Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities 9781498503990, 1498503993

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Creative Capitalism
1 Cognitive, Relational (Creative) Labor and the Precarious Movement for “Commonfare”
2 The Case of the Braga Stadium
3 The Common and Its Potential Creativity
4 Flexibility and Mobility in the Creative Economy
5 Network Subjectivity and Its Culture of Resistance
Part II: Multitudinous Creativities: Radicalities and Alterities
6 The Creativity of the Streets and the Urbanism of Disaster
7 What Can a Face Do? What Can an Arm Do?
8 Cognitive Capitalism, The Uprising of the Multitude and Museums
9 Biopolitical Shipwreck
10 Activist Design in Helsinki
Part III: Creativity, New Technologies, and Networks
11 The “Creative Turn”
12 From Culture of Labor to Cultural Labor
13 Autonomy, Free Labor, and Passions as Devices of Creative Capitalism
14 Unblock the Chain
15 The Pollination of Creativity
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

Citation preview

Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity

Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity Radicalities and Alterities Edited by Giuseppe Cocco and Barbara Szaniecki

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941338 ISBN: 978-1-4985-0398-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-0399-0 (ebook) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction Barbara Szaniecki and Giuseppe Cocco Part I: Creative Capitalism 1 Cognitive, Relational (Creative) Labor and the Precarious Movement for “Commonfare”: “San Precario” and Euromayday Andrea Fumagalli 2 The Case of the Braga Stadium: Work, Spectacle, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century José Neves 3 The Common and Its Potential Creativity: Post-Crisis Perspectives Óscar García Agustín 4 Flexibility and Mobility in the Creative Economy: Between “Feminization” of Creative Work and Slave Labor Verónica Gago, Translated by Liz Mason-Deese 5 Network Subjectivity and Its Culture of Resistance: The Challenges in Post-Fordist Capitalism Bruno Cava Part II: Multitudinous Creativities: Radicalities and Alterities 6 The Creativity of the Streets and the Urbanism of Disaster Clarissa Moreira 7 What Can a Face Do? What Can an Arm Do?: The Brazilian Uprising and a New Aesthetic of Protest Raluca Soreanu v

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8 Cognitive Capitalism, The Uprising of the Multitude and Museums: For the “Right to the City” and to “Common Places” Vladimir Sibylla Pires 9 Biopolitical Shipwreck Peter Pál Pelbart 10 Activist Design in Helsinki: Creating Sustainable Futures at the Margins, the Center, and Everywhere In Between Eeva Berglund

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Part III: Creativity, New Technologies, and Networks 11 The “Creative Turn”: Digital Space and Local Dynamics Sarita Albagli 12 From Culture of Labor to Cultural Labor: Youth and Networks in Today’s Brazil Bruno Tarin 13 Autonomy, Free Labor, and Passions as Devices of Creative Capitalism: Narratives from a Co-Research in Journalism and the Editing Industry Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano 14 Unblock the Chain: Cooperative Processes and P2P Technologies between Commons and Capitalist Integration Giorgio Griziotti 15 The Pollination of Creativity: For a Basic Income in the Creative Capitalism of Network Societies Yann Moulier Boutang

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About the Editors and Contributors

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Introduction Barbara Szaniecki and Giuseppe Cocco

This book works toward a new vision on contemporaneous capitalism. Beyond the debates on “cognitive capitalism” and the “creative economy,” we think that it is both possible and necessary to talk of a new, flexible, and often invisible line that unites and divides creative capitalism and multitudinous creativity. In the center of these reflections we put the transformations of labor and the production of subjectivity. We hope to be able to grasp this new ontology of labor thorough the notion of precariousness, which some authors use starting with the first section of the book. Precariousness is the notion that speaks about the separation between work and labor. Work is less and less in the sphere of wage relations of industrial type and, therefore, it is exiting the regulations and guarantees that characterized the main postwar economies. Not surprisingly, one of the most important struggles of Milan’s metropolitan proletariat—a city that used to be one of the largest centers of Fordist industry and today is a creative capital—is called “San Precario” (“Saint Precarious”). The “precarious” is a saint because he has to solve, in everyday life, the mystery of the separation between “work” and “labor” and thus do the miracle of revealing, behind this separation, the increasingly dense plot that connects the time of life and the time of work, the sphere of production and the sphere of reproduction. More prosaically we will say that each precarious worker has to become holy, that is, has to invent the conditions that enable him to work. While the quality of work is increasingly dependent on “the rights labor”—that is, the levels of education, health, and services that produce what the literature calls the “human capital,” “intellectual capital,” or “social capital”—the worker reality remains linked to the old-fashioned “labor rights.” However, when we change our perspective and start seeing from the “South,” we note an inversion: it is the “North” of the major economies that is stagnant, and the vii

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economies of the “South” are growing. This change of perspective is a productive exercise for thinking precariousness, the forms of subjectivity that cross it, and some possible horizons for the future. In the global South, precariousness is the ontological condition of the great majority of the population, made up of poor people waiting for a future inclusion in the dynamics of industrial development and, therefore, in the sphere of a wage relation. If in the North work becomes increasingly poor, in the South an increasing number of poor people are put to work. But that happens in a totally different way from what was expected and announced by the neo-developmentalism. The “poor” are mobilized to work as “poor,” that is, without inclusion in wage relation and its guarantees. Cognitive capitalism and the creative economy articulate exclusion and inclusion, in an infinite modulation that fully leverages the legacy of underdevelopment. The “Saint Precarious” of the “North” meets the “poor Christ” from the “South” that has to make the daily miracle of survival by continuously inventing life forms, starting with the construction of liveable urban space. The different articles of “Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities” delineate and organize the debate between cognitive capitalism and the creative economy, systematically changing points of view, going from North to South while hybridizing disciplinary approaches from different fields of knowledge. The book is made up of three interarticulated parts. In the first section, Creative Capitalism, we propose a global analysis in order to understand how the global crisis goes through the European Union and reaches developing countries in Latin America. It is clear that each country seeks out its own path, but is nevertheless influenced by paths undertaken in other countries. In crisis, through the different ways it affects the countries it permeates, capitalism transforms itself according to certain global tendencies and quickly points towards a horizon of post-crisis. The literature refers to its new form as “cognitive.” In this book we will seek to go deeper into the creative aspect, which points to a creative capitalism more than to a cognitive capitalism. “Creativity” has already been used by governments in Europe for several years now as a tool of revitalization of cities in the process of de-industrialization, both in the centers and in the city outskirts, but especially in degraded areas. It has also been used for the completion of a “national project” in countries that support old and new formulas of growth. In the 90s under neoliberal breakthroughs, twelve sectors were already defined as “creative industries,” with their innovative characteristics being considered levers of the new economy. Little by little, creativity stopped being enclosed in sectors, and it started being promoted throughout the entire economy. The idea of an economy based on “creative sectors” was gradually replaced by the one of an economy crossed by “creative vectors.” But the problem of defining this “creativity” that brings renovations to the

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economy persisted. Charles Landry defines it with 3 “C”s—Culture, Communication, and Cooperation—while Richard Florida considers that it is based on the 3 “T”s—Talent, Technology, and Tolerance. The difficulty in defining it indicates that there is not one precise “nature of creativity,” although it is possible to grasp its functioning. Indeed, creativity seems to be entrusted with a similar function to that once attributed to reason. If reason served to illuminate the modern republics born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on their paths towards civilization, it seems that creativity serves the purpose of opening a post-industrial horizon and, more recently, a post-financial crisis horizon. It is this kind of “faith in creativity” that we propose to explore here. We argue that global capitalism territorializes in the form of the “creative city” and deterritorializes in the form of the “global city.” Thus, the creative economy is based on strong economic relations with tourism, museums, and galleries, heritage and sports—all articulated globally and, in their turn, articulating creative clusters at the local level. The first feature leads to the realization of mega-events and the construction of sportive and cultural megaequipment such as stadiums and museums. This city monumentalization is aimed at achieving competitiveness in a global tourist market. At the same time, the urban spectacularization ensures profit for mainstream media, on the basis of the production of images. The second feature refers to the organization of creative industries in networks of small businesses of producers, preferably agglomerated in “creative clusters.” Unlike the major media and entertainment companies, these productive networks are ephemeral and project based: they are “project-companies” These characteristics of the creative economy—on the global and local level—bring different immediate consequences. For the local population, and in particular for the popular classes, the organization of mega-events associated with the building of mega-equipment is accompanied by the removal of population—which can be translated as real gentrification. Surely, the violence of the process varies from country to country: the preparation for the Olympic Games in Barcelona (1992) or London (2012) shows considerable differences compared to the process taking place in Rio de Janeiro (2016); whereas the FIFA World Cups that took place in South Africa (2010) and Brazil (2014) present many similarities. The similarities and differences of these processes are generally related to political practices. The lack of public consultation and citizen participation results in greater effects of gentrification. Conversely, the presence of instances of collective decision in the processes of the creation and articulation of “global cities” leads to higher benefits—an effective “legacy”—for the general population. Specifically, for the so-called “creative classes,” the form of “creative economy” is not exempt from problems of precariousness and insecurity. In contemporary times, creativity doesn’t occur only in manufac-

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turing, but rather spreads throughout the metropolis. However, with their refusal of employment, the cultural and creative workers are freelancers that leap from project to project, depend on each other’s creativity to survive, and often succumb to free work. The creative economy seems to come with the experience of a loss of autonomy. The Italian economist Andrea Fumagalli grasps the biopolitical quality of the contemporary accumulation process by analyzing the exploitation mechanism of the general intellect (intelligentsia), through the networking of production, nomadic labor, and the symbolic production (advertising). This linking is possible only on the basis of the continuous mix of life and work time. All life has to be mobilized. Thus, in cognitive bio-capitalism, precarity is first subjective, then existential, then generalized. It is, therefore, a structural condition of the new capital/cognitive–relational labor ratio, as an outcome of the contradictions between social production and individualization, between social cooperation and hierarchy. The composition of labor is crossed not only by the technical and contractual divisions, but also by ethnicity, through the regulation of migrant flows. So, we can see something like a dialectical triad of cognitive-relational labor between communication, cooperation, and self-control. Based in the experiences and practices of precarious workers like the San Precario in Milan, Fumagalli maps the challenge to adapt the transformation of welfare policies to the transformation of both market and quality of labor. Particularly, he stresses the urgent need to design a new kind of “wage,” a basic income to recognize the creative dimensions of labor and then productive mobilization of an entire life. The second article contextualizes the shift from industrial capitalism to creative capitalism, with the analysis of the relationship between labor, spectacle, and democracy. The Portuguese historian José Neves introduces the case of Braga Stadium to study the role of architecture, cities, and sports. Creative capitalism needs to displace the figure of architect-auteur in two opposite directions. He is the subject of discourses that recognize pre-modern elements in a kind of genuine design and, at the same time, of discourses that project his figure and practice toward a future age. The ambiguity of these discourses about traditional craftsmanship and futurist engineering is due to the friction between local and global aspects, large and small features, as well as artistic and economic elements. Beyond these apparent paradoxes, José Neves shows the triangulation of the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, and engineering and the double process of proletarianization of the profession and the industrialization of its activities. Finally, the democratization spectacle (by the transformation of stadium) meets the challenge of a democracy of production. Óscar García Agustín, from Denmark, writes about the creativity of the commons. With this article, the problematic of creative economy is extended to the horizon of social creativity. There is in fact a contradiction between

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creative capitalism and multitudinous creativity. In other terms, creative economy reduces social creativity through the fragmentation of social composition based in the existence of an individualized creative class and then through the expropriation of people’s skills. These operations happen by clustering the common space of creativity in certain territories and networks. Therefore the challenge is to blend the creativity dynamics and their democratic conditions. This blend is called the common, i.e., the creativity of a social cooperation that is more and more autonomous. To produce the common, urban multitudes need to affirm the right to the city or, in other words, to affirm the city as common. It’s in the urban space that multitudinous creativity produces and reproduces the common as the power-to-do-together: the cooperation of bodies with others bodies produces forms of life. At the same time, the reduction of multitudinous creativity to creative economy is the result of separation between creative and non-creative workers, and this through the denial of creative skills in those who are considered manual workers. The Argentinian sociologist Veronica Gago introduces the topic of popular pragmatics and relationships between formal and informal economies as she defines the informal as the instituting source of creativity. At the same time this creativity that arises from informality is a source of incommensurability. Gago presents her research about popular economics at the market called Salada in Buenos Aires. Reading Partha Chatterjee, she tries to radicalize the concept of externalities used in the analysis of cognitive capitalism. Multitudinous creativity is not simply something produced outside of the capital relationship, but also an absolute outside. Not a pre-capitalist relic, but something akin to a popular economy. As such, the creative economy appears as organized on top of processes of dispossession, particularly in the peripheral areas and in the popular cooperation networks. The very idea is to put proletarian microeconomies in the place of mainstream microeconomics. Finally, in the fifth article of this first section, the Brazilian philosopher Bruno Cava proposes to grasp the relationships between networks and the production of subjectivities. He discusses notions such as “wealth of networks,” peer to peer architecture and commons, from the perspective of the rise of social factory of value production. The challenge is to shift the approach of networking, beyond any sort of techno-utopia or techno-phobia, in order to understand how the conflict between technologies of control and autonomous practices for the social production of networks happens. The second section of the book is dedicated to what we refer to as Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities. A new cycle of struggles began with the Arab Spring extended from North Africa and the Middle East to Southern Europe through Turkey, Greece, and Spain, crossed the ocean and arrived in the United States with the Occupy Movement, and then spread

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over to Brazil before the FIFA World Cup. These struggles showed resistance to new forms of capitalism. The intensity of the movement that stirred up the streets and Brazilian networks from June 2013 onwards showed us that it is possible to create resistance to the adverse effects of “creative capitalism,” whichever they may be: those which articulate models of urban gentrification (global cities that combine monumentalism and clusters of creative workers and, thereby, legitimize the creativity of the few but expel the culture of many), social stratification (the creative class in possession of creativity weakens the culture of the popular sectors that do not adhere to this faith), and subjective precariousness amongst those that depend on their creativity (their knowledge and practices) to survive. Creativity becomes biopolitics. How may a multitudinous art, culture, and creativity be configured? Carnivalization is visible in street manifestations: masks, costumes, performances, posters, banners, speeches, jokes, and desecrations are directed at politicians and businessmen. All this makes reference to carnival, but not the official and spectacularized carnival with big brands and discourses of consumption, property, and truth, but rather a carnival of the multitude. This includes well-articulated micro and bottom-up processes, subversions of power, openings of knowledge, questionings of absolute truth and creation of other truths. Worldwide, carnivals against capitalism have been a space and time of potent creativity. If in Europe, carnivalization multiplied throughout various cities in the workers demonstrations of the May Day and taking on the name Euromayday, in countries of Latin America, with their already strong carnivalesque tradition, like in Brazil (and on a smaller scale in Argentina with “murgas” and “escraches”), the creativity of the carna-manifestations never ceased to amaze. Beyond the carnivalizations, a creativity born out of different ways to occupy the city is visible. The practices of “occupy” and “squats”—the first more ephemeral and the second more enduring—have proliferated. OccupyWallStreet has undoubtedly been an important experience in this new cycle of struggles but we must not forget that different forms of “occupations” (“squats”) have been taking place throughout the world. They occur in cities or areas that suffer from de-industrialization and consequent deterioration of their urban structure. They are carried out by traditional workers who have lost their jobs, homes, and guarantees, as well as by various categories of professionals that experience precarious conditions in employment or in the autonomous forms of production. Although non-artistic, these occupations are hosts to lifestyles and cultural practices that can interest artists as well as the creative workers. Worldwide artistic and cultural “occupations,” which in the past were insisting on maintaining a position of autonomy in relation to capital, now become the basis for the configuration of creative clusters encouraged by local governments and articulated with the formal market. In addition to the occupations of public buildings, amongst other abandoned

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spaces, cities in Latin America also have historical occupations. These are their informal settlements or “slums”: in Brazil they are called “favelas,” in other countries they are called “Villas miséria.” Sometimes located in areas of recent real estate valorization inflated by the inclusion of cities in the global city market, they also suffer the threat of forced removal. Squats, favelas, and villas miséria exist as a result of a lack of choice, but also as a form of resistance, by affirming an option: affirming other modes of life, of being in the city, by affirming a different city. Ultimately, the contemporary metropolis, as a result of its own territorial composition, which is always more heterogeneous, hosts lifestyles, cultural practices, work options, and therefore creative possibilities, which go far beyond those modelled by creative capitalism. And above all, there are the common uses of the city. In the demonstrations and occupations, in their varying temporalities, we find radical and creative alternatives that are in turn expressions of social recomposition underway: multitudinous creativities. The Brazilian architect Clarissa Moreira examines how, in the Brazilian scenario (and specially in Rio de Janeiro), the notions of “sustainability” and “creativity” become omnipresent in corporative and governmental discourses and policies that boost the recovering of the historic centers for the promotion of tourism and mass culture. Culture is indeed taken here in a very business-centered perspective. Very few voices manifest critically against this hegemonic way of thinking the present and the future transformation of the city that gets reinforced with mega-events like the World Cup and propositions like Porto Maravilha—the renovation project for the port of Rio de Janeiro. “Sustainability” and “creativity” function here to legitimate strategies in which the idea of revitalization hides real processes of gentrification. However, in conflict with this new governance of cities, Moreira perceives and describes a vital creativity through the streets of Brazil both in the multitudinous protests of 2013 and in their extensions through molecular organizations such as Oi Telerj (Rio de Janeiro), Ocupa Estelita (Recife), and Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela (Belo Horizonte) as new perspectives for a promising urban future. An analysis of the social-political aesthetic of the Brazilian uprising in 2013 is conducted by the Romanian psychoanalyst Raluca Soreanu. Mass media depicted the uprising as saturated with negativity. Their representation of the events as a “triumph of violence and of fascism” functioned as “the apocalyptic register needed by the neo-developmentalist pact in order to perpetuate its legitimacy.” In contrast to this condemnation, and based on reflections of Sigmund Freud and Félix Guattari about the “Fort/Da Game,” Soreanu considers that talking about “revolution” is a necessary act in today’s Brazil and captures the emergence of subjective modes defined by attention and mutual containment that can lead to a new paradigm of politics. These “subjectivities of care” are expressed through a new aesthetic para-

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digm that, according to Guattari, is constituted by a modification of sensitivity in the contact between bodies. Gestural units connect and resonate with other gestural units constituting multiplicity. When bodies become an infralanguage, it makes sense to ask: What can a face do? What can an arm do? In June 2013, the multitude in the streets of Brazil made possible a politicoaesthetic shift by practicing other facialities beyond the “four-eye machines” with their binarizing scopic logic and other corporal experiments inspired by but beyond the “long raised arms.” The Brazilian museologist Vladimir Sybilla also analyses the June 2013 uprising in Brazil, but his reflections are directed to the possible agencies or agencements between the communicational, cultural, and artistic expressions of the protests and the museums. These considerations are necessary as Rio de Janeiro adopted the creative city model based on Barcelona’s experience and is now in the midst of an extensive process of gentrification. This problematic model is based on the realization of mega-events and on the setup of creative districts literally “anchored” in museums: in Rio de Janeiro and in particular in its port area, we can mention the Museu de Arte do Rio (Rio Art Museum) and the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow). Sybilla considers that museums often have a close relationship with the territory and this relationship can be either “physicalist” or “symbolic.” The latter features some museums as “places of memory” in the terms of Pierre Nora. Nowadays, in immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism times, the productive subjectivities of the multitude can create non-museums, post-museums, museums of events or, in a broad sense, the encounter between poiesis and praxis, materialized in the “common spaces” of language and city. This “touristification” of the world characteristic of a creative economy that multiplies museums in the cities is also the target of some thoughts by Peter Pál Pelbart, Hungarian-Brazilian philosopher and director of the Ueinzz Theater Company. In 2011, the company was invited by the Finnish collective mollecular.org to make a film and a play inspired by Kafka’s book Amerika, or the Man Who Disappeared together with another collective. The originality of the invitation consisted in carrying out the task aboard the transatlantic Splendour of the Seas during its journey from Santos in Brazil to Lisbon in Portugal. Pelbart chronicles the attempt to make the film (in the case of the Ueinzz collective, the project was inspired in a small paper by Félix Guattari entitled Project for a film by Kafka) inside this luxurious floating space with sumptuous chandeliers, panoramic elevators, huge television screens, swimming pools, saunas, bars, restaurants, casinos, nightclubs and . . . two hundred people on board. In short: a “hallucinating overdose of entertainment stimuli and gastronomic stuffing.” The refusal to produce—“I would prefer not to make a film, make a play, make a work, make something nice, to finish”—emerged as resistance to the “imperative for pleasure.” The

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art of not creating work seemed to be the only way to transform the creative Atlantic crossing into a chaosmotic experience. Let’s go back to mainland . . . with the essay by the Finnish anthropologist Eeva Berglund. In her essay, stimulated by the fact that in 2012 Helsinki became the World Design Capital, she presents some reflections on the history (specially related to the environmentalist movement and inspired by Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change) and mainly on the ambiguities of “design activism.” In fact, design activism can be understood as political contestation and even as social movement but it can also be part of neoliberal governance. It circulates from the political center to the critical margins. The WDC process in Helsinki emphasized design’s capacity to enhance well-being and sustainability and, therefore, stimulated the creation of artefacts, services, and ideas as do-it-yourself activities and green-tinged urban culture generally inspired by a p2p ethos of participation in a kind of social movement mobilization. All of these activities seemed to aim at making the world a better place to live but some of them were extended into public policy, harmonized with ministerial agendas and, therefore, can be taken as government-driven activities. With these five chapters we close the section Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities focused on urban territory and on issues of the cities. Next, in the section Creativity, New Technologies, and Networks we will turn our attention to creativity in networks. Demonstrations, occasional carnivalization, lasting or ephemeral occupations (such as the “occupy” movement), have used networks to amplify the impact of their actions. And here we arrive at the third part of this book: the role of creativity, new technologies and networks in this conjuncture of events. Networks, connections, and connectivities are essential in creative capitalism. In this context of production, tensions become fiercer. Whereas the creative economy defends intellectual property, the protests and other creative practices of the multitude open up to multiple forms of sharing. The first conceptions of creative industries, centered on intellectual property, have effectively become more flexible through the Creative Commons, given the fact that an economy so focused on intellectual property was harming capitalism itself. We have seen that the heterogeneous territories that make up our post-industrial metropolises—formal neighborhoods and informal settlements, degraded areas and areas undergoing “revitalization,” historical squats and more recent and ephemeral occupations—host different ways of life. And in turn each promotes different forms of production and circulation: beyond the opposition between copyright and copyleft and beyond the mediation of Creative Commons, many other uses and modes of sharing are possible. Barters, reciprocities, and gifts can be strengthened in the networks. Aspects of labor in the creative economy and digital economy, as well as the

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creativity of the struggles and insurgencies within the networks, will be addressed in this section of the book. The chapter of the Brazilian researcher in science and technology Sarita Albagli introduces aspects of the new form of capitalism in networks, focusing on working methods that characterize it and the challenges that await them. According to the author, the crisis of capitalism, based on separation between the conceptual work (by a minority “glamorized”) and its execution (by workers disciplined by the Fordist-Taylorist system), leads to emergent modes of production that put knowledge, information, and creativity in the center of processes: this mode of production can be called “creative capitalism.” Living labor characterized by its communicative-relational-linguistic character becomes more than prized, now it is required. The static cooperation of the Taylorist assembly line gives way to the dynamic cooperation based on unscheduled, unpredictable, and interactive communication in networks of differentiation and antagonism that thus stand as conditions for power of creation and innovation. The dynamics of networks and territorial dynamics are intertwined in sociodigital formations. In these networking territories, “creative capitalism” seeks to capture the value produced by various social groups including those considered alternative and transgressors. In his article, Brazilian researcher Bruno Tarin brings specific contributions to the field of art and culture and focuses on youth. Tarin considers that over the past forty years, there was a shift from “culture of labor” into “cultural labor.” Contemporary production is in fact characterized not just by a cultural essence but also by more collective organizations than previous ones. The work performed in the production of the networks of art and culture is therefore a potential source of autonomy but is also susceptible to being captured. As life itself is put to work and creates value in the cultural capitalism, the concepts of biopower and biopolitics are useful to understand this relationship: “it is in the dimension of dissociation that biopolitical production makes an asymmetry within and against biopower.” In Brazil, Giuseppe Cocco points out the conflict between two seemingly opposing points of view—the “post-everything” and the “neomodern”—but, in reality, they both converge into the project of a “Major Brasil” in dissonance with a “minor bRASIL.” Tarin proposes a cartography of networks of art and culture by using the metaphor of the “radio spectrum” where he visits different stations. In the first one, he visits the idea that the relationship between youth and networks establishes a kind of new slavery; In the second, he moves from objective conditions to subjective aspects as manipulation; and in the last one, it is possible to hear a polyphony that promotes a sort of continuous productive excitation. The challenge for the networked youth is how to produce self-valorization rather than social fragmentation and legitimation of dead forms of representation.

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Beyond the networks of art and culture, the authors Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano research the working world of the journalism and editing industry in order to inquire about the relationship between cognitive labor, creative passion, and precariousness. Here again the authors take the concept of biopolitics as a theoretical framework in order to underline the specificity of today’s work and mode of production and domination. According to this concept, language and relational, communicative and affective capacities gain crucial relevance for the biocapitalist mode of production which promotes a permanent state of insecurity. As the empirical research aimed at analyzing practices and agency potential of journalists and editorial workers in the face of precariousness, the methodological choice was to adopt techniques of data collection—creation of focus groups and gathering of mailing lists—in order to have access to the main stories of the individual and collective dynamics and narratives. An important part of the research was carried out through meetings, from June 2011 throughout 2012, with two focus groups located at Milan: journalists and precarious editorial workers in book publishing. From this step emerged important issues such as limited capacity for self-realization, constant presence of frustration, and a perennial imbalance between the lack of autonomy and the requirement of responsibility. The article concludes with the case study of network Re.Re.Pre, where the online communication intertwined with the off-line presence, promotes new forms of coalition and resistance. We have seen that in the general cultural field, as well as in specialized activities such as journalism and editing, precariousness became widespread. Previous authors tried to understand the reasons of this loss of autonomy and some attempts to overcome them in networks. Giorgio Griziotti analyzes the milieu of collaborative activities and considers that “the autonomy commons are the left wing of a much larger trend, the collaborative commons.” Unlike authors who believe that production in networks, for its alleged horizontality, promotes the decline of capitalism, Griziotti argues that capitalism is making the sharing economy its workhorse at the same time the wish to practice a nonsubmissive cooperation is growing. He distinguishes the classical hierarchical organization of large transnational corporations, the netarchical organization, such as the mainstream platforms of the sharing economy, and, finally, the distributed ones represented by a kind of libertarian dream of individual entrepreneurship: “all these trends are mixed and combine to operate on a continuum of products and flows.” Bitcoins are attractive to financial oligarchies but also to libertarians as they introduce the blockchain and the “proof of work” that are so essential for the P2P technologies and for completely decentralized systems. However, Griziotti alerts to the fact that, as these tools can be used in the process of putting life to work by cognitive and creative capitalism, there is no guarantee at all that they will be at the service of autonomous commons.

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Griziotti showed that the possibility of autonomous commons can be stimulated by new technologies but don’t rely exclusively on technological factors. In a similar way, Yann Moulier Boutang considers that it is important to understand the role of “creativity” in contemporary capitalism, i.e., in a form of production based on the contradiction between the commonist nature of collaborative work and market inspired models co-existing in digital platforms. Very different from the machines of the Industrial Revolution, the “second machine age” consists of algorithmic programs fed by big data in real time. These machines seem to fit perfectly the cognitive capitalism capturing of the positive externalities produced by the connected intelligence of the multitude in digital platforms. So where and how does art (the concept of “creativity” has been borrowed from it) come into it? The biggest part of added value in production is shifting towards intangibles codified in software, intellectual property rights, and serial procedures. These intangibles require the integration of intuition, expertise in complex matters, synthesis, global perception of forms, in short, they require “creativity” intended as understanding, feeling, and sharing complex objects and information. Therefore, it’s not a matter of making the brain work like a computer but, on the contrary, of making computers in networks imitate brains in their qualities of intelligence and creativity. In this capitalism extracting value from the collective pollination a basic income is required. The book Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities will therefore be articulated around these three themes. Its originality is based on the exchange of viewpoints of different countries and from different fields of knowledge. It is also unique in that these themes will be treated both by means of socio-economic and political analysis as well as from the points of view of the “creative” in their plurality of practices. This possibility arises from the complementarity of our fields of knowledge and action as organizers: Giuseppe Cocco (political scientist) and Barbara Szaniecki (designer and researcher in design). These changes of perspective about creativity show themselves as extremely important for generating a debate that faces the current challenges of contemporaneity without proposing magical solutions. NOTE We would like to thank Daria Lavrennikov for reading the manuscript. This book benefitted from her comments and revisions.

Part I

Creative Capitalism

Chapter One

Cognitive, Relational (Creative) Labor and the Precarious Movement for “Commonfare” “San Precario” and Euromayday Andrea Fumagalli

After the decline of the Fordist-Taylorist paradigm as an engine and basis of accumulation and valorization processes in contemporary bio-cognitive capitalism, we have faced structural changes in labor organization, both from quantitative and qualitative sides. The increasing role played by immaterial production, putting to labor (and hence a value on) (Morini-Fumagalli, 2011) human faculties that were before constrained inside the sphere of reproductive and relational activities (considered “unproductive” from the capitalistic point of view), together with the pervasive diffusion of language and technologies, has led to the modification of the social composition of labor. The traditional “workerist” division between technical and political composition of labor needs to be revised, by taking into account the rise of new forms of labor subjectivity. We refer, in particular, to the cognitive relational (creative) labor, today more and more characterized by the spread of precarious conditions, inside the limbo and chains of uncertainty and lack of income. The way in which exploitation allows for accumulation is not only based on the dialectic relationship between human labor-force and machinery, but it is also linked to forms of expropriation (dispossession) of the richness (in all its meanings) of human life. In this chapter, we try to analyze these new labor subjectivities and, at the same time, to investigate how an adequate welfare policy (that we call “com3

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monfare”) can be a useful political target to highlight the contradictions and critical points of the current crisis. Finally, we give evidence of some recent organizations of the struggle to overcome precarious conditions, according to the experience gained in Europe and in Italy, in particular the Euromayday process and the “San Precario” experience. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRECARIOUS MULTITUDE: COGNITIVE, RELATIONAL (CREATIVE) LABOR The biopolitical essence of the contemporary accumulation process can be found in the exploitation process. It is present when a “financial convention” (in the Keynesian sense) 1 arises through financial markets, together with the exploitation of the general intellect (intelligentsia), thanks to the networking between production and nomadic labor and the symbolic production (advertising). “Financial conventions,” general intellect, networking, and advertising not only represent the phenomenal form of value creation, but define the modalities of the irreversible process of bio-economic accumulation of biocognitive capitalism. They are constituent factors of capital—a labor ratio, which in cognitive bio-capitalism, unlike in Fordist capitalism, can be defined as “mobile.” By this term, we mean that labor is now characterized by both subjective and objective mobility. “Subjective mobility” means that employment relationships have different features depending on performance, involving direct production, reproduction, or consumption. This depends on whether the body, affections, or brain are predominant. This turns into “objective mobility,” which is defined by the flow of goods and individuals that define the space and the time of production. Time and space define a set of vector flows that, from time to time, outline the passage and the perennial recombination of the working subjectivities, according to the dominant organizational model. Labor in cognitive bio-capitalism is mobile, as it is dispersed in a production environment that has no immediate boundaries: it can be neither closed in a single space (like a factory could be) nor in a single organizational model (as was the Tayloristic organization). It is from this labor mobility that general intellect is drawn up as a result of social cooperation. From time to time it is able to reconstruct the different streams from which it originates. It is from this mobility that the concept of “multitude” originated, to account for the complexity of the labor force, no longer reducible to a single, consistent stock. In bio-cognitive capitalism the condition of labor mobility is accompanied by the dominance of individual bargaining. This stems from the fact that there are nomadic individualities who are put to work and the primacy of

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“private law” on a “still-to-be-built common law,” induced to turn the individual contribution, especially that of the cognitive, affective and relational, into individualistic bargaining. It follows that the labor inherent mobility becomes precarious subjective labor. In this context, the precarious condition assumes new forms. In capitalism, human labor has always been characterized by widespread precarity, more or less depending on the stage of economic and power relations prevailing from time to time. That was evident in a massive way under pre-Taylorist capitalism, the same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, in Fordist capitalism. But, in those times, we always talked about the precarity of labor conditions, related to predominantly manual work based on the distinction between labor time and free/leisure/life time. The Trade Union struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have always been aimed at reducing labor time on behalf of non-labor time. In the transition from industrial—Fordist to cognitive bio-capitalism, the relational and digital labor has become increasingly popular in order to define the main modes of labor performance. The separation between the human and the machine that organizes and regulates manual labor fades away. The moment in which the brain and life become elements of labor, the distinction between life and labor time loses meaning. Here we have that individualistic bargaining at the basis of the legal precarity of labor, which overflows into the subjectivity of the individuals themselves, influencing their behavior and transforming it into a precarious existence. In bio-cognitive capitalism, precarity is first subjective, then existential, then generalized. It is, therefore, a structural condition of the new capitalcognitive-relational labor ratio, as an outcome of the contradictions between social production and individualization, between social cooperation and hierarchy. The precarious condition is subjective as it enters directly into the perceptions of individuals in different ways, depending on the expectations of the imaginary and the degree of possessed knowledge (culture). Precarity is an existential condition because it is pervasive and present in all the activities of individuals and not only within certified labor time, in a context where it is increasingly difficult to separate labor from non-labor. Moreover, because of the uncertainty that creates the conditions for precarity, there is no social insurance, independent of the behavior of those same individuals, due to the gradual dismantling of the welfare state. Precarity is a generalized condition, because even if you are in a stable and guaranteed workplace, one is fully aware that this situation may end at any moment as a result of any restructuring, relocation, economic crisis, or bursting of a speculative bubble, etc. . . . This awareness implies that the expectations of the most guaranteed workers are in fact very similar to those, who objectively and effectively, live in a “precarious” situation. Hence, the multitude of labor is, directly or psychologically, unstable and precarious.

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THE COMPOSITION OF PRECARIOUS LABOR To the division of labor on a contractual basis, we also have to add a division of labor based on ethnicity, deriving from the regularization of migrant labor. In Italy, for instance, the Bossi-Fini law states that the legal stay of immigrants in the country is dependent upon the existence of a “labor contract.” The existence of an employment relationship is the main condition to achieve a “residence permit.” This is the only condition to obtain civil rights (though not political). Thus, the residence permit, what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights,” as a passport to social and civilian visibility, is constrained by the employment status. This is the case especially in the private labor market: but a labor contract, and hence the residence permit, is not unlimited. It is easy to imagine how this situation put the immigrant in a highly blackmailed condition and how employers can profit from this condition to impose economic and biopolitical power on the immigrant labor force. Finally, it should be noted that the transition from a Taylorist to a cognitive division of labor is in progress. In this framework, the production efficiency does not only deal with the reduction of the operating time required for each task, but more and more with the knowledge and the versatility of a labor force, able to maximize learning processes, innovation, and adaptation in a dynamic context. Beyond the paradigmatic model of immaterial services in the new high-tech economy, we see the diffusion of knowledge production activities and the processing of information services in all the economic sectors, including those with low technological intensity, as proof of the progression of cognitive and more autonomously individualized labor. Of course, this trend is not unique. Within a single sector, some stages of the production process can be organized according to cognitive principles, while other stages of production (especially the more standardized industrial operations) may be based on the Taylorist labor organization type or neo-Taylorism. Nevertheless, in both qualitative and quantitative terms (at least in the OECD countries), it is cognitive labor that is at the heart of the process of valorization of capital. This trend highlights new forms of segmentation and division of labor that the classical Smithian division of labor is not able to grasp. In particular, at a very embryonic stage, we refer to the division between codified and tacit knowledge. The first, because it is transmittable through mechanical procedures without human activity, is subject to an increasing devaluation. While the second, because of its exclusivity, can develop a bargaining power in the labor market that tends to overestimate it. Therefore, it becomes necessary to investigate the fundamental characteristics of cognitive-relational labor, which often have to do with s.c. “creative labor.”

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The Characteristics of Cognitive-Relational (Creative) Labor The concept of “cognitive-relational labor”—as any recent idea—is still defined in a variety of ways, with the consequent rise of ambiguities and contradictions. Increasingly, literature deals more with the explanation of what kind of labor is not cognitive-relational, rather than circumscribing its constituent parameters. It is, therefore, not surprising that different terms are used, such as “intellectual,” “immaterial,” or “digital” labor. In these paragraphs, we will define the concept of cognitive-relationalcreative labor by identifying some parameters that may be useful to define it: a. Reflexivity. By “cognitive-relational labor,” we mean the labor that is invested by its own reflexivity: it modifies the organizational structure and the procedures that are carried out and, in so doing, it generates new knowledge (cumulativeness). b. Relationality. The cognitive-relational labor obviously implies relational activity, as a tool to transmit and decode the accumulated knowledge over time. It follows that it cannot be fully standardized because of its dis-homogeneity, which depends on the subjectivity of the individual worker: it is a bio-labor. Cognitive capacities and relational activities are inseparable from each other. c. Spatiality and networks. To allow cognitive-relational labor to become productive, it needs “space,” i.e., to develop a network of relationships. Otherwise, it remains embedded in the individual sphere, perhaps able to enhance the person, but not to create exchange-value for the accumulation of wealth. Cognitive capitalism is, by force, reticular, that is, non-linear and hierarchized. Its development is internal to the single nodes inside the different networks. This is a complex hierarchy, which often results in the social control of the space within which it develops. 2 d. Education and learning. This type of labor requires a cognitive-relational learning and training. The learning process increasingly requires possession of information and knowledge resulting from the development of forms of communication and accumulation of relational skills. In this respect, training and learning are not synonyms. Training describes the process by which the subject comes into possession of information that defines the “toolbox,” or “know how,” where it is possible to obtain the necessary knowledge to carry out the labor performance. Learning, by contrast, develops with experiential activities, necessary to develop the skills of a specialized “know-how.” Training can be external to the labor process, learning derives from direct participation in that same labor process.

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e. Coordination. The cognitive-relational labor needs, as mentioned, the inclusion in a reticular structure (virtual or real), where networking between nodes is a highly symbolic and linguistic communication. This implies that, unlike the Taylorist system, the forms of coordination are not incorporated into the mechanical means (and thus, external to human activity), but depend on the type of interactions and relationships existing among human beings and, therefore, may give rise both to forms of hierarchy or forms of cooperation, at the same time. In the context of bio-cognitive capitalism, the labor’s organization is studied in order to take advantage of communication and cooperation, as required by digital technologies. From this point of view, the dialectical triad of cognitive-relational labor becomes communication, cooperation, and self-control (or social control). Communication activity is related to the use of language (human and/or artificial), while cooperative activity is implied in the multi/bilateral relationship that is at the basis of linguistic communication. In it, as an antithesis, the essence of language is coagulated. In this case, cooperation is understood not as a succession of disjointed individual transactions, but as a multilateral set of behaviors characterized by different degrees of hierarchy, where the outcome is not similar to the simple sum of singularities. More specifically, since the cooperative activity is the result of forms of communication, the latter is characterized by being directly immaterial cooperation, even if it relates to a material production. The cooperation activities are the constituent element of the network structure, of the production chain.

Figure 1.1. Dialectics and philosophy of cognitive-relational labor.

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Self-control also becomes a form of social control when it is activated as an imitation of a behavior dictated by the collective, common, and dominant imaginary. In any case, the individual is adapting his behavior, through forms of self-control or self-repression, in order to meet the needs of productive organization. The five parameters that define the framework of cognitive-relational labor imply that we are simultaneously in the presence of co-operation and social hierarchies. Social cooperation is the need for coordination, networking, and relationality. The hierarchy, created by the different forms of learning and training economies, gives rise to a cognitive division of labor. This latter gives rise to and develops factors of labor market segmentation, facilitated by the fact that the reflexivity of cognitive-relational labor leads to a variety of paths of cumulative knowledge, at an individual level. Social cooperation and hierarchy: these are the two sides of the paradox of modern relational-cognitive labor; the need to develop a general intellect as the result of social cooperation, simultaneously defines the hierarchical structures that stem from the individualization of labor relations. It follows that, in bio-cognitive capitalism, labor activity escapes a clear and homogenous definition. If we were to use a synthetic expression, we could say that labor, whatever material form it takes, is now characterized by the attribute of the “differences.” With this term, we mean that today the concept of labor performance is no longer based on the uniqueness of each singular labor activity, not comparable to a typological, contractual, or dominant type. Can we talk about “difference” in the singular, i.e., binary relation (man-woman, manual-intellectual, white-blue collar, etc.), but about a plurality of differences, or of a multitude: a multitude of seemingly chaotic job forms? Are these “differences” enough to qualify the labor-force of the current cognitive capitalism? It is the exploitation of these differences, and their material declination, that determines the new forms of capital/labor ratio. COMMONFARE The transformations of the labor market in Europe, over the past two decades, urgently imposes the redefinition of welfare policies. This goal has not always been considered a central interest in socioeconomic alternative thinking. When it occurred, it affected specific topics, such as the criticism of the privatization of public services or the need to introduce a minimum income and/or a conditioned basic income. The main cause of this failure lies in an analytical reading of the current structural transformation, not yet sufficiently adapted to the new needs and new requirements that have sprung up since the crisis of the Fordist paradigm.

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In particular, I refer to the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative aspects that today constitute and define labor performance. A little in-depth analysis of these issues will not allow us to grasp the elements of novelty inherent in the precarious condition, a condition that the institutionalized left, and its parties and organizations, too often read as the dismantling of the simple form of stable and permanent employment as a consequence of the decline of labor bargaining power. At the same time, the present crisis of national welfare is the result of the dependence of the State on the SC free-market power, as the result of the triumph of neoliberal theories. In the current socio-economic debate, there are two conceptions of welfare that, in particular, attract the attention of scholars and politicians: workfare and, alternatively, the Keynesian public welfare. Workfare is not a universal welfare system that is guaranteed only to those who have the financial means to pay for it. It is a self-financed welfare system (as are most of today’s European retirement systems), which is particularly functional to the public balanced budget, imposed by Troika, and hence to the adoption of austerity policies. Moreover, it is structured on the idea of providing aid as a last resort, where there are existential conditions that do not allow one to work and thus to access those rights that labor is able to provide. The idea of workfare is also complementary to the privatization policy of much of the public welfare, from health and education, to retirement planning. Therefore workfare is complementary to the SC principle of subsidiarity, according to which the State may take action only if and in so far as the objectives (social services), cannot be satisfactorily achieved in a private way. The case of England is, in this respect, striking. In the name of freedom of choice, by citizens, between public and private, health care and education are subsidized and prescription charges and various tariffs are introduced with the result of increasing the costs of social services. In addition, workfare only has partial and immediate targets: those who are outside the labor market, such as the unemployed and low income retired persons, risk being excluded, and the social minimum is based on a clear distinction between social and labor policies. The idea is still that of a purely Fordist system, with the addition of a neo-liberal framework, the Anglo-Saxon model: job incentives and a minimum welfare state. The same perspective is working in Italy. The Keynesian public welfare is, in part, the exact opposite. The State should take charge of a universal intervention, able to guarantee to all citizens (which does not always coincide with residents) some basic social services such as health, education, and social security, available to everyone (from cradle to grave, according to the famous definition from the Beveridge Report, from World War II). Then there would be space for the private action.

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These two visions are followed by other visions that represent hybrid situations: from one side, the Scandinavian welfare model that gives rise to the policies of flexicurity, which are presented as a synthesis of the universalistic Keynesian welfare, but tailored to the needs of the flexibility of the labor market; from the other side, the Latin-Mediterranean welfare model based on family, a mixture of workfare, and selective welfare. Therefore, it is increasingly necessary and urgent to introduce a new idea of welfare, an idea that is able to deal with the two main elements that characterize the current phase of the SC “Western” capitalist countries: • precarity and debt condition as a dispositive of social control and dominance • the generation of wealth that arises from social cooperation and general intellect (commonwealth). Regarding the first point, labor is becoming more fragmented, not only from a legal point of view, but mainly from the qualitative and subjective point of view. The figure of the industrial wage worker is emerging in many parts of the globe, but is declining in an almost irreversible way in Western countries, for the benefit of a variegated multitude of atypical and precarious parasubordinate and autonomous workers, whose organizational skills and representation are more and more limited by the prevalence of individual bargaining. The primacy of the individual over the collective bargaining empties the capacity for representation of the traditional trade unions. The attempt to recover this capacity, through concerted tactics, has shown its limits, to the point of distorting and transforming the role of the Union into a dispositive of control and subalternity for business and financial interests, in the name of economic compatibility. Furthermore, in times of crisis, the condition of precarity is strengthened by debt increases, in a vicious circle. Regarding the second issue, the production of wealth is no longer based solely on material production. The existence of learning economies (generating knowledge) and network economies (which allow its diffusion, at different levels) now represent the variables that are at the origin of the increases in productivity: a productivity that results more and more from the direct exploitation/expropriation of the commonwealth and from the privatization of common goods. Commonwealth is different from common goods. Commonwealth is, nowadays, the source of the production both of common, private, and public goods. It follows that, in this context, a redefinition of welfare policy should be able to respond to the unstable trade-off, inside the accumulation process of cognitive bio-capitalism: the negative relationship between life precocity and social cooperation. More particularly, it is necessary to remunerate social

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cooperation, from one side, and favor forms of social production, from the other. These two aspects constitute the two main pillars of what some scholars define as commonfare 3 (see table 1.1). Basic Income The remuneration of social cooperation implies the introduction of individual, unconditional basic income, for everyone who lives in the territory regardless of his/her professional and civil status. The unconditional basic income (UBI) should be understood as a kind of monetary compensation (remuneration) of the social productivity and of productive time which are not certified by the existing labor contracts. It occurs at the primary level of income distribution (it’s a primary income), hence it cannot be considered merely as a welfare intervention, according both to workfare and Keynesian logic. This measure should be accompanied by the introduction of a minimum wage, in order to avoid a substitution effect (dumping) between basic income and maintaining the same wages, in favor of firms, and to the detriment of the workers. Basic income, together with minimum wage, makes it possible to expand the range of choices in the labor market, i.e., to refuse a “bad job” and then modify the same labor conditions. The unconditional possibility of refusal of work opens up perspectives of liberation that go far beyond the simple distributive measure. The Managing of the Commonwealth and Common Goods The second pillar concerns the managing both of the commonwealth and common goods. Actually, the idea of commonfare implies, as a prerequisite, the social reappropriation of the gains arising from the exploitation of commonwealth that are the basis of the idea of accumulation today. This re-appropriation does not necessarily lead to a transition from private to public ownership. As previously stated, we need to distinguish between common goods and commonwealth. As far as basic services such as health care, education, or mobility are concerned, which are now increasingly privatized, the goal is to provide a public management of their supply as use-value, against any attempt of commodification. But if we refer to the commonwealth, the framework is different, since the fruit of social cooperation and general intellect are neither private nor public goods. The only way to manage the commonwealth is through self-organization, by imagining a different régime of valorization, based on what Marazzi calls “a production of human beings in favor of human beings.” 4

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Further in detail, as far as re-appropriation of common goods is concerned, the proposal of commonfare currently means to outline a policy: • able to “free” the population from the hierarchy imposed by the economic oligarchy of commodities and utilities, which was subject to extensive privatization over the last 20 years as a consequence of the Cardiff Process (1996) on the regulation of the market for goods and services (access to common material goods). • able to provide institutions of the common, at the local level, regarding essential common goods such as water, energy, and environmental sustainability through forms of Municipalism from the bottom-up (democratic principle). • that guarantees free transport and housing. As far as commonwealth is concerned, we need a policy: • able to reduce intellectual property rights and patent laws in favor of greater freedom of circulation of knowledge and the ability to acquire free information infrastructures, through appropriate and innovative industrial policies. At the same time, it should be able to guarantee a self-organized and free education process (cognitive commonwealth). • that provides all the means necessary to build up relational activities, care needs, health insurances, free access to Internet (breaking monopolies) (reproductive commonwealth). POTENTIAL CONFLICT: EUROMAYDAY, SAN PRECARIO, 5 AND THE GENERAL STATES OF PRECARITY The word “precarity” is a neologism in Anglo-Saxon languages. In German, it doesn’t exist (sometimes the adjective “Precär” is used). But it has existed for a long time in the neo-Latin languages of the South of Europe: Precariedad, Precariedade, Précarité, or Precarietà. Around the year 2000, the word started being used in English by some social movements, linked to the No-Global activities (Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions—European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), and also in EU official reports on social welfare. But it was at the strikes of young part-timers of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut in the winter of 2000 in Paris, France, that the first political union network emerged in Europe explicitly devoted to fighting precarity: Stop Précarité, with links to other elements of the French radical left (especially AC!—Action contre le chomage—action against unemployment).

Andrea Fumagalli

14 Table 1.1.

Commonfare policy

Social needs

Instruments to implement in order to achieve them

Income stability Unconditional Basic Income Education

Public and self-organized education centers till the university education

Information and Free access to information and to knowledge, through free communication availability of immaterial infrastructure (wi-fi, network, open-source, and so on). Removal of intellectual property rights and their regulations Health

Right to a free health system and care system

Housing

Guaranteed house: opportunity for everyone to have a space for the creation and organization of their own lives

Mobility

Low cost or free public transport service, free circulation of bodies in the territory: no borders.

In Italy, the first autonomous collective was born in 1997 in Milan, in the squat Via dei Transiti, in opposition to the introduction of a temporary employment agency in the job legislation (Law 196, known as Law Treu by the minister of labor at that time). From this first seminal experience, along with the diffusion of the SC movement after Seattle, a new collective in Milan, under the name “Chainworkers Crew,” started a specific activity against precarious conditions mainly in the big malls of the metropolitan area. From Mayday to Euromayday It is from this collective that the idea arose to organize, in 2001, an alternative first of May (Labor Day in Europe), called Mayday Parade. The form of the parade, in the afternoon, differently from the traditional labor day demonstration of Trade Unions in the morning, was explicitly aimed to give representation and voice to the so-called “precarious generation.” It employed carnival-like techniques of agitation (allegorical wagons, media subvertising, colorful actions, etc.), in imitation of gay pride and love “reclaim the streets” parades of the 1990s. Chainworker activists meant it as a revival of the wobbly traditions of May Day and consequently as a break with the traditional union representation and social-democratic compromise that had allowed precarity and social insecurity to spread unchecked, reaching critical levels in all of Europe. The first Mayday saw the participation of no more than 2,000 people, but in a few years the participation grew exponentially. By 2003, Milan’s Mayday saw the first participation of French and Catalan groups. In 2004, activists in Barcelona (organized around the collective Yo Mango) joined the Mayday efforts, while at the same time delegations of

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French “Intermittents” participated as guests of honor in both Mayday parades. The same year saw the launch of the icon of San Precario, patron saint of the struggle against precarity. The religious imagery proved very popular in Italy and elsewhere, and would colonize the mainstream mediascape in the following years. By virtue of all these developments, Mayday 2005 and 2006 drew 80,000 young protesters from all over Italy. This attracted attention from other parts of Europe. In October 2004, libertarian and syndicalist collectives from across Europe gathered at Middlesex University for “Beyond ESF” (a critical reference to the European Social Forum that was being held in London at the same time) in order to give life to a unified European May Day of precarious and migrant workers: Euromayday, which involved a dozen Western European cities in 2005, and about twenty in 2006, including Milan, Paris, Helsinki, Hamburg, and Seville among the most lively nodes. In 2006, the Mayday process was launched in Brussels on Good Friday, with a few hundred activists from Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany protesting against pro-business lobbies in Europe: “no borders, no precarity: fuck the new inequality!” The Euromayday network has gathered several times across the EU to discuss, in its assemblies, common actions against precarity and mobilizations against the persecution of immigrants, and particularly the segregation of undocumented immigrants in detention centers all over Europe. Euromayday demands the full adoption of the EU directive on temporary workers (which states that the only admissible labor contract is the permanent and full labor contract, and that any other type of contract, especially part-time and temporary, must be justified and regulated), being blocked by the Barroso Commission, as well as a European minimum wage and basic income. Cyber and queer rights are also part of the Mayday deliberations and activities. A core constituency of Mayday has been the movement of theIntermittents, the French expression used to refer to stage hands and showbiz personnel. From 2002–2005, the Intermittents captured the French imagination and filled the press with their inventive rebellious tactics (e.g., they famously disrupted live TV news programs and the 2004 edition of the Cannes festival) denouncing precarity in the form of cuts to their unemployment benefits (they counter-proposed an alternative reform of the system which was so well crafted that it put French élites and union leaders in an awkward position). In the early months of 2006, French youth rejected the CPE, the first-job contract introduced by the government that made it easier to fire workers under the age of 26. Clashes with the riot police, as they reclaimed the Sorbonne from occupying students, was the signal that something major was happening, since the university had been the epicenter of social insurgence in 1968. Four decades later, France was again paralyzed by huge student demonstrations and solidarity strikes, called by the major French unions, as well

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as the more militant unions and organizations. With the vast majority of French universities occupied for more than a month, and the whole nation on strike, the Villepin government was forced to withdraw the provision, in a test of force with democracy in the streets that weakened the presidency itself. Le Monde commented that “précarité” was going to be a central issue in the upcoming 2007 presidential elections. A few months earlier, France had been rocked by generalized rioting of the French youth of Arab and African descent in their suburban ghettos (cités), who sought to express angst at racial and economic discrimination that they were experiencing from the rest of French society. Although expressing the same national malaise and social anguish, banlieue rioters and student protesters did not actually share tactics and demands. The French explosion of 2006 against precarity was followed, a few months later, by a lengthy general strike in Denmark to protest against welfare cuts, especially discriminatory with respect to young people. All the universities were occupied, and the right-wing government was forced to withdraw the provisions that had to do with student subsidies and other welfare benefits for young people, although it retained pension cuts for older employees. “San Precario” 6 February 29 is the feast day of San Precario (http://kit.sanprecario.info/), the patron saint of precarious workers, who—together with his feast day (very precarious date, since it happens only every 4 years)—was created by the Chainworkers at the Milanese occupied space, Reload, where the 2004 Euromayday was organized with others, including the Critical Mass group. The Milan Critical Mass already had its own patron saint, “Santa Graziella” (Graziella is the brand name of a popular Italian folding bicycle). San Precario was originally conceived as a male saint (Romano, 2004). The Saint’s first public appearance was at a Sunday supermarket opening on February 29, 2004: A statue was carried in the streets, preceded by assorted clergy including a cardinal reciting prayers over a loudspeaker, and followed by pious people. 7

San Precario is the building of a counter-imaginary, that is, the icon is a form of media, whose aim is to subvert the traditional and mainstream view that young people have to pay a period of insecurity in order to stably enter the labor market. From this point of view, San Precario represents a sort of Spinozian “conatus,” in the communication context, against the prevailing spirit of resignation and impotence due to the concerted compromising policy led by institutional trade unions and traditional left parties.

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We are the post-socialist generation, the post-cold war generation, the end of vertical bureaucracies and of information control generation. We are a global and neo-European movement, which brings forward the democratic revolution started in 1968 and the struggle against the neoliberal dystopia at its peak today. We are eco-activists and media-activists, we are the libertarians of the Net and the metroradicals of urban spaces, we are the transgender mutations of global feminism, we are the hackers of the terrible reality. We are the agitators of precariat and the insurgents of cognitariat. We are anarcho-unionists and post-socialists. We are all migrants looking for a better life. And we do not recognize ourselves in you, gloomy and tetragon layerings of political classes already defeated in the XX century. We do not recognize ourselves in the Italian Left. 8

From this point of view, San Precario is profane, mocking, and offensive. San Precario is a creation of the precarious intelligence, a free and independent expression that does not refer to any party or union. It is an expression and an institution of the commonwealth. San Precario is the patron of those who are underpaid, who suffer the pains of an intermittent income and who are oppressed by a precarious future that is common to us all: sales clerks and programmers, factory workers and researchers, but even immigrants and Neet youth. After his first appearance, the consecration of San Precario takes place every year during Mayday. It has been used and sanctified by tens of thousands of groups of workers, has created a network, has taken the squares all over Italy, has protected his followers, and made their exploiters tremble. During the 2005 Milan Fashion Week, the Mayday collectives around San Precario, starting from the Chainworkers, organized a famous hoax to denounce the precarious conditions of fashion workers in the so-called “creative industries,” creating a fictive stylist, Serpica Naro, whose name was in fact an anagram of “San Precario.” 9 Hence, Serpica Naro is a fictitious fashion meta-brand. Today, Serpica Naro is licensed under the Creative Commons, and the collective organized around it is working towards dismantling the conventional fashion industry with its exploitation of humans and nature. “Intelligence precaria” and the General States of Precarity (2007–2011): The Experience of the City of Gods, the Charter of Knowledge-workers’ Rights, and Towards the “Precarious Strike” After the success of Serpica Naro was born, the network “Intelligence precaria,” which began to be structured on three levels of intervention: legal legislative intervention through the creation of Saint Precarious points in Milan and their near hinterland, legal aid desks and reporting workplace abuse; the intervention of the “intelligence” in the industries with the highest share of

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precarity (according to the motto: “precarize who precarize you”), direct political interventions through pickets, blockades, and subvertising in the work place, where it was an ongoing labor dispute. In support of these activities, in 2008 San Precario launched a new initiative to raise awareness amongst precarious workers: the free magazine titled City of Gods, a sort of free press, of which 10.000 copies were distributed in the Metro stations of Milan, as a mockery/satire/imitation (with same graphics and characters) of a well-known free press edited by Rizzoli Publishing, the editors of the most important Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera. The contents of this free press were about conditions of precarity, storytelling, sarcastic issues (like a precarious horoscope), and political proposals. One example is shown by the first presentation of the Charter of Knowledgeworkers’ rights (2009) in Italy and Europe, whose first lines declare: When knowledge, information and culture become commodities, then knowledge workers are doomed to sink into disownment, weakness and occupational and income blackmailing. Italy has declared war on intelligence.

Then the following 10 claims are asserted: 1. We claim our right to be intelligent, that is, the right to knowledge and an education completely independent from the aims imposed by the market and the current production schemes. Just like the water or the air we breathe, knowledge is a common—both universal and individual; it is the collective engine able to produce welfare and progress for the greatest number of people: it is not a commodity to be sold or bought on the market of the “owners,” on the basis of profit and the social control that capital can impose. 2. Both within and outside the workplace, we thus claim the right to a recognition and respect of our skills, independence, competences, professionalism and material and spiritual needs. 3. The main problem for knowledge workers is the lack of the chance to choose and set themselves against various forms of blackmail; that is why we also assert our right to self-determination. Which implies the assertion of the right to a guaranteed fixed income. Knowledge labor, by its very nature, is mostly not defeasible, even if technologic development wishes it to become so. On the contrary, it is basically flexible and discontinuous. We also want an appropriate income during our non-working periods. We ask for a guaranteed wage in moments of unemployment. We are not only talking about benefits and social security cushions; we want a secured fixed income. 4. We still assert the need of establishing a minimum hourly wage for our work, be it occasional or not. The hourly wage must be established according to the real cost of living and its possible future variations. 5. We demand the possibility to choose the kind of contract we want to stipulate for our work. We thus firmly oppose those unilaterally imposed

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

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by companies, which in the past few years have spread to the point of becoming the only natural possibility of employment. We want to meaningfully enjoy both our work and our time again. Since any type of market contract imposing exclusivity (partial or total) limits our intellectual capacity. Action must be taken for a supplementary remuneration. We want freedom of expression, communication, and learning. Cognitive autonomy is not negotiable. The prostitution of brains is not any better than that of bodies. Because knowledge is a common good belonging to the individual and to the whole collectivity, the benefits of knowledge must be socially shared in a perspective of peer-to-peer circulation. We claim our right to free access to education, updating, and personal and cultural growth opportunities without having to pay for them. No matter the consistency or the subordination of our working conditions, we also claim the basic rights attached to social status: social safety cushions, sick leave, maternity leave, paid holidays, paid parental leave, gratuity and a fair and settled pension at the end of our working cycle. We have seen how economic resources are always available when it is about saving banks and holding companies. We have seen how, notwithstanding the new system of precarious, “flexible” and discontinuous work, overall productivity and wealth have increased, precisely by virtue of cooperation and the innovative power of the General Intellect. What is needed now, is an even distribution of the fruits of the social adjustment that is already taking place. We, here and now, determine to name this distribution (wages), together with all its consistent rights, “common welfare.” What we claim is precisely this: “common welfare.”

It is the first time in Italy in which a political statement argues in favor of the “Commonfare”! With the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, there was greater need to establish a national network of action on precarity. Thus, in 2010 the General States of Precarity (GSP) 10 was born. In the course of the third edition in April 2011, the organization of the first precarious strike in Italian history was discussed. This is a very different proposal for a strike than the traditional one. First, it is established that the strike must cause harm to the other party, whatever it is, otherwise it is not efficient and it is not able to build up contractual power. Since in the past twenty years, in Italy, the constraints on the right to strike had become increasingly stringent, it means to organize something on the border of legality. Second, whereas the precarious worker has difficulty striking without the risk of suffering the negative consequences dictated by the high degree of blackmail, one needs to think of nonrisky practices of striking. Third, because today the flexible capitalist accumulation in metropolitan areas valorizes the life put to labor via material and immaterial production flows, one must block their networks in terms of commodities, people, and information.

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A precarious strike implies the blockade of the territory: transport means (mainly surface and underground networks), the main access roads, and the main information servers. It is a very ambitious project, which needs a sophisticated level of organization and political capacity. It is also very risky, by taking into account the police repressive pressure on Italy and the opposition by traditional trade unions. All these thoughts were born out of an attempt to begin to present an autonomous and independent “precarious point of view.” To this end, in order to collect the processing and analysis of the General States of Precarity, the Quaderni di San Precario was founded in 2010. On October 15, 2011, a big demonstrations of more than 300,000 people crossed the streets of Rome against austerity policies, the cutting of welfare, and the increasing precarization of labor. It was a self-organized demonstration, in which the Mayday network (together with other collectives) was very much involved as a first attempt to implement forms of precarious strike. The demo ended with very intense riots and clashes with the anti-guerrilla policy that lasted for more than 4 hours, with a final manhunt by police in the center of the city. We don’t have the time to discuss why: the political result was the rise of some strategic division inside the movement, with the consequence that led to the end of the experience of the General States of Precarity and the goal of the precarious strike. SUMMARY AND SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS It is not possible to critically analyze all the problematic issues and the lessons that arise from this story. We can limit ourselves to a brief treatment of two crucial nodes: the form of the representation of the precarious multitude and the tools of the struggle. They are completely interdependent. We will start with the first: the forms of representation. The critical action and the shape of the traditional union representation of the ’90s by the movement is usually based on the rejection of reformist-compromised strategy. In the ’70s, this criticism was primarily based on the inadequacy and timidness of the social claims of the trade union platforms. Today it is based on the complaint of the (in)direct complicity and subordination of traditional trade unions to the economic compatibility dictated by the global process of financialization, in order to justify the existence of the traditional trade unions as a tool not only to control the labor force but as a guarantee of its political and cultural dependence: it occurs inside a process of increasing individualization and the blackmail of precarious labor contracts. On the opposite end the increasing role and consensus played by not concerted and antagonist trade union organizations (like Cobas, USB and so on) is greatly linked to a certain nostalgia for the seasons of the conflict of the ’70s, without an awareness that

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the precarious subjectivity, valorization, and labor conditions are completely and structurally different from blue-collar and Fordist claims. This runs the risk of perpetuating certain schematicisms that, if in other times could make sense and function, are now quite weakened. We refer mainly to the obsession of identifying a segment of the labor force for reference, able to foster its struggle with other parts of the labor market and thus the need to be an avantgarde movement, tracing a derived “Leninist “ pattern. Whether it is the old figure of ‘‘mass worker” or new types of “immigrant,” or “the young cognitariat” or independent workers of the second generation, it does not matter. The technical composition of labor, to return to a concept introduced by the “Operaismo” (workerism) thinking, is today no longer reducible to that of the Fordist period. It presents new structural elements that make the equipment for its translation into political settlement obsolete. Such a statement requires more space for the arguments than it is now possible to develop. To summarize, we therefore limit ourselves to pointing out a few items: 1. the relationship between man and machine has changed dramatically (and with it the organization of labor that tends to move from vertical disciplinary models to cooperative-disciplinary and horizontal models, with effect on the technical composition of labor itself); 2. the process of real subsumption, typical of Fordism, has given way to an exploitative relationship that can be defined as a synergistic process between real and formal subsumption: this latter as a result of dispossession processes. These new forms of real and formal subsumption lead to a new type of subsumption, that is not simply their sum but something more and new. We can call it: life subsumption. 3. valorization and the accumulation is not only based on putting life to labor, but also on the heterogeneity of production conditions: it is the difference (in term of gender, education, ethnicity, preferences, . . .) that creates (plus)value; 4. wages remunerate only the time that is certified as labor, inside an organized context and according to the existing industrial relations (still based on the Tayloristic-Fordistic paradigm). It follows that increasing amounts of lifetime involved in production are more and more enslaved; 5. labor time and therefore the unit of measure of exploitation escapes any objective calculation. All these aspects are transversal to different labor situations in non-homogenous conditions: hence, they are not subjectively perceived in the same way. Therefore, there is a shift in the labor force enabled by unique working conditions imposed from the outside. The labor discipline (as well as its

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timing) is not directly determined by the machine but indirectly by the same, single, worker. The new technical composition of labor cannot be translated into a political composition, able to dictate the timing of the struggles, the homogeneity of the claims and, consequently, the forms of representation and modalities of the conflict. Rather it gives rise to a “social” labor composition, not immediately and directly represented. Therefore the problem we face is how to build forms of “self-representation and subjectivation.” Autonomy and self-subjectivation—dialectical awareness of life subsumption—unveil the imaginary behind social control and self-discipline, unmasking the cultural imposition of power ideologies that overcome individualization processes: in a word, self-organized subjectivation enables exit mechanisms against the complicity in which the subject himself is involved. The political organization at this stage does not seem to be able to avoid taking advantage of innovative tools that until now have been used as selfconscious paths, and which can be inspired by the bio-political struggles of the feminist movement. If subjectivity is fully invested by a life implication in the labor process, if capitalism is transformed into bio-capitalism, then the analysis of neoliberal subjectivity should be critically analyzed through the use of conceptual tools offered by psychoanalysis. This new toolbox must be linked to neo-workerist readings, enquiring the generative wealth of social cooperation. The typical mindset of Fordist unions is not enough and appears as counterproductive. Simple communication and immediate investigation, use of social media, subvertising, culture jamming and imaginary corporate networks, basic income, the study of the bottlenecks in labor organization, anonymity, and where possible forms of direct actions and conscious use of instruments of labor law, at least until they are not completely dismantled. Based on these elements, it is possible to create a new process of subjectivation as a base component of a constellation of autonomous organizations. Only if the organized structures of antagonist unions are put at the service of autonomous structures that organize themselves and are born from the struggles (without any suggestion to represent the avant-garde), can we then discuss how to network such experiences and build a representation in terms of flows, that is both modular and flexible, decentralized but coordinated. There may be new features in the otherwise obsolete structures, and/or new forms of self-organization outside them: functions and forms of self-organization able to foster active participation of precarious people, thanks to the organization of cultural and recreational events, in which they rediscover the pleasure of new forms of aggregation: fluid and creative subjectivity that might lead to a recompositive imaginary and recompositive practices.

