Cultural critic Brian Holmes explains how in communal space, which is determined more and more by technology, the privatization of knowledge continues to increase. Can language and communication still be meaningful in this context?

Now that neoliberalism seems to be in decline, Brian Holms wonders what this will mean for the emergence of Asian biennials. In reference to the concept of the sixth Taipei Biennial – undeniably a neoliberal stronghold – and a few of the works of art presented there, he discovers possibilities to imbue this transcontinental exchange with new meaning on various scale levels.

Cultural critic Brian Holmes analyses the genesis of the distributional machinery of intermodal transport that circulates commodities through the global economy. What are the implications for our way of life, both for people tied to a particular area and for migrants? Is it possible to escape capitalism’s laws of motion?

Using the ideas of Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Herbert Mead, writer and critic Stephan Wright reflects on the question of how, in a capitalist knowledge economy, to prevent intellectual property from being commodified and knowledge from becoming increasingly privatized.

In the modern era, publicity is often depicted as the leading principle of political and social representation, in which there is no longer any room for secrecy. This is a myth, according to the Viennese philosopher Stefan Nowontny. Publicity and secrecy are – through the production of affects – more entangled than ever in an inextricable knot.

Media theorist Boris Groys analyses the significance of WikiLeaks against the background of the democratic need for universal openness and communication. In doing so, he makes a remarkable observation: WikiLeaks’ universal openness is based on total concealment, and this makes it a first example of a truly postmodern universal conspiracy. By devoting itself to being a universal, administrative service in the form of a conspiracy, WikiLeaks is not only a historic innovation – it also runs a great risk.

Art philosopher Boris Groys sees the art installation as a way of making hidden reality visible. The ambiguous meaning of the notion of freedom that Groys observes in our democratic order is also present in the contemporary art installation. This can be exposed by examining it and analysing the role of the artist and the curator. The public space created by the installation, and by the biennial, is the model for a new political world order.

According to American political theorist Jodi Dean, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange lacks insight into the setting in which he operates. In communicative capitalism, the whole concept of the relation between openness and democracy radically changed. Not only does Assange assume that reliable, symbolically effective information is the basis of democracy, he also does not recognize that information overkill is a greater handicap than too little information, and that he himself is part of the spectacle that is diverting attention from political issues.

Political theorist Jodi Dean asserts that Jonathan Lethem’s novel Dissident Gardens (2013) “gives communism a body where we can again feel its beating heart”. She describes how Lethem “lets us sense the continued vibrancy of communist desire on the left despite the absence of a party.”

Once we accept that capitalism is communicative and communications are capitalist, where might we find openings for critique, opportunities for resistance and possibilities to break free, Jodi Dean asks? She sees one answer appearing in the commoning of faces, a practice that emerges out of the communicative practices of mass social and personal media. To explore this commoning, she develops the idea of ‘secondary visuality’ as a feature of communicative capitalism. Reflecting on the repetition of images and circulation of photos, Dean presents secondary visuality as an effect of communication that blends together speech, writing and image into something irreducible to its components, something new.

Marco Scotini is the curator of the ongoing Disobedience Archive project, a video station and discussion platform that focuses on the relationship between artistic practices and political action. In this text, Scotini focuses on the Autonomia movement of 1977 and the Italian underground filmmaker Alberto Grifi, who is considered a cinema pioneer who anticipated contemporary disobedience cinema. Scotini analyses Grifi’s film Festival of the Young Proletariat at Parco Lambro and offers his reflections on social disobedience in relation to mediatisation and representation.

The Italian-French sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato uses Foucault’s concept of ‘pastoral power’ to analyse the demise of the separation between public and private space. Furthermore, his study of the social policies concerning unemployment shows how ‘the production of guilt’ is more and more often being used as a strategy; a process already described by Franz Kafka in his literature.

Privacy is a defensive right that protects a person’s private life. However, the ‘right to be left alone’ is not just a legal but also a political and social construction. Therefore, this is a concept that, although established by law, can be experienced and observed differently by individuals and groups, depending upon their position in society and the desires and interests attendant upon that. For instance, privacy can be an urgent topic for civil rights movements, whereas citizens apparently are less bothered about it. And so more and more government measures can be taken and new technologies applied that conflict with the right of privacy but which are used in a relatively unconcerned way or submitted to with hardly a whisper of protest.

Whether this be an endangered basic right, an obsolete concept of the enlightenment, a lost cause or an activists’ obsession, the traditional notion of privacy has largely been undermined in today’s security and information society. This certainly is the result of a preventive government policy that is out to control the comings and goings of citizens, and a commercial sector that, off-line and online, tries to get more and more of a handle on the individual desires and consumption patterns of customers through its clever registration devices. But there is more going on: people are having less and less qualms about voluntarily revealing personal information in the media and on the Internet. The protection of privacy seems to be subordinate to people’s desire to manifest themselves publically in society. In the globalized network cultures, visibility, transparency, accessibility and connectivity are what count. These values are at odds with the idea of privacy as ‘secluded from the rest’. Does this imply that ‘everyone belongs to everyone else’ to an increasing extent, as in Huxley’s dystopic Brave New World (1932)? Or, these many years after The Fall of Public Man (Richard Sennett, 1974) are we experiencing ‘the fall of private man’ – from which we could then conclude that the public-private antithesis has lost its force as a signifier of meaning? Are alternative subjectivities and rights emerging that are considered more important in the twenty-first century? Are new strategies and tactics being mobilized to safeguard personal autonomy and to escape forms of institutional biopower?

In Open 19, the concept of privacy is examined and reconsidered from different perspectives: legal, sociological, media theoretical and activist. Rather than deploring the loss of privacy, the main focus is on the attempt, starting from our present position of ‘post-privacy’, to gain an idea of what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions. Naturally, this cannot be investigated without paying attention to the sociopolitical and technological violations of privacy that are going on at present.

Daniel Solove, law professor, proposes that privacy be considered as a pluralistic concept with a social significance. A theory on privacy should be directed at the very problems that create a need for privacy, according to Solove. Maurizio Lazzarato, taking Foucault’s concept of ‘pastoral power’ as an example, analyses how the state wields power techniques to control the users of social services, and how it intervenes in the lives of individuals in doing so. Sociologist Rudi Laermans goes into the implications of the ideal of transparent communication for secrecy and personal privacy.

In search of effective strategies against the surveillance regime, Armin Medosch, media artist and researcher, has developed a model in which he couples the historical function of privacy in a free democracy with the overall technopolitical dynamics. Felix Stalder examines today’s ‘post-privacy’ situation, in which a change is taking place in how people achieve autonomy, and how institutions and corporations exercise control over them.

In the column, Joris van Hoboken, member of the board at Bits of Freedom, challengingly states: ‘Privacy is dead. Get over it.’ Oliver Leistert uses a post-Fordian framework in criticizing the German protest movement AK-Vorrat, which focuses on issues concerning data retention and privacy from a liberal democratic standpoint. Martijn de Waal considers the concrete possibilities of using locational data from cellular networks for civil society projects and the questions on privacy that this raises. In the light of contemporary computer paradigms like the Internet of Things, Rob van Kranenburg argues in favour of making concepts of privacy operational from the bottom up in the infrastructure of technologies and networks that connect us with one another in our environment.

Mark Shepard has made a contribution on ‘The Sentient City Survival Kit’, his research project in the area of design, which proposes playful and ironic technosocial artefacts that investigate the consequences that the observing, evermore efficiently and excessively coded city has for privacy and autonomy. Matthijs Bouw, architect and director of One Architecture, investigates privatization and privacy in the context of the Internet platform ‘New Map of Tbilisi’. With photos by Gio Sumbadze and Lucas Zoutendijk, he shows how the ‘wild capitalism’ of the new Georgia has led to a reduction of privacy in Tbilisi.

Recent years have seen a politicization of the ‘common’ in the public domain. This intensification of the debate stems from a growing number of conflicts between public and private with respect to the ownership and control of knowledge and culture. ‘Freedom of culture’ has become a pressing issue with both legal and ethical ramifications: it concerns the extent to which culture and knowledge can be freely distributed, exchanged or appropriated, and the guarantee of places where the ‘commons’ can manifest themselves and be discussed.

The expansion of restrictive legislation relating to copyright and intellectual property, as well as the increasingly inaccessible technical architecture of the Internet, the source codes, are jointly responsible for the rise of movements or initiatives such as Free Software, Open Source, Libre Commons, Copyleft, Free Culture and Creative Commons, projects which differ widely with regard to politics, philosophy and chosen strategy, but which all interpret ‘free’ as ‘free as in free speech, not free beer’. The activists in particular are concerned not merely with fighting copyrights or creating alternative licences and free spaces, but with realizing a social vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, argue in their writings about power and the masses in an era of globalization, for an ‘an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can all work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programmes’.

Concepts like originality, authorship and ownership were already being explored in art and philosophy in the 1970s and ’80s, at which time ‘appropriation’ became an explicit figure of speech. Compared with the massive scale on which culture is being appropriated and exchanged today, due in no small part to digitization, this now looks more like a symbolic, intellectual and elitist affair, more like an artistic project than a social strategy. But the flip side of today’s ‘free culture’ is a growing measure of regulation and control in which some people discern the contours of a ‘permission culture’. At the same time, there is a growing tendency to outsource elements of public culture to private parties (patrons, corporations and the like) who are then able to co-determine what will be released or made publicly accessible and what not.

Open 12 examines the consequences of these developments for the ‘free’ realization and exchange of culture, the dynamism of art and the balance of power in the public domain and urban space. It looks at new restrictions but also at new possibilities. The emphasis is on questions surrounding the privatization of intellectual property on the one hand, and on public space as creative practice on the other.

Stephen Wright ponders what the growing privatization of knowledge means for art as a form of knowledge. Brian Holmes also looks at the privatization of knowledge, but in relation to the collective, technologically determined space in which language and communication acquire meaning. McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory, describes the adventure of publishing his books in light of his own theory. Joost Smiers criticizes the current copyright system and leading alternatives like General Public License and Creative Commons. He puts forward an alternative proposal for returning ‘to the commons what has always belonged to it’. Willem van Weelden questions the effectiveness of the activist credo of ‘becoming minor’ in relation to Net criticism of Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons.

In ‘Artistic Freedom and Globalization’, Pascal Gielen seeks to return art to a role that encourages reflection and argues for the creation of a free zone that would entail accepting globalization in all its complexity. Maxine Kopsa interviews British artist Chris Evans about his project Militant Bourgeois: An Existential Retreat, which focuses on the area of tension between patronage (in particular the increasingly criticized Dutch system of government grants) and the contemporary production of art. In his column, Arjen Mulder states that ‘an artist doesn’t live on in his oeuvre, but in his fakes’.

Architect Dennis Kaspori collaborated with Jeanne van Heeswijk on a supplement entitled ‘Guest ≠ Welcome’ in which they react to the discourse of segregation in urban space with new models for care and hospitality aimed at developing a better understanding of the fragile situation in which the residents of the so-called Zones Urbaines Sensibles find themselves, and at devising more inclusive forms of urbanity. They invited a number of international firms and initiatives to present a vision based on their own practice.

Swop Network’s contribution, ‘Give Away in Circulation’, challenges the notion of intellectual property, while artist Oliver Ressler gives a special presentation of his project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies.

Taking WikiLeaks as an illustrative example, Open 22 investigates how transparency and secrecy relate to one another, to the public and to publicity in our computerized visual cultures. This issue continues to explore what for Open are fundamental themes such as privatization, mediatization and the demand for the communal. In the more general sense, it examines transparency as an ideology, the ideal of the free flow of information versus the fight over access to information and the intrinsic connection between publicity and secrecy. It also tries to come to grips with the social and political implications of the phenomenon of WikiLeaks, which, with the illustrious Julian Assange as front man, produces an effect on a global scale. While most people would agree that WikiLeaks has started something that is unstoppable; there is hardly any consensus on its morality, effectiveness or strategy, neither in conservative nor in progressive circles.

WikiLeaks, as the counterpart of the ‘transparent’ citizen or consumer, expresses a growing public desire for openness and transparency as regards the state, businesses and administrators – a demand for publicity that is continually fed by floods of sensational social and political revelations. And whereas people often consider secrecy within the public sphere to be inadmissible and clandestine, transparency is associated with democracy, participation and accessibility. But does transparency only work in a liberating way? Can it not equally have a concealing or controlling effect? Aren’t certain forms of transparency actually the manifestation of the banality of the contemporary spectacle, which revolves around pure display and the production of affects?

In any case, with their capacity to immediately reproduce and disseminate information, the media play a crucial role in the social process of displaying and disclosing. But on behalf of whom are they doing this, and for whom? Do they not increasingly form an abstract power?

Two introductory essays explore political and social notions of transparency and secrecy. Media theorist Felix Stalder searches for a form of transparency that is not employed as a means of power and control, such as in neoliberal market thinking, but that can express and strengthen social solidarity. Stefan Nowotny, philosopher, goes into publicity and openness as a modern myth in relation to the production of affects and the exercise of power, and finds that secrecy and publicity are intertwined more than ever.

Other pieces directly examine WikiLeaks and its implications. Philosopher and media theorist Boris Groys argues that WikiLeaks’ democratic universal openness is based on the most absolute secretiveness, and as a matter of fact is a conspiracy. The American political theorist Jodi Dean shows herself to be extremely critical about WikiLeaks, stating that too much information is a greater handicap than too little information in ‘communicative capitalism’ and that Julian Assange, by becoming a star in his own story, takes attention away from the political issues he says he wants to bring to the public’s attention. The interview conducted by Willem van Weelden, researcher-publicist on interactive media, with media theorist Geert Lovink and political scientist/sociologist Merijn Oudenampsen goes into the question of whether and how WikiLeaks brings about social and political change, and what the platform means for contemporary forms of art and activism. In the column, Jorinde Seijdel wonders where WikiLeaks and Facebook converge, seeing as both avow transparency as their ideology but apparently out of very different motives.

Transparency and secrecy are also relevant concepts in art and architecture. The art historian Roel Griffioen posits that, analogous to social developments, the ideal of the glass house in modern and contemporary architecture has made way for the house of one-way glass, in which concealing has become just as important as displaying. Art theorist Sven Lütticken discusses how the structure of the modern art work offers the perfect means of gaining insight into the dialectics of opacity and transparency in this age of public secrets. The work of Amsterdam-based American artist Zachary Formwalt, who also made a special visual contribution to this issue, is one example of this.

This issue features a number of excerpts from Failed States, a manuscript-in-progress by American artist Jill Magid that investigates transparency and secrecy out of Magid’s desire to be an eyewitness to the ‘war on terror’ and the media’s representation of it. British artist Heath Bunting contributed a fold-out flowchart that explores the porous borders between the individual, their ‘data body’ and corporations.

Illustrations of a project by designer Floor Koomen and graphic design students of the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam can be found throughout this issue. The assignment consisted of selecting a leak from the WikiLeaks website and editing and designing it for a print-on-demand publication, thus providing us with a critical look at WikiLeaks as a medium and the current position of journalism. (see: www.orderyourwikileak.org)

According to Daniel Solove, professor of law at Washington University Law School, we need to reconsider the concept of privacy. He appeals for a more pluralistic reading of the concept, to facilitate the recognition of problems pertaining to privacy. In his most recent publication Understanding Privacy,1  he has developed a framework for this. In the following article he discusses the ideas unfolded in the book.

Media artist, writer and curator Armin Medosch researches the development in the meaning of the term ‘freedom’ and the idea of privacy that goes with it. The solution to the current crisis concerning privacy stretches beyond finding a new balance between private and public. According to Medosch, the solutions should be sought in the realm of the digital commons, where freedom is not seen as something to achieve on one’s own by accumulating possessions, but as something that is created by sharing knowledge.

Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, Minor Compositions / Autonomedia 2009, ISBN 9781570272080 

Researcher Felix Stalder analyses the loss of the key role of the concept of privacy. Privacy long secured the balance between the control of institutions and the autonomy of the citizen. Today, with institutions aiming more and more to provide customized services and the autonomy of both citizens and institutions changing, this role is disappearing, making the danger of an increase in control and power a realistic one. To turn the tide, Stalder argues for a greater transparency of the back-end protocols, algorithms and procedures of the new, flexible bureaucracies.

Media theorist Felix Stalder describes the changed agenda of transparency in today’s neoliberal era. That agenda’s regime of measurability and standardization leads people to make forced choices in order not to be isolated or excluded. In order to avoid this, a new form of transparency is necessary, one that is horizontally organized and employs the newest means of communication.

While the current historical situation demands urgently a redefinition of authorship, the art world offers very little in terms of critique or alternative practice.

‘Privacy is dead. Get over it.’1

The introduction of the data retention policy in the EU, resulting in digital doubles, has led to the emergence of grassroots protests centred on privacy and surveillance issues, especially in Germany. One of these, AK Vorrat, is a network platform that makes intensive use of the Internet and is rooted in the liberal democratic tradition. In the following text, media researcher Oliver Leistert places data retention in a post-Fordist framework and highlights some of the shortcomings of the protest movement.

According to media researcher Martijn de Waal, it is time to rethink our ideas of privacy. The growing use of cellular networks is generating data that plays an important role in civil society projects. To be able to continue using such data in a meaningful and fair way, people must become aware of the fact that privacy is not only a question of either private or public, but includes many gradations in between.

In this essay, media philosopher Martijn de Waal examines the implications of the rise of Web 2.0 for the public sphere and its democratic content. Who decides what is of value in the new media ecosystem and how do important processes take place?

To what extent can artists and designers develop instruments that, using the newest digital technology, question how we will live our lives in the (near) future? In search of an answer, the editors of Open asked artist, architect and researcher Mark Shepard to write about his research project The Sentient City Survival Kit.

Net criticism, by consistently employing a strategy of decentralization and un-organization (‘becoming minor’), has become marginalized. How relevant can it continue to be from within its self-appointed ghetto? The ambiguous way in which net critics have responded to the ideas and actions of Lawrence Lessig, front man of the Free Culture movement and one of the initiators of Creative Commons, makes this question all the more urgent, argues Willem van Weelden in this polemical essay.

In the wake of the developments around WikiLeaks, the time is ripe to take a closer look at the current information landscape. Willem van Weelden, researcher and publicist specialized in media and culture, spoke with political sociologist Merijn Oudenampsen and media theorist Geert Lovink on how WikiLeaks can effect social and political change and contribute to making power more transparent.

How can the web be understood as both a symptom and an expression of a public practice? According to what logic do search engines work and how do they influence the way we deal with knowledge, news and information? Web epistemology is a new research practice that regards the web as a separate knowledge culture and advocates giving an ear to what lies beyond all the din. An interview with Richard Rogers, web epistemologist at the University of Amsterdam, author of Information Politics on the Web, founder of the Govcom.org Foundation and developer of the Issue Crawler, an ‘info-political tool’.1

Many culture and art critics have pointed to the negative impact of globalization on the art world over the last decade. As this concept has been linked to a variety of phenomena such as ‘commodification’, mediatization and uniformization, it has become heterogeneous and anaemic. Sociologist Pascal Gielen attempts to clarify the relationship between globalization and all the evils ascribed to it. In order to give art a renewed role in inspiring reflection, he calls for the creation of a free zone in which globalization is accepted in all its complexity.

By means of an analysis, sociologist Pascal Gielen attempts to get a better handle on the problematic aspects of the art biennial as a global phenomenon. Only then can new strategies be developed for escaping the worldwide competition hysteria, with all its negatives characteristics. Neoliberal city marketing as the bogeyman is too facile an explanation.

According to art sociologist Pascal Gielen neoliberalism, by pushing artists to be more entrepreneurial and to embrace the creative industry, leads to a shrinking of the imaginative horizon and to the evaporation of the modern hope for autonomy. If we ever want to become modern, we have to make a political choice, he states.

Militant Bourgeois: An Existential Retreat is a project by British artist Chris Evans that became an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (smba) and an artists’ residence along the A10 in 2006. Fifteen artists accepted the challenge and confronted the primitive and unsubsidized ‘retreat’. Evans focussed on the field of tension between patronage, especially the increasingly criticized Dutch system of state subsidies, and current art production. Maxine Kopsa talked to him about anachronisms and the relation between artist and society.

Pirate copies and fakes have a bad name, yet many an artist owes them a rich body of work. The music Franco et le T.P.O.K. Jazz put out on LPs in Zaïre in the 1980s would typically be on sale throughout the country on illegal cassettes within about four months. Their way of keeping one step ahead of this piracy was a stroke of genius: they produced a new LP every three months. This provided them with a tidy nest egg and us with 150 records of wonderful dance music.

Etcher and painter Anton Heyboer did something similar. In order to assure his five wives of an income after his death, he painted dozens of canvases every day in his characteristic style, each adorned with his sizable signature. His widows still have warehouses full of paintings and sell them under the motto: ‘You can only be sure it’s genuine if you buy it from us in Den Ilp.’

Somewhere in the Dutch polders there’s a big barn with good overhead lighting where expert painters and silkscreen artists churn out lithographs of artists like Herman Brood, Corneille and Appel on an assembly line. In smaller, urban studios the work of Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Chagall, Giacometti and Hockney is being reproduced.

The only one who truly profited from this democratization of art is Karel Appel. In his early years he was often too poor to buy canvases and paint, so little work exists from this period. Then suddenly, unknown early works began to turn up. They were submitted to the painter, who must have thought, ‘There’s no way I could have painted this that year. On the other hand, it’s not badly done – if I’d had the money at the time I would have painted something like that; maybe the top streak a bit brighter and blurrier, but still, you know what, I’m just going to say it’s one of mine.’ This validation must have come as a pleasant surprise to the makers of the paintings, and inspired them to produce even better early Appel work.

It won’t be long before literary texts, too, are discovered, which, if their authors were still alive (or indeed are still living) would and will be recognized by them as written in their unique approach to sentence structure and language associations. If only they’d had more peace and quiet, time and concentration, they would have written these themselves! Once authors’ names become big brands with price tags to match, it becomes profitable to counterfeit them. Thomas Pynchon’s work is probably already being produced by a team of writers.

Some writers anticipate this and develop a style that is so typical, or in fact so generic, that they can be perfectly imitated with little trouble by the fellow writers who will later fill in the gaps in their literary oeuvre. Others attempt to pre-empt this development by imitating Pessoa and writing as much new and unknown work destined for their desk drawers as possible, so that there is enough upon their deaths to supply the market for at least 70 years. In the Netherlands, over the past 15 years, the oeuvres of Nescio, Hanlo, Elschot and Ida Gerhardt have doubled thanks to the publication of suddenly discovered letters and notes.

Other authors wish to remain authentic and write in a style that will never be counterfeited because no one can make head or tail of it now. Or is it better to write clearly for a small group of attentive readers, providing them with such rich hours that you never need explain anything on radio or television, and therefore never become famous?

I don’t know. When I think about what I’d love to happen after I die, I think of Nicola Tesla. He posthumously dictated one hefty tome after another to a medium in Wales, or was it Eastern Europe? I don’t care who writes it down. One day a woman will sit at a computer and begin to type. She won’t be writing; she’ll be transcribing what she hears an external voice dictate to her inner ear. I’ll be that voice. I’ll come up with new essays, bundles of poetry, enthralling novels, travelogues, works of philosophy and revelations from the beyond. I hereby give my descendants permission to authenticate everything, as long as the work is just like I would have written it. We don’t want rubbish. An artist doesn’t live on in his oeuvre, but in his fakes. So reinvent me as often as possible.

Pirate copies and fakes have a bad name, yet many an artist owes them a rich body of work. The music Franco et le T.P.O.K. Jazz put out on LPs in Zaïre in the 1980s would typically be on sale throughout the country on illegal cassettes within about four months. Their way of keeping one step ahead of this piracy was a stroke of genius: they produced a new LP every three months. This provided them with a tidy nest egg and us with 150 records of wonderful dance music.

Etcher and painter Anton Heyboer did something similar. In order to assure his five wives of an income after his death, he painted dozens of canvases every day in his characteristic style, each adorned with his sizable signature. His widows still have warehouses full of paintings and sell them under the motto: ‘You can only be sure it’s genuine if you buy it from us in Den Ilp.’

Somewhere in the Dutch polders there’s a big barn with good overhead lighting where expert painters and silkscreen artists churn out lithographs of artists like Herman Brood, Corneille and Appel on an assembly line. In smaller, urban studios the work of Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Chagall, Giacometti and Hockney is being reproduced.

The only one who truly profited from this democratization of art is Karel Appel. In his early years he was often too poor to buy canvases and paint, so little work exists from this period. Then suddenly, unknown early works began to turn up. They were submitted to the painter, who must have thought, ‘There’s no way I could have painted this that year. On the other hand, it’s not badly done – if I’d had the money at the time I would have painted something like that; maybe the top streak a bit brighter and blurrier, but still, you know what, I’m just going to say it’s one of mine.’ This validation must have come as a pleasant surprise to the makers of the paintings, and inspired them to produce even better early Appel work.

It won’t be long before literary texts, too, are discovered, which, if their authors were still alive (or indeed are still living) would and will be recognized by them as written in their unique approach to sentence structure and language associations. If only they’d had more peace and quiet, time and concentration, they would have written these themselves! Once authors’ names become big brands with price tags to match, it becomes profitable to counterfeit them. Thomas Pynchon’s work is probably already being produced by a team of writers.

Some writers anticipate this and develop a style that is so typical, or in fact so generic, that they can be perfectly imitated with little trouble by the fellow writers who will later fill in the gaps in their literary oeuvre. Others attempt to pre-empt this development by imitating Pessoa and writing as much new and unknown work destined for their desk drawers as possible, so that there is enough upon their deaths to supply the market for at least 70 years. In the Netherlands, over the past 15 years, the oeuvres of Nescio, Hanlo, Elschot and Ida Gerhardt have doubled thanks to the publication of suddenly discovered letters and notes.

Other authors wish to remain authentic and write in a style that will never be counterfeited because no one can make head or tail of it now. Or is it better to write clearly for a small group of attentive readers, providing them with such rich hours that you never need explain anything on radio or television, and therefore never become famous?

I don’t know. When I think about what I’d love to happen after I die, I think of Nicola Tesla. He posthumously dictated one hefty tome after another to a medium in Wales, or was it Eastern Europe? I don’t care who writes it down. One day a woman will sit at a computer and begin to type. She won’t be writing; she’ll be transcribing what she hears an external voice dictate to her inner ear. I’ll be that voice. I’ll come up with new essays, bundles of poetry, enthralling novels, travelogues, works of philosophy and revelations from the beyond. I hereby give my descendants permission to authenticate everything, as long as the work is just like I would have written it. We don’t want rubbish. An artist doesn’t live on in his oeuvre, but in his fakes. So reinvent me as often as possible.

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, zkm / The mit Press, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 2005, isbn 0262122790

Boris Groys, Topologie der Kunst (‘The Topology of Art’), Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 2003, ISBN 3446203680

The Austrian artist Oliver Ressler (b. 1970) in many works focuses on forms of resistance against neo-liberal globalization. One of his recent projects is Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies (2003–2007). Having received an initial grant from republicart (www.republicart.net), the ongoing project consists of a series of installations, usually expanded with new video work (www.ressler.at). Each installation contains monitors with video interviews, as well as a typical quotation taken from one of these and projected in the exhibition space. Ressler made a presentation for Open, in which nine text excerpts from the video interviews are combined with installation shots from various cities.

In Failed States Jill Magid finds a mentor in CT, a writer and editor in Austin, Texas with a military and intelligence background. A former war reporter who has covered ten conflicts, he agrees to train her to be an embedded journalist with the US military in Afghanistan. In these excerpts Magid is confronted with the reality of going to war, and what is personally at stake for her in this decision. Failed States approaches the themes of transparency, secrecy and publicity through Magid’s personal desire to engage the war on terror and its media representation through becoming an eyewitness.The following is a series of excerpts from Failed States, a work-in-progress manuscript by Jill Magid.

According to Michael Hardt, the production of the common is the most important economic mainspring in a time in which immaterial and biopolitical production are dominant. By connecting economics, politics and aesthetics and analysing their relations, Hardt arrives at questions concerning the role of the artist and the meaning of his or her work in the distribution of the common.

Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe shows how the existing hegemonic structures in current political systems can best be opposed by the development of counter-hegemonic practices. Specifically, cultural and artistic practices can play a major role in this because they are pre-eminently the terrain on which new subjectivities can be developed.

The strength of Occupy is having a designated adversary, but that is not enough to ensure concerted political action.

The Belgian polit­ical philosopher Chantal Mouffe defines the public space as a battleground on which different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation. According to Mouffe, critical artistic practices can play an important role in subverting the dominant hegemony in this so-called ‘agonistic’ model of public space, visualizing that which is repressed and destroyed by the consensus of post-political democracy.

According to Belgian philosopher Thierry de Duve, the criticism of the art biennial as a global phenomenon from the perspective of economic and amusement value is too limited. By allowing the aesthetic value of art to again be part of art criticism, a different type of opposition against the hegemonic centres that are dominant in today’s global culture becomes possible. To achieve this, De Duve lays claim to the Kantian idea of sensus communis – the human ability to share feelings.

In order to fathom the real meaning and opportunities of biennials as a global phenomenon, Scandinavian critic and curator Simon Sheikh introduces the term a politics of translation. Seen in this light, the biennial is a place where new meanings, stories, histories and connections are constantly produced. This condition of permanent flux may mean that biennials can do more than generate capital.

According to Simon Sheikh, the erosion of the nation-state has led to a post-public situation, in which the public sphere of ‘the public’ can no longer be specifically located. The answer is not a nostalgic return to outmoded notions of the public and its spaces, but an analysis of the relations between publicness, consumption and production, culminating in new public formations where action can be taken.

‘Geo-Cultures’, a research project conducted by Irit Rogoff, a professor at Goldsmiths College in London, investigates how the contemporary practice of art informs rather than reflects globalization processes. Seen in the framework of this study, biennials are interesting places. They have evolved into circuits of research, exchange and dialogue that combine specific local features with the illumination of conditions elsewhere in the world.

A worldwide explosion of mobility versus bodiless interaction in digital networks; hypermobility of flows of capital and goods versus the immobility of the biological body; the pressure of ecological and energetic depletion versus the desire for total freedom of movement: our present-day mobility regimes are characterized by deeply rooted contradictions. Media critic Eric Kluitenberg seeks a perspective for intervention to achieve ecological and social stability.

After witnessing “2011”, a year marked by intensely mediatised popular protests and public square occupations around the planet, we no longer need to speculate about “how wireless media mobilise public space”, or what kinds of “webs of interhuman relations” may eventually develop here.

Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, in association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2006, ISBN 9789056625269

In order to describe a sense of connection with the local without denying dynamic physical and virtual interpersonal relationships, philosopher Marc Schuilenburg introduces the term terroir. Introducing terroir as a right makes it possible for new subjectifications to arise, with which the relationship between identity and places can be restored in this age of immigration and globalization.

Marc Schuilenburg addresses the issue of governance as an essential aspect of the philosophy of social engineering. Via the insights and concepts of Foucault and Deleuze he goes in search of a more adequate understanding of the link between social reality and governance. Discussion on this should no longer be fixated on the dichotomy between private and public, says Schuilenburg. Society, after all, is not an immutable, static quantity; it has a fluid character that requires thinking in terms of surveillance 'assemblages'.

In discussions about 'makeability' or social engineering, specifically when they concern manageability and biopolitics, references are often made to the ideas of philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Open is republish­ ing his key 1993 text 'Beyond Human Rights', with an introduction by philosopher and jurist Marc Schuilenburg. According to Schuilenburg the figure of the homo sacer that Agamben presents in this and other writings leads to many misunderstandings. He also addresses the differences in Agamben's ideas about biopolitics and those of Foucault.

Architecture historian Wim Nijenhuis charts the history of the concept of mobility and its significance for the city and its inhabitants since the Renaissance. Ultimately, the modern-day world city seems engulfed by the ethereal city-world, as the philosopher Paul Virilio argues. There’s only one way out: exit!

In the process of globalization, mobility has become characterized by ambivalence. On the one hand, we are witnessing ever greater control of the movements of migrants, and on the other, a rich elite can travel freely all over the world. The free flow of people, capital and goods within the Schengen Area has required an increasingly stricter policing of its external borders. Combined with innovative digital techniques, this has led to a shift from a system of control to a proactive system of selection and exclusion.

Space is not a given, but is continuously produced, reproduced and reconfigured. Taking up where the French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre left off, the Marxist geographer David Harvey has focused on the development and incorporation of a spatial analysis in Marxist theory. He has emerged as one of the foremost intellectual commentators on the global financial crisis, portrayed in his recent book The Enigma of Capital (2010) as an instance of those same structural contradictions Karl Marx forewarned us about.

Contrary to what many people might think, politics involves imagination, storytelling and the creation of myths. According to sociologist Merijn Oudenampsen, guest editor of this issue, recognizing this truth is absolutely essential if we are to understand and learn from populism as a growing political force.

Merijn Oudenampsen focuses on some of the deeper issues and paradoxes that underly both art discourse and the recurring discussion about its intelligibility in the Netherlands. Can it be that the “unassailable jargon” of art discourse and the anti-intellectualism of newspaper journalists criticizing it stem from a similar background? Could it be that they are both actually feeding and reinforcing each other?

