Gerald Laoniger.
In everyday terms, flight is considered a coward's act. Brave people would take up arms and fight against the disgraceful attitude of flight and retreat. In the everyday life of heterosexual norms, the dominant model endorsed by honourable and masculinist fighters is the choice of one side and then fighting to eliminate this division and eventually rebuild unity. Movement can only develop in such stripes and layers between division and unification.
However, in our narrow geopolitical discourse, shaped by Western dialectics, we have found a remnant of images that are certain of flight, treachery and subversion, while avoiding the limits of division and abandonment. Various approaches have emerged in recent years in philosophy, political practice and artistic creation, developing and testing a non-arguable concept of resistance that goes beyond the concepts of contradiction, denial and reaction. These concepts have evolved from the images of flight to nomadicism, flight and poverty to the concepts of disappearance, betrayal and flight.
I want to outline a particular spectrum created by this concept, which has gained special meaning in the past three decades, especially in the field of art, where they -- which I want to be problematic here -- are often misused to explain. On the other hand, my discussion has turned the theme into a fugitive image and its realism, and I would like to try with Spanish artists and activists. Three videos by Marcelo Aixposito illustrate this.
Escape line: some conceptual components
As early as the 1970s, the concept of the escape line began to emerge more and more frequently in the creative practice of Gil Delarez and Felix Guatelli -- and in the cooperation between Delarez and Claire Parner. In 1980, at the height of cooperation between Deleuze and Guatari - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. II, the Millennium Plateau - the escape line eventually became a core concept in the creation of a set of concepts that were adjacent to and interfered with other new concepts, such as decolonization, organless bodies, smooth spaces and nomadic science. Although these concepts appear to have become ubiquitous in some of the words of the past decades, their specificity has never reached the appropriate level of clarity. The effect of this inaccurate adoption of the concepts of Guataly and Delarez is, on the one hand, the depoliticization of these concepts (which have developed in a highly politicized context) and, on the other hand, the consequent widespread condemnation of their authors as "postmodern relativists", "Hippies" and "Theoretical poets of Don Quijote".
In this context, I would like to start by outlining the seven most important conceptual components of the escape line that appear in the works of Delarez and Guataly. The common denominator of these components is that they all point to a particular core strategy, described in the introduction to their last book, " What is Philosophy? ", as the continuous creation of concepts. That is how Delarez and Guatari understand the function of philosophy, and I would like to add two possible forms of realization to this proposition. On the one hand is the practice of continuing to create new concepts, "which are meteors rather than commercial products" (Deretz and Guatari, 1994:11). In this first model, the concept was created as a radical language that consciously created misunderstandings and stimuli. In addition to this strategy of sending celestial objects into everyday languages, there is also the possibility of a second equally destructive concept: the radical error of the concept, which I would like to discuss in connection with the image of flight.
The specific quality of the term "runaway" must be studied in the context of its diverse and misleading connotations of evadingism, artistic secrecy or political retreat. This misperception implies that the reference to flight means that the subject retreats from the world ' s noises and gossips. From a philosophical perspective in the field of artistic production, for Deleuze and George Agampen, the leading escape actor is Herman Melville's Batby. For Paul Werner, it's the image of Glen Gould, the "master" pianist. In the rapid digestion of these images in artistic discourses, they are often quickly reduced to the incarnation of individual resistance, and in the case of Batby, the incarnation of individuals. Fortunately, Delarez and Guatari foreseen this misappropriation of the escape concept and responded clearly to it. In a brief chapter on novels and their cuttings, fractures and escape routes, chapter VIII of the Plateau, they say: "As for the escape line, will it be entirely personal, that individuals escape in their own way, `responsibility', escape the world, seek refuge in deserts or art? Misperceptions" (Delz and Guataly, 2004: 225). Running away here does not mean avoiding or appeasement, but rather, it is a very positive matter involving the constant search for the latest weapons - citing Black Panther activists in the Plateau. The words of George Jackson exemplify this: "Run and seek weapons while running" (Delz and Parne, 2002:102). The link between flight and weapons breaks the dichotomy between active fighting and cowardly flight. Escape here means neither defence nor individualism, but rather a creative form of attack. "The escape line never escapes the world, but causes a leak, as you drill a hole in the pipe; no social system will leak from any direction, even if it makes its parts more rigid to block the escape line" (Delz and Guatari, 2004: 225).
