Brian Holmes writes:
"[There follows the lecture I gave at the expo "Geography - and the
Politics of Mobility" in Vienna. It revists the gift economy debates,
via Karl Polanyi, with some new ideas thanks to the talks at the
WorldInfoCon, all in the hope of understanding networked
mobilizations. Plenty of things for nettimers to disagree with
anyway! -- BH.]"

"The Revenge of the Concept:

Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance"

Brian Holmes

Since June 18, 1999, I have been involved in a networked resistance
to the globalization of capital. This resistance has been
inextricably connected to art. It has taken me from London to Prague,
from Quebec City to Genoa and Florence. It has given me an interest
in experimental uses of advanced technology, like the Makrolab
project. It has pushed me to explore new organizational forms, like
the research network developed by Multiplicity. It has encouraged me
to support cross-border solidarity movements, like Kein Mensch ist
illegal. And it has resulted in collaborations with Bureau d'Ètudes,
in their attempts to map out the objective structures of contemporary
capitalism. But the experience of the movement of movements has also
led me to ask a subjective question. What are the sources of this
networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is
revolution really the only option? Or are we not becoming what we
believe we are resisting? Are the "multitudes" the very essence and
driving force of capitalist globalization, as some theorists believe?
To look deeper into this question, consider the work of Anthony
Davies and Simon Ford, who observed how artistic practice was being
integrated to the finance economy of London during the late 1990s.
These critics pointed to the establishment of convergence zones,
"culture clubs" sponsored by private enterprise and the state. In
these clubs, so-called "culturepreneurs" could seek new forms of
sponsorship for their ideas, while businessmen sought clues on how to
restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative teams
of creative, autonomous individuals. Basing themselves on the new
culture clubs, Davies and Ford claimed that "we are witnessing the
birth of an alliance culture that collapses the distinctions between
companies, nation states, governments, private individuals - even the
protest movement." For unlike most commentators from the mainstream
artworld, these two critics had immediately identified a relation
between the activism of the late 1990s and contemporary forms of
artistic practice. But what they saw in this new activism was the
expression of a conflict between the "old" and the "new" economy:

"Demonstrations such as J18 represent new types of conflict and
contestation. On the one hand you have a networked coalition of
semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the hierarchical command and
control structure of the City of London police force. Informal
networks are also replacing older political groups based on formal
rules and fixed organisational structures and chains of command. The
emergence of a decentralised transnational network-based protest
movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that are
slow in shifting from local and centralised hierarchical
bureaucracies to flat, networked organisations."

The alliance theory of Davies and Ford combines the notion of a
network paradigm, promoted by people like Manuel Castells, with an
anthropological description of the culturalization of the economy, as
in British cultural studies. But what they portray is more like an
"economization of culture." In fact their network theory draws no
significant distinction between contemporary protest groups and the
most advanced forms of capitalist organization. As they conclude: "In
a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and
'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen
their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense
with tangible centres, the oppositionality that has characterised
previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful
model."

These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already
quite confusing for the movement. But they took on an even more
troubling light when the Al Quaeda network literally exploded into
world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness
of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked
paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon
and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could now
be called "oppositional," it was that of the Islamic fundamentalists.
Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory of a
decisive transformation in organizational structures, and Samuel
Huntington's culturalist theory of the "clash of civilizations."
Suddenly the protest movement could identify neither with the
revolutionary form of the network, nor with the oppositional refusal
of the capitalist system. Loud voices from the right immediately
seized the opportunity to assimilate the movement to terrorism. And
to make matters worse, the financial collapse the movement had
predicted effectively happened, from the summer of 2000 onwards,
casting suspicion over everything associated with the dot-com bubble
and making it easier for society at large to accept the policing of
electronic communication, whose formerly inflated prestige
drastically plummeted. The difficulty of situating a networked
resistance to capitalism within a broader spectrum of social forces
became enormous -- as it still is today.

