The Autonomy Project, initiated in 2010,  had its roots from the 2008 Global Financial Crash, major bailouts to Banks and Financial institutions, and the resulting response of neoliberal global austerity. In this context, cuts to ‘non-essential’ budgets – such as those set aside for the arts – marked a significant radical change toward the absolute financial instrumentalisation of public institutions, including museums and galleries, that had been underway since the collapse of the Eastern Block in 1989. As a result, the Autonomy project was initially an attempt to recapture and repurpose one of the main terms and conditions of Modernist art practice – that of artistic autonomy – and to reopen its fixed and institutionalised meaning as a condition of disinterested aesthetic contemplation and engagement that could only be provided by Modern Art museums. Instead, the Autonomy Project set out to re-vivify the term autonomy as a site of social, political and economic – as well as aesthetic – struggle, a territory to be struggled over and fought for. As Charles Esche pointed out, this would obviously mean that any repurposing of the term Autonomy would have to run counter to common sense and often strongly-held and guarded beliefs. Nevertheless, envisaging autonomy as a socially produced construct – rather than as an a priori given – and as something that has to be fought for and taken from those who would misuse or misconstrue the term for purposes of power and control,  offered those involved with the projet  with an opportunity to imagine ourselves otherwise at a time of global crisis. 

What we did not realise when we undertook this project was just how far-reaching its consequences might prove. What started out as an attempt to rethink how audiences or visitors of museums and galleries might experience art in a more democratic and meaningful way soon turned into the realisation that museums and galleries – and art itself – had to be fundamentally re-thought, or re-imagined, if the arts-commodified absorption into luxury tourism, leisure and cultural industries was to be avoided. Instead of thinking about the ways in which we might re-democratise and re-activate the established terms and conditions that currently dictate a ‘top down’, one-way public access to art (where an expert culture governs the culturally-correct understanding and uses of art taking place within the physical and ideological purview of their institutional architectures), we started reflecting how museums and galleries could play a key role in the re-democratisation and re-activation of the public body itself via the uses of art. 

From my own perspective, this initially meant accepting that, under our current condition of neo-liberal occupation, there is no longer any form of a priori alterity that can be offered by art or, for that matter, by the work or labour of art itself. Rather than seeing this admission as a  raising a white flag to neoliberalism, I argued that having ‘no inside out or outside in’ would allow us to begin re-imagining a condition of capitalist colonisation that, to paraphrase Mark Fisher, currently occupies the horizon of the thinkable. Instead of falling back into the historical trap of ‘art for art’s sake’ autonomy – where useless usefulness and purposless purpose are seen as ways in which art can simply fly in the face of financial instrumentalisation – I began to argue that the condition of neo-liberal occupation was asymmetrical. What I meant by this was that the languages of alterity and the left, once so clearly distinguishable from the terms and conditions that delimited the right, had already been successfully occupied and repurposed inside neoliberal discourses of self-management, deregulation and fiscal responsibility. And if this was the case, then any form of socially and politically radical art would now have to recapture, reoccupy and repurpose its own terms and conditions of use and usership from within the operational overcodes of a globalised, neoliberal logic. 

In this light, I also started reconsidering my relationship to history and theory, more specifically the tradition of Marxist Social History and Theory that conditioned my own thinking around art. One of the conundrums – or more accurately the Gordian Knot – or Marxist art history and theory has been the fraught relationship of art to autonomy and heteronomy, or – more commonly – of the alleged line that divides high art from everyday life – a line which, more often than not, has been drawn between the notion of the autonomous sovereign individual and the confused and inexact ambiguity of the social mass or social body. However, I would argue that this perennial impasse, exemplified by Adorno’s famous response to Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – that art and life are the torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up (Adorno, 1936) - also holds within it a clue to its resolution. What if we begin to look back at a time before this ‘split’ between art and life happened? What if we also started asking why this ‘split’ appeared as a necessary precondition for the existence of art as we know it or knew it to be? And what clues lie waiting for us in the rubble of forgotten history, that will help us to rethink, reimagine and remake ourselves today? 

As we started scratching away at the historical conditions that underpinned the autonomy / heteronomy bifurcation, increasing possibilities and alternatives for thinking through and beyond this historical impasse seemed to emerge and converge. For example, the growing difficulty in reconciling use or use value to the alienation of mechanised mass production that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries, which clearly underpinned a shift toward the idea that art for art’s sake could provide a moral and ethical rebuff to the instrumentalisation of mechanised laissez-faire capitalism – were also clearly expressed in Marx’ writings. This struggle is perhaps most evident in the early pages of Marx’ Kapital Volume I, where he tries to draw a plausible distinction between use value and exchange value. For Marx, initially, use value is an ethical, political and moral imperative – it is a bodily, physical necessity, a compelling function of our humanness (a material and qualitative pre-requisite for our continued subsistence) – whereas exchange value is an abstract, quantitative mental process. In this light, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of use value is more than a moral and ethical imperative – it is an insistence on the social (as mankind works to produce the conditions of its own reproduction, individuals enter into relationships that are inescapably social in their nature). Simultaneously, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of social use value also enables him to isolate the point at which use value starts mutating into abstract labour-power under the conditions of Capitalism. As a historical shift takes place in the general labour force, from the experience of actively making or participating in the means of subsistence to simply selling labour power as a tool within an increasingly extended manufacturing process, we begin to experience a circulation and sale of goods that, in themselves, seem to have magically appeared in the ‘absence’ of this increasingly exploitative labour process. This seismic historical shift, I began to argue, also marks the point at which Capital’s new forms of alienated labour and use value became simultaneously haunted by a mythologised historical past and an imagined revolutionary future – a future where the individual and the social body (as the Proletariat to be) are reunited through valorised forms of useful and fulfilling labour. And this is also precisely the point when historical narratives of ‘returns’- to craft (the arts and craft movement for instance) started intersecting with mechanised futurologies of a social machine age that is yet to come (Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, etc.)