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NOTES 1. See J. M. Keynes, 1936. 2. See M. Castells, 1996. 3. The first debate on these topics starts from A. Fumagalli, 2008 and it will be reprised by the Charter of knowledge-workers rights (2009). 4. C. Marazzi, 2005, 117. 5. Most the following information derives from the Wikipedia lemma “Precarity,” collectively written by various exponents of the Mayday process. Some other references are Chaiworkers Crew (2001), Spazzali-Tedesco (2002), Romano, (2004), M. Tarì, I. Vanni (2005), Fumagalli (2003, 2011, 2013), Foti (2004, 2009). For more details, see the following websites: http://www.chainworkers.org, http://www.euromayday.org, http://www.serpicanaro.com/, http://www.precaria.org. 6. For an historical analysis of San Precario, see van der Linden (2014). 7. Cfr. M. Tarì and I. Vanni, 2005. 8. See Il Manifesto Bio-Pop del Precariato Metroradicale, 2004. See also “The Middlesex declaration of Europe’s Precariat,” 2004 9. R. Amato, 2005. 10. See http://www.precaria.org/stati-generali-2010.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aa.Vv. 2004. Il Manifesto Bio-Pop del Precariato Metroradicale, in Globalproject: Il Fascino Indiscreto del Precariato 1.6. ———. 2004. “The Middlesex declaration of Europe’s Precariat.” http:// www.euromayday.org/2005/middle.php. Amato, Rosaria. 2005. “Abbiamo creato Serpica Naro in 7 giorni e con pochi soldi,” Repubblica, February 26, 2005. Castells Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I., Oxford: Blackwell, second edition. Chainworkers Crew. 2001. ChainWorkers. Lavorare nelle cattedrali del consumo, MAP, DeriveApprodi, Roma. Foti, Alex. 2009. Anarchy in the EU. Movimenti pink, black, green in europa e grande recessione, Agenzia X, Milano. ———. 2004. Precarity and n/european Identity: an interview with Alex Foti (ChainWorkers). http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precarity-and-neuropean-identity-interviewalex-foti-chainworkers. Fumagalli, Andrea. 2013. “Cognitive Biocapitalism, the Precarity Trap, and Basic Income: Post-Crisis Perspectives,” in García Agustín Óscar, Ydesen Christian (eds.), Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Common and its Powers (New York: Peter Lang): 57–82. ———. 2003. “Considerazioni sparse sulla precarizzazione del mondo del lavoro.” http:// www.cub.it/htm-mayday/2004-AF2-cambiamenti-sulle-trasformaz.htm. ———. 2011. “La condizione precaria come paradigma biopolitico,” in F.Chicchi, E.Leonardi (a cura di), Lavoro in frantumi. Condizione precaria, nuovi conflitti e regime neoliberista (Verona: Ombre Corte): 63–79. ———. 2008. “Trasformazione del lavoro e trasformazioni del welfare: precarietà e welfare del comune (commonfare) in Europa” in Paolo Leon, Riccardo Realfonso (a cura di), L’Economia della precarietà (Roma: Manifestolibri): 159–74. Fumagalli, Andrea, and Cristina Morini. 2011. “Life put to work: towards a theory of lifevalue,” Ephemera, vol. 10, 234–52. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Palgrave Mcmillan. Mayday Network Milano. 2009. Charter of knowledge-workers rights. http://eipcp.net/n/ 1241170491.

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Marazzi, Christian. 2005. “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico del lavoro. L’ammortamento del corpo macchina,” in Laville J. L., Marazzi C., La Rosa M., Chicchi F. (eds.), Reinventare il lavoro. Roma: Sapere. Mattone, Alice. 2008. “Serpica Naro and the Others. The Media Sociali Experience in Italian Struggles Against Precarity,” in Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 5, no 2: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/706/920. Romano, Zoe. 2004. email, 23 September. di San Precario, Rete. 2011. “Intelligence Precaria, Intelligenza collettiva e precarietà. Manifesto e carta dei diritti dei lavoratori della conoscenza,” in Quaderni di San Precario n. 2, Milano, April: http://quaderni.sanprecario.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Q2-Intelligenza-collettiva-e-precarieta.pdf. Tarì, Marcello, and Ilaria Vanni. 2005. “On the Life and Deeds of San Precario, Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives.” Fibreculture Journal 5. Tedesco, Gino, and Tommaso Spazzali. 2002. Mi fletto ma non mi piego. Come orientarsi nella giungla della flessibilità, MAP, DeriveApprodi. van der Linden, Marcel. 2014. “San Precario: A New Inspiration for Labor Historians,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11, no. 1, 9.

Chapter Two

The Case of the Braga Stadium Work, Spectacle, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century José Neves

Buildings which reflect the expansion of spectator events as well as the growth of sports, stadiums proliferated around the world during the twentieth century, to the extent that nowadays it is not possible to identify their exact number. 1 The bibliography produced in the areas of the social sciences and humanities has not kept pace with this proliferation. It is true that there are studies developing a sociological or historical analysis of stadiums, as well as publications prepared by architects which involve contributions by the social and human sciences. 2 However, when compared to other themes related to sports, such as violence and hooliganism, sports architecture has not been a primary subject of research. This chapter aims to contribute towards remedying this situation. Without intending to provide a summary of the trajectory of stadiums during the contemporary age, this text shall provide a case study touching upon their history and examining their current circumstances. The study will focus on the new stadium in Braga, in northern Portugal, which was built for the 2004 UEFA European Football Championship and was designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura, a Portuguese architect who was awarded the 2011 Pritzker Prize, often called the Nobel Prize for architecture. 3 During my research, I consulted the architectural plans and project, visited the building, and analyzed discourses about the stadium. In the case of the Braga stadium, as well as in the case of some other buildings that have become global architectural icons, various types of discourses were set in motion: the stadium was the subject of great media attention, ranging from Japanese archi25

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tecture magazines to Portuguese sports publications; it became a tourist attraction and won prizes in the field of engineering; it caught the eye of the then mayor of the city of Braga, Mesquita Machado, as well as the current president of the United States of America, Barack Obama. This chapter is organized in three sections. The first section analyses the building and the discourses which lauded—and continue to laud—this stadium. The second section of the article relates an analysis of Souto Moura’s project with the emergence of a new type of stadium. Finally, the third section examines the expectations and desires associated with the praising discourses vis-à-vis the Braga Stadium. 4 THE BRAGA STADIUM The first element worthy of note regarding the discourses produced in relation to the Braga stadium is the fact that the building is almost always lauded. Among the various arguments characterizing such praise, three are more frequent. Two of them concern the work and the architect (one could call them the ecological argument and the technological argument) and a third argument refers to the spectators (which can be called the democratic argument). Let us start with the ecological and the technological arguments. Architecture, Ecology, and Technology Discourses related to the Braga stadium often praise the way in which the work blends with the surrounding landscape and it has been argued that the stadium is a singular example of a harmonious relationship between man and the surrounding environment. According to most of the discourses analyzed, the building maintains a dialogue with the territory and does not simply impose itself on it: it opens up to the valley, at one end, and is positioned right in front of the cutting face of an erstwhile quarry, at the other end. As a result of this condition, the Braga stadium is considered to be an unusual stadium from the environmental point of view, an element that mediates between what is artificial and what is natural, attenuating the line that demarcates these conditions. 5 This ecological argument is often complemented by a second argument, referring to the innovative nature of the technological solutions adopted during the project. In this context, the most frequently highlighted example of innovation is that of the cables that criss-cross above the pitch, joining—and supporting—the two canopies which cover the central stands. The design of this solution is cited by architectural critics as proof of the benefits that can result from a virtuous relationship between architecture and engineering, the work often being presented as a sublime expression of the possibilities sci-

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Figure 2.1. Braga Stadium. Source: Paulo Catrica.

ence offers mankind, enhancing mankind’s capacity to engage in revolutionary feats over nature. 6 In other words, most of the discourses related to the stadium present it as a building that makes ecological sense and simultaneously incorporates technological sophistication. Some discourses emphasize, above all, the ecological meaning, affirming that the “new” is a continuation of the “old”—this is what happens, for example, in discourses which state that the cables uniting the canopies reflect the design of ancient Inca bridges or even that their structure mimics the intertwining warp and weft of looms. 7 Other discourses accentuate the rupture between the “new” and the “old,” this being the meaning that can be distilled from Eduardo Souto Moura’s own words when, with regard to the project, he stated: “Nature must perforce exist, consenting to our violations,” a verse from a poem by a Portuguese poet, Herberto Hélder, which also goes on to say: “And poems do not transcribe the world, but rather they rival the world.” 8 It can be said that these ecological and technological meanings are expressed in discourses about the work but also in discourses about the architect responsible for the project, identified as an auteur and not just an archi-

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Figure 2.2. Braga Stadium. Source: Paulo Catrica.

tect. As in the case of what happened with the trajectories of figures such as Rem Koolhaas, Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, or Oscar Niemeyer, Eduardo Souto Moura’s trajectory tends to be described as the manifestation of an author architecture (also known as starchitecture)—with the architect’s characteristic hallmarks, this being understood to be a type of work that distinguishes itself from the dominant practice in the professional field of architecture. 9 The discourses proceed to make this differentiation by displacing the figure of the architect-auteur into two directions. Firstly, by supposing that his design enshrines the memory of a time that has not yet been fully contaminated by the vices of the present, the figure of the architect-auteur is moved towards a past age: aligned with the pre-modern elements of Inca bridges or traditional Minho looms, Souto Moura’s designs would reflect the architect’s proximity to an artisanal mindset, immune to mechanization and the mass quantification of the world, the territory, and humans, uncorrupted by the modernizing dynamics of the contemporary age. Secondly, the discourses tend to shift the figure of the architect towards a future age: being an expres-

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sion of the creativity of someone who has not yet been corrupted by contemporary machinations, Souto Moura’s designs are likewise linked to technicalscientific engineering knowledge, which allows him to intervene more precisely in reality. In short, the discourses praising the architect of the Braga stadium explain Souto Moura’s traits by affiliating his architecture with a romantic inspiration, which simultaneously incorporates a technological aspect. It is as though, on the one hand, the discourses associate the architect with a stereotypical figure of an artisan, one shaping his own work, investing it with the formal care that transforms it into something that cannot be reproduced, being aloof from the mechanisms and functionalities that weigh down the professional routine of civil construction. On the other hand, it is as though the discourses also emphasize Souto Moura’s engineering skills—which end up by being a modern certification of the aforesaid romantic inspiration—and simultaneously distance him from an artisanal métier, now viewed as professionals whose technical skills are limited to a pre-technological world. Architecture and Democracy Among the reasons cited in the discourses praising the Stadium, the ecological and technological arguments are often supplemented by a third main argument, regarding the building’s democratic nature. But what exactly is meant here by “democratic nature”? According to most of the discourses analyzed, the Braga stadium is democratic because its configuration—just two stands symmetrically arranged along the sides of the pitch, facing each other—would place all spectators on an equal footing, unlike what happens in the vast majority of stadiums, where stands extend behind the goals, creating orbicular or rectangular stadiums. In this understanding of the stadium as a democratic building it is possible to discern the development of two concepts of democracy. According to the first concept, Souto Moura’s work is democratic because by placing all the spectators on an equal footing it annuls any populist vocation evident in various other stadiums. As per a Spanish architecture critic and professor, Jaime Cervera, the elimination of the stands behind the goals eradicates the figure of the mass spectator, who, arrayed at the head of the stadium, and as unconditional fans bereft of a capacity of reasoning, only served to legitimize and frame the figure of the supreme leader. While in other stadiums the profile of this leader could be defined against a backdrop reflecting multitudes, no such backdrop exists in the Braga stadium. 10 In the footsteps of such criticism, democracy is to be understood as being against a given idea of populism. In a second way of conceiving it, democracy is instead chiefly seen as the culmination of a political process to combat socioeconomic inequalities. Ac-

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cording to this interpretative tendency, Souto Moura’s building is democratic insofar as it expresses a desire for social justice. How is this desire expressed? According to some discourses—for example that by the current president of the USA, Barack Obama 11—, the Braga Stadium can be qualified as democratic because, by leaving the area at the two ends of the field open, it allows people without the necessary resources to acquire a ticket to still see the playing field from outside the stadium. However, most of the discourses indicating that an idea of social justice served to inspire Souto Moura—such as the discourse by Mesquita Machado, the mayor of Braga between 1976 and 2013 12 —attribute a democratic nature to the building because, by placing all the spectators who enter the stadium at an identical viewing point, it ensures that less privileged economic groups and classes are seated at the site best suited to watch a football match. In short, irrespective of the conception of democracy in play, the discourses lauding the new stadium in Braga consider it to be a virtuous building not just because it establishes a more harmonious relationship with the landscape of the surrounding territory, or for being the result of great technological sophistication. But also for promoting a democratic culture of spectacles, impervious to propaganda of a political-ideological nature or the mechanisms of exclusion typical of sports commercialization. THE BRAGA STADIUM AND A NEW TYPE OF STADIUM As has been mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Braga stadium and the discourses shaping it can be better understood in the context of a broader process of transformation that has been taking place in sports architecture. Delimiting a space for the performance, the way in which a stadium divides its interior and relates to the city around it proved essential for the creation of the modern figure of the football spectator. The stadium allowed spectators to enter into it, selecting them from among the city’s population, but simultaneously banned access to the playing field, which was reserved for players. However, if the stadium is, today as in the past, a decisive element in the transformation of sports into a public spectacle, more recently this operation has been assuming new characteristics, which are worthy of particular attention. 13 These new characteristics—which would have emerged indirectly, with the remodeling of older stadiums, as well as directly, with the destruction or lack of use of these old stadiums and the construction of new buildings to substitute for them—should lead to contemplating the construction of a new type of football stadium and not simply the construction of new stadiums. It is possible to underscore three aspects among the most recent changes: the fact that there are almost only seated places and chairs in new stadiums; the

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absence of the running track, which in various older stadiums can be seen between the stands and the pitch and which has practically disappeared with the new type of stadium; and, finally, a reduction of the visual preponderance of concrete and the growing relevance of glass or materials that, as highlighted by authors like Hal Foster, have a suggestive effect in terms of lightness, as is the case with fiber wool. 14 These and some other novel aspects have been emphasized in the praise of this new type of stadium, especially sustaining the idea that it is more respectful of spectators and the city. Let us start by looking at the question of spectators. Not only is their comfort said to increase because these stadiums only have stands with seats, but it is also said that spectators at these new stadiums likewise benefit from better visibility: a more panoramic view, ensured by stands that are higher than they are deeper, as a result of the elimination of the running track. As for the allegation that the new stadium has a better relationship with the city, it is based on the smaller expanse of concrete on the stadium’s façades. This change lightens the building’s visual impact on the urban landscape, while allowing the work to achieve an artistic status, i.e., the stadium is no longer an object simply aimed at producing sports spectacles—and hence alien to the urban fabric—but it could also be an artistic piece benefitting the city. According to the discourses analyzed in the first section of this article, the Braga stadium is part of the emerging context of the new type of stadium. It embodies an architecture that is less subject to commercial constraints and is more respectful of the city and spectators. As we have seen, the building has been lauded for the harmonious manner in which it blends with the site and the solution of the overhead cables reflects the aforesaid effect of lightness. Similarly, the reference to the visual impact of Souto Moura’s design presents the Braga stadium as a work that helps make sports more democratic. Plus, the stadium allows all spectators to watch the match from the best possible viewpoint: a central stand. Departing from the case of the Braga stadium, the following pages examine the new stadium architecture and some of the main arguments presuming it to be less determined by commercial interests and more beneficial for spectators and the city. One can begin by examining the possibility of instituting a site on the margins of global market dynamics. Local Heritage as Global Commodity, Artistic Autonomy as Professional Labor While local and national aspects sometimes prove to be reasons for resistance to the mechanisms of internationalization typical of what is known as economic globalization, on other occasions they seem to be factors for this same globalization. During the course of the expansion of the global sports indus-

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try, the organization of sporting spectacles has often mobilized a mindset that, in the footsteps of Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, can be classified as romantic. 15 This mobilization is executed in various ways, for example by drawing sports closer to an imagined authentic experience, conferring a primal and non-commodified aspect to football, as suggested in the opening clip marking the television broadcasts of the 2014 Football World Cup. Made by FIFA, the clip begins by showing a dark-skinned child playing with a ball on a tin roof, high on a hill, in a slum in Rio de Janeiro; and only then does the camera move to the interior of the stadium. In other cases, a similar effect of romanticizing sports spectacles had resulted from football being attributed a disruptive role in relation to some functional public sites. This is what happens in a TV advertisement for a sports equipment brand, presented as a news report showing the arrival of a Brazilian football team at a French airport during the 1998 World Cup. An informal “ball play” begins among the players of the team inside the airport itself, which disturbs the bureaucratic organization typical of a site such as the airport. 16 In line with these examples of articulation between the commodified and non-commodified features, combining global dynamics with local processes, the fact that Souto Moura’s stadium is said to be integrated into its setting— relating to the site and the surrounding landscape and not being closed unto itself, as is the case with a circus tent for example, which is indifferent to the site where it is installed—can itself also be seen as being in conformance with a global sports industry. But our doubts concerning the hypothesis that a territorial space is able to escape global market dynamics are coupled with another type of reservation, associated with the hypothesis—also voiced in discourses praising the Braga stadium—that professional activities can break with processes that commodify human activities. This hypothesis of breaking away is often called artistic autonomy and, in the case of architecture, it is reflected in the consecration of the aforementioned figure of the architect-auteur. Souto Moura’s consecration as an architect-auteur can be understood both in the international context of honing a universal canon of architecture as well as in the Portuguese context of the growing number of graduates with degrees in architecture. 17 Combined with the growth in construction and the ‘massification’ of urban landscapes, this has frequently entailed the idea that an architect’s creative autonomy could invert the intense pace of civil construction companies. In the field of architecture in Portugal, this idea of a loss of creativity in architectural practices was evident in various considerations regarding stadiums built for the Euro 2004 championship. Despite equally positive references to Manuel Salgado’s architectural design for the Dragão stadium in the city of Porto, the Braga stadium was the great exception

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celebrated by Portuguese architectural critics. In the words of one of these critics, also an architect himself, Manuel Graça Dias, all the stadiums built for the Euro 2004 championship were proof of an “architecture of franchising,” with the exception of the stadium in Braga. 18 The assumption that Souto Moura’s artistic autonomy could defy commercial mechanisms also merits critical examination. On the one hand, as has already been pointed out by the sociologist Frederico Ágoas, it must be noted that, while designing the Braga stadium, the architect would have above all sought to comply with a set of norms instituted more or less formally in the context of the process of commodification of professional football. 19 Souto Moura described his project thus: “Not knowing much about football I deduced that I had to create a green stage for 22 people and 3 referees, with 105 cameras filming everything to be broadcast around the world, the rights for which were worth millions of euros. I essentially had to create a television studio. And the best television studio is that American image of the vertical stadiums of boxing matches, with light from above, everything being concentrated there and affording the best images possible for broadcasts.” 20 In light of these statements, while Souto Moura’s stadium is the result of an author’s will to break with the context in which it produces, it must also be considered to likewise have been subject to commercial constraints, just like the works designed by architects whose artistic autonomy is being affected by the increasing proletarianization of its workforce. On the other hand, it is important to mention that the very idea of an artistic practice impervious to the market economic dynamics often ends up being positively integrated into these very same dynamics. Just like they integrate aspects not characteristic of their scale, such as local elements, the global dynamics of “commodification” also seem to encompass cultural activities characterized by not being part of the cycle to reproduce capital. This is what often happens with distinctive hallmark architecture by auteurs. Their mobilization in the context of real estate projects for urban renewal— and in Portugal the case of Souto Moura is particularly elucidative—is an example of the growing economic tendency to integrate into its process what usually goes beyond its own nature. 21 In other words, commercial dynamics themselves sometimes endorse anti-commercial demands, as exemplified by a sports brand advertisement that tried to sell a football club shirt under the motto “for love of the shirt.” 22 In short, while there are reasons for friction between local and global aspects as well as between artistic and economic elements, they do not necessarily end in drastic discord. While most discourses portray the stadium in Braga as an exceptional work, it is possible to affirm that the relationship between exceptions and the norm encompasses differentiation as well as complementarity. The identity attributed to a building for its sensitivity to the site where it is built is what partially makes it break away from global trends,

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but this identity is what also makes such a building an icon of a global circuit of architectural culture. It is possible to conclude that more than being the product of a genuinely local setting—a kind of terroir—the stadium is part of a global dynamic that produces combining differences. While being instituted as an artistic work that contributes towards the cultural enrichment of the city in which it is located, the stadium has also become an element adding value to global cultural and touristic circuits. Thus, what is an artistic heritage when viewed on a local scale proves to be a cultural commodification when viewed on a global scale, as Hal Foster suggested with regard to the Olympic stadium built for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. 23 Similarly, art simultaneously proves to conform to and break away from the process of the “commodification” of culture. Democratic Variations The first section of this article mentioned that discourses praising Souto Moura’s project often viewed the fact that the stadium has just two stands as the result of a democratic decision, and not the effect of economic and commercial pressure. The reasons for this interpretation can be found in an understanding of the processes of globalization and commercialization, the limits of which have just been demonstrated. But it can also be found, as mentioned in the first part of this article, in the very idea of democracy mobilized in these discourses. It is this latter question that will be examined now. One can begin by seeing what Souto Moura himself observed in an interview with regard to the Braga stadium: “Nowadays, football is a spectacle, just like cinema, theatre and television, hence the decision to only have two stands. Nowadays nobody can bear to see a work by Peter Handke with a zoom from behind the goalposts.” 24 This statement suggests that this work by Souto Moura was influenced by the homogeneous effects of the process whereby culture is transformed into commercial spectacle. It is possible to speak of a homogenization of culture when an architect attributes a similar nature to different cultural activities, in this case proceeding to depict spectators as uniform figures, idealized as someone whose profile is indifferent to the specific nature of the activity being observed, no matter if it is Handke’s theatre or Cristiano Ronaldo’s football. Furthermore, Souto Moura’s architectural project also uniformizes culture by contributing towards uniformizing the types of football spectators. This happens, namely, by limiting observation of the match to the view afforded by the central stands. The discourses praising the Braga stadium do not question this as a limitation and instead highlight democratic qualities in the architectural decision to opt for two central stands. Discourses with an underlying understanding of democracy as being anti-populism take it for

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granted that there is an angle of vision “closer to the objectivity of the performances of actors” (in the words of Jaime Cervera, the aforementioned critic). They do this ignoring that there are different views about what is greater and lesser objectivity, let alone questioning the universality of any pretension to objectivity. But this same unawareness can also be seen in the discourses in which democracy is viewed, above all, as a criticism of socioeconomic inequality. In fact, here it is possible to detect a longstanding trend and cite at length a note written by a Portuguese communist leader, Álvaro Cunhal, in the 1950s, with regard to the National Stadium. In this note we can see that the idea of “a more favorable angle to view the game” was already present: “Consider the National Stadium in Lisbon and the beautiful architectural layout: the marathon entrance, just before the grandstand, with the space opening up towards the surrounding landscape. While the maximum pleasure of the ambience is partaken by spectators installed in the central stands, the bulk of the spectators are relegated to the two ends, where the view of the game is not so favorable. Also consider the stadium in Lausanne, where the Football World Cup finals were held in 1954. The layout of the seats is precisely the opposite of the stadium in Lisbon. From the end the stands rise progressively along one side and the other of the field until the middle of the site, thus providing the vast majority of the spectators a favorable angle of vision to watch the game. The social reality evident at the stadium in Lisbon has an anti-democratic meaning, it reflects the arrogance and the privilege of the dictatorial powers because the architecture was conceived for their pleasure and pomp. The social reality present in the Lausanne stadium is objectively a democratic consideration of respect for the interest of the masses as a priority, even though on a subjective concrete plane it is also a sign of financial interest, by increasing the number of seats in order to increase revenues.” 25 EMANCIPATION, PRODUCTION, AND CONSUMPTION The first section of this article identified the main elements of the discourses praising the stadium in Braga, while the second provided a critical analysis of the limits of this discourse, to the extent of critically examining the exceptional nature of the work and the author as well as the democratic nature of the project. This third and final section will not focus on the distance between the laudatory discourse and the object being lauded, but will instead analyze the significance of this discourse independently of its analytical inadequacy. We will argue that the fact that the discourses lauding Souto Moura’s project present the new stadium as an exception to the norms of globalization and commodification is partially due to a yearning. A yearning to go beyond an economy in which the division of work identifies the desire to produce with

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Figure 2.3. Jamor National Stadium. Source: Paulo Catrica

specialized tasks and their respective professional identities. We will also argue that discourses lauding Souto Moura’s architectural project as a democratization of spectatorship reflect a particular concept of democracy. In short, we will now discuss the idea of producer and the idea of spectator at stake in the praise of the Braga stadium and of the new types of stadiums. The De-industrialized Producer The discourses highlighting the exceptional nature of the stadium and the architect who designed the project can be seen to reflect the actual dynamics of the incorporation of architecture and local spaces in processes that “commodify” work and globalize the territory. But they can also be viewed as proof of a desire to escape from these very same processes. Consider the relationship established between the figure of the architectauteur and the world of craftsmanship and engineering. While the discourses analyzed tended to “humanize” the architect, reducing him to the miniaturized scale typical of the work of artisans (the charm of his atelier, his meticulous attention to detail, small projects), they also sought to present the archi-

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Figure 2.4. Pontoise Stadium. Source: © Service des sports / Ville de Lausanne

tect as someone who learns and handles the materials used to make the work, and not just someone drawing plans on paper. Simultaneously they subjected artisanal production to the opposite process, drawing it closer to the scale of architectural work, amplifying the impact of what is small, amplifying to a global scale the enchanting effect of what is minimal, exploring the possibility of an alliance between large and small. In other words, the discourses do not simply make the artisan abandon the studio and convert to a factory-like worldview, but rather have the artisan addressing the world—and not just his small country—from his studio. As for associating the architect-auteur with the field of engineering, while the discourses sought to have the figure of the architect benefit from the prestige of sophisticated technical knowledge, associated with the figure of engineers during contemporary processes of economic modernization, they also ended up by bringing the world of engineers closer to the artistic reputation of architecture. This proximity associated engineers with the world of producers, marking their distance in relation to common workers, who are irremediably viewed as being simple cogs in the economic wheel. In the praise for the technologically innovative aspects of the Braga stadium, the most highlighted elements are the aforementioned cables, which mark the discovery by engineering of a formula that makes it possible to exert the

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greatest possible force with the least possible effort. Spanning a gap of 200 meters with a lightness that is in stark contrast to the mass of the quarry wall and the canopies, they prove a capacity for sensitivity that contrasts with the idea of brute force associated with the condition of workers. In this triangulation of the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, and engineering, it is possible to discern a progressive discourse that, aimed above all at the figure of the architect, ends up by promoting and participating in a broader movement of redefining the roles that each plays in the general economy. While these redefinitions can be understood by focusing on the particularities of each of the aforesaid professional fields, they share a common feature: the desire to escape from a mass labor practice, marked by the repetition of tasks and disciplined by strict time frames, as it is historically associated with the figure of those industrial workers disciplinarily tied to the production line. The discourses analyzed seek in large measure to demarcate the architect from such industrial workers, to this end depicting Souto Moura in the role of an auteur and distinguishing him from the mass of architects. Refuting the “proletarianization” of the profession and the industrialization of its activities, the discourses seek to identify the architect as the figure of a producer only by means of the sophistication of engineers and artisanal inspiration, never resorting to the image of the strength of workers. This is also the case with the way in which artisanal activities are redefined, while likewise distancing them from the condition of workers. While the new figure of the artisan shares with the industrial worker the fact of using the hands as a work tool and the aim to see its products circulating around the world, just like merchandises produced by industrial labor, he nonetheless takes care to ensure that, in the process of globalization currently underway, his touch is not affected by the pace of machines. The artisan values the fact that the key to his possible global success lies in the antiindustrial and authentically local aspect of his work. Finally, a similar demarcation of the industrial worker’s condition characterizes the redefinition of the world of engineering. By approaching architecture, the new figure of the engineer seeks to acquire the artistic legitimacy it lacks owing to its proximity to factory floors. In short, with a strong ecological and technological emphasis, mobilized respectively by citing the mindset of an age prior to the industrial period as well as a post-industrial imaginary, the discourses related to the Braga stadium also express a desire to escape from processes leading to the “massification” of the territory and human activities, which have marked the contemporary age as a result of industrialization. This implied the uniformization of space—owing to growing urbanization and an urbanism that uprights the interests of civil construction—and the discipline of time—with the “com-

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modification” of production, in the form of work, and with the habits of industrial work being extended to various domains of production. The Individual Spectator We shall now discuss transformations related to the idea of the spectator. It has already been seen that the different types of discourses lauding the Braga stadium highlight the building’s democratic nature, presupposing the existence of a position that is best for watching the game. This is the naturalization of the spectator condition. This effect of naturalization can be clarified by comparing the laudatory discourses on the Braga Stadium and other discourses. Some analytical approaches to the architecture of stadiums, namely those supported by ethnography, have highlighted the plurality of fan cultures and the subjectivity of the spectator’s point of view. One can refer, first of all, to the work developed by sociologist Anthony King. 26 In his seminal study about transformations in the political economy of English football, suggestively entitled The End of Terraces: The Transformation of English Football, this English sociologist was sensitive to the voices and gestures of those who, in older English stadiums, occupied the standing areas behind the goalposts: the terraces. In the course of his research, King accompanied the protests of groups of fans against the abolition of this area, decreed during the reforms of professional English football, in the context of problems with hooliganism during the 1980s and the emergence of a liberal political and economic culture in England during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is important to ascertain the relevance of a study such as the one by King for this article. By focusing on an area of the stadium where the game was watched while standing, King’s work located a site of an undetermined identity, situated between those who see and those who do, inviting us to question the limits of the dichotomy that has partially guided commodification policies as well as cultural criticism, the dichotomy between those who watch and those who perform. Discourses lauding the new type of stadium tend to represent spectators in older stadiums as being mass spectators, clustered together in the standing areas or on continuous benches, with the discourses comparing their drawbacks with the virtues of the individual spectators in the new stadiums, entitled to individual seats; but an analysis such as the one by King sheds new light on the question of the proximity between spectators in older stadiums and the players, depicting the figure of a spectator who does not conform to the dichotomy action/contemplation. That is, someone who is less attracted by achieving a point of view deemed to be an objective one and instead cultivating a more partisan position, as though defining the condition of a spectator who is a fan and is not neutral.

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Hence, what is most essential to note is that King’s work reveals the plurality of fan cultures, which the anthropologist Christian Bromberger had already examined in an important study. In effect, we refer to King’s study while not demanding the preservation or re-establishment of the terraces. We are not concerned with the preservation or resumption of cultural practices deemed to be typical of certain social groups or certain historic contexts. In truth, we do not discard the fact that the new type of stadium seeks to transmit a culture of spectacle distinct from a culture of masculine violence present in the older stadiums, in the English case partially associated with the standing areas. Nor are we oblivious to the propaganda rituals that older stadiums allowed, with choreographed scenes of power staged by different political elites. 27 What showcasing the plurality of fan cultures does is enable us to retain the particularism endorsed by those who assume that nobody would want to watch the match from anywhere other than the central stands. Such an assumption reflects not a democratic idea of the spectacle but instead an idea of democracy particularly determined by history, society, and politics. ENDING NOTES This article was able to identify a set of transformations in the context of sports architecture, namely by analyzing the discourses that influence the experience of new types of football stadiums. While it is true that, when critically analyzed, those discourses reveal the biased nature of the knowledge they seek to develop, their interest goes beyond this circumstance. And they can be considered not just for the veracity of their descriptions but also for the desires that these descriptions express. More specifically, grasping such desires can help us to better understand some changes that nowadays, in a context of the globalization and commodification of economy and culture, involve the figures of the producer and the spectator—or, in other words, the economic and the cultural, doing and seeing, the culture of production and the consumption economy. And it may also encourage us to identify a form of political relationship that social and human sciences can establish with the subjects that are the object of their inquiry. Such political relationship means enlarging the autonomy that any idea of democracy should guarantee for all and anyone of us. It is by recognizing such autonomy—and not by affirming artistic values against commodification values or local interests against global interests—that sociological analysis can animate the hypothesis of a democracy of production. This autonomy is also what makes it possible to contemplate a democracy of the gaze, which does not have to be rooted either in the popular figure of mass spectator, characteristic of older stadiums, nor in the liberal figure of individual spectator, promoted by new stadiums. Reaf-

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firming a conviction of the Portuguese revolutionary period of 1974–1975, a time when the young architect Eduardo Souto Moura was involved in programmes for participatory architecture, we can say that democracy is either democratically built or it is not democracy. NOTES 1. See the database organized by Deproft, Amadò, and Spampinato: www.world stadiums.com. 2. Michelle Provoost (ed.), The Stadium: The Architecture of Mass Sport, (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007); Sybille Frank and Silk Steets (eds.), Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment, (London, Routledge, 2010); Rod Sheard, Robert Powell, Peter Cook, and Patrick Bingham-Hall, The Stadium—Architecture for the New Global Culture (Sidney: Periplus, 2005). 3. www.pritzkerprize.com/. 4. The discourses being analyzed have a dual significance: insofar as they are discourses about the stadium they can be considered to be bibliographic material which has inspired this research, in a more or less significant manner; insofar as they influence ways of using or contemplating the building in question—i.e., insofar as they are part of the stadium’s human and social experience—these discourses themselves also constitute sources of analysis. 5. As an example, see the discourse by a Portuguese architecture firm, Cultour, which organizes visits with a view to publicizing contemporary Portuguese architecture. One of the itineraries the company offers focuses on the theme of “Souto Moura in the Minho Region” and the promotional material reads thus: “Sometimes architecture, in perfect harmony with programs, landscapes, memories and history, is capable of creating spaces with a soul, magical spaces. We shall visit the Santa Maria do Bouro Heritage Hotel, at the heart of the most splendid Minho landscapes, where Eduardo Souto Moura astutely reduced his intervention to let the site’s soul speak. Two other projects by Souto Moura await us in Braga, the Carandá Cultural Mart and the Municipal Football Stadium. . . . The Stadium, built from scratch for the Euro 2004 Championship, blends perfectly with an erstwhile quarry, to host large crowds on match days.” “Souto Moura in Minho,” accessed February 3, 2015. http://cultour.com.pt/tours/ souto-moura-no-minho. 6. Praise of this enhanced capacity is particularly emphasized in comments concerning the structural project. Overseen by an engineer named Rui Furtado, the project was awarded the 2005 SECIL Civil Engineering Prize. It was also nominated as the Portuguese candidate for two international awards in the field of engineering viz. the FIB (Federation Internationale du Béton) and IABSE (International Association for Bridges and Structural Engineering) awards. 7. Antonio Esposito and Giovanni Leoni, Eduardo Souto Moura (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2003), 401. 8. “La naturalidad de las cosas—Entrevista a Eduardo Souto Moura,” in El Croquis 124 (2005): 11. 9. Manuel Villaverde Cabral and Vera Borges, “Muitos são os Chamados, Poucos os Escolhidos,” in Entre a Vocação e a Profissão de Arquitecto. Profissão e Vocação, edited by Ana Delicado, Vera Borges, and Steffen Dix (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2010), 147–77. Also see: Manuel Villaverde Cabral and Vera Borges, Profissão: Arquitecto/a, ICS Report available on the website of the Portuguese Order of Architects, 2006 (http://www. arquitectos.pt/documentos/1164322770I3pQH2qr9Wg02JR3.pdf). Also see: Pedro Gadanho, Arquitectura em Público (Porto: Dafne, 2010); Magali-Sarfati Larson, Behind the Post Modern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 10. Jaime Cervera, “Crisol de Roca—sobre el nuevo estadio de fútbol de Braga,” in Arquitectura—Revista del Colégio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid 337 (July–Sept 2004): 68–69. 11. Speech by Barack Obama at the 2011 Pritzker Prize award ceremony, accessed February 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTk3EhB0bwI.

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12. Mesquita Machado cited in A Bola, 23/12/2003. 13. See: Anthony King, The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 2001. 14. Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011) 15. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 16. Accessed February 3, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhRlwUPQ5HU. 17. From 740 in 1975 to 8121 in 1998 (Cabral and Borges, op.cit., 154). 18. Manuel Graça Dias, “Intervenção e invenção,” in Em Jogo/On Side, edited by Albano Silva Pereira (Coimbra: Centro de Artes Visuais/Ministério da Cultura, 2004), 75–77. 19. Frederico Ágoas, “‘Que de longe parecem moscas’: contributo para uma arqueologia do estádio de futebol,” in A Época do Futebol—o Jogo visto pelas Ciências Sociais, edited by José Neves and Nuno Domingos (Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 2004), 263–303. 20. Eduardo Souto Moura cited in “O Braga de Souto de Moura,” Expresso, November 29, 2003. 21. See Souto Moura’s involvement in a real estate renovation project promoted by Eastbanc in one of Lisbon’s historic neighborhoods (http://www.eastbanc.pt/content/pr percentC3 percentADncipe-real-est percentC3 percentA1-renascer-com-programa-da-eastbanc, accessed February 3, 2015). Or, also, Souto Moura being hired by Portugal’s leading provider of electricity, EDP, to build one of the most controversial (for ecological and landscape reasons) energy projects in Portugal, the dam at Tua (http://www.valetua.pt/barragem-souto-moura/, accessed February 3, 2015) . 22. João Rodrigues and José Neves, “Do Amor à Camisola: Notas Críticas da Economia Política do Futebol,” in A Época do Futebol—o Jogo Visto pelas Ciências Sociais, op.cit., 165–229. 23. Hal Foster, op.cit., x. 24. Eduardo Souto Moura cited in “O Braga de Souto de Moura,” op.cit. 25. Álvaro Cunhal, A arte, o artista e a sociedade (Lisboa: Caminho, 1996), 38. 26. Anthony King, op.cit. 27. See: André Gounot, Denis Jallat, and Benoît Caritey (eds.), Les politiques au stade— étude comparée des manifestations sportives du XXie au XXIe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007).

Chapter Three

The Common and Its Potential Creativity Post-Crisis Perspectives Óscar García Agustín

The initiative Occupy Together provides information and material to increase engagement in the Occupy Movement. Within this movement, the Occupy Design is a grassroots project that connects designers and on-the-ground demonstrators with the aim of creating freely available visual tools around a common graphic language, to unite the 99 percent. 1 The project arose in San Francisco in 2011 and was initiated by a team of designers, programmers, artists, and demonstrators. It aims to create (infographic, logistical) signs to support the protests through the creation of a new imaginary of capitalism, and a resistance capable of graphically representing the new creativity that emerged from the Occupy Movement. As emphasized by Anna Feigenbaum (2011), this sort of movement responds to the demand expressed by David Harvey (2012, 162) to “bring together the creative workers and artists whose talents are so often turned into commercial products under the control of big money power.” Indeed, this movement opposes what Harvey calls the Party of Wall Street, which assumes the command over labor and creative potentials of people. In this case, it is interesting how an activity like design, considered as one of the creative industries, can be used for a completely different purpose than that of the formal economy, and put to the service of the community. Looking at the project Occcupy Design, it is evident that, despite the capitalist expropriation of creativity, it is possible to use creativity to strengthen social relations as well as constitutive and alternative ways of living. To understand how creativity can contribute to reproducing social 43

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relations of domination or to promote new ones, two factors must be taken into consideration. The first is the reinforcement of the capitalist mode of production during the economic crisis, which becomes increasingly centered on immaterial values, among others, creativity. It entails seeing creative industries as one of the main sources of innovation and growth (though not exclusively), and encourages people to use creativity to establish new ways of organizing and cooperating. The second factor is that creative capitalism relies mainly on the expropriation of the common, which at the same time creates a relation of dependence on it. What is at stake is whether the common is exploited to support creative industries, or if it is used to foster alternative ways of living. Occupy Design exemplifies the creative power of the commons to configure new imaginaries against capitalism through social cooperation, and without reproducing the social relations of capitalism. It shows the possibility of exploring an alternative conception of creativity grounded in the common. As highlighted by Hardt and Negri (2009), the capitalist modes of production and accumulation require and make possible the expansion of the common. It implies a tension between autonomy and subordination, between selfvalorization and expropriation (Roggero 2010): The dependency of capitalism on the common opens up the possibilities of different paths seen from post-crisis perspectives, which “refer to scenarios after the crisis and how to deal with them (the possible options) as well as to underline the importance of defining these scenarios” (García Agustín and Ydesen 2013). The postcrisis perspectives can be monopolized by the interest of capital in exploiting the common, but they can also create other scenarios. In the first case, creative capitalism moves towards a mode of production based on clustering, mostly in the cities, to produce untraded externalities or interdependencies. In the second case, the interconnectedness and the potential creativity of the common allow for the production of other forms of life. In this chapter I will begin by presenting the pillars upon which creative capitalism is based. Within this perspective, the only goal of creativity is to drive economic growth and innovation, whilst the common is expropriated through its marketization and individualization. Then I will conceptualize an alternative model in order to show the potential of the common to offer new uses and understandings of creativity, illustrating this with cases. The chapter concludes by arguing that creativity can be put at the service of the democratic project instead of the capitalist one if it is grounded in the right to the city, the precarious multitude as a class composition, and the production of cultural commons.

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POST-CRISIS, POST-FORDISM, AND CREATIVE CAPITALISM As a way out of the economic crisis, creative capitalism soon took prominence as one of the most solid modes of overcoming the crisis and boosting economic growth. In its Creative Economy Report, the UN (2013) underlines the powerful transformative force of the creative economy, being one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, both in terms of income generation, job creation, and export earnings. According to the report, the creative resources produce intangible outputs, which are as real as those of other industries. Therefore, “human creativity and innovation, at both the individual and group levels, are the key drivers of these industries, and have become the true wealth of nations in the twenty-first century” (2013, 15). Creative economy, rather than being merely a sector, is also seen as an economic model which holds a huge potential, since both investments and outputs are intangible. During the economic crisis creative economy was presented as a resilient path to recovery (UN 2010). This is not only applied to developing countries but also to developed countries, including those most affected by the economic crisis. Creative capitalism assumes a leading role from a post-crisis perspective through its establishment often to the detriment of other forms of production. The crisis would have been proof of the need of replacing an economically obsolete model with a model based on the creativity of individuals in the cities. Compared to the desperate and ruinous national economy of Portugal following the crisis, Lisbon is regarded with hope if it is capable of using its cultural possibilities and promoting individual creativity, through small-sized companies in particular. In their analysis, Richard Florida, along with Todd Gabe and Charlotta Mellander (2013), hurried to show how there is a structural change in the U.S. economy characterized by high unemployment rates in working class occupations and lower unemployment rates and fast improvement for the creative class after the recession. If creativity is the key to the growth of the cities, it is also the only way of avoiding the risk of unemployment (which is in contrast to the working class situation). The reinforcement of creative capitalism and its relevance in a post-crisis time is found in all international forums in which the future of the economy is discussed. One of the clearest examples of the shift towards this new model is the speech by the South Korean president Park Geun-hye, at the World Economic Forum in 2014. She acknowledges that the global economy is charting a new course in the post-crisis era. Abandoning the material divide of the Industrial Revolution, the future will be defined by a creative divide in which the extraction of mineral resources is no longer the reason for growth but instead the reason to tap into the human mind. To Park creative economy will generate “less income inequality since anyone with a great idea can live out one’s dreams by starting a business.” This vision of creativity as

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a new post-crisis paradigm would apparently remove the problems of educational inequalities, lack of economic distribution, precarization, or social exclusion, since creativity remains a system in which the production of value relies on individual capabilities (hiding any socioeconomic difference). Although defended by national presidents, creative capitalism is not best produced in the nation states. Due to the economic re-scaling originated by globalization, cities are the drivers of regional development and the locations of creative activities. Thus, creativity is tightly intertwined with territory, and to reflect this connection, the idea of a ‘creative ecosystem’ emerges. Following the model elaborated by INTELI (2011), it is composed of three interlinked components: economy, places, and people. The creative industries represent the core of the economy based on three pillars: the individualization of creativity as the main source of industrial activities; the creation of wealth and growth through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property; and the individual talent (creativity) converging with mass scale (cultural industries) for the use of interactive consumers-citizens. 2 The second component, the urban places, are framed as creative places, understood as spaces for culture and creative production and consumption, which ensure the attraction of capital, resources, and people. Finally, people own their creative talent, and through their artistic skills and personal creativity, accompanied by an entrepreneurial spirit, they foster the creation of innovative businesses. This is what Florida (2013) identifies as the creative workers that can be found within and outside of creative industries. It reveals that cities, as places in which to develop innovative capacities, are more important than firms. The creative ecosystem offers an integrated model (economy-place-people) whose Post-Fordist mode of production is becoming hegemonic and is expanding to small and middle-sized cities. In opposition to Fordist mass production, flexible specialization and global mobility result in the factory no longer being the place of production; it is instead replaced by the cluster. Spatial connectivity and proximity, primarily in the cities, make clustering, as “pools of common knowledge and skills, flexible human resources, relations of trust and a sense of common goals” (O’Connor 2010, 34) the production method of economic benefits. It is noticeable that clustering creates social relations, which are quite different from the ones known from the Fordist system. Urban and regional clusters produce ‘untraded externalities,’ such as bonds of trust, common goals, and shared local knowledge rooted spatially. Companies produce and exploit the shared knowledge and take advantage of the untraded externalities. Although the creative economy uses them, it must be emphasized that the untraded interdependencies “cannot be captured by input-output transactions or contract exchanges” (Lang 2009, 83). Whilst the latter refers to formal contracts and formalized relationships, the former remains informal. This means that informal and collective interac-

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tions, shared knowledge, and collective learning become essential to the valorization process and, despite capitalist relations trying to exploit them, their reference to the common makes them transcend the capitalist bounds and entail the possibility of increasing autonomy (Hardt 2009a). In other words, creative economy is, in reality, reducing social creativity through the expropriation of people’s skills and their production of a certain class composition, based on the existence of an individualized creative class, and expanding the space of domination to the cities as clusters in order to produce value more efficiently. To understand better how the creative economy works and to discover the possibilities of establishing social relations based on other uses of creativity, it is necessary to consider creativity from a different angle. My proposal is that a different approach can only be offered by introducing the centrality of the common to understand how the latter is the base of exploitation for the economy, but also holds the potential to create alternative relations. THE COMMON AND CREATIVITY Creative capitalism shows how immaterial production is becoming hegemonic and imposing to other forms of production. In this conception, the essence and nature of economic production lie in creativity, both in the use and the production of it. Therefore, creative capitalism cannot be understood if we ignore the fact that it is based on the expropriation and exploitation of the common. Even the perspectives which emphasize the individuality of creativity cannot conceal the importance of the production of shared knowledge, common learning, and exchange. This can also be said of the types of social relations produced by creative capitalism which depend on the common (without it, there is no economic activity at all). The latter cannot be completely captured by capitalism; although untraded relations are exploited, they cannot be fully absorbed by economic relations. For these reasons, it is necessary to rethink creativity from the centrality of the common and consider its democratic and political potential. The common, as a source of creativity, entails the use of capacities, skills, and talents. However, it would be incorrect to understand creativity as individual. An interesting perspective of appreciating creativity as social activity can be found in the work of John Holloway (2010), who refers to Marx’s two-fold nature of labor when he distinguishes between abstract labor and concrete doing. The conversion of doing into abstract labor (power-over-us) is undertaken through the expansion of wage labor and the externalization of our own power by doing (power-to-do). Abstract labor implies that the pleasure of creative power is forgotten, as well as the fact that we create the power that is exercised over us. This means that one of the most powerful effects of

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the creative economy consists in denying the creativity of any concrete doing, and reducing it to the social relations fixed by establishing a difference between creative class and working class. Creativity as doing is denied. Furthermore, the abstraction of labor complicates the recognition of creative power as social activity, an activity produced in the fact of being-together. Thus, under creative capitalism, it is repeatedly stressed that creativity solely depends on individual capacities, and excludes the collective power of doing as the main source of creativity. The expropriation of the common as a basis for economic production is carried out through this double movement of the reduction of creativity and individualization. The production of the common is based on the creation of untraded externalities and interferences through clusters that promote linkages between people and places (and consequently the uses of creativity). Despite the fact that the focus on individual creativity is predominant, it becomes evident that the creation of value relies on social knowledge and cooperation. Indeed, those externalities refer to the expropriation of the general intellect for primitive accumulation in which social knowledge, including that which is produced during the labor exchange and not reducible to trade relations, is exploited by capitalism. Thus, creative industries expropriate the common, which is based on social knowledge and cooperation, and likewise produce new forms of social knowledge and cooperation, besides immaterial goods. The dependence of creative capitalism on the common reveals that creativity, insofar as it is produced by general intellect, and social cooperation, will exceed the processes of capturing its potential through individualization and abstraction. Assuming the potential creativity of the common, it is possible to offer an alternative model to that of creative industries, through which its three main components can be replaced. 3 Instead of talking of an economic model which is based on creative industries, I introduce the idea of the cultural commons as a collective doing, a power-to-do together; the creative class is seen as the class composition of the precarious multitude; and the city as a space of production and reproduction is maintained, due to the potential of the common to strengthen social cooperation, claim new rights, and produce spaces of collective creativity. I summarize this conception in figure 3.1. In the following, I develop these dimensions and include some examples that reflect on how this alternative model, in search of the autonomy of the common, works in concrete situations. THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Since creative economy has expanded to the life-space and the clustering of the cities, to improve the economic potential of social relations, the possibil-

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Figure 3.1. An alternative model of creativity based on the common (my own elaboration).

ities of producing alternatives based on the common become more feasible. Whilst the main capitalist concern is to attract and concentrate the creative class in the cities, it opens up to the possibility for using creativity in political struggles as a way of producing and distributing the common. As Michael Hardt (2009b, 26) claims, the concentration of creativity (talents and skills) does not mean that “those engaged in biopolitical production are immediately acting politically but rather that they can act politically, that they have the necessary capacities.” This explains why the city has become a field of economic exploitation but also of political struggle, by using the potential of biopolitical production. Movements like Reclaim the City and others, which can be conceived under the right to the city (as “The City is for All” in Budapest, the campaigns “No Country for Young Men” by Youth without a Future in Madrid, and “It’s raining caviar” in Hamburg), show how the city has become the main place for political struggle. Since the city is also the place for developing creative capitalism, urban struggles contest the practices of segregation and social exclusion and enhance democratic participation, social cooperation, and a vision of cultural diversity from below. Besides being the place of producing subjectivities, the city, used as a political space, moves beyond the formal citizenship of the nation state, and instead makes substantive practices of citizenship possible

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(Brown and Kristiansen 2009) through participatory democracy and intercultural encounters. In opposition to the expropriation of the common through privatization and commodification of space, the common allows for alternative uses of the city to produce new social bonds and communities by being together. One experience, among multiple initiatives aimed at reconfiguring the cultural cities, is the festival “Undoing the City,” which took place in Copenhagen on May 7–10, 2009. 4 It was a questioning of European urban policies, of recent years, by means of a gathering of activists from different cities (Copenhagen, Berlin, London, and Lund) presenting several activities (workshops, debates, movies, parties, parades). The goal of the festival is the commoning of the city, and in order to achieve this, diverse creative sectors such as citizens, activists, artists, intellectuals, and graffiti-painters are called upon. The clusters which are used to exploit common knowledge and cooperation are appropriated by the uses of the common. A large number of collectives, not restricted to the definition of the creative industries, are subjectivized as creative to foster autonomy in the production of the common. The shift from the factory to the city is emphasized by the organizers when they define the battlefield of today both as the need to win autonomous spaces of creativity (like social centers), and the struggle against discrimination and social exclusion that is the result of gentrification and ghettoization. The festival aims “to challenge the perceptions of the city made by the capital, the state, the municipality as well as by the creative class.” The struggle must be undertaken in all spheres (political, theoretical, social, and cultural) and by all social, cultural, and artistic counter powers. As a result of the concentration of creativity, the city and the existing places are the new battlefield. The production and contribution of the common can contribute to sharing, thinking, and practicing alternatives in which the existing frameworks of the city can be changed. Creativity is used to reveal social conflicts which would otherwise remain invisible. The question is how to use creativity, the power-to-do together, to change the city in a post-crisis scenario which is characterized by the rise of the creative class and its colonization of the urban spaces. The case of “Undoing the City” shows two different (perhaps intertwined) paths: as described so far, the first is based on the sharing of knowledge and experiences, and organizing an alternative creative agenda: using public spaces to debate asylum policies, show movies, perform theater, launch alternative media, and using GPS to follow and draw new urban landscapes based on the uses of the city, etc. The second path, which is also included in the official program, is illustrated through a street party in Hyskenstræde (a street in Copenhagen), in collaboration with the group “Street Dancing.” The idea was inspired by events such as “Reclaim the Streets” and the philosophy of the Temporary Autonomous Zone to cause an uprising around the logic of a party, which can

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be reproduced in other places before it can be repressed by the state. The street party is created by undoing the urban space and transforming it into a party with decorations, graffiti on the walls, the introduction of new elements (such as bonfires or sofas), and the appropriation of objects as party-objects (for instance, dancing upon cars). The controversy emerged when participants caused damage to stores and cars after the party, followed by a confrontation with the police. These incidents were later presented as vandalism and attracted more attention than the other activities of the festival. One of the main reasons for its critique was the fact that the festival had received public funding from the Municipality of Copenhagen. This case raises a couple of questions on the means of production and distribution of the common as an alternative to the creative industries, especially in a post-crisis perspective considering that the city has been reinforced as the place for the expropriation of the common and the struggles for the (re)production of forms of life. The first question is the different uses of urban spaces to make social conflicts visible and undo the dominant model of exploiting the city and creativity as a commodity: from the common production of knowledge and the appropriation of public spaces to the more radical alterations of space. If the latter holds the advantage of undoing public spaces and producing non-hierarchical relations, the former places a wider range of creative people in contact with each other to explore alternative rights to the city. The second question is the participation of institutions in a project aimed at increasing the autonomy of the common. In this case, the municipal institution supports activities produced from below (opening up the understanding of the neoliberal city as a creative place), but this entails contradictions when the activities transgress the limits of the legal or public order. What matters, however, is if these practices are capable of challenging the hegemonic model of the creative city, and if the potential of the common is deployed to create new social bonds and non-commoditized social knowledge. In this light we must assess how the creative processes of commoning are produced, whether radical or not, and whether supported by institutions or not. PRECARIOUS MULTITUDE The conception of creative workers beyond creative industries, although apparently expanding the understanding of creativity, reinforces a strong division between creative and non-creative workers. Undoubtedly, precariousness is a serious problem affecting the creative industries, especially when the post-crisis scenarios have deepened precarity and uncertainty through the politics of austerity. However, precarious labor is a larger phenomenon in which the common is exploited, including its potential creativity. As indicat-

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ed by García Canclini (2013), the relationship between industrial forms of organizing creativity and creative movements outside the market logic reflects the fact that creativity must not be reduced to industries. In my conceptualization, given that precarity is inherent to the model of creative industries, creativity, as based on the common, creates a new basis for recomposing social and class relations through cooperation and solidarity. It blurs the distinction between creative and non-creative workers, although in a different manner. The term ‘precarious multitude’ is appropriate to understand the complexity of a labor force which is not reducible to a unique and consistent stock (Fumagalli and Morini 2013) and its unsecure condition. This mobility and dispersion in the environment of production (and reproduction) make it possible to constitute alternative uses of creativity beyond the distinction between creative and non-creative workers. I focus on the struggle carried out by the cleaning women of the Greek Ministry of Finance. 5 Following a reduction of 75 percent of their salaries, they received the news that they were to be replaced by contracted workers. These women of 45 to 57 years of age, many of whom were single mothers, had unemployed husbands, or were caring for disabled dependents, decided to organize themselves. This case is relevant in many respects: firstly, they primarily worked for powerful men; secondly, due to their social class and gender, they have traditionally been marginalized by the trade unions; and finally, they exemplified the blurred limits between production and reproduction, waged and non-remunerated labor, domestic work and the workplace. In her critique of Italian autonomism, Silvia Federici (2008) does not place the emphasis on the system of production, but on the social struggle. She claims that this multitude mainly refers to male, high-qualified workers immersed in situations of precariousness and, at the same time, labor is becoming more intelligent. Federici does not believe that capitalism is creating its conditions to overcome exploitation. Thinking of creativity, it is quite possible to maintain a gender-blind perspective and foster a certain idea of who the creative subject is. The point made by Federici must be taken seriously. However, capitalism does not rely only on labor conditions but, more generally, on the common, on social cooperation, and on production of general intellect. This implies that the creative force remains hidden under the dominant model of creative capitalism. The creativity of workers, such as the cleaning women, is dually denied (as creative and as workers). Moreover, forms of creativity as well as of social intelligence are ignored. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the struggle of the cleaning women is their slogan “We are cleaners, not idiots”; this reveals the opposition to creative power as reduced to abstract labor and the denial of their doing-together. The cleaners are also workers affected by the politics of austerity and privatizations of the public sector. From a post-crisis perspective, the cleaners show how class relations can be

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recomposed by commoning and fostering new social bonds through solidarity. It entails, in Cristina Morini’s words (2013, 94), “to produce collectively, generally, and outside the walls of our own homes the raw material of capital, that is, ourselves.” Once the cleaners proved the inefficiency of going on strike, they used their creative doing to protest by commoning public spaces and to enhance social bonds and new relations of solidarity. The creativity, denied through the waged activity (through abstract labor and its abstract time), emerges when it creates new social relations. The affirmation of their labor condition (“we are cleaners”) implies the affirmation of social intelligence (“we are not idiots”). They are exceeding the limits of their identities (Stavrides 2013) through practices of cooperation that overflow their assigned identity. The creative power of the precarious multitude offers an alternative to the creative class by claiming that “we are workers; we are not idiots,” including non-remunerated workers and temporary or long-term unemployment. This identification allows for many other sectors of the population to see the cleaning women as part of the same group against austerity measures and the privatization of the public sector. By producing collectively, by doing-together, the exploitation is replaced by joy. As the singer Haris Alexiou said at the concert “solidarity with laid-off cleaners”: “We will not sing songs of struggle. Tonight is a night of joy for these ladies. We are all cleaners.” The struggle was moved to the terrain of the production of forms of life. Their creative actions were based on humor, nonviolence, and shock tactics. Through these activities, deploying communicative, cognitive, linguistic, and affective skills, they were capable of creating a social value that they were denied as cleaners. The relation between mind (“we are not idiots”) and hand (wearing red rubber gloves to dignify their work) is incarnated in the body of the workers, which, as pointed out by Giuseppe Cocco (2013), in cooperation with other bodies become a generation: a multitude of cooperating singularities. The body of the cleaners is used to reverse the gendered power relations. Obstructing access to Troika officials in the Ministry of Economic Development, they were forcing officials to enter through the back door with their bodyguards. They also engaged in physical skirmishes with the police in which the bodies of the cleaners contrasted with the use of power and violence by the male bodies. Their act of building a wall with their bodies in front of the main entrance of the ministry’s offices also underlines the importance of the body for visualizing how abstract labor and the financial economy are produced, through the exploitation of the capability of ordinary people to create together. The potential of the common is important for producing social relations, forms of life, and political subjectivities. The separation between creative and non-creative workers is based on the exploitation of social relations and the denial of creative skills in those who are considered manual workers.

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Against this post-crisis construction the alternative is the production of social relations, the generation of cooperation, and the solidarity between singularities. Against the individualization of creativity, or creativity as the ‘private property’ of each isolated person (Haiven 2012), the reinforcement of creativity as social relations can contribute to class composition of the precarious multitude. The production of new social bonds must be open to the inclusion of gender (feminization of labor) and material inequalities (the importance of the poor) to avoid the male middle class domination reproduced by creative capitalism. CULTURAL COMMONS The production of cultural commons must be seen in the light of the crisis of reproduction (Federici 2012), due to neoliberal policies of the defunding and privatization of the public sector. In this sense, the challenge faced when offering alternatives to creative industries is double: to encourage new forms of cooperation and the production of collective knowledge, and to foster the creation of institutions for self-management. In both cases, “capital is now forced to continuously block the productive potential of living labor with intellectual property and with precariousness” (Roggero 2010, 360). The case of new forms of cooperation and production can be found especially on the Internet and in the uses of social networks. Precisely because of their immaterial nature, capitalism is having serious difficulties in owning these new common rights in the field of communication (such as the creation of the software Loomio, during the Occupy movement, to expand horizontal democracy and collaborative decision-making processes), property (like Creative Commons or copyleft), and free sharing files. It is generating new interesting horizons and seriously questioning the dichotomy of private and public property. However, I want to address the creation of creative institutions embedded in the struggles for the right to the city. In this context, I find it particularly relevant to consider the following issues regarding the production of cultural commons: the role of institutions (existing and emerging); the separation between creative and cultural activities; and the opposition between places of creative production and social production. An alternative to creative industries, based on the potential of the common, must consider to which extent cooperation with state institutions allows for self-managed projects, and how to contribute to social production by gathering cognitive, creative, and artistic skills. To illustrate this, I choose two cases which differ in terms of their institutional cooperation. The Transmission Gallery in Glasgow (Scotland) was founded by private donations and public resources from Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland (the former Scottish Arts Council). The combination of public and private

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support allows for the development of its program and an organization of 300 members. This raises the question of what degree of autonomy, of the commons, may be achieved within the existing institutional framework. However, the organization attempts to preserve its autonomy by offering a space for local artists and by managing the gallery through a voluntary committee of six people who are replaced every two years. The production of cultural commons can be enhanced in cooperation with other organizations or in the realization of shared projects. One example of this is the project “Knowledge is Never Neutral” made in collaboration with the artist group “The Strickland Distribution,” which conducts independent research in art-related and noninstitutional practices and aims to include grass-roots histories and social enquiries, which are outside of the academic sphere, and transmit them into the public sphere. 6 The project took place from September 2012 to June 2013 within and outside the Transmission Gallery. The idea is to create new forms of cooperation and participatory dialogue through several means such as public walks, co-research inquiry, film screenings, and discussion groups. The project reveals the need for cooperation among cultural and knowledge workers, since cultural production is in and of itself a form of knowledge production. The aim is to replace the entrepreneurial conception of the creative class through “emancipatory and critical education as collaborative research practice.” The reflection over the collective doing is necessary in order to understand the conditions of production and the assignation of value. Cultural practices, seen within and beyond the arts, require a collective reflection on the production and distribution of knowledge. It becomes apparent that the collaboration between Transmission Gallery and Strickland Distribution exemplifies how cultural workers move beyond artistic production towards social production. The reflection of the conditions of production, characterized by immaterial work and increasing precarity, is carried out through cooperation. Thus, artists participate in political struggles and engage in the production and distribution of the common, in which cooperation, social learning, and knowledge become essential. The occupation of Teatro Valle in Italy reflects a different process of commoning, as a response to austerity and public cuts in the cultural sector, and is consequently a symptom of the crisis of reproduction. 7 Compared with other commons, and due to the proximity of the water referendum, culture as air or water was claimed to be a common. The occupation of Teatro Valle was a reaction to the rumors of selling the theater to private investors or converting it into a commercial business. Not only people from the cultural sector were involved in the occupation. After the first days, its progressive institutionalization raised questions on how to manage it and how to produce and distribute the common from a cultural institution such as the theater.

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The organizational issue was solved by the creation of an Assembly as its central organ. The reflection on the theater as a place of production offered very creative practices for opening it to all citizens and not only professionals. Similarly to the case of the Transmission Gallery, the goal is to selfmanage social production, which implies that, besides cultural and artistic production, it is important to share forms of knowledge traditionally marginalized by institutions. The occupation of the theater became the re-appropriation of an area of the city that has experienced processes of gentrification, property speculation, and commodification. For this reason, the occupation can be considered a struggle for the right to the city, consisting in the creation of a common place (Belingardi et al. 2014). It contributed in creating alternative social value, the reconstruction of the urban everyday life, and it enhanced new forms of collaboration and doing-together. The inclusion of the right to the city in the production of the culture commons motivated the need for creating new social bonds with other movements from the precarious multitude (as LGBT, migrants, etc.). Teatro Valle shows that creative labor is not restricted to the act of performance with its uses of affects, emotions, and other immaterial values as means of production. It is expanded to the production of forms of life. The cultural practices reinforce the democratic struggles and produce new social links, alternative practices, and common knowledge. Theaters as places of the production of cultural commons assume a form of biopolitical struggle as “something resembling the coagulation of a self-determined project, aware of its own might around a community” (Morini 2013, 96). In contrast to the exploitation and appropriation of the common by cultural industries, the cases of the Transmission Gallery and Teatro Valle show how the potential to act politically and transform cultural institutions into places of creating new forms of life, in which political practices become a part of the right to the city, are undertaken by the precarious multitude. The constitution of institutions of the common (which is also a post-crisis perspective opposed to austerity and privatization of the public sphere) offers an alternative, which connects the cognitive, creative, and cultural dimensions (questioning the relevance of the distinction between cultural and creative industries) and considers artistic practices to be social production. CONCLUSION The financial crisis has strengthened the essentiality of the creative economy defined as a post-Fordist system of production that seeks to capitalize on cognitive and affective work (Livergant 2013), in which creative industries play a central role for economic growth and innovation; creativity is an individualized resource owned by the so-called creative class; and the city is

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the place of creative production through clusters and an entrepreneurial approach to governance. The centrality of immaterial labor and the extraction of value through mechanisms of rent (De Peuter 2011) rely on the exploitation and expropriation of the common. Therefore, in order to consider the creative potential of the common and its autonomy, it is necessary to develop alternatives to the dominant model imposed by creative capitalism. This is the grounding principle for constituting post-crisis perspectives, i.e., scenarios as a response to the situations caused by the crisis, and for the definition and concretization of alternatives. This must be based on three dimensions: the place (the city), the social relations (the social class: the precarious multitude), and the object (cultural commons) of production. The analysis of several cases in these areas have been used to illustrate and show the creative potential (and some constraints) of the common. • The city is not the place of economic production based on the exploitation of the common through clusters that use immaterial labor and social knowledge (untraded externalities). The city is a right. It is the place of the creation of new social bonds, the production of general intellect, and the transformation of public spaces. • The precarious multitude reflects a new class composition opposed to the entrepreneurial conception of creative class. Precarity and mobility characterize this class, particularly the creative and cultural workers. However, considering relations outside of wage labor in the project of autonomy of the common, creativity becomes essential for the multiplicity of singularities that create new social bonds and relations of solidarity. • Cultural commons offer an exit strategy from the dichotomy between private and public, and lead to the collective production of culture and the confluence of knowledge. This implies the creation of new common rights attached to the development of new technologies, to production and distribution, and to the self-management of institutions aiming to build an alternative to privatization and social cutbacks. The affirmation of the common, as a project opposed to its exploitation, produces different forms of social relations and collaborations. The potential creativity of the common allows for the organization of such social relations. From the lessons learned from the analyzed cases, it is possible to point out some relevant reflections. Firstly, the relation to existing institutions raises the question of whether or not it is necessary to create completely autonomous institutions, or if it is possible to develop projects of self-governance in cooperation with state institutions. Secondly, despite the hegemony of cognitive capitalism and immaterial production, the creative organization of the common shows that the collective power-to-do-together is not restricted to the workers in the cultural and creative industries but includes all workers,

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including those in non-remunerated jobs. Finally, cultural and creative production is translated into new forms of organizing community and new social solidarities. Based on the production and distribution of the common, it is possible to think of post-crisis perspectives in which the creative forces can act politically in the (re)production of social relations and forms of life. Ultimately, the creative potential of the common becomes essential to the construction of a democratic project. NOTES 1. The information on Occupy Design is available at their website: www.occupydesign.org. 2. The latter originates in Hartley’s definition of cultural industries as collected in the INTELI’s report. 3. This particularly concerns the model for a creative ecosystem elaborated by INTELI as presented above. My proposal follows from the same partition but places the common at the center to show its potential for creativity instead of creative policies. 4. The program and description of the festival can be consulted at the website Modkraft: http://spip.modkraft.dk/kalender/article/festival-undoing-the-city-10526. A narration of the events can be read in Geist (2009a; 2009b). 5. For a more detailed description of the struggle of the cleaning women and their ways of protest, see for instance Mitralia (2014) and Vasilaki (2014). 6. More information about Transmission Gallery at http://www.transmissiongallery.org/ and about “Knowledge is Never Neutral” run by “The Strickland Distribution” at http://strickdistro.org/2012/08/22/knowledge-is-never-neutral/. 7. For the elaboration of this section, reflections made by Chiara Belingardi, Ilenia Caleo, Federica Giardini, and Isabella Pinto (2014) have been very useful.

REFERENCES Belingardi, Chiara et al. 2014. “Spatial struggles: Teatro Valle Occupato and the (right to the) city.” Open Democracy, February 24. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/caneurope-make-it/chiara-belingardi-ilenia-caleo-federica-giardini-isabella-pinto/spatial-struggles. Brown, Alison, and Annali Kristiansen. 2009. Urban Policies and the Right to the City. Rights, Responsibilities and Citizenship. UNESCO. Cocco, Giuseppe. 2013. “KORPOBRAZ: The Powers of the Poor.” Post-Crisis Perspectives. The Common and Its Power (García Agustín, Óscar and Christian Ydesen, eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 119–42. De Peuter, Greig. 2011. “Creative Economy and Labor Precarity: A Contested Convergence.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35 (4): 417–25. Federici, Silvia. 2012. “The Means of Reproduction. Interview by Lisa Rudman and Marcy Rein.” Race, Poverty and the Environment, 19 (2): 55–59. ———. 2008. “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.” In the Middle of a Whirlwind. Available at http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feministviewpoint/. Feigenbaum, Anna. 2011. “How to Draw Capitalism? Iconography and the Occupy Movement.” Protest Camps. Available at: http://protestcamps.org/2011/11/06/how-to-drawcapitalism-iconography-and-the-occupy-movement/.