Now, this difficulty has not stopped the mobilizations. What has come
to a halt, or rather, splintered into a state of extreme dispersal,
are the theoretical attempts to explain them in a way that can
contribute something to their capacities of self-organization. What I
want to do here is to make a fresh try at this kind of explanation,
from the viewpoint of an economic anthropology that specifically
distinguishes between the market and what we call "culture." From
this viewpoint I will try to show why a resistance to capitalism has
arisen, how this resistance operates in a networked society, and
where art fits into it. Now, if you are specifically interested in
the field of art, the gain you may expect at the end of this
reflection is an understanding of the way that conceptual practice
has come to have its full effect -- or to take its revenge -- in the
context of a networked society. But I hope this understanding will
also help you to realize that the promise of contemporary art can
only be fulfilled outside the institutional frame that specifies it,
and claims to separate it from its cultural context. I think it would
be interesting, in a show about "geography" and "mobility," to ask
about the most productive relations that could be maintained between
a museum and artistic practices whose destination lies outside.

I.

Let's begin with some considerations of the subjective reasons why a
networked resistance to globalization has arisen in the Western
societies. It is well known that we are increasingly coming beneath
the gaze of an intensifying surveillance regime. The most obvious
example is DARPA -- the American military entity that created the
Internet. They are now interested in things like "bio surveillance,"
"human ID at a distance," "translingual information detection,"
"evidence extraction and link discovery," "future mapping" (for which
they want to use "market techniques"), and the so-called "Genoa
program," which aims at a better fit between human beings and
machines, providing "the means to rapidly and seamlessly cut across --
and complement -- existing stove-piped hierarchical organizational
structures by creating dynamic, adaptable, peer-to-peer collaborative
networks." Here, at the cutting edge of military surveillance, you
have a program for a networked repression, integrating humans into a
machinic web.

These innovations in military technology have been extensively
covered by exhibitions like World Information. There has also been a
large mobilization by No Border against at least one police database,
the Schengen Information System in Strasbourg; and a very interesting
map on the subject was done by Bureau d'Ètudes, under the title
Refuse the Biopolice. What is not so well understood is the fact that
many of these surveillance systems have been implemented for years,
particularly in the workplace, with the omnipresence of CCTV cameras,
radio tracking badges, workstation monitors, telephone service
observation, remote vehicle monitoring, etc. And even less apparent
is the way this coercive surveillance is mirrored, as it were, by
data gathering techniques which have adapted military technology to
the job of building profiles on one's individual desire, so as to
inform product design, targeted advertising, consumer architecture,
etc. So-called "one-segment" marketing companies such as
KnowledgeBase sell detailed lists of individuals with specifically
catagorized "consumer attitudes." They also offer "Digital
Neighborhood" lists, where, as they say, "we combined online
intelligence gleaned from click stream data with demographic,
lifestyle and transaction data from our AmeriLINKÆ national consumer
database to segment consumers into clusters that describe their
digital behavior -- not just what they are doing online but why they
are using this channel." This behavior-specific information is
supposed to guide retailers to "the best ways to develop an
e-relationship (or not!) with each segment." As the authors of The
Harvard Guide to Shopping explains, "the aim is no longer to control
the consumer, but to follow his every whim with perfect flexibility."

"Flexibility" is the key word. Elsewhere I have theorized the
development of the "flexible personality," whereby the quest for
personal development and unique experience, carried out by
individuals employed within loosely networked structures, serves to
mask the intensified exploitation of a so-called "flexible" labor
force. With this concept, I wanted to show the ways that creatives in
the semiotic economy -- including the so-called "culturepreneurs" --
actually participate in the new regime of domination. In effect,
labor patterns, managerial techniques and consumer desire are all
being mobilized under increasingly tight regimes of monitoring and
control, guided from a distance by the imperatives of transnational
financial speculation. What we are seeing in this process of
mobilization is an economization of subjectivity -- ushering human
existence into the accelerating circuits of networked capitalism, and
over-coding every form of behavior with a monetary calculus. Now, I
don't want to reiterate all the details of that argument, but rather
to suggest that there are limits to the flexible personality. Perhaps
our first consciousness of them in the affluent societies comes
through the intensification of the surveillance regime; but
ultimately they are anthropological, they have to do with humanity's
very capacity for survival, for self-reproduction. To understand them
we shall have to take a detour through the work of Karl Polanyi, an
economic anthropologist who in 1944 published a book called The Great
Transformation.

II.