The Autonomy Project, initiated in 2010,  had its roots from the 2008 Global Financial Crash, major bailouts to Banks and Financial institutions, and the resulting response of neoliberal global austerity. In this context, cuts to ‘non-essential’ budgets – such as those set aside for the arts – marked a significant radical change toward the absolute financial instrumentalization of public institutions, including museums and galleries, that had been underway since the collapse of the Eastern Block in 1989. As a result, the Autonomy project was initially an attempt to recapture and repurpose one of the main terms and conditions of Modernist art practice – that of artistic autonomy – and to reopen its fixed and institutionalised meaning as a condition of disinterested aesthetic contemplation and engagement that could only be provided by Modern Art museums. Instead, the Autonomy Project set out to re-vivify the term autonomy as a site of social, political and economic – as well as aesthetic – struggle, a territory to be struggled over and fought for. As Charles Esche pointed out, this would obviously mean that any repurposing of the term Autonomy would have to run counter to common sense and often strongly-held and guarded beliefs. Nevertheless, envisaging autonomy as a socially produced construct – rather than as an a priori given – and as something that has to be fought for and taken from those who would misuse or misconstrue the term for purposes of power and control,  offered those involved with the projet  with an opportunity to imagine ourselves otherwise at a time of global crisis. 

What we did not realise when we undertook this project was just how far-reaching its consequences might prove. What started out as an attempt to rethink how audiences or visitors of museums and galleries might experience art in a more democratic and meaningful way soon turned into the realisation that museums and galleries – and art itself – had to be fundamentally re-thought, or re-imagined, if the arts-commodified absorption into luxury tourism, leisure and cultural industries was to be avoided. Instead of thinking about the ways in which we might re-democratise and re-activate the established terms and conditions that currently dictate a ‘top down’, one-way public access to art (where an expert culture governs the culturally-correct understanding and uses of art taking place within the physical and ideological purview of their institutional architectures), we started reflecting how museums and galleries could play a key role in the re-democratisation and re-activation of the public body itself via the uses of art. 

From my own perspective, this initially meant accepting that, under our current condition of neo-liberal occupation, there is no longer any form of a priori alterity that can be offered by art or, for that matter, by the work or labour of art itself. Rather than seeing this admission as a  raising a white flag to neoliberalism, I argued that having ‘no inside out or outside in’ would allow us to begin re-imagining a condition of capitalist colonisation that, to paraphrase Mark Fisher, currently occupies the horizon of the thinkable. Instead of falling back into the historical trap of ‘art for art’s sake’ autonomy – where useless usefulness and purposless purpose are seen as ways in which art can simply fly in the face of financial instrumentalization – I began to argue that the condition of neo-liberal occupation was asymmetrical. What I meant by this was that the languages of alterity and the left, once so clearly distinguishable from the terms and conditions that delimited the right, had already been successfully occupied and repurposed inside neoliberal discourses of self-management, deregulation and fiscal responsibility. And if this was the case, then any form of socially and politically radical art would now have to recapture, reoccupy and repurpose its own terms and conditions of use and usership from within the operational overcodes of a globalised, neoliberal logic. 

In this light, I also started reconsidering my relationship to history and theory, more specifically the tradition of Marxist Social History and Theory that conditioned my own thinking around art. One of the conundrums – or more accurately the Gordian Knot – or Marxist art history and theory has been the fraught relationship of art to autonomy and heteronomy, or – more commonly – of the alleged line that divides high art from everyday life – a line which, more often than not, has been drawn between the notion of the autonomous sovereign individual and the confused and inexact ambiguity of the social mass or social body. However, I would argue that this perennial impasse, exemplified by Adorno’s famous response to Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – that art and life are the torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up (Adorno, 1936) - also holds within it a clue to its resolution. What if we begin to look back at a time before this ‘split’ between art and life happened? What if we also started asking why this ‘split’ appeared as a necessary precondition for the existence of art as we know it or knew it to be? And what clues lie waiting for us in the rubble of forgotten history, that will help us to rethink, reimagine and remake ourselves today? 

