is situated. From this basis, I will proceed to elucidate the ways in which such a practice overcomes the limitations of previous modes of radical writing; namely, those premised on compartmentalised, linear time. In the second half of the article, I will link the futurology of the present to a politics of hope, before concluding with some thoughts on the nexus between activist and artistic practices – the very note on which I began.

The Perpetual Present
In today’s social movements, there is an increasing call for a harmonisation between means and ends, now widely understood by way of the notion of ‘prefigurative politics’¹⁶. Such a sensibility cannot but imply a radically different, even ‘amodern’¹⁷, temporal schema. Present and future cease to be treated as two distinct entities (the former but an instrument for the realisation of the latter), but instead become rendered as simply two linguistic signs referring to a common, indivisible flow. Such is also the case with the past. Drawing on Guattari, we could well say that both past and future inhere together in the ‘perpetual present’¹⁸, an enduring liquid moment containing both memory and potentiality; traces of what has been, but also intimations of what could be, each indissolubly connected to the other. With this perspective in mind, there can no longer be said to be a revolutionary before, during, and after. Instead of activist strategy being determined by a stark delineation between discrete stages, means and ends become consonant within a permanent revolutionary process; a continual freeing up of life, desire and the imagination wherever they happen to be imprisoned. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write: ‘We must think of [pre-revolutionary] resistance, [revolutionary] insurrection and [post-revolutionary] constituent power as an indivisible process, in which these three are melded into a full counter-power and ultimately a new, alternative formation of society’.¹⁹
It has occurred to me that the Roman god, Janus, could be taken as figurative of the perpetual present. He had one face looking forward towards the future and one face looking backward towards the past, and yet both belonged to a single head. The term ‘Janus-faced’ has, in modern times, become a synonym for ‘two-faced’ or ‘duplicitous’, carrying with it negative connotations, and yet, for the ancient Romans, Janus had an altogether different meaning. He was the god of thresholds; ‘an important Roman god who protected doorways and gateways’, primarily symbolising change and transition.²⁰ The perpetual present is always a threshold between that which is ceasing to be and that which is coming into being; at once the repository of memories and the font of potentialities; a record of the past and a map to the future. Friedrich Nietzsche is of critical import here: ‘I am of today and of the has-been’, he writes, ‘but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be’.²¹ This may well have been uttered by Janus himself.
A word on Michel Foucault is apposite here as well, particularly regarding his notion of the ‘history of the present’, which was how he described his genealogical method.²² Despite first appearances, the history and futurology of the present are not at all in conflict. Both, in fact, are immanent within the perpetual present. The multifarious routes by which the present is constructed are simultaneously one and the same with those processes by which alternative futures continually come into being. Hence, the history and futurology of the present are not unlike the two faces of Janus. One casts its gaze upstream towards the tributaries and the other downstream towards the delta, but both belong to a common body bobbing upon a single river. While the history of the present challenges linear history and its obsession with the origin, the futurology of the present does likewise with respect to linear futurology and its drive toward the projected end-point of history, or telos. There is no Future with a capital ‘F’; only the delta, opening out onto the infinite expanse of the ocean.
At this point, it must also be made clear that the perpetual present has nothing at all to do with the kind of endless present postulated by neoliberal ideologues. Where the former is the font of infinite alternative futures, of a variable creativity that continually issues forth from the free play of difference, the latter is a present condemned to futurelessness, to an endless reproduction of the status quo. It was in this context that, in response to Margaret Thatcher’s infamous doctrine that ‘There is No Alternative’, the World Social Forum first proposed its counter-slogan of ‘Another World is Possible’. Alterglobalisation activists have since been vindicated in this idea, with the global financial crash of 2008 serving to irreparably discredit the neoliberal experiment. The state bail-out of banks to the tune of trillions revealed the neoliberal discourse (particularly its insistence on minimal state intervention in the economy) to have been fallacious all along. Capital needs the state and has always needed it, not least of all in its policing of unruly citizens. Neoliberalism was never really realised as a system, but functioned only as a legitimating discourse that, in practice, never aligned with what it professed in theory. Following these embarrassing revelations, global elites are increasingly eschewing the concept of neoliberalism, and find themselves conflicted about the way forward. As such, we have now entered into a brand new historical moment; one in which the futurology of the present arguably becomes more important than ever. With neoliberalism staggering along ‘zombie-like’ and ‘ideologically dead’²³, the space has now become wide open for the assertion and enactment of alternatives.
Tying together some of the points I have made thus far, the perpetual present is forever the site of ‘unconsciouses that protest’²⁴, of insubordinate creativity and disobedient desire, of emergent values and practices that lead outwards onto alternative horizons, beyond the mirages conjured up by capitalism, the state, the traditional Left, and all similar such boring and life-denying institutions. It is the work of the futurologist of the present to tease these out from the tangle of everyday life, help increase their visibility, and thereby participate in their propagation. Below, I will seek to expand on these ideas and to further articulate their implications for radical scholarship and writing practices. In so doing, I will focus, first of all, on the challenges that the futurology of the present poses to compartmentalised time (and those modes of writing premised on such a temporality), before proceeding to do likewise with respect to linear time.

Beyond Compartmentalised Time
As touched upon earlier, my contention is that the past-present-future schema of time has been at the root of a profound disarticulation between means and ends in traditional revolutionary politics. Means and ends have only come to be regarded as mutually exclusive entities because present and future have been treated likewise. There has, as such, been a failure to recognise the necessary correspondence between the two; that is, between how we act in the present and the kind of world we wish to see in the future. It is for this reason that we have ended up with such abominations as the Leninist vanguard party, whereby dictatorial practices are supposed to somehow lead to a democratic society.²⁵
Owing to the fact that the idea of compartmentalised time has been little reflected upon in the past, radical nonfiction has tended to take three principle forms; namely, historical treatises, jeremiads, and manifestos, each mapping with its own discrete domain within the past-present-future trinary. The notion of the historical treatise needs little introduction, and the other two have already been briefly discussed. What I would like to do here, however, is to zoom in a little more closely on the jeremiad form. Diagnostic jeremiads like Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital²⁶ are meant to function only as a set of ‘is’ claims upon which prescriptive ‘oughts’ can be based. Marx’s jeremiad- and manifesto-style writings therefore go hand-in-hand. Had David Hume been alive in Marx’s time, he no doubt would have critiqued Marx for assuming that it is even possible to make valid ‘ought’ statements on the basis of descriptive ‘is’ claims.²⁷ For Hume, all such prescriptions are dubious at best. And yet, the assumption that an ‘is’ must necessarily precede an ethical ‘ought’ is still rife amongst radical scholars. There is an unthinking assumption that a complete and ‘objective’ understanding of the present is a necessary prerequisite for effective political action.²⁸ Some jeremiad writers in fact become so consumed with this task, that they fail to even try to imagine alternative possible futures. What matters to them is to first negate the present; to limit themselves to mere resistance, in other words.
Hence, aside from those jeremiads which function within the is-ought framework, there are also those based on ‘is’ descriptions alone; pure lamentations of, or fulminations against, the present configuration of things.²⁹ For the most part, the intention of the lamentative jeremiad is to raise consciousness about this or that issue, such that the reader might somehow, magically, be spurred into action, as if a detailed knowledge of the evils of society was all that was required for this to happen. Precisely how to act on this knowledge is left up to the reader. Often, however, these works have the unintended and reverse effect of leaving the reader feeling overwhelmed and helpless, even despite their politicisation or conscientisation. The futurology of the present, in contrast, aims not to be merely descriptive or prescriptive, but rather, demonstrative. By this I mean that its concern is with fostering inspiration and hope through the demonstration of alternatives. So many contemporary writers and scholar-activists dedicate their lives, as Marx did, to writing about what is wrong with the world, but far fewer have cared to write about what people are already doing to change the world or to bring to light the many living, breathing examples all around us of how things can always be otherwise. Indeed, Harry Cleaver’s observation that Marx’s ‘historical analysis provided much more detail on capitalist domination than on working class subjectivity’³⁰ is an understatement to say the least. This is one reason that radicals so often end up with a perverse fascination for the ‘creativity’ and ‘dynamism’ of capitalism, thereby reifying that which they claim to oppose. One of the ironies here is that capitalists do not create; they simply orchestrate and marshal the creativity of the commons for their own ends.³¹
In contrast to the jeremiad, the futurology of the present starts not with capitalism (or any other kind of domination), but with the ideas and practices of those challenging it. That is not to say, however, that it fails to offer a critique of the various apparatuses of domination. On the contrary, it offers a critique of a radically different kind – one that operates via the presentation of alternatives, of ‘yeses’ that already carry within them a ‘no’. Every innovation, every ‘yes’, embodies a proposal for a different kind of world, but one that is defined, from the outset, against the world that it is leaving behind. The point is to commence with the affirmative, rather than defer it until after the negative. It is in this way that the futurology of the present becomes a project of fomenting hope. It destabilises the taken-for-grantedness of the present, albeit not in a way which disowns it, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels do when they celebrate the communist movement as that ‘which abolishes the present state of things’³². Disavowing oneself of the present in this manner could be seen to be part and parcel of the disastrous disconnect between means and ends, as discussed earlier. Unlike the jeremiad form, the futurology of the present centres not on the negation of the present-day so much as on its continual reinvention. It necessarily remains within the temporality of the perpetual present. It aligns itself, as such, with the radical challenge that Nietzsche poses to Hegelian thought. In Hegel, negation invariably precedes creation, but in the work of Nietzsche, we are presented with the alternative possibility of creation itself as a means of negation.³³ One creates in order to negate, and not vice versa. In prefigurative politics, we prefigure the world we wish to create through our actions in the present, while simultaneously rendering redundant that which we leave behind. And in our futurologies of the living present, we offer an exposition of these other worlds already in construction without having to first negate. Such texts, furthermore, are themselves self-conscious creations. They are not just about the world, but are also added to it, thereby becoming a part of its workings. The creative act – whether on the streets or on the page – is already subversive. To practice creative subversion is not to overthrow, as with mere resistance, but to undercut and displace. Most importantly of all, it is to cultivate alternative futures in the living present and therefore to affirm life despite capitalism.

