Mute Vol 2 #8

With investment in stocks and property now inducing ambient neurasthenia, mainstream investors are allegedly turning to ‘alternative investments' like wine and art, not to mention gold. Although art and wine were considered riskier than property in the pre-credit-crunch era, according to one recent article they are now regarded as safer than bricks and mortar (‘Credit crunch fuels investor search for art, wine', Clara Ferreira-Marques, Reuters.com). If this appears to spell good times ahead for the contemporary art market, further inspection reveals that a new breed of fund manager specialising in this asset class is looking to ‘strip out the risk' by focusing on established artists - or wines. In other words, cultural conservatism will be (even more) the order of the day.

Meanwhile, in London's East End, the once-Young British Artists (Tracey Emin, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread, etc.) are protesting a series of planned high-rise developments in fashionable Shoreditch, and Mayor Ken Livingstone's ‘destruction of London' more generally:

We, and thousands of others who live and work in this community, are facing the prospect of being driven out of the area by runaway development ... As developers seek to multiply their profits with every floor we feel as if we are living in a latter-day gold rush where ordinary rules do not apply.

Apparently these ‘ordinary rules' didn't apply in the early '90s either when the mass influx of artists and other culturati replaced existing businesses in the area, industrial space becoming studio and cappuccino space. Nor do they apply when it comes to the prices fetched by the YBAs' art - not least in the current risk-averse moment, when, the story goes, only market-approved names are considered safe investments. A correlation between the bubble economy which sustained the astronomical prices of ‘fashionable' contemporary art and the real estate industry planning to raze Shoreditch simply does not seem to exist in the minds of these people. Indeed, the very notion that ‘ordinary rules' have suddenly ceased to apply in the present era of capital accumulation is clearly absurd.

The rule of no rule is what has made watching the slo-mo free fall of the global economy so perplexing, not to mention gripping. Since the crisis began there has been a frantic search for rules, patterns in the chaos. Risk has given way to rampant indeterminacy: is the real economy in recession yet? Is this 2002 or 1998, 1973 or 1929? When do we know we've hit the bottom of the crisis? 

In the case of Shoreditch, perhaps the credit crunch will cut off the supply of cash to developers before the first demolition ball is swung. This seems to be the only hope, since the celebrity-endorsed Open Shoreditch campaign has forged minimal links with the local community, and Hackney Council has already earmarked anticipated revenues from these developments for the building of its new £45 million town hall.

It is somewhat apt that Shoreditch, the ‘creative hub' par excellence, is about to be converted into a corporate non-place at the same moment that the creative economy runs out of hot air and the city braces itself for upward of 40 thousand job losses. One can only dream of Shoreditch's half-built and abandoned turrets of commerce overrun by a Ballardian anarchy. 

Under straitened circumstances, however, it is more likely that ‘creativity' in all its social forms will be subjected to more finely calibrated measurement and capture. In this issue of Mute, Benedict Seymour touches on this in relation to art and sport, within a longer history of the suppression of working class activity by the state and culture industry. He also discusses the Arts Council's 2008 McMaster report and its mooted policy switch from funding criteria promoting ‘social inclusion' to the vapid catch-all of ‘excellence'. An implicit admission, perhaps, that ‘art for all' hasn't unleashed a tsunami of creativity in the general populace. In his discussion of radical pedagogy Stewart Martin argues that the autonomy of labour is being instrumentalised across higher education and the flexibilised work place. If these articles conceive of autonomous activity in different ways, they beg the same question about the terms of its continued existence. 

Meanwhile, for those not buying art, wine or gold as a hedge against recession, you can at least download free We Are Bad posters protesting the 2012 London Olympics from the Mute website [http://www.metamute.org/ en/We-Are-Bad-Posters] - no YBA status required.

 

 

 

In the 1960s and '70s musicians devised innovative forms of notation and protocol to liberate themselves from aesthetic and social conventions. Today's digital devotees of code based production and improvisation are continuing this tradition, argues Simon Yuill*

Of all the art forms supported and enabled through FLOSS, ‘livecoding' has emerged as the one which most directly embodies the key principles of FLOSS production in the creation and experience of the work itself. In livecoding, the artwork is expressed in software code that is written and re-written live during its performance. Many livecoding artists write their own software tools to support this. Alex McLean's ‘feedback.pl' was one of the first such tools. It is a simple Perl script that continuously reads and executes an extract of its own code displayed in a text editor. This code defines various algorithms from which music is generated. During performance this is re-written by the performer, changing the musical structure and effectively improvising with the code. A projection of the performer's desktop makes this visible, thereby emphasising how the code and the changes made to it are integral to the work and to the audience experience of it. The material and formal relationships between code and music are therefore discernible, even though many audience members may be unfamiliar with programming languages themselves. To some extent this is comparable to witnessing a performance on an acoustic instrument such as a guitar or clarinet. While we may not understand how to play such instruments ourselves, we can relate the gestures of the performer to the sounds that we hear and thus acquire a sense of the relation between the sound and its material production. This contrasts sharply with previous forms of electronic music performance, such as those of Jean Michel Jarre and Todd Machover, in which interface devices are presented on stage often simulating and referring to acoustic instruments. Livecoding dispenses with such ‘fetishes' and is unashamed to expose the bare materiality of its production. The unfamiliarity of presenting code as a raw material, however, results in something very different from that of the guitar or clarinet performance, and more akin to revealing the stage machinery in a Brecht play. It creates a virtue by exposing something that is normally concealed.

While livecoding initially developed as a form of music, it is not restricted to this. Dave Griffith's ‘fluxus' and Tom Schouten's ‘PacketForth' are tools for creating visual works, the first based on a 3D graphics engine and the second a video processing system. Some existing tools, such as ‘SuperCollider', ‘Chuck' and ‘Pure Data' have also been used for livecoding work. In fact, any programming language or tool that can execute code on the fly can potentially be used for livecoding. The concept has also been extended into other forms of work. ‘Social Versioning System' (SVS) enables multi-player simulation games to be created and coded live, with new code distributed among the players as a game evolves. Ap's ‘Life Coding' is a large scale performance combining software coding, circuit bending and conference-style spoken presentations.

 

Livecoding Aesthetics

There are two key aspects of livecoding that embody FLOSS principles. Firstly, the way it makes the continual re-writing of code itself a primary mode of artistic production, and, secondly, its presentation of the ‘work' itself as an open-ended mutable piece of code rather than as a static discrete artefact. As opposed to most non-digital and new media art which is presented solely as a commodity to be consumed, livecoding makes its own materials and practices of production available to others. Livecoding emphasises the FLOSS principle of code-based production as a form of production that is itself ‘live' and living, that enables the possibility of production by others for their own purposes.

This ‘enabling the possibility of production by others' is often continued beyond the performance not only in the use of FLOSS-style distribution, but also in the conscious use of workshops as a means of presenting works and teaching the skills used in their creation. This pedagogic aspect extends to the prominence given to technical meetings and development workshops in artist-run festivals such as Piksel and MAKEART, or groups such as Dorkbot and OpenLab, and into the creation of dissemination platforms and projects such as pure:dyne and FLOSS Manuals. The often ad-hoc, workshop nature of many livecoding performances and projects themselves is an extension of the livecoding ethic of sharing and making materials generally available. In the case of the ap events that are staged over extended periods of 12 hours or more, this includes participants learning and adapting the tools of the performance as it takes place. On a smaller scale, the London OpenLab group host ‘drumming circle' performances in which anyone can join in with their own algorithms and code, constructing and developing a collective, rhythmic work, as well as performances that start from one piece of code that is rewritten by successive performers. Rather than something marginal or extraneous to the ‘art', the idea of the workshop has been absorbed as an integral aspect of livecoding aesthetics.

Livecoding is not the sole or even dominant form of practice pursued by all those involved in FLOSS-related arts. What all practitioners involved in these projects do share, however, is a commitment to the broader notion of ‘live code' as a mode of production and a common preference for a workshop aesthetic. It is also within these more ‘pedagogic' practices that artistic production within FLOSS meets with other aspects of the FLOSS world, and specifically the political and socially engaged practices emerging from hacklabs and hackmeets.

 

Hacklabs & Hackmeets

Hacklabs are voluntarily run spaces providing free public access to computers and the internet. They generally make use of reclaimed and recycled machines running GNU/Linux and, alongside providing computer access, most hacklabs run workshops in a range of topics from basic computer use and installing GNU/Linux software, to programming, electronics, and independent (or pirate) radio broadcast. The first hacklabs developed in Europe, often coming out of the traditions of squatted social centres and community media labs. In Italy they have been connected with the autonomist social centres, and in Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands with anarchist squatting movements. Hackmeets are temporary gatherings of hackers and activists in which skills, tools and knowledge are exchanged and projects developed. Among the first hackmeets were those in Italy in the 1990s. There are direct connections between many of these and artists working with FLOSS. The dyne:bolic project (from which pure:dyne evolved) partly developed through the Italian hackmeets and Dutch hacklabs. RampArts hacklab in London has provided a meeting point for the local OpenLab group, and in Barcelona, spaces such as Hackitectura and Riereta have supported several FLOSS-based art and political projects. Not all artists working with FLOSS and livecoding necessarily share the politics of the hacklabs scene, nor do all hacklab participants necessarily look upon their own activities as art-related, and some are, sometimes rightly, sceptical of artistic involvement in what they do. Hacklabs, however, have been absolutely fundamental to the development of FLOSS in recent years, especially in Europe and South America, and have provided a clear political and ethical orientation in contrast to the somewhat confused and often contradictory political and social perspectives articulated in the other communities and contexts of the wider FLOSS world.

If livecoding is one of the most emblematic artistic manifestations of FLOSS, hacklabs have become one of its most emblematic social forms. While the two may not occupy identical trajectories, they nevertheless overlap and compliment one another in many significant ways. Central to this is their shared principle of ‘enabling the possibility of production by others'. This is an issue of distribution, not simply at the level of product, in the way a piece of software can be easily distributed for example, but at the level of practice. The practice itself is inherently distributive, for it integrates the distribution of knowledge on how to produce into that which it produces. While this allows for possibilities of collaborative production, it should be seen as distinct from collaboration in itself. For whereas a practice that is collaborative coheres the production of many under a single goal, thereby directing the disposition of their labour, a practice that is distributive enables the disposition of labour by others under their own direction. This is enabled in the output of production as notation, as code that not only creates a product, but enters into an active life beyond its initial implementation.