As we started scratching away at the historical conditions that underpinned the autonomy/heteronomy bifurcation, increasing possibilities and alternatives for thinking through and beyond this historical impasse seemed to emerge and converge. For example, the growing difficulty in reconciling use or use value to the alienation of mechanised mass production that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries, which clearly underpinned a shift toward the idea that art for art’s sake could provide a moral and ethical rebuff to the instrumentalization of mechanised laissez-faire capitalism – were also clearly expressed in Marx’ writings. This struggle is perhaps most evident in the early pages of Marx’ Kapital Volume I, where he tries to draw a plausible distinction between use value and exchange value. For Marx, initially, use value is an ethical, political and moral imperative – it is a bodily, physical necessity, a compelling function of our humanness (a material and qualitative pre-requisite for our continued subsistence) – whereas exchange value is an abstract, quantitative mental process. In this light, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of use value is more than a moral and ethical imperative – it is an insistence on the social (as mankind works to produce the conditions of its own reproduction, individuals enter into relationships that are inescapably social in their nature). Simultaneously, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of social use value also enables him to isolate the point at which use value starts mutating into abstract labour-power under the conditions of Capitalism. As a historical shift takes place in the general labour force, from the experience of actively making or participating in the means of subsistence to simply selling labour power as a tool within an increasingly extended manufacturing process, we begin to experience a circulation and sale of goods that, in themselves, seem to have magically appeared in the ‘absence’ of this increasingly exploitative labour process. This seismic historical shift, I began to argue, also marks the point at which Capital’s new forms of alienated labour and use value became simultaneously haunted by a mythologised historical past and an imagined revolutionary future – a future where the individual and the social body (as the Proletariat to be) are reunited through valorised forms of useful and fulfilling labour. And this is also precisely the point when historical narratives of ‘returns’- to craft (the arts and craft movement for instance) started intersecting with mechanized futurologies of a social machine age that is yet to come (Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, etc.)

The Autonomy Project, initiated in 2010,  had its roots from the 2008 Global Financial Crash, major bailouts to Banks and Financial institutions, and the resulting response of neoliberal global austerity. In this context, cuts to ‘non-essential’ budgets – such as those set aside for the arts – marked a significant radical change toward the absolute financial instrumentalization of public institutions, including museums and galleries, that had been underway since the collapse of the Eastern Block in 1989. As a result, the Autonomy project was initially an attempt to recapture and repurpose one of the main terms and conditions of Modernist art practice – that of artistic autonomy – and to reopen its fixed and institutionalised meaning as a condition of disinterested aesthetic contemplation and engagement that could only be provided by Modern Art museums. Instead, the Autonomy Project set out to re-vivify the term autonomy as a site of social, political and economic – as well as aesthetic – struggle, a territory to be struggled over and fought for. As Charles Esche pointed out, this would obviously mean that any repurposing of the term Autonomy would have to run counter to common sense and often strongly-held and guarded beliefs. Nevertheless, envisaging autonomy as a socially produced construct – rather than as an a priori given – and as something that has to be fought for and taken from those who would misuse or misconstrue the term for purposes of power and control,  offered those involved with the projet  with an opportunity to imagine ourselves otherwise at a time of global crisis. 

What we did not realise when we undertook this project was just how far-reaching its consequences might prove. What started out as an attempt to rethink how audiences or visitors of museums and galleries might experience art in a more democratic and meaningful way soon turned into the realisation that museums and galleries – and art itself – had to be fundamentally re-thought, or re-imagined, if the arts-commodified absorption into luxury tourism, leisure and cultural industries was to be avoided. Instead of thinking about the ways in which we might re-democratise and re-activate the established terms and conditions that currently dictate a ‘top down’, one-way public access to art (where an expert culture governs the culturally-correct understanding and uses of art taking place within the physical and ideological purview of their institutional architectures), we started reflecting how museums and galleries could play a key role in the re-democratisation and re-activation of the public body itself via the uses of art. 

From my own perspective, this initially meant accepting that, under our current condition of neo-liberal occupation, there is no longer any form of a priori alterity that can be offered by art or, for that matter, by the work or labour of art itself. Rather than seeing this admission as a  raising a white flag to neoliberalism, I argued that having ‘no inside out or outside in’ would allow us to begin re-imagining a condition of capitalist colonisation that, to paraphrase Mark Fisher, currently occupies the horizon of the thinkable. Instead of falling back into the historical trap of ‘art for art’s sake’ autonomy – where useless usefulness and purposless purpose are seen as ways in which art can simply fly in the face of financial instrumentalization – I began to argue that the condition of neo-liberal occupation was asymmetrical. What I meant by this was that the languages of alterity and the left, once so clearly distinguishable from the terms and conditions that delimited the right, had already been successfully occupied and repurposed inside neoliberal discourses of self-management, deregulation and fiscal responsibility. And if this was the case, then any form of socially and politically radical art would now have to recapture, reoccupy and repurpose its own terms and conditions of use and usership from within the operational overcodes of a globalised, neoliberal logic. 

In this light, I also started reconsidering my relationship to history and theory, more specifically the tradition of Marxist Social History and Theory that conditioned my own thinking around art. One of the conundrums – or more accurately the Gordian Knot – or Marxist art history and theory has been the fraught relationship of art to autonomy and heteronomy, or – more commonly – of the alleged line that divides high art from everyday life – a line which, more often than not, has been drawn between the notion of the autonomous sovereign individual and the confused and inexact ambiguity of the social mass or social body. However, I would argue that this perennial impasse, exemplified by Adorno’s famous response to Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” – that art and life are the torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up (Adorno, 1936) - also holds within it a clue to its resolution. What if we begin to look back at a time before this ‘split’ between art and life happened? What if we also started asking why this ‘split’ appeared as a necessary precondition for the existence of art as we know it or knew it to be? And what clues lie waiting for us in the rubble of forgotten history, that will help us to rethink, reimagine and remake ourselves today? 