‘The city was a fused group’ – so says Jean-Paul Sartre, speaking of Paris during the 1789 storming of the Bastille. What Sartre apprehends in his analysis of this revolutionary moment is the necessary interdependency of space, time, movement and will. His concept of the fused group brings these elements together in a way that recognizes the capacity to transform the given into something altogether new. In the moment of fusion Sartre sees a transformation from an isolated seriality, in which each person is a lonely powerless unit, into a collective entity – a being together in the most powerful sense of the term, a mutual recognition of that which he understands as most human, freedom.

According to Florian Schneider, researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the world’s current border policy is based on the outdated liberal ideology of the nation-state. He advocates the development of a new border regime in which the key concept is ‘transnationality’.

The many proposals advanced by policymakers and designers to tackle the ever more complex issue of mobility are merely spurious solutions, according to design critic John Thackara. We must radically change our thinking in this regard. In his view, we can learn a lot from the workings of the human brain, microprocessors and network topography.

Media theorist Tatiana Goryucheva investigates the logic behind the correlations between the traceability of food and the technological and social processes during its production. She advocates a democratic model of a socio-technological infrastructure for reconnecting people with their natural and social environment through food.

Metahaven is an Amsterdam-based design studio, founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. Metahaven creates and researches visual identity, which was the focus of their 2010 book Uncorporate Identity. For this issue on mobility, they draft a speculative future for ‘mobile money’, in which a faltering Euro currency is rescued by Facebook Credits.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

With the project In the Air,1 Spanish architect Nerea Calvillo wants to make the citizens of Madrid more aware of the city’s official monitoring systems for measuring air pollution and get them involved. Through the development of interfaces, collective action can be initiated that is aimed at exchanging experiences and raising community consciousness.

A dominant movement in leftist politics has always embraced a sense of reality as opposed to dreams and imagination. The American sociologist Stephen Duncombe argues instead for a dreampolitik, which, unlike reactionary populist fantasies, can activate the imagination with impossible dreams. They make it possible to think ‘out of the box’ and to wonder what an alternative world and a different attitude to life might be like.

What artistic activist aims have in common is a faith that awareness can change the world without any specific follow-through. This is magical thinking.

Yves Citton, author of Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (2010), analyses the various affective levels that motivate sociopolitical movements and argues that they should not only be recognized but also taken seriously. Against that background it becomes possible to understand current populist developments more clearly, and even to learn from them. By creating new myths that are emancipatory, we can steer the future of our society in a better direction.

A spectre is haunting Western Europe, and it no longer bears the name ‘communism’ but ‘populism’. Politicians and political parties such as Wilders in the Netherlands, Le Pen in France, Berlusconi in Italy or the Vlaams Belang in Flanders refer to ‘the people’ or the demos to legitimize what is usually an extreme right-wing programme that connects ‘the danger of Islam’ and ‘the threat of immigration to identity’ with such things as globalisation, security and the future of ‘our’ social safety net. This rhetoric is embedded in a more general discourse that creates a broader antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘the people’ and their adversaries. ‘Us’ stands for average hard-working citizens who behave decently and have common sense. ‘Them’ stands for the political establishment and the ‘left-wing church’, who squander money at the government’s expense and deprive ‘us’, ‘the silent majority’, of freedom of speech through the imposed morality of political correctness. In this way, right-wing populism can position itself as an ultra-democratic discourse, adept at aggregating various complaints and fears in the name of ‘the people’. Whether it’s the European Union, the uncertain future of the pension system, the credit crisis, the rate of taxation, or simply the ever-growing queues on the motorways, it is always connected to the discrepancy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘They’ do not listen to ‘us’; ‘they’ ignore the will and identity of ‘the people’. This discourse not only simplifies the political arena; it also relates ‘the people’ to a charismatic leader who seems to literally personify its presumed desires. Le Pen, Wilders, De Winter or Berlusconi profess that they give the ‘silent majority’ a voice, while in fact they actively articulate it by ascribing very different complaints, demands and desires to the discrepancy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. All of this is facilitated by the mediatized audience democracy, in which self-appointed mouthpieces of ‘the people’ can directly address the individual citizen in prime time with well-chosen one-liners. In the Netherlands, first Pim Fortuyn and then Geert Wilders proved in this way that a populist politician can appeal to a broad spectrum of the population without the support of a consolidated party machine.

Latin America is in the grip of a completely different kind of populism. Of a left-wing persuasion, it is buoyed by a combination of three factors: the mobilization capacity of various grassroots movements, the recruitment power of the mass media, and the rhetorical allure of a charismatic leader, à la Evo Morales, Lula da Silva or Hugo Chávez. Unlike in right-wing Europe, the contradistinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not primarily articulated culturally, but economically, which would seem to make Latin American populism a descendent of Marxist thought. Or is this precisely not the case, because the populist antithesis between the people and the establishment differs thoroughly from the antagonism between a dominated or exploited class and a propertied class?

For political theorist Ernesto Laclau (born in 1935 in Buenos Aires), this question sparked a reflection that would bring him ‘beyond Marx’ and prevailing theories of democracy. The populist appeal of ‘Peronism’ in Argentina was a reason for Laclau to cast serious doubts on the orthodox Marxist axiom that all politics is essentially an expression of economic class differences. Instead, populism teaches that class politics is also first and foremost, a question of discourse: the articulation of the social space according to a specific dichotomy, which in populism assumes a more general form than in Marxism. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), written together with Chantal Mouffe and which co-initiated so-called post-Marxism, this idea is further elaborated through an appeal to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. A hegemonic discourse, or a discourse that strives for hegemony, relates various dissatisfactions to each other: it homogenizes them by linking them together as equivalent demands in a chain of equivalence. This simultaneously creates an antagonism between ‘the people’ and the establishment: on the one hand, the equivalent demands are represented as coming from ‘the people’, which is thus discursively construed and given a political content, and on the other hand these demands are contrasted to the interests of those in power and the groups connected with them. The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may be defined in class terms, but this is only one possible articulation. Every hegemonic or contra-hegemonic discourse has its characteristic central signifiers that connect or combine divergent demands – one of the meanings of the verb ‘to articulate’ – and thus give shape to the antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Precisely because a signifier such as, for example, ‘the working class’, ‘the Dutch people’, or, in a liberal context, ‘the citizen’, combines very different demands, it acquires so many connotations that it ultimately tends towards meaninglessness, it changes into ‘an empty signifier’. In short, hegemonic politics comes down to constructing a ‘people’ by creating an antagonism with the help of versatile symbols.

After Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau published several collections of theoretical essays in which he on the one hand dwells upon specific issues regarding the theory of hegemony he developed with Mouffe and on the other gives attention, among other things, to the dialectics between universality and particularity in light of the identity politics that were strongly taking hold in the 1990s. He thus became an internationally much heard and broadly respected voice on the left, as shown by the debate with the feminist theorist Judith Butler and the Lacanian-inspired political philosopher Slavoj Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). In 2005, 20 years after the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau published On Populist Reason. Rather than a faithful synthesis of insights noted earlier, this is a study that stands on its own in which Laclau rearticulates the path his thinking has taken in the meantime. One of the basic propositions of the book is that populism is neither an aberration of a democratic politics nor a danger to it but, on the contrary, an inherent dimension of it. Democratic politics requires the construction of a ‘people’ on the basis of one or more empty signifiers as well as an antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – which is not to say that every populism is also by definition democratic.

Rudi Laermans: In Western Europe, a resurgence of populism can be observed, particularly of the extreme right-wing type. What is your perspective on this development?

Ernesto Laclau: I think that the prospects in today’s Western Europe are rather unpleasant. All the governments in Western Europe are reacting to the crisis with extreme neoliberal formulas of adjustment. Zapatero has just passed a set of draconian measures and you know what is happening in Greece. In Germany the situation is also relatively unsustainable, and in England the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron is quite feeble because there exist strong tendencies within the Liberal Democrats to reject the coalition agreement and the way it is implemented. So the situation is bad, and this all the more because the social democratic parties, which are the only viable alternative at the moment in Eastern as well as Western Europe, do not have any alternative plan. These conditions fuel extreme right-wing populism. If you don’t have an alternative to the system, people who feel a need for such an alternative move to extreme ideologies, whether they are right-wing or left-wing. Take the example of France. There existed a classical discourse of opposition, which was that of the Communist Party and the red belts of the industrial cities. This world has disintegrated as a result of the tertiarization of the labour market. The outcome was a unique system of power in which the social democrats and the more conservative forces did not differ very much from each other. The only political alternatives were to be found on the fringes of the left and the right, yet it is the right fringe that has progressively expanded. Many former voters of the French Communist Party are today voters of Le Pen, a phenomenon that is called gaucho-lepénisme. The reason is simple: if you want change in some way, the precise way in which that change is going to happen and its ideological framing become a secondary matter. And that is of course not only the situation in France. The chances for a left populism are today in Western Europe rather minimal. Populism is going to expand, but it will be a populism of the right.

RL: You mean an ethno-populism?

EL: Not necessarily. Ethnic populism is important in Eastern Europe, but I don’t think you will have a populism of that kind in Western Europe. Thus Le Pen is not someone who tries to recreate a national identity as the sole basis of inclusion. It’s not the ethno-populism that flourished in Bulgaria or Romania during the interwar period. It’s a rather complicated matter, and I don’t know how it’s going to evolve. What is clear is that without a reconstruction of the left along a social democratic line – because communist options are already over – it’s difficult to imagine how a more democratic politics can come about.

RL: People like Le Pen in France or Wilders in the Netherlands make an appeal to the identity of the French or the Dutch, which they position as threatened by immigrants as well as the reigning political elites. Yet you wouldn’t speak of ethno-populism?

EL: No, because of a terminological question. Le Pen or Wilders are not focusing on race as the central question. Le Pen is not claiming that there exists a superior French race. He is saying something different than ethno-populism: ‘We are French people and we reject the immigrants.’ The same goes for the Dutch right-wing populism of Wilders: it’s not an ethno-populism but an anti-immigrant one. Maybe the situation is a bit different in Flanders because there you have not only the theme of immigration but also the relationship with the Walloons.

RL: Wilders and the Party for Freedom are a complex thing. It’s a populism that claims to defend ‘our values’, such as tolerance toward homosexuals. There is thus a twofold reference, one to the supposed values of the Dutch, so a nationalist reference, and a more general one to the modern-liberal tradition.

EL: What would be the empty signifier?

RL: In the case of Wilders Party for Freedom, ‘freedom’ itself is a very important signifier. It’s made equivalent with being modern, tolerant, secularized… and at the same time with a certain idea of ‘We the Dutch’.

EL: At this point we have to distinguish several things, such as ethnicity, nationality, race… These unifying signifiers don’t all function in the same way since their modes of inclusion and exclusion are different. All of them are without doubt right-wing, yet the logic behind the creation of these identities differs. Thus in the Nazi discourse the eugenic component was very important, whereas this is not at all the case in today’s right-wing movements. And a second thing is that it’s also important to distinguish the logic of dichotomizing society in two camps from the ideologies that invoke this logic: in Latin America the opposition to neoliberalism mobilized around populist themes in the wake of the ascension of peasant communities in Bolivia, the dynamic of the new social movements in Argentina, or the grassroots mobilization in Venezuela. The latter would have collapsed without the presence of Hugo Chávez as a unifying signifier. So there are two levels at which popular mobilization takes place. The same is happening in Ecuador with Rafael Correa, with Evo Morales in Bolivia, with first Nestor and then Christina Kirchner in Argentina, and with Pepe Mujica in Uruguay. To some extent, Lula has managed to create a similar situation in Brazil, clearly a more complicated country than the others just mentioned. So overall the spectrum of politics in Latin America is moving to the left, with populist logics.

RL: Hearing you mentioning all these presidential names reminds me of the fact that in On Populist Reason, you stress the importance of the name of the leader as a constitutive performative element in populist discourse. Yet most political theorists of liberal democracy regard populist leadership as quite problematic because it rapidly tends to become authoritarian.

EL: Politics is constructed around two poles. One side is populism, the other is institutionalism. The excess of populism leads to the dissolution of the social community, which is of course a disaster. Yet since an excess of institutionalism results in political paralysis, one always has to construct a balance between these two poles in order to have a viable political system. This balance is created in different societies in different ways. An excess of institutionalism more particularly leads to the parliamentarization of power, which paralyses the executive. A typical example was the Fourth Republic in France. The country became unmanageable and within this context Gaullism emerged, which was probably a moment of populism. Several things that were not manageable by the disintegrating political system became again manageable thanks to the personalization of power. And then came the rebellion of 1968. It threatened to disintegrate society since it proved difficult to transform this broad mobilization and the many accompanying demands into a viable political progressive alternative going beyond Gaullism. Only one man had the sense of what was needed at that point, and that was Pierre Mendès France. When the mobilization started, he was giving a series of talks in Chile. He interrupted his tour, went back to France, and said on the radio that he was prepared to seize power if he was backed by the whole left. He proposed the founding of a Sixth Republic on a left-wing basis but did not succeed. On the one hand the Communist Party had a very cautious corporatist politics of negotiation. The last thing in the world they wanted was the emergence of a left-wing populism in France. On the other hand the gauchistes were totally elsewhere with their slogan ‘all power to the imagination’. What happened then, we have already been speaking about. People didn’t see that the mobilization of 68 could result in a reorganization of French society. During the subsequent election De Gaulle therefore won massively, but not because people were particularly happy with him. For one year later, in the April 1969 referendum on the proposed constitutional amendment, De Gaulle was defeated. In the forced parliamentary election of 1968 people just didn’t see how a new politico-hegemonic arrangement could possibly emerge. So confronted with the prospect of a complete disintegration they voted for De Gaulle. Jacques Lacan once said that the two great leaders in French politics of the second half of the twentieth century that he admired were De Gaulle and Pierre Mendès France. Slavoj Žižek has misinterpreted this statement, saying that it showed Lacan was not at all left-wing. I think Lacan was actually trying to say something different, namely that the only genuine hegemonic projects that proposed an image of the state’s capacity to unify French society were advanced by the right-winger De Gaulle and the left-winger Mendès France. But to reiterate the more general point: we need a balance between populism and institutionalism. In the Latin-American context this is perfectly clear. In the European context the lack of unifying signifiers, so of slogans or leaders, is going to be felt very much in the next few years. And the risk is that they will be come from the right…

RL: What you say reminds me of the analysis of Max Weber. In his view, the administrative bureaucratic apparatus needs a strong leader on top who receives a plebiscitee via election. Without that kind of leader, the moment of true politics disappears because you end up with a takeover of bureaucracy or administration. Weber therefore favoured a presidential regime based on the American model. In comparison with a strict parliamentary system, a presidential regime seems indeed to foster populist politics. One could perhaps be in favour of a dual regime with a populist dynamic via the presidential channel that is balanced by procedures and parliamentary control?

EL: Postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Leela Ghandi, the great-granddaughter of Mahatma Ghandi who is professor at the University of Chicago, have produced an interesting analysis of – if I translate it in my language – the ways in which the signifiers of democracy create different institutional preconditions within different societies. What could democracy mean in an Islamic society? What could democracy be in the Latin American case, which I am trying to analyse? They are dealing with the kind of topic that you mention. I think we have to arrive at a more universal theory of democracy in which democratic demands are dealt with in all of their diversity, considering both their dangers and possibilities. With our Eurocentric view we tend to think that democratic demands can be handled in only one way. Yet at the beginning of the nineteenth century liberalism was a very respected form of political organization, whereas democracy was a pejorative term, like populism today, because the notion was identified with the ‘government of the mob’ or Jacobinism and related things. It took many revolutions and reactions to reach the kind of relatively stable balance between liberalism and democracy we still know today in the West. I think that this kind of integration of democracy and liberalism was never reached in Latin America. After they became independent, Latin American states were organized as liberal parliamentary regimes, yet they were not the least democratic because the democratic demands of the masses were ignored. The mass movements that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century therefore expressed themselves predominantly not via liberal channels but mainly through a form of nationalistic military dictatorship. There existed a bifurcation in the democratic experience of the masses: there was liberalism and there was democracy expressed through these non-orthodox channels. Only after the experience of the horrible dictatorships of the 1970s arose the possibility of coupling the liberal-democratic and the national-populist tradition. This construction is an uneasy thing but I think no one in Latin America, neither Chávez or Morales nor Kirchner or Correa, is advocating the dismantlement of the liberal foundations of the state. In Latin America, we have, or are going to have, democratic governments with a strong presidentialism. This is not the case in Western Europe. Nevertheless, Western Europe needs some kind of populist reconfiguration of the social space in a democratic direction since otherwise that space is going to be occupied by the horrible movements we were speaking about previously – by Le Pen, Wilders and his Party for Freedom, and the like.

RL: Let’s go the philosophical basis of your work. In your view, politics is not just a separate societal sphere but a necessary dimension of instituting the social. Could you elaborate this idea a little bit?

EL: In my work I have tried to clarify the distinction between the social and the political according to the Husserlian distinction between sedimentation and reactivation. Whereas the social consists of sedimented practices, the dimension of reactivation comes to the fore in the instituting moment – and that is the political. Obviously, Husserl would not have bought this argument. He would have conceived the instituting moment as being that of the transcendental subject, which has in his view an absolute constitutive priority. I consider the moment of reactivation as a moment of radical contingency. You have social institutions or sedimented practices, but their institution or reinstitution does not have a ground beyond itself. Suppose that you use a mathematical operation. You don’t remember the moment in which this mathematical operation was mathematically grounded. So in the moment of sedimentation you use practices that are simply established, whereas in the moment of reactivation you go back to the original moment of institution. For Husserl, this moment of institution would imply an absolutely grounding, transcendental subject, whereas for me it points to a radical contingency that defines the moment of the political.

RL: And that moment appears in various kinds of struggle?

EL: Yes, I think that the instituting moment is continually reproduced. The social is never completely ordered but society is also not something that starts from zero. The two dimensions are constantly overdetermining each other.

RL: Yet why call the instituting moment political? Because it involves struggle?

EL: Yes, and that brings us to another aspect of my thinking. You have read my joint work with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and subsequent writings. One of the defining ideas is that antagonism is of central importance to the institution of the social. You have overall two ideas on the social. Either it is a ground preceding everything else that is happening, which implies that the social has a definite meaning. Or it is an Abgrund, in the sense of Heidegger, which is to say that the social lacks any foundation and that the moment of totalization is not a ground but a horizon. Once you have this idea of a horizon, the moment of the political comes to the fore.

RL: And for you this necessarily implies an antagonism?

EL: I have a twofold position on antagonism. When we wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, we conceived antagonism as pointing to the impossibility of the social order to constitute itself as a sedimented order. Later on I had second thoughts. Antagonism already goes hand in hand with a first discursive inscription of somebody as an enemy that is already a form of sedimentation. There is thus something deeper involved, a moment of dislocation that prevents the existing structure from overcoming this unstructured moment in one way or another. Let’s take as an example of a dislocating experience the crisis of the Weimar Republic in which the middle classes lost their savings. You can say: ‘It’s forces of evil doing this’, or ‘It’s a punishment sent by God because of my sins’. Whatever form of inscription you choose is a second moment with regard to the experience of dislocation, which does not necessarily lead to any form of discursive articulation.

RL: The moment of dislocation can also just elicit particular claims that are dealt with in an administrative way, so without the moment of politics.

EL: There is no radical dislocation if the claims can be handled in that mode. A radical dislocation happens in the moment in which you cannot follow administrative ways.

RL: How would you then delineate administration from politics?

EL: Let me start with an example and then move on to the theoretical approach of this question. Suppose you have a group of neighbours asking the municipality to create a bus line that connects the place where they live to the place where most of them work. If the municipality accepts this claim, this is the end of the matter. The claim is discursively inscribed and administered. But let’s suppose the municipality does not accept the claim. There is then the frustration of a demand, and an inability of the institutional system to channel the demand. Now let’s further suppose that among or connected to these people whose demand has been frustrated, there exist other demands that are also being frustrated, for instance regarding housing, health, security, schooling, and so on. People start to have the idea that they have something in common, in the sense that their demands are being opposed by a system that has power but does not recognize them. That is a pre-political and pre-populist situation. Instead of the demands being administratively solved, there is the emergence of a chain of equivalent demands not recognized by the system. In this situation people will start feeling that there exists a division of society between those at the top and those at the bottom. At some point somebody starts interpellating people at the bottom against the whole system. That is the moment in which the populist identity arises. So you have all these demands floating there and some sense of equivalence, or what I call an equivalential chain. And then there is the crystallizing of the plurality of demands around one symbol that unifies the chain. In most of the cases – in fact I have not found a single example in which this is not the case – that symbol is the name of a leader. When all this happens, the social space is divided into two camps. It can happen with an ideology of the right, like you may observe in Flanders or in Holland, or it can happen with an ideology of the left, like in Latin America. The crucial point is that populism is not an ideology itself. It is a form of constructing the political through the division of society in two camps.

RL: And with an explicit reference to ‘the people’?

EL: Well, the people are precisely constructed through this chain of equivalences.

RL: I had the impression that your early work on populism suggested that it was necessary to refer to ‘the people’ as a basic signifier that keeps the whole chain of equivalences together, whereas in more recent writings the empty signifier that installs a hegemonic discourse can for instance also be ‘the market’, witness neoliberalism.

EL: After 1989 the reference to the market definitely played that role in Eastern Europe of the signifier unifying all demands. The market is actually a way of organizing the economy but in Eastern Europe the market meant at that time many other things, such as catching up with the West, the end of bureaucratic inefficiency, freedom and the right to be different, and so on. Everything crystallized around the signifier ‘market’ but that did not last long. People started realizing that the market was not an all-in solution to all their difficulties. This led to a disintegration of the anticommunist imaginary and the emergence of some kind of more pragmatic arrangement in most Eastern European countries.

RL: So even if ‘the market’ is the central signifier, you would still speak of a populist discourse?

EL: It was a genuine populist discourse.

RL: Because it still contained an implicit reference to the people and their claims?

EL: Yes! Don’t forget that the people can be constructed in various ways. Thus the Long March of Mao constructed the people as something that exceeded class. There was at that moment no possibility to say that they all belonged to the working class or something of the kind. You had predominantly people who were marginal, with destroyed daily lives – people who were dislocated, as we said before, because of the Japanese invasion. All their demands that could not be met were reabsorbed around the Red Army and communism. In that period, communism started to signify in China something that had very little to do with what it meant in the experience of nineteenth-century Europe, where it was associated with justice and related things. The same can happen in discourses with a completely different ideological orientation. Take the case of Mussolini and Italy in 1923-1924. When people observed that the state that had emerged from the Risorgimento was disintegrating, they were looking for some sort of radical re-foundation. The fascists have been able to carry out that revolution whereas the communists failed. One could say this is nonsense, since a true revolution would have been something very different. Yet at some point, ‘revolution’ became the central signifier pointing to a radical reorganization of society, be it a fascist one. When people realize that society is threatened with radical disintegration, whatever kind of reorganization of society weighs more than the actual ideological content framing it. The truth is that there were many people moving from communism to fascism and vice versa during this period. In 1944-1945 the opposite process took place: the communist signifier started to articulate a much wider series of equivalences than the fascist one within the context of the German army occupying Northern Italy.

RL: Let’s return to more recent times. You spoke of the populist character of the market discourse in Eastern Europe just after the fall of communism. At that time, neoliberalism was already becoming a hegemonic discourse in the West. During the 1990s neoliberalism spread out in different ideological directions, including the left – I’m thinking for instance of Tony Blair’s so-called third-way politics. Was this kind of neoliberalism also a populist discourse?

EL: No. I don’t think Blairism was at any moment genuinely populist, except perhaps in its very beginnings. The conservative regime was disintegrating in the 1990s, so there was some kind of populist appeal to Blairism. Yet what Blairism was providing later on was a continuation of Thatcherism by other means. Eric Hobsbawm has written that Blairism was Thatcherism with trousers. It was exactly that. Very quickly the mystic of Blairism was reduced to nothing and, with the Iraq war, it simply disappeared.

RL: How should we then conceive neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse?

EL: The interesting phenomenon is that neoliberalism in its most crude forms requires authoritarian methods. The restructuring of the Chilean economy in a neoliberal direction by the Chicago boys required the dictatorship of Pinochet. In Argentina, the economic plan of Martínez de Hoz would not have been able to implant itself without the dictatorship of Videla. But there exists another, more pervasive form of neoliberalism that emerges when the parties that should have opposed these regimes are permeated by their ideas. It happens all the time. The Blairism just mentioned is a clear example. And today, the politics of readjustment according to the most traditional norms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are advocated by the socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The neoliberal disease ultimately goes beyond the authoritarian form, by way of negotiations. Argentina offers an example to the contrary. After the crisis of 2001 and the arrival to power of Nestor Kirchner, the country completely broke with the formulas of the IMF and started up a more pragmatic politics. The result is that Argentina is passing through the actual crisis in a rather mild way, without having to appeal to any forms of adjustment. Most Latin American economies are actually moving in this direction.

RL: Is neoliberalism then predominantly hegemonic with regard to active government and administration?

EL: Neoliberalism was only hegemonic among economic and political elites. It never obtained hegemony over society as a whole.

RL: Some people would question this diagnosis on the basis of phenomena such as contemporary consumerism, which can be linked to the marketization of nearly everything, including politics. One may consider neoliberalism not only as a method of politico-economic government but as a broader ideological formation that re-articulates nearly all social relations in terms of provider-customer positions.

EL: I don’t think that there is such a continuity between neoliberalism and consumerism. Consumerism is perfectly compatible with many forms of the welfare state that neoliberalism opposes. It is true that in its most hegemonic moment, neoliberalism rearticulated consumerism according to its own logic. That is exactly what I think is collapsing. Not that I want to be too optimistic because we may have consumerism as an ideology and a social practice for a long time after the neoliberal formula has stopped being effective. So overall consumerism and neoliberalism are not necessarily linked. Before the crisis of the 1970s, there existed a consumerist attitude that was definitely not a neoliberal one. Thatcherism and Reaganism attempted to link these, and stated that consumerism, which had already become a mass ideology, was compatible with self-regulated markets without state regulations. That was the dominant ideology in the 1980s and the 1990s. Things are different today. Consumerism as an ideology is not exactly withering away but what is definitely in decline is the faith that neoliberalism is the best way to achieve consumerism. So my point is that the logic of consumerism and the logic of neoliberalism don’t tend to coalesce in a coherent or necessary way. Let’s suppose that they don’t, and also that neoliberalism does not deliver the goods and that even the consumerist logic is put to the test. Many things may happen then, for instance that people start realizing that they have to become subjects of their own lives at different stages of organization. When this occurs, consumerism is also put into question. I think that all these recent crises not only reveal that neoliberalism is bankrupt but that the confidence on which consumerism was based is also threatened. In such a situation people can think of becoming a different kind of subject, and some hope for another form of societal organization may emerge…

Using several historical lines, the Belgian sociologist Rudi Laermans analyses the present ‘heritage regime’. Actualism, which so dominates the modern era, is characterized by an emphasis on forgetting. The present focus on heritage seems to contradict this. Yet stressing the autonomous value of the past in fact reinforces the division between past and present. According to Laermans they are two sides of the same coin. The often expressed criticism of Disneyfication merely diverts attention.

The culture of the recent deposed, but all-too-undead New Labour project may be summed up in a single phrase: ‘Populism without popularity.’ What does this mean? It means that the simulacrum of politics has overtaken any possibility of genuine social content, that the desire to be seen to be doing something to be approved of is greater than the desire to actually do it. Politics may well have been like this for some time, we should say, but something subtle has shifted in the transition from Thatcher to Blair, at least in the UK: the USA has long been entranced by presidents who are equally at home on the big screen as on the rallying stage (as Gil Scott Heron put it in B Movie: ‘Acted like an actor . . . Hollyweird. Acted like a liberal. Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican. Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president. And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate. We’re all actors in this I suppose.’).

We all know about spin, about style over substance, about how the media frames the debate, where one public ‘slip’ can cost an election, but what about the dire contradictions unleashed by the desperate attempt to appear popular without the will to enact potentially unpopular decisions? In Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self (2002), in an episode entitled ‘Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering’, a line describing New Labour focus groups, Derek Draper, a former Labour spin doctor, makes a valid point about the incoherency of the ‘research’ generated by such groups. Of course people are going to say that they both want better public services and to pay less tax! But is there anything more New Labour than asking people to map out their contradictory desires and then somehow pretending to be able to act on them? The sheen of populism gives everyone a good feeling: my voice has been heard on the one side, we’re listening on the other. The miasmic fantasy of ‘Cool Britannia’ that saw pop stars mingle with politicians in a weightless bubble of faddish fashion and creative industry speak, was pop music and the art world revealing their desperate desire to seem appealing without necessarily arousing any passion (it was about this time that pop stars were suddenly allowed to be just nice normal boys and girls and no one was supposed to worry about class any more).

Recent years have seen the arrival of flash mobs – distracted spectacles of apolitical ‘communities’ incredibly quickly co-opted by ad campaigns and ‘spontaneous’ fake demands to bring back old products (chocolate bars, crisps) that people dimly remembered from their childhoods. These ironic displays nevertheless hint at a subterranean desire for both spontaneity and a more genuine sense of belonging: popularity without the need for populism. In the twentieth century, the right-wing, or, more broadly reactionary, tendencies of political and social life have historically been much better at attempting to inculcate a ‘true’ populism (mass rallies, mass use of propaganda cinema, etcetera), although the Soviets were the first to see the potential of reproducible poster art and an international cinema (albeit in one country). Today, in the USA we see the rise of the ‘Tea Party Movement’, which seems to want to directly fuse a horror of taxation with a kind of deep psychological resentment, and in the UK the rise of the English Defence League, a single issue ‘popular’ movement that objects to ‘extremist Islam’ and looks and acts uncannily like the racist mobs Ballard depicted in his final novel Kingdom Come. Trapped between a commodity culture obsessed with creating fake-popular campaigns, and Facebook-organizing racist thugs, the future of populism doesn’t look great: against this depressing populism, our own recourse is to reclaim the notion of popularity when and where it emerges.

But how can we separate true popularity from false? Is anything allowed to be genuinely popular without immediate recapture by media and consumer culture? A hint here would be to observe when and where the numbers game is fixed, when precisely people don’t want you knowing how many people are involved. Every protestor and activist knows that when the police give out their figures for protests it’s usually a quarter to a half of the real numbers; the same goes for media coverage – the crowd was barely there! Even in the arena of the basely numerical (that is, all contemporary human life), we can see the cracks in the edifice of populism against popularity. These moments of genuine popularity may be overwhelmingly motivated by anger and injustice, but perhaps this is as good a starting point as any, and perhaps the only one we have available to us in our current predicament.

To what extent is the political use of myths justified? Wu Ming, a writers’ collective based in Bologna, asks itself that question in this kaleidoscopic self-critique. The binding element is mythopoesis, a radical politics of storytelling that, says Wu Ming, must never be beyond all doubt.

Unlike in pre-modern communities, we consider our democracies to be rationally constituted. Philosopher Aukje van Rooden wonders whether the greatest myth of contemporary politics isn’t our assumption that we can function without a mythological structure. Perhaps that denial is precisely what underlies the overwhelming advance of right-wing populist politicians.

Willem Schinkel, sociologist at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, does not consider populism a threat to democracy. According to him, populism in fact especially has significance as a means of criticism, now that ‘democracy is so little criticized that every dictator holds elections in order to adorn himself with democratic attire’.

Now that politics is deliberately being shunted aside with greater and greater frequency and all sorts of measures that sooner apply to an emergency are being legitimized, cities are coming under increasing pressure. War rhetoric and marketing strategies are converging in the formulation of urban policies that are primarily aimed at attracting the creative class and integrating the ‘ underclass’. Reflecting on Amsterdam’ s future, sociologist Willem Schinkel reacts to the marketing slogan ‘ I Amsterdam’ by asking, ‘ Who is Amsterdam and where is it heading? ’

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

In Syria cartoon characters are appropriated and re-narrated in order to reflect anti-regime protest propaganda.

The graphic design and research collective Foundland (Ghalia Elsrakbi, Lauren Alexander and Dirk Vis) conducts research from within political and social developments through graphic design. They translate complex issues in Dutch society into accessible communications products, such as posters and installations. The editors of Open have asked them to make a special contribution because of their research into populism.

Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum’s experiences during the making of the video Últimas Palabras in Argentina in 2013 have allowed them to reflect on the historical and didactic nature of the political trial. The video – published at the bottom of this text – focuses on the trial and closing argument of ex-Naval Commander Alfredo Astiz (aka “The Blond Angel of Death” during Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship). It is presented here as a case study that demonstrates how Astiz’s final plea can be read as an expression of power relations in society.

The Basque-Dutch artist duo Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum have written a first-hand report about their experiences of working and living inside Occupy Amsterdam, a protest camp that appeared on a public square in the heart of the city at the end of 2011. This ideological enclave sought to distinguish itself from the social order that surrounded it by creating a radically inclusive and participatory form of democracy. The text is a reflection of how this ambition became entangled with the complex moral and political implications of providing some form of protection for the weak in the name of a common good, which is itself in the process of being renegotiated.

Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova were invited, as representatives of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and BAK in Utrecht respectively, to contribute to the Brussels Biennial. With ‘Once is Nothing’1 they tried, from their position of institutional responsibility, to find an answer to the fleeting character of many biennials and their economically motivated quest for modernization.

I was brought up in England, a country inside a bigger state, the UK, that had been an empire within living memory. Its grandeur, fading but still apparent in the 1970s, was part of my understanding of who I was and could be. At the same time, consciousness of class and ethnicity made it clear that this state to which I belonged could not be expected to care about me in return. There were economic and social forces that excluded and undermined any appeals to loyalty. In short, I knew that the UK could never be 'on my side' in the course of my life; a knowledge embedded in my posture, voice and gesture. The best that might happen would be a temporary alignment of interests – a light mutual abuse.

When I moved to a job in Sweden, I was charmed by discovering a society where people believed that the state was on their side. Years of social democracy had persuaded many people, even given them the evidence, to see the state and their identity as largely coinciding. Personal transparency produced a successful society it seemed, one that was content with itself.

It was partly the riots in Gothenburg in 2002 that marked a change in this rhetoric. Swedes were genuinely shocked that the global movement's demonstrations against the EU leaders' meeting was violently opposed by their police. But, as a foreigner, a sense of disquiet had happened earlier. The Swedish version of social democracy was intrusive in ways I had never experienced in England. This intrusiveness went deep into personal ethics, urban planning, physical movement and demanded a certain spectrum of relatively homogeneous behaviour. I also had the impression that this system of quiet social control appeared much more visible to me, an outsider, than those educated in the system. There was a certain attraction to a parent state, an idea that it cared for life rather than made living possible. In my worst moments of despair, it seemed to reduce bodily experience to the conditions of the maternal womb, with warm, double-glazed housing and clean linoleum flooring curving clinically up the wall.

In 2004, I moved to the Netherlands, aware of its reputation and its troubles. Naturally, I found a different body in a different condition than in Sweden, though a degree of the social democratic temperature was familiar. What struck me first was the survival of what I perceived as the 1960s. 'Letting it all hang out' still appeared to have some currency. Meetings were about telling people what you thought not building alliances, agreement was something given rather than asked. I came across pure 'autonome kunst' for the first time too, and a passion for authenticity that reminded me of the hippies seeking to find themselves in the high mountains of the Afghan trail.

Yet, just as in Sweden, my initial enthusiastic curiosity was inevitably tempered by some realizations that all was not well with the 1960s model. The political consequences of social democratic failure were obvious from before I arrived, but socially – bodily – gestures appeared out of scale. Maybe the lack of self-conscious identity was suddenly imagined to be a weakness rather than a strength and over-compensated. It is difficult for an outsider to understand it well, I think.

But one thing struck me as different. If the 1960s were still the benchmark, what happened in 1989 – the political and consequent social changes in Europe, South Africa, China – seemed unacknowledged. What for me was a change of overwhelming significance, maybe because I grew up between two ideologies in some ways, appeared here to be interpreted as a distant event of minor actual consequence.

The project 'Be(com) ing Dutch' that we began two years ago has been, in many of its facets, an observation and research into just this question – did another era start in 1989 here as well as 'over there in the former east' and, if so, what are its consequences 20 years on? The discussions and art commissions we organize certainly seek to internationalize the question by asking artists to help us see ourselves as others see us, yet the question still stays close to its particular formation in this country. Looking at the exhibition after one month, I see artists who are almost always seeking to get to grips with the question of Dutch identity, yet doing it from their own position and integrity. This often means they look at the subject in a quite literal way, giving a flavour of ethnology to their work in order to confirm Jacques Rancière's crucial insight that: 'the real must be fictionalised in order to be thought'.1 If this is true, then it gives a role to art. While personal and social identity always remains 'in becoming', the field of action in which they 'become' is delineated in part by these fictions.

It is the need to make visible what is taken for granted or ignored in the everyday through enlarging the details that the 'Be(com) ing Dutch' exhibition uses as its main trope. Its purpose is partly to fictionalize in order to think, but also to use the detail as a hieroglyph for the broader state of things – a device that is I think not so well understood from a pre-1989 position. In the 1960s, gestures still had a certain grandeur of ideological certitude, exoticism was exciting, difference (to a degree) an attraction. If that comprehension is used to read 'Be(com) ing Dutch', it fails.

Having gone through two-thirds of the extended project, perhaps Rancière's fictions of the real, and then on a small scale, are one of the few options left to us today. They give us the possibility to come to conscious terms with the post-1989 world without resorting to grand schemes and new utopias. The most worthwhile contemporary artists are often found ploughing slowly through the many surviving fictions of that socially foundational moment in the 1960s to find out how far we have travelled and in what direction. While all history is inevitably constructed, our collective historical construction needs largely to match contemporary observations. If it falls too far out of alignment, it generates frustration and alienation. 'Be(com) ing Dutch', which should then be seen as part of a potentially wider process that goes beyond artistic expression, tries to temper that frustration by zooming in on the details and close-ups of our imagined pasts, presents and futures. Such a focus is not particularly heroic, which is probably why the exhibition counters much artistic expectation in the Netherlands.2 In this sense the project 'Be(com) ing Dutch' remains a modest proposal for a specific reorientation of our contemporary artistic condition rather than a grand narrative. The next step – configuring new self-conscious fictions for our situation today – appears some way off. It is, without any doubt, a major collective task, but the fragmented Dutch (art) scene is not minded to start such a project today. However, I remain convinced that it will become a crucial theme for the future to which this project will have made a thoughtful contribution.

You can find out more about the two-year project at becomingdutch.com

Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova were invited, as representatives of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and BAK in Utrecht respectively, to contribute to the Brussels Biennial. With ‘Once is Nothing’1 they tried, from their position of institutional responsibility, to find an answer to the fleeting character of many biennials and their economically motivated quest for modernization.

In 2007, Maria Hlavajova was the curator of the Dutch Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. She worked with visual artist Aernout Mik, who compiled the three-part video-installation Citizens and Subjects for the Biennale.1  Their collaboration led to a number of reflections on the relationship between art and society, and on terms such as communality and nationalism in relation to Mik’s work.

A study of contemporary Italian society reveals social and political trends that are still developing elsewhere in the world, according to Franco Berardi (philosopher) and Marco Jacquemet (communications specialist). The success of Silvio Berlusconi can be explained by forces that arose during the Counter Reformation and the baroque and never actually left industrialized, Catholic Italy. Since the transition to the semiocapitalistic system, in which the linguistic element is dominant, they even have become obvious again.

A study of contemporary Italian society reveals social and political trends that are still developing elsewhere in the world, according to Franco Berardi (philosopher) and Marco Jacquemet (communications specialist). The success of Silvio Berlusconi can be explained by forces that arose during the Counter Reformation and the baroque and never actually left industrialized, Catholic Italy. Since the transition to the semiocapitalistic system, in which the linguistic element is dominant, they even have become obvious again.

In the following essay, political scientist Jolle Demmers and writer Sameer S. Mehendale argue for the necessity of recognizing the relationship between xenophobia and neoliberalism and of gaining an understanding of the complexity of that relationship. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is part of a broader process: the largely market-controlled takeover of symbolic forms of collectivity in an increasingly atomized society.

In the following essay, political scientist Jolle Demmers and writer Sameer S. Mehendale argue for the necessity of recognizing the relationship between xenophobia and neoliberalism and of gaining an understanding of the complexity of that relationship. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is part of a broader process: the largely market-controlled takeover of symbolic forms of collectivity in an increasingly atomized society.

This text is based on a lecture given at the University of Groningen within the conference Arts and Humanities: Of(f) Course. The conference was addressing the fact that both the arts and the humanities have lost their self-evidence in a world where ‘bottom line’ economic standards are becoming increasingly dominant.

We must find the right allies to show that art can be a tool used to break down the barriers that prevent engagement and the creation of different public domains.

Open! published the texts and videos developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate that took place in the City Council of Amsterdam on May 9, 2014. In Beyond Allegories politicians and artists discussed proposals on the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

What is the real motivation behind the Dutch government’s increased efforts to reduce arts funding?

Life Between Borders: The Nomadic Life of Curators and Artists, New York City, apexart, 2013, (edited by Steven Rand and Heather Felty), ISBN 9781933347653, 112 pages

Matthew Stadler, Deventer, nai010 publishers: Rotterdam, 2013, ISBN 9789064507496, 256 pages

Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain happens to include, in its very title, at least two misreadings...

In June 2020, the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research was published by seven European umbrella organizations for higher art education (representing art schools, conservatories, architecture,  and film schools), two art school accreditation bodies, the public arts sector organization Culture Action Europe and the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). The Vienna Declaration is the first international policy document on artistic research, meant to provide concepts and definitions for integrating artistic research into European higher education. According to its authors, it addresses “political decision-makers, funding bodies, higher education and research institutions as well as other organisations and individuals catering for and undertaking AR”. Although the Vienna Declaration will likely become a future constitution and framework for artistic research in European art schools, no public debates of its content seem to have taken place in the six months after its publication. Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma think that it is time to speak up – and fundamentally disagree with its concept and framing of artistic research.

Two things are crucial for Open!, both in its previous and in its putative future form. The first is the problematisation of the category of art and the use of an extended notion of aesthetic practice; the second is the shift away from criticism to critique.

Sven Lütticken argues that it is only by facing the ongoing process of extraction and abstraction of the pre-capitalist that the commons becomes a political and an aesthetic project. He asks what contributions artistic or aesthetic practice can make to practice directed against our current regime of accumulation and abstraction. The aim would not be to instrumentalise art in the name of a political project, but to sound out possibilities for an aesthetic contestation in conjunction with a political one.

With Commonist Aesthetics, the editorial team Binna Choi (Casco), Sven Lütticken, Jorinde Seijdel (Open!)  introduces “the idea of commonism” – not communism – as a topic that various writers and artists will explore and expand upon in the course of this series. Commonist aesthetics pertain to the world of the senses, or a “residually common world” that is continuously subject to new divisions, new appropriations, and attempts at reclamation and re-imagining.

What artistic activist aims have in common is a faith that awareness can change the world without any specific follow-through. This is magical thinking.

Matteo Pasquinelli is advocating a paradigm where the opposition between body and mind, between bios and noos, between life and knowledge will eventually vanish.

Now that the financial world seems to be collapsing, writer and researcher Matteo Pasquinelli thinks the time is ripe to think about how the creative city and its gentri­fication processes will develop in the coming years. It’s important that this debate goes beyond the position of the art scene and the cultural industry and that it includes the ruins that the immaterial accumulation of value has left behind.

In times of war, the accepted food chain is broken and the city becomes ‘edible’. It starts to cannibalize itself, according to Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, who use various historical examples to prove their point. With this ‘urbanibalisme’, as they call it, as their motive, they’ve developed a recipe for a therapeutic beverage, Ferment Brussels, to bring a toast to a communal lifestyle as the antidote to rising forms of nationalism.

Society seems to have slowly accepted the use of business-world measurement tools in other areas, but it remains profoundly unclear whether these statistical tools have actually contributed to the quality of our democracy, culture, or our actual lives.

In his latest response to Camiel van Winkel’s The Sandwich Will Not Go Away Or Why Paradigm Shifts Are Wishful Thinking, Steven ten Thije critiques his concept of the “sandwich” as an analytical tool. Ten Thije claims that Van Winkel’s “sandwich” is nothing more than pure theory because it fails to offer the necessary connections to the extra-theoretical and, moreover, essentially ignores art altogether.

In a critical response to Camiel van Winkel’s essay The Sandwich Will Not Go Away Or Why Paradigm Shifts Are Wishful Thinking, Steven ten Thije insists that merely describing the sandwich is not enough; if we find it difficult to digest, we should ask ourselves: Who made this sandwich? Ten Thije rejects the black-and-white polarity that some insist exists between autonomous art and an art that is less so. He pleads for more generosity and a new attitude from everyone involved in the cultural sector.

This text is based on a lecture given at the University of Groningen within the conference Arts and Humanities: Of(f) Course. The conference was addressing the fact that both the arts and the humanities have lost their self-evidence in a world where ‘bottom line’ economic standards are becoming increasingly dominant.

What if the university was a unique time and space where society could offer itself a future? Would this be a sufficient reason to offer the university a future?

This text is based on a lecture given at the University of Groningen within the conference Arts and Humanities: Of(f) Course. The conference was addressing the fact that both the arts and the humanities have lost their self-evidence in a world where ‘bottom line’ economic standards are becoming increasingly dominant.

What if the university was a unique time and space where society could offer itself a future? Would this be a sufficient reason to offer the university a future?

The monetization of our social relations is the causality of crowdfunding. Instead of just giving one’s time, or attention – those of us who are online and participating are coerced into contributing. This network, then, becomes the commodity.

In his response to Merijn Oudenampsen’s essay “Lost in Translation: On the Intelligibility of Art Discourse” Steyn Bergs tries to both complicate and adjust the essentially sociological account offered by Oudenampsen from an art historical perspective. Bergs wants to offer a clearer image of some of the intricacies of the functioning of art discourse in asking after what we mean by “a more accessible language in the arts” or “a more critical, intellectual and pedagogical relation to art.”

From its inception, Open! and Casco’s series Commonist Aesthetics was meant neither as a celebration nor as a debunking exercise, but as a critical inquiry. The commons certainly is not lacking in those who hype the cause, nor in vehement detractors. For the Invisible Committee, an example, ‘commonism’ is identified with Ostromite liberal managerialism:

Governing the Commons is the title of the recent bestseller by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, who has defined eight principles for ‘managing the commons.’ Understanding there is a place for them in an ‘administration of the commons’ that remains to be invented, [Antonio] Negri and associates have embraced this theory, which is perfectly liberal at its core…

…[They] are inclined to make the ‘commons’ into the latest metaphysical principle to come out of the West’s magical hat. An arche, they say, in the sense of that which ‘organizes, commands, and rules all political activity,’ a new ‘beginning’ that will give birth to new institutions and a new world government.1

And is the excitement in some art world circles (however marginal they may be) for forms of commoning, or at least the rhetoric of commoning, not deeply suspicious? In her essay for Commonist Aesthetics, Marina Vishmidt suggested that a ‘structural and ideological affinity already holds between “commonist” politics and the field of art practices’; both, she argues, ‘are committed to change in the here and now through the means available, often interstices and spare capacities, “making do” as in the “sharing economy.”’ Making changes in the here and now sounds good when the alternative is waiting for a phantasmagorical revolution. But is the exclusive privileging of ‘making do’ under current conditions not equally problematical – especially if connected to the hope that enough cute grass-rootsy commonizing activity will attain such critical mass that capitalism will, after all, disappear or morph beyond recognition? Vishmidt states in the aforementioned text: ‘The centrality of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (2006) to several of a number of cultural scenes of inquiry into “the commons” would seem to point to the voluntaristic roots of this attitude as they cut across art and politics, present and past, performance and mobilisation.’

Nonetheless, we would not have pursued Commonist Aesthetics if we agreed that commons discourse is completely bankrupt and utterly irredeemable. In a passage recently evoked by Katharine Gibson during a lecture at Casco, Massimo de Angelis acknowledges that commoning is often instrumentalized not in order ‘to provide alternatives to capital, but to make a particular node of capital – a region or a city – more competitive, while somehow addressing the problems of reproduction at the same time.’ However, he maintains that ‘in spite of capital’s strategies to use a commons fix to the problems it creates while never really solving them, commons may well be part of a different historical development.’2

This ‘may well be’ continues to hover over the debate, a debate that we wish to develop and intensify with this ‘virtual roundtable’ titled Common Conflict, mirrored by a public forum at Casco on 12 March. Later this year, the whole Commonist Aesthetics project will be rounded off by a book publication.

For Common Conflict, we have confronted a number of authors with a series of questions, some or many of which may be leading questions. The authors were free to pick and choose, or ignore, as they saw fit; to rephrase and reroute a line of questioning; and to examine their own as well as others’ practices and theoretical presuppositions.

Is the notion of the commons subject to an ontological essentialization? Is dehistoricization tantamount to depoliticization?

The resurgence of the commons is clearly linked to the decline of the public sector, at least in Europe. Is commonism tacitly complicit with the ever further dismantling of the state and the public? Does the state need to be reclaimed?

Does the commonist discourse have a potential depoliticizing effect, being compatible with hazy visions of the ‘sharing economy’ and an Ostrom-style governance? What are the consequences of the division between ‘Ostromites’ interested in governing the commons and autonomists eager to prefigure a coming insurrection or a coming community?

How does, or should, commonist self-organization around specific issues relate to more general antagonisms and struggles? Is commonism in need of a wider autonomist horizon and bona-fide leftist strategy – or are ‘actually existing’ commonist tactics, however compromised, a daily reminder of the bankruptcy of more fundamental, more rigorous, more dialectically canny leftist positions?

What is the relation between theories of the commons / commoning and specific practices? Does the theory lag behind the most cogent practices? Is it often a substitute for actual commoning practices at specific sites for struggles? Can problematic, partial or blocked attempts at commoning be as valid as seemingly successful and exemplary endeavours?

Is the commons’ rhetorical success in parts of the art world indicative of an aestheticization of the social – with aestheticization here being used in its negative Benjaminian sense? Does the all too familiar critique of art institutions need to be followed by an active commoning of institutions? How to proceed with this?

Does the art world focus overly on low-tech forms of commons and commoning, unduly neglecting the digital commons? How can and should online and offline impact each other?

Do we see the beginnings of a commonist aesthetic practice in a more fundamental sense, involving forms of sensuous activity that challenge and go beyond established notions of art and existing institutional forms? Does aesthetic practice allow us to refocus all of the above questions?

Questioning the assumed ‘irrepresentability of finance’ and critically looking at works of Geissler / Sann, Andy Warhol and the Institute for Human Activities, Steyn Bergs asks if better practices and models for the redistribution of wealth via art and its institutions could not be developed. Reflexivity is what is needed, he asserts, especially because art is so implicated within the world of finance that it displays a highly similar relation to the value form.

Levien Nordeman takes a closer look at the notion of craft, as well as analog or “retro” media, and argues that the current fascination with craft, which is increasingly observable in both the cultural sector and the art academies, can be understood as a way of redefining our relationships with digital technologies.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen argues that we must both continue to identify the revolutionary perspective as a communist one and continue to describe the revolution as a communist revolution. He contributes to the on-going discussion of the revolutionary position by reflecting on the relationship between revolution, counterrevolution and reformism. His essay is also contributing to Open!’s Commonist Aesthetics theme.

Klaske Havik, Urban Literacy: Reading and Writing Architecture, nai010 publishers: Rotterdam, 2014, ISBN 9789462081215, 256 pages

The Good Cause at Stroom Den Haag addresses the military, political and cultural complexity of rebuilding operations. Can architecture contribute to a sustainable world peace? Roel Griffioen & Stefaan Vervoort critically question the exhibition and its premises.

Whereas in the 1950s transparency in architecture was considered an unambiguous and politicized ideal, since the advent of the television programme Big Brother it has become a paradoxical concept. ‘What is transparent for the camera is opaque for the resident,’ writes architecture historian Roel Griffioen. Openness and privacy, transparency and opaqueness are intertwined with one another more than ever.

With this investigation into the relationship between commoning and aesthetics via the dimension of time, Marina Vishmidt contributes to the theme of Commonist Aesthetics. Vishmidt views temporality as a framing condition for thinking “commons” as a practical and affective project that traverses politics and aesthetics. The exploration of Commonist Aesthetics is an editorial collaboration between Open!, art critic and historian Sven Lütticken and Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory.

Writer, editor, and critic Marina Vishmidt is preoccupied with issues that involve art, labour, and value. She takes up Chris Evans’ artwork Portrait of a Recipient as a Door Handle to elaborate upon Pierre Klossowski’s text Living Currency and to address the notion of people as currency and commmodities and the inherent economies of affect.

Philosopher Marieke Borren explores the phenomenon of the undeportability of “illegal aliens”. She argues that their undeportability results from fundamental legal and political tensions – the “paradox” of politics and democracy or a “rights gap” in international law. She also discusses the question of claiming collective agency of undeportable illegal aliens in light of these tensions, gaps and paradoxes.

Open! published the texts and videos developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate that took place in the City Council of Amsterdam on May 9, 2014. In Beyond Allegories politicians and artists discussed proposals on the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action.

Open! published the texts and videos developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate that took place in the City Council of Amsterdam on May 9, 2014. In Beyond Allegories politicians and artists discussed proposals on the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

Open! published the texts and videos developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate that took place in the City Council of Amsterdam on May 9, 2014. In Beyond Allegories politicians and artists discussed proposals on the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

Open! invited writer E.C. Feiss for her opinion on the Beyond Allegories congress held in Amsterdam in May 2014, in which the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action was discussed. Feiss also addresses some of the propositions that were jointly formulated by artists and politicians on the occasion of the debate and are as well published by Open!.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

In light of the recent protests concerning the democratisation of higher education, this short essay will develop two arguments; firstly, democratisation of the university requires a critical re-evaluation of the “demos”. Secondly, the We Are Here Academy is not an alternative to higher education – nor should it be – but a protest movement that strives for an educational system that is both inclusive and democratic. This essay will conclude with the argument that cooperation between the New University and “undocumented Dutch citizens” is relevant and necessary in order to stimulate and critically investigate how accessible higher education is, and, thus, the very meaning of a democratic university.

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

De volgende tekst werd ontwikkeld ter gelegenheid van het Beyond Allegories debat, waarvoor 250 kunstenaars, toneelschrijvers, politici, academici, afgevaardigden van vakbonden en vluchtelingenorganisaties en NGO’s, journalisten en studenten gedurende zeven uur bijeen waren in de raadzaal van Amsterdam om te spreken over de rol van kunst binnen bestuur, politieke mobilisatie en activisme. Dit debat werd georganiseerd door Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (tot voor kort wethouder Kunst en Cultuur, PvdA, Amsterdam) en de kunstenaars Hans van Houwelingen en Jonas Staal in een poging om nieuwe progressieve allianties te smeden. De tekst zal deel uitmaken van het DVD-boek Beyond Allegories, een verzameling van de resoluties en video’s van het project, dat dit jaar gepubliceerd zal worden. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

De volgende tekst werd ontwikkeld ter gelegenheid van het Beyond Allegories debat, waarvoor 250 kunstenaars, toneelschrijvers, politici, academici, afgevaardigden van vakbonden en vluchtelingenorganisaties en NGO’s, journalisten en studenten gedurende zeven uur bijeen waren in de raadzaal van Amsterdam om te spreken over de rol van kunst binnen bestuur, politieke mobilisatie en activisme. Dit debat werd georganiseerd door Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (tot voor kort wethouder Kunst en Cultuur, PvdA, Amsterdam) en de kunstenaars Hans van Houwelingen en Jonas Staal in een poging om nieuwe progressieve allianties te smeden. De tekst zal deel uitmaken van het DVD-boek Beyond Allegories, een verzameling van de resoluties en video’s van het project, dat dit jaar gepubliceerd zal worden. 

The following text was developed on the occasion of the Beyond Allegories debate, for which 250 artists, politicians, union representatives, university professors, dramatists, representatives from refugee organisations and NGOs, journalists, and students gathered together for seven hours in Amsterdam’s City Council to discuss the role of art within governance, political mobilisation and action. This debate was organised by Ann Demeester (De Hallen | Frans Hals Museum), Carolien Gehrels (until recently Alderman for Art & Culture, PvdA / Labor Party Amsterdam) and the artists Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal in an effort to forge new progressive alliances. The text will be part of the DVD-book Beyond Allegories, a collection of the resolutions and videos that resulted from the project, which will be published this year. 

British artist Chris Evans introduces his artwork Portrait of a Recipient as a Door Handle, After a Drawing Produced by an Anonymous Philanthropist, which was produced through a commission from Sculpture International Rotterdam (SIR) and installed at the Blaak 333 branch of the Rabobank in Rotterdam. Also Dees Linders, SIR’s artistic director, explains her organisation's interests in Rotterdam and this particular project. Open! also includes essays on Evans’ work by Tirdad Zolghadr and Marina Vishmidt.

Curator and author Tirdad Zolghadr tries to frame Chris Evans’ new artwork Portrait of a Recipient as a Door Handle, After a Drawing Produced by an Anonymous Philanthropist by de-framing it as well as returning it to its essential materiality and site-specificity. Evans’ work, commissioned by Sculpture International Rotterdam, was recently placed at a local branch of the Rabobank in Rotterdam.

The Good Cause at Stroom Den Haag addresses the military, political and cultural complexity of rebuilding operations. Can architecture contribute to a sustainable world peace? Roel Griffioen & Stefaan Vervoort critically question the exhibition and its premises.

Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 2014, ISBN 9780674051867, 768 pages

Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2013, ISBN 9783943365085, 194 pages

With The SKOR Codex the artists’ collective La Société Anonyme adopted an experimental model for an artistic corporation to respond to the commodification of culture by searching for alternative ways to make, promote and sustain art.

Olga Goriunova, Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet, London, Routledge 2011, isbn 9780418893107, 112 pages

Solidarity or Solo is a research and design project executed by third-year Graphic Design students at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, initiated by the tutors Niels Schrader (Graphic Design), Lauren Alexander (Interactive Media) and Maarten Cornel (Philosophy). The project encouraged students to investigate their own relation to, and opinions about, the European Union by using mapping, archiving and referencing methods to formulate a refreshing and articulated view of what the EU means to a younger generation.

Solidarity or Solo is a research and design project executed by third-year Graphic Design students at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, initiated by the tutors Niels Schrader (Graphic Design), Lauren Alexander (Interactive Media) and Maarten Cornel (Philosophy). The project encouraged students to investigate their own relation to, and opinions about, the European Union by using mapping, archiving and referencing methods to formulate a refreshing and articulated view of what the EU means to a younger generation.

Declaring Reason is a collaboration between Museum Meermanno and the KABK – Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague that presents the works of third-year Graphic Design students who investigate the history of parliamentary democracy by means of books and manuscripts from Museum Meermanno’s collection. The exhibition juxtaposes books from the museum’s historical collection with innovative new impressions by students, and is on show for the public from 3 June until 24 September 2017. Declaring Reason was tutored by Niels Schrader and Lauren Alexander from the Royal Academy of Arts and included theory component tutoring by Maarten Cornel. Guest critics were Alice Twemlow and Olivier Arcioli.

Solidarity or Solo is a research and design project executed by third-year Graphic Design students at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, initiated by the tutors Niels Schrader (Graphic Design), Lauren Alexander (Interactive Media) and Maarten Cornel (Philosophy). The project encouraged students to investigate their own relation to, and opinions about, the European Union by using mapping, archiving and referencing methods to formulate a refreshing and articulated view of what the EU means to a younger generation.

Solidarity or Solo is a research and design project executed by third-year Graphic Design students at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, initiated by the tutors Niels Schrader (Graphic Design), Lauren Alexander (Interactive Media) and Maarten Cornel (Philosophy). The project encouraged students to investigate their own relation to, and opinions about, the European Union by using mapping, archiving and referencing methods to formulate a refreshing and articulated view of what the EU means to a younger generation.

Declaring Reason is a collaboration between Museum Meermanno and the KABK – Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague that presents the works of third-year Graphic Design students who investigate the history of parliamentary democracy by means of books and manuscripts from Museum Meermanno’s collection. The exhibition juxtaposes books from the museum’s historical collection with innovative new impressions by students, and is on show for the public from 3 June until 24 September 2017. Declaring Reason was tutored by Niels Schrader and Lauren Alexander from the Royal Academy of Arts and included theory component tutoring by Maarten Cornel. Guest critics were Alice Twemlow and Olivier Arcioli.

Brigitte van der Sande discusses An Ecology of the Courtroom by Model Court, a live event and exhibition she curated at Stroom Den Haag about the politics of media technologies, their central role in exercising the principal of universal jurisdiction and how they condition and reconfigure the space of law.

Image and sound in Moniek Toebosch’s oeuvre are like Siamese twins; even in projects which seem initially to consist solely of sound, the surrounding countryside may for instance serve to heighten the experience of the sound. Loudspeakers are never deployed neutrally, but are presented in a dramatic setting. Brigitte van der Sande spoke to her about art, sound and open space, about overstepping limits in cultural institutions and setting limits for art in public space.

In last year’s exhibition ‘Partners’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich the Canadian curator and collector Ydessa Hendeles broke the tacit laws of Holocaust memorials. Grouping objects of different natures and placing them in a single context, created all manner of fascinating cross-connections among the objects and with the building, laden by the Nazi past.

Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013, (edited by Werner Hamacher and translated by Adam Kotsko), ISBN 9780804784054, 157 pages

Sven Lütticken, History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image, Berlin / New York, Sternberg Press, 2013, ISBN 9783943365894, 312 pages

Camiel van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2005, isbn 905664253; W.T.J. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005, isbn 0226532453

In the early 2000s French artist duo Bureau d’Études began making interactive maps that identify links among global corporations, drawing attention to our own positions within those relations. After opening up the map-making process to other users, the duo turned away from institutional art practice to invest in local movements – an approach that is at times challenged for its potential distancing from the ‘general intellect’. Yet in reflecting on their work, the question remains: How far does our embeddedness extend and how do we extricate ourselves, without, as Tom Holert asks, falling prey to dominant forms of representation? How can other movements like Lokavidya Jan Andolan (People's Knowledge Movement) in India motivate the recognition of knowledges that may not hold currency in what has come to be termed the ‘knowledge commons’?1

Camiel van Winkel responds to Steven ten Thije as part of their discussion regarding Van Winkel’s essay "The Sandwich Will Not Go Away Or Why Paradigm Shifts Are Wishful Thinking" on the state of contemporary art discourse. Van Winkel here argues that Ten Thije never actually addresses the content of his essay, and then pretends that it is about artistic autonomy. Look for Ten Thije’s concluding reaction to be published here soon.

Camiel van Winkel postulates the notion of a sandwich of artistic-academic discourse to dispute the supposed paradigm shift in the arts and society as put forward by key figures in the institutional art world. Considering the paradigm shift a mere escape fantasy, Van Winkel senses a distaste for the autonomy of art. Steven ten Thije, researcher and curator of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, will soon offer his response to Van Winkel’s essay.

Using a number of examples from fashion, advertising, graphic design and television, Camiel van Winkel invest­igat­es the regime of visibility and its implications for a ­ crit­ical approach to contemporary visual culture. This article is a condensed version of Chapter 1 of his forthcoming book The Regime of Visibility.

Maaike Lauwaert questions the issue of the balance between work and life within the cultural field. Our lives are governed by the terror of the updates, she says. How can we resist the burps and farts of a system that is trying to eat us alive?

Jeroen Boomgaard, Wild Park: Het onverwachte als opdracht, Amsterdam, Fonds BKVB, 2011, ISBN 9789076936000, 98 pages

Jonas Staal, Art, Property of Politics III, Onomatopee 63, 2011, isbn 9789078454755

Facebook has turned all of us into addicted, narcissistic cheerleaders. It has become increasingly difficult to quit Facebook, a “public space” that could suddenly make or break our revolutions. It has been said that the true revolution will not be televised, but it won’t be facebooked either.

Visual artist Florian Göttke investigates the function of public images and their relationship to social memory and politics. In this contribution, Göttke zooms in on the newspaper photograph of a Syrian protester to reflect on how images serve as a means of communication in our current mediatised society. He poses questions regarding the agency of the photographed subjects and the responsibility of the spectator.

The brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects, authors and producers at once – and we do not know it.
—Catherine Malabou

(Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism is a new series of artists’ publications resulting from the 2016–2017 Open! COOP Academy Publishing Class at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). DAI is an internationally orientated MA Art Praxis focusing on art, but explicitly granting attention to the crossings and interactions with other domains, disciplines and knowledges. As a partner of DAI, Open! conducts thematical research and publishes projects with a group of MA students using the Open! platform as the overarching discursive framework and site for experimentation and presentation. You can find links to the results of the previous year below.

This year our study group questioned the state of the mind and brain under conditions of cognitive capitalism. Mainly from the perspective of the humanities and political aesthetics, we focused on current notions of the brain in our global capitalist societies. We asked after how far the brain can be ideologically infiltrated or resist that infiltration. From the assumption that culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control and resistance, and that language, memory and imagination are more and more performed by machines and automated algorithmic procedures, we looked at some of the implications of ‘cognitive automation’ in terms of our subjectivity, identity and free will. We learned how neuro-scientific conceptions of the brain can be appropriated by cognitive capitalism and charted possibilities to subvert the instrumentalization of our brains. 

Through seminars and in conversation with generous guest tutors and by studying texts and other resources, we entered the brain. We were very much inspired by philosopher Catherine Malabou’s questioning of ‘what we should do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism’. Malabou wants to instigate consciousness of the ‘plasticity’ of the brain – that is the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience – at the service of an emancipatory political understanding. We also closely looked at the ‘neuroplastic dilemma’ as described by theorist and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi who asserts that neuroplasticity can be the condition for the reactivation of empathy and political solidarity’s necessary conditions for a process of self-organization of the general intellect driven by ethical and aesthetic sensibilities rather than by the an-ethical impulse of economic competition.