Notational Production

Notational production is not unique to software. The emergence of livecoding as an initially musical activity reflects the engagement with notational production that has characterised many different musical traditions. The application of computer code to the construction of sound is, in one sense, simply one more episode in this process. Livecoding works from within a particular relation between notation and contingency. The specificity of code is opened towards the indeterminism of improvisation. In this respect livecoding not only adds to the evolution of notational production within music but echoes a particular period where a similar relation between notation and contingency came to the fore. This was a period in which the ‘free playing' of experimental jazz developed by the likes of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, met with the ‘open' compositional systems of the avant-garde that had been developed by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Earle Brown and others. Just as FLOSS brings together two related, yet differing, ethics of software production (‘Free Software' and ‘Open Source'), we might describe this music as Free Open Form Performance (abbreviated as FOFP). ‘Free playing' was a term preferred by Coleman and other jazz musicians who rejected the use of the term ‘improvisation' on the grounds it was often applied to black music by white audiences to emphasise some innate intuitive musicality that denied the heritage of skills and formal traditions that the black musician drew upon. ‘Open' comes from Umberto Eco's ‘Poetics of the Open Work', an essay from 1959 which was among the first to survey and analyse the experiments with aleatoric, indeterminate and partially composed works that were emerging in the classical avant-garde. By the late 1960s these two strands of development had crossed over. Jazz composers such as Coleman and Anthony Braxton consciously worked with classical avant-garde instrumentation and musical structures. Meanwhile, the Scratch Orchestra adopted the collective social form of outfits such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Experiments with notation were significant for many of these musicians and composers, but for the Scratch Orchestra, the exploration of notational production was a cornerstone of the project.

 

Scratch History

The Scratch Orchestra grew out of a series of public classes in experimental music that Cornelius Cardew and other composers had been running in London in the late 1960s. These began at the Anti-University on Rivington Street continuing at Morley College, a workers education centre set up in the 19th century. It was here that the original members of the Scratch Orchestra first came together: Cardew, Michael Parson, Howard Skempton and people attending their classes. The foundation of the Orchestra was officially announced in June 1969 through the publication in the Musical Times of ‘A Scratch Orchestra: draft constitution' written by Cardew. The constitution defines the Orchestra as:

 

[...] a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).

 

Membership was open to anyone, regardless of musical ability. Many visual artists, such as Stefan Szczelkun, joined and brought with them an interest and experience of art happenings and urban intervention works. Through these, and more conventional concerts, the Orchestra aimed to ‘function in the public sphere' presenting works developed by the group. The constitution outlined various forms of activity that the Orchestra would follow in creating these works. One of the most important activities was the writing of ‘Scratch Music'. Each member of the Orchestra had a notebook, or ‘Scratchbook', in which they would write small works that could be combined into larger ensemble pieces. The constitution emphasises that these Scratch Music pieces should be an active process of experimentation with different notational forms: ‘verbal, graphic, musical, collage, etc.'. By 1972 a clearly defined process for the development of Scratch Music had emerged. Each piece was originally performed by its author, the scores were then exchanged and performed by other Orchestra members, providing a kind of ‘peer review' critique of the pieces. ‘Scratchers' were asked to write no more than one new piece per day, but encouraged to keep a ‘regular turnover', so that there was a tight feedback loop between writing and performing.

From the very beginning the Scratch Orchestra took a conscious decision to make all their notations freely distributable, stating that the Scratch Music works were without copyright. One of their first collections of scores, published in 1969 and called Nature Study Notes: Improvisation Rites, replaced the conventional copyright notice with the following:

 

No rights are reserved in this book of rites. They may be reproduced and performed freely. Anyone wishing to send contributions for a second set should address them to the editor: C. Cardew, 112 Elm Grove Road, London, SW13.

 

While rejections of copyright restriction were nothing new - both the situationists and the folk singer Woody Guthrie had placed anti-copyright notices on their works - it is notable that the Scratch Orchestra also encouraged others to modify and add to their scores, stating that these may be incorporated into the next version.

 

Noise Interrupts

The works in Nature Study Notes are all textual instruction pieces. Few of them describe ways of making sound however, and instead focus on various social interactions that construct and play with power relations among the performers. Some are like party games:

 

Form a standing circle. Nominate a leader, who stands in the circle with eyes blindfolded. The remainder of group rotate slowly around him/her. ... When the leader is touched, he forfeits his role and so doing shouts ‘Porridge'.

Others like generative automata:

 

Each person entering the performance space receives a number in order. Anyone can give an order (imperatively obeyed) to a higher number, and must obey orders given him by a lower number. No. 1 receives his orders from the current highest number (the most recently entered player); the highest number can give orders only to No. 1.

 

Many of the scores in Nature Study Notes set up small scale ‘operating systems', simple organisational structures that enable other works to be produced within them. The notion of the performance as an operating system is one that ap have taken up in their ‘Life Coding' project. Adapting mechanisms from computer systems, the interaction of performers is dictated by ‘interrupt' signals connected to actions defined in look-up tables. In conventional computers, the interrupt mechanism enables signals from peripheral devices such as mice, keyboards or network cards to enter into the operating system. When an interrupt signal is received, the computer selects a response action by matching an identifier code for each signal against a look-up table of programmed routines known as ‘interrupt handlers'. In this way pressing keys on a keyboard or moving the mouse can change the course of events currently in action. The interrupt creates a vector between the internal operation of the central processing unit (CPU), the domain of notational operations, and the contingency of the outside world. As Edsger Dijkstra, one of the inventors of the interrupt system, noted:

 

It was a great invention, but also a Box of Pandora. Because the exact moments of the interrupts were unpredictable and outside our control, the interrupt mechanism turned the computer into a nondeterministic machine with a non-reproducible behaviour, and could we control such a beast?

 

The interrupt breaks the closed linear unfolding of the Turing Machine, enabling programs to be stopped, altered and restarted. This enabled the development of languages that could be executed as individual statements one step at a time, giving rise to shell commands (the basic text-based commands used in the UNIX terminal) and the read-evaluate-print-loop (sometimes ‘read-eval-print-loop' or REPL for short) that forms the basis of interactive programming languages such as Lisp. The interrupt and read-eval-print-loop lie at the heart of any livecoding program and all UNIX-derived operating systems. In his notes for the first release of Linux, Linus Torvalds wrote: ‘interrupts aren't hidden'. It is here where contingency and notation meet, but it is here also that the possibility of error enters. However, rather than treading lightly for fear of a crash, for some the error carried on an interrupt signal is a positive, productive opportunity. This is not restricted to computer interrupts. During rehearsals, Sun Ra would deliberately interrupt and trick his performers. The ‘errors' this produced, however, were not mistakes but rather forms of evolution:

 

There are no mistakes. If someone's playing off-key or it sounds bad, the rest of us will do the same. And then it will sound right.

 

The operating system of Ra's Arkestra incorporated such ‘noise' and restructured itself in the process. This ‘noise' is not simply that of unmusical sound, but also, in the sense that Jacques Attali adapts from information and systems theory, any material that is not recognised by an existing system and is therefore opposed to ‘information' which is material that has value or significance in a given system. Attali describes the evolution of musical styles as one in which an existing system of music becomes exposed to ‘noise' that at first disrupts it, but then, through incorporation restructures it and gives rise to a new system. In the voyage of the Arkestra, systems would collapse and be reborn on a daily basis.

 

Schooltime Compositions

This power over systems was not limited to the Demiurge or intergalactic jazz master. During the same period in which the Scratch Orchestra was re-inventing music from the ground up, a group of children at Muzzey Junior High School in the US were experimenting with their own improvised notation systems. These children were not writing music however, but teaching themselves to program computers. They were part of the first LOGO Lab, a project initiated by Seymour Papert, a researcher from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. LOGO was a simple programming language that directed an entity called a ‘turtle'. The turtle could either be an on-screen virtual character or a small robot that was instructed to move around their terrain (screen or floorspace) and that could draw a trail on its path. LOGO Lab students developed their own programs in which the turtles would act out drawings or spatial exercises. In so far as LOGO expresses a series of potential actions out of which a drawing emerges it is analogous to the notations of the Scratch Orchestra, which often did not express sound directly but rather actions from which sound could arise. As Cardew wrote in his notes to Treatise: ‘Notation is a way of making people move.'

Like the Scratch Orchestra, the LOGO Labs grew out of a conscious pedagogical interest in developing forms of collective, self-directed practical research. These were realised through semi-structured ‘improvisational' activities and used self-developed notational systems as a means of constructing, communicating and reflecting upon these activities. As the constitution makes clear, the Scratch Orchestra was a conscious exploration of what notation could be and how that related to attempts to establish another understanding of what the practice of music itself might be. This developed out of the pedagogic context of the Morley College classes, and, in a perhaps self-mocking gesture, the Orchestra's Nature Study Notes and Cardew's earlier Schooltime Compositions scores deliberately took the form of school exercise books.

Papert believed that programming was a skill that should be available to everyone not as a ‘technology' - a mechanism for manufacture abstracted from human labour - but as a means of conceptual exploration. There are political parallels between the two projects. Papert's approach to computing was influenced by his previous involvement in radical left-wing politics - in the 1950s he had been involved in the group running Socialist Review in London. The LOGO Lab concept combined insights from Jean Piaget's and Lev Vygotsky's psychological studies of child development with the non-schooling principles of Ivan Illich. It advocated an approach in which, ‘the child programs the computer rather than the computer being used to program the child.' Papert also argued that the design of a programming language could reflect a particular political and ethical position. He criticised BASIC, another language originally designed for teaching programming, as demonstrating

 

how a conservative social system appropriates and tries to neutralise a potentially revolutionary instrument.

 

Although the Scratch Orchestra did not develop out of a defined political program, it nevertheless acted as a context for the development of a politicised arts practice, informed by both Marxist and anarchist tendencies. It was through the Scratch Orchestra that Cardew was to acquire a profound political awareness, applying an explicit Maoist perspective to his own practice, and leading to his involvement in founding the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Echoing Papert's criticisms of BASIC, Cardew similarly criticised the institutionalised conservatism of much music notation, demanding instead that ‘all problems of notation will be solved by the masses.' For both Papert and Cardew, pedagogy was a two way street. The lab and the orchestra broke down distinctions between pupil and tutor, and placed learning in the context of self-directed production. In these ways they were forms of distributive practice.