As we started scratching away at the historical conditions that underpinned the autonomy/heteronomy bifurcation, increasing possibilities and alternatives for thinking through and beyond this historical impasse seemed to emerge and converge. For example, the growing difficulty in reconciling use or use value to the alienation of mechanised mass production that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries, which clearly underpinned a shift toward the idea that art for art’s sake could provide a moral and ethical rebuff to the instrumentalization of mechanised laissez-faire capitalism – were also clearly expressed in Marx’ writings. This struggle is perhaps most evident in the early pages of Marx’ Kapital Volume I, where he tries to draw a plausible distinction between use value and exchange value. For Marx, initially, use value is an ethical, political and moral imperative – it is a bodily, physical necessity, a compelling function of our humanness (a material and qualitative pre-requisite for our continued subsistence) – whereas exchange value is an abstract, quantitative mental process. In this light, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of use value is more than a moral and ethical imperative – it is an insistence on the social (as mankind works to produce the conditions of its own reproduction, individuals enter into relationships that are inescapably social in their nature). Simultaneously, Marx’s insistence on the bodily necessity of social use value also enables him to isolate the point at which use value starts mutating into abstract labour-power under the conditions of Capitalism. As a historical shift takes place in the general labour force, from the experience of actively making or participating in the means of subsistence to simply selling labour power as a tool within an increasingly extended manufacturing process, we begin to experience a circulation and sale of goods that, in themselves, seem to have magically appeared in the ‘absence’ of this increasingly exploitative labour process. This seismic historical shift, I began to argue, also marks the point at which Capital’s new forms of alienated labour and use value became simultaneously haunted by a mythologised historical past and an imagined revolutionary future – a future where the individual and the social body (as the Proletariat to be) are reunited through valorised forms of useful and fulfilling labour. And this is also precisely the point when historical narratives of ‘returns’- to craft (the arts and craft movement for instance) started intersecting with mechanized futurologies of a social machine age that is yet to come (Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, etc.)

One way of beginning to think and act both through and between these extremes of social nostalgia or utopian futurology is, I would argue, also offered by Rancière. However, I’m not thinking of Rancière’s suggestion of a meta-politics of aesthetics here – as a means of usefully rethinking the interconnectedness and emplotments of political and aesthetic activities that are, fundamentally, made of the same stuff (of a politics and aesthetics that are, in essence, mechanisms for the re-distribution of the sensible, or of making ‘sense of sense and sense’ as Rancière puts it). Instead, I am thinking here of the Rancière of ‘The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France’ (1989); of the Rancière who looks back to the future at the historical struggle of artisans, workers and craftsmen who used writing - and the growing availability of ground-up political publications in the 1840s - as a means to reuse and challenge existing languages of power and control. In doing so, Rancière consciously avoids the trap of projecting a revolutionary and proletarian class that is yet to be – a mythologised class that somehow stands at the ready to free itself from the shackles and yoke of capitalist oppression (when, and only when, it is brought to the full consciousness of its own servitude by enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries). Instead, he paints a more plausible picture of everyday micropolitical dissent – a rhizomatic reuse of the existing languages of mastery made by a class that is already entirely conscious of its own fixed position inside the hierarchies of power. For Rancière, this existing class of fully conscious workers, who are willing to reuse a language that is always too mutable and porous to be owned completely by the hand of their masters, encompasses more revolutionary potential than an idealised and abstracted proletariat:  

A worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs… Perhaps the truly dangerous classes are not so much the uncivilised one thought to undermine society from below, but rather the migrants who move at the borders between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material concerns. (Rancière J., 1988, p.50)   

This type of work or labour of art, this continual and migrant reuse and reconfiguration of the possibilities offered by language, technology and existing architectures and protocols of power is now, I would argue, the kind of work – or labour – that artwork has now become. As I have already argued, the use value of art within the asymmetrical context of neoliberal occupation becomes the activation of non-alienated forms of social labour allowing for the possibility of alternative and otherwise to be kept open as resources for thinking and doing against the grain. And, if there are no pre-given alterities or asylum-like safe havens from which these activities can be launched, then the work or labour of art must become one of social and collective recapture of the very terms and conditions of possibility. And if this is so, then the work or labour of art cannot simply remain a condition of refusal, it must entail the activity of making and doing otherwise.  

Another way of thinking through this contemporary urgency – of envisaging the work or labour of art as a form of active recapture from within – can again be found in the historical analysis of Jacques Rancière; this time in his excavation and reactivation of a story, written by 19th  century joiner and lifelong prolific writer Gabriel Gauny and that first appeared in one of the many journals that arose during the 1848 revolution in France. This story, which was the only writing to be published by Gauny’s in his lifetime, describes the work of a casual floor layer. More importantly, Gauny uses the story to describe the complex attitude of a skilled worker who believes that he is less exploited than a day labourer. In Gauny’s narrative, the skilled worker, who is more or less allowed to get on with his job in his own time as long as the result is perfect, feels himself to have more ownership of his own arms than an unskilled labourer who is constantly supervised by his bosses. This gives the floor layer a delusory sense of freedom and emancipation – delusory in the sense that he knows that his so-called freedom is earned at the expense of spending more time and effort over his labour than is necessarily required. Conversely, the skilled labourer in the story derives a genuine, secret pleasure from this delusory emancipation which is earned at the cost of his own exploitation. In this light, Rancière argues that texts such as Gauny’s do not merely represent everyday experience through description but instead, they reinvent the everyday through the reframing of individual experience within the redistribution of the sensible. For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible means:  

[…] a relation between occupations and equipment, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that “fit” those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and interpretation which makes sense of it. It ties an occupation to a presumption. (Rancière, J. 2009, p. 275)   

As such, Rancière argues that the delusion in Gauny’s story represents “both a tiny shift and a decisive upheaval in the understanding of the relationship between exploitation and delusion”.  