Polanyi's concern was to explain the collapse of the free-market
economy in the early twentieth century. He begins by establishing the
coordinating role that international financiers, or so-called haute
finance, had played in ensuring the century of relative peace that
lasted up to 1914. "Independent of single governments, even of the
most powerful, [haute finance] was in touch with all; independent of
the central banks, even of the Bank of England, it was closely
connected with them," he explains. The paradigmatic example is the
international banking firm constituted in the late eighteenth century
by Nathan Rothschild and his four sons: "The Rothschilds were subject
to no one government; as a family they embodied the abstract
principle of internationalism; their loyalty was to a firm, the
credit of which had become the only supranational link between
political government and industrial effort in a swiftly growing world
economy. In the last resort, their independence sprang from the needs
of the time, which demanded a sovereign agent commanding the
confidence of national statesmen and of the international investor
alike." The system of haute finance, coordinating national values
through the universal equivalent of gold, allowed for the functioning
of a world economy whose benefits, in turn, were a powerful argument
for peace -- or at least, a powerful argument against any conflict on
a scale large enough to disrupt international trade. The gradual
abandonment of the system, culminating in 1933 when the United States
went off the gold standard, then led to the organization of purely
national economies characterized by large, integrated industrial
conglomerates, which could find a positive interest in the unleashing
of war.

It is dizzying to consider the contemporary role of the American
dollar, or more precisely, of the negotiated balance between the yen,
the euro and the dollar, as the guarantor of peace and prosperity in
what Rem Koolhaas calls "the world of YES." The yen, euro and dollar
signs form the symbolic language of exchange under globalization,
which has abandoned the stability of gold for the fluctuating
balances of a computer-linked value-system. But I would like to
confront the flexible world of YES with Polanyi's basic thesis as to
reasons for collapse of the entire laissez-faire system in the 1930s.
For his argument is that the basis of this system -- the notion of a
self-regulating market, the "magic of the marketplace" that dazzled
the world again in the 1980s -- was actually a fiction. In reality,
the exchanges of the self-regulating market depended on social
institutions foreign to it, institutions which its operations would
ultimately tear apart. The Great Transformation retraces the gradual
destruction the cultural institutions of exchange into which the
natural environment, human production, and the various national
monetary systems themselves were embedded. Land, labor and money --
the symbolic language of exchange -- were reduced to the status of
commodities, to be bought and sold on markets regulated by short-term
profit. The result of market-governed exchange was to wreck the
patterns of reciprocity that had made it possible for society to
reproduce itself over time. The fascism of the 1930s, in Polanyi's
explanation, was a failed and disastrous effort to restore these
institutional balances.

Now, the point I want to make will become obvious when you consider
that in the late 1990s, the desperate attempt to maintain the
exchange value of the Argentine peso against the international
standard represented by the US dollar and the currencies of ?§$ led
to the exclusion of increasing numbers of Argentineans from access to
work, to food and basic services, and then even to their own money,
when limits were placed on the possibility of bank withdrawals. The
reproduction of society became impossible in neoliberal Argentina.
This ultimately resulted in an insurrection which has paralyzed the
Argentine state. Of course, Argentina is the most extreme case so far
of the social disaster wrought by the dominance of the
self-regulating market. But to return to the question of the flexible
personality, I think the artistic insurrections against neoliberalism
in Europe and North America can be understood as advance reactions
against the imposition of a market-based regulation upon subjectivity
itself. This is why the notions of freedom, gratuity and of the gift
economy are so prominent in the movement, to the point where they
seem to form its specific culture. To give things away at the
demonstrations is a way to publicly reinstate other patterns of
exchange, while opposing the dominance of money. And these kinds of
give-aways, like potlatch itself, are not only extraordinarily
playful. For example, a scathing satire of the language of YES was
carried out by the group known precisely as the Yes Men, when they
posed as the WTO to offer a neoliberal solution to world famine. They
suggested that the poorest countries could commercialize hamburgers,
which indeed were being given away to the audience as they spoke; the
meat, they said, could be recycled as many as ten times through the
use of a cheap, charitable defecation filter, a so-called "Personal
Dietary Assistant" (PDA)... Finally they intimated that the modern
food business could even learn something from the Aztecs, who had
found an ingenious way to supplement the lack of protein in their
diet - by sacrificing their neighbors! Could there be a more precise
analogy for the life-destructive nature of the neoliberal economy?