Artist-theorist Warren Neidich introduced us to the fields of neuro-aesthetics, neuro-ethics and concepts such as the neurobiological sublime, the brain without organs and noology. Art historian Antonia Majaca conducted a brainy seminar about the use of technology and the potential to generate non-paranoid imagination and agency in the age of algorithmic governmentality. Bifo passionately spoke about the Guattarian concept of ‘chaosmose’ and about ‘chaosmique spasm’. He urged us to find a new rhythm between the relation of the brain and the chaos of the infosphere. Art historian Amelia Groom focused on ‘viscosity with a will’ and went into the ways in which soft invertebrates and brainless slimes invite new ways of understanding intelligence, embodiment and collectivity. Finally researcher and lecturer Willem van Weelden tried to critically compare Malabou’s recent definition of trauma (brain trauma and psychic trauma), based on the advances made in neurobiology and new senses of materiality (plasticity), with Jean-François Lyotard’s investigation of time and matter – as demonstrated in the eighties by his manifestation ‘Les Immatériaux’ and his philosophy of the Inhuman. 

Alongside all this the Open! COOP Academy participants developed their individual (image)essays and experimental writings, guided by the Open! team and the guest tutors. As a collaborative exercise in thinking and writing they also created a playful image-text lexicon in relation to the overarching subject matter and the issues at stake, so as to break open concepts and create new relationships among them.1 

Like the current economic order, Bitcoin privileges certain social relationships. It is a Weltanschauung, and, like all systems, it produces its own animal spirits.

In a recently pub­lished book, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, Geert Lovink analyses the impact of blogging on the public sphere. This essay is an updated version of one chapter of his book, 'Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse', in which Lovink sees blogging as an attitude aimed at undermining 'the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media'.1 

Visual artist and archivist Tjebbe van Tijen (1944) is interested in the functioning and the creation of collective memory. He concentrates on the gathering of data that generate meanings which deviate from official interpretations. This can lead to a more ­differentiated picture of the past and of the way in which we remember it. To this end Van Tijen makes use of material as well as virtual media and regards them as an inseparable whole. This interview by media theorist Geert Lovink focuses extensively, among other things, on Van Tijen’s project Unbombing the World 1911–2011.

Both the artistic practice and the art theory that claims to address art’s political significance will need to face the fact that the latter will remain a dead letter as long as a politics of universal emancipation fails us.

Artists and theorists have frequently deliberated the meaning of the idea of ‘autonomy in art’, and certainly since the protests against the cutbacks in art. Cultural studies specialist Joost de Bloois considers the present debate on this issue problematic because it is based too much on assumptions. Fundamental contradictions within the art sector as well as its complex relation to politics and the public domain are often ignored.

In his commentary on the University of Amsterdam occupation, Dutch sociologist Willem Schinkel underlines what he sees as the major pitfall of the current protest movement: students and staff appeared to be indulging in “a reactionary defense of privileges without being able to formulate a convincing narrative concerning the public task of the university”, a supposedly reactionary stance that hinges on “elitist notions such as Bildung”.1 What the protests lack, according to Schinkel, is a thorough analysis of the university’s role in the turn towards “cognitive capitalism”. The protests themselves are, in fact, a symptom of the fact that “we are on the brink of a major political-economic transformation that”, Schinkel argues, “raises the question of what will remain of what we cherish about the university after that transition is completed”.

What is actually going on when objecthood suddenly reappears as obsession, as a component of art’s currently most fashionable hypes?

Against the background of Foucault’s analyses of the philosophical significance of the cynic, philosophers Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig at the Zurich University of the Arts are investigating present-day forms of activism such as the Occupy movement. By means of three themes – creating new forms of living, inventing new modes of organization and re-appropriating time – they show the pioneering potential of such activism.

In reflecting on new sociabilities and communities, Christoph Brunner and Gerald Raunig ask how individuals “enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum,” and how a being “can take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world.” They respond with a detailed consideration of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons as a micro-political active power.

What is actually going on when objecthood suddenly reappears as obsession, as a component of art’s currently most fashionable hypes?

‘The concept of post-Fordism is invented for that which dawns as the future – a linguistic hereafter that seems to stand obtusely at the exit from the past, knocking timidly at the door of the future because its old home no longer exists.’ Thus Hans-Christian Dany, describing the threshold from Fordism to post-Fordism in his cultural history of amphetamines published by Nautilus-Verlag Hamburg in 2008. And just as the ‘linguistic hereafter’ has been peering round the corner into the future now for a pretty long time, obtusely if not without curiosity, so the linguistic labels for the social transformations taking place since the late 1960s have gone on multiplying: post-industrial society, service society, information society, network society, cognitive capitalism, knowledge economy, and so forth. No matter what the perspective, however, it is the acceleration, pace and speed of the currents flowing through it that define the quality of the ‘future’ whose door we have long since passed through.

It is not by chance that Dany’s book is titled Speed. Social transformations are also central to the changes of function and use of the cheap drugs known in their users’ slang by that name. ‘Speed’, in its narrower, drug-related sense in post-Fordist capitalism, no longer implies, as in the preceding century, an ambivalent acceleration, conditioner for the pressures of professional life and resistant medium of new subcultures. In an astounding process of disambiguation it is increasingly found only on the affirmative side, although now more strongly as an element of caring for self. Controlled intoxication is more and more part of a well-ordered relation to self, where getting high and consciousness-raising are deliberate means of self-effectivization. In the cocktail of neoliberal-governmental modes of subjectivization the ‘speed’ family of drugs has become one of a host of components in a generalized style of self-government.

‘Speed’, however, by no means refers any longer exclusively to drug use, but increasingly to all areas of production and reproduction. And in the sphere of production it not only concerns the acceleration of material work processes but also, and above all, the immaterial terrain of the cognitive, the communicative and the affective. Dany describes this in detail with reference to a proto-post-Fordist avant-garde that was already moving into the new era 40 years ago: Andy Warhol’s Factory. In this factory – much as in the completely different political contexts of the fabbrica diffusa conceptually formulated by Italy’s operaist theoreticians and put to the test in the struggles of the Autonomia at the start of the 1970s – the time and space of its subjects are diffuse. As ‘pioneers of the new work’ they have no permanent collective workplace and know nothing of orderly Fordist time. And they no longer produce things but atmospheres: ‘The majority of those present are involved in activities that aren’t immediately recognizable as work and mostly look like the opposite, so that some think it’s a party.’ This new form of employment is no longer based on the separation of work and free time, achievement and leisure, factory and home, sobriety and drug consumption, but on the blurring of the formerly clear-cut boundaries between these areas.

Speed shakes off its more or less intentional marginality and becomes central to post-Fordist production, extending far beyond peripheral drug use as dependence on all forms of acceleration, especially dependence on being attached to accelerated communication and information technologies. And in this dependent attachment the components of the apparatuses traditionally referred to as machines and our own machinic subjectivizations intermingle. Just as we adopt the modes of functioning of the technical apparatuses that we operate and that operate us, so the apparatuses adopt our skills, technology and knowledge. It is as if we had simply gone a step further in the incessant process of becoming machines, from a Fordist-industrial osmosis with the production line to a post-Fordist-informational osmosis with computers. And just as the nineteenth-century view of machines as something like the extension of our arms was reductive, so too now there is the simplistic view of the computer as prosthetic brain. Involved here is not just a one-sided extension of the human body or the upgrading of the human being by a machine, but as ever a flow of machinic currents that permeate things, people and socialities alike.

Once the acceleration of these currents tends to infinity, however, and that moreover on the basis of a machinic desire driving us, grave consequences ensue for living and working conditions. Some of the worst excesses are the outsourcing of material dirty work to the global peripheries, recent interrelated forms of sexist and racist exploitation, and the development of new pathologies specific to the full-speed subjects in the era of precaritization. But machinic desire, as a producer of wishes, also has a revolutionary side. In combating the new subjectivizations, the new atomizing forms of individualization, it is no use simply turning one’s back on machines, or wrecking them, or throwing clogs in the works. Nor are the current patterns of dealing with sociality any help, the yearning for a state that parcels social space and for a closed community are losing all meaning. What we must rather ask is: What are these machines in which accelerated-accelerating singularities can link up together instead of returning to the identitary vessels of community and rasterization by the state apparatuses? What is the nature of this new irrepressible link among these singularities that cannot be understood in terms of homogenizing cohesion? How and where do offensive accelerative strategies emerge, as traffic and concatenation, linked by the absence of any link?

Against the background of Foucault’s analyses of the philosophical significance of the cynic, philosophers Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig at the Zurich University of the Arts are investigating present-day forms of activism such as the Occupy movement. By means of three themes – creating new forms of living, inventing new modes of organization and re-appropriating time – they show the pioneering potential of such activism.

Artists Bik Van der Pol are currently researching the participatory budget, a very specific and challenging process of democratic deliberation and decision-making that emerged as a form of radical participatory democracy in Brazil.

There was once a plan to build a Museum of Revolution in the Park of Friendship in Belgrade: but only the foundations were ever laid. As part of the Differentiated Neighbourhoods project, initiated by Zoran Eric, curator of the Centre of Visual Culture of the Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade, the artists Bik Van der Pol researched this area. They developed a scenario that imbues the location with meaning and questions art, the museum, revolution, the public and the way the media work. Their contribution to Open stems from this project.

According to Isabell Lorey, it is essential to invent new forms of democracy and to understand how we are specifically governed by a perverse democratic governing system, which encourages increased precarisation. To counter this, Lorey proposes the subversive figure of the immune: constituent immunisation. She postulates that constituent immunisation stresses a renewed ordering in which the safeguarding of the political body is no longer at stake. Instead, we must turn to the constituting of those who were formerly constructed as a threat.

Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners, Verso Books, London, 2014, ISBN 9781781681749, 288 pages

More and more often, artists, critics and intermediaries are expected to know whom they are addressing. Critic Jan Verwoert holds an ardent plea for a practice in which the public is anonymous. Only if we don’t know who our audience is do we become curious, can meaningful encounters take place and communities be formed.

From a person­ally felt necessity, Jan Verwoert calls on artists to search for a new form of ethics in this pamphlet-like text. An ethics that makes it possible to adopt a different position concern­­­­­­­­­­ing the current demand to perform that characterizes today’s culture. Acknowledging that you care about something makes it easier to make conscious decisions about whether or not you want to participate.

Martijn de Waal, The City as Interface: How New Media Are Changing the City, nai010 Publishers: Rotterdam, 2014, ISBN 9789462080508, 208 pages

Space is not a given, but is continuously produced, reproduced and reconfigured. Taking up where the French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre left off, the Marxist geographer David Harvey has focused on the development and incorporation of a spatial analysis in Marxist theory. He has emerged as one of the foremost intellectual commentators on the global financial crisis, portrayed in his recent book The Enigma of Capital (2010) as an instance of those same structural contradictions Karl Marx forewarned us about.

According to political, cultural and media theorist Oliver Marchart, the degree to which public media are actually public depends on the political significance invested in the concept of democracy. He believes the main prerequisite for achieving a democratic media is the creation of an absolute democratic hegemony.

According to Richard Grusin, the reason that the photographs from Abu Ghraib triggered such a commotion is not that they cross the ethical boundaries of media practice. He believes that their similarity to everyday media practices of producing and circulating digital images is the cause.

The rise of virtual worlds and the 3d web is accompanied by great transformations in the way in which we communicate and interact, publish and learn, meet people and have fun, do business and are involved in politics. The best-known and most flexible virtual world is Second Life (sl). Web sociologist Albert Benschop explores this digital world and compares the structure of the 3d web with the structure of the old, flat web.

Media researcher and artist David Garcia is dedicated to achieving effective media tactics by artists and internet activists. Despite the dominance of the commercial, absorbing services industry in which media are pervasive, Garcia believes that they are nonetheless able to offer ethical and critical services by developing tools. He discusses projects by Bricolabs and Mongrel, among others.

1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks – a space where commercial, amateur, non-profit, governmental, educational and activist content coexists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power. One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf – fake grassroots media – through which very powerful groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past, these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass-market media, but now they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture.

2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the ‘You’ in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.

3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which they originated. A classic example of this might be the entertainer/writer Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that the media conglomerate Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed from YouTube.

4. YouTube’s value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites – with content gaining much greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace and the like. While some people come and surf YouTube, its real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickyness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content).

5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cell phones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn’t thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equipment: George Allen’s ‘macaca’ comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards’s racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein’s execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution.

6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple’s ‘1984’ advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy: ‘Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form – a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent. . . . Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.’

Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Mormons, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.

7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and remixes content from the mass-media industry; the mass-media industry monitors trends and pulls innovations back into the system, amplifying them and spreading them to other populations. Yet as they do so, they often alter the social and economic relations which fuelled this cultural production in the first place. We will see increasing debates about the relations between the gift economy of participatory culture and the commodity relations that characterize user-generated content. There is certainly a way that these sites can be seen as a way of economic exploitation as they outsource media production from highly paid and specialized creative workers to their amateur unpaid counterparts.

8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks.

9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented – at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle-class males. If we want to see a more ‘democratic’ culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.

This text was taken from Henry Jenkins’ weblog: henryjenkins.org, 28 May 2007.

'Tell me something I don't know. ' That was the subtitle of the proposal Bregtje van der Haak, programme maker at the vpro, submitted to the Dutch Public Broadcasting Authority's Executive Board. Surprise me. Move me. And above all, inspire me with new ideas and passionate people. This brief forms the core of the initiative that since this January has borne the name Hot Spot and is set to run into 2008. After an intensive preparation process in which Bregtje van der Haak called in the assistance of Martijn de Waal and myself, the outlines of the project became discernible. Hot Spot is an informal, creative club for programme makers at all Dutch public broadcasters, which organizes regular gatherings at alternating locations. The aim is to come up with new ideas and to exchange thoughts, with an eye towards the future. Evenings are organized around a central theme, during which new technologies are discussed, social trends are examined and useful ideas are derived from such disciplines as fashion, design and the visual arts for application in public media. The evenings consist of presentations and discussions. Guests, well-known and unknown, speak about their own work and their ideas, often about a work in progress. Sneak previews, pilots and rushes are screened, but also websites and Power Point presentations.

The fact that public broadcasting is regarded as belonging to the creative industry cannot conceal the sad state of creativity in this sector. Radio, television and internet display a striking lack of imaginative power, a situation that becomes even more embarrassing when set against the vigour of other creative sectors.

Why, for example, is no one in Hilversum1 making programmes with a cachet to match that of our architecture and our design?

Stefan Themerson, writer, filmmaker, publisher and poet, distinguishes two ways of making images: the camera obscura and the magic lantern. The camera obscura represents reality. The magic lantern by contrast elevates representation to the status of reality. Each of these principles results in a different approach to public broadcasting as a creative medium: do programme makers accept existing reality for what it is? Or do they manipulate reality by allowing their imagination free play?

Jaap Drupsteen (b. 1942) belongs to the second category. Drupsteen trained as a graphic designer. In 1975, following a sensational series of vpro network promo spots, he produced his first major feature: Het grote gebeuren (The Great Happening). The action, based on a short story by Belcampo, takes place on the Day of Judgement in the Overijssel village of Rijssen. Hordes of devils and angels descend on the village to read the inhabitants their final lesson. After all the villagers have been carried off to heaven or to hell, only Belcampo, disguised as a devil, remains behind. Eventually, after a group of angels discovers him, he is conveyed heavenwards, 'with steady wingbeats'.

I still recall the New Year's Eve when Het grote begeuren was broadcast. The sense of witnessing something completely new was overwhelming.

Jaap Drupsteen says of this work: 'The viewer is repeatedly fucked about', thereby revealing himself to be no devotee of today's phone-in quizzes. Rather, he champions the programme maker as illusionist. He takes issue with television's alleged social benefit: 'Everything that's added is nonsense, personal hobbies, artistic claptrap, fake magic, pomposity, technical tours de force, trendy hype and showing off, which usually undermines the functionality and for that reason is infinitely more interesting.'

No one looking at the way things have developed since the 1980s can avoid the conclusion that Jaap Drupsteen's views are out of date. Television, radio and internet have become reality machines: the 'Big Brother' living room and the 'Golden Cage' villa turn television quite literally into a camera obscura.

So where did things go wrong with the magic lantern? This was a question Jaap Drupsteen asked himself in 1985, when the nos2 refused to enter his music theatre production The Flood in the Prix Italia. He vented his frustration in several interviews: 'If the nos enters something it's more likely to be a recording of a good performance. But that's more to the credit of the theatre makers than the tv makers. . .. That's typical of the views on creativity and innovation. It's completely normal for television to appropriate the creativity of other media. . .. I've always found that a bit parasitical. But when a production in which television itself is used as creative medium is brushed aside as an incident, I'm rather dismayed.'

Drupsteen regards television as a creative medium, especially public television and the public broadcasting system as a whole. Public broadcasting is public space. Public space is free space. Free space is a space for imagination. Or should be, at any rate.

The international success of Dutch architecture and design is due not just to training, talent and a little money, but above all to good clients. Not to managers, who hide behind public approval and taste, but to people of character with the courage to take responsibility for complete and partial failures. Open-minded and open-hearted. Convinced of the need to stimulate public curiosity.

If public broadcasters are serious about rediscovering their creativity, they must start by being good clients. Who will give the old and new Drupsteens the opportunity to conquer public space? As long as no one feels the need to do so, even the illusionists can have no illusions.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Maarten Reesink took part in a forum on various forms of reality and 'emotion' television, organized by the University of Maastricht. The two other forum participants were Frits Abrahams, then the nrc Handelsblad newspaper's regular television critic, and Pieter Storms, maker of the notorious consumer advocacy programme Breek­ ijzer, who took offence that a scientist would label his programme 'emotion television'. No offence was intended, Reesink argued, for 'emotion television' can in fact have all sorts of positive qualities – something Abrahams, on the other hand, felt to be nonsense: one should not justify something that is bad, certainly not as an academic. You will have guessed that the discussion lasted late into the night, too late to head home all the way across the country, which is why the organization had reserved rooms for all the forum participants in the adjacent three-star hotel.

The next morning, Abrahams, rightfully considered by many to be the best television critic in the Netherlands, announced that now that he had slept on it, there was something, after all, in science's more nuanced view of the new genre. And in fact, in the time he had been a television critic, he had never opened an academic book about television. Nor was he about to do so: his career as a television critic had nearly run its course, and, far more significantly, he was no longer able to absorb such a completely different view of the medium of television. That other vocabulary, those new perspectives, all those nuances and aspects would have to be left to a new generation of critics to take up.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Maarten Reesink took part in a forum on various forms of reality and 'emotion' television, organized by the University of Maastricht. The two other forum participants were Frits Abrahams, then the nrc Handelsblad newspaper's regular television critic, and Pieter Storms, maker of the notorious consumer advocacy programme Breek­ ijzer, who took offence that a scientist would label his programme 'emotion television'. No offence was intended, Reesink argued, for 'emotion television' can in fact have all sorts of positive qualities – something Abrahams, on the other hand, felt to be nonsense: one should not justify something that is bad, certainly not as an academic. You will have guessed that the discussion lasted late into the night, too late to head home all the way across the country, which is why the organization had reserved rooms for all the forum participants in the adjacent three-star hotel.

The next morning, Abrahams, rightfully considered by many to be the best television critic in the Netherlands, announced that now that he had slept on it, there was something, after all, in science's more nuanced view of the new genre. And in fact, in the time he had been a television critic, he had never opened an academic book about television. Nor was he about to do so: his career as a television critic had nearly run its course, and, far more significantly, he was no longer able to absorb such a completely different view of the medium of television. That other vocabulary, those new perspectives, all those nuances and aspects would have to be left to a new generation of critics to take up.

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Eric Kluitenberg, Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, Institute of Network Cultures / NAi Uitgevers, Rotterdam 2008, isbn 9789056626174

In 2000, an explosion in a fireworks factory wiped out the entire Roombeek district in the city of Enschede. Stichting Droombeek [Droombeek Foundation] responded with a digital project that enables individuals to call up memories of the area with the click of a mouse. Using digital technology, residents add their own images and stories to the website, which can then be accessed by visitors to the digital district, who may in turn add their own experiences to the mix. By linking the present to the past in this way, the website becomes a ‘lived’ space.

Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.), Interact or Die!, NAi Publishers and V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, ISBN 9789056625771

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science, Mediawork / The MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 026263287 

Kas Oosterhuis, Lukas Feireiss (eds.), Game, Set and Match II: On Computer Games, Advanced Geometries, and Digital Technologies, Rotterdam, Episode Publishers, 2006, isbn 9059730364

René Boomkens argues that the contemporary city transcends national social engineering. The city is being confronted by the unpredictable logic of a transnational publicness. Neither the marketing nor the politicization of the use of the city are adequate to deal with this. What is required is a phenomenology of the urban experience that does justice to the everyday and the unspectacular.

Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization – On the City in the Age of Fear (Reflect #3), NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2004, ISBN 9056624075

Philosopher of law Gijs van Oenen detects a 'socially engineered utopia' in the New Babylon project and other work of the Situa­tionists. In light of political social engineering and of our behaviour in contemporary public space, he sees New Babylon as a 'playground'. He calls for an understanding of social engineering in spatial terms, so as to promote the inter­active capabilities of human beings.

The trend towards ‘interpassive citizenship’ that legal philosopher Gijs van Oenen wrote about in Open 6, is leading to a radical change in the way we behave in the public domain.1  Because of this, tolerance is in danger of sliding into an ever wider two-way split between assertion and presence, in other words between citizens who emphatically demand their rights and citizens who avoid making a choice. An important task in the coming years will therefore be to halt this process and to look for alternatives.

The issue of security in the public domain is not so much pre­cipi­tated by increased danger as primarily a problem of ‘inter­passive citizenship’, accor­ding to legal philosopher Gijs van Oenen. In the follow­ing piece he examines the conditions for the transformation of the public sphere into an obsessive medium of security concerns.

Using two urban development plans for a new city grounded on ideological doctrine – one in a totalitarian regime and one in a democratic society – architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout demonstrates how the identification of urban planning with a political societal system ultimately turns against itself. Urban planners would do better to see the city not as something that can be made out of nothing, but rather as an unruly reality for which they develop instruments so that it can grow in all its complexity and layeredness.

In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article titled 'We Refugees' in a small English-language Jewish publication, the Menorab journal. At the end of this brief but significant piece of writing, after having polemically sketched the portrait of Mr. Cohn, the assimilated Jew who, after having been 150 percent German, 150 percent Viennese, 150 percent French, must bitterly realize in the end that 'on ne parvient pas deux fois,' she turns the condition of countryless refugee – a condition she herself was living – upside down in order to present it as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness. The refugees who have lost all rights and who, however, no longer want to be assimilated at all costs in a new national identity, but want instead to contemplate lucidly their condition, receive in exchange for assured unpopularity a priceless advantage: 'History is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people of Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples.'1

One ought to reflect on the meaning of this analysis, which after fifty years has lost none of its relevance. It is not only the case that the problem presents itself inside and outside of Europe with just as much urgency as then. It is also the case that, given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.

The first appearance of refugees as a mass phenomenon took place at the end of World War I, when the fall of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, along with the new order created by the peace treaties, upset profoundly the demographic and territorial constitution of Central Eastern Europe. In a short period, 1. 5 million White Russians, seven hundred thousand Armenians, five hundred thousand Bulgarians, a million Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians left their countries. To these moving masses, one needs to add the explosive situation determined by the fact that about 30 percent of the population in the new states created by the peace treaties on the model of the nation-state (Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, for example), was constituted by minorities that had to be safeguarded by a series of international treaties – the so-called Minority Treaties – which very often were not enforced. A few years later, the racial laws in Germany and the civil war in Spain dispersed throughout Europe a new and important contingent of refugees.

We are used to distinguishing between refugees and stateless people, but this distinction was not then as simple as it may seem at first glance, nor is it even today. From the beginning, many refugees, who were not technically stateless, preferred to become such rather than return to their country. (This was the case with the Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or Germany at the end of the war, and today it is the case with those who are politically persecuted or for whom returning to their countries would mean putting their own survival at risk.) On the other hand, Russian, Armenian, and Hungarian refugees were promptly denationalized by the new Turkish and Soviet governments. It is important to note how, starting with World War I, many European states began to pass laws allowing the denaturalization and denationalization of their own citizens: France was first, in 1915, with regard to naturalized citizens of 'enemy origin'; in 1922, Belgium followed this example by revoking the naturalization of those citizens who had committed 'antinational' acts during the war; in 1926, the Italian Fascist regime passed an analogous law with regard to citizens who had shown themselves 'undeserving of Italian citizenship'; in 1933, it was Austria's turn; and so on, until in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws divided German citizens into citizens with full rights and citizens without political rights. Such laws – and the mass statelessness resulting from them – mark a decisive turn in the life of the modern nation-state as well as its definitive emancipation from naive notions of the citizen and a people.

This is not the place to retrace the history of the various international organizations through which single states, the League of Nations, and later, the United Nations have tried to face the refugee problem, from the Nansen Bureau for the Russian and Armenian refugees (1921) to the High Commission for Refugees from Germany (1936) to the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (1938) to the UN's International Refugee Organization (1946) to the present Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (1951), whose activity, according to its statute, does not have a political character but rather only a 'social and humanitarian' one. What is essential is that each and every time refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as was the case between the two world wars and is now once again), these organizations as well as the single states – all the solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of human beings notwithstanding – have proved to be absolutely incapable not only of solving the problem but also of facing it in an adequate manner. The whole question, therefore, was handed over to humanitarian organizations and to the police.

The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man'.2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human.3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second.

That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.

It is time to cease to look at all the declarations of rights from 1789 to the present day as proclamations of eternal metajuridical values aimed at binding the legislator to the respect of such values; it is time, rather, to understand them according to their real function in the modern state. Human rights, in fact, represent first of all the originary figure for the inscription of natural naked life in the political-juridical order of the nation-state. Naked life (the human being), which in antiquity belonged to God and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as zoe) from political life (bios), comes to the forefront in the management of the state and becomes, so to speak, its earthly foundation. Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life) the foundation of its own sovereignty. This is the meaning (and it is not even a hidden one) of the first three articles of the 1789 Declaration: it is only because this declaration inscribed (in articles 1 and 2) the native element in the heart of any political organization that it can firmly bind (in article 3) the principle of sovereignty to the nation (in conformity with its etymon, native [natío] originally meant simply 'birth' [nascita]. The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.

If the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis. Single exceptions to such a principle, of course, have always existed. What is new in our time is that growing sections of humankind are no longer representable inside the nation-state – and this novelty threatens the very foundations of the latter. Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history. We should not forget that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps-concentration camps-extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation. One of the few rules the Nazis constantly obeyed throughout the course of the 'final solution' was that Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized (that is, after they had been stripped of even that second-class citizenship to which they had been relegated after the Nuremberg Laws). When their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in the Roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death.

The concept of refugee must be resolutely separated from the concept of the 'human rights', and the right of asylum (which in any case is by now in the process of being drastically restricted in the legislation of the European states) must no longer be considered as the conceptual category in which to inscribe the phenomenon of refugees. (One needs only to look at Agnes Heller's recent Theses on the Right of Asylum to realize that this cannot but lead today to awkward confusions.) The refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed.

Meanwhile, in fact, the phenomenon of so-called illegal immigration into the countries of the European Union has reached (and shall increasingly reach in the coming years, given the estimated twenty million immigrants from Central European countries) characteristics and proportions such that this reversal of perspective is fully justified. What industrialized countries face today is a permanently resident mass of noncitizens that do not want to be and cannot be either naturalized or repatriated. These noncitizens often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as they prefer not to benefit from their own states' protection, they find themselves, as refugees, in a condition of de facto statelessness. Tomas Hammar has created the neologism of 'denizens' for these noncitizen residents, a neologism that has the merit of showing how the concept of 'citizen' is no longer adequate for describing the social-political reality of modern states.4 On the other hand, the citizens of advanced industrial states (in the United States as well as Europe) demonstrate, through an increasing desertion of the codified instances of political participation, an evident propensity to turn into denizens, into noncitizen permanent residents, so that citizens and denizens – at least in certain social strata – are entering an area of potential indistinction. In a parallel way, xenophobic reactions and defensive mobilizations are on the rise, in conformity with the well-known principle according to which substantial assimilation in the presence of formal differences exacerbates hatred and intolerance.

Before extermination camps are reopened in Europe (something that is already starting to happen), it is necessary that the nation-states find the courage to question the very principle of the inscription of nativity as well as the trinity of state-nation-territory that is founded on that principle. It is not easy to indicate right now the ways in which all this may concretely happen. One of the options taken into consideration for solving the problem of Jerusalem is that it become – simultaneously and without any territorial partition – the capital of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet, aterritoriality) that would thus be implied could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communities existing on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other – communities that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular. In an analogous way, we could conceive of Europe not as an impossible 'Europe of the nations', whose catastrophe one can already foresee in the short run, but rather as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the (citizen and noncitizen) residents of the European states would be in a position of exodus or refuge; the status of European would then mean the being-in-exodus of the citizen (a condition that obviously could also be one of immobility). European space would thus mark an irreducible difference between birth [nascita] and nation in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political meaning, thus decidedly opposing itself to the concept of nation (which has so far unduly usurped it).

This space would coincide neither with any of the homogeneous national territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Möbius strip, where exterior and interior in-determine each other. In this new space, European cities would rediscover their ancient vocation of cities of the world by entering into a relation of reciprocal extraterritoriality.

As I write this essay, 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of Israel find themselves in a sort of no-man's-land. These men certainly constitute, according to Hannah Arendt's suggestion, 'the vanguard of their people'. But that is so not necessarily or not merely in the sense that they might form the originary nucleus of a future national state, or in the sense that they might solve the Palestinian question in a way just as insufficient as the way in which Israel has solved the Jewish question. Rather, the no-man's-land in which they are refugees has already started from this very moment to act back onto the territory of the state of Israel by perforating it and altering it in such a way that the image of that snowy mountain has become more internal to it than any other region of Eretz Israel. Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is – only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable.

This English translation of the original Italian text (1993) was first published in: Giorgio Agamben, 'Means without End. Notes on Politics' in: Theory Out of Bounds, Vol. 20 (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Hans Boutellier, Ronald van Steden (eds.), Veiligheid en burgerschap in een netwerksamenleving, Uitgeverij Boom, Amsterdam, 2008, isbn 9789054549918, 326 pages

Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder, Binna Choi (eds.), On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, BAK / Revolver, Utrecht / Frankfurt am Main, 2008, ISBN (BAK): 9789077288115; ISBN (Revolver): 9783865884664, 222 pages

Margriet Schavemaker & Mischa Rakier (eds.) Right about Now. Art & Theory since the 1990s, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2007, isbn 9789078088172

Jeroen Boomgaard (ed.), Highrise – Common Ground. Art and the Amsterdam Zuidas Area, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2008, isbn 9789078088189, 384 pages

Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (eds), World Art Studies. Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Uitgeverij Valiz, Amsterdam, isbn 9789078088226, 480 pages

Urban Affairs (ed.), Fear and Space. The View of Young Designers in the Netherlands, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2004, ISBN 9056624229

Forty years after the revolt of May ’68, the prevailing opinion seems to be one of aggrieved jealousy, disguised as the wisdom of experience. A series of retrospective newspaper articles seeks to finish once and for all with a troubled legacy. Writers stubbornly struggle to distance themselves from the idea that idealism and engagement could mean anything other than the charitable causes espoused by pop stars and society figures. The soixante-huitards are dismissed as sandbox idealists, weak-minded and aimless sympathizers of terrorism, who in their unbridled naivety thought the world could be changed; we know better by now. It’s the gist of several months of disappointing newspaper reading.

What all this disparagement of the ’68 activists is meant to cloak – without succeeding particularly well – is the bottomless vacuity of today’s politics and the loss of any horizon along which social development might take place. Where are the utopian visions today? Where are the visions of the future, for that matter? With the exception of the development scenarios of consultancy firms, planning bureaus and policy advisers, no one is willing to offer any sort of vision about a collectively desirable future. The world cannot be remade, we are told, when it is in fact being irreversibly reproduced day after day.

Urban space is where the spirit of ’68 – in essence a struggle against any form of authority – particularly manifested itself, not just in Paris, but also in the inner cities of the USA, where the violent repression of the civil-rights movement degenerated into full-scale riots, in the streets of Prague, where the rebellion turned against the Soviet occupation, or in bullet-riddled Saigon, target of the Vietnamese Tet Offensive. In Amsterdam the spirit of ’68 was embodied by the Provo and Kabouter movements, the Nieuwmarkt protests, and the general resistance of residents against the form of autocratic modernist urban development in force at the time. A small revolution took place, one that still defines the structure of Dutch cities to this day.

