To misunderstand the given is nothing less than the instantiation of relations of heterogeneity, of appearing otherwise in a world, of creating other possibilities for meaning. The double signification of misunderstanding, as Rancière has noted, is both that of failed apprehension and of disagreement based on the misinterpretation of signs. Construing misunderstanding as a negative event reveals a will to solidify meaning, to freeze sense-making in language, to petrify the interpretation of gestures and modes of identification, as if we live in a world where words and images define things absolutely. If we are to elicit or provoke a commitment to the political capacities of art, it is here, where the “absolute” interpretation of ethics (the lamented ethical turn) as imperative, as norms-turned-law, demands a transformation of the semantic state. The articulation of misunderstanding, the supernumerary apprehension of a good that generates misunderstanding, affirms the contingencies among signs and semantics, between what is given and what is possible—it does not delight in revealing the actual state of things, but disentangles the actual from the sensible constraints of unconditional reification. It is in the artist’s unstable, task-less, and speculative work of creating conditions of and for sensory misunderstanding that demands a situated fidelity to an intangible good; a faithfulness to potential modes of sensibility in the face of a normative will for consensual semantic and operative fixity. When we refuse the (limiting) definition of “ethics” as a stand-alone abstract principle, but instead deploy it as something that can only be practiced in relation to a situation as a gesture of relation, of “withness” relative to an imagined mode of otherness, we are confronted with the fundamentally ambiguous call of all artistic practices: to perceive a virtual, murmuring, and not-yet-existing demand, and to orient our material (or immaterial) actions in fidelity to the politicity proper to shared autonomy.

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Beyond the Q&A sessions delineated by a conference program into allocated time-slots when the audience is permitted to speak, the articulation of ‘listening labour’ is manifest in the notebook, that basic technology of personal notation. Unlike a diary, where one notes narratives of the self, prying into one’s consciousness, the notebook is an outward reflection nestled in that third space between self and other. Similar to the ancient activity of writing hypomnemata discussed by Foucault as an exercise or praxis of self-care, hypomnemata is an activity of inscribing (for subsequent recollection) ‘fragmentary logos’ imparted through the act of listening, reading or observing. The subjective nature of what one chooses to write (what is of pertinence to note) is already a gesture of appropriation, before being put into ‘use’. In the labour of listening, such gestures of citation, are not merely the setting into motion of idea from an other, but interrupt an idea through its fragmentation, setting it into contingent proximity of that which has been previously inscribed. As a recording technique of localized apprehension, the discontinuity of the notebook opens a novel space for the emergence of thought, thought manifest as an abutment between subject, other and a situation in common.

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Eine Diskussion der Winter School Middle East in Kuwait
Markus Miessen, Patricia Reed, Kenny Cupers, Magnus Nilsson und Ralf Pflugfelder
Published in ARCH+ 204: Krise der Repräsentation

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1. Oikotic responsibility — Artists work in and produce for an economy. When we examine ‘economy’ from its etymological origins: oikonomia (household management), we can locate it in the private sphere. The oikos, the household from which oikonomia derives not only signifies the ‘putting-a-roof’ over ones head, as in financial subsistence. More importantly, the household delineates the various actors, practices, situations, influences and interminglings the artist forges, absorbs, rejects and interacts with. The household of the artist is the space of/for thought, dialogue and production, viz., praxis. With no predetermined space of/for praxis, artists possess an ‘oikotic responsibility’ (1) to set-up their particular household, the thresholds of which are osmotic, and subject to continual fluctuation. This ‘oikotic responsibility’ is co-autonomous in nature– it is only partially autonomous for it engages and is embedded within a social and multi-logical world. How have such ‘households’ of/for praxis been re-shaped under the boom of contemporary art on an international scale, and indeed the very requirement to work for a global audience?

2. Ethics of excess necessity — The labour of the artist is without particular task. In this task-less quality of work – in form and content – the artist perceives a demand, and the fidelity to said demand as praxis, situates the artists’ work within the realm of the ethical.(2) Neither good, nor evil, ethics is that which is sensed and faithfully followed through upon, without law-like imperative. The work of artists overflows that of sheer command or order, and in this regard is necessarily unnecessary.