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Florida, Richard. 2013. “The Real Reason Creative Workers Are Good for the Economy.” Citylab. Available at: http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/09/real-reason-creative-workersare-good-economy/6804/. Fumagalli, Andrea, and Cristina Morini. 2013. “Cognitive Bio-capitalism, Social (re)Production and the Precarity Trap: Why Not Basic Income?” Knowledge Cultures, 1 (4): 106–26. Gabe, Todd, Richard Florida, and Charlotta Mellander. 2013. “The Creative Class and the Crisis.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6: 37–53. García Agustín, Óscar, and Christian Ydesen. 2013. “In Search of Post-Crisis Perspectives.” Post-Crisis Perspectives. The Common and Its Power (García Agustín, Óscar and Christian Ydesen, eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 11–23. García Canclini, Néstor. 2013. “Precarious Creativity: Youth in a Post-Industrial Culture.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 22 (4): 341–52. Geist, Anton. 2009a. “Aktivisternes selvmål.” Information, May 12. Available at: http:// www.information.dk/190789. ———. 2009b. “Der er ingen pointe. Det er pointen.” Information. May 11. Available at: http:/ /www.information.dk/190718. Haiven, Max. 2012. “The Privatization of Creativity. The Rise of ‘Creative Capitalism.’” Dissent Voice, May 9. Available at: http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/05/the-privatization-ofcreativity/. Hardt, Michael. 2009a. “The Common in Communism.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society, 22 (3): 346–56. ———. 2009b. “Production and Distribution of the Common. A Few Questions for the Artist.” Open, 16: 20–28. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. INTELI. 2011. Creative-based Strategies in Small and Medium-sized Cities: Guidelines for Local Authorities. Lang, Josephine Chinying. 2009. “Cluster Competitiveness: The Six Negative Forces.” Journal of Business and Management, 15 (1): 73–93. Livergant, Elyssa. 2013. “The Passion Players.” New Left Project. Available at: http:// www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_passion_players. Mitralia, Sonia. 2014. “Six Hundred Cleaning Ladies Re-invigorating Greek Movement.” Labor Notes. August 25. Available at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/08/six-hundredcleaning-ladies-re-invigorating-greek-movement. Morini, Cristina. 2013. “Social Reproduction as a Paradigm of the Common. Reproduction Antagonism, Production Crisis.” Post-Crisis Perspectives. The Common and Its Powers (García Agustín, Óscar and Christian Ydesen, eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 83–98. O’Connor, Justin. 2010. The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Literature Review. Newcastle: Creativity, Culture and Education. Park, Geun-hye. 2014. “The Creative Economy and Entrepreneurship.” Speech at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2014. Available at: http://english1.president.go.kr/activity/speeches.php?srh[view_mode]=detailandsrh[seq]=4355andsrh[detail_no]=23. Roggero, Gigi. 2010. “Five Theses on the Common.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society, 22 (3): 357–73. Stavrides, Stavros. 2013. “Re-inventing Spaces of Commoning: Occupied Squares in Movement.” Quaderns-e, 18 (2): 40–52. UN. 2010. Creative Economy Report. A Feasible Development Option. New York: UNDP. ———. 2013. Creative Economy Report. Widening Local Development Pathways. New York: UNDP. Vasilaki, Christina. 2014. “Armed Only with Rubber Gloves, Greek Cleaners Fight the Iron Fist of Austerity.” Equal Times, September 24. Available at: http://www.equaltimes.org/ armed-only-with-rubber-gloves#.VG3c-5Ym-So.

Chapter Four

Flexibility and Mobility in the Creative Economy Between “Feminization” of Creative Work and Slave Labor Verónica Gago, Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

CRISIS AND POPULAR PRAGMATICS How is the economy forced to become creative and flexible? In Latin America it is impossible to argue that these mutations are the result of a sort of technical sequence or optimization of management, the simple effect of a new spirit of capitalism. Perhaps it would be more productive to hypothesize that there are two causes behind such attributes: the persistence and recurrence of crisis and the way in which the informal-popular is interwoven with a vitalist pragmatic. Here, we propose that these two elements challenge the very vocabulary of flexibility and creativity: are these the best ways for thinking about the characterization of a series of popular economies that, however, have much to say about the matter? How do these political economies put the notions of work and exploitation into play and, in this vein, immerse the notion of creativity in a thicker and more variegated field? In what sense are flexibility and creativity thought of as plebeian resources that foreground the question of the so-called “surplus” populations? Here we will take these two questions as premises to deploy: 1) The informal as the instituting source or the principle of reality creation. I define informality not negatively, by its relation to the normative 61

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defining the legal/illegal, but rather, positively by its innovative character and, therefore, its dimension of praxis that seeks new forms. The informal in this sense does not refer to that without a form, but to the dynamic that invents and promotes (productive, commercial, relational, etc.) forms, focusing on the process of the production of new social dynamics. 2) The informal as a source of incommensurability, the dynamic that puts into crisis the objective measurement of the value that these economies create. The informal thus refers to the overflow, by intensity and overlap, of heterogeneous elements that intervene in value creation, necessitating the invention of new formulas for value convention and the production of mechanisms of institutional inscription and acknowledgment. In this article, I focus on an investigation carried out at a popular market called the Salada, located on the border between the city of Buenos Aires and its suburban periphery. In its twenty hectares, numerous and agitated transactions accumulate: food, clothing, technology, leather goods, shoes, music, and movies are bought and sold. In its early days, the popular market functioned at night. An area that was once a popular swimming spot during the 1950s, today is renewed as a transnational and multitudinous shopping space. More and more buses, vans, and cars from all over the country, as well as from Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Chile, disembark there. It was characterized as the largest illegal market in Latin America. 1 It is onto this intensive territory of a series of multiple transactions that we will project the earlier questions. TOPOGRAPHY OF INFORMALITY Partha Chatterjee, citing the arguments of economist Kalyan Sanyal (2007), proposes that the type of “primitive accumulation” taking place in some countries of Asia, Africa, and even South America (Chatterjee 2014; 2014b) unfolds without the methods of political contention that were available during the same process in Europe (“mass emigration, recruitment into the army or death by disease or famine”). Thus, the newly dispossessed do not form a reserve army that will be absorbed by large industry, but rather “. . . capitalist growth creates a large sector of informal production and of services that are not a pre-capitalist relic but rather a new outside of capital” (2014, 7). Chatterjee leaves us with this question, in the wake of his previous reflections, of how this outside will be governed. There are two points in this question that seem relevant to discuss here. The very idea of an outside associated with the popular informal economy and the necessity of its inscription into some type of governmentality as a way of confronting the effects of new processes of dispossession and exploitation that particularly impact areas characterized as peripheral, but, at the

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same time, reorganize the very topography that divides and categorizes zones into center and periphery. Popular markets, with the massive experience of barter, reached their peak during the 2001 crisis. The multiplication of currency notes, and the possibility of exchange under different rules than those of the formal-legal market, are a decisive precedent for understanding the success of the megamarket, La Salada. This moment was that of the crisis, when much of the country maintained itself through quasi-false currencies, expanded the modes of production and consumption combining self-management with smuggling, piracy, and invention. This occurs in times of turmoil when the currency becomes, to use Klossowski’s beautiful expression, a living currency because the norms of economic functioning show themselves, more than ever, to be a “substructure of social affects.” In turn, La Salada’s recent impact cannot be understood outside of the inflationary trend, in which a certain excess of the currency (and its virtual falsification/devalorization) is again made present as “one mode of the expression and representation of instinctive forces” (Klossowski 2012). La Salada opens the possibility for popular consumption at the small scale and allows access to cheap goods and services at a time when consumption becomes the quickest and most dynamic form of social inclusion, and it does so as an expressive space of a modality of baroque transactions. Thus La Salada grew strong, during the 2001 crisis, although strictly speaking, it does not owe its origin to that decisive conjuncture. Nor was it weakened in the period following the crisis; the recent economic reactivation did not cause it to stagnate or decrease in size. On the contrary, the conglomeration of La Salada and the complex economic web connected to the mega-market have become key pieces of new political-economic articulations. If the market and its first boost, tied to the simultaneous scarcity and multiplicity of currencies, are intimately connected to the conjuncture of the crisis, it should be stressed that the market know-how becomes a permanent form of management of a greater challenge: that of formal wage labor. The crisis is revealed as the privileged locus of analysis because it demonstrates the social dispute for obedience through rules that enable and hinder accumulation, but also because it is a moment of collective experimentation of other forms of living, cooperating, exchanging, and protecting one another. La Salada thus becomes a sort of laboratory for new forms of producing, consuming, and constructing networks of distribution and commercialization, structuring themselves in a quarry of new types of employment. The market’s key sector is textiles. Their trajectory during the last two decades marks a prototype. If in the 1990s the textile industry was dismantled as the result of the massive influx of imports favored by peso-dollar convertibility, after the crisis, the end of the exchange rate parity and the devaluation of the Argentine peso, the industry was revitalized, although on

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new bases: outsourcing production in small workshops whose labor force is composed by sewers from Bolivia. PROLETARIAN MICRO-ECONOMIES In La Salada, what is seen during periods of employment crisis—the decline of formal waged labor—becomes stabilized. It is clear that moments of economic fragility intensify hierarchical relations (Moulier Boutang 2006), but in La Salada we see a framework that exhibits these same problems in a space of strong prosperity and the creation of new modes of employment. The contemporary situation is characterized by the emergence of new forms of dependent activities combining, in an unprecedented way, a liberation from the regulations of Fordist dependency, with new forms of servitude of market fluctuations (Virno 2003). At this point, the multiplication of labor realities is replicated as the result of the multiplication of levels, scales, and dimensions that make global space heterogeneous and crisscrossed by different migratory movements transforming the international division of labor (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Thus, the current capitalist drive achieves competitiveness and dynamism by flexibly articulating itself through practices, networks, and attributes that historically characterized the flows of non-paid labor. This allows us to understand the labor markets as a “pluriarticulated” assemblage where mixed and hybrid forms co-exist (always in “counterpoint” with a homogenous ideal of wage labor). This argument, capable of gauging the heterogeneity of the contemporary world of work, is especially interesting to us in pointing out the uni-dimensionality of informality. Informality, understood only in terms of de-proletarianization, risks being reduced to a privileged source and zone of violence and crime. By emphasizing La Salada as an extreme and differential territory of violence, while marginalizing it, appraises, in a strictly negative way, that which effectively functions as a possibility for life (and not only of survival and violence) 2 for a massive portion of the population, and as highly innovative modes of coping with scarcity, violence, institutions, and consumption. All the vitality involved in the creation of a space of popular commerce and consumption, with its tactics and hierarchies, transactions and appropriations, remains basically undone if there are only victims (of neoliberalism, of unemployment, of the mafias, etc.). This does not negate the violence of social relations, nor does it romanticize their transactions, but it does not unilaterize them either. I call these economies “proletarian micro-economies” for the purpose of showing a new landscape of the proletariat beyond its Fordist definition and to highlight the question of the scales that make these economies function, above all, as assemblages. This is also, as I noted

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above, in order to argue against the concept of the deproletarianization of the popular world. In this sense, the Salada manages to combine a series of proletarian micro-economies composed of small and medium-sized transactions and, at the same time, is the basis for a large transnational network of (mostly textile) production and trade. This occurs because small-scale sales, commercial retail—that enable diverse survival strategies for resalers—are developed, as well as a lot of business for small importers, manufacturers, and market sellers, along with creating space for mass consumption. Enormous numbers are managed in La Salada: with only two days of activity per week, more money passed through it in 2009 than in all the country’s shopping malls (nearly 15,000 million Argentinean pesos as opposed to 8,500 million in the shopping malls, according to the official data of the National Institute of Statistics and Census). 3 La Salada and textile workshops form a circuit where labor categories are changing and intermittent. As flexible transitions occur between dependent work and self-employment initiatives, ranging from moments of informality and never abandoned aspirations of “going formal,” being a beneficiary of state subsidies and relying on communitarian networks; tactically transiting, using, and enjoying family, neighborhood, commercial, communal, and political relationships. In short, the frontier zones populating this economy reveal the plurality of labor forms and call into question the very frontiers of what we call work. La Salada is a territory of new regimes of submission and new places of social innovation. The question is: how to also capture the moments of searching for autonomy and freedom that function as “the permanent back-light of processes of servitude and (internal and external) colonial hegemony?” With this insistence on reading in a counterway, Toni Negri (2006) says that it is possible to understand migrant cultures and behaviors as constituent countercultures. This implies searching for a definition of the concept of labor where the history of slaves-migrants shows a fundamental reality: their insertion entirely within, but also outside of, capital. At stake is the potential of an independent political social reality. THE ARCHAIC AS A SOURCE OF INNOVATION La Salada exhibits a new composition of labor power—informal/illegal/precarious/innovative/entrepreneurial—that has become notorious in the postcrisis Argentina as the key element of the economic recomposition under new labor forms. We add to this the decline of alternative practices that challenged wage labor, emerging from the most radical sectors of the movement of the unemployed.

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La Salada and the textile workshops exhibit a singularity: the migrant composition of the labor force that plays the lead role in this popular economy and that, while not restricted to a single nationality, brings out, in extreme circumstances, modalities and forms of recomposition and transformation of the world of work that overflow its classic coordinates (formal, waged, masculine, national work, which perceives the individual alone, detached from his or her home and relations of reproduction, etc.). A “community capital” travels with Bolivian migration and is reformulated, characterized by its ambiguity: capable of functioning as a means of selfmanagement, mobilization, and insubordination, but also as a means of servitude, submission, and exploitation. However, the archaic is not confined to a traditional use that would enter into contradiction with new forms of employment, but rather, the operation is more complex: the archaic becomes the input for an absolutely contemporary recombination. A singular entrepreneurship emerges from there, promoted by the informalization exploited by textile workshops and continued in La Salada, which values the domesticcommunitarian elements, putting dynamics of self-management into play and nurturing concrete political networks. VITALIST PRAGMATIC To understand the dynamic of the migrant labor force, we will focus on the power of decision and will for progress that mixes the Foucauldian definition of the migrant as an investor in him or herself when community capital is put into play. This is a vital impulse that deploys a calculus, in which a rationality based on the desire of personal and family progress is superimposed on a repertoire of communitarian practices. A second, complementary hypothesis is the specifically postmodern articulation of the communitarian with the post-Fordist productive world: its capacity to become an attribute of labor, in specific qualifications for the migrant workforce of the highlands in Buenos Aires. The communitarian becomes, in being put to work, a source of a pragmatic versatility, crossing borders and capable of adaptation and invention. We cannot attribute anti-capitalist premises to that vitalist pragmatic a priori. However, they demonstrate a level of self-management of the production of social life that is organized without the political mediation of traditional institutions (from the state to the trade union, from the political party to social assistance). At the same time, it is a principle of organization and expansion of popular life that knows how to pragmatically relate to and negotiate with those traditional institutions (in decline or refunctionalized in new dynamics where they are not the privileged mediations).

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The vitality that we want to highlight, however, implies a fundamental political perspective: to not consider the subjects of these baroque economies as victims. The state’s systematic disinvestment during its harshest neoliberal phase generates the space to interpellate social actors under the logic of the micro-entrepreneur and entrepreneurship. It is a way in which self-managed politics appear compensating activities and services of reproduction (from education to health care, from care or security to transportation), so that workers are forced to assume the costs of their own reproduction. So that, as Federici argues, “every articulation of the reproduction of labor power has been turned into an immediate point of accumulation” (2012, 102). THE MARKET AS PRODUCTION OF THE URBAN FABRIC However, what we are interested in investigating is the mode of growth associated with market dynamism and all the layers of activity that it organizes. This is because the market is the space where part of the merchandise produced in the workshops is carried out, and it is simultaneously the prolongation of a traditional commercial center that has crossed borders and includes techniques of sabotage of mercantile forms, or, at least, multiple uses of things (from contraband to knock-offs). An entire glossary of terms must be rethought based on their concrete meanings in La Salada: illegal, clandestine, knock-offs, false, real imitation, real stolen merchandise, legal fake merchandise, etc. The market proliferates and grows: upwards and sideways; in warehouses and under the open sky; on the grounds in Greater Buenos Aires and in an infinity of points colonized by the Saladitas (little Saladas). It also grows in terms of the services it provides (for example, the formation of a health insurance plan belonging to the Urkupiña market), and the series of businesses that it makes possible. The market, as an urban fabric, manages to combine a temporality of rapid and versatile constructions (stalls are assembled and disassembled while the infrastructure itself is increasingly stabilized and strengthened) with sustained and amplified progress over time. In the social sciences it is common to associate the informal economy with an invisible and marginal economy. Even that moniker of an economy that functions “under the table” (that is, outside of the legal parameters and tributaries of the formal economy) reveals that supposed character of the hidden economy: in the shadows. However, these economies can no longer be considered marginal from any perspective, and even less so in their capacity to intimately relate to metropolitan heterogeneity (the articulation of forms going in a continuum from self-employment to illegal commerce, which, in neoliberal terms, negates what those fragments have in common and organizes them as segments), and because they reveal cities’ dilemmas

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over the simultaneous visibilization and invisibilization of these economies’ productive function. Being increasingly massive and street-based, these informal economies oscillate between hyper-visibilization and invisibility. The question, in short, can be traced between those who seek to eradicate them and those who propose their recognition as part of the contemporary urban dynamics. Meanwhile, their visibility is full of dilemmas taking the form of stereotypes and prejudices, but also due to the difficulty of naming practices that combine mercantile circuits, family survival strategies, enterprises appropriating knowledges of self-management, and an informality that values independence. The question brings us to the regime of visibility that the neoliberal city brings about and how it is subverted and reconfigured by certain popular practices. If relocations and displacements are the basis for contemporary metropolitan heterogeneity, how do they make themselves visible in the sense of valuing their productive capacity and their constructive capacity to make the city? These dynamics require a new way of seeing, capable of overlaps and contradictory logics. COPY AND BORDER Let us examine one of these superpositions. Is there a relationship between simulacrum and border? Jean and John Comaroff (2009) argue that the global world’s mobility supposes a growing market of falsifications that allow access to that movement: seven fake titles and marriage licenses, counterfeit passports, etc. When governance is about apparatuses of control of flows, falsification is a way of circumventing or sabotaging some links of those regulations. This supposes that certain areas of the world would be destined to be, or even better, would have a historical affinity with a “false modernity,” where everything happens as a copy, under the guise of a false object or apocryphal document. Peripheral modernity, in this sense, would be almost fictional (the insistent appeals to build “a serious country” would fall under this schema). Its other side, the reign of the “original,” would be that space dominated by legality. However, contemporary global capitalism reveals these spaces of homogeneous and regulated modernity (an original modernity) as spaces in crisis, since the (productive, social, ethnic, etc.) heterogeneity that they maintained in a colonial outside is now immersed and proliferates within its own interior. Furthermore, the supposed illegality of the south is revealed, in the global economy, as a more than adequate, and even constitutive, component of the new assemblages of power, as Sassen (2008) refers to them. The impact of neoliberal transformations is crucial here: they complexly weave together a growing web of informalization with entrepreneurial dy-

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namics (at a popular and business level, both trasnationalized actors) in a context of flexibilization and dispossession of rights. Then, there is the reign of the copy, proliferating in fictive modernities, a collection of experiences from which principles of alternative modernities arise and are projected? Does La Salada propose a vernacular epistemology of the copy as being the truth of things? In the mega-market La Salada, everything is a copy and everything is true, simultaneously. From there stems its polemic power (potencia) and its problematic charge. In any case, the so-called forgeries are such that they put in question the very notion of what is false. Additionally, there are multiple categories and forms of the false in circulation. This is due to the mode of production of—mostly textile, but not only— items that are bought wholesale as well as by small-scale retailers or for family consumption. In that fuzzy production zone that gives rise to an immense node of transnational distribution and sales that is La Salada, the clandestine textile workshop stands out as an enclave. Opening up a new paradox: La Salada is a space of publicity and expansion for a type of production defined by its clandestine nature. Once again, the simple opposition between the two terms is complicated: the original is produced clandestinely and the counterfeit copy is openly distributed. Between the workshop and the market all sorts of brands proliferate: apparel without any sort of logo, others with brands specially produced for the market and also those belonging to well-known clothing stores, since workers producing for a major brand often receive some of that merchandise as payment. Or because competition forces the brands to hand over design patterns and fabric cuts to various workshops so that the workshop that is able to produce the item the fastest is the winner of this informal bidding process. However, in this process more than one batch of garments that still has all of the signs of the original remains free, displaced and ready for the parallel market. It is not a simple question: it is the task of the sewers, who receive the items as part of their payment (or appropriate them in a trickle down method seeking to complement their income), who must assert them as such in some segment of the market. That is: the same garment removed from its “legal” circuit of commercial valorization has to demonstrate that it is the same quality and design, even if the price is notably lower and if, effectively, it is their same producers who guarantee that the objects are identical. But what does identical mean? Here we would limit that notion to the mode and material of manufacture. However, the notion of authenticity clearly demands other immaterial components of valorization, associated with a universe of belonging, of images that make explicit certain modes of life and to different segments of the public, which are those that La Salada puts in question, to the point of questioning, subverting, or pirating them.

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This modality of the post-Fordist economy—that Lazzarato (2006) refers to as the creation of worlds as a central element of the current mode of creation of goods—finds an ironic and challenging provocation in this experience of massive piracy. In any case, the task of reselling recognized brands’ production that finds a parallel channel in La Salada reveals the ambiguity of the “true” brand, which is only tautologically confirmed as such: that is, by paying a high price for it because it is the brand. However, this garment— even, we insist, made in the same way and with the same materials and most often by the same workers—once subtracted from the circuit in which that brand is valued as such, is multiplied in a popular and transnational chain of sales and commercialization, jeopardizing the value of exclusivity. At this point La Salada remains in the center of a very current debate: disputes over the appropriation of the immaterial, which translate, precisely, into the battle around intellectual property and trademark rights. 4 COPY AND CONTROL The paradigm for this apparel is sportswear, but in general all brands have this relation with the idea of being “original.” The brands’ campaign against piracy is confronted with the following paradox: they need to de-authorize garments that are made by the same people that make the so-called “legitimate” ones. With the same production, the difference increasingly lies in that paying a high price for a garment turns into the ultimate and true act of its effective and distinctive consumption. This is a difficult way for the brand to impose its authority. Even loyal customers, disposed to pay an elevated price as a form of distinguished consumption, confronted with the popular use of those brands proliferating in social sectors, which in principle would not have differentiated access, revert back to the garment in an increasingly ambiguous way: it confirms the need to assert its originality even more, at the same time as the distinction requires greater immaterial resources since the materials (preparation, fabric, labels) are not a reliable source of originality. 5 The conditions of exploitation in the textile industry and its close relation with fashion that, following Rancière (2004), functions as part of the fabric of opinion and as a place for the elaboration of social difference, also confers on the sewers’ the possibility of boycotting, paralleling, and denouncing the brands’ tactics. The protests held against brands (mostly by the organization La Alameda) were part of this type of campaign, which sought to make visible an economic circuit that assembles legal and illegal parts but whose operation requires it to be invisible for consumption to be effectively carried out. These public allegations also sought to highlight the absurdity of the differentiation between expensive businesses and popular markets when the

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merchandise is the same. A story told by a woman working in a textile factory, who works formally for the large brands but also contracts out for clandestine workshops, recounts the following. The factory, where 80 percent of the workers are migrants, produces for the main multinational sportswear companies. One of its commissions is manufacturing soccer jerseys for one of the most important teams in Argentina. The new jersey’s launch is planned as a big event. In the workshop, one of the sewers takes a picture of the still brand new, secret jersey with his cell phone and this photo makes it onto social media. A sort of clandestine anticipation for the team’s fans. The image proliferates and the team and the brand see their scoop ruined, with concern and great loss of prestige, losing control over the launch and promotion of the premiere and, therefore, the profit. Retaliation falls on the workers, who are then prohibited from having any communication devices, no matter what type of phone it might be. The workers’ suffer doubly, since, during those long work days, the cell phone is their way of knowing how their children are, coordinating their care, talking with them to hear their voices, and letting them know, for example, when they will be home. The brand impacts the workshop, exacerbating its control mechanisms, as an abusive way of containing the image’s secret, a key component in an item’s promotional campaign. The sanction is the response to the workers’ sabotage of that production secret (what was classically known as an industrial secret). A sort of punishment for the workers’ revenge, having those who make the products be the first to enjoy and circulate them. The massive falsifications—with increasing levels of perfectionism—demonstrate the growing gap between the desire for globalized consumption and the political management of its scarcity-exclusivity. MIMESIS AND HETEROTOPIA Foucault used the concept of heterotopia in counter-position to the idealist notion of utopia. The market, with its nooks and crannies, mounting and dismounting, would have the status of an other space, able to install a dynamic of variegated transactions on the city’s borders. As a rule, the heterotopia juxtaposes in a real place various spaces that should normally be incompatible. The idea of an order otherwise, a critique of the existing order, is held in this superimposition. The market, in this sense, proposes a space of multiple uses and also an other notion of, cyclical, time. At the same time, copying brands produces a simultaneous effect of parody and devaluation. 6 La Salada’s complexity, at this point, is the expansion of consumption that in principle would be segmented by class (restricted access to brands) underpinned by a mode of production, which implies conditions of intensive exploitation of migrant

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workers. Can we infer a mode of subversion of market rules from this massive falsification or is it their popular affirmation? The consumption of counterfeit trademarked clothing disrupts the trademark’s prestige as a sign of exclusivity, while it demonstrates how that exclusivity is underpinned by a restricted classist exhibition. This supposes that as the brand is desired, used, and displayed by the popular classes, its value is subverted/devalued. It is a way of producing the copy that devalues the original, while it exposes what they have in common—the semi-identical—production of both, highlighting the dispute over the difference of this intangible and ever more decisive good: the construction of a way of life. As Chang signals, “fake” brands and the consumption of “superlogos,” “can rewrite the entire theory of mimesis.” Along this line, the false itself is dislocated in respect to the true/false difference, while the false, “in the ‘globalization of the false,’ means counterfalsification as well as ‘appropriation.’” On a large-scale, the false constructs a heterotopic landscape: a meticulous but not institutionalized regulation of the traditional way of organizing open air exchange. Neither its heterogeneous texture nor its extension, although neither its appearance and disappearance in the middle of the night during its early years, allows us to compare La Salada with other urban spaces. Foucault speaks beautifully about the markets, which he compares to the theater, as heterotopic spaces tied to time, following the mode of a party. True chronic heterotopias that are built at cities’ borders. The reign of the transnational copy, characterizing the mega-market of the Buenos Aires urban periphery, might be a pirated form of that anonymous, multi-ethnic, and mobile multitude that populated the ships that made capitalism a transatlantic enterprise. The market brings together, in its heterogeneous composition, a new type of proletariat, surely false if compared with that which was established in modern times. THE VOICE Despite its large migrant composition, La Salada has gained notoriety in the mainstream media through the voice of one of its Argentine leaders: Jorge Castillo. With him, market sellers have also managed to join the official business delegation that visited Angola with president Cristina Fernández in 2012. The market’s representation—its political and mediatic voice—is an Argentine and this fact makes most of its participants stay in the shade. Here a central conflict is debated: the identification of Argentine work as dignified work, while migrant labor is linked to the moniker “slave labor.”

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From there, echoing Gayatri Spivak’s controversial question, it is not easy to hear migrants’ voices when La Salada is talked about in public. Castillo’s frequent appearances in the press also reveal the expansive logic toward the future that the market promises: on more than one occasion, the leader has revealed to the media that he has already bought land in Miami to set up a branch of La Salada, and, even more important, he announced the addition of food items as part of the market’s offer. A double argument seeks to legitimate the expansion: on the one hand, it emphasizes the expansion of popular consumption, while it blames overpricing on corporate intermediaries (unions, retailers, etc.), an argument that has even greater repercussion in a context of increasing inflation. On the other hand, it reveals that the productive mode enabled by La Salada (flexible, precarious, supported by a varied self-entrepreneurship, etc.) is the basis for the majority of productive circuits and, therefore, is not exclusive to the market of markets. Returning to the voice: in this sense, community radios, organic to the economy that goes from the workshop to the market, play a central role. We will talk about them more later, because it is through them that market participants create a site of enunciation. Nevertheless, the classic muteness with which the subaltern are represented—with its counterpart of invisibilization—in recent decades gives way, following Beatriz Jaguaribe (2007), to a hypervisibility founded on new “aesthetics of realism.” This emerges to narrate the metropolitan experience, the anonymous lives, in a global world saturated with mediatic images. For the case of Brazil that Jaguaribe analyzes, magical practices co-exist with a carnivalesque imaginary. But these codes of realism, “as a narrative form of the everyday,” have non-traditional characteristics: they are not utopias, they are not supported by lettered cultures, and they have the dramatic intensity of a reality that is perceived as more vital. In contrast to the realism of other decades, there is not aesthetic experimentation, but there is a willingness to dismantle clichês. The proliferation of images comes with the cost of “visual inclusion”: it makes visible subjects and experiences that, based on the legitimacy of their testimony and in presumption of their authenticity, exploit a new capacity for producing images. Can it be said, then, that the notions of invisibilization and muteness suffer from a certain anachronism when thinking about the subaltern worlds in Latin American cities? Jaguaribe argues that the trend of favela tours, for example, is due to the fact that, in contemporary capitalism, poverty, exclusion, and local violence are also resymbolized as part of the “authentic communities.” The Brazilian sociologist makes a point in regards to the favelas that we are interested in testing in La Salada: are these privileged spaces of dispute, where ideals and imaginaries of modernity fail and are reinvented?

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Do they make visible, then, the defeat of a normative and inclusive modernity while experimenting with forms of inclusion outside of the norm (something that Carlos Monsiváis also pointed to in Mexico in relation to the sellers of pirated DVDs)? Can it be said that there is much more than a cartography of exclusion to be thought about, in other words, the proliferation of other forms of consumption, the production of images and spacemoments of well-being from the bottom up, the negotiation of rules and the construction of a visibility announcing another perspective. COMMUNITY CAPITAL AND FRACTAL ACCUMULATION In the particular case of Bolivian migration, that plays a leading role in La Salada and the textile workshops, a “communitarian capital” also migrates, characterized, as I noted earlier, by its ambiguity: it is liable to function in terms of self-management, mobilization, and insubordination and also as a modality of servitude, submission, and exploitation. As I said earlier, the communitarian aspects in their flexible meaning compose the landscape of a new migrant proletariat, simultaneously political, neighborly, familiar, and delocalized. That heritage becomes capital in various forms, capitalizing precisely on knowledges and practices considered to be archaic, pre- (or anti-) modern, as inputs for adaptation and reinvention of forms of production, circulation, and consumption. The form in which we here characterize this communitarian feature demonstrates the problematic character of the notion itself put to work in the city (that is, taking away its strictly rural connotations), involved in market practices and transactions (in other words, moving it from a closed circuit of reciprocity) and linked to migrant trajectories (that is, displacing it from its purely territorial identity and anchor). We hypothesize that there is a plus for the popular economies, in their skill of innovation and informality, that has to do with putting into play modalities that had been displaced or marginalized while the pattern of wage labor spread as the majoritarian norm. Nor can they be confined to a “solidarity” matrix, which to us seems to be a weak category, from the point of view of political anthropology, for assuming the complexity of what we call baroque economies, as a composition of disparate practices. “La Salada is a place of survival without rules,” I was told by a financier who started his business there, however, it is the market itself that “provides a type of exceptional financial education: precisely by not having rules.” The historical experience of Andean self-employment placed in relation to the territory of the Buenos Aires urban periphery, in the middle of the crisis, is the space-time where that financial versatility finds an opportunity for progress. Additionally, what is revealed in these economies is the ration-

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alization of diverse reproductive economies as immediately productive economies. Going a step further in the argument leads us to ask what type of accumulation this communitarian capital is capable of. According to Gutiérrez Aguilar (2011), it could be thought that the dynamic of the popular-communitarian economy produces a fractal system of accumulation. This means that accumulation does not follow a linear and progressive logic, but rather “associative M-C-M loops.” If it could be diagrammed based on two mathematical models, we would say that there is a geometric growth and another exponential growth. Geometric growth could be thought of as the pattern that industrial accumulation follows, while financial capital tends to, without ever fully achieving it, grow exponentially. The hypothesis of fractal accumulation would work to think up a mode of accumulation that, upon reaching a certain point, displaces capital accumulation toward other associative nuclei (the family, neighborhood, friends), whose distinctive quality is its strongly relational character, abandoning, in this sense, the canonical form of geometric growth. This gives meaning to a displacement of accumulation as the motor of small and medium businesses that, like a game of Chinese boxes, enables reproductions on the small and medium scale. This is how we can characterize the mode of growth and proliferation that marks La Salada’s rhythm. Each accumulation point would result in a new series that would be dependent at its starting point, but, at the same time, would relaunch itself as a new starting point. Accumulation, under the fractal figure, would not have the increase and concentration of capital as a uni-dimensional goal, but rather its multiplication, operating in a networked way and enabling a logic of multiplication of scales. We are left with the question of whether this strongly associative character, as a dynamic of accumulation, can make itself a counterpoint to the properly capitalist figure of “possessive individualism.” This fractal geometry of accumulation, along with allowing for thinking processes in terms that are not strictly linear, introduces a certain notion of circular temporality. This temporality, defined by each iteration loop in fractal reproduction, can break, however, unfolding and/or turning into a traditional dynamic of accumulation. The investigation of this transit is a central point, where, for example, the state contends for territory (the demarcation of La Salada’s borders by Gendarmerie’s force) and there are attempts for more “formal” enterprises within the market itself (like the new construction of the warehouse Tunari, aiming to be neater and less market-like than the rest of the constructions). The fractal mode of accumulation that we are hypothesizing would be a mode of proliferation that would work, at the same time, as a reassurance of the dynamic border or limit of accumulation. Meanwhile, it is a modality that assures the labor market’s regeneration: it trains and organizes workers in a

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context of informalization and the transformation of state institutions, recreating a logic of exploitation, already outside of any norm of traditional contractual work (opening a broad range of combinations of diversified waged and contractual forms), enabling a flexible labor flow from below that is articulated with communitarian dynamics, historically familiar in territories without welfare institutions. La Salada, from this point of view, produces welfare—or institutions of well-being—from below. This occurs because La Salada, as a zone, concentrates a productive know-how that unfolds as the rapid invention of economic forms, where production and reproduction are mixed, linked to tactics of the simultaneous resolution of life and work, work and life. Fractal accumulation, at this point, seems to coincide with what I noted above: from a point of view, the self-managed politics appear to compensate for the activities and services of reproduction (from education to health care, from care or security to transportation), so that workers find themselves forced to assume the costs of their own reproduction. However, the thesis immersed in these types of communitarian practices brings us back to the ambiguity of an autonomous drive that is capable of breaking down distinctions between life and work, not only as an effect of the dispossessive cunning of capital, but also as a self-organizing, non-state centric tradition. THE MARKET AS VARIEGATED SOCIAL SPACE The market is a thick space, with multiple layers, meanings, and transactions. A variegated space that simultaneously cherishes traditions and is heretical in respect to many of them, that serves as a celebratory environment and space of disputes, as a moment of encounter, consumption, and diversion, but also an intense day of work and business, of competition and opportunism. It maintains itself and develops as a massive business based on family, neighborhood, sponsorship, and friendship networks. It is also an economy of diverse languages: of costumes, dances, promises, meals, and excesses. The variegated element here is not, however, a cultural trait or a colorful difference, but rather the sustenance of the immeasurability of these economies. La Salada, while confined to a symbolic and geographic border territory, has a proliferating dynamic that is replicated in other neighborhoods and cities, in Argentina and beyond, both in the merchandise and the market form that characterizes it. In turn, it represents a model of an open air commercial center that puts in tension all the classic economic categories: informal/ formal, legal/illegal, etc. It works in harmony with similar spaces in other parts of the world, which could be classified as nuclei of “non-hegemonic” commerce.

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We define them as a transnational network supported by multiple proletarian micro-economies. On this point, as I have noted, La Salada is revealed as a privileged space for analyzing how the informal economy constitutes, above all, the force of the unemployed, migrants, and women that could be read as a response “from below” to the dispossessive effects of neoliberalism. 7 Its urban impact is decisive (despite not being marked on the maps): a city like Buenos Aires finds itself transformed by this new informal, predominately migrant and feminine tide that, with its hustle and bustle and transactions functioning, are at the same time agents for restructuring capital and the urban space. La Salada is a multitudinous web of production of non-state welfare. With the new project of becoming a food market, La Salada achieves, in a paradoxical and diverse way, what many experiments in the social economy proposed to do in the culminating moment of the 2001 Argentinean crisis: cut costs, eliminate intermediaries, and contribute to massive and popular consumption. During a period of inflation, like the current moment, it is a decisive intervention. La Salada displays forms of great versatility and flexibility in terms of political organization, through multitudinous assemblies, leaders, and thousands of stall operators that organize the day-to-day of the market and connect it to other spaces like the slums, the workshop, and the party. An image of unregulated open space gives way to a complex coordination of an infinity of flows. A festiveness and mysticism (virgins, saints, miracles, ekekos) accompanying the bonanza. Finally, a mode of urban progress that escapes plans and blueprints. Migrant labor, in particular, allows us to question the idea of a “normalization” in the world of work referring to a pattern of strictly waged labor and national composition. The market, as part of a complex assemblage with the economy of the textile workshops, is an especially productive territory for thinking about the ambivalence of the common: that is to say, the multiple uses, conflicts, appropriations, and reinventions of “communitarian capital” that is capable of functioning as a resource for self-management, mobilization, and insubordination, but with no less intensity as a source of servitude, submission, and exploitation, which rightly points out that the communitarian experience is a key moment for the social wealth in dispute. BAROQUE ECONOMIES: A FORM OF MAKING (THE) CITY A baroque economy like La Salada then has a similar logic to the bricoleur discussed by Levi-Strauss: a capacity to bring together elements that at first

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seem to be dissimilar or corresponding to incompatible regimes, a heterogeneous composition of fragments and dynamics that do not resist an analysis of purity, but, on the contrary, reveal a plurality of forms in an unequal meshwork. Armando Bartra (2005) notes this characteristic for certain domestic campesino economies: wagering on various activities without the economy depending on one unique and specialized activity. We say baroque economies because baroque refers to the hodgepodge. In La Salada this baroque style also has to do with imitation, the reign of the copy. “Every imitator is a manufacturer, a polytechnician.” Rancière (2004, 30) says in regards to a fundamental topic: imitators are responsible for a particular production that “reproduces and falsifies the image of the necessary” (2004, 10). Imitators’ power is their general power: “the power of the double, of representing anything whatsoever or being anyone whosoever” (ibid.). Imitation or falsification allows an overturn of the stipulated consumption, places, and roles. Suddenly, anyone can consume anything. Products that are supposedly ranked by cost and brand start being consumed by anyone. Additionally, in the market, those who migrate find the possibility of changing work, profession, and aspirations. From there, the force of progress is the possibility of a passage, a change. Balibar (2014, 19) says that only the prospect of “unlimited progress, that is, the idealized collective desire to effectively arrive at equality of opportunity for everyone in society, could maintain the pressure that tended to curtail privileges and hold perennial forms of domination in check, enlarging the space of freedom for the masses,” pressure as the motor of social citizenship. In migrant trajectories, this idealized collective pressure-desire for expanding rights is revived under that formula of “antinomy of progress.” However, unlike that amalgam between progressivism and statism that for Balibar characterizes the limits of nineteenth and twentieth century socialism, the aspiration of progress is no longer completely fused into the statist horizon, but rather retakes—as Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) notes—a post-statist communitarian horizon in fully urban contexts. The baroque, applied to popular economies, refers to the heterogeneity of productive forms: sufficiently flexible to combine and subordinate family workshops, home work, informal enterprises, and kinship networks with highly consumed brands and export networks and transnational transactions. In its own way, it reissues a “baroque modernity,” as García Linera (2014) refers to it, when it unifies “productive structures of the XV, XVIII and XX centuries in a scaled and hierarchical way” in Bolivia. It is also the repetition of servile or semi-slave labor (from the maquiladora to the textile workshop) as an important, but non-hegemonic, segment of transnational economies in capitalist globalization, which confirms that modality is a (post)modern component of the organization of work and not an archaic remnant of an over-

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come, pre-modern, or pre-capitalist, past. The Universal Exposition of production forms that Virno talks about in defining post-Fordism is a diverse image but which dialogues with the baroque: the simultaneous co-existence of modes that challenge the linear narrative of progress and the overcoming of forms that tend to be ever more modern and “free.” This baroque effect is translated onto the city. The dynamics led by the migrant labor force in Argentina, give rise to a spatial reconfiguration through “new cross-border geographies of centrality and marginality” constituted by these territorial processes (Sassen 2007). This form of understanding geopolitical processes destabilizes the center-periphery division as it was understood thirty years ago: as a segmentation based on the distinction between nation-states. The market is a laboratory-place where many of these changes are expressed and a new form of making the city is anticipated. FLEXIBILITY AND MOBILITY OF THE CREATIVE ECONOMY In this text, we wanted to link the notion of the creative economy to a sector that usually remains exempt from this characterization. In the textile-market, the popular economy that we take as a laboratory for a type of informality that functions as an instituting source and as a source of incommensurability, the production and management of the symbolic and material aspect of the brands’ clothing, their (legal and illegal) retail circuits, and exclusivity as an attribute that is maintained in opposition to the falsification of the garments (in legal and illegal retail circuits). Creativity is put to work as a way of flexibilizing, amplifying, and sabotaging the class hierarchies of consumption and, at the same time, it displays its reverse as a form of exploitation and servile characteristics of work. The communitarian dimension that we underlined as an essential component of those productive assemblages (that articulate multiple dimensions going from housing to work, from migration to consumption, and from the family to the micro-enterprise, passing through the transnational brand) is key for thinking a type of “flexible creativity” capable of translating, adapting, and reinventing knowledges, technologies, and modalities of doing that, more than an archaic stereotype, function as part of a political and economic dynamism for large parts of the popular sectors. However, the idea itself of “flexible creativity,” immersed in these economies, does not cease to show its ambivalence: as part of the neoliberal conditions that structure it and as a vitalist pragmatic that puts it in tension and disputes it from below.

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NOTES 1. Throughout the year the newspaper La Nación returned to the North American description of the matter: see the article from February 12, 2014, titled “The Salada, the Largest Black Market in the Region, According to the United States,” and the article from March 30, 2014, “The United States Complained About the Argentine Government’s ‘Absence of Political Will’ for Fighting ‘Phony’ Products.” 2. This perspective is reflected, for example, in the 2013 book by J. Auyero and G. Berti Violence at the Margins. Their work, interesting in how it locates the problem of violence without compartmentalizing it in order to investigate its interconnections, reiterates the classic locus of violence as an anomie, exacerbated by conditions of poverty. 3. “The Salada outsellsshoppingmalls,” by Patricia Barral in Perfil, May 9, 2010. 4. The title of an article referring to the art world is striking: “The Louvre in the Salada,” that casts the Salada’s polemic in relation to art: “copyright, copy and paste, and the new rules requiring access to art in the world of corporations and 2.0.” http://www.pagina12.com.ar/ diario/suplementos/radar/9-7866-2012-04-15.html. 5. Adidas launched an advertisement where an amateur soccer team plays wearing the brand’s clothing but over time you see the shirts shrink and the shoes break. The screen goes dark and the words appear: “Fake clothing doesn’t make you look very good. If it’s illegal it’s produced under bad working conditions and with low quality materials.” However, these working conditions are the same as those under which “non-falsified” clothing is made. 6. The case of Lacoste vs. the Wachiturros is emblematic in this sense. Particularly the polemic around whether or not the brand would offer the band money to stop “discrediting it” and how the cumbia singers defended their right of use. 7. For another interpretation, see “The Shopping Mall of the Poor” by Jorge Luis Ossona.

REFERENCES Balibar, Étienne. 2014. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Translated by James Ingram. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bartra, Armando. 2005. “Dilemas históricos y actuales de las luchas populares en México. Diálogo con Armando Bartra,” en Bienvenidos a la selva. Diálogos a partir de la Sexta Declaración del EZLN, ColectivoSituaciones (comp.), Tinta limòn: Buenos Aires. Chatterjee, Partha. 2014a. “Democracy and the Political Management of Primitive Accumulation,” conferencia dictada en la Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, November 6. ______. 2014b. “Restos coloniales en la modernidad,” entrevista de Verónica Gago y Juan Obarrio, en revista Ñ, 3 de noviembre, disponibleen http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/ideas/Partha_Chatterjee-Restos-coloniales-modernidad_0_1240675931.html. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press. García Linera, Álvaro. 2014. Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, WorkingClass and Popular Identities in Bolivia. Leiden: Brill. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel. 2011. “Modernidades Alternativas. Reciprocidad y formas comunitarias de reproducción material,” mimeo. Jaguaribe, Beatriz. 2007. O choque do real: estética, mídia e cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. Klossowski, Pierre. 2012. Living Currency. Trans. Jordan Levinson. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006. “Immaterial Labor.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Neilson, Brett. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moulier Boutang, Yann. 2006. De la esclavitud al trabajo salariado. Madrid: Akal.

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Negri, Antonio. 2006. “Prologue,” in MoulierBoutang, Yann (2006): De la esclavitud al trabajo salariado. Madrid: Akal. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Philosopher and His Poor. Translated by Corinne Osterand John Drury. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Ch’ixinakaxutxiwa.Unareflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Retazos/Tinta Limón. Sanyal, Kalyan K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. London; New York: Routledge. Sassen, Saskia. 2007. Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Virno, Paolo. 2003. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Chapter Five

Network Subjectivity and Its Culture of Resistance The Challenges in Post-Fordist Capitalism Bruno Cava

The network is crucial in the debate on the struggles’ organization. While building horizontal networks is currently in vogue among theorists and activists, the discursive practices around the network are frequently mystified: smoothing out the problems, contradictions, and paradoxes without which all the political sharpness of this issue simply disappears. A basic premise in this article is that the network should not be understood as a liberating tendency in itself, as if some formal architectural and procedural rules would be enough to establish horizontality, nor does it mean a sort of technological evolution bringing unstoppable progress, without an entire problematic field arising throughout the entire network. Notwithstanding, on the other hand, it is at the same time necessary to avoid “decadentist” or even apocalyptical arguments regarding networks, as control technologies that now suffocate any kind of resistance or creativity within its knots, a kind of technophobia, which limits itself to regret the sophistication of the net surveillance mechanisms. In a broad sense, capitalism always functioned within social networks, as clearly shown since at least as early as Marx in his classical formulations around the criticism of the founding fathers of the liberal political economy (Marx 2011). All circuits of capital circulation depend on the launch of a production-circulation-consumption scope that allows the condensation of the actual work of cooperation into value form, which will restart the cycle and so on. In short, capital needs to exploit labor to continue functioning, or it would drain to death, like a vampire without blood (Harvey 2010). The 83

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more capitalism engulfs society, seeking further “extraction points” of living work, the more instances of production, circulation, and consumption need to be created, sophisticating and disseminating the places and time of the valorization process in progressively more complex networks. This capitalist process of “networking,” with all of its intrinsic violence and unequal character, continues until a point where all of society becomes subsumed in the “social factory” of value production, that is, the historical point of the post-Fordist capitalist society (Negri 2006). This also means a process of progressive abstraction of the value form, once networks begin to pervade every aspect of the social tissue. The globalized financialization of the twenty-first century and the present horizon for the struggles aiming to disrupt such capitalist networked society. Another tendency associated with the value form cycle consists in the acceleration of the value realization cycle, which implicates more speed and more connectivity of the networks, in order to obtain higher profits. This also means higher risks and exploitation rates (plus-value). In other words, this refers to the tendency to develop a continuous mesh of value extraction spread throughout the metropolis (apex of the networked territory), not depending on the old command and production centers of industrial capitalism that polarized the social networks in the industrial society of the past. Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks (Benkler 2006), supposes the gradual formation of an online organized multitude out of the expansion of network culture, essentially based on peer to peer (P2P) architecture and on the horizontal production of common goods [commons]. Proprietary and centralizing models, like Microsoft, simply do not work because the richness of cooperation is reduced and the free exchange of goods, which also characterizes a gift economy more productive than the copyright standard of scarcity, is interrupted. Thus, Microsoft’s 20-billion-dollar net profit in 2013 results from an obsolete business model, which harms productive chains that could have been generating more, and in a more democratic way. Radicalizing democracy means, therefore, radicalizing networks, making sure they are the most horizontal and circulative as is possible. The fact is that proprietary companies like Microsoft explore transversal cooperation that happens in the nets. According to Wikipedia data, Google and Facebook profited $13 billion and $1.5 billion in 2013 without charging the users a dime. Both companies profited only by capitalizing on the other companies’ brands. Therefore, they operate mainly on the immaterial plane, offering services in exchange for the highly productive investment of time, attention, and cooperation of billions of people. Benkler’s theories, embraced by several network enthusiasts, are rather incomplete, as they seem to simply accompany the sophistication of the process of exploitation and diffuse expropriation nets, putting themselves at the service of a capitalistic modernization that guarantees nothing in terms of liberation of social labor in the face

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of valorization scopes. From the point of view of capitalism, Benkler´s theories seem rather cooperative for the expansion and deepening of exploitation, inequality and the value form circuit. Lawrence Lessig, in “free culture” (Lessig 2004), put himself up against the proprietary paradigm of copy and authorial rights and patents, and against the colonization of the communication spectrums and of the Internet itself by big concentrative companies. Even though this line of speech in fact thickens the struggle against the giants of the phonographic industries and television, it is equally insufficient to deal with the new forms of exploitation of cooperation, which occurs inside its own paradigm of the free. The NGO Creative Commons multiplies the alternatives of the licensing models for the authors, but it does not question the forms of labor, company, and profitability. The choice of the word “free” to designate free cultural programmatic ideas ironically carries into its theoretical matrix all the ambiguity expressed within capitalism: does it mean “free market,” or maybe “free labor”? Probably both, some entrepreneurs of the new 2.0 markets would estimate. Usually with their “hip” styles and heavy investments in technological innovation marketing, such companies limit themselves to collecting what they do not produce (the so-called “positive externalities”). They accredit themselves based on the capacity to concentrate time and attention on themselves, just like Google and Facebook operate on a regular basis, in order to magnetize publicity funds and governmental aids, in a growing symbiosis based on a new form of living labor exploitation. However the gratuitousness does not guarantee anything and can rapidly reach the status of ideological discourse, once it shadows all the hierarchies and free labor behind the “horizontality” and “free culture” slogans. When a precarious worker is hired by an outsourced company from Africa to perform maintenance on Facebook (inspecting accounts, erasing pornography, identifying bugs, etc.) for one dollar per hour, it is not shown on the spreadsheets as semi-slave labor, it will probably not be shown at all. Nor do we find it so strange that a multibillionaire company profits on photos, messages, conversations, and relationships, after all, it is free service. I must say it again: there is a nuclear ambiguity, since the term free culture can be interpreted as “culture with no restraints” or “culture for free (as in having no money exchanged).” Secondly, in the “2.0 free culture” model enterprise, capitalization occurs by the association of the brand itself with sources of immaterial content, like bands, artists, collectives, and social movements, anything that the current generations of consumers feels attracted to and wants to associate themselves with, as subjectivity pluses. At the end of the cycle of consecutive maneuvers, under the idea that “we are all together and mixed,” the brand administration manages to integrate in the general estimate not only an alternative, indie, hip, innovative image but also starts to aspire to the practice of the actual representation of these sources, channeling publicity funds and state’s

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mediations, presenting itself as a youthful political force. The capture of the free here consists of an efficient technique of binding the immaterial richness with the ones who intend to represent them politically or commercially— paying the minimum possible in the implementation of the process, in order to reverse what is saved in the process itself, in the best Calvinist capitalist spirit (Universidade Nômade 2012). There is a third misappropriation of the networks in the speech that limits itself to celebrate a new stage of the development of “mankind” (whatever that may mean). It is just another step on the long path of humans before reaching superabundance. With a focus on network technologies, it would be sufficient to spread the new ways of communication and “human” interaction that networks provide, in a mass inclusion of people into the digital environment. The struggles, conflicts, and contradictions would have been rendered obsolete in the face of the immeasurable potential for evolution triggered by something like the Internet and its ultra connectivity. This “digitalism” (Pasquinelli 2008, 2012), usually invoked by theorists who behave as prophetic gurus, is as new and innovative as some utopian experiences of socialism of the nineteenth century. Saint-Simon, an aristocrat, used to say that the invention of the railroads and the telegraph were a revolution that would lead inexorably to everlasting peace. The new technologies would lead to the refoundation of humanity based on free cooperation and the automatic moral evolution, automatically eradicating poverty and social conflicts along its creative evolution. Nowadays Saint-Simon’s followers are in the same trench as the neoliberals, and they are, unsurprisingly, selling their consultations and lectures on “technological training” at high prices, harmoniously aligned with the theoretical mockery at the end of history. We should radically change our premises concerning networks, if we want to elaborate minimally effective strategies within globalized and integrated capitalism. Beyond any sort of techno-utopia, and without falling into the symmetrical error of technophobia, we should consider networks and their (social) technologies as the new ground of the conflict. The seemingly horizontal and, at first view, cooperative production that happens in them continues in dispute and should be assumed that way. The conflict happens along several coordinates. For instance, it happens between bodies of representation and technologies of control and autonomous political practices, around the struggle of liberation of this socially networked production. A liberation that can occur in the form of sabotage (think of the Anonymous commandos) or a reappropriation of social wealth (like systematic copyleft and “piracy” practices), but also in a less confrontational manner, through cooperative collectives creating vacuoles of non-capitalization. The latter should not be mistaken for utopian communities, as if it were possible nowadays to live outside the scope of capital and the state, but as experiments of

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autonomy and self-valorization, mostly inspired by the communicative networks established around the Zapatista movement since the 1990s. The main goal of these network liberation struggles is to generalize an alternative to society, and not merely a self-managed alternative society, which usually hides its own implication in the capitalist process, while reproducing some sort of sheer anarcho-individualism and paranoid horizontality. Because of that, it is important to build political fronts in the network, or better said, to network resistance without “free culture” or techno-utopian lobbies, therefore keeping liberation tendencies beyond any entirely functional brand management of a celebrated “capitalism 2.0” (Roggero 2009). As capital and the state are relations and not untouchable leviathans, the question of autonomy is still how to fight the terms of this autonomy amidst the current form of domination. Actually, the alternative to society already exists as pre-transitory forms (still embryonic) in the actuality of organizational knots and nets of living labor. However living labor and its organizational instances need to liberate themselves from inside the networks, colonized by the capital and the state. After all, within capitalist networks the living labor remains active and potentially rebellious, depending on autonomous subjectivities for gathering an organizational force big enough to start an open struggle. Either way, even under the most paranoiac control, capitalist networks still have a latent living labor force, and are crossed from all corners by conflicts, paradoxes, and conflictive tendencies. This complex reality of network exploitation and liberation struggles requires a continuous discussion and political evaluation in regard to strategies and possibilities, without mystification of freedom, gratuity, or immediacy. This is not “just” theory (Negri and Hardt 2009), but also the way in which those who are willing to fight “in and against” the forms of domination and exploitation live, that is, in precariousness. As Gigi Roggero (2013) explains that a strong political concept of network is needed, one that corresponds to the material basis of desire of who needs to go beyond the “less bad,” in the self-organization of common practices beyond the state and the market, both meshed completely and inextricably in post-Fordist capitalism. Despite the fact that the networks are the historically concrete place of capitalist appropriation and control, paradoxically they are also where the best of social cooperation happens, and where the most potent resistance affirmation of alternatives can be thought of and transformed in political projects. As a matter of fact, this is already happening and has not gone unnoticed by those who research the global cycle of on-going struggles. The rising subjectivity is born in the network of movements, in a sort of anthropological, social, and political transformation, of how we see ourselves connected, of how we construct practices of the “common,” indignation and forms of struggle. In this front of a grand transformation of subjectivity, we are entirely “rewired” according to an ultra-accelerated sociality, that is, alterations of

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perceptive, psychomotor, and other sensitivities to experience the relationships, the time, and the space, a new awareness of the social and political body. Either way, this can neither lead us to celebrate some qualitative evolution (because capital also evolved, and all forms of control and exploitation), nor to grieve some sort of lost authenticity in a nostalgia of the good old days (of the civil rights movement, of past revolutions), which will not return, at least not in the same subjective coordinates. The coordinates to liberate networks have shifted. Obviously this struggle for liberty of networks is a long process. Especially, in the poorest global areas. Capitalism also works stagnating levels, because only in this manner can it impulse the productive flows through the architecture of value. Value has to be forced to enter the pipelines and to circulate. Capital needs to coerce labor so that it “freely” submits to the process of exploitation. Therefore, what moves the digestive system are different energetic levels of oppression that push each other. Consequently, struggles for digital inclusion, facilitation of access to hardware, cheapening of cellular telephony, and the spreading of wi-fi signals in communities, peripheries, and nooks are vital for the liberation of networks. All of this within a permanent problematization of the ambivalences and contradictions of the process of the networked culture of resistance itself, what takes us back to the problem of the organization of the struggles in the post-Fordist capitalist reality. REFERENCES Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010). Lemos, Ronaldo. Direito, tecnologia e cultura (Author ed., 2011). Lemos, Ronaldo, and Oona Castro. Tecnobrega: o Pará reinventando o negócio da música (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2008). Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004). Marx, Karl. Grundrisse; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1857–1858, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Mario Duayer and Nélio Schneider (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011). Negri, Antonio. Fábricas del sujeto / ontologia de la subversión; Antagonismo, subsunción real, poder constituyente, multitud, comunismo, trans. Marta Malo de Molina Bodelón and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo (Madrid: Akal, 2006). Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2009). Pasquinelli, Matteo. Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, 2008). ———. “Capitalismo maquínico e mais-valor de rede: notas sobre a economicapolítica da máquina de Turing,” transl. Henrique Antoun and Caia Fittipaldi, Revista Lugar Comum 39 (2012): 13–36.

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Roggero, Gigi. “Five Theses on the Common, Rethinking Marxism,” transl. Silvio Pedrosa, Revista Lugar Comum 42 (2013): 11–30. ———. La produzione del sapere vivo. Crisi dell’università e trasformazione del lavoro tra le due sponde dell’Atlantico (Verona: ombre corte, 2009). Universidade Nômade. “O comum e a exploração 2.0,” Site UniNômade Brasil, February 11, 2012, accessed Dicember 2014, http://uninomade.net/tenda/o-comum-e-a-exploracao-2-0/.

Part II

Multitudinous Creativities: Radicalities and Alterities

Chapter Six

The Creativity of the Streets and the Urbanism of Disaster Clarissa Moreira

Noticeably, the study and evaluation of major earthly risks in the geosciences have highly increased since the two last decades of the twentieth century. According to studies from geoscientists (Marriner et al. 2010), explanatory theories diverge. The main tendencies state that the Earth was shaped gradually and in very long and slow processes, while catastrophist visions affirm that sudden disasters have always been fundamental to shifts on the environmental conditions and for reshaping the planet. This tension has left a mark on the interpretation and discussion of natural phenomena carried out by scientists throughout the last two centuries, catastrophists often being accused of religious fanaticism. Still according to the authors, neo-catastrophists presently try to unite both visions constituting “a new integrated view that gradual changes in the earth’s history have been punctuated by catastrophic events” (Marriner et al. 2010). These tensions around geoscience’s interpretations seem to be of great relevance in approaching daily life’s concrete situations and governmental decisions concerning the city and its future. The announced climate threats are already a concrete reality faced by large cities throughout the world, and they unleash disaster on many levels and intensities. São Paulo is a sound example, where shortages on water supply seem to have been caused by the heavy destruction of rainforest areas. Still, it is indeed the menace of groundbreaking disaster, rather than everyday micro-catastrophes, that mobilizes a whole market with its own economic, psychological and—to be dealt with in this article—urbanistic horizons. From disaster films to green economy, the image of a merciless, decimating catastrophe is highly invested in.

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Recurrent climate incidents, such as water shortages, floods, air pollution, and the like get less general attention. Similarly, the inequality that sustains post-industrial capitalism and its intrinsic social hierarchies is easily noticeable while distinct social classes feel the aftereffects of disaster before and way longer than others. What followed 2005’s New Orleans 1 tragedy offered the world a didactic example of this cleavage. Visibly, we are never equal, not even before a disaster. In parallel to the awareness of increasing environmental dangers—mainly global warming processes—imagining scenarios of less environmental impact becomes the core subject of thousands of researches, congresses, exhibitions, books, and debates. Lately, it resulted in a complete set of new laws, programs, national and international policies, in which the idea of sustainability looks central, but is actually reframed in a new market tendency. With important research on the issues concerning sustainability, Brazilian urbanist Henri Acselrad examines the main principles for the sustainable city, and the possible convergences and divergences concerning planetary sustainability, observing how eco-efficiency becomes central in governmental and even corporative discourses while the market appears as the main instrument for its concretization (Acselrad 1999). At the same time that sustainability becomes omnipresent in corporative and governmental discourses, aligned with the idea that economic development should be sustainable, the sector known as the creative economy, which includes audiovisual products, design, new media, performing arts, publishing, and visual arts, starts receiving growing importance in the same hegemonic contexts, 2 and is usually presented as a sustainable economic sector. In the Brazilian scenario, the creative and sustainable agenda will clearly join international and national business oriented agendas and interests by means closely connected to the promotion of real intra-urban disasters on different scales and levels, while agencing urban processes where the accumulation of capital is the main target. For instance, the idea of a compact city (Rogers 1998), supposed to be more sustainable by using at the most the existing urban infrastructure, densifying and concentrating the urban organization instead of building in the outskirts of cities, will be the background justification for intervening in old centers by promoting very large renovation projects. At the same time, such projects claim to be recovering historic city centers for protecting the memories of a city, promoting tourism and mass culture and stimulating the creative economy. Culture, in that case, is taken on with an economical and business-centered perspective. The idea of competition among cities is also very much considered in general discourse, whereas city marketing (Sanchez 2010) has become the main tool for promoting these strategies in both local and international contexts. The most critical aspect within that which became the hegemonic way of thinking the present and future transformations of the city is its difficulty, if

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not incapacity, to relate to the urban poor and to ways of life considered marginal or not welcome. No wonder today’s major social and economic conflicts are urban: the world’s greatest cities are a privileged stage for conflicts at various levels, becoming concrete during such processes of urban transformation. Already concerned with this state of things, French philosopher Felix Guatarri envisioned the need of transversal thinking for dealing with environmental and cultural matters (Guatarri 1989). The author presents different manifestations of disaster and their clarifying correspondence in urban situations: More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think “transversally.” As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by “degenerate” images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology, Donald Trump and his ilk—another form of algae—are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology. (Guatarri 1989, 135)

What Trump helped promote in New York, by the time Guatarri was writing, is in fact taking place in Rio de Janeiro as a proposed project for the adjoining areas of the port of Rio: buildings higher than 490 ft., significantly named Trump Towers. Host to several mega-events in the first decades of the 21th century, Rio de Janeiro is engaged in a series of mega-projects that overdo the sustainability and the Creative City discourses as the main ingredients of a recipe for creating urban value and for justifying exclusive, secured, and homogenous ways of building the city (Wanis 2013). In the larger context of that city’s renovation process, more than thirty thousand poor families were evicted in five years and relocated in distant areas disconnected from the main urban grid. The number of evictions rises to more than two hundred thousand families in the whole country in the preparations for the FIFA World Cup. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, this number will still increase due to preparations for the Olympic Games (Sánchez and Broudehoux 2013). The whole creative economy (Wanis 2013) is being enacted: tourism, architecture, urbanism, cultural heritage, design, arts, and other cultural activities coordinated to generate real state value. And the main internal discourse of those creative professions is urban sustainability: using the major discourse of environmental threats to justify and legitimize territorial evic-

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tion in order to promote a major reconstruction and destruction of the urban landscape. This use of the word creative, if we understand it as that which holds in itself the power of creation, and creativity as the capacity for producing or imagining the new, becomes rather problematic. It would be necessary to distinguish the morbid from the vital creativity, to distinguish the sort of creativity of a system which produces catastrophe or a progressive silent disaster, on both micro and macro levels, from a creativity that develops new ways of living to survive and thrive in a more balanced way. It is therefore necessary to distinguish a creativity that operates to release and give life, from one that acts supporting destruction and social damage. The significance of this task gets stronger as the vitality of this leisure-business conceived urban structure depends on conducting the existing ways of life into a more generic or standard pattern of both behavior and consumption, if not directly excluding them as undesirable. The almost religious belief in the inevitability of the present economic system, its demands and modus operandi, became totally hegemonic, as geographer David Harvey reminds us about the neoliberal formula of Margaret Thatcher: “There isn’t any alternative” to neoliberal solutions (Harvey 2005, 12). THE URBANISM OF DISASTER Since the 1990s, the idea of inclusive housing and promoting urban social diversity has conquered some space in Europe, the United States of America, and Canada, resulting in proposals where a percentage, from twenty to thirty percent of social housing, should always be included in urban projects, as a way to balance the major tendency of segregation. 3 Nonetheless, most plans and projects for cities, urban laws and proceedings still generally depart from a naturalizing and normalizing vision where social-spatial hierarchy is hardly questioned and mostly envisioned as a pragmatic reality. In many ways hegemonic urbanism seems to be spatially organizing social inequality. The renovation project for the port of Rio de Janeiro, officially announced as one of the largest urban projects in the world today, is a model case for such an urban conception that clearly engages an urbanism of disaster that has in common with natural catastrophes the fact that it also destroys houses, lives, communities, places, and personal or collective economies. It has the extra difficulty of being a voluntary process held by dominant groups in society. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, a series of top down planning decisions promoting the destruction of most of the old harbor’s old industrial built structure were followed by unjustified forced evictions and houses marked to be removed, which were victoriously interrupted by demonstrations prepared

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by the inhabitants, which had been organized in a community forum with the aid of supporting institutions. 4 The implementation of urban facilities, which is clearly not a priority, if not quite ineffective, was one of the main discussion points. An expensive cable car structure that concerns a very small portion of the depleted community of the oldest remaining Rio slum, Morro da Providência, leaves unattended those who are in need of a better availability of public transportation. The demolition of an existing viaduct and the opening of tunnels, and new express routes, definitely separates a large part of the harbor from the Guanabara Bay with a non-crossable express road, in a project which cost more than $1.5 billion (Sánchez and Broudehoux 2013). These are major interventions clearly aiming at a new urban landscape that may be attractive to national and international investors, financed by the public sale of air building rights in such a fashion, without precedent in the entire city of Rio de Janeiro, and which lack emphasis in creating neighborhoods with mixed uses (Mesentier and Moreira 2014). Housing is mostly neglected in a mono-functional corporation business-oriented urban planning, which is clearly not sustainable. Failure in emphasizing housing issues was lately incorporated into the project as a law to flexiblize urban parameters and lower production prices to stimulate residential use that otherwise had been discouraged by the financial model of this enterprise. Nonetheless evictions from ancient housing communities have started again in 2015, with still no solution for dwellers within the major urban operation perimeter. Porto Maravilha will be reintegrated with the city center of Rio through sustainable urban development and productive social inclusion. To do so, new infrastructures will be implemented such as new sewer grids, waste water treatment plants and a public lighting system (5,000 LED streetlights have already been purchased). The Perimetral Overpass will also be demolished and replaced with expressways, underground road tunnels and tunnels that will create green corridors and help reintegrate the region to the rest of the city. Porto Maravilha is a story that indeed will play out over the next 30 years. The challenges faced by Rio de Janeiro are not unlike those faced by many other cities that have embarked on massive waterfront revitalization projects in the post-industrial era. As with any large-scale urban development, it is largely up to the private sector to figure out creative ways to make projects within the urban intervention district economically viable. (City Climate Leadership Awards, 2014)

The increase of real estate value is visibly preceded by an image of recovery of the same area (Mesentier and Moreira, 2014). Producing urban landscapes associated with symbolic references of the hegemonic international culture are the very target of such projects. For urbanist Paola Berenstein-Jacques “these so-called revitalization projects—this designation insinuates that the spaces to be ‘revitalized’ are dead, lacking in life, or that the kind of existent

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life is not appropriate and must be replaced—are almost always spectacularization projects” (Berenstein-Jacques 2013, 285). In this strategy local life, which does not respond to the main aesthetics desires, or even menaces them, must either be re-adequated or re-signified to compose the scenario, or should go elsewhere. These projects seek to transform public spaces into stage sets, disembodied spaces, facades without bodies: pure publicity images. Contemporary scenographic cities are increasingly standardized and uniform; they are pacified spaces, apparently destitute of inherent conflicts, of discord and misunderstandings; in short, they are apolitical spaces. (Berenstein-Jacques 2013, 285)

These projects act as, what David Harvey mentions as, the many utopian practices going on nowadays, from bourgeoise utopias of fully protected and comfortable small bucolic spaces, to Marin’s degenerated utopias of enclosed cities and neighborhoods as hidden utopias in actual urban renovation projects (Harvey 2000, 67). And it is precisely in this context where the class of professionals and strategies named creative play a major role, not only helping to design, build, transform, and publicize, but also to personally inhabit these places. When it comes to projects of reconquering, for instance, old city centers or well-located poor neighborhoods, artists and other creative talents during the last decades have been the first to move in, in an induced manner. It is clear that in gentrification processes the so-called creatives are the great pioneers in the resumption of territories, along with their eternal thirst for new horizons and a mixing/cultural exchange that nurtures their production and their way of life. The difference now is that the process is induced and organized by the State. It is very clear in Rio de Janeiro’s case how the first to start moving into the changing harbor were artists and designers (Mesentier and Moreira 2014). CREATIVE CAPITALISM AND ITS COLORFUL ARMY Taking over territories, rebuilding landscapes to increase real estate value and creating a general consensus of its necessity, efficiency, and advantages are the main operative strategies for building a creative city, if Rio de Janeiro would be taken as an example. And, if one looks at the references to the Porto Maravilha project, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires there is little difference as per strategy. Most of these projects start by building a great museum or other major structures attractive for tourists. In the Porto Maravilha project, the case of Morro da Providência is an example of how creative strategies may operate in a rather subtle and complex way. Moments when dissensual tactics and resistance forms were put

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forward by inhabitants and their supporters, and how they are either captured or reframed, are also important references of how the process is being held. The construction of the Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro (MAR), together with Calatrava’s Museum of Tomorrow (still under construction), were thought of as a starter or urban catalyst that would work as a landmark of the renovation operation put forward by the municipality, together with a private consortium of the major building contractors operating in Brazil and Latin America. From its opening day in 2012, the MAR hosted a series of exhibitions and lectures intending to intellectually explore conflicts going on in the area, and trying to establish a dialogue with local life. A cultural policy, whose main goal is to systematize meanings and senses engaged by the renovation process held in the port area, was gradually made clear. By engaging in an instant process of museification, a disturbing distancing of the spectator from a painful and violating process happening next door seems to be established. An example would be the exhibition Abrigo e Terreno (The Shelf and the Site) held at the MAR in 2012, whose theme was the urban struggle for housing. The removal of inhabitants from sites, subject to urban renewal, especially in São Paulo, was a theme for several art works. Rio de Janeiro’s case was far less mentioned. According to the exhibition’s publicity materials, the event was “conceived as a laboratory for dialogue and antagonisms which traverses the XX century and invades contemporaneity.” 5 By that time, two photographers (French artist JR and Maurício Hora, from Providência’s community) were working with the inhabitants of the favela in Morro da Providência whose houses had been condemned to demolition. The houses marked with numbers, by the Municipal Housing department personal, to be demolished without further explanation, were photographed alongside their dwellers, giving a human correspondent to the numbers tagged on their external walls. Videos and films were also produced by independent media activists in order to support menaced inhabitants. Concurrently, Portuguese artist Vhils also made carving works picturing faces on the remaining walls of some of the already demolished houses. One of the panels was then remarkably placed in MAR’s terrace to take advantage of a fantastic view over the port. This art work figured in the official publicity material as an artistic reinforcement of local social memory, and nothing was said about the political struggle of dwellers fighting for minimum rights. “MAR’s terrace will receive Vhils intervention that will carve on the walls the faces of those who inhabit the harbor area, promoting the symbolic meeting of bodies—people, houses, architectures—experiencing recent urban transformation.” 6 Ultimately, the slings and arrows of the renovation process are transformed into a spectacle which is feeding back the whole cycle, in an instant museification of what is naturalized through the recurrent idea of “urban

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transformation,” 7 as if there were no calculated and deliberate political decision implicated. In this context, artist Yuri Firmeza was invited in 2013 for an installation work at the same museum. The artist also chose to work the tension underlying that renovation project, dealing with the subjects of loss, aging, death, memory, and oblivion. Debris of demolished houses and materials resulting from rescue archaeology works were put side by side. On the official exhibition texts the idea of inclemency of the passing of time seem to perform a kind of management of grief. 8 French philosopher Henri-Pierre Jeudy has closely examined these tendencies regarding catastrophes in the light of present museography. According to his analysis, these mechanisms of representation or this celebration of grief actually promote the collapse of all meaning that disasters could generate (Jeudy 2003, 94). Urban conflicts seem to be re-channelled or reframed in artistic narratives that organize and somehow capture all meaning of the process of territorial control and de-possession through top-down critical urban decisions. Meanwhile, the cable car of Morro da Providência resumes the touristification process. All other promised infrastructural urban improvements never happened; inhabitants explain that local real estate prices have already begun to increase, and seemingly the younger generation is already forced to leave the community when they intend to have a home of their own. The idea of gentrifying the favelas became a hegemonic governmental policy in Rio de Janeiro. Urban renovation reinforced by sustainability and the whole creativity discourse, on the one side, and the need for urban development in the face of world crisis on the other side. Mega-events have been the occasion to address all those issues at one time, specifically created in Rio de Janeiro, a particular atmosphere for a sort of private kidnapping of the city’s future helped with constitutionally allowed public and private partnerships that today, in Brazil, represent absolute privatization of some parts of the city. In this difficult context, poor people seem to have to either be able to join in the whole process of redevelopment, or move out to the outskirts. The creative class thus, mobilized and articulated around museums and other cultural centers, constitutes real think tanks that could operate by means of generating real alternatives, possible conciliations, real dialogue and exchange of ideas. But it all seems to display little effect on ongoing policies that show no special evolution despite the occasion for rethinking and re-planning. Finally, this sort of strategy for managing dissent seems to be rather constitutive of new spaces, as a means of depriving or preventing conflict. Almost in a post-traumatic collective psychotherapeutic mechanics, culture and arts end up as a means to organize grief and dissenting thoughts and ideas: they are received, recorded, and then archived.

