Deleuze and contemporary art｜The heterogeneity of escape

Material and immaterial memory work overlap, developing complementary strategies of commemoration that refuse to cooperate with forgetting.

Gerald Raunig

In everyday parlance, running away is seen as an act of cowardice. The brave man takes up arms and joins the fight, as opposed to the dishonorable attitude of flight and retreat. In heteronormative everyday life, the mode of subjectivation endorsed by honorable and masculine warriors is to choose one of two sides and then fight to undo this division and ultimately reestablish unity. Movement can only develop in this striated and layered space between division and unity.

Yet, within our narrow geopolitical discursive space shaped by Western dialectical thinking, we find the remnants of an image that affirms escape, deft evasion and subversion, while escaping the limits of fragmentation and sublation. In recent years various approaches have emerged in philosophy, political practice and artistic production that develop and test a non-dialectical concept of resistance that goes beyond notions of contradiction, negation and reaction. These conceptual developments extend from various images of escape, through nomadism, flight, and poverty, to disappearance, betrayal, and various notions of exodus.

I want to outline a specific lineage created by this set of concepts, which have acquired a special meaning over the past thirty years, especially in the arts, where they - and this is what I want to problematize here - are often misinterpreted. On the other hand, my discussion will thematize the image of escape and its reality, which I would like to try to illustrate using the example of three video works by the Spanish artist and activist Marcelo Exposito.

Lines of Escape: Some Conceptual Components

Deleuze and contemporary art｜The heterogeneity of escape

As early as the 1970s, in the concept-making practices of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - and in Deleuze's collaboration with Claire Parnet - the concept of the line of flight began to appear with increasing frequency. In 1980, in the culmination of Deleuze and Guattari's collaboration - A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia - the line of flight ended up being the central concept in a bundle of conceptual creations, adjacent to and interfering with other new concepts such as deterritorialization, the organless body, smooth space and nomadism. Although these concepts have seemed to become ubiquitous in certain discourses over the past few decades, their concretization has never achieved adequate clarity. The effect of this inaccurate adoption of Guattari's and Deleuze's concepts has been, on the one hand, the depoliticization of these concepts (in which they were developed in a highly politicized context), and on the other - and therefore - the widespread condemnation of their authors as "postmodern relativists", "hippies" and "quixotic theoretical poets".

Against this background, I would like to first outline the seven most important conceptual components of the line of flight as they appear in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. What these components have in common is that they all point to a specific core strategy, as described in their last book, What is Philosophy? " is described in the introduction as the continuous creation of concepts. This is how Deleuze and Guattari understand the function of philosophy, and I would like to add two possible realizations of this proposition. On the one hand is the practice of continually creating new concepts, "concepts that are meteorites rather than commercial products" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 11). Concept creation in this first mode serves as a radical linguistic rupture, consciously creating misunderstandings and irritations. Beyond this strategy of sending celestial bodies into everyday language, there is a second, equally destructive possibility of concept creation: the radical dislocation of concepts, which I want to discuss in connection with the image of escape.

1. The specific qualities of the word "escape" must be studied in the context of its diverse and misleading connotations of escapism, artistic obscurity, or political withdrawal. This misunderstanding implies that reference to the word escape implies the subject's personal withdrawal from the noise and chatter of the world. In a philosophical perspective on the field of artistic production, for Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, the paradigmatic protagonist of escape is Herman Melville's Bartleby. For Paul Virno, it was the image of the "master" pianist Glenn Gould. In the rapid digestion of these images by artistic discourse, they are often quickly reduced to embodiments of personal resistance and, in Bartleby's case, personal withdrawal. Fortunately, Deleuze and Guattari anticipated this appropriation of the concept of escape and responded explicitly to it. In a brief chapter on the novel and its cuts, ruptures and lines of escape in Chapter 8 of A Thousand Plateaus, they note: "As for the line of escape, could it not be entirely personal, an individual escape in his own way, from 'responsibility', from the world, seeking refuge in the desert or in art...? A false impression" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 225). Escape here does not mean escape or appeasement, but rather it is an extremely active affair involving a constant search for the latest weapons - this is exemplified by the quote from Black Panther Party activist George Jackson in A Thousand Plateaus: "Run away, but in flight look for weapons" (Deleuze and Parnay, 2002: 102). The connection between flight and weapons breaks down the dichotomy between aggressive fighting and cowardly flight. Escape here implies neither defense nor individualism, but a creative form of offense. "The line of escape is never about escaping from the world, but about creating leaks, like when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak in all directions, even as it makes its parts more and more rigid in order to seal off the line of escape" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 225).

