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On the day before
the Euro Mayday (1 May 2004 in Barcelona and Milan),
activists from Indymedia groups all over Spain gathered
at the invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA)
in Barcelona. The activists had traveled from Andalusia,
Galicia, Madrid, the Basque region and the Canary
Islands, and they had taken the opportunity not only to
participate in the Mayday demonstration against
precarious working and living conditions, but also to
conduct an intensive debate during the days beforehand
about their media-activist practice: issues of (non-)
institutionalization, the expansion and the limitations
of freedom of speech, information strategies in between
communication guerrilla and counter-information were the
focal points of the discussion. The dense debates framed
by inputs - drawing lines from post-1968 activism to the
present - from Franco Berardi Bifo (Radio Alice, Bologna
1976/77), Carlos Ameller (Video-Nou, Barcelona
1977-1983) and Dee Dee Halleck (Paper Tiger TV, USA,
since 1981), and a discussion with Naomi Klein and Avi
Lewis about their new film "La Toma" were
interrupted by a critical objection from an Indymedia
activist. Politely but firmly, the activist called
attention to the fact that the MACBA, as organizer of
the conference preceding the Mayday actions against
increasingly non-self-determined precarious working and
living conditions, is itself involved in the game of
cognitive capitalism and the tendency toward precarious
conditions, in which the institutions of the art field
play a role that is by no means innocent. This criticism
of the ambivalent role of art institutions was further
discussed in the days that followed and demonstrated in
a manifestation and a graffiti attack on the Fundació
Tàpies
(one of the more important contemporary art foundations
in Barcelona) in the course of the Mayday demonstration.
Following a model
from Foucault, which is also frequently cited in the
art field now as well, the current development of society
can be illustrated with the concept of governmentality:
the dismantling of welfare-state forms of intervention
is accompanied by a restructuring of techniques of governing,
which transfer the leadership capacity of state apparatuses
and instances to the population, to "responsible",
"prudent" and "rational" individuals.
This development relates primarily to the self-government,
self-discipline and self-technologies of individuals,
yet it goes beyond this. A new area of the management
of microsectors is crystallizing in the dissolution
of the welfare state, an intermediate zone between government
by the state and the (self-) government and voluntary
self-control of individuals: seemingly autonomous facilities,
NGOs, which are invoked with buzz words like "civil
society" and "distant from the state"
as an exterior to the state, but which function as "outsourced"
state apparatuses at the same time. Many art institutions
belong to this category as well.
In the governmentality
setting, it becomes theoretically impossible and strategically
not very promising to construct a dichotomous opposition
between movement and institution, because not only resistive
individuals, but also progressive institutions and civil
society NGOs operate on the same plane of governmentality.
In a reflection on the relations between political art
practices and progressive art institutions, it can be
neither a matter of the abstract negation of existing
and incipient institutions and micro-institutions, nor
of an acclamation of "anti-institutional"
free networks or autonomous art collectives as being
outside the institution.
Contrary to a view that occasionally imputes this kind
of naïve freedom propaganda to poststructuralist authors
such as Deleuze and Guattari, disparaging them as anarchist
aging hippies, with a little good will one can read
from Deleuze and Guattari that they unequivocally identify
the pole of movement and organization/institution and
set it in a relation: in "Thousand Plateaus"
Deleuze and Guattari not only hallucinate - as has often
been imputed - hybrid streams of deterritorialization,
but also describe a permanent connection between deterritorialization
and reterritorialization. This connection relates less
to a geographical "territory", but rather
to exactly the relationship of political movement and
institutions, of constituent and constituted power,
of instituting and institutionalization.
Guattari problematized organization
and institutionalization in 1969 thus: "The problem
of the revolutionary organization is basically that
of establishing an institutional machine that is distinguished
by a better axiomatics and a special practice; this
means the guarantee that it does not enclose itself
in various social structures, especially not in the
state structure." For the art field that
would mean reflecting on the danger of the closure and
establishment of the art institution as a state apparatus
and keeping sight of the coopting function of the institution,
yet without principally condemning the institutions
straight away because of it. Against this background,
a "progressive" institution would be one which
conducts - counter to the initially static quality of
the term institution - a moving practice of organizing.
The problem of the
concept of governmentality in this context lies primarily
in the appearance of an inescapable totality, which
seems to leave a defeatist withdrawal and individual
exodus a la Bartleby
as the only "forms of action" possible. Foucault,
however, also sees a possibility specifically in the
indissoluble linking of power and self-techniques. This
possibility is developed in his Berkeley lectures from
1983 in the genealogy of a critical stance in western
philosophy within the framework of the problematization
of a term that played a central role in ancient philosophy:
parrhesia
means in Greek roughly the activity of a person (the
parrhesiastes) "saying everything", freely speaking truth
without rhetorical games and without ambiguity, even
and especially when this is hazardous. The parrhesiastes
speaks the truth, not because he
is in possession of the truth, which he makes public
in a certain situation, but because he is taking a risk.
The clearest indication for the truth of the parrhesia
consists in the "fact that a speaker says something
dangerous - something other than what the majority believes."
According to Foucault's interpretation, though, it is
never a matter of revealing a secret that must be pulled
out of the depths of the soul. Here truth consists less
in opposition to the lie or to something "false",
but rather in the verbal activity of speaking truth:
"the function of parrhesia
is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but
has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor
or of the speaker himself."
Foucault describes the practice
of parrhesia
using numerous examples from ancient Greek literature
as a movement from a political to a personal technique.
The older form of parrhesia
corresponds to publicly speaking truth as an institutional
right. Depending on the form of the state, the subject
addressed by the parrhesiastes is the assembly in the democratic agora, the tyrant
in the monarchical court. Parrhesia is generally understood
as coming from below and directed upward, whether it
is the philosopher's criticism of the tyrant or the
citizen's criticism of the majority of the assembly:
"Parrhesia
is a form of criticism [...] always in a situation where
the speaker or confessor is in a position of inferiority
with respect to the interlocutor."
The specific potentiality of parrhesia
is found in the unequivocal gap between the one who
takes a risk to express everything and the criticized
sovereign who is impugned by this truth. Through his
criticism the parrhesiastes
enters into exposed situations threatened by the sanction
of exclusion. The most famous example, which Foucault
also analyzes in great detail,
is the figure of Diogenes, who commands Alexander from
the precariousness of his barrel to move out of his
light. Dio Chrysostom's description of this meeting
is followed by a long parrhesiastic
dialogue, in which Diogenes probes the boundaries of
the parrhesiastic contract between the sovereign and the philosopher,
constantly seeking to shift the boundaries of this contract
in a game of provocation and retreat. Like the citizen
expressing a minority opinion in the democratic setting
of the agora, the Cynic philosopher also practices a
form of parrhesia
with respect to the monarch in public.
Over the course of
time, a change takes place in the game of truth "which
- in the classical Greek conception of parrhesia
- was constituted by the fact that someone was courageous
enough to tell the truth to other people. [...] there is a shift from that kind of parrhesiastic
game to another truth game which now consists in being
courageous enough to disclose the truth about oneself."
This process from public criticism to personal (self-)
criticism develops parallel to the decrease in the significance
of the democratic public sphere of the agora. At the
same time, parrhesia
comes up increasingly in conjunction with upbringing
and education. One of Foucault's relevant examples here
is Plato's dialogue "Laches", in which the
question of the best teacher for the interlocutors'
sons represents the starting point and foil. The answer
is naturally that Socrates is the best teacher; what
is more interesting here is the development of the argumentation.
Socrates no longer assumes the function of the parrhesiastes in the sense of exercising dangerous contradiction in
a political sense, but rather by moving his listeners
to give account of themselves and leading them to a
self-questioning that queries the relationship between
their statements (logos)
and their way of living (bios).
However, this technique does not serve as an autobiographical
confession or examination of conscience, but rather
to establish a relationship between rational discourse
and the lifestyle of the interlocutor or the self-questioning
person.
The function of the parrhesiastes undergoes a similar change analogous to the transition
from the political to the personal parrhesia. In the first meaning there is a presuppositional condition
that the parrhesiastes
is the subordinate person who "says everything"
to the superordinate person. In the second meaning,
it only seems that the "truth-speaker" is
the sole authority, the one who motivates the other
to self-criticism and thus to changing his practice.
In fact, parrhesia
takes place in this second meaning in the transition
and exchange between the positions. Parrhesia
is thus not a characteristic / competency / strategy
of a single person, but rather a concatenation of positions
within the framework of the relationship between the
parrhesiastes'
criticism and the self-criticism thereby evoked.
In "Laches" Foucault sees "a movement
visible throughout this dialogue from the parrhesiastic figure of Socrates to the problem of the care of the
self." Contrary to any individualistic
interpretation, especially of later Foucault texts (imputing
a "return to subject philosophy", etc.), here
parrhesia
is not the competency of a subject, but rather a movement
between the position that queries the concordance of
logos and
bios, and
the position that exercises self-criticism in light
of this query.
My aim is to link
the two concepts of parrhesia
described by Foucault as a genealogical development,
to understand hazardous refutation in its relation to
self-revelation. Criticism, and especially
institutional criticism, is not exhausted in denouncing
abuses nor in withdrawing into more or less radical
self-questioning. In terms of the art field that means
that neither the belligerent strategies of the institutional
criticism of the 1970s nor art as a service to the institution
in the 1990s promise effective interventions in the
governmentality of the present. This is especially so
because there is no obstacle to the cooptation of political
contents by (supposedly) progressive art institutions
within the framework of these strategies.
Parrhesia
as a double strategy is needed: as an attempt of involvement
and engagement in a process of hazardous refutation,
and as self-questioning. This brings us back to the
situation mentioned at the beginning: in my interpretation,
the Indymedia activist described assumes exactly the
role of the parrhesiastes
in the double sense in MACBA: in general, Indymedia's
tradition of political parrhesia (also at the conference in MACBA and the actions in conjunction
with the Euro Mayday the next day) involve contrasting
the molar truth production of the media monopolies with
counter-information. In addition, though, the activist
also assumes the role of the parrhesiastes in the personal sense: he compels the institution MACBA
to test the concordance between logos
and bios,
between program and institutional reality. The political
parrhesia
as hazardous refutation is not carried out here in the
free space of the agora, but rather in a specific public
sphere, but one that is also not limited to the internal
structure of the art institution. The personal parrhesia, the movement from parrhesiastes
questioning the concordance of the institution's logos and bios, to the actors
in the institution, who propel the self-questioning
of their own institution because of the way it is questioned,
develops as an open and collective self-critical practice
of the institution. A productive game emerges here in
the relationship between activists and institution,
which is neither limited to a cooptation of the political
by the institution, nor to a simple redistribution of
resources from the progressive art institution to the
political actions. Recomposing social criticism and
institutional criticism means merging political and
personal parrhesia.
It is only by linking the two parrhesia
techniques that a one-sided instrumentalization can
be avoided, that the institutional machine is saved
from closing itself off, that the flow between movement
and institution can be maintained.
Translated by Aileen Derieg
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