Rarely have the protests attained such extremes of black humor. But
the networked resistance continually theatricalizes Polanyi's basic
insight, that economic exchange is embedded within cultural patterns
of reciprocity. And this theater, the entire carnavalesque dimension
that is so characteristic, is clearly a way of reaching back or
forward to a culture that cannot be identified with capitalism. The
idea would seem to be confirmed by the important place that
indigenous cultures hold in the mythology of the counterglobalization
movement, such as the Mayans of Chiapas or the Ogoni tribes facing up
to the transnational oil companies in Nigeria. What then should we
make of Manuel Castells' opposition of the Net and the Self, of
progressive mobility and regressive identity as two contradictory
figures of the contemporary world? Or again, what then should one
make of Toni Negri's notion of the real subsumption of labor by
capital -- that means, the penetration of all the aspects of life by
the processes of extraction, circulation and accumulation of abstract
value -- whereby market-based exchanges effectively bring all other
social relationships beneath their transformatory empire? What I
think is that the real subsumption of traditional culture by
capitalist relations of production almost immediately creates an
imperious need to invent new forms of non-monetary exchange, so as to
escape from the constrictive and sterile realm of pure commodity
relations. Therefore the Net is always accompanied by figures of the
Self, and a progressive, mobile subjectivity seeking to reinvent
patterns of exchange always feels a kinship with the bearers of
ancient cultures, who in the case of the Zapatistas at least, and
probably in very many cases, do not cultivate the regressive identity
that Castells suggests, but instead try actively to transform their
traditional heritage into something emancipatory in the present.

All of which is not to say, of course, that regressive mentalities do
not exist in the contemporary world. The stock market crash of the
year 2000, and the continuing menace of deflation that haunts the
world's leaders and financial elite today, combines with the
manipulated resurgence of archaic social forms to paint an
increasingly ugly and depressing picture which no one can ignore. My
own belief is that the continuing imposition of networked capitalism,
backed up increasingly by military force as the symbolic language of
money loses its ability to integrate the world system, is going to
bring up waves of violent resistance whose nature we cannot really
understand from out positions here in the Western world. But although
these realities clearly exist, what I want to do right now is not to
talk extensively about them, but rather to look first at the
technological, and then at the specifically artistic conditions of
exchanges that do not depend on the universal equivalency of
globalization's floating currencies.

III.

It is clear that "the oppositionality that has characterised previous
forms of protest and resistance" is in no way "finished as a useful
model." On the other hand, the oppositional energies I have been
pointing to are very much entangled in networks, and even
specifically electronic ones. Now I will discuss the way that these
networks operate outside capitalist forms of exchange.

It is well known that the Linux operating-system kernel, and free
software generally, is made cooperatively without any money changing
hands. This is something that quickly caught the attention of artists
and culture critics, with the result that in the early days of
Nettime, for instance, there were a lot of discussions about the
"high-tech gift economy," to use Richard Barbrook's phrase, or about
"Cooking-Pot Markets," to quote Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. Behind these
discussions one occasionally catches a glimpse of an anthropologist,
not Polanyi, but a figure of even greater importance: Marcel Mauss,
author of the famous essay on The Gift. As Barbrook points out, Mauss
was a living presence, his ideas having inspired the Situationists,
who passed them on to the do-it-yourself media ethic of the Punk
movement. But mostly what fueled the discussion of the Internet gift
economy was the actual practice of adding information to the net. As
Ghosh writes, "the economy of the Net begins to look like a vast
tribal cooking-pot, surging with production to match consumption,
simply because everyone understands -- instinctively, perhaps -- that
trade need not occur in single transactions of barter, and that one
product can be exchanged for millions at a time. The cooking-pot
keeps boiling because people keep putting in things as they
themselves, and others, take things out."

Today, with the popular explosion of Napster, Gnutella, and other
peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, these debates over the high-tech
gift economy are quite well-known indeed. Less well-known, because of
a denial which is characteristic of economic liberalism, is the fact
that non-monetary models of exchange have been operating on a very
large scale for as long as one can remember, for instance in the
realm of academic publishing, where information is shared not for
monetary value but for the recognition it brings -- which itself is at
least partially dependent on the feeling of contributing something to
humanity or truth. Recently, an author named Yochai Benkler has taken
the twin examples of free software and academic publishing as a
foundation on which to build a general theory of what he calls
"commons-based peer production," by which he means non-proprietary
informational or cultural production, based on materials which are
extremely low cost or inherently free. This ownerless, voluntary form
of production depends, in his words, "on very large aggregations of
individuals independently scouring their information environment in
search of opportunities to be creative in small or large increments.
These individuals then self-identify for tasks and perform them for
complex motivational reasons." Benkler's problem, however, unlike
Polanyi's or Mauss's, is not so much describing the reasons for
motivation, as the organizational and technological conditions that
make this self-motivated scouring of the informational environment
possible.

