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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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.

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Harmonistan is Miessen’s tongue-in-cheek name for this regime of consensus, and although eliciting a chuckle upon reading, is anything but harmonious. What is at work in the regime of consensus is the totalization of various peoples, places and functions into a unity of a single space indistinguishable with the population and its distribution, to the exclusion of any remainder. Consensus has nothing to do with a common agreement of policies of an expert government, yet permeates and petrifies the normative symbolic order or, to the violent segregation of that which is supernumerary, to that which is otherwise possible. The stultifying presupposition of consensus is that the people, the demos are already given (consensus is whole), that their communities are established, and their modes of speech are concordant with their roles, functions and disputes. Within the normative symbolic order, what the regime of consensus sets up is an impotently myopic vision: that we have attained resolution in regards to the fight over political structures, yet the condition of this resolution is that we only can have what we have; in the words of Alain Badiou, consensus is the fusing of what is with what can be (Badiou: Infinite Thought, 2005). To downplay the inherent violence of this totalizing consensus is a dangerous gesture, both in theory and in practice, for to do so prohibits the political subjectification of that which is excluded, of the part that has no part in the normative structuring. The regime of consensus cannot even conceive of a representable barrier of exclusion, nor of the processes of division in its totalizing view, as a result, the delineation of a supernumerary is completely absent from common sensibility, from the sensus communis (Rancière: Disagreement, 1999).

To conflate consensus with ‘all-inclusive democracy’ reifies this violently negligent presupposition of totality, of wholeness, of the congruency between the population (the accountable, the surveyable) and the demos. Now in fairness, the general tone of The Nightmare of Participation seeks necessary and admirable strategies to combat such a regime of consensus, through the intrusion of uninvited intervention, yet the stakes of rhetoric involved in such a project, cannot be unquestioned. Words are not innocuous. The suggested avoidance of democracy alluded to through the book, in order to instigate other modes of appearance (of architecture, art, people, interactions, policy-making, pedagogy and so forth), is a commonly held opinion from both the right and left. The beaten up notion of democracy as that associated with mediocrity, watered down solutions, majority rule, rampant populism coupled with mass individualism, passivity, and the reproduction of the status quo; is explained as a form of governance riddled with bureaucratic procedures, unable to propel substantial change or novelty. What we are reduced to on both sides of critiques on democracy is an imbrication of democracy with an order of governance, a form of governance that can be instituted (even viciously imposed), and a form of governance synonymous with certain states known simply as ‘democracies’. In these instances democracy becomes identical to systems of law, expert guidance, protocols of management and even designates certain geographical regions, to the subordination of democracy as a universal potential power of the people. Daniel Bensaïd captured these doubts projected at democracy quite acutely when quoting Tocqueville from 1853: “I accept the intellectual rationale for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, in the sense that I contemn and fear the crowd. I dearly love liberty and respect for rights, but not democracy” (Bensaïd: Permanent Scandal, 2011).

Tocqueville’s statement is emblematic of an ongoing hatred or deep mistrust of democracy (from Plato to Churchill and beyond) that has been duly traced by Rancière, who resuscitates this bloodied term from the shackles of ordered governance. Fear of the crowd is nothing new, for the crowd is inherently unbounded, and it is here where we see Plato’s critique of democracy: that the limitless wills and demands of the people (the excess drives of the demos) must be contained to conform to the wills of an expert government, of those who know better, of those who are privy to knowledge. By equating democracy with a system of expertly delineated limits, what is at stake is a fundamental shift from the very unsettling force implied in the ‘-cracy’ of democracy, to an ‘-archy’ (of oligarchy, monarchy) that is some form of legitimated, grounded power. This is not merely a linguistic issue, but the very limiting of the limitless, which strips democracy of its political thrust and is conceived as a structure to contain the implicit excess of wills and drives of the people. The hatred of democracy is thusly that a ‘good’ democracy is one that can successfully contain, stabilize, subdue and repress the inherently unstable and excessively demanding demos. The hatred of democracy is a doubly directed one; on the one hand it is directed at the increased instantiation of limits by government (totalitarianism), and on the other hand, the hatred is directed at popular participation in public affairs itself, which is portrayed as irresponsible, individualistic and consumer driven (mediocracy, media driven) (Rancière: Democracies Against Democracy, 2001).

The call to avoid an ‘all-inclusive democracy’ in The Nightmare of Participation reveals an accord with the hatred of democracy itself. And here in lies a central point that demands arrestation before proceeding on this excurses. What needs to be avoided at all cost is not democracy, but its very equation as a totalising instrument of cohabitational, structural limitation and popular mediocracy. For it is in the hatred of this particular apprehension of democracy where politics disappears, being usurped into the category of a given ordering, the disappearance of which is the specific critical axis around which Miessen’s ‘agonistic’ stance on participatory intervention revolves. If participation is called upon to unsettle given modes and protocols of operation, instigating other conditions of possibility, this commendable portrayal of participation can go by no other name than the enactment of democracy, assuming the vital force of the ‘-cracy’ (kratos) in all of its augmentative capacity in agonistic relation to the settlement of the ‘-archy’ (arkhe), or that which rules and distributes a given order.

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