For “Alternative Now”, WRO BIENNALE 2010

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE 
Geoff Cox

What are the possibilities for alternatives when the homogenizing effects of neo-liberalism have become the dominant force? This question relates to the perceived failure of the avant-garde to deliver its promises, and its integration into the canon of art history and culture. Franco Berardi writes how the aspirations of the avant-garde have become our lived reality, as the distinctions between sign and referent disappear. The desires of the avant-garde and the dominant order it hoped to overthrow have collapsed in on themselves. Consequently, to Berardi, art no longer represents autonomy or potential freedom from the forces of domination but is part of the aestheticisation of everyday life and the nullification of alternatives. Indeed it is neo-liberalism that now wishes to draw art and life together in our contemporary setting (into what has become known as creative enterprise and instrumentalised forms of creativity, the creative economy and so on). Radical art seems to have become just another marketing opportunity and blockbuster shows in major museums seems to emphasise the point. 

Do we simply assume the same nullifying effects in the case of media art? Surely the conditions are even more pronounced. Writing in 1999, Lev Manovich observed how the tactics of the Modernist avant-garde had become normalised as the standardised routines and procedures of commercial software applications. For instance, the once radical technique of montage, where everyday reality was made transparent and could be seen to be reconfigured, had become commonplace (he cites Schklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' to demonstrate how things had become strangely familiar). His claim that « avant-garde has become software » indicated how software naturalised the old techniques of the avant-garde but also changed them and in so doing represented a new avant-garde introducing new paradigms associated with manipulation, generation and transformation of data. According to this view, the avant-garde remains an unfinished project, where new possibilities are tied to technological innovation. So rather than alternatives simply being nullified, new alternatives are produced and wizardry. But is this not the logic of constant upgrades associated with consumer capitalism, a rehearsal of the ideology of progress? If the avant-garde is software, then it appears to be commercial and proprietary in form. Has the avant-garde become good marketing in this respect?

The general idea that new media forms achieved cultural significance by remediating earlier media forms is echoed in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’, written around the same time. Writing more recently, Grusin describes a perceptible shift in cultural logic from mediating past forms to premediating future events and possibilities. Although this sounds rather avant-gardist on first encounter, on the contrary it is intended to dispute the ideological hype of the newness of ‘new’ media. Furthermore, the argument is that, post 9/11, premediation attempts to remediate the future before it settles into the present, and hence serves to produce a consensual hallucination such that we imagine future scenarios before they happen (and as if living life in a dystopian science fiction movie obsessed with security issues). Indeed, the logic of premediation represents a pre-emptive strike on the cultural imagination and nullifies any sense of agency over future events and limits the possibilities of social renewal to the cultural regeneration agenda (in other words, to instances where capital aims to renew itself). If the shock tactics of the avant-garde have morphed into premediated communication, then what are the possibilities for social change?

Social media operate under the logic of premediation too. This is what Grusin refers to as ‘commodified premediation technologies’ that are based on affective states of anticipation and connectivity. Perhaps we can claim that the avant-garde has become social media? The case of social media makes a good example in as much as it reflects the way that neoliberalism is significantly underpinned by open social exchange, and the ways that the human subject is increasingly defined in terms of the market (no longer centrally defined by the State as with the model of liberalism or communism). This is an effective technique of biopolitical control, the more so as it involves the willing subjectivity of the user in the process as we update our profiles and provide intimate data on ourselves in exchange for free (market) services. In other words, the market has outsourced production to its consumers, and they work for free both producing and consuming their subjectivities as part of the process. Creativity is stolen from source and commodified. 

Such issues have been recognized by a number of media art practitioners in recent years that wish to challenge the underlying proprietary logic of popular social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Can we usefully describe these as alternative? 

[image: Thimbl]
One example is Telekommunisten’s Thimbl (2010-11), a free, open source, distributed micro-blogging platform. It uses common server software called Finger and adapts it to the principles of the open web. The publicity states: “The most significant challenge the open web will need to overcome is not technical, it is political.” The political challenge addresses the private interests and profiteering of the social web by returning to the best principles of sharing in the public domain (what Dmytri Kleiner ironically calls ‘venture communism’, where the control over immaterial assets extends to the whole of society). With Thimbl, the key difference is that the client owns their webhost rather than be served through the authoritarian client-server architecture of a platform like Twitter. The analogy is the server operates like State control as opposed to workers control over the means of production (‘Peer-to-Peer Communism vs The Client-Server Capitalist State’ as he puts it). More precisely, the distinctiveness of peer production lies in the relative independence of workers to control common productive assets and share the benefits. Thimbl is a socio-technical critique rooted in these principles positioned in relation to the legacy of the social project of the early Net and peer to peer organisational forms. Indeed, the rise of social networking with its participatory ethic has been largely stolen from free software development - interpreted by Dmytri Kleiner as “capitalism's preemptive attack against p2p systems”. In other words, what was once considered to be alternative culture has been thoroughly expropriated.

