hydrarchist posts:

("Those of you who were at the No Border camp in Strasbourg last
summer, or at the Hub in Florence during the ESF, probably received a
copy of the maps made by Bureau d'Etudes with collaboration from
several others (including myself). You can find one example at
http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html. To give background on the
projects and their relation both to art practices and political aims,
I wrote this text for "Geography and the Politics of Mobility,"
an upcoming expo in Vienna (info below). I'll also be raising some
methodology questions at World Information this Friday morning in
Amsterdam." -- BH)

"Maps for the Outside:

Bureau d'Etudes, or the Revenge of the Concept"

Brian Holmes

The closure of the gallery space is a classic conceptual gesture.
Witness this proposal by Robert Barry: "My exhibition at the Art &
Project Gallery in Amsterdam in December, '69, will last two weeks. I
asked them to lock the door and nail my announcement to it, reading:
'For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.'(1) Conceptual art
can be defined, not simply as the refusal of the commodified object
and the specialized art system, but as an active signage pointing to
the outside world, conceived as an expanded field for experimental
practices of intimacy, expression and collaboration -- indeed, for the
transformation of social reality. (2)

Thirty-two years later, in October-December 2001, the French
group Bureau d'Etudes reiterated the gesture, sealing off the
exhibition space of Le Spot, a converted industrial building in the
port city of Le Havre. Instead of a simple sign, they confronted the
visitor with a book, Juridic Park, which upon closer inspection
proved to be a detailed set of maps to the "legal subsoil" of the
city. But these maps, like the more recent cartographic projects, do
not simply embrace the outside of one of modernity's specialized
subsystems. Rather they detail the proliferating closures of a
totally administered society, where almost every square inch of
terrain is strictly codified for exclusive, proprietary uses.
The name of the group, "Bureau d'Etudes," denotes an expert
consultancy, a study office for technical research. Theirs is an
intensely precise apprehension of the world, shot through with
flashes of dark humor. But their work in its broadest dimensions is
also the foundation, or perhaps the springboard, for an antagonistic
utopia.

Beginnings

In 1998, with the exhibition Archives du Capitalisme, Bureau d'Etudes
started producing organizational charts showing the proprietary
relations between financial funds, government agencies, banks and
industrial firms. A number of these graphic charts, or "organigrams,"
were deployed as part of an installation including black-and-white
photographs of heads propped up on wooden pickets (presumably CEOs),
as well as a scale model of a proposed new parliament building, to
articulate the voting rights of those with real power in today's
society. The exhibition was an autonomous project in an artist-run
space, at the time called the "Faubourg," in the city of Strasbourg.
For a subsequent show entitled Le Capital, mounted by Nicolas
Bourriaud in the city of Sete, an organigram detailing the relations
between the French state and a panoply of major transnational
corporations was blown up to wall size. Squares and rectangles of
varying proportions, each identified with a name (Societe Generale,
Dresdner Bank, Mitsubishi, Pirelli, etc.) were connected with a
labyrinth of elaborately traced channels, printed in black against a
white ground. The result was something like an all-over painting for
the computer and finance-obsessed 1990s: an aesthetics of
information. In other words, one of the historical failure-points of
what has been called "conceptual art."

Sooner or later, artists working on the analysis and
transformation of social reality must face the obvious question: How
to escape the formats, publics and modes of exchange that are offered
by the gallery-magazine-museum system? The answer is a gradual
process, a social and psychic experiment. Invited to a group
exhibition for which, as usual, they would not be paid, Bureau
d'Etudes responded by creating a "zone de gratuite," Free Land, where
treasures and all kinds of junk could be deposited and taken away
without the intermediary of money. The experiment of the free zone
was pursued in a gallery/living space in Paris, where theoretical
curiosity and the more practical prospect of something-for-nothing
drew a variegated public. Expanding on the question of the artist's
real social status in an age of casual labor and mass
intellectuality, Bureau d'Etudes worked with Alejandra Riera, Andreas
Fohr and Jorge Alyskewycz to launch the "Syndicat Potentiel" or
"Potential Union," a proto-political association addressed to
intellectual and cultural producers whose aspirations take them
outside all professional categories. The key ideas here came from the
French anarchist traditions, but also from theories of the gift
economy, developed by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and reworked by
French social critics after the great strikes of 1995, in an era of
structural unemployment. (3) Among the first co-operators were the
group Plus tot te laat, from Brussels -- jobless artists who had
occupied an unemployment bureau, transforming it into a center of
expression and reflection on the meanings of work in contemporary
society. Such reflections in turn led to increasing proximity with
the squatters' movements, whether in France, Italy or Germany. From
these beginnings, Syndicat Potentiel grew into an open-ended frame
for intimate and networked collaborations, with the explicit goal of
producing autonomous counter-knowledge, oriented toward an economy of
_gratuite totale_ (in which basic services such as living space,
water, electricity, access to communications media, etc. would be
"totally free"). (4) The project continues today, giving its name to
the self-managed space in Strasbourg where the art group had produced
its earliest proposals.