Beyond Linear Time
Aside from the compartmentalisation of time, we have also inherited from Hegel the idea that time moves in a straight line from an identifiable origin toward an ultimate end-point. Where the historical treatise usually draws a rigid straight line between the origin and the present, the manifesto does likewise between the present and the projected telos. The origin and the telos alike are both employed in the construction of linear timelines in which the progressions from past to present and from present to future are cast as somehow natural and inevitable. The way in which Marx adapted these ideas is by now the stuff of undergraduate textbooks: Guided by the invisible hand of History with a capital ‘H’, we pass through certain inevitable stages, one of which is our capitalist present, in order to eventually arrive at communism. Hence, even as Marxists angrily denounce capitalism, they ironically naturalise the social injustices that it produces as necessary by-products of the inexorable forward impetus of time. This became ludicrously apparent to me in a recent Facebook debate in which one Marxist tried to reason with me that ‘slavery was a necessary stage in human history’. The history and futurology of the present, as mentioned earlier, each seek to disrupt this kind of linearity in their own ways. The former cares not for the single origin, but for the multiple tributaries which have converged upon the present. The latter, meanwhile, concerns itself not with the single telos, but with the deltaic openings spilling out on to oceanic infinity. In each case, past, present and future – and the pathways between them – are denaturalised and rendered contingent. Here, I will focus most especially on the movement between present and future. Hence, while in the previous section, I sought primarily to problematise the jeremiad, I will now endeavour to do likewise with respect to the manifesto.
The manifesto could be thought of as akin to a children’s colouring book. When we are issued a colouring book with all of the designs already pre-determined, all that remains for us to do is to colour them in. Exactly such an idea was expressed by Marx himself when he wrote: ‘It is not enough that thought strive to actualize itself; actuality must itself strive toward thought’³⁴. What he meant by this was that the telos of history was already known in thought and all that was required was for reality to catch up; that is, for the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission. This is a temporality in which the future, paradoxically enough, actually precedes the present, since the telos is always given a priori. As the French-Russian Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, puts it, ‘the historical movement arises from the Future and passes through the Past in order to realize itself in the Present’.³⁵ The present is thus held in tow by someone or other’s personal utopia, usually cast as universal. As such, it might well be argued that the manifesto form is inherently authoritarian. Martin Luther King had a dream, but so did Mao Tse-Tung. The difference in the latter case was that the dream had rigidified into a nightmarish Plan. The telos upon which such plans are predicated becomes a transcendental ideal; a mirage on the horizon dictating a single path we are to follow if ever we are to reach it. The question is: Who decides upon such ideals and who is enslaved by them? Do those enslaved by other people’s ideals not have dreams of their own? How might we avoid these dreams being steamrolled in the rationalist march of History?
The tyranny of linear time, according to Rosi Braidotti, is that it ‘functions like a black hole into which possible futures implode and disappear’³⁶. To reject this conception of time is therefore to make ‘an ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible’³⁷. It means to move from the World Social Forum slogan of ‘Another World is Possible’ to the more open idea that many worlds are possible. In addition to the image of the delta invoked earlier, let us also consider Jorge Luis Borges’ evocation of the ‘garden of forking paths’; a garden in which ‘time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures’³⁸. Change at any given point in time occurs through the aleatory and contingent actualisation of any one of these countless possible futures, not through any kind of rational progression. To proceed in this garden is not to progress, since the paths lead not so much forward, but outward. Contra Hegel and Marx, then, history does not consist of a series of logical stages, nor does it move in only one direction. There is only perpetual movement; a processual and protean creativity that wells unceasingly out of the perpetual present. The kind of writing appropriate to this movement is precisely that which I have been calling the futurology of the present. When revolution no longer has anything to do with linear timelines or the realisation of a pre-ordained telos, those self-proclaimed prophets of the hidden god of History cease to have any relevance. The futurology of the present, as such, could well represent a possible new form of non-vanguardist writerly practice. There are no experts or professional revolutionaries diagnosing the present or prescribing the future, as with the jeremiad and manifesto forms respectively. Rather, the writer takes her lead from the autonomous and creative participation of people in the making of their worlds, in social movements and countercultures of all kinds; ‘those crucibles of human sociability and creativity out of which the radically new emerges’³⁹.
Here, it will be worth lingering for a moment with the question of the new. In the introduction to this piece, I emphasised the point that the futurology of the present necessarily requires a special sensitivity toward newness. This stands in stark contrast to past modes of radical writing, which usually subordinated the new to the ostensibly eternal. In the linear temporal schema of the manifesto, there is no such thing as novelty, since the work of activists is not conceptualised as the creation of new forms of life so much as the gradual fulfilment of an essential humanness, or ‘species-being’⁴⁰. This set of essences is deemed to have always been there, hidden beneath the veil of false consciousness.⁴¹ It is the difference between drawing and simply colouring-in. My contention is that the production of novelty needs to be understood on its own terms. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts forth, ‘the conjunctions and disjunctions between things are each time contingent, specific and particular and do not refer back to an essence, substance or deep structure upon which they would be founded’⁴². Once radical writing is able to successfully dissociate itself from any kind of hidden god or pre-ordained telos, it can become instead a valuable means with which to bring to light the open-ended and indeterministic ways that everyday actors at the grassroots creatively negotiate and construct their worlds. The value of this sensibility towards newness lies in the fact that it charges the imagination with an enriched sense of possibilities and demonstrates how the world is forever open to reinvention. This is an antidote, not just to the sense of historical duty preached by the vanguardists and manifesto writers, but also to the pervasive sense of hopelessness peddled by those whose interests lie with the present configuration of things.

A Note on Hope
In the context of this discussion, hope is that intangible but very real feeling that our struggles remain worthwhile; that it is still worth resisting assimilation into the soul-crushing tedium of the system and persisting in our efforts to prefigure alternative futures. However, it is in the interests of the political and economic elite to maintain and reproduce the status quo from which they benefit – and a huge part of this is the effort to ‘destroy any sense of possible alternative futures’; to stamp out any initiatives which hint to how the world might be otherwise or at least ‘to ensure that no one knows about them’⁴³ As such, the capitalists, politicians, police, media, and so on could even be said to constitute ‘a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness’⁴⁴. As Graeber succinctly puts it, ‘hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced’⁴⁵.
I would like to argue, though, that capitalism has not been alone in producing hopelessness.
Revolutionaries too have been just as culpable. From the perspective of the traditional Left, the story of the twentieth century is one of dashed hopes and unfulfilled dreams. It is not that the prophets of History overlooked the importance of hope to our movements, but rather that they propagated endless false hopes in a tomorrow which never comes. Reality was never really able to live up to their manifestos. The prophets will usually fault reality for failing to fulfill their version of utopia, but it is instead their utopia that must be faulted for failing to correspond to reality. It was situated in the distant future, completely cut off from the living present. It was thought, furthermore, that it could be achieved only by means of negation. In practice, negating the present also meant negating oneself. Sacrifice and discipline were what was commanded. Revolutionaries came to conceive of their practice as war, rather than creation, and their creative desires were endlessly deferred until after the revolution. The point I am getting at is that if people today are mired in cynicism and feel helpless to change the world, it is not only because the elites have perfected their bureaucratic apparatus for the production of hopelessness, but also because the traditional Left offers absolutely no alternative. Many people have grown wary of the vanguardists and self-appointed prophets, whose faith in the inevitability of historical progress now seems more misguided than ever, but at the same time have yet to be convinced that alternative revolutionary practices are viable, worthwhile, or even possible. The result is apathy, but an apathy that could very well be political⁴⁶ – a sensibility, perhaps, of profound antipathy towards the authoritarianism of both capitalism and the traditional Left, but one that lacks sufficient hope to be able to be enacted in alternatives.
Many writers who wish to avoid the authoritarianism of the manifesto tradition might very well feel that their solution is to offer simple critiques, sans prescriptions. I would like to argue here, however, that failing to offer any hope at all is no alternative to offering false hope. Even Foucault, whom earlier I identified as an ally, oftentimes falls into this trap. A detailed knowledge about the workings of various forms of power, most notably ‘discipline’⁴⁷, can only take us so far. What then? What about counterpower? Foucault tends to give the impression that the reach of power is total. His concept of the ‘carceral continuum’⁴⁸ means that we are forever on the backfoot, only ever able to resist in a scattered and piecemeal way. But there are some profound ironies here. The first is that, despite Foucault’s philosophical emphasis on contingency, his writings often leave the reader (well, at least this reader) with the impression that relations of force are an inevitable aspect of social life. The second irony is as follows: Foucault knew as much as anyone that our discourses do not simply emerge from the world, but also serve to produce it. Therefore, if we do not allow enough discursive space in our work for resistance, subversion, and counterpower, we only end up reproducing the very conditions of our own incarceration. What is perhaps needed, then, is to make a subtle, yet profound inversion: that it is power on the backfoot, forever in an attempt to contain our uncontainable vitality.⁴⁹ Where things do cohere together and take on the character of something resembling an insurmountable power structure, we would do well to remind ourselves that the longevity of such social formations is, historically-speaking, much more exceptional than the event of their break-up and dissolution – not vice versa. Certainly, it is of paramount importance to understand the world and the systems of oppression and exploitation that we are up against, but if our writing stops there and avoids giving due attention to what people are doing to undo the status quo, then there is the risk that we will only end up leaving our readers feeling disempowered – armed with knowledge, but starved of the hope necessary to act on this knowledge. An example drawn from personal experience – even despite it being in the context of teaching, rather than writing – will illustrate well the point I am attempting to make here.