2. The escape line is neither illusion nor delusion. "The biggest and only mistake is to think that the escape line is to flee from life; to flee into imagination or art. On the contrary, running away creates reality, creates life, finds weapons" (Delz and Parne, 2002:36). It sounds like a pre-reaction to the criticism that Deleuze and Guataly received for decades after Capitalism and Schizophrenia, when they were stigmatized as drug-addicted hippie poets and metaphors. Contrary to these condemnations and accusations, a radical, sometimes revolutionary, tone runs through the works of the 1970s in Delarez and Guatari, but this aspect is often deliberately ignored in academic and artistic writings by means of hype. But the metaphor is indeed the last thing that Deleuze and Guatari want to associate with creation and invention: "We always create on the escape line, not because we imagine ourselves dreaming, but rather because we paint reality on it, where we form a plane of unity" (Delz and Parne, 2002:102).
3. As if flight alone was not suspicious enough, it was often accompanied by more words in the military language condemning the arsenal: flight meant deserters and flight meant betrayal. But when the concept of betrayal was misappropriated, there was a radical reassessment, beginning with a radical shift in the subject of betrayal: "We betray the fixed power that tried to block us, the established power on the ground" (Delz and Parne, 2002:30). Fixed and established powers do not form an outside; they travel through our bodies, our relationships, our world. Thus, the traitor betrays his own territory, his own sex, his own class and his own majority. Betraying one ' s own majority means departing from the norm of its own dominance. "Because being a traitor is difficult; that is creation. People must lose their identities and faces in it. People must disappear and become invisible." (33). The beginning of betrayal is the movement of disappearance, becoming a nobody, breaking down loyalty to the logic and terror of identity, representation and visibility. However, as an absolute act, the result would be the loss of a face, the abandonment of identity and disappearance, perhaps not only difficult but also inconceivable, especially in the arts and in the many ways in which writing accumulates symbolic capital. On the contrary, betrayal, as a creative act, must be imagined and realized as a tendency to disappear, a movement that must be constantly built, a movement to restart and defeat representative systems, structures and State machinery over and over again.
4. In the conceptual mix of escape lines, the concept of escape lines also departs from its everyday meaning. According to Delarez and Guatari, the escape line is not a continuous, uninterrupted straight line, but a combination of mobility and cutting, a continuous stasis, a fall-down, usually outside normal orbit. There is no ordinary thing in the escape line, no sacred thing, nothing that dominates territory, possessions, stripes dominated by direct movement. On the contrary, the escape line implies a demonic diversity, jumping from one interval to another and skipping the interval (Delz and Parner, 2002:30ff.).
Even though the concept of escape appears to assume movement from one place to another, which is implied by the mathematical definition of the line, the escape line is in fact not. "The line is between the points, between which it no longer runs from one point to another" (Dretz and Guataly, 2004:298). Lines pass through points, between points, as a flow through the middle, a wanton middle without beginning or ending. Thus, escape routes can have specific movements (although not from one point to another), but they can also take place in situ, as an unmoved journey, an unchanging escape. In this context (and he also said that he should not be afraid of change), Delarez (who is not entirely in agreement with Guataly) repeated the words of Historic philosophers and ubiquitous historian Arnold Tonby about the surprising quality of nomadic peoples
Toynbi shows that nomads are neither immigrants nor travellers in a strictly geographical sense; rather, they are those who do not move, those who are close to the grasslands, those who move on in situ, and those who walk along the escape line and are the greatest inventors of new weapons. (Deretz and Parne, 2002:28)
The paradox that nomads do not leave their places of origin or escape as a step forward seems to me particularly helpful in dealing with the overly luminous interpretations of Dratz and Guataly's traditions: from the nomadic enthusiasm of worldist intellectuals to the image of immigrants as subjects of the new revolution.
