Greg to Gerald Raunig:
Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sought to make a radical break with (among other totalizing discourses) the powerful influence of Hegel’s dialectical thinking on Structuralists as well as members of the Frankfurt School and other followers of Marx. However this intellectual intervention refused to establish its own version of a master narrative. Undecidability, playfulness, and continuous discursive invention not only served to undermine absolute textual meaning, they also aimed to destabilize the rigidity of the European Left and its institutions. At the same time Deleuze and Guatari’s philosophical approach shares with this rejected, dialectical tradition a desire to not merely “interpret” the world, but to also change the world. Your bracing keynote lecture for this year’s Creative Time Summit charged directly into this contentious terrain, exposing an auditorium full of social practice artists to the complex, and at times inscrutable, vocabulary of Deleuze and Guatari, before concluding with what I would describe as a passionate call to liberate time itself from the disciplinary grip of neoliberal capitalism. And yet time is increasingly in short supply. This is especially true here in the United States where public support for culture vanished long ago along with the social safety net as neoliberal globalization swept over us more than three decades back. Given the difficulty of your theoretical model, just how would you recommend artists and activists go about generating enough concentrated time so as to gain some degree of fluency in this radical vocabulary?
Gerald Raunig answers:
Let me begin by explaining a few aspects I stressed in my lecture at the Creative Time Summit: Molecular revolution, as Guattari conceptualised it already in the 1970s, is not reduced to transforming the modes of political organisation, it spreads out in the pores, the molecules, in the new durations of everyday life. For these durations to be instituted, however, first requires an evental break with subservient deterritorialization in machinic capitalism. The molecular strike is both: duration and break. It is not leaving, not dropping out of this world, no time-out. The molecular strike is the breach in the time regime that we drive in, in order to try out new ways of living, new forms of organization, new time relations. No longer a struggle merely to reduce working time, but rather for an entirely new streaking of time as a whole. In machinic capitalism, it is a matter of the whole, the totality of time, its entire appropriation. The molecular strike struggles for its reappropriation, its streaking, piece by piece.
Interestingly enough, there is an early version of this form of a molecular strike, in the 1970s art world, Gustav Metzger’s concept of the art strike. For the exhibition “Art into Society – Society into Art” at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1974, Metzger provided no object, but instead only a written contribution for the exhibition catalogue. It centered around inciting himself and his artist colleagues to go on strike. He called for years without art in the period of three years. Metzger’s appeal was not even discussed or considered for realization. He conducted the three-year strike from 1977 to 1980 by himself. This probably had something to do with him being far ahead of his time and daring to enter previously unexplored territory. In the artfield where the main components of the machinic modes of production were anticipated, long before the post-fordist paradigm had prevailed as such, Metzger prefigured what a strike could look like in the smooth and newly striated times. He attempted to establish the refusal to work specifically in the art field, which is marked not only by extreme competitiveness, strong innovation pressure and an extreme diffusion of production locations, but also by the specific smoothness of its temporality. The time regime of artist production anticipated certain aspects of today’s machinic capitalism that appropriates the time in its totality.
And of course, one could see these early experiments of art strikes, together with more recent ideas of care strikes, migrant strikes, precarious strikes, also as prototypes for the molecular strike of today’s occupying movements, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Puerta del Sol in Madrid, from Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv to Liberty Plaza in New York City.
More on all of this, see the upcoming issue of the transversal web journal http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011, due to be published oct 4.
