"Politics of Desire in the New Economy. From the historical background to critical artistic and social movements in Spain" en Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad, n°19, 2015, pp. 80-92. (original) (raw)
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2015
Normal 0 21 false false false CA X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar procesos y discursos, historicos y contemporaneos, relacionados con la afectividad, las emociones y el deseo como elementos clave en la produccion social de subjetividades y en las dinamicas economicas. Su objetivo es explorar la correspondencia entre las primeras criticas a la modernidad y el modelo de nueva economia actual. Para ello, nos centraremos en la economia politica de las industrias creativas, en las que la produccion de deseo se entiende como un activo productivo y responde a la ultima reforma capitalista. Los casos de estudio visibilizaran como emergen ciertas comunidades criticas desde el campo artistico para cuestionar estos discursos hegemonicos y las condiciones laborales actuales, tanto del trabajador cultural como de otros tantos trabajadores desprotegidos. Las practicas de los diversos casos escogidos, pretenden mostrar como un conceptos alternativo...
The Critical Theory of Artistic Capitalism
This article takes up Lipovetsky`s discussion on artistic capitalism in "L'esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l'âge du capitalisme artiste", to trace its definitions and methodological construction, but also in order to create a critical theory of artistic capitalism, based on the following working-hypothesis: the production of art and the production of self, understood in the sense of a Foucauldian project of the aesthetics of existence, represent correspondent purposes in artistic capitalism. My research will be focused on examining previous attempts of developing such a critical inquiry, claimed by Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, and Luc Ferry. It is my thesis that the failure of a homogeneous critical theory of artistic capitalism is owed to different inconsistent interpretations of contaminating ethics with aesthetics in order to create an ideal of morality and authenticity for the existence of the individual inspired by contemporary techniques of art production, aspects that were conceived by Lipovetsky as parts of the process of the " aestheticization of the world " .
Schizoproduction: Artistic research and performance in the context of immanent capitalism
Acta Scenica, 2016
In the written part of my doctoral dissertation, I am presenting the artistic works and set them in a larger context, which I have entitled immanent capitalism. This is an artistic research, where the artworks, their processes or workshops produce knowledge, which will not be fully translatable to a written form. The artworks are performances, live-art projects and works on video. In the presentation of the context, I am presenting the transformation that has taken place starting from the industrialism and modernism, and which have recently been incorporated with new forms of labour and economy. These forms are often referred as cognitive capitalism, affective labour, post-Fordism and neoliberal market economy. I am presenting this context in relation with artistic practice and such concepts or phenomena as trauma, relationality, affect and neuroplasticity. The starting point and the hub of my research are schizoanalysis, which was developed by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean Oury. In my research I am regarding schizoanalysis in relation with the economy, artistic practice and the paradigmatic change of forms of labour. At the end of the written part, I reflect artistic practice and the artistic works with in relation to immanent capitalism. I present a critique toward the presumed hegemony of capitalism from the point of view of artistic research and I am giving an argument counter to the philosophical assertions of schizoanalysis. In this way, my intention is to produce models for thinking and practice, where artistic practice and research may adhere a function of a critical tool against the presumed immanence of capitalism. The written part has a form of an architectonical drawing of a building, which has two floors. At first, I give a cross-section of the structure, which is followed by the first ‘floor’. In the first floor I present the starting points and question for my performance art practice and artistic research, and this floor includes the description of the artistic works and the processes, which are related with this research in chronological order. The works, which are presented here are: Loop Variation (2008), Tell me about your machines (2012), Life in Bytom (2012), The Astronomer: Experiment (2013) and finally a description of the project Man-a-machine: schizoproduction (2014). In the second floor, I am presenting the theoretical discourses of the research. It begins from the presentation of the conjunction with industrialism, avant-garde and the concept of trauma, which follows a presentation of the relationship between the immaterial labour, artistic practice, relationality and the concepts of affect and neuroplasticity. This part concludes with a presentation of the schizoanalytic practice and theory. The third part is called Foyer, in which I will provide a critical argument both towards the theoretical apparatus presented above and towards my artistic practice and the projects, also. I will present the intricate conjunction between the schizoproduction and immanent capitalism, the function of a heretical practice in artistic practice, the relation between knowledge and knowing and I will conclude in the critique of relationality, processuality and co-operation. In my argument, these three concepts are essentially connected with the philosophy of immanent capitalism. At the end of the written part of my doctoral dissertation, I conclude with a arguments on the possibility for departure, exit or heresy through artistic practice in the context of immanent capitalism.
