Transparency & Exodus

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Brian Holmes

Transparency and

Exodus

On Political Process

in the Mediated

Democracies

The British culturecritic and activistBrian Holmesclaims that theimprint of artisticexperimentation onsocial protest move-

ments is undeniable.He examines thenotion of processas that which exper-

imental art and

activism have incommon. Holmesanalyses the exodus,

mass defection, asa means of escapingthe immobilizingtransparency of the

mediated democra-cies, as a way toresist politics-as-usual.

48 Open 2005/Nr. 8/(In)visibility


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What is it that separates the leftfrom the right?. . . Fundamentally, itis nothing but a processual calling,a processual passion.

Flix Guattari1

In October of1968, in Rosario,Argentina, the artist Graciela Carnevaleinvited visitors to what would be thefinal opening of a Cycle ofExperimental Art held in a storefrontspace in the city. Her contribution tothe series consisted in luring the publicinside, then slipping out to lock thedoor and enclose the crowd within thegallery.The visitors became the materialof a social artwork.The question was:How would they react to this imprison-ment? Who would finally shatter the

glass to release the captives from thetrap? Through an act of aggression, thework tends to provoke the spectator toa heightened consciousness of the powerwhereby violence is exerted in the eve-ryday world, wrote the artist. On adaily basis we passively submit, throughfear, connivance and complicity, to allthe degrees of violence, from the mostsubtle and degrading violence that coer-ces our thinking via communicationsmedia broadcasting false contents provid-ed by their owners, to the most provo-cative and scandalous violence exertedon a students life.2 In the event, thepublic submitted.After an hour, the

blow that finallyshattered the glass

came from outside.A photograph showsa woman crouching down to exitthrough a jagged hole in the window.

At the same time, Graciela Carnevalewas also part of the project known asTucumn Arde, or Tucumn is Burning

an experimental process of informa-tion analysis, multimedia reportage andartistic display, involving some thirtyartists in an attempt to expose the con-ditions of exploitation, expropriationand impoverishment in an Argentineanprovince.The participants, who haddrawn their conclusions from the mostadvanced theoretical positions andtechnical experiments of the time, choseto break with the existing institutions inthe hope of infiltrating the nationalinformation system and contributingdirectly to the political struggle againstthe Ongana dictatorship. Tucumn Ardeis increasingly recognized as a genealo-gical departure point for the kinds of

media activism practiced today.3

Butcan we not alsoread Carnevalesenclosure pieceas an allegory ofthe way that socialclasses are transfor-med under condi-tions of urgency?

In the late1990s, the political-ly involved sectors of the overdevel-oped countries the NGOs, thecharities, the unionists, the commu-nists and ecologists were the peopleinside the glass bubble of consensus,or civil-society dialogue. It was the

direct actionists who shattered thewindow.

1. F. Guattari,The Left as aProcessual Passion, in G.Genosko (ed.), The GuattariReader, Blackwell, London1996, p. 260.

3. See M. Carmen Ramrez,Thriving on Adversity:Conceptualism in LatinAmerica, 1960-1980, inGlobal Conceptualism:Points ofOrigin,1950s-1980s, catalo-gue, Queens Museum of Art,1999, pp. 66-67; as well asM.T. Gramuglio and N. Rosa,Tucumn Burns, inConceptual Art:A Critical

Anthology, A. Alberro and

B. Stimson (eds.),MIT

Press,Cambridge, Mass.1999),pp. 76-79.

2. G. Carnevale, cataloguetext,Ciclo de Arte Experi-mental, in Ana Longoni and

Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tellaa Tucumn Arde, El Cielo PorAsalto, Buenos Aires 2000,p. 122.

Transparency and Exodus 49


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Graciela Carnevale, El Encierro (the Lock-up Action), part of El

Ciclo de Arte Experimental (The Art Experimental Cicle), Rosario,

October 1968. Photo Carlos Militello.



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We know that the cycle of massivedemonstrations that began in the years1999-2001 was no miracle.The impetushad come from the South, primarilyfrom social movements in Latin Americaand India.The global justice campaigns,

inspired by South African efforts toforce debt cancellation, had built a tre-mendous following. Critique of neoliber-alism had become a national issue inboth France and Canada.The labourmovements of the overdeveloped coun-tries were ripe for radicalization. Andthe Zapatistas offered a new model ofpolitical confrontation, combiningpowerful symbolic actions with nationaland international networks of support.But political forces must be set intomotion, passions have to catch flame. Inthe cities of Western Europe and NorthAmerica, where the postmodern waningof affect appeared to be complete, itwas the urban cultures of resistance that

struck the match. Reclaim the Streetsin Great Britain, the Tute Bianche(White Overalls) in Italy, the DirectAction Network of the PacificNorthwest United States these werethe catalysts that transformed a diffuseaspiration of isolated civil-societygroups into a movement, able to take tothe streets and reach beyond the specificdemands of each dissenting group.

