redaktionsbüro: Platforma 9,81 and MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE
Boris Groys and MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE:
- PLATFORMA 9,81: Can you speak about the experience of countries once part of the eastern block? How can this experience of the socialist system can be operationalized and used as a tool in creating different urban scenarios or even as tool for urban planning?
- Boris Groys: I think that’s possible. There’s one example. It’s quite strange, but I was impressed by it. There was a Mexican artist called Santiago Sierra, who organized his event in Barcelona and invited people to participate but cheated them – he didn’t pay them their money or something of the sort. And then he organized a space for them to complain about it. I think it’s very interesting because if you look at Utopian literature in general, from Plato to present day, it has always been based on the same movement of visiting Utopia and then leaving it. It’s like a drug experience - there are two problems, how to get in and how to get out of it. So what we actually have now is completed Utopia. And that’s precisely what makes this experience operational. It’s about collective emotional ecstasy, it’s an aesthetic experience. You experience something from it and you experience something when you get out of it. This going in and coming out is a post-communist experience that should actually be understood as a completing of the communist experience. We should use this as a certain technique.
The second point is about socialism in general, which was like total installation, total theatre without any distinction between private and state owned. I think about something like the Soviet Union, like the October Revolution in all its processes and manifestations. Like medieval festivities that encompassed the whole city, the whole country. In socialism the whole country was organized as exhibition space with posters and political propaganda, a space in which everything and everyone had some political relevance and ideological meaning.
To understand Utopia like that is precisely what creating contemporary public space with artistic or architectural or political means actually is. If we look at these ‘carnivalistic’, non-government, anti-global occurrences, it’s like Bakhtin and his series of carnivals. You go in, and there’s a certain state of affairs coming out of it. Instead, we should use this as a certain technique. What we really need is a technical side to the whole experience. We should reflect on this.
We have the experience of organizing something that is like Kabakov’s total installation, an encompassing space. Looking at the differences between western and eastern art tradition shows that that is not even a tradition but something completely different. If we take a look at what happened in western art, with a few exceptions, we conclude that it is always confronted with same gesture of showing something in the certain space. In very few instances, all ideologically motivated, and one of them is Beuys, they were confronted with redefinition of the space. It is interesting that artists coming from the east do that immediately and spontaneously because they can’t just accept western exhibition space as natural for exhibiting themselves and objects. It is almost always very unfavorable for them. They lose with that strategy. The winning strategy would be to redefine space in a way that is not only stable exhibition space but social and political space. I think that is something in the blood of the politically, ideologically indoctrinated east, a feeling for the meaning of gesture, a meaning of things which is not contained inside them. Let’s say a non-positivistic approach, ideological approach of things and actions. It is different from minimalism and western conceptualism where things and actions are identified within themselves. I see very a clear difference here.
The second point is about socialism in general, which was like total installation, total theatre without any distinction between private and state owned. I think about something like the Soviet Union, like the October Revolution in all its processes and manifestations. Like medieval festivities that encompassed the whole city, the whole country. In socialism the whole country was organized as exhibition space with posters and political propaganda, a space in which everything and everyone had some political relevance and ideological meaning.
To understand Utopia like that is precisely what creating contemporary public space with artistic or architectural or political means actually is. If we look at these ‘carnivalistic’, non-government, anti-global occurrences, it’s like Bakhtin and his series of carnivals. You go in, and there’s a certain state of affairs coming out of it. Instead, we should use this as a certain technique. What we really need is a technical side to the whole experience. We should reflect on this.
We have the experience of organizing something that is like Kabakov’s total installation, an encompassing space. Looking at the differences between western and eastern art tradition shows that that is not even a tradition but something completely different. If we take a look at what happened in western art, with a few exceptions, we conclude that it is always confronted with same gesture of showing something in the certain space. In very few instances, all ideologically motivated, and one of them is Beuys, they were confronted with redefinition of the space. It is interesting that artists coming from the east do that immediately and spontaneously because they can’t just accept western exhibition space as natural for exhibiting themselves and objects. It is almost always very unfavorable for them. They lose with that strategy. The winning strategy would be to redefine space in a way that is not only stable exhibition space but social and political space. I think that is something in the blood of the politically, ideologically indoctrinated east, a feeling for the meaning of gesture, a meaning of things which is not contained inside them. Let’s say a non-positivistic approach, ideological approach of things and actions. It is different from minimalism and western conceptualism where things and actions are identified within themselves. I see very a clear difference here.
- PLATFORMA 9,81: An interesting phenomenon in eastern art is its collaborative aspect and group work. The non-institutional scene in Croatia shares similar concepts. Why do you think this happens and how can we use this in the context of global art markets?
- It is a repeated attempt to realize something like a party, maybe a clandestine group as a nucleus of a future party. It is a kind of difference between the eastern artist and the generic type of western artist. Speaking of western artists, if you ask them what the goal of their activity is, the answer would be that they are just doing it without knowing the reason why, and that is a kind of an open process which you can interpret as you want because every spectator has his own interpretation while their interpretation is changing every day. Every approach is legitimate. It is a very slippery and open situation which is very market-driven because people just don’t want to define themselves in ideological terms being compatible with a possible set of expectations and being bought by people who maybe don’t share their attitudes. So the result is extreme atomization, individualism and self-commodification in terms of commodification of the personality of the artist himself who presents himself as a commodity. And the result is a completely neutralized meaning because the meaning comes from the outside. So the meaning comes from somebody who is buying these things.
Fifteen years ago I saw an exhibition of abstract paintings and I asked the gallery owner what the meaning of those works was. He said one very interesting thing and that is that the works had a meaning but only the one who would buy them would know it. So there is a notion that you know the meaning only if you pay. But the next step is to say that the meaning of the work is the intention of the buyer to buy it.
Speaking about public space and group activities is a reverse strategy. It is a strategy of organizing discourse as value. To understand the whole problem we should compare language with mind and see them as two competitive media that produce value. Producing value by language is ideology and producing value by money is market. And they are competing in everyday practice. Value production in socialist systems was dominated by the mechanisms of ideology. People thought that something was very valuable because it had a deep meaning. In what sense? Why does the Black Square have a deep meaning in whatever sense? It is a deep meaning within a framework of a certain discursive politically ideological order. We must have this order, a certain producer of value, by ascribing meaning through ideological mechanisms of such value production. There is also a different moment, for example paintings that look good and that people buy, and that produces value. But competitive moods still exist in our culture. I could say that our culture is an overstatement or that it is only market driven, but that is not true. There is some possibility for value production by ideological discourse and still a possibility to connect both value productions, although that is happening mostly in the opposite direction. For example if the American Academy introduces courses on Madonna as an artist because Madonna is very successful. The case of reverse operation would be Homia Hirschou who uses philosophical space and philosophical values in a specific way, like a commercialization of philosophy. He makes installations instead of selling things. So we have a kind of machine that turns discursive value production into market value production and also in the opposite direction. There are different modes of interaction between these two mechanisms. We are the sons and daughters of the eastern system, which was almost exclusively a system of discursive value production, and that is why we are well attuned to the possibility of interplay between discursive value production and commercialization in both directions.
I think that group activity is a possibility of such interaction because it is nothing else but microdiscoursive value production, a kind of a creation of micro-space and micro-politics already described by Deleuze, giving at least a possibility to convert discursive value production into market value production and back. The group is a machine for reversing discursive value production into market value production and also in the other direction. For example, the soviet group Medical Hermeneutics is working in both ways. Ninety percent of their activities are discursive reflections on media and market phenomenon so that they create pseudo-soviet hallucinating psychedelic space whose content acquires symbolic value just like in Marxist economy.
Fifteen years ago I saw an exhibition of abstract paintings and I asked the gallery owner what the meaning of those works was. He said one very interesting thing and that is that the works had a meaning but only the one who would buy them would know it. So there is a notion that you know the meaning only if you pay. But the next step is to say that the meaning of the work is the intention of the buyer to buy it.
Speaking about public space and group activities is a reverse strategy. It is a strategy of organizing discourse as value. To understand the whole problem we should compare language with mind and see them as two competitive media that produce value. Producing value by language is ideology and producing value by money is market. And they are competing in everyday practice. Value production in socialist systems was dominated by the mechanisms of ideology. People thought that something was very valuable because it had a deep meaning. In what sense? Why does the Black Square have a deep meaning in whatever sense? It is a deep meaning within a framework of a certain discursive politically ideological order. We must have this order, a certain producer of value, by ascribing meaning through ideological mechanisms of such value production. There is also a different moment, for example paintings that look good and that people buy, and that produces value. But competitive moods still exist in our culture. I could say that our culture is an overstatement or that it is only market driven, but that is not true. There is some possibility for value production by ideological discourse and still a possibility to connect both value productions, although that is happening mostly in the opposite direction. For example if the American Academy introduces courses on Madonna as an artist because Madonna is very successful. The case of reverse operation would be Homia Hirschou who uses philosophical space and philosophical values in a specific way, like a commercialization of philosophy. He makes installations instead of selling things. So we have a kind of machine that turns discursive value production into market value production and also in the opposite direction. There are different modes of interaction between these two mechanisms. We are the sons and daughters of the eastern system, which was almost exclusively a system of discursive value production, and that is why we are well attuned to the possibility of interplay between discursive value production and commercialization in both directions.
I think that group activity is a possibility of such interaction because it is nothing else but microdiscoursive value production, a kind of a creation of micro-space and micro-politics already described by Deleuze, giving at least a possibility to convert discursive value production into market value production and back. The group is a machine for reversing discursive value production into market value production and also in the other direction. For example, the soviet group Medical Hermeneutics is working in both ways. Ninety percent of their activities are discursive reflections on media and market phenomenon so that they create pseudo-soviet hallucinating psychedelic space whose content acquires symbolic value just like in Marxist economy.
- PLATFORMA 9,81: You mentioned that in transitional countries, such as Croatia , privatization has not really happened since this process was organized by society. In our research, we focus on the line between the public and private realm and its spatial imprint. Do you think that we should shift the analysis because there isn’t a straight line between them?
- This is a difficult question for me. I don’t know the situation in Croatia, but it is obvious for me that in Russia and China for example a model of privatization exists, one that is a political project not quite unlike those artistic projects described above. The state and society consciously produce private owners as artificial products of political activity and they see them as political and cultural projects and products by saying that this is a good private owner, that is a bad private owner, this it is a good product and that it is a bad product. Russia and China had different political systems but the mode is the same. It is something like a financial channel. You are allowed to make between one and two millions or you are allowed to make between ten and twenty millions. So you are a good capitalist and private owner if you don’t leave this channel in one or other direction. That has nothing to do with the American concept of natural law where ownership is a natural right and even an integral part of the definition of human nature. The question of society is how to socially and politically define a man’s natural right and capability to own. It is the same question as the one about how we can define human potential to create. Humanity is creative from the beginning. How do we do that? But what is a man by nature? Should I be creative if I’m really free? A normal human being would never be creative.
In any case socialism and contemporary postmodern capitalism are two completely different systems, but both tell you how you have to produce individuality, property and to how to produce owners as a collective political project. For example, Germany now has economic problems and the government doesn’t tell the population that they have to produce more, it tells them to consume, consume, consume. The social obligation is to consume. If you consume you keep the economy afloat and you should always consume things that are more expensive, more stylish, more fashionable. Our social obligation is not to produce but to consume. We consume not because we like it, so the poststructuralist concept of desire is a complete nonsense. We consume because that is our moral and social obligation, because if we don’t do that, the system could collapse. Art is involved in the same process and that is also its political dimension. What kind of consumer personality does art produce?
I think that we have to differentiate between private property and the process of privatization. My bet is that the process of privatization never leads to private property and that private property ends at the moment in which privatization begins. It is a kind of the next step from modernity to postmodernity that the private owner increasingly has to legitimate his being a private owner because he has to prove that he is correct politically, ecologically... And suddenly we have a model completely different from the capitalistic system.
In any case socialism and contemporary postmodern capitalism are two completely different systems, but both tell you how you have to produce individuality, property and to how to produce owners as a collective political project. For example, Germany now has economic problems and the government doesn’t tell the population that they have to produce more, it tells them to consume, consume, consume. The social obligation is to consume. If you consume you keep the economy afloat and you should always consume things that are more expensive, more stylish, more fashionable. Our social obligation is not to produce but to consume. We consume not because we like it, so the poststructuralist concept of desire is a complete nonsense. We consume because that is our moral and social obligation, because if we don’t do that, the system could collapse. Art is involved in the same process and that is also its political dimension. What kind of consumer personality does art produce?
I think that we have to differentiate between private property and the process of privatization. My bet is that the process of privatization never leads to private property and that private property ends at the moment in which privatization begins. It is a kind of the next step from modernity to postmodernity that the private owner increasingly has to legitimate his being a private owner because he has to prove that he is correct politically, ecologically... And suddenly we have a model completely different from the capitalistic system.
- MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE: Would it be paranoid to recognize the intention of the west towards eastern Europe to produce new opportunity space as for instance the attempt of ‘Domus’ magazine to see potential within this borderline syndrome of not being fully involved. Do you see it as a paranoid situation that there is kind of intensive pursuit from the west to produce the east as a kind of an option?
- Maybe we are already westernized and there is no hope at all.This kind of paranoia has a complicated structure because it is a very positive one. It gives a very positive feeling because people feel themselves as objects of somebody other’s desire. That is a sort of escape from the very unpleasant hypothesis that we are absolutely not interesting to the west in any sense which is not very far from the reality. The only possibility to escape reality is a fantasia of someone other’s desire. In German and French publications the main topic is China seen as one million consumers. So people are also discovered as consumers, not as producers. I don’t regard the question whether we are westernized or not as an important one because the cohabitation of market value production and discursive value production is a fundamental threat to the constitution of western civilization in general. In the west the market is dominant and discursive value production is minimal, while in the east discursive value production was dominant but there was also market value production. I don’t think that a sort of fundamental gap exists between the east and the west but rather a shift in the mechanisms of value production that is more discursive or more market driven. That shift has no fundamental ontological meaning. There is no real break, just a different part of the same story. Coming from the east we are more attentive to discursive value production than our colleagues from the west while they are more attentive to market value production. For example I participated in a Rem Koolhaas program about communist cities at Harvard, and it was very interesting that Koolhaas himself and other participants were only cons with numbers. Speaking about communist city they never mentioned the ideology of communism, so it seemed like any other western city built with the some amount of money, the some amount of material. All those symbolic values of communism were completely neglected. When I asked Rem why is like that, he said that they want to have a clear western look, free of the unnecessary details of communism. That was an interesting perspective for me, although many things were overlooked like the fact that you can’t describe the system of the communist city if you neglect the fact that it was a stage for certain demonstrations. If you do that, as Rem did it, then it makes no sense, but it is an interesting perspective because things can also be described in those terms. I can’t tell someone that he can’t describe Moscow in that way. If I am attentive to certain mechanisms of discursive value production as people here are not, I can say it is an interesting perspective. I don’t see a gap here, just a shift. But it is paranoid of course and it is a very positive paranoia after all.
- PLATFORMA 9,81: I would like to get back to urban policy. We are interested in the deregulation of national state and the possible spatial implications of this process. Trying to research examples of that deregulation in Croatia and their impact on enclosed processes of building and urban planning, we hit a dead-end, realizing that maybe that process is not happening at all. Do you think that deregulation is really happening in transitional countries, or that it is just sort of a pre-state of global processes?
- That is my hypothesis. Things should be looked and recognized in general perspective. The political and economical horizon for Croatia is to join the EU, which is something like the Soviet Union, a huge bureaucracy not elected by anybody, not legitimized democratically, and one that lives on regulating every aspect of life. It is very different from any other real contemporary world. In the context of contemporary, globalized economy, EU space is more exceptional than the Soviet Union was. There is no other place as EU. The strangest thing in the world is Brussels. Normal people outside just don’t understand what is going on. The capitalistic attitude is generally understood in terms of global economy, as a sort of American free will capitalism with a criminal side like Russia or China has. It is like entrepreneurship without socialist responsibility and with moral obligation for private sponsorship, which is very deeply rooted in American culture. EU is based on bureaucracy, bureaucratic regulation, a tax system, on the idea that everything should be made according to rules. The problem is that Croatia is going to join the most socialist system that ever existed in the contemporary world. What is going now in political and economical terms is not easy to analyze. My opinion is that the EU is the last workshop of radical socialism trying to establish itself like an island in a globalized, neoliberal economy. Whether this strategy is successful or not, although the majority of the population has its doubts about it, we will see. If you look at the west now, there is split between Anglo-American and continental modes of production. That gap is not so deep but still there are differences between socialist and neoliberal systems. At this moment the west is not a homogenous space at all.
- MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE: How do you see the processes elaborated through the work of Lawrence Lessig concerning the change of position in the sense that the system of social production is moving from a level of regulation, legal system that economic globalization has spread over the world, away from this direction of technology which implements these closed options of communication?
- I think that what is described by those authors will significantly close the public domain and that we will have to strive not to lose consciousness and stay aware of all of these processes because it wouldn’t happen under political process at all. The legislation should not be the curtail point implanting the whole thing into the technology level. That would close the way in which we produce our social context. What is the critical position and option to resist this?All that is completely correct. There is one passage at the beginning of the famous book Arbeiter by Ernst Jünger where he says: Let us make an experiment. I let the social democrat political party into my everyday life and see what is going to happen. My participation is technological. That system is much more important to me than the political system. The problem is that we should not neglect the fact that there is no such thing as free communication meaning free from any kind of technology. There are different types of communication, but there is no such thing as technologically free communication. If we want to escape a certain technological model of communication we have to invent a different one. It is not enough to resist something because we don’t have the potential of non-technological communication. The change of modes of communication comes only with a change of technology. If confronted by a book, as is Negri’s Empire, we realize that the left wing has for a long time presented resistance against institutions. Negri still thinks in that way, like an immaterial worker, and that is really driving me crazy because I am supposed to be a material worker sitting in front of my computer like a slave of nineteenth century industry. What is immaterial about that? All this equipment and hardware are so material. And using the term immaterial work you must be crazy. Being against institutions and for freedom from them is the policy of one section of the left wing. Immediately in the context of EU described above we can say that this part of the left wing is pro-American because the other side is free will capitalism. Leaving the space of regulation and institutional control we immediately go into free entrepreneurship and de facto post-Deleusean and post-Derridian politics, which is pro-American neoliberal politics. That is why there is a very strange phenomenon of neo-Stalinism in the left wing, people like Alain Badiou who say that they are against freedom of the institutions and let them be neo-Catholics and neo-Stalinists so that they can secure their continental institutions from the free market. There is a very interesting split in the European left discourse between people who accuse those like Badiou for collaborating with the conservative state, and Badiou accusing them for collaborating with America. Speaking about left and right we should not forget that there is a split and difference between what is inside and outside EU and that that split dictates strategies. Every time we try to resist some systems we should ask ourselves what is that system, what is the alternative, what is the option, what this system actually means.
- MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE: Do you see neoliberal logic of multinationals and political elites who use legislation to implant into technology the very closed up options as a new post political situation which negates liberal democratically principles?
- There is no question about it. If you look at the rhetoric of non-globalist movements you see that it is rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion. Just as people say that they are excluded from the network. You want inclusion. Exclusion and inclusion is computer language. It means connected or disconnected. They want to be branched, they want to be included. Who can do that? Only multinationals. If you are interested in having access to information and communication you have to ask Microsoft. Talking about resistance we can ask what it means. Is there an alternative system to Microsoft? First, it is too expensive and secondly it makes access more difficult because easy inclusion has something to do with standardization. Between the left wing’s requirement for inclusion and the politics of the multinationals there is a one hundred percent correspondence of goals. Both of them transcend the borders of the sovereign state and that means transcending the borders of democracy, because democracy is sovereignty of the people defined as being inside a sovereign state. The moment you transcend these borders democracy is gone. We can say that democracy is now like the kingdoms at the end of the middle ages, a system which functions but has no real power in institutions that represent it. The real power is in the flow of market value money through borders, and beyond them without democratic and legitimate controlling instances. Art is the same thing. On the one hand there are internationally successful artists and no international art institution. If an artist wants to be internationally successful he has to free himself from national institutions. We should understand that this is in many cases freedom from democracy. You don’t want to be a part of democracy; you want to be part of the world. That also means a freedom beyond democracy.