Benkler identifies four attributes of the networked information
economy that favor commons-based peer production. First, the fact
that information serves as an inexhaustible or indestructible raw
material for products which share the same characteristics. Second,
the cost of production equipment, high in the era of the printing
press, has become low in the age of the personal computer. Third,
creative inspiration, the main input to information production, is
notoriously hard to identify by anyone except the individual who
experiences it. Fourth, distribution of the results has become
extremely cheap. Under these conditions, quite complex tasks can be
imagined, divided into small modules, and thrown out into the public
realm where individuals will self-identify their competency to meet
any given challenge. The only remaining requirement for large scale
production is to be able to perform quality checks and integrate all
the individual modules with relatively low effort into a completed
whole -- but these tasks, it often turns out, can also be done on a
distributed basis. The fact that all of this is possible, and
actually happening today, allows Benkler to contradict Ronald Coase's
classic theory, and make the claim that commons-based peer production
has joined the market and the firm as one of the viable ways for
organizing and coordinating human production. And this is a very
large claim, because it means that there is a productive economy
outside the two major organizing devices of capitalism as we know it.

Now, the examples Benkler uses to prove the existence of voluntarily
organized large-scale cultural production are nethead favorites like
the Wikipedia encyclopedia project, the slashdot technews site, the
Kuro5hin text-editing site, and so on -- basically situations where
publicly available text plus creativity produces publicly available
text. But perhaps it is more existentially, socially and even
visually impressive to consider the peer-production of recent
networked demonstrations, where publicly available text and
perception about the increasingly deplorable state of our shared
world, plus human conviction, solidarity, creativity and courage are
able to touch off huge collective performances, media irruptions,
social and political crises, and of course, more publicly available
texts, as well as reverberating memories of shared experience.

So -- if you're willing to concede that something like the networked
demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank in Prague in
September of the year 2000 are perhaps not more noble, but anyway
more socially and visually impressive than Wikipedia, then I shall
have to ask you to imagine about 15 thousand people from all around
the Western world self-selecting and self-motivating themselves for
the volunteer tasks of informing each other in advance, of traveling
across Europe to meet at specific dates, and then upon arrival,
preparing a convergence center, a counter-summit, a festival of
resistance, a networked media unit, and above all, a massive and
successful direct-action demo, which itself was self-organized into
three different sections, namely: the blue line, which went to tangle
with the cops; the yellow line, which went to block an important
bridge with a very peculiar kind of theater; and the pink line,
which went to blow people's minds and basically show them that
anything is possible, including getting into the conference center
and stopping the meeting. I think if you have the chance to look at
the different kinds of actions undertaken by the different lines,
you'll realize two things: first of all, that making the right
decisions about what kind of module you're up to working on is quite
important, and second, that the sheer fact of redundancy -- I mean,
lots of people working on the same module -- does in fact help get
over the problem of those little mistakes some people make about what
they really can accomplish.

Now, if it's still possible to be serious about such kooky events,
then there's just one more thing I'd like to say, in terms of
Benkler's thesis about peer production being a new possibility for
human organization. That one thing is that the Global Days of Action
in which I have been involved, far from being the random, violent
mass events that are portrayed in the media, are in fact among the
most complex, intelligent and creative social productions that I
know, precisely because of their self-organization. The research of
the Multiplicity group, in particular, has gone a long way towards
showing how complex and innovative these kinds of self-organization
can be, and how far they escape previously known categories. I would
only add that situations like these demonstrations, where conflict is
expected over very high stakes, seem to take self-organization to yet
higher levels of complexity, creativity and effective realization.
This is a politics of mobility, which has begun to operate at a world
scale. And the kinds of exchanges that take place during these events
-- of ideas, images, gestures, cultures and solidarities -- are very
intriguing indeed, for those who believe that cultural innovation
must now take place outside the established institutions.

IV.