A political generation is forged, notby determinants of age, but by choicesof involvement and experiences of con-frontation. How are such choices made?The invitation to illegal protest thatsparked the current cycle of anticapita-list mobilizations aimed to draw out the

participation of social categories, parti-cularly youth, who could no longer be

lured into involvement by identityissues, parties or unions. But it alsosought to bring more traditional forma-tions into heightened conflict.The suc-cess of the Direct Action Network inSeattle, at the WTO meeting in

November 1999, was to use civil-diso-bedience techniques to immobilizetraffic in a key sector of the city, focus-ing police repression and in this waycreating a magnetic attractor for unionmembers exiting from their consensual-ly managed events but also for localinhabitants, ecologists,Third Worlddelegations, anarchists and many others.Through that intervention a five-dayurban uprising was unleashed. In a lessdisciplined yet equally potent way, theReclaim the Streets carnivals offereda tantalizing cocktail of transgressivepleasure, informed political protest anddirect confrontation, which radicalizedthe participants by exposing the struc-

tural violence of contemporary socialrelations. But the Tute Bianche of Italydeveloped the most explicit strategy.The white overall, which could bedonned by anyone, signified the per-meability of a movement that was notideological in the disciplinary sense.The use of quite ridiculous-looking pro-tective padding created a theatrics ofhumour and self-derision, while allow-ing police brutality to be captured onvideo as a kind of comic spectacle. Mostimportantly, the duration of this move-ment was limited in advance by the pre-diction of its self-dissolution into all thecolours.The release from a paralyzingconsensus became constitutive of the

movement.



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Art and Activism

It would be misleading to claim that thedirect actionists played the role of avanguard artist, leading a naive publicinto an experiential trap where every

participant would be forced to drawfresh conclusions.The self-transforma-tion of society is more complicated,more multiple, than Carnevales enclo-sure piece can suggest.Yet the imprintof artistic experimentation on the cur-rent political generation is undeniable.The most obvious contribution of thevisual arts to the anticapitalist move-ments is the merger of community-oriented video with the distributionsystem offered by Internet, giving riseto innumerable non-normalized mediaprojects that combine documentaryinformation and expressive politics, inthe lineage ofTucumn Arde.These proj-ects carry out a specular combat with

broadcast TV that is, with the specta-cle society and in that way, they atleast partially fulfil the political aspira-tions of the early video makers.

Another, more subtle thread is theproliferation of mail art, first throughzine culture and desktop publishing,then through the net, culminating in themid-1990s in the widespread circulationof subversive texts and media pranksunder multiple names like MontyCantsin or Luther Blissett. Multiplenames bring the refusal of copyright andintellectual property to the very centreof ego-dominated subjectivity, in anattempt to dissolve the proprietaryfunction of the signature which has

always served as the barrier betweencontemplative, individualistic art and

collective, interactive forms of expres-sion.Yet another artistic contribution tothe movements is performance culture,with its emphasis on the embodimentof the political, played out in its insepa-rability from the sexual, ritual, genera-

tional, ethnic, and psychodramaticdimensions of human experience. Onecould be tempted to conceive the entiredispositifof the carnivalesque demonstra-tion as an extension of performance tothe streets. But if we stopped there wewould miss the deepest commonalitybetween experimental art and activism.This is the notion of process, as a valuein and of itself.

In the now-canonical anti-formdefinitions of the 1960s, process desig-nates the temporal dimension of materi-als, their transformation in time, as ini-tiated or continuously effected by theactivity of the artist. But there is anotherdefinition, whose roots lie in the chance

philosophy of John Cage, in the relationof prop and performance sought byFluxus, in the interplay of score andinterpretation developed in concretepoetry and vanguard dance, in theorchestrated chaos of the happenings,the improvisational work of the LivingTheater or the insurgency of Provo andSituationist interventions. In theseapproaches, process can be defined asthe generative matrix constituted bythe meeting of catalytic artefacts, more-or-less conscious group interactions,and the dimension of singular chanceinherent to the event.This artisticunderstanding of the way that socialmaterial can proactively transform itself