Revista Karpa, 2008
Cabaret is a genre well known for its playfulness, irony, ambiguity, and parody. Furthermore, cabaret has been and continues to be a tool through which artists express poignant criticism of their societies. Mexican cabaret has a rich tradition of such dissident expression. Due to its intimate connection to current affairs and its link to a strong theatrical tradition, Mexican cabaret can be used as an open map of knowledge for understanding the links between sexual and political ideologies in contemporary Mexico. In this paper we analyze cabaret as a quintessential urban production, characterized by fragmentation and improvising and with the potential of carrying out a radical analysis of the official symbolic order. In doing so, cabaret often becomes a social force that produces critical knowledge in an urban setting. In fact, in present day Mexico City cabaret has emerged as part of the globalized displacement of forms of knowledge. The oral and visual order, traditionally subordinated under the writing system, is suffering a constant deterioration in present times. This phenomenon originated in the new models of knowledge and texts that emerge through a new transnational arena and new technologies, especially computers and the Internet (Case 2003). This process has rationalized the market as the main organized principle of symbolic production (Martín-Barbero 2003). While cabaret artists may be critical of such order, their popularity is certainly related to the displacement of formal/canonical theater and connected to the search for cultural manifestations more closely reflective of the post-modern realities of their audience.
PRECARIOUSNESS AND ARTISTS: THE SPANISH CASE
Our research focuses on the labour conditions of the artistic sector, based on the surveys the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE) publishes on a periodical basis, informing about socioeconomic data regarding the type of contracts, economic activity and earned incomes in the general labour market. We analyse the distribution of salaries , the number of working hours and the kind of contracts for the sector of activity of the artists through a series of statistics and use of web microdata forms as defined by the 2014 Wage Structure Poll (EES-14) as a primary unit of analysis. We obtain empirical evidence of an actual precarious artistic life and demonstrate that the values characterising the right to lead a life with dignity are substantially lower in the so-called creative industries than the ones in other professional fields..
Art Work: Santiago Sierra and the Socio-Aesthetics of Production
In this essay, I consider the work of contemporary artist Santiago Sierra in order to assess the social, political, and cultural role of labor in contemporary artistic and economic production. Looking at Sierra's controversial performance pieces, in which he hires itinerant workers to enact menial tasks for minimal remuneration (e.g. paying unemployed workers minimum wage to sit in cardboard boxes for four hours), I argue that Sierra collapses the distance between art and work, thereby translating the aesthetic into a pure function of capitalist instrumentality. Sierra, as such, explores the dark potential of art's reduction to wage labor, to the extent that the former wholly operates within the capitalist monetization of time and the neoliberal decentring of space. In doing so, he posits decidedly irresolvable questions about art's inextricable relation to the exploitation of work and to the larger subjective and biopolitical technologies that organize global divisions of labor today. With this in mind, I locate my analysis of his work at the intersection of historical materialism and institutional critique so as to examine the political vicissitudes of art and aesthetics in and against the unremitting commodification of art. Given Sierra's refusal to offer any alternatives to the troubling questions he poses, I hope to uncover the fruitful insights he may nevertheless reveal about the relations between aesthetics and politics and between artistic and economic production. Ultimately, I aim to theorize what his art may say and do beyond simply reproducing systems of economic exploitation.