Finally I will try to use some of the familiar terms of the art world
to talk about the relationship between concept and performance, as a
cultural exchange within the networked resistance to capitalism. It
is well known that conceptual art was a failure. The "escape
strategies" that Lucy Lippard talks about, in her famous book on The
Dematerialization of the Object of Art, were intended to free artists
from dependency on the gallery-magazine-museum circuit as their sole
means of distribution. But the escape led at best from
market-oriented New York to the museums of Europe. And even that was
only a detour. In 1973, Seth Siegelaub said in an interview:
"Conceptual art, more than all previous types of art, questions the
fundamental nature of art. Unhappily, the question is strictly
limited to the exclusive domain of the fine arts. There is still the
potential of it authorizing an examination of all that surrounds art,
but in reality, conceptual artists are dedicated only to exploring
avant-garde aesthetic problems.... Unhappily, the economic pattern
associated with conceptual art is remarkably similar to that of other
artistic movements: to purchase a work cheap and resell it at a high
price. In short, speculation." Lucy Lippard, for her part, wrote in
1973 that the "ghetto mentality predominant in the narrow and
incestuous art world... with its reliance on a very small group of
dealers, curators, editors and collectors who are all too frequently
and often unknowingly bound by invisible apron strings to the 'real
world's' power structures... make[s] it unlikely that conceptual art
will be any better equipped to affect the world any differently than,
or even as much as, its less ephemeral counterparts."

These admissions of defeat are well known. But it is also very
intriguing that quite recently, another history of conceptual art has
been coming back to light. It is a history that unfolds in Latin
America, and particularly in Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires
and Rosario. It would seem that here, in the context of an
authoritarian government and under the pressure of American cultural
imperialism, conceptual art could only be received, or indeed,
invented, as an invitation to act antagonistically within the
mass-media sphere, which had already been thematized as an artistic
medium by Argentine pop. The most characteristic project in this
respect was no doubt Tucum·n Arde, or "Tucum·n is Burning," realized
in 1968. A group of some 30 Rosario artists researched the social
conditions in the province of Tucum·n, carrying out an analysis of
all the mass-media coverage of the region that was currently
available, and going out themselves to gather first-hand information
and to document the situation using photography and film. They then
staged a traveling exhibition that was explicitly designed to feed
their work back into the national media, so as to counter the
propaganda of the government which had shut down the entire
sugar-cane industry in the province, and was now trying to paint an
idyllic picture of a region which in reality was wracked by poverty
and intense labor struggles. In this way, the artists sought to work
oppositionally within the media sphere, insofar as that sphere
directly affects social reality.

Now, to understand the differences from today, you must realize that
Tucum·n Arde was done with the support of the Argentine CGT, that is,
a labor union, and that the exhibition was shown in union halls. In
other words, to obtain the funding and distribution of work that
would not be supported by the market, the Rosario group had to
collaborate with a bureaucratic structure, which despite being
"workerist" is essentially an outgrowth of the capitalist firm. This
is where Benkler's central remark, about the possibility of peer
production emerging only when the relevant equipment is widely
dispersed and densely interconnected, takes on its full significance
for a contemporary practice of conceptual art. The communications and
transportation network of today is the precondition for the revenge
of the concept. But the Rosario group's relation to the CGT prompts
another remark, which is that after the anti-bureaucratic revolt of
the New Left in the Northern countries, from 1968 onward, it has
become practically impossible social movements, let alone artists, to
collaborate with bureaucratic structures, such as parties, unions,
etc. This is why the revolution must now be a do-it-yourself affair,
and why the concepts that work are those that can be freely
actualized, by each participant, as a political performance. To roll
it up in a phrase: "the revenge of the concept = do-it-yourself
geopolitics."

This is about to bring us full circle, back to June 18th, 1999. First
I'd like tell you that an important share of the preparation for the
London performance of this global street party and carnival against
capitalism was done by artists. They were apparently the ones who
pointed to the LIFFE building, the London International Financial
Futures Exchange, as a perfect instance and symbol of globalized
finance capitalism. Because they had read extensively about
Situationism and been part of its prolongations in England, they were
sure that a spontaneous mass action could succeed in a district where
large, sophisticated modern buildings were laid out on a medieval
street plan. Because they were Joseph Beuys freaks, they were very
curious about the fact that a natural river still flowed beneath all
the steel and stone of the street where the LIFFE building is
located. And because they were contemporary artists, they knew that
what they had to do was to throw out ideas and metaphors and images,
amid a group of many more people doing the same, and then work
further with the ones that would start coming back to them,
transformed. To exemplify that, it seems that the idea of a global
street party rapidly went around the world, passing from person to
person through various networks, and was eventually sent back to
people at London Reclaim the Streets by someone in Buenos Aires,
saying this is a great idea, you should really work on this!