Cognitive Capitalism is the term used to describe our current economy, where socially driven surpluses (beyond the paid working day) of particular ability or know-how (virtuosity) are continually expropriated from producers or commonly shared knowledge (general intellect) of a society, and directly accumulated as private capital. And, where labour has been vastly extended beyond the production of physical goods towards the immaterial production of affects and desiring subjectivities. If contemporary labour conditions, in general, are characterized by a necessary excess of working day activities/capacities into the sphere of life itself and the production of affect alone becomes a job, and thusly a task to be fulfilled, how is the necessarily unnecessary labour of artists to appear in antagonistic relation to these normative conditions? How would an ethics of artistic labour be enacted that confronts the totalization of ‘cognitive capital’, whilst not negating our necessarily excessive production of sensibility?

3. Inappropriate Affirmation — What was once conceivably a mode of working outside everyday production conditions; artists today are often emblematic of ideal neo-liberal working subjects. Creative, re-locatable, flexible, hyper-mobile, ‘self-designed’, communicative and appropriately critical; have we artists not partially gentrified the very territory of work itself? Confessions of guilty compliance will lead nowhere, nor will mannerist gestures of representing such conditions of work suffice whilst adhering to precisely those ‘critiqued’ conditions of production. Our culpability demands, rather, the affirmation of a capacity to work otherwise. In the co-autonomous circumstance of our aforementioned household, augmented organizations of time, materials and interactions, in themselves, wrestle with the acknowledgement that the very act of producing can be a fertile territory for a politics of work to emerge. How can our activities of work move beyond a simplistic negation of work tout cours and begin to speculate on possible scenarios for the performance of work as such?

4. Risking poiesis — Artists and their work (since Modernity) have been directly linked with the activity of critique, gestures of representing/presenting a given cultural/social diagnosis. The institutionalization of critique has been a highly successful labour indeed, across all fields of cognitive/creative labour, where we have been duly educated to mistrust the ‘lies’ on the surface, and peel back the onion to reveal a catastrophic, evil beast-/machine at work in the shadows. The labour of diagnosis is of course important, however endlessly revealing the self-same beast has resulted in the petrification of our imagination of alternatives. In an uncertain world, the labour of critique could even be described as perversely comforting – we may be wholly discomforted with the results, but at least they are constant. If we are to labour beyond the petrification of imagination, towards future life itself (and not doomsday), we must begin to take the risky step of speculative work, of risking processes and procedures that affirm potential reconfigurations of life and work. How can the labour of poiesis be envisioned today, a precarious Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ into a potential good life (eudaimonia)?

5. Expressive exposure? — If the circulation (drive) of communication constitutes our plight of labour in a networked culture, what has been called ‘Communicative Capitalism’ (3), our very human capacity to communicate (transformed to an economic imperative) can be described as ‘captured’, in the sense that our communicative interactions have become commodities in themselves (attention, traceable and transformed into revenue; and our public discussion/consumption turned into lucrative marketing profiles). How are we to refigure and reconstitute our very modes of interaction, and modes of self-expression (not demoted to self-exposure) in the process of work, and the very subsistence of our labour (visibility)?

6. Precarity as agency of the unnecessary? — Precariousness, in regards to creative labour, has been a frequently repeating term to describe project oriented, flexible work practices, with no long-term security – with some naming this as a particular class: the precariat. The precariat, it must be mentioned, can refer to both those who require exposure (artists/creative labourers) for subsistence and those who must remain clandestine (black market labour). With such fundamentally distinct characteristics, can these two realms of labour even be compared? Or is precarity, rather, a general condition of all contemporary labour, visible and invisible? This seems an inconsistent comparison – those who require visibility vs., those whose demise (legally speaking) rests on visibility. From the perspective of artistic labour, is our household of praxis not enriched by a certain condition of cognitive precarity (constantly risking unknown modes of work, articulation of time-schedules, etc.), indeed in the age of signature branding (self-design), it could be said that more precarity should be introduced into the praxis of artists, who would rely less on self-quotation for a given marketplace, and more on risky speculation. Within artistic labour how can such a predicament of precarity be negotiated as a form of agency of the supernumerary?

Notes:
1. Term was jointly coined in discussion with Société Réaliste as part of contractual negotiations for M6.1: Contract of Discord, WestGermany, Berlin 2007.
2. Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York: Verso, 2007.
3. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.