reclaiming spaces: urban transformations

Monsters in the Metropolis: Social Centres, Cultural Production and the Re-structuring of Capital.

Debra Benita Shaw

This was written following the European Conference of Social Centres in Barcelona/Terrassa (January 8^th – 10^th, 2009) and is a reflection on the themes of the conference and the concepts that dominated the discussions.

A primary concern was bio-unionism which refers to new forms of commonality in conditions where the hegemonic organising principle of all social relationships is biopower. Social centres were seen to have a crucial role in reclaiming cultural production and as spaces for developing self education initiatives in response to the continuing opposition to the implementation of the Bolonga Process across the EU. A primary focus of the discussions was how social centres should respond to the global recession and how strategies for intervention can be formulated. Crucial to this was an understanding of our identity and function in terms of the post-Fordist metropolis and changing patterns of work and social life.

‘the monster is not an accident but the ever present possibility that can destroy the natural order of authority in all domains’ (Hardt & Negri, Multitude)

Hard and Negri understand monsters as emergent forms that are necessary adjuncts to the processes of social production. In a sense, monsters are abject in that they are the result of what is excluded in order for the ‘natural order of authority’ to function. In writing about the dissolution of commonality and community in the post-Fordist city, they identify monsters that have emerged from the conjuncture of neo-liberal isolationism and outdated Left community practices, ‘rabid soccer-fan clubs’, ‘charismatic religious cults’, ‘revivals of Stalinist dogmatism’ and ‘rekindled anti-Semitism’ (191). The need then, is for the monstrous to be re-thought in terms which can re-produce the commons but in a form which is responsive rather than reactionary and attuned to the need for new forms of cultural production and new patterns of social thought in a time when the restructuring of Capital in the current ‘crisis’ has the potential to intensify oppression through the institution of controls which limit mobility and the withdrawal of support for social initiatives.

There is no outside

If the production of ‘outsider’ identities is what the ‘natural order’ needs in order to sustain itself then it follows that there is no wedge thin enough to lever apart the monsters and their natural counterparts. Indeed, the conscious occupation of outsider subject positions is not enough to guarantee an effective opposition. If social centres are to be part of effective movements for change, then the need to strategise becomes paramount. If part of our strategy is to identify the common then we need to understand how we are positioned with regard to any emergent commonality. One immediate question then, is how we respond to the current wave of protests against the Bologna and Copenhagen Processes and the movement of students across Europe.

Social centres are well placed to operate as meeting points for students travelling across the EU. We can offer crash space and cheap or free food and also provide facilities for meetings, screenings, talks and workshops. But probably our most important function is the hosting of self education initiatives (eg., Universidad Nómada, London Freeschool and Temporary Schoool of Thought). The Bologna Process aims to standardise university education across the EU with the explicit intention of equalising the transfer of students across national borders and instituting standards recognisable by employers in all member states. Implicit in this is a demand that universities conform to a set of pre-defined goals, largely defined by the requirements of the employment market. Funding, for both research and teaching, will therefore be limited to those faculties and departments that can demonstrate a commitment to these requirements. The UK, where universities were placed under similar constraints following the creation of the ‘modern’ (post-1992) universities, has witnessed the demise of non-vocational subjects and an increase in degree offerings which blur the distinction between training and education with a concomitant curtailment of knowledge production in fields that cannot (or refuse to) demonstrate a commitment to a neo-liberal agenda. Because academic jobs increasingly depend upon the ability of departments to attract funding through competition and to meet certain ‘quality assurance’ requirements, short term contract working has become the norm. Therefore, the most far reaching implications of the Bolonga Process are likely to be an increase in precarious labour across the university sector and a significant contraction of opportunities for intellectual and critical debate.

Implementation of the Bologna Process depends upon an extension of the Erasmus programme which facilitates the exchange of students across member states of the EU. Alter-Erasmus is a proposition which utilises social centres as spaces for alternative knowledge production and training outside of the university. These kinds of initiatives are not without precedent. Intellectuals on the Left like Stuart Hall, former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University (UK) has, throughout his career, been committed to self education; to making ‘what knowledge you have available to publics outside the framework of formal educational opportunities and the social class structure’ (Coté, Day & de Peuter (eds), 2007: 120). But, as part of movement for change, alter-Erasmus has the potential to mobilise considerable forces for social democratic knowledge exchange if local initiatives are structured into a mobile network of cross-European free schools and skill sharing events. However, Hall’s use of the term ‘publics’ is instructive. Carmona et al recognise a form of exclusivity, what they call a ‘politics of self affirmation’, leading to insularity and partisanship in the social centres movement which they believe is now less apparent than in eg., the 1980s. This they attribute to the resurgence of social centres as spaces allied to new global movements and attuned to the diversity of resistant forms. While this may be true, the predominate political affiliations of social centres attract a largely white and middle class constituency. For social centres to be spaces which welcome diverse ‘publics’, they need to not only be ‘porous’ (Carmona et al) but also engaged with communities which affiliate on the basis of fundamental needs rather than political commitment. The current ‘crisis’ provides opportunities for informal education on a grassroots level which takes account of the multiplicity of practical skills that can alleviate dependence on the consumer economy and that can be shared by people who may not necessarily identify with the politics of social centres.