To see how well the frozen vocabularies of conceptual and performance
art in the museum applies to this outdoor art of concept and
performance, just look at this [or imagine the images!]:

- ATTITUDE: "Our resistance is as transnational as capital"

- FORM: Global street party

- AUTHOR: Crowd of protestors at the tube station

- SEMANTIC MATERIAL: the LIFFE building

- PERFORMANCE ACCESSORY: A golden mask

- INFORMATION: Text on the mask, describing carnival possibilities

- THEATRICALIZATION OF PUBLIC SPACE: People dancing in the street

- RELATIONAL ART: Couple kissing under the spouting fire hydrant

- SOCIAL CRITIQUE: A rear guard of protestors fighting the police

- MEDIA INFILTRATION: FT headline: Anti-Capitalists Lay Seige to London

- TRACES: Smoke over St. Paul's catherdral,br>
- DOCUMENTATION: RTS webpage showing global map of J18 actions

(It's important that this documentation, rather than just being some
kind of contemplative archive, actually helped inspire people to do
what they did in Seattle about six months later...).

V.

In conclusion, I'd like to both agree and disagree with Eric
Kluitenberg, who, by drawing on Manuel Castells, has written a
suggestive essay on what he calls "the negative dialectics of the
net." In phrases which seem like a contemporary echo of the ideas of
the Argentinean pop and conceptual artists of the sixties, he
explains:

"The logic of the digital network now informs all dominant aspects of
society. This fact on the one hand marks the end of the virtual, a
sphere that has become completely intertwined with the real world. At
the same time, however, every significant social interaction can only
become meaningful by virtue of how it is mapped in the digital
domain."

What this means is that if artistic resistance is now entangled in
the networks, it is because the networks are thoroughly entangled in
the real, just as television has been since its massive deployment in
the 1950s, or radio since the 1930s. Yet whereas television, like
radio, could only be very imperfectly made into a medium for art, the
real virtuality of computer networks has been far more open to
autonomous uses, which are in fact able to defy the systemic aspects
of the channels they invest. Thus Kluitenberg writes: "In this
paradoxical environment, dominant discourses of social, political and
economic power can be challenged at the level of the representational
systems they employ. The classical avant-gardes provide a repository
of ideas, tactics and strategies that are now played out in a
radically enlarged context; no longer the context of art itself, but
that of the network society."

I see it pretty much that way. The interest of a cartography of
contemporary capitalism, for instance, is to break the frame, not of
art, but of domination as it is exercised over society. But I have to
add something: if the strategies of vanguard art can function in this
"paradoxical environment," it is precisely because they have given up
vanguard privilege, or perhaps more exactly, extended it in a kind of
potlatch that destroys it. It is the capacity to actualize the
virtual - what I have so far called "performance" -- that destroys the
privilege of any vanguard. And this capacity springs from an
anthropological level of resistance to domination about which there
is still everything to be learned.

For it is clear that "round one" of the revenge of the concept is now
over. For three reasons. On is that the initial form of media
penetration no longer works: it has succeeded in publicly identifying
the illegitimacy of the transnational institutions -- a major victory.
But what we have seen since Genoa is nonetheless a containment
strategy that successfully minimizes and distorts the media coverage.
Second, and more importantly no doubt, the operative limits of the
initial discovery of self-organization in transnational space have
also been reached; and the "multitudes" must learn deeper forms of
coordination, without giving into the representative fallacy that
looks to create a new political party, ripe for absorption and
neutralization. But finally there is the question of enlarging the
struggle, and learning from those who bear the brunt of capitalist
exploitation today, in a moment of impending Imperial war and
devastation. All of the people touched by the emergence of new
capacities for self-organization, for cultural production outside the
frameworks of the market and the firm, will have to decide, in a
thousand different and very diffuse ways, whether they want to go
further, whether they want to actualize an understanding of what life
is like, and of what resistance means -- outside the spheres of
privilege which are insured by contemporary capitalism.