Call for contributors: /seconds issue 5: Handbook for Disobedience: Multitude

/seconds: Call for contributors:

an open invitation to respond to the topics of network, art and multitude- issue 5:

Handbook for Disobedience: Multitude

All media formats accepted Material to be considered should be sent to submissions@slashseconds.org

References, notes and background material can be accessed at www.reduxart.org.uk [images: Peter Lewis]

'Art aside, Art Basel Miami is all about seeing and being seen, spending time with old friends and new friends and networking like crazy...' From 'Notes from Miami Beach, Basel Art Fair 2006', Steven Psyllos

'Even as we seek to have a sense of orientation which will allow us to protect ourselves, we also perceive, often in retrospect, various forms of danger.' Paolo Virno MULTITUDE

'We can say that this destiny of marginality has now come to an end. The Multitude, rather than constituting a 'natural' ante-fact, presents itself as a historical result, a mature arrival point of the transformations that have taken place within the productive process and the forms of life. The 'Many' are erupting onto the scene, and they stand there as absolute protagonists while the crisis of the society of Work is being played out. Post-Fordist social cooperation, in eliminating the frontier between production time and personal time, not to mention the distinction between professional qualities and political aptitudes, creates a new species, which makes the old dichotomies of 'public/private' and 'collective/individual' sound farcical. Neither 'producers' nor 'citizens', the modern virtuosi attain at last the rank of Multitude.' From 'Virtuosity and Revolution', Paolo Virno'

'...Hardt and Negri [on 'Multitude'] are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality ... They assert that 'immaterial labour' - service work, basically - now prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don't cite any statistics: you'd never expect that far more Americans are truck-drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth's population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.' [Henwood, D. (2003) After the New Economy. New York: New Press, pp.184-5] From an essay by Steve Wright, in Metamute.com

Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World? M30:: 14.12.05 'The protocols of representative legitimisation attempt to render continuous what is not, to give disparate sequences a unique name, such as the ‘great proletarian leader’ or the ‘great founder of artistic modernity’, names that are actually borrowed from fictional objectivities.' Alain Badiou

A question is posed in the contradictions of an antagonism between 'belonging', and 'conforming': to the mechanics of conformity that uphold the opposition friend/enemy, to ambivalence in solutions inscribed in the attempted tactic to move through the threshold of an opposition: resistant 'refusal'[dread] to accommodating 'acceptance'[refuge]. The once 'marginal' China Art Objects Galleries in Chinatown, Los Angeles, predicated 'refuge' by winning the Basel Art Fair's prestigious award [Best Booth] whilst, as Chris Kraus has also written [in eulogistic prose for the work of the late Giovanni Intra, its founder], at the same time raising the real estate value of a poor area through the sign of 'regeneration' and failing subjective and objective intentions. Intra's precocious, intellectually and artistically ambitious practice would bring a 'new' nexus of concerns and strategies into play: L.A subculture, as exemplified by its appropriation of unhealthy forms of surrealism, situationism and punk, injected a dose of disorder into the local art world's protocols of representative legitimisation. All good things come to an end. Any real exit from the art traffic in desire [for autonomy] is better read in an indifference to the double-edged 'belonging' [being safe] imposed by the 'dread / refuge' coupling. As the work/leisure dynamic plays out the possibility of a new generic form of angst is being hi-jacked, formalised and reconstituted as the new legitimate [global] aesthetic model. ['disobedient' art fairs, off the map biennales, 'political' symposia, social interventions etcetera ] Or, in other words, everything that is 'permitted' inside [except,in the uncanny sense, what is true] is only by an injunction to art's non-antagonistic contradictions; what is, or not, made and done, is accorded to visibility. Art's pluralities, aesthetic transformations, technological bifurcations and virtual simulations might apply a radical in-difference, or an uncanny separation from within the system, infinitely reproducible in singular moments. As a new aesthetic possibility it is 'at home' in discontinuity, a user of the subversive capability of networks, a screen for a hidden and anonymous netwar within capital. The governmental and aesthetic 'home' of the Multitude is two-fold, the same: 'everywhere', in specific, discontinuous, bio-political acts of revolt, and at the same time, invisible, emerging uncannily 'elsewhere' as art, not in contradiction, negation but as separation. In the rupture of obedience to and disobedience from the market's mechanisms, [from which unity of opposition the art world accumulates value, projected and authorised through the public/private, collective/individual sphere] is Multitude to be aroused from slumber in a 'call to arms'? Is it not that the call to arms has 'always-already' arrived in the discomfiting of all affective pedagogy?

In the phantom 'Handbook for Disobedience'? 'My name is Nobody...' Homer /seconds. is an online publishing project initiated and edited by Derek Horton and Peter Lewis, designed by Graham Hibbert and supported by an international editorial and advisory board of academics, artists and curators. The project acknowledges support from Leeds Metropolitan University. A new issue of /seconds. will be published every three months and will include text, visual material (including moving image) and sound-based work. General enquiries should be made to derekhorton@mac.com, plewis@inbox.com executive editors Derek Horton Peter Lewis designer Graham Hibbert editorial board Maurizio Bortolotti Tony Chakar Clementine Deliss Wolfgang Fetz Simon Ford Andrew Hunt Craig Martin David Mollin Sarah Wilson advisory board Steve Arguelles Richard Caldicott Mark Harris Melanie Manchot Makiko Nagaya Michael Nyman Annie Ratti Dimitra Vamiali Paul Violi Mark Arial Waller Steven Wong /seconds is published by Derek Horton and Peter Lewis. The views published in /seconds are are not necessarily those of the individual writers and artists who contribute, nor of the publishers, editors, editorial and advisory board members or funders.