OCTUBRE
JALEH MANSOOR, DANIEL MARCUS,
AND DANIEL SPAULDING
Occupation as a revolutionary tactic has a long history, from the factory
takeovers in post–World War I Italy, to the Sorbonne in May 1968, to Tahrir Square
en 2011. The use of “Occupy” as a rallying cry is of more recent origin, sin embargo. En
December 2008, students at the New School barricaded themselves inside a student
center that had been slated for demolition, demanding the university president’s
resignation. In the aftermath of their eviction, “Occupy Everything” became the
movement’s slogan. The following autumn, students at the University of California
schools amplified the call to Occupy, launching a spate of campus occupations and
blockades in an attempt to forestall proposed tuition hikes and budget cuts. On
walls and banners, the slogan “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” marked a
break in the usual codes of student protest: faced with the dismantling of public
education, students did not so much demand redress for specific grievances as seek
to initiate a total transformation of the university, and of the student-administrator
relationship. These struggles marked a transition away from a politics of visibility
towards one of direct expropriation of space and resources, parting ways with the
media-based activism of the previous decade.
The shift in tactics from protest to occupations owes much to French and
Italian ultra-left and insurrectionist theory. Sometimes called the “communization
current,” this strain of Marxist thought transects several generations, from Jacques
Camatte and Gilles Dauvé to the collectives Théorie Communiste, Tiqqun, y
Endnotes. Focusing on the nexus of social relations that sustain the capitalist mode
of production (wages, competition, exchange, marriage), these writers abandon
the view that capitalist relations will be altered only after a revolutionary break;
en cambio, they define revolution as the continuous process of instituting communist
relations directly and immediately—from exchange into free giving and taking, de
wage labor to wageless life. In this body of literature, “communization” is the name
for this activity (revolution as activity) of making things available for communal
usar, expropriating what a community needs without getting it from capital, y
without the prior mediation of organized labor or the mass party.
Last autumn, the three of us became interlocutors (we hadn’t known each
other previously) in an argument regarding the stakes of the Occupy Wall Street
movement and its implications for contemporary art and art history. Informed by
the university occupations, we saw the proliferation of encampments as a first step
in the direction of communization, and as a spur to rethink the relation between
art and politics. Following feminist theorists/strategists Silvia Federici and Selma
James, we interpreted this shift as a straightforward reversal of values: from the
reproduction of capital through the labor process to the reproduction of society
through communization. Here we saw an unfolding politics of care far more
OCTUBRE 142, Caer 2012, páginas. 48–50. © 2012 Revista Octubre, Limitado. y el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
/
mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
d
oh
i
/
.
/
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
1
7
5
3
6
6
7
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
pag
d
.
/
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
Questionnaire: Mansoor, marco, and Spaulding
49
promising than insurrectionist rhetoric alone. At each of the major occupations
(Oakland and New York in particular), activities related to communal life—e.g.,
claiming a common space in violation of the rule of property, finding and organiz-
ing the means of subsistence for the wageless and homeless, defending the camps
from the police, and so on—were in no way secondary to the exigencies of protest;
for many occupiers, sustaining and defending the camps was their modus operandi
as well as their livelihood. While this might sound like a utopian reading of the
autumn uprisings, we are referring merely to the practical activities of the
encampments, such as preparing food and disposing of waste—activities that had
to be organized on a communist basis because it would have made no sense to do
de lo contrario. Occupy showed that it is possible, and even pleasurable, to do commu-
nism in the present tense.
***
We are thrown back, entonces, to the history of art, which now reads differently.
For us, the horizon of communization provides not only a revolutionary theory
and praxis but also a potential exit from the art-historical antinomies of false sub-
lation and bourgeois autonomy, the exhausted (neo-)avant-gardist dialectics of art
y la vida. It also positions anew the notion of autonomy. This concept, once a vital
plank in the modernist platform, seems to us to have returned under the sign of
Occupy in several problematic guises: as economic self-management, exemplified
by the renewed enthusiasm for artists’ unions, collectives, and advocacy groups,
but also as an aesthetic paradigm—autonomy as line of flight, as institutional
flâneurism, as information displaced from one network to the next. From a com-
munist perspective, we find neither of these positions satisfactory. Por un lado,
the project of artists’ self-management maintains the relationship of artist-gallery,
and of worker-capital, whereas it is the relationship itself that must be overcome.
On the other hand, the aestheticizers of autonomy (if we can be permitted that
term) vaunt autonomy within capitalist relations, presuming—in our view,
wrongly—that these relations cannot be altered by any means.
Beyond these positions, and in opposition to capital and its privileged epis-
temes, we see a common horizon for both art and politics: autonomy as a material
práctica, according to which relations between bodies and things are mediated
impurely, provisionally, without forms of capitalist valorization—in other words,
autonomy as process, not as a stable state. Art’s usefulness in these times is a matter
less of its prefiguring a coming order, or even negating the present one, than of
its openness to the materiality of our social existence and the means of providing
for it. When its instruments are fine-tuned, art is capable of registering what is
false about the world-picture projected by capital, with its transparent universe of
isolated selves, each subject an atom in circulating flow. En cambio, art insists that the
fracas of society cannot be captured in number or concept: bodies are always par-
particular, events flee from capture, and things are not what their commodity-form
has us believe.
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
/
mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
d
oh
i
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
1
7
5
3
6
6
7
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
pag
d
.
/
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
50
OCTUBRE
Este, we argue, is the perspective of communization as well. What Marx
called “the real movement of history which abolishes the present state of things” is
also a movement of things—of matter and form transfigured through the metabo-
lism of communal life. Art cannot accomplish this movement on its own, but it can
meet politics on the grounds of everyday subsistence, coordinating things, bodies,
and discourses without yielding to the categories of capitalist valorization (de
course it can do the latter, también, as the very existence of the art market attests). En
view of Occupy, it should be clear that a new account of autonomy is required, uno
that places the means of subsistence over and against the global reticulation of
ideals and visibilities. Paradójicamente, art tends towards autonomy by fixing on what
recedes from visibility, what withdraws from evaluation. Tends towards it, pero
never arrives: from the perspective of communization, autonomy is a horizon, no
an end-state or totalizing system. At best, art beckons from beneath the present
state of things, showing us—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes naively—the world
composed of objects and bodies alone, putting to us the question: “Why isn’t this
good enough? Why does there have to be Value, también?"
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
/
mi
d
tu
oh
C
t
oh
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
d
oh
i
/
/
.
/
1
0
1
1
6
2
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
1
7
5
3
6
6
7
oh
C
t
oh
_
a
_
0
0
1
2
2
pag
d
.
/
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
JALEH MANSOOR is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History, Critical
Curatorial Studies, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
DANIEL MARCUS is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of California,
berkeley.
DANIEL SPAULDING is a graduate student in the Department of Art History, Yale University.
Descargar PDF