What would seem helpful here is that, via Gauny, Rancière offers a way of thinking beyond the current neo-liberal fixity by which any forms of oppositional practice seem doomed to repeat the instrumentalised logic of the commodity. Rancière is also offering a way to open up a new understanding of the Marxist concept of ideology and its relationship to political art, one which is useful in addressing the false separation of use value and art that has plagued us since the latter half of the 19th Century. Whereas classical Marxist theories would see ideology as a delusional misrepresentation of the truth in the interest of a ruling class – with the concomitant proviso that uncovering the ideological misrepresentation of exploitation would ensure the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat – Rancière argues that the “schema of knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, actually covers up a mere tautology: people are where they are because they are incapable of being elsewhere”. (Rancière J., 2009, p.275 italics). In other words, people do not occupy specific roles and functions because they either ignore, or are simply incapable of perceiving, the reasons why they occupy a specific position – people are incapacitated simply because they occupy those positions in the first place. “The point” argues Rancière “is that those who have the occupation of workers are supposed to be equipped for that occupation and for activities related to it. They are supposed to be equipped for working, not for peripheral activities such as looking around and investigating how society at large works”. (Rancière J., 2009, p.275)  

The acceptance of inequality, or the schematic organisation of occupations, is resolved for Rancière through the “egalitarian mode of the story” that simultaneously ties empirical fact to “belief” and enables this belief to be addressed through the common sense rhetorical mechanism of “as if”. Rancière uses the example of the two reasons Plato gives for workers to remain in their place. First comes the temporal and material argument whereby workers should remain in their place because they have no time to go elsewhere - their time is taken up by work. Second comes a mythological reason – the gods mixed iron in the makeup of workers and gold in the makeup of those others whose job it is to deal with the common good. By combining  mythos and logos, fiction and fact, a particular distribution of the sensible is established and maintained. For Rancière, the worker in Gauny’s text starts reversing the logic of his allotted place, not through the revolutionary rupture caused by a sudden understanding or knowledge of his position, but by becoming “less aware of exploitation and pushing aside, thereby, its sensory grip”: (Rancière J., 2009, p.277 italics).  

It is a subversion of a given distribution of the sensible. What is overturned is the relationship between what is done by one’s arms, what is looked at by one’s eyes, what is felt as a sensory pleasure, and what is thought of as an intellectual concern. It is the relationship between an occupation, the space-tie where it is fulfilled, and the sensory equipment for doing it. This subversion implies the reframing of a common sense. A common sense does not mean a consensus but, on the contrary, a polemical place, a confrontation between opposite common senses or opposite ways of framing what is common. (Rancière J., 2009, p.277) 

This reframing of common sense as a space where conflicting common senses collide, allows Rancière to do two things. First, it allows him to map out what he sees as the key relationship between aesthetics and politics - if politics is about polemical reframings of common sense then it is, above all, an aesthetic affair. Second, it allows him to remind us that the widespread idea of the worker’s voice is derived from a continual and complex aggregate of multiple reframing operations taking place within and across the distribution of the sensible at a given historical period. As with the example of Gauny’s letter, these activities are predominantly accomplished through common forms of reading and writing.  For Rancière, reading is not simply a passive activity whereby pleasure and knowledge can be gained from a fixed text, it is a form of the redistribution of the sensible which is activated through writing. In turn, writing is an activity where words or signs are continually released from narratives of mastery, from fixed social structures that would seek to impose consensual forms of meanings upon them, and become available to anybody. And here, I would argue, we can see clear correspondences between Ranciere’s  insistence that words or signs are ‘released’ from the fixed conditions of mastery, an insistence on the emancipatory potential of language as a material and productive force, and Marx’s notion that use value that – as a bodily, political and moral imperative – is predicated upon the ongoing social production of work or labour. This is important to keep in mind, since what Gauny does in a further letter to his friend Ponty, is to recommend the activity of reading as a means to secure freedom. “Plunge into terrible readings. That will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the labourer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him.” (Rancière J., 2009, p.277).  

For Rancière, reading in this sense becomes an active means by which the labourer can steal some of the symbolic gold, formerly fused only in the souls of his masters, and thus contribute to a redistribution of power. The reading and writing activity does not only make messages or representations available to the passive subject; it makes passions available that can be used as forces of change. In turn, Rancière argues that the triggering or arousing of these passions, not simply the messages imbued in literature by particular authors, makes the activities of reading and writing political. By “breaking the rules that made definite forms of feeling and expression fit definite characters or subject matters”, (Rancière J., 2009, p.279), Literature was able to contribute to the production of the aesthetic as a new form of experience. For Rancière, this shift in aesthetics was made possible by a historically-specific redistribution of the sensible that occurred during the rise of the bourgeois epoch.  As emblems of power and religious iconography started to lose their original purpose due to their relocation within the new symbolic forms of museums and art histories, they became available to all as a new recombinant resource. 