A few years ago, I was helping to teach an undergraduate course entitled ‘Environmental Issues in Asia’ – one of my earliest experiences as a university educator. In the last class of the semester, I asked each student, as we went around the room, to share one thing that they would be taking away with them from the course. The response that most stood out to me was that of a young Asian Australian man, the gist being more or less as follows:
Well, I came into this really interested in the environment; interested in learning more about the issues and exploring how I could get involved to make a difference. But I’m left feeling really overwhelmed. The issues are just so big and the scale of the challenges so great that I’ve almost lost hope. We’re all doomed. Indeed, there seems these days to be more and more of an apocalyptic zeitgeist about the place, especially when it comes to the environment and issues around climate change. What I realised from this feedback was that, as educators, myself and my colleagues had given too little thought to mitigating against this kind of counter-productive, fatalistic resignation. The course content covered things like dam construction in China, the effects of glacier melt and rising sea levels in Bangladesh, deforestation and oil palm monocultures in Malaysian Borneo, and so on, but gave scant attention to what can be done about such issues (including what we in Australia can do, especially considering the record of some Australian companies in the Asia-Pacific region), or how indigenous peoples and others are already fighting back. On this last point, local peoples have rarely been treated as agents acting on the stage of world history, only as helpless victims. This, however, must change. I realised through this experience how mistaken I had been in thinking that it was enough to simply convey content about the issues, without also conveying hope – not a false hope premised on some transcendental future utopia, but an immanent hope, grounded in real-life, real-world futures already in construction in the present. I hence resolved from then on that, in both my teaching and writing, I would not limit myself to trying to conscientise people simply by pointing out what is wrong with the world. Equally important would be showing what can be done – indeed what already is being done – about injustices everywhere; that relations of force are never total or inevitable and that new worlds are always in construction. Hope (in the very specific sense in which I have been using the term here) is what makes the difference between empowerment and mere conscientisation. And the propagation of such hope, through the exposition of alternative futures already in construction, is one very important role that both radical educators and writers can play.
The futurology of the present, then, might fruitfully be characterised as a practice of hope. It is not simply about the transfer of knowledge, but more significantly of ‘affect’⁵⁰. It is animated by revolutionary desire, while at the same time acting as a relay for this desire to spread. It does not speak about movements, but with them. It thinks with them, moves with them, and tries to inspire movement in turn. This is exactly what happened with a recent article by the North American-based CrimethInc Collective on the Really Really Free Market (RRFM)⁵¹ – an anarchist initiative best described as a kind of celebratory potlatch in which nothing is bartered or sold and everything is free. The idea is that people bring food, clothes, books, art, music, skills, services, or whatever else to share, and the rest takes care of itself. This is a perfect example of prefigurative politics in that it embodies, in the here and now, what an alternative commons-based society would look like. There is no question of having to wait until after the revolution to begin building a new world. And it demonstrates that we do not have to choose between Josef Stalin and Milton Friedman, but rather, can opt for an alternative politics of liberating the commons from both the state and the market. Indeed, the RRFM (along with other such cooperativist initiatives) acquires a new poignancy in light of the Crash of 2008 – its very name being an irreverent poke at neoliberal free market ideology. Soon after the appearance of the CrimethInc article in print and online, RRFMs began popping up across North America, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. The latest I have heard is that Philippine anarchists are now beginning to organise such events as well, of course adapting them to local conditions. As the idea parachutes into a new context, it immediately enters into a new set of relations and necessarily emerges transformed in the process. It is a becoming and not a matter of simple repetition (unless, however, we are talking about a McDonalds franchise). I should also add here that it is never a matter of initiatives flowing in a one-way direction from the ‘West’ to the ‘Rest’, since there is also considerable cultural traffic in the opposite direction. Consider, for instance, the sheer global influence of the Zapatista movement or of the World Social Forum initiative originating from Brazil. A more recent example might be the affective vector that traversed the Mediterranean from Tahrir Square, Cairo, to Puerta del Sol Square, Madrid, from there emanating throughout the rest of Spain and beyond.
In each of the above cases, the role of the writer in acting as a relay for hope and inspiration cannot be discounted or underestimated. To foment affect in this way is especially revolutionary considering the ‘veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives’⁵². To actively help in circulating, amplifying and making visible the alternatives being realised all around us is to shatter any sense of inevitability. And by this, I am really referring to two things: firstly, to the inevitability of the present promoted by the political-economic elite, and secondly, to the inevitability of the future posited by the traditional Hegelian-Marxist Left. The former would say that there is no alternative to the present; the latter that there is no alternative to their prescribed future. The futurology of the present, in contrast, emphasises that there are always alternatives. It offers examples of creative subversion, while at the same time refusing to channel movement in a particular direction, as with the manifesto form. To participate in the cultivation and propagation of new liberatory potentials – the ‘production of production’⁵³, in short – is enough. What matters is that creativity, desire and the imagination remain free to flourish, rather than be shut down, domesticated, canalised, or stultified.
In addition to the aforementioned CrimethInc article, another work that I would consider as exemplary of the futurology of the present is The Take⁵⁴, a documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein on the workers’ rebellion in Argentina that followed the financial meltdown of 2001. Here, I depart from my focus on writing for a moment, since the futurologist of the present need not necessarily be bound by the written word. The Take’s activist filmmakers aimed to mobilise their audience not solely by rousing in them an indignation against the local elites and International Monetary Fund, but more importantly by highlighting the real alternatives to capitalist social relations that Argentinian workers are already building in the present. Through their appropriation and collective self-management of abandoned factories, these workers are setting about the task of building a new and different kind of economy without having to first take state power. The bosses are not overthrown, but simply made redundant – completely surplus to the needs of society. This is another instance, like the RRFM, of creative subversion. In demonstrating real alternatives and emergent futures, The Take stands in stark contrast to the long tradition of documentary realism amongst radical filmmakers, the goal of which is simply to raise consciousness and bear witness to a given situation of injustice, in much the same vein as the jeremiad. In this style of documentary, the creative autonomy of people on the ground in responding to their situation is submerged or rendered irrelevant – perhaps because it is deemed a priori that local people are incapable of self-organisation and hence that solutions need to come from elsewhere and be imposed from the outside. It is the self-legitimating discourse of vanguardists and professional revolutionaries. The Take, however, partakes of no such nonsense, nor does it limit itself to merely communicating information about what is wrong with the world. Rather, it offers an inspiring, concrete example of how the world can be, and already is becoming, otherwise. In conveying an immanent hope, it too is exemplary of that which I have been calling the futurology of the present.
Graeber’s Direct Action is also worth mentioning.⁵⁵ Graeber, who sometimes likes to refer to himself as a ‘professional optimist’, describes in his book the proposals for a new society embodied in the practices of North American activists in the alterglobalisation movement. His work takes the form of an ethnography, albeit one that centres not on some supposedly static culture (as with traditional ethnographies), but on culture-in-motion. It strikes me that ethnography in the latter mode seems particularly well-suited to the futurology of the present. This is because embodied participation in people’s social worlds arguably allows us to grasp newness in its very contexts of production and at the very moments of its inception. The ethnographer starts with small things in small places and, from there, learns to appreciate their wider significance and connect the dots between them. The small, therefore, is never to be confused with the insignificant or trifling, since, arguably, it is only ‘through attention to detail that we can find different kinds of collectivity in formation’⁵⁶. Social theorists of the more conventional, desk-bound kind have typically overlooked the small details on the ground in favour of abstract theory, but in so doing, they have often also overlooked those formative processes by which newness enters the world.
Without wishing to indulge too much, my own research project at present is one which combines an ethnographic and futurological sensibility. In short, my work is concerned with the fate of national liberation movements under conditions of globalisation, focussing, most importantly, on the tentative green shoots that are beginning to emerge from their ashes.⁵⁷ My primary case study is that of the Philippines, which, although having been granted formal independence from the United States (US) in 1946, is still considered by many Filipin@s⁵⁸ to be under the thumb of US imperialist control – and with good reason. As such, the Maoist insurgency against the US-backed Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s – led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA) – was imagined as a war of national liberation, in much the same vein as those which arose in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the same period. Despite having mobilised hundreds of thousands of people on countless fronts for almost two decades, the CPP-NPA was ironically absent in the developments which finally brought down the Marcos regime in February 1986. What toppled the dictator in the end was a military mutiny, accompanied by a popular though bloodless uprising. This dramatic turn of events became known as the People Power Revolution. In adherence with Maoist orthodoxy, the CPP-NPA’s focus was guerrilla war in the countryside, and yet the popular uprising that had swept Marcos from power had taken place in urban Manila. Long accustomed to proclaiming themselves as the vanguard of the movement, these developments came as a severe shock to many. The CPP-NPA’s absence in the midst of an insurrection meant that what replaced Marcos was not the long-prophesised communist seizure of state power, but the restoration, at least nominally, of liberal democracy. These events plunged the entire Philippine Left (in which the Maoist CPP had for so long been hegemonic) into a full-blown crisis. This was only further compounded by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union in the years between 1989 and 1991, therefore dovetailing with the generalised Crisis of the Left that had, by that point, become a global phenomenon. By that time, too, the national liberation movements that had won political independence had proven themselves utterly incapable of improving the lot of the populations they now presided over. One set of bureaucrats was simply replaced by another. The same old problems associated with statism persisted, and imperialist logics were indigenised and perpetuated in the form of exclusionary nationalisms.
In 1993, the CPP-NPA imploded, with two-thirds of its members choosing to defect en masse, rejecting not only its increasingly authoritarian leadership, but also Maoist ideology as a whole. Although many of the defectors still find themselves shackled by old habits, their response to the crisis of the Left, for the most part, is not the rectification and reconsolidation of old orthodoxies (as is the case with those who remained loyal to the Party), but an effort to invent new subjectivities more in consonance with the times. Indeed, in my ethnographic fieldwork in both the Philippines and Filipin@ diaspora, these two contrasting responses to the Crisis of the Left – rectification and reinvention – were what I found to constitute the most significant fault-line in Philippine radical politics today. The flipside to the Crisis of the Left, then, has been a vibrant regeneration of radical political culture. With the Marcos dictatorship gone and the Maoists a spent force, there occurred a veritable flowering of new ideas and practices throughout the 1990s, continuing through to the present day. The disintegration of the CPP-NPA in 1993 in fact coincided with the beginning of a boom period for the environmentalist, feminist, and anarchist movements in the Philippines. Today, the Philippine social movement landscape is home to a diverse array of nascent subjectivities, constitutive of efforts to re-found transformative politics on new grounds. During my fieldwork, I sought out those former CPP activists who had broken with Maoism; those who were rethinking all of the old certainties and endeavouring to enact new modes of activism in tune with contemporary realities. I also sought out the younger generation of Filipin@ activists in order to get a sense of both the continuities and discontinuities between their ideas and those of the older generation. In each of these cases, what I paid special attention to was the new; that is, to intimations of alternative futures arising in the present, which I took to be the same thing. These intimations included all manner of emergent, even insurgent, subjectivities – new political tendencies and ways of seeing, innovations in practices and methods, new modes of cultural identification, alternative values, and so on. It is important to point out, though, that these were most often elemental or larval in form – small becomings that did not necessarily add up to fully-baked ideas or practices, nor to formal theory that was written down or codified into political programmes. This did not mean, however, that they were any less significant. On the contrary, these larval subjectivities turned out to be of paramount importance in my work, since it was at the micropolitical level of identity and desire that some of my most significant insights were gleaned. In addition, the concept of hope that I detailed earlier remained, at all times, extremely pertinent, since the novel imaginings, identities, values, practices, and experiments that I picked up on already point the way beyond the impasse within which many activists have floundered in recent decades. From the ruins of the traditional Left, a new radical politics for the twenty-first century is in the process of being born.