It is therefore in the area of urban development – in Dutch history one of the most fertile grounds for the development of radical politics – that an impressive system of procedures was created to prevent conflict and not so much parry criticism as render it toothless. ‘Interactive policy making’, ‘open plan processes’ with ‘sounding-board groups’, ‘consultation procedures’, ‘co-production’: the quantity of terms used to describe the participation of residents in contemporary urban development gives the impression that we are living in a veritable Mecca of democracy. Ultimately, however, the marvellous participation models result in a disappointing reality of notification and information, with a few therapeutic public-comment meetings to calm tempers a little. For it’s too late for any real decisions. The political establishment now hides behind a hedge of semantic impenetrability: urban development plans are deliberately drawn up in a jargon that no resident can comprehend. We live in a so-called post-political age, where the framework of politics is set and remains unquestioned by any political party, and within which tiny alterations are the subject of intense negotiations.

The post-political framework of contemporary urban policy is that of the entrepreneurial city. An entrepreneurial mindset has taken over city government, where the drive towards competition among cities has supplanted every other policy consideration. As much care as is being devoted to the strategic positioning of cities in global flows of human and financial capital, so little interest does there seem to be in adopting the existing population of the city as the premise for any integral vision of city politics. We have arrived at a clearly atopian juncture,1 safely removed from any utopian philosophy and at the same time from the dystopian darkness.

The only fertile domain of utopian politics today seems to exist in the digital world, in the open-source software movement FLOSS,2 where an all too real battle is being fought for the public, open nature of the Internet. Although there have been attempts to pull these politics out of the computer domain and transpose them to analogue everyday life, this has aroused surprisingly little interest in the social mainstream. The first step in the Netherlands to translate the cybernetic to the urban domain, strangely enough, is coming from the real-estate sector, which describes its projects using terms like urban hardware (urban infrastructure) and urban software (urban programming). It is no longer just about the bricks. Project developers have discovered that genuine added value lies in linking the physical hardware (the built environment) to sociocultural software (practices, identities, and so forth). This is why project developers now almost routinely invite artists and other cultural actors, on a permanent or temporary basis, to ‘add some flavour’ to as yet unfinished real estate, in order to jack up the prices. Almost every large-scale project in Amsterdam is now associated with a new cultural institution; the Zuidas has a design museum, the South Banks of the IJ have the Muziekgebouw, and the Overhoeks project the new Filmmuseum. Even in the restructuring of social housing, cultural branding has been turned into a new trend.

Interestingly, these computer terms of software and hardware were translated to urban space in the 1970s by the Pop Art architecture group Archigram,3 to promote the use of soft and flexible materials such as the inflatable bubble instead of the modernist hardware of steel and cement. Along with contemporaries such as the Italian architecture group Archizoom and texts such as Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, Archigram aimed its critique at the monotonous and rational functionalism of modernism, presenting a more organic conception of the city as a living organism (comparable views made Aldo van Eyck the quintessential architectural spokesman of the Nieuwmarkt battle against urban modernization). The term urban software thus dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, with software as the social programming of a city and hardware as its infrastructure. Just as the Situationists experimented with bottom-up software through psychogeography and the dérive, so did subjective, organic and bottom-up approaches develop into a spearhead of the utopian urbanism of the time. French urbanist Henri Lefebvre, an important source of inspiration for the urban social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, formulated ‘the right to the city’ in the 1960s: ‘. . . the right to the city means the right of citizens and city residents . . . to take part in all the networks and circuits of communication, information and exchange.4 

In light of current notions of cities as centres for trade in and exploitation of knowledge (the ‘creative knowledge economy’), this formulation of the right to the city seems more imperative than ever, as well as being intrinsically connected to open-source politics. For, in the neoliberal city, this libertarian approach to software is being replaced by an increasingly tightly regulated and coded version, in which urban programming often comes to serve narrow economic functionalism. Through the introduction of codes of behaviour, local ordinances and an increased police presence, streets are kept free of unsanctioned street scenes and undesirable use. By means of the creative city policy, the neoliberal city encourages and promotes the influx of highly educated residents, even as cutbacks are imposed on the creative public domain such as education and the cultural sector and lower education levels have been in crisis for years. Notions of cultural and creative entrepreneurship are becoming dominant in the cultural sector, formerly grounded in political and aesthetic considerations. Culture as a consumer product is developing into a crucial resource in the branding battle among cities. In the process, cultural branding becomes an attempt to construct competitive urban software products that serve to ‘programme’ the urban space in the most economically favourable fashion possible. The neoliberal city is becoming the Microsoft of the spatial knowledge economy: it chooses branding over substance and refuses to makes its source code – its political agenda – public. With the ‘kernel'5 of the city increasingly focused on intercity competition, policy no longer needs legitimization – the need to be a ‘top city’ is reason enough. It seems an almost inevitable necessity, as a response to this trend, to create a programme that translates the demands of the FLOSS movement to the urban space. The realization of a public domain dedicated to the bottom-up production of knowledge and power, and an open urban source code that encourages, rather than complicates, participation; these, at any event, are two essential ingredients of a yet to be determined method for open-source urbanism.

Flexmens, text Merijn Oudenampsen; illustrations: Thijs Vissia

In the struggle against the global world order, Lieven De Cauter calls for a rehabilitation of social engineering and the realization that political choices do matter1  And rightly so. The triumphal march of the global world order – at least at an ideological level – is being made possible by an apolitical view of society.

bavo, a collaboration of architects /  philosophers Gideon Boie and Matthies Pauwels, conducts research in the political realm of art, architecture and planning. According to them, art that aims to be politically relevant has reached an impasse. To break through this impasse, they call on artists to link radical artistic activism with radical political activism. Only then might art that engages with politics genuinely ‘make a difference’.

German curator and art theoretician Nina Möntmann believes that small art institutions, because of their subversive potential, offer possibilities to escape the pressure of having to attract a mass public. By experimenting with interaction between diverse interest groups and by creating international platforms, they can break away from dominant corporate strategies and redefine their public significance.

Philosopher Sjoerd van Tuinen calls for a perspective on publicness he derives from Peter Sloterdijk and his ‘critical awareness of atmospheres’. In this, intimacy is not seen as something obscene that excludes public interaction, but rather as something that actually needs to be taken seriously on a public level. For the visual arts this implies balancing exercises between observation and participation: a socializing art that is not made for an audience but instead creates an audience.

By the time you have finished reading this, it will have been 750 or more words, the space allotted to us by the editors with a going rate of 0.45 euro a word. We have been asked to write a short and polemic column-like text in which we formulate 16beaver’s vision on the public mission of art and its institutions.

Of course we are scripted into schedules and deadlines which need numbers. Yes, numbers were calculated to consider the space available in this publication, the budget for printing, the fees, the salaries, and so forth. Numbers... what started as zeros and ones will soon enough lead to a more complex and flexible equation, bearing with it millions of combinatory numbers, a set for each person on earth... mirroring and tracking us inside and along the peripheries of the camp. We are assigned numbers on boarding, with each seat we take, each meal we charge, we are statistics, analysed, located, identified, placed into groups, numbers, we are pedestrian number x, customer x times, we are worth x, we are weighed, measured, ranked, even speculated upon, hell, we speculate upon ourselves. We are a credit rating. We are supply, we are demand? And yet, we are weightless and measureless. So we take a minute to measure just exactly how much we are worth and in this same logic, we argue, we demand more.

250 or so words in, we are seemingly no closer to addressing our subject of the public mission of art and its institutions. And the task is getting more difficult. We will ask the editors to improve our pay from this point forward. They agree, and raise the price to 0.47 euro per word.

We think about proposing that art’s role today and the role of the institutions (which take on the mandate to protect, house, teach, care for, consider and nurture art) is to wage a war against these numbers. Art, which once took the poetic device – through language, images, diverse forms and behaviours, the task of thinking, elaborating and outlining humankind’s place on earth – has reached an impasse. It has ridden on this impasse for the last century. A century in which the product entered into art as the readymade and art (later the artist) entered into the market as a product. Even if artists long ago left behind these legacies, we nonetheless remain in the vicinity of this intersection today.1

Moreover, a growing number of the existing institutions today, whether universities, museums, or even smaller non-profit spaces, are governed and often directed by the bureaucrats, the accountants, the crunchers of numbers, the trustees, the corporations (the sponsors), the investors, the speculators, the head counters, the grant givers, the generous donors, the infinite ways and means available to distribute and hold us all captive in / to the world of numbers.

Numbers which may aid us in understanding, for instance, the infinite complexity of genetic information residing in our bodies, or to investigate the wondrous textures of our cosmos, and estimate the number of years humans will need to destroy themselves, or how to increase the number of years we live. But they do not go very far in determining how one could live or organize society differently, for instance without creating false scarcity, without engineering and fostering fear, without rampant dispossession, without so much inequity or war. How to rethink our relation to the earth and all the other living and non-living matter? Growing our bank accounts will not address these necessary and quite pragmatic questions.

Some of us, meanwhile, naively await a cry or a whimper, as the marches to various disasters proceed on schedule . . . cries to break banks open, to free the detainees, to end all occupations, to end the wars, but instead we hear the roar of bulls, the hurried thunder of a euphoric albeit confused stampede, running to cash the checks, counting the number of heads, speculating on the next big product launch, noting all the while that bills and salaries have to be paid, in fact, first of the month and a small pssst, ‘you know, since these budget cuts’... You get the picture?!

Liquidity analysts, asset managers, resource administrators, endowment officers, treasury chiefs, grant clerks, donor strategists, corporate liaisons – these are key figures in our coming art institutions.

But this is not about a shortage; on the contrary, art may be entering the greatest period of financialization it has ever known as it gains further and further traction as an investment tool, a marker of status for the newly minted wealthy elite (the few beneficiaries of globalization) and gets increasingly mobilized as a powerful agent for tourism, for redevelopment, regeneration and city re-branding schemes.

47 words past our limit, and we are just scratching at the surface of an idea. What could this call against the becoming-numbers of the world have to do with the possible public role of art and its institutions? To continue we could distinguish (for instance) and disentangle the word public from audience (a word not implicitly negative but too often linked to passivity, numbers, market research and spectacle)?2 To insist that art is not after a marked and predicted audience (much to the dismay of the marketing and publicity departments of many museums), but instead is seeking a public, to call forth a public which has yet to exist. Here calling forth this public would be part of a process called democracy: since we would reject the reduction of democracy to a mode of governance based upon counting votes, tallying numbers, etcetera...3 This process of constructing or calling forth or creating a public would also require some struggle, some disagreement...4 It would require fighting for ground lost and ground which has yet to be imagined. On another front, it would require some effort to link this discourse on numbers to the neoliberal values being taken on increasingly throughout the world – an irrational drive which hides under the seeming rationality of numbers – resting on the world’s greatest selling fiction (money), yet referring to itself as realistic or pragmatic. Furthermore, it would require understanding the constructivist project of neoliberalism: its harsh process of imbuing its logic and values within existing and emergent institutions of government, education, social economic policy and culture.5

And it would come back to art and ask how it might be possible to question and argue against the becoming-numbers of the world, and then to argue for the measureless, infinite, incalculable, uncountable, unheard and unseen futures, which would require an explicit struggle and fight. And if the existing artists and institutions do not exist to wage this fight, then we would have to speculate upon how to shape the space and way for them to exist. The stakes are immeasurable.6

Art critic and curator Florian Waldvogel asks Kasper König about his experiences with ‘Skulptur Projekte Münster’, which König has organized from 1977 to 2007. This interview outlines a glimpse of the changing relationship of art, public space and the urban environment. What impact does art have on publicness and public space and how can it influence our view of these?

What role is there for art to play in a public space that is increasingly marked by public-private partnerships and in which public interests are more than ever mixed with economical and security concerns? A conversation with Jeroen Boomgaard, lecturer on Art in Public Space of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Tom van Gestel, artistic leader of skor.

According to the editorial concept of this issue of Open, there is a ‘crisis of the public sphere, of public institutions, spaces and tasks’. The question is how art and its institutions should react to this crisis. Indeed, public space has become more and more contested, particularly when it comes to defining what ‘public’ actually means. Freedom and safety, once two concepts that were, if not synonymous at least intimately linked, seem to have grown into two opposite poles in the struggle for arranging public space. The freedom of someone to say and do what he or she wants can jeopardize the safety of another. And the need of political and economical stakeholders for a safely predictable and controllable environment, warranted by public and privatized surveillance agencies, is often at odds with the need for freedom and individuality felt by independent and responsible citizens.

Where does art stand in this debate? As of old, on the side of the ‘most individual expression’? Or on that of symbolizing whatever there remains of collectivity in today’s atomized society? Certainly when looking at art in public space, that question is not so easy to answer. ‘Community art’ is in vogue these days, but it is still often based on the subjective concepts and interventions of one independent and autonomous person: the artist. And cultural institutions are assessed on the basis of a paradoxical combination of demands: they have to enlarge their audience (read: please more people), and at the same time mediate between art and society (read: protect the artist’s idiosyncratic position as a tolerated anomalous individual). This does not transpire without friction. But is this clash of opposing interests and concerns a sign of crisis, or is it the icing on the cake of a society and culture that develop by fits and starts?

I asked two insiders in the field of art in public space, an art historian and a facilitator. One, Jeroen Boomgaard, is lecturer on Art in Public Space, connected to the Rietveld Academy and the University of Amsterdam, and focuses on the Zuidas area, where the Virtual Museum Zuidas is developing a new condition for art in public space. The Virtual Museum’s supervisor, Simon den Hartog, works there alongside project developers in a mega-business quarter, which is now being built by a massive public-private partnership on the South axis (Zuidas) of Amsterdam.1 The other is Tom van Gestel, artistic leader of skor and chairman of the Artistic Team of Beyond, the organization that is developing a programme for art in the public space of another mega-building project, the expansion of the city of Utrecht in Leidsche Rijn.2 To both I put the question of the possibilities and role of art in such partly privatized public spaces, in which enormous economical interests are at play. In such areas, is there a crisis in the relationship between art and its public surroundings?

In Almere’s new city centre, Susann Lekås and Joes Koppers are creating a work of art entitled Optionaltime, which plays a fascinating game with time. The screen is literally a hybrid space and mirrors both the real and the virtual surroundings. On screen, they are mixed together.

Martijn Engelbregt / egbg, Dit is Nederland, de Dienstcatalogus, Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers, isbn 9078088028

Jacques Rancière, Het esthetische denken; Solange de Boer (ed.), Grensganger tussen disciplines. Over Jacques Rancière, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2007, isbn 9789078088141; Amsterdam, Valiz, 2007, isbn 9789078088158; set of two books, isbn 9789078088165

Jacques Rancière, Het esthetische denken; Solange de Boer (ed.), Grensganger tussen disciplines. Over Jacques Rancière, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2007, isbn 9789078088141; Amsterdam, Valiz, 2007, isbn 9789078088158; set of two books, isbn 9789078088165

Ed Romein, Marc Schuilenburg en Sjoerd van Tuinen (ed.),  Deleuze Compendium, Amsterdam, Boom, 2009, isbn  9789085065388, 408 pp.

BAVO (eds.), Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification, Episode Publishers, Rotterdam, 2007, isbn 978905973068, 128 pages

Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2011, ISBN 0262134918, 224 pages

bavo (eds.), Urban Politics Now. Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City, NAi Publishers Rotterdam, 2007, isbn 9789056626167, 224 pages

In November 2004 the artist Santiago Sierra staged a much-discussed intervention in the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. Entirely in keeping with his reputation as a controversial artist, his gesture was as simple as it was radical. He took all the artworks out of the museum and then removed all the glass from the outer windows and doors. The building was completely dismantled, stripped and reduced to a gaunt structure in which wind, rain and vandals had free rein. There was nothing to see, other than a slowly crumbling skeleton. Sierra has a history of similarly drastic architectural interventions. For his contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2003, he had a brick wall erected in the main entrance of the Spanish pavilion. To the dismay of many visitors, Sierra moved the entrance to the rear of the building, where a Spanish police officer would only allow passage to people holding a valid Spanish passport. Once inside, the handful that met this requirement got to see only an empty and (again) dilapidated space. In Kunsthaus Bregenz Sierra loaded 300 tons of bricks on the top floor. The work, 300 Tonnen, 300 tons, tested the load-bearing capacity of the KUB to its limits. The weight of the top floor had to be distributed via support pillars on the floors below. In each of these three examples, architecture – and in particular the accommodations of institutions – is tested in its capacity to undergo and resist artistic intrusion. Whether the building is dismantled, closed off or put under pressure, the end result is always that the institution is no longer able to function in a normal way, or in the worst-case scenario, to function at all.

Sierra’s interventions are part of a relatively short tradition of symbolic and increasingly violent assaults on architecture, and against institutional architecture in particular, from Daniel Buren’s sealing off the entrance of the Galerie Apollinaire (1968), Robert Barry’s During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed (1969), Michael Asher’s removal of the windows of the Clocktower New York (1976), Gordon Matta-Clark’s Window Blow-Out (1976) to Chris Burden’s Exposing the Foundations of the Museum (1986). In the 1960s and ’70s architecture was something that had to be reacted against. Architecture was seen as the discipline and practice that represented and empowered the system – the institutions and the social order – and therefore had to be criticized, opposed, demolished, destroyed, rent asunder or blown up. Architecture gives institutions their form – it makes them ‘recognizable’. Therefore it was the ideal target for attacking these institutions and ‘visualizing’ the critique. By intervening in architectural elements like doors, windows, staircases or foundations – those elements that define and demarcate the institutional space – one could assail and challenge the institutional conditioning of that interior.

Such offensives against architecture are no longer opportune today, let alone meaningful. In an era dictated by commercial, media and virtual regimes, there is an explicit need for temporal and spatial enclaves that ‘make a difference’. Art needs its own, demarcated places to prevent it from being washed away, unlamented and unnoticed, in the visual slurry of society. Architecture is simply the perfect medium to give this ‘difference’ a form and a concrete content. It makes it possible to create a framework within which an institution can make concrete and publicly visible moves in the wide and, above all, misty domain of cultural production. ‘Subversive’ works like Sierra’s are nothing more than yet another pathetic and hysterical assault on the wrong institution, typical of the critical zero degree at which a lot of contemporary art operates. It is a blind, nihilistic, and, in a political and social sense, even dangerous attack by art on that very institution that lends it both its rationale and its visibility. In an artistic-institutional landscape plagued by a constant questioning of the ‘means’ as well as the ‘place’ of art institutions, it is an act of unbelievable stupidity to play the anti-institutional card once again, and to do so by tackling the very instance that mediates in the creation and demarcation of this institutional place. Sierra’s dismantling of the museum building, then, is nothing more than a vulgar stunt that made the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens briefly ‘visible’ in the media. But above all it is representative of the cynical complacency with which curators, in their servile flirtation with artists, are willing to put their own institutions on the line. Moreover, their common hidden agenda is all too obvious: a hankering for a reputation as a critical and controversial rebel. It goes without saying that we must continue to question the place(s) in which art appears in public, and the role of architecture in this. But preserve us from frivolous and idiotic interventions like Sierra’s.

In the following essay, Nicolas Bourriaud reacts to Jacques Rancière’s claim that his ‘esthétique relationelle’ is little more than a moral revival in the arts. According to Bourriaud, the significance of the political programme of contemporary art is its recognition of the precarious condition of the world. He elaborates this theme in his recently published book The Radicant.1 

The emergence of precarity as an object of academic analysis corresponds with its decline as a political concept motivating social movement activity, according to Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter. But precarity as an experience has not disappeared. By interrelating its various registers and boundaries, precarity can be seen as an aspect of a common space.

The emergence of precarity as an object of academic analysis corresponds with its decline as a political concept motivating social movement activity, according to Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter. But precarity as an experience has not disappeared. By interrelating its various registers and boundaries, precarity can be seen as an aspect of a common space.

In his home town Rome, Italian philosopher Paolo Virno talks with philosopher Sonja Lavaert and sociologist Pascal Gielen about the relation between creativity and today’s economics, and about exploitation and possible forms of resistance. Virno is known for his analysis of post-Fordism; his view that the disproportion of artistic standards runs parallel to communism, however, is new to the philosophy of art. He believes aesthetics and social resistance meet in a quest for new forms. Political art or not, the contents hardly matter.

With Assembly (2017), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have continued their trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009) into the new decade, expanding it into a tetralogy. The fourth episode sees these advocates of commonism once again provide a critical analysis of the most topical developments in society. Their central issue this time concerns why the social movements that express the demands and wishes of so many and show that the common is a fact, have not succeeded in bringing about a new, truly democratic and just society. The line of questioning itself is already controversial, as are many of the propositions and concepts launched by the authors in Assembly. According to them we must confront the problem of leadership and institutions, dare to imagine the entrepreneurship of the multitude, appropriate old terms and, especially, reverse their meaning. We meet with Antonio Negri in his apartment in Paris, to try out this recipe for reversal and to discuss strategy and tactics, ideology and aesthetics, and art and language.

Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions), an architecture firm based in Sevilla, was founded in 2001 by Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda. The firm is devoted to making interventions in the precarious nature of the urban environment. Their aim is to win back public space for the city’s inhabitants by creating ‘urban interventions and situations’, as they call them. Subversive occupations of public space are proposed in the form of portable architecture. These interventions are often on the borders of what is legal and what is not legal.

Under the name Studio Popcorn, architect Alex de Jong and jurist-philosopher Marc Schuilenburg research the effects of urbanization processes. They argue for the inclusion of processes other than physical, spatial ones in the scope of research on urbanization. This article focuses on the rise of an intermedial space, which includes contemporary popular music and its associated urban culture, and which plays a crucial part in today’s urbanization processes.*

Mobile telephones create aural space that is both technological and imaginary. Caroline Basset explores the new spatial economy that is the result of the dynamics between physical and virtual space, between old and new space. Fragmentation and individualization are not her primary findings. Rather, according to Basset, the changing dialectics of presence / absence also generate new types of connectedness and continuity, of mobile subjectivity.

On 11 July this year, the court in Utrecht ruled that Dutch Internet providers do not have to hand over their customer data to Stichting Brein. Brein (Dutch acronym for ‘Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands’ and coincidentally the Dutch word for ‘brain’) monitors copyright compliance in the music industry, among other things, and has declared war on ‘peer-to-peer services’ (P2P) like the popular KaZaA and LimeWire programs, which enable Internet users to share music without paying royalties. Although the judgement represents a provisional victory for Internet users offering copied music, ‘file sharing’ is facing an uncertain future. Elsewhere, in the United States for example, the makers of P2P software programs are now being prosecuted too.

The increased pressure on music sharers is also causing ripples in the world of ‘audio bloggers’. Just recently, the highly popular mp3 blog aggregator Totally Fuzzy called a time out. Aggregators generally don't do much more than publish lists of mp3s discovered on the web and provide links to the song, mix or even whole CD in question. They are much-needed guides in a diffuse universe of mp3 blogs. An audio or mp3 blogger posts one or more tracks every day, usually accompanied by a review, commentary or an interview with the musicians concerned. These weblogs engage not only in scouting, promotion and discourse formation, but also in the ‘leaking’ of tracks that have not yet been released and which are meanwhile tested by aficionados and DJs. mp3 blogs are also used differently from, say, a P2P program. In the latter you ‘search’ deliberately for music you want to hear; with an audio blog you ‘find’ music you can listen to and about which you can express your opinion. Most bloggers are CD and record collectors, music fanatics and DJs keen to share with visitors their enthusiasm for a new or forgotten composition, an instrumental (riddim), or self-made remix (refix or mash-up). You’re not very likely to stumble across 50 Cent’s latest hit on an audio blog, but you will find the hiphop-refix Riders On the Storm in which the late Jim Morrison and rapper Snoop Dogg engage in a vocal battle. And in many cases an audio blog will tell you where you can buy the track.

Unlike the classic mp3 blogs, many aggregates are gradually becoming ‘polluted’ by references to obscure outposts of websites where entire CDs have been placed ready to be downloaded. Students in particular use the web space allotted them by universities and colleges to store their favourite music. As a result, aggregates find themselves promoting the ‘search structure’ so typical of P2P programs. Totally Fuzzy, too, discovered that more and more links to CDs were being circulated and declared a brief suspension of activities – to the annoyance of its thousands of mp3-addicted visitors. ‘I’m fed up with all those CDs’, complained host Herr K., returning a week later with the announcement that from now on he would only be publishing links to interesting songs, ‘mix tapes’ and audio blogs. On the one hand he did not want to surrender his blog to the copyright police, on the other hand he wanted to remain true to his genuine love of music. In short, more quality rather than more quantity.

Elsewhere on the net, the first consumer survey has been conducted into the phenomenon of the audio blog (www.surveymonkey.com). The purpose was clearly formulated: have copyright guardians set their sights on mp3 blogs, too? Over a hundred audio bloggers took part in the survey, sixty of them from the United States. Striking findings included the high ratio of male bloggers (94%) ; the relatively mature age of audio bloggers (some 80% are between 25 and 45 years old) ; the explosive growth of mp3 blogs (82% are less than eighteen months old) ; and the high percentage of mp3s devoted to ‘independent’ or ‘alternative music’ (31%). There were also some interesting results concerning discourse development. Only 3% of bloggers do not attach a comment to a posted track and 55% add comments that have nothing to do with the mp3 in question – popular topics are pop culture (42%), personal anecdotes (33%) and politics (21%). It is also clear that audio bloggers do not encourage the posting of entire CDs: over 82% steadfastly refuse to post links to complete albums or concert recordings.

Finally, the question of copyright was raised. Some 40% say they operate ‘legally’, meaning that they seek permission from record labels, musicians, producers or DJs. The remaining 60% readily admit to operating the audio blogs in an illegal fashion. To the question of whether bloggers are ever pressed to remove tracks by musicians or record labels, 88% replied in the negative. In the recent past, only three mp3 bloggers have been faced with legal steps against their websites or threats from providers.

Another, more qualitative, survey was recently conducted by Siddhartha Mitter, a correspondent for The Boston Globe (31 July 2005). Mitter, who credits blogs with helping to broaden and deepen musical taste, came across a growing interest in music from Sri Lanka, Congo and Norway, to name but a few countries. He also discovered that the music industry is flourishing under a regime of audio blogs. In his article ‘Listen. And Learn’ he concluded that mp3 bloggers are seen as ‘a new tastemaking elite, conveners of hipness and buzz... Promoters send popular bloggers free product in the hope of scoring a posting. Some bloggers have been asked to scout new talent for labels.’ What’s more, the audio blog is beating the music-writing media on all fronts and its opinion-forming role can no longer be ignored. Paul de Jong, musician and member of the Dutch-American duo The Books, confirms this trend. ‘The popularity of The Books is first and foremost down to the Internet and mp3 blogs. They promote our music and concerts, publish interviews and tour itineraries with the result that a small band like ours is able to prosper and our record label can make a decent-sized CD pressing.’

It would become Stichting Brein if, as well as acting as the fierce ‘copyright watchdog of the entertainment industry’ (Elsevier), it were also to become a positive force in the development of musical taste. Providing web space where consumers are encouraged to discuss their music with one another would improve Brein’s image and also make a positive contribution to the general development of taste. Until that time, everyone who believes in musical progress is condemned to illegality.

Muzak, also known as a ‘nonaggressive music deterrent’, is used more and more often as a strategic weapon in the effort to make public space ‘safe’ and controllable. But according to Jonathan Sterne, its use is primarily aimed at excluding non-consumers – whereas he believes it should be seen as a vital component of urban design. In Sterne’s opinion, besides an aesthetical dimension, sound also has a political and ethical dimension.

Radio demon­ strated all too often in the past how the community spirit could be stirred and feelings of loneliness and isolation dissolved, according to Dirk van Weelden. Today developments in mobile telephony are providing the medium of radio with a new stimulus. If the network is linked to the city’s physical reality this can stretch the significance of the public realm considerably.

Dear Gerry,

Thank you for your kind e-mail messages and the package with delicious things that you sent us. Please forgive me for being so slow and not answering by e-mail, but it's better for me to send you this letter on paper through our own people. My work for the armed resistance makes it too dangerous to use electronic post for personal messages. I would not be able to write freely.

To start with the best news: Laura and I are healthy, our things are safe in an as yet undamaged warehouse in the Westelijk Havengebied and our house in the Rivierenbuurt is intact. We live in an area where there is still hardly any fighting and where the regime so far has displayed little enthusiasm for purging it. Perhaps this has to do with the Second World War, when so many Jews were deported from this neighbourhood. It would raise too many bad memories.

Like I said, we cleared out most of our valuable possessions, like the books, Ma's grand piano, Laura's jewellery, the silverware and the art and have stashed them safely away. It's much too dangerous to have all that stuff in the house; we live in our apartment with the feeling that we can flee any day, if necessary, with an overnight bag with some clothes and a toothbrush. The bags are packed and ready to go, under the coat rack in the hall.

Many people in Amsterdam are taking advantage of the chaos caused by the civil war for their own ill purposes. In Buitenveldert, bands suddenly started going around and chasing people out of their houses, looting the premises and, after a few blows here and there and a gang rape or two, moving on again. Minibuses towing furniture trailers drove along with them at a footpace in order to carry off the booty. Sometimes they set fire to the houses, sometimes not. When they didn't, it turned out they had made an agreement with the so-called 'Restoration Agents', usually collaborationist notaries, who redistribute the houses of public enemies at the order of the regime. As a matter of fact, most of the addresses the plunderers went to were on a list that the new Minister of the Interior had sent to the Chief of Police of Amsterdam-Amstelland. That's why there's been so little uproar and why the police are only symbolically working on the case. They have plenty of excuses for not having any time. They were called in to maintain order behind the advancing troops when the battle over the Zuidas suddenly broke out and were also requisitioned for Amsterdam East, after the Marines revolted.

I read that a resistance group in Amsterdam North is considering a disciplinary campaign against a band that is causing automobile accidents on the A10 ring road in order to rob the victims. It's discouraging to see how similar those plans are to the emergency legislation that the regime is enacting against us.

Ever since the tourists have been staying away and most of the ex-pats have left, there is a miserable feeling of boredom in the city. As if even the daylight is murky and dim. New ads only appear on the squares and the large thoroughfares. In the rest of the city, the sales, models and packaging are from a year or two ago. The photos are wrinkled by the rain that has seeped into the glass cases. The bright colours are faded, the hairdos of the models looked dated. The world in which those posters belong no longer exists.

The city does not maintain its status any more; there is hardly any upkeep. Even the woodwork on the luxury stores in the Nine Streets is peeling. And all of this is extra noticeable because the streets are so empty – and because a third of the shops have gone bust by now or are open just a few days a week.

In the outdoor cafés, you see only young Amsterdammers, who probably sit there in order to keep an eye on the street for their organization or to make a deal.

The alleys next to the busier streets and canals are piled with garbage. Even the municipal workers don't like to go in them anymore. Three of the four safe houses that we have in the inner city are on such alleyways. When I walk into an alley it's as if the hand of a giant has picked me up and transported me back in time. For a moment, I'm in the years of the city's degeneracy, the late 1970s, early '80s. I talked to an old journalist who can hardly believe his own conclusion that Amsterdam has been more devastated in a year and a half than in the 150 years prior to that.

As everyone knows, the least chance of explosions, attacks and murders is on and around the Max Euweplein. The casino on that square is one of the most important economic hotspots in the city. Gambling is much more popular than ever – I think because most of the other pleasures have fallen away. But it's also the presence of large amounts of black money and the clandestine business and trading that is done around the casino that gives the Max Euweplein the function of a city centre. This is where the bigwigs of the regime are seen when they are in the city. Elsewhere in the city they don't feel at ease, but in this enclave of louche bling bling and swindle they feel at home.

The regime boasts that it is safe and peaceful around the Leidseplein and the Max Euweplein. But are the volunteers patrolling in their nationalistic uniforms and the heavily armed soldiers with their armoured vehicles on the Weteringschans and the Babylon complex also the boss? Since the introduction of the permit system for journalists, it's not easy to find out who's in charge here, but my impression is that it's primarily the businessmen from all sorts of countries who come to the city in the wake of the ambassador of the friendly Italian regime. They, and the crews of the companies they hire to do the dirty work. The local underworld and the boys and girls of neighbourhood gangs that deal in guns and drugs make up the rest of it. Besides broken English and Amsterdam patois you mostly hear Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian.

In the cafés around the Max Euweplein you can also find the foreign journalists, with their differing theories about the source of the money that the regime has at its disposal. Oddly, tax revenues have collapsed but the funds available to the armed forces apparently are inexhaustible.

I am regularly at the Max Euweplein because I also meet with an editor of my London publisher there. I give him USB sticks with stories and essays that I write in English. It's roundabout, but I don't want to risk sending my pieces by Internet. What's more, I publish under a pseudonym. Sometimes one of them gets published and then Jeff, my editor, can give me the money I earn from it – in cash, which is a welcome addition to the little that Laura and I make. As you know, she works as a cook. I'm now an employee at a large dry cleaner's.

Do you remember Harold? That big boorish guy who had a gallery on the Lijnbaansgracht. I think you once bought that drawing with the skaters in it from him, the one that you had hanging on the long wall of your living room. Anyway, this week he suddenly appeared in the dry cleaner's, bringing a pair of trousers, a jacket, suit and a couple of skirts. He looked unhealthy. Red eyes, puffy. He said that besides the gallery he was doing something much more lucrative: selling valuable watches. My not exactly enthusiastic reaction must have shown him I was irritated by the umpteenth bragging story of somebody who is trying to profit from the war. I quickly began to talk about his wife, who was a social worker and probably suffering a lot under the new regime.

