| Sascha D. Freudenheim on Fri, 6 Jul 2018 19:35:40 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice | By Marc Garrett. |
Ermahgerd, where to start. How about...
The cultural, political and economic systems in place do not work for most people. They support a privileged, international class that grows richer while imposing increasing uncertainty on others, producing endless wars, and enhancing the conditions of inequality, austerity, debt, and climate change, to own everything under the rule of neoliberalism.
It seems to me that these two sentences fall victim to exactly the thing you're bemoaning. Under the well-established political theory of "It Takes One to Know One," this reads like a statement from someone belonging to the privileged, international class. (That's not as harsh an accusation as it may sound, as it comes from someone who also belongs to that class.)
I will happily admit that yes, the scales of wealth distribution are significantly out of whack. So significantly that "significantly" is an understatement.
And yet ... by nearly every agreed-upon measure, the "cultural, political and economic systems in place" have contributed to what can be called--with equal understatement--a significant reduction in global poverty rates. A 74% reduction since 1990 by some estimates.
Also, those "cultural, political and economic systems in place" have contributed to the creation of a vast ecosystem of tools and technologies that allow people to communicate, to create, and even to travel, across great distances and at significantly lower entry costs than ever before. (And yes, yes, the financial/market processes around some of these tools have also have contributed greatly to the wealth gap.)
Also, those "cultural, political and economic systems in place" have created massive classes of people who--despite their iron cages!--have decided that fuck it, certain work is beneath them. We've seen a fair number of examples of this in the U.S. (and elsewhere), where the natives (so to speak) don't want to take tough jobs in slaughterhouses or working in the fields. The pay can be high and it doesn't matter; it's beneath them and so they won't do it. So immigrants, legally arrived or not, will happily take their place...
...but it hardly seems fair then to basically blame the hard-working immigrant for creating the iron cages for all those disaffected/uppity poor nationalist natives who don't like the jobs that the "cultural, political and economic systems in place" are offering them, despite the fact that they're ... jobs.
Am I saying that things are not tough for many, many people? Absolutely not. The debt load for many people is too high. The price of higher education is both insane and nonsensical. The climate change challenges are broad, unresolved, and frankly, unknown (and thus terrifying).
But to pretend that despite all of that, *everything* is in the shitter, that everyone is in a cage--or in that cage because of "neoliberalism," as opposed to any and every other ism that has ever been tried--is just total balderdash.
Sascha D. Freudenheim sascha@sascha.com @SaschaDF On 7/6/18 7:39 AM, marc.garrett wrote:
Hi all,It's rare that you'll see any posts from me on this list. However, I thought, perhaps some of you may be interested in the subject of 'Proprietorial Systems', and my take on it. As some of you may know, I've been working with Furtherfield for over 20 years now. The context of the paper reflects a small example of my autoethnographical PhD, at Birkbeck, London. I am now in my write up period, and will be spending the next 6 months in it until it's all finished.Wishing you well. marc Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice | By Marc Garrett."Proprietorial domination is the presumption of ownership not only over our psychic states of existence but also through the material objects we possess and use daily, and this extends into and through our use of digital networks every day."http://www.aprja.net/unlocking-proprietorial-systems-for-artistic-practice/ IntroductionThe cultural, political and economic systems in place do not work for most people. They support a privileged, international class that grows richer while imposing increasing uncertainty on others, producing endless wars, and enhancing the conditions of inequality, austerity, debt, and climate change, to own everything under the rule of neoliberalism. David Harvey argues that the permeation of neoliberalism exists within every aspect of our lives, and it has been masked by a repeated rhetoric around “individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and free trade”. (Harvey 11) Thus; legitimizing the continuation of and repeating of policies that consolidate capitalistic powers. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval in Manufacturing the Neoliberal Subject, say we have not yet emerged from “the ‘iron cage’ of the capitalist economy […] everyone is enjoined to construct their own individual little ‘iron cage’.” (Dardot and Laval 263)If we are, as Dardot & Laval put it co-designing our own iron cages, how do we find ways to be less dominated by these overpowering infrastructures and systems? How do we build fresh, independent places, spaces and identities, in relation to our P2P, artistic and cultural practices, individually and or collectively – when, our narratives are dominated by elite groups typically biased towards isolating and crushing alternatives? Does this mean that critical thought, aligned with artistic and experimental cultural ventures, along with creatively led technological practices, are all doomed to perpetuate a state of submission within a proprietorial absolute?To unpack the above questions we look at different types of proprietorial systems, some locked and unlocked, and consider their influence on creative forms of production across the fields of the traditional art world, and media art culture. We look at how artists are dealing with these issues through their artistic agency: individually, collaboratively, or as part of a group or collective. This includes looking at the intentions behind the works: their production and cultural and societal contexts, where different sets of values and new possibilities are emerging, across the practice of art, academia, and technology, and thus, the world.Part of RESEARCH VALUES | A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Research Values | VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1, 2018 | Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox - http://www.aprja.net/research-values/Marc Garrett Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield. Art, technology and social change, since 1996 http://www.furtherfield.org Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQ http://www.furtherfield.org/gallery Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK Latest post: Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems interview: with Artists, Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams https://bit.ly/2HQM1bs Sent with ProtonMail <https://protonmail.com> Secure Email. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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