2. The line of escape is neither fantasy nor delusion. "The biggest and only mistake is to think that the line of escape is to escape from life; to escape into imagination or art. On the contrary, escape is to generate reality, to create life, to find weapons" (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002:36). Producing the Real sounds like a pre-emptive response to the criticism Deleuze and Guattari received in the decades after Capitalism and Schizophrenia, when they were dismissed as drug-addled hippie poets and kings of metaphor. Contrary to these condemnations and accusations, a radical and sometimes revolutionary tone runs through the writings of Deleuze and Guattari in the 1970s, but this aspect is often deliberately ignored in academic and artistic writing through taking them out of context. But metaphor is indeed the thing that Deleuze and Guattari least want to associate with creation and invention: "We always create on the line of escape, not because we imagine ourselves dreaming, but on the contrary, because we depict reality on it, where we form a plane of coherence" (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 102).

3. As if escape alone were not suspicious enough, it is often accompanied by further words in military language denouncing the arsenal: escape means desertion, flight means betrayal. But in appropriating the concept of betrayal, a radical reassessment occurs, starting with a radical transformation of the object of betrayal: "We betray the fixed power that seeks to stand in our way, the established power of the earth" (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 30). Fixed and given powers do not form an outside; they traverse our bodies, our relationships, our world. The traitor therefore betrays his own domain, his own gender, his own class, and his own majority. To betray one's majority means to break away from one's own dominant norm. "Because it is difficult to be a traitor; this is creation. In it one must lose one's identity, one's face. One must disappear, become unknown" (33). Betrayal begins with the movement of disappearance, of becoming nobody, of breaking allegiance to the logic and horror of identity, representation and visibility. Yet, as an absolute act, the result is becoming a nobody, losing face, giving up identity, disappearing may not only be difficult but unimaginable, especially in an industry as diverse as art and writing where symbolic capital is accumulated in so many ways. Rather, betrayal as a creative act must be imagined and realized as a tendency to disappear, a movement that must be constantly established, a movement that restarts again and again and frustrates representational institutions, structures and state apparatuses.

4. In the conceptual combination of escape lines, the concept of line is also separated from its daily meaning. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the line of escape is not a continuous, uninterrupted straight line, but a combination of flows and cuts, a constant stuttering, a stumbling, often outside the ordinary orbit. There is nothing conventional in the line of flight, nothing sacred, nothing that governs territory, possession, striated space dominated by straight movement. Rather, the line of flight implies a demonic multiplicity that jumps from one interval to another, skipping intervals (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 30ff.).

Even though the concept of escape seems to assume movement from one place to another, which is also suggested by the mathematical definition of a line, an escape line is not in fact like this. "The line is between points, in the middle of them, no longer from one point to another" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 298). Lines pass through points, between points, as a flow through the middle, an unbridled middle without beginning or end. Escape lines can therefore have a specific movement (albeit not from one point to another), but they can also occur in place, as an immobile journey, an escape that does not change position. In this context (he also says that change should not be feared), Deleuze (who is not entirely in agreement with Guattari on this point) repeatedly quotes the historical philosopher and universal historian Arnold Toynbee about the surprising qualities of nomads

Toynbee showed that nomads were neither immigrants nor travelers in the strict geographical sense, but rather, they were those who did not move, those who clung to the steppes, those who strode in place, along lines of flight, who were the greatest inventors of new weapons. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002:28)

This paradox of the nomad not leaving his place, or running away as staying put, seems to me particularly helpful in dealing with those overly fancy interpretations of the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari: from the nomadic fervor of cosmopolitan intellectuals to the figure of the immigrant as the new revolutionary subject.