Although having presented a number of examples of the kinds of things that the futurology of the present concerns itself with, each in relation to the idea of immanent hope, I do wish to leave a degree of openness in my formulation so that readers can remain free to take up the practice and carry it in their own directions. Social movements, often the hotbeds of cultural innovation, have been my main focus in this article, but they certainly need not constitute the entirety of what the futurologist of the present looks at. Glimpses and intimations of other worlds in the making are indeed all around us. There is, in all spheres of life, an ‘unceasing creation’ and ‘uninterrupted upsurge of novelty’⁵⁹. Anywhere where there is an autonomous cultural production taking place, outside of the habituated channels by which the status quo reproduces itself, is a potential site for the futurologist of the present to involve herself in and draw inspiration from. Wherever there is disobedience, insubordination, creative maladjustment, play, experimentation, or creation, no matter whether at the micro or macro scale, there is something happening which deserves our attention.

Revisiting the Art-Activism Nexus
Apart from hope, another point that has resurfaced throughout this article is the vital place of creativity. This idea, however, will now need to be unpacked and expanded upon. It turns out that the ways in which I have been using the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’ have really been operating on three distinct levels. There is, first of all, the ontological creativity of the ‘chaosmos’⁶⁰ – a point alluded to upon my introduction of the concept of the perpetual present. Secondly, there is the creativity of activists and countercultural deviants. Thirdly, there is the creativity of artists and writers in their production and relaying of affect. Although each of these forms of creativity are able to be distinguished from one another, it is the relationships between them, and not the categorical divisions, which are of paramount importance here. To begin with, activist practice aligns with creativity in the first sense in that to forge new forms of life outside of prevailing apparatuses of domination is to allow ontological processes of creation to continue flourishing without blockage or curtailment. From the moment there is an imposition of relations of force, or a reduction of life to either state or market logics, there is creative subversion. ‘Life revolts against everything that confines it’⁶¹, as Suely Rolnik felicitously puts it. The same could certainly be said of creativity in the artistic sense.
Activists and artists alike converge in the figure of the creator – that inventor of new values of the kind celebrated by Nietzsche⁶² as well as by autonomist theorists of ‘self-valorization’⁶³ – in that they self-consciously endeavour to bring newness into the world. Each intervenes into the material-semiotic realm that we have become accustomed to calling ‘culture’ and there, works to shake up and reinvent conventional ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, valuing, doing. Hence, to revisit a point I made in the beginning of this article, perhaps there is little real difference between making art and making change. Perhaps the production of new forms of life by activists is itself an art – not art that simply represents life, but art that is utterly indistinguishable from it.⁶⁴ As such, the futurologist of the present does not simply observe and describe at a distance the alternative futures arising in social movements and countercultural milieux, but rather, participates politically in their production and propagation. In other words, to write of countercultural practice, broadly conceived, need not take the form of a detached reportage, but can alternately become a countercultural practice in its own right. Before there was ever such a thing as viral YouTube videos, there were contagions of revolutionary desire of the kind that spread with lightning speed in 1848, 1968, 1989–1991, and 1999–2001, not to mention the Arab Spring currently underway. The principle, though, is the same. One important role that the radical writer can play, as I have suggested, is to act as a relay through which such contagions can spread – not as a spokesperson or representative of a given initiative or movement, but as a participant; an element amongst others, animated only by the winds of collective desire that fill her sails.
At this point, yet further unpacking of the concept of creativity will be required. Implicit in this article to date has been an idea of creativity defined in opposition to two separate, albeit related, aspects of Hegelian dialectics. The first is the primacy that Hegel accords to negation, which relates to the past-present-future trinary of compartmentalised time. The second, meanwhile, is Hegel’s faith in an ultimate telos, inextricably related to the notion of linear time. I will discuss each of these in turn, zooming in first of all on creation beyond negation, before then turning my attention to creation beyond teleology.
It is only owing to the dialectical schema imported into radical politics by Marx that we have come to conceptualise movement practice as war rather than as creation. Had radical politics been based upon an alternative set of premises, the history of the recent past might have looked very different. From today’s standpoint, Tristan Tzara’s quip in the early twentieth century that ‘dialectics kills’⁶⁵ seems strangely prescient of what was to ensue. ‘It lives by producing corpses, which lie strewn across an empty field where the wind has ceased to blow’, he continued.⁶⁶ Tzara was a key figure in the Dada movement, and what set the Dadaists apart from other avant-garde groups was precisely their staunch anti-Hegelianism. In fact, the Dada Manifesto of 1918 was not really a manifesto at all.⁶⁷ Instead, what Tzara produced was a parody of the very manifesto form, mocking his contemporaries for the Hegelian sense of historical self-importance which they accorded themselves.
Tzara’s distaste for Hegel was likely to have been inherited from Nietzsche, a well-known influence on Dada. The idea that dialectics kills has echoes of Nietzsche all through it, perhaps no better illustrated than when he affirmed: ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth’⁶⁸. For Hegel, truth meant dialectics and the law of negation, to which Nietzsche counterposed an affirmative philosophy of creation. He upheld creativity and the artistic sensibility as alternatives to those modes of thought which attempt to reduce reality to a stable set of laws, axioms, and equations. For Marx and Hegel, creation is always suspended until after the moment of negation, but Nietzsche’s radical contribution was to free creativity from the negative, while at the same time freeing temporality from the past-present-future trinary. Jeremiad writers and documentary realists are amongst those who continue to enslave their creative sensibilities to the negative, their practice bound by an unthinking adherence to Hegelian folk theories. Their overarching imperative of needing to first negate the present means that they fail to appreciate the creativity happening all around them. Blinded by the Sun of Hegel, they lose sight all those other stars out there; those ideas, practices, and intimations of alternative futures continually coming into being in our midst. Once we are able to regain our vision, our actions in the present cease to be rendered simply as means to an end, but instead become ‘means without end’⁶⁹ – a protean creativity and endless becoming that knows no discrete temporal stages, no telos, no hidden god. When means and ends become discordant, we forget that both are in fact immanent within the perpetual present. Creativity needs to be able to flourish, and to do so it must be liberated from negation. This is the place of means without end, of prefigurative politics, of the futurology of the present, and of all art that ceases to become abstracted from life and instead becomes life itself.
Having just discussed the possibility of creation beyond negation, I will now direct my critical gaze to creation beyond teleology. To free temporality from the telos of linear time is to do away with the idea that there is any kind of intrinsic point to history. Earlier, I recounted a Facebook debate I had with one particular Marxist who insisted that slavery was a necessary stage in human history. In this case, the African peoples brought to the Americas were quite literally the slaves of someone else’s future. This trans-Atlantic trade in human lives, however, was a contingent and non-inevitable event, not a progression along a linear timeline toward some ultimate telos – no matter whether the telos of colonial masters or Marxist historiographers. For the prophets of the hidden god of History to naturalise the entire past as inevitable only makes them the strange bedfellows of the slave-masters. And their naturalisation of the future only makes all of us slaves, condemned to playing catch-up with their version of what the future should look like.
In this schema, there can never be anything new, since everything is already given a priori. The future is foreordained and simply awaits realisation. Only when we can unmoor ourselves from hidden gods, illusory tomorrows, and other such stultifying ideas, can we really embrace creativity and appreciate the production of novelty on its own terms. From the instant that the god of History is dethroned by Janus, infinite horizons fan out in all directions. And our creativity suddenly becomes creativity per se, not the mere fulfilment of a telos. This is an idea I characterised earlier in terms of drawing, rather than merely colouring-in. The blank sketchbook knows no a priori designs; only the a posteriori marks that we leave behind as we move. In the realm of activism, this sensibility is embodied in the practice of prefigurative politics – a break not only from the cult of negation, but also from the idea that revolution has to mean fulfilling some programme handed down from on high. As Graeber writes, ‘we’re all already revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new’⁷⁰. What this means for radical writing, meanwhile, is to do away with manifestos and instead tune our attention into the profound creativity everywhere in our midst. Unlike in the manifesto tradition, the futurology of the present does not prescribe a single monolithic future, but tries instead to articulate the many alternative futures continually emerging in the perpetual present. The goal of such an endeavour is to make visible the living, breathing alternatives all around us, while at the same time fomenting an immanent hope that can spread virally and be enacted in other places elsewhere.
To sacrifice today in the name of an illusory tomorrow is just not the point anymore. It is for this reason that I chose to open with those extraordinary words from Janis Joplin – tomorrow never happens. The point is to draw, not simply to colour-in or fulfill some pre-ordained utopian future. It is to continually re-invent reality from within reality, rather than from some external, transcendental standpoint such as that mystical realm where invisible hands and hidden gods reside. As an aside, it has occurred to me, as I sit here at my kitchen table punching out these final words, what a happy coincidence it is that the names Janis and Janus bear such a striking resemblance to one another. If I was a visual artist (not just a writer-cum-artist manqué), I would no doubt enjoy experimenting with ways to combine the two in some sort of installation – perhaps a stone bust of Janus, singing in the unmistakably raw and passionate voice of one of the legends of the hippie movement. But it matters not that I am no artist in any formal sense, since each of us are already artists of the present in our own ways. ‘One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’, writes Guattari.⁷¹ The parallel he draws between art and social transformation is not to be taken as mere metaphor, however. What he calls for is a merging of art with life, his contention being that global warming and the other great issues of our times cannot be adequately addressed ‘without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society’⁷². To the ends of forging a more habitable and convivial present, the cross-fertilisations between artistic and activist practices need to continue proliferating, and creativity in general must remain free to flourish. Just as the economic crisis in Argentina in 2001 was quickly and creatively responded to by way of a slew of liberatory initiatives at the grassroots (including the occupied factory movement discussed earlier), the same is now happening in response to the current economic crisis, albeit at a global scale. In these conditions, the futurology of the present is needed now more than ever. The question becomes whether to resign ourselves to the life-denying ossification of creativity under capitalism and the traditional Left alike, or, to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned and to participate passionately and deliberately in the production of the new.