What Rancière offers us, though his readings of Gauny, is a means by which it becomes possible to conceive a dialectical micro-politics of resistance as relay - one that is continually worked out and worked through a myriad of redeployments, or repositionings, within the structural fabric of political consensus. In this model, Gauny’s 1848 article acts as an example of the emancipatory potential held within new modes of art that, through a historical reimaging and reactivation of their relationship to use vale and the work or labour of art, can provide us with the means to recapture  and redistribute the previously fixed positions and modalities of autonomy and heteronomy. In this sense, the political content of art would no longer be identical with – or reducible to – its aesthetic content. Nor would its potential or impact depend on identifying and uncovering false-truths that belie the real conditions of subsistence and exploitation. Instead, Gauny’s writings point towards new ways of recapturing the common fabric of enunciation, and towards a new common language of previously fixed signs and symbols that can be recombined and re-distributed to form new meanings, precepts and possibilities. Also, it makes it possible to think how this process, this simultaneous working of and ongoing contribution to the use value of art, can happen within an uneven and unequal distribution of power and control under the conditions of neoliberal occupation. Gauny’s floor layer is all too painfully aware of the true conditions of his own historical exploitation whilst, at the same time, being able to wilfully carve out the space within which he can truly begin to imagine the condition of his freedom. This delusory state that offers the real possibility for material change does not arise with the sudden realisation of ideological misrepresentation. Nor is it prompted by art which reveals a state of inequality that would otherwise remain incomprehensible to those caught in its grip. Instead, it is brought about inside a lived experience of inequality and by a shift in the aesthetic enabling the possibility for altering the spatial relations of power and control through the use value of art.  

One way of beginning to think and act both through and between these extremes of social nostalgia or utopian futurology is, I would argue, also offered by Rancière. However, I’m not thinking of Rancière’s suggestion of a meta-politics of aesthetics here—as a means of usefully rethinking the interconnectedness and emplotments of political and aesthetic activities that are, fundamentally, made of the same stuff (of a politics and aesthetics that are, in essence, mechanisms for the re-distribution of the sensible, or of making ‘sense of sense and sense’ as Rancière puts it). Instead, I am thinking here of the Rancière of ‘The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France’(1989); of the Rancière who looks back to the future at the historical struggle of artisans, workers and craftsmen who used writing - and the growing availability of ground-up political publications in the 1840s - as a means to reuse and challenge existing languages of power and control. In doing so, Rancière consciously avoids the trap of projecting a revolutionary and proletarian class that is yet to be – a mythologized class that somehow stands at the ready to free itself from the shackles and yoke of capitalist oppression (when, and only when, it is brought to the full consciousness of its own servitude by enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries). Instead, he paints a more plausible picture of everyday micropolitical dissent—a rhizomatic reuse of the existing languages of mastery made by a class that is already entirely conscious of its own fixed position inside the hierarchies of power. For Rancière, this existing class of fully conscious workers, who are willing to reuse a language that is always too mutable and porous to be owned completely by the hand of their masters, encompasses more revolutionary potential than an idealized and abstracted proletariat:  

A worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs.… Perhaps the truly dangerous classes are not so much the uncivilized one thought to undermine society from below, but rather the migrants who move at the borders between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material concerns. (Rancière, J. 1988, p.50)   

This type of work or labour of art, this continual and migrant reuse and reconfiguration of the possibilities offered by language, technology and existing architectures and protocols of power is now, I would argue, the kind of work – or labour – that artwork has now become. As I have already argued, the use value of art within the asymmetrical context of neoliberal occupation becomes the activation of non-alienated forms of social labour allowing for the possibility of alternative and otherwise to be kept open as resources for thinking and doing against the grain. And, if there are no pre-given alterities or asylum-like safe havens from which these activities can be launched, then the work or labour of art must become one of social and collective recapture of the very terms and conditions of possibility. And if this is so, then the work or labour of art cannot simply remain a condition of refusal, it must entail the activity of making and doing otherwise.  

Another way of thinking through this contemporary urgency - of envisaging the work or labour of art as a form of active recapture from within - can again be found in the historical analysis of Jacques Rancière; this time in his excavation and reactivation of a story, written by 19th  century joiner and lifelong prolific writer Gabriel Gauny and that first appeared in one of the many journals that arose during the 1848 revolution in France. This story, which was the only writing to be published by Gauny’s in his lifetime, describes the work of a casual floor layer. More importantly, Gauny uses the story to describe the complex attitude of a skilled worker who believes that he is less exploited than a day labourer. In Gauny’s narrative, the skilled worker, who is more or less allowed to get on with his job in his own time as long as the result is perfect, feels himself to have more ownership of his own arms than an unskilled labourer who is constantly supervised by his bosses. This gives the floor layer a delusory sense of freedom and emancipation – delusory in the sense that he knows that his so-called freedom is earned at the expense of spending more time and effort over his labour than is necessarily required. Conversely, the skilled labourer in the story derives a genuine, secret pleasure from this delusory emancipation which is earned at the cost of his own exploitation. In this light, Rancière argues that texts such as Gauny’s do not merely represent everyday experience through description but instead, they reinvent the everyday through the reframing of individual experience within the redistribution of the sensible. For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible means:  

[…] a relation between occupations and equipment, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that “fit” those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and interpretation which makes sense of it. It ties an occupation to a presumption. (Rancière, J. 2009, p. 275)   

As such, Rancière argues that the delusion in Gauny’s story represents “both a tiny shift and a decisive upheaval in the understanding of the relationship between exploitation and delusion”.  

What would seem helpful here is that, via Gauny, Rancière offers a way of thinking beyond the current neo-liberal fixity by which any forms of oppositional practice seem doomed to repeat the instrumentalised logic of the commodity. Rancière is also offering a way to open up a new understanding of the Marxist concept of ideology and its relationship to political art, one which is useful in addressing the false separation of use value and art that has plagued us since the latter half of the 19th Century. Whereas classical Marxist theories would see ideology as a delusional misrepresentation of the truth in the interest of a ruling class – with the concomitant proviso that uncovering the ideological misrepresentation of exploitation would ensure the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat – Rancière argues that the “schema of knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, actually covers up a mere tautology: people are where they are because they are incapable of being elsewhere”. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.275 italics). In other words, people do not occupy specific roles and functions because they either ignore, or are simply incapable of perceiving, the reasons why they occupy a specific position – people are incapacitated simply because they occupy those positions in the first place. “The point” argues Rancière “is that those who have the occupation of workers are supposed to be equipped for that occupation and for activities related to it. They are supposed to be equipped for working, not for peripheral activities such as looking around and investigating how society at large works”. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.275)  

The acceptance of inequality, or the schematic organisation of occupations, is resolved for Rancière through the “egalitarian mode of the story” that simultaneously ties empirical fact to “belief” and enables this belief to be addressed through the common sense rhetorical mechanism of “as if”. Rancière uses the example of the two reasons Plato gives for workers to remain in their place. First comes the temporal and material argument whereby workers should remain in their place because they have no time to go elsewhere - their time is taken up by work. Second comes a mythological reason – the gods mixed iron in the makeup of workers and gold in the makeup of those others whose job it is to deal with the common good. By combining mythos and logos, fiction and fact, a particular distribution of the sensible is established and maintained. For Rancière, the worker in Gauny’s text starts reversing the logic of his allotted place, not through the revolutionary rupture caused by a sudden understanding or knowledge of his position, but by becoming “less aware of exploitation and pushing aside, thereby, its sensory grip”: (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277 italics).  

It is a subversion of a given distribution of the sensible. What is overturned is the relationship between what is done by one’s arms, what is looked at by one’s eyes, what is felt as a sensory pleasure, and what is thought of as an intellectual concern. It is the relationship between an occupation, the space-tie where it is fulfilled, and the sensory equipment for doing it. This subversion implies the reframing of a common sense. A common sense does not mean a consensus but, on the contrary, a polemical place, a confrontation between opposite common senses or opposite ways of framing what is common. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277) 

This reframing of common sense as a space where conflicting common senses collide, allows Rancière to do two things. First, it allows him to map out what he sees as the key relationship between aesthetics and politics - if politics is about polemical reframings of common sense then it is, above all, an aesthetic affair. Second, it allows him to remind us that the widespread idea of the worker’s voice is derived from a continual and complex aggregate of multiple reframing operations taking place within and across the distribution of the sensible at a given historical period. As with the example of Gauny’s letter, these activities are predominantly accomplished through common forms of reading and writing.  For Rancière, reading is not simply a passive activity whereby pleasure and knowledge can be gained from a fixed text, it is a form of the redistribution of the sensible which is activated through writing. In turn, writing is an activity where words or signs are continually released from narratives of mastery, from fixed social structures that would seek to impose consensual forms of meanings upon them, and become available to anybody. And here, I would argue, we can see clear correspondences between Ranciere’s insistence that words or signs are ‘released’ from the fixed conditions of mastery, an insistence on the emancipatory potential of language as a material and productive force, and Marx’s notion that use value that – as a bodily, political and moral imperative – is predicated upon the ongoing social production of work or labour. This is important to keep in mind, since what Gauny does in a further letter to his friend Ponty, is to recommend the activity of reading as a means to secure freedom. “Plunge into terrible readings. That will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the labourer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him.” (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277).  

For Rancière, reading in this sense becomes an active means by which the labourer can steal some of the symbolic gold, formerly fused only in the souls of his masters, and thus contribute to a redistribution of power. The reading and writing activity does not only make messages or representations available to the passive subject; it makes passions available that can be used as forces of change. In turn, Rancière argues that the triggering or arousing of these passions, not simply the messages imbued in literature by particular authors, makes the activities of reading and writing political. By “breaking the rules that made definite forms of feeling and expression fit definite characters or subject matters”, (Rancière, J. 2009, p.279), Literature was able to contribute to the production of the aesthetic as a new form of experience. For Rancière, this shift in aesthetics was made possible by a historically-specific redistribution of the sensible that occurred during the rise of the bourgeois epoch.  As emblems of power and religious iconography started to lose their original purpose due to their relocation within the new symbolic forms of museums and art histories, they became available to all as a new recombinant resource. 

What Rancière offers us, though his readings of Gauny, is a means by which it becomes possible to conceive a dialectical micro-politics of resistance as relay - one that is continually worked out and worked through a myriad of redeployments, or repositionings, within the structural fabric of political consensus. In this model, Gauny’s 1848 article acts as an example of the emancipatory potential held within new modes of art that, through a historical reimaging and reactivation of their relationship to use vale and the work or labour of art, can provide us with the means to recapture and redistribute the previously fixed positions and modalities of autonomy and heteronomy. In this sense, the political content of art would no longer be identical with – or reducible to – its aesthetic content. Nor would its potential or impact depend on identifying and uncovering false-truths that belie the real conditions of subsistence and exploitation. Instead, Gauny’s writings point towards new ways of recapturing the common fabric of enunciation, and towards a new common language of previously fixed signs and symbols that can be recombined and re-distributed to form new meanings, precepts and possibilities. Also, it makes it possible to think how this process, this simultaneous working of and ongoing contribution to the use value of art, can happen within an uneven and unequal distribution of power and control under the conditions of neoliberal occupation. Gauny’s floor layer is all too painfully aware of the true conditions of his own historical exploitation whilst, at the same time, being able to wilfully carve out the space within which he can truly begin to imagine the condition of his freedom. This delusory state that offers the real possibility for material change does not arise with the sudden realization of ideological misrepresentation. Nor is it prompted by art which reveals a state of inequality that would otherwise remain incomprehensible to those caught in its grip. Instead, it is brought about inside a lived experience of inequality and by a shift in the aesthetic enabling the possibility for altering the spatial relations of power and control through the use value of art.  