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In official documents, MAR declares its aim to create a policy of the look which poses the problem of the role of art. French philosopher Jacques Rancière mentions how aesthetics is criticized for having become a sort of perverse discourse (Rancière 2009, 2) that would prevent a real confrontation between the arts and politics, where the works of art are submitted to a thinking machine conceived for other purposes—social, poetical, or philosophical. In the MAR’s case, the meaning capture apparatus seems to definitely discard censorship as an old-fashioned strategy, as all possible contradiction is reabsorbed and re-signified by the museum itself, and by other official media with precious aid from artists and art critics. The trinomial urban renovation, creativity, and corporative business work harmoniously in building a pacified and consensual vision of the city under construction. In November 2014, for instance, Moma displays the exhibition Uneven Growth: tactical urbanism for expanding megacities, which is a major example of how creative architects, urban planners, and designers are invited to approach complex urban situations in a manner which is also directed for building pacific visions of the city, avoiding inner conflicts and disputes, intrinsic to real contemporary urban processes. Mostly spared the violence of micro-catastrophes going on in the context of the metropolis, it is not difficult for creative professionals to avoid, deny, or take as natural the conflictual and rather painful dimension of the city, and sometimes of their very projects and their political and social effects. A brief look over how architects, urban planners, artists, and designers have related to the major urban transformation process of Rio de Janeiro shows a clear division between those that were willing to join in the hegemonic process, those who show indifference to this conflict, those few standing aside in a rather critical position, and those very few that actually supported affected communities with projects, in a conjoint struggle for turning public their expectations and needs, and, for that, often being stigmatized. 9 The whole problem of collaboration on the local levels of disaster promotion must be seriously addressed in the context of creative professions and the idea of a creative city working for generating financial value. In doing so, class conflicts which are a subterranean tension in that discussion, should not be eluded: imposition of middle class and élite sociabilities and ways of life, and racist naturalized practices at all levels, are never too far away while constructing the utopia for what the city should be. Local policies allowing poor and black people a place in public universities (Nascimento 2006) are a path to overcome the exclusion of non-elitist or middle class hegemonic visions of the city and urban culture in urban thinking and other creative professions. It could represent a major way to reinforce and affirm other ways of imagining and producing a diverse common future. Simultaneously, bottom-up strategies to think and transform the city are also a valuable and

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necessary key for exploring other ways of thinking and building a more balanced city. THE VITAL CREATIVITY OF THE STREETS The greatest intelligence, brought by the contemporary multitudinous social movements that seized metropolitan streets around the world, and in Rio after June 2013, was perhaps their transversal and complex understanding of the catastrophe mechanism in a Guatarrian sense. Differently from governmental policy that is visibly incapable of thinking and acting transversally on major urban issues—for instance, by programming housing provision, mobility, job offers, infrastructure construction in non-coordinated strategies— people on the streets understood that all the main urban issues were connected. From family evictions in poor communities, targeted by major urban infrastructure and renovation projects, to the price of bus fare, the assassination of the favelas’ working class young people, police repression over the protests in the streets, and the huge public expenses with mega-events. . . . Differently from the accusations of nonsense or of political misinformation, concocted by the main local media networks, the crowd that seized the streets seemingly defied the hegemonic capitalist way of capturing meaning. Actually, the common line of all protests was a fundamental bio-political struggle: to preserve ways of life and to force space to create new ones, to halt the invasion of territories and to reinvent new ones, slowing down the catastrophe process by launching new cooperative small scale processes. But now, in a contradictory way, the actual profiling of a major catastrophe for the dominant capitalist power system has to do with envisioning—and worst of all, actually experiencing—other ways of living, living on a collective scale, creating autonomy. All sorts of new communal organizations, meetings, and public discussions collectively and horizontally organized have emerged, encouraged by protests. Some interesting experiences give materiality to that other kind of creativity, which seems to work to enable new ways of life, definitely more creative and “ecological” ones. Young artists and other professionals and students working in the creative field have organized themselves in the form of collectives (coletivos), which are rather nomadic and open collective organizations, during the last decade. Concurrently to the street protests in Brazil, hundreds of collectives were created in an activist perspective operating on independent media, art, design, politics, and even architecture, and largely using digital social networks with an intense and vibrant production. The moments we wish to highlight in this practice are the moments when politically engaged creativity of collectives focused on supporting social

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movements in urban conflicts, mostly dealing with the lack of inclusive housing within the metropolis and with mobility issues. A precedent experience had already taken place in São Paulo (Szaniecki 2014) articulating social movements through “artivist” interferences as a way of giving more visibility to people’s struggle, in 2003. Ten years later, in 2013, the possibility of interchange and support has increased enormously with a major possibility of connecting to people on a global basis through the Internet, and after world experiences like in Egypt, Turkey, or the United States (Occupies). These actions generated know-how for facing micro-catastrophic urban policies: some, concerning the eviction of families from their homes, did generate new urban experiments that constitute real alternatives for thinking the city and its future possibilities: Few resources, a lot of collaboration, collective decision making, reutilization of urban heritage, struggle for the right to dwell, negotiations on various levels, and even international articulation. Some cultural initiatives were also directly attacked like the Aldeia Maracanã—a heritage building occupied by native indigenous descendants and many urban tribes, artists and activists next to Maracanã Stadium, a target for demolition for building a parking area. The building was recovered by the government and private associates, but the social groups are still active. The Museum of the Maré 10 favela complex is also under the menace of eviction in the context of the military pacification process held in that territory because of increases of real estate prices and other political reasons. Some other cases are: Oi/Telerj: concerning the eviction of more than 3,000 people occupying an abandoned building—this struggle was supported by activists and art collectives but heavily repressed by state police forces, denounced to the United Nations organization by the NGO Global Justice. 11 Ocupa Estelita: artists, students, researchers, local inhabitants, and political activists resisting a major real estate high rise development within the old historic center in Recife—Pernambuco, north of Brazil. 12 Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela/Resiste Isidoro: many collectives of the arts, politics, gender, students, the local population and homeless people build together cultural events and also give support to the occupation Resiste Isidoro, where more than 8,000 people are under the menace of eviction by the government in Belo Horizonte. In the case of the metropolis, a whole new set of precautions or ethics should be evoked here while advocating for collaborative and creative interaction between artistic collectives and urban needs, as it might quickly become a new way of a self-promotion strategy for artists and creative groups. Coresearch, co-projects, and autonomy are key words for developing careful and consistent initiatives. Supporting such possibilities of social articulation

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and mitigation of social inequality should be considered a way of thinking on a real Creative City perspective. What is new here is the level of collaboration between social groups struggling for housing and basic rights, homeless people or people with mental disorders, artists, media activists, intellectuals, students, designers, activists, lawyers, and supporting institutions. Failing to recognize the emergence of new forces, concepts, and practices that might really make a difference in building new spaces of democracy and a better quality of life and exchange is nowadays the major catastrophe already happening. Just like the government, a considerable part of society and major private corporations stay insensible to real creative ways of producing urban life, disastrously repressing and dismantling the New that does come from these actions—real way-out actions in the context of global crises are in fact still trying to find their path. It poses a difficulty when being captured by hegemonic strategies or dismantled and erased by repressive policy, which is the real and constant danger. NOTES 1. According to journalist Rebecca Sonit, “Katrina was a fairly terrible natural disaster. But it turned into a horrific social catastrophe because of the response of the people in power, spurred on by their willingness to believe a hysterical, rumor-mongering media. (Journalists on the ground were often fiercely empathic and right on the mark, but those at a remove were all too willing to believe the usual tsunami of cliches about disaster and human nature.) The story that few can wrap their minds around is that ordinary people mostly behaved well—there were six bodies in the Superdome, including four natural deaths and a suicide, not the hundreds that the federal government expected when it sent massive refrigerator trucks to collect the corpses. On the other hand, people in power behaved appallingly, panicking, spreading rumors, and themselves showing an eagerness to kill and a pathological lack of empathy.” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/26/katrina-racism-us-media (Sonit, 2009). 2. “It is not only one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, it is also a highly transformative one in terms of income generation, job creation, and export earnings. Between 2002 and 2011, developing countries averaged 12.1 percent annual growth in exports of creative goods. . . . While creating jobs, creative economy contributes to the overall wellbeing of communities, individual self-esteem, and quality of life, thus achieving inclusive and sustainable development. At a time when the world is shaping a new post-2015 global development agenda, we must recognize the importance and power of the cultural and creative sectors as engines of that development.” In http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/in-focusarticles/creative-industries-boost-economies-and-development-shows-un-report/. 3. For a resumed revue, see the report of the workshop Columbia University and the Federal Fluminense University reported at on: “Porto Maravilha: Planning for Inclusive Communities in Rio de Janeiro” Columbia University GSAPP Urban Planning Studio 2012. In: http://www.arch.columbia.edu/files/gsapp/imceshared/lld2117/1_RioStudio 2012_FinalReport_interactive.pdf. 4. The Forum Comunitário do Porto has started its activities during 2011. https://forumcomunitariodoporto.wordpress.com/. 5. “Shelter and Land opens the Art and Society in Brazil project, which is dedicated to the Brazilian art’s performance in the field of otherness and social relations. The exhibition brings together artists and initiatives from various regions around an issue that—given the urban

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reforms that currently transfigured Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro—is particularly urgent: The views of the city and the forces that combine and come into conflict in the urban, social and cultural transformations that have taken place in the public/private space. Crisscrossing different political and aesthetic horizons—such as Flávio de Carvalho’s idea of the city of the naked man (1930), the finding of a town of weak houses (Clarice Lispector, in “O Mineirinho,” 1962), Brás de Pina’s slum upgrading project (Quadra office, 1960s), or the work of artists (2003–2007) in the Prestes Maia Occupation, in São Paulo—, the exhibit discusses the ownership, possession and enjoyment of social spaces—the land—and the ways politics and subjectivity are produced, from the right to housing to the desire for shelter. Conceived as a laboratory for dialogue and antagonism that runs through the twentieth century and invades contemporaneity, Shelter and Land also includes a schedule of activities with interventions, debates, lectures and publications.” From the MAR official website http://museudeartedorio.org.br/en/node/161 (accessed December 13, 2014). 6. From MAR’s offical website http://museudeartedorio.org.br/pt-br/evento/intervencaono-terraco-do-mar (accessed December 13, 2014). 7. From MAR’s offical website http://museudeartedorio.org.br/pt-br/evento/intervencaono-terraco-do-mar (accessed December 13, 2014). 8. Aquino, José Groppa, Yuri Firmeza: Turvações Estratigráficas. http://museudeartedorio.org.br/pt-br/node/423. 9. This was one of the questions raised during the NEPLAC international meeting in Rio de Janeiro, organized by ETTERN/IPPUR/UFRJ and PPGAU/GPDU/UFF. 10. The museum website: http://www.museudamare.org.br/joomla/index.php?option=com _contentandview=articleandid=48andItemid=54. 11. Rio: ONG denuncia caso de sem-teto da Favela da Telerj à ONU http:/noticias.terra.com.br/brasil/cidades/rio-ong-denuncia-caso-de-sem-teto-da-favela-da-telerj-a-onu ,357eb744ca585410VgnVCM20000099cceb0aRCRD.html . 21 de abril de 2014 16h18 atualizado às 18h50. 12. A batalha pelo Cais José Estelita. Renan Truffi— publicado 18/06/2014 10:13, última modificação 18/06/2014 21:57 http://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/a-batalha-pelo-caisjose-estelita-8652.html.

REFERENCES Acselrad, Henri. Discursos da Sustentabilidade urbana, RBEUR, Estudos Urbanos e Regionais n1/Maior 1999. ANPUR. Berenstein-Jacques, Paola. Urban generation: the improvisations tactics of the favelas vs the spectacularization of public space In Leary, Michael, McCarthy, John. Companion to Urban Regeneration. Routledge, 2013. Guatarri, Felix. The three ecologies. New formations. Number 8, Summer 1989. 135. Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005 ———. Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 167. ISSN: 17120624. http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/1390/2023. Jeudy, Henri-Pierre. La Machinerie Patrimoniale. Paris: SensandTonka, 2003. Marriner, Nick et al. Geoscience meets the four horsemen? Tracking the rise of neocatastrophism. Global and Planetary Change 74 (1): 43–48. 2010. Mesentier, L., and C. Moreira. Produção da paisagem e grandes projetos de intervenção urbana: o caso do Porto Maravilha no Rio de Janeiro Olímpico. Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 2014. http://www.anpur.org.br/revista/rbeur/index.php/rbeur/article/ view/4822. Nascimento, Alexandre do. Ações Afirmativas: da luta do Movimentos Social Negro às políticas concretas. Rio de Janeiro: CEAP, 2006. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Robyn—Goodreads. Rogers, Richard. Cities for a Small Planet. Basic Books, 1998.

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Sánchez, Fernanda. A reinvenção das cidades para um mercado mundial. Chapecó: Ed. Argos, 2010. Sánchez, Fernanda, Broudehoux, Anne-Marie (2013). Mega-events and urban regeneration in Rio de Janeiro: planning in a state of emergency, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 5:2, 132–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2013.839450. ———. A reinvenção das cidades para um mercado mundial (2a edição) chapecó, SC: Argos. Sonit, Rebecca. Four years on, Katrina remains cursed by rumour, cliche, lies and racism. Guardian, Wednesday, 26 August 2009. Szaniecki, Bárbara. Outros monstros possíveis: Disforme contemporâneo e design encarnado Annablume, São Paulo; 1ª edição, 2014. Wanis, Amanda. O Momento Rio e o processo de construção da cidade criativa. Actas Icono14—III Congreso Internacional de Ciudades Creativas. ISBN 978-84-15816-05-8—Calle Salud, 15, 5ª dcha, 28013—Madrid. 2013.

Websites Carta capital revue website: http://www.cartacapital.com.br. City Climate Leadership Awards, 2014. Rio de Janeiro: Porto Maravilha. http://cityclimateleadershipawards.com/rio-de-janeiro-porto-maravilha/. The Forum Comunitário do Porto website: https://forumcomunitariodoporto.wordpress.com/. MAR official website http://museudeartedorio.org.br. Maré museum website: http://www.museudamare.org.br/joomla/index.php?option=com _contentandview=articleandid=48andItemid=54. Unesco website: www.unesco.org.

Chapter Seven

What Can a Face Do? What Can an Arm Do? The Brazilian Uprising and a New Aesthetic of Protest Raluca Soreanu

The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.— Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis

The chapter discusses the socio-political aesthetic of the Brazilian uprising in 2013, relying on a Guattarian understanding of aesthetics as a study of the ways bodies come in contact with one another. I first show the blind spots and excesses of the analyses of the Brazilian protests that focus on their violent aspects. I particularize these blind spots in terms of the pervasiveness of the signifier “fascism” in the Brazilian political imaginary, and in terms of the deadlocks around the signifier “revolution.” I argue that the analyses conflating the violent dimension of the protests fail to see some emergent modes of subjectification, which are centered on care and mutual containment. To account for these modes of subjectification, I compare Guattari’s image of capitalistic facility seen as a “four-eye machine,” with Freud’s image of the “Fort/Da” game (a child’s game). While I acknowledge Guattari’s critiques to the Freudian account of the “Fort/Da” game, I argue that a fresh look at Freud’s proposition can lead us toward a new paradigm of politics and toward a new semantics of social proximity. The radicality in Freud’s proposal is that it relies on a non-racialized and an embodied subjectivity. Turning to actual contents and episodes of the Brazilian uprising, I ask two mutually elucidating questions about the new aesthetics of protest: “What can a face do?” and “What can an arm do?” I thus point to forms of re107

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incorporation and re-democratization of the face; and to the de-facialization of bodies. CONTEXTUALIZATIONS: FROM VIOLENCE TO NEW FORMS OF CARE Ever since June 2013, both the mainstream media and the intellectual arenas of Brazil have been overloaded with a concern for the emergence of a violent collective subject, ready to decimate “society” in a nihilistic destructive spree, and to endanger “civilization” with its supposed barbarity. A significantly binarizing grammar underlies these concerns. A plurivocal and strikingly new mass phenomenon is being underdescribed by resorting to the binaries individual/society, reason/emotion, civilization/barbarity. The grammar of othering. The grammar of criminalization. A grammar that does not historicize itself, that does not reflect upon its strong affinities with irrationalistic perspectives on collective phenomena, which organicize the collective and dismiss it as an uncontrolled beast, a mere “mob.” Alternatively, if not purely irrational, the crowd would supposedly be acted on from a distance by invisible occult powers. As Giuseppe Cocco (2013, 12) argues, there was talk of the “hypnotized masses” without clarifying who the hypnotizer would be. Overburdened with images of violence, of the unleashed beast making its way through the corrective tear gas of the state apparatus, or smashing the windows of banks and shops—we (and who is this “we,” indeed?) might start to be convinced of the violence as if it were a matter of flesh, and not mainly a matter of pixels. Saturated with negativity, the visual representations of the scenes of protest become foreclosed upon themselves. They inflate in a nearly symphonic gesture. The triumph of violence. The apocalyptic register needed by the neodevelopmentalist pact in order to perpetuate its legitimacy. I argue that the only seeing that is possible in the case of the Brazilian uprising is a seeing from very close, which includes touching, hearing, smelling, and feeling on the epidermis. Only so we might start to understand the scale and the direction of the violence (or lack of it! or presence of something else than violence!), and the mutations of the social bond. The image of violence assembled by the media through techniques of seeing from afar was necessarily connected to the fear of the emergence of fascism. From the very first days of the uprising in June 2013, the phrase “the giant has awoken” [“o gigante acordou”] has produced electrifying reactions. What is of interest here is how a general fright in the face of monsters and gigantic emergences becomes particularized as a fear of fascism. How did the category of “fascism” inflate so much in the aftermath of June 2013, becoming a type of master term, endowed with a false potency of explaining all that was going on in the streets? The first discursive move here is the

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mystification of microfascisms as macrofascism, or the implicit assumption that fascism is a mere political regime—this external “other” that takes over in a violent way a passivised, docile, and victimized social body. In his manifesto Everybody Wants to be a Fascist, Guattari (2009, 169) clarifies how fascism is a micropolitical operation. As he writes: Capitalist totalitarian machines manage to divide, particularize, and molecularize the workers, meanwhile tapping their potentiality for desire. These machines infiltrate the ranks of the workers, their families, their couples, their childhood; they install themselves at the very heart of the workers’ subjectivity and vision of the world. Capitalism fears large-scale movements of crowds. Its goal is to have automatic systems of regulation at its command. This regulatory role is given to the State and to the mechanisms of contractualization between the “social partners.” And when a conflict breaks out of the preestablished frameworks, capitalism seeks to confine it to economic or local wars.

It is the fear and the criminalization of the expressive crowds in the streets that are part of a fascist mode of operation. All desirous and multiconnective movement must be contained at all costs. Guattari argues (2009, 171): “[a]longside the fascism of the concentration camps, which continue to exist in numerous countries, new forms of molecular fascism are developing: a slow burning fascism in familialism, in school, in racism, in every kind of ghetto, which advantageously makes up for the crematory ovens.” The second discursive move is a more contextual one, and it has to do with the place of the golpe [the military coup] in the Brazilian social imaginary, and the correlative deemed impossibility of revolutionary process. All revolutionary processes are coups in disguise. Let us explain. To talk of revolution in the Brazilian context is never a mere theoretical clarification: it is as if you needed to utter the word in a soft voice, to whisper it nearly, so as not to shock, retraumatize, and transport your interlocutor to a horizon of associations that necessarily leads to the golpe—the military coup, the attempt to seize power in a violent way, followed by the terrors and the repressions of a military regime (Hollander 2010; Teles and Safatle 2010). The golpe haunts the social imaginary, conditioning what can and cannot be spoken. In fact, golpe immediately overflows into its plural, golpes, for here in Latin America history always threatens to repeat itself, unless we all repeat back to it, like in a mantra, that the project of modernity has been completed and that we are now invulnerable to our hauntings. Certainly, we are not, and the golpe always returns, circumventing the revolted present, and creating a present-blind temporal thread between a compromised past and an eternally endangered future read in the terms of the past. Berardi (2012, 64) warns that we have exhausted the creativities of the idea of revolution, that it contains “an exaggerated notion of political will,” and that it can now be replaced by the notion of “paradigmatic shift.” I argue

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that in the Brazilian context, talk of revolution (even if whispered) is timely. With Kristeva (2000, 7), we might thus understand “the necessity of a culture of revolt in a society that is alive and developing, not stagnating. In fact, if such a culture did not exist, life would become a life of death, that is, a life of physical and moral violence, of barbarity.” In avoidance of barbarity, we might thus need to relearn to utter the word “revolution.” What we are working toward is indeed a new semiotics for revolutionary collectives. How might we talk of revolutionary politics without falling into Berardi’s trap of postulating a conflated political will? Working along a linear conception of time, revolutions appear as breaks or cuts in a clearly defined moment—a suspension, a time when history holds its breath. We could thus talk about the Chinese Revolution of 1949 or the Cuban Revolution of 1959. For non-linear thinkers, revolution is retrieved to the within of history and to social struggle: it is the end of power-over and the unleashing of power-to (Holloway 2010); it is the installing of new bonds between people (Deleuze and Guattari 1987); it is a force that brings a maturation of consciousness (Castoriadis 1964). Castoriadis gave elaboration to the topic of dominated groups being able to self-institute, self-organize, and self-construe. Society, he asserts, “is a form of self-creation” (Castoriadis 1991, 132–33). The forms of each society are determined within and by society; they are not the product of forces external to society. Castoriadis’ revolution is thus a patient one, one in which the development of mass autonomous organs comes first. What he had in mind were communes, soviets, factory committees, councils, and— thinking of the Brazilian case and its emergent forms—“plenárias” and neighborhood committees. Bringing the spirit of the Castoriadian critique to revolutions understood as seizing power, Eugene Enriquez (1989, 39) notes: “global revolutions that have in view ‘social totality’ are perhaps only bringing the worst aberrations, contrary to what revolutionaries have always thought, because they despise the idea of patient constructions of another social and cultural reality by individuals and groups, and they distance themselves of the actions of all those who cast themselves as ‘creators of history’ without preoccupying themselves with the ‘direction of history,’ as they pertinently know that there is no such pre-established direction of history.” Writing in a way that maintains its poignancy in the context of our current dilemmas around the horizontal dimension of politics, Castoriadis shifts the very objective of the socialist revolution: it is no longer about the abolition of private property over the means of production, but the abolition of the clear-cut distinction between the leaders and the executants in the production of social life more generally (Eguchi 1989, 51). Castoriadis retrieves to the idea of revolution its broadness: the main concern is that humanity has ahead of itself a real future, and this future is not simply to think about, but it is to craft. The very content of the revolutionary project is to arrive at a kind of society that can perpetual-

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ly question what it has instituted, and thus remain fundamentally open. The postrevolutionary society will not have distilled any miraculous principle of self-regulation, but it will continue to institute itself in an explicit and reflexive way. The apocalyptic portrayal of the street protests is thus silently traversed by these two moves: the mystification of microfascism as macrofascism; and the reduction of all radical politics to a potential military coup. On huge screens, we are all turning into nihilistic warriors, fascinated by broken glass. The translucent phantasm of this nihilistic warrior haunts us. In what follows, I capture the emergence of subjectivities of care during the Brazilian protests. Fully given to the moves of the collective and making collective texture through her moves, this caring and careful protester is a complex pacifier or a container of violence. Traversed by an ethics of care for others, this protester is re-facialized, thickly incorporated, and multiconnective, announcing a new aesthetics. This is not a hopeful description, but a phenomenological one. AESTHETICS, SOCIAL DISTANCE, AND THE “FORT/DA” GAME In his last book, Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari speaks of “a new aesthetic paradigm,” by which he means the mutations of sensibility, of epidermis, of the contact zones between bodies. Western thought got stuck with the idea of aesthetics as the science of an object’s beauty. But once we break out of an idea of beauty as an object of contemplation, the central concern of aesthetics becomes how bodies perceive each other in and across the social field. Aesthetics thus becomes a science of contact. Contact between epidermises. Contact between bodies. Contact between faces (as parts of the body). Franco Berardi Bifo (2008) refers to Guattari’s new aesthetic paradigm in terms of a “semantics of social proximity.” So how close were we, exactly, before June 2013, and how close have we grown, after this date? Are we crossing from skin to skin in different ways, after June 2013? To start with, capitalism works as pathology of contact. Don’t touch, mostly see. Epidermises are replaced by screens. Faces are replaced by screens. To ask an epistemological question, what would it mean to read a change in the semantics of proximity? It all starts with where and how we trace the symbolic. Guattari refuses the Saussurean division of the sign into two constituent parts, material signifier (the word) and conceptual signified (the thing referred to by the sound). For him, things mean in their immediate materiality. Their meaning is not detached from them, located elsewhere in an abstract or conceptual realm of the mind or of semantics. To install this split within the sign is to divide meaning into a here and an elsewhere, into a presence of materiality and an absence of intended meaning. It is to divide meaning into a lower order of materiality, the mortal world where we are

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caught, and an elusive higher order of semantic fullness, an elsewhere we wish to attain. The symbolic is thus not reduced to language. Bodies make their way back into the symbolic equation, while the semantics of social proximity reads both the distances between these material bodies and the qualities of these distances. As Guattari (2011, 27) argues: “There is no language in itself. What specifies human language is precisely that it never refers back to itself, it always remains open to all other modes of semiotization. When it is closed down in a national language, a dialect, a patois, a special language or delirium, it is always due to a certain type of political or micropolitical operation.” What is symbolic is precisely what can mean more than one thing. José Gil (1997, 23) speaks of the “fluctuating signifier,” which is an energy, a force that is impossible to signify across codes. Here, the permutator of codes is the body. The semantic units are the gestural units. Affect is the global modulator which integrates a multiplicity of units in an individuated sequence. From just a mere series of elements in conjunction we thus move to a singular form. The body becomes an infralanguage. This is not at all conceived as standing in a binary relation to verbal language. José Gil (1997, 47) confronts us with a notion of the post-pre-verbal, capturing the concomitance of verbal language with corporeal languages. As he argues (1997, 46): [i]nfralanguage is the result of a process of incorporation/embodiment of verbal language, or even better said of its inscription-sedimentation in the body and in its organs. In this inscription the greatest part of verbal articulations are lost, grammar is simplified, it is reduced, and it is absorbed by corporeal movements, the lexis almost disappears. The body transforms itself: it gains an intelligence, that is, a plasticity of its own spirit.

This plasticity of the body will flow back into the intellect, through subtle movements, associations, impregnations, imperceptible semantic contaminations, rhythms, modulations, caesurae. The semantics of social proximities is grounded in reading the relational qualities of the post-pre-verbal dimension of life. How do gestural units connect and resonate with other gestural units? Are diverse relations to alterity emerging or is the connection gradually sliding into a mirroring that becomes foreclosed upon itself? Or, in other words, is the heterogeneity of the gestural units growing or decreasing? By asking these questions, we are already in dialogue with the Guattarian (1995, 9) notion of the “collective,” which “should be understood in the sense of a multiplicity that deploys itself as much beyond the individual, on the side of the socius, as before the person, on the side of preverbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimitated sets.” Instead of preverbal intensities, we however maintain here the productivity of the term post-pre-verbal, which makes

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bodies an infralanguage that is not opposed to verbal language, but passes through it. Guided by an ethics of heterogeneity, Guattari (1995) theorizes the collective as a multiplicity. What pulsates in this multiplicity for us—while thinking of the semantics of proximity—are the complexes of subjectification, where, through a coming in contact, people can achieve their singularities. The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectification: multiple exchanges between individual-group-machine. These complexes actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularize themselves. Grafts of transference operate in this way, not issuing from readymade dimensions of subjectivity crystallized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette.

Once we have settled into the understanding of aesthetics as “science of contact,” let us further specify our question. How is social distance crossed? How is contact actually realized? In which way can we decipher the multiple exchanges between individual-group-machine that Guattari speaks of? Or, how do we describe the relational qualities of the post-pre-verbal? To answer these questions, I turn to a Freudian idea, which Guattari himself has criticized harshly (perhaps too much so!), within his reflection on the dangers of oedipal notions operating within (and without) the field of psychoanalysis. This idea is the “Fort/Da” game, which Freud introduces in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I argue that a creative re-appropriation of Freud’s idea of the “Fort/Da” game is an important step toward answering the question on how social distance is crossed. As I see it, Freud gives us a compelling example of the rehearsal of distance as an obligatory condition for social life, in his recording of the game of childhood known as “Fort/Da”—“now you see it, now you don’t”—or more literally, “gone”/“there again” (Freud 1920, 11–13). 1 As I see it, all psychoanalytic elaborations postulating the existence of a “third” or “third space” (see especially Donald Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin) are rooted in Freud’s analysis of the “Fort/Da.” In the attempt to establish his own schizoanalytic proposal, by contrasting it to both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Guattari is perhaps not giving sufficient recognition to the brilliance of Freud’s discovery of the “Fort/Da” game, and its potentials in being a radical starting point for understanding social distance. As he writes (1995, 74–75): “[u]nlike Freud, schizoanalysis doesn’t make the Fort-Da refrain depend on a feeling of frustration with regard to the mother and on universal principles of life and death; nor

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like Lacan on a transcendent signifying order. It considers it as a desiring machine, working toward the assemblage of the verbal self—in symbiosis with the other assemblages of the emergent self, the nuclear self and the subjective self—and thereby inaugurating a new mastery of the object, of touch, of a spatiality dissociated from Winnicott’s transitional space.” Let us discern how we might talk with Guattari and Freud about the “Fort/Da,” and not with Guattari against Freud. First, there is nothing in the Freudian text that instructs an eternal return to the figure of the mother. The frustration of the child is more enigmatic than Guattari seems to consider, it can be addressing the mother, as well as the presence of a different other. Also, this other is not just an individual substitute of the mother, but can be conceived as a collective or as a composition of inter-articulated presences. Furthermore, when Guattari (1995, 75) suggests that we have to choose “between a mechanical conception of deathly repetition and a machinic conception of processual opening,” he is losing sight of the fact that there is a profoundly hopeful solution in the “Fort/Da,” where the child finds an active solution to the problem of solitude. Repetition thus does not appear in an unambiguous series with the death drive. In conclusion, it is important to repoliticize the “Fort/Da” game from within: the child’s interlocutor is not the mother, exclusively, and the child does not only morbidly repeat himself, he also invents and reappropriates space—he claims it away from stillness into the movement of his own imagination. By throwing his toy across the space, the child primarily desires. Together with the toy, he thus makes up a desiring machine (and less a mere “theatre of language,” or a mere foundation for the place where later the “theatre of language” will be erected), to put it in Guattarian terms. The child also encounters the unforeseen: in his active traversing of space, he opens up a world of possibles, where not all the unfoldings are calculable. There is something both enigmatic and non-scripted about the game, although we can agree that it is in appearance a sequence of repetitive moves. The game has a centrifugal vector at its core: it is a reaching outside, toward the imagined territory where an “other” begins. After we have lingered with the child for a while, granting him the position of the subject (it is a temporary move, as we will see), it is worth noting that any re-politicization of psychoanalysis will have at least three elements of concern, possibly more. I here follow Jessica Benjamin (1988) in her ideas of the “third space,” where subject/other/third space are the elements of concern, each treated with equal interest. The “other” here refers to another subject with her own singularity, and not a mere “object” (which would refer to a mode of relating to the other as constituted by unconscious fantasy, by need, or by defense). An “object” never escapes the position of a mere subordinate of the subject and thus never escapes the subject’s omnipotence. To complexify Benjamin’s scheme, the other can also be a composition of

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singularities, a collective, a multiplicity. The “third space” refers to a particular kind of space between subject and other, where mutual recognition is possible, with both subjects recognizing the other’s subjecthood. The third space thus conceived is already a quality of the relational—it is the intersubjective in a qualified version, with a direct reference to the possibility of mutuality: both subject and other take turns in being active and passive, in doing and being done. Returning to our idea of social distance, the “third space” is a horizontal crossing of the distance, which recognizes the other. In an even more felicitous event, it can become an oblique crossing of social distance, where subject and other not only meet each other as equal partners of the exchange, but also create a new mode of relationality in their encounter. This kind of oblique “third space” has a strong affinity with the Guattarian collective assemblages of enunciation and with his transversality. In Chaosmosis Guattari (1995, 120) writes: “New collective assemblages of enunciation are beginning to form an identity out of fragmentary ventures, at times risky initiatives, trial and error experiments; different ways of seeing and of making the world, different ways of being and of bringing to light modalities of being will open up, be irrigated and enrich each other. It is less a question of having access to novel cognitive spheres than of apprehending and creating, in pathic modes, mutant existential virtualities.” The triadic scheme subject/other/third space silently encapsulates temporality. The subject is not eternalized, it is never being assembled into a unique point of perspective from which a single story is told. The subject is fundamentally in the place of the other in another moment of the temporal unfolding. Also, in yet another moment, the “third space” becomes our focus as analysts. In a sense, we treat the “third space” as a subject, or we are preoccupied by the qualities of relationality, or we wish to do a semantics of social proximity. To wonder about the aesthetics of crossing social distance is thus not a sign of the aestheticization of the social, but it is precisely a form of grappling with the fact that the emergence of a subjectivity has a way of establishing contact between epidermises, between bodies. The social has an aesthetics. This is why incursions into the world of art can only heighten our senses as social observers. In an interview made toward the end of his life, Guattari (1992, 30) sharply responds to his critics, formulating three areas where our turning to art can be fruitful: “There mustn’t be any misunderstanding: I’m not proposing an aestheticization of the social. I only refer to art as a paradigm that underlines three types of problems: that of processual creativity, of the permanent calling into question of the identity of the object; that of the polyphony of enunciation; finally, that of autopoiesis, that is to say, the production of nuclei [foyers] of partial subjectification.” Through Guattari, we return to Freud. Firstly, the child of the “Fort/Da” game, through his active throwing of a message across the social space, asks

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just as many questions about what he might become in his encounter with the other. He is never just as safely identified with himself to assemble into an eternal “subject.” Secondly, there is no certainty that he repeatedly throws his toy toward his mother—the addressee of his activities varies. In Freud’s account, we are presented with just a cut in the activity of throwing something across the space. At a different point in time, others might send things toward the child; or they might send things while having him on their mind. Thirdly, we see the child self-producing himself in his relational activity. The child in the moment right before the game is not the same as the child after it. WHAT CAN A FACE DO? The aesthetic changes brought by the political awakening of June 2013 in Brazil would have perhaps surprised even Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, where he writes with Gilles Deleuze, the facialization of the social and the inescapable system of the black hole/white wall (which produces the face) weigh heavily. The signifier is the white wall, while subjectivity is the black hole. Facialization begins with Christ’s face in year zero. The face of Christ is elevated to the level of a paradigm. Christ is the White Man who equalizes/facializes all deviances and divergences. “A horror story, the face is a horror story,” Guattari and Deleuze (1987, 186) write. They de-naturalize the face, and they show how processes of facialization are not restricted to the face. Almost anything can be facialized—other parts of the body, animals, things, houses (Guattari and Deleuze 1987, 188): The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are no more than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality.

In his single-authored chapter on faces of The Machinic Unconscious, Guattari introduces the analytical pair signifying faciality/diagrammatic faciality, which already configures more escapes from the capture of the year zero faciality. Capitalistic faciality belongs to the first category: it is a signifying faciality. Faces carved by capitalism are faces where nothing happens; they are benevolent and binarising; they are carriers of social roles. For him, in capitalism, “an abstract faciality speaks at the heart of speech, dressing up

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subjective black holes, masking semiotic collapses, deploying personological structures of power” (2011, 76). This leads to the individuation of enunciation—statements are always controlled and censored—on the background of a constant fear that the ego might crumble, expose itself, lose control. Social distance is thus cancelled out, as the trip taken is very short: from self to self, and never from self to other. This “short trip” of the ego is actually equivalent to an abolition of the socius. The face, the phallus, and self-consciousness function together as a series: all three of them are involved in an operation of production of a feeling of appropriation. We have power over the abstracted face; we also have power against abstracted others. Thus, for Guattari (2011, 98): “[n]o new semiotic conjunction is conceivable, no creative nomadism, no ‘amazing’ encounter, no flash of desire.” The constitution of the abstract faciality has a crucial feature: it is based on the linking of elementary faces two by two. This results in “four-eye machines,” working according to a binarizing logic: while part of the machine, everyone and everything is either x or y—“teacher and student, father and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 196). Guattari and Deleuze (1987, 42) here speak of an affective prison based on the production of infinite instances of the double gaze. Eye-to-eye contact between two participants, excluding the world outside and constituting each other into a binarism. Power flows through these foureye machines: “the maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of the film operating through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 175). This scopic cage impoverishes and homogenizes the world and our possible encounters. All alterities that land out of the binary scheme must be extinguished: At every moment, the machine rejects faces that do not conform or seem suspicious. A ha! It’s not a man and it’s not a woman, so it must be a transvestite: The binary relation is between the ‘no’ of the first category and the ‘yes’ of the following category, which under certain conditions may just as easily mark a tolerance as indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all costs. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 197)

Within a four-eye machine the social distance is zero. The two participants are not close or intimate with one another, but they are merely mirroring each other. This kind of scopic pair also silently depends on being seen (like, for instance, a couple in a restaurant)—otherwise it ceases to exist. As I suggested, in Guattari and Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus, the paradigm of faciality appears as more entrapping than in Guattari’s later The Machinic Unconscious. In A Thousand Plateaus, the solution proposed to us

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is more enigmatic: “if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 189); and “the program, the slogan, of schizonalysis is: Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight” (1987, 208). But what does it mean to find one’s black holes, if the four-eye machine is the paradigm of the West? In The Machinic Unconscious Guattari introduces the idea of a “diagrammatic faciality.” As I see it, this brings a face re-fallen into the body; a face that is taking its materiality seriously; a face that is porous; a face that is composing and de-composing all the time; a face that “emits signs-particles in a network” (2011, 102); a face that is not dependent on constant mirroring. We move from the question “what is a face?” to the question “what can a face do?” Here, we note the radicality of the paradigm of relationality contained in Freud’s “Fort/Da” game, where the face is already diagrammatic, it is already re-corporealized and equalized with the other parts of the body—with regard to how much “sense” there is expected to emanate from it (See table 7.1). The face of the child is desirous, and not self-consumed with perfect mirroring. The other could or could not materially be in the room! Even if the other were in the room, they would often be either too close or too far, so the game is not rendered redundant. There is always something to throw across the space as an act of a desirous demarcation of the right distance from the other. The deepest politico-aesthetic shift of June 2013 is the move from a faciality that can be read as a “four-eye machine,” to one that can be better understood through the “Fort/Da” game. In the protests, the face is not more significant than a hand or than a knee—it all depends what a face does. The face is thus democratized, in relation to the other body parts or organs. It returns to the head, and it returns to the body. It is also collectivized, as its movements and modulations are not opening the black holes specific to the

Table 7.1. “Fort/Da” Game [child throwing a toy back and forth]

The Four-Eye Machine [a couple in a restaurant]

corporealized active centrifugal creates sense potentially includes others does not assume an external point of perspective

facialized and facializing faking activity/passively mirroring centripetal “eats up” sense in its black holes shuts itself off from the world assumes a spectator

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production of a White Man, but they are connecting to others at differential speeds, scrutinizing the action scene and warning for danger. How has politics returned to the face? How has desire returned to the face? How have faces stopped being subjective black holes after June 2013? First, there has been a refusal of the dichotomy between material process and semiotic process. The way the protesters make sense is directly onto the body. They give the face and the skin to politics and in this way it (the face) becomes re-singularized. One million people were out in the streets of Rio de Janeiro on the same evening—this was an encounter that temporarily collapsed the necessity of an abstracted faciality, by condensing and qualitatively altering social space. After so much time of walking the streets merely following functional and docile trajectories, people were walking the streets questioning the social and political order. Faces were near each other, while carrying an interrogation. This is marking the re-emergence of the social. The re-tying of the social bond. Second, the new desirous face has emerged through the workings of a violent and repressive state apparatus. Because of the many clouds of tear gas, the protesters have felt their faces. They went numb, they pained, they swelled, they leaked. Here, it is important to denaturalize the state’s choice of repressive techniques. The toxic fumes of the bomb achieve one main goal: they ensure that the protesters cease to see each other. On the incorporated end of this form of violence, the protesters still move, breathe, blink, frown. A new sociability develops—it is the sociability of traversing clouds of tear gas with others. Fixes for the temporarily blind eyes are invented and practiced. “Would you like some vinegar, comrade?” (“Quer vinagre, companheiro?”)—here is one of the questions central to this sociability, uttered so often on the streets of Rio de Janeiro after June 2013. Vinegar turns into the face-fix of the protests. It becomes a quite powerful substance, a potion, an antidote for the state’s attempt to tear out eyes. Third, we need to look at how the wearing of the masks during protests stands in relation to the emergence of new facialities. I argue the mask is a performative mirror for state violence. This performance alerts that the Leviathan has blinded itself a long time ago. It fails to see citizens as equals, and instead, while surveilling and controlling fluxes, it identifies within them dangerous elements that could come to interrupt the smooth functioning of the machine. The machine of moving bodies to and from the workplace. The machine of consuming. The machine of leisure. When the young man of color wears his own face, he is stopped, searched, and aggressed by the police. As such, the wearing of the mask equals a redistribution of “danger” across the social space. With masks, we are all equally dangerous, but first and foremost through a categorial violence: what collapses is precisely the racist and classist categorizations that are at work in the deeming dangerous of bodies. The black mask of the protests is part of the new semiotics; it is

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not a return to the featureless face, the capitalist black hole, but the active crafting of a kind of faciality that capitalism can be touched by: a faciality it cannot codify. The skin-face under the textile-face (mask) is felt more and more as the place of production of a political selfhood. After June 2013, we have thus become more productive of sentient and multiconnective facialities. But let us now turn to the case of Amarildo, which condenses a great part of the aesthetico-political changes brought by June 2013. Before crossing over to the making of the symbol, let us remember the person. Amarildo de Souza was a bricklayer, living in the community of Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro, who was last seen on July 14, 2013. He disappeared without a trace after a police investigation. This disappearance assembled into a political event of national and even international resonance, coming to symbolize the violence of police and state apparatuses. And their capacity to make life superfluous and dispensable. Piles of dead bodies (imaginarily piled, for their materiality is denied to us) that were unaccounted for were crystallized into one reference. This crystallization is one of the densest symbolic happenings that the Brazilian uprising has produced. The strength of the symbol is given by the space carved in the social imaginary by all the other disappeared humans, by all the politically unqualified lives that are dispensed with and that remain anonymous. By shouting “Where is Amarildo?” the crowd gave a name to loss. Temporal threads become superimposed. The disappeared of the military dictatorship met the disappeared of the times of the pacification of the favelas. The passage from unmournable loss to loss that can be mourned is made when times cross each other. The question “Where is Amarildo” is the Fort/Da game of the collective subjectivity. An interrogation is thrown across the political space, with no foreclosed or predetermined addressee. The collective subjectivity is striving to establish a tie with an other via an interrogation. But this other fails to send a message back to the collective, thus leaving it in a state of misrecognition. Even so, political space gains a new quality, which has to do precisely with the openness of the interpellation: the political other of this sequence is a virtuality much more than a predetermined foreclosed instance of authority (the State, a political party, the military police, etc). The case of Amarildo does not condense only the changes in the aesthetico-political regime of faciality. It also brings the repetitions, the morbid points, the paranoiac reactions of our culture. Shortly after Amarildo’s disappearance, I heard someone uttering: “I saw a photo of Amarildo. He has holes in his cheeks. He has the face of a drug dealer.” Let us compare the grammar of this remark—a formation of the racist imaginary—with Fanon’s (1986, 111) episode on the impact of the alienating gaze, centered around the child’s outcry: “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened.” This episode is crucial to discussions on alienation/recognition and colonialism. Colonial power

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is built upon the colonizer’s capacity to deny the source of subjecthood to the colonized; it is a taking-away of the mirror of the other. 2 Guattari and Deleuze (1987, 197) show how racism needs the face, and how it abstracts and redistributes across the social the face of Christ, in the generalized face of the everyman, the White Man: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your every ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. . . . Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be.

What is similar in the two excerpts (the quote on Amarildo and Fanon’s episode) is the reduction of a human subject to an observable racialized feature (skin color, facial markers). But what differentiates the two? First, contemporary racist imaginaries do not rely on the presence of the actual body carrier of the assigned feature. An image of the body will suffice. A photo of Amarildo is Amarildo for the racist imaginary. Contemporary racism is keen on screens, being predicated on surveillance technologies. It turns faces bi-dimensional and codifies them. It decides from afar which ones are dangerous. This loss of depth passes unnoticed, it is part of what “we” do. Through a projection, the unwanted and unthinkable characteristics of the self are evacuated into the other. It is the other who is a subject of excess (here, involved with drugs). But there is a second striking feature revealed here: contemporary racism often contains an element of profanation. The choice of the racialized other is for someone who has gone missing—and might have died. The encounter between bodies and between faces is doubly denied: Amarildo is merely a photo; and he has anyhow disappeared. He couldn’t be further. He can’t touch us. The new kind of racist imaginary has an inclination for dead bodies—we will call it profanatory racism. The third emergence is a cool, aloof eugenics—which allows precise remarks on the “holes in the cheeks” to be made, and the causal chains in which they fit to be established. Here, we might want to recall what the place of facial measurements is in the making of race in Brazil. 3 Late capitalism confronts us with eugenics introjected. Each individual is turned into a laboratory for making minute racializing measurements. A judge with an abstracted face (Guattari’s “black hole”) is detachedly recording the connotations of excess of the “holes in the cheeks” of a disempowered and dangerous other. A facialized black hole is morbidly looking to displace its lack onto another face.

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Undoubtedly, there have been many such profanations of Amarildo’s photo. There is a true ecology of racist ideas where these profanations can be accommodated. What animates us here, however, is observing the emergence of a different kind of mental ecology, and a new kind of aesthetics. What gave the racist the chance to constitute the other as a “drug dealer” was the fact that the photo of Amarildo had already reached public space, achieving many complex mutations of the political imaginary: here, I will refer to resingularization and to public mourning. Public mourning itself can be read through the paradigm of the Fort/Da game. The collective voice is “thrown” across the political space, so that when it returns to the collective hearing, something in the collective loss moves, gets out of its place, and is experienced differently. In a first cut of the semiotization (referring to re-singularization), Amarildo only stands for himself, making a statement about the non-superfluous nature of human life. An escape from an endless trail of unidentified bodies—of bodies in black rubbish bags, of bodies buried without ceremony—is being sought by re-singularizing Amarildo. In a second cut of the semiotization (referring to public mourning), we are all Amarildos, meaning that we are exposed to the violence of state power. For several months, the question “Where is Amarildo?” (“Cadê o Amarildo?”) was heard in the protests of Rio de Janeiro. Hundreds or thousands of people chanting a name at the same time counts as a ceremony of public mourning. A somewhat quiet night in Rio de Janeiro where the silence is broken by a scream, somewhere in the distance: “Amarildo!” is a night of mourning. A city bus full of people who spontaneously start crying out his name, again, “Cadê o Amarildo?,” marks a profound reconfiguration of public space. The unmourned residues of the dead and disappeared of the military dictatorship, as well as of those of the democracy, are starting to migrate to another place in the social imaginary. We seem to be able to start talking about it. While Amarildo is at risk of being disfigured by the operations of the racist unconscious, his face was reassembled not so much through images, but through attuned voices, through the rhythms of the protest chants. The new mental ecology slides away from the visual; it is at times anti-scopic; it is auditory and kinetic. Through the voice, we assemble a face in movement. Our face. The face of the other. The chains of semiotizations around Amarildo are, quite simply, an immensity, in terms of shifts of the political imaginary. Something happened, and for a while we might want to ponder its aesthetics and its poetics. The political symbol is becoming more and more minimal. It is slender. It is versatile. It is elliptic. And its meaning is not foreclosed. Lately, on the walls of Rio de Janeiro a question has started appearing: “Cadê?” A four-letter word, with a verb already contained in it, and with a reference to existence. This four-letter word is part of a new post-oedipal politics, which bears no

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necessary reference to the political father—to its numerous authorizations and institutions, as well as to its killings and destitutions. New political form emerges without necessary reference to Authority and to the Law of the Father (Reason, Order, the State, the Market). “Cadê?” makes a cut into subjectivity, and by making this cut it constitutes the responsibility of the political subject. Where is the pain? Where are the dead of the military dictatorship? Where is mourning? Where is memory? Each political subject is to fill this ellipsis differently. Finally, the question “Cadê?” marks a radicalization of the openness to the other, if read through the paradigm of the Fort/Da game. It marks that the subject knows that something has been displaced, on misplaced, or simply lost. When the question becomes so open in its referents, the other is met in her radical alterity. She could be anyone, as long as there is a way she can relate to some aspect of what has been lost. After June 2013, we seem to have walked far enough in acts of political creativity to not grow uneasy with an open question, with slender grammar, or with the very smallness of our acts. WHAT CAN AN ARM DO? So far, we have looked at an unexpected return of the face as a mode of doing of the body: a re-corporealized active face. In what follows I discern another instance of the democratization of body parts and body doings, by describing an episode where the protagonists are arms and hands. The question here becomes: “what can an arm do?” The arms do not act alone, nor do they facialize themselves by being erected to a new totalizing abstraction; instead they enter into a creative assemblage: arms-eyes-voice-moving crowd. The episode occurred during the manifestation of June 20, in Rio de Janeiro, when more than one million protesters were walking on and around Avenida Presidente Vargas. While passing the Central Station, the protesters encountered the first police barricade, heard the first explosions of the “bombas de efeito moral,” and felt the effect of the first cans of tear gas in their nostrils. The density of the crowd around the Central Station at that time was immense. The encountering of the barricade made the leading part of the collective body thicken greatly, as the protesters kept coming from behind. In the moment when the first explosions were heard and the gas sensed, the tension raised, and instantly multiple threads of protesters started circulating within the same space, with body-to-body friction, as some were decided to advance, while some wanted to return. This powerful new urban traffic of great manifestations was accumulating in terms of seconds toward a general panic, where people start running and risk trampling each other. In this moment of heightened tension, one of the protesters engaged in a Ford/Da experiment with the crowd. He stood up on a cement block, raised

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his long arms obliquely over the crowd, moving them slowly up and down, and uttered in a strong deep voice, in attunement with his movements: “Sem correr! Sem correr!” [“No running! No running!”]. The repeated chants paused the collective body, which then let itself be modulated by the containing voice-movement. The erratic threads of people who were prepared to run away in panic slowed down and returned to more orderly patterns. Social distance is here crossed obliquely, by a line of sound and movement. This line creates a containing “third space” (Benjamin 1988), where the collective does not collapse into a collection of individuals, but maintains its synchronized modulations. The efficacy of the long raised arms, their social power in the locale, their oblique creativity, is made possible by the kind of corporealization-facialization of the protester. Instead of what Guattari (2011, 80) calls “the empty semiotic screen of capitalistic faciality,” grounded in the individuation of enunciation, and haunted by obsessions of semiotic collapse, we here discover a faciality of kairotic care for the collective texture. Instead of the empty eye of capitalistic facialized consciousness (Guattari 2011, 87), we see the perplexing plenitude of the concerned eye scrutinizing the movement of tens of thousands of people, and drawing a sound-movement line toward them. Writing over an abstract faciality, we have a deep rhythmic voice ascending from an undulating body. Escaping from the “facializing eye-nose-forehead triangle that collects, formalizes, neutralizes, and crushes the specific traits of the other components” (Guattari 2011, 75), we meet the long raised arms as a new locus of signification and we observe a gesture of social-political effectiveness. The obliquely raised arms do not claim authorship or revert to personalistic totalization. The face of the protester does not wish to institute itself as a Face (a White Man’s Face) but is instead concerned with its efficacy in the assemblage face-arms-eyes-voice-moving crowd. The face is plugged into a body and it is also plugged into a collective. The oblique line drawn by the arms travels away from the individual body to contain and modulate the rhythm of the socius. In so doing, it creates a new socius, a new complex of subjectification. The new collective has incorporated the obliqueness of care. A new semiotic conjunction becomes conceivable across arms-eyes-voice-moving crowd. CONCLUSION We do not yet know what a body can do, Spinoza says. The matter of finding out is a matter of experimentation, but as well a matter of prudence. The matter of ethics springs from this very tension between both the necessity of experimentation and the necessity of prudence. The manifestations of 2013 have brought new compositions of bodies, with different speeds and inten-

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sities. They have also brought new compositions of the socius. To observe their creativities, we need to cross several phantasms. It is the phantasm of the individual, as the “subject” of history or politics. It is the phantasm of a duality between the individual and the social. It is the phantasm of the “social” itself, understood as fusional, homogenous, and constituted through a logic of identity. Finally, it is the phantasm of the potential violence that can be done to this “socius” understood in terms of identity or homogeneity—a sort of nostalgia for the community that never existed (Pelbart 2013). At this moment, our most ardent questions in social and political theory are those about how social distance is crossed. A semantics of social distance encounters a way to qualify and describe the strikingly singular modes of traversing social distance. What I proposed here is to approach Freud’s image of the “Fort-Da” game as a paradigm of politics. It is however a Freud that does not fear an encounter with Guattari’s critique of facialization. Thus, distance becomes the umbilical point of politics. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writing of this chapter was supported by the European Union, through a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship. The author would like to thank Cunca Bocayuva, Giuseppe Cocco, Irina Culic, Stephen Frosh, Manuela Linck de Romero, Peter Pál Pelbart, Igor Peres, Barbara Szaniecki, Frédéric Vandenberghe, and the members of Sociofilo (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) for their close readings and for their comments to this chapter. NOTES 1. As Freud (1920, 14–15) writes, describing the game: “This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small object he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawnout ‘o-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expression ‘o-o-o-o.’ He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return.” 2. See Frosh (2013) for an elaboration on mirroring and colonial subjectivities. 3. See Moritz Schwarcz (1993).

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REFERENCES Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon. Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2008. Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia and Charles J. Stivale. New York: Palgrave. Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2012. The Uprising. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1964. “Recommencing the Revolution.” In The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis. London: Blackwell. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1991. “Power, Politics, Autonomy.” In Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis, 143–46. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cocco, Giuseppe. 2013. “Introdução—A dança dos vagalumes.” In Amanhã vai ser maior—o levante da multidão no ano que não terminou, edited by Bruno Cava, and Giuseppe Cocco. São Paulo: AnnaBlume. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eguchi, Kan. 1989. “Un portrait de Castoriadis, penseur de l’autonomie.” In Autonomie et autotransformation de la société. La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis, edited by Giovanni Busino, 49–58. Genève: Librairie Droz. Enriquez, Eugène. 1989. “Cornelius Castoriadis: un homme dans un oeuvre.” In Autonomie et autotransformation de la société. La philosophie militante de Cornelius Castoriadis, edited by Giovanni Busino, 27–48. Genève: Librairie Droz. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto. Freud, Sigmund. 1961 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922). Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton. Frosh, Stephen. 2013. “Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 33: 141–54. Gil, José. 1997. Metamorfoses do corpo. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix. 2009. “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist.” In Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, 154–75. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, Félix. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hollander, Nancy Caro. 2010. Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas. New York and London: Routledge. Holloway, Jack. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. New York: Columbia University Press. Moritz Schwarcz, Lilla. 1993. O espetáculo das raças: cientistas, instituições e questão racial no Brasil, 1870–1930. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Pelbart, Peter Pál. 2013. O Avesso do niilismo—cartografias do esgotamento/ Cartography of exhaustion—nihilism inside out. São Paulo: n-1 publications. Teles, Edson, and Vladimir Safatle. 2010. O que resta da ditadura. São Paulo: Boitempo.

Chapter Eight

Cognitive Capitalism, The Uprising of the Multitude and Museums For the “Right to the City” and to “Common Places” Vladimir Sibylla Pires

There is nothing that seems more enigmatic nowadays than the action.—Paolo Virno

Despite the immense variety of museistic experiences now found around the world—and, therefore, the risk we run to suggest this or that generalization—we will not incur any big mistake if we say that the relationship between “museum” and “information” is narrow and unambiguous. In fact, two of the strongest understandings on Museology relate precisely to this statement: on one hand, the one that says that the objects preserved in museums are privileged sources of information; on the other hand, the one that believes that exhibits—what, in the eyes of many, are the core, the very reason of being of the museums—are vehicles, par excellence, of the communication of this information to the general audience. The understanding of museums as info-communicational agencies (collecting, processing, and information communicators) would thus not be an absurdity. But it would also not be an absurdity that some say that—precisely because of its info-communicational dimension—many museums were erected (and have been presented to the world) founded on the centrality of the “work” and “authorship” (identity notions related to each other and of strong informational load). To emphasize, from there, the character of “open work”—namely, polysemic—not just the items that make up a collection, but also museums and exhibitions (Loureiro and Silva 2007), were even a kind of natural outcome: exhibits would be open works as much as the museums that 127

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host them and, because of that, its sense would only be accomplished in the relationship with the audience (Scheiner 2003). However, our proposition with this short essay is to say that, in the contemporaneity, given the new material conditions of production (Cocco 1999, 2012), the centrality assumed by knowledge (not so much for the information) in the production of itself, of the other and of the world, not only subverts what we were used to understanding as work (as well as object and authorship), but also keeps in check the very definite understanding that we inherited about the museum. In other words: the multitude, producer of cooperating singularities, which now characterizes the current stage of capitalism (the cognitive)—replacing the individual author of individuated works (which characterized the whole manufacturing modernity)—undermines the belief in the agency of the museum as merely info-communicational. Simultaneously, it makes us question the timeliness and relevance of its own model of open work (especially the centrality of the interpretative opening of the work, on the contrary to the eventual opening behind the collaborative práxis without an author). On the other hand, the protests that have been taking place since June 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, as well as other Brazilian cities, have also contributed to putting a new and necessary perspective on what we understand as a museum. Not only because of the powerful display of our multitudinous dimension in the streets, but because they force this new vision by bringing to light the close—and almost invariably confrontational—relationship that we have with the territory. They also serve to strip the intrinsic perversity of the “Barcelona model” of “creative city” pursued by our Prefecture, whose fraud and misery have been widely explained by the Catalan anthropologist Manuel Delgado (2007, 239). In his own words: “the utopian city of star designers and politicians rises blind to the misery that it covers up, deaf-mute to the exclusions that it constantly generates.” Given our pretensions (and limitations) in this short essay, it’s not necessary to recover the logic of production of urban space (Lojkine 1981; Castells 2000; Lefebvre 2006; Topalov 2006). However, it is important to have this in mind in order to understand that, regarding the museums, the relationship with the territory is made even more specific nowadays because many of them have been mobilized by the government and the private sector beyond its cultural function. Or to be more precise, they have been mobilized precisely for this function, allowing them to function as anchors of urban revitalization projects and, above all, for the social gentrification of areas considered as degraded by the government, preparing for all kinds of onslaught by big businesses. It is an urban strategy based on the productive mobilization of the territory and its relations, adopted by neoliberalism since the 1970s, and which has its “foundational milestone,” regarding the role (renovated) of museums, in the building of the Cultural Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

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An urbanization which is anchored in culture (Arantes 2009), and thus, an accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004). However, the changes in the regime of accumulation occurred in the same period and, as a direct result, the assumption of a whole new set of theoretical tools and more appropriate concepts for new times, make us think over the development—even as pure theoretical speculation—of other form-museum more appropriated to the immaterial dimension, and eminently evental and current (territorial, therefore) of contemporary production. A form-museum that, even if it is tough, does not extinguish the other existing forms (institutional, community, virtual, etc.), but question or complement them (perhaps exceeds them), to serve as the alternative “escape route” to contemporary catches of our affections and creative potential. To open up this debate, we will articulate our argument around three parts: the first one will recall the intrinsic relationship that museums have with the territory and the proposition of “places of memory” (Nora 1993), an understanding that is necessary for any new formulation; the second one will present an extrapolation of the model of “open work,” proposed by Umberto Eco in the form of emergency synthesis of cognitive capitalism and the dematerialization of work alongside Paolo Virno’s considerations on the dissolution of the distinction between work (poiesis), action policy (praxis), and intellect (mind life), amid a virtuous contemporary production (without work); finally, the third and final part will discuss, with Szaniecki (2014), the museum’s role in contemporary society in line with the considerations presented by Correa (2013), Cocco and Negri (2013), and Pillati, Negri, and Cocco (2013) on the recent demonstrations that occurred in Brazil (in particular in the city of Rio de Janeiro). The choice of this material has two reasons: on one hand, because Rio de Janeiro is in the midst of an extensive process of spectacularization and gentrification, with a view on their suitability for a number of major events and multiple roles (Olympic City, Creative District, World Heritage Cultural Urban Landscape, etc.), anchored, symptomatically, on the construction of new large museums (and some of the recent riots that have occurred are related to that); on the other hand, because this has been treated as the “uprising of the multitude,” our “spring” (autumnal). It is quite enlightening for our times, and, by extension, for the challenges imposed on our understanding of museums: no longer considering it only (or primarily) as an infocommunicational agency based on a poetics (even an opening one), which produces works (catchable and taken into its collection in a container space), but also (or essentially) considering it as centered on the práxis of lifeworld: centered in a poetic action, in the evental (a “being” that is even before—and independently—it turns to a museum object). Therefore we must ask, in a relational, evental world, of labor without work and of work without an author (Cocco 2012), yet will there be the

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museum we know or another form-museum will arise? What form-museum would this one be? MUSEUMS, TERRITORY, AND THE “PROBLEM” OF “PLACES OF MEMORY” We can roughly see the relationship between museums and territory in two basic forms, both simplifying and generalizing (with all the risks that this implies, of course): the first, obvious and immediate, lies in the fact that every museum (at least the physical world) is in itself, and always, a relationship with a territory: a concrete space we inhabit, by which we circulate, in which we live and from which we produce. The second, not so necessarily obvious, is that every museum also conforms, in itself, an imaginary lócus, as if it occupies a kind of symbolic over-territory. The first would be an approach to the question that we might call “physicalist,” to make tangible its institutional dimension; the second, an understanding we would call “symbolic,” to give visibility to their presence in our imagination as a “place of memory,” to use Nora’s expression (1993). By that so-called “physicalist” understanding, we would have two dynamics: a) on one hand, the fact that the modern form-museum—model and structure that we deal with nowadays—have appeared in the eighteenth century as a materialized institution in a building, so specifically located in a particular locality, imbricated in (with) a specific territory. It could not be otherwise since this is the necessary condition for their survival, as based on an eminently disciplinary and subtractive logic (in this case, the extraction, for accumulation and exhibition, what we would call “objects informants”) 1; b) on the other hand, we have the fact that, from the nineteenth century on, this institutional form-museum, embodied in a building, starts a gradual process of expansion of its operations and will incorporate its own surrounding territory (seen as heritage). It can also be established by the very musealization of the territory. This expansion of its ways of acting (from the building to the territory, from the collection to the heritage, from the audience to the population) will be followed from a number of museistic experiences that will culminate in the current community, territorial, and related museums in all their diversity and complexity: from open sky Scandinavian museums—opened even in the second half of the nineteenth century—and the first French designs of ecomuseums—already brought forward in the 1930s—to the post-1960 experience of the studio museum, neighborhood museums, territory museums, and route museums, among others. For purely schematic and didactic purposes, all these experiences are here generically called “physicalist” because they carry, in our view, somehow,

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this close relationship with the territory (physical) where they occur (or from which they are organized): no matter if it is from a subtractive musealization (for traditional museums) or because of a musealization in situ (in the case of community museums or territorial museums post-1960); or if it is because they have a specific seat (where its actions take place or from where its missions arise from) or because, in the case of not existing as a seat, it still aims to anchor its existence (even though nomadic) in several concrete areas 2 (although changing). These museums are, in this sense, always closely related to a physical space. It is, of course, also symbolic, because it is social, but in a different way from that advocated by another understanding that will be mobilized here. For this one, called “symbolic” in this purely speculative exercise, our relationship with the museums is, moreover, narrow and indelibly marked by the advent of the concept of “places of memory,” an expression forged at the turn of the 1970s to 1980 by French historian Pierre Nora (1993). Although originally a negative sense, through it (though not exclusively, of course), however, the museums have been endowed with an “aura” according to which, as “places of memory,” would be in a certain way beyond reproach. Its construction would be an unquestionable good for society. Its mere presence, an explicit indication of civility. They would be “places of memory” because they contain within it the marks, the expressions of events (memorable) to our city, community, or country; but would be “places of memory” also because they would express themselves as an emotional milestone in the landscape, a beacon in everyday life, a presence (supposedly positive) in our imagination. Given the perversity of this semantic-symbolic dynamics (which only reinforces the still existing guidelines in many museums of “do not touch the objects,” “do not intervene in construction,” “do not run or do not talk loudly in the rooms,” and at last, do not take them as parts of daily life, including all its perishability), dynamics that transform (uncritically) the museum in a supposed perennial and mental territory, justifying instances of its presence in any urban revitalization policy (one might wonder who could criticize the construction of a new museum), a critical reinterpretation of the concept is necessary (and its overcoming). The “places of memory” in Nora (1993), are the result of a verification: the rapid disappearance of the French national memory. But they are also the expression of a loss: the secular connection that the historian identified as existing, in the past, between memory and history. No wonder Nora (1993,7) claims: “One speaks so much about memory because it no longer exists.” When formulated, the author realized that, at least in France, the past was no longer part of a retrospective continuity; in fact, one remembered it as a discontinuity brought to light through a memory-file, a memory-duty, a memory-away. As a pure representation in an “age of commemoration.” Not

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one of the nation, of historical subjects, of certain key instances of diffusion and execution (such as textbooks and public squares), but “a remodeled celebration, ‘metamorphosed,’ nourished . . . by the multiplicity of identities of particular groups, which unfolded in the diversity of events of various shades and profiles, with no ordering and hierarchized criterion” (Gonçalves 2012, 27). In the context of the development of the concept, the author pointed out that one lived an eternal present, the result of an acceleration of history based on the globalization of relations and the role played, in this process, by the mass media. History became more dynamic: the duration of the fact was the duration of the news. One lived to a power/change of duty and the distance between what he considered a “real memory” and the record/narrative (history) that is made from the past. He adds, “If it still inhabited our memory we would not need to dedicate places to it. . . . Each gesture, even the most quotidian one, would be experienced as a religious repetition of what has always been done, in a carnal act of identification and meaning” (Nora 1993, 8–9). Holding traces and remains, in this sense, act as an opposition to the disintegrating effect of globalization, of the acceleration of history. For Hartog (2006, 266), “the ‘places of memory’ . . . reached the diagnosis of a ‘patrimonialization’ of the history of France, or even the France itself, so far the change from a memory scheme to another made us leave the ‘historymemory’ to get into a ‘history-heritage.’” The “places of memory” thus appear as a crossroads of two movements: a historical one (the end of a memory tradition) and a historiographical one (to think of the story about oneself). The expression of the disappearance of capital that was lived in the intimacy of memory and what was going to survive only in historical reconstruction, “the places of memory are, first of all, remains. . . . It is the deritualization of our world that brings up the notion” (Nora 1993, 13). The result is a valuation of the new despite the antique, of the young despite the old, of the future despite the past. A world in which museums, archives, cemeteries, birthdays, etc. become the witness marks of another era, marking an illusion of eternity, “rituals of a society without ritual; passing sacralizations in a society that desecrates” (Nora 1993, 13), fruits that show that there is no more spontaneous memory. For the author, the “places of memory” would thus be as bastions, but only because of the fact that what they stand for is under threat of destruction: they would not become “places of memory” if we still lived the memories to which they are related, nor if history did not seize upon them in order to cripple them. And they are, as pointed out by Nora (1993), loci in three senses: spatial (as in the case of a file), functional (as in the case of a textbook) and symbolic (as in the case of a moment of silence), and these dimensions interact.