Training in Contingency

An element of the contingent was essential to this form of radical pedagogy. In Papert's eyes, one of the strengths of programming as a tool for learning was the attitude to error that it encouraged. Encountering error, in the form of bugs, was an inevitable and necessary part of programming, especially that particular practice of programming developed at MIT's AI Labs known as ‘hacking'. Papert pointed out that in conventional education errors had a purely negative connotation. When a student makes a mistake they are discredited for it, losing marks or being punished, thereby inculcating a fear of error, leading to an unwillingness to stray from conventional boundaries and take risks. For the hacker, conversely, what mattered is not whether or not a mistake is made but rather how creatively it can be responded to. As with the Arkestra, embracing error is a productive possibility. The embracing of error is reflected in documents such as HAKMEM. Short for ‘hack memo', this was a collection of code snippets and programming ideas distributed among the hackers within the AI Labs - contributors include Richard Stallman, James Gosling and Marvin Minsky. Many of the entries utilise possibilities discovered through bugs and inconsistencies within the PDP computers that the AI Lab worked on. Other entries suggest ways that a particular algorithm might be played with, encouraging people to mess around with it in what can only be described as a form of aesthetic code play. HAKMEM can be seen as the AI Lab's equivalent of the Scratchbooks exchanged between Scratch Orchestra members. Within the LOGO Labs, code was written and exchanged between students in a similar manner. Rather than planning out programs in advance, pupils would ‘improvise' with their code, responding to the how the turtle performed and modifying their programs accordingly. LOGO learning thereby operated through a similar feedback loop of coding-performing that livecoders such as Alex McLean identify as the basis of their practice and which builds upon the principle of the read-eval-print-loop.

Computers and programming languages present highly constrained environments that limit the possible varieties of interpretation that a particular notation may be subject to. The interpretation of notation by a human may be far less constrained. For Cardew this was a major concern in the development of new forms of notation, for it presented both a danger and an opportunity. The opportunity was that notations need not only encode existing patterns or defined systems of sound, but could also be proposals and provocations to create new ones. The danger lay in the fact that a trained musician, when confronted with an unfamiliar notation system, rather than responding to it directly, might fall back on their personal predispositions and ingrained habits. The performance may simply become the regurgitation of old clichés and formulas like that of the amateur jazz musician described by Adorno, unable to stray from the existing models to which he has adapted and subordinated himself. The trained musician approached a performance with a predefined system of producing sound against which the new notation was interpreted. What was novel in the new notation may simply be responded to as ‘error' or noise within that system and therefore avoided. New notations required performers with a similar attitude to that of the hacker and LOGO Lab student, one who could respond creatively to the unknown and unexpected. The performer, therefore, could not rehearse such music but rather ‘trained' for it like a martial art, developing ways of acting upon contingency. This similarly developed through a feedback loop of coding-performance that formed the basis of Scratch Music practice.

Through such feedback loops notation incorporates the experience of the contingent into future practice. What was the unexpected ‘error' of the past becomes preparation for unknown future possibilities. In absorbing this a notation records the historical development of a practice, capturing different versions of how things could be done, and enabling comparison, analysis and synthesis. In both the LOGO Labs and Scratch Orchestra, this process of versioning was consciously engaged in, with the evolving knowledge, intentions and standards of the practitioner community acting as a form of version control identifying those practices which are most current and those which are conflicting or tangential.

 

Black Notated Music

How a notation comes to be defined and how it is distributed are inherently political issues. This distribution extends beyond the publication of music scores and software code, in the form addressed by Scratch Orchestra's use of copyleft mechanisms. As Ornette Coleman recalls, the very visibility of notation within the production process, how it is revealed and concealed, both depends on and expresses particular relations of power:

 

I once heard Eubie Blake say that when he was playing in black bands for white audiences, during the time when segregation was strong, that the musicians had to go on stage without any written music. The musicians would be backstage, look at the music, then leave the music there and go out and play it. He was saying that they had a more saleable appeal if they pretended to not know what they were doing. The white audience felt safer.

 

The denial of notation described in this episode is a denial of the black musician's self-legitimation. If the use of a notation can help register the development of a practice, its history and self-reflection, then the denial of notation is a denial of this history and, therefore, a denial of the practitioner's basis for legitimation. It is from this perspective that Coleman distances his own practice from the idea of improvisation, for this form of ‘virtuosity' became the basis of a denial of legitimation. The ‘free playing' that he and other black jazz musicians promoted in the 1960s was not simply free in the sense of a break from conventional musical structure, but also free in breaking away from the condition of being ‘improvisers in a compulsory situation.' This led to the development of new performance venues, many situated directly within black communities, and of the conscious articulation of practice as a form of research. Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago adopted a scientist's white lab coat on stage to announce the performance itself as a site of radical experiment. Sun Ra encouraged his Arkestra by declaring: ‘You're not musicians, you're tone scientists'. Ra developed this concept further through the creation in 1967 of Ihnfinity Inc, a research corporation intended

 

to own and operate all kinds of research laboratories, studios, electronic equipment, electrochemical communicational devices of our own design and creativity ...

In St. Louis the Black Artists' Group set up a Training Centre to create a discussion forum for the local community that, alongside performances, rehearsals, and workshops, hosted regular meetings and debates about local issues. For Anthony Braxton the relation of notation to legitimation became the basis of research that has been the focus of his work ever since, the development of what he calls ‘Black Notated Music'. ‘Black Notated Music' goes beyond the simple description of sounds on a page and engages with the extended role of sound at a socially structuring level: ‘notation can be viewed as a factor for establishing the reality platform of the music.'

While on the surface these may appear to mirror the pedagogic basis of projects like the Scratch Orchestra and LOGO Labs, they developed from an entirely different trajectory. Although the pedagogics of Cardew and Papert, on the one hand, aimed at breaking down established social structures determining the acquisition of music and programming skills, pedagogy was also the basis upon which they integrated their work back into existing institutional frameworks. In this way this way their practice was legitimated in institutional terms. In particular teaching legitimated their ‘non-commercial' status. A similar case could be made for Free Software's dependence on academia, and suggests a potential conflict of interests within artist-run workshops, or at least highlights the tensions under which self-valorising labour is forced to ‘pay the rent'. For black musicians in the USA of the 1960s, for whom even basic access to education was an issue, such avenues were not available. The appropriation of ‘white' lab coats and research culture was not a way of seeking institutional acceptance, but rather questioned their very use as legitimising mechanisms. Eventually the Scratch Orchestra was to become aware of its own dependence on such external forms of legitimisation and the ‘compulsory situation' within which it operated.

 

Instrumentalising the Collective

In 1972 tensions began to emerge within the Scratch Orchestra. It was felt by some that the group was operating in a way that contradicted its aims, and a ‘discontents file' was set up in which people could address these grievances. In response, Cardew, Keith Rowe and John Tilbury established a Scratch Orchestra Ideological Group applying a practice of Maoist self-criticism among the Orchestra members. While a process of self-criticism within the Orchestra may have been beneficial, this vanguardist approach merely exacerbated the situation. Many felt that it was the imposition of one self-appointed elite exerting its authority over the Orchestra as a whole, and that the Ideological Group's dismissal of certain initiatives from other members did not properly recognise their own political basis. Rather than finding a new clarity of purpose, the Orchestra fell apart. As one member, Eddie Prevost, was later to comment, the fundamental contradiction confronting the Orchestra was perhaps its dependency upon its own constitution, the paradoxical aim of ‘legislating for noncomformity'. Another member, Michael Chant, observed that the constitution was itself a ‘score'. The Orchestra was then the product of this score, a score that carried the name of only one author: Cornelius Cardew. From this perspective the setting up of the Scratch Ideological Group might be seen as an attempt to reassert authorship over Cardew's ‘composition', echoing the concern of his earlier writings that ‘the score must govern the music'. This may be a classic example of an ideological vanguard acquiring and instrumentalising the collective for its own ends, or the rebirth of the author in a group attempting to move beyond such notions of singular authorship. In refusing to succumb to such ideological and authorial acquisition, a necessary restructuring of the ‘composition' of the Orchestra was taking place. The inherently distributive quality of the Orchestra empowered forms of self-actualisation that rendered the need for a single coherent group unnecessary. Many members later engaged in activities that extended the radical praxis developed within the Orchestra. The break-up, therefore, represented not the failure of its members, but rather the breaking of the limit between the formal structure of the score/constitution and the people who were the ‘substance' of the Orchestra. In words that Adorno used to describe an error of notation in one of Schoenberg's serial compositions, this represented

 

[...] the breakthrough of the substance to be structured, the point where it encounters the structuring process and but for which the latter could not be legitimated.

 

Legislating for Nonconformity

There are parallels with Free Software's current reliance on copyleft and the GPL which can also be seen as a way of ‘legislating for noncomformity'. The GPL may ‘reverse' the normal restrictions created by conventional copyright, but it nevertheless depends upon their basic legal framework, and therefore upon a legalised notion of freedom that is realised through property ownership. Hence the attraction of copyleft for right-libertarians such as Eric Raymond. Indeed it may be argued that copyleft, as it is currently realised, rather than embodying a form of ‘production in common' actually exemplifies something closer to Robert Nozick's ‘just transaction'. The problem with copyleft in its current form, and the notions of ‘remix' and legalised ‘appropriation' culture that have been developed from it, are that they merely present an alternative within proprietary, acquisitive production (capitalism) rather than an alternative to that. This is echoed in the active promotion of Jeffersonian ‘liberty' among advocates of Open Source and Creative Commons such as Raymond and Lawrence Lessig. To place an emphasis upon copyleft as an end in itself, and upon the GPL as the defining document of Free Software, is therefore potentially contrary to the aims of Free Software. This is borne out in a comment from Stallman:

 

Free software is a matter of freedom. From our point of view, precisely which legal mechanism is used to deny software users their freedom is just an implementation detail. Whether it is done with copyright, with contracts, or in some other way, it is wrong to deny the public the freedoms necessary to form a community and cooperate. This is why it is inaccurate to understand the Free Software Movement as specifically a matter of opposition to copyright on software. It is both more and less than that.

 

It is significant that this was given in response to Robert T. Long's promotion of copyleft as appropriate to the values of a right-libertarian free market. It is perhaps best therefore to view the GPL and copyleft as tactics affording certain leverage in current circumstances. The proliferation of ‘open' licences in recent years might be more a sign of the accommodation of resistant practices to an order of legitimation that they might best avoid, for under current law there is no magic licensing scheme that will bring an end to proprietary production.

Distributive Production

The conflicts within the Scratch Orchestra and the conflicts between Free Software and Open Source illustrate the distinctions within forms of production between those that are collective and distributive, and those that are collaborative and acquisitive. A distributive practice enables the disposition of labour by others under their own direction, while an acquisitive one accumulates the labour of others without regard to their self-disposition. It also exposes the conflict that can emerge when a practice that has developed within a self-constituting community becomes subject to external forms of constitution and legitimation. Not all collaboration is inherently distributive, therefore. The nature of the power relations within it, and the disposition and legitimation of production they enable, may be subject to forces that operate in opposing ways.

The significance of groups such as the Scratch Orchestra in the late 1960s to the emergence, nearly 40 years later, of livecoding may be related to the changes in the general forms of production that have taken place during this time. At a time when the ‘information economy' was still emerging, and the tools and conceptual frameworks that have underpinned it were still embryonic, projects like the Scratch Orchestra and LOGO Labs were attempts at creating an emancipatory trajectory with the resources and knowledge available. Now, we are in an era in which the ‘information economy' has become more consolidated and its distinctive modes of production are more established and pervasive. As Martin Hardie argues, it is UNIX, with its networked, distributed filesystem, that created the basic notational inscription for these modes of production. Notational production itself has become a core element of contemporary production and consumption, with the masses involved in ways Cardew may never have foreseen nor wished for. Every aspect of our lives is notated to a degree not previously known and we are constantly challenged by new scores and scripts that we must perform in order to complete even the most mediocre task. It is through such notation that immaterial labour is valorised and managed, and through which we are drawn into collaboration with the very processes of production it inscribes. Indeed, such collaboration has become the dominant paradigm both of managerial control and everyday consumption as exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised' products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0. This form of collaboration, however, is one constructed through mechanisms that are acquisitive rather than distributive. Through this the factory as a single coherent unit of production has given way to amorphous networked systems. To some extent these developments are paralleled in the shift from groups with a relatively stable membership like the Scratch Orchestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago, to more loosely connected groups and individuals that are characteristic of the FLOSS-related arts scene. Similarly, practices that might once have been contained within one group, such as scratch music composition, have become increasingly disseminated and pervasive, with online code repositories replacing the circulation of scratch books and collaboration within artistic practice valorised to a greater extent than ever before, and sometimes merely as an end in itself. This reflects the intersections and conflicts between dominant and resistant practices that characterise the dialectical nature of production in general. If livecoding is emblematic of a new emancipatory trajectory emerging within this dialectic, then there is much to be gained from re-examining the problems of notation and the politics of notational production as experienced and worked though by those who previously brought the code on stage.

 

 

Simon Yuill <simonATlipparosa.org> is an artist and programmer based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a developer in the spring_alpha and Social Versioning System (SVS) projects. He has helped set up and run a number of hacklab and free media labs in Scotland including the Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT) and Electron Club, as well as the Glasgow branch of OpenLab. He has written on aspects of Free Software and cultural praxis and has contributed to publications such as Software Studies (MIT Press, 2008), the FLOSS Manuals and Digital Artists Handbook project (GOTO10 and Folly). His current projects address issues of land use in relation to social organisation: http://www.giventothepeople.org

 

*A full length version of this text with footnotes is online at:  http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses

Post-Fordism’s appetite for self-directed activity is bringing about a crisis in progressive education. No longer perceived as threatening, a work force trained to think for itself has become highly desirable. So what should an emancipatory education entail today?, asks Stewart Martin

What is the relation of education to capitalism today? And what are the consequences for an emancipatory education? These questions might seem less bold than bald, untextured by the currency of popular debate. Yet they are unavoidable, and not just for the European Social Democracies in the process of negotiating the commodification of their welfare provision, but also for all those confronting the Neo-Liberal restructuring of what used to be considered beyond the market. There is equally a sense in which these questions are both obscured and entrenched by the difficulties in answering them, theoretically as well as practically. Besides the formidable noise of specificities that tends to drown them out, the scene of contemporary education presents striking ambivalences.

On the one hand, there has been an exponential and seemingly inevitable expansion of the realm of formal education, that is, education that leads to publicly recognised qualifications, both in the expansion of the traditional sector of schools, colleges and universities, and in the incorporation of new sectors. This is evident in the rise of student numbers, the extended total length of study, accompanied by the increase in post-graduate degrees, as well as the repeated drives to establish ‘vocational’ qualifications or the formal ratification of what previously would have been considered apprenticeships or such like. McDegrees did not come out of the blue. The evolution of education as a leisure sector is also notable, as is the growth of educational initiatives within the leisure industries. (This may sound like the privilege of the rich West or North speaking, but, even in more impoverished countries, who is seeking to delimit education?) On the other hand, this expansion of education is comparatively informal, both in the sense that it takes place through new sectors that are outside the traditional institutions and their rules, and in that education as a whole has become in certain respects informalised. ‘Distance learning’, ‘work based learning’, ‘home based learning’, ‘life long learning’, all indicate the integration of education into realms previously considered outside the school gates. The internet has been instrumental in these developments. The emphasis on ‘transferable skills’ is also indicative of how various disciplines’ rigour has been somewhat suspended or re-qualified. But these expansions, whether formal or informal, stand in contrast to certain pervasive contractions of education. Efficiency is the name of the game, with reduced resources per student the supreme goal, both from the side of provision and from the supplements students must contribute. The rich can buy more resources, but not another goal.

Of course, many of these phenomena and their apparent conflicts can be understood as a direct consequence of commodification. This is certainly fundamental, but what form does this take exactly? Stacking high and selling cheap only accounts for part of these developments. It doesn’t explain their ideological function, which draws on certain emancipatory claims. The liberation of ‘choice’ and ‘opportunity’ is usually the carrot; the stick is the threat of deserved poverty, whether of the individual or the nation. It is all too clear that education has become a way for rich nations to manage class conflicts, either through keeping people off the unemployment register, or through seducing their populations into the idea that they can all be middle class, with proletarianisation becoming an attribute of newly industrialised nations like China or India, or immigrant work forces. Within this ideology, failure is educational failure. The idea that contemporary education is characterised by the move away from authoritarian forms of indoctrination and towards forms of self-directed or autonomous learning is perhaps the most powerful emancipatory ideology in this context. ‘Life long learning’ is exemplary. The phrase oscillates between the dream of fulfilling self-transformation beyond the privileges of youth, and the nightmare of indiscriminate de-skilling and re-skilling according to the dictates of a ‘flexible’ labour market. It modifies the ideology of meritocracy, which is perhaps the core educational ideology through which the contradictions of capitalism and democracy are recoded as the successes and (more usually) ‘failures’ of disciplined individualism: ‘life long learning’ extends ‘meritocracy’ to the whole of your life. Qualification is a receding horizon; its promise of maturity takes the form of infantalisation.

Many of these educational phenomena coalesce in the socio-political characterisations that have gained increasingly insistent currency since the 1960s: post-industrial society, neo-liberalism, cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour, bio-politics. The socio-economic qualities indicated by these terms - the emphasis on white collar labour and the service economy, and the significance of high-tech knowledge and its socio-economic relations or networks; the de-regulation of labour markets, making labour more pliable to the demands of markets; the commodification of areas of society traditionally considered outside the economy or market, extending the demands of the production and reproduction of labour power to all aspects of social and natural life; the demand for increased self-discipline and initiative, if not creativity, in wage labour; and the emergence of new terms of political struggle and dispute over capitalism and its limits – all provide an increasingly familiar context for articulating the transforming pressures on education today. Indeed, it is evident that education is at the core of these formations. Just as we can draw parallels between the traditional school and the factory, so we can between the dispersal of the factory into society as a whole and the dispersal of the school. The expansion of education is the conduit for the transformation of wage labour, entwined with the procurement of a new kind of labourer and even, some would say, a new kind of human being. Gary S. Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics for his study of ‘human capital’, understood as the economic value of educational qualifications.[1] The term has since acquired a bio-capitalist currency, standing at the centre of political-philosophical disputes over the commodification of human beings. Rather than the capitalisation of education, it has come to indicate the educationalisation of capital.

These developments have led to a crisis of ideas of emancipatory education. Not merely because they have become embattled, but due to their appropriation and instrumentalisation. John Dewey’s critique of ‘traditional’ education – its dependence on the authoritarian discipline of the teacher, and his defence of ‘progressives’ taking a non-hierarchical approach to pedagogy, embedding learning within a shared social context, and thereby integrating education into a democratic ethos, committed to the ‘quality of experience’ – sounds commonplace today, but also naïve about the entwinement of this education within new labour markets.[2] Paulo Freire’s inspirational ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, despite its direct confrontation with capitalism as a class struggle of master and slave, remains similarly remote in its articulation of the relation of teacher-master to pupil-slave in a way that is removed from the expanded and self-directed context of the new educational forms.[3] Jean-François Lyotard’s reports on the postmodern condition of education does manage to articulate many of these forms and their relation to new forms of wage labour, but he is led to profoundly ambivalent conclusions. His claim that, ‘[w]e should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goal of the system, yet the system tolerates it’, is precarious, if not desperate.[4] The ambivalences of this situation are well recognised by many commentators, but they remain. Perhaps this merely indicates that we face a situation that cannot be theoretically resolved, and that theoretical criticism can at best aspire to clarification of the terms of political engagement.

It seems that the root of this ambivalence concerns the way in which the new forms of wage labour require forms of self-directed skills and competences that have previously been considered the preserve of progressive education, namely, its focus on authoritarian and autonomous modes of pedagogy. In short, the autonomy aspired to by emancipatory education has turned out to involve points of indifference to the autonomy required of new capitalist work. This has profound implications. Crucially, it is entwined with fundamental transformations at stake in the relation of capitalism to life. If education has become the means through which advanced capitalist societies extend the subsumption of labour under capital to the subsumption of all aspects of social life, then the issue of emancipatory education needs to be understood in terms of this radical alteration to capitalism’s metabolism.

So, if we ask what an emancipatory education should be today, we are led to questions about changes in the basic structure of capital. This may sound reductive to those seeking a stronger independence of educational concerns from economic matters, but this independence must be wrested from out of the social fact of this reduction. Moreover, there is a reverse determination revealed here, of capitalism itself as an educational form, a pedagogy.

Educating Life

Core pedagogical concepts and forms, such as ‘rule’, ‘freedom’, ‘subject’, ‘autonomy’, and so on, are already involved in capitalism’s fundamental antagonistic relation between capital and living labour, where capital exploits the powers of living labour, appropriating the production of surplus value. Capital aspires to autonomy in this relation; a self-valorisation in which it creates its own value, reducing labour to its rule and its interiority. The subjection of living labour makes capital subject, indeed sovereign. Capital, not the consumer, is king. This is expressed in the contractual agreement of a person, who, as such, is assumed to be free and able to sell their labour as their property, becoming a wage labourer through which their capacities are expropriated. But capital, for Marx at least, is ultimately incapable of autonomy. It remains intrinsically dependent on living labour, which is actually creative of value. Autonomy is rather the potential of living labour, not capital. The struggle of labour against capital is therefore a struggle against the rule of capital, against labour’s external or heteronymous determination by capital, and for labour’s self-determination, its autonomy.

The educational consequences of this account are various and conflictual, but also profound, extending well beyond the classroom and its textbooks. From the development and dissemination of knowledge about capitalism, and the formation and discipline of ‘the party’, to the more devolved and self-directed activities of labourers and anti-capitalists – pedagogical issues suffuse this terrain. The deep conflicts between science and ideology, party and proletariat, etc., remain all too familiar today, even though their early forms have decayed. The pedagogy of the oppressed, as Paulo Freire showed, reveals a disputed lesson at the heart of this whole formation: the emancipation of the oppressed from their masters must avoid reproducing new masters, ‘emancipators’ who invert emancipation into a new form of oppression. The reproduction of class struggle within the communist movement may seem like an arcane problem, something resolved by the more ‘horizontal’ organisation of recent anti-capitalist movements, but it is a problem that persists in new guises. Moreover, while its solution promises a simplified struggle of slaves against masters, the struggle against capitalism is not so easily personified, especially today.

This returns us to the pedagogical structure of capital itself, about which Freire among others has surprising little to say. The terms of this are in some sense plain: capital functions as a master, subjecting living labour to its rule, the law of value, in the process of its self-valorisation; emancipation demands a counter-pedagogy, disobeying the law of value, enabling living labour to have value for itself. The struggle of labour against capital thus assumes an educational ambition and vice versa, an emancipatory pedagogy of autonomy.

But returning to the ABC of capitalism does not only face the subsequent task of elaboration and specification. It also enables the exposure of deep transformations in the evolution of capitalism, which have equally profound effects for any pedagogy of autonomy. What is at stake here is the intensification of capital’s subsumption of labour – extending it beyond the industrial restructuring of labour processes diagnosed by Marx, and even beyond his discernment of an expanded realm of productive labour that incorporates various social and scientific supplements of the labour process – to the subsumption by capital of life itself. In other words, the colonisation by capital of all those aspects of living labour that were previously deemed outside the labour process, from leisure and the environment, to sex and physiology, and certainly education. The consequences for the struggle against capitalism are self-evidently profound: the dissipation, if not outright negation, of the basic antagonism between living labour and capital.

The contention that capitalism has subsumed living labour may be exaggerated. Few stand by it unequivocally. But it is plausible to consider it as the regulative idea of a number of theories of late capitalism. Furthermore, it is possible to understand it as the source of a series of profound political disputes between Right and Left. On the right, these tend to concern the market’s legitimate intrusion into the realms of nationhood, religion, familial life, etc. On the Left, they tend to concern the very possibility of a non-capitalist life; insofar as this seems impossible, its disputes tend to retreat to liberal versions of drawing the market’s boundaries.

What is particularly revealing and significant here, certainly for the radical Left, is the intense ambivalence that the contention of capital’s subsumption of life has produced within neo- and post-Marxist thought. On the one hand, there is the understandably pessimistic reaction, from the Frankfurt School to Baudrillard, that tends to see the intensification of capitalist subsumption as an incorporation of all social and natural life within the reproduction of capitalism, leading to the exhaustion of anti-capitalist politics, even its imagination. Notoriously, environmental catastrophe seems a far more realistic future for many than an end to capitalism. On the other hand, Negri and others have drawn a radically opposed conclusion: that capital’s tendency to subsume life is merely a consequence of the intensification of capital’s parasitic dependence on life; that capitalist production processes change not of their own accord, but as a result of the power and resistance of labour. This therefore demonstrates the very creativity and growing autonomy of living labour, which capital only subsumes as an increasingly thin membrane of control, predisposed to disintegrate. For the former, capital tends to subsume not only labour but life; for the latter, capital’s tendency to subsume life is merely its tendency to reach its unsubsumable limit. Such opposed reactions to such similar structural characterisations of capital is striking. It indicates an intractable disagreement, since both reactions seem liable to each other’s objections. But rather than approaching it as a simple choice or alternative, perhaps it indicates a change of the terms of struggle that needs to be grasped as such: no longer between living labour and capital, as Marx understood this, where capital is understood simply as dead or mechanical; but between alternative forms of life, capitalist life versus non-capitalist life. In other words, not a struggle between life and non-life, but between alternative forms of life. Negri remains an orthodox Marxist in maintaining a residual, unsubsumable, border between capital and life – non-capitalist life remains for him a tautology. The Frankfurt School’s thinking of non-capitalist life tended to remain utopian. Neither of them quite confront the predicament that anti-capitalism has become the struggle to wrest non-capitalist life from capitalist life.

This predicament also suggests a change in the significance of the aspiration to the autonomy of living labour. If both capitalist life and non-capitalist life tend to autonomy, then non-capitalist life must be understood according to an alternative form of autonomy. Indeed, given this issue, perhaps the value of autonomy should be revised? Perhaps living labour’s heteronomy should be sought as resistant to the autonomy of capitalist life? But how would this advance on labour’s heteronomous determination by capital according to Marx’s original characterisation? The terms may spiral here, but this speculation is not idle.

The consequences for education are profound and in many respects very visible. Most obviously, the subsumption of life by capital offers a powerful explanation of why education, despite being formally outside the labour process, is nonetheless treated as integral to it, indeed, an urgent and necessary part of the capitalist mode of production. By the same token, it also suggests that the extension of education beyond the formal realms of schools, colleges, etc., should also be seen within this extended orbit of production. In sum, it provides grounds for understanding the subsumption of education by capital, and indicates how education itself becomes a mode, perhaps the central mode, of capital’s subsumption of life. ‘Life long learning’ is not exhausted by this explanation, but it can certainly be interpreted as a struggle between capitalist-life and non-capitalist life.

But, what of an emancipatory education? Clearly its terms become questionable. If capital can no longer be understood as a mechanical rule that oppresses living labour’s autonomy from outside it, then the powerful correspondence this has to a pedagogy of emancipation, as a struggle of autonomy contra dogmatic rules, is problematised, if not inverted. If life can be subsumed by the law of value, such that it is life’s own law, its autonomy, then does this not suggest that a new pedagogy is called for?

If these queries are substantive then they indicate a crisis for the terms of an emancipatory education. But they are difficult to resolve. Perhaps this indicates that they should be treated as the issues of a novel struggle between capitalist life and non-capitalist life fought out on an expanded field of education.

Autonomy or Heteronomy?

In order to try and clarify this transformation of terms it is worth considering the broader context of their evolution – in particular, the libertarian and egalitarian formation of the idea of autonomy that emerges with the modern notion of democracy, and that in large part defines the idea and significance of emancipatory education. The French Revolution grounded freedom on equality, as an inalienable right, introduced in the form or guise of ‘man’, and therefore distinguished its notion of democracy from the aristocratic forms of antiquity. This introduced a non-dogmatic conception of law: freedom must be subject to universal law, demonstrating its equality, but this law must simultaneously be subject to freedom, demonstrating that it is not a new enslavement. This dialectic of subjection infuses the idea of autonomy: a rule to which a subject subjects ‘himself’. Obedience is therefore transformed into an act of freedom. In consequence, one is not subject to dogmatic or externally imposed rules – heteronomy.

This idea of autonomy produces a crisis and reinvention of the idea of education. For, insofar as education is essentially a relation of subjection – of student by master – then it is incompatible with the constitution of autonomy. Even if education means merely the transmission of something from those who have it to those who do not, how can there be an education in autonomy? How can autonomy be ‘received’ without collapsing it into subjection? Autonomy would rather need to be an egalitarian presupposition of any such exchange. If education contradicts autonomy, then it should be left behind in the seminary, or reduced to a minor and subordinate cultural function.

These contradictions justified the various forms of anti-education to emerge from this epoch, frequently attached to the natural, the naïve and the untrained or perhaps self-trained. And yet this anti-education also induced new ideas of education, of an education against education, which might indeed succeed as an education in autonomy. Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education has his Savoyard vicar profess a faith in ‘common reason’ to his young companion, rather than conduct ‘learned speeches or profound reasonings’:

I do not want to argue with you or even convince you. […] Reason is common to us, and we have the same interest in listening to it.’[5]

Kant, famously enthused by this peculiar education, conceives of enlightenment as a matter of courage: ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ Further:

Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of [man’s] natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity.[6]

The paradox of Joseph Jacotot’s universal method of teaching is exemplary: ‘I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you’.[7]

The paradox of an education in autonomy should not be overstated, since, if freedom should be subject to equality – albeit as much as vice versa – then education’s subjecting function might be employed to this end. Still, this only tends to heighten the tensions that remain precariously in balance in the idea of autonomy. If one becomes free through subjecting oneself to oneself, then there is an obvious sense in which freedom is understood in essentially disciplinary terms, as if doubling subjection cancelled it out, emancipating a subject, rather than just oppressing it twice over. The conception of freedom in terms of autonomy thereby articulates freedom as a function of ruling, freedom as domination. Autodidact: the educational hero of autonomy is well named. It may be insisted that the unity of equality and freedom in autonomy is essentially and necessarily antagonistic, as the unity of competing rules. But this doesn’t sound like a good life.

An antidote to this antagonism was found in a rapprochement with nature and life, often via art. This is even the case in Kant, despite his tendency to express autonomy in disciplinary terms, and it was already central to Rousseau. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) is a manifesto of the new pedagogy at stake here. The beautiful artwork presents autonomy less in terms of self-ruling or self-domination, than in the suspension of rules. The whole disciplinary ethos of giving or receiving rules is displaced by play. Art becomes that through which the antagonism of nature and reason is mediated: nature’s heteronomy, its externality to human reason, is internalised through art, but without dominating it; hence art presents a way through which reason can relate to human nature without dominating it. Autonomy is then rendered a form of life. This aesthetic conception of autonomy, of a life that is spirit, infuses speculative philosophy from Fichte to Hegel, and is pivotal to the theoretical founding of the influential University of Berlin between 1807 and 1810.

This formation of spirit assumes a profoundly ambivalent relationship to Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism. In one sense, Hegel’s speculative idealism provides the model for articulating the speculative character of capital as self-valorising value. However, Marx’s idea that living labour should free itself from its determination by the dogmatic and mechanical rule of capital – and not just as brute nature – clearly remains indebted to key aspects of a speculative concept of life.

These equivocations are reproduced when we consider the extension of capital’s subsumption of labour to that of life in general. Marx’s modelling of capital on the speculative concept is simultaneously critical of it, in that he draws a limit to the idea’s/capital’s subsumptive capacities. But if these capacities exceed these limits in late capitalism then this overcomes Marx’s critique, and speculative idealism becomes true in a sense that neither he nor the idealists claimed: a model of the subsumption of life under capital, of capitalist life.

In so far as this is substantive, the whole project of an education in autonomy, even where this takes radically anti-dogmatic and aesthetic forms, becomes problematic, if not undermined, as a simple alternative to capitalism. This justifies the attempt to try and conceive of anti-capitalism through alternatives to autonomy, re-valuing forms of anti-autonomy or heteronomy. This would not only radicalise the aesthetic mediations proposed by Schiller, but exceed them. (This is the alternative sought by Lyotard among others, overcoming Adorno’s hesitations.) But anti-autonomy is scarcely a straightforward alternative. Its advocates tend to buy into a neo-vitalism (Deleuze is seminal here) which ironically returns us to Marx’s investment in living labour as essentially independent from capital, and thereby to the same problem of living labour’s subsumption by late capitalism. Otherwise, a more intensive naturalism is sought out that tends to be indifferent to the subjection of humans and just as indifferent about capitalist culture. It is perhaps unsurprising that in this context an alternative form of heteronomy has also gained ground: a neo-dogmatic anti-capitalism that reconceives of forms of subjection as forms of political subjectivity. (Žižek’s and Badiou’s alternative Lacanian-Leninisms are illustrative.) These projects are far from escaping the ambivalences of autonomy; frequently, they simply reproduce them.