Opportunities

It is against the almost invisible background of Syndicat Potentiel
and a parallel project, "Universite Tangente," that the recent
cartographic projects deserve to be understood. They came as an
unexpected, long-desired opportunity. The rupture of consensus
brought by the Global Days of Action, beginning in May of 1998,
served to galvanize the wider counter-globalization movement, through
innovative uses of the Internet as a worldwide distribution system
operated from below. A kind of autonomous, do-it-yourself
conceptualism began to emerge, whereby "attitudes become forms": an
idea or phrase arising in one locality (for instance, "Our Resistance
is as Transnational as Capital") becomes a geographically distributed
political performance (the "Global Street Parties" against the annual
G8 reunions). (5) In perfect accord with Lawrence Weiner's famous
dictums, the work could be carried out by the initial authors of the
ideas, realized by others, or not done at all -- something like a
taste of planetary exchange, where the "art" is "totally free."
Even as these protest forces emerged on a large scale --
mapping out the power structures of globalization with their feet, as
it were -- the rise of the information society and the deregulating
thrust of neoliberalism had made it possible for relatively small,
highly mobile groups to appropriate and use advanced technologies,
acting upon extremely sophisticated visions of the world. Yet these
new possibilities for the application of specialized research were
not immediately visible in France, due to language barriers, a
pitifully conservative art scene, and critical discourses dominated
by the aging communist professors of Attac. Perhaps it was as late as
December 2001, with massive protests at the EU summit in nearby
Brussels, that the potential for a more active distribution of the
antagonistic maps became clear. Further institutional projects, at La
Box in the city of Bourges, then at Kunst-Werk in Berlin, served as
occasions for the initial production of graphic charts in large print
runs, for broad distribution. These helped prepare the knowledge and
the skill-sets needed for two autonomous, collaborative productions,
both printed in thousands of copies for specific activist events:
Refuse the Biopolice, for the No Border Camp in Strasbourg in July
2002, and European Norms of World-Production, for the meetings of the
European Social Forum in Florence in November of that same year.
This delayed access to the counter-globalization movements
meant that the antagonist maps, with their extraordinary complexity
of analysis, have come at the right time -- after the initial
breakthroughs of the first period of dissent met their enforced
pacification and partial neutralization, as a consequence of the
violence unleashed by the police riot in Genoa. Both these maps
present an excess of information, shattering subjective certainties
and demanding reflection, demanding a new gaze on the world that we
really live in. These are synoptic visions of the contemporary,
transnational version of state capitalism, as constructed "by
collusion between specific individuals, transnational corporations,
governments, interstate agencies and 'civil society' groups." (6)
They make visible the institutional patterns that have structured
themselves in an overarching, terrifyingly abstract space, almost
totally beyond the grasp of the democratic counter-powers formerly
exercised within the purview of the national states, and indeed,
almost totally invisible -- at least until recently when the
communicative possibilities have allowed a certain measure of
"cognitive mapping" to be performed by inhabitants. (7)
Refuse the Biopolice, focused on contemporary control
systems, also offers more detailed readings of the way that
surveillance and incarceration technologies are implemented for
profit by private firms, in collaboration with national and
interstate agencies. As for the map of European Norms, it
specifically charts the vast administrative structure that has arisen
around the bureaucratic European Commission, whose directorates,
innervated by the demands of corporate lobbies, produce the
"industrial standards, territorial models, ideological guidelines and
truth criteria" that help structure the production of a life-world --
a steel-and concrete form of continental integration, vying with its
distorting mirror in North America. European Norms also presents the
interlocking structures of so-called "organized civil society," which
serves to legitimate the status quo; but at the same time, with the
lighter traceries of its mysterious, biomorphic front cover, devoted
to "inklings of autonomy," it presents the patterns and meshworks of
worldwide potentials for resistance.