5. The concepts of Deleuze and Guatari do not include individual and social concepts compared to the traditional leftist, especially Marxist political theories. Instead of replacing it, it was destroying this particular stripe of thought axis, and the authors used concepts such as singularities and events. Like these concepts, the escape line is not only non-evadingist and non-individualist, but also transcends the dualist logic of collective and individualism. For Delatz and Guataly, this confrontation does not describe the relevant reality
A single group, even a single individual, may at the same time display all the lines that we discuss. But it is more common for a single group or individual to function as a escape route; The group or individual created the line rather than following it, and it was itself a living weapon that it forged, not a stolen weapon. (Deléz and Guatari, 2004:226)
Escape is not merely an empty movement from which one or more people flee. It replaces the main-client relationship between the person who drew the escape line and the escape line itself, between the person who forged or possessed the weapon and the weapon itself, and at the same time it becomes an invention and thus a productive, creative and innovative weapon. We should not interpret escape and the use of weapons as extremes of confrontation, as well as as as separate patterns of Jurisprudence, such as cowards (feminized) and heroes (maleized), but must understand escape and weapons as interrelated. Creation occurs precisely in the chain of escape and invention. Different possible worlds are created precisely on the escape line. Creating the world also means escaping the idea that there is only one possible world, while constantly creating a new world. The escape, which was abolished, overlaps with the composition of the new social chain, constitutional powers and institutional practices.
Finally, the escape line is paramount. It is not in the sense of chronology or permanent universality, but rather as a constitutive factor in the level within society. Here again, there is a need to interpret the concept of flight contrary to the daily usage of flight, which is a reaction to the previous circumstances and attacks. "In a sense, the first line in society is the escape movement. For, far from fleeing society, far from utopia or ideology, these form the social sphere, drawing out its hierarchy and boundaries, all of which it generates" (Deléz and Paré, 2002:101). If we see this primacy of the escape line as a dominant model that goes beyond merely responding to something, then the end semantic result must be a shift from "run away..." to escape as an absolute concept.
"The year of the end of the future."
Marcelo Expósito drew two escape lines in his video, The Year of the End of the Future (12 Minutes, 2007), breaking the dichotomy of memory politics. Here, flight leads us beyond the conventional documentary practice to achieve the legacy of traumatic history in an entirely new way. Instead of burying the future in the past under the guise of false objectivity, Expósito introduced memory work into a dual archaeological practice. While the past has often become rigid in historical codification procedures and in the form of classic documentaries, here an immediate generation needs to be excavated between images and also between archaeological discoveries. There is a need to excavate, because memory does not come from mere meditation: "Memory is work, not something you can just gaze at."
The escape point for the Marcelo Expósito video was in 1977, when Spain held its first democratic elections, the culmination of the Spanish democratic process, according to official history. For Expósito, 30 years later, however, it was "the end of the future." Much can be said about the hollowness of this date of approval, and much about the continuity of the Franco regime beyond this threshold until today. Similar to the concept of "transition", which was used in the process of neoliberal transition in the former communist countries of Europe, the phrase "transition to democracy" was also of great significance in Spain. Just as the concept was used by post-communist countries to test new forms of neoliberal exploitation under the cover of democratic commitments, there were also indications that the late introduction of Spanish democracy was not merely an adjustment to Western European normal. However, the initial interest of Expósito was less focused on the 30 years that had passed and the layers of oppression that had accumulated during that period. In fact, he traced his escape line back to 40 years before 1977.
In a phantom, accelerating reversal, he accumulated representative images of Franco-era religious fascism, but also included resistance to it, from the attacks on ETA in the early 1970s to the rebellions of the 1960s and 1950s. This madness followed by post-war cleansing and isolated years of civil war and revolution.
The video is based on the assumption that "the official narrative of the democratic transition is to a large extent naturalized through a visual expression based on over-encoded images, which, paradoxically, are becoming less and less visible, while at the same time increasingly hindering the possibility of understanding the historical events that they claim to represent."
The normative repetition of images, especially in the context of anniversary events, has stagnated the past and violently de-speaked it. That is why Expósito invented his first escape line and tried to betray the dominant expression and revive the images of the past. On this first line, Expósito over-confirms the crude form of the official literature by accelerating the crazy reverse of the normative image sequence, leaving them completely unrepresentative. The memory of images and the work of dreams are used here to connect the past and the future, and they lose linear sequencing, integrate into a flow, a escape line and open a new path between points of mainstream history.