5. Compared with traditional left-wing, especially Marxist political theory, there is no concept of individual and society in the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than replacing, but disrupting, this particular striated axis of thinking, the two authors use concepts such as singularities and events. Like these concepts, lines of flight are not only non-escapist and non-individualistic, they also cut across binary logics of the collective and the individual. For Deleuze and Guattari, this opposition does not describe the relevant reality

A single group, or even a single individual, may exhibit all of the lines we have discussed simultaneously. But more often, a single group or individual functions as a line of escape; the group or individual creates the line rather than follows it, itself a living weapon it forges rather than a stolen weapon. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004:226)

6. Escape is not just the empty movement of one or more people to escape. In place of the subject-object relationship between the person who draws the line of escape and the line of escape itself, between the person who forges or possesses the weapon and the weapon itself, escape becomes at the same time an invention and therefore a productive, creative, innovative weapon. Rather than understanding flight and the use of weapons as opposite poles and seeing them as distinct modes of subjectification, such as the (feminine) coward and the (masculine) hero, flight and weapons must be understood as interconnected. Creation occurs precisely in this chain of escape and invention. Different possible worlds are created precisely on the line of escape. World-making also means escaping from the idea that there is only one possible world, and it means constantly creating new worlds. Escape as abolition overlaps with the constitution of new social chains, constitutional powers, and institutional practices.

7. Finally, escape lines are primary. Not in the sense of chronology or eternal universality, but as a constitutive element of the inner plane of society. Here it is necessary to read the concept of escape again against the ordinary usage of escape, against the idea that escape is a reaction to a previous situation, a previous attack. "In a sense, what is primary in society are lines, movements of escape. For, far from escaping society, far from being a utopia or ideology, these constitute the social field, outline its hierarchies and boundaries, all its becomings" (Deleuze and Parnay, 2002:101). If we consider this primacy of the line of escape as a mode of subjectivation that is more than just a reaction to something, then the final semantic result must be a move away from "escape..." towards escape as an absolute concept.

"The year that ends (begins) in the future"

In his video The Year the Future Ends (Begins) (12 minutes, 2007) Marcelo Expósito draws two lines of escape in his video work, breaking down the dichotomy of memory politics. Here, Escape takes us beyond conventional forms of documentary practice to realize the legacy of traumatic history in a new way. Rather than burying the future in a past masked by pseudo-objective appearances, Expósito introduces memory work as a dual archaeological practice. While the past has often become ossified in historiographical procedures and classic documentary forms, here a becoming of the present needs to be unearthed, existing between images but also between archaeological finds. Digging is indeed required, because memories are not only produced through contemplation: "Memory is work, not something you can just stare at".

The point of escape for Marcelo Expósito's video is 1977, the year Spain held its first democratic elections, which, according to official history, was the high point of Spain's democratic process. However, for Expósito, who looks back 30 years later, this is "the year in which the future ends (begins)." Much can be said about the hollowness of this recognized date, and much can be said about the continuity of the Franco regime beyond this threshold until today. Similar to how the concept of "transition" was applied to the neoliberal transformation process in the former communist countries of Europe, the phrase "transition to democracy" also has great significance in Spain. Just as the concept was used in post-communist countries to test new forms of neoliberal exploitation under the cover of democratic commitments, there are also signs that the late introduction of democracy in Spain was more than an adjustment to the Western European norm. Expósito's initial interest, however, was less focused on the thirty years that had passed and the layers of oppression that had accumulated during this time. In fact, he traced his escape line back four decades before 1977.

In a dreamily accelerated rewind, he accumulates representative images of Franco's clerical fascism, but also resistance to it, from ETA's attacks in the early 1970s to the various rebellions of the 1960s and 1950s. This frantic backtracking was then met by civil war and revolution in the years of postwar purges and isolation.

The premise of the video is that "the official narrative of democratic transition is largely naturalized through a form of visual representation based on overcoded images that paradoxically show less and less while increasingly hindering the possibility of understanding the historical events they purport to represent."