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The “places of memory” are also, therefore, expressions of a whole process of construction of meaning, symbolic transmutation around these contents, these landmarks (tangible and intangible) in the landscape (physical or social). They are the fruit of a history that feels the need to invent them, afraid that the memory they contain will be extinguished. Despite its vagueness—which, in fact, may not be so qualified—the expression “places of memory” has become popular among a non-academic audience, and was appropriated by the very age of commemoration that it tried to denounce. Today, everything is a “place of memory,” “as if memory had value in itself and was the expression of pure truth and the supreme good; as if forgetting was evil or a criminal virus that should be fought” (Chagas 2011, 12). As if memory could exist only if sustained by some sort of support (material or not) rather than a relationship. As if it did not permanently renew in every movement to create the daily life (Certeau 2009). As if this was not always an ethical and political attitude, disregarding that “there is always a conception of social memory involved in choosing what to save and what to question” (Gondar 2005, 17). COGNITIVE CAPITALISM, VIRTUOSITY, AND “COMMON PLACES”: BEYOND THE “OPEN WORK” For over 30 years, however, parallel to the formulation and dissemination of the concept of “places of memory,” “work continues to get separated from job and to subsume life as a whole” (Cocco 2012, 21). In this changing production paradigm (of factory to cognitive), the work has become eminently social. Something collective and collaborative, dispersed throughout the territory, in the midst of networks of networks. Thus, the concepts of “live labor” (as opposed to “dead labor” from the machines) and “immaterial labor” (producer of signs, semiosis etc.), became central. In fact, “the work becomes a relationship, its content is therefore culture, meaning and life” (Cocco 2012, 21). And, it not only changed the nature of work (and the way we produce value), but also the nature of the space where production occurs, of the time of its production and, above all, of the subject producer (in other words, the mobilized subjectivity), making this whole production cycle become “pre-composed of a social and autonomous work force” (Lazzarato and Negri, 2001, 26–27). A living labor “that exists as a process and as an act” (Marx apud Cocco 1999, 274), and that no longer subsumes within the machine system (dead labor). Being process and act, it is social and cultural, scattered throughout the territory, no longer restricted to the industry floor. A regime of accumulation centered on knowledge dynamics (more than on information flows), which “involves the use of the worker’s subjectivity,

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their ability to face the random and unpredictable, the event” (Cocco 1999, 270). A radical transformation of the subject before the production: from the pure subordination to capital towards a productive power/capacity based on language and cooperation, capable of producing an excess (a supplement of value to the same objects of consumption) that cannot be reduced to the more traditional extraction of surplus labor time (Cocco 2012). The development of these “productive subjectivities,” the heart of cognitive capitalism and of immaterial labor, makes apparent the biopolitical feature of contemporary production: life forms producing life forms, in other words, an anthropogenetic model where the production of knowledge through knowledge appears as production of man by man (Cocco 2012). Its central core is no longer producing objects for subjects (goods), but the very production of subjectivities, since what characterizes knowledge is the fact that there is a production of worlds (Cocco 2012). This puts us on the need to adopt another social subject (political and productive), distinct from the unifying idea of “people.” This other social subject is the “multitude,” a multiplicity of subjectivities (singularities) cooperating to define themselves in relation to each other (Negri 2005), here seen as “a form of political and social life of many as many” (Virno 2001, 2). The adoption of the concept of multitude is defended by Virno (2001), according to the aforementioned dematerialization of work bringing out some phenomena that become unintelligible if analyzed in another way: the language games, life forms, ethical tendencies, between other aspects of the production equipment in the contemporary world. Multitude is thus the unit term that Virno (2001, 38) proposes to describe and relate the life form and the language games of the contemporary world. As a concept historically “defeated” by the concept of people (and their unity in the state), the “many” existing behind the notion of the crowd were first imprisoned by liberal political philosophy within the binomial “public” and “private” (in the sense lack, deprivation): the multitude was deprived of the sphere of common affairs, of voice and of public presence. In the social democratic thought incarceration was performed using the binomial “collective” and “individual”: the people are the collective, while “the multitude is the shadow of impotence, restless disorder, singular individual” (Virno 2001, 3). Going one step further: for social democracy, the uniqueness of the individual—which is the very uniqueness of the multitude—resulted ineffable, inexpressible, and unspeakable. (Virno 2001), however, believes that the imprisonment of the concept of multitude in these dichotomies no longer holds. But also he believes that there is no more sense in an interpretation of the contemporaneity that would be done from the inevitable overlap between the notions of the people and the state. This would not be the unit pursued in a world of assemblages of cognitive and communicative capabilities of its actors.

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Although the One from the multitude is no longer the state, still that notion requires a unit. And this unit is exercised by “language, intellect of mankind’s faculties. The Uno (One) is no longer a promise but a premise” (Virno 2001, 4). We can understand the emergence of this premise by the aforementioned Marxist notion of general intellect: intellect—“the life of the mind”—made public and in the foreground, resulting in “the most general and abstract linguistic structure made as an instrument to guide its own conduct” of individuals. Such publicized general structures are called “common places,” and are nothing more than a “logical-linguistic form that aligned all the speeches,” in other words, the “epicenter of this linguistic animal that is the human being” (Virno, 2001, 15). The publicized “common places” become the recurring substitutes, in turn, of the Aristotelian idea of “special places” (ways of saying and thinking that only grow together with specific areas of life). These are called “substantial communities”: the football college, religious congregation, the party section, etc. These “special places” have dissolved, although they have not disappeared. They are just no longer responsible for pointing out a direction, and no longer provide “a criterion of orientation, a reliable search, a set of specific habits, specific ways of saying/thinking” (Virno 2001, 14). Everywhere, on the contrary, we refer to the same basic logical-linguistic constructions (fundamental or general), and not the sectoral ethical-communicative codes. It is this external, social, and collective nature of intellectual activity that nowadays becomes— and even for Marx in the nineteenth century—“the real engine of wealth creation” (Virno 2001, 8–9). The dissolution of these “special places” engenders the adoption of the “common places” not because someone so decides, but because of a desire for protection in a society deprived of such communitarian codes. And, as the multitude can run over to these “common places,” it “does not converge in a general will . . . [and] may seek a non-state public sphere. The many, as many, are based on the pedestal of the publicity of the intellect: for better or for worse” (Virno 2001, 11). Let us not think, however, that the multitude marks—or will mark—the end of the working class. Virno (2001) points out that this, actually, is not simply a coincidence with certain habits, uses, or customs. It means, in fact, the subject that produces surplus value. In this sense, the working class in the contemporary world—the subordinate live labor—coincides with the very notion of the multitude, with their cognitive and linguistic cooperation. Work and intellect merge into the multitude and make the basis on which this notion is built, in the contemporary world, come forth: from the disintegration of the classical division of human experience into labor (or poiesis), political action (or práxis), and intellect (or mind life). A distinction, which was clear and precise until the Fordist era, is meaningless nowadays, since work began to absorb many typical characteristics of political action, with which it hybridized, generating one of the facial

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features of the contemporary multitude. This subsumption of the features of political action to the work process leads us to another important feature of the contemporary multitude, central to our proposition: its virtuosity. For virtuosity, Virno (2001, 15) understands “the peculiar ability of a performing artist” without, however, restricting the definition of artist: this is both an accomplished pianist as well as a persuasive speaker; both a brilliant dancer as well as the suggestive sermon priest. What characterizes the activity of the virtuous is the execution of something whose purpose is in itself, without depositing into a finished or lasting product (the dancer’s performance does not leave behind a distinct palpable object of actual implementation). Moreover, it is something that requires the presence of the other, of an audience. Its meaning lies in the fact, in itself, to be seen or heard. For Aristotle the production of an object refers to the existence of the labor or poiesis, whereas the political action or práxis is the result of an act whose end lies in itself. Therefore, every political action was / is virtuous. Nowadays, according to Virno (2001; 2008) this distinction no longer makes much sense. “In post-Fordism, one who produces surplus value behaves—from a structural point of view, certainly—as a pianist, dancer, etc. and therefore, as a political subject. . . . In post-Fordism, labour . . . resembles a virtuous activity (without work)” (Virno 2001, 17). The virtuosity of contemporary work rests fundamentally on the language, on the speaker’s activity. Not the speech of wise speakers, but any speaker. In addition, its virtuosity is dual: the language is workless, because no object is required or regularly produced in a different form from the enunciative act itself; and, unlike a musician or dancer, the speaker can act without a score to guide him. He is served only by language potentiality, and by the general faculty of language, but not by a pre-set script. Contemporary production is virtuosic because it is based on its own linguistic experience. It doesn’t produce a concrete work, so (at least in the physical, objectual sense), it is a “being.” And this “labour-without-work [that contemporary production engenders] ceases to be a special and problematic case to become the prototype of wage labour in general” (Virno 2001, 123), “the paradigm of all and any types of production” (Cocco 2012, 19). A labor without work, a work (resized, because it comes from other poetics) without an author (as the result of a multiplicity of singularities in interaction). But when the product becomes inseparable from the production act, as suggested above, it inexorably refers to the person who performs it. This subjection, in contemporaneity, to people of productive work takes us to the fact that the multitude is, above all, a multiplicity of singularities, “the fruit of individuation that comes from the universal, the generic, the pre-individual” (Virno 2001, 27). And pre-individual is the biological apparatus of the human being, as is language (of everyone and anyone) and the dominant relation of production (in this case, “social cooperation as a concerted task, a

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poietic set of relations . . . the general intellect” [Virno 2001, 28]). Using Simondon, Virno (2001) argues that individuation is never complete, since the pre-individual is never fully unique. The collective experience is, contrary to what may seem, the land on which arises a new individuation: “participating in a collective, the subject, far from renouncing their more peculiar traits, has the opportunity to individuate, at least in part, the preindividual reality quota that he always carries with him” (Virno 2001, 29). We are thus social-individuals and the multitude, the name given to a whole. “It might be said . . . that the radical transformations of this state of affairs are to give the largest value to and highlight the existence of each individual member of the species” (Virno 2001, 30). And they also denote the centrality, nowadays, acquired by that other poetics based on the interaction of bodies and language: not only the poetic of work of an author, but a poetics—so to speak—of action, interactions, relationships. A poetics of the eventual, that also questions not only the statute of the work (object), but also, as a consequence, the statute of authorship. After all, as Walter Benjamin said, anticipating in just over three decades the discussions of Barthes (2004) and Foucault (1984), about the author’s death: “the essential difference between author and audience is about to lose its fundamental character. . . . At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer” (Benjamin 1994, 184). The same is happening everywhere. But how can we bring this to the discussion of the role of museums today (and in the future)? THE UPRISING OF THE MULTITUDE CALLS INTO QUESTION THE MUSEUM AS WE KNOW IT: TOWARD A MUSEOLOGY OF MONSTROSITY? If we accept the proposition that museums are (or always behaved as if they were) “mirrors of the world” (Lara Filho 2006); if we accept the consideration that societies create them because they need them to see themselves reflected there (Scheiner 1998), which images would be related to such museums-mirrors today (or fated, condemned, obliged)? What contemporaneity would be given to be reflected? With a quick glance at what is currently going on in the streets or what is captured in the daily news of the mainstream media, we can easily realize that a vibrant energy is in the air. This has nothing to do, obviously, with (pseudo) the joy (induced) from the recent conquest of the Confederations Cup (2013); nothing to do, obviously, with the imminent possibility of— finally?—us turning into the “Barcelona of the tropics.” 3 Preceding and permeating the whole process of conception, research, and writing of this text, important events now routinely occur around us: 4 in the specific case of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the initial protest against the

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increase in public transport tickets and the claim for a “free pass” became a protestation against the brutality of the military police, against the systematic murder of favela’s residents, against the lack of dialogue with teachers on strike, against the public health crisis, against arbitrary removals (and the constitutional right of housing), against the gentrification of the city and its delivery to big business, against the loss of rights and the imposition of a state of emergency, against implosion and oppression, and finally, against the model of the “creative city.” . . . What we have seen on the streets was, thus, “the power and the virtù of these restless and useless bodies, unruly and unbehaved, which constitutes the principle of the disarticulation of power strategies that are concealed under the issue of public transport fares in large metropolises” (Correa 2013). “Miserable” R$ 0.20 may have been the trigger for what has happened. However, it was a multiplicity of causes, issues, indignation, and claims, of all faiths and shades that were taken to the streets (and networks) by an even greater variety of singularities that knocked down the established consensus around a myth—the pax brasilis (guaranteed not only by discursive regimes, but also by the violence of state repression devices)—and imposed the amazement of the Spinoza doubt: what can a body do? In fact, many things. First, by what we have been watching, we can say that it is to join other bodies for a re-appropriation of public space (Correa 2013); but also as some analysts ponder, we realize that it is a struggle for the establishment of an insubordination, an exodus, the “uprising of the multitude” (Cocco and Negri 2013; Pillati, Negri, and Cocco 2013): “this is what all disobedient bodies . . . that occupy . . . public spaces bring into play: an indomitable becoming of our ways of living and thinking the market. One way . . . to fight the closure and stasis that power produces on the subjected bodies” (Correa 2013). A fight against the reduction, imposed by modernity, of restless bodies and multiple singularities to tamed and emptied identities; a fight against the alienation of its power. What we see today are the subjectivities taking the streets: a significant change, which is an heiress of May 1968, the moment when what was produced, according to Lazzarato and Negri (2001, 33–34), was “a phenomenology, which implies a whole new ‘metaphysics’ of the powers and of the subjects. The resistance and revolt foci are ‘multiple.’ . . . The definition of the relationship with power is subordinated to the ‘constitution of itself’ as a social subject.” And this, without going through work or the political (as “that which separates us from the state,” as defined by Marx). What we are witnessing is the materiality of what has been said elsewhere in this text: with cognitive capitalism, intellect and labor merging in action, in a move that brings out the disintegration of the classical division of human experience into labor (or poiesis), political action (or práxis), and intellect (or mind life)—the basis on which the concept of immaterial labor is built in the

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contemporary world—doing away with the Fordist discipline and logic of industrial modernity. And all this with “aggravation” (so to speak): what we see in this insurrection of the body against the State is its transformation from a “phenomenology of revolt” into an “ontology of freedom” (Correa 2013), significantly transforming the “images to be reflected” in our institutionsmirrors (museums included therein). A movement that suppresses—perhaps—the necessity of reflection itself and the assumption in its place—who knows?—of a poiesis of action and a práxis of the evental, according to which things and senses would be inseparable, “the event is inseparably the meaning of the sentences and the development of the world; is that the world is allowed to engage in language and allows it to operate” (Zourabichivili 2004, 7). This is not necessarily what was extracted (decontextualized) from the lifeworld and musealized (recontextualized), not necessarily the represented and the representational, but is the very “monstrosity of the flesh” in all its “monstruation.” What, throughout history, has been tamed and trapped in the inside of the museum, is now loose again on the streets in all its dynamis and alternative creativity to the model the “creative cities”: the ambivalence (the break with the dichotomy of “good” and “evil”), the exceedance (their excessive production) and the primacy of resistance of power (Szaniecki 2014). But let us go back to the protests that have been taking place in Rio de Janeiro, and how they help us understand contemporaneity. Looking at the new economic cycle started from the creative re-signification of urban revitalization that has been undertaken in recent years by the Municipality, Szaniecki (2014) points out one of the perverse aspects of the relationship between museums and the monstrosity of the multitude: 5 the gentrification of the city through the institutionalization of art, of culture, and of creativity, with the consequent domestication of criticism, through “museums, fairs, notices and permissions for creative occupations of public buildings.” As Szaniecki (2014) points out, new major museums are in the process of creating justifications for the gentrification of urban space and its spectacle. Behind what we could name “cabinet cultural effervescence” it is possible to catch a glimpse of a strategy of redefinition of the flows and the dynamics of the city, an extinguishment of memories and affections (and its reconstruction in other words), a transformation (often arbitrary) of places into non-places and non-places into places (Augé 1994). Finally, taming the monstrosity (productive exceedance) of the multitude, for a better directioning (exploration), ignoring the fact that cities are the inventors of âgon (dispute, conflict) as a basis for citizenship, and ethos of a community of free men as rivals (which is not to say enemies), as Deleuze and Guattari (2010) well remember. Or—we can also suggest here—that they do so precisely because they are well aware that this is so. As Szaniecki (2014) reinforces,

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Vladimir Sibylla Pires I think we can, in the light or shadow of the monster . . . bring the issues of ambivalence that demand an ethical screen, the excess that does not fit into the market economy and the representation of the state and the resistance that is politics and aesthetics, it urges to rethink our relations with the institutions and representations: of the artist with the museum, of the professor and researcher with the university, of the movements with governments and movements between them. . . . It seems necessary to me, but still not enough to say that, given the institutional vampirism—from the museum to the municipal government and corporative monopolies—it is necessary to strengthen all these monstrous alliances that make up the flesh of the multitude: recognizing and making recognize that a great part of our creations are co-creations; demanding social mix and cultural remix as something necessary for creativity in Rio de Janeiro; and even by affirming the creative power of the conflict, without conflict there is no creativity. . . . Where there is creativity being subtly coopted and creativity being violently expelled from the city, do not hesitate, let us be monsters!

FINAL THOUGHTS As we have seen throughout the text—from the recognition of the changes in the paradigm of the capitalist accumulation regime, of the transformations in work and, by extension, of the images themselves that we are currently given to as a reflection by/in our museums-mirrors—the question nowadays may not be essentially linked (or solely) to ensure the interpretive opening of the work produced (the recognition of its intrinsic polysemy). This has been demonstrated and defended by Eco (1991) almost 60 years ago and since then, has been incorporated into our sociocultural practices and theoretical reflections. Therefore, by extension, it is not just a matter of emphasizing the fact that museums and exhibitions are also open works. This was already clear. Nor is it a matter of believing that, because of that, they are spaces of creation and creativity per se. It is already clear that they are—or should be—by the simple fact that we are all creative in our interpretive effort. It is, however, a matter of moving forward with these proposals to also take the opening beyond the work, that means, the defense of the productive opening (creative) of práxis itself: the multiple forms of life that produce not only other works, but also other lives, as we could see in Virno (2001) and Cocco (1999, 2012), and all that which implies museums nowadays. After all, in cognitive capitalism (communicational, relational, affective, corporal), unlike the previous paradigm (manufacturing and informative), we no longer essentially have individuals producing objects for consumption of other individuals (goods), from the incorporation of knowledge to fixed capital (machines), but knowledge producing new knowledge, forms of life producing new forms of life: a multiplicity of subjects in dynamic interactions, “monstering.” To

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what kind of form-museum does it correspond? Or, going back to the first question previously asked: in a relational, evental world, of labor without work, and work without an author, will there be museums as we know them? The answer, indeed, is double (one easy, the other difficult): the easy answer could be “yes, it is clear that the hegemonic form-museum that we know and have inherited from modernity (institutional) is going to persist.” After all, the centrality of the dynamics of knowledge nowadays does not imply full disappearance of information flows; as well as the understanding that creation is an eminently collective gesture, this does not imply the absolute suppression of the author; and the hegemony of the living and immaterial labor does not result in complete dematerialization of objects. Such changes, in general, although real, will not prevent us from continuing to live—at least for a while—with a sort of “ghost of modernity” that makes us need custody spaces for the works already carried out (and even for those we may want to preserve for future generations). The museum-continent is bounded and is the delimiter and articulator of items and information flows, artificially prepared for the production of meaning from an induced interaction between human being, works (own or outsourced) and its authorship (individual or collective). This museum will not disappear (not completely, not easily). Instead, it will recrudesce whenever the neoliberal state and big businesses co-opt this museum model to be inductor of the revitalization processes/urban reframing around the planet. And even though “fruits of their time,” they are still mostly as designed as ever: a defined lócus, a cut, a continent. A space par excellence of poiesis, not necessarily of práxis. The difficult answer, on the other hand, makes us see that persisting at this truism poetics of open work (playing it ad infinitum), do not go beyond it, do not update the discussion (and practices), condemn all of them—museums, exhibitions, and our own understanding of them—to a kind of conservatism. As well as, to a level where the criticism of the system was simple and properly absorbed, and did not generate another form (alternative) and had been incorporated by their modus operandi—a kind of “emptying critics by recognizing it” movement. However, if capitalism is cognitive, if labor is relationship, if culture is their content, if subjectivities are productive, if production is without work and the work produced is without authorship, which of these then goes to the museums? Ones own life lived? Why, on the contrary, is the life lived (as such) not itself “museal” (with no needs of a continent for this: the ecomuseum, the community museum, or one of its variations). If those recent events show us, in all their plenitude, on the one hand, the crisis of representation and the abolition of mediation (an event is organized and reproduces it without going through it), while on the other hand, the dynamics of âgon and the “monstruation” (productive exceedance) of this multiplicity of singularities (the multitude) in search of an “alternative measure” for the crisis of the

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capitalist system, then the contemporary form-museum must accompany this shift (from representational to evental), overcome the centrality of the poetics of work (even if opened), and start to recognize the very creative opening of práxis. And in doing so, establish a museum of the evental (not just of the representational), a museum-monster. A museum and museology (why not?) of the museality of urban practices and dynamics as such; to recognize what is ‘museal’ in the eventual performativities of the world-of-life there, where they occur without delimitations, without restrictive logic or spaces, where intellect, práxis, and poiesis are one. After all, is such virtuosic performance without work, which occurs throughout the territory: in the circulations, in the interaction of subjectivities, amid a language that engenders the “common places” to which Virno (2001) refers, that here we assume as the most appropriate notion, rather than that of “places of memory.” Especially in times of explicit manifestation of our multitudinous exceedance, we demand, in our view, a non-subtractive form-museum, not representational, accustomed to their affective character and evental. This form-museum cannot be a fearful materialization (facing the risk of a loss), the expression of something where there is no more vivid memory (a fallacy, as it always is, therefore pure relationship). Maybe it did not materialize, in fact, as it happens in “common places” and in the commons of places—linguistic places, but also territorial, physical, and emotional, produced by the interaction of subjectivities. A “place,” at last, of those that only exist because in it there are multiple spirits, hidden there in silence, that we can evoke, as well pointed out by Certeau (2009, 175). A live space—material and/or symbolic—that is defined to be identity, relational and historical, as Augé (1994) has pointed out. Something about which (or from which) we can assert our rights, not just the ones of surviving, living, and inhabiting, but also the right to move around, as it is for this gesture, for the free act of walking, for which we appropriate the topographic system; we can spatially “perform” the location; and in that we imply relations, that is, we undertake pragmatic contracts in the form of movements, as if the mere act (walking) was a “space of statement” (Certeau 2009, 164). A “right to the city,” as already advocated by Lefebvre (2008), which means, above all, to make-cities and, by extension, to make-memory: to permanently (re)invent “common places” in a continuous and dynamic game of power to remember and desire to forget. A more creative and democratic way to animate (in the latin sense “to give soul”) the urban environment.

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NOTES This essay has been developed in the ambit of the PhD thesis “Museum-monster: inputs for a museology of monstrosity,” held at the Post Graduation Program in Information Science from the convenant IBICT/UFRJ (Brazil), under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Cocco and the support of CAPES. 1. Here defined as a type of document produced, collected, sorted, organized, preserved, and displayed for the express purpose of telling a story about something or someone, usually under the prism of the power that had established it, which has given his “speech capability.” 2. According to Chagas (2005, 131): “In the 1990s, in a meeting, those responsible for the Ethnological Museum of Monte Redondo, Portugal, deliberately “desgeographised” the Museu saying it was ‘the tavern of Rui, when we sat there making decisions, and also the home of Joaquim Figueirinha, in Geneva, when we are there working.” However, for the purpose for which this brief essay is proposed, this experience still maintains the physicalist relationship with the territory. 3. In October 2009 the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, signed a cooperation agreement between Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona. At the time, the project Barcelona ’92 had been chosen by Paes as the model to be followed by Rio de Janeiro in achieving the 2016 Olympics, which even declared: “the dream of Rio is being Barcelona tomorrow” (JB Online, 2009). 4. We refer to the month of June 2013 onwards, when, on the eve of the Confederations Cup, and amid an increase of ticket prices on public transport, protests breaks out all over the country, an impressive numbers of events occupying the streets, not only of the capital but also of many towns, literally, from north to south and from east to west. 5. Remember that this characterization of the monster and the monstrosity is something inexorably negative and to be feared, tamed, and controlled; diametrically opposing design to positivity suggested by Hardt and Negri (2005) and adopted in this text.

REFERENCES Arantes, Otília. Uma estratégia fatal: a cultura nas novas gestões urbanas. Arantes, O. et al. (ed.). A cidade do pensamento único: desmanchando consensos, 5.ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009. Augé, Marc. Não lugares: introdução a uma antropologia da supermodernidade. 9.ed. Campinas: Papirus, 1994. Barthes, Roland. A morte do autor. O rumor da língua. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica. In Walter Benjamin. Magia e técnica, arte e política: ensaios sobre literatura e história da cultura. Obras escolhidas, v.1. 7.ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994. p. 165–96. Campos, Haroldo de. A obra de arte aberta. In Campos, Augusto de; Pignatari, Décio; Campos, Haroldo de. Teoria da Poesia Concreta: textos críticos e manifestos 1950–1960. 2.ed. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1975. p. 30–33. Castells, Manuel. A questão urbana. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2000. Certeau, Michel de. A invenção do cotidiano: 1. artes de fazer. 16.ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009. Chagas, Mario. Casas e portas da memória e do patrimônio. In Gondar, J.; Dodebei, V. (ed.). O que é memória social? Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2005. p. 115–32 ———. Museus, memórias e movimentos sociais. In Cadernos de Sociomuseologia, Lisboa, n. 41, 2011, p. 5–16. Cocco, Giuseppe. Trabalho sem obra, obra sem autor. In Belisário, Adriano; Tarin, Bruno. Copyfight: pirataria and cultura livre. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, 2012. ———. A nova qualidade do trabalho na Era da Informação. In Lastres, H.; Albagli, S. (ed.). Informação e globalização na Era do Conhecimento. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1999. p. 262–89.

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Cocco, Giuseppe; Negri, Antonio. Do bolsa família ao levante da multidão. In Revista Global, 17 de junho de 2013. Correa, Murilo Duarte Costa. Indóceis e inúteis: o que podem os corpos? In A navalha de Dali, 15 de junho de 2013. Debord, Guy. A sociedade do espetáculo. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. O que é a filosofia? São Paulo: Editora 34, 2010. Delgado, Manuel. La ciudad mentirosa: fraude y miseria del ‘Modelo Barcelona.’ Madrid: Catarata, 2007. Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta. 8.ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991. Foucault, Michel. O que é um autor? Ditos e Escritos: Estética—literatura e pintura, música e cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 1984. v. III. p. 264–98. Gonçalves, Janice. Pierre Nora e o tempo presente: entre a memória e o patrimônio cultural. In Historiæ, Rio Grande, v. 3, n. 3, 2012, p. 7–46. Gondar, Jô. Quatro proposições sobre memória social. In Gondar, J.; Dodebei, V. (ed.). O que é memória social? Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2005. p. 11–26. Hardt, Michael; Negri, Antonio. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Traducción: Daniel Clavero. 2009. ———. Multidão. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2005. Hartog, François. Tempo e patrimônio. In Varia Historia, Belo Horizonte, v. 22, n. 36, 2006, p. 261–73. Harvey, David. O “novo” imperialismo: acumulação por espoliação. In Socialist Register–Brasil, v. 40, p. 95–126, 2004. JB Online. Paes afirma que sonho do Rio é ser como Barcelona. 23 de outubro de 2009. Lara Filho, Durval de. Museu: de espelho do mundo a espaço relacional. Dissertação de mestrado. (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação). USP, São Paulo, 2006. Lazzarato, Maurizio; Negri, Antonio. Trabalho imaterial e subjetividade. In Maurizio Lazzarato. Trabalho imaterial: formas de vida e produção de subjetividade. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2001. p. 25–41. Lefebvre, Henri. A produção do espaço. Versão eletrônica traduzida por Doralice Barros Pereira e Sérgio Martins. 2006. ———. O direito à cidade. 5.ed. São Paulo: Centauro, 2008. Lojkine, Jean. O estado capitalista e a questão urbana. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1981. Loureiro, Maria Lucia de Niemeyer Matheus; Silva, Douglas Falcão. A exposição como “obra aberta”: breves reflexões sobre interatividade. In X Reunión de la RED POP, San José, Costa Rica, 9 a 11 de maio de 2007. Negri, Antonio. A constituição do comum. In II Seminário Internacional Capitalismo Cognitivo—Economia do Conhecimento e a Constituição do Comum, 2005. Nora, Pierre. Entre memória e história: a problemática dos lugares. In Projeto história, São Paulo, n.10, 1993. Pillati, Adriano; Negri, Antonio; Cocco, Giuseppe. Levante da multidão. In Uninômade Brasil, 28 de junho de 2013. Rancière, Jacques. O espectador emancipado. Lisboa: Orfeu Negro, 2010. Scheiner, T. C. M. Apolo e Dionísio no templo das musas—Museu: gênese, ideia e representações na cultura ocidental. Dissertação de mestrado apresentada ao PPGCOM/ UFRJ, sob a orientação do Prof. Dr. Paulo Vaz. Rio de Janeiro, 1998. ———. Comunicação—educação—exposição: novos saberes, novos sentidos. In Semiosfera (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, v. 4–5, 2003. Szaniecki, Barbara. Disforme contemporâneo e design encarnado: outros monstros possíveis. São Paulo: Annablume, 2014. Topalov, Christian. La urbanization capitalista: algunos elementos para su análisis. Esta edición en soporte magnético ha sido autorizada por el autor exclusivamente para su uso por parte de la cátedra de Sociología Urbana—Facultad de Ciencias Sociales—Universidad de Buenos Aires. 2006. Virno, Paolo. Gramática da multidão: para uma análise das formas de vida contemporânea. Tradução para o português de Leonardo Retamoso Palma a partir da publicação italiana de Rubberttino Editore Catanzaro, Itália, 2001.

Cognitive Capitalism, The Uprising of the Multitude and Museums Zourabichivili, François. O vocabulário de Deleuze. Campinas: IFCH/UNICAMP, 2004.

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Chapter Nine

Biopolitical Shipwreck Peter Pál Pelbart

In 2011, the Finnish collective mollecular.org invited us, the Ueinzz Theater Company, 1 along with the group presque ruines from France to conjointly make a film and put together a play inspired by Kafka’s book Amerika, or the Man Who Disappeared. The extravagant aspect of this proposition, hailing from the bold mind of Virtanen Akseli and Ana Fradique, consisted of carrying out this endeavor on a transatlantic voyage, during the two-week crossing between Lisbon and Santos, in a remote evocation of Ship of Fools, but also, as in a possible “rediscovery” of Brazil. When Akseli asked us if we could confirm the reservation of the ship for November 25th, he added humorously: does the project seem sufficiently impossible to be desirable? Indeed, some years before he had made a trip between Finland and China, on the Trans-Siberian railway, with 40 people from different collectives, in a daring artistic/political project called Capturing the moving mind. This innovative experiment and the texts published by him were an inspiring precedent. 2 In our case, the film project was inspired by a small paper by Félix Guattari entitled Project for a film by Kafka, where he tries to imagine what a film made by Kafka would be like. 3 Having flown into Lisbon, we embarked on November 25, 2011, the three collectives from different parts of the globe, on The Splendour of the Seas. Here is, quite summarily, the context of this micro-political experiment. In order to understand it, however, it is necessary to minimally describe what a cruise consists of—something that I had ignored entirely before we threw ourselves into this adventure. About two thousand people confined to the pseudo-luxury of a floating hotel ten stories high, velvet hallways, enormous chandeliers hanging everywhere, gilded handrails, panoramic elevators, swimming pools in the open air surrounded by gigantic television screens, huge saunas, bars, casinos, and restaurants everywhere, 147

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music and shows, slot machines and dance halls, theme parties next to the pool, dinner with the captain, commemoration when crossing the Equator with glowing champagne glasses. The hallucinating overdose of entertainment stimuli and gastronomic stuffing, an imperative for pleasure, produces an absolute saturation of the physical, mental, and psychological space of the passengers. A true semiotic bombardment from which no one can escape anywhere, not even in the cabin where the loudspeaker announces the next bingo competition or the internal television irradiates the news from the ship itself. The floating entertainment machine, however, has nothing extraordinary—it condenses our daily life, a propelled contemporary capitalism. If it would not offend historical victims, I would say that it is a type of concentration camp in reverse, post-modern, organized thoroughly according to the logic of consumption, of the spectacle, of the interminable intensification of pleasure, of the imperative for enjoyment, of the “your smile is my smile,” that one of our actors translated as “your card is my card.” Of course, all of this works thanks to an army of 700 underpaid employees who live in the basement and circulate smiling at the disposal of the clientele 24 hours a day, and whose habitation is blocked from passenger visitations. Personally, I lived our embarking on the ship as an individual and collective shipwreck. Of course we were stunned by everything, the dimensions, the enormousness, the abundance, the solicitude, and the actors were increasingly shocked at being treated with such solicitude—if someone asked for ten desserts, the waiter brought ten desserts—after all, the final objective is to satisfy the client, however absurd their caprices seemed to be. This type of inclusion through consumption, with its grotesque side, however, just highlighted the contrast at stake. There could not be anything more discrepant than our group, with its unique fragility, on the one hand, and the ostentatious and glaring luxury present everywhere. Two poles, two worlds, in an asymmetric confrontation, in an inevitable friction and in which we set out as losers and scorched. We had no chance of “winning,” we barely knew if we would be able to “survive.” It recalls the beautiful observation by DidiHuberman about the fight between the fireflies, that need the dark in order to appear, and the light of the projectors that entirely sweep away the social space, concealing the glow of the fireflies. It is the triumphant fascist industry of political exposition, as Pasolini said. 4 Of course, we also had a project—we were not mere tourist passengers. If on the one hand the unfavorable context for our project generated a doubled effort of those invested in the objective, it happened like an irritation with this taskness, with anxiousness to do, to finish, to fill in the anticipated direction. On my part, I was overcome not by laziness, but by a type of refusal, though passive, Bartlebyesque, of the type “I would prefer not to” make a film, make a play, make a work, make something nice, to finish. . . . An anarchist desire, or rather, the desire to dive into a different dynamic, non-productive, a desire for un-

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production, where quitting, unwillingness, withdrawal, the plunge, the surf, heading out to sea, all became interlaced in an intensive logic, of interpenetrated sensations, much more than constructive and displayable articulation. It is hard to describe to what extent the set of tiny gestures, miniscule movements, humorous or hilarious deviations seemed more effective in the parodic contrast to what from the outset some experienced as confinement, with its dose of violence and coercion. Little by little we noticed that everything that we had foreseen went wrong, or worked poorly, or barely worked, or simply revealed its laughable or absurd dimension, where we re-encountered the disturbing, inevitable, and necessary question: but what the hell are we doing here anyway? What an idea to put ourselves in such a maze of coercion and strangulation, in the midst of two thousand tourists, which one of our actors named the “contemplastic world!” And now, from this situation of saturation, how does one leave, if there is no exit, surrounded by a sea that is definitely lived as decoration, and does not remotely evoke an exterior, an outside? It is important to say it: everything on the ship is made for you to turn your back to the ocean. It is the absolute inside, of pleasure, of consumption, impermeable to any exteriority, the hypnosis of the casino, of the giant screen above the outside pool that displays precisely what is next to it: the ocean. It is incontestable that, at a certain moment, even inside of this protective bubble in which we had taken refuge, in a room on the fourth floor, in order to resist the athletic or flaccid normopathy that surrounded us, there was something that dissolved in us, among us. Everything slipped, the roles, functions, references, objectives, meanings, reasons. A kind of viscous collapse, which derailed the “what,” the “what for,” the “how,” the “where,” the “when,” even though we occupied an enclosed space, following our own routine, rehearsal in the morning, filming in the afternoon, conversations at night. Despite this agreed-upon plan, some of us went through an involuntary chaotization, a subtle catastrophe, with its terrors, angst, nausea, claustrophobia, the “nothing is possible” that would make outbursts, the “it could have been so much better” from this type of collective de-subjectivation, this vacuity, where everything seemed to break to pieces, or drown, including the foreseen and programmed projects Chaosmosis. While the ship worked perfectly, we were shipwrecked. It was necessary to part from this complex and confusing material, from this body-withoutorgans that was being proclaimed, and to follow the lines that from it arose. If the functions seemed disturbed, the actors, with their presence, affectivity, body relation, contaminated the surroundings and created a magnetic field that surprised and attracted the other collectives, who had trouble decoding the nature of this connection to which they could not resist, which held onto different things, much smaller or larger than the completion of a project. And did it really make sense to oppose such an invasive surrounding with a theatrical play, even one inspired by Kafka (what better author than he to

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expose such claustrophobia, such an army of workers, such a maze of meaning)? Was it really the case to make a film that rivaled the cinema-becoming of this “contemplastic” world? In this context of extreme capture, an option would be, in fact, “to compete.” Placing oneself in a situation of rivaling, of “defeating” this background bombardment, to try to do “more” than it, or be “better.” Another option was to constitute, by withdrawing and shrinking, a space where flows circulated differently. It is always about ways for circulating desire, flows, drainage, overflows, leaks, escapes. Singularities could appear as long as they were not linked to places, functions, roles, accomplishments, though along different lines, susceptible to appear and be “exposed,” perhaps even in the photographic sense, as long as a different surface were offered, detached from the organizational framework, thus, supported in small deviations, interruptions, even the growl of a peevish actor. Of course, countless situations of collective joy alternated with moments like these, in a very dizzying oscillation of what was offered by the ship at high sea. It was necessary to learn to “navigate,” in its most diverse meanings. When Deligny defines his attempts with autistic patients as a raft, he explains to what point it is important that, as in this rudimentary structure, the logs are connected in such a way as allowing them a certain flexibility, so that amidst the torment they let water pass through them and do not break under the impact of the water. As he says: “When the issues abate, we don’t straighten out the lines—we don’t tighten the logs . . . on the contrary. We just maintain the project that connects us. You perceive the importance of the knots and the way they are tied, and the distance that the logs can have between them. It’s important that the knot be loose enough so that it doesn’t let go.” 5 Perhaps, the question is this—how to accompany this flow that was constituted there, amidst the nuisances that unsettled the articulation of signs, of signifiers, of functions, undoing the “functioning,” leading to an “unproduction,” a “slipping,” that actually constitutes a different collective corporeity? Simone Mina, our costume and set designer, with her sewing machine, clothes hanging on lines, threads and ribbons, came up with a “corner” in our rehearsal refuge, a cozy and rich space, where one and all could try out fabrics, come up with their own costumes or characters, sew, or just lie down sheltered by hanging clothes, like a protective cabana. It is all a question of atmosphere. But what is hardest is sustaining an atmosphere, not heroically holding on to a framework, but rather a state of, simultaneously, lightness, presence, alertness, humor, openness. In a different context, Jean Oury discussed with Danielle Sivadon what could be called a “constellation”: the open, fantasy graft, a delimitation, the feet, (going and coming, walking), humor, emerging, the possibility of inscribing oneself. 6 Now, for Oury, or for Deligny in his way, these are something like the conditions for something to happen precisely because nothing needs to happen—when, on the contrary, it is exactly when something needs to happen

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that the most impalpable events run the risk of being aborted. It is where you see what is important. But what is it exactly that is important? What is seen? What is produced? What happens in the cracks? What is in a state of almostbeing? What escapes? What lives in a state of exhaustion? What is composed together? What is it that, inside of this, lives together, alone, in the between, and questions, in a skewed manner, the thing that the factory-ship requires? What community is this that does not need to show any work, which does not necessarily base itself on the work it creates? At a certain moment, Erika Inforsato, one of the coordinators, wanted to read for the group some passages from her doctoral thesis in which she explained, among other things, what it meant for her to travel with this group. It was written long beforehand, but resounding perfectly with the situation, since it made explicit the risks that accompanied us on the trips, even death. Indeed, it was an omnipresent risk on the ship—with the low railing on the decks and the individual cabin terraces with even lower railings. At any instant someone could, abruptly or in anger, jump over the side and disappear. And one of the unwritten “rules” that we bring with us on our trips, obviously, is this: it is forbidden to disappear, even if Kafka’s book, which inspired us was Amerika, or the one who disappeared!!! In one of the most beautiful passages from her thesis, entitled, Unworking: Clinical and Political Constellations of the Common, she exposed, in the context of her work, the Blanchotian idea of unworking, or inoperativeness, which designated, with great precision, something that many were going through at that moment: a type of resistance to “create a work,” precisely amidst the filthy production offered by the ship. 7 Thus, a set of impossibilities which opened up a vision for, however, a common event. Running the risk of concluding that nothing happened, nothing, and there is no work, but that in this absence of work something could happen in the nature of the common. “Community for the art of not creating work,” says Erika Inforsato. Sustaining the unsustainable, an encounter with the gravity of life, above all facing populations in processes of disaffiliation and vulnerability, says the author, requires a readiness, a distance that does not break the affect, this ascesis, she adds, of never presuming what someone else’s life is like, or never investing in obligatory bonds, freeing oneself of the telos, resisting spectacular, overly visible, or prescriptive interventions: resisting not by reinventing the wheel, but by making it spin in a different direction, even if it comes to a point of crushing the encounter. At times it is necessary to leave the situation, observes the author, stop wanting to save and be saved, give up on the charade so that something may be possible: sustaining the suspension, adrift instead of in opposition, infiltration instead of intervention, leaving the field open, instead of betting on the constructions. The ambiguity of the notion of “absence of work,” inspired by Blanchot, is known by every reader of the History of Madness. On the one hand,

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Foucault shows that in the relationship between art and madness, work collapses and is abolished. On the other hand, this work of madness is triumphant, according to him, to the extent that it forces the world to measure itself up to its inordinacy. In this sense, instead of measuring ourselves based on the size and scale of the ship, we could evaluate this surrounding based on this “inordinacy” that was ours. In fact, throughout the voyage we had lost several things—meanings, hierarchies, projects, certainties, securities. Perhaps they are the best moments, these, to be able to “think.” Not thinking an “object,” but asking oneself: why make a group, why sustain a group like this, what is this Ueinzz? It is a group that experiments with something on the order of the unlivable, perhaps of the useless, but through which one attempts to breathe something, especially in un-breathable surroundings. When debarking onto solid ground, for a long time everywhere I looked I saw, with an indescribable sickness, The Splendour of the Seas. The ship caricaturely explicated something of the contemporary world, as well as the distance to which they are thrown, these fragile, precarious, unique existences, and the means by which they can sew among themselves invisible threads that give support to an existential territory where they insist upon living, not just surviving. After all, what is the crossing of an Atlantic Ocean next to this other challenge, a chaosmotic crossing? In a radiophonic conference aired in 1967, Foucault referred to the ship, the one from the 19th century most of all, as a “floating space, a place without a place, living on its own, closed about itself, free in its own way, but fatally at the hands of the sea’s infinite” and that, from port to port, it goes to the colonies to seek in them what they hold most precious. One can understand, therefore, since the 16th century, the ship has been our largest “economic instrument and our biggest reserve of imagination. The ship is the heterotopias par excellence. Civilizations without ships are like children whose parents did not have a great berth upon which to play; their dreams then dry up, the espionage replaces in them the adventure, and the heinousness of the police, the beauty of the corsairs.” 8 Certainly, today’s ship, a mere prolonging of the world, has ceased to be what Foucault described. Perhaps it is needed, in light of this, to look back to the image of the raft as Deligny exposed it. Years after this conference, Foucault referred to the infamous men and their insignificant, inglorious lives, men who by a game of chance were illuminated for a brief moment in the floodlights of power, which they came face to face with, and whose words then appeared to have been traversed by an unexpected intensity. Perhaps we no longer find those resplendent, although inessential, lives; those poems-lives, “particles endowed with more energy the smaller and more difficult to detect they are.” Diluted between the multiple mechanisms of anonymous and arbitrary power, the words do not enjoy that theatrical resplendence and fleeting vibration which Foucault savored in the archives—it is banality which takes center

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stage. But from within, signs of singularity appear to confirm the desire for something else. As Deleuze used to say, even before the term biopolitical was coined, we are all in search of “vitality.” Singular, collective, anonymous, plural, suspensive, intensive, un-working—within an undefined boundary, each time reinvented, between exhaustion and a fleeting vision. NOTES 1. Active for more than eighteen years, the Ueinzz Theater Company is a schizoscenic project based in São Paulo. Ueinzz is a scenic territory for whoever feels the world staggering. As in Kafka, from seasickness on land it creates material for poetic and political transmutation. In the ensemble, there are masters in the art of soothsaying, with notorious knowledge in improvisation and neologisms; specialists in maritime encyclopedias, frustrated trapeze artists, dream hunters, interpretive actresses. There are also inventors of pigeon-slang, musical unknowns, beer masters. There are lives on a razor’s edge experimenting on aesthetic practices and transatlantic collaborations. It is the community of those without community, for a community to come. The group currently consists of the following people: Adélia Faustino, Alexandre Bernardes, Amélia Monteiro de Melo, Ana Goldenstein Carvalhaes, Ana Carmen del Collado, Artur Amador, Eduardo Lettiere, Erika Alvarez Inforsato, Fabrício de Lima Pedroni, José Petronio Fantasia, Leonardo Lui Cavalcanti, Luis Guilherme Ribeiro Cunha, Luiz Augusto Collazzi Loureiro, Maria Yoshiko Nagahashi, Oness Antonio Cervelin, Paula Patricia Francisquetti, Pedro França, Peter Pál Pelbart, Simone Mina, Valéria Felippe Manzalli. 2. The beautiful article by Virtanen Akseli and Jussi Vähämäki Structure of Change, and the dialogue between Virtanen Akseli and Bracha Ettinger, Art, Memory, Resistance, in Framework, Issue 4, December 2005, The Finnish Art Review, 2006. 3. This work by Félix Guattari was published by Stéphane Nadaud as Les 65 reves de Franz Kafka, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2006—and its translations into Portuguese and English were put out by n-1 publications, São Paulo/Helsinki, 2011, as Maquina Kafka/Kafkamachine. 4. Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles, Paris, Minuit, 2009, p. 32. 5. Fernand Deligny, Oeuvres, ed. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2007), p. 1128. 6. Jean Oury and Danielle Sivadon—Constellations, a conversation promoted, recorded and transcribed by Olivier Apprill, published in Portuguese in Cadernos de Subjetividade, São Paulo, PUC-SP, 2012. 7. Erika Alvarez Inforsato, Desobramento: constelacoes clinicas e politicas do comum/ Unwork (Desoeuvrement):clinical and political constellations of the common (São Paulo/Helsink: n-1 publications, soon to be published). 8. Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique—Les Heterotopies, Paris, Lignes, 2009, p. 36, published in Portuguese and French by n-1 publications, in 2013.

Chapter Ten

Activist Design in Helsinki Creating Sustainable Futures at the Margins, the Center, and Everywhere In Between Eeva Berglund

Design and design thinking have entered public life via business management fashions in the last couple of decades. They signal a pragmatic approach to decision-making that mixes practical and theoretical work in efforts to respond creatively to deepening and recurrent crises. It is hoped that design will help solve problems that straddle the domains of environmental, economic, medical, and technological knowledge, leading to sustainability. These hopes can be found anywhere, in activism, academia, business, and government (Escobar 2012; Julier 2013). This essay looks at design’s new role in decision making in the Finnish capital Helsinki, where it is reworking the relationships between decision makers and citizens. In Helsinki design activism has gained new prominence, drawing attention to issues and pursuing creative practical efforts to make life better, especially for the vulnerable, much as it has elsewhere (Fuad-Luke 2009; Julier 2013). It is a fast-growing phenomenon of initiatives and projects seeking to create a socially just, culturally meaningful, and materially sustainable alternative to what is currently considered “normal.” Practical initiatives—urban gardens, up-cycling workshops, green energy experiments, volunteer-run local services—work alongside other forms of collective action like guerilla art, protests, or consciousness-raising, to design and prefigure a better world right here, right now. Design activism 1 disrupts habitual attitudes and helps question and escape the dominance of consumer values, predominantly by making physical changes in space (Markussen 2012). Usually, but not always, sometimes at the margins of legality, design activism 155

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can be understood as political contestation and even as a social movement (Thorpe 2014). However, the ethical (re-)design of everyday life is also, arguably, a part of neoliberal governance, just as the vastly expanded remit of design is rooted in the economics of creative capitalism (Moor 2009; Julier 2013). As shared problems are now seen to be thick with social and cultural dimensions, expertise in people-skills and in cultural difference has become valued, and a demand for facilitators and designers, or co-creators, of better tomorrows continues to grow. Helsinki Design Lab, discussed below, was one official instantiation of how design entered decision making in Helsinki. Another instantiation was when the city engaged three designers to help develop urban policy from early 2014. Countless government-produced reports, pamphlets, and power-point slides, seminars, conferences, and documents 2 indicate that instead of, or alongside, top-down blueprint planning, there is now a demand for design-oriented experts who can teach flexibility and responsiveness across different domains. Cross-disciplinary, flexible, and full of hope, design continues to appeal to policy makers (Moor 2009). 3 Carl di Salvo refers to this as “design for politics” (2012, 3, my italics), since it is aimed at enhancing the capacity and legitimacy of established institutions. He contrasts it with adversarial design that is agonistic (as Chantal Mouffe defines it), sustaining democracy by forever examining and challenging itself (di Salvo 2012, 5). Critical design literature (Fry 2011; Markussen 2012; Marres 2013) gives further weight to this contrast, noting that design interventions can both downplay and accentuate their own political impacts, that is, they can both politicize and de-politicize. However, it may be premature to judge the actors here, and so I will use an all-embracing concept “activist design,” encompassing activities at the political center as well as at the critical margins. I use activist design to refer to design-led interventions that are both utilitarian and politicized (Julier 2013, 219), that seek to change both everyday artifacts and the social practices and relations that come with them. The kind of impact that activist design has on social change is an empirical question, and may be more indirect than di Salvo’s contrast suggests. For example, the contributions to Helsinki Beyond Dreams: actions towards a creative and sustainable hometown largely sidesteps institutional backgrounds and political goals, simply celebrating the “social innovations and grassroots initiatives” that are making the city ‘more open, green and inspiring,’ as the back cover of the book puts it (Hernberg 2012). One impulse is to see this as naïve, but who knows how they will reshape politics and spaces over time? In conditions of normalized inter-urban competition and creative city policies, the inspirations for as well as the effects of activist design are likely to be contradictory because “alternative” or “creative” design is no longer just the protestor’s response to social breakdown or ecological collapse but also a

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policy ideal. Furthermore, there where legitimacy relies on public participation, the center actually solicits the input of the margins, especially where expertise is understood as facilitation. In these conditions, activist design easily contributes to the way neoliberalism cunningly shape-shifts and renews itself, squeezing out space for social critique. However, as Guy Julier’s empirical work shows, design and its impacts (2013, 221) are integral to the conditions of neoliberalism and cannot be wished away. In the following section, I sketch out some ways in which creativity, generally, and design skills, particularly, are seeking to recompose social realities in Helsinki. I argue against both celebration and pessimism, taking seriously Julier’s (2013) idea that design is now central to how collective life is organized. The text is based on engagements, over the last four years, with activist design as a long-term but occasional participant as well as unpaid researcher. 2012—DESIGN TAKES OVER HELSINKI In Helsinki public attention to design came with place branding, as a variant of the city as spectacle, but it cannot be dismissed as mere surface. Design shapes the fabric and tenor of everyday life, suffusing production and consumption habits and rearticulating questions of value (Julier 2013). When, in 2010, I moved back to the city after many years abroad, I found a flurry of reports and TED 4-talk-like events extolling design, but also a lively network of small-scale experiments of a green hue that had affinities with the design talk but were not directly of it. Some were descendants of social movement groups I knew from the 1990s. Then the news came that Helsinki was to become World Design Capital (WDC) 2012. Since the city was also launching into a massive redevelopment of former harbor areas, debating urban futures became a popular pursuit (Berglund 2011). From the start, the organization set up to administer the WDC process emphasized design’s capacity to enhance well-being and sustainability. The press release announcing Helsinki’s nomination by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design put it like this: design has for decades been a pivotal enabler to building an open city. The concept [in Helsinki’s application document] of “Embedded Design” has tied design to innovation and has enabled desirable solutions that have addressed the needs of its inhabitants. Helsinki Design is also part of world design—it is created together with the international design community and the people of the world.

The invitation 5 to do one’s bit fell short of asking everyone to become a design activist, but as the “design year” progressed, artifacts, services, and ideas aiming to make the world a better place were in demand, and there was

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also palpable interest in do-it-yourself activities and fun, green-tinged urban culture. Novel applications of data processing and social media became normalized, sometimes under the auspices of established neighborhood associations, often deployed not to overcome space but to enhance community and sense of place. Some projects left tangible traces, while others produced ideas and new social groups. Many simply carried on as before, but with WDC backing. The environmental organization Dodo continued a varied program of consciousness raising, talks, and reading groups but also initiated the ambitious Turntable urban garden and café (kaantopoyta.fi). Art practices with a peer-to-peer ethos of participation flourished (e.g., pixelache.ac) (more detail in Berglund 2013). The WDC program also produced sleek open-air keep-fit stations, powerpoint presentations, and fun-filled workshops about the Good Life, featuring info-graphics and design solutions aimed at nudging the public into happiness, well-being, and sustainability. The distinctions became blurred between design as aesthetic or surface qualities (logos and branding) and design as engineering or organizing. Design of products and design thinking were quite intentionally bled into each other, as the Finnish words “suunnitella” (plan) and “muotoilla” (give shape or form) became fused in the loan-word “design,” inciting both irritation and excitement.. There was little politics here, only exhortations to use design skills to solve problems together. WDC in Helsinki was not just about image but about intervening in everyday life, or “normality,” enhancing quality of life and boosting economic indicators. No doubt similar ideas had made the WDC-status attractive to Turin (in 2008), Seoul (2010), and Cape Town (2014) as well. Policy interventions included Demos Helsinki’s report on well-being for the city of Espoo (Demos 2011), the National Design Program Muotoile Suomi (2013), and the City of Helsinki Strategy Programme 2013–2016. In all of these the idea that the fate of the planet is a human affair easily translated into making it everyone’s responsibility. These documents also voiced discomfort with the hubris of “planning,” understood as the reign of aloof experts, whereas design was presented as both pragmatic and “human centric.” 6 Some commentators worried that design was being unrealistically proffered as the nation’s new wealth-creating project, after a century of forestbased growth followed by a spectacular if shorter-lived Nokia-boom. Many experienced activists were soon annoyed by the hype, as were some designers. The ADC or Alternative Design Capital network emerged and engaged in gentle rebellion by organizing events and retooling activities as well as ridiculing the WDC. Still, the excitement of making better cities and making them quickly was palpable in Helsinki in the summer of 2012. An urban vibe of self-organizing eco-chic and fun settled in. Even the former critics began to take a pragmatic stance.

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DOING POLITICS THROUGH DESIGN Experimental world-improving activities were presented as both necessary and ethical. Yet, in reorganizing benefits and disbenefits, they would have political effects, whether in seemingly trivial lifestyle preferences (Haenfler et al. 2012) or what William Connolly (2013) calls role experiments, not to mention in ambitious experiments for dealing with climate change (Evans and Karvonen 2014). Implementing design solutions to shared problems has created a niche for new forms of expertise and a cohort of a new type of knowledge worker, for whom no collective noun (in Finnish or English) yet exists to my knowledge. One suggestion was put forward in the summer of 2013, in one of Helsinki’s regenerated former industrial spaces, where six such people were having lunch: “architects of social space!” Those present struggled to describe themselves collectively, but I doubt they would have argued with architect, graphic designer, event organizer, and university lecturer individually. This was at the closing event of the internationally known Helsinki Design Lab (HDL). Between 2009 and 2013 HDL promoted what it called strategic design (Boyer et al. 2011), extending design principles into public policy and in harmony with ministerial agendas, but at arm’s length from government. 7 Before being dismantled HDL did much to popularize the idea that society as a whole must ‘transition’ to a resilient and low-carbon future, and that government planning needs to be replaced by design thinking that is pragmatic and experimental enough for our unsustainable times. This idea, with its promise of dealing with enormous problems without relinquishing economic competitiveness, is integral to neoliberal economic practices, and it clearly appealed to a majority of Helsinki residents in the early 2000s. When it entered policy in the first decade of the new millennium—joining the buzzwords “creativity” and “innovation”—design also made individualism and entrepreneurship seem not just natural but necessary. Helsinki Design Lab was dissolved in 2013, but not before the Ministry of Employment and the Economy had launched a fresh national design program (Muotoile Suomi 2013), declaring design “part of intellectual property consisting of several factors . . . its significance for the competitiveness of enterprises . . . constantly growing. Today, large Finnish corporations know how to use design in their business operations. Use of design by our small and medium-sized enterprises, on the other hand, remains scarce. Investments made in design skills [will] benefit all businesses” (National Design Programme 2013). If the WDC had helped raise awareness of these issues, it was now time to turn ideas into action. Some “architects of social space” engage in protest, but even those who do not animate a rhetoric that inspires people to see the world anew and redesign it. People, ideas, and things also become reassembled through so-

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cio-technical inventions, alerting publics to the heterogeneity of what makes up cities and the urbanized world we now inhabit. In contemporary Helsinki urban activism is strikingly apolitical in its rhetoric, with many activists strenuously asserting their distance from politics. This can be explained by a history where “imagined unanimity” has helped lead to a high value on consensus and to a “perplexed” political culture (Luhtakallio 2012), but also by two features common to many wealthy cities. Firstly, the relative popularity of environmental and generally ethically virtuous policies, and secondly the way urban administrations increasingly support not just fun events but urban improvements originating from the grassroots. Thus, a compendium like Helsinki Beyond Dreams was novel and challenging, at the same time as its message supported an emerging embrace of entrepreneurial and self-reliant urban culture fit for neoliberalism. The exciting urban vibe of the 2010s did not, of course, appear from nowhere, as activism of many kinds has deep roots in Finland (Luhtakallio 2012). Cindy Kohtala was involved in the early 2000s in maintaining a pavilion-like greenhouse and kitchen garden on derelict land in central Helsinki. She captured something crucial in an e-mail. She did not, she writes, remember consciously acting as a “design activist” even though some of us were consciously working as designers-who-wanted-to activate discussion, new thoughts, new practices, and affect education. . . . Others had roughly parallel ambitions . . . a combination of things and people and ideas that came together in a “synergy” . . . that made me, and I assume all of us, realise some happy accidents. We looked for a place, the greenhouse seemed available, we bought it, we started cooperating with people like the [Association of Useful Plants], the nature-culture-urban-rural contrasts made sense and we could both use them and take them for granted because once we were there so much was already somehow there. (e-mail February 2014)

The Oxygen Room as it came to be called had to be abandoned in 2007, but now it appears as a precursor to the urban activism that has blossomed in recent years. It was more overtly critical of consumer society than today’s activist design, yet like today’s activism, it developed as part of the city’s bid to succeed as a creative economy, under the banner of Helsinki as a European City of Culture in 2000 (Kohtala and Paterson, forthcoming). As a critical intervention however, it was inheritor of even earlier environmentalist reactions to consumer society. EARLIER DESIGNERS OF A BETTER WORLD Environmental movements have long shaped expectations of science, nature, and machines. Within the complex history, the Cold War-inflected 1960s and ’70s emerge as a watershed, not only among artists and architects (Scott

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2007; Sadler 2012) but with enfants terrible like Thomas Kuhn, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs 8 emboldening themselves to question modernism’s ideology of progress on intellectual grounds. In the design field a turning point was the publication, in 1971, of Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Translated into 23 languages, with several examples of good design from Finland, its political message still inspires (Clarke 2013). Papanek begins by noting that very few professions are more harmful than industrial designers, and none more phony than the advertising designers who hawk the “tawdry idiocies” concocted by them (Papanek 1971, ix). Papanek was interested in the Nordic tradition of participatory design, where collective effort and the needs of the most vulnerable were emphasized as part of 1970s welfare politics (Binder et al. 2011). Although participatory design was largely developed in Sweden, an important milestone of design for good, not profit, was a seminar held in Helsinki in 1968 under the title, Industry, Environment and Product Design. Here, international visitors celebrated Nordic social virtues along with promises of saner design practice (Clarke 2013). It was this event, only later branded Helsinki Design Lab by Sitra/the Finnish Fund for Innovation, that gave its name to its strategic design unit thus creating a sense of continuity with a local tradition of socially beneficial design. Indeed the environmentalism of the “long 1960s” was substantially influenced by critiques of design and architecture. In countless social utopias and technological experiments people pursued an agenda of replacing expert authority with people-power, and destructive consumerism with something saner. Famous examples include the Whole Earth Catalog, a resource book for anyone interested in saving the planet through their own activities and purchases (Sadler 2012), Ant Farm, a San Francisco-based team “at the intersection of architecture, design and media art” (Awan 2011, 95; also Scott 2007), and Drop City, an alternative community in Colorado partly housed in selfconsciously weird “geodesic domes” inspired by the maverick engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller (Sadler 2012). An enthusiast of cybernetics, Fuller became an icon of countercultural design, promoting nothing less than a novel “ontology and epistemology,” a means “of being in the world” (Sadler 2012, 73). However, he was impatient with the messiness of social and political reality and his vision for an alternative became technocratic. According to Nigel Cross, the “design science revolution” that Fuller called for, should be “based on science, technology and rationalism” the only forces he believed might “overcome the human and environmental problems that he believed could not be solved by politics and economics” (Cross 2001, 1). Significantly, much of the more serious effort at transformation was literally located in the rural margins of the American West.

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With their penchant for desert landscapes and voluntary primitivism, and their belief in technology, the environmentalism of these countercultural ecoutopians identified humanity, as a whole, as harmful to nature. Elsewhere, and arguably more resonant for today’s urban movements, other countercultural thinkers saw people as part of, rather than separate, from their environments. They saw possibilities in reforming, rather than abandoning, urban life. Jane Jacobs in 1950s and 1960s New York and a little later Jan Gehl in Copenhagen, who is still designing, gave voice to increasing popular mistrust of the large-scale humanitarian but technocratic building projects that had established the prevailing “normal” of modern cities. But both Jacobs and Gehl were considerably more sanguine about human achievements than the early environmentalists. 9 They championed cities, and saw a judicious mixing of people and buildings as conducive to a good life that did not destroy its own foundations. From today’s perspective, an important but under-emphasized aspect of their thinking was their understanding of social relations in the city, where strangers rubbing shoulders can be a source of value, not just decay. They highlighted that designing space, and the things that occupy it, is also to design human interaction, whether in support of the safety conferred by what Jacobs dubbed “eyes on the street” or the conviviality that Gehl sees built into physical infrastructures at “human scale.” Pragmatic, design-inflected repertoires of urban change-making today owe a debt both to Jacobs and Gehlas, as well as to the techno-utopians. However, in the intervening years, green—and information—technologies have been domesticated, and the consumerism against which 1960s countercultures railed is now taken for granted. Another important difference comes from the multiple crises of legitimation that have beset political culture in the last 50 years, particularly in relation to expertise where crucial “settlements between natural knowledge and political order” have been upset (Jasanoff 2010, 240). Praise for all things collective also has a rather different flavor now that, alongside creativity and culture, popular participation has been coopted into mainstream governance (Mayer 2013), and sustainability experiments are official policy (Evans and Karvonen 2014). The idea of the city meanwhile, is again one that privileges its role in creating progress and hope. Today’s design ethos and the practical activities it inspires, certainly animates socially useful activity just as it did in the 1960s. Reflecting on that slice of history, perhaps also helps us think about the politics of both technoutopian design and the critiques put forward by Jacobs and Gehl, and see both reflected in today’s activism, their ideals however, fundamentally altered by cultural and historical shifts since then.