[image: Repetitionr]
In recognition of these recuperative forces, and an example that rejects the idea of offering an radical alternative for the tactic of ‘over-identification’, Les Liens Invisibles offer their online petition service Repetitionr (2010). The success of every campaign is guaranteed as just one click is all it takes to generate a whole campaign with up to a million automatic fake signatures. It is a platform for activism from the comfort of your armchair that questions the effects of similar services and participatory democracy more broadly. Berardi indicates something of the inspiration when he states that: “Democracy is becoming more an empty ritual, devoid of the ability to deliver true alternatives and true choices.” Do we also conclude that media activism is a spent force too, in the sense that it repeats previous failed strategies to bring art and communicative action together, to echo Berardi once more? A more recent project by Les Liens Invisibles, Tweet4Action.com (2011), takes the same principles and uses Twitter and a Smart Phone augmented reality application to create “twitter revolutions” from your armchair (against a backdrop of uprisings in the Near East). Is this effective critique?

To begin to consider these issues, it is crucially important to recognise that it is partly through critique that capital is able to regenerate itself. After 1989 and the collapse of the Cold War, the project of neo-liberalism is considered to have triumphed through the recuperation of its critique (the so-called ‘end of history’). But what comes next after the failures of socialism and the bankruptcy of capitalism? Rather than thinking of alternatives as such, something else has to be posed outside of oppositional (cold war) logic – an alternative alternative that recognizes that critique is required to feed capital’s own motor of development. Of course in general terms, this what the avant-garde always attempted, in critiquing critique, in rejecting the institution and art’s autonomy for everyday praxis. So in this sense, the avant-garde was always negation. The difficulty is that “the avant-garde aim to end the separate realm of art as a specialized role itself becomes a specialized role within art institutions.” In other words, its very reference has become a way of neutralizing critique. Critique cancels itself out. 

Rather perversely, one possibility for an alternative ‘alternative’ might lie in another seemingly outmoded concept, negation of negation, a much maligned but also much misunderstood concept. And interestingly there has been recent attention to the concept, as with Paolo Virno who develops a critique of capitalistic production as a negative condition that requires further negation. The role of negation, and its negation, in this context is important to understand some of the ways in which dominant ideas attempt to reproduce themselves, even when an oppositional stance is taken. Only in this way is it possible to move from in-itself to for-itself (and self-consciousness of conditions). The traditional (Marxist) view is that producers take over the means of production, but at this first stage it remains within the confines of private ownership, this has to be further negated to abolish the whole principle of private ownership of the means of production – thus expropriating the expropriators as it used to be called. But Virno’s sense of negation is not ‘negative dialectics’ per se, as his interest is to develop a non-dialectical understanding – through ambivalence and oscillation – thus protecting the possibility of a reciprocal nonrecognition as he puts it. Underpinning political action, for Virno, is the ability of humans to modify their forms of life, to create strategies that oscillate between innovation and negation, of placing ‘not’ in front of ‘not human’. Should we not do the same with the figure of the artist (and again in a non-dialectical, non-avant-gardist ways), and of arts practice in general, no longer thinking in terms of alternatives but in the further negation of alternatives? 

If the gesture of the avant-garde in seeking to collapse the distinction between art and everyday life has been achieved in distorted form by neo-liberalism, then what is to be done? How do we now affirm the possibility of creative autonomy over art and life? For Berardi, the struggle is between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. It is only the autonomy of intellectual labour from economic rule can save us. He is invoking the force of mass intellect and the social function of intellectual labour no longer separated from other forms of physical labour – and a situation where the figure of the artist and media artist have become paradigmatic. If art is to have any useful social function at all then it is only through its separation from the neo-liberal marketplace. There is simply no alternative to this and some artists continue to press the point with their efforts.

Acknowledgements
With support from the Digital Urban Living Research Center, partly funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research grant number 2128-07-0011.