However, this does not mean that practical skill sharing should supersede cognitive engagement and critical debate. Indeed, social centre collectives need to be aware of the dangers of anti-intellectualism and the potential for a retreat to dogmatic positions. Free schools can offer a unique opportunity for considerations of political, social and cultural theory in a non-hierarchical and non-commodified space. As the universities succumb to marketisation, social centres can be involved in the broadening of knowledge production, alternative publishing practices and new media dissemination. Social centres, in this sense, perform a deterritorialisation of knowledge and confirm their monster status in relation to the knowledge factories of European academia.

Reclaiming cultural production

In recognising the relationship between social and cultural production, we also recognise that the politics of everyday life is immured in the processes and practices of post-Fordist working and social relationships. Paolo Virno offers a term for thinking through the subjectivation of post-Fordism in the concept of the virtuosic which describes the practices of immaterial labour as performances which have no end product; which are affirmed by the presence and witnessing of others rather than the production of a material object. As Gerald Raunig points out ‘What defines a fundamental aspect of the political for Hannah Arendt—the presence of others, the exposure of oneself to the gaze of others, the necessity of cooperation and communication—now become fundamental qualities of labor’. In fundamental terms, this means that everyday reality is structured by the vocabulary of Michel Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’; the techniques that we employ to maintain ourselves as suitable performers in the virtuosic economy. To put it another way, because how we understand who we are has necessarily to be what counts in determining our position on the labour market, there is no social life that is demarcated or distinct from the field of labour. We are constantly working to position ourselves as subjects suitable to market requirements; a processing of the self which is made more acute by precarious employment and is largely structured by consumerist ethics. Cultural production can then be understood as working to confirm and replicate virtuosity. Reality TV, for instance, reproduces virtuosity as a condition of celebrity which itself is consumed and reproduced in social interaction; in the rehearsals of linguistic competence, information processing and emotional literacy which establish the subjectivity of workers under contemporary economic conditions. The distinction between public and private modes of being and interaction become blurred and the city thus comes to be understood as a factory which produces proliferating forms of identity and their symbolic equivalents.

It is these symbolic equivalents that make up the ’spectacle’ of the contemporary city, ‘the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness-motifs. Batteries Not Included, as the old punk band had it’ (Retort Afflicted Powers).

The proposition that social centres can function to reclaim cultural production from the culture factory that the city has become thus needs to be understood in terms of reclaiming virtuosity as a condition of political action while recognising that the flexible subjectivities required by spectacular culture are a necessary condition of our organisation as institutions. This is what Hardt and Negri saw in the emergence of ‘multitude’ and what inspires Donna J Haraway’s formulation of cyborg politics. The fluidity of contemporary subjectivities under the terms of the information economy is, simply put, a strength which can allow for the production of some very promising monsters. Haraway offers the coyote or trickster as a figure for coding monstrosity; Hardt and Negri are in love with vampires ‘a threat to the social body and, in particular, to the social institution of the family’ (Multitude). Vampires emerge, they tell us, at the point where traditional institutions are breaking down. Vampires, ‘are still social outsiders, but their monstrosity helps others to realise that we are all monsters’ (193).

If social centres are to fulfill the promise of alter-institutionality then we need to provide space for vampires to flourish. We don’t, of course, know what form our vampires will take; only that they are a necessary part of the cultural expression of contemporary forms of alienation and thus new forms of commonality that undermine what Hardt and Negri call ‘natural identities’. These are the identities that once supported the institutions of modernity and are now called into being by the spectacle. For Hardt and Negri, ‘the family, the community, the people, and the nation’ which entail the assumption also of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Because the vampire ‘undermines the reproductive order of the family with its own, alternative mechanism of reproduction’ it can equally undermine the reproduction of the spectacle.