However, in the final paragraph of the video, a powerful archaeological practice was added to this first escape line, which is visual archaeology. The motto of the video, "Mixing the Underground World", refers not only to the archaeology of visual expression, but also to a specific cause, a small and effective social movement where hundreds of civil war fighters and the remains of anonymous victims of the Franco regime were excavated. In the course of detailed excavation, classification, marking and documentation, between 2005 and 2007 the remains of 439 FRPI soldiers and victims of reprisals by Franco in the central Spanish town of Uclés were excavated.
This particular form of memory work is embedded in a social movement that works underground like moles, which stirs the official politics of the Spanish State, or, as Marcelo Expósito put it, creates a "real micropolitical earthquake"
"Since the late 1990s, some have decided that if the law and the State do not take any decision on how to deal with our fellow human beings buried throughout the country, we will take them out ourselves - which means that an impressive social process has taken place: dozens of organizations, officially known as the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, have been created with the main aim of locating the sites where the bodies were buried and beginning the exhumation process (individually or collectively), trying to identify the relatives and, if possible, burying them again in honour and proper names."
Finally, civil war and revolution. The video is based on the assumption that "the official narrative of the democratic transition is to a large extent naturalized through a visual expression based on over-encoded images, which, paradoxically, are becoming less and less visible, while at the same time increasingly hindering the possibility of understanding the historical events that they claim to represent."
The normative repetition of images, especially in the context of anniversary events, has stagnated the past and violently de-speaked it. That is why Expósito invented his first escape line and tried to betray the dominant expression and revive the images of the past. On this first line, Expósito over-confirms the crude form of the official literature by accelerating the crazy reverse of the normative image sequence, leaving them completely unrepresentative. The memory of images and the work of dreams are used here to connect the past and the future, and they lose linear sequencing, integrate into a flow, a escape line and open a new path between points of mainstream history.
However, in the final paragraph of the video, a powerful archaeological practice was added to this first escape line, which is visual archaeology. The motto of the video, "Mixing the Underground World", refers not only to the archaeology of visual expression, but also to a specific cause, a small and effective social movement where hundreds of civil war fighters and the remains of anonymous victims of the Franco regime were excavated. In the course of detailed excavation, classification, marking and documentation, between 2005 and 2007 the remains of 439 FRPI soldiers and victims of reprisals by Franco in the central Spanish town of Uclés were excavated.
This particular form of memory work is embedded in a social movement that works underground like moles, which stirs the official politics of the Spanish State, or, as Marcelo Expósito put it, creates a "real micropolitical earthquake"
"Since the late 1990s, some have decided that if the law and the State do not take any decision on how to deal with our fellow human beings buried throughout the country, we will take them out ourselves - which means that an impressive social process has taken place: dozens of organizations, officially known as the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, have been created with the main aim of locating the sites where the bodies were buried and beginning the exhumation process (individually or collectively), trying to identify the relatives and, if possible, burying them again in honour and proper names."
Some associations are associated with the gc party, some are closely associated with the anarchist trade union CGT and others are independent; some form networks, some are less obvious, but the interesting question is how they operate: they use the "semi-legal" state of affairs, usually initiated by relatives of the oppressed and murdered (often grandchildren) and attract an increasing number of participants: those who provide testimonies of killings or burials, local historians, lawyers, archaeologists, sometimes politicians who can provide "unofficial" asylum, forensic experts, volunteers who help in various activities: digging, driving, etc.
Hundreds of people have brought together their diverse knowledge and abilities to build a network of practical activities for the purpose of... how can we say? Just exhumations? It's more than that -- it's an act of unleashing ghosts -- like the real return of the oppressed, which, in my view, completely questions the socio-psychological foundations of democratic transformation and of our current political order at a level of near-preliminary awareness.