Harold burst out in raw, mirthless laughter. She had been interned, and after being interrogated was released. She did lose her job, however. The service at which she worked was located in a 'black district' and declared unnecessary. In the very next breath, he went on to complain about the vigilante groups who were opposing the regime. Why didn't they let the government make a clean sweep, then the repression would automatically lessen and everything could be like it used to be. Living in prosperity, peace and harmony. A provocation. He was not at all surprised to find me working in a dry cleaner's. So he had known all along that I had been fired from the university.

'Harold,' I said, 'little people like you and me have to sit tight and wait it out, try to save our own necks and take care of our loved ones and only join in the discussion again when the madness is over.'

He slammed the money against the counter with his broad, swollen paw.

'Play-actor,' he growled and I gave him the stapled together tickets with a vague smile.

The trains are running again, as I'm sure you've heard. Here you immediately notice it on the street. There are people with maps in their hands walking around again. The shopkeepers are happy about these courageous visitors. Usually they are people looking up their families or coming to do business.

It took months after the bombardment of the Marine Establishment and the devastation of the Eastern Islands in Amsterdam, but now it's once again possible to travel to the south and east of the country by train. The revolt of the Marines and the Marine Intelligence Service headquartered there did give us hope. Luckily, they were clever enough to smuggle out most of the weapons and vital technical systems before openly turning against the regime. We have already had contact with a few of their commanders and they have a couple of bases near the Rai and in Amsterdam North. I expect a lot from working together with them and who knows, maybe they will succeed in persuading other branches of the armed forces to choose our side.

The evacuation and total destruction of the districts neighbouring the Marine bulwark was a typical example of the misbegotten enthusiasm of the regime. Just ask the Kattenburgers camping in the tents in the Vliegenbos Park whether they consider punishing rebellious marines important enough to blast their houses to bits.

With typical bombast, the regime offered the people from Wittenburg, Kattenburg and Oostburg new apartments on Java Island. After all, plenty of apartments would be freed up after the intellectuals who have been singled out as 'enemies of freedom' or 'agents of Islamo-fascism' were arrested. But then the troops of the regime would have to pacify Java Island first. If it's up to us, that will never succeed. What's more, there are far too many people without a roof over their head.

Yesterday, our group was involved in an over-water attack on the Silodam on the river IJ. There's a company in that building that does research for the regime into the antecedents of subversive activities on the Internet. No security or defences could be discerned, probably because they assumed that no one knew about their freelance work for the AIVD. Our intelligence is very good; we even have moles in the Ministry.

We came from three different directions in canoes painted black with powerful and silent – because they were electric – outboard motors. From less than thirty meters away, we shot two RPGs into the building and lobbed a big phosphor grenade after it to cause an extremely hot fire and thus maximum damage. Our canoes vanished just as quickly in three different directions. No telephonic, radiographic communication had been necessary to plan and carry out the attack. A successful operation, with a quick exit and no traces left.

This was not a solo action by our group. We worked with the Fighting Designers, a group of radicalized designers who seldom engage in armed conflict, by the way, but who lately, especially after the destruction of the eastern islands, Oostelijkeilanden, recognize the necessity to also sabotage the regime by physical means. They provided a skipper, the camouflage clothing and treated the hulls of the canoes so that they are quieter in the water and do not reflect light. I was one of the skippers, and one of the marksmen was ours; we also supplied the canoes. The rocket launchers and the other members of the six-man special commando came from the Amsterdam branch of the Turkish communist party.

The water police and the army still have found no answer to our speedy canoes. We were able to sail into the Haarlemmervaart unhindered and under the cover of darkness reach our hiding place in the Bretten district.

Every week in Café Oostoever, a splendid white concrete 1950s café that overlooks the waters of the Sloterplas in an area that is firmly in the hands of anti-regime militias, I join a think tank of people who discuss peace. We don't talk about how and when peace will come. Meetings about that are held in other places. We consider the problems and possibilities for the city once the regime has been beaten.

One of the leading figures is Bas G., an architect and urban designer. Right before the civil war broke out, he had built his own house on IJburg, and after that island was purged (from which he had a lucky escape) he can only come to the suburbs in the West via secret routes and with false identity papers. He leads an apparently unsuspicious life as a town hall employee who records the city's housing situation. I admire the sangfroid with which he looks at the ticklishness of his daily life from the point of view of the long term. We protect him and his family, but we do this in exchange for information that is valuable for combating and sabotaging the regime.

He always claims that the civil war will turn out to be such a horrible trauma for the Dutch that they will rise above themselves trying to rid themselves of the memory. 'It will better here than it ever was before,' he says nonchalantly, 'not necessarily wealthier, but more lively, international, inventive. In some sectors, such as software, sustainable technology, engineering, we can become world leaders. The difference will lie in rediscovering sharpness and fighting spirit. There will be something to prove. The feeling that we now have of standing with our backs against the wall and seeing everything go to pot will soon give us tremendous energy. A whole lot of crap will disappear like snow under the sun.'

When he talks about the future it calms me down. That's necessary, because the situation can make me desperate. After all, I am participating in the fight against the regime without having an explicit ideology. My loved ones and I are outlawed, considered suspicious and designated as enemies of the people. I was fired and spied upon like a criminal on probation. The reaction was instinctive and intense. I joined a group that is primarily engaged in sabotage, but sometimes also with armed combat.

I am not always completely convinced of the rightness of what we are doing, in the service of which all those terrible things occur, the attacks, the raids, the fires. Hasn't it been true for some time that there are not only two, but four, or maybe even six, parties confronting each other in this mess? A month ago, jihadists from Amsterdam West blew up two commanders of The True Patriots from the Pijp district and bragged about it to boot. Left a gigantic crater on the Fredriksplein. And last week I heard the rumour that the raid on the Social Security office in Amsterdam North was given away by a splinter faction of a Jewish action group. Doesn't this seem more like a war between mafia organizations than a fight for liberation?

How do I know, for example, where the money that pays for our group is coming from? Sometimes we have Israeli weapons, at other times American, but also Belgian and Italian ones. It's also never been completely clear to me how much influence our cell's discussions have on the organization's choices of targets and times. Often I have the impression that they couldn't care less about what we say or think. It could be that behind the organization is an Italian real estate investor who wants to buy a certain section of the city, whether it be for a good price or even destroyed and thus ripe for development.

Laura says at such moments that I should drink herbal tea and get more sleep. Every now and then I think about disappearing to Germany, where it's still a little bit civilized. But those thoughts don't often occur to me after I've spent an evening in Café Oostoever. Bas is able to convince me to stay despite everything. Amsterdam is such a special city in his stories that I want to stay here and fight for it.

This week I was in one of the high-rises in the Zuidas district. The air above the city is different than it used to be. Actually you always see a fire smouldering in a few places in your view. Trails of smoke ranging from dirty yellow to deep black. The difference is even greater when you look down at the city. The bust up roads, the destroyed housing blocks, the roadblocks. The picturesque look and hip international atmosphere is gone, but you do see a tough, sturdy urban structure that can't be messed with that easily. When I looked down at the battered city of Amsterdam I know for sure that we will drive the regime out.

Every day I ride to work on my scooter and pass no less than 18 roadblocks. At ten of them at the least, I am stopped and searched. The weird thing is that I can drive from my house to the Vijzelgracht without a problem, whereas the Rivierenbuurt actually is not occupied by any faction at all at the moment. The centre is indeed in the hands of the regime, but I know for sure that three resistance groups have important bases there. And sometimes we simply make a hit, like when we killed four advisors, among them the great leader's speechwriter, who had gone to a discount computer shop on the Koningsplein. The doors suddenly closed and our people came in from the back garden. The three bodyguards were much too late. Burly farm boys in the big city, they had been gaming.

When I go to see Steef and Ben in the Transvaal neighbourhood, I have to take a detour via the Ceintuurbaan and the Wibautstraat because the Berlage Bridge has been blown up. That was inescapable when we took the Amstel Station, where there were a few trains loaded with weapons and ammunition. Otherwise we would have been attacked from the rear.

But anyway, what I wanted to say is that despite all the havoc and the look of the battlefield, that's the direction I take when I tootle along on my scooter to Steef and Ben on the Steve Bikoplein. They stop me 15 times on this route too, but I look too nondescript, and apparently the profession I once practiced, the history of science, is not suspicious enough to earmark me as an 'intellectual opposed to liberty'.

Gerry, the situation is wretched and disastrous, as you can see, but we haven't had to eat the cats yet and the chance of a blanket bombardment is zilch. If nutters break into the laboratories of the VU and the UvA in order to commit biological terrorist attacks with a couple of test tubes, I'm out of here. Or if the regime lines up its tanks in the Rijnstraat and opens fire on the houses. But I don't see that happening very soon as yet.

Keep your chin up there in Wierden. As far as I know it's a fairly comfortable area to be in during these years of national catastrophe. I'm glad you are there. Say hello to Leo and the children. If you want to send something from the garden again, we would be very grateful. And finally, what's most important of all, thanks for offering to take us in, if life becomes impossible here. I am well aware of how big a risk that is for you. For what it's worth, dear sister, I would do the same for you and yours. Let's hope that it will never be necessary. If it becomes unacceptably dangerous for me here, you will receive a message from our people that we are coming. For now, I am trying to stay here in the city as long as possible. It's terrible to have to say it, but never have I loved Amsterdam as much as I do now, when the city is partly in ruins, ripped up by bulldozers and tanks, mutilated by roadblocks and torn apart by factions shooting at each other.

Hugs from your brother Koos

and from Laura

From now on, the editors of Open will (re) focus attention on an existing work of art in public space. Max Neuhaus’s Sound Work was first installed on Times Square in 1977. It ceased to function in 1992. In 2002 the Dia Art Foundation restored this work of art and included it in their collection. Ulrich Loock analyses the work and describes how Neuman separates sound from the dimension of time. Without being visually or materially present, Neuhaus creates what he calls an individual and authentic experience of place.

Artist Mark Bain’s work focuses on the interaction between sound, architecture and public space. Triggered by the emergence of new sound techniques for crowd control, he reflects on ‘psychosonics as an invisible tactile material to provoke a public’, using William Burroughs’ ‘audio virusses’ and his own sound art as points of reference.

The following text is a rewritten version of the monologue which was broadcast in the shopping centre ‘De Kalvertoren’ in Amsterdam on 27 April 2005 between 4.45 pm and 5.45 pm in the programme of the art project Radiodays at The Curatorial Training Programme of Foundation De Appel in Amsterdam. Several ghetto blasters hidden in plastic bags received the broadcast voice. The voice was dispersed over the homogeneous pedestrian zone. The titles should not be read. New lines and spaces indicate pauses.

The editors of Open asked Huib Haye van der Werf, one of the participators of the tenth Curatorial Training Programme (CTP) of De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, to write a review of the project Radiodays that took place in April 2005.1  The description of various projects sheds light on the reason why the curators in training chose radio as the medium, and also on the selection of the artists and the type of contribution.2

Jeanne van Heeswijk and Amy Plant started Valley Vibes in 1998, in association with chora, a research institute for architecture, landscape and urbanism. For four years, the inhabitants of an urban regeneration district in East London were given the opportunity to record, mix and broadcast the sounds of their events using the Vibe Detector. This registration of sound can be seen as a ‘journey’ through the district. The following is a description of the project and a selection of the logbook entries.

Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (ed.), The [Un]Common Place. Art, Public Space and Urban Aesthetics in Europe, Fondazione Adriano Olivetti and Actar, 2005, ISBN 8495951983

One Place after Another. Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon, MIT Cambridge Massachusetts, London, 2002, ISBN 0262112655

Engagement with the public is the central focus in the practices of many artists and designers who deal with urban public space. Art historian Mariska van den Berg analyses three examples that investigate how to call a halt to dysfunctional public spaces in the city and how to reinterpret the relation between citizens and the government.

Lara Schrijver and Pnina Avidar (eds.), OASE 66: Virtually Here: Space in Cyberfiction, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2005, ISBN 9056624288

STIFF, Hans van Houwelingen vs. Public Art, Artimo, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 9075380143

Olav Velthuis, Imaginary Economics. Contemporary Artists and the World of Big Money, Fascinations 14, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2005, ISBN 9056624016

Bik Van der Pol – With Love from the Kitchen, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2005, ISBN 9056624180

Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, is specialized in the influence that globalization and digitization processes have on the transformations of urban space. In this essay, she looks at the possibilities of artistic practice to ‘make’ public space that can produce unsettling stories and make visible that which is local and has been silenced.1 

In this article, media experts Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluiten­berg ask us to consider if unques­tioned connectivity – the drive to connect everything to everything, and everyone to everyone by means of electronic media – is necessarily a good thing. To stimulate ideas, the authors propose a possible alternative: a practice of ‘mindful disconnection’, or rather the ‘art of selective disconnectivity’.

Locative media art makes artistic use of location-aware and time-aware media to promote social encounters between users and locations. The social contact is usually experienced via a pc. Assia Kraan wonders whether the shared location is only the pretext or also the location for social activity.

rfid (Radio Frequency IDentification) is rapidly finding new applications and this is giving rise to concerns about threats to privacy. It’s therefore worth thinking about how individuals can have a say in which privacy they are willing to share with whom and when. If citizens can acquire more access to particular rfid implementations, then rfid can also become a support for other, socially interesting value systems. Recent developments in online culture provide exciting ideas for this.

Since the early 1960s the Flemish television producer Jef Cornelis has explored the conditions of television as a public medium. A number of his early films look at the changes that have occurred in urban public space. Reason for Open to publish an interview with him by Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau as part of a broader investigation of Cornelis’ work.

Since the early 1960s the Flemish television producer Jef Cornelis has explored the conditions of television as a public medium. A number of his early films look at the changes that have occurred in urban public space. Reason for Open to publish an interview with him by Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau as part of a broader investigation of Cornelis’ work.

Phrases like ‘they finally gave in to public pressure’ or ‘public opinion responded unintelligently’ are pretty standard utterances. The normalcy of such expressions may easily obscure the fact that they evoke a mysterious entity. Indeed, the conjuring up of a public that is capable of performing acts, such as ‘exerting pressure’, inevitably involves a certain amount of wizardry. But this wizardry often goes unappreciated. Those who want to support a given public will want to affirm its reality. Accordingly, they have little interest in acknowledging the magic involved in its manifestation. And those who are critical of a particular public are likely to follow the strategy of showing that this public is not a real public. They will want to demonstrate that in fact we are dealing here with little more that a few actors with dubious interests: just business people, or leftists. That is, they will try to kill the magic. But an appreciation of the wizardry involved in the emergence of publics is crucial, it seems to me, for a good appreciation of what they may be capable of.

A first rough indication that publics that are capable of action represent a riddle is that, as long as we follow everyday logic, such entities appear to be a practical impossibility. The notion of a public endowed with agency brings together two contradictory demands. On the one hand, ‘action’ requires that there is an identifiable actor, and preferably an individual, that can be said to do the acting. This is clear from how we deal with questions of justice, for instance. To establish that a particular deed has been done, whether bad or good, we customarily require that there is a specific doer who can be associated with this doing. A bottom line of our everyday logics is that there is no deed without a doer. But, on the other hand, it is an important characteristic of a public that it cannot be reduced to an identifiable actor. As a rule, a public must consist of more than a known set of individuals. When it is revealed that behind a public there is merely a particular social grouping, its status as a public is challenged. When it can be said: these are only the environmentalists making a fuss, then we are only dealing with a special interest group. When it is revealed that ‘it was the political campaign team that directed the crowd into the hall, to cheer during the candidate’s speech’ we speak of a scam. A public must thus satisfy two demands simultaneously: it must be capable of agency, but it must not be reducible to an identifiable agent.

How could such an impossible combination of demands nevertheless come to be accepted as normalcy in many contemporary cultures? Crucial in this respect is a particular commitment that is peculiar to advanced democracies: the commitment not to accept, as matter of course, that if a public is to act, then a representative must do the acting for the public. Indeed, one could say that radical democracies are defined by the requirement that it should be impossible to trace back a public’s actions to one (or a few) identifiable social actor(s). To sustain this demand, to perform a deepening of democracy beyond representative democracy, all sorts of formats have been developed that enable the public to express itself, and potentially, to acquire agency in the process. The mass demonstration is one solution, the opinion poll is another, and then there are the spectacular protest event and the media debate, and so on. These formats can be regarded as attempts to make the riddle of an acting public workable: to produce a capacity to act without producing an identifiable agent. That is, these formats are to enable the emergence of agency in the absence of a specifiable actor behind the action.

To speak of the formats that are available for organizing the public, is also to say that media have a special role to play in all this. To begin with, the media are sometimes held responsible for bringing about the radicalization of democracy mentioned above. According to some political theories, it was an effect of the rise of print media that the public came to be understood as an audience endowed with a voice. Media must then be held responsible for a certain loss of respect for representative democracy, for instance for the idea that it is sufficient for a public to act through individual representatives. Thus, according to the philosopher Kierkegaard, ‘the Press’ was to blame for the fact that the public in his time had become an abstract entity. He observed that in ancient times, ‘men of excellence’ could stand in for the public, but after the rise of print media, the public had taken on the form of ‘a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage – and this phantom is the public.’ Intriguingly, one of Kierkegaard’s main problems with this media-based phantom public was that it was incapable of action.

However, a few decades after Kierkegaard made his gloomy observations, the American public intellectual Walter Lippmann developed the argument that media provide crucial instruments for the evocation of phantom publics, including phantom publics with a capacity to act. According to Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, media like the daily press, the radio and the telephone are indispensable for the organization of publics, that is, for the production of a non-actor that can nevertheless act in certain ways. For him, publicity media make it possible to produce the public as an effect. As they report conflicts, provide forums for debate, and poll audiences, Lippmann argued, media enable the expression of publics. In these ways, namely, media give direction to the indefinite and multiple concerns of an open-ended population. They channel these concerns into a current with a definite charge, that of being for or against a given position, decision, intervention.

By redefining the public as an effect of media circulation, Lippmann went some way towards solving the riddle of the public. The trouble with his solution, however, is that by reducing the public to an effect he made the public look quite weak. For Lippmann, to make a public emerge is to extract a definitive ‘no’ or ‘yes’ out of content and sentiment circulating in media. It is hard to see what could make a public that obeys this description strong enough to be able to exert force. That is can exert such force, however, is clear from phrases like ‘they were obliged to respond to public pressure’. Thus, the question that remains open after Lippmann is that of the forces that publics may unleash.

To appreciate this force, I would say that we should at the least recognize the following: the agency of the public derives in part from the fact that this entity is not fully traceable. That is, the force of the public has to do with the impossibility of knowing its exact potential. And this for the following reason: when a thing is publicized in the media, whether a person, an object or an event, this involves the radical multiplication of the potential relations that this entity can enter into with other things and people. Thus, when something starts circulating in public media, this brings along the possibility, and indeed the threat, of an open-ended set of actors stepping in to support this entity, and to make it strong. The fact that the public cannot be definitively traced back to a limited number of identifiable sources is thus crucial to the effectiveness of the public: this is what endows publics with a dangerous kind of agency.

This also makes it clear why the wish to concretize the public, to boil it down to the real actors that constitute it, involves a misunderstanding of the public. In relating to publics, and in performing ‘the public’, the point should be to try and work with the threat of a partly untraceable potential of connections, and not to dissipate it.

Taking the teapot as an example, Noortje Marres, a sociologist at Goldsmiths University in London, examines how it is used to make associations between disparate issues, contexts and players. How can you 'charge' objects with issues, or in other words the 'issuefication' of things, and what role does digital technology play in this? Her analysis especially focuses on the fact that political disputes are fought out by way of objects, and not only by people.

Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar of invoffice for architecture, urbanism and design in Amsterdam are investigating the interaction between the physical and the digital public domain in contemporary urban networks. They are interested in the way that the built environment relates to the space of mass media and communication networks and how these influence each other. On the basis of the project Neighbours Network City for the city of Essen in the Ruhr region, they reveal how this design research is taking shape.

Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar of invoffice for architecture, urbanism and design in Amsterdam are investigating the interaction between the physical and the digital public domain in contemporary urban networks. They are interested in the way that the built environment relates to the space of mass media and communication networks and how these influence each other. On the basis of the project Neighbours Network City for the city of Essen in the Ruhr region, they reveal how this design research is taking shape.

Using the Halloween Critical Mass bike ride as an example, Marion Hamm analyses how cyberspace overlaps the physical space of a protest demonstration on the street and how a construction of what she calls ‘geographies of protest’ is developing. Marion Hamm is affiliated with Indymedia, a worldwide network of independent media centres.

At the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, a research project is underway, on the public space of the Zuidas business district in Amsterdam. This project, entitled Logo Parc, looks into the value of the Zuidas as a ‘symbol’. In addition, proposals are being developed for a conception of the public space as a new type of space. The present essay, along with its accompanying pictorial material, is one of the results of the project.

Clothing and accessories have always served as a membrane between the outside public world and the inside private world of our body. But what happens when you put the mediated outside world on your skin and so largely do away with the boundary between public and private? Kristina Andersen and Joanna Berzowska, two artists and research workers, use their wide experience of working with wearable technologies – ‘wearables’ – to speculate on the nature of the experiences created by this increasingly permeable membrane.

Clothing and accessories have always served as a membrane between the outside public world and the inside private world of our body. But what happens when you put the mediated outside world on your skin and so largely do away with the boundary between public and private? Kristina Andersen and Joanna Berzowska, two artists and research workers, use their wide experience of working with wearable technologies – ‘wearables’ – to speculate on the nature of the experiences created by this increasingly permeable membrane.

René Boomkens, De nieuwe wanorde. Globalisering en het einde van de maakbare samen­leving, Amsterdam, Van Gennep, 2006, isbn 9055156507, 328 pages

When the political discourse retreates to the realm of the visual, when we are supposed to debate the appearance of a flag, then we have to admit that politics has become little more than visual design, according to the Belgian philo­s­opher Dieter Lesage. He argues for a ‘funda­mentalism of human rights’ that will guide us out of the post-political impasse of Empire, the world-embracing network characterized by Negri and Hardt.1 

Markus Miessen (ed.), East Coast Europe, Berlin / New York: Sternberg Press, 2008, ISBN 9781933128498, 352 pages

The following text is a shortened version of a lecture delivered by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk during the conference ‘Atmospheres for Freedom. Towards an Ecology of Good Government’ in Venice in 2004.1  In this lecture, Sloterdijk addresses the premises of a democratic society and the importance therein of written and representational media.

Now that art is being deployed more and more in public / private development processes, people expect it to have a clearly described effect. The artist’s autonomous position is seriously undermined by this requirement – which, in Jeroen Boomgaard’s view, is a bad thing. He argues the case for a radicalization of the autonomy of art. That alone will allow art to wrest itself free of processes where the law of the strongest holds sway, and so become truly effective.

In these texts art theoreticians Jeroen Boomgaard and Sher Doruff take a bifurcating approach to art praxis in public space from a Dingpolitik point of view. Two distinct vectors, one speculative and the other practical, explore and ‘transduce’ the current exigencies of artmaking in the public sphere and the relevance of the thing as it is made and as it continues to make. What’s happening now to the affective before and after of the work of art and the practices that inform it? Referencing key concepts from Bruno Latour (instauration matters of concern, making things public), Isabelle Stengers (ecology of practices) and Gilbert Simondon (transduction), issues concerning the current state of affairs of public space art praxis are fielded, considered and argued, marking a dynamic oscillation between making things public and things making publics.

Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty (eds.), Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art, Amsterdam, Valiz, 2011, isbn 9789078088516, 288 pages

Contemporary architecture is seldom political. Either it withdraws from reality because of its introverted body of ideas or it uncritically embraces reality in all its heterogeneity. According to the architecture critic Roemer van Toorn, Wiel Arets’s library and Rem Koolhaas’s Casa-da-Música prove that it is indeed possible to develop what he calls a ‘political aesthetics’.

With the formulation of his concept of ‘repressive tolerance’ Herbert Marcuse uncovered a key strategy of manipulation and control in our consumer societies. Repressive tolerance, Marcuse states in his controversial analysis from 1965,1 is sham tolerance that only serves to maintain the status quo. A perversion of genuine tolerance. Its purpose is to draw the teeth of opposition by capturing it into political, economical, and cultural systems that are already fully controlled by the establishment. Democracy, free market, freedom of speech, and tolerance – once revolutionary goals themselves but now fronts for repressive, exploitative, and totalitarian systems – are the false denominators under which opposition is annexed and neutralized. And once absorbed by systems that are really run by large corporations, banks, investment companies, the military industrial complex, and their secret services, all opposition is rendered toothless and turns into a caricature of itself. In that way our democracies are no more than staged media spectacles that conceal and maintain true power relations, the free market principle serves as an excuse for monopolistic concentrations, and even the word ‘revolutionary’ has been adopted by the world of advertising to such an extent that it has become powerless and should be replaced by ‘fuck’ (at least, according to revolutionary Jerry Rubin2 before he fell victim to repressive tolerance himself).

With his analysis, Marcuse outlined implicitly how the counterculture,3 of which he was one of the leading figures and which still seemed very much alive in 1965, would come to its end. He was not thanked for that at the time. ‘We didn’t care for Marcuse’s lectures on how the revolution was going to be co-opted,’ remembers John Sinclair, former leader of the radical White Panther Party, ‘We were too deeply involved in what we were doing and having a lot of fun doing it.’ But Marcuse was proved right in his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1979 the counterculture had been absorbed almost fully by established culture through a process of repressive tolerance. A subjugated Iggy Pop sang in that year: ‘O baby, what a place to be, in the service of the bourgeoisie. Where can my believers be? I want to jump into the endless sea4 Twenty-five years later this process was so complete that another prominent member of the counterculture, French artist and activist Jean-Jacques Lebel, observed: ‘In the worst cases, all that is left is rotting cultural merchandise, as for all the productions and superproductions that enjoyed a certain success in the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties, fifties or sixties and which today have evaporated.5

William Blake, Robert Desnos, William Burroughs, Sun Ra, The MC5 – rotting merchandise? Certainly, works, life, and thought of visionaries and revolutionaries are being sold as consumer goods. Plenty of examples. On the other hand, hardly anybody could have got acquainted with the works of William Blake or Sun Ra if their distribution had remained limited to the original small and handmade editions. So, it works both ways: with the incorporation and commercialization of countercultural works material is spread on a large scale that carries the germs of subversion and attacks the system from within. After all, not everything will be incorporated. That goes for the obstinate core of truly visionary or revolutionary work, but, of course, in the first place for violence.

Repressive tolerance – in the guises of historicizing, aestheticizing, and romanticizing – may have incorporated revolutionaries like The Weather Underground, the Rote Armee Fraktion, and The Black Panthers in academic and artistic circles (which often perform pioneering work in that respect), the violence that they employed remains indigestible for the establishment. Violence is a radical break with any order. A trauma that refuses to be denied or converted and that will only be repeated until the underlying conflict has been settled. According to Andreas Baader, one of the revolutionaries who drew inspiration from Marcuse, breaking a state’s monopoly of violence will expose the ‘fascist-repressive’ character of the legal order. Violence disrupts and unmasks. Let all who want to use it fill their bottles with gasoline and the others let their hands be sniffed at by policemen and security officers.6

‘Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory’, writes Marcuse in One Dimensional Man.7 Consequently, a first step in the repositioning of the counterculture is to inventory and analyse revolutionary and visionary works from the past. From that it will soon follow that the counterculture can only be viable if it contains both violent and non-violent elements: no revolution without violence and no alternative society without visionaries. From those elements only naked violence and visionary works that are truly capable of evoking other worlds have proved insensitive to repressive tolerance. The choice then to bring the establishment to its knees is that between a Molotov cocktail and Sun Ra’s ‘living blazing fire, so vital and alive.8

* From A Song of Liberty by William Blake, 1792–1793.

In the project Amsterdam 2.0, a political model is developed, in which the idea of democracy is once more given content and meaning. The key phrase here is ‘radical tolerance’: the co-existence of the absolutely sovereign and the radical other. British artist / writer Tom McCarthy interviews artist Paul Perry and architect Maurice Nio on the meaning and possible implications of this model.

In the mid 1990s I lived in Amsterdam. My accommodation, then, was a well-appointed squat. My downstairs neighbour was a Serbian performance artist whose work consisted of dragging his hands down window-panes. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, one of my flat’s windows was missing a sheet of glass. After measuring the hole and trudging off to have a new sheet cut, I boarded a tram whose driver refused to transport me, instructing me, in Dutch, to disembark. I didn’t understand, of course; a fellow passenger translated for me, adding, in a reasoned, explanatory tone, that ’if the tram crashed, shards of glass might hurt us’. The emphasis and inflection of his words made it crystal clear that us meant the Dutch passengers, not me.

As the tram pulled off again and I stood on the pavement watching it recede, I pictured the only tram crash I’d ever heard of: the one in Mexico City in 1925 in which the artist Frieda Kahlo, seated behind an artisan transporting a small bag of gold dust, found herself both skewered by a metal pole and gilted by the ruptured package. The event formed the basis of her work, which repeatedly shows her transfigured, by some glorious catastrophe, into a tortured icon.

The violent, Catholic splendour of Kahlo’s Mexico seemed very far away that day from safety-conscious, Puritan Holland. And yet the Dutch have been living in the shadow of catastrophe since their country’s inception. The very land on which they build their houses and through which they run their trams is stolen from a sea that wants it back, protected by dams and polders that defy the basic principle that you can’t live lower than sea level. I imagine that Holland first enters the imagination of most of the World’s non-Dutch children, as it did mine, via the fable of the little boy who, noticing a small hole in the sea wall, plugs it with his finger and stays there all night to save the town. His civic-mindedness is a Dutch feature, as an English carpenter, encountered in a bar, explained to me one evening soon after my ejection from the tram: ’In the old days, every citizen, irrespective of their wealth or status, had to put in two or three days every year at shoring up the sea wall. Their logic was that if the dyke goes, we’re all fucked.’

I wondered who the we referred to this time. Puritan theology divides the world into an us and a them: within a predetermined universe that will end, soon, in apocalypse, a few have been selected – pre-selected – as Elect, the ones who will be saved; the others, indeed the vast majority, however, are the Preterite, or damned. The script’s been written, and it can’t be changed. But acting in a way consistent with being one of the Elect confers upon the actor an Elect status – one that, since it’s not the actor but the writer (God) determining his actions, becomes its own proof, its own confirmation: a logic as self-contained as a polder.

The bar in which the carpenter explained the collective barrage-shoring custom to me lay on the Zeedijk, the location (as its name suggests) of Amsterdam’s old sea dyke. The street is full of late-night bars. There used to be one there named Mexico City; Camus used it as the setting for The Fall. In the novel, ’judge-penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence talks, like my carpenter, to an anonymous narrator, comparing Amsterdam’s layout, with its concentric canals, to the topography of Dante’s Inferno. Nowadays, outside the Zeedijk’s bars, on the street itself, foreign drug addicts shake and shuffle as they wait for their next hit. While their Dutch counterparts are provided with prescription heroin, these people, modern Preterite, are kept firmly beyond the polder of social inclusion, scraping its window-pane from the outside. For them, the apocalypse has come, and is repeating on an endless loop: each day is a long, slow catastrophe.

Camus’s Clamence dates his own fall to his failure, some years ago, to act to save a woman from drowning: he, like her, has sunk, lower even than sea level. During the short time I lived in Amsterdam, my childhood image of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dam mutated, till it grew into a strangely English one: a boy pulling his finger from the hole, his face, no longer innocent, replaced with the malicious, leering one of Johnny Rotten, two maniacal white eyes glaring from its centre like marble chrysanthemums.

Joke Hermes lectures on the formation of public opinion at the InHolland University. The editors of Open invited her to write about the political effectiveness of the work of Martijn Engelbregt (www.egbg.nl), an artist who systematically explores the functioning of democracy in his projects. Her conclusion is that popular culture achieves more than art in terms of influencing the free formation of public opinion. For the moment, Engelbregt’s work is reserved for political and cultural cognoscenti.

Art critic Anna Tilroe’s and exhibition maker Rutger Wolfson’s appeal to art to furnish the Netherlands with new symbols is, in Lex ter Braak’s view, ill-considered and gratuitous. Not only is it indefensible to presume you can prescribe a direction for art in this day and age, but the form in which the appeal to create new symbols went out was equivocal. The debate and the exhibition took place within the exclusive circles of the art world, and the attempts to target the public domain lacked all impact.

Frits Gierstberg a.o. (eds.), Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts (Reflect #04), NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005, ISBN 9056624555

Sophie Calle M’as-tu-vue?, Prestel Verlag, Munich / Berlin / London, New York, 2003, ISBN 3791330357

Erik Hagoort, Goede bedoelingen. Over het beoordelen van ontmoetingskunst, Fonds bkvb, Amsterdam, 2005, isbn 9076936145

In these texts art theoreticians Sher Doruff and Jeroen Boomgaard take a bifurcating approach to art praxis in public space from a Dingpolitik point of view. Two distinct vectors, one speculative and the other practical, explore and ‘transduce’ the current exigencies of artmaking in the public sphere and the relevance of the thing as it is made and as it continues to make. What’s happening now to the affective before and after of the work of art and the practices that inform it? Referencing key concepts from Bruno Latour (instauration matters of concern, making things public), Isabelle Stengers (ecology of practices) and Gilbert Simondon (transduction), issues concerning the current state of affairs of public space art praxis are fielded, considered and argued, marking a dynamic oscillation between making things public and things making publics.

