Urban affects

street art culture and control

via @thisbigcity “To answer the question “How can a city control its Street Art?” Let’s look at an analogy in a different field: wildfires. In wild areas in Spain, the government adopts a zero-tolerance policy. However, the forest ecosystem depends on fires for its well-being. To attempt to suppress forest fires allows vegetation to grow unchecked, so in the dry summer months, the smallest ground fires can quickly spread to the canopy, where it becomes an unstoppable inferno. The right policy is to provoke controlled fires which allows for appropriate stratification, that is, layering of the woods so that a ground fire stays a ground fire. If a zero-tolerance policy is adopted towards Street Art, undeveloped tagging will go on the increase. Professional artists will move to other countries. Unrest, especially among the budding Street artists, will grow.”

— Ian Currie on street art culture in Spanish cities.

On assemblages and subjectivation

“Assemblages capable of building up their own modes of subjectivation involve two kinds of attitude:
—the normalizing attitude, which follows two different but complementary ways: either it systematically ignores those assemblages, dismissing them as ancillary problems or archaisms, or else it recovers and integrates them.
—the attitude of recognition, which preserves their specific character and their common traits in order to make their articulation possible and produce a real change in the situation.
Any emerging singularity brings about two kinds of micropolitical response: a normalizing response or an attempt to use that singularity to initiate a process that may change the situation, and perhaps not just locally.”
Suely Rolnik: Molecular Revolutions in Brazil

Zizek on jouissance and ideology

“what is the sublime object of ideology? The idea behind it is simply “it is the mode of jouissance, the way ideology functions.” The idea is to go against the so-called discourse, the analysis of ideology. You must deconstruct it, reduce it to certain discourse practices and symbolizations. My idea is that this is not enough. … Without this core of jouissance, ideology does not function. So now we are again at the problem of the death of jouissance. In today’s so-called cynical society nobody believes in ideology anymore. Lacan says somewhere that the cynic believes in jouissance, and this is precisely what complicates things.”

— Zizek, Flash Art March 1992.

via jujutsu-with-zizek

Micropolitics and subjectivity

“The problematics of micropolitics don’t involve the level of representation

but the level of the production of subjectivity. They have to do

with modes of expression that involve not only language but also

heterogeneous semiotic levels.” 

Suely Rolnik + Felix Guattari in Molecular Revolution in Brazil p. 39

On schizoanalysis

“Guattari’s approach to analysis tries to  help open up “collective assemblages of enunciation,” or possibilities  for taking speech. This does not just mean speaking in the restricted  sense: it could be gestures, affects, symbols, practices. The point is  to articulate something singular, not systematized, not overcoded in  advance. And the point is to articulate it collectively, in public. But the strange thing is that Guattari approaches the collective assemblages through a schiz, that is to say, a splitting, a dissociation. Schizoanalysis splits subjectivity into four incommensurable dimensions: Territories, Universes, Phyla and Flows. They are separate and more-or-less autonomous assemblages, even within the experience of a single individual. They are not functions of any primary cause or mobilizing energy; but they can be approached as functors, that is to say, operators of a relational process. Life does not necessarily add up, but we all move through it anyway. Here goes:

1. Existential Territories. They are literally grounds, inhabited spaces of the body, pacings, ranges, graspings, sinkholes and sometimes dead ends. Think of a landscape, an ocean, a neighborhood, a street corner, the four walls of your ecstatic and unbearable room. Territory is not only a category of human settlement but also of ethology, it is the home and at the same time the nest, the lair or the den, the warm and familiar haunt that can coax you into well-being or veer off into obsessional repetition: the clamminess of sweat, the black hole of anxiety. It is crucial to realize that in Guattari’s fourfold matrix, the Territories lie at the intersection of the real and the virtual, so they can be expressed as the Territories of the Virtually Real. Through their virtuality they relate (or not) to something else:

2. Incorporeal Universes of reference (or of value). Now we’re talking about the insistence of rhythms, forms, images, aesthetic patterns of all sorts, fragments of poetry or film that return in memory as what Guattari called “refrains.” It’s not the painting on the wall, but the one you see in the dark that matters here. These constellations of Universes are never complete, they are in but not of the body, they point beyond themselves to further horizons. Yet they are what sparks the pathic trance of self-reference, or “autopoiesis”: an affective appropriation, a singularizing process that turns the outside in. Reaching beyond the real, these are the Universes of the Virtually Possible. And it is by following their incorporeal call that the bounds of an existential Territory can be overstepped, so as to relate (or not) to something else:

3. Material and semiotic Flows. Here is the domain not only of speech but also of action, in a world understood less as one of things and more as one of processes, that is, things that appear in streams: signs, bean counters, money, libido, gasoline, semen, milk, electricity… The space of flows is taken by social science as the very realm of reality, institutions, economics, relations of classes, things we can measure – or even things that we can change. So this is the dreaded realm of acting out, where you move from intuition and upwelling desire to concrete statements and irrevocable deeds. These Flows of the Actually Real are as different from Virtual Territories as the word on the tip of your tongue is from the one you’ve just spoken. Yet the force of actuality relates them (or not) to something else:

4. Abstract machinic Phlya. Now we arrive at the realm of the symbolic, of code, of formalized concepts: rhizomes of abstract ideas whose destiny is to complexify forever, like science, philosophy, mathematics, law, and everything that fills the Borgesian Library of Babel. The notion of the “phylum,” with its connotations of metamorphosis over time, is a way to indicate this evolutionary movement. As formalized codes, the machinic Phyla exist beneath the regime of the Actually Possible. They interact with the realm of material and semiotic Flows, not only through the dialectic of theory and practice, but also in a more estranging or deterritorializing relation where practice is pulled outside itself and into the endless labyrinth of ideas. Guattari seemed to think that abstract ideas have a direct relation (maybe not) to the glimmering of aesthetic Universes.”

From: Brian Holmes: Activism and Schizoanalysis

Bishop on emotional arousal and performance in the avantgarde

“The futurist desire for dynamism, activiation and emotional arousal is repeated in innummerable avantgarde calls of subsequent decades, when performance was perceived as able to rouse emotion more vividly than the presusal of static objects. But if the Futurist approach to participation was via negativa - as a form of total emotional response in which one could not occupy the position of a distanced observer but was incited to take part in an orgy of destruction - then the 1960 model would be conducted in a more optimistic light, as an artistic metaphor for emancipation, self-awareness and heightened experience of the everyday. “

From Claire Bishop: Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012: 48)

And a comment:

If performance and emotional arousal in mass society in the avantgarde movements was oriented towards either destruction of hierarchies through participation or means to emancipation of art in the every day, what role does performance play today? Furthermore, what Bishop labels “emotional arousal” is rather similar to the notion of affect in recent urban culture.

Do we witness a third urban avantgarde now? Participation, affective tactics and the upheaval of art in the every day urban life are all characterizing urban culture at the moment…

Temporary use as an instrument?

“For claim strategies, influencing public opinion is the key. The goal is to deprive existing town planning of its legitimation and gain an ideal majority for an alternative use and development scenario. The means for achieving this are not first and foremost protest, criticism, and negation.

This realization takes place on two levels, which usually go hand in hand – first in the sense of wish production, that is, the awakening of the idea of a different, more desirable development in the mindst of the public, and secon in the practical implementation of that idea from the very beginning. However small, symbolic, and temporary these single steps may be, the are nonetheless still capable of sparking a social dynamic in which more and more actors participate, so that the project keeps evolving.”

Oswalt, Overmeyer, Misselwitz (2013): Urban Catalyst: The power of Temporary Use p. 276

The Politics of the Social in Contemporary Art

By Esther Belvis Pons

“ The revivification of social movements and the reoccupation of public spaces by the citizens affected by the global financial crisis through the Occupy movement has intermingled perspectives and interests, activating a specific social agenda. This one responds to current political matters and triggers actions that often perform between the boundaries of art and the social”

“The interdependent relationship between politics and art has given birth to the development of intermedial practices that often engage participants in global actions. Often these artworks allow participants to become socially engaged in practices that might not be referring to their immediate context, but rather address a topic of social interest beyond the particularities of their territory, or that explore the tensions emerging between individuals and socially constructed spaces”

performamagazine: 

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