1.) Acknowledgements are due first of all to Anamaine Asinas for all her love, support, and inspiration. Ana – I cannot help but think that the kind of intensely passionate, nurturing and mutually-liberating relationship we share is the very stuff that revolutions are made of. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to Eric Pido and Marta Celletti, since it was in many a conversation with these dear friends that some of the ideas presented in this article were first formed. Sincere thank yous must also go out to Marc Herbst, Rosi Braidotti, Steven Morgana, Suzanne Passmore, and Elmo Gonzaga, each of whom kindly read various incarnations of this work and provided some very helpful and encouraging feedback. Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of the many activists whom I have worked with over the years, since it is really the collective imagination of our movements that is the true author of this work.
2.) Janis Joplin, ‘Ball and Chain’ in Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits, CBS Records, 1973.
3.) See Gottfried Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977 [1807].
4.) As the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève put it: ‘Time in which the Future takes primacy can be realized, can exist, only provided that it negates or annihilates’. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Basic Books, New York, 1969, p. 136. Hegel’s ideas on negation are drawn, in no small part, from physics: ‘In modern physical science the opposition, first observed to exist in magnetism as polarity, has come to be regarded as a universal law pervading the whole of nature’ (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 223). Here he takes the positive-negative opposition found in electrical and magnetic phenomena and adapts it to social relations, elevating it as a mechanical law governing all of history.
5.) See, for example, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992 [1848]; Michael Albert, Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy, AK Press, San Francisco, 2000; and George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, New Press, New York, 2004. The manifestos of the twentieth century avant-gardes (Futurist, Surrealist, Situationist, and so on) are perfectly exemplary too – with the exception, perhaps, of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, which was more a parody of the manifesto form.
6.) See, for example, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992 [1848]; Michael Albert, Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy, AK Press, San Francisco, 2000; and George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, New Press, New York, 2004. The manifestos of the twentieth century avant-gardes (Futurist, Surrealist, Situationist, and so on) are perfectly exemplary too – with the exception, perhaps, of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, which was more a parody of the manifesto form.
7.) Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A critique of the state-form, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994, p. 6.
8.) Rebecca Solnit, 2009, ‘The Revolution Has Already Occurred’, The Nation, viewed 19 April 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/solnit, p. 13.
9.) Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson & Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, Pluto Press, London, 2008, p. xiii.
10.) Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’, in T. J. Armstrong (ed), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992, p. 163.
11.) Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995, p. 12.
12.) Colectivo Situaciones, 2003, ‘On the Researcher-Militant’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, viewed 28 January 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en, p. 3.
13.) David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004, p. 12.
14.) Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Multiplicity, Totality, Politics’, Parrhesia, iss. 9, 2010, p. 24.
15.) Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, pp. ix–xv.
16.) See Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Pluto Press, London, 2008; and Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008.
17.) Bruno Latour, ‘Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern!: Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 21, iss. 1, 1990, pp. 145–171.
18.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 92. Here, Guattari draws from the concept of ‘duration’ as found in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Dover Publications, Mineola, 1998 [1911].
19.) Cited in Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007, p. 47.
20.) Scott Littleton, Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology, Vol. 6, Marshall Cavendish, Tarrytown, 2005, p. 770.
21.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 2003 [1885], p. 150.
22.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin, London, 1991 [1977], p. 31; Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in P. Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, Penguin Books, London, 1984, pp. 76–100.
23.) Free Association, 2010, How to generate a generation, viewed 25 February 2011, http://freelyassociating.org/2010/10/how-to-generate-a-generation/, p. 1.
24.) Gilles Deleuze cited in Félix Guattari & Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2008 [1986], p. 19.
25.) See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What is to be Done?, Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1963 [1902].
26.) Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Books, London, 1986 [1867]; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, Penguin Books, London, 1985 [1885]; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Penguin Books, London, 1981 [1894].
27.) See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007 [1740].
28.) An analogy might help to illustrate the problematic I am dealing with here: Imagine that you are a houseguest at the home of a friend and you get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. The only problem is that there is an electrical storm outside and the power has failed. All is dark. Would it be necessary to have a complete map of the entire household in your mind in order to be able to reach the bathroom, or might it also be possible to feel your way there through the dark? The futurology of the present is not concerned with the map of the house; only with those feeling their way through the dark. Instances of the latter kind are what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has referred to as ‘absorbed coping’. See Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Merleau-Ponty and ‘Phenomenology of perception’, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011, pp. 96–97.
29.) Examples include Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Berg, Oxford, 2005; Paul Virilio 2005, The Information Bomb, Verso, London; and Annie Le Brun 2008, The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm, Inner Traditions, Rochester.
30.) Harry Cleaver, 1992, ‘Kropotkin, Self-Valorization and the Crisis of Marxism’, Libcom, viewed 9 March 2010, http://libcom.org/library/kropotkin-self-valorization-crisis-marxism, p. 4.
31.) The commons could be considered as capitalism’s constitutive outside. It is the very lifeblood of capital and yet, even as it is harnessed, it must simultaneously be negated lest it threaten the calcified order necessary for capitalism’s own reproduction. The concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ has been drawn here from Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex“, Routledge, New York, 1993, pp. 3, 8.
32.) Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976 [1847], p. 57.
33.) Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Athlone Press, London, 1983 [1962].
34.) Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982 [1844], p. 138.
35.) Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 136.
36.) Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 167.
37.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 29.
38.) Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ in D. Yates & J. Irby (eds), Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New Directions, New York, 1964, p. 28.
39.) Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Pluto Press, London, 2005, p. 183.
40.) Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’ in K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961 [1844], pp. 67–83.
41.) This is an idea expressed in Gottfried Hegel, ‘The doctrine of essence’ in W. Wallace (ed), The logic of Hegel, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892 [1817], pp. 207–286. ‘[T]hings really are not what they immediately show themselves … there is a permanent in things, and that permanent is in the first instance their Essence’ (pp. 208–209).
42.) Lazzarato, ‘Multiplicity, Totality, Politics’, p. 24.
43.) David Graeber, 2008, ‘Hope in Common’, The Anarchist Library, viewed 1 July 2011, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/David_Graeber__Hope_in_Common.html, pp. 1, 4.
44.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1.
45.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1
46.) This formulation of a ‘political apathy’ is indebted to the work of Feeltank Chicago. See Jerome Mast Grand, Amber Hasselbring & Corndog Brothers, 2008, ‘Renaming Bush Street’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, iss. 6, viewed 5 July 2011, http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/6/antiwar/renamingbushstreet.html.
47.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
48.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 293–308.
49.) Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
50.) My thinking on affect is primarily sourced from Brian Massumi, Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002. In short, affect is the capacity to affect and be affected. It is not a personal feeling, but a pre-personal intensity that exists only in flows between people and things.
51.) CrimethInc., 2008, ‘The Really Really Free Market: Instituting the Gift Economy’, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, viewed 8 July 2011, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/reallyreally.php.
52.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1.
53.) Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Penguin, New York, 2009 [1972], pp. 4–8.
54.) Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein, The Take, Barna-Alper Productions, New York, 2004.
55.) David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, AK Press, Oakland, 2009.
56.) Penny Harvey & Soumhya Venkatesan, ‘Faith, Reason and the Ethic of Craftsmanship: Creating Contingently Stable Worlds’, in M. Candea (ed), The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, Routledge, Abingdon, p. 130.
57.) The bulk of my research results are still in the process of being written up, although a few preliminary sketches have so far been published. See, for instance, Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketches of an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging’, Budhi: A Journal of Culture and Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2007, pp. 239–246; and Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘The Figure of the “Fil-Whatever“: Filipino American Trans-Pacific Social Movements and the Rise of Radical Cosmopolitanism’, World Anthropologies Network E-Journal, no. 5, 2010, pp. 97–127.
58.) I seek to neutralise gender here by synthesising both the feminine and masculine suffixes (‘-a’ and ‘-o’, respectively) into the new suffix of ‘-@’. The reason that I have chosen this form over the standard ‘Filipino’ is that I wish to avoid using a gender-specific descriptor to stand in for all Filipin@s. This is an unfortunate grammatical inheritance from Spanish colonialism, since pre-Hispanic indigenous languages in the Philippine archipelago were, by and large, gender-neutral. I might have chosen to use the alternative suffix of ‘-a/o’ but decided against it, not just because it reads somewhat clumsily, but more importantly because it perpetuates the rigid binary notion of gender by which genderqueer individuals are marginalised.
59.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 29.
60.) Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London, 2004 [1987], p. 7.
61.) Cited in Guattari & Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p. 87.
62.) Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1989 [1886].
63.) Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Anti/Theses, Leeds, 2000 [1979], p. 18; Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, Verso, London, 2005, pp. 198–207, 215–230.
64.) See John Jordan, ‘Deserting the Culture Bunker’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, iss. 3, viewed 10 July 2011, http://www.joaap.org/new3/jordan.html.
65.) Cited in Lee Scrivner, ‘How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto (A Manifesto)’, London Consortium, viewed 9 July 2011, http://www.londonconsortium.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/scrivneripmessay.pdf, p. 13.
66.) Cited in Scrivner, ‘How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto (A Manifesto)’, p. 13.
67.) Tristan Tzara, 2006 [1918], ‘Dada Manifesto’, Wikisource, viewed 4 July 2011, http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Dada_Manifesto_(1918,_Tristan_Tzara).
68.) Cited in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin Books, London, 2005 [1942], p. 90.
69.) Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000.
70.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 4.
71.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 7. To interpret Guattari here as saying that the production of novelty is simply a straightforward matter of human intent and free will would be gravely mistaken. Becomings can only occur through ‘heterogenesis’ (pp. 33–57); that is, through a multiplicity of elements in symbiosis. In the case of multiplicities in which human beings play a part, subjectivity is certainly one ingredient in the mix, but it does not assume the role of primary causal determinant. There is always an unpredictability to heterogenesis and we often we end up with entirely different outcomes to what we originally intended. It must furthermore be stressed that human subjectivity does not exist on some separate plane of reality as René Descartes presumed, but must rather be seen to be part of matter.