over time was enriched by the move-ments of anti-psychiatry and schizoana-



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lysis, which extended the domain ofwhat could be accepted as self-expres-sion, and attempted to reshape institu-tional structures to accommodate thismultiplication of subjective forms.Themicropolitics of a host of liberation

movements of the 1970s, including thewomens movements in particular, butalso the local constellations of ItalianAutonomia, made group processes ofself-understanding and decision-makinginto one of the ways that adherence toa political project is developed andsustained over time.The difference ofthe last ten or fifteen years is that theproliferation of expressive practices ineveryday life inseparable from the riseof intellectual and affective labour4 hasbrought thespecifically artisticdefinition of socialprocess back tothe forefront, not

within the artworld but in themore open anduncontrollable space of the urban event.

The fundamental relation betweenpost-vanguard art and contemporarysocial movements is here, in this resur-gence of expressive and interactive pro-cess which has helped forge a politicalgeneration.What it gives us to under-stand is that an entire current of experi-mentalism has migrated outside therealm of art as defined by the signature-work. But this realization is only thedeparture point for a series of questionsconcerning the political postures thathave developed as a necessary exodus

from the immobilizing transparencyof the mediated democracies.The

questions are these:Why was the mix ofcarnival and direct action so importantto the protagonism of civil society? Howhas the situation changed sinceSeptember 11? What will happen to thenew political generation that emerged

just before the authoritarian turn? Andwhat roles can artists play in that gen-erations development?

Civil Society in a Hall of Mirrors

Ive suggested that art can be comparedto activism through the metaphor of anintervention on social material.Theidea might sound scandalous; yet justsuch a process lies behind the emer-gence of what we now recognize as globalcivil society. In the late seventies andearly eighties, Eastern European writerslike Adam Michnik,Vclav Havel andGyorgy Konrad used a combination ofliterary expression and political critique

to redefine the classical concept ofnational civil society, and in this way, toprecipitate a change in collective con-sciousness. No longer would civil societybe simply understood as the pacifyingrule of law within the boundaries of asovereign territory; nor just as the rightof citizens to engage in critical discourse.Instead it would designate the need tocreate an everyday space of civic en-gagement that effectively secedes fromthe totalitarian state. For Konrad, civilsociety was an anti-politics. As he wrotein 1982,Anti-politics is the emergenceof forums that can be appealed toagainst political power; it is a counter-power that cannot take power and does

not wish to.5

TheCzech dissidents

4. For the relation betweenlabour and expressive poli-tics, see Paolo Virno,Virtuosity and Revolution:the Political Theory ofExodus, in M. Hardt and P.Virno (eds.), Radical Thoughtin Italy, University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis1996, available at:www.makeworlds.org/book/view/34.

5. G. Konrad,Anti-Politics:An Essay, Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, New York 1984,p. 231.



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Graciela Carnevale, Tucumn Arde, graffiti advertisement for an exhibi-

tion in the CGT, Rosario 1968.



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spoke of aparallel polis, which, as VclavBenda explained,does not compete forpower. Its aim is not to replace thepower of another kind, but rather underthis power or beside it to create astructure that represents other laws and

in which the voice of the ruling poweris heard only as an insignificant echofrom a world that is organized in anentirely different way.6 Because theSoviet andAmerican blocswere widely per-ceived as two sides of the same coin both threatening nuclear violence ona scale that dwarfed the traditional, na-tionally bounded space of civility itwas immediately considered necessary toextend the rightful space of anti-politicsto global dimensions. Konrad maintainedthat the existence of a world forumfavours the emergence of the eccentric,those who stand out. And he continued:

The international alliance of dissentersand avant-gardists takes under its wingthose few people who, in their variousways, think theirthoughts throughto the end.7

Similar ideas developed in SouthAmerica, in the face of the dictator-ships.The aim was to open up a myriadof divergent and ultimately uncontrol-lable micropolitical spaces, in order tosucceed where the guerrilla struggleshad failed.8 This conception of divergentspaces remains animportant legacyfor anti-systemicmovements, as

witnessed by theZapatista autonomous zones, the Social

Forums, John Holloways call to changethe world without taking power, orPaolo Virnos notion of a non-statepublic sphere.9 But there has been a cri-tical change sincethe 1980s. No one

today can ignorethe deeply ambi-guous role thatcivil society wouldplay after 1989 especially sinceMichnik, Havel and Konrad have all sup-ported the invasion of Iraq.10 The morerecent attempts tointervene on socialmaterial have allhad to respond tothe bewilderingmetamorphosis ofcivil society after the collapse of theSoviet Union.