The canonical repetition of images, especially in anniversary commemorations, stagnates the past and brutally decontextualizes it. This is why Expósito invented his first line of escape, trying to betray mainstream representations and resurrect images of the past. In this first line, Expósito overaffirms the crude form of official documents by accelerating the frenzied inversion of sequences of standardized images, causing them to completely lose their representational connotation. Image memory and dream work are used here to connect the past and the future, they lose their linear arrangement and merge into a flow, a line of escape that opens a new path between the points of mainstream history.

However, in the final passage of the video, a powerful archaeological practice is added to this first line of escape, a kind of image archeology. The video's motto, "Stirring the Underworld," refers not only to the archeology of visual representations but also to a concrete cause, to those small but effective social movements that, in the here and now, exhumed the remains of hundreds of civil war fighters and anonymous victims of the Franco regime. In a meticulous effort of excavation, classification, labeling and documentation, the remains of 439 Republican soldiers of the Civil War and victims of Franco's reprisals in the early postwar period were unearthed between 2005 and 2007 in the central Spanish town of Uclés.

This specific form of memory work was embedded in a social movement that worked underground like a mole, stirring up the official politics of the Spanish state or, as Marcelo Expósito puts it, creating "a real micropolitical earthquake"

"Since the late 1990s, some people have decided: if the law and the state do not make any decisions about what to do with our relatives buried like animals across the country, we are going to go and bring them out ourselves - which means that an impressive social process has taken place: dozens of organizations, officially called 'Associations for the Recovery of Historical Memory', have been created, with the main purpose of locating the places where the bodies were buried and starting the process of exhuming them (individually or collectively), trying to identify relatives and, if possible, bury them again with honors and proper names."

Finally came civil war and revolution. The premise of the video is that "the official narrative of democratic transition is largely naturalized through a form of visual representation based on overcoded images that paradoxically show less and less while increasingly hindering the possibility of understanding the historical events they purport to represent."

Some associations are linked to the GC Party, some are closely related to the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CGT, others are independent; some form networks, others are less visible, but the interesting question is how they operate: they take advantage of a "semi-legal" status - often initiated by relatives (often grandchildren) of the oppressed and murdered - And attract more and more people to join: people who give testimonies of shootings or burials, local historians, lawyers, archaeologists, sometimes politicians who can provide "unofficial" cover for some activities, forensic experts, volunteers who help in various activities: excavations, driving, etc.

Hundreds of people pool their diverse knowledge and abilities to build a network of practical activities with the aim of...what should I say? Merely exhuming corpses? More than that - it is an act of releasing a ghost - like a literal return of the repressed, which, in my opinion, completely calls into question, on an almost preconscious level, the socio-psychological foundations of democratic transition and our current political order.

Here, embodied archaeological movements complement another line of flight - that of visual representation - with material memory work, subverting subterranean connections between fascist histories and present-day governmentality. Material and immaterial memory work overlap, developing complementary strategies of commemoration that refuse to cooperate with forgetting. While the official narrative of the democratization process separates any relationship between the future and the past, in Expósito's works, the relationship between the past and the future is realized on two lines of escape, placed in the uneasy tension of becoming in the present. Not letting the past rest, but accelerating it and keeping it in a state of unease, is what the line of escape means here.

Antonio Negri's Deleuzianism

The year 1977 marked a dubious turning point or "transition" in Spain, while the same year in Italy was the year of rebellion and the beginning of the "Year of Lead" (anni di piombo). The genealogy of (post)workerist thought is an important thread in the development struggles of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s; from the labor struggles that took place in the big factories to the deinstitutionalized strategies of workers' autonomy (autonomia operaia) to the early theoretical and practical ways of resisting the transformation of the capitalist mode of production that continue today. Escape has been a familiar concept in these experiences of autonomy, primarily from the factory. Antonio Negri made a significant contribution to the formation of the workers' movement from the early 1960s, when he founded the Workers' Autonomous Organization in 1969. The organization developed concepts such as the social worker (operaio sociale) and the dispersed factory (fabbrica diffusa), which understood the factory no longer as a center of production and conflict, but as a more dispersed space and intersection, potentially involving the whole of society.