The contemporary polemics between autonomy and heteronomy may be complex, but the polemic persists. And while the opponents often fight it out within the Left, its stakes traverse the political spectrum. The claim here is simply that these disputes should be interpreted in terms of the effects of the subsumption of life under capital, and the struggle this produces between capitalist life and non-capitalist life. So we return, by way of another route, to the same junction reached before.

And what of education? The effects have already been forecast, but the issues are modified. Should an emancipatory education be understood as a form of self-determination, or as freedom from self-determination? Should it be free of subjection, or an alternative subjection? Should education be a determination of life, or an emancipation from life’s determination? Autonomy or heteronomy? It is difficult to answer these questions, and not just because they are abstract. But whatever the answers may be, for them to constitute an emancipatory education within advanced capitalist societies today, they must engage in the struggle to wrest non-capitalist life from capitalist life.

Stewart Martin <S.C.Martin AT mdx.ac.uk> is a member of the editorial collective, and reviews editor, of the journal Radical Philosophy, and teaches philosophy and art at Middlesex University

Footnotes

[1] Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964, 3rd edition 1993. Becker won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1992.

[2] See John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), New York: Free Press,  1966, and Experience and Education, (1938), New York: Touchstone, 1997.

[3] See Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), trans. M. Bergman Ramos, London and New York, Continuum, 2000.

[4]  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 66.

[5] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1762), trans. Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1979, p. 266.

[6] Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Moral Practice, trans. Ted Humphrey, Hackett, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1983, p. 41.

[7] Quoted in J.S. Van de Weyer, Sommaire des leçons publiques de M. Jacotot sur les principes de l’enseignement universel, Brussels, 1822, p. 11, itself quoted in Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 15.

Notes

This essay draws some ideas and phrases from a previous essay, ‘An Aesthetic Education Against Aesthetic Education’, Radical Philosophy, 141, Jan/Feb 2007, written as part of the journal’s contribution to the Documenta 12 ‘Magazines Project’, in particular its theoretical motif, ‘What is to be done? (Education)’, which is also available on the Documenta 12 website http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1504

The comic 'Staabucks Fukkee is Your Enemy' ran between articles by John Cunningham and Stewart Martin in the print edition of Mute Vol 2 #8

 

Staabuckkee

Info

‘Staabucks Fukkee is Your Enemy’ was a comic produced for Magnetic Fields and Other Sculpture Parks, ed) Chris Evans London: Studio Voltaire, 2006

January's Art and Immaterial Labour conference at the Tate brought together some famous names from post-Autonomia to discuss conjunctions between the dematerialisation of art and immaterialisation of labour. John Cunningham reports

 

Upon hearing that some of the stars of the post-autonomist scene – Maurizio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, Franco Beradi aka Bifo and Antonio Negri – were to give presentations at a conference examining the conjunction of ‘immaterial labour' and art, my initial reaction was fairly sceptical. The concept of immaterial labour has always showed signs of strain at the sheer weight of revolutionary expectation placed upon it – a carrier of a subversive charge so immanent to capital that it is almost already here. This conclusion has been subjected to an incisive critique by more sober analysts within autonomist Marxism such as George Caffentzis, Steve Wright and Sergio Bologna, amongst others. Given the pre-eminence of symbolic production inherent to immaterial labour, that Lazzarato and Negri, both intimately connected with the theorisation of immaterial labour, should now be addressing the role of contemporary art did seem oddly appropriate. However, it was also a source of potential disquiet. From the mass worker of operaismo (workerism) to the socialised worker of Autonomia to cognitive labour – would the cycle of struggles end in the self-valorisation of the knowledge worker and ultimately the artist? Such a schema is an easy caricature of this variegated discourse around the possibilities of resistance in post-fordism. Indeed, immaterial labour has lent itself to an uncritical optimism regarding its potentiality to give rise to the subversive subjectivities of the multitude.
 
After an introduction by Peter Osborne of Radical Philosophy (co-organisers of the conference) and Eric Alliez of Multitudes, Lazzarato presented his paper, ‘Art, Work and Politics in Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Security.’ It immediately became apparent that one major problem of the conference was to be the difficulties of translation. This was unfortunately the case despite the uniformly excellent work of the translators, mainly Arianna Bove of Generation Online. Whereas Revel and Negri with some hesitancy but good grace read their papers in English, Lazzarato relied upon a simultaneous translation that caused him to cut sections and occasionally become confusing. Bifo seemed more comfortable speaking English and this showed in his more charismatic delivery.
 
The audience was substantially different from a political event, philosophers seeming to twitch and mutter in a more muted way. This subdued atmosphere may also have been due to the particular psychogeographic effects of the Tate Britain lecture hall upon the docile subjectivities within it, inducing a soporific daze in even the most hardened post-autonomist acolyte.
 
In a reading of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Franz Kafka’s short story ‘Josephine the Singer’, Lazzarato attempted to trace the possibility of a third term between the dichotomies of work and play established by capital. He described this as a suspensive space emerging  through a gesture of refusal within the practice of art that consists of the appropriation of everyday objects, as in the readymade, through a minimal activity that removes virtuosity from the production of art. This problematised several themes theorised by Michel Foucault that Lazzarato characterised as the ‘society of security’, wherein the production of a certain amount of ‘freedom’ to produce value necessitates the management of difference. The injunction to create is subverted by such an artistic gesture; the distinction between the everyday and art, work and play, become subject to a double suspension and within this space there is the production of a more subversive subjectivity subtracted from the demands of utility and value.
 

Image: Bicycle Wheel, Marcel Duchamp, 1913
 

Autonomist and post-autonomist thought has always had a place for Bartleby-style negation and it is unsurprising that Lazzarato’s paper should reintroduce a figure of the refusal of work in the guise of artistic practice. Lazzarato’s reading of ‘Josephine the Singer’ introduced the figure of the public and the worker into this analysis since Josephine, while an artist, only sings in a way that is easily replicated by the other workers. Lazzarato argued that it is a similar suspension that diffuses artistic labour across the social.

There was a Bataillean ‘unemployed negativity’ – a surplus at the heart of the productive apparatus of capital – in Lazzarato’s interpretation of Duchamp that placed it dangerously close to positing the kind of ‘outside’ to capital that Judith Revel’s paper sought to dispute. Revel also based much of her paper, ‘The Material of the Immaterial: Against the Return of Idealisms and New Vitalisms’, on Foucault. From an analysis of Foucault’s work on art, Revel’s main concern was the production of resistance through the irreducibly materialist networks of biopolitical production. The most interesting part of her paper was a sustained polemic against Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ as the basis of biopolitics and political sovereignty. It was Revel’s contention that Agamben’s ahistorical formulation of bare life, subtractive trace or remainder of biological life, reformulates Foucault’s concept of biopower only to remove all sense of agency from the subject.
 
 

Image: Engraving from De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, Andrea Vesalio, 1568
 

Revel’s reading of Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ emphasised the role of art as a process of the production of the subject albeit intertwined with networks of governmentality. She emphasised the complex interaction between these poles of subjectification and the infinity of ways that power is employed within this process of governmentality to create value within ‘immaterial labour’. Against Agamben, who she maintained posited an impersonal universality of bare life as what remains and resists, Revel insisted upon an account of the production of resistance that is historical and materialist. One that  contains a potentiality that is embedded in contemporary forms of production, an immateriality that is not opposed to the material. Nonetheless, a fairly classic reformulation of biopolitics within this strand of post- Autonomia. Bare life, for Revel, simply did not exist. She viewed it as an attempt to produce a theory of the margins that contradicted the insight of Foucault that it was necessary to invent forms of struggle that act upon the relations of power and produce new forms of subjectivity. Revel’s emphasis upon an ‘aesthetics of the self’ as a form of political agency, is itself problematic. It particularly lends itself to identity politics, the production of a marginal oppositional subject, and tends to downplay capitalism, the present system of production, in favour of more abstract networks of power.

While Revel’s critique of Agamben is a necessary corrective to the way that bare life has almost become a new critical orthodoxy in discussions of biopower, it might prove more difficult to dismiss bare life than the above summary suggests. Agamben has produced, in bare life, a concept that articulates a particular aspect of the operation of political sovereignty over ‘life’ in contemporary society. Whereas Revel emphasised the ‘marginality’ of bare life, Agamben is always at pains to underline that bare life, while originally situated on the margins of the political, now coincides with it in a ‘zone of indistinction’ and is diffused throughout society. It is not so much that we are all necessarily one step away from the camp or rendition centre, as much as that we are always already bare life in our everyday lives. Perhaps with reference to works, such as The Many Headed Hydra or The London Hanged by Peter Linebaugh, bare life could be historicised as one of the originary forms of primitive accumulation. Peter Osborne’s droll assertion that ‘Agamben is over’, to which Revel punched the air, seemed a bit premature.

As opposed to the sobriety of much Marxist theory, autonomist and orthodox, there is a certain philosophical drunkenness in much of the discourse that propagates ‘immaterial labour’ as the repository of antagonism towards capital; an eclectic theoretical ensemble composed of Marx, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and Spinoza. This eclecticism was on full display at the conference. While having the advantage of extending a broadly Marxist analysis in line with new conditions, it can also lead to a theoretical delirium that was most evident today in the figure of Bifo, a drunken master who administered a Zen slap to the general optimism of the 'multitude'.
 

Image: Armoured Train, Gino Severini, 1915
 

Beginning with an analysis of the Manifesto of Futurism, Bifo emphasised the shift in technology from the externality of modernism to the internalisation of the machine in contemporary subjectivity. Whereas the focus of the previous two papers was on the production of subjectivity through the conjunction of art and resistance, Bifo, in his paper ‘Conjunction/Connection’, argued that there would be no next wave of subjectification or political agency due to the shift from a society based around ‘conjunction’, composed of machinic assemblages that produce gaps and lines of flight, to a society based around ‘connection’ and the sensory overload of ‘semio-capital’. In the society of ‘connection’, Bifo argued, the interpreter must learn to recognise a sequence, there is no room for ambiguity and the inability to recognise such a sequence leads to various social anxieties, expressed in psycho-pathologies such as panic, suicide, self-mutilation, etc. In fact Bifo predicted a ‘wave of suicides’ that he also related to the collapse of distinctions in time due to an increased ‘precarity’. This production of an overwhelming sprawl of time, paralleled in the infinite expansive capabilities of ‘cybertime’ and cyberspace, marked the end of a future based upon any kind of technological speed based upon relative use value.