“Inside, outside and against institutions: Latin American aesthetic practices in the era of mass consumption and contemporary techno-capitalism (1950- 2020)”, 2023
*** Deadline: October 30 *** This dossier intends to set up a dialogue between aesthetic approaches that analyze different aspects of artistic production about institutionalism, under the specific prism given by the expansion of artistic consumerism and the progressive commodification of visual productions. The considered period extends from the second half of the 20th century –a world that, marked by capitalist production and mass consumption, exhibits the wearing out of the cultural field’s autonomy– to the first decades of the 21st century –a scenario that, in the heat of the development of new technologies of communication, has shaped a globalized “techno-capitalism” (García Ferrer, 2017), marked by a lack of artistic differentiation and a diffuse aestheticization. To address these issues, we consider two perspectives that intertwine in a dialectic and complementary manner: the institutional devices that encourage the artistic mainstream and the creative strategies that intend to corrode that system. Thus, we center our attention in the Latin American aesthetic field, understood not as an identity or an original property tied to the well-known binarism between center and periphery, but as a zone of loans and negotiations between cultural formations standing out by its political and positional character that disrupt the rigid territorial demarcation, thus overturning the categorization conducted by the question about the Latin American in art (Ticio Escobar, 2004). From institutionalism’s point of view, we are interested in critically observing the role of museums, exhibitions, and the art market as devices that shape artistic production, establish criteria of material and symbolic validation, and promote aesthetic and political ideas. As Nelly Richard suggests, we are referring to art as a tradition (the ideal of the aesthetic canon), a field (the specificity of the practices identified as works of art), or a system (the institutional mediations in the circuit of production, distribution, and exhibition) that validates “the authority of its own beliefs, values, and regulations, based on a selective layout of its borders” (Richard, 2014, 9). Regarding production, we propose to analyze the practices that critically intervene inside institutions, generating friction and hybridization of the aesthetic categories that, relationally, lead to transformations in social reality. On the other hand, we are interested in pieces developed at the margin of institutional spaces and in actions that intervene in the urban scene as a medium of work and subversion of the statu quo. In this sense, following Martha Rosler (2017), we intend to question the idea of institutional critique, exploring the issues concerned with canonical discourses, and to observe the positioning and urgencies traced by activism and other forms of interventionism, through new artistic regimes, new materialities, and new notions on art and on what it means to be an artist. In this way, we focus our attention on the subversive potential of the arts regarding other systems of symbolic and material validation, especially when dealing with resistance to the commodification of the work of art and the obliteration of critical voices under the pressure of the multiple conflicts of cultural authority (postcolonialism, subordination, feminism, and sexual and gender minorities).
After the decline of the Fordist-Taylorist paradigm as an engine and basis of accumulation and valorization processes in contemporary bio-cognitive capitalism, we have faced structural changes in labour organization, both from quantitative and qualitative sides. The increasing role played by immaterial production, putting to labour (and hence a value on) (Morini-Fumagalli, 2011) human faculties that were before constrained inside the sphere of reproduc-tive and relational activities (considered “unproductive” from the capitalistic point of view), together with the pervasive diffusion of language and technologies, has led to the modifica-tion of the social composition of labour. The traditional “post-workerist” division between technical and political composition of labour needs to be revised, by taking into account the rise of new forms of labour subjec-tivity. We refer, in particular, to the cognitive relational (creative) labour, today more and more characterized by the spread of precarious conditions, inside the limbo and chains of un-certainty and lack of income. The way in which exploitation allows for accumulation is not only based on the dia-lectic relationship between human labour-force and machinery, but it is also linked to forms of expropriation (dispossession) of the richness (in all its meanings) of human life. In this essay, we try to analyze these new labour subjectivities (para. 2 and 3) and, at the same time, to investigate how an adequate welfare policy (that we call “commonfare”) can be an useful political target to highlight the contradictions and critical points of the current crisis (para. 4). In para. 5, we give evidence of some recent organizations of the struggle to over-come precarious conditions, according to the experience gained in Europe and in Italy, in par-ticular the EuroMayday process and the “San Precario” experience.