These maps aspire to be cognitive tools, distributing as
broadly as possible the kind of specialized information that was
formerly confined to technical publications. Yet on another level
they are meant to act as subjective shocks, energy potentials,
informing the protest-performances as they are passed from hand to
hand, deepening the resolve to resist are they are utilized in common
or alone. In this sense it is the very closure of their intellectual
discipline, the rigor of their conceptual effort to depict a totally
administered world, that makes them maps for the outside, signs
pointing to a territory that cannot yet be fully signified, and that
will never be "represented" in the traditional ways. "Solidarity with
extraterrestrials" reads one such indication, in an almost empty
bubble at the lower left-hand corner of the cover of European Norms.

Perspectives

The acceleration of the last few years has been vertiginous, for
everyone. Today, the accumulated knowledge of recent projects and the
beginnings of a genuinely networked collaboration make it possible to
envision more strategically focused mapping projects. The three
studies presented in the catalogue of the Vienna show -- Info war, Bio
war, Psychic war -- respond to a need to grasp the fully military
strategies of legitimation and population control that have emerged
since 1989, with the end of the bipolar stasis predicated on the
madness of mutual "overkill." (8) Similarly, more limited and precise
maps of transnational state capitalism can now be imagined, attuned
more closely to the possibilities of the protest and direct-action
movements. Another perspective is the possible invention of a
computer database, with a visual interface allowing the user to
situate specific power-players within a nexus of supporting and
opposing relations. Much remains to be done.

In this light, the old dilemma of the relation to museum,
magazine and gallery structures fades toward insignificance. For the
tactical media underground in Europe, art shows offer useful research
deadlines, a chance to share ideas and critiques, at best some
production money -- and at worst, a damaging distraction. The revenge
of the concept has been to finally create parallel and alternative
circuits of experimentation, production, distribution, use and
interpretation. To be sure, these circuits are hardly consolidated --
but the best way to do so is to maintain other urgencies, which
cannot be treated within any of the specialized subsystems.
Perhaps one such urgency can be expressed as a question, for
artists and activists who must now address increasing levels of
confrontation in the world. The question runs like this: Is it still
possible to sublimate antagonistic conflicts into the pacifying
rituals of reasoned, agonistic debate? (9) Or in other words: Can
properly political relations be wrested from a totally administered
world?

Brian Holmes

This text will be published in the catalogue of the exhibition
curated by Ursula Biemann, "Geography -- and the Politics of
Mobility," at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, opening January 16,
2003. Participating groups: Frontera Sur RRTV, Raqs media collective,
Multiplicity, Makrolab, Bureau d'Etudes. A conference with further
participants will take place on Jan. 18.

Notes

[1] . See Robert Barry, Gallery Closing, Amsterdam, Art & Project,
December 17-31, Bulletin #17, in: Ursula Meyer, ed., Conceptual Art
(New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 41.

[2] . Thanks to Andreas Broeckman for pointing my browser to a Howard
Slater text that broadly supports this definition. See the opening
section of "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations -- Some Notes on
Political Conceptual Art," at Infopool

[3] . The journal M.A.U.S.S. ("Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les
sciences sociales") offers a look into some of the background ideas
informing the debates over value in France after 1995.

[4] . See the Syndicat Potentiel website
(syndicatpotentiel.free.fr) for a far more precise overview,
with texts on "gratuite totale" among many other subjects.

[5] . Those wishing to piece together the history of the Days of Global
Action may consult the websites of People's Global Action and London
Reclaim the Streets, among others.

[6] . The quote, from Refuse the Biopolice, applies to all the recent maps.

[7] . I refer to the famous phrase by Frederic Jameson, who in 1984
called for "an aesthetics of cognitive mapping" to resolve "the
incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global
multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find
ourselves caught as individual subjects." See his essay,
"Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," reprinted
in a book under the same name.

[8] . Anyone with doubts about the epochal shift in military strategy
after 1989 can consult John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's books, such
as Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy,
available as PDFs at Rand

[9] . The antagonistic/agonistic distinction comes from Chantal Mouffe
and Ernesto Laclau, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; those who get
bored reading dense books can listen to the video of Mouffe's talk at
the recent "Dark Markets" conference, available at http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at/video/mouffe.ram