Connected with this was the proposition to form strategic alliances with established art cultural institutions to further the purpose of ‘creating seductive spaces and dynamics for the inclusion of groups with no direct link to the history and the practice of social centres’ (Carmona et al) and to attract funding for projects that can take advantage of grants available to recognised organisations. The social centre establishes itself with reference to a stable entity and derives a form of legitimation while continuing to operate in a local context. Such alliances are expected to destabilise notions of public and private, inside and outside while providing new forums for performances of virtuosity. However, this proposition may only be feasible under conditions where a social centre has at least a quasi-legal status and enough stability to generate long-term planning. In the UK, for instance, where squatting is legal, social centres are closely allied to the squatting movement and are necessarily both residential spaces (because of the need for security) and provisional (because eviction could come at any time). While there are exceptions (spaces that are rented or purchased), in general it is understood that occupation of social centre spaces is temporary and that the project does not depend on a stable space. Under these conditions, the establishment of wider networks and cooperation between disparate groups supersedes the requirement for stability. Provisionality, on the other hand, is not necessarily at odds with what Carmona et al refer to as staging creation ‘as an act of resistance and affirmation of shared production’. Social centre collectives are not outside of the circuit of established cultural production in that many users of social centres as well as those involved in their administration also work in arts administration and in the so called ‘creative industries’. As well as this, there are already informal links between social centres and universities in that many left leaning academics are drawn to social centres as spaces which facilitate the kinds of knowledge production which are curtailed by the marketisation of higher education. In recognising this, we also recognise possibilities for intervention, the appropriation of resources and informal strategic alliances as well as sharing of expertise which does not rely on the acquisition of permanent space or the need to attract state funding. Indeed, social centres are already experienced in raising funds for projects that do not claim alliance with any particular space (eg., No Borders and Food Not Bombs). Therefore any benefit to be gained from association with established institutions would seem to be in widening participation and enhancing the profile of social centres as spaces where more radical and interventionist art projects can be realised. However, the possibility of attracting surveillance in such situations would expose social centres to the risk of eg., health and safety monitoring and we may be forced to eg., meet the requirements of corporate publicity departments.

Further to this, alliances with existing cultural institutions would seem to be borrowing the power of legitimation, rather than acknowledging and utilising the power of the nomadic and heterarchical forms of organisation which social centres produce and participate in.

A New Politics of Space

Social centres can be understood as Temporary Autonomous Zones, as defined by Hakim Bey; a concept we might do well to revisit, while not necessarily taking on board the counter-cultural separation implied by his Pirate Utopias. TAZs enable us to think through the current cultural moment in that they are spaces that are ‘a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies’. The cracks and vacancies of the current order of flexible accumulation (Harvey) are becoming more apparent by the day but, if we are to take seriously the proposition that social centres can function to promote new forms of unionism then, in the current conjuncture we need a politics of space which can help us to understand the field (Bourdieu) in which we operate. This transverse politics of space might take the form of questioning our own assumptions with regard to what we mean when we speak about ‘autonomy’ and how the exploitation of ‘cracks and vacancies’ can operate across national borders and in diverse local contexts. Bey contends that TAZs share certain similarities: ‘the importance of aesthetic theory (cf. the Situationists)–also, what might be called “pirate economics,” living high off the surplus of social overproduction– […] and the concept of music as revolutionary social change–and finally their shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re- locate to other universities, mountaintops, ghettos, factories, safe houses, abandoned farms…’. To return to Haraway’s coyote and Hardt and Negri’s vampire, it would seem that these are the figures that resonate with the nomadic and opportunistic concept of the TAZ in that they are never ‘at home’ and are associated with the impermanence of, not only the social centre as an occupied space but also the zone where the ‘pirate economics’ of all forms of production (cultural, social, economic) can operate. Indeed, what may be missing from our self-understanding is a notion of ‘home’ as a contested space under current biopolitical regimes where it is a prime site for surveillance under the terms of neo-liberal subjectivation. While we occupy literal vacant spaces in the metropolis and exploit the precarious architecture of capital, we may do well to recognise that the impermanence of ‘home’ is not only a new cause for concern as economies worldwide are unable to support lending for permanent home ownership but part of our common experience in terms of the social structures that demarcate the associated idea of ‘family’. Bey opposes the nuclear family to the band which ‘is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance’. These contracts and alliances do not emerge spontaneously but must be discovered. A new politics of space, then, needs to be attentive to possibilities for their discovery.

For more readings :

• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

• Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War Verso, 2nd edn with Afterword, 2006.

• T. A. Z. ,The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic TerrorismBy Hakim Bey      Full text of T.A.Z. at Hermetic.com

Posted on March 4th, 2009 under Ressources, Barcelona • Tags: Documentation, Social Centres, struggle. •  Print This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed