Joana Hadjithomas and
Khalil Joreige, Franco Berardi Bifo,
James T. Hong, Marina Vishmidt,
Anton Vidokle, and Marina Gržinić
www.e-flux.com/issues/43-march-2013
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Now that we are fully stratospheric, it would seem that we are simply stuck with this mirror, if it weren’t for the ghost of humanism that still nags at us with the dream of something truly other that would play against our limits, not just reflect what we look like to each other. Some kind of remnant of humanism still haunts our conception of art, like a corpse we don’t know whether to bury or venerate. It sits in our throat, and when it makes us cough we think it’s from smoking or the pollution, because it’s probably that too. Because it still seems to promise forms of life other than those that have been completely overtaken by an economic calculus that stops at satellite broadcasts and the rapture of information.
But if we cosmopolitans now come from space, the old earthbound humanism won’t work anymore. We are much more than that.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
In this issue:
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige—On the Lebanese Rocket Society
Did the Lebanese really dream of participating in the conquest of space? It’s hard to believe and rather surreal. We ask our parents, our friends … No one remembers anything, no one knows what we’re talking about. It is 2009 and we begin our research. A web search for “Lebanese rocket” yields only images of war, specifically Hezbollah missiles targeting Israel and Israeli missiles targeting Lebanon. When we search for “rocket” or “conquest of space,” we find many images, but no trace of our Lebanese rocket.
Franco Berardi Bifo—Pasolini in Tottenham
Having been killed in November 1975, Pasolini did not see the explosion of 1977. So we cannot say if he would have recognized in the insurgents of Rome and Bologna the brothers of his Gennariello. I don’t think so. Rather, I think Pasolini would have joined the Stalinists of the Italian Communist Party (who after ’89 converted to neoliberalism, but in ’77 still worshipped the supreme authority of the State) in condemning the delirium and madness of Mao-Dadaists and Indiani Metropolitani. Who knows?
James T. Hong—From Guilt to Sickness, Part II: The Bite of a Dog into a Stone
Seemingly out of place, the perfect setting for a horror film, the Shihua Shimen Sino-Japanese Friendship Park serves as a failed Japanese attempt at atonement, precisely because it isn’t. There is no apology, no litany of Japanese atrocities and abuses, and no list of the victims. The monument’s capitalist intentions are too visible and reek of insincerity. In the end, the park’s state of disrepair mirrors the current state of Sino-Japanese friendship.
Marina Vishmidt—Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social Practice as Business Model
Creativity thus marks the joint between self-management and self-exploitation, autonomy and heteronomy. The capacity of creativity to be easily internalized as a workplace norm renders it the form of governmentality that obtains specifically in the workplace, even as the entrepreneur can principally operate anywhere, most visibly in the cultural field and as a labor template for the no-longer-autonomous artist.
Anton Vidokle—Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art
After all, what is the expertise of a contemporary artist? Perhaps a certain type of passionate hobbyism, a committed amateurism, is okay: after all, we still live in a reality largely shaped by talented amateurs of the nineteenth century, like Thomas Edison and so many others. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to work in some other capacity in the arts, or in an entirely different field, and also to make art: sometimes this situation actually produces much more significant work than the “professional art” we see at art fairs and biennials.
Marina Gržinić—A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna and the European Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination
This is to say that what supports the process of identity politics is not simply a multicultural project of differentiation in society, but a process of racialization that is actually at the core of contemporary global capitalist societies. The identity politics that we have defined as the product of a process of multiculturalization in contemporary capitalist societies is in fact a process of racialization.
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