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DESIGN AS A NEW IF VAGUE FORM OF EXPERTISE Today’s constantly changing technological culture would not exist without market-driven design. Design is also its own solution, said to overcome the division between the arts and the sciences, and to approach the world as historically constructed and messy. To a designer it matters little whether a problem stems from a natural or a cultural condition, problems just are and must be tackled. Designers also understand that material objects exceed their materiality—they embody meanings, identities, and practices. 10 An iconic example of this genre is John Thackara’s In the Bubble: designing in a complex world, from 2005. Helsinki exemplars include for instance HDL’s publications (e.g., Boyer et al. 2011). These texts rehearse the themes of design connecting, contextualizing, and integrating, instead of separating. They tend to advocate a pragmatic combining of what is (realism) with what might be (optimism) (Manzini 2008). Whether in declamatory style (TEDtalks or power point presentations) or academic analyses, design talk also often emphasizes that to design an artifact is also to design its uses, or a whole “form of life.” The strongly participatory or “citizen driven” design ethos actively exploits the grassroots, not only to “scale up” improved everyday technologies, but to contribute to producing those technologies. In Helsinki this has meant that design’s entry into sustainability talk and environmental governance is almost automatically understood as positive and wholesome, a “good thing.” In its wake come experts offering visions and visioning exercises, toolkits, and endless sources of guidance (Julier 2009). Design professionals, but also architects, are prominent among the change makers and sometimes present themselves as radicals (see also Awan et al. 2011), but they are ambivalent critics. Architects and designers (and students) struggle increasingly with the question of how to use their own expertise: to work for the corporate sector or do something more socially satisfying and, perhaps, work against it? The problem is further exacerbated in complaints that architects’ prominence in this arena merely reflects the huge profits to be had in redesigning for sustainability, not to mention building entire “sustainable cities” from scratch. 11 To date, “alternative” practices appear not to threaten mainstream policies geared to capital-intensive urban growth. In fact, under the banner of designing better tomorrows, contesting and sustaining commercial value are easily confused, an iconic case of activist design contributing to gentrification being New York City’s High Line (Cataldi et al. 2011). The picture is complicated further if we accept that radicalism does not follow from scale or institutional location. Impressive sustainable transport schemes from Bogota’s “Transmilenio” to London’s “Boris bikes” bicyclesharing-scheme were top-down impositions. Typical design experiments like using IT to help share bicycles or cars, or bringing underused spaces into

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productive use, can be capital-intensive as well as low-budget, intrinsic, or opposed to neoliberal practice (Unsworth et al. 2011; Julier 2013). 12 So the center, the margins, and everywhere in between are engaged in simultaneously technical and political change-making (Mayer 2013; Novy and Colomb 2013; Thorpe 2014). This is also clear from the guides to alternative architectural and other design practices that are now a growing genre. In a survey going back over forty years, Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till refer to those involved as spatial agents and write that they “never take no for an answer, [and are] driven by the belief that situations in which they find themselves . . . can always be changed” (2011, 55). Another good resource is the July 2012 issue of Architectural Design, edited by Jon Goodbun with Till and Schneider. Both publications are alert to the unequal possibilities of humans to cope, and both are evidence of highly skilled individuals contributing to a worldwide movement of activist design. Another survey is the Compendium for the Civic Economy (2012), subtitled “What our cities, towns and neighbourhoods should learn from 25 trailblazers.” Its research and publication partners were 00:/, a London-based strategy and design practice, trancityxvaliz, a Dutch publishing house, the UK’s Nesta (formerly National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), and the quasigovernmental Design Council. Through ample graphics and short narratives organized under standard headings –“the story,” “impact,” “key lessons,” “in conclusion”—the compendium surveys initiatives to “build more sustainable routes to shared prosperity” (back cover). Here too we get a sense that this amounts to a social movement, albeit one that works comfortably within an entrepreneurial paradigm. Austerity and problems of inequality are given more analytical attention in Handmade Urbanism, edited by Marcos L. Rosa and Ute Weiland (2013) and Make Shift City (2014) edited by Francesca Ferguson and Urban Drift Projects in Berlin. Aside from being testament to experiments in political accountability, these publications underscore the emergence of a new type of expert. Their skills are in urban transition and resilience policy, or perhaps social, strategic, community, participatory, or sustainable design. They can perhaps be described collectively as change-makers, spatial agents, or architects of social space, but more important is the fact that they are collectively influencing decisions that are as political as they are technical. Their institutional identities are typically fluid and multiple with individuals moving in and out of positions in these matrices of action, from well-paid to unpaid and back, and so on. As stable occupational identities (and posts) get lost, so do simple ways to distinguish between types of activist design and designers. Those who are young enough to take for granted the ‘knowledge economy’ and creative city policies, may take the design ethos in their stride, but they are also resistant to the commercial capture of their creativity. Many of

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them occupy a precarious economic position and, as with the German “creatives” studied by Johannes Novy and Claire Colomb (2013), for many the pleasures of creativity are combined with profound dissatisfaction (also Julier 2013, 224–25). Their attitude to life and their career decisions are influenced by cumulative socio-economic crises reflected in urban and planetary space. This helps explain the over-representation of the creatives in so much activism. Judging from those designing a better world in Helsinki—what I have dubbed activist design—it is obvious that oppositional forms of activist design are attractive, despite an education and socialization geared to success in the market economy. Alongside the well-resourced, government-backed designers, explicitly anti-capitalist, sometimes commons-based, collective action at the agonistic-adversarial end of di Salvo’s (2012) contrast, flourishes (and exhausts). 13 Older social movement repertoires are in evidence also, for example such as carnivalesque and artistic ways of getting attention, or as prefigurative styles of working as groups and other staples of social movement practices familiar from recent global mobilizations, and sometimes these practices now link up with anti-austerity campaigning (Susser and Tonnelat 2013). Although the Occupy and Indignados movements have receded from international news, failures of technological and economic expertise in the last decades are fresh in people’s memories and inform academic discourse (see references). People cope as best they can with frightening prospects of environmental change but also social injustice, pushing an older expert-based paradigm beyond tolerable limits of legitimacy. Wherever they come from, “architects of social space” and the activities and ideals they help set in motion are also helping put a new “normal” in place—literally. POST-POLITICAL AND TECHNOCRATIC? The need to redesign the world goes unquestioned in Helsinki (if not its rural hinterlands), the ultimate environmental threat forcing action rather than reflection. This urgency is often paralleled with a sense of tremendous complexity that, it is implied, only experts can comprehend. In di Salvo’s terminology, this is design for politics (di Salvo 2012). People, from this point of view, are important but their role is to be persuaded to adopt win-win-win behaviors: protecting the planet, staying healthy, and saving public money. 14 Design could, of course, also take the form of so-called “geo-engineering,” technical interventions at a planetary level aimed at fixing carbon cycles, solar radiation, and other mega-scale processes that can support capitalism (Mirowski 2013, 349). Such design homogenizes the fate of “humanity” whilst facilitating the return of almost feudal social relations, and entrenching individualist values.

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References to technocratic concepts like efficiency and functionality and the imperative to redesign environments—or users—were a consistent feature of Helsinki’s WDC program (Berglund 2013), not surprisingly perhaps in that the key actors, like Helsinki Design Lab, modeled themselves on techno-utopians. Felicity Scott’s argument about the 1960s resonates, in that alongside interest in open-endedness and alternatives its radicalism also ‘harboured a paradoxical call to order, an atavistic alliance with modernist dreams of a totalizing environmental control’ (Scott 2007, 1). This is not to suggest that HDL’s experts or work were unreflective, let alone blind to politics. However, as design talk diffused through political rhetoric and administrative practice and even planet-saving activism, it turned into a progressively blunter tool, yet into a trendy one that combined with environmentalism and gained an added “wholesome and pacific” tenor (Gourevitch 2010, 12) that can turn radicalism into moralizing. As Alex Gourevitch puts it, environmentalism on the political left (writing of the USA) “presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right” (2010, 420), and thus (quoting its guru, Al Gore) presents politics with a mission it cannot refuse, an exhilarating, compelling moral purpose (2010, 420), compared with which politically significant categories like class, race, and religion come to appear beside the point. From his U.S.-based position, Gourevitch means dismissing these issues as petty, but in Finland at times it can seem as if these distinctions never existed in the first place. Finnish political culture is different, of course, from the United States. There is the lingering consensus about national progress and pride in Nordic welfare policies. Seen from the inside, however, Nordic democracies are struggling to reproduce the welfare contract, and the minority experiences and the politics these generate on the back of a globalized labor market are barely integrated into the local politics where activist design is felt. Against this background of resentments combined with increased migration, the most visible examples of design for good, unsurprisingly, focus overwhelmingly on environmental questions. Meanwhile cultural difference, inequality, and contention can all be wished away under pressure from a situation that demands nothing less than a (depoliticizing) call to order. TINY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS I will end by describing contrasting styles of activist design in Helsinki. In a book of grassroots initiated public service projects, Towards Peer Production in Public Services: Cases from Finland (Botero et al. 2012) 15 a chapter, “Tiny Social Movements: Experiences of social media based co-creation,” by journalist and campaigner Pauliina Seppälä, describes her experiences of creating ‘public good’ in voluntary, informal, and even “light-hearted” net-

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works. This is closer to pure social movement territory. One of Seppälä´s examples (not supported with WDC funds), the Refugee Hospitality Club (RHC), has to be seen as highly political, even radical in intent and execution. Although its focus is on a social problem, similarly to the book’s other examples, the club understands its work as contributing to sustainability, fusing concern for social exclusion with access to nature and material goods, in this case, simply a roof over one’s head. Here, in a rather expensive neighborhood in a country where xenophobia was reaching political respectability, it was novel and radical to suggest saying “yes in my backyard” to an asylum center and to organize it via Facebook, building on voluntary work by professionals (e.g., web design). Seppälä also underlines another important aspect of the designerly thinking inspiring such work, namely its “strongly social and cultural, rather than technical” content (2012, 72). Like the rest of the collection, her text emphasizes both cognitive and cultural challenges. Those involved not only had to find ways to make the best use of co-creative effort, but to maintain the momentum even in the shadow of the surrounding profit-oriented culture. The very fact that these initiatives defined success as something other than sustained profits, marks them out, in Seppälä’s apt words, as “tiny social movements.” In my mind they make them highly political, even if the texts make relatively little mention of this point. Towards Peer Production shows that the effort required to sustain a definition of success that is not based on economic growth, is considerable. Here it echoes other critiques of the unprecedented one-sidedness of neoliberal ways of imagining society, where goods (or bads) only matter if they are privatized. Collectively achieved goods and activities of caring and nurture are simply not acknowledged. The life-sustaining value of small (or tiny) social movements and collective efforts is affirmed in face to face interaction and at activist events, but remains extremely difficult to transfer into a political discourse dominated by neoliberalism’s model of the world as a business. Such are the realities to which activist design, like the RHC, has arguably been addressing itself. The philosophical horizons opened up here have inspired ideas of a plurality of possible sustainable worlds (Escobar 2012). At the other extreme the design ethos narrows down the space of the imagination and of democracy by claiming to have knowledge of the only possible universe, one where “humanity” must save “the planet.” As elsewhere, notions of “us” or “the people” work wonderfully to deny variation in viewpoints and experiences. As Erik Swyngedouw puts it, in the shadow of climate change, “the ‘people’ here are not constituted as heterogeneous political subjects, but as universal victims, suffering from processes beyond their control” (2010, 221). Activism in design may be contradictory, but its possible ramifications for political imaginations are enormous. At its broadest, activist design gives

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everyone—from policy makers to end users—an opportunity to work through their concerns about what needs to change. Its claims to be transformative are more problematic. For some what needs to change is technology, for others capitalism, for yet others everything must change. To sort out salient distinctions amongst the calls for change it will not be sufficient to identify activist designers’ institutional position, in government, at arms length from it, or in opposition to it. Rather, we should ask: What do they want to change, and what do they wish to preserve? Is the appeal to design as radical socio-technical transformation just wishful rhetoric or does it presage deeper critiques of prevailing social relationships? POSTSCRIPT In spring 2014 a few dozen “architects of social space” and just plain architects gather to hear a talk at the Museum of Architecture about new design practices in Europe. The speaker extols the virtues of localness, flexibility, and pragmatism, but during questions her celebratory tone is forcefully challenged. One listener notes that professionally, “people are trying to find positions that make sense,” and elaborates on how difficult this is. Another observes that although a design job often means becoming a slave to corporate agendas it also helps with raising a family. Someone notes that activist design often deflects attention away from the fundamental infrastructures that sustain collective urban life. Yet another listener remarks that Helsinki’s activists change the world more by designing social encounters than buildings. The concept of activist design seems to capture the full range of what is being talked about. However, it says nothing about where the politics in activist design might lie. Both radical no-budget design activism and government-enhancing design for policy are held up as potentially radical. The questions continue to be thrashed out over drinks. NOTES 1. I use the concept of design activism in a loose sense, to encompass phenomena that also go by names such as DIY-urbanism (from do-it-yourself) or urban prototyping or hacking, and to include interventions made both by design professionals and others. 2. The internet abounds with examples, e.g., the U.S.-based City Fix online resource http:// thecityfix.com/about/ and EIDD—Design for All Europe, http://www.designforalleurope.org/. 3. Lucy Kimbell problematizes this in her work. See http://mappingsocialdesign.org/2014/ 09/12/ahrc-escr-design-research-fellowship-at-the-uk-cabinet-office-policylab/ (accessed October 2014). 4. “A non-profit devoted to spreading ideas” (TED 2014). 5. Literal in the case of the World Design Capital administration, which in 2011 put out a call for contributions to the program. 6. Boyer et al. 2011 in particular, but elsewhere also, in print and in talk.

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7. It was funded through the quasi-public Finnish Innovation Fund/Sitra. 8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1961, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962, Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961. 9. Jacobs was a prolific writer until her death in 2006. Gehl’s Life Between Buildings was published in Danish in 1971 and English in 1987. A documentary film about his urban design philosophy and ongoing work, Human Scale, was released in 2013. 10. Bruno Latour’s celebration of design in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (2011) offers a good summary in five points: 1. Design is implicitly humble; 2. Design pays careful attention to detail, and it requires skill and care at all stages; 3. Design foregrounds meaning, not just efficiency or functionality; 4. Design has a historical dimension, so to design is always to redesign; 5. Its most decisive advantage is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension—to design is, or should be, to take responsibility for change. 11. E.g., “Ecocities” projects (http://ecocity.fi/en/) masterminded by Eero Paloheimo, an engineer with a long record of techno-utopian environmentalism in Finland. 12. The online journal Ephemera will publish a special issue on low-budget collective urban organizing, http://www.ephemerajournal.org/. 13. The activists I know are constantly over-stretched and yet mostly remain committed to voluntary engagement over many years. 14. Often the argument is made in the language of behavioral economics as ‘nudging’ individuals to behave better, where better is predefined (e.g., Demos Helsinki’s A macro nudge towards an energy-efficient economy, n.d.). 15. More examples can be found in Demos Helsinki (2011).

REFERENCES Awan, N., T. Schneider, J. Till. 2011. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, Routledge. Parts accessible at www.spatialagency.net. Berglund, E. 2011. Tangled and Tangible, Straight and Abstract: Anthropology and Helsinki Architecture, Someone Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 3/ 2011: 5–22. Berglund, E. 2013. Design Activism in Helsinki: Notes from the World Design Capital 2012, Design and Culture 2013/2: 195–214. Binder, T., P. Ehn, G. De Michelis, G. Jacucci, and G. Linde. 2011. Design Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Botero, A., A. G. Paterson, J. Saad-Sulonen (eds). 2012. Towards Peer Production in Public Services: Cases from Finland, Helsinki: Aalto University. Boyer, B., J. W. Cook, M. Steinberg. 2011. In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change. Helsinki: Sitra. Cataldi, M., D. Kelley, H. Kuzmich, J. Maier-Rothe, J. Tang. 2011. Residues of a Dream World: The High Line, Theory Culture Society, 28: 358–89. Clarke, A. J. 2013. “Actions Speak Louder”: Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism, Design and Culture 2013/2: 151–68. Compendium for the Civic Economy. 2012. 00:/ (London) and trancityxvaliz (Amersfoort), also online at http://civiceconomy.net/. Connolly, W. E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press. Cross, N. 2001. Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline versus Design Science, Design Issues, 17(3), 49–55. Demos Helsinki. 2011. The Well-Being of the Metropolis, online www.hel.fi/hel2/ helsinginseutu/seutuselvitykset/kilpailukykytutkimus/20110328-Metropolia-report-final. pdf . Demos Helsinki. No date. A macro nudge towards an energy-efficient economy, online www.slideshare.net/DemosHelsinki/peloton-macronudge-towards-an-energyefficient-economy. Di Salvo, C. 2012. Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Escobar, A. 2012. Notes toward an ontology of design. Unpublished manuscript. Evans, J. and A. Karvonen. 2014. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Lower Your Carbon Footprint!”—Urban Laboratories and the Governance of Low-Carbon Futures, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2): 413–30. Ferguson, Francesca, Urban Drift Projects. 2014. Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Commons. Berlin: Jovis. Fry, T. 2011. Design as Politics. New York: Berg. Fuad-Luke, A. 2009. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan. Gourevitch, A. 2010. Environmentalism: Long Live the Politics of Fear, Public Culture 22(3): 411–24. Haenfler R., B. Johnson, E. Jones. 2012. Lifestyle Movements: Exploring the Intersection of Lifestyle and Social Movements, Social Movement Studies, 11:1, 1–20. Hernberg, H. 2012. Helsinki Beyond Dreams: Actions Towards a Creative and Sustainable Hometown. Helsinki: Urban Dream Management. Jasanoff, S. 2010. A New Climate for Society, Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2–3): 233–53. Julier, G. 2009. Designing the City, in G. Julier and L. Moor (eds.) Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice. Oxford and New York: Berg, 40–56. Julier, G. 2013. From Design Culture to Design Activism, Design and Culture, 5 3.: 215–36. Kimbell, L. 2011. Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I, Design and Culture, 3(3): 283–306. Kohtala, C. and A. Paterson, forthcoming, C. Kohtala and E. Berglund (eds.) What New Helsinki? Latour, B. 2011. Un Prométhée Circonspect? A Cautious Prometheus?, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, No. 381: 109–19. Luhtakallio, E. 2012. Practicing Democracy: Local Activism and Politics in France and Finland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Manzini, E. 2008. New Design Knowledge: Introduction to the Conference Changing the Change, 12.7.08. pdf retrieved from www.allemandi.com/university/ctc.pdf. Markussen, T. 2012. The Disruptive Aesthetics of Hijacking Urban Space, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 4, online www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/rt/printerFriendly/18157/22783. Marres, N. 2013. Why Political Ontology Must be Experimentalized: On Eco-show Homes as Devices of Participation, Social Studies of Science, 43: 417–43. Mayer, M. 2013. First world urban activism. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 17(1): 5–19. Mirowski, P. 2013. Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London and New York: Verso. Moor, L. 2009. Designing the State, G. Julier and L. Moor (eds.) Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice. Oxford and New York: Berg, 23–39. Muotoile Suomi. 2013. (National Design Program) online www.tem.fi/innovaatiot/kysynta-_ja_ kayttajalahtoinen_innovaatiotoiminta/kayttajalahtoinen_innovaatiopolitiikka/muotoilu/ kansallinen_muotoiluohjelma . National Design Programme. 2013. Retrieved from www.tem.fi/en/innovations/demand_and_user-driven_innovation/user-driven_innovation_policy/design/national_design_programme. Novy, J. and Colomb, C. 2013. Struggling for the Right to the Creative. City in Berlin and Hamburg: New Urban Social Movements, New “Spaces of Hope,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 5: 1816–38. Papanek, V. 1971. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books. Rosa, M. L., and U. Weiland (eds.). 2013. Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models. Berlin: Jovis. Sadler, S. 2012. The Dome and the Shack: The Dialectics of Hippie Enlightenment, in I. Boal, J. Stone, M. Watts, and C. Winslow (eds.) West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. Oakland: Retort/PM Press.

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Scott, F. 2007. Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics After Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Seppälä, P. 2012. Tiny Social Movements: Experiences of social media based co-creation. In Botero, A. et al., pp. 62–75. Susser, I. and S. Tonnelat. 2013. Transformative Cities: The Urban Commons, Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 66: 105–32. Swyngedouw, E. 2010. Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change, Theory, Culture, Society, 27 2–3: 213–32. TED. 2014. Technology, Entertainment, and Design, homepage, online www.ted.com/about/ our-organization. Thorpe, A. 2014. Applying Protest Event Analysis to Architecture and Design, Social Movement Studies, 13(2): 275–95. Unsworth, R., S. Ball, I. Bauman, P. Chatterton, A. Goldring, K. Hill, G. Julier. 2011. Building Resilience and Well-being in the Margins within the City: Changing Perceptions, Making Connections, Realising Potential, Plugging Resource Leaks, City, 15(2): 182–203.

Part III

Creativity, New Technologies, and Networks

Chapter Eleven

The “Creative Turn” Digital Space and Local Dynamics Sarita Albagli

Creativity and innovation acquire a new centrality in the contemporary scene, at the same time that the role of living labor comes to the fore in its cognitive and subjective dimensions, opening new horizons to its biopolitical power. The new digital platforms are essential components in this process, extending the possibilities of interaction and networked production. Territories, on the other hand, gain informational, communicational, and technical density, constituting privileged spaces for social experimentation, and being objects of dispute for uses and significations. This chapter situates the main elements that make up this picture, indicating on one hand how, in creative capitalism, digital networks and territories constitute arenas for disputing the appropriation and capturing of the value produced by creative exceedance. And on the other hand, how they reposition the role of creativity in the construction and affirmation of future alternative directions, open to the diversity of life forms and new institutionalizations. ON CREATIVE CAPITALISM The idea of “creativity” which predominated (and is still in force) in the Western world was clearly a historic construction of the European transition into modernity, as part of the social affirmation of a “learned” bourgeoisie and of the very expansion of capitalism at a global level. Creativity and culture were then conceived as individual and singular productions of “crea175

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tive geniuses”—typically white men—differential features of a “refined” elite and the object of “commoditization,” strengthening the perspective of the author as proprietor. The mass production and consumption of the twentieth century corresponded to the strong social divide between creative work, destined for a “glamourized” minority, and the repetitive work characteristic of FordismTaylorism. At that time, the productive and educational systems were, to a large extent, framed by a rigid disciplinary structure (Foucault 1977). At the same time, cultural production became the object of large economic conglomerates, characterizing the so-called “cultural industry,” which would later take on the shape of the “creative economy.” During the 1970s, the crisis of Fordism signaled the limits of the assembly line production for the scale manufacturing of identical products, as well as the rigidity of the Taylorist work organization. In the same context, social conflicts and counterculture movements, represented by the emblematic May 1968, together with the anti-colonial fights of that period, opened new horizons to diversity and creativity. Within the transition that constituted post-Fordism, the new role of knowledge and information, as well as the greater economic weight of the tertiary or service sector (in which value is produced essentially through interpersonal relations), gave rise to notions such as Knowledge Society (Machlup 1962; Drucker 1968), Post-Industrial Society (Bell 1973) and Information Society (Porat 1976). These notions were accompanied by the discourse on the end of class struggle and conflicts, brought about by the idea that advanced capitalism (informational) provided the solution to the problems of old-time capitalism (industrial). During the transition to the twenty-first century, terms such as Network Society (Castells 1996), networked information economy (Benkler 2006), and digital capitalism (Schiller 2010) evidenced the new centrality of communication and digital interaction networks. Soon after, it would be flexible, networked, creative, and collaborative labor that would be central to the creation of value. If, “at the dawn of the industrial age capitalism exploited human bodies to extract from them their mechanical energy,” “soon it realizes that the series of creative acts, measures and decisions that workers constantly have to make is the most important value that they produce” (Pasquinelli 2011, 19). The theses of cognitive capitalism which developed in the wake of the post-workerist thinking captained by Antonio Negri and other authors, threw light on the new role of the cooperative and immaterial dimensions of labor, 1 directly affecting “the way capital is endowed with value” (Corsani 2003, 15). Immaterial labor is understood as that which mobilizes above all the affective, relational, creative, and innovative dimensions. The “‘raw material’ of immaterial labor is subjectivity,” which becomes “directly productive”

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(Lazzarato and Negri 2001, 46). Here, the objective time of repetitive work, as in Fordism, matters less, whereas the (inter)subjective time of creation and innovation matters more (Corsani 2003); innovation as product, stock matters less than innovation and creativity as attributes, capacities, processes. Creation, art, and production are integrated in the new productive logic. In this sense, “artistic activity has an ontological importance,” by imprinting its logic onto the general mode of production, that is, the mode “of the beingcreative in the world.” (Negri 2011, 109). Living labor is valued as living knowledge, given the “new [cognitive] quality of contemporary living labor” (Roggero 2011, 62). According to Negri (2003, 110), this means “defining, from the start, method as living labor in terms of knowledge.” The distinction between work and life becomes tenuous, leading to an overlap between time for living and time for working, production and reproduction. Production not only in the strict economic sense, but also as mobilization, cooperation, and communication among subjectivities, involving affections, bodies, and languages, factors until then considered as “externalities,” undoing “the classic distinction between productive and unproductive labor” (Roggero 2011, 93). It is also the production of worlds/life forms/ significations, knowledge generating knowledge, living labor producing living labor, involving multiple knowledges and subjects, the productive mobilization of the whole society and of the whole lifetime, a biopolitical or anthropogenic production (Marazzi 2011). What is produced is no longer the surplus, but the exceedance of life forms, in their creative way of being. Thus, for Negri (2011, 115), in contemporary time, “labor—which as we have seen, was immaterial, cognitive and affective—is in the process of transforming itself into bios, into biopolitical labor, into activity which reproduces life.” Living labor takes on an increasingly communicative-relational-linguistic character. Communication and language act not only as vehicles for the transmission of data and information, but also as creative force. Language does not only describe facts but it also creates them (Marazzi 2008). The new communication and information technologies can be considered real linguistic machines, unspecialized metamachines that act as “relational cognitive assistants.” Their performance “depends on the intelligence and creativity of living labor, which is at once cooperative,” living labor which consists of creating uses (Corsani 2003, 22). From specialized machines, mobilizing labor empty of any singular specificity (typical of Fordism), we come to the malleability of instruments. Digital technology provides the technical basis for changes in the relationship between conception and production and, thus, in the relationship between the intellectual content of labor and its material execution.

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The passive, static cooperation of the Taylorist assembly line gives way to dynamic cooperation, based on the unprogrammed, unpredictable—thus creative—communication, arising from polyvalent labor. This is about the unification of anthropogenesis and technogenesis when “the technical means becomes mental (that is, cognitive); and vice-versa, intelligence becomes technique and labor” (Negri 2011, 111). With the spread of the communicative and interactive network production mode, new spatial formats and logic emerge around spaces of flows. Thus, digital platforms and the Internet in particular, should not be seen as a mere instrument, as a thing, but rather as a new social space (Poster 2001) for production, creation, and innovation. They constitute, nowadays, the “major heterogeneous and transborder medium which we call cyberspace” (Levy 1998, 12), space of possibilities for a collective intelligence. Therefore, whereas the rise of neoliberalism in the closing decades of the twentieth century (accompanied by the decline of Keynesian Fordism) moved the focus to and gave new meaning to the creativity of the individual entrepreneur, the spread of networked production made it evident that creativity is essentially a collective process. Its motivation derives mainly from the pleasure of producing in common, and thus producing the common. According to Lafuente (2014), “there is only one way of obtaining recognition in the community: giving. . . . When you give, you become an author.” It is a collective production of knowledge and information by a diffuse intellectuality—the general intellect, in Marxian terms—that, at the same time, becomes embodied in living labor. The general intellect is not only “the paradigm of the intellectualization of production, but the symptom and symbol of its socialization” (Roggero 2011, 23), that which Moulier Boutang (2007) characterizes as “social pollination,” “bee economy,” or “pollen society.” For Negri (2003, 153) “nowadays, in order to be creative, labor must be ‘common.’” Here, common is understood as the antithesis of identity, of community, and of consensus; on the contrary, it is constituted and enriched by the production of singularities, of differences (which is distinct from the notion of individuals as repetition), springing from gift and receptivity, but also from conflict and resistance. Creative labor is that which exceeds, an exceedant that leads to the common (Negri 2011). Lafuente, in turn, prefers to think the common not from the point of view of a property regime, of common assets. But the common understood in a double sense: as that which constitutes the “between,” the connecting element; and as the antithesis of the well established, as common knowledge, amateur. It values not only formal and so-called advanced knowledge (scientific-technological knowledge), but also informal knowledge, knowledge built in the context of social practice and in different cultural perspectives.

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In creative capitalism, what is valued is not identity or the feeling of belonging to homogenous communities (until then equivalent to the notion of social capital), but the potential for differentiation and for “affecting,” be it in collaborative dynamics, or in conflicting dynamics. Consequently, “Where strong ties among people were once important, weak ties are now more effective. Those social structures that historically embraced exclusiveness and closeness may now appear restricting and invasive. These older communities are being exchanged for more inclusive and socially diverse arrangements” (Florida 2005, 30–31). Thus, differentiation and antagonism become conditions for a new power of creation and innovation: “Similarity and unity involve no creation, but mere repetition, without difference” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 184). One must consider the multiplicity of points of view, becoming aware of the wealth and potential of “mixtures,” of “hybridizations”; the “other” also referring to our capacity of self-transformation, our ability of “becoming another” (Hardt and Negri 2009). It is within this setting that creative capitalism takes place, expressing a true “creative turn” in value production as part of a new biopolitics. The term “creative class” was coined by Richard Florida (2002), who also resorted to terms such as “creative capital” and twenty-first century creative capitalism, 2 to emphasize that creativity is nowadays the main source for the creation of value. Although acknowledging that creativity is “an intrinsically human ability” and that “every human being is creative,” Florida argues that only a minority (about 30 percent of the workforce, according to his calculations) is remunerated as a result of its work having as its main function to “create meaningful new forms” (Florida 2005, 34). The dominant meanings and forms of what is understood by creativity have varied throughout history. As pointed out by Landry and Bianchini (1995, 18), most agree that genuine creativity involves thinking a problem afresh and from first principles; experimentation; originality; the capacity to rewrite rules; to be unconventional; to discover common threads amid the seemingly disparate; to look at situations laterally and with flexibility. These ways of thinking encourage innovation and generate new possibilities. In this sense, creativity is a modernist concept because it emphasizes the new, progress and continual change. (Landry and Bianchini 1995, 18)

The authors highlight, however, that nowadays creativity refers not only to the new, but above all, to opening up to diversity and to the capacity of connecting knowledges and points of view from a transverse perspective: “[creativity] also involves opening ourselves out to ideas, influences and resources that are all around us, that we cannot control totally, yet that can be

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harnessed to making our lives richer and more sustainable” (Landry and Bianchini 1995, 21). 3 Along the same line, for Lafuente (2014) “creativity is . . . like an atmosphere where openness, failure, sharing, differences, and the unfinished are welcome. It’s a place where the experiences and energy of many people can be mobilized at once. Also, it’s something where the ability to listen is more important than the ability to speak.” WHO ARE IN FACT THE CREATIVE CLASSES? Knowledge, talent, and creativity are nowadays basically flows, mobile factors and not stock. “In contrast to other factors of production, talent is mobile, and people can and do pick where they want” (Florida 2007, 20). The fierce competition for creative talent is equivalent to the dispute for capturing flows. The idea of brain drain gives way to that of brain gain, or that of brain circulation. This is the expression of the new mobility of living labor as living knowledge, at the same time corporeal and abstract/immaterial. This mobility encompasses circulating among businesses, organizations, professions, and productive sectors but also the mobility to migrate between territories. A new degree of biopolitical potency of living and creative labor is thus inaugurated, with the possibility of “enjoying and building new spaces and new temporalities for labor” and for life (Negri 2003, 110). This mobility also indicates the shaping of a “new geography of creativity” (Florida 2005, 35). Florida argues that certain places are more successful than others in generating and attracting talented, creative, and innovative people, by reason of “their openness, diversity, and tolerance” (Florida 2007, 38), “a socially adaptive capability” (Florida 2007, 244) to internalize externalities of the creative economy. Fluidity becomes an attribute that differentiates places more capable of becoming up to date from those that tend to become dated, keeping the globalized space, at the same time “unified, but differentiated” (Santos 1997 [1996], 253), unequally benefiting regions and social segments. Network dynamics and territorial dynamics are imbricated in sociodigital formations (Sassen 2011). While networks extend globally, it is locally that they gain “a unique and socially concrete dimension” (Santos 1997 [1996], 215). Networks only become effective when mobilized in action processes (socio-technical networks) that emerge from the territory, the informational labor being inseparable from living knowledge. At the same time, the territory becomes increasingly connected, gaining informational and technical density. Territories of networks, territory networks, and networked territories are

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mentioned. Also, territory as social network, whose dynamism is linked to flow. Territorial dynamics implies the coexistence of the diverse, of heterogeneity and of inequalities on the territory and between territories. Cooperation and conflict coexist: the cooperation through solidarities and synergies generated by life in common; conflicts, to a good extent, due to the different significations and forms of use and appropriation of territory. The territory is understood not only in its material or concrete dimension, but also as a field of forces, a relational space under power dispute (Raffestin 1993: Albagli 2004). Networks, on the other hand, may generate new hierarchies and forms of control, but also new possibilities of communication, cooperation, and encounter in difference. Nowadays, cities are considered privileged spaces for creativity and innovation, due to their openness to diversity, to hybridization, and to the intersubjective interactions, a space for experiences, allowing the construction and remaking of values. Imposed finality and counter finality, hegemonic and non-hegemonic actors coexist, with distinct rationalities. In metropolitan spaces, the desire for a new kind of bottom-up politics, an alternative to the existing institutional structures, is more forcefully expressed and constitutes fertile soil for thinking alternative futures. The future conceived not as chronology, but as something to be invented, from the perspective of the event. It is also “where the weak may subsist” (Santos 1997[1996], 258). Those excluded and not benefited by material modernity—the poor, the migrants, the minorities, the less modern, and “opaque” areas—constitute the main sources of creativity, capable of looking into the future. For Santos, it is the poor, in the city, who bring about a new debate and populate the open spaces of creation. “Fundamental destitution” (quoting Jean-Paul Sartre) or, in other terms, the condition of scarcity as a permanent feature of one’s existence generates a “creative discomfort”: “the wealth of the ‘have-nots’ is the readiness of the senses” (Santos 2011[2000], 130). The poorest social groups and areas are those which present the greatest mobility, flexibility, and capacity to adapt to change, as well as the motivation to build solidarity and the wish for greater freedom, elements that “however much you give them away, the more you have” (Santos 2011[2000], 130). These are the major sources of irrationalities, or rather, of counterrationalities, other rationalities, or parallel rationalities, “in other words, forms of coexistence and regulation created within the territory itself and that are preserved there despite the will for unification and homogenization, characteristic of the hegemonic rationality” (Santos 2000, 110). Hegemonic rationality leaves a narrow margin to spontaneity and variety. Consequently, the territory sees the coexistence as well as the frequent collision of vectors of organization/rationalization/stabilization (of manage-

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ment), on one hand, and elements of spontaneity/creativity/the unusual on the other, or, the conceived and the experienced, making diversity and antagonism the conditions for a new creative power. The territory becomes a laboratory and advanced frontier of experimentation and of political and social innovation, which also connects with the new sociodigital spaces. Thus, “the less integrated an individual is (poor, minority, migrant . . .) the harder she/he is hit by the shock of novelty and the easier it is for her/him to discover new knowledge. . . . The more unstable and surprising the space is, the more easily surprised the individual will be, and the discovery operation will be more effective.” (Santos 1997 [1996], 263–64). From the perspective of creativity and change, ephemerality and discovery gain more importance than experience and long-lived territoriality. For Santos (1997[1996], 261), the poor and the migrants are particularly capable of finding “new uses and purposes for objects and techniques and also new practical articulations and new norms, both in social and in affective life.” On the other hand, “creative capitalism” seeks to incorporate or to capture the value produced by these marginalized social groups and individuals, as well as those considered as alternative and transgressors. This is what historian Tom Frank, quoted by Florida, referred to critically as “the conquest of cool—the blending of business culture and counterculture into a new culture of hip consumerism” (Florida 2005, 116). Even those who defend that creative capitalism offers opportunities to match economic growth to personal satisfaction, admit that several social problems also derive from it, especially the concentration of its benefits. “Perhaps the most salient of what I consider the externalities of the creative age has to do with rising social and economic inequality” (Florida 2005, 171). For those more critical, however, precariousness and “excluding” inclusion are not mere externalities, but constituent parts of the current forms of exploitation. From this perspective, the current process of precarization of creative labor does not constitute a mere form of exclusion from the labor market, but “a technique for the production of a segmented inclusion and hierarchy,” for capturing and appropriating (by capital) the new value produced by this kind of labor (Roggero 2011, 17–18). The exploitation of the power of invention and creation, however, is limited by the impossibility of directly subordinating the brain, as well as of catching and capturing that which is not codifiable, transmissible as information, that which is the exceedance of forms of life. It is also argued that precariousness—generally associated with the absence (of rights, protection, work), with the “naked life”—also takes on a productive character, in the opposition between precarization and the affirmation of the autonomy of living and creative labor. In this sense, creativity constitutes a biopolitical perspective, the condition of survival and existence, construction, affirmation of worlds. “Here

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creating and generating become acts of resistance. Even more, they are the figures of an art of desertion—going away to seek Potenza and joy, going away to distant places, while at the same time remaining inside this world and outside of its dynamics, while creating collective meaning, while inventing new common experiences” (Negri 2011, 95). One should then not stick to what is dominant/constituted, but to acknowledge and value that which is “peripheral”/emergent/constituting. The role of policies, from this viewpoint, is to open the space for constitutive processes and subjects and, for this reason, potent of creativity and innovation. NOTES Translation from the Portuguese by Maria Cristina Matos Nogueira and Sandra Possas. 1. Negri stressed that Marx, in the Grundrisse “Fragment on Machines,” already pointed to the tendency of labor to depend essentially upon the intellectual and scientific energies that constitute it. At the same time, Negri would also question the understanding of the term “immaterial work.” For him, to use the term immaterial work implies admitting that “we are all dealing here with an immateriality which is very full of flesh, very mobile and very flexible: an ensemble of bodies” (Negri 2011, 107). 2. In 2008, in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates proposed another meaning to the term creative capitalism. For Gates, “Creative capitalism isn’t some big new economic theory. And it isn’t a knock on capitalism itself. It is a way to answer a vital question: How can we most effectively spread the benefits of capitalism and the huge improvements in quality of life it can provide to people who have been left out?” 3. The authors also distinguish creativity and innovation: “Creativity . . . is the process through which new ideas are produced, while innovation is the process through which they are implemented” (Landry and Bianchini 1995, 19).

REFERENCES Albagli, Sarita. “Informação, saber vivo e trabalho imaterial” Pp. 107–26 in Fronteiras da Ciência da Informação, edited by Sarita Albagli. Brasília: Ibict, 2013. http://livroaberto.ibict.br/bitstream/1/1020/8/Fronteiras percent20da percent20Ciencia percent20da percent20Informacao.pdf (accessed February 1, 2015). ———. Território e territorialidade Pp. 23–64 in Territórios em movimento: cultura e identidade como estratégias de inserção competitiva, edited by Vinícius Lages, Christiano Lima Braga, and Gustavo Morelli. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2004. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Download_PDFs_of_the_book. (accessed November 15, 2009). Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Corsani, Antonella. Elementos de uma ruptura: a hipótese do capitalismo cognitivo in Capitalismo Cognitivo: trabalho, redes e inovação. Pp 15–32, edited by Giuseppe Cocco, Gerardo Silva, and Alexandre P. Galvão. Rio de Janeiro: DPandA, 2003. Drucker, Peter. The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

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Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. ———. The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ———. Cities and the Creative Class. New York; London: Routledge, 2005. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. Haiven, Max. Privatizing creativity: the ruse of creative capitalism. ArtThreat. October 10, 2012. http://artthreat.net/2012/10/privatizing-creativity/ (accessed February 1, 2015). Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Lafuente, Antonio. A laboratory is a place where important questions are asked. September 29, 2014. http://ferranadria.fundaciontelefonica.com/en/antonio-lafuente-laboratory-place-important-questions-asked/. (accessed January 31, 2015). Landry, Charles and Bianchini, Franco. The Creative City. London: Demos, 1995. Lazzarato, Maurizio and Negri, Antonio. Trabalho imaterial. Rio de Janeiro: DPandA, 2001. Lévy, Pierre. A inteligência coletiva. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Loyola, 1998. Machlup, Fritz. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. ———. Capital and Affects. The Politics of the Language Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011. Moulier Boutang, Yann. Le capitalisme cognitif: la nouvelle grande transformation. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2007. Negri, Antonio. Art and Multitude. Nine Letters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labor. Cambridge: Polity, 2011 ———. Cinco lições sobre o império. Rio de Janeiro: DP and A, 2003. Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value: Towards a Political Economy of the Turing Machine,” October 2011. http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/ Pasquinelli_Machinic_Capitalism.pdf . (accessed March 3 2014). Porat, Marc Uri. The Information Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Poster, Mark. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Raffestin, Claude. Por uma geografia do poder. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1993. Roggero, Gigi. The Production of Living Labor: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Santos, Milton. A natureza do espaço: técnica e tempo. Razão e emoção. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997. ———. Por uma outra globalização: do pensamento único à consciência universal. Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo: Record, 2011[2000]. Sassen, Saskia. Conhecimento político informal e seus efeitos capacitantes: o papel das novas tecnologias Pp. 151–82 in Informação, conhecimento e poder: mudança tecnológica e inovação social, edited by Maria Lucia Maciel and Sarita Albagli. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2011. Schiller, Dan. “Digital Capitalism in Crisis” Pp. 133–46 in Information, Power and Politics: Technological and Institutional Mediations, edited by Sarita Albagli and Maria Lucia Maciel. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010.

Chapter Twelve

From Culture of Labor to Cultural Labor Youth and Networks in Today’s Brazil Bruno Tarin

IMMATERIAL LABOR It can be claimed that until the ’70s the regime of production and capitalist accumulation found itself to be strongly oriented towards industrial processes and grounded in disciplinary relations. However, from then on new modes of production and labor emerged that allowed a displacement of certain activities, previously crystallized in the industrial economy, towards new forms of production. Such forms, according to post-autonomist literature, could be characterized as immaterial. These forms of immaterial labor can, in part, be defined by the centrality of communication, knowledge, affection, and collaboration as key dynamics of production, these being organized through communication and information networks on a global scale (Lazzarato and Negri, 2001). The immaterial, beyond representing just the production of intangible services and goods, reorganizes the forms of production oriented at industries. As well as installing, in general in the forms of labor—industrial or not—a focus on creativity, cooperation, and intellectualization qualitatively changing the previous relations of division between production, circulation, and generation of wealth. Within this context, an acceleration, expansion, and diversification of forms of capitalist capture occur, where its main focus shifts from disciplinary relations, expressed in wage relations (labor value) and in the subordination to employment—almost always oriented towards industrial processes—towards the establishment of an anthropological shift, where work and the generation of wealth stops focusing on formal 185

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work spaces and expands into all levels of social relations. Based on these propositions, we can affirm that we are currently facing a scenario where the productivity of affection and of the cognitive arises as central to the economy and modes of contemporary life. In the shift from disciplinary relations, towards the establishment of a new culture experienced over at least the past forty years, it can be said that there was a transformation of the culture of labor into a culture of the labor of culture. Culture and art, in this way, absorbs labor and vice versa. Cognitive capitalism represents much more than just the insertion of feelings, intellectualization, and creativity into the modes of production and labor, it represents the collective, cultural, multitudinous dimensions of contemporary production. Thus, production is established through a spiral of creation of life forms through life forms, in other words, in the social factory 1 what is produced is exceedance—a combination of excess (surplus) and existence. For Negri: precisely at a time when labor power is cognitive, the desire for artistic expression presents itself in all places; when the mass of workers transforms itself into a multitude of singular workers, the artistic act invests the forms of life, and these forms of life become the flesh of the world. (Negri 2011, 113–14)

Work, affective relations, value generation, creativity, art, leisure, consumption, and culture, tend to increasingly intertwine and overlap. Thus, it is life itself that is put to work, it is life itself—as a work of art and as the flesh of the world—that turns productive and acquires value in the contemporary capitalist system. However, it is evident that the relation between culture and labor, broadly spoken, is permeated by conflicts: if on the one hand there is capture—in terms of subjection and exploitation—there is also a dimension of freedom and autonomy established in this relation. BIOPOWER AND BIOPOLITICS: A DISSOCIATIVE ASYMMETRY IN POWER As theoretical contributions to address the issues related to the apparent paradox, presented at the end of the previous section, we have found a fertile ground in the theoretical tools of the post-autonomist school, in particular regarding the distinction claimed and highlighted by the post-autonomists in the qualitative difference between biopower and biopolitics. Very briefly, we can say that biopower is the power over life, while biopolitics is a political expression of the power of life (Pelbart 2002). In order to better understand this distinction, we will observe it through an analysis of the concept of immaterial labor—or in the specific case of this research, the work performed in the production of the networks of art and

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culture. For the post-autonomist school, the immaterial labor of workers is a potential source of autonomy from the determinations of capital. Therefore it tends to be constituted by a diffused workforce that contains the necessary means to care for and organize itself, the work, and its relationships with capital. After all, the work is done primarily through constituent elements of the workers themselves—such as affective relationships, cognition, communication skills, etc.—that cannot be fully pre-organized and homogenized by capital. The immaterial labor thus tends to move out the limited realm of the strictly economic domain and engage in the general production and reproduction of the society as a whole. It is, therefore, the production of subjectivities. In other words, it can be said that the immaterial work is, tendentiously, biopolitical production, a political expression of the power of life where “the distinction between economic and political tends to disappear and that the production of economic goods tends also to be the production of social relationships and ultimately of society itself” (Hardt and Negri 2005, 350). However, it is worth highlighting that Antonio Negri in his book Spinoza for Our Time (2013) explains that we cannot reduce biopower and biopolitics to an antinomy. Considering that they always exist together, just as there is coexistence between labor and capital. But it is in the dimension of dissociation that biopolitical production makes an asymmetry within and against biopower. However, this asymmetry is not a given a priori, it is not a metaphysical question. For this asymmetry to take place, it is necessary that this asymmetry is in constant production—which emerges from the power relations. It is in the conflict that occurs continuously, “an ethical tension that emerges through the difficulties and obstacles of the trajectory”(Negri 2013, 33), that biopolitical production materializes itself as a subjectivity that produces dissociative subjectivities of biopower. BEYOND THE APOLOGETICS OF NEOMODERN AND POST-EVERYTHING MINOR LOVE Following current research that seeks to investigate the conflicts that go through the modes of production and labor in contemporary capitalism, we have the contribution of the social scientist Giuseppe Cocco. In his text Não existe amor no Brasil maior published in 2013, Cocco seeks to accomplish, systematically, a series of analyses about the current sociopolitical situation in Brazil. The main argument of the text is that Brazil has, in recent years, gone through a deep and progressive transformation with the introduction of new forms to mobilize productivity. For the author, this transformation is currently the terrain of both the exponential growth of social fragmentation, as well as the possibilities of production of new subjectivities based on selfvalorization.

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In this scope, Cocco seeks to expose the two viewpoints—and their political implications—that he calls “post-everything” and “neomodern.” At the same time, he tries to present and produce another perspective, which is neither of the two previously mentioned. The perspective “post-everything,” we could say, identifies itself and is produced under certain networks of art and culture. 2 As stated by the author, the “post-everything” is “dead new forms of representation, which means NGOs, ‘houses’ and other ‘Circuits’ that, based on the language of ‘post-whatever,’ transform activists into employees, and employees into precarious workers” (Cocco 2013, our translation). On the other hand, the “neomodern” perspective can be identified with some (neo)developmentalist sectors in the coalition government of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), and more specifically the management of the current president Dilma Rousseff. This perspective in Cocco’s words: “puts into practice the big projects of the dictatorship (Belo Monte, nuclear powerplants, atomic submarine) . . . the governments pass, the modernist rationalism stays, absolute sovereign” (Cocco 2013, our translation). At this point we would like to reiterate that it is not possible to separate the presented perspectives, after all the opposition between the “post” and “neo,” between digital and analogue, between cognitive and industrial, holds up two totalitarianisms: one is the apology of “post-everything,” which hides and empties the new struggles (of class) stating that the conflict only opposes the digital to the analogue, the cognitive to the industrial; and the other is the “neomodern,” which also empties the struggles and conflicts in the name of a development which, by the magic of state intervention, would look like “socialism.” . . . In both cases, the horizon of history and politics is that of rationality, which is always capitalist, even though for the apologists of the “post,” capitalism is “post-industrial” and private (centered on the market), and for the other it is “industrial” and public (centered on the state). In reality, the childish binarism of “digital” versus “analogue” only reproduces the two sides of the same capitalist exploitation of labor of subjectivity, as well as just fordism and socialism were the two sides of the same exploitation of factory labor. (Cocco 2013, our translation)

Therefore, despite an apparent opposition between “post” and “neos,” or between “analogue/industrial” and the “digital/cognitive” there is a legitimation and feedback between one part and the other. Although there are real frictions and disputes between one position and the other, the two coincide in the reproduction of capitalist exploitation of labor of subjectivity. In other words, they are two heads of the same body, a kind of monster like Orthrus. 3 Thus, the perspectives “post-everything” and “neomodern” go together and need each other, in spite of the maintenance of their differences in the ways they mobilize immaterial labor, in other words that is, the common wealth for its subsequent capture and exploitation.

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Cocco shows that this mixture of “post” and “neos” is embodied in what he calls “Major Brazil” which would be at dissonance with a “minor bRAZIL.” The latter being produced by social mobilization dynamics based on the struggles of the poor, indigenous, black people, women, gays, and, in our case in particular, young people seeking to work with culture and art outside of the “monopoly” of big media companies or more “traditional” financing schemes and projects. To articulate the dynamics between the major and the minor Brazil, Cocco analyzes and uses the successful campaign of the mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, as an example. At this point it is worth mentioning: there is no particular interest for us to expose or analyze the Haddad campaign in detail. However, we would like to use the author’s analysis as a basis to expose a few more general questions about the participation of networks of art and culture, which Cocco calls “the sustenance of dead forms of representation that maintain the dramatic democratic deficit.” Just before the elections for mayor of São Paulo, a big event in the street was organized involving various networks connected to the production of culture and art in São Paulo. The event was called “There is love in SP” and it was supporting the candidacy of Haddad—even though this support was not explicit initially. This event was organized, according to Cocco, in the mixture between “post” and “neos,” through the creation of a branding of love. It is possible to say that both this mixture and this branding aimed to transform the conflict surrounding the democratic deficit in harmony. That is, pacify the conflict through a specific idea of love, and the attempt to neutralize the dynamics of social mobilization for more democracy embodied by the struggles of networks of culture and art that are mainly formed by the youth. In this case, it can be stated that the Major Brazil sought to produce a certain neutralizing vision of love: a Major Love. However, Cocco concludes his text by stating that love only exists when immanent to the practices of struggle and democracy. Love can only be constituted in the horizon of freedom and autonomous organization of conflict, rather than its neutralization. Peace or harmony, in this case, can only be constituted when immanent to the incessant, autonomous, and conflicting production of the common of the multitude. Thus, dissociated from the apologetics of the “post” and “neos,” what emerges is what we would like to call “minor love of minor bRAZIL,” even though there is a constant attempt to neutralize and transform this minor love into a Major Love. However, even if we take on the viewpoint of the minor love, dissociated from the apologetics of the “post” and “neos,” some questions remain unanswered. After all, the Major Love can only, and could only, constitute itself materially with the active contribution of the minor bRAZIL and, therefore, also the minor love. Thus, why and how does the minor bRAZIL involve its work in the production of networks of art and culture supporting a Major

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Brazil? Or in other words, how does this process of transition from a minor love to a Major Love happen? CARTOGRAPHY Using the analysis presented earlier, we can continue our work, keeping in mind after all, that this analysis is of great importance for a better understanding of the territory—environment—where the relations of production of networks of art and culture are established, as well as of their main producers, namely the youth. It is worth highlighting that we are not talking about youth in an all-embracing way, or as a universal and individualizing category. We refer specifically in this chapter to the youth in their relations of coemergence to the networks of art and culture. In this case, we adopt a relational methodological perspective. Indeed, to do research on contemporary issues—that are short of investigation—results in arduous work, since there is often a lack of tools and foundation to support this type of research. Faced with this challenge, it is up to the researchers, to a certain extent, to invent their own tools. For the purposes of this paper, within the wide range of relational methodological perspectives, we start with the idea of a “Cartography of Desire” as a research method in the humanities. 4 The aim is primarily to perform work that can map the territory where strategies are developed for the shaping of desire, in the relationship between the youth and the networks of art and culture in Brazil. To this end, we conducted the mapping through direct contact, in other words, through the dialogue and involvement of the researcher with the art and culture groups and collectives of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; with the support of social networks, mailing lists and web sites on public policy, culture, art, and technology. This process was conducted in parallel with literature reviews, and constantly traversed by the theoretical reference presented in this article. To end this section, we would like to present some issues that go beyond—and are complementary to—the already presented issues. In specific: Why are networks mostly formed by young people? Why do they currently play such a vital role in the production of art and culture? In addition, why do most of the young people who seek to exercise creativity and express themselves currently seek to work and produce networks of culture and art? Networks and Youth Much is said about the crisis of the cultural industry and of the public institutions of culture like museums, theaters, libraries, etc., and their business models. It is not in our interest, in particular, to analyze or verify the reality

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of this crisis. What is pointed out in this paper is the recent emergence of new forms of subjectivity that, through digital technologies and networks, has transformed the organization of producers, as well as of the production, circulation, and consumption of art and culture. It is in this direction, in particular, that we are interested in looking at networks, instead of cultural industries. This is because we believe that these new forms are in greater synergy with the transformation of modes of production and contemporary life, in other words with the immaterial. The idea of networks of art and culture is often identified with the concepts of creative industries and creative economy. While we recognize that, here, this connection focuses specifically, as stated earlier, on the relation to the co-emergence between networks of art, and culture and youth. Canclini in his text De la cultura postindustrial a las estrategias de los jóvenes (2012) states that the youth is not an essence nor a condition that is structured by age bracket, but rather, in reality, is a position in which one experiences cultural and social transformations. It is in this sense that we can see the close relationship between networks and youth. After all if the networks of art and culture are at greater synergy with the recent changes in the modes of production and life, this situates them together with the youth. We can go even further by saying that networks are in synergy with the contemporary, whereby they are co-produced with youth. From this perspective, we can see one of the reasons why networks became extremely attractive to young people—who seek to exercise creativity and desire to express themselves. After all, networks transform the universe of discourse and practices of organization, production, distribution, and consumption of art and culture, approaching the hacker ethics of freedom, autonomy, horizontality, and decentralization (Himanen 2001) so present and so dear to the practices of, and discourses on, the new digital technologies and the internet. These practices and discourses are certainly very central to the ways of life of the youth. To claim that the networks are at greater synergy with the current modes of production also means that the networks tend to occupy increasingly central spaces in the economy and in politics—the analysis presented in part III of this study serves as a good example of this relationship. In this scope, we can see another reason for the attraction that networks have on young people. One of the daily struggles today’s youth face is to get value from their practices in a world “dominated” by adults, and their “established” practices—even in the crisis—of economy and labor that in various aspects oppose the practices and discourses of the youth. Given this scenario, for many young people, networks become a real possibility of improving their conditions of work and life, both in the sense of spaces of sociability and the desire for self-expression, as well as income generation. In other words, networks can appear as a horizon for jobs and more open forms of expression, and

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even a privileged space for the construction of opposition against the constituted dynamics of power and control. In Brazil, the journalist and researcher Rodrigo Savazoni is a big advocate of this point of view, expressed in a systematic way in his recently released book, A onda rosa-choque: reflexões sobre redes, cultura e política contemporânea (2013). From the analysis of some groups—networks such as: Fora do Eixo (Off-Axis), Casa de Cultura Digital (House of Digital Culture), Transparência Hacker (Hacker’s Transparency) among others; Savazoni proposes an extreme affirmation of what he calls the “pink alliance” 5 that, in his view, is profoundly transforming the economic and political forms in Brazil. This can be seen in some passages of his book: I speak on about political-cultural networks in the interest of building a concept that allows us to begin to classify some of the most significant contemporary phenomena in the fields of culture and politics. I adopt the politicalcultural expression because I see it as a way to express, mindedly, three characteristics that I see in these groups that are producing the story of our time: (1) the organization of the field of immaterial, or symbolic, or cultural production; (2) the formulation of a new political culture based on cooperation, on affection and in dynamics in network (more or less horizontals); and (3) the interference, based on communication and culture, in the traditional dynamics of power. (Savazoni 2013, 23, our translation)

A little further: To weave networks becomes, then, the form that the dissidents have to establish lines of flight, alternative behaviors, deviant practices. It is also a way to accumulate “social and cultural” capital. . . . That is, value into your production. Increasingly, these forms of organization are recognized as the main practices of new generations. (Savazoni 2013, 25, our translation)

However, while recognizing a degree of materiality in this interpretation, one could argue that not everything is like “la vie en rose” in the “Hot Pink Wave”—as Savazoni seems to propose in his analysis. After all, to assume that the networks are in deep synergy with contemporary modes of production requires that, parallel to the affirmation of their biopolitical characteristics, there is also an affirmation of their dimension of biopower. Isabell Lorey in her article, “Gubernamentalidad y precarización de sí: Sobre la normalización de los productores y las productoras culturales” (2008), based on the work of Foucault, establishes an interesting relation between the practices and discourses involved currently in the exercise of creativity and the forms of subjugation and exploitation of the subjects of this exercise. Lorey draws attention to the relationships between alternative ways of life 6 and work, and the widespread precariousness—modus operandi prevalent in cognitive capitalism. That is, financial instability, lack of social

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rights, life plans undergoing constant execution, and the search for very short duration projects and lack of remuneration based on promises of obtaining cultural or social capital—exposure—etc. These elements are everyday realities of cultural producers. Not to mention that, while it is increasingly important to be schooled in cognitive capitalism, often the networks that propose an alternative way of life—mixing working time with life in general— are locations of overexploitation of time of the young who are still students. This prevents or makes it harder for the youth to continue their schooling, deepening precariousness. Thus: It is precisely these alternative living and working conditions that have become increasingly the most useful in economic terms, since they favor the flexibility demanded by the labor market. Thus, the practices and discourses of social movements of the last thirty or forty years have not only been resistant and have been directed against normalization, but also at the same time, have been part of the changes that have resulted in a form of neoliberal governamentality. (Lorey 2008, 72, our translation)

It is true that these precarious conditions are not new realities in the world of cultural work, after all, cultural workers, with rare exceptions, have never entered into the social welfare system based on wage and employment dynamics, normally acting according to the employability logic. It is also worth mentioning that young people, through the nature of their innovative practices and the exercise of creativity, including and especially in networks, have been trying to transform these conditions of precariousness into merits for their lives (Canclini, Castro, and Cruces 2012). However, what is seen is that often the networks, or alternative ways of life, do not outweigh the barriers of precariousness; and as pointed out by Lorey, as a result of being produced based on freedom and autonomy they, in some cases, reinvent and reinforce the conditions of precariousness and exploitation. At the limits, the networks and their operating modes are mobilized and presented as role models by—what Cocco calls—dead forms of representation. Those who work creatively, the precarious that create and produce culture, are subjects that can be easily exploited because they constantly bear such living and working conditions, because they believe in their own freedom and autonomy and because they dream about self realization. In a neoliberal context they are exploited to such an extreme degree that the State always presents them as role models. (Lorey 2008, 74, our translation)

It is important to point out that the arguments presented so far do not go towards producing a manichean perspective. After all, as Canclini and Cruces underline, in the introduction of their book (2012), the young people’s position is not, in fact, as free as sometimes is supposed, nor, on the other

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hand, completely subjected or determined. There is an exercise of agency on their part. As Lorey also shows that: The precariousness . . . it has come to be an inherent contradiction in liberal governmentality that which, as an abnormality, disturbed the dynamic of stabilization. . . . In this sense, it has often been the trigger for the struggles and behaviors of resistance. (Lorey 2008, our translation)

At this point, the analyses of biopower and biopolitics, previously presented, help us to recognize the existing game between the dynamics of control and dynamics of resistance in the relation of co-emergence between networks and youth. Therefore, it is assumed here that there are inter-crossings between biopower and biopolitics, however, it is not about grasping its dynamics as symmetrical. Based on this, we can take on the questions raised throughout this paper, in particular: What are the relations and forms of power involved in the passage of the minor love to the Major Love? More specifically, what are the mechanisms that make youth collaborate with networks of art and culture? Certainly, we do not have the final answers to such wide and deep questions. What we try to do, in this chapter as a whole, is simply address them through a theoretical effort approach—even if inconclusively. About Spectrum and Frequencies It is proposed, as the final part of this paper, to make a kind of flash tour. The idea is to make a quick visit to different stations, as if someone who scours the radio spectrum. Like “frequency selectors,” through contact with tunings and noises produced in the passage from one station to another, we will focus on certain theoretical and conceptual approaches that deal—or can be used to analyze—the process of “attraction” exercised by networks of art and culture for the youth. It is worth highlighting that our objective is not to fall into “catastrophism” or pure condemnation, in other words, of a moral critique in the presentation of different “frequencies.” Neither are we performing, in this part of the paper, a thorough survey of the proposed concepts, for their subsequent generalistic replication. But rather, we aim to quickly “visit” concepts, concepts that have already been quite exploited, with the intention to perform a kind of radar of the possibilities for analytical approaches of our research topic. Our main aim through this tour is to be in touch with—and to some extent produce—materialistic theoretical tools that can compose, aid, and, ultimately, broaden our spectrum that is the frequency band. The first “frequency” to be visited is the idea that the relationship between youth and networks establishes a new kind of slavery. Briefly, the concept of contemporary slavery in general in Brazil, is mobilized when the features of labor relations are based on grooming, debt-bondage, overt surveillance, psychological coercion, violence and abuse, degrading working

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conditions, seizure of documents and personal belongings to retain the employee on-site of labor and, of course, widespread and systematic breaches of the rules of labor protection (Silva 2010). The perspective that examines the relationship between youth and certain networks of art and culture, from the point of view of a new kind of slavery, has as its main argument in the fragility of youth that in the face of the extreme necessity, or in the face of the lack of job options because of structural unemployment, would be compelled to enter into these networks. Once inside, they will suffer various forms of coercions, ranging from threats of being “cut out” of the cultural labor market, to the point of physical threats. Given this scenario, the young oppressed would have to subdue themselves to authoritarianism and totalitarianism of such networks. However, although we see a certain degree of materiality in this point of view, one could argue that collaborative relations and the “attraction” between networks and youth cannot be simply reduced to coercion and a new kind of slavery. After all, to understand these relations as slavery it is necessary to fully assume that, by entering these networks, young people could not, under any circumstances, choose where and how to apply their creativity. In other words, how to produce their own times, forms, and work environments. In short, it would be the same as saying that for the young to join these networks, the total and radical annulment of their freedom and autonomy would be necessary. This point of view does not seem very wise, because the new modes of life and work, and also the new regime of accumulation, as previously seen, are based strongly on immaterial labor, flexibility, and mobility—the networks being one of the greatest expressions and means of this process. Moving a little further along the dial, we confront the perspective of the lack of access to means of production. This view approaches the perspective of a new kind of slavery because it deals with the topic from the bias of necessity and compulsion. However, it differs greatly in how it approaches labor relations. After all, in this frequency we “hear” the expression: free labor. Very simply, seen from this perspective the fact that the workers are not owners of the means of production, force them—by necessity of survival—to sell their labor force to others, consenting to the exploitation of their work. While we recognize the power relations involved in the current dispute by means of production—and circulation—, and in that sense we also acknowledge the important dimension that this issue occupies in the relations between young people and networks, it seems to us that this point of view is also not fully accurate. We can mention a reason for that, certainly among many others. In the exercise of culture and creativity, the brain, in other words cognition and knowledge as well as affective and social relations, are the main means of production and these, as seen above, cannot be fully controlled and homogenized. However, at this point it is worth highlighting that this does not mean that working with culture or art necessarily means

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freedom and emancipation. After all, workers of culture and art as well as artists, often, must subordinate themselves to providing services and/or certain kinds of personal relationships. This occurs because, in many cases, they cannot autonomously produce value through their activities, as Marx had analyzed and Virno resumes very well (Virno 2008). In a qualitative shift, such as when changing the switch from am to fm, we listen to another tune. Instead of analyzing the topic particularly from the standpoint of necessity, or even from its material and objective conditions, we move to an approach that seeks mainly the subjective aspects. On this station it is manipulation that appears, saying that the subdued, even though they have the potential to destroy the servitude, do not do it because they are deluded, as a result of being “deceived.” The manipulation in this sense, is effective whenever there is a full internalization of an exteriority. In other words, the subjugated are unable, by themselves, to see the truth and obscure interests behind the dominant ideology. Therefore due to this, they constantly feel “attracted” by the dominant ideology, naturalizing it and collaborating with its dynamics. To accept this perspective implies, consequently, to remove the capacity of subjectivation from the youth, draining from them the possibility of being responsible for themselves, and also of being vectors of transformation of their material and symbolic conditions. The basic theoretical operation, in this point, is the reduction of youth to a mere manipulated object, in other terms: the masses. To analyze the relationship between networks and youth in these terms makes us affirm a close relationship between conformity and young people. This can be translated into the statement that critical faculties and the possibility of autonomous political antagonism does not exist in young people. After all, as the masses, the youth always need a cause and an external agent who will organize and produce them. They always need someone who will guide and govern them; whether this cause or agent be capitalism and its dominant ideology, or a political, artistic, or intellectual vanguard that could accomplish the emancipation of the consciousness of young people. In other words, to free them from the shackles of obscurantism and ignorance, thus freeing their potency and in this way making them, truly, political subjects (Virno 2004). An argument to distrust this manipulation hypothesis is that, as seen above, the relations between networks of art and culture and youth are coemergent. In this sense, it can be stated that both networks as well as youth, together, form one of the main vectors of recent and profound changes in how contemporary life works, both in terms of economics and, especially, in terms of politics and culture. After all, if networks are the producers and at the same time the means of immaterial labor, they are certainly central in the recent transformations in the forms of control, but also in the forms of resistance. Thus, youth in co-emergence with the networks, cannot be seen from

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the perspective of conformism, and even less, devoid of subjectivity to be reduced to the notion of the masses. On the last station of this tour, we heard a sound that caught our attention in particular: a polyphony that blends elements from other stations at the same time as that making them different. A frequency fertile with tunings and noises, something different and new for our senses. In the action of association, between the objective and subjective aspects, the perspective of the ‘excitation’ prospers. Lorey, based on Foucault, when analyzing the power relations that run through contemporary cultural producers, helps us to clarify this perspective: To govern, control, discipline, and regulate itself means, at the same time, to fabricate, educate and empower itself. That is, in this sense, to be free. Only through this paradox the sovereign subjects can be governed. This is because the techniques of government of itself arise from the simultaneity of subjugation and empowerment, of compulsion and freedom. (Lorey 2008, 69, our translation)

Seen in these terms, for the excitation to take effect, it cannot impose an internalization of an exteriority. In other words, an active implication— founded on freedom—is necessary in the power dynamics. This form of analytical approach, despite the apparent paradox, allows us to integrate and put into a single movement—without negating the qualitative differences— the elements of coercion and “attraction” in the relationship between networks and youth. Thus, young people excited by the networks of art and culture are not merely obligated to collaborate with these networks, however, neither can their implication and participation in such networks be interpreted as a pure manifestation of their choices without “external influences.” In that sense, what we can see is that the excitement closely links the dimensions of need and desire, being the expression of this bond: love (Cocco 2010). Indeed, we would like to highlight that the mixture between need and desire cannot be seen as an operation founded on transcendence and, even less so, as a creation “out of nowhere,” or in other words, ex. nihilo. Therefore, the excitation exercised by the networks of art and culture can only transform itself in love when it connects the materiality of the life of young people to their desires. This is where the “glue” of powerful force resides. Glue, which “attracts” the youth to certain networks. An environment that provides opportunities that are really important for youth, including opportunities related to their desire to transform the contemporary relations of power. However, these networks are also a very effective place of control and exploitation. After all, from the excitation it is possible to attempt and sometimes be successful in the modulation of desires. Yet, for this to occur it is necessary to deal and play with contradictions, rather than impose a truth, or even to try to prevent or negate the wishes of transformation of power rela-

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tions. In this case, if the modulation of desire is successful, the internalization is very intense and “deeply rooted.” ON THE WAY TO THE OPEN As stated before, this research deals with an extremely contemporary topic that is constituted and traversed by accelerated and impetuous processes of transformation. In this case from our point of view, it would not be fruitful to attempt to produce analyses that point to closures or major conclusions. In this paper we simply attempted to make evident some aspects of the organization and “attraction” processes exercised between networks of art and culture, and youth in Brazil, especially in the southeast. For this we rely on the cartography, especially those who seek to have as practice and locus fundamentally, the strategies of the formation of desire in the social field (Rolnik 2011). This journey was made by monitoring movements and boundaries that draw the relation of co-emergence between networks and youth, rather than attempting to capture the structures and states of things. Thus, we did not find a definitive setting on our “radio dial,” or even a categorical outcome based on deductions. What we find was a movement on the way towards the open. Indeed, the cartography that we use is based on the desire to build a dynamic knowledge that recognizes the emergence of actors and actions in their movements, meetings, and connections. Thus, it also denies a “naturalistic” view of the social and of culture, based on ideas of stability and essence. Having made these considerations, we would like to end this paper pointing out that, if we consider that the excitation presents itself as a strategy of the formation of desire, it is certainly constituted by asymmetric degrees rather than absolute poles. In this way, excitation presents itself in its dimension of control, as an art and an exercise, vital to the networks of art and culture of the Major Brazil. The excitation for these networks produces the “attraction” in the youth, needed for the realization of its neutralizing and pacified version of love: the Major Love. It is through the constant exploitation of the art of excitation that the Major Love can (re)produce itself as a safety margin—for the Major Brazil—against the antagonistic elements of the minor bRAZIL. This is an attempt to neutralize and pacify the minor bRAZIL and its love, so they are not too radical, making it possible to transform them only in the valve of production of creativity, and the value for its later capture and exploitation. However, it is important to point out that affirming the existence of a passage from the minor love to the Major Love does not imply denying the power (potentia) and virtues of the “uses” that young people make of the networks of art and culture. In other words, this does not mean placing the youth in a position of pity, or even categorically

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limiting the notion of excitation to absolute control. However, recognizing these “uses” does not mean affirming that there is a symmetry in power relations between the youth and networks. It only implies that we recognize the existence of an exercise of agency—many times quite dangerous and uneven—between them. Based on these considerations, we can introduce a number of issues to be addressed in future works: What are the consequences—especially in terms of power relations and the production of subjectivities—in the networks of art and culture, of the close relations that exist between obtaining value from their activities and actions taken as politicized, in the sense of resistance? How can minor love keep, organize, and expand itself as such, that is, on the horizon of production of new values and other subjectivities, based on selfvalorization rather than on social fragmentation and legitimation of dead forms of representation? Finally, how is excitation, in the mixture between needs and desires, the engine (with the potential to speed up) for a minor love? In this case we refer to a minor love that can (re)compose activity and value, in other words, labor and wealth—material and immaterial. NOTES 1. Social factory is a concept developed by workerists (operaistas) to describe the expansion process of the dynamics of extraction of surplus value and of struggles to outside the boundaries of industrial, that is, in its generalizations to society. 2. We will see in a more accurate way this conceptualization of networks of art and culture specifically in “Networks and Youth.” 3. Orthus is a Greco-Roman mythological figure represented by a two-headed dog responsible for guarding one of the largest flocks of sheep, that means: wealth, narrated in the twelve labors of Hercules. 4. Unfortunately, it is not the aim of this study to offer a detailed explanation of this perspective, therefore, in this part we will only be pointing out the research delimitation and some issues that accompanied us and that were forged in the research process, that is, in the dialogue between actors involved in the research. In a general way, the methodological issues were inserted transversely in the body of text as a whole. For a more detailed explanation on the metodological perspective adopted in this paper, check Passos, Kastrup, and Escóssia, 2009; Rolnik 2011. 5. In the part entitled “Rosa-Choque” (hot-pink) of his book, Savazoni explains that the term “pink alliance,” as the title of his book A onda rosa choque (The hot pink wave), was produced in reference to the collectives that organized the event, like the event itself: #ExisteAmoremSP (There is Love in São Paulo). These are the same collectives and event identified by Cocco as “post-everything.” 6. Lorey refers to alternative ways of life as being made by people who follow the promise that from their work they will be responsible for their own creativity, make life according to their desires, and oppose normalization. Martín-Barbero states: “Estamos . . . diante de juventudes cujas sensibilidades respondem, não só, mas basicamente, a alternativas de socialidade que permeiam tanto as atitudes políticas quanto as pautas morais, práticas culturais e gostos estéticos” (Martín-Barbero 2008, 13).

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REFERENCES Canclini, N. G., M. Castro, and F. Cruces. (Org.). Jóvenes, culturas urbanas y redes digitales. Barcelona; Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2012. Cocco, G. Não existe amor no Brasil Maior. 2013. Accessed April 7, 2014. http:// www.diplomatique.org.br/artigo.php?id=1413. ———. Uma filosofia prática. 2010. Accessed April 3, 2014. http://revistacult.uol.com.br/ home/2010/03/uma-filosofia-pratica/. Deleuze, G. Conversações. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 1992. Hardt, M, and A. Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2005. Himanen, P. The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age. Berkeley, 2001. Lazzarato, M, and A. Negri. Trabalho imaterial. Rio de Janeiro: DPandA editora, 2001. Lorey, I. Gubernamentalidad y precarización de sí: Sobre la normalización de los productores y las productoras culturales. In: Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes: Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional. Proyecto Transform (Ed.). Traficantes de Sueños, 2008. Martín-Barbero, J. A mudança na percepção da juventude: sociabilidades, tecnicidades e subjetividades entre os jovens. In: Filho, J. F; Borelli, S. (Eds.). Culturas juvenis no século XXI. São Paulo: EDUC, 2008. Negri, A. Art and Multitude. Malden: Polity Press, 2011. ———. Spinoza for Our Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Passos, E., V. Kastrup, and L. Escóssia. Pistas do método da cartografia: pesquisa-intervenção e produção de subjetividade. Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2009. Pelbart, P. P. Biopolítica e Biopotência no coração do Império. 2002. Accessed April 3, 2014. http://www.multitudes.net/Biopolitica-e-Biopotencia-no/. Rolnik, S. Cartografia sentimental: transformações contemporâneas do desejo. Porto Alegre: Sulina; Editora UFRGS, 2011. Savazoni, R. A onda rosa-choque. Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2013. Silva, M. Trabalho análogo ao de escravo rural no Brasil do século XXI: novos contornos de um antigo problema. 2010. 280 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Direito Ambiental)—Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2010. Virno, P. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. 2004. Accessed April 10, 2014. https://libcom.org/library/grammar-multitude-paolo-virno. ———. Virtuosismo e revolução: a idéia de” mundo” entre a experiência sensível e a esfera pública. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2008.

Chapter Thirteen

Autonomy, Free Labor, and Passions as Devices of Creative Capitalism Narratives from a Co-Research in Journalism and the Editing Industry Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano

In the current stage of global capitalist crisis and general precarity, the valorization process has been increasingly characterized by emotions, creativity, language, and images, both in material production and in labor and human activities, which make up a significant aesthetic and relational content. Today, in all work contexts it is required to know more, to communicate more, and to interact more with the social world outside the workplace. But, nonetheless, these requirements are particularly evident for some specific types of work. Journalism and editorial work are usually considered a creative freelance type of work with relevant margins of autonomy concerning the labor process, as well as work contents. Moreover, they are associated with a relatively high social status. How then are processes of precarization lived in such an exemplary context of knowledge and cognitive labor? How does precarization affect creative workers’ autonomy and creative capacities, their professional identities, and their passion for their jobs as writers and editors? The aim of our paper is to inquire into the relationship between cognitive labor, creative passion, and precariousness. We want to understand how work attitudes change in a context of daily lived precarization. Therefore, our analysis is focused on representations of precarity, and is based on an empirical qualitative enquiry focused on on-line texts and vis-à-vis meetings undertaken as a process of co-research (“conricerca”) together with journalists and editorial workers in Milan in 2011 and 2012. Narratives are a central element of this research, both as an object of analysis and an instrument to produce 201

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collective knowledge. We mainly used in-depth group discussions focussed on daily work experiences and employment biographies to examine workers’ common sense, that is, the constructions of meaning. Such agency potential is the focal point of our analysis: especially workers’capacities to cope with experiences of precarization, changing forms of labor control and resulting daily lived conflicts, as well as their capacities to change their working conditions, defend their rights, and realize their own interests. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES In current sociological debate various concepts are used to describe knowledge and cognitive labor in its different forms, such as “intellectual work,” “immaterial work,” or “cognitive-relational work” (Gorz 2003; Vercellone 2006; Fumagalli 2008; Chicchi and Roggero 2009; Fumagalli and Morini 2011; Armano 2010; Armano and Murgia 2012). Often, however, definitions and differences between these various concepts are not sufficiently specified. Therefore, our research refers to the concept of biopolitics as a theoretical framework (Codeluppi 2008; Amendola, Bazzicalupo, Chicchi, and Tucci 2008) in order to underline the specificity of today’s cognitive labor, and to collocate it in the context of a changing mode of production (Castel 1999; 2009). According to this concept, language and related relational, communicative, and affective capacities (such as being able to communicate and express one’s opinions and feelings in front of social reality) gain crucial relevance for the current biocapitalist mode of production. As these capacities are put to work and commodified within the labor process, new forms of exploitation and control are produced, as well as new sense constructions (Rullani 2004; Bologna and Banfi 2011; Lypovetsky and Serroy 2013). We use the concept of cognitive labor as an analytical category in order to take account of these changes in the labor process, and more precisely, in management strategies aimed at resolving the transformation problem; that is, in management’s strategies to transform workers’ multiple subjective labor capacities in the kind of labor power required in the processes of production and accumulation in question. We start out from the idea that current biocapitalist forms of exploitation aimed at workers’ cognitive capacities are based on a mix of direct and indirect forms of control. Today’s cognitive labor calls upon talents, creativity, passion, and the capacity to produce oneself as decisive elements of the production process. Cognitive workers tend to invest themselves in free work, provided that this work gives room to passion and creative capacities: “Journalists that write books, commercial artists that create pieces of art, computer scientists that demonstrate their virtuosity as hackers and as inventors of open source software” (Gorz 2003, 24). If Fordism can be described

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as the era in which administrating workers’ whole lifestyle by means of repression, submission to the machine and a strict governance of subjects’ time was considered indispensable, then creativity and flexibility as despotic norms constitute the center of gravity of cognitive labor within current biocapitalism, as argued by Paolo Virno (2002). Following this shift from factory discipline to biocapitalism, precarious subjectivity is constantly called to enact self-normative, self-realizing, selforganizing capacities that characterize biocapitalism and which can be captured and controlled only by descending to the level of affects and relations that closely belong to the subject; or, in other words, by incorporating affects and relations into the production process itself. The self-normativity at the center here is reached precisely by mobilizing passion within a context of precarity. Such precarity corresponds, by subtraction, to a self-normative iron cage, self-imposed by the precarious subjects upon themselves. The whole, passionate life of cognitive workers in the cultural industry analyzed in this chapter tends to be subsumed, and this subsumption results in a type of social submission, which cannot be separated from the mode of subjectification and self-governance within a completely open and transparent environment. The immersion of passion within productive processes, such as the here analyzed editorial and journalistic production processes, which require capacities such as writing and knowledge acquired through education and training, translates into a shift from past forms of disciplining by means of hierarchical supervision to current forms of self-control and voluntary self-exploitation (Raunig 2012). Cognitive labor unfolds itself within an “economy of libido” for which the principle of pleasure plays a crucial role as the mechanism through which the subject internalizes the “liberal” post-Fordist type of governmental power (Foucault 1985). Referring to the concept of biopolitics, we intend to evoke above all this dispositive of “performance—pleasure” that pervades today’s labor market. However, the focus of our research is based on the hypothesis that the relational element inherent in cognitive labor (Morini and Fumagalli 2011; Morini 2010) also always brings about a surplus (Virno 2001) of labor capacities, which exceed those functional to the capitalist labor process. Starting out from Marx’s notion of surplus value (the surplus as the sum of labor incorporated in the produced commodity, in relation to the amount of paid labor), the term surplus intends to underline the presence of such a social productivity, of creative capacities, diffused across society, which do not correspond with and may enter in conflict with the requirements of capital accumulation. Following Rossi-Landi, such a surplus also implies a capacity to take a critical stance towards and escape from the social and ideological devices subjects are confronted with in everyday live (Rossi-Landi 1985). In the last years, there has been a lot of discussion about the role of emotions and relational capacities in organizations. In a first instance, this

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debate has been concentrated on the definition of “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1979/1983/2006; Bolton, Grugulia, Vincent, and Leidner 2010). It has been argued about how organizations try to control and subjugate these subjective capacities according to their interests, and how such attempts of control impact workers, and how such attempts of control impact on the definition of “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1979), the discussion has regarded the practices by which workers appropriate margins of autonomy and independently manage the emotional aspects of their work, also in contrast to the interests of management (Korczynski 2003; Bolton and Boyd 2003). In fact, in a process of “feminization of labor” (Morini 2007; 2010) relational and communicative capacities, historically associated with female ways of being in the private sphere, in today’s biocapitalism are required in the labor process, but neither recognized nor paid for by companies (Folbre and Nelson 2000; Folbre 2006; Durand 2004). In the following we will apply these hypotheses to cognitive labor in journalism and editing (Morini 2012). Besides other specific professional qualifications, the work of journalists and editors also requires relational capacities such as empathy, emotional intelligence, affective and communicative resources. It is thus a good example to inquire into how these relational and emotional elements—the feelings for one’s work—are affected by precarization (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008; 2011). Let’s also assume that journalism and publishing labor, as a significant segment of the broader knowledge labor, should be considered as socialized, placed, and networked inside the dynamics of the Web. Without highlighting what the key dispositives are that govern the network, we would like to point out what Terranova writes about the coercive power of the network and the limited but possible areas of counter-use of the network itself: “The digital automation is expressed in nodes made by electronic and nervous connectivity so that users themselves become quasi-automatic connections within a continuous flow of information” (Terranova 2014, 2). However, it is just the limited margins of a potential common use of the network which we are interested in: with the aim to investigate how the space for self-organization of subjectivity can be and becomes an instrument of agency and expression of experiences against the precarious condition. This level of analysis seems relevant since the mass individual communication involves a creative audience (Fuchs 2009) and “communication networks are networks of fundamental tools of power making in society” (Castells 2009, 544). In this, we are particularly interested in analyzing the subjective dimension of precarization: its relational, emotional, and existential aspects that regard the way in which workers give meaning to their working and social lives and position themselves in society. We would like to stress that we focus our analysis on workers’ subjective representations of experiences of precarization (Bourdieu 1998). We are

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more interested in understanding precarity as a manifold and inter-subjective construction of meaning. Therefore, we have chosen to inquire workers’ multiple representations of insecurity from a subject-oriented approach (Murgia and Armano 2013), that is from the point of view of the subject (Butler 2004), and to assume this partiality as heuristically important. This is the backdrop from which our interest in comparing representations linked to different work contexts, such as those of journalists and editorial workers, stems (Morini, Carls, and Armano 2014). Referring to a polysemic notion of precarity (Bresson 2007), we understand it as “an expression of a new mode of domination, based on the institution of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity that aims at forcing workers to submit to and accept exploitation” (Bourdieu 1998, 97 [translation K.C.]). As stressed in sociological debates, such insecurity does not only regard the future prospects of a given employment relation, but, crucially, also touches upon social relations (Barbier 2002) and social vulnerability (Cingolani 1986; 2005; Boumaza and Pierru 2007). While we refer to such a polysemic understanding of precarity, we also want to underline that with regard to social constructions, precarity is to be understood as a perception of increasing risks, personal destabilization, and the fragilizing of social relations (Castel 1999; Bourdieu 1998). As the “factory of the neoliberal subject,” precarity means that responsibilities are transferred upon social actors and that systemic insecurity is attributed to individual choices (Dardot and Laval 2013, 414–65). According to Corsani (2014, translation K.C.), this notion of precarity can be further specified: “What is at stake is to make everybody become a ‘self-entrepreneur’ who assumes, on his own, all economic and social risks of his activity, an individual struggling against all others in order to obtain an employment position, investing all his daily life time in frenetic rhythms, day and night, in the ‘production of himself’ in order to win the war for a ‘merited’ (direct or indirect) income.” METHODOLOGICAL CHOICES Our empirical research aims at analyzing representations, practices, and resulting agency potential of journalists and editorial workers’ in the face of precarization. The methodological choice was to adopt several techniques of data collection, able to investigate various aspects of individual and collective history. Through the creation of focus groups, it was possible to access the main stories in the dynamics of journalism and publishing labor. At the same time, the collection and analysis of the mailing lists of the Network of Precarious Editors (Re.Re.Pre) on its website showed us the issues that were more discussed, and the intensity of trade and development phases in response to

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specific events. Therefore, including the analysis of the material on the Re.Re.Pre website, what has been adopted can be defined as a cyber-ethnographic approach, which equates the offline empirical material with the online (Teli et al. 2007). We also refer to the notion of netnography, according to the definition coined by sociologist and marketer Robert Kozinets, a neologism that identifies a qualitative research method of ethnography matrix and allows users to take a series of assessments from the interactions that can develop through the network, shedding light on a number of important insights (Kozinets 2010). Netnography, which was created to monitor the cultures of online consumption, can be used for sociological purposes, helping to define the contours of new and alternative social worlds that are mobilized just by the use of Internet. It allows us to understand the communication flows within their socio-cultural context, together with the use of the form of the more traditional focus groups. Therefore, it promotes participative observation, which is particularly useful to note the political significance of the Re.Re.Pre experience. This approach is consistent with the ideas of Castells regarding the centrality of information, the ability to imagine forms of the social web (Castells 1996) that are propedeutical to the rise of new organizational forms. Its ambition lies in the in-depth analysis of daily work practices, meaning constructions and cultures in a relevant segment of cognitive labor rather than in the production of representative outcomes. As regards to methodology, a narrative approach (Riessman 1993) has been chosen as a way to render visible workers’ diverse practices in the face of daily lived conflicts and contradictions. Through the analysis of narratives we want to grasp the meaning constructions that workers develop to make sense of their work experiences. These meaning constructions can be analyzed relying on direct explanations and opinions given within a narrative, but also by considering the positioning of single events in the overall story line. From an analytical perspective, we are not so much interested in analyzing narratives as such, but to understand how the worldviews that guide everyday practices are constructed. In this attempt, we refer to a mix of various methodological instruments, ranging from narrative analysis of interviews (Riessman 1993) to critical discourse analysis of co-research (Alquati 1993) and cyber-ethnography (Teli et al. 2007). From a co-research approach, narratives are considered as an instrument to create collective knowledge about participants’ own social working and living conditions. More precisely, the aim of such a co-research process is to create a collective space in which the narration of individual experiences can facilitate a critical reflection about collective positions and coping practices, in front of conflicts experienced in everyday work realities. Crucially, this entails reflecting upon the contradictions within one’s own common sense as well as the potentials and limits of one’s own agency. What is at stake is the

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production of a practical collective knowledge that is useful in daily conflicts to increase workers’ capacities to influence and change their working conditions. Given this co-research approach, the empirical investigation has been organized in the form of group discussions rather than as a top-down process of interviewing. These group discussions have been concentrated on daily lived conflicts within the labor process. In addition to the analysis of the main results that emerged from the focus groups through the path of co-research, in the following pages, we present a cyber-ethnographic analysis of mailing lists and online communications on the web, especially with reference to the possibility of the implementation of collective action. ACCESS ON THE RESEARCH FIELD AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE SAMPLE An important part of the research was carried out through face-to-face meetings with focus groups, located in Milan, starting in June 2011 and going on throughout 2012. Given the fact that our empirical inquiry took the form of a co-research, it was based on group discussions instead of traditional interviewing. For this reason, active participation of the involved workers as well as sound trust relations have been crucial right from the beginning. Only subsequently, three research encounters have been organized outside the workplace, in a favorable environment, two for a first focus group and one for a second. Each of the group discussions lasted for about five hours. Cristina Morini and Kristin Carls conducted these discussions and guided them towards the chosen topics, while their realization, however, remained a collective process. Two different groups of editorial workers are part of this co-research. The first focus group is composed of six professional journalists who work or have worked until recently for different monthly and weekly journals of one of the biggest Italian publishing houses in Milan. The one journalist in this group, who, at the time of the co-research, did not work for that publishing house any more, has moved to the press office of a TV channel. Four of these journalists are on open-ended employment contracts. These are three women and one man above 40 years of age. The other two journalists are younger women (both 28 years of age) that work on temporary project contracts or on temporary internships. The second group comprises five editorial workers, four women and one man that work for three different book publishing houses in Milan (non-fiction and school books). They are between 30 and 40 years old. As project and pseudo self-employed workers with only one contractor, they can all be considered to be in a precarious employment position.

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Particularly, these two groups bring together a number of participants motivated to share and narrate their experiences in a collective process, thanks to long-standing mutual knowledge and confidence. For privacy reasons all names used in the following section have been changed. FINDINGS OF THE CO-RESEARCH AMONG JOURNALISTS The central conflict in everyday work experienced by those journalists, in our group with open-ended employment contracts, is the loss of margins of autonomy and creativity within the work process. The issues of autonomy, creativity, and passion for one’s work are central in this group’s discussion, though they are above all associated with past experiences, former patterns of work organization, and relations. Once, there was a strict editorial line. But sometimes I was alone at work at night, only with some friends, and on such evenings it was only me to decide how to arrange the radio news. That means, step by step, following the editorial line, I did chose the opening news and the following ones. That’s something I’ve never had the opportunity to do again. Just as if I was the chief editor who decides about the front page of a magazine! If I compare that situation with the confidence that is given to me today: as if I was a fool. Though I don’t really think to be considered as such, but at the end that’s what the structures here make you feel like. It’s tragic.” (Marta, department head, open-ended contract)

Table 13.1.

Composition of the first focus group with six journalists–May 2011

Name

Age

Gender Professional Role

Publishing house

Contract

Luca

48

M

chief editor, journalist

weekly magazine

permanent

Marta

46

F

head of editorial department, journalist

weekly magazine

permanent

Giulia

55

F

head of editorial department, journalist

monthly magazine

permanent

Laura

49

F

head of editorial department, journalist

monthly magazine

temporary job

Roberta

28

F

editorial staff, journalist

monthly magazine

project contract

Simona

28

F

press office staff

television

internship, temporary job

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Table 13.2. Composition of the second focus group with five editorial workers—June 2011 Name

Age

Gender Professional Role

Publishing house

Contract

Barbara

40

F

editorial staff

school book editor

free lance + pseudo selfemployment

Stefania

30

F

editorial staff

book editor, nonfiction

free lance + pseudo selfemployment

Daniela

32

F

editorial staff

book editor, nonfiction

pseudo selfemployment

Mario

35

M

editorial staff

book editor, nonfiction

pseudo selfemployment

Chiara

38

F

editorial staff

book editor, nonfiction

temporary job

The journalists tell us about a change in work organization that has produced more hierarchies and direct control in their everyday work. According to their analysis, this transformation is aimed at increasing management’s power of blackmailing and disciplining in front of a professional category that, until recently, used to be rather independent and autonomous. A central narrative, in this respect, revolves around the experience of professional devaluation resulting from management’s growing disinterest in the contents and quality of journalistic work. Instead, work processes are more and more unilaterally formatted and standard is according to market aims and imperative marketing rules. The difference between today and some years ago is that, if I have to cover a story, let’s say “children in jail,” once I could chose by myself which stories to collect, which people to talk to and which experts to eventually interview. Today . . . I am in a situation where I can actually choose very little by myself. That is, I’m told who I have to talk to. . . . There is too little delegation of responsibilities and also a lack of confidence in our work now. For sure, under these conditions, you feel even more restricted in your creativity. . . . You are not recognised as a specialist anymore. I’m just treated as an instrument. They put me in front of some topics that are good to sell, and I simply have to write about them, even if I don’t know anything about these issues. (Marta, department head, open-ended contract) I refuse this fact that today magazines are called “products.” I don’t like this, but it’s very common and accepted by now. When I think of pure production, I think about something schematic, following pre-established rhythms, something linked to efficiency, precise measurable performances and out-

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These stories show how precarization touches upon this rather well-established category of professional journalists with open-ended contracts, medium-high positions in the firm hierarchy, and consolidated professional experience. Precarization here passes through the deterioration of working quality and a consequent “fragilization” (Sennett 1999) of professional identities—be it with respect to the contents and the sense of the work, or with respect to the margins of autonomy and self-determination in the labor process. Castel has described a similar “precarization of stable workers” as a process in which the progressive degradation of rights and social relations, and an increasing insecurity of working conditions, causes a constant sense of threat and weakening of one’s future working position (Castel 1995/2004; 2009). The discussion within our group of journalists shows how such a precarization regards not only the degree of employment protection and labor rights, but also the qualitative aspects of the labor process (Morini 2012). In other words, it becomes evident how precarization directly involves knowledge workers’ subjectivity as it touches upon their emotional relation with their work, its contents and meaning. Journalists’ work is described as the work of “proletarian knowledge workers” (Bologna and Banfi 2011) rather than that of professionals. In this, shrinking margins of autonomy, increased direct control, and marketization go hand in hand with a reduction of the creativity that is required or possible to express, in the labor process. Creativity thus gets redefined and repositioned as a capacity to efficiently recompose given resources according to given objectives and time frames. The creative element? In everyday work, maybe, if it’s not really creativity, maybe it’s something similar . . . , or maybe it’s all just a fairytale. . . . But, giving a personal autonomous contribution could also simply mean that you have had the time to pick up the telephone to get first-hand information on news, because, however, you do have a vantage point of observation, the reporters outside send you their various signals, but its you who puts them all together. You are like a power station for up-to-date information and you have to organise that information in some way. . . . You could do much more things, you could be much more creative, but you don’t have time. And that’s why in the end you just give the writing jobs to external collaborators, all those things that would be nicer to do, just because you are obliged to stay in the office to do other stuff. (Marta, department head, open-ended contract)

The most frequent reaction to these transformations in the labor process, shown by all the participants with a longer work experience, is a strong sense of disillusion, resulting in emotional distancing and disengagement from work. There are not really any attempts to reappropriate the lost margins of autonomy, because the described changes are perceived as an irreversible

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change not only in the work organization, but also in power relations. Participants share the impression that more autonomous contributions and greater investment of creativity would be rejected and disliked by management. This is an example for how a chief editor describes his role in managing colleagues’ proposals and negotiating them with the headquarters: All that is of interest here is a top-down type of management. In this context, own ideas become a challenge that includes a threat, an implicit negative judgement, just like “don’t bother us!” This ranges from their [managements’] annoyance because you open your mouth and say something, to a quite clearly expressed “We don’t care a damn shit for your opinion.” . . . In consequence, you get used to censoring yourself, even though you still get challenged, such as that: “You don’t have anything to propose? Where are your ideas?”I have to say that, in my position, the mechanism that sets in is one of filtering and rejecting ideas. It is risky to try to bring in ideas from outside, from the bottom and to formulate them as proposals to the top, to the core of the magazine, . . . because then they easily accuse you of notdoing your job, of not filtering sufficiently.(Luca, chief editor, open-ended contract)

To cope with constant frustration, the older journalists try to limit their involvement and efforts put in daily work. Instead, they try to realize their professional passion outside of wage work, for example by publishing their own books or other texts on their own account. Emotions, desires, and passion associated with the act of writing, producing texts, and transmitting ideas thus remain a central element for the self-representations and the sense of self-realization of these journalists. But, they are not collocated and realized within the workplace anymore. The following quote describes these escape strategies. However, many people, according to me, in this period have tried to escape from certain mechanisms. The diaspora that has emerged is also a consequence of this internalized conflict: the desire to turn this into a sort of infidelity. So you decide to go away from that place, and you retrieve yourself to somewhere else. . . . This has become a way of saying: “No, I don’t want to be part of this mechanism, I don’t want to stay in this dimension.” But I also need some money, some income; so I try to find a different position. (Laura, department head, open-ended contract)

These strategies of escape, however, do not completely manage to remove the sense of alienation that stems from the loss of professional identity, autonomy, and creativity (Corsani 2012). Taking a real distance from one’s work remains difficult given the necessary personal involvement in the production of texts, and the continuous sense of frustration of one’s desires of self-realization in everyday work. The however strongly lived passion for the work of writing is thus described as strongly problematic and ambiguous: On

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the one hand, it is a crucial resource to beat off the experience of alienation, on the other hand this same passion is the basis of a powerful mechanism of self-control and disciplining. Well, in regards to this blackmailing that comes out of passion, I do put all of myself into it. In the sense that I am absolutely a kamikaze of passion, I’m completely into it, I just don’t manage not to get involved. . . . Even if I’m told to write something about blue celery, I will still have fun with it, maybe even if this story is pushed for marketing aims, because I’ll always find something interesting even in such a story. (Marta, department head, open ended contract)

An additional downside is that the attempts of withdrawal from work and the refuge searched for in personal self-realization, outside work, contribute to the individualization of daily work and labor relations. These coping practices cause a loss of collective capacities in the workplace, as under such conditions of emotional distancing and individualized withdrawal it becomes more difficult to recognize any collective positions and to struggle together for shared interests and labor rights. Years ago, there was still more participation. The dramatic thing is, it’s not a coincidence that today we find ourselves discussing more about the individual, subjective issue of passion and emotions: you are more lonely in this situation today. . . . Before, more or less, we were a group, even though with few resources. There was also a conflict at stake with the trade union, which somehow we still recognized. Because, if we did get so angry with the union, that meant that we still attributed it some role. (Laura, department head, openended contract) Frankly speaking, today I do feel more alienated, more distanced from the trade union than from my journalistic type of work. For sure, this whole situation worries me. (Giulia, department head, open-ended contract)

Let us turn our attention now towards the younger journalists in our group who are on precarious employment contracts: Among them, disillusion regarding the qualitative aspects of work appears less pronounced. In contrast, the central problem for these colleagues is the experience of continuous employment precariousness. Such precariousness translates into a strong vulnerability towards management’s strategies of blackmailing, and subjects workers to forced availability (Marazzi 1994). Precariousness is experienced here above all as an existential insecurity, due to an unstable employment position and the lack of effective labor and social rights. It dominates one’s whole life (Salecl 2010), affecting social relations as well as individual capacities to project oneself into the future. Confronted with this situation of existential precariousness, lacking margins of autonomy and creativity in the work process appear as secondary issues.

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No, the fact that there is not much space here for autonomy and creativity is no big deal. In the sense that I try to create myself some space to express my creativity elsewhere. And, however, this magazine offers other possibilities to me: the pleasure to do the research type of work that is required here, as I feel disposed for that and I also have the impression to learn something. . . . However, this kind of reasoning that we have engaged in now in our discussion, for me, in this moment, only represents a subsequent level, it’s really quite far away for me now . . . in the sense that I’m much too worried about how to manage to pay the rent for my apartment, to ask myself whether this work gratifies me or not, or whether this work gratifies me or not.

The discussion shows how even only limited possibilities of self-realization within the work process are used to smooth over the highly negative experience of precariousness. Despite their strongly negative experience of employment precariousness, these young journalists manage to get some motivational reward from their work. Together with their hope for a better future, such identitarian counterbalancing makes it easier to accept the given precarious conditions. In other words, also in this case, the emotional aspects of passion and meaning attributed to one’s work are central elements of workers’ daily coping practices. At the same time, however, workers have to face the ambiguous character of these practices that make them resist precariousness (in the sense of enduring it), but not against it, and in which their expectations and desires of self-realization and recognition are at best partially met. In fact, also from their stories, the distance between imagined and real work clearly emerges. Consequently, the reconfigured forms of work organization and labor control do not succeed in fully exploiting the potentials of cognitive labor in terms of meaning constructions, motivation, and emotional involvement, as they only manage to seize those aspects most immediately linked to the disciplining of labor and the reduction of labor costs (as this latter is made possible by the regime of precarious employment). The positive aspect of this work that makes you go on and accept these conditions, is that it contributes to creating your sense of identity. You feel like a thinking being, you do a job that requires and engages your competences. . . . For sure, we are not in a comfortable position. We are not only precarious but also young. This means that we always have to keep our head down, we never talk back, because we still have to learn. Under these conditions it gets difficult to express any passion for your work. [. . .] In the sense that I’m really still young, I don’t have family yet, so I could give a lot, because I still have enthusiasm, time, desire, I still have the desire to do things. (Roberta, journalist, project contract)

In regards to the hope for a better future, it is not so much based on any concrete career prospects, and neither is it based on any strong and positive professional identity linked to the collective imaginary of creative work or to

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the social status as journalist. Rather, this hope seems to be based on the above mentioned learning possibilities offered in the current work positions as these could, at least potentially, allow for personal and professional growth in the future. Moreover, this hope is linked by the young journalists to their own capacities to seize such opportunities of professional growth: the capacity to learn and produce, but also to respond positively to management’s continuous requirements of flexibility and availability, to submit oneself and to sustain blackmailing in order to obtain, finally, the aspired for recognition. The only thing that makes you go on is this sentence that you repeat to yourself constantly: “Maybe, if I don’t give up now, maybe one day I will succeed and really be part of this editorial department or this workplace.” . . . And then you live with this hope that once you have a stable contract you will be less vulnerable to blackmailing and you will be able to say “no” more easily, you will have to endure less and be less available. (Simona, press office staff, internship/fixed term)

Such a hope in the future, based on the belief in one’s own professional capacities and the readiness for emotional involvement in one’s job can be read as a coping practice that, again, helps to resist highly negative contractual conditions. It is a way to claim the value and meaning of one’s work performances, as well as to express the experienced injustice that stems from lacking recognition. But, this meaning construction can also be built upon by the counterpart to increase exploitation, given workers’ emotional and identitarian attachment to work and their readiness to accept forced availability in order to obtain possible future rewards. In fact, these young precarious journalists are conscious of the “passion trap” (Murgia and Poggio 2012), a mechanism of forced availability and forced acceptance of given conditions within an always less participatory and more hierarchical work organization. But, this situation is experienced as a “normal” uneasiness that does not give rise to any claims for such larger margins of autonomy and creativity, which are central for their older colleagues. That is, precariousness here clearly functions as a disciplinary device to enforce acceptance of less qualifying tasks, worse working and employment conditions, and increased, forced availability. This disciplinary mechanism functions all the better since the younger journalists do not feel attached to, or even distance themselves from their old professional identity as journalists and thus from a possible collective identity. Such dissociation is stimulated not only by the described changes in labor processes and control, but also by precarious workers’ negative experiences with the institutions of collective interest representation, as the following quote shows:

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Often, I feel like an anomaly, like a problem for everyone, because I’m neither an independent professional worker nor in the position of an internship that can be justified as such anymore. I’m somebody that everyone tries not to see. And that’s not all, I also feel completely ignored by the shop stewards, as if I didn´t exist, sometimes I even feel a certain hostility. (Roberta, journalist, project contract)

FINDINGS OF THE CO-RESEARCH AMONG PRECARIOUS EDITORIAL WORKERS IN BOOK PUBLISHING Also, for the second group composed of precarious editorial workers in various book publishing houses, the biggest everyday problem is employment precariousness, linked to their employment positions as project and selfemployed workers. Like the older professional journalists on a permanent contract, however, they equally strongly complain about lacking autonomy and quality of work. They experience this lack as heavily contrasting with the high level of responsibility demanded in the work process, which they consider as not adequately recognized. You are paid little, you have enormous responsibilities, but with a ridiculous employment contract. You publish the books practically alone, ok, managing all the suppliers and everything. . . . But, at the end, the only thing that matters is to have the book out. What is in it does not matter to anyone. . . . You publish bullshit; you publish school books in which you really can’t recognise yourself, because personally you would never publish such low-quality work. . . . But, anyway, you put something of yourself in your books. When I flip through them I see that it’s been me who has done them. (Barbara, editorial staff, self-employed project worker)

As this quote demonstrates, the experience of lacking recognition comprises two aspects: On the one side, there is the contrast between precarious employment conditions and required responsibilities that translates into lacking economic, material recognition and thus missing existential security. On the other side, the deterioration and limited attention given to the quality of one’s work is lived as lacking recognition of professional performances. The precarious editorial workers in this group seem to experience, particularly intensively, this second aspect. As the following quote demonstrates, this feeling of lacking recognition also stems from precarious workers’ daily exclusion from the company context, since they are treated as (supposedly) external staff. Such exclusion functions as yet another device of control and subjection. For example, we don’t have a company mail address; we have to use our personal mail for work related communication. In this way you never feel as part of the group. . . . For example, the issue of the editorial office meetings:

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Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano Maybe in reality they are just annoying, but maybe it would make you feel a bit more like you´re participating, involved. . . . But, instead, you never know anything about the books that are put into the program, because you are not allowed to participate in the meetings, you are not part of it. . . . And then, there is also this fact that we don’t have our own desks. . . . There are quite a lot of issues that are kind of humiliating in terms of gratification. The absurd thing is that they expect you to be there in the office, and I can’t guaranty my presence because I don’t know where to sit and work. . . . This is also precariousness, the fact of not having a desk or a company mail etc. (Daniela, editorial staff, self-employed)

This strong experience of missing recognition makes individual coping by means of identitarian compensation difficult. It is not that the precarious editorial workers in this group would not identify with their work, but, once they have fully acknowledged the extent to which their expectations, desires, and needs are in fact constantly disregarded; their passion for editorial work is no longer enough to assure motivation and daily endurance of precarious work and employment conditions. As the older journalists on open-ended contracts, they develop practices of emotional distancing and try to limit their availability and investment in their work. But, due to their precarious employment positions that make them highly vulnerable to blackmailing, such withdrawal from work is much more difficult and limited as compared to the journalists on open-ended contracts. In fact, it often only remains at the cognitive level. Yet, instead of trying to escape to alternative, individualized forms of self-realization outside of work, these precarious editorial workers have started to organize collectively. They have formed a network of precarious editorial workers (www.Rerepre.org) that comprises colleagues from various publishing houses. In one of the workplaces, under observation in this coresearch, an assembly of precarious workers has been created. Workers’ narratives, however, clearly show how difficult such attempts of collective organizing are, due to the high workforce fragmentation into various different employment categories that produce relevant interest differences and increase invisibility of each category. There is a huge generational gap, between the way I react to a situation that is an injustice, and their way of reacting, in a more passive way. . . . I feel this as a really strong difference: At our workplace, there are some people that already work there as project workers for at least 10–15 years, and they could very well sue the publishing house [for illegal pseudo self-employment]. But they don’t do it. . . . I don’t know why they don’t do it. Maybe due to mental laziness? Maybe because they are accustomed to this situation? . . . However, there are also some younger colleagues, people of our age, in their 30s, who never get involved in our activities, because they are too lazy, or because they are afraid to lose what they have. (Daniela, editorial staff, self-employed)

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Particularly the position as project and self-employed workers makes it rather difficult to develop collective conflict strategies, given the highly individualized working conditions, the equally individualized practices of negotiating contracts and pay, as well as the various individual coping practices of reducing and balancing experienced conflicts. Moreover, old conflict strategies, such as strike action or daily forms of performance reduction and slowdown of work processes are not very practical for these (pseudo) self-employed workers. Any such practices of abstention avoidance and refusal to work do not harm the firm, but rather fall back on workers themselves as they are considered to be self-responsible for accomplishing their work tasks within a given deadline, without any (officially) fixed working hours. Network Experiences of Creative Labor: The Case of the Re.Re.Pre Network The analysis of the focus group with the middle-aged publishing workers in book editing points out the big gap and the huge contrast between their fragile bargaining condition as freelance workers, and the great responsibility attributed to them in the everyday work process. It is a subjective situation characterized by a lack of recognition of responsibilities and capabilities, which does not only lead to bad economic employment conditions and to lacking access to workers’ rights, but also to the humiliation experienced in feeling “desapericidos” (invisible). This experience produced feelings of impatience from which the precarious editors felt that they could not escape individually. In fact, there were no individual strategies of identity compensation among this group of workers, because in this case the passion for work, unlike for the young journalists, was not sufficient to endure the experience of frustration. Instead, in the face of these feelings of humiliation, impatience, and being made invisible some editorial workers started to act collectively by putting into place a network called network of precarious editors (Re.Re.Pre). In a first instance, this network functioned above all as a tool to share experiences and feelings, opinions and ideas, by using interaction via e-mail and a website (Rerepre.org). In the following, we will critically analyze the attempts of self-representation undertaken by this network, starting from their discursive and relational online practices which are aimed at making visible precarious conditions and facing them collectively. The Re.Re.Pre website, since its establishment in 2008, works as a network of self-organized publishing workers. The Re.Re.Pre has been a space for spontaneous and cooperative communication with each other. It serves as a tool to build up interaction, using online as well as face-to-face offline relations. The main issue behind this relation building is to promote better

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working conditions and to build collective agency in a situation of precariousness in which the traditional forms of organizing would not be effective. In recent years the Re.Re.Pre had as its main reference point national movements against precarity, such as the network of Saint Precario and the respective website Precaria.org. But, at the same time, it tried to speak with traditional trade unions (especially with some of the components of the CGIL). At the moment the network Re.Re.Pre is structured around three local nodes located in the Italian cities Milan, Bologna, and Rome in which the publishing activities are particularly concentrated. A strong component is maintained in Milan, the city that can be considered the heart of the Italian publishing industry. In the following section we will analyze the online narratives by precarious editors that were collected by the network, insisting particularly on the value of creativity and the experiences of precarious life-stories. We will exhibit two particular dynamics underlying the labor experience described by members of the Re.Re.Pre. The first relates to the visible manifestation and sharing the experience of precarity and the narrative power of online selfrepresentation, as it renders invisible conditions visible; the second is the widespread use of a dual register of online communication, intertwined with offline interaction, to promote forms of coalition based on “friendship” relations and work practices continuously exceeding the time limits set by the employment contract. To this end, the following pages will offer an interpretive synthesis of an article from the Re.Re.Pre (2011), already published in the first issue of the magazine Quaderni di San Precario. 1 Online Story Telling as the Power of Self-Representation of Invisible Conditions The live-stories published by the precarious editors on the Rerepre.org webside reveal how much uncertainty is subjectively perceived as the uncertainty of workers activity and the experiences of precarious life-stories. We will exhibit two particular dynamically powerful resources to avoid the invisibility of individualization. And it is just online that the language and the word give body to the thought and empower it (Foucault 1985), to “make society” in the interactions of speech, which converts the individual experience into a collective experience (Bruner 1991). In an excerpt titled “Accreditation direct to Cv. The man and the yogurt” is written: “there is the stable employee; I would like to say a few words on the subject but it is so rare to speak about him that to talk of him or Superman is the same thing, so I’ll avoid it. Then there’s the temporary employee, he, like yogurt, has a shelf life, but its preservation is longer and is usually around a year or,

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luckily, a little more. The employee is sort of a wild card in the publishing industry, whether he/she work at home or in the office does not make that much difference, he/she often works like a slave, and when you come to see him/her in the refrigerator, you can always throw him/her away. The internship worker is a valuable commodity, it is a crucible of ideals, sourced direct route from the university dairy. . . . Finally then there’s me. . . . The others, despite their complaints about their precarity, at least they have a job and a hated miserable salary. But I am much more fortunate than them, I do not have to stain myself with money, for me the right phrase is “direct accredit to Cv.” What is this? You work for work, just do it for free, and if you ask him what is it that we gain, the answer is always the same: your collaboration with us can boost your Cv. (from the website Rerepre.org) Privileges, now they call them so; those rights that were the result of decades of union struggles that seemed to be acquired for all workers, cancelled in a flurry of laws and sneakiness in recent years: illness, parental leave, vacations, bonuses, retirement, salary increases due to inflation . . . stuff from the last century! (from the website Rerepre.org)

This second fragment, titled “Things from the last century,” reveals the diversity of viewpoints and the anger, frustration, and disenchantment, but also the irony that accompanies the daily effort of those workers, trying to survive daily in poor working conditions, with the most varied temporary contracts in the publishing world. RE.RE.PRE NETWORK: THE ONLINE COMMUNICATION INTERTWINED WITH THE OFF-LINE PRESENCE TO PROMOTE NEW FORMS OF COALITION AND RESISTANCE January 2008 marks a significant step, as the network’s activities evolved from sharing individual indignation to attempting to act collectively, at least in terms of a proposal and a statement of intent. At that time, on the web, in a number of specialized mailing lists and on some websites, the following collectively signed message was quite diffused: A call to all precarious workers of the publishing-editing industries Precarity and exploitation. A condition that today most editorial workers know because they live it in their own skin. Our class, in addition to suffering the consequences of a set of institutional arrangements that are, to put it mildly, insane, is virtually invisible: it seems that no one knows we exist, no one cares about our situation. We too, guilty, are reduced to silence, bowing more and more our heads for few pennies and embracing the logic of competition that underlies the triumphal economic model. The signers firmly believe that the time has come to say: that’s ENOUGH: stop the permanent precarity, stop the denigration of our professionalism, stop

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Cristina Morini, Kristin Carls, and Emiliana Armano individual negotiation of piecework contracts, that imprison us at the desks (at home or, worse, at the office) and that allow us to hardly survive, stop dumping behaviors against our colleagues. Stop, above all, our submissive silence. Today more than ever, we feel the time has come to take care of our lives, our common destiny towards the road of self-organization. We have in mind a network, our network, which serves to valorize us, defend us, support us. A web of experiences and proposals, which seek to vindicate fairer labor conditions, to oppose those who so far have just tried to squeeze us. . . . We want to know how and who would be willing to spend some of his/ her own time and remaining energy on this project, because the network is made of nodes, and the more nodes there are, the narrower the links are between them. We ask you, therefore, to spread this appeal as much as possible and to demonstrate the will to commit to saying no! to this situation. . . . We will let you know if we will be enough to start. Then what? The network is horizontal in nature and is built with the contribution of everyone: we will therefore activate a mailing list where ideas and witnesses can circulate and where we agree to hold a constituent assembly. . . . We will write the rest together. See you there! Some precarious workers of the publishing/editing industry of North, Central and South Italy. (from the website Rerepre.org)

This represents a shift from the simple expression of feelings, on the net, about individual experiences as a victim of precarity, towards the attempt to build coalition. While any kind of action might be used to express discontent and share emotions on an individual basis, the action of the Re.Re.Pre network aims to join the different precarious conditions online. It goes beyond the temptation to simply express self-memory and beyond what Castells has defined as the individualism Network (2004; 2002). In other words, precarious workers here face precarity by creating a network of relationships held together by a bond that can connect them in a symbolic order. In this sense, the plot of the stories and the making of a subject of discourse on precarity, on the Net, may well have a generative perspective in terms of collective identity: it has helped to establish a collective subject that passes from expressing feelings online to proposing projects to be implemented in reality, face to face, and often territorially anchored. In fact, this appeal had positive feedback from fellow writers and publishing editors until, in April 2008, a Constituent Assembly was convened in Milan, where fifty workers gave birth to the core foundation of the Re.Re.Pre. The systematic use of mobile technology designed a flexible and dynamic new way to communicate. Internet and digital media have enabled the precarious editors to implement a horizontal network of interactive communication, able to connect at any time, at “local” and “global” levels, virtual and

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face-to-face, and to develop new ways to position themselves and their rights. The fundamental innovation in relation to digital technology is that there is a sort of middle space of connectivity in which it is possible to build new relationships, to socialize and learn about organizing. This intermediate space, neither merely public nor private, potentially defines a real network across various publishing firms which can take an extended form. From this point on, the network of Re.Re.Pre is formed and expands through informal channels, and the summer of 2008 sees the contact with the RSU (Unitary Union Representative) of the various publishing groups in Milan. In December 2008, the network is presented to the public and to the press with a flyer made by the Cub (an antagonist Trade Union) in front of the main library in Milan, with the launch of the Rerepre.org site. Followed by appearances on radio broadcasts, there were several meetings and activities denouncing precarity in publishing industries: the organization of a conference on precarious labor in publishing (on the fringes of the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna), interventions and flash mobs at the most important book fairs of Milan (Bookcity in December 2012) and Turin (Book Fair in spring 2011), the construction of an important link with the movement of Saint Precarious (important in particular for the drafting of the Manifesto of knowledge workers, accession to the platforms of the 2009 and 2010 Mayday and the participation in the General Estates of Precarity). 2 Finally, there were other initiatives such as the launch of an online survey to map the situation of precarious workers in the publishing industry and the creation of a Facebook profile, which under the name of “Re.Re.Pre” today counts about three hundred friends. The Re.Re.Pre Network has attracted the attention of the most important Italian trade union “CGIL,” and since 2010, of the Council for Professional Work. With all this the “veil of Maya” was torn: thanks to the Internet, many precarious workers and writers have felt less alone and have had one more chance to escape the silence and openly address the harsh reality of the workplace in which they are located: seeking self-fulfillment, meaning, and culture, they found only very precarious working conditions. In mid-2013, during the Italian “technical government” of Mario Monti, after the approval of the labor market reform (named Fornero, by the Labor Ministry), which has resulted in a further increase in precarity and therefore an increasing desire to react, the Re.Re.Pre thought it could make a quantum leap: it set up a file with the mapping of the editorial situation in Milan, which collects data from more than 300 workers and organizes a viral campaign on social networks to denounce these “numbers of shame.” However, at the last, everything sells. So an activist network, called Santa Pazienza

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(Saint of Patience), describes the crisis and the inability to flow to the bottom of claims and of the necessary conflicts: First, there is hesitation, there are steps back: no one wants to tell his/her story to journalists, no one feels like pressing charges indirectly on the publisher. Some start to be afraid and immediately the group disintegrates. Worse, some began to study exit strategies at the individual level, to speak—without telling colleagues—with the office staff to find solutions for themselves. Others decide to propose a bargaining table, where to look for a compromise: the claims are watered down, the company procrastinates because it knows that the hourglass runs in its favour. The counterpart (the firm) takes time; workers misled by the firm’s statement of availability let their guard down, lay down their arms of conspiracy, commit countless missteps. Soon, the front falls apart.

CONCLUSION Our analysis of knowledge and cognitive labor in journalism and book publishing, based on a narrative co-research process and cyber-ethnography, has revolved around the link between changing forms of work, precariousness, and the commodification of emotional experiences and creative capacities. In this process, we have particularly insisted on how editorial workers establish a relationship between themselves and their work. Within our co-research group, precariousness is experienced in various different forms that, well beyond the employment contract, are linked to the labor process and control. Within the work process, precarization results from the conditions of forced availability and blackmailing, the intensification of workloads and rhythms and the existential insecurities these entail. Moreover, it is linked to the strengthening of hierarchies and direct control, and the weakening of professional identities. Indeed, in order to establish effective labor control, to gain access to and put to work workers’ cognitive labor capacities, management cannot simply rely on the power of blackmailing based on precarious work and employment conditions. It also needs to condition workers’ motivations and subjectivities. That is, effective labor control needs to involve workers’ professional identities, their creative passion for their job and their emotional investment in their work—even more so under precarious conditions. These desires, and particularly the emotional attachment to the object of one’s work, its contents and quality, can be exploited by management in order to capture, control, and commodify workers’ cognitive capacities within the labor process. A control and exploitation, however, that remains incomplete and (at least potentially) unstable as it has to be constantly kept up against the daily frustration of workers’ professional expectations and the continuous experiences of precarization. In fact, such frustration might well reveal itself as a catalyzer of conflict, as the attempts of collective organizing

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among our group of precarious editorial workers in book publishing shows, though with all the described difficulties. The experience of networking by the Re.Re.Pre informs us, on the one hand, of the importance of using the potential offered by technological developments and social innovation. Internet has enabled and allows us to find information, get in touch with others, and thus break the individualized coping practices imposed by insecurity, experimenting with forms of co-conspiracy and conflict. On the other hand, in our case-study, the use of the web and social networking is not enough in order to overcome the main problems of organizing resistance and opposition encountered by workers and working poor in the areas of cognitive labor. In particular: • Networking remains a complex issue and does not circumvent the problem of subjectivity. Even if you identify the control mechanisms that govern contemporary labor, and even if the network makes it easier to build and share reflections and knowledge, it is hard to aggregate real conflicting energies around the theme of precarity in the publishing industry, as in other areas; • Ideologies of merit and creative labor as well as the inclusion of items related to passion and emotional blackmail that particularly act on cognitive labor require a constant performativity, and make it difficult to distance oneself from work. Internet is now full of similar initiatives. The evaluation of the problems encountered, in any case, does not raise the value of the forms of co-creation based on collaboration and information flows that are capable of providing continuous support to learn from one another, in a process of continuous improvement and innovation. Clearly all this cannot replace, in its entirety, the general problems of organizing cognitive labor with which we are confronted. In regard to the subjectivity of cognitive labor, our co-research among editorial workers and journalists has brought to the foreground how the relationship between workers and their object of work is modulated by emotions and passions, and how the resulting imaginaries play a central role in the social construction of reality and practices through which the meaning of precariousness and creativity is redefined. This regards the way in which workers identify with their work, the kinds of individual and/or collective imaginaries they derive from these identities, and especially how they make sense of daily experienced conflicts and contradictions. A crucial aspect appears to be the degree to which workers render these conflicts invisible or visible within their common sense, whether (at least at the level of meaning constructions) they would rather try to smooth out or to name and address conflicts, and, last but not least, whether they manage to develop the neces-

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sary collective agency potential to face them. Thus, the analysis of meaning constructions inherent in workers’ narratives about everyday work experiences has been useful to us for at least two reasons: First, in order to make the coping practices used to face daily lived conflicts and contradictions within the labor process emerge, and, secondly, to critically question the resulting agency potential, its limits and prospects of enlargement within a collective discussion process. NOTES Translation from the Italian language by Kristin Carls and Andrea Fumagalli. The coauthors of this article thank Valeria Graziano for their attentive supervision of this translation. The research project and the article are the result of joint work of the three authors. All the paragraphs include many ideas and research tracks from both authors. 1. Rete dei redattori precari, I redattori precari si raccontano, Quaderni di San Precario— n. 1: p. 209–32. Available at web page: www.http://quaderni.sanprecario.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ Q1-I-redattori-precari-si-raccontano.pdf. 2. On these topics, see Fumagalli’s chapter in this book.

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Chapter Fourteen

Unblock the Chain Cooperative Processes and P2P Technologies between Commons and Capitalist Integration Giorgio Griziotti

This article is born from the debate around the crypto currencies in Italy and intends to present some elements of investigation on areas naturally keen to the adoption of electronic money, and to an organizational practice of autonomous and decentralized productions. This is the context in which the social and economic processes of Peer to Peer (P2P) are instantiated. In other words, these are the decentralized forms of collaborative activities based on the principles of P2P networking, where everything communicates with everything without a hierarchical center. We cannot deny that the Bitcoin had an important role in the development of this environment. At the end of the previous industrial phase cognitive capitalism, moved by a financial rationality and defeating the organized working class, has also destroyed the existing social relations of production without creating new ones. Today, thirty-five years after taking almost absolute power, this global governance has proved to be unable to create a new balance. The deliquescence of the political, economic, and social infrastructure, and the Great Recession that characterized the first two decades of the twenty-first century, appears as the consequence of this systemic crisis. Such a scenario feeds populist gasps, nationalist outbreaks, and fanatic archaic religious integralism. But, we also assist, and not only in Europe, the emergence of an increasingly widespread research of new forms of organization and production often driven by a desire for self-government and exodus. The autonomous commons are cooperative forms of post-capitalist and eco227

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logical production. They are organized from the local to the global (glocal), and they experience methods of self-management with an egalitarian and not capitalist ethic: a set of guidelines which look vaguely anarchist. The Catalan Integrated Cooperative (CIC) is the first and most advanced example of this new movement. The autonomous commons are the left wing of a much larger trend, the “collaborative commons,” which in the meaning given by J. Rifkin, 1 becomes a generic term. This last, all-purpose definition covers quite everything: the sharing economy, the free software, the social networks, the “Internet of things and energy,” and the growing number of alternative initiatives. These activities can assume different statuses as start-ups, associations, cooperatives, etc., sailing as they can in the swamp of the recession. According to Rifkin, this generic cooperation, approximately horizontal, is to replace the hierarchical one causing the inevitable decline of capitalism. This assumption seems denied by the facts, capitalism is making the sharing economy its workhorse and many collaborative activities are now the main “product” offered by companies, based on large technology platforms built for sucking income from prosumer’s work on the network. The two most mediatized recent examples are Uber, which makes us become taxi drivers precarious and exploited, and Airbnb, which transforms us all into guesthouses hosts. The hypothesis that we will try to develop here is that in this magma of the social and productive cooperation network the Marxian categories of real or formal submission to capital become difficult to distinguish. At the same time, the tension to practice an unsubmitted cooperation is growing. The previous industrial age is characterized by strong forms of a sense of belonging and by a dichotomy between capital and the working class in the productive universe. Now it is impossible to make well-defined distinctions in productive multitudes, except the minority group of the financial oligarchy. There are no barriers in a wide spectrum ranging from autonomous experiences that, in addition to claiming non-capitalist ethics, refuse any compromise with the more or less infiltrated or Venture Capital remotecontrolled ones. In France, for example, institutions are increasingly present in these areas where they introduce agencies with the specific task to transform the overall precariat in an attractive start-up creation for the privileged few. Even if watching the same magma from the opposite point of view, the situation is not different and it could be misleading to look for the classification and different roles between types of capitalism: the classical hierarchical organization of large transnational corporations, the netarchical 2 one, like the mainstream platforms of the sharing economy, and the distributed one represented by the “libertarian dream realization in which every human being is an entrepreneur who seeks his own personal profit.” 3 All these trends are mixed and combine to operate on a continuum of products and

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flows. On one hand they intensify the wage and precarious labor exploitation rhythms, on the other hand they increase the financial income through prosumers’ free labor. In 2012, Benedetto Vecchi, in a review dedicated to the book “In the facebook aquarium, the resistible rise of anarco-capitalism” 4 by the anarchist collective Ippolita, does a first diagnosis of this osmosis between enemy brothers of the two opposing forms of anarchy: the capitalist and the left one. According to Vecchi, the Ippolita pamphlet leads an intimate but incomplete attack against Facebook and anarco-capitalists, but the book miss two key points. Primarily, the structural constraints that bind capitalism to the oppressive institutional power are not clarified, and then there is no political denunciation of the capitalistic social relations of production established by Facebook that vampirizes a large component of the free work done by its users. This lack of clarity in the criticism made by left anarchists against their right-wing “twin,” highlighted by Vecchi, is typical of what happens in the collaborative commons field. We have at least some elements that allow us, if not to explain, to understand the difficulty in establishing clear separation lines between different organization modes. The first element has a methodological nature: although we live under the heavy influence of neoliberal ideology, generation Y prefers to give priority to action. It does not seem important here if this is a reaction of certain ideological excesses of previous generations, a consequence of the “real socialism’s” collapse, or if it is due to the pervasive cynicism induced by commodification of everything or, perhaps, a mixture of all these elements. The second element is linked to the decentralization permitted by increasingly sophisticated P2P technologies. This is a common ground of the two “anarchies” where the same technology can be used to build two politically opposed mediations. A third essential element is the relationship between decentralization and the state of the art of network technologies such as blockchain 2.0. BLOCKCHAIN 2.0: A TECHNOLOGY OF A DYSTOPIA OR A TOOL OF THE NEW COMMONS? Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym covering the identity of the inventors of Bitcoin, in speaking about the socio-political consequences of P2P technologies, 5 declares: [Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though . . . we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled net-

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The Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are attractive not only to libertarians. As for Facebook, there is also, in the present context, an “aquarium of Bitcoins,” often functional to the financial oligarchies. The participant who tries to get out from the cryptocurrency enclosure is forced to pass the control and the capture: for example, when it changes its bitcoins or other digital moneys in euros or dollars. For the global financial oligarchy agencies that can be legal or the mafia-type, these rules do not apply, of course. In this game, however, the Bitcoin has a minor role if compared to the tax and moneylaundering havens practiced by the major corporations and banks in tropical exotic sites, but also in the enclosure of Luxembourg, ruled during eighteen years by the president of the European Commission. 6 In any case the Bitcoin introduces the blockchain, an essential element in the development of P2P technologies. The concept of blockchain is derived from the principle of an electronic ledger in which all the transactions of every bitcoin since the moment it is generated are written. Blockchain is a file replicated by each user at the beginning of its activity. By participating in the collective effort to keep the blockchain updated each miner provides, among other things, the “proof of work” that allows him to participate in the extraction of new cryptic bitcoin blocks. This mechanism is the condition which effectively allows a completely decentralized system to have no central responsibility to maintain safety, consistency, and integrity. 7 Ongoing developments extend the capabilities of this principle by including a programming language that permits you to integrate, into blockchain, the code to perform procedures of any complexity. Here a new paradigm emerges of digital applications and contracts of pure P2P that are autolegitimated by the peer participation, without the need of a central authority. Some examples of future blockchain applications often evoked are: dynamic electronic voting, file-sharing networks that allow the copyright infringement and in general other activities, sometimes illegal, with transactions that pass under the radar of controls and taxation. These could also include financial derivatives, gambling, or even applications to attribute an identity and to allocate a universal income. This will lead to the conceptualization of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) or Corporations (DAC). Vitalik Buterin, class of 1994, co-founder of Bitcoin magazine and more recently of Ethereum, a platform for the creation of decentralized applications, outlines below the philosophy of the DAO/DAC: 8 Computer software is increasingly becoming the single most important building block of our modern world, but up until now search into the area has been focused on two areas: artificial intelligence, software working purely on its own, and software tools working under human beings. The question is: is there

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something in the middle? If there is, the idea of software directing humans, the decentralized corporation, is exactly that. Contrary to fears, this would not be an evil heartless robot imposing an iron fist on humanity; in fact, the tasks that the corporation will need to outsource are precisely those that require the most human freedom and creativity. Let’s see if it’s possible.

In spite of the young Buterin’s brilliant technological mind, this kind of thinking could be interpreted in ambiguous modes and also as a dream (or nightmare) of messianic omnipotence of the technosciences. 9 Brett Scott’s interesting article 10 about blockchain politics makes us aware of a technoLeviathan vision where One merely escapes to a different set of rules, not one controlled by “politicians,” but one in the hands of programmers and those in control of computing power . . . a self-sustaining system can be created by individuals following a set of rules that are set apart from human frailties or intervention. Such a system is assumed to be fairer by allowing people to win out against those powers who can abuse rules.

A vision where the ontological contempt of human nature seems to be pushed to an extreme and individualistic conclusion: unmodifiable algorithms in an active blockchain will be a better way to manage and to govern humanity then the “corrupted politicians.” The blockchain could also be used by the financial power networks. They could conceive autonomous digital corporations where the “peers” are the shareholders that extract profit—in activities exclusively managed by algorithms that drive human labor. Will it be the Blockchain 2.0 that “activates” the workers of the “zero hour contracts”? On the other end, these technologies could be used in an opposite collective way. We could imagine that forms of non-representative and direct ways to take democratic decisions could be established with the support of blockchain technology. Will the collective intellect be capable of creating the context in which these technologies amplify and strengthen the non-capitalist forms of governance to the point of making them uncontrollable? 11 The first attempts to insert a cryptocurrency in a context of autonomous cooperation are ongoing. An example is the Faircoin recently adopted by the project Faircoop. In addition to technically correcting the waste of energy required by Bitcoin and similar 12 projects, the Faircoin is part of a very articulated global project. Faircoop is an initiative that has its origins in the CIC and the P2P Foundation, and that try to globally federate a broad set of instances of commons autonomy like Integrated Cooperatives and other noncapitalistic activities.

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DECENTRALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE COMMONS Decentralization is therefore an underlying trend, and the P2P collaborative applications are a fundamental part of their technologic infrastructure. As we can see in the above paragraph these applications do not guarantee that these tools will be at the service of the autonomous commons. Cognitive capitalism directly uses P2P technologies that can be perfectly suited in the process of putting life at work. The philosophy of the Decentralized Autonomous Corporation, based on the principle of an application designed to manage humans, could amplify this tendency. In this context, the attitude of those who assumes an “automatic” decline of capitalism in front of the growth of collaborative commons and the expansion of P2P technologies is mystifying, because it pushes one to drop the guard and distracts them from the need to fight politically for a more democratic, fair, and ecological society. While the Soviet regime was not able to create the non-capitalist modes of cooperation, which contributed to its extinction, the actual autonomous cooperative initiatives are not aware of the reverse danger: seeking new forms of cooperation but losing the political capacity to change the present. Neither the Occupy movements, an important but ephemeral milestone, nor the Pirates Parties, neither the recent success of the Podemos party in Spain nor the Syriza party in Greece, seem in themselves sufficient to coagulate the political force that corresponds to a glocal post-capitalist movement. The success of a recent social strike in Italy indicates the possible opening of another front that could be linked with the autonomous cooperation movement. The claim of a universal unconditional income, which, among other things, would enormously enhance the autonomous cooperation activities, is the axis on which these convergences can operate and accelerate the process of political maturation. Today the technological infrastructure network and collaborative processes of P2P are essential tools in an uncertain and risky environment. The spark of radical change is the ultimate human responsibility. NOTES Translation from the Italian language by Giorgio Griziotti and Dasha Lavrennikov. 1. J. Rifkin, The zero margin cost society, 2014 Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Term proposed by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. 3. http://www.uninomade.org/intervista-a-michel-bauwens/. 4. The book: http://www.ippolita.net/en/facebook-aquarium, and the article: http:// www.uninomade.org/disincanto-ippolita-e-sboom-facebook/. 5. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto . 6. Current so-called scandal Luxleaks: http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/economie-mondiale/article/2014/11/05/evasion-fiscale-tout-sur-les-secrets-du-luxembourg_4518895_1656941.html. 7. For those wishing to explore the subject on Bitcoin in depth see the article http:// www.dyndy.net/2013/04/bitcoin-ends-the-taboo-on-money/.

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8. Article in three parts by Vitalik Buterin: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7119/bootstrapping-an-autonomous-decentralized-corporation-part-2-interacting-with-the-world/. 9. This echoes Simondon’s theory about a technicality as symmetrical and opposite mediation of the religion. 10. http://www.e-ir.info/2014/06/01/visions-of-a-techno-leviathan-the-politics-of-the-bitcoin-blockchain/. 11. See in this regard, the reflections on political fiction “software agents communists” that would allow, among other economic planning effective platforms: Red plenty of Dyer-Witheford. Posted on www.culturemachine.net. 12. The faircoin introduces the algorithm of mining the principle of “Proof of stake,” a kind of proof of presence by reducing the role of the “proof of work” and the computing power as an engine extraction. See the site https://fair.coop/.

Chapter Fifteen

The Pollination of Creativity For a Basic Income in the Creative Capitalism of Network Societies Yann Moulier Boutang

CREATIVITY: WHAT IS IT SUPPOSED TO BE? Creativity and innovation are used more and more frequently in management and economics. They both mean a renewal in technical devices of production, in applied knowledge and development of processes, products, and proceedings. Both tangible and intangible assets are concerned. The deposit of tradable patents, copyrighted materials, and marks is generally considered as a signal of creative, inventive, and innovative activities. In a highly competitive economy (the neoclassic hypothesis of a great number of competitors) but also in a less competitive economy (i.e., dominated by monopolies), the position of a firm in terms of profits and competitiveness (as shares of the market) depends on its ability to sequentially produce new goods and services, so as not to be a victim of the downward oriented segment of the life cycle of these productions and services that is shorter and shorter: from 40 years of age in traditional mechanical manufacturing to 3–4 years for a program in informatics. An increase in competition means an increase in a search for a continuous renewal. Apple has been criticized recently for its slowdown in presenting true innovation in iPhones and tablets each year. Since Schumpeter, it has been admitted among economists that invention has to become applied to a large scale by firms and/or society to bear the name of innovation. Innovation involves the process of creation of something new for its own sake as well as for the novelty of a solution it provides. Both invention and innovation describe the objective face of the phenomena, 235

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whereas creativity grasps the subjective quality of the inventor or of the innovator. Yet if invention and innovation are not controversial, the concept of creativity is much more discussed for its ambiguity. AMBIGUITY OF CREATIVITY If we want to avoid a purely psychological concept for creativity as a gift and the discussion on nature and nurture (acquisition), we should introduce two specifications: a) creativity alludes to the imagination of something not given in contrast with imitation as a mere repetition of the past or the present; b) but imagination does not mean here to program a pre-settled procedure to obtain a forecasted result, according to a logical and already mastered process. Planning, management, execution, and repetition of already learned procedures cannot be defined as manifestations of creativity. Tautological deduction does not explain invention of something new as Kant has pointed out in his first Critique of Pure Reason. The problem of knowledge and progress in knowledge and learning is the a priori synthetic judgment and the imagination not repeating already perceived affects. Gabriel Tarde (1890) on the one hand has shown that imitation is never mere repetition as soon as we are dealing with living beings and society. Gilles Deleuze (1994) on the other has explained in Difference and Repetition that even repetition should be grasped in its productivity through the lentil of “difference.” Three notions allow a better approach of creativity: the definition of intelligence in a digital context and the characteristic of invention or discovery of a solution. One can define intelligence as the ability to give a successful answer, to question the solution of which has not already been pre-settled in a digital program. Creativity is thus synonymous with intelligence and smartness. The second notion is effectuation logic instead of causal logic in the discovery and invention of a solution. Saras D. Sarasvathy (2009) has proposed some rules for entrepreneurs: the Bird in hand principle (starting with resources you do and do not have with goals), the less affordable loss principle (do not seek hypothetical profits but minimize the possible losses, the Crazy quilt principle (cooperate with parties you can trust), the Lemonade principle (be able to seize opportunities when they occur and do not follow a predetermined plan) and The Pilot-in-the-plane principle (do not lose time to predict the future but act on the factors you can control and that have a good chance to shape the future). These principles are very similar to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) has developed in his last book: if you cannot make trustful predictions about the objective state of the world (due to too many variables and nonlinear processes) try to make yourself less fragile.

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The third basic notion of creativity is the notion of serendipity, a strange blending of wisdom, chance, and intelligence without determined goals. Horace Walpole (1754) has described the Three Princes of Serendip “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995) point out that the serendipitous quality means the “ability to create knowledge not by processing information,” but rather by “tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights.” All these characteristics are needed to find solutions to complex problems when analytical, deductive, and causal logic are not sufficient. Creativity is needed to understand and manage a complex situation when predictions relying upon statistical probabilities about the state of the world have failed. What becomes evident, as soon as we proceed into a deeper examination of creativity, is that creativity is a contradictory and nonlinear notion. If you admit that creativity is an equivalent of tackling with complexity and finding new solutions to complex enigmas, the injunction to be creative or to practice creativity (a permanent principle of management of innovation) seems a perfect example of a double bind injunction or constraint (G. Bateson 1972). This is probably one of the reasons why the notion of creativity has been rapidly criticized for being a mere disguise and deceit of the new forms of exploitation of highly trained manpower. A recent exhibition in Pau (France), Disnovation (2014) has scorned the ideology of “disruptive innovation” that fits so well to new forms of programmed obsolescence, when the old one (creating products vowed to a rapid decay) is more and more jeopardized. The imperative of creativity and innovation pushes the wage earner of the socalled creative class to adopt a position of effort at his maximum without receiving a codified and objective reward for his competencies that exceeds his qualifications. Revisiting Harvey Lebeinstein’s famous X-efficiency (H. Lebeinstein, 1966), we could say that invoking creativity in a performative way is but a new device to get a better position of effort from the wage earner when old incentives have failed. But this contradictory injunction at the root of the well-known phenomena of “burning out” at work, cannot be treated as a mere and rough trick to exploit the invention-labor-force equipped by digital means, connected and relying upon big data, following the old model of exploitation of the working force. It is not by chance that Maurizio Lazzarato has developed this relevant concept in a book about Gabriel Tarde (Lazzarato 2002). This author had explained that human imitation should be revaluated because it involves always à part of creation or recreation. Recalling creativity and invention is a necessity for cognitive capitalism, a true contradiction that it cannot elude. We shall now examine this point.

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AN INTERPRETATION FOR A CATEGORY THAT WAS BORROWED FROM ART What is creativity in art? Since the Italian Quatrocento and the Renaissance in Europe, it has been to draw a clear distinction between transmission as a mere copy and the work of a genius that refers to the Latin word ingenire, to find and discover something new. Romanticism has added the individual character of the artist and authorship. But the important feature of the category of creation is the rupture of the work of the artist compared to the past, as a fractal of the creation by God of the world and mankind upon chaos. Thereafter, the injunction of novelty has never ceased, even if painting and sculpture of the classical and baroque period has claimed to imitate Antiquity, but this Antiquity was disruptive of the Medieval production in sacred or secular art, and since the Quarrel of the Ancient and the Modern between the Perrault brothers and Bernini on the project of the Square Court of the Louvre, rupture with the Baroque was praised. In fact with the break of Perrault, the Modern was to introduce a kind of monumentality fitting the absolutism of the King. This imperative of modernity has infused Romanticism, the Impressionist school, the surrealist revolution, modern and contemporary art. There is a direct correspondence between the artistic commandment of invention and creativity and the continuously disruptive transformation of production by capitalism, although one must qualify this statement. Art since the Renaissance has generally been in advance, if compared to the sphere of economy. Abstract art has preceded dematerialization of value. Relational art or relational aesthetics, as described by Nicolas Bourriaud (1996, 113), has shown up five year before the Web 2.0. It is no surprise, one should reply; is this not the role of the “avant-garde”? There is also another set of specific reasons that have installed artistic creativity closer into the core of extraction of economic value. Let us say a few words about the definition of cognitive capitalism (Y. Moulier Boutang 2012). In its first period, cognitive capitalism has turned simple cognitive operations of the brain mechanized, computable and substitutable, as the first industrial revolution had replaced physical force by machine. Only routine tasks were concerned. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) have pointed out, “During the first machine age, which was triggered by the Industrial Revolution, new technologies automated a lot of the physical work. In contrast, the second machine age is automating and augmenting our cognitive tasks. . . . The first wave of automation is hitting routine information processing tasks, for instance tax preparation. Software programs like Turbo Tax can do your taxes cheaper and quicker than most human tax preparers. As a result we have fewer human tax preparers than we used to. But it’s not just the routine information processing tasks that are being affected.” With the spillover of machine learning, i.e., of programs of algo-

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rithms fed by big data in real time and correcting their decisions, a lot of very complicated tasks performed by a great number of agents can be modeled and performed without any direct intervention of man. Routine procedures are extended to new domains such as translation, expertise, driving, parking a car, writing articles for newspapers. The revolution of big data as described by Viktor Mayer-Schöneberger and Kenneth Cukier’s controversial but illuminating book (2013), has opened up the possibility for cognitive capitalism to penetrate the automation of the governance of complexity, what Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns have called the Algorithmic Government (2010). Governance means, here, what capitalism can suck from collective interaction of the multitude, when inventing intelligence is connecting and playing the real game of life. We have defined cognitive capitalism as the capture, through digital platforms, of the positive externalities resulting from collective and connecting intelligence (Y. Moulier Boutang 1997, 2011). The second wave of the second age machines fits perfectly in this program. Where and how does art come into this program? THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF INTANGIBLES 2 Automation of the human brain by digitalization, that is, codification into programs and algorithms has produced the same effect as the mechanization of physical activities: it has increased productivity of labor in huge proportions. But at the same time, it has depreciated menial works tearing away large amounts of medium- and low-skilled tasks. The first effect of the digital revolution has been to de-skill blue-collar workers end employees. The second effect has been to extend the process to cognitive jobs (those that have to do with the guidance of a complicate process). The third effect, the beginning of which we are experiencing now, is a first attempt to replace human decision in complex tasks imitating human behavior through machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence. In each of these cases, the biggest part of added value is shifting towards the intangibles hardly codified in software, intellectual property rights, serial procedures, that I have called intangibles of level 2, of halo intangibles: cooperation instead of coordination, singularity instead of the general, competence instead of qualification, care instead of mechanical treatment, contextualization, and implicit knowledge. If we examine the kinds of intelligence and perception that are needed for these intangibles, we find that it reintegrates intuition, expertise in complex matters, synthesis, and global perception of forms rather than the analytic brain. What is at stake is complexity, heterogeneity, and heterotopy. Creativity is not needed to execute a simple program, in a binomial black or white world. Descartes’s fifth and sixth rules for the guidance of the Spirit (“divide difficulty into simpler parts and reassemble them after by summing”) (Des-

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cartes 1628–1701) cannot help because it holds that the total is but the sum of the elements. Nuances of grey cannot be grasped by black or white, nor can the whole spectrum of colors. The thesis of lateralization of creativity in the right brain (following the experimentation of Roger Sperry [Nobel Prize 1981], the books of Betty Edwards (1979), are rather simplistic. Lucien Israël (1996), although sharing the main thesis of the previous authors, i.e., promoting a revaluation of the role of the right hemisphere, is aware of the complexity of the brain: each cognitive operation mobilizes both parts of the brain, but he holds that in Western civilization too much space has been devoted to the analytical mind. A large experiment conducted in the University of Utah has not found any evidence of a clear lateralization of cognitive functions even if some asymmetry is evident. Kahneman et al. (2011) have proposed a distinction between the slow way of thinking (analytical) and the fast way (intuition, synthesis). Thus, the good distinction is not between the left or right brain (the lateralization of creativity) but between understanding, feeling, and sharing complicated or complex objects: the direct productivity structure or dynamic systems; between what can be codified in a binary way (true/untrue, on/off, black/white) and what cannot. In the kingdom of complication, the logic of Aristotle and the three components of the principles of contradiction can apply (especially the third excluded principle), whereas in the kingdom of complexity, one must use Stoic logic with its famous paradoxes and the fuzzy mathematics. For modelling complexity using non-statistical prediction and especially for events possible but not plausible see Zyed Zalila (1993) and also N.N. Taleb’s Black Swan (2010) and Anti-fragile (2012). But one must notice that the human brain is able to deal with complexity, and knowledge of complex matters. If continuity, infinity, and negative quantities require sophisticated mathematics, the use of spoken or written language, of analogical symbols, of arts (including music) has been able to allow human beings to apprehend complexity, to reproduce it, to perceive it, to share and to teach it. Very simple problems like how a child can learn to speak, to read (three hundred operations of the brain at the same time). How can we share judgment of beauty, of qualitative valuation? How and why does language evolves by means of its two main tropes, metaphor and metonymy? Why does the ambiguity of language, that is, its fuzziness make it superior for dealing with the utmost degree of complexity if compared to mathematical precision? Why can images, drawings, and architectural forms grasp more relations and provide a synthesis of what is implicit. Since Herbert Simon we know that substantial rationality cannot be separated from procedural rationality, and that the program for research in artificial intelligence is not to try to make the brain work like a computer, but to make the computer imitate the brain to try to catch its principal quality, intelligence and invention of new solutions.

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Cognitive capitalism is seeking endlessly to codify and appropriate intangibles of this meta-level. Why? Because, what is rare now, is not information but intelligence. But when trying to do so, it faces two obstacles. First, codification through procedures, algorithms, and intellectual property rights depreciate their value rapidly, inasmuch as the execution of IPR is threatened by digitalization. Second, as soon as they are codified intangibles 2 are losing a great part of their efficiency. Unlike industrial production, there is no way to produce a best seller, a masterpiece: too much uncertainty, too many variables. The attempts of the years 1970–2005 to capture intangibles 2, reducing them to the traditional and codified intangibles, have failed. In its first valorization device, cognitive capitalism has systematically used interactivity (blogs, tags, forum, search engines) and mobile phone platforms, such as GPS, beyond the traditional use of cookies for dedicated publicity and the branding of the audience; it has been creative as far as it could capture positive externalities resulting from increased interaction of the multitude in networks, be they platforms or search engines. But it was only with the generalization of production, of a huge amount of data in another network of interconnected objects, that a conception of algorithmic intelligence has appeared that closely resembles the validation of aesthetic judgment by a mimicry of the connected collective brain of multitudes in the city, in life, and the appropriation of the new digital commons. The critical point was a shift from an individualistic exploitation of each wage earner or contributor (the clicker) towards a commons, a global exploitation of the social productivity of interactivity. At this point we should ask: in the cognitive and creative capitalism extraction of intelligence, what does exploitation looks like? EXPLOITATION AT THE SECOND LEVEL, PRODUCTION OF VALUE FROM POLLINATION Exploitation of the creative force or invention-force means that labor stays alive in the process of labor and is not reduced to mere dead labor. 1 In both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, the correct metaphor or paradigm is what we can observe with the pollination of the biosphere: the economic value of the service of pollination is worth between a hundred to five thousand times the value of the output of the bees in terms of marketable goods. We can notice that what Marx called the extraction of surplus work by the individual capitalist perfectly fits the case of the beekeeper and the bees. But what about the social exploitation of the human equivalent for bee’s pollination: linguistic, cultural, relational, living, activities (including what stays outside of the market and salary waged work, hence the positive external-

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ities)? Marx was well aware of the social productivity of the collective labor of workers gathered under the commandment of the capitalists and its exclusive control of the means of production. But outside the factory, there was no production of capital but the conditions of its reproduction, including the reproduction of the working class. What is happening today under the regime of cognitive capitalism is exactly what was described in the fragment of the Grundrisse (1857–58) on the machine. Life, population, interaction of man with its biosphere and noosphere are producing the greatest part of wealth. It is this continent, that is still mostly made of positive externalities, that cognitive capitalism has started to colonize in a new primitive accumulation. But extracting social surplus value from the pollinating multitude is but a gentle walk, it faces new forms of antagonism. Living labor being exalted in platforms of the cloud, the brain, and cognitive learning activities and emotions becoming the basis for the extraction of Big Data, the old proletarianization (deprivation from the control over the means of production is not given as a natural situation in society) cannot support the acceptance of exploitation as previously. Creative classes (not the mythic class of R. T. Florida but the concrete composition of learning and knowing classes) are starting to claim for the ownership and free disposition of its creativity, inasmuch as the destruction of the planet (the equivalent of the death of the bees) is raising an active and intelligent rebellion that bees have not shown. Another factor of a radical critique of cognitive capitalism, is the superfluous character of the exploitation that does not make the dictatorship of the law of value, measured by the wage system and the time of labor, a condition to the development of wealth. When what is at stake is not only production, that is, the quality or quantity of surplus value, but what both juridical means of appropriation, definition of classes, means of production, nature of exploitation consist of now, are we not discussing of relations of production and mode of production? This is the reason why we do not agree with those who consider cognitive capitalism merely as a simple continuation and an improvement of industrial capitalism. Under cognitive or creative capitalism, the organization of a long duration cycle of exploitation is as hazardous as long-term employment. Proletarianization, like the measure of what is intellectual capital, is becoming itself hazardous and precarious. This goes with the monstrous importance of finance capital and the resilience of financial bubbles and crises. This instability has nothing to do with a crisis of realization and disproportion between demand and supply of the goods as recently claimed by Gordon and Brenner. Creative capitalism has to overcome the following vital contradiction. The most valuable part of profit has to be extracted from the collective productivity of the multitudes digitally equipped. This means that the strate-

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gy of dispossession, consisting of reproletarianizing the General Intellect by reducing intangibles 2 to intangibles 1 through the generalization of intellectual property rights (the IPRization of the world), meets insuperable limits. The powerful threat of getting rid of human intelligence by algorithmization led by big data and a constant espionage of the inventions of flight, constantly bridle the needs to control and dominate the process of production of value. What we attend to from now on is the resumption of techniques created by the multitude (digital Quilombos, collaborative places, digital canteens, workshops, Fablabs), to turn them against the new digital common spaces and fold them in the financial normalization of the model of business (affairs) and production of cash money. Every time their legal owners are investing in the format or the technical equipment or the data storage, they receive back about twenty years of exclusive exploitation of the data, that is more or less what a patent would have given to them, although invention and creativity were not on their side, whereas the true authors of these same data, practically do not have a say. Through Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon on the one hand and multiple data banks on the other, there is a rapid transformation of the continent of the positive externalities into marketable goods. The new creative digital commons are experiencing a serious offensive of colonization. Indeed, initiatives such as the development of the encryption of data by their producers and authors, the multiplication of a personal decentralized cloud, begin to raise the question of the relationships of property of platforms and of their contents (personal data, open science, knowledge produced by public financing). Movements like the Tiers Lieux (Third places) (Yoann Duriaux) in France, the Peer 2 Peer Foundation (M. Bauwens) or the Open Knowledge Foundation are all stressing the importance of a new codification of intangibles property. The crucial idea is to make a clear separation between a generic open source movement and the creative commons movement of Lawrence Lessig or the Free Software Foundation of R. Stallman. The open source movement does not claim for precise modalities of appropriation of the new digital commons. It yields the positive externalities produced in the new digital commons to the market sphere without claiming rewards or limits like the free software movement of Stallman that has settled the obligation of keeping open the code source? I have shown, elsewhere (Y. Moulier Boutang 2008), that the open source in this new period of primitive accumulation of cognitive capitalism was very similar to the terra nullius principle that the European colonists had set forth against the native peoples of America, Australia, or New Zealand so as to appropriate their lands and resources. Their denial of any property rights (usus, fructus, access) on the basis that abusus (definitive transfer of property) was neither designed nor written, allowed for the dispossession and the proletarianization of the Amer-

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indians. Nowadays, when private firms or public agencies are standing aggressively in favor of a gratuitous access to data, information, and knowledge, combined with the settlement of new intellectual property rights on data banks, we should not praise their generosity but pay attention to what they are doing in a very smart way: depriving the new commoners of tools for defending digital Quilombos. The battle on the new digital enclosures is very entrenched with technological issues, and the impressive rhythm of progress in memory, computational power, the flows in the broad band, and the appropriation by the multitude of digital culture. Creativity of cognitive capitalism depends deeply on the intensity of struggles among hackers, crackers, pirates, and “leakers” against re-enclosed spaces of liberty in the New Found Lands. Even among the main stream of economics, some recognition of the relevance of Elenor Ostrom’s analysis of what property rights consists of has occurred. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (2012) have developed interesting insights into these arguments. A lot of invention and creativity in law is needed to face the challenge of a sustainable cognitive capitalism, that is to say, for a new embedding of the “wealth of networks” (Y. Benkler 2003). But it would be very naïve to wait for a neutral and fair trial and error method to create good conditions for increasing human pollination. The trend within capitalism for dealing with intangibles 2 is already to try to reduce them to codified and sizable intellectual property rights, because persistence of control over living collective labor will be a priority whatever the economic cost may be (Y. Moulier Boutang 2011). When you are dealing with surplus value, mostly extracted from the general interaction of the multitude, captured by its traceability upon digital platforms, when exploitation has reached life in society and not in the factory, and when activity in life overcomes working hours in factories or offices, the bargaining of the creative force can only be measured at a global level. This is the reason why the objective of an unconditional basic income for all, besides subordinated labor, has acquired a strategic importance (Y. Moulier Boutang 2012). Reducing the creativity of the multitudes on human pollination platforms is operated when social exploitation of the General Intellect is measured by the salary of the individual waged laborer employed in firms and offices, and when productivity and wealth of the human bees are measured by their marketable output. This mutilation was feasible in an economy of full employment. But it becomes more and more unsustainable with an unemployment rate of 30 percent. This big problem has not escaped Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of The Second Machine Age. What are their propositions? Precisely a basic income granted to every member of society. But how do they solve the problem in the incentive to work, the old problem that the Poor Laws had already to confront. Their answer is extremely suggestive: they hold for an additional measure. Not

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only people should receive a guaranteed income and develop a free activity and creativity, but wage work, subordinated labor, should be subsidized by the State. The funding of such a transformation of the Welfare State supposes a revolution in tax policies. We have argued elsewhere (Y. Moulier Boutang 2006) that taxation has to shift from the stocks between fluxes of revenue and that it should rely upon a flat tax on flows of money, information, clicks, data (Y. Moulier Boutang 2009). We proposed that for each dollar paid by private employers, the State should add one dollar reducing the real cost for a private capitalist to hire some employees. This proposal apparently did not frighten Martin Wolf, the columnist of the Financial Times when he discussed the argument on February 11, 2014. One should notice that French president François Hollande announced a general discharge for all the employees paid to the minimum wage: in 2017 the employer would not fund any more welfare costs; that would be taken care of by the State. We can see other symptoms of this fundamental change in the waged work with the British Green Party’s announcement that in the next race for PM elections, it will claim for a basic income and the inclusion of such measures in the Party Sirysa in Greece. Cognitive capitalism facing a huge, continuous unemployment is entering under a curious new regulation: wage salary will not be the real core of extraction of surplus value. It will only remain a way to control the creative classes. And one must wonder if this is not volens nolens a crucial step in the direction of a transition to postcapitalism. In a way, Jeremy Rivkin in his two last books (2012 and 2014) was not far from the conclusion of an extinction of the political engine of accumulation, except maybe on one point: he never deals with the redistribution issue, nor with the struggles that go along with it, and with the power that rarely commits suicide unless it is obliged to do so. The revenue of pollination, and social or commoner guidance of entrepreneurship for real creativity, is but a gala or a charity dinner. But it shows a true solution in order to deliver human’s creativity. NOTE 1. See my article Marx in California (2001).

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53/2001) @ http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/98BOPR,0,0,Marx_in_Kalifornien:_Der_ dritte_Kapitalismus_und_die_alte_politische_ percentD6konomie.html-index. ———. 2003. “O territorio e as politicas de contrôle do trabalho no capitalismo cognitivo” in A. Patez Galvaô, G. Silva & G. Cocco (Eds.), 2003, Capitalismo cognitivo, trabalho, redes e inovaçaô, DP & A, Rio de Janeiro, pp. 33–60. ———. 2012. “Revoluçâo 2.0, comun e polinizaçâo,” in Giuseppe Cocco & Sarita Albagli, Revoluâo 2.0 e a crise do capitalismo global, Sao Paulo, Garamond, pp. 73–93. ———. 2006. “Transformation de la valeur économique, de son appropriation et de l’impôt,” in Thomas Berns, Jean-Claude K. Dupont & Mikhaïl Xifaras (Direct. De), Philosophie de l’Impôt, Collection Penser le Droit, Bruxelles, Bruylant, pp. 199–226. ———. 2011. “What defines an externality, today,” ParisTech Review online, 11 March 2011 @ http://www.paristechreview.com/2011/.../what-definesexternality-today. ———. 2011. “Wikipolitics and the Economy of the Bees, information, power and Politics in a Digital Society,” in Sarita Albagli & Maria Lucia Maciel (Eds.), Information, power and Politics, Technological and Institutional Mediations, LexingtomBooks, Lanham, USA, chap. 3, pp. 47–77. Nonaka, Ikujiro, and Hitotaka Takeuchi. 1995. The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, New York: Oxford University Press. Open Knowledge Foundation. https://okfn.org. Rivkin, Jeremy. 2012. The Third Industrial Revolution, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, St Martin’s Press ———. 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, St Martin’s Press . Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Berns Thomas. http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-place-de-latoile/09-10-la-gouvernementalite-algorithmique-breaking-2010-05-21. Sarasvathy, Saras D. 2009. Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Simon, Herbert. 1982. Models of bounded rationality: Behavioral economics and business organization (Vol. 1 et 2), The MIT Press. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2012. Antifragile. Things that Gain from Disorder, Random, USA and Penguin (UK). ———. 2010. “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” @ http://avaxhm.com/ebooks/business_job/081297381XBlack_S.html. Tarde, Gabriel, Les lois de l’imitation (1890) @ http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/ tarde_gabriel/lois_imitation/lois_imitation.html. Walpole, Horace. “Three Princes of Serendip,” Letter to Horace Mann (1754). This letter is contained among the 31 volumes of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven, 1937), edited by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. Zalila, Zyed. 1993. Contribution à une théorie des relations floues d’ordre N = Contribution to a theory of order N fuzzy relations, PhD , UTC ; and Complexity made simple with xtractis. Now. @ http://www.xtractis.fr/News.html.

Index

Aboriginal People of America, Australia or New Zealand, 243 Abrigo e Terreno (exhibition), 99 absence of work, 151 abstract labor, 47–48, 53 accumulation, 129; exploitation and, 3, 4; fractal, 74–76; primitive, 62 Acselrad, Henri, 94 Action contre le chomage (action against unemployment), 14 activist design, 155–157, 168; early designers and, 160–162; as form of expertise, 163–165; politics and, 159–160; post-political, 165–166; technocratic, 165–166; tiny social movements and, 166–168; WDC and, 157–158 ADC. See Alternative Design Capital Adidas, 80n5 advertising, x, 4 aesthetics, 73, 107, 111–116, 238 agency, 199, 202, 206 agitation techniques, 14 Ágoas, Frederico, 33 âgon, 139, 141 Agustín, Oscar Garcia, x Airbnb, 228 Akseli, Virtanen, 147 La Alameda, 70 Albagli, Sarita, xvi Aldeia Maracanã, 103

Alexiou, Haris, 53 Algorithmic Government (Rouvroy and Berns), 238 alienation, 120, 211–212 Alternative Design Capital (ADC), 158 alternative ways of life, 192–193 Amerika, or the Man Who Disappeared (Kafka), xiv, 147, 151 anarcho-capitalism, 229 antagonism, 179 antagonist unions, 22 Ant Farm, 161 Anti-fragile (Taleb), 240 anti-guerrilla policy, 20 anti-populism, 34 A onda rosa-choque: reflexões sobre redes, cultura e política contemporânea (Savazoni), 192, 199n5 Apple, 235, 243 appropriation, 72 Arab Spring, xi Architectural Design (magazine), 164 architecture: democracy and, 29–30; ecology and technology and, 26–29 L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 169n9 Arendt, Hannah, 6 Aristotle, 135, 136, 240 Armano, Emiliana, xvii arms, 123–124 art, xvi, xviii, 238–239 artistic autonomy, 31–34 249

250 atmosphere, 150 Augé, Marc, 142 authoritarianism, 195 authorship, 127, 128, 141 autonomy, 22, 31–34, 51, 191, 208, 214 avant-garde, 238 Awan, Nishat, 164 Balibar, Étienne, 78 barbarity, 110 Barcelona ’92 (project), 143n3 Barcelona model, 128 baroque economies, 67, 77–79 baroque transactions, 63 Barroso Commission, 15 Barthes, Roland, 137 Bartra, Armando, 78 basic income, 12 Beijing Olympic Games (2008), 34 Benjamin, Jessica, 114 Benjamin, Walter, 137 Benkler, Yochai, 84 Berardi, Franco Bifo, 109, 111 Berenstein Jacques, Paola, 97 Berglund, Eeva, xv Berns, Thomas, 238 Beveridge Report, 11 Beyond ESF, 15 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 113 Bianchini, Franco, 179 bicycle-sharing scheme, 163 bio-capitalism, x, 202–203, 204 bio-cognitive capitalism, 3, 9 biopolitics, xii, 179, 186–187, 194, 202, 203 biopower, 186–187, 194 biosphere, 241, 242 bird in hand principle, 236 Bitcoin, xvii, 227, 229–230, 231 Bitcoin Magazine, 230 blackmailing, 212, 222 Black Swan (Taleb), 240 Blanchot, Maurice, 151 blockchain, 230, 231; zero hour contracts and, 231–232 body, language and, 112 Bollier, David, 244 Bookcity, 221

Index Boris bikes, 163 Bossi-Fini law, 6 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 238 Braga Stadium, x, 25–26, 27, 28; architecture, ecology, and technology and, 26–29; architecture and democracy and, 29–30; artistic autonomy and, 31–34; conclusion to, 40; democratic variations and, 34–35; emancipation, production, and consumption and, 35–40; local heritage and, 31–34; as new stadium type, 30–35 brain, xviii, 5, 195, 238, 240 brain circulation, 180 brain drain, 180 brain gain, 180 brands, 69, 70, 71 Brazilian uprising, xiii, 107–108; aesthetics and, 111–116; arms and, 123–124; conclusion to, 124–125; contextualisations of, 108–111; faces and, 116–123; social distance and, 111–116 Brenner, 242 British Green Party, 245 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 238, 244 burning out, 237 Buterin, Vitalik, 230, 231 cabinet cultural effervescence, 139 Calatrava, Santiago, 28, 99 Calvinism, 86 Canclini, Néstor García, 51, 191, 193 capital: ADC, 158; community, 66, 74–76; creative, 179; human, vii; intellectual, vii; social, vii; venture, 228; WDC, xv, 157–158, 166 capitalism. See specific types capitalization, 85 Capturing the moving mind (Akseli), 147 Carandá Cultural Mart, 41n5 Cardiff Process, 13 Carls, Kristin, xvii, 207 carnivalization, xii Carson, Rachel, 161 cartography, 190–198; networks and youth, 190–194; spectrum and frequencies, 194–198

Index Casa de Cultura Digital (House of Digital Culture), 192 Castel, R., 210 Castells, M., 206, 220 Castillo, Jorge, 72, 73 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 110 Catalan Integrated Cooperative (CIC), 228 catastrophism, 93 Cava, Bruno, xi Certeau, Michel de, 142 Cervera, Jaime, 29, 34 Chainworkers Crew, 14, 17 Chang, 72 Chaosmosis (Guattari), 107, 111, 115 Charter of knowledge-workers rights, 18 Chatterjee, Partha, xi, 62 Children’s Book Fair, 221 Chinese Revolution (1949), 110 Christ, face of, 116 CIC. See Catalan Integrated Cooperative cities, 48–51, 57, 181; compact, 94; competition and, 94; creative, ix, 95, 128, 139, 156; exploitation and, 49, 51; global, ix; marketing, 94; monumentalization of, ix citizenship, 49 City of Gods (magazine), 18 class relations, 52 climate threats, 93–94 clustering, 46, 57 Cocco, Giuseppe, xviii, 53, 129, 189, 193; hypnotized masses and, 108; museums and, 140; neomodern and, xvi, 187; post-everything and, xvi, 187 co-creation, 223 cognitive bio-capitalism, x, 4, 5, 11 cognitive capitalism, vii, xi, 127–130, 186, 238, 242; alternative ways of life and, 192–193; bio-cognitive capitalism, 3, 9; common places and, 133–137; conclusion to, 140–142; digital space and, 176; museums and multitude uprising and, 137–140; places of memory and, 130–133; virtuosity and, 133–137 cognitive commonwealth, 13 cognitive labor, 201, 202, 203, 223 cognitive-relational (creative) labor, 3; characteristics of, 4–6, 7–9; dialectics

251

and philosophy of, 8 Cold War, 160 coletivos (collectives), 102, 112–113, 115 collaboration, 101, 223 collaborative commons, 228 collective action, 155 collective identity, 220 collective intelligence, 178 collective interest representation, 215 collectives (coletivos), 102, 112–113, 115 collective subjectivity, 120 Colomb, Claire, 165 colonialism, 120 Comaroff, Jean, 68 Comaroff, John, 68 commodification, 33, 34, 40 common, xi; alternative model of creativity and, 49; autonomy of, 51; creativity and, 47–48; decentralization technologies and, 232 commonfare, 3, 9–13; basic income and, 12; managing of commonwealth and common goods, 12–13; policy, 14 common goods, 11, 12–13 common places, 133–137, 142 commonwealth, 11, 12–13 communication, ix; activity, 8; common rights in, 54; mass, 204 communicative resources, 204 community capital, 66, 74–76 compact cities, 94 Compendium for the Civic Economy, 164 conatus, 16 concerted tactics, 11 concrete doing, 47 Confederations Cup, 137, 143n4 Connolly, William, 159 conricerca, 201 constellation, 150 Constituent Assembly, 220 control, 202 cooperation, ix, 54; social, 9, 12, 48, 136; territorial dynamics and, 181; Transmission Gallery and, 55 cooperative activity, 8–9 coordination, 8 copyright, 84 co-research approach, 206–207, 222, 223; in journalism, 208–215; in publishing,

252

Index

215–219 corporeal languages, 112 Correa, Murilo Duarte Costa, 129 Corriere della Sera (newspaper), 18 Corsani, Antonella, 205 Council for Professional Work, 221 countercultures, 65, 161–162 creation of worlds, 70 creative capital, 179 creative city, ix, 95, 128, 139, 156 creative classes, ix, 55, 56, 100, 180–183, 237, 242 creative clusters, ix Creative Commons, xv, 17, 54, 85 creative economy, vii, ix, 45, 95; archaic as innovation source, 65–66; baroque economies and, 77–79; community capital and, 74–76; copy and border and, 68–70; copy and control and, 70–71; crisis and popular pragmatics and, 61–62; flexibility of, 79; fractal accumulation and, 74–76; market as production of urban fabric and, 67–68; market as variegated social space and, 76–77; mimesis and heterotopia and, 71–72; mobility of, 79; proletarian micro-economies and, 64–65; topography of informality and, 62–64; vitalist pragmatism and, 66–67; voice and, 72–74 Creative Economy Report, 45 creative ecosystem, 46 creative labor. See cognitive-relational (creative) labor Creative Scotland, 54 critical design literature, 156 Critical Mass group, 16 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 236 Cross, Nigel, 161 Cruces, F., 193 crypto-currencies, 227, 231 Cuban Revolution (1959), 110 Cukier, Kenneth, 238 Cultour (film), 41n5 Cultural Centre Georges Pompidou, 128 cultural commons, 54–56, 57 cultural industry, 176, 190–191 culture, ix; art and, xvi; countercultures, 65, 161–162; fan, 40; free, 85, 87;

homogenization of, 34; of labor, 186; mass, xiii Cunhal, Álvaro, 35 currency: crypto-currencies, 227, 231; notes, 63 DAC. See Decentralized Autonomous Corporations DAO. See Decentralized Autonomous Organizations data collection, xvii dead labor, 133 decentralization, 191; technologies, 232 Decentralized Autonomous Corporations (DAC), 230, 232 Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), 230 definitive transfer of property, 243 De la cultura postindustrial a las estrategias de los jóvenes (Canclini), 191 Deleuze, Gilles, 116, 117, 120, 139, 153, 236 Delgado, Manuel, 128 Deligny, Fernand, 150, 152 democracy, x; architecture and, 29–30; social, 134 democratic principle, 13 Demos Helsinki, 158 Descartes, René, 239 design activism. See activist design Design Council, 164 design for politics, 156 Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (Papanek), xv, 161 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 148 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 236 differentiation, 179 digital capitalism, 176 digital inclusion, 88 digitalization, 239, 241 digital space, 175; creative capitalism and, 175–180; creative classes and, 180–183 digital technology, 191, 220–221 di Salvo, Carl, 156, 165 disaster, 93–96; creative capitalism and, 98–101; urbanism of, 96–98; vital creativity of streets and, 102–104

Index disillusion, 210, 212 Disnovation (exhibition), 237 dispossession, 62 Dragão stadium, 32 Drop City, 161 Eco, Umberto, 129, 140 ecology, 26–29 eco-museums, 130, 141 economic globalization, 31 economy: baroque, 67, 77–79; hidden, 67; knowledge, 164; learning, 11; of libido, 203; networked information, 176; proletarian micro-economies, 64–65, 77; sharing, xvii. See also creative economy editorial work, 201, 215–219 education, 7–8 Edwards, Betty, 240 effectuation logic, 236 emancipation, production and consumption and, 35–40 embedded design, 157 emotional intelligence, 204 emotional labor, 203–204 emotions, 203, 211 empathy, 204 employment: contracts, 212; crisis, 64; precariousness, 215; self-employment, 74 empty semiotic screen of capitalistic faciality, 124 Enriquez, Eugene, 110 environmental movements, 160, 161, 162, 166 escape strategies, 211 Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela, xiii, 103 Ethereum, 230 ethos, 139 eugenics, 121 Euromayday, xii, 4, 14–16 European Commission, 230 European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion (Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions), 13 Everybody Wants to be a Fascist (Guattari), 109 evictions, 95

253

excitation, 197 expansion, 66 exploitation, 62, 202, 214, 241–245; accumulation and, 3, 4; city and, 49, 51; of commonwealth, 11, 12; general intellect and, x, 4; of intellectual property, 46; of social relations, 53 external influences, 197 externalities, xi, 177 extraction of surplus, 241 Facebook, 84, 85, 167, 229, 230, 243 faces, 116–123 Faircoin, 231, 233n12 Faircoop, 231 false modernity, 68 falsifications, 68, 71, 72, 78 fan cultures, 40 Fanon, Frantz, 120, 121 fascism, 107, 108–109, 148 fashion industry, 17 favelas, xiii, 73, 99, 100, 102 Federici, Silvia, 52, 67 Feigenbaum, Anna, 43 feminisation of labor, 204 Ferguson, Francesca, 164 Fernández, Cristina, 72 FIFA World Cup (1998), 32 FIFA World Cup (2014), ix, xii, xiii, 32, 95 financial power networks, 231 Finnish Fund for Innovation, 161 Firmeza, Yuri, 100 flexibility, 61, 195; of creative economy, 79 flexible creativity, 79 flexicurity, 11 Florida, Richard, ix, 45, 46, 179, 180, 182, 242 fluctuating signifier, 112 fluidity, 180 focus groups, 205–206, 207, 208, 209 Fora do Eixo (Off-Axis), 192 forced availability, 212, 214, 222 Fordism, vii, 10, 21, 22, 139, 176, 177, 202; crisis of, 176; dependency, 64; Keynesian, 178; post-Fordism, 45–47, 56, 66, 70, 79, 136; proletariat and, 64 Fornero, 221

254

Index

“Fort/Da” game, xiii, 107, 113–114, 115, 118 Foster, Hal, 31, 34 Foucault, Michel, 66, 137, 152, 153; heterotopia and, 71, 72; Lorey and, 192, 197 four-eye machine, xiv, 107, 117, 118 fractal accumulation, 74–76 Fradique, Ana, 147 fragilisation, 210 Frank, Tom, 182 free culture, 85, 87 “Free culture” (Lessig), 85 free labor, 85 free market, 85; power of, 10 Free Software Foundation, 243 frequencies, 194–198 Freud, Sigmund, xiii, 107, 113–114, 115–116, 118, 125n1 friendship relations, 218 Fuller, Richard Buckminster, 161 Fumagalli, Andrea, x functional loci, 132 fundamental destitution, 181 Furtado, Rui, 41n6 Gabe, Todd, 45 Gago, Veronica, xi García Linera, Álvaro, 78 Gates, Bill, 183n2 Gehl, Jan, 162 Gehry, Frank, 28 gendered power relations, 53 general intellect (intelligentsia), 9, 12, 48; exploitation and, x, 4; Marx and, 135, 178; mobility and, 4 General States of Precarity (GSP), 17–19 gentrification, xii, xiii, xiv, 50, 56; of favelas, 100; social, 128 geo-engineering, 165 geometric growth, 75 geosciences, 93 ghettoization, 50 Gil, José, 112 Glasgow Life, 54 global capitalism, ix global city, ix global commodity, local heritage as, 31–34 global financial crisis (2008), 19, 56, 63

globalization, 31, 34, 40, 46, 132 Global Justice, 103 global North, vii global South, vii global warming, 94 golpe (military coup), 109 Goodbun, Jon, 164 Good Life, 158 Google, 85, 243 Gordon, 242 Gore, Al, 166 Gourevitch, Alex, 166 governance, 238 Graça Dias, Manuel, 33 Great Recession, 227 Griziotti, Giorgio, xvii–xviii GSP. See General States of Precarity Guattari, Félix, xiv, 107, 115, 117–118, 120, 121, 139, 147; aesthetics and, 107, 111; collectives and, 112–113, 115; disaster and, 95; empty semiotic screen of capitalistic faciality and, 124; fascism and, 109; “Fort/Da” game and, xiii, 107, 113–114; four-eye machine and, xiv, 107; language and, 112 “Gubernamentalidad y precarización de sí: Sobre la normalización de los productores y las productoras culturales” (Lorey), 192 Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel, 75 Hacker’s Transparency (Transparência Hacker), 192 Haddad, Fernando, 189 halo intangibles, 239 Handke, Peter, 34 Handmade Urbanism, 164 Hardt, Michael, 44, 49 Hartog, François, 132 Harvey, David, 43, 96, 98 HDL. See Helsinki Design Lab hegemonic rationality, 181 Hélder, Herberto, 27 Helfrich, Silk, 244 Helsinki Beyond Dreams: actions towards a creative and sustainable hometown, 156, 160 Helsinki Design Lab (HDL), 156, 159, 163, 166

Index heritage, 130; history-heritage, 132; local, 31–34 heterotopia, 71–72 hidden economy, 67 hierarchical organization, 228 Hirotaka Takeuchi, 237 history, 132 history-heritage, 132 History of Madness, 151 Hollande, François, 245 Holloway, John, 47 homogenization, of culture, 34 Hora, Maurício, 99 horizontality, 85, 191 House of Digital Culture (Casa de Cultura Digital), 192 housing, inclusive, 96–98 human capital, vii hypnotized masses, 108

intangibles of level 2, 239–241 INTELI, 46 intellectual capital, vii intellectual property, xv, 13, 46 intellectual work, 202 intelligence, 241; collective, 178; emotional, 204; social, 53 intelligentsia. See general intellect Intermittents, 14, 15 International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, 157 Internet, 54, 178, 191, 206, 220, 223 inter-urban competition, 156 In the Bubble: designing in a complex world (Thackara), 163 invisibilization, 73 invisible economy, 67 Israël, Lucien, 240 IT. See information technology

identity, 53; collective, 220 Ikujiro Nonaka, 237 immaterial labor, 176, 185–186, 195, 196, 202; places of memory and, 133; productive subjectivities and, 134; rent and, 56 immigrants. See migrants Inca, 27, 28 inclusive housing, 96–98 income, basic, 12 incommensurability, 62, 79 Indignados movement, 165 individualism: network, 220; possessive, 75 individualization, 44, 48, 54, 212 industrial capitalism, x industrial modernity, 139 Industrial Revolution, xviii, 238 industrial wage workers, 11 Industry, Environment and Product Design (seminar), 161 info-communicational agencies, 127 informality, topography of, 62–64 information flows, 223 Information Society, 176 information technology (IT), 163, 177 Inforsato, Erika, 151 innovation, 235, 237 insecurity, 205

Jacobs, Jane, 161, 162 Jaguaribes, Beatriz, 73 Jeudy, Henri-Pierre, 100 journalism, xvii, 201, 204, 205; coresearch and, 208–215 JR (artist), 99 Julier, Guy, 157

255

Kafka, Franz, xiv, 147, 150, 151, 153n1 Kahneman, D., 240 Kant, Immanuel, 236 Keynesian Fordism, 178 Keynesian public welfare, 10–11 Klossowski, Pierre, 63 knowledge economy, 164 “Knowledge is Never Neutral” (project), 55 Knowledge Society, 176 Kohtala, Cindy, 160 Koolhaas, Rem, 28 Kozinets, Robert, 206 Kristeva, Julia, 110 Kuhn, Thomas, 161 labor activity, 9 Lacan, Jacques, 113, 114 Lacoste vs. the Wachiturr, 80n6 Lafuente, Antonio, 178, 180 Landry, Charles, ix, 179

256

Index

language, 8, 13, 136, 202, 240; body and, 112; theatre of, 114 lateralization of creativity, 240 Latin-Mediterranean welfare model, 11 Latour, Bruno, 169n9 Lausa, 35 Lausanne stadium, 35 Law of the Father, 123 Law Treu, 14 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 70, 138, 237 learning, 7–8; economies, 11; machine, 238 Lebeinstein, Harvey, 237 Lefebvre, Henri, 142 legacy, ix lemonade principle, 236 less affordable loss principle, 236 Lessig, Lawrence, 85, 243 Levi-Strauss, 77 libido, economy of, 203 linguistic communication, 8 linguistic machines, 177 living knowledge, 177 living labor, xvi, 133, 177, 180, 242 local heritage, as global commodity, 31–34 loci, 132 logical-linguistic constructions, 135 London Olympic Games, ix Loomio (software), 54 Lorey, Isabell, 192, 193, 194, 197, 199n6 Louvre, 238 love, 197; major, 189, 194, 198; minor, 199 Löwy, Michael, 32 Machado, Mesquita, 26, 30 machine learning, 238 The Machinic Unconscious (Guattari), 116, 117–118 macrofascism, 109, 111 major Brazil, 189, 198 major love, 189, 194, 198 Make Shift City, 164 manipulation hypothesis, 196 Marches Européennes contre le chômage la précarité et les exclusions (European Marches against unemployment, precarity and social exclusion), 13 marginal economy, 67

market dynamism, 67 marketization, 44 Marx, Karl, 83, 138, 183n1, 196, 203, 241–242; general intellect and, 135, 178; Holloway and, 47 mass communication, 204 mass culture, xiii Mayday, 14, 17, 20, 221 Mayer-Schöneberger, Viktor, 238 McAfee, Andrew, 238, 244 McDonald’s, 13 mega-events, ix, xiii, 100 Mellander, Charlotta, 45 metaphysics, 138 methodological choices, 205–207 metropolitan heterogeneity, 67 micro-economies, proletarian, 64–65, 77 microfascism, 109, 111 Microsoft, 84 Middlesex University, 15 migrants, 6, 65, 66, 77; baroque economies and, 78, 79; undocumented, 15 Milan Fashion Week (2005), 17 military coup (golpe), 109 mimesis, 71–72 Mina, Simone, 150 mind life, 129, 135 mineral resources, 45 Minho looms, 28 Ministry of Economic Development, 53 Ministry of Employment and the Economy, 159 minor Brazil, 189 minor love, 199 mobility, 195; of creative economy, 79; general intellect and, 4; of living labor, 180; objective, 4; subjective, 4 modernity, 68, 139, 141 MOMA. See Museum of Modern Art Le Monde, 15 Monsiváis, Carlos, 74 monstrosity, 139 monstruation, 139, 142 Monti, Mario, 221 monumentalization, of cities, ix Moreira, Clarissa, xiii Morini, Cristina, xvii, 52, 207 Morro da Providência, 97, 98, 99, 100 Mouffe, Chantal, 156

Index Moulier Boutang, Yann, xviii, 178 multitude, 134; precarious, 51–54; uprising of, 137–140 Municipal Football Stadium, 41n5 Municipalism, 13 Muotoile Suomi, 158 museography, 100 Museology, 127, 142 Museu de Arte do Rio (Rio Art Museum), xiv, 99, 101 Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow), xiv, 99 Museum of Architecture, 168 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 101 Museum of the Maré, 103 Museum of Tomorrow (Museu do Amanhã), xiv, 99 museums, 127–128, 140–141; ecomuseums, 130, 141; multitude uprising and, 137–140; territory and, 130–133 muteness, 73 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 229 Não xiste amor no Brasil maior (Cocco), 187 National Design Program, 158 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), 164 National Stadium, 35 Negri, Antonio, 44, 129, 138, 176, 177, 178, 186, 187; living labor and, 177; Marx and, 183n1; migrant cultures and, 65 neo-catastrophism, 93 neoliberalism, 67, 68, 128, 157, 160, 178, 229 neomodern, xvi, 187–190 neo-Taylorism, 6 Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), 164 netarchical organization, 228 netnography, 206 networked information economy, 176 networking, xi, xv, 4, 84, 223 Network of Precarious Editors (Re.Re.Pre), 205–206, 216, 217–218, 219–222, 223 networks, 7, 133, 196; dynamics, 180; financial power, 231; individualism, 220; liberation of, 87; social, 54, 83;

257

subjectivity, 83–88; technologies, 86; wealth of, xi, 244; youth and, 190–194 Network Society, 176 Neves, José, x New Found Lands, 244 Niemeyer, Oscar, 28 No-Global activities, 13 non-state welfare, 77 noosphere, 242 Nora, Pierre, xiv, 130, 131, 132 Novy, Johannes, 165 Obama, Barack, 26, 30 objective mobility, 4 objects informants, 130 occupations, xii–xiii Occupy Design, 43–44 Occupy Movement, xi–xii, 43, 54, 165, 232 Occupy Together, 43 Ocupa Estelita, xiii, 103 Off-Axis (Fora do Eixo), 192 Oi Telerj, xiii, 103 Olympic Games, ix, 34 online narratives, 218–219 Open Knowledge Foundation, 243 open sky museums, 130 open source movement, 243 open work, 127, 133–137 Operaismo (workerism), 21 organization, 66 Orthus, 188, 199n3 Ostrom, Elenor, 244 Oury, Jean, 150 Oxygen Room, 160 P2P. See peer to peer Paes, Eduardo, 143n3 Papanek, Victor, xv, 161 paradigmatic shift, 109 Park Geun-hye, 45 participatory design, 161 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), 188 Party Sirysa, 245 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 148 passion, 203, 208, 211 passion trap, 214 patent laws, 13 Peer 2 Peer Foundation, 243

258

Index

peer to peer (P2P), xi, xvii, 67, 84, 227, 229–230 Pelbart, Peter Pál, xiv peripheral modernity, 68 peso-dollar convertibility, 63 physicalism, 130 Pillati, Adriano, 129 pilot-in-the-plane principle, 236 pink alliance, 192, 199n5 Pirates Party, 232 places of memory, xiv, 129, 130–133, 142 plenárias, 110 Podemos party, 232 poetics, 137 poiesis, 129, 135, 136, 138–139, 142 politics: activist design and, 159–160; biopolitics, xii, 179, 186–187, 194, 202, 203; design for, 156 pollination, value production from, 241–245 Poor Laws, 244 popular economics, xi, 74, 78 popular pragmatics, 61–62 Porto Maravilha, xiii, 97, 98 positive externalities, 85 possessive individualism, 75 post-crisis perspectives, 43–44; cities and, 48–51; common and creativity and, 47–48; conclusion to, 56–58; cultural commons and, 54–56; post-Fordism and, 45–47; precarious multitude and, 51–54 post-everything, xvi, 187–190 post-Fordism, 45–47, 56, 66, 70, 79, 136 Post-Industrial Society, 176 post-political design, 165–166 post-pre-verbal, 112, 113 post-workerist division, 3 power: biopower, 186–187, 194; dissociative asymmetry in, 186–187; financial power networks, 231; of free market, 10; of imitators, 78; relations, 53, 211 power-to-do-together, xi, 47, 48, 50, 57 práxis, 128, 129, 135–136, 138–139, 140, 142 Precaria.org, 217 precarious labor, composition of, 6–9 precarious multitude, 51–54

precarious strikes, 19–20 precarisation, 204, 210 Prestes Maia Occupation, 105n6 primitive accumulation, 62 principle of subsidiarity, 10 private property, 54 productive subjectivities, 134 progressivism, 78 Project for a film by Kafka (Guattari), xiv, 147 proletarianization, 242 proletarian knowledge workers, 210 proletarian micro-economies, 64–65, 77 proof of stake, 233n12 proof of work, 233n12 property rights, 243–244 psychoanalysis, 114 PT. See Partido dos Trabalhadores public space, 138 public transportation, 138, 143n4 publishing, 204, 205, 221; co-research and, 215–219 Quaderni di San Precario, 20, 218 Quilombos, 244 racism, 120–122 radicalism, 163, 166 radio spectrum, xvi Rancière, Jacques, 70, 78, 101 rationality, hegemonic, 181 real estate value, 97 realism, aesthetics of, 73 reality creation, 61 Reclaim the City, 49 “Reclaim the Streets”, 50 reflexivity, 7 Refugee Hospitality Club (RHC), 167 relational aesthetics, 238 relational art, 238 relational capacities, 203 relationality, 7 rent, mechanisms of, 56 reproductive commonwealth, 13 Re.Re.Pre. See Network of Precarious Editors research field, 207–208 residence permits, 6 Resiste Isidoro, 103

Index revitalization projects, 98 revolution, 109–110; of big data, 238; Industrial Revolution, xviii, 238 RHC. See Refugee Hospitality Club Rifkin, J., 228, 245 rights labor, vii right to have rights, 6 Rio Art Museum (Museu de Arte do Rio), xiv, 99, 101 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 78 Rizzoli Publishing, 18 Roggero, Gigi, 87 role experiments, 159 Romanticism, 238 Ronaldo, Cristiano, 34 Rosa, Marcos L., 164 Rossi-Landi, F., 203 Rousseff, Dilma, 188 Rouvroy, Antoinette, 238 RUS. See Unitary Union Representative Saint Precarious. See San Precario La Salada (market), xi, 62, 63, 71; archaic as innovation source and, 65–66; baroque economies and, 77–79; community capital and, 74; copy and border and, 69–70; fractal accumulation and, 76; proletarian micro-economies and and, 64–65; variegated social space and, 76–77; voice and, 72–74 Salgado, Manuel, 32 sample construction, 207–208 San Precario (Saint Precarious), vii, x, 4, 16–17, 221; City of Gods and, 18; Re.Re.Pre and, 217 Santa Graziella, 16 Santa Maria do Bouro Heritage Hotel, 41n5 Santa Patience, 222 Sanyal, Kalyan, 62 Sarasvathy, Saras D., 236 Sartre, Jean Paul, 181 Sassen, Saskia, 68 Savazoni, Rodrigo, 192, 199n5 Sayre, Robert, 32 Schneider, Tatjana, 164 science of contact, 113 Scott, Brett, 231 Scott, Felicity, 166

259

Scottish Arts Council, 54 Second Age Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 244 second machine age, xviii segregation, 49, 96 self-employment, 74 self-governance, 57, 203 self-realization, 211, 213, 216 self-representation, 217, 218–219 self-subjectivation, 22 semantics of social proximity, 111, 112, 125 semiotic process, 119 Seppälä, Paulina, 166–167 serendipity, 237 Serpica Naro, 17, 18 sharing economy, xvii Ship of Fools, 147 Simon, Herbert, 240 Simondon, Gilbert, 137 singularities, 134, 150 Sivadon, Danielle, 150 slavery, 194–195 social capital, vii social cooperation, 9, 12, 48, 136 social creativity, x–xi social democracy, 134 social distance, 111–116 social exclusion, 49 social factory, 186, 199n1 social gentrification, 128 social innovation, 65 social intelligence, 53 socialism, 78, 86 social knowledge, 48, 51, 57 social movements, 13, 103, 165, 166–168 social networks, 54, 83 social relations, 47, 53, 58, 186, 205, 229; clustering and, 46; exploitation of, 53; violence of, 64 social space, variegated, 76–77 social stratification, xii social welfare, 13, 193 Soreanu, Raluca, xiii Souto de Moura, Eduardo, 25–26, 27–30, 32, 34, 40 Souza, Amarildo de, 120, 121–122 spatial loci, 132 special places, 135

260 spectacle, x speech, 136 Sperry, Roger, 240 Spinoza, Baruch, 16, 124, 138 Spinoza for Our Time (Negri), 187 Spivak, Gayatri, 73 Splendour of the Seas, xiv, 147, 151 Square Court, 238 squats, xii–xiii Stallman, R., 243 starchitecture, 28 statism, 78 Stoicism, 240 Stop Précarité, 14 strategic design, 159 “Street Dancing” (group), 50 “The Strickland Distribution” (artist group), 55 subculture of social affects, 63 subjectification, 203 subjective mobility, 4 subjectivities, 223; of care, xiii, 111; collective, 120; network, 83–88; productive, 134 subject-oriented approach, 205 substitution effect, 12 surplus populations, 61 surplus value, 203 sustainability, xiii, 94 sustainable transport schemes, 163 Swyngedouw, Erik, 167 Sybilla, Vladimir, xiv symbolic loci, 132 Syriza party, 232 Szaniecki, Barbara, xviii, 139 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 236, 240 Tarde, Gabriel, 236, 237 Tarin, Bruno, xvi Taylorism, 6, 176, 178 Teatro Valle, 55–56 technocratic design, 165–166 technology, ix, 26–29; decentralization, 232; digital, 191, 220–221; IT, 163, 177; network, 86; new, xviii; P2P, xvii technophobia, 83, 86 Temporary Autonomous Zone, 50 Terranova, T., 204 terra nullius, 243

Index territorial dynamics, 180–181 territory, 130–133 Thackara, John, 163 Thatcher, Margaret, 96 theatre of language, 114 theoretical frameworks and hypotheses, 202–205 Third Places (Tiers Lieux), 243 third space, 113, 114–115, 124 A Thousand Plateaus (Guattari and Deleuze), 116, 117 Three Principles of Serendip, 237 Tiers Lieux (Third Places), 243 Till, Jeremy, 164 tiny social movements, 166–168 totalitarianism, 195 touristification, xiv Towards Peer Production in Public Services: Cases from Finland, 166–167 Trade Union, 5, 14, 20 training, 7–8 Trancityxvaliz, 164 Transmilenio, 163 Transmission Gallery, 54–55, 56 Transparência Hacker (Hacker’s Transparency), 192 transportation: public, 138, 143n4; sustainable schemes, 163 Trans-Siberian railway, 147 Troika, 10, 53 Trump, Donald, 95 Turbo Tax, 238 2.0 free culture model enterprise, 85 Uber, 228 UBI. See unconditional basic income UEFA European Football Championship, 25 Ueinzz Theater Company, xiv, 147, 151, 153n1 UN. See United Nations unconditional basic income (UBI), 12 undocumented immigrants, 15 “Undoing the City” (festival), 50 “Uneven Growth” (exhibition), 101 Unitary Union Representative (RUS), 221 United Nations (UN), 45, 103 Universal Exposition, 79 untraded externalities, 46, 48, 57

Index Unworking: Clinical and Political Constellations of the Common (Inforsato), 151 Urban Drift Projects, 164 urbanism, of disaster, 96–98 urban renovation projects, 98 urban social diversity, 96 urban spaces, 51 Urkupiña market, 67 Vargas, Getúlio, 123 variegated social space, 76–77 Vecchi, Benedetto, 229 venture capital, 228 verbal languages, 112 Vhils (artist), 99 Via dei Transiti, 14 Villas miséria, xiii Virno, Paolo, 79, 129, 134, 135–136, 137, 142, 196 virtuosity, 133–137 visual inclusion, 73 vitalist pragmatism, 66–67 vitality, 153 voice, 72–74

wage labor, 47, 65 Walpole, Horace, 237 WDC. See World Design Capital wealth of networks, xi, 244 “The wealth of networks” (Benkler), 84 Weiland, Ute, 164 Wolf, Martin, 245 workerism (Operaismo), 21 workfare, 10 workforce fragmentation, 216 World Design Capital (WDC), xv, 157–158, 166 World Earth Catalog, 161 World Economic Forum, 45, 183n2 X-efficiency, 237 Yo Mango, 14 youth, xvi, 190–195 Youth without a Future, 49 Zalila, Zyed, 240 Zapatista movement, 87 zero hour contracts, 231–232

261

About the Editors and Contributors

Giuseppe Cocco is professor of political theory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and adjunct fellow in Master of Human Rights and Development in the UPO University–Sevilla (Spain). He holds a master’s degree in political sciences and a PhD in social history (University of Panthéon–Sorbonne, Paris). He is a founding member of Universidade Nômade network. His main fields of research are transformation processes of labor, cognitive capitalism, and development. With Antonio Negri he is the author of GlobAL: Biopower and Struggles in a Globalized Latin America (Paidos, 2006). His most recent book is Korpobraz: por uma política dos corpos (2014). In English he edited “The Insurgent Multitude in Brazil,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2014; “The Crisis of Cognitive Capitalism from the Point of View of Amerindian Perspectivism,” in Albagli and Maciel (eds.), Information, Power, and Politics (2010); and “Korpobraz: The Power of the Poor,” in Augustin and Ydsen (eds.), Post-Crisis Perspectives (2013). Barbara Szaniecki graduated with a bachelor’s in visual communication from École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (1994) and a master’s (2005) and PhD (2010) in design from Pontificia Catholic University. She is currently a researcher at the Design and Anthropology Laboratory at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (ESDI-UERJ) and the Territory and Communication Laboratory (LABTeC) at IBICT-UFRJ. She is also a professor at ESDI-UERJ (Faculty of Design). With an extensive practical experience in the graphic design area, she is also coeditor of the magazines LUGAR COMUM: Media Studies, Communication and Culture (Universidade Nômade, Redobra) and Multitudes (Paris, France). Her research emphasizes the relationships between graphic design (in particular posters) and political concepts such as multitude, manifesta263

264

About the Editors and Contributors

tions and representations, and alternative creativities. She is the author of Estética da Multidão (2007) and Disforme Contemporâneo e Design Encarnado: Outros Monstros Possíveis (2014). CONTRIBUTORS Andrea Fumagalli is professor of economics in the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Pavia and militant researcher. He teaches History of Economic Thought, Theory of Firms, and Economics of Knowledge. He is a member of Effimera Network, founder member of BINItaly (Basic Income Network, Italy) and member of the Executive Committee of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network). He is active in the San Precario network. His research interests deal with the transformation of accumulation and valorization processes in contemporary capitalism (Cognitive bio-capitalism), labor flexibility and precarization, theory of money, and basic income hypothesis. Among his recent publications are “A Financialized Monetary Economy of Production” in International Journal of Political Economy 41, 2012 (with S. Lucarelli); “Cognitive Biocapitalism, the Precarity Trap, and Basic Income: Post-Crisis Perspectives,” in García Agustín Óscar, Ydesen Christian (eds.), Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Common and its Powers, 2012; and “Cognitive Bio-capitalism, Social Reproduction and the Precarity Trap: Why Not Basic Income?” in Knowledge Cultures 1 (4), 2013 (with C. Morini). José Neves is assistant professor of history at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, New University of Lisbon. His main areas of study are the history of communism, nationalism studies, and sport studies. He is the author of Comunismo e Nacionalismo em Portugal—Política, Cultura e História no Século XX (2008) and he co-edited Uma História do Desporto em Portugal (2011). He is the author of several articles in national and international journals. He has been Camões Visiting Professor at King’s College–University of London. Óscar García Agustín is associate professor at the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published several articles on social movements, civil society, and political and discourse theory. He has coedited Post-Crisis Perspectives. The Common and its Powers together with Christian Ydesen (2013) and Politics of Dissent with Martin Bak Jørgensen (2015). He is author of Discurso y Autonomía Zapatista (Discourse and Zapatista Autonomy, 2013) and Sociology of Discourse. From Institutions to Social Change (2015).

About the Editors and Contributors

265

Verónica Gago received her PhD in social sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She currently holds a research fellowship from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina. She is a member of Colectivo Situaciones and of the independent publishing house Tinta Limón. Bruno Cava is author of A multid ã o foi ao deserto (2013) and A vida dos direitos: ensaio sobre modernidade e direito (2008). He is a part of the Nomad University net (uninomade.net), coeditor of the magazines Lugar Comum and Global Brasil, graduated in law and engineering and has a masters degree in law philosophy from UERJ (Rio de Janeiro State University). He blogs at quadradodosloucos.com.br (Portuguese). Clarissa da Costa Moreira is an architect and urbanist, has a masters in urbanism and PhD in philosophy of art and architecture, and is a professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal Fluminense University. She is currently researching conflictual urban planning and critical cartographies and interdisciplinary research in philosophy, arts, and the city. She is a member of the laboratory of Globalization and the City (PPGAU/ GPDU) and a participant at the Universidade Nomade network. Raluca Soreanu is a practicing psychoanalyst and an associate member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is Marie Curie Fellow in Sociology at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, London, United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD in sociology from University College London, with a thesis on creativity and Cornelius Castoriadis. Raluca’s interests lie in psychosocial studies, psychoanalytic theory, sociology of emotions, sociology of knowledge, feminist theories, and contemporary theories and epistemologies of the social sciences. In psychoanalytic theory, Raluca is dedicated to the study of the work of Sándor Ferenczi and of the political implications of his theorization of trauma, denial, and the confusion of tongues. Raluca has published in journals such as International Political Sociology, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Revista Política &Trabalho, and Studia Sociologia, among others. Raluca is currently working on collective trauma, drawing on the work of Sándor Ferenczi. She is also reflecting on the forms of creativity of protest, focusing on the case of Brazil. Her book manuscript, Working-Through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial and Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising, will bring the last two topics together, while proposing a psychosocial theory of recognition. Vladimir Sibylla Pires was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1968. He is a museologist and a professor at the Museology School at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO). He received his PhD in 2014, at the Post Graduation

266

About the Editors and Contributors

Program in Information Science at the Brazilian Institute of Information for Science and Technology (IBICT) in covenant with Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His thesis “Museum-monster: inputs for a museology of monstrosity” had the guidance of Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Cocco. Nowadays he researches the role of museums, social memories, and cultural heritage in the cognitive capitalism. He leads the research group “Museology, Territory and Communication” at UNIRIO and he also collaborates with the Institute for Contemporary History at New University of Lisbon (IHC/UNL), Portugal. Peter Pál Pelbart is a philosopher and an essayist. Born in Hungary, he studied in France and lives in Brazil. He is a professor at PUC University in São Paulo. He translated works of Deleuze into Portuguese. He writes books mainly about madness, time, subjectivity, and biopolitics. He recently published Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out, in which he is copublisher. He is part of the Ueinzz Theater Company, a schizoscenic project. Eeva Berglund received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Cambridge, the results of which were published in 1998 in the monograph, Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Environmental Activism. She pursued an academic career until 2002 when she left a lectureship at Goldsmiths, London, for a more varied life. She now lives in Helsinki where she teaches university courses and writes features and book reviews in English and Finnish, especially on society and the environment, built and unbuilt. She contributes actively to academic publications and collaborates in networks pursuing academic projects as well as with politically engaged groups. In 2011 she became Docent (Adjunct Professor) of Environmental Policy and Urban Studies at Helsinki University. She is responsible for the Forum-section of the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society and in October 2013 she took over the editorship of the EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) book series, published by Berghahn Books. Sarita Albagli is a senior researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), and at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She is a senior lecturer at the Post-Graduate Program in Information Science, developed by IBICT and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Sarita is a sociologist and PhD in geography (UFRJ), and was Senior Visiting Researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science—LSE. She coordinates the Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Information and Knowledge Studies (Liinc) and is editor of the scientific journal Liinc em Revista. She leads the research group “Information, Knowledge and Socio-Technical Change.” Her research interests include the following topics: information, knowledge, and social innovation; collaborative and open production in science, technology, and

About the Editors and Contributors

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innovation; network and territorial informational and innovative dynamics. Among other publications, she edited the book “Information, Power, and Politics: Technological and Institutional Mediations.” Bruno Tarin is currently a doctoral student and researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in the research line “Technologies and Aesthetics of Communication” with the support of CNPq, and researcher at the Laboratory Territory and Communication (LABTEC–UFRJ). He is both organizer and author (with Adriano Belisario) of the book Copyfight: Piracy & Free Culture, about the exercise of creativity and intellectual property in the contemporary world and also editor of the academic journal Lugar Comum (http://uninomade.net/lugarcomum/). He created and produced the Cultural Imaginary Borders Project (FIC) dedicated to perform cognitive and affective mappings (http://fronteirasimaginarias.org/node/158). And also created and produced the Living Tupi Project: Cartography Affective in the Clouds of Deep Roots, performed with indigenous Tupinambá of Bahia (tupivivo.org). The project was carried out with FUNARTE resources within the project Aesthetic Interactions: Artist Residency in Culture Points. Cristina Morini graduated in political theory at the University of Milan, and is an independent social researcher and journalist. She focused on issues relating to working conditions of women and the transformation processes of labor and gender study. Among her various publications, see “The Feminization of Labor in Cognitive Capitalism,” in Feminist Review, Volume 87, Number 1, 2007, pp. 40–59; “Per amore e per forza. Femminilizzazione del lavoro e biopolitiche del corpo,” 2010 (Spanish edition: “Por amor o a la fuerza. Feminizaciòn del trabajo y biopolìtica del cuerpo,” 2014), “Life Put to Work: Towards a Theory of Life-value,” Ephemera: web-magazine, n. 8, May 2011, “Social Reproduction as the Paradigm of the Common. Reproduction, Antagonism, Production Crisis” in O. Garcia Agustin, C. Ydesen (eds.), Post-crisis perspective, 2013. Kristin Carls currently works at the Department of Socio-economics at the University of Hamburg where she teaches labor studies and sociological theory. She has pursued her PhD at the Universities of Bremen and Milan, with research on retail workers’ everyday practices to face precarization. Her research interests are labor relations, social movements, cognitive capitalism, financial crisis, welfare politics, and coresearch. She currently works on a project about the reregulation of social work and the subjectivity of social workers in the context of current austerity politics in Europe. Emiliana Armano has a PhD in labor studies at the Department of Social and Political Sciences in the State University of Milan. She collaborates in

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About the Editors and Contributors

research activities and her main fields includes political economy of the production of subjectivity, knowledge work, flexibility, and precariousness in the context of informational capitalism, with a social enquiry and coresearch methodological approach. Amongst his books are (with Annalisa Murgia) Mappe della precarietà. Knowledge workers, creatività, saperi e dispositivi di soggettivazione (2012), and (with Federico Chicchi, Eran Fisher, Elisabetta Risi) Boundaries and Measurements of Emerging Work. Gratuity, Precariousness and Processes of Subjectivity in the Age of Digital Production, Special Issue of Sociologia del Lavoro (133) (2014). Giorgio Griziotti in the seventies participated in autonomous movement in Italy, and is today an independent researcher on the contemporaneous technological mediations and their political, cultural, and social implications. A graduate of Polytechnic Univeristy of Milan with a degree in electronic engineering, he has experience of more than thirty years in international consulting on information and communication technologies. He publishes essays and articles in different sites and magazines, among others Open Democracy in UK, Alfabeta2 in Italy, and Rue89 and Le Monde Diplomatique. He is a member of the Italian political think-tank Effimera. He lives in Paris where he participates in the “Coopérative Intégrale Ile de France” project experience. He contributes with other authors in writing the book La moneta del commune that will be published in 2015. He is writing a book on the technology mediation and postcapitalist perspectives. Yann Moulier Boutang was born in 1949, studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm (philosophy). He is a socio-economist and teaches intellectual property rights and political economy at the University of Technology of Compiègne and humanities and digital humanities at the High School of Arts and Design (Saint-Etienne), Innovation by Design at ENSCI of Paris, and interculturality and cognitive economics at the Sino-European Institute of Technology at Shanghai Universitrty (SHU) since 2009. His fields of research are slavery, migrations, wage labor, firms web studies, and long-run transformations of the capitalist system especially in digital issues. He has translated numerous works of the Italian operaist school including M. Tronti and A. Negri. He published a biography of Louis Althusser (1992 and 2002). He runs the Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES (57 issues since 2000) http://multitudes.net. This review is investigating new forms of critical thinking and culture. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Serie Traces (published in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese) and Subjectivity. He published Le capitalisme cognitif (2007 and 2008) translation into English in 2012; L’abeille et l’économiste, 2012; Liberté, égalité, blabla, 2013. Recenty he was an invited professor at SUNY Binghamton (USA) in 2005–2007; at the International University of Sevilla & University Pablo

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Olavide of Sevilla (2008–2013); at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris Malaquais (2010–2011); at the Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro and IBICT (2011), and at Shanghai University of the City of Shanghai (SHU) (2015).