72.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 20.

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Kreative Arbeit und Selbstverwirklichung

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

Die Idee einer Kreativen Arbeit gilt gemeinhin dem Kapital und seinen Investoren als viel versprechend, weil der in ihr enthaltene Begriff der Schöpfung, des Schöpferischen mit dem Versprechen einer Produktion von Wert aus nichts, einer creatio ex nihilo, zu wedeln scheint. Kreativität ist wie Zauberei – das Gegenteil einer Abarbeitung an und Bearbeitung von vorgefundenem, vorproduziertem, stets Widerstand leistendem Material, das auch noch teuer der Erde (oder sonst wem) entrissen, herbeigeschafft und gelagert werden will. Die Erfindung, die Geschäftsidee, der Slogan, das Kunstwerk, die Designlösung brauchen, so die Vorstellung, keine teure materielle Voraussetzung, um ihrerseits materielle Folgen zu erzielen. Die Maschinen, Fabrikhallen, Grundstücke, Fuhrparks und Zugangsrechte und all die anderen Voraussetzungen von Produktion können gen Null schrumpfen. Der autopoietische Hirnschmalz verspricht hingegen himmlische Renditen.
Dass dem nicht so ist, dass auch kreative Arbeit so etwas wie Rohstoffe, Bearbeitungstechniken, hochspezialisierte, weil oft emotions- und inspirationsgeführte Feinmechanik, Wissensformen und deren Beherrschung etc. kennt, soll hier nicht Thema sein. Nur soviel: Würden die Bestandteile der kreativen Arbeit herausgelöst aus der metaphysischen Holistik einer vom Selbst gesteuerten magischen Produktivität, wäre immerhin schon eine Kleinigkeit gegen die Überforderung derer, die sie leisten, getan. Dann würde auch das kreative Wissen als eine externalisierbare Technik verstanden werden, der gegenüber man sich verhalten kann, statt mit ihr identisch zu sein. Doch dazu später mehr.
In jüngster Zeit gibt es zwar den Sonntagsreden-Allgemeinplatz, dass in Bildung und manchmal sogar in Kultur zu investieren, nicht nur kulturell, sondern auch ökonomisch sinnvoll sei. Der Hirnschmalz verliert so etwas vom Nimbus seiner Wunderkraft und wird als Ressource gesehen, die man pflegen muss, wie Maschinen und Wälder. Eine jüngst veröffentlichte Studie der deutschen Bundesregierung beziffert den Sektor kultureller Produktion – also die sozusagen reine kreative Arbeit – auf rund 3% des Bruttosozialprodukts und macht ihn damit sogar zur zweitgrößten einheitlichen Branche nach der Autoindustrie. (Natürlich erstreckt sich das Panorama der hier gemeinten Produktion von Poesie bis Pornografie). Doch in den begleitenden Empfehlungen dieser Studie liest man nichts, was über die Vorstellung hinausgeht, dass irgendwie gut ausgebildete Menschen die Produzenten solcher Ideen sein könnten, über die sich die Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit ein paar Jahren in einer von der Deutschen Bank gesponserten Kampagne selbst definiert, als Land der Ideen nämlich.
Aus der Sicht des Kapitals ist aber, so würde ich behaupten, der phantastische Wertschöpfungsfaktor einer creatio ex nihilo gar nicht so entscheidend für die Begeisterung an kreativer Arbeit. Zunächst, weil der Kapitalist weiß, dass es so etwas nicht gibt. Wenn es überhaupt das mit dem Schöpferischen Assoziierte ist, das ihm an der kreativen Arbeit gefällt, dann eher im Sinne des Marx‘schen Gesetzes von der tendenziell fallenden Profitrate. Dieses Gesetz besagt ja, dass der Anteil menschlichen variablen Kapitals, also der lebendigen Arbeit, im Verhältnis zum Anteil des konstanten Kapitals auch bei wirtschaftlichem Wachstum stetig sinkt und damit auch der Mehrwert, denn der entsteht nur aus der Ausbeutung von Menschen. Die kreative Arbeit, so zumindest ihr Mythos, erhöht den nichtmaschinellen Anteil der Arbeit. Der abhängig beschäftigte kreative Arbeiter erhöht also durch seine lebendige Arbeit den Mehrwert.
Doch auch das ist nicht der entscheidende Faktor. Der Begriff der Kreativität und der kreativen Arbeit ist nicht nur von Haus aus nebelhaft, er ist auch speziell irreführend, wenn man von aktuellen Entwicklungen wie der so genannten Kreativwirtschaft oder den so genannten kreativen Industrien sprechen will. Viel wesentlicher als ein erhöhter Anteil kultureller Produktion am Bruttoinlandsprodukt und das Anwachsen eines so genannten kreativen Anteils auch an nicht kultureller Produktion ist die Umstellung einer des-identifizierten oder nur mittelbar identifizierten zu einer voll identifizierten Produktion. Dies ist eine Entwicklung, die sich keineswegs auf kulturelle Produktion und den kulturellen Anteil weiterer Sektoren beschränkt: vor dem Hintergrund von Outsourcing und Prekarisierung sollen die weiterhin fest oder dauerhaft Beschäftigten eine andere innere Einstellung zu dem Unternehmen gewinnen, das sie beschäftigt. Für diese Umstellung spielen die kreativen Industrien eine bestimmte Rolle, sie sind Vorbilder bei bestimmten Organisationsformen, sie bringen Leute hervor, die einen Job- und Branchen-identifizierten Lebensstil vertreten, aber sie machen nicht den entscheidenden Paradigmenwechsel aus.
Was meine ich mit identifizierter Produktion? In der Vergangenheit der industriellen Produktion kann man mehrere Stadien und Formen von Identifikation mit der Erwerbstätigkeit unterscheiden. Der ungelernte Arbeiter der industriellen Revolution sah seine Arbeit als auferlegtes Leid in jeder Hinsicht. Dies betraf die Tätigkeit als solche, wie auch die Beziehung zum Arbeitsplatz in Bergwerk oder Manufaktur. Er war gewissermaßen hundertprozentig des-identifiziert. Der gelernte und gar spezialisierte Arbeiter späterer, differenzierter produzierender Epochen war mit seiner Tätigkeit identifiziert, aber nicht mit seinem Arbeitsverhältnis. Die berühmte Bestimmung der Entfremdung aus der Separation des Produzenten von seinem Produkt ist natürlich für denjenigen Produzenten besonders schmerzhaft, der zur Herstellung seines Produktes ein hohes Maß an spezialisiertem Wissen einsetzt. Er weiß aber auch genauer, worin die Entfremdung besteht, d. h. er ist gezielter zornig und verfügt über gezielt einsetzbares, avanciertes Wissen. Er ist potenziell revolutionäres Subjekt, weil sich Identifikation und Desidentifikation je in gesteigerter Form in seiner Praxis gegenüberstehen.
In der Produktion des fordistischen Kompromisses nimmt die Desidentifikation mit dem Arbeitsplatz und den Arbeitsverhältnissen ab. Die echten oder vermeintlichen Errungenschaften der Arbeiterbewegung, ihren Parteien und Gewerkschaften, die Tendenz zur fürsorglichen, integrierenden Firma, der Wohlstand der Nachkriegszeit haben dafür gesorgt, dass in den letzten 50 Jahren unter den klassisch abhängig Beschäftigten die Identifikation mit dem Arbeitgeber und den Arbeitsverhältnissen zugenommen hat; der Beschäftigte empfindet den Gegensatz zwischen Produzent und Produkt als nicht mehr so gravierend. Das hat aber nicht nur mit einer Aufwertung seines Einflusses in fordistisch-sozialdemokratisch ausgehandelten Mitbestimmungsmodellen, werkseigenen Fußballclubs und anderen Integrationsmodellen zu tun, sondern sukzessive mehr und mehr auch mit einer Abwertung seines spezialisierten Wissens. Dem über ein in anerkannten Ausbildungsprozessen erworbenes, externes und anwendbares Wissen verfügenden, einigermaßen geschützt lebenden Lohnabhängigen des Westens wird seit einiger Zeit erzählt, dass dieses Wissen nicht mehr viel zählt und dass die globale Konkurrenz seinen Arbeitsplatz eben gerade deswegen bedroht, weil sie entweder ohne ein solches, teures Wissen produziert oder dieses anderswo billiger zu haben ist.
Lohnabhängige identifizieren sich sukzessive weniger mit ihrem Können, ihrem Produzentenwissen und mehr mit dem Arbeitsplatz, der ja ein bedrohter ist. Das Verhältnis von Identifikation und Desidentifikation hat sich tendenziell also während der letzten 30 Jahre gedreht. Zur Identifikation mit dem Arbeitsplatz gehört auch die Tendenz, sich mit der eigenen Nationalität und anderen nicht erworbenen Privilegien eher verbunden zu fühlen als mit der Klasse. All dies sind Entwicklungen einer proletarischen Defensive, die man in den letzten 20, 30 Jahren beobachten konnte. Das jeweilige Können, ein objektives und einigermaßen souverän auf dem Markt gehandeltes und getauschtes Wissen erscheint dessen Besitzer weniger entscheidend für seine Position auf diesem Markt; vielmehr glauben die Betreffenden an Glück und Pech, ihre Persönlichkeit, ihren Charme als (weiche) Faktoren, die für den begehrten Besitz eines Arbeitsplatzes nunmehr entscheidend sein sollen.
Man könnte nun meinen, dass im Rückgriff auf individuelle, persönliche und künstlerische Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten der Beschäftigten auch bei diesen wieder ein proletarischer Stolz im Sinne eines alten Facharbeiter-Selbstverständnisses entstehen müsste. Der kulturell-künstlerische Anteil an Produktionen aller Art brachte ja ein Wissen zum Einsatz, das von Haus aus wieder zu genauso einer Identifikation mit der eigenen Arbeit führen müsste, wie das früher bei denjenigen der Fall war, die über ein entwickeltes, spezialisiertes Fachwissen verfügten. Die kreativen Produzenten müssten eigentlich wieder wissen, was sie wert sind. Ihre Fähigkeiten sind noch spezieller, ihr Wissen noch stärker an ihr Verfügen über dieses Wissen gebunden. Und da andererseits ein Einspeisen solches kreativen Könnens in Produktionsabläufe eigentlich das alte Verhältnis aus hoher Identifikation mit dem eigenen Können und des-identifikatorischer Skepsis gegen das Arbeitsverhältnis und den Arbeitgeber wieder herstellen müsste, wäre mit dem Kreativarbeiter auch wieder ein politisierbares Subjekt geboren.
