A.L. STEINER 

1. Bifo: “the depth of the catastrophe represented by the collapse is awakening hidden potencies of the social brain.”

Can we feel good about the crisis, as an alarm clock, sparking fresh awareness or social movement? Describe a favorite action or insight sparked by, or emerging in response to, the financial crisis of 2008.

A group of us—collaborators, lovers, friend & colleagues—started W.A.G.E. (Working Artist sand the Greater Economy http://www.wageforwork.com) in the winter of 2008. We’d become sick & tired of the inequity, naivete, hypocrisy, passivity within the arts community. We were tired of complaining, of feeling pissed, confused, silent. This is right when the crash occurred, and many people said, “How can you start a group that advocates for artist’s payment NOW? There’s an economic crisis!” Of course, this was not a new crisis for us – this was an ongoing crisis that we’d been preparing to confront, that many others were also experiencing and confronting, or ready to confront and speak up about. When was there a better time to be compensated for our works and our contributions? The system was about to be called out for what it was—unjust, inequitable, phony, divisive, exploitative, unethical. When the economy was good, we weren’t being compensated when working with arts institutions,so it made perfect sense to begin advocating on behalf of ourselves, to raise awareness and consciousness, now that the shit had hit the fan. It was a perfect moment—we were already prepared with clarity and determination before others even knew what was happening, in terms of a semio-capitalist sphere.

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Keith Hennessy’s “Turbulence” by Robbie Sweeney

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2.

1985. Diane DiPrima. “the only war that matters is the/war against the imagination/ all other wars are subsumed/ in it”

1991. Adrienne Rich. “War is the absolute failure of the imagination, scientific and political.”

2012. Bifo. “The European collapse is not simply the effect of a crisis that is only economic and financial—this is a crisis of imagination about the future, as well.”

Are you an imagination activist, or do you approach your work as a vehicle for addressing failure or crisis of the imagination? How does the current economic situation (yours, the art or dance market, global finance…) inspire or stymie your imagination about the future?

The term ‘imagination activist’ is intriguing. I do identify with Emily Roysdon’s proposition regarding ecstatic resistance—that queering possibility can presuppose normativity, and that artistically-identified communities and practices can present strategies of protest and resistance. She states in her essay,

 “[Ecstatic resistance] develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility—the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance—sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change…to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.”

I don’t know exactly what I am because I try to operate within a multiplicity of intentions, identities and arenas. For the most part, capitalocentric societies, as J.K. Gibson-Graham proposes, do not allow for systemic knowledge—the implications and affects of our imaginations and decision-making processes; our desires and actions become naturalized and automated, without consciousness. I have a locational & transitional relationship to automatism, agency and autonomy. I am intrigued by Bifo’s core proposition that “money and language have something in common—they are nothing and move everything,” and thatwhen the general intellect “reconstitutes it’s social and erotic body, capitalist rule will be come obsolete.” Obsolescence presupposes a replacement with something updated, improved, something that is needed—that capitalism won’t be necessary. I try to imagine the potentialities of such scenarios—that vision, desires and pleasures will be reoriented, reconnected to our minds and bodies alternately. As Bifo quotes from Wittgenstein, “to be able to think what cannot be thought….”

3. Bifo calls for the “conscious mobilization of the erotic body” and the “poetic revitalization of language.” For me this resonates with the “sexual creativity” of Steiner & Burns’ community art porn Community Action Center. What are the choreographic potentials, or the political imperatives, of erotic bodies and sexual creativity?

Yes—via Community Action Center, A.K. and I affirmed that we see the entirety of one’s body and mind as a sexual organ, oppositional to the heteronormative “naturalized” notion of phallocentric-oriented genitalia as transcribed through a hegemonic monotheistic patriarchal view. We see sexualities/sensualities/eroticisms as creative processes rather than actions reflecting anatomy, gender and economy. I was taken by Bifo’s writings regarding “sensibility”, “acceleration” and “sensitive organisms” in relation to poetics and artistic practices, the “reopening of the indefinite.” Economics is now our universal mind/body language continuum, and it must be challenged, refused, replaced. I’m looking for the affect of sensuality, humor, pleasure, and their connections to typologies of consciousness, transformation and liberation. When our communications —and our silences—are meaningful and purposeful, better things feel possible; when, as Bifo recognizes, “art and therapy and political action” are gathered. If art is a “composition of chaos that yields vision and sensation” as Deleuze and Guattari propose, we must begin to develop the possibility of bringing that into the everyday—much like you and I share the everyday lived practice of feminism.

MÅRTEN SPÅNGBERG

1. Bifo: “the depth of the catastrophe represented by the collapse is awakening hidden potencies of the social brain.”

Can we feel good about the crisis, as an alarm clock, sparking fresh awareness or social movement? Describe a favorite action or insight sparked by, or emerging in response to, the financial crisis of 2008.

Crisis lives some dubious existence between total doomsday, necessary evil and new beginning, on the one hand completely rhetoric used by the transmitter to produce desired attention and on the other an indication of some asymmetry that can be addressed as much as an inconvenience as a moment of rejuvenation. What we might need to fear isn’t crisis, which after all generates desire, what is really to fear is equalisation of life into a sort of flat-rate existence producing a numb population, but luckily we don’t need to worry as our present forms of governance has understood to transform crisis into forms of commodity. It is both the up- and down-side to crisis that it “awakes hidden potencies” because as much as these potencies can be used by the “good guys” the bad ones will also use them and probably to suck even more value out of the people.

Social movements are important and many should be supported, but they are social independently of the politics purported. There is right now an ultra conservative social movement against gay partnership going strong in France, and there is, or was a sort of queer leftist social movement in Sweden against any kind of couple based authorised partnership. The problem is not this or that social movement but social movement in the first case. Basically, social movements don’t take the crisis seriously enough. They are like a sweet spanking on the ass, a confirmation that we are engaging in experimental sex. Social movements are Redbull for people with identity issues, feel-good zero risk confirming a good deed.

Freely recalling Zizek, people, or we engaged in social movements in order not to take the situation at hand for what it really is: totally fucked up. Social movement is like popular ecology, about not having to deal with the fact that the apocalypse is arriving no matter what. Hence, contemporary economy and governance is using social movements, whatever affiliations and style as a kind of smokescreen for what is really going on. More over, social movement designate recognisable forms of organisation, what is needed today is new forms or organisation that can not be classified as anything at all until the day they take over administration all together. Social movements inherently desire authorisation, recognition through dominant discourse, and as long as “we” stay in dominant discourse, as long as we remain in an established grammar, nothing more than “a little bit” this or that will change.

What we need today is not more socially, especially not in art, but instead stuff that isn’t social at all, as it is in the confrontation with a radically non-social that new forms of grammars can emerge, and those new forms of grammar can and must produce new forms of life.

2.

1985. Diane DiPrima. “the only war that matters is the/war against the imagination/ all other wars are subsumed/ in it”

1991. Adrienne Rich. “War is the absolute failure of the imagination, scientific and political.”

2012. Bifo. “The European collapse is not simply the effect of a crisis that is only economic and financial—this is a crisis of imagination about the future, as well.”

Are you an imagination activist, or do you approach your work as a vehicle for addressing failure or crisis of the imagination? How does the current economic situation (yours, the art or dance market, global finance…) inspire or stymie your imagination about the future?

Our problem is not whether imagination is this or that, nor if our present predicament is a crisis of imagination. The real problem is that the enemy and the sponsor of the emancipation is one and the same, or in other words that the very formation of imagination has been corporatised and if capitalism is based on endless expansion “it” will indeed be very very happy the more and weirder we use it’s imagination. Capitalism knows how to harvest, and makes no difference between good or bad ideas, but it knows an efficient idea. The power of imagination is today a force that has become obedient and something utterly useful. Creativity is something every individual, worker, parent, child and artist is obliged to utilise in order to produce further efficiency. Imagination and creativity have become well behaving commodities or strategic instruments in the centre of financialisation. Yet, there is no other tool to use to get out of, or fight the world we today participate in maintaining and producing.

A large part of our world has over the last 30 – 50 years transformed from being organised around material production, goods and history to be geared through immaterial production, performance and contemporaneity, in such a world imagination and creativity have become centrefold to circulation of value. In our present society your most precious property is not your car, house or supermodel girlfriend, it’s the imagination your subjectivity generates.

Somewhat cynically, any somewhat smart artist is today surfing and capitalising on the current economical situation, crisis, social decomposition, ecological disaster scenario and what have we. Artists are active in the same landscape as the financial market, Obama’s drones, Facebook, cultural subsidy (either state organised or through nice rich people) and they live the same imagination, an imagination that produces liquid or abstract value, i.e. money. And at the same time, an art that is not in the middle of deep shit is not an art we need to bother about. Only in the middle and ready to disco will we change the world, and it will be to the worse.

3. Bifo calls for the “conscious mobilization of the erotic body” and the “poetic revitalization of language.” For me this resonates with the “sexual creativity” of Steiner & Burns’ community art porn Community Action Center. What are the choreographic potentials, or the political imperatives, of erotic bodies and sexual creativity?

I want to be traditional. It’s the one and only thing I have ever strived to be. To become fully and completely traditional but with one condition, that it is traditions that I don’t serve but live, that I don’t try to complete but can exist with. Tradition against confirmation. Tradition against beauty, against Ranciere and against negotiation. I can only tolerate unconditional tradition, that negates any kind of negotiation. Traditions that are completely no more mr nice guy, that submit to the sublime, perhaps using beauty but certainly not relying on it.

To become traditional is a means of losing organs. To be fully traditional implies an over-striation to the extent where it ends in smooth. A system so totalitarian it falls over into excessive smoothness. The revolutionary subject is always absolutely traditional, and thus it fails radically to be subject. The non-trivial unconditional tradition is a moment of losing perspective and becoming horizon. Absolute tradition and revolution is like becoming rainbow. Dance strives to lose it’s organs to vanish into tradition, to be tradition, and it loses it’s organs through the endless organization in and of time and space. To dance for real is to become tradition, to decay, to plunder and mess about in graves.

The dance that becomes one with itself, that vanish into tradition, and changes the consciousness to a non-human capacity, is necessarily danced by and through an erotic existence or even better an orgasmic existence, an existence that is deeply traditional, totalitarian, auto-revolutionary (and shuns autopoiesis), that is non-economical and non-capitalist precisely because it, contrary to the liberal subject (engaged in reflexivity, divisibility, maintenance of the species and survival), is totally non-reflexive, indivisible, orgasmic and devouring.

This dance that is non-composed, is non-organized, non-divisible—and has nothing to do with philosophy—it’s a dance that is only itself and however it can not be seen it has and is obsessively organized, divisible and makes philosophy, but this is an organization, divisibilitiy, philosophy that withdraws endlessly from human consciousness.