After being accused of being a terrorist and denounced as a "bad teacher" (cattivo maestro), Negri fled to Paris, where he more closely aligned his (post-)Marxist workerist theory with that of his poststructuralist colleagues while in exile in France. Negri co-authored a book with Guattari (New Free Spaces, 1985), and his relationship with Deleuze can be inferred from an interview Negri conducted with Deleuze titled "Control and Becoming." There, Deleuze repeats his alienation from the traditional Marxist focus on contradictions and returns to the concept of the line of flight: "First of all, we argue that any society is defined not by its contradictions but by its lines of flight, which it escapes everywhere, trying to follow the line of flight formed at a given moment of right and wrong. Very interesting." (Deleuze, 1995:171) Negri seems not to have forgotten the excitement of his time in Paris; a few years later he even described his choice to return to an Italian prison from Paris in exile in 1997 as a "line of escape" (Negri, 1998:17).

This is how flight as a specific form of "opposition" was eventually taken up prominently in Empire, Negri's political manifesto co-written with Michael Hardt around the turn of the millennium. Through concepts such as "nomadism," "escape," and "exodus," Hardt and Negri continue to conceptualize the non-dialectical forms of resistance pioneered by Deleuze and Guattari.

"Whereas in modernity opposition often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity opposition may be most effective through oblique or diagonal gestures. The battle against empire may be won by subtraction and defection. This flight has no specific place; it is an evacuation from the site of power." (Hardt and Negri, 2000:212)

The exodus is presented in Empire as a rejection of the logic of nation-state borders and as an expression of the right to free movement. In addition to this exodus from the peripheries subject to new forms of exploitation under the global post-Fordist regime, three other types of exodus appear in the work of Hardt and Negri: the old notion of the exodus of workers from factories, and therefore from labor, developed in the self-government movement an exodus from patriarchal and heteronormative conditions; the decline of the state and representative democracy as an exodus from outdated forms of government and ways of being governed; and finally an exodus from narrow anthropological models that seek to center the human and confine it within the boundaries of gendered bodies.

Although Hardt and Negri overly sympathetically promote the problem of immigrants as revolutionary subjects, the point of Negri's concept of exodus is to redirect the image of escape toward radicalism. This connotation is also present in Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the line of flight, but in Negri the analysis of the revolutionary past and the commitment to a new communism are tinged with a strategy of wild escape, stimulating the accumulation of desire rather than loss: "For me, running away sometimes requires strength."

"Radical Imagination"

This climax, this activist turn, can be seen in another of Expósito's videos. "Radical Imagination (Carnival of Resistance)" (61 minutes, 2004) presents the experience of Reclaim the Streets, one of the most important groups of the 1990s, adopting new, partly artistic forms of political activism. Taking Back the Streets originated from the ecology and carnival movements of the early 1990s and organized many radical public space occupations in London and other British cities. Expósito's video mainly focuses on the occupation of London's financial center, one of the main actions of the "Global Day of Action Against Capital" on June 18, 1999, known as "J-18" and the "Carnival against Capitalism".

An integral part of the aestheticization of new political practices is their emphasis on questions of form: forms of organization, forms of action, non-representational forms of expression. In this context, Carnival functions not as a simple confrontation - "against capital" - but more as an image that escapes this dichotomy and transcends classic forms of protest. Radical Carnival is not about staging a Dionysian carnival so that we can work more efficiently later. Opposition here is not a transgressive gesture that attempts to impact or cross boundaries. Rather, in this carnivalesque escape, the creativity of new forms of political organization and action becomes important, forms that do not separate politics and aesthetics but develop a new political aesthetics.