The integration of a diluted conceptof civil society to the reality of capitalist

globalization was a consequence of theideological vacuum left by 1989. In theabsence of any coordinated oppositionalforce, every critique could be consid-ered at worst harmless, and at best,profitable.The exploitation of humanita-rian NGOs by the neoliberal state isthere to prove it along with the cor-porate patronage of art.Yet the 1990swere also a time of opening. Air trans-portation, global communications andinternational coordination were nowaccessible even to informal groups.Thestructures of governance became moretransnational but more transparent too,permeable to the public, permeated bythe media, constantly overseen by innu-

merable observers.The paradox of civilsociety in the years of Clinton, Blair,

7. G. Konrad,Anti-Politics:An Essay, op. cit., p. 211.

8. For the Brazilian situationin the early 1980s, see FlixGuattari and Suely Rolnik,Cartography of Desire:Schizoanalysis in Brazil(forthcoming fromMI T/Semiotexte, 2005).

6.V. Benda, quoted inMary Kaldor, Global CivilSociety, Polity, London2003, p. 56.

9. J. Holloway, Change theWorld Without Taking Power,Pluto Press, Londen 2002;

P.Virno,A Grammar of theMultitude. For an Analysis ofContemporary Forms of Life,Semiotext(e), New York2004. Also see note 4.

10. Michnik justified himselfand his two peers in an arti-

cle entitled We, theTraitors, published in hisown newspaper, GazetaWyborzca,Warsaw, 28 March2003, available in Englishat: www.worldpress.org/Europe/1086.cfm.



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Jospin and Schroeder was to sit on allkinds of official panels, to be aired on allkinds of channels and to be allowed todebate about everything, except thebasic values that orient the post-89world-system.

Such was the Westernglasnost.Thehidden aims of public relations andprivate sponsorship, the realpolitik ofelected office and international commis-sions, and the increasing insistence ofthe news media on the rules of a worldmarketplace in which they themselvesare major players, all gave civil-societyfigures the uncanny sensation of movingin a hall of mirrors. As though transpar-ency in the mediated democracies couldonly be found in a camera lens, whosefunction is to select and frame, evenbefore the image is recorded, edited,repurposed and broadcast as the oppositeof whatever was initially intended. Inthe late 1990s, Havels warning in his

famous 1978 essay on The Power of thePowerlesswas timelier than ever, despiteor even because of the presidentialoffice occupied by its author:It wouldappear that traditional parliamentarydemocracies can offer no fundamentalopposition to the automatism of techno-logical civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are beingdragged helplessly along by it. Peopleare manipulated in ways that areinfinitely moresubtle and refinedthan the brutalmethods used inthe post-totalitarian societies.11

By the end of Clintons imperial

mandate, the need for direct actionbecame obvious at least to those on

the fringes. Because they did not claimto be civil anymore, deliberate gesturesof disobedience could break the distort-ing mirror and reclaim the density andopacity of an oppositional position.Only this kind of confrontation could

make activists from the South take theNorthern protests seriously. But thecarnivalesque dimension, the artistictreatment of information and the experi-mentation with social process are notjust window dressing for a protestorsbrick. These are the ways that partici-pants have found to reinvent the anti-political space of everyday experience,despite full-spectrum attempts at com-mercial, cultural, governmental and ide-ological mediation.

Its often said that September 11 putan end to the effectiveness of direct ac-tion protests, by delegitimating anythingthat could be assimilated to terrorismand authorizing massive deployment of

the police.Thats true, and the strategyhad already been sketched out in Genoa.But the consequences of September 11on the US government have had thelong-term effect of demonstrating thatthe fusion of the state with a corporateoligarchy can produce a repressive appa-ratus that stretches its electronic fingersinto every aspect of daily life.We arewitnessing the onset of a social patholo-gy, comparable in scale if not in natureto the Cold War. And only idealistscould believe that the European bloc isnot producing its own variations on thispathology, for instance in the treatmentof immigrant workers and the national-ist rhetoric surrounding the presence of

so-called foreigners, or in the establish-ment of detainment camps inside and

11. V. Havel,The Power ofthe Powerless, inJ. Keane(ed.), The Power of thePowerless, Hutchinson,London 1985, p. 91.



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outside the EUborders.12 But to opposethe security panicand the reality ofinstitutional racismthat underlies it would mean refusingthe false transparencies, escaping the

co-optation machinery of parliamentarydemocracy itself.This is why in the verymoment of their rise to visibility and tomore complex forms of organization,dissenting social movements have begunto experiment once again with newforms of anti-politics, marked by thepragmatics of defection and exit, butalso by the more intangible, almostmythical theme of exodus.