 

Image: Mechanical Head, Raoul Hausmann, 1919
 
Bifo’s despair was genially universal. He rejected any application of art as activism as already superseded by the deterritorialising flows of capital, more efficient at mobilising the potentialities of the ‘general intellect’. Any form of creation was an intimate form of exploitation within what he termed a ‘Prozac economy’. Much of this did sound like the Baudrillard/Kroker axis of cybertheory that was influential in the 1980’s and 1990’s. An important proviso is that Bifo was speaking from the heart of a strand in post-Autonomia noted for its relative optimism. His assertion that the precarious nature of labour and its subsequent expropriation of time leads to an inability to project oneself as a political subject grounded his dystopian vision in a critique of the rhetoric of ‘immaterial labour’, that has an almost evangelical zeal for the potentialities of the multitude. Bifo advocated the 'intellectual potency of depression'. This was surprisingly well received at the conference, perhaps because of the strangely invigorating qualities of a dose of pessimism and the sense that, however pessimistic, he had in no way given up. However, Bifo’s description of Lenin’s three nervous breakdowns produced images in my mind of the old Bolshevik weeping and writing What is to be Done, that I would rather forget.

There was a real sense in the panel of a shared political engagement and particular warmth between Bifo and Negri, who stated that Bifo’s questioning of Autonomist orthodoxy in the 1970’s, was correct. In comparison to his expressive, charismatic manner when presenting something in Italian Negri was restrained and heroically concentrated upon reading his paper in English. ‘Concerning Periodisation in Art: Some Approaches to Art and Immaterial Labour’, marks one of the rare instances where Negri has explicitly addressed Art, in contrast to Badiou, his major rival in questions of subjectivity and radical politics. He began with a broadly post-Autonomist spin on a classic trope in Marxism – the link between different modes of production and forms of art. Commencing with 1848 and the beginning of the cycle of emancipatory politics with the artisan, Negri emphasised how Courbet articulates something of the real of the struggle of the period 1848-1871, then how post 1914 the abstract forms of artistic production correspond to the increasing abstraction of labour and capital in the period of the mass worker. Post 1968 and into the 1970’s, with the gradual emergence of the socialised worker he emphasised the role of the dematerialisation of art as a de-structuring demystification of the object and apparatus of capital.

This is a very rough précis of the first part of Negri’s paper because by this point the long day of dense theory was beginning to take its toll and I was craving my own subtraction or exodus in search of food and alcohol. However, it did seem that in drawing such broad strokes Negri ran the risk of removing the singularity of particular moments of art that might be related to sequences of emancipatory politics. For instance, the rupture in art constituted by Berlin Dada (1917-20) has an undoubted relation to the politics of the Spartacist revolt that cannot be quite explained by such a periodisation.
 
 

Image: Fathers and Sons, John Heartfield, 1924
 
Negri suggested that artistic production is subsumed within the biopolitical production of life that traverses industry and creates the ‘commons’. However he proposed a contemporary role that would create an ethics capable of dealing with the ‘monstrous’ real of the biopolitical while postulating, with reference to Kant, a model of the sublime expressed in the creativity and resistance of the ‘commons'. What Negri was suggesting is similar to Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, perhaps with the added 'joy in production' that Negri’s reading of Deleuze and Spinoza contributes to his brand of post-Autonomia.

A frustrating aspect of the conference was the lack of specific contemporary examples, excepting Bifo, that might add flesh to the immaterial bones of a post-autonomist reading of Art. For instance the sound art collective Ultra-Red would seem to be a perfect example of a dematerialised practice that refuses the commodification of free downloads and immersion in art institutions. By being based on the net; their sound-based research into political struggle and social space, and emphasis upon the exchange between Art, politics and organisation, would seem to embody a model of interaction between art and ‘immaterial labour’. Another aspect that the relatively broad strokes of the conference singularly failed to address was the whole system of the art market, the production of value and the networks of institutions that create value from artistic practice. Odd, given that everyone speaking was a Marxist of sorts, and speaking at the Tate Britain. It was a relief that the focus of the conference was upon the possibility of resistance through the production of subjectivity and not the beginning of some sort of shift towards art as the embodiment of this. What emerged in the papers presented in the conference was an eclectic series of reflections that emphasised the role of art in the biopolitical production of subjectivity and resistance.

‘Dematerialisation’ or conceptualisation of art aside, one of the reference points of the conference suggested another possible ‘dematerialisation’ into the purely conceptual: that of this particular strand of post-Autonomia itself. Conferences such as this illustrate the danger of theory becoming its own self-regarding end point, reaching a plateau of conceptualisation that is divorced from the messy, concrete reality of the political. It is easy within the production of radical theory to mistake the statement for the thing itself. Politics, contra-Badiou, rather than being one of the conditions of philosophy, is expressed in increasingly opaque theory that mistakes itself for a politics when it is really a substitute. It is unfair to describe this strand of post-Autonomia, given that it’s still informed by the network of activists, social centres, etc., formed in the anti-capitalist movement as completely within the bounds of such a shift, but some of the rhetoric of ‘immaterial labour’ is well suited to the self-valorisation of the academy.

John Cunningham is a writer who lives in London
 
Info:

Art and Immaterial Labour conference was held at the Tate Britain, London, 19 January 2008

Generation Online
http://www.generation-online.org/

Radical Philosophy
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/

Multitudes
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/                        

Ultra-Red
http://www.ultrared.org/directory.html

Some audio from the recent 'Art and Immaterial Labour' event at the Tate Britain is available:

Here: http://www.ecopolis.org/art-and-immaterial-labor/

and

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi: http://download.yousendit.com/EC92CF1437048096

Maurizio Lazzarato: http://download.yousendit.com/A8E1E3981A1C7724

Antonio Negri: http://download.yousendit.com/2BB45E0011C01B90

Videos of some of the presentations and discussions:
http://www.mazine.ws/node/574

Is the convergence of art and sport under the pressure of pseudo-participatory spectacle undermining the utopian potential of both? Benedict Seymour goes back to the future to recover the new kind of activity which, in different ways, informs them still

Contemporary art is almost identical with contemporary sport. If one considers artistic practice and reception in its specificity this may sound like an exaggerated claim. Clearly most art is still not much like most sport. But from the perspective of the UK government it is sport against which the arts – including fine art – must compete in terms of validity and hence for funding. £30 million of lottery money was cut from the Arts Council of England’s (ACE’s) budget last year and redirected to the 2012 Olympics, presumably on the assumption that all the things art was supposed to be good for – urban regeneration, social cohesion, self-esteem, entrepreneurial ambition, economic vitality and health – would be done better by sport.

Last year’s cut reflected the instrumentalised definition of art (and sport) advanced by the New Labour government and increasingly internalised by artistic institutions, not to say artists. The fact that art and sport could swap places in the government’s funding priorities reflects a utilitarian conception of culture in terms of ‘benefits to communities’ which, in practice, interlocks with processes of urban restructuring, cultural tourism, and financialisation that may benefit some ‘communities’ but rarely the ones named on the funding application forms.

Institutions such as ACE were already used to citing art’s sport-like qualities when appealing for funding to the Department of Culture Media and Sport, but with the Olympics large-scale looting operation demanding ever-larger potlatches of State expenditure, any difference between art and sport, rather than constituting a bonus, appeared as a deficit: sport is good for health, art, if not necessarily as bad as smoking, is at best neutral in terms of obesity reduction; sport is more closely associated with audience participation than art (despite the claims of relational aesthetics), gets more TV viewers and can pull bigger crowds; finally, sport is said to contribute more to the economy and can also mobilise volunteer labour on a scale that the arts can only dream about.

The fact that much data exists to contradict the official claims for sport – for instance, stadiums are a waste of money in terms of local economic growth, and of space when considered in terms of community involvement – is by the by. The point here is that the claims made for sport are strikingly similar to those made for art, it is just that art is (even) less effective than sport at delivering on them.

 

Still from multi-screen video Deep Play, Harun Farocki, 2007

Of course were we looking at art from the perspective of the private sector, at art’s value in terms of the art market, auction sales, etc., rather than sheer audience-community-participation power, then art might have a better chance to justify itself. But funding bodies are supposed to be about supporting that which the market cannot. While encouraging artists to think entrepreneurially is an increasingly prominent part of funding policy, a focus on access, visibility and audiences as a measure of cultural value, rather than sales, only highlights art’s weakness when contrasted with sport.

So, how did it come to pass that art and sport should now be interchangeable competitors for State money? And if their current role reversal is in part a sign of these hitherto polarised forms of leisure mutating under the pressure of commodification, with sport emphasising its aesthetic component (the beautiful game, etc.) and art emphasising its sport-like qualities (spectacle, involvement), is this a realisation of earlier utopian projects for sport and art, a liberatory dissolution of historic boundaries and exclusions, or a perversion of both?¹

Sport, Politics, Activity

To begin answering these questions about sport and art today, I want to take up a series of propositions from Loren Goldner’s remarkable book Herman Melville, identifying sport as one site of the emergence of an epochally new form of human activity. Goldner develops C.L.R. James’ observations regarding Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick and James’s provocative reflections on the place of sport in the life of the working class.² In his autobiography Beyond A Boundary, James remarks the simultaneous birth of modern sport and modern politics in the mid to late 19th century: the Football Association was founded in 1863, the first all-professional US baseball team organised in 1869, in 1866 the first athletic association. Around the same time, Disraeli’s Reform Bill (1865) introduced popular democracy in England, the slave states were defeated in the American Civil War, the first modern organisation of American labour appeared, and Marx and Engels founded the First Communist International (1864).

As Goldner relates, James saw this historical conjuncture as not only a significant intersection of novel forms of sport and politics, but as a moment in which an intimately related mutation in the aesthetic was occurring. James, who grew up in Trinidad, was well placed to register this transfusion between art and sport, raised as he was on a steady stream of English novels and constant games of cricket. James became fascinated by what he called the ‘social aesthetic’ of cricket:

men from the neighbourhood described by his aunts as ‘ne’er-do-wells’ were transformed into aristocrats of self-mastery and brilliance at bat in cricket matches.³

Goldner discerns in this vignette not simply the grace and cooperative activity celebrated in today’s paeans to football but an intimation of the sovereignty of the working class, a new social relationship manifest in the ‘at once collective and highly individualized … tensions of men at bat’.