Marcelo Expósito not only shows how "anti-capitalist carnival" anticipated or developed the most important forms of action of the anti-globalization movement, his video also refers to carnival as a historical precursor of rebellion. These pioneers have one thing in common: unlike orderly strikes and demonstrations, in which protest masses tend to be homogenized from the outset into one structure, in Carnival emerges what I would call unconventional mass formations. Contrary to views that condemn the masses as gray, indifferent and homogeneous, and contrary to the negative connotations of the masses that can also be found in left-wing discourse, the concept of the unconventional mass suggests that it cannot be understood as unified. This unconventional formation organizes itself in heterogeneity and difference, a permeable, fluctuating, dispersed mass. Its unconventionality is twofold: the mass manifests its unconventionality by disapproving of being dominated, and its unity remains passive based solely on the rejection of specific forms of being dominated. Irregularity, on the other hand, is the negation of any positive description of community and implies the permanent differentiation of individuals. The unconventional mass is not limited to one form but moves itself, its space and sociality.

In the unconventional forms of radical carnival, the most problematic separation in aesthetic and political representation - that between active and passive components - is dissolved. This is reflected in a quote from Mikhail Bakhtin quoted in the video: "Carnival ignores any distinction between actors and spectators, it eliminates the stage, the spectators do not go to the carnival, they are the carnival." If crisis and rebellion, chaos and protest arise in the unformed, invisible, unconventional flow of radical carnival, then it is not about the influence of the inside on the outside, an "external effect" realized on those who are outside - the anonymous art spectator or the revolutionary subject, the one who is not yet aesthetically and politically enlightened - education or participation. What matters is a new mixture of bodies and signs that does not want to be presented to the outside, that wants to be different and excessive, as different and excessive as possible - even if only for the brief time of an event, a rupture, inventing ever new techniques to avoid being counted, striped and segmented by the state apparatus.

The "anti-capitalist carnival" not only makes possible events, ruptures, and escapes, but also social reorganization and the emergence of desire machines, thus breaking the striation of space. This double movement, these parallel lines of flight and weaponry, suspended ruptures and social reorganizations, shape the transgressive quality on the inner plane of radical carnival. This form of immanent transgression means that there is no transgression in space, no transgression in time, no sequence of escape and invention, escape and constitution of power. The space in which inner transgression occurs is the only space in which transgression is possible. The time of immanent transgression is the realization of the two temporalities of the line of flight, namely the event of protest in flight and the duration of creatively constituted power. In the words of Take Back the Streets activist John Jordan: "We wanted to move away from the traditional confrontational protest situation and prefigure the world we imagined in the moment of protest itself."

Paul Virno and the Grammar of Exodus

Paolo Virno is a philosopher who mainly studies the philosophy of language. This philosophy, like that of Antonio Negri - albeit less obviously - also stems from the Marxist background of Italian workerist and post-worker theory. As a young man in the 1970s, Virno was active in workers' power groups and spent three years in prison until his acquittal. Unlike Negri, Virno has no personal or theoretical connections to Deleuze and Guattari, nor does his work explicitly refer to the French school. However, the resonances between different schools of political philosophy that shaped late 20th century Europe are also present in Virno's core concepts.

Virno developed his concepts of escape and exodus early on, as a direct result of his experiences with the Autonomous Movement of the 1970s. In September 1981, he published the short essay "The Taste of Abundance," which clearly outlined his concept of exodus. Starting from the image of the crisis of the capitalist accumulation process already described by Marx, namely the flight of workers from the factories, Virno offers an explanation for the difficulties of implementing capitalism in the United States. Low real estate prices, nearly inexhaustible land reserves, and a state of overabundance made possible a mass exodus from wage-earning jobs. According to Virno, the rise of the cult of mobility, the desire to escape clarity, and the flight from the factory in the 1970s were repetitions of this earlier crisis of American capitalism: "Nomadism, personal freedom, escape, and a sense of abundance nourish contemporary social conflicts" (Virno 2002: 181). As early as 1981, Virno ended his article on running away with the following paragraph, which has been his "programme" to this day

Disobedience and flight are by no means a passive gesture that absolves action and responsibility. Rather, fleeing means changing the conditions under which conflict occurs rather than submitting to them. The active construction of favorable situations requires more initiative than the confrontation with presupposed conditions. An affirmative "doing" embellishes the defection, leaving a sentimental and operational flavor to the moment. Conflict is engaged from what we have constructed by escaping in order to defend the new social relations and forms of life that we are already experiencing. To the age-old idea of "escape in order to better attack" is added the conviction that the struggle is more effective if there is something to lose besides one's own chains. (Virno 2002: 181)

In his most famous book, The Grammar of the Masses, Virno returned to images of (radical) disobedience and escape almost twenty years later (Virno 2004: 69-71). There he describes the migration of politics from the "public sphere" to the sphere of production. He explains the situation in which political action is subsumed by work processes, especially craftsmanship. Virno sees this as a fundamental premise of contemporary production, linked to the emergence of a new historical-political "subject": the post-Fordist masses. Of course, reading The Grammar of the Crowds one might get the impression that, compared to the older Negri, Virno seemed more interested in grammar than in crowds. His interest in philosophical questions of language, and his emphasis on language as an undefined score common to all, corroborate this interpretation. But the continuing quality of Virno's writing is to connect, through surprising ruptures and bridges, these questions of language and intelligence as a basis for inter-individual cooperation and as integral parts of "universal intelligence" and political philosophy.

This theoretical strategy of politicizing language grammar is repeated again in Virno's latest book, Resourcefulness and Creative Action. The book begins with a basic discussion of the "nature," "structure," and "logic" of jokes in relation to the emergence of creativity and innovative action. The starting point of the book is Freud's 1905 study of jokes. Virno considers the book an important attempt to interpret various jokes in a quasi-botanical manner, which he proceeds in a similar manner, albeit - like Deleuze and Guattari - strictly anti-Freud.

But Virno doesn't care about the jokes themselves. In his view, jokes are illustrations of innovative action. In its grammar, macroscopic changes in life forms are reflected in microscopic ways. In a broad philosophical exposition, mainly about Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Carl Schmitt, Virno attempts to show that it is jokes that show how the world can be changed and how. After these expositions, which include the difficulties of applying rules and their relationship to exceptions and the state of exception, he finally and unexpectedly returns to two of his most famous images in The Grammar of the Masses. In "Wit and Creative Action," these images first appear as two basic types of jokes. For Virno, these are multiple, contradictory uses of concepts and proverbs, and misplacements of meaning. According to Virno, all jokes, as well as all human efforts to change the form of its life, draw their nourishment from unusual combinations or sudden deviations of existing elements. In this context, jokes become microcosms in which we experience unexpected combinations and transfers of meaning as the basis for changes in life forms.

These are exactly the two modes of continuous creation of concepts that I mentioned at the beginning of this article: new combinations, recombinations that deliberately create misunderstandings and excitement, and radical dislocations of concepts from their familiar contexts. But we also find this basic typology at the macro level, as innovation and exodus - or, to return to the key concepts of this article, as invention and escape, weapons and escape, rupture and reorganization, abolition and institutional practice.

Virno writes about the connection between jokes as dislocation and the oldest exodus stories: "The logical-linguistic resources required to find the way out of Egypt are precisely those on which jokes depend. These resources are characterized by delays and dislocations, that is, sudden deviations from the axis of discourse. At the linguistic level, such deviations mean an immediate change of subject if the conversation proceeds as if it were on railroad tracks. In the political sphere, it manifests itself as Collective defection as exodus. Faced with the question of whether to obey or openly rebel against the Pharaoh's rule, the Israelites invented a possibility that no one had considered before: rather than seeing the question as a decision between given options, the exodus changed the context in which the question emerged. This opened up a side path that had not yet been recorded on the existing political map, thus changing the very grammar of the choices that could be considered

Exodus is the transfer of a heuristic procedure that mathematicians call data mutation into political practice. By preferring secondary or idiosyncratic factors, we gradually move from a specific question, that of submission or insurrection, to an entirely different question: How do we realize a movement of escape while testing previously unimaginable forms of autonomy? (Virno 2005: 79)

From Virno's early political writings on exodus to more recent works on the philosophy of language, this Deleuze-Guattari figure reappears: there is a connection between escape and weapons, between movements of flight, defection, suspension and the artifice, creative, constructive forces of social reorganization that re-emerge in the context of post-Fordist capitalism.

"Urban Factory": Escape from the City as Factory

So, what score are contemporary craftsmen playing? I suggest the following answer: Every day, contemporary craftsmen (who view craftsmanship as an unfinished activity that requires a public space)...are following a specific and unique score of "universal intelligence," that is, the total collection of human intellectual abilities.

With a lot of political and aesthetic intuition, Marcelo Expósito comes close to the actualization of Virno's conceptual composition in his video May Day (City-Factory) (62 minutes, 2004). This video provides a complex introduction to the shift from the Fordist factory paradigm to the post-Fordist paradigm of virtual cognitive and emotional labor. Taking the Fiat Lingotto plant, once a proud center of car production and now a hotel and conference center as well as an example of a decentralized factory, Expósito uses meaningful and detailed pictures to illustrate the transformation of politics and means of production that Virno describes. Parallel to this is a discussion of forms of resistance throughout the video, from strikes to interventions in the city as a post-Fordist factory space, from clogs thrown at machines to images of hackers disrupting communication machines, from striking workers in Fordist factories to the assembly line and the European May Day movement as a contemporary practice of transnational renewal of May Day political practices.

In post-Fordist capitalism, labor increasingly develops into a craft performance without a product. It requires a place that is structured like a public space. It requires the presence of others, which is what Hannah Arendt considered the fundamental category of politics. It requires one to expose oneself to the gaze of others, so that cooperation and communication become essential qualities of labor, while craftsmanship and performativity become necessary intersubjective abilities. Virno's example comes from the everyday realm of narrow craft: Glenn Gould hated performing in public and retreated to the recording studio. Of course, this retreat is by no means a simple retreat into the artist's ivory tower. In his videos, Expósito demonstrates Glenn Gould's practice in a surprising way: craftsmanship appears here as a suspension of his emergence as a "performance artist", coupled with a meticulous rearrangement of the material in post-production - suspension and reorganization becoming two aspects of a line of escape. Although Gould declined to reproduce scores in the concert business, he was more focused on potential new arrangements of given material in an undefined score.

But this line of escape is no longer the exclusive ability of craftsmen. Today it also belongs to what Virno calls contemporary everyday craftsmen. Escape from the everyday as representational and a weapon for new (social) arrangements is also an implicit part of Expósito's description of the May Day movement. If factories spread throughout the city, then "the city is a new labor space, a field that needs to be subverted and reorganized by new confrontational forces." This deterritorialization and reterritorialization also occurred in many cities in the middle of the century: since 2004, like an accelerated version of the practice of "reclaiming the streets," a stream of dancing, singing, and painting people flowed through many European urban centers on May 1st. The reoccupation of city streets, city walls and social spaces occurs as a suspension of traditional forms of protest and a reorganization of bodies and symbols in blurred fields of action and representation. In this way, the diffusion of craft/art into the cognitively capitalist city strikes back: thanks to the creativity of large numbers of cognitive workers as craftsmen, the signs and displays of corporate capitalism differentially unify urban centers, and now the score of creativity - practiced in precarious work - serves as a counterpoint to signs and displays that pervade consumer urban areas: "On walls, in advertisements, in the representations of countries, banks or big brands, new signs emerge that make visible the 'social precarity' of the city as an emerging social subject".

Marcelo Expósito's video works realize the different variations of this double movement of escape and invention (finding/finding weapons) found in Deleuze and Guattari, Negri and Virno, and in the art-political practices of the past decade. However, these videos cannot be understood simply as representations, but rather as sympathetic depictions of intertwined currents of theory and practice. They draw a line of escape from conventional documentary practices (history, art, and activism), while they are also interventions into political practices that have abandoned old schema of political and aesthetic opposition and separation.

Translated by Anita Fricek and Stephen Zepke

Deleuze and contemporary art｜The heterogeneity of escape

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