Redisappearing

A strange and quite funny anecdotefrom the European Social Forum inFlorence, in November 2002, can helpmake the point. Faced with an overload

of slogans like Stop this Bloody Warand Another World Is Possible which is like a marriage of Trotskyistpopulism and civil-society naivet members of the Euraction Hub networkdecided to intervene.They used thematerials at hand.An activist in an out-landish blue wig was installed on theroof of a van outfitted with projectingpink wings; this emissary from the out-side advanced within a compact crowdtoward the Fortezza da Basso, a medie-val castle where the main events werebeing held for paying admission.Vanquishing the objections of the secu-rity team, the procession entered theForum to have a dance party right next

to the circus tent where SWP Trotswere bellowing out slogans from 1917.

As the perimeter of the castle wascrossed, the activists raised a banner thatread: Stop the World, Another War IsPossible.

The satire of consensus was perfect and so was the call for massive direct

action that would paralyze entire cities.The banner in the gateway expressedthe widespread desire for somethingmore effective than the global antiwardemonstrations of February 15, 2003,which were in fact proposed at the ESFmeeting in Florence.Along with thisidea of mass defection from the milita-rized societies, it asserted the possibilityof a wholly other war: a subversion thatcould dissolve normalized behavioursand established hierarchies.13 The net-worked activistshad not forgottenthat Deleuze andGuattari conceivedtheir nomadic war

machine as a potential of expressiveand epistemological variance that couldoperate within every institution, andeven at the heart of the military-industrial complexes.They had not for-gotten, because the development of theInternet over more than thirty years hasproved this kind of subversion to be apractical reality. Such struggles neces-sarily take place within the capture-devices that seek to neutralize them:thus the entry of the activists into thecastle, as a way to pursue the exit frompolitics-as-usual that had launched theentire social forum movement in thefirst place.Without a constant resurgenceof the radicalizing process, grassroots

mobilization can be halted by the veryorganizations and figureheads it needs

12. See I. Saint-Sans,Descamps en Europe aux campsde lEurope, in Multitudes19, Paris, December 2004.

13. For the subversivephilosophy of this slogan,see the Spanish-languagepublication [sic]:http://sindominio.net/ofic2004/publicaciones/sic/indice0.html.



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failure of representation, both in thevisual and the political sense, that contin-ually leads activist-artists to abandontheir work and their familiar skills,and to dissolve once again into theintersubjective processes of societys

self-transformation.This moment of dissolution is where

one could locate exodus, not as aconcept, but as a power or a myth ofresistance. On the one hand, exodus isa pragmatic response to the society ofcontrol, in which any widespread polit-ical opposition becomes an object ofexacting analysis for those who canafford to invest major resources in theidentification, segmentation and manip-ulation of what we naively call thepublic. In the face of these strategies,exodus is a power of wilful metamor-phosis: the capacity for a movement toappear, to intervene and to disappearagain, before changing names and

recommencing the same struggle in adifferent way. And this too is a processthat artists can symbolize, by perform-ing the self-overcoming of art onceagain at the risk of dissolving theirproper names, their trademarks andtheir careers. But the very statement ofthis tactical necessity of disappearanceraises a deep anxiety, which must befamiliar to all old revolutionaries, aboutthe possible continuity of resistantculture, or the constitution over timeof something like an anti-systemicmovement. In this regard, exodus seemsto designate an existential reserve, thatpsychic space where fragments ofartistic, poetic and musical refrains are

inseparable from the wellsprings ofaction, but expressible only as a kind of

myth.15 To touchthis intangiblespace is the ulti-mate interventionon social material something no indi-vidual can do, because it is only achieved

through a collective experience, by amultiplicity that has no authority, nosignature.

Exodus is an expression of processpolitics. It points beyond the distortingmediations and structural inequalitiesof capitalism toward a strange sort ofpromised land for the profane, which isthe immediacy of the everyday, thedirect experience of cooperation withothers.The carnival that sometimesbreaks out in the midst of concertedpolitical action is a way to celebrate theoccasional reality of this powerful andpersistent myth.

15. See F. Guattari,Chaosmosis:An ethico-aesthetic

paradigm, Indiana UniversityPress, Bloomington 1995,esp. pp. 19-20, 60-61.


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