James was unusual among Marxists in that he attributed a positive value to the working class’s passionate interest in ‘organised sports and games’. Unlike his comrades, rather than seeing workers as deflected from politics by sport, or believing that workers needed ‘raising’ up to some cultural level set down by the bourgeois radical intelligentsia or avant-garde, James recalled the ‘ne’er do well’ sporting aristocrats of his youth, and refused to accept this one-sided evaluation. James differed from both Lukács ‘who saw the works of high bourgeois culture, up to the watershed of 1848, as bourgeois society’s legacy to the working class’ and currents such as the Frankfurt School, ‘which saw that legacy more in the modernist revolt against classical bourgeois culture’, as Goldner succinctly sums it up.

 

Still from Deep Play, Harun Farocki, 2007

 

For James, not only was sport not a diversion from revolutionary politics but it contained within itself, ‘a new, higher rationality for the organization of society that superseded the capitalist antagonism between work and leisure,’ says Goldner. James, like Melville and Marx before him, see in working class labour and leisure a new form of activity which overcomes the very work/leisure, and individual/collective oppositions. James may not have known it at the time, argues Goldner, but in his meditations on working class sport and games as a new social ‘art’ form:

he had reproduced Marx’s own fundamental idea of the supersession of the work/labour split in the Grundrisse:

‘Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labor beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürfdigkeit] and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself…’ (Grundrisse, p.325)

Here we should note that capital, rather than simply instrumentalising or subsuming creative activity, is seen as one of its preconditions. The emergence of this ‘rich individuality … as all-sided in its production as in its consumption’ derives not from the development of ‘artistic’ activity by isolated bourgeois individuals of genius but from ‘activity itself’ – the identity-in-collectivity of the proletariat whether at work or at play, in the hold of the whaling ship described by Melville in Moby Dick or at the wicket on the patch of grass outside James’ childhood home.

If James sees sport as taking over the mantle of literature as a vehicle of a (truly) ‘social aesthetic’ (compare Lukács on the ‘social mission’ of the novel), Melville is the first, and perhaps one of the few, modernist artists to recognise and describe this new form of human activity. In Moby Dick Melville captures this category-breaking form of labour/leisure as praxis, not in a socialist-realist celebration of heroically accelerated production but as a ‘grace of total activity’, the collective development of a full individuality rather than its subsumption under Party, State or punch card:

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooners. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooners chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it.

Notably, the mind and the body, like the individual and the collective, work and leisure, are literally cheek by jowl in Melville’s Rabelaisian descriptions of the crew. Abstractions such as democracy become lip-smackingly substantial, the crew’s easy movement between separated spheres of activity constituting the real overcoming of the frozen antitheses that structure the lives of Captain Ahab and the ship’s officers.

James’s comments on Melville’s description of the crew at work in the ‘red heat’ of the whaling ship’s hold strongly imply that, for him at least, this new form of activity is not aborted by the ‘real domination of capital’ – the full integration of the labour process in the process of accumulation – in the 20th century, let alone by the massive destruction of workers and fixed capital in the ’30 and ’40s of which Moby Dick is a premonition:

That at first sight is the modern world – the world we live in, the world of the Ruhr, of Pittsburgh, of the Black Country in England. In its symbolism of men turned into devils, of an industrial civilization on fire and plunging blindly into darkness, it is the world of massed bombers, of cities in flames, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world in which we live … But when you look again, you see that the crew is indestructible. There they are laughing at the terrible things that have happened to them. The three harpooners are doing their work. True to himself, Ishmael [prototype of the bourgeois intellectual/artist] can see the ship only as an expression of Ahab’s madness…

This latter comment pivots on the gap between the external bourgeois viewpoint on production as no more than a ‘dark satanic mill’ and the viewpoint of the workers whose praxis seems to (mentally and physically) transform their conditions. This point is crucial. For Goldner, Melville’s insight marks a Copernican revolution in perspective which most ‘Marxist’ cultural criticism has itself failed to register.

Why were such insights into the centrality of proletarian activity so rare in modernist art and, more scandalously, socialist politics? One general answer given by Goldner, again drawing on James’ analysis, is that modernism saw itself as the crucible of revolutionary activity, in the position of a vanguard in relation to the working class. His critique of this attitude encompasses the intellectual tradition of western Marxism as well as the more obviously anti-working class intellectual currents of the 20th century:

There can be no question that through the classical humanist tradition as defended by Lukács, and one arguably traceable to Marx’s scattered writings on art and literature, a separate aesthetic external to the project of all-sided activity was at the center of the Marxian discussion until quite recently.

In short, even (or sometimes, especially) orthodox Marxist aesthetics was preoccupied with the specialised discipline of art and ignorant of or even hostile to a conception of working class ‘all-sided activity’ as a kind of ‘social aesthetic’ in its own right, whether manifest in the individuality-in-collectivity of work or sport.

Goldner claims that, with leftist intellectual and political indifference or hostility to the working class as agent of its own (and the species’) destiny, this possibility of overcoming the labour/leisure opposition undergoes a kind of repression during the era of artistic and political modernity:

Only the definitive demise of high bourgeois culture and of the modernist coda and consequently of the desire of pro-working class artists and intellectuals … to see their creations as somehow directly revolutionary, has made possible an approach to culture like that of James and more in keeping with some of Marx’s less developed or implicit views. This shift can be defined succinctly as the transformation of the question of culture from an aesthetic to an anthropological viewpoint.

On this account the very abandonment of a modernist conception of art as a directly revolutionary force reopens the possibility of comprehending the (repressed) aesthetic-political activity at the core of Marx’s communist project. After the vanguardism of modernism – aesthetic and political – with its distorted attempt to overcome the reified social condition of which it was itself a part, the ‘social aesthetic’ of working class activity becomes perceptible again.

Art and (Bourgeois) Crisis

Rather than seeing the same avant-gardism or radical newness in aesthetic modernism that James detects in the self-organisation of working class sport and work, Goldner seems to view aesthetic modernism as the critical reaction of the bourgeoisie to it own crisis. Its novelty and its critical power, then, is a reaction to the tendential obsolescence of bourgeois culture and society. After Melville’s moment of profound social and political insight in Moby Dick, modernist art is itself split between a rearguard action against industry, science and consumerism – the numbing effect of market society with its quantification, fragmentation and disenchantment of experience, destruction of social and temporal continuities, etc. – and an attempt to renew an ever-fading nostalgic ideal of integral, not yet rationalised, social existence which might heal these wounds:

… what danced in the fantasy life of the Parisian romantic just before or after 1848, or in a different way (as has been argued) for the New England Transcendentalist [writers such as Thoreau or Emerson], was a ‘memory’ of a life intensely and collectively lived, perhaps best captured for Western traditions by the pageantry of the Renaissance urban festival.

Subjugated by the increasingly industrialised rationality of work with the rise of capitalist societies during the 16th and 17th centuries, argues Goldner, the unitary social ‘play’ of Renaissance pageantry disappears as a social reality, to be replaced by a ‘pale mythical flicker’. This takes the form respectively of pseudo-sacred and diminishingly auratic ‘homunculus Napoleons’ in politics and an increasingly alienated romantic unhappy consciousness in culture. Melville’s Ahab and Ishmael are exemplars and prototypes of these two intimately related figures.

Ahab, whose irrational authority and will to power foreshadows the Bonapartist, fascist and Stalinist dictators of the 20th century, enlists the isolated intellectual, Ishmael, who, repelled by the petty commercial activity of his own class, has run away to sea and spends his life dreaming at the mast-head. Admiring of but separated from the activity of the crew, Ishmael hovers between a reactive sympathy for his working class shipmates and a fascination with Ahab with whom he shares what Goldner terms the ‘absolute I’. This later term requires some explication but we can briefly and inadequately gloss it as the bourgeois ego, an ‘I’ defined undialectically against collectivity, self-sufficient and self-destructive. When it comes to the crunch, Ishmael is willing to sycophantically comply with Ahab’s tyrannical and self-destructive power, identifying with him precisely as the ‘man of action’ he feels impotent to be himself.

Action is, once again, the key word here. In Goldner’s reading, Moby Dick presciently and emblematically plots a historical matrix of activity, false versus real, in which the totalitarian Ahab, the ‘pragmatic liberal’ Starbuck, and the ‘alienated intellectual’ Ishmael represent interdependent forms of a bankrupt and self-destructive bourgeois individualism (‘different manifestations of the ultimately asocial ego of bourgeois society’) counterposed to the crew of the Pequod who embody ‘the real individualism of … collective social relations, in work and in play.’

 

On the Horizontal Bar, Alexander Rodchenko, 1935, © DACS 2008, © Rodchenko archives

 

However, as we know, this agent of a new form of activity and all-sided creativity beyond the limits both of aesthetic creation and state redistribution, did not fare as well in the 20th century as Melville or Marx might have hoped. The bourgeois ego, though shattered, continued to suppress identity-in-collectivity in the form of fascist, Stalinist and Third World Bonapartist states, heavily influencing the working-class movement through the identification of the latter two types of regimes as ‘socialism’. Intellectuals glorified these regimes, just as Ishmael ultimately sided with Ahab against the crew, developing ‘artistic forms external to the general social activity of the proletariat’, argues Goldner. To the extent that modern artists sought to produce populist works in the service of the state, their art was ignorant of or hostile to the social aesthetic intuited by James, Marx and Melville. One only has to think of the athletic photos of a Rodchenko, let alone a Riefenstahl, to see how artists could miss the specific character of sport as a (different) ‘social aesthetic’ even when taking sport’s ‘beauty’ as their subject.

Submitting the working class (collective) body to a simultaneous glorification and reification, artists played a ‘biopolitical’ role in socialist states where the cult of the worker and of exemplary bodies is always shadowed by the same states’ mass production of working class corpses. Here again Rodchenko, who turned his lens away from the collective graves of workers as he celebrated their achievements in production, might constitute an archetypal figure.

In this grim light it becomes clear why sport, insofar as it offered a space of working class ‘identity-in-collectivity’, as opposed to identity subsumed beneath state collectivity and an image (whether neue sachlichkeit or neo-classical) of idealised labour, might appear to James and Goldner as a more primary form of ‘social aesthetic’ activity than the productions of the avant-garde, even if one can list, with Adorno, the many ways in which sport was itself reduced to a commodity and tool of labour discipline.

 

Anthropological Culture?

Goldner’s suggestion that we invert the hierarchy of sport and art – in which sport has become, for Adorno, a ritualised passion for subjection, and art alone possesses a critical self-consciousness of its own compromised status as a commodity – throws up some interesting questions. Are Goldner and Adorno talking about the same ‘art’ and ‘sport’? Is art defined by its specific commodity status and its individuated mode of production/consumption against sport’s collective one? And what happens when sport becomes commodified and individuated on a level unknown even in Adorno’s time? On the other hand, may not both art and sport resist the violence done to their different or opposed forms of ‘aesthetic’ (social and, in Adorno’s case, ‘anti-social’), offering a ‘critique’ of, or alternative to, statist instrumentalisation without simply