Sher Doruff examines improvisation in the potentially activist use of mobile devices, focusing on the recent ‘moving of the squares’ that describes Black Lives Matter. Doruff observes that in live-streaming acts of injustice, our real time responses reveal what is most necessary to us. The author brings in Brian Massumi’s work on affect, and Fred Moten’s and George Lewis’s research within the realm of African-American theory, to better understand how, in ensemble, we improvise to seek a justice-to-come, but one we are not willing to wait for.

Art can play an important role in drawing attention to the influence of things, according to Peter-Paul Verbeek, Professor of Philosophy of Technology at the University of Twente. It can enable people to see through the political role of things and experiment with it.

The Belgian cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter has written extensively on the emergence of the capsular civilisation, in which public space is divided into mon­­itored and enclosed, secure enclaves (gated communities, shop­ping malls, theme parks, camps, ghettos). In this article he makes an initial attempt at analysing the new fear upon which this capsular­ization is based. Is it a frightening but fleeting hallucination, or does collective fear suggest a genuine danger?

Marina Vishmidt and Metahaven (eds.), Uncorporate Identity, Maastricht, Jan Van Eyck; Baden, Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, ISBN 9783037781692, 608 pages

Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (translated by Aileen Derieg), Semiotext(e), 2010, ISBN-10: 1584350857, ISBN-13: 9781584350859, 128 pages

Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken and Jill Winder (eds.), The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht: bak basis voor actuele kunst, and Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2009, ISBN 978946980075, 214 pages

We live in a time without illu­sions. Its utopian yearning is for security. Fear and unease are so prevalent that we can think of nothing else but fighting them. The police and the criminal justice system have become the agents of our yearnings, and we cannot get enough of this. We are trapped like a rabbit in the headlights: paralyzed with fear and unable to get away. I expect artists to manage to escape the powerlessness of the present time. Art does not have to please, but it could offer some support.

A few months ago I saw a perform­ance of the oratorio Die Schöpfung by Haydn at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki. The musical composition of the Creation story was simply overwhelming. But what especially struck me was the unembarrassed sense of jubilation about the beauty of nature and of humanity. It dawned on me that the power, the joy and the solace this composition expressed are out of date. I think few artists these days feel compelled to celebrate Creation in such an exuberant way.

But why? It seems art is being guided by the idea that there is little to celebrate. It prefers to focus on the Fall and on the unmasking of beauty as kitsch, of love as a trap and of human motives as terror. I realize general statements about art are dilettante-ish and criticism of modern art practice quickly smells of grousing. And yet I am often unable to shake off a feeling of disillusionment upon visiting a museum of modern art. A lot of concepts but little inspiration.

In essence there are three sources for providing impulses to a culture devoid of illusions. We cannot expect this of politics – the first candidate. Its pragmatic and mediagenic course can no longer be turned back. Something similar applies to the second candidate, religion. Religious faith is an individual matter and will not experience a revival as a cultural factor. From the Muslims we would prefer no organized religious movement.

When it comes to inspiration, I still base my hopes most on the art and culture sector. For a long time – too long – this has been dominated by the motif of unmasking. The inquiry into the deepest if not the lowest motives of human beings (Bataille!) seems to me to have been sufficiently carried out by now. Indeed, if we look at some commercial television programmes, the results of this examination have become common property. The inquiry into human perversion has made it commonplace and thereby become superfluous.

Pornography and violence have become normalized and thereby have acquired a new significance. They abnormalize restraint, vulnerability and the inquiry into moral­ities. This is not a call for decency in art or for a reintroduction of hypocrisy. It is, however, a plea for a new cultural élan, which must come from the people who have traditionally dared to venture down unbeaten paths. I yearn for new (or in fact old) representations of – ahem – love or reformulations of the battle between good and evil.

The old culture has been sufficiently dismantled to look for new potential in its foundations. This requires time (and means), which might best be used in studying texts and images that have survived, or in fact in making new ones that have not yet been appropriated by the culture of security. In the current utopian yearning for security lurks the danger of a totalitarian dream of power, but also a spark of hope. I yearn for the hope of creation.

Fear is a poor counsellor if we want to examine the potential of the information society. If we let ourselves be led by it we will remain stuck in a mass-media society, in which obsolete systems of power and knowledge still operate. According to Jouke Kleerebezem we must above all be vigilant ourselves and test the limits of the possibilities offered to us in a network society.

In the last several years, under the spotlight of media attention, a number of spontaneous monuments have popped up all over the place, monuments that threaten to ignore society’s complexity and remain visible only as long as the ­media’s attention lasts. This places the traditional monument, as well as the collective memory, in jeopardy. In Jouke Kleerebezem’s view, the networked media and the network culture related to it, offer signifi­cant perspectives of a new process of ‘post-monumental conceptualization’, a new economy of attention.

Heath Bunting explores the porosity of borders. Often performing as an interventionist or prankster and finding form within everyday acts of resistance, Bunting’s work reaches its public through systems of documentation and distribution including photography, print publishing and the web. Dismantling the divisions separating art and everyday life, Bunting prioritizes information and action. His work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communication technologies and social systems. (Annet Dekker)

The editors of Open invited the ­photographer Nico Bick (Arnhem, 1964) to produce a pictorial essay, especially for this issue, about archives, the places in which the tangible proofs of the past are ­collected and stored. Nico Bick lives and works in Amsterdam. His work is characterized by a penchant for the ostensibly unremarkable, the ordinary aspect of a place. For this assignment he photographed the archives of the International Institute for Social History, the National Institute for War Documentation and the Municipal Archives in Amsterdam as well as the National Archives in The Hague. He focused on the storage space and not on the content of the archives of its users. He aims to ‘make the structure of the storage clear, as well as making visible the collective memory, which is contained in places that are public, but at the same time hidden’.

As a conceptual documentary photographer, Nico Bick’s photographic works, often produced as series, invite concentrated investigation. In this work, by focusing on the plenary chamber of parliaments in the European Union, he draws attention to parliamentary history of democracy and its functioning within the EU.

Within Open!’s research theme Commonist Aesthetics, artist Andreas Siekmann created a series of pictograms and a matching glossary to continue his investigation into the increasing privatisation of the public realm. The work is part of his larger ongoing project initiated in Berlin in 2012, The Economic Power of Public Opinion & the Public Power of Economic Opinion: Think Factories, Think Tanks and the Privatisation of Power. One can view and read Siekmann’s contribution by either clicking the underlined entries beneath the pictures in the slideshow, or by directly entering the glossary pages in which pictograms and texts are combined. Sven Lütticken wrote a short introduction to the piece.

Within Open!’s research theme Commonist Aesthetics, artist Andreas Siekmann created a series of pictograms and a matching glossary to continue his investigation into the increasing privatisation of the public realm. The work is part of his larger ongoing project initiated in Berlin in 2012, The Economic Power of Public Opinion & the Public Power of Economic Opinion: Think Factories, Think Tanks and the Privatisation of Power. One can view and read Siekmann’s contribution by either clicking the underlined entries beneath the pictures in the slideshow, or by directly entering the glossary pages in which pictograms and texts combined are combined. Sven Lütticken wrote a short introduction to the piece.

According to John Byrne, who works at the School of Art and Design in Liverpool, autonomy in art is by no means a given any more, but a socially constructed and produced possibility that constantly must be fought for. Using Marx’s distinctions between ‘work’ and ‘labour’, and ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, he investigates the role and significance that art could have in the ‘smooth, mirror-like surface of global capital’.

According to philosopher and cultural theorist Johan Hartle, the rightwing populist criticism of art is anything but democratically inspired. The democratic legitimacy of art is in fact destroyed by the present ‘culturalist paradigm’, which is dominated by a romantic, nostalgic longing for the restoration of cultural unity. Instead of a ‘leftist hobby’, this attempt at restoration is actually the ultimate ‘rightist hobby’, which is blind to the diversity and contradictions so characteristic of the modern age.

The protest movement in and around the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has – in changing waves of conjuncture – been active for more than half a year now. It has produced some beautiful encounters between staff members and students, and has led to various learning and politicisation processes that, for a long time, seemed unthinkable. Suddenly things could be put on the agenda that had been impossible to discuss in times of atomised and competitive working relations, on the one hand, and endless formalised administrative meetings, on the other. 

Nowadays work, like art, has become an ‘occupation’, with autonomy having turned into a dominant ideology of flexibility and personal initiative. Now that art has ‘occupied’ life, according to the filmmaker and theoretician Hito Steyerl, she wonders how life can recapture its autonomy from art. Just as the white cube was once employed to criticize the narcissistic spectacle of artistic autonomy, she makes a case for using the black box as a zone in which to consider how the autonomy of life can be reinstated with respect to art as an occupation.

Against the background of Foucault’s analyses of the philosophical significance of the cynic, philosophers Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig at the Zurich University of the Arts are investigating present-day forms of activism such as the Occupy movement. By means of three themes – creating new forms of living, inventing new modes of organization and re-appropriating time – they show the pioneering potential of such activism.

More than anybody else, artist Andrea Fraser has for decades painstakingly investigated the concept of autonomy, basing her work on the analyses of the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. She discovered that the different dimensions of autonomy are contradicting one another more and more sharply in their functioning. A more meaningful autonomy can be developed by approaching the concept from a psychoanalytic perspective, provided that certain conditions are accepted.

It is a distinctive feature of much recent critical discourse that ‘autonomy’ has become increasingly derided in art, while being increasingly valued in politics. Indeed, autonomy is frequently claimed to be the very basis of politics, and hence of a politics of art – art activism – dedicated to the production of non-autonomous art. Yet it is not clear that the sense in which some art may be claimed, critically, to function autonomously is well understood; or that the theoretical intimacy of relations between claims for autonomy in art and in politics is fully appreciated. This short piece (brutally brief) approaches these relations from a historico-philosophical angle and a broadly Adornian point of view. It sets out from four common misconceptions of the autonomy of art, and proceeds to what Osborne takes to be Adorno’s less inadequate conception, its political limits, and the dialectical entanglement of its critique with artistic autonomy itself.

Download the maps as a PDF: Global Laboratory / World Government.

The archive has ­become a universal metaphor for all ­conceivable forms of storage and memory. Seen from the ­media-archaeological ­perspective of the Ger­man theorist Wolfgang Ernst, ­however, the archive is not dedicated to memory but to the purely technical ­practice of data storage: any story we add to the archive comes from outside. The archive has no narrative memory, only a calculating one. In a digital culture, Ernst says, the archive in fact changes from an archival space into an archival time, in which the key is the dynamics of the permanent ­trans­mission of data. The archive then ­become literally a ‘metaphor’, with all the possibilities this entails.

Between December 2009 and February 2010, French philosopher Jacques Rancière and Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn exchanged thoughts in a series of e-mails.1  Using Hirschhorn’s art project Bijlmer Spinoza Festival from 2009 in Amsterdam as an example, the two of them investigate the essence of a work of art in this day and age. Hirschhorn tries to analyse his work with terms like ‘presence’ and ‘production’, to which Rancière reacts and stimulates further reflection.

Between December 2009 and February 2010, French philosopher Jacques Rancière and Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn exchanged thoughts in a series of e-mails.1  Using Hirschhorn’s art project Bijlmer Spinoza Festival from 2009 in Amsterdam as an example, the two of them investigate the essence of a work of art in this day and age. Hirschhorn tries to analyse his work with terms like ‘presence’ and ‘production’, to which Rancière reacts and stimulates further reflection.

Serge Daney, Volharden, Solange de Boer (editor), Een ruimte om in te bewegen. Serge Daney tussen cinema en beeldcultuur, Isbn 9789490334017, 160 pages ,isbn 9789490334048, 192 pages, ‘Text & Context’ series, Amsterdam, Octavo Publications, set: isbn 9789490334062

Because the work of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler is relatively unknown in the Netherlands, the editors have asked Pieter Lemmens, who is specialized in the relation between man and technology, to write an introduction for the following article by Stiegler.

On the basis of the Actor Network Theory and Science & Technology Studies (STS), Ruth Benschop and Peter Peters, affiliated with the lectorate Autonomy and Publicness in the Arts at the Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, attempt to reinterpret the meaning of art in public space. Using Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc as a case in point, they take a different approach than that of the usual dualist thinking on art and its publics.

If we go by the number of lectorates (research groups at universities of applied sciences that revolve around specific knowledge domains) in the Netherlands that are currently investigating the role of the arts in the public sphere, it is clear that more attention is being paid to the relation between art and its publics than ever before. The fact that lectorates in particular are being allocated to do this research is a logical consequence of the position they occupy on the interface of theory and practice. Affiliated with practice-oriented educational programmes, they are responsible for setting up and stimulating research that takes actual practice as its starting point. It is therefore only logical that this research primarily focuses on the area where art practice and art criticism step out of their isolation and take on the confrontation with public space.

In this issue of Open, the analysis of this confrontation is based on the work of Bruno Latour. Its central idea can be summarized with the concept of ‘relationality’. Facts, ideas and artefacts do not exist in isolation, but in webs of relations with other facts, ideas and artefacts. The benefit of this relational thinking is that it enables us to look at things in a new way. In what has become a classic example given by Latour: If we want people to keep to the speed limit in the built-up area, we need speed bumps as well as traffic regulations. The traffic regulation, car, driver and speed bump form a network in which there is no a priori difference between people and things. Within such an ‘actor network’, a speed bump can do something; namely, cause the driver to step on the break.

We generally consider art in public space from an art-theoretical or sociological point of view, for example the role of the artist in relation to the commissioner and the public; or from an urban planning perspective that centres on the position of the art work in relation to the built environment. However, when we take the relationality of people and things as our starting point, it is possible to investigate art in public space in new ways. What a work of art does is dependent on more than only its intrinsic aesthetic qualities, social constellations or spatial appropriateness. Latour’s approach makes a combination of perspectives possible. As a result, we can avoid the oppositions and dualisms that often paralyse the discourse on the arts in the public domain. The role that the art work plays as Thing in the public sphere goes beyond distinctions such as ‘applied’ or ‘autonomous’. In Latour’s thinking, these perspectives on the functioning of art are inseparably interrelated. Autonomy can be seen as a condition for engagement, while applicability and instrumental value may be outcomes of the reception of autonomous works of art.

Jeroen Boomgaard, research group Art and Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academie

Peter Peters, research group Autonomy and the Public Sphere in the Arts, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences

On the basis of the Actor Network Theory and Science & Technology Studies (STS), Ruth Benschop and Peter Peters, affiliated with the lectorate Autonomy and Publicness in the Arts at the Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, attempt to reinterpret the meaning of art in public space. Using Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc as a case in point, they take a different approach than that of the usual dualist thinking on art and its publics.

In the Vintage Wireless Museum in London, the private and the public sphere are closely connected. With this museum as an example, Fiona Candlin, teacher of Museum Studies at Birkbeck (University of London), examines the extent to which the autonomy and independent position of private museums makes it possible for them to have a different form of exchange than that of museums financed by the government.

Christian van ’t Hof, Floortje Daemen and Rinie van Est, Check In / Check Out: The Public Space as an Internet of Things, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers (in collaboration with the Rathenau Institute), ISBN 9789056628086, 272 pages

Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things, Chicago / London, The University of Chicago Press, 2011, isbn 0226852938

Is the Amsterdammer where he really wants to be? There are whole tribes living in Amsterdam who would rather be somewhere else: somewhere in the past.

There are people who have come from faraway countries. They have difficulty adapting. They find Amsterdam difficult, they think, and they simply cannot get used to Western society. But that’s not it. They have difficulty with the present-day. They dream of their youth, when they still had a grip on their lives. That was in a country far away, with a different culture and a different climate.

Born and bred Amsterdammers also have a youth that they reminisce about. They also want to turn back the clock. They have it no easier adapting than do immigrants. The present takes a bite out of the city of their youth every day: all the things that disappear and all the things that are added. There are poignant memories around every corner.

I am one of these Amsterdammers: I was born and raised here. Every time I try to negotiate the traffic chaos known as the Leidseplein, my compassionate thoughts turn to the Leidsebosje. Until the 1980s this little copse was nothing more than a few trees and some shrubs in the middle of a roundabout. The roundabout used to stand in front of the modern-day Marriott, and you could ride around it until you reached the right exit. I’ve never actually been into the Leidsebosje, merely peered at it from my father’s car.

It’s best to be a tourist in Amsterdam: then you have least trouble adapting. Tourists have no memories of the past. For them, everything is fresh. In the same way parents are much more easygoing with someone else’s children, they cruise around in the knowledge that they will be leaving again. Four million of them come here every year to look at the canals, visit the coffeeshops and the museums. Tourists are a serious is­sue for the city council. In order to please them, the city centre has been designated a protected cityscape. They just have to tunnel the new North / South Line metro through beneath it and then they can set up a ticket booth for the city centre: the centre of Amsterdam as an open-air museum.

But isn’t that what the born and bred Amsterdammer wants as well? Then everything continues just like it was?

No, that’s not what I want. You don’t gain anything by stopping the clock. And certainly not by turning back the clock. For me, the Leidsebosje doesn’t need to be replanted. The filled-in canals don’t have to be excavated again either. And please let the Paleis van Volksvlijt (Amsterdam’s 19th-century ‘Palace of Industry’ that was destroyed by fire in the 1930s) rest in peace as a stack of photos.

The size of two big classrooms filled with chests of drawers, with people nosing around among them, is more or less how you can best imagine what was, until recently, the Beeldbank (‘Image Bank’) of the Gemeente­archief, the Amsterdam Municipal Archives. In the drawers there were photographs of Amsterdam from the seminal years of photography, the middle of the 19th century, up to the present. Subdivided by street. Every Amsterdammer could go and search in those drawers for evidence of his or her past. So there they were, usually huddled in pairs, with a photo of the street where they were born in their hands. Look at this! Just look at that! Do you remember? Or the street where they live now, but then as it used to be. The air was filled with ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’. At the counter they could order a little print of their find, almost as big as an A4. That cost a couple of guilders at the time, and took a couple of weeks. You can find them in a great many staircases of Amsterdam homes, those photos of how the street used to be. Set in a simple frame. You could also hang them up inside, but then you couldn’t share them with the neighbours.

The room full of drawers has disappeared now. The 100,000 photos have been scanned and placed on a server the size of a fridge. Go to www.gaaweb.nl and click on the ‘Beeldbank’ button. You can search by street, by photographer, by neighbourhood. The photos appear on your screen. You can even print them out, for free and without waiting, in a format slightly bigger than a postcard. Slightly too small for the staircase, that’s true. However, there is no municipality in the Netherlands, in the whole world, where the archives are as accessible as in Amsterdam. I miss that room with chests of drawers all the same. I miss the delighted exclamations of people who have dug up something from their past. One day, when the windows are wide open on a summer’s day, I will go onto the street at dinnertime. According to statistics collected by the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, it’s at this hour that the Image Bank gets the most visitors (120 per hour). You never know, I might catch an ‘oh’ or an ‘ah’ through the open windows.

I visited the Image Bank for the last time a fortnight ago. Via via I had heard there was a garage with living space above it for sale in the Bellamystraat. On the corner with the Ten Catemarkt, the city’s cheapest and most pleasant market, according to insiders. I just wanted to take a look first. It turned out to be a real immigrant neighbourhood, but completely unlike Bos en Lommer. Whether it’s because of the monotony of the architecture there, or because of the utter listlessness that hangs in the air, I think Bos en Lommer is the saddest part of Amsterdam. I can’t see a headscarf there without thinking: throw off that hopeless thing, participate, don’t let yourself be boxed in by those men. There are so many women walking around there with their hair shielded from the glances of men that you can only get those ideas out of your head after you’ve left the neighbourhood. In the Bellamystraat and on the Ten Catemarkt there are also a lot of headscarves, but more cheerful, more varied, perhaps even more exotic. By the look of it more than half of them don’t speak any Dutch, but you don’t feel like a stranger in your own city there. In the garage there was a Volvo on the ramp which looked like new. It had a sports exhaust that two men wearing winter jackets were pulling around to check whether it was attached properly. Most of the tinkering was done, the garage owner told me, sitting in the little office right at the back. He had Parkinson’s disease, and would be leaving the place within a month. A friendly man with big hands, and he offered one in a handshake, firm without gripping. He stood up to show me the property. I hardly noticed he was ill, except that it seemed like he had to force every word out of his throat. That didn’t stop him talking nineteen to the dozen. Did I remember Stiefbeen en Zoon? Sure, that television series about that scrap-metal dealer (based on the English series Steptoe and Son). His little dealership was just opposite, and the scenes were shot from that place on the corner. Crikey! Was that here? Wasn’t it Rien van Nunen who played the father? And the son was played by … what was his name again? Now he’s a Chief Constable in that police series … what’s it called again? He also acted in that … but that was even longer ago … that children’s series about a sailor …. ’To sail is more fine than you think…,’ I piped up, and the garage owner chimed in with the second half of the couplet: ‘… come sail along with me.’

‘Piet,’ it suddenly came to me, ‘his first name was Piet ...’
‘…Römer,’ the propietor added.
‘Piet Römer!’ we chimed in unison.
He shook my hand for the second time.
‘And that police series was called …Baantjer.’
Our memories, pleased with their success, picked up steam.

‘Do you remember how Stiefbeen senior dragged kettle after kettle of hot water to the bathtub in the garden, stripped off down to his underwear and took a bath, right in the middle of the garden! The dirty git would keep his filthy black feet out of the water. He would have a jar of pickled onions in his hand, and a couple always ended up in the bathwater, then he fished them out and stuck in his mouth. That Rien van Nunen played the mayor in Swiebertje later on. And then he became seriously ill. What was it he had? He was in a wheelchair.’

‘…Parkinson’s,’ the garage owner finished.
‘I didn’t know it was infectious,’ I splurted out before I could stop myself.
The garage owner burst out laughing.

When I returned home I found 20 photos of the Bellamystraat on www.gaaweb.nl, including one showing the garage and the cinema next door, the Olympia, which is now a Turkish Cultural Centre. There had been a flood, and the cars were standing up to their axles in water.

There used to be floods often, the garage owner told me. The Bellamystraat was the lowest point in Amsterdam. If anything went wrong with the draining of the polder then they would be up to their knees in water. Then they would go surfing on old doors. The photo was taken in 1951, the year I was born.

I printed it out and took it along to the garage. He wasn’t there. The letterbox was so small, a type you hardly ever see now. A slit only 10 cen­timetres wide. I had to fold the photo double in order to get it through.

What can the past do for you? It used to be like that, now it’s like this, and later it will be like something else. There’s hardly anything to be learned from the past. Results from the past don’t provide any guarantee for the future. On photos the past looks so rosy. Meaningful and acceptable, like the present never is. Perhaps in 30 years, when the present has itself become the past. You would prefer it if that gap wasn’t there. That you could look at the present with the same acceptance as you look to the past. Photos from the past can’t help you here. Sooner the opposite. They make the gap even greater. It’s best to accept that there’s a gap and that it will never be bridged. Let the present and the past co-exist like two different versions of the same world. One slightly easier to understand than the other. You can dig up Amsterdam’s past in the archives. But where do you find the present?

If you want to understand the present then stop harrying the tourists from the cycle path, step off your bike and walk along behind them. Tou­rists, with their innocent gaze, understand Amsterdam better than the Amsterdammers. Tourists know why they have come here. Amster­dam­mers have forgotten, because we’ve been here so long already.

Follow them into the souvenir shop and look over their shoulder at the stand of picture postcards. Amsterdam is what the tourists send home to show where they’ve been. An image of a bright yellow bike against a bright green bridge railing, locked with three chains. Wherever that card falls on the mat they will understand immediately: that card comes from Amsterdam. There is only one city in the world where 100,000 bikes are stolen every year. A man’s backside in tight jeans astride an Amster­dam­mertje. Ten naked guys dancing on a boat in the canals. It could only be Amsterdam. Walhalla for homosexual love. The window of a coffeeshop with a man-high symbol of the marijuana plant painted on it. Every­thing’s possible: that’s Amsterdam. A sanctuary for tourists. And for terrorists. For everyone who has the prospect of being somewhere else sooner or later.

Fifty years from now, the generation that is currently growing up will look back to this present on www.gaaweb.nl with a hint of melancholy. The days when everything was possible. Or will they perceive it as the era when everything was supposed to be possible.

Gilbert Simondon poses that the transindividual is constituted by its supports, which signifies that signification is not only a fact of language, but also one of things: the supports of the transindividual are, above all, primarily our everyday objects.

Visual artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall, in the project Under Fire, which was recently exhibited at the Witte de With centre in Rotterdam,1  examines the significance of the representation of armed conflicts. According to Crandall, it is imperative that attention be shifted from what an image means to what an image does. By developing a sort of counter-memory, it may be possible to expand our outlook and acquire more insight into the political and cultural dimensions of the representation of war in a globalized world.

Euroscapes - Forum, volume 41, 2003, MUST Publishers and the Genootschap Architectura et Amicitia, ISBN 908063512X

Hans Aarsman, Onzichtbaar Gent, foto’s en diagrammen van de stad / Invisible Ghent: Photos and Diagrams of the City, published by Gent Cultuurstad vzw, 2004, ISBN 9080672238

In the Nether­lands, the politicization and dramatization of fear is preventing people from seeing the real problems, according to sociologist Frank Furedi. It is high time we realize that this in fact has to do with an estrangement from our own identity, especially as it has developed since the 1960s. Furedi thus argues for a more future-oriented activism, in which we must ask ourselves what the Nether­lands and Am­ster­­dam in particular want to be in the future.

The investigations of geographer and writer Stephen Graham show us a city not only caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual war between international military coalitions and their swarming counterparts, but a city that’s been reframed, re-imaged, as a strategic site in a larger geoeconomic scheme for engineering the urban machinations of control that are necessary to secure the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the globe.

An introduction to the art contribution to this issue by Gert Jan Kocken, which is included as a loose supplement titled Depictions of Amsterdam in the Second World War. This article is partly based on Bianca Stigter’s De bezette stad: Plattegrond van Amsterdam 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Athenaeum Polak & Van Gennep Publishers, 2005).

Architect and researcher Eyal Weizman uses interviews with two brigadier generals of the Israeli Armed Forces, Aviv Kokhavi and Shimon Naveh, the latter of whom headed up the Institute for Operational Theory and Research that closed in 2006, and is now retired, to illustrate the importance of the formulation of theories in the Israeli army’s recent ways of conducting a municipal war. He likewise shows what radical and disastrous conse­quences the ‘operational theory’ derived from thinkers such as Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari has for the population.

At the request of Open, the cultural theoretician John Armitage interviewed the French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio (b. 1932, Paris). A discussion on the future of the city.

In times of war, the accepted food chain is broken and the city becomes ‘edible’. It starts to cannibalize itself, according to Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, who use various historical examples to prove their point. With this ‘urbanibalisme’, as they call it, as their motive, they’ve developed a recipe for a therapeutic beverage, Ferment Brussels, to bring a toast to a communal lifestyle as the antidote to rising forms of nationalism.

For Open 8, the editors invited Pascale Gatzen to make a visual contribution, more specifically in reaction to The Regime of Visibility by Camiel van Winkel. As a fashion designer, Pascale Gatzen is primarily interested in fashion as a formal system of codification and production of meaning. Gatzen won international fame with photos of clothing she made herself, which were published in various fashion magazines. Her clothes are meticulous re-creations of the two-dimensional images of clothing as presented in fashion spreads in magazines such as Purple, i-D magazine and Vogue, but rather than interpreting the items of clothing from the fashion spreads (the collaborative interpretation of designer, stylist and photographer) as derivatives of an original, as representation, Gatzen treats them as something that can be treated as inspiration, as source. By photographing the remake and presenting it alongside the photo from the fashion collection on which it is based, Gatzen manages to liberate the image from the representation, or, put more precisely, opts to revise image and representation in a way that transcends their limitations.

Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund, edited by Tom Eccles, Anne Wehr and Jeffrey Kastner, Merrell Publishers, London / New York 2004, ISBN 1858942470

Michael Seemann, Digital Tailspin: Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden, Network Notebooks 09, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2015, ISBN 9789082234589

The Arachnean and Other Texts, Fernand Deligny, translated by Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter, Univocal Publishers, Minneapolis, 252 pages, ISBN: 1937561100, 2015

Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality), New York / Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2010, ISBN 9781934105078, 304 pages

Wouter Davidts, Bouwen voor de kunst? Museumarchitectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Modern, Gent 2006, ISBN 9076714282, 412 pages

Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice (eds.), The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2009, ISBN 9789078088295, 250 pages

Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Verso Books, London, 2015, ISBN 9781781687147 (UK), 148 pages

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement: Another Time, A Greater Task, Verso Books, London, 2015, ISBN 9781781683392 (UK), 224 pages

Blink and you will mistake last year’s UvA marketing campaign for a United Colors of Benetton ad. The posters juxtaposed groups of contemplative students and lecturers with captions such as Curious by Nature, No Guts No Story, and Competent Rebels. 

In light of the recent protests concerning the democratisation of higher education, this short essay will develop two arguments; firstly, democratisation of the university requires a critical re-evaluation of the “demos”. Secondly, the We Are Here Academy is not an alternative to higher education – nor should it be – but a protest movement that strives for an educational system that is both inclusive and democratic. This essay will conclude with the argument that cooperation between the New University and “undocumented Dutch citizens” is relevant and necessary in order to stimulate and critically investigate how accessible higher education is, and, thus, the very meaning of a democratic university.

The current protests by students and staff at the University of Amsterdam and other universities in the Netherlands are a sign of very deep structural problems in the academic system. Rather than just a local problem concerning the language departments ​​or the position of the humanities (well beyond the University of Amsterdam or universities in the Netherlands), these demonstrations are a reaction to an accumulation of national and international developments in the way the university is structured, organised and funded. 

With Commonist Aesthetics, the editorial team Binna Choi (Casco), Sven Lütticken, Jorinde Seijdel (Open!)  introduces “the idea of commonism” – not communism – as a topic that various writers and artists will explore and expand upon in the course of this series. Commonist aesthetics pertain to the world of the senses, or a “residually common world” that is continuously subject to new divisions, new appropriations, and attempts at reclamation and re-imagining.

From its inception, Open! and Casco’s series Commonist Aesthetics was meant neither as a celebration nor as a debunking exercise, but as a critical inquiry. The commons certainly is not lacking in those who hype the cause, nor in vehement detractors. For the Invisible Committee, an example, ‘commonism’ is identified with Ostromite liberal managerialism:

Governing the Commons is the title of the recent bestseller by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, who has defined eight principles for ‘managing the commons.’ Understanding there is a place for them in an ‘administration of the commons’ that remains to be invented, [Antonio] Negri and associates have embraced this theory, which is perfectly liberal at its core…

…[They] are inclined to make the ‘commons’ into the latest metaphysical principle to come out of the West’s magical hat. An arche, they say, in the sense of that which ‘organizes, commands, and rules all political activity,’ a new ‘beginning’ that will give birth to new institutions and a new world government.1

And is the excitement in some art world circles (however marginal they may be) for forms of commoning, or at least the rhetoric of commoning, not deeply suspicious? In her essay for Commonist Aesthetics, Marina Vishmidt suggested that a ‘structural and ideological affinity already holds between “commonist” politics and the field of art practices’; both, she argues, ‘are committed to change in the here and now through the means available, often interstices and spare capacities, “making do” as in the “sharing economy.”’ Making changes in the here and now sounds good when the alternative is waiting for a phantasmagorical revolution. But is the exclusive privileging of ‘making do’ under current conditions not equally problematical – especially if connected to the hope that enough cute grass-rootsy commonizing activity will attain such critical mass that capitalism will, after all, disappear or morph beyond recognition? Vishmidt states in the aforementioned text: ‘The centrality of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (2006) to several of a number of cultural scenes of inquiry into “the commons” would seem to point to the voluntaristic roots of this attitude as they cut across art and politics, present and past, performance and mobilisation.’

Nonetheless, we would not have pursued Commonist Aesthetics if we agreed that commons discourse is completely bankrupt and utterly irredeemable. In a passage recently evoked by Katharine Gibson during a lecture at Casco, Massimo de Angelis acknowledges that commoning is often instrumentalized not in order ‘to provide alternatives to capital, but to make a particular node of capital – a region or a city – more competitive, while somehow addressing the problems of reproduction at the same time.’ However, he maintains that ‘in spite of capital’s strategies to use a commons fix to the problems it creates while never really solving them, commons may well be part of a different historical development.’2

This ‘may well be’ continues to hover over the debate, a debate that we wish to develop and intensify with this ‘virtual roundtable’ titled Common Conflict, mirrored by a public forum at Casco on 12 March. Later this year, the whole Commonist Aesthetics project will be rounded off by a book publication.