Doch so verhält es sich aus zwei Gründen nicht: Zunächst steht dieses Wissen, wenn es in Produktionsabläufe eingebracht wird, eben nicht starren, aber für ihre unmenschliche Starre mit Verlässlichkeit zahlenden Strukturen gegenüber, in denen sich das alte Verhältnis von eigen und fremd, von mein Beitrag und deren Organisation rekonstruieren ließe. Der Stolz, von dem ich in Erinnerung an historische Arbeiteraristokraten rede, verdankte sich ja einer Konfrontation, in der man sich als Subjekt einer antagonistischen Struktur und einer Institution gegenüber sah. Stattdessen arbeiten die kreative Unternehmerin und der kreative Unternehmer ja meistens entweder tatsächlich oder metaphorisch als Unternehmer in eigener Sache oder als selbstverantwortlicher Knoten in einem nicht mehr als Struktur oder Institution überschaubaren Netzwerk, wodurch auch die Organisation zur Selbstorganisation wird. Selbstorganisation war einst der Name eines Ziels, gemeint war damit aber die Organisation davon, wie man über ein Wissen als getrenntes, objektives Arsenal von Handlungsmöglichkeiten verfügen kann, gemeint war nicht eine durch erzwungene Identifikation zusammenschnurrende Entdifferenzierung im Modus der naturgemäß panischen Subjektivität im Konkurrenzverhältnis.
Der zweite Grund aber betrifft das zweite Stadium, in das die Kreativarbeit eingetreten ist, bei dem nun eher Lebenswissen gefragt ist als ein noch an klassischen Modellen der Skills und des Könnens orientiertes kreativ-kognitives Wissen und seine Techniken. Denn Kultur und Kreativität haben nicht nur als Vorbilder der Kulturalisierung und Personalisierung (bis hin zur Psychologisierung) von Arbeitsleistung in anderen Branchen gedient, sie konnten auch als eigene Branchen neuer Art reüssieren und wieder neue Arbeitsformen entwickeln, die dann womöglich Vorbild einer weiteren Radikalisierung des allgemeinen Umbaus der Arbeitswelt dienen. Im Blick auf diejenigen ökonomischen Bestände und Ausbaumöglichkeiten, die weniger von globaler Konkurrenz bedroht zu sein scheinen, entstand die Formel von der Kreativwirtschaft und der Creative Industries zwar zunächst vor allem als Standortfaktor für andere Industrien.¹ Zunehmend wurden sie aber auch zu einem neuen Modell von Wertschöpfung, das durchaus von den oben angedeuteten Versprechen einer creatio ex nihilo insofern inspiriert war, als möglichst wenig externes Material inklusive indirekte Ausbildungskosten verarbeitet werden würden, dagegen maximal viel von den individuellen Eigenschaften, dem Lebenswissen und den performativen Fähigkeiten der beschäftigten Personen (Charme, Sexyness, Schönheit, Witz, Schlagfertigkeit etc. bis hin zu der Oberweite, die eine Voraussetzung für einen Job bei der mittlerweile auch in Deutschland aktiven Restaurantkette „Hooters“ darstellt).
Solange wie – im ersten Stadium – kreative Arbeit als Erfindung, Geistesblitz, Einfall, Problemlösung etc. konzipiert war, war sie noch bezogen auf konventionell materielle Produktion, sie bezeichnete den immateriellen Bestandteil materieller Produktion. Selbst in den mittlerweile klassischen Diagnosen vom Aufstieg immaterieller Arbeit (von Naomi Klein bis Maurizio Lazzarato) geht es vor allem um Marken, Brands, Logos und andere semiotische Aspekte materieller Produkte: Die Produzenten der immateriellen Bestandteile bleiben als anonyme Besitzer von semio-technischem Können im Hintergrund, auch wenn ihr Anteil an der Wertschöpfung gegenüber den materiellen Produzenten steigt. Materielle Produzenten mussten nicht performen, nicht auftreten. Die in Call-Centern, Gastronomie, Tourismus, Verkauf und Vermittlung von kulturellen und Lifestyle-Gütern, Pflege, Kinder- und Altenbetreuung und anderen Service- und Dienstleistungsbranchen gefragte Attraktivität erlaubt hingegen keine Rückzüge mehr.
Dieses neue kreative Wissen und Können der performativen Produktion enthält noch weniger als im ersten Fall der kreativen Erfindung eine abrufbare Ausbildungskompetenz. Es gibt kein Ensemble von Handlungs- und Denkmöglichkeiten, die dem Subjekt als erworbene, externe und objektive Tools vorliegen und die es sich zu seiner eigentlichen, als nicht verwertbar gedachten Persönlichkeit hinzurechnen kann. Das Subjekt hat nicht die Wahl, sich über einen Anteil am objektiven Reichtum des Kompetenzwissens und dessen Verwertungspotenzial mit diesem zu identifizieren, sondern es ist bereits mit diesem identisch. Hier geht es also nicht mehr um ein erworbenes, objektivierbares Ausbildungswissen, wie es sich die aktuelle, so eifrig bürokratisierende Bildungspolitik noch vorstellt, sondern um ein unmittelbar mit der Persönlichkeit verbundenes und in ihr lokalisierbares Lebenswissen in eigener Sache. Auf dieses Lebenswissen kann man darum nicht stolz im Sinne eines auf einem souveränen Selbstverwertungsmodell aufbauenden Leistungsdenkens sein. Vielmehr kann man sich allenfalls narzisstisch – oder aber auch angstbesetzt, in Panik vor dessen möglicher Abwertung – mit seinem Lebenswissen identifizieren. Das ist der zweite Grund, warum eine Politisierung dieser Lage so schwer fällt.
Es gibt nur eine Möglichkeit, den alten Facharbeiterstolz in solchen Arbeitsverhältnissen zu rekonstruieren – indem man eine Distanz zu diesem Selbst aufbaut, das man als Kompetenz verkauft und feilbietet. In manchen Arbeitsverhältnissen ist das nicht möglich und/oder wird negativ sanktioniert: als berechnend und unsympathisch und damit den Zielen gerade affektiver Arbeit zuwiderlaufend. Oder aber dieses Verhältnis wird zu einer pragmatischen doppelten seelischen Buchführung, die man als Reaktion auf Berufe aus der Sexarbeit und andere Formen von Prostitution kennt, am anderen unpragmatischen Ende stehen Zynismus und Burn-Out-Syndrom in helfenden Jobs, die eher für das Scheitern der Distanzierung stehen. Nur in diesen, traditionell negativ beschriebenen Fällen ist aber ein Blick auf die eigene Fähigkeit möglich. Der für diesen Blick nötige Aussichtspunkt gilt aber entweder als Verfehlung des Berufs oder als deformation professionelle, die den Therapeuten als erweiterten, meist selbst finanzierten Reparaturbetrieb auf den Plan ruft, statt zu einer Politisierung zu führen. Es hat sich daher ein ironisches Selbstverhältnis etabliert, das zwar eine solche Selbstdistanz aufbaut, diese aber nicht mehr reflexiv als Symptom einer bestimmten – erzwungenen – Notwendigkeit, mit sich selbst umzugehen, hauszuhalten, zu hökern, verstehen kann oder will, sondern diese Selbstdistanz wiederum zur Ironie zweiter Ordnung naturalisiert: Die Selbstdistanz ist nicht mehr die Bedingung einer möglichen Veränderung; man registriert sie, performt sie zuweilen auch, macht aber mit Hilfe von Therapeuten und Yoga-Lehrern trotzdem weiter wie bisher. Die Ironie zweiter Ordnung schließt Engagement und Fanatismus in dem Maße aus, wie sie die letztlich zerstörerische, allseits geforderte Identifikation mit Beruf, Tätigkeit und Firma, der man sich verkauft, bloß lindert.
Die Reklame aber, die in Massenkultur und Medien für solchermaßen performative Arbeit gemacht wurde und wird, greift auf das Reservoir der Selbstverwirklichungsdiskurse aus den Kulturrevolten und Befreiungsszenarien der Jahre ca. 65–85 zurück. Tatsächlich unterscheidet der traditionell unscharfe Selbstverwirklichungsbegriff nicht zwischen der Verwirklichung von (künstlerischen) Projekten und von Lebensformen; er bietet sich also für genau die vielen Übergänge an, die zwischen spezialisierten, sozusagen technisch-kreativen Berufen vom Erfinder bis zum Dichter auf der einen Seite und der performativen Virtuosität, der Kreativität ohne Werk, von der Paolo Virno spricht, denkbar sind. Die Selbstverwirklichung gehört in einen Diskurs, der gegen die Doppelmoral des von sich selbst distanzierten, spezialisierten Subjekts der industriellen und fordistischen Epoche ein Ende doppelter Buchführung einklagte. In dem Symptom der Spaltung erkannte diese Rede die Entfremdung wieder und konzentrierte sich zumindest in vielen lebenspraktischen Projekten psychologischer, kommunitärer, künstlerischer Richtung auf mindestens die pragmatische Umgehung dieses Tatbestands, wenn nicht auf seine kulturrevolutionäre Abschaffung.
Dabei ging es in erster Linie darum, seine Lebenspraxis im Einklang mit den persönlichen Bedürfnissen und Überzeugungen zu gestalten. In der Regel lief das darauf hinaus, dass künstlerisches oder kreatives Arbeiten sich mit den ökonomischen und anderen normativen Anforderungen vertragen musste. Nur wenige radikale Gruppen versuchten die Lebensform selbst anzugreifen und richteten sich unabhängig von Fragen des Broterwerbs direkt gegen die Kleinfamilie, Patriarchat, Monogamie, Privateigentum etc. Die meisten gegen „Entfremdung“ gerichteten kulturreformerischen Strömungen der 70er Jahre wollten im Zuge ihrer Selbstverwirklichung nur die Tätigkeiten selbst verändern oder neue Tätigkeiten entwickeln. Sie unterschieden sich von all den lebensreformerischen und reformpädagogischen Bewegungen der ersten Jahrzehnte des 20. Jahrhunderts, die ganzheitlich erziehen und arbeiten wollten, Arbeitsteilung und Spezialisierung bekämpften, nur darin, dass der Maßstab für Nicht-Entfremdung nicht mehr in einem allgemeinen Ideal religiöser, politischer oder sonstwie weltanschaulicher Art zu suchen sei, sondern in der individuellen Persönlichkeit des Einzelnen; sein Selbst war kein indisches Brahman mehr, sondern das konkrete individuelle Selbst, das Atman der westlichen Einzelseele.