Here, specific archaeological campaigns complement another escape line with material memory work -- the visual expression that subverts the underground link between fascist history and current governance. Material and non-material memory overlaps and develops complementary memorial strategies, thus rejecting cooperation with oblivion. The official account of the democratization process, however, separates the future from any relationship with the past, which, in the works of Expósito, has been realized on both escape routes and is now in a state of disquiet. Let the past not rest in peace, but accelerate it and keep it in a state of uncertainty, which is what this escape line means.
Antonio Negri's Drozism
The year 1977 marked a suspicious turning point or "transition" in Spain, while in Italy it was the year of rebellion and the beginning of the year of lead. (later) The spectrum of the industrialist ideology was an important link in the Italian development struggle of the 1960s and 1970s; From the labour struggle in large factories to the uninstitutionalized strategy of workers ' autonomy (autonomia operaia), to the early theoretical and practical approaches to countering the changes in capitalist production patterns that continue today. In these experiences of self-government, flight has become a familiar concept, mainly involving flight from factories. Antonio Negri has contributed significantly to the formation of the worker movement since the early 1960s, when he founded the Workers' Self-Government Organization in 1969. The organization has developed concepts such as social workers (opario sociale) and decentralized factories (fabbrica diffusa), which no longer interpret factories as centres of production and conflict, but rather more dispersed spaces and intersections, potentially involving society as a whole.
After being accused of being a terrorist and condemned as a "bad teacher" (cattivo maestro), Negri fled to Paris to link (later) Marxist worker theory more closely with post-structured theories of his peers in exile in France. Negri and Guattari co-authored a book (New Freedom Space, 1985), and his relationship with Deleuze can be deduced from Negri's interview with Deleuze called "Control and Generation". There, Deleuze repeated his conflicting concerns about traditional Marxism and returned to the concept of the escape line: "First of all, we believe that the definition of any society is not its conflict, but its escape line, which runs around trying to follow the escape line formed at a given moment. " (Deloz, 1995:171) Negri does not seem to have forgotten the stimulus of the Paris period; A few years later, he even described the option of returning from exile in Paris to Italian prisons in 1997 as a "line of escape" (Negri, 1998:17).
This is the way in which flight as a particular form of "opposition" was finally prominent in the political declaration of Negri and Michael Hardt, the Empire, written before and after the millennium. Through the concepts of "nomadicism", "runaway" and "runaway", Hardt and Negri continue to conceptualize the non-arguative forms of resistance that Deleuze and Guatari have created.
" In modernity, objections often mean the direct and/or dialectic confrontation of power, and in post-modernity, objections may be most effective through an oblique or diagonal gesture. The battle against the empire could be won through mitigation and defection. There are no specific locations for such flight; it is an evacuation of power sites. " (Hardt and Negri, 2000:212)
The departure of migrants, described in the Empire as a rejection of the logic of the borders of the nation State, is also an expression of the right to freedom of movement. In addition to this departure from marginal areas that have been subjected to new forms of exploitation under the post-Fortist regime, there are three other types of departures in Hardt and Negri ' s writings: workers developed in the autonomous movement have left the old concept of the factory, and thus from the patriarchal and heterosexual normative conditions of labour; The decline of State and representative democracy as a result of outdated forms of government and domination; Finally, it runs out of a narrow anthropological model that attempts to centralize human beings and limit them to the boundaries of genderized bodies.
Although Hardt and Negri too sympathetically preached the problems of migration as the subject of the revolution, the main point of the Negri exit concept was to shift the image of flight to radicalism. This element also exists in the concept of escape lines in Delarez and Guatare, but in Negri, analysis of the past of the revolution and commitment to neo-communists have a strategy of wild flight that stimulates the accumulation of desire rather than loss: "For me, running out sometimes takes strength."
"The radical imagination."
This orgasm, this radicalization shift, can be seen in another video of Expósito. The radical imagination (resisting carnival) (61 minutes, 2004) shows the experience of "restoring the streets" - one of the most important groups in the 1990s - using new, partly artistic forms of political activism. The "Strike Street" originated in the ecological and carnival movement of the early 1990s, which organized many aggressive public space occupation operations in London and other British cities. Expósito's video focused mainly on the occupation of the financial centre in London, one of the main actions of the Global Action Day Against Capital on 18 June 1999, known as "J-18" and "anti-capitalist carnival".
An integral part of the aestheticization of new political practices is their emphasis on form: form of organization, form of action, non-representative expression. In this context, the function of Mardi Gras is not simply a confrontation -- "against capital" -- but more an image of escaping this dichotomy and going beyond classic forms of protest. Radical Carnival is not a Dionysos-style party, which will make our work more efficient. The objection here is not an attempt to strike or cross a border crossing posture. On the contrary, in the midst of such acrimony, the creativity of new forms of political organization and action, which do not separate politics and aesthetics but develop a new political aesthetics, becomes important.
Marcelo Expósito not only demonstrated how the Anti-Capital Carnival foreseen or developed the most important forms of action of the anti-globalization movement, but his video also mentioned Mardi Grail as a historic pioneer of the insurgency. These pioneers have one thing in common: unlike orderly strikes and demonstrations, in which protesters from the very beginning tended to be homogenized into a structure, and in Carnival, a form of what I would call an unconventional crowd emerged. Contrary to the view that the masses were condemned as grey, apathy and homogeneity, and contrary to the negative content of the masses that could also be found in left-wing discourse, the concept of the unconventional masses shows that it cannot be understood as unified. This non-conventional pattern, which organizes itself in different forms and differences, is permeable, volatile and dispersed. Its non-conventionality is twofold: the masses manifest their unconventionality by not agreeing to domination, and its unity is based only on negative rejection of a particular form of domination. On the other hand, non-conventionality is a negation of any positive description of the community and implies the permanent division of individuals. Unconventional people are not limited to a form, but move themselves, their space and their social nature.
In the unconventional form of radical carnivals, the most problematic separation in aesthetics and political expression -- the separation between active and passive components -- has been dissolved. This is reflected in a quote from the video by Mikhail Bachkin: "The Carnival ignores any difference between actors and the audience, and it eliminates the stage, and the audience either goes to Carnival or they are Mardi Gras. "If crises and insurrections, chaos and protests occur in the intangible, intangible, non-conventional flow of radical carnivals, then this is not about the internal impact on the outside, an external effect, the education or participation of those who are outside -- anonymous art viewers or revolutionaries, those who have not been inspired in aesthetics and politics. What is important is the new mix of body and symbol, which does not want to be external; it wants to be different and excessive, as different and as excessive as possible -- even in the short span of events, fractures, to invent new and continuous techniques to avoid counting, stripping and fragmentation by State machines.
Anti-capitalist carnivals not only make events, break-ups, flight possible, but also social restructuring, the emergence of desire machines, thus breaking the stripes of space. This dual movement, the parallel escape and weapons lines, the staggered fractures and the social restructuring, have shaped the quality of deviance on the plane within the radical carnival. This inherently deviating form means that there is no exvil in space, nor in time, and that there is no hierarchy in flight and invention, flight and power formation. The only possible ex-orbit space is that which occurs internally. The time of internal deviance is the realization of both the escape line, i.e. the duration of the fleeing protests and the creative formation of power. In the words of Jordan, "We want to get rid of the traditional confrontational protest, and at the moment of the protest itself, the world we imagined."
Paul Werner and the runaway grammar.
Paolo Virno is a philosopher of linguistic philosophy. This philosophy, like Antonio Negri's, though less obvious, also stems from the Marxist background of Italian and post-worker theory. When young in the 1970s, Virno was active in the Workers ' Power Organization and was imprisoned for three years until his acquittal. Unlike Negri, Virno has no personal or theoretical connection to Deleuze and Guataly, nor does his work explicitly refer to French genres. However, the resonance that shaped the philosophies of European politics at the end of the twentieth century also emerged in the core concept of Virno.
Virno developed his concept of flight and runaway very early, as a direct result of his experience with the autonomy movement in the 1970s. In September 1981, he published a short article entitled " Splendid tastes ", which clearly outlined his concept of leaving. From the image of the crisis in the capitalist accumulation process already described by Marx, where workers fled from the factory, Virno provided an explanation for the difficulty of implementing capitalism in the United States. Low real estate prices, scarce land reserves and a situation of excessive abundance make it possible to flee wage-earners on a large scale. According to Virno, the rise of mobility cults in the 1970s, the desire to escape clarity and to flee from factories are all a repetition of this early United States capitalist crisis: "nomadicism, personal freedom, flight and enrichment feed contemporary social conflicts" (Virno 2002: 181). As early as 1981, Virno ended his article about runaways with the following
Insubordination and flight are in no way a negative gesture of exoneration from action and responsibility. On the contrary, flight means changing the conditions under which the conflict takes place and not yielding to them. Active construction of a favourable scenario requires more initiative than confrontation with pre-conditions. It's a positive "do" that's made up for defection, leaving now a sense and operational taste. Conflict begins with what we have built by escaping, to defend the new forms of social relations and life that we are already experiencing. In addition to the ancient idea of "evading for better offensive purposes", there is also an added conviction that fighting is more effective if there is something else to lose beyond their chains. (Virno 2002: 181)
In his most famous book, The Grammar of Masses, Virno returned to the image of (radical) insubordination and flight after nearly two decades (Virno 2004: 69-71). There, he described the political migration from "public" to production. He explained that political behaviour was included in the work process, particularly in the context of technical skills. Virno considers this to be the basic premise of contemporary production and related to the emergence of a new historical-political "subject": the population of post-Folderism. Of course, reading the grammaticals of the masses may give the impression that Virno appears to be more interested in grammar than it is in the older Negri. His interest in linguistic philosophy and his emphasis on language as an undefined score shared by all confirm this interpretation. However, the continuing quality of Virno writing lies in the fact that, through surprising fractures and bridges, these linguistic and intellectual issues are linked to the components of political philosophy as a basis for cross-individual cooperation.
This theoretical strategy of politicizing the grammar of languages is repeated in Virno ' s latest book, Smart and Innovative Action. The book begins with a basic discussion of the "substantial", "structure" and " logic" of jokes about the emergence of creative and innovative actions. The starting point of the book is the study of jokes published by Freud in 1905. Virno thinks this book is an important attempt to interpret the jokes in a quasi-vegetal way, and he does it in a similar way, although -- like Delarez and Guataly -- it's strictly anti-Freud.
But Virno does not care about the joke itself. In his view, the joke was an illustration of innovative action. In their grammar, macro-changes in the form of life are reflected in a micro. In a broad philosophical statement, mainly on Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Carl Schmidt, Virno tried to show that it was the joke that showed that the world could be changed and how. After these statements, which included the difficulty of applying the rules and their relationship to the exceptional and exceptional situation, he finally unexpectedly returned to his two most famous images in the Mass Syntax: In Smart and Innovative Action, these images first appeared as two basic types of jokes. For Virno, these are multiple, contradictory uses of concepts and proverbs, as well as errors in meaning. According to Virno, all jokes and all human efforts to change the way they live are derived from the unusual combination of existing elements or sudden deviations. In this context, the joke becomes the microworld in which we experience unexpected combinations and shifts of meaning as the basis for changes in life forms.
These are the two models that I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, which continue to create: new combinations, a recombinant combination of intent to create misunderstandings and stimuli, and radical misperceptions of the concept from its familiar language. At the macro level, however, we have also found this basic typology as an innovation and runaway -- or back to the key concepts of this paper, as inventions and escapes, weapons and escapes, fractures and reorganizations, abolitions and institutional practices.
Virno writes that the joke is the link between the wrong and the oldest runaway story: "The logical-linguistic resources needed to find the way out of Egypt are the resources on which the joke depends. These resources are characterized by delays and misalignments, that is, sudden departures from the axis of the discourse. At the linguistic level, this deviation means that if dialogue takes place as it does on the track, the subject matter changes immediately. In the political sphere, it manifests itself as a collective defection as a runaway. Faced with the question of whether to obey or openly resist Pharaoh's rule, the Israelis invented a possibility that had not been considered before: they fled. Escapes do not see the problem as a decision between given options, but change the context in which the issue arises. This opens a side road that has not yet been recorded on the existing political map, thereby changing the semantic itself that determines which options to think about
Escapes are the inspirational program to transfer mathematicians to political practice called data mutations. By opting for secondary or heterogeneity factors, we gradually moved from a particular question, namely, obedience or uprising, to a completely different question: How can we achieve an escape movement while testing previously unimaginable forms of autonomy? (Virno 2005: 79)
From the early political writings on runaways in Virno to the linguistic philosophy of recent writings, this Deleuze-Guataly image has re-emerged: there is a link between flight and weapons, between flight, defection, suspension of movements and the technical, creative and structural forces of social restructuring that re-emerged in the context of post-Fold Capitalism.
"City Factory": Escape from the city as a factory
So, what is the score that contemporary artists are playing? I propose the following answer: Every day, contemporary technicians -- who see their skills as an unfinished activity requiring public space - are following the particular and unique score of "universal intelligence", that is, the whole body of human intellectual abilities.
With a great deal of political and aesthetic intuition, Marcelo Expósito approached the reality of the Verno concept combination in his video, The Five One (City-Face) (62 Minutes, 2004). The video provides a complex introduction to the transformation of the virtual cognitive and emotional labour paradigm from the Fordist to the post-Fortist paradigm. In the case of the Fiatrin Goto factory, which used to be a hub of pride in auto production, is now a hotel and conference centre, and is an example of a decentralized factory, Expósito shows a meaningful and detailed picture of the political and productive transformation described by Virno. Parallel to this is the discussion of the form of resistance that runs through the video, from strikes to intervention in cities that are the space of post-Fortist factories, from the throwing of wood at machines to the hacking image of the communications machine, from the strike workers at Fordist factories to the Water Line and the European Five One movement, as contemporary practices that have been updated across borders as political practices.
In post-Fort Capitalism, labour has increasingly developed into a productless technical performance. It requires a place with structures similar to public spaces. It requires the presence of others, which is what Hanna Arendt sees as the basic political context. It requires a person to expose himself to the eyes of others, so that cooperation and communication become the basic quality of work, while skill and performance become the necessary inter-subject capacity. Virno's example comes from a narrow field of everyday art: Glenn Gould hates performing in front of the public and is therefore absent from the studio. Of course, this retreat is not simply a retreat to the artist's ivory tower. In his video, Expósito showed Glenn Gould's practice in an amazing way: the technicalism is shown here as a pause in its appearance as a "acting artist" and, at the same time, a detailed reprogramming of the material in late production -- the suspension and reorganization of the escape line. Although Gould refused to repeat the score in the concert business, he focused more on the potential new organization of given material in an undefined score.
But this escape line is no longer the exclusive preserve of a skilled artist, and today it belongs to what Virno calls the contemporary daily craftsman. The re-emergence of weapons as daily escapes and new (social) arrangements is also an implicit part of Expósito ' s description of the P5 movement. If factories spread throughout the city, "the city is a new work space, an area that needs to be subverted and reorganized by new opposing forces." This de-territorialization and re-territorialization also took place in many cities in the middle of the century: since 2004, an accelerated version of the practice of "retrieving the streets" has been flowing through many European urban centres on 1 May. The reoccupation of urban streets, urban walls and social spaces was a moratorium on traditional forms of protest, as well as the reorganization of bodies and symbols in areas of action and resurgent ambiguity. In this way, the spread of art/art to the cities of cognitive capitalism has reciprocated: as a result of a great deal of recognition of the creativity of workers as craftsmen, the branding and displaying of corporate capitalism has been synchronised in urban centres, and now the musical spectrum of creativity - practiced in precarious work - has been used as a symbol and display of rivals throughout the urban areas of consumption: "On walls, in advertising, in State, in banks or in large brands, new symbols have emerged that make the city's `social instability' visible as an emerging social subject."
The video work of Marcelo Expósito fulfils this dual escape and invention (search/discovery of weapons) movement, which was found in Deleuze and Guatari, Negri and Virno, as well as in artistic-political practice over the past decade. However, these videos cannot simply be understood as re-emerging, but rather as a compassionate picture of the entanglement of theory and practice. They draw an escape line from conventional documentary practice (history, art and activism), while at the same time they interfere with old political practice that has abandoned political and aesthetic rivalry and separation.
Translated by Anita Fricek and Stephen Zepke
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