For Common Conflict, we have confronted a number of authors with a series of questions, some or many of which may be leading questions. The authors were free to pick and choose, or ignore, as they saw fit; to rephrase and reroute a line of questioning; and to examine their own as well as others’ practices and theoretical presuppositions.

Is the notion of the commons subject to an ontological essentialization? Is dehistoricization tantamount to depoliticization?

The resurgence of the commons is clearly linked to the decline of the public sector, at least in Europe. Is commonism tacitly complicit with the ever further dismantling of the state and the public? Does the state need to be reclaimed?

Does the commonist discourse have a potential depoliticizing effect, being compatible with hazy visions of the ‘sharing economy’ and an Ostrom-style governance? What are the consequences of the division between ‘Ostromites’ interested in governing the commons and autonomists eager to prefigure a coming insurrection or a coming community?

How does, or should, commonist self-organization around specific issues relate to more general antagonisms and struggles? Is commonism in need of a wider autonomist horizon and bona-fide leftist strategy – or are ‘actually existing’ commonist tactics, however compromised, a daily reminder of the bankruptcy of more fundamental, more rigorous, more dialectically canny leftist positions?

What is the relation between theories of the commons / commoning and specific practices? Does the theory lag behind the most cogent practices? Is it often a substitute for actual commoning practices at specific sites for struggles? Can problematic, partial or blocked attempts at commoning be as valid as seemingly successful and exemplary endeavours?

Is the commons’ rhetorical success in parts of the art world indicative of an aestheticization of the social – with aestheticization here being used in its negative Benjaminian sense? Does the all too familiar critique of art institutions need to be followed by an active commoning of institutions? How to proceed with this?

Does the art world focus overly on low-tech forms of commons and commoning, unduly neglecting the digital commons? How can and should online and offline impact each other?

Do we see the beginnings of a commonist aesthetic practice in a more fundamental sense, involving forms of sensuous activity that challenge and go beyond established notions of art and existing institutional forms? Does aesthetic practice allow us to refocus all of the above questions?

This report from the two-day event Revolution at Point Zero organised by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in 2013 and lead by activist and philosopher Silvia Federici, provides a premise for thinking commons today, pushing off from the domestic sphere and into the realm of political struggle. Contributors included professor Tine De Moor, collective ASK! (Actie Schonen Kunsten) and trade union FNV Bondgenoten among many others who attempted to source collective practices we might envision as commons.

This report from the two-day event Revolution at Point Zero organised by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in 2013 and lead by activist and philosopher Silvia Federici, provides a premise for thinking commons today, pushing off from the domestic sphere and into the realm of political struggle. Contributors included professor Tine De Moor, collective ASK! (Actie Schonen Kunsten) and trade union FNV Bondgenoten among many others who attempted to source collective practices we might envision as commons.

The Artist Organisations International conference, organised by Florian Malzacher, Jonas Staal and Joanna Warsza, took place in Berlin’s HAU theatre from 9 to 11 January 2015. The organisers emphasised how it seems that more and more activist artists are creating organisational structures that increase the effectiveness of their artistic actions and productions, which also makes it possible for them to exert an influence on the ethical standards of the contexts in which they work.

The Artist Organisations International conference, organised by Florian Malzacher, Jonas Staal and Joanna Warsza, took place in Berlin’s HAU theatre from 9 to 11 January 2015. The organisers emphasised how it seems that more and more activist artists are creating organisational structures that increase the effectiveness of their artistic actions and productions, which also makes it possible for them to exert an influence on the ethical standards of the contexts in which they work.

“Academia on Sale”1 includes addressing managerialism, the decline of autonomy and the deterioration of the organisational climate, as well as how to maintain commitment and engagement, love for teaching, and how to revive our enthusiasm, maintain solidarity among the disciplines, and strive for a socially and academically sustainable context in universities. Performance pressure is high; many of us suffer from the stress of overwork and, at the same time, we “can’t get no satisfaction”.

Hu Wei's image essay is part of the Open! Co-Op Academy research theme “did you feel it?” It focuses on the production, distribution and perception of selfies related to Hong Kong Occupy Central. Wei here attempts to understand the role of affect in the functioning of these images: How can protest selfies also be “entertaining” and vice versa?

This short video by Charlie Dance is a playful performance that reflects on our insatiable desire for spectacular images. What if suddenly there were no images? This work is part of the Open! Co-Op Academy project “did you feel it?”, which focuses on affect, public images and digital technology.

The contemporary neoliberal university is often compared to a factory. In this essay, Roel Griffioen and Jesse van Winden explore the practical and symbolic value of this metaphor, using the recent protests at VU University in Amsterdam as a case study. Is the relation between the two institutions – university and factory – more than just proverbial?

You are about to begin paging through a visual essay, A sketchbook is blown onto the floor. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other image. Let the world around you fade away. Best switch off the notifications on your phone, they are always vibrating and interrupting you. Find the most comfortable position with your device: seated, stretched out, curled up or lying flat. You were browsing the Open! site and then while scrolling around you noticed A sketchbook is blown onto the floor and you found the author’s name somewhat intriguing and completely unknown. You tapped and arrived here. Good for you.

Sebastian De Line reflects on how affect appeared to spread across a large demographic following the events of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 that started with two gunmen forcing their way into the Paris headquarters of the magazine and opening fire. In order to rethink subjectivity and difference, he questions the image documentation and exposure surrounding this event and prompts us to ask what happens when the image is cut or edited. This essay is part of Open! Co-Op Academy ‘did you feel it?’.

Indigenous scholarship in the Americas offers an alternative to the dualistic focus of Western science in embracing a wider and more animated body of relations. Sebastian De Line brings this line of investigation into contact with Karen Barad’s thoughts on wave diffraction and the unpredictability of matter, pulling from the contingent relationships that form during the classic double-slit experiment. The unravelling of these takes on science, stemming in the first case from spirit and in the second from controlled experiment, unearths a platform to address our web of relations that does not dispose of past models but rather integrates them. ‘All My / Our Relations’ is part of the Open! COOP Academy series Between and Beyond.

This video, image and text work by Kastė Šeškevičiūtė explores the visual appearance of two historical sites in Lithuania and Iran, respectively. Meanwhile, the accompanying poem attempts to make a speculative inquiry into their agency as the embodied affects of public memory. ‘Take a Leap into a Memory Hole’ is part of the Open! Co-Op Academy project ‘did you feel it?’

This essay (part of the Open! Co-Op Academy project “did you feel it?”) is concerned with how affective forces move through our technological encounters and how technology itself can alter these, as well as their perception within our brain. It’s not so much about the exchanges between one another, as about the situations where other, non-human, intelligences come into the fray. How and where do these intelligences manifest and what psychology do they bring about? In the latter part of the essay, I’ll compare some examples with existing theories of affective labour in order to give us an idea of what could come of these forces in the future. Affective labour has become central to consumer capitalism, seen in the prevalence of roles like the call centre worker, and so related theories can show how capital already functions affectively.

Delusional Cause is an ongoing artistic project within the theoretical framework of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s critique of epistemology. This video is an interruption in a cumulative and reiterative study which aims to work toward a method or model to adequately visualize capital. Delusional Cause is part of ‘did you feel it?’ Open! Co-Op Academy.

Miguel Ángel Rego Robles’ essay demonstrates how Madrid’s public space, the Puerta del Sol, has over the past two centuries been transformed from a “passive body as a spectator” to a paradigm and receptacle of social emotion. This image-essay is part of the Open! Co-Op Academy project “did you feel it?”.

As the focus in some aspects of contemporary art turns increasingly to the cognitive arena, artists adopt neuroscientific research to explore larger issues, political or otherwise. This text introduces the work of Thomas Metzinger, who developed a phenomenological model for how we experience consciousness, in tandem with that of Wilfrid Sellars, who stresses the importance of past experience in that process. The author makes a claim for interpreting certain works of art through a combination of these two approaches to create a possible map for understanding art concerned with how we construct realities. ‘Art and Neuro-philosophy’ is part of the Open! COOP Academy series Between and Beyond.

In From Biopolitics to Mindpolitics Marc Schuilenburg and Rik Peeters explore how ‘nudging’ as a technique to alter people’s behaviour works in social fields and how it is embedded in our environment. They ask what nudging means in terms of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics. This essay is part of Culture of Control, a collaboration with Stroom Den Haag.

Clare Birchall attempts to set up an ‘aesthetics of the secret’ against the background of the revelations of  Edward Snowden. She discusses secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than regulation and looks at the secret not only as it figures in current affairs but also in artworks by Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid. Aesthetics of the Secret is part of Culture of Control, a collaboration with Stroom Den Haag.

In this image essay Amir Avraham questions what we really see of events in the images spread by the media. The closer we get to reality, the less there is to see, he asserts. The affect of news pictures is not primarily created by their subject matter, but by their graphic framing. In ‘The Closer We Get the Less There Is to See’ the affect generated via multilayered mediation is suspended in order to create a different viewing experience. This essay is part of the Open! Co-Op Academy project ‘did you feel it?’.

Michael Seemann argues that there are a lot of ways that governments and nation-states can lose control. First, they lose control over their data. This is neither a particularly new thing nor unique to the nation-state. The loss of control over one’s data is an issue that affects everyone. But there is also another way that the nation-state loses control, Seemann asserts. The world is currently undergoing a transition that is driven by that first level of Kontrollverlust, which transfers much of the power and control from the nation-state to new players: the platforms. This essay belongs to Culture of Control, a collaboration with Stroom Den Haag.

Canadian writer and artist Marc James Léger asserts that today’s socially engaged art is mainly a socially enraged art. He reflects on a current meeting of Artist Organisations International (AOI) to ask what cultural revolution and avant-garde art might mean today. This essay is part of the research theme Commonist Aesthetics.

The art project One and Another State of Yellow (2013–2016) studies the interplay between architecture and urban planning, ideologies and psychological warfare around two landscapes of ‘war’ in the US: 1) the urban military experiment El Paso-Juárez at the United States-Mexico border; and 2) Washington, DC as the US war and control apparatus. El Paso is an American city that borders directly on Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2010 Juárez was listed as the deadliest city in the world. At the same time El Paso was listed as the safest city in the US. Washington DC can be seen as the big overall political ‘constructor’ and ‘producer’ of the landscape of war. The work questions the ways in which architecture and urban planning are strategically employed – as psychological warfare strategies, that is, propaganda, military deception, perception management – to threaten or stimulate fear, or even to deceive an audience or enemy. One and Another State of Yellow consists of a photographic installation of the Mount Cristo Rey foothills in El Paso, and a cartographic work of greater Washington DC that takes up an entire wall.

For this digital version the carthography is accompanied by the text work From the Monument, a script for voice over. The text is based on a collection of literature, newspaper and magazine articles, from amongst others LIFE, TIME and Collier’s, and descriptions of urban plans and systems. Written from an urban planning perspective on the one hand (narrator I) and from a strategic planning perspective on the other hand (narrator II), it brings together various urban plans and systems based on urban planning ideologies as well as hidden military agendas. The two perspectives almost overlap, but the differences between narrator I and narrator II (both clickable) are subtle and significant. 

Erik Bordeleau characterizes the political collective the Invisible Committee as a revolutionary and literary force entangled within a complex field of power relations. He asserts that the collective configures a politics of enunciation that oscillates between anonymity and extreme personalization. This essay is part of the research theme Commonist Aesthetics.

Érik Bordeleau slightly shifts the ground for the Common Conflict virtual roundtable. Seeing as the main challenge is how to envisage and feel our being-in-common, he argues that the commonist question par excellence is whether or not to abstract the commons: Does the -ism in communism or commonism elevate the commons to a higher and more enduring power, or does this universalization of particular instances of commoning hinder their capacity to affect?

Ruth Noack is a German art historian and curator. In 2007, she held the post of curator of documenta 12 in Kassel, while Roger M. Buergel served as artistic director. As the two state in the preface to the exhibition, it ‘was organised around three leitmotifs: modernity’s fate and legacy, the biopolitical turn and aesthetic education as a possible alternative to both commodity fetishism, and the complacency of critical studies.’1 Based on the presumption that exhibition is a medium, Noack and Buergel defined, as the organizing principle of documenta 12, the migration of form. Regarding the multiple and diverse modernisms, Noack develops a political interpretation of formalism, as she puts it, politicizing the line. Analyzing the works of Lygia Clark, Sheela Gowda, Eva Hesse, Trisha Brown, Chantal Akerman and others, Noack writes: ‘Each line is born of history and pain,’ not being able to be considered as a neutral abstraction.

In 2014, Noack was Visiting Professor of the sixth edition of the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (GBICC), leading the program on the dynamics of thinking through art. The interview below by curators Manoel Silvestre Friques and Renan Laru-an was held on the occasion of this course, on 5 September 2014, and continued through e-mail until June 2015.

Ruth Noack is a German art historian and curator. In 2007, she held the post of curator of documenta 12 in Kassel, while Roger M. Buergel served as artistic director. As the two state in the preface to the exhibition, it ‘was organised around three leitmotifs: modernity’s fate and legacy, the biopolitical turn and aesthetic education as a possible alternative to both commodity fetishism, and the complacency of critical studies.’1 Based on the presumption that exhibition is a medium, Noack and Buergel defined, as the organizing principle of documenta 12, the migration of form. Regarding the multiple and diverse modernisms, Noack develops a political interpretation of formalism, as she puts it, politicizing the line. Analyzing the works of Lygia Clark, Sheela Gowda, Eva Hesse, Trisha Brown, Chantal Akerman and others, Noack writes: ‘Each line is born of history and pain,’ not being able to be considered as a neutral abstraction.

In 2014, Noack was Visiting Professor of the sixth edition of the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (GBICC), leading the program on the dynamics of thinking through art. The interview below by curators Manoel Silvestre Friques and Renan Laru-an was held on the occasion of this course, on 5 September 2014, and continued through e-mail until June 2015.

Early this year, the first volume of the multimedia project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, a platform for ongoing research, a matrix for generating future projects and an oracular montage machine was launched at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Compiled and conceptualized by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen in collaboration with Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Yasuhiro Morinaga and Bani Haykal, it gathers ‘narratives of shape-shifting and amorphous characters, ideas, and genres’1 and for the past few years, it has worked as a finite resource and a node for continuation of Tzu Nyen’s artistic projects. The dictionary is divided into twenty-six terms – some of them annotated, for instance, in the case of G for ghost, ghostwriter, gene z. hanrahan. The perpetual sense of inscription, of perennial inflection and contamination in a server containing some 5,000 online video clips and 300 feature films on and about Southeast Asia brings the reader into an interface of displacement despite the abundance of signs.

The remainder of the Emirates’ cool breeze welcomed curator and scholar Claire Tancons’ Look for Me All Around You, one of the three independently curated platforms of Sharjah Biennial 14, in early March last year.  Identified by the biennial-going international art crowd to possess ‘a strong performative bent’1, the reading consistently aligns with Tancons’ methodology in relocating the act of looking ‘towards the aural’ and in reiterating the space of feeling in the vibrations of the echo within the infrastructures of global exhibition-making.

Gerald Raunig, Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Vol. 1, translated by Aileen Derieg, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2016, ISBN: 9781584351801, 208 pages

Within Open! Academy Open! occassionally publishes research, essays and reports that came into being within educational contexts. This text by artist k.g. Guttman is an individual writing project she produced as a PhD candidate at PhDArts Leiden University / KABK Den Haag that offers a doctorate in art and design.

The article examines the theoretical notions underlying the installation / performance Fear of losing the details (2014), a site-specific project that took place in the artist’s childhood home in North York, Canada (January–March 2014). The home is located on land colonized by the British Crown (now the Canadian government) administered by a disreputable treaty between the British Crown and the First Nation, the Mississaugas of Credit River in 1787. The article takes up, through the prism of historical research and practice-based choreography and performance, how site-specific work initiates the production of new critical and creative counter-movements within the infrastructure of colonial spatiality, referencing de Certeau’s notion of ‘practiced place’: ‘Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it…’1

Within Open! Academy, Open! occassionally publishes research, essays and reports that came into being within educational contexts. This text by artist Yota Ioannidou is an individual writing project she produced as a PhD candidate at PhDArts Leiden University / KABK Den Haag that offers a doctorate in art and design.

The project The Storyteller, The Knife and The ‘Machine’, created for the Athens Biennale in 2013, serves here to introduce the research topic. It is a form of ‘research-based art,’ which denotes artworks whose research process – in situ, visits to archives, discursive conversations, research material, etc. – includes images, texts, interviews, documents, records and other forms of data, constituting dominant elements in the shaping and presentation of the artwork itself. The research process and material thereby become the artwork – either in the form of a performance, an event, an installation or a publication.1

In this response to the Common Conflict questionnaire, architect and theorist Stavros Stavrides contextualizes the popularity of commons discourse on an ongoing redefinition of ‘the public.’ He states that commoning practices, insofar as they are informed by concrete social experiences and embedded in specific historic conditions, can provide valuable tools for post- or anti-capitalist struggle. Stressing the importance to the commons of openness to ‘newcomers,’ he claims that art should be re-appropriated as a crucial field of commoning.

This is about the moment you realize that a single tear has formed and is cascading down your cheek. This isn’t about the act of crying or the emotions associated with tears. This is about the single tear, :’( . This isn’t about the other tears, the ones that come after the :’( has been shed. This is about the image of a :’( , the moment that forms that image, and its subsequent abstractions and permutations in popular culture. This isn’t about feeling but rather the realization of feeling a feeling. This is about the baggage attached to an image and what is potentially transferred when this image is viewed. This isn’t about what is felt but rather that it is felt. This is asking whether ubiquitously understood images can mean something anymore. This essay is part of the Open! COOP Academy series 'did you feel it?'

In this contribution to the Common Conflict virtual roundtable, Rick Dolphijn emphasizes that the commons is not a humanist concept but much more a materialist concept. He argues that the commons depends upon the creation of new assemblages: it is the accidental process of realizing a mental, a social and an environmental whole that marks the commons. 

In their contribution to the virtual roundtable Common Conflict Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen of the arts and spatial practice STEALTH.unlimited say that in order to achieve some form of social and economic endurance, we have to establish solidary structures and forms of organization that emerge from within our own networks. With that, the commons is becoming a way to work and live, rather than a subject of work or research. The commons thus shifts from an external, to an internalized subject – it becomes a verb.

This piece has been formulated in the context of the research project Disorderly Group Behavior in Public Space which started in 2014 in Amsterdam. The text and diagrams were presented at the closing event of Culture of Control on 13 December 2015 at Stroom Den Haag.1 Mob sexual attacks are handled here as one example of group behaviour that can get out of control at any time and at any place; It goes beyond any specific incident. Having said that, I would like to condemn the appropriation of such struggles for the sake of racist and political arguments.

The abstraction inherent to neoliberalism has us constantly shifting between the real and virtual. The self moves among multiple spheres, perhaps in search of shared universals and a future other than alienation. In this essay, part of the Open! COOP Academy series ‘did you feel it?,’ Aarti Sunder looks at how the self negotiates continuously changing boundaries and what potential lies in the relational field. 

The Missing Pieces, Henri Lefebvre, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, translated by David L.&nbspSweet, ISBN: 9781584351597, 2014, 88 pages

This text and image work, part of the Open! COOP Academy series Between and Beyond, explores the violence of museum display particularly with respect to ethnography. Since the emergence of ethnography, cultural objects have been taken out of their immediate contexts and rearranged for the purpose of Western humanist study. While the arranger remains out of sight, objects are displaced into a taxonomy of otherness, appropriated by a single story that leaves them incomplete. In fact, the objects seem absent, rendered invisible by layers of interpretation and projection. ‘Temporarily Removed’ suggests that the objects removed from their original context could someday be returned; it also explores the space of objects around and beyond the museum. Reflecting on how the original contexts of these objects might resonate today, and how things-turned-artefacts relate to their current environment and need to be integrated into new networks of relations, might bring us closer to an inclusive posthumanist thinking.

The relationship between animate and inanimate species is becoming more elusive. When one finds the touch of the screen preferrable to that of a partner, it is time to consider the agency of the object. As we become each other, there is less to tell us apart. Can poetry be written by our devices? Can they reflect our beliefs, or even have their own?  ‘Silicon-companion Species’ is part of the Open! COOP Academy series Between and Beyond.

How do we step away from a culture of docility, and move to a place of imperfect neuronal liberation, where amenity is no longer part of us? Malcolm Kratz argues that we should enrage ourselves against an economic, political and mediatic system that promotes flexibility and obedience, while accepting that our brain does not obey itself, that it overproduces and needs to get the pressure off. Kratz advocates education for a culture of neuroliberation. This essay is part of the DAI Open! Coop Academy research project (Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism.

The Cloud, and those who live in it like 0001, can introduce us to algorithms that allow us to exist as a whole. This algorithmic process of becoming sees the whole as not merely the end but the means to it. In the Cloud, it is possible that we are always already whole, and that there we find our desires are not ours alone. ‘Cloud_0001’ is part of the Open! COOP Academy series Between and Beyond.

Maike Hemmers’s image essay is part of the Open! COOP Academy research theme Between and Beyond. In order to understand the boundaries between bodies as animate and inanimate beings, she attempts to question the notion of a body as a fixed condition. ‘I, They, Body, Space’ is me and them as bodies in space. What does a stone desire, when it’s falling? What does a dead rat want to talk about, when it places itself next to a rubber glove? And what is an I: Is it the body that reflects on itself or is it the body that disconnects?

A conference held last year in Palestine reflected on the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s critical responses to oppression, in a place all too familiar with its reality. Here, Jack Segbars considers how and if critical theory now can avoid entrapment by the very target of its critique, and instead realize actual political change. As knowledge production becomes more entangled with artistic production, models – namely that of participatory panel discussions – must be reviewed for their capacity to enact the change they so desire.

Precarity is both viewed as a result of lower living standards, and something that can give millenials an adaptive edge in today’s ‘libidinal’ economy. The rise of Post-Internet style in contemporary art takes up this positioning, laying a gloss over or even displacing criticality. The authors create a framework in which to read this transition, and offer that lines may need to be redrawn with respect to representation in contemporary art.

Precarity is both viewed as a result of lower living standards, and something that can give millenials an adaptive edge in today’s ‘libidinal’ economy. The rise of Post-Internet style in contemporary art takes up this positioning, laying a gloss over or even displacing criticality. The authors create a framework in which to read this transition, and offer that lines may need to be redrawn with respect to representation in contemporary art.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that we’re living in the future that has already taken place. We go on speculating about the prospective forms of power, in which access to knowledge is equipped with information-, nano- and bio-technology along with cognitive science. What it seems we fail to recognize is that we already are a part of the new state: a political corporation that is not a mere extension in scale and scope of already existing precedents, but a completely novel form of government. While the new state might still be in the process of comprehending its own capacities, power-knowledge within it is already fully deployed via technology. Furthermore, knowledge and its dissemination are interweaved so radically it is no longer possible to distinguish between technological and power relations. In essence, the model is an upgraded version of body politic in which all members, human and non-human, are agents in a larger meta-body construction, an electronic as well as a biological body at once.

The commercial housing projects that arise from gentrification in Jakarta are inseparable from the longstanding neighbourhoods and markets they displace, each defining the social landscape. Alessandra Renzi observes that in Jakarta this process of ‘modelling,’ in which disembodied data is used to control disenfranchised populations and further corporate development, is being turned on its head. Groups are engaging with this same data, but in the interest of creating ‘counter-models’ towards rezoning and sustainable housing solutions that still fit the larger plan.

Last year, on 28 February 2016, Michel Bauwens gave a talk at Casco – Office for Art, Design & Theory for Commoning Governance, the third instalment of the We Are the Time Machines Commoning Forum Series. This event aimed to look into actually existing commoning practices working with, within and against existing forms of governmentality on different scales. More specifically, the question was how and to what extent these practices can alter and revolutionize existing governmental forms from within. To this end, we relied on the concrete, lived experience with commons-based modes of governance of two speakers. The first was Manuela Zechner, a researcher and cultural worker involved in the leftist party Barcelona en Comú, which seized power in Barcelona in the city’s municipal elections in May 2015. After Zechner, Bauwens spoke in his capacity as founder of the P2P Foundation, an international organization – itself structured as a commons – dedicated to studying, documenting, and promoting peer-to-peer processes, from software production to participatory forms of knowledge-sharing. The P2P Foundation is mostly known for its work on Ecuador’s FLOK (Free-Libre, Open Knowledge) Society plan, the first time an entire nation commissioned a plan to transform itself into a mature peer-to-peer economy.

In his talk Bauwens discussed his work in Ecuador as an experiment that ultimately failed due to hesitations on behalf of the Ecuadorian government, but that had some interesting outcomes nonetheless. Taking cues from the lessons learned from FLOK, he evaluated the practical possibilities that exist in moving to a post-capitalist form of cooperative peer-to-peer production, noting that a special point to attend to was the role that existing political structures, such as cities and states, can play in this process. First, however, Bauwens addressed how the seeds for this transition are already planted, as evidenced in the shift in the value regime that is becoming more and more evident everywhere.

Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–2016, edited by Mirna Belina, Sonic Acts Press, ISBN:  9789082321623, 256 pages

Geert Lovink, Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation, Polity Press, 2016, ISBN UK: 978150950775, 220 pages

This contribution to Technology / Affect / Space (T / A / S) consists of a ‘walking essay’ by Esther Polak. The world in which this essay takes place is Google Earth: an alienating landscape of almost seamlessly stitched-together satellite images. The stage of the walk, a utopian appartment building in the Amsterdam’s Bijlmer neighbourhood, seems warped and flattened and competes for attention with the black weirdness of its own shadows. During a repetitive walk around the building Polak uses Judith Butler’s ideas on the performativity of gender and applies them to the city space, exploring different possibilities of what she calls ‘move-categories’ and ‘move-drag’. The City as Performative Object is walked and spoken by Esther Polak. It was executed through conversation in and around the Hakford building in the Bijlmer.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Seven Work Ballets, Kari Conte, ed., Kunstverein Amsterdam, Grazer Kunstverein, Sternberg, 2015, ISBN 9783943365931, 232 pages and Patricia C. Phillips with Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris and Lucy R. Lippard, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2016, ISBN 9783791355382, 256 pages

One fateful night the word ‘demasculinization’ came up during a conversation I was having at a bar with my artist-friend André Chapatte. We were discussing the possibility of reconfiguring the male gaze. A few days later we met up again and decided that we should work further on this idea. We started to exchange thoughts, writing and things to read almost immediately. Throughout 2016 we worked together in Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. In our correspondence, we discussed (in no particular order) (de)masculinity, nature / culture, manhood, manly emotions, the male gaze / perspective, gender equality, gender neutrality, redefining of men in society, gender in public / private / domestic spaces, romanticism, objectification, violence, power, domesticity, gendered-language / words / tones / expectations, privileges, sex, domination and cultural hegemony.

Open! COOP Academy Publishing Class 2016–2017 – a project with the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) – has been investigating the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of cognitive capitalism. We focused on current notions of the brain in our global capitalist societies and questioned in how far the brain can be ideologically infiltrated. From the assumption that culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control and resistance, and that language, memory and imagination are more and more performed by machines and automated algorithmic procedures, we looked at some of the implications of ‘cognitive automation’ for our subjectivity, identity and free will. We explored how neuro-scientific conceptions of the brain are appropriated by cognitive capitalism and charted possibilities to subvert the instrumentalization of our brains. This lexicon is one of the results of the project and a collaborative work by the Open! COOP Academy participants. 

For PhDArts at Leiden University / Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, which offers a doctorate in art and design, Thalia Hoffman details the production of her film Sham, part of a larger series that considers Israeli-Palestine relations in the wider Middle East. Here, she uses several voices to unfold the personal and sociopolitical environment around the film’s production, involving script excerpts, theoretical reflections on art’s role within activism and diaristic reports of her on-set reflections. In relation to her project she examines Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the distortion of history, and the importance of plurality in both politics and art evidenced in the work of Hannah Arendt and Claire Bishop among others. Hoffman thereby creates a backdrop against which to process the debilitating violence that plagues Israel-Palestine relations. ‘Sham’ means ‘there’ in Hebrew, and in Arabic refers to Sham, Greater Syria, which included Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria of today.

Agata Cieślak questions the position of the artist in an academic regime that has perhaps become more dependent on discourse than material reality. To do so she explores three narrative threads in the below text for Open! COOP Academy (2016–2017). With the piece adopting its title from Bas Jan Ader's famed last work, and her research into a Polish ship held hostage somewhere in Europe, Cieślak begins to grasp the difficulty of being an artist at sea facing both is potential for freedom and imprisonment.1

In this contribution to the 2016–2017 session of Open! COOP Academy, Maya Watanabe looks at the devices on which fictional spaces depend: from architecture in theatre to the frame in film to the omnidirectional camera in virtual reality. In tracing this trajectory back to Alain Resnais’ 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, Watanabe exposes the progressive dissolution of separation between body, location and language. She thereby shows how make-believe space is made believable, and perhaps, how it is becoming more real.

Mr. Gu just started to work as an intern after graduating from university. He commutes to work every morning from Sindorim station to Seolleung station on Seoul Subway line 2. He departs from home, waits for the train on the platform and thinks about the life of a hellish city in a subway filled with people. Then he faces the full-blown capitalism of the train, the obsession with false beauty, advertisements for violent game, and the physical pressure… Is it possible for Mr. Gu to go to work safely this morning? After this perilous journey to work, will he survive his day as a precarious worker safely as well?

Pitchaya Ngamcharoen’s sound essay is part of the Open! COOP Academy research theme (Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism. Sound plays a crucial role in positioning oneself in the given surroundings. Memory is important in perceiving sound without knowing its source. ‘Peep Peeps = ⋆≋≬※⁑⊸’ offers a space for the reader to create, within her own imagination, using sounds – and at the same time, to question what is lost and gained in translation. Have you heard the sound of a rock singing? Or a conversation between fish and seaweed? Do you know what light and shadows sound like? Have you heard your own toe complain after a long day? How can we understand sounds whose sources are unknown, and reflect ourselves in these? What are we missing in what we see?

In Mónica Lacerda’s contribution to the Open! COOP Academy research theme (Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism both language and writing float and drift, evoking a more spatial and sensory reading experience. With this the artist asks, can we play with words, letters, their sounds and images and disentangle ourselves from their prior meaning? Can we restructure our mind and thinking by postponing interpretation?

Download complete poem.

Our media-inscribed self-images direct not only the way in which we perceive ourselves, but on a cosmetic level, can normalize our attempts at differentiation. DAI participant Katja Dendulk unlocks this algorithmic process in her essay below as part of the Open! COOP Academy research theme (Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism. Does the scientifically proven phenomenon of our preference for novelty paradoxically swallow self-expression? How might our increasing awareness rejigger self-image under mass media? 

‘The _____ Between Us Lines’ is an experimental text contribution by Wilfred Vlad Tomescu to the Open! COOP Academy research theme (Against) Neuralgia: Care of the Brain in Times of Cognitive Capitalism. The aesthetics of the text are meant to reminisce about dot matrix or thermal printing and to reference ticker tape, punch cards and the first human computers, such as Jean Bartik, a savant mathematician operating the ENIAC in 1946. 

Ramon Amaro signals traces of political arithmetic thought in government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Amaro goes into the wider implications of human quantification and data consolidation and asserts that COVID-19 analysis tools, vaccine research, and detection devices risk leaving open future gaps in data privacy, while also centralizing the patient data into government forecasting efforts. We must consider what impact data consolidation might have on future, even non health related, surveillance programmes. It must be asked whether the risks involved outweigh the immediacy of crisis; and if so, what traces of political and economic speculation based on our intimate medical data might be left behind. This essay is part of the publication and research project of Open! about sense of touch in the digital age.

Is the blockchain an instance of commoning in cyberspace or is it enhancing capitalism to automate labour? Louis Volont and Walter van Andel argue that the blockchain is particularly well-suited to explore ideology and counter-ideology in the realm of the commons, for the blockchain constitutes a contested kind of commons: a market common, a monetary common, a kind of common that facilitates the accumulation of exchange value for, indeed, self-interested individuals. Could common ownership of that which is automated prevent the blockchain from a relapse into corporate tragedy?

To find out whether capital has nowadays discovered the commons, or if the commons can and must remain invisible in order to survive, Louis Volont speaks with historian Peter Linebaugh. Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo and has written extensively on labor, history and the commons. His books include The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (2008) and Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (2014).

Is the blockchain an instance of commoning in cyberspace or is it enhancing capitalism to automate labour? Louis Volont and Walter van Andel argue that the blockchain is particularly well-suited to explore ideology and counter-ideology in the realm of the commons, for the blockchain constitutes a contested kind of commons: a market common, a monetary common, a kind of common that facilitates the accumulation of exchange value for, indeed, self-interested individuals. Could common ownership of that which is automated prevent the blockchain from a relapse into corporate tragedy?

This experimental lexicon is by the participants of Open! Coop Academy’s study group Topologies of Touch. The study group – part of DAI Roaming Academy 2017–2018 – focused on touch and feel, the tactile and haptic, from philosophical and political standpoints and within cultural, artistic and social practices. Here you find a video summary of the public presentations of the study group in Athens in June 2018.