Selbstverwirklicher dieser ersten Nach-68er-Generation bildeten insofern Modelle für Kreativarbeit, als sie in erster Linie Symbole und Zeichen verarbeiteten. Sie konnten diese besser lesen und schreiben als ihre Auftraggeber, weil sie näher an den sozialen Verabredungen der Leute waren. Sie arbeiteten in der Kneipe oder im Plattenladen und hatten durch ihr Szene- und Nachbarschaftswissen Zugang zu den Genealogien und alles entscheidenden sozialen Mikrobedeutungen von Styles. Sie hatten erlebt, wie sich Lebensformen in Logos sedimentierten. Doch schon gegen Ende der 70er Jahre und vor allem in den 80ern geriet das ganze Milieu in die Kritik. Gegenmilieus wie die Punk-Kultur warfen – meistens implizit – den Selbstverwirklichern vor, sich nur halb befreit zu haben, nur zu therapieren und zu reformieren, wo es um die Bedingungen fürs Personsein überhaupt ging. Ob im eher politisierten Milieu – bei Anarchisten und Autonomen – oder im eher spirituellen Milieu – bei neuen Tribalisten, Travellern und Gothic-Anhängern – sollte die „halbe Ganzheitlichkeit“ durch totalere und umfassendere, auf die Einheit aus Leben, Praxis, Alltag zielende Programme ersetzt werden. Zwar war die zur gleichen Zeit und interessanterweise in den gleichen kulturellen Milieus aufsteigende „postmoderne“ Kritik an Ganzheitlichkeitsvorstellungen während der 80er Jahre sichtbarer (weil artikulierter), die gesteigerte Ganzheitlichkeit erwies sich aber letzten Endes in den Subkulturen und ihren Nachfolgern als nachhaltiger. Die Sympathie für Doppelleben und gebrochene Subjektivität blieb Vorrecht intellektueller und akademischer Fraktionen, die Strahlkraft der Doppelleben-Kritik reichte weiter – bis zu den Ganzheitlichkeitsfeiern der Techno-Kultur. Deren Beteiligte konnten nun allerdings nicht mehr an eine utopische Zukunft jenseits der Feier glauben, sondern hatten die körperlich nachhaltige Selbstverwirklichung jenseits von Zeichen- und Symbolbearbeitung ganz auf die Party und den Rave verlagert. Ganz in der performativen Präsenz eines als authentisch empfundenen Körpers aufzugehen gelang der egalitären, sexuell entspannteren, queer beeinflussten Rave-Kultur sicher besser als ihren Vorgänger-Modellen in den 60er und 70er-Jahre-Gegenkulturen. Aber die Party war nicht mehr mit einem gesellschaftlichen und politischen Ziel verbunden, einem Nachher: Wohl auch deswegen dauerten die Parties so lange und zögerten ihr Ende heraus. Danach gab es keine Praxis, die die Erfahrungen der Party politisch in den Alltag verlängern konnten.
Für das heutige, zweite Stadium kreativer Arbeit war diese zweite Phase von Ganzheitlichkeits-Ideologie wichtiger als die erste Phase der Selbstverwirklichung. Dem wirtschaftlichen Aufstieg der Symbolverarbeitung – das haben wir gesehen – ist der der Körperverwertung gefolgt. Damit ist natürlich nicht die Verwertung der Körperleistung gemeint, die in früheren Gesellschaften ja neben der Verwertung von Pferden und anderen Tieren durchaus eine Rolle gespielt hat, sondern die besondere körperliche Präsenz, Charisma-Produktion, aber auch die besondere Interface-Funktion von menschlichen Körpern und Gesichtern. Es geht also um die Verwertung des symbolisierten und kulturalisierten Körpers, um den Live-Auftritt derselben symbolverarbeitenden Fähigkeiten, die in der ersten Phase der Kreativwirtschaft noch an Rechner und Leuchttisch zur Geltung kamen, die sich nun inkorporiert auf die Bühne stellen. Auf den Hippie der 70er, der mit wilden Haaren und endlosen Gitarrenläufen Selbstverwirklichung lediglich symbolisch verkörperte, ist nun der gepiercte, tätowierte, in Ernährung und Drogenkonsum ohne kognitive Dissonanzen lebende Trance- und Techno-Esoteriker als Modell getreten. Er ist dabei nicht nur in sich konsistenter, sondern auch weiter verbreitet: Man findet diese Grundmuster von „Ganzheitlichkeit“ von der protestantischen neo-bürgerlichen Mittelschicht über die post-religiösen und esoterischen Milieus bis in die Kulte der Unterschichten – dem steht eher vereinzelt im akademischen Milieu die Ironie gegenüber (wobei von dieser auch hier nicht viel mehr übrig geblieben ist als die leere Ironie zweiter Ordnung). Anders als die in Selbstdistanz weitermachenden Ironiker, aber auch anders als der politisch bewusste Hippie erlebt der ganzheitliche Typ die Grenzen seines Lebensmodells als schicksalhaft oder religiös, Mängel schreibt er sich selbst zu oder verschwörungstheoretisch einem großen Ganzen.
Natürlich, das muss man neuerdings ja immer sagen, wenn man von Phasen spricht, ist der vorangegangene Zustand nicht erledigt oder verschwunden, auch die andere Kreativwirtschaft gibt es noch. Sie ist die besser bezahlte und auch die stabilere. Die andere, die neuere – und in ihren Regeln eigentlich viel ältere – ist unsicher und prekär. Sie betrifft – um Beispiele aus Pop-Musik und Subkultur heranzuziehen – den Wechsel von der Bedroom- Tüftelei der digital-elektronischen 90er zur Live-Attraktion der Gegenwart, vom slicken Design zum sexy Gesicht. Der Preis besonderer Daten ist ins Bodenlose gestürzt, nur im Zusammenhang mit Live-Auftritten, 3-D-Erlebnissen sind sie noch attraktiv: Selbst die Spielkonsolen und ihre Benutzung hat sich verkörperlicht und dreidimensionalisiert. Nicht mehr digitale Musikproduktionsprogramme sind der Hit, sondern die digitale Simulation älterer, prä-digitaler Rock-Musik verkauft sich wie geschnitten Brot.
Die Kneipenbedienungen, Servicecentermitarbeiterinnen, Musikerinnen, Boten, Helfer, Junior-Art Directorinnen, die in dieser Wirtschaft ihren kulturellen Körper einsetzen, sind das Gegenteil des körperlosen, fetten Nerds, der noch in der ersten Generation digitaler Kultur als Klischee eines neuen Phänotyps kursierte oder auch des speedzerfressenen Dot-Com-Selbstausbeuters – diese waren die letzten Selbstverwirklicher des ersten Typus. Die Identifikation ist bei ihren Nachfolgern eben kein freier Akt mehr, der auch anders ausfallen könnte. Sie sind auf ihr Selbstsein zurückgeworfen, alles, was sie tun können, ist, es zusammenzuhalten. Kognitive Dissonanzen zwischen Tätigkeit und Bewusstsein lassen sich dann nicht mehr aufrechterhalten, wenn meine Attraktivität (und mit ihr mein ökonomischer Erfolg) darauf basiert, dass ich so reizend und so kräftig ich bin. Die materiellen und physischen Kosten, aber auch die Chancen der Verwertung von Körpern und Physis verbinden die neue Kreativwirtschaft mit einer ganz alten Entertainment-Industrie als Unmittelbarkeitsdealer, wie sie es im Rotlichtmilieu, in Jazzkellern und Kabaretts jahrzehntelang gegeben hat.
Doch für Kreativarbeiter im ersten wie im zweiten Sinne gilt vor allem eines: Sie sind für sich selbst verantwortlich; sie identifizieren sich nicht souverän, wie jemand, der auch anders könnte: Sie sind immer schon das, was sie sein müssen. In Althussers Ideologietheorie gab es ja dieses berühmte dreiteilige Modell, bei dem ein Subjekt in seiner Reproduktionsphase von einer staatlich organisierten Ideologisierungsmangel so zugerichtet wurde, dass es am nächsten Tag wieder in die Fabrik gehen und seine Arbeitskraft so weit mobilisieren konnte, dass sich ein Mehrwert abschöpfen ließ. Kreativarbeiter müssen alles drei zugleich sein: arbeitskräftiges Subjekt, leeres, womöglich zweifelndes, zu prägendes Subjekt und prägendes, beeinflussendes, motivierendes, das eigene Subjekt in die Mangel nehmendes Unterhaltungs- und Spiritualitätsprogramm. Wenn sie Glück haben, reicht Leere und Selbstentertainment, weil das von außen dann schon aussieht wie sexy Präsenz.
Was hülfe es, würde man sich in eine Gewerkschaftsposition gegenüber der Kreativarbeit begeben, was könnte man fordern, ohne gleich alles zu fordern? Nun dies: die Wieder-Versachlichung der personalisierten Techniken, das Verfügen über Rückzugsmöglichkeiten, die nicht vom Zwang zur Reproduktion aufgefressen werden, die Wieder-Aneignung des Selbst durch das Selbst, die De-Ökonomisierung der Seele, des Körpers, der Präsenz, der Sexyness; die Re-Politisierung, Re-Objektivierung, Re-Reifizierung von Fähigkeiten, Skills, Wissen.

1.) Gemeint sind die sattsam bekannten Richard-Florida-Thesen, dass kreative Produktion einen urbanen Standort attraktiv für andere Produktionen macht.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: Menke, Christoph; Rebentisch Juliane (Hrsg.): Kreation und Depression. Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, Kulturverlag Kadmos: Berlin 2012, S. 118–128.