One way of beginning to think and act both through and between these extremes of social nostalgia or utopian futurology is, I would argue, also offered by Rancière. However, I’m not thinking of Rancière’s suggestion of a meta-politics of aesthetics here—as a means of usefully rethinking the interconnectedness and emplotments of political and aesthetic activities that are, fundamentally, made of the same stuff (of a politics and aesthetics that are, in essence, mechanisms for the re-distribution of the sensible, or of making ‘sense of sense and sense’ as Rancière puts it). Instead, I am thinking here of the Rancière of ‘The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France’(1989); of the Rancière who looks back to the future at the historical struggle of artisans, workers and craftsmen who used writing - and the growing availability of ground-up political publications in the 1840s - as a means to reuse and challenge existing languages of power and control. In doing so, Rancière consciously avoids the trap of projecting a revolutionary and proletarian class that is yet to be – a mythologized class that somehow stands at the ready to free itself from the shackles and yoke of capitalist oppression (when, and only when, it is brought to the full consciousness of its own servitude by enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries). Instead, he paints a more plausible picture of everyday micropolitical dissent—a rhizomatic reuse of the existing languages of mastery made by a class that is already entirely conscious of its own fixed position inside the hierarchies of power. For Rancière, this existing class of fully conscious workers, who are willing to reuse a language that is always too mutable and porous to be owned completely by the hand of their masters, encompasses more revolutionary potential than an idealized and abstracted proletariat:  

A worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs.… Perhaps the truly dangerous classes are not so much the uncivilized one thought to undermine society from below, but rather the migrants who move at the borders between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material concerns. (Rancière, J. 1988, p.50)   

This type of work or labour of art, this continual and migrant reuse and reconfiguration of the possibilities offered by language, technology and existing architectures and protocols of power is now, I would argue, the kind of work – or labour – that artwork has now become. As I have already argued, the use value of art within the asymmetrical context of neoliberal occupation becomes the activation of non-alienated forms of social labour allowing for the possibility of alternative and otherwise to be kept open as resources for thinking and doing against the grain. And, if there are no pre-given alterities or asylum-like safe havens from which these activities can be launched, then the work or labour of art must become one of social and collective recapture of the very terms and conditions of possibility. And if this is so, then the work or labour of art cannot simply remain a condition of refusal, it must entail the activity of making and doing otherwise.  

Another way of thinking through this contemporary urgency - of envisaging the work or labour of art as a form of active recapture from within - can again be found in the historical analysis of Jacques Rancière; this time in his excavation and reactivation of a story, written by 19th  century joiner and lifelong prolific writer Gabriel Gauny and that first appeared in one of the many journals that arose during the 1848 revolution in France. This story, which was the only writing to be published by Gauny’s in his lifetime, describes the work of a casual floor layer. More importantly, Gauny uses the story to describe the complex attitude of a skilled worker who believes that he is less exploited than a day labourer. In Gauny’s narrative, the skilled worker, who is more or less allowed to get on with his job in his own time as long as the result is perfect, feels himself to have more ownership of his own arms than an unskilled labourer who is constantly supervised by his bosses. This gives the floor layer a delusory sense of freedom and emancipation – delusory in the sense that he knows that his so-called freedom is earned at the expense of spending more time and effort over his labour than is necessarily required. Conversely, the skilled labourer in the story derives a genuine, secret pleasure from this delusory emancipation which is earned at the cost of his own exploitation. In this light, Rancière argues that texts such as Gauny’s do not merely represent everyday experience through description but instead, they reinvent the everyday through the reframing of individual experience within the redistribution of the sensible. For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible means:  

[…] a relation between occupations and equipment, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that “fit” those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and interpretation which makes sense of it. It ties an occupation to a presumption. (Rancière, J. 2009, p. 275)   

As such, Rancière argues that the delusion in Gauny’s story represents “both a tiny shift and a decisive upheaval in the understanding of the relationship between exploitation and delusion”.  

What would seem helpful here is that, via Gauny, Rancière offers a way of thinking beyond the current neo-liberal fixity by which any forms of oppositional practice seem doomed to repeat the instrumentalised logic of the commodity. Rancière is also offering a way to open up a new understanding of the Marxist concept of ideology and its relationship to political art, one which is useful in addressing the false separation of use value and art that has plagued us since the latter half of the 19th Century. Whereas classical Marxist theories would see ideology as a delusional misrepresentation of the truth in the interest of a ruling class – with the concomitant proviso that uncovering the ideological misrepresentation of exploitation would ensure the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat – Rancière argues that the “schema of knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, actually covers up a mere tautology: people are where they are because they are incapable of being elsewhere”. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.275 italics). In other words, people do not occupy specific roles and functions because they either ignore, or are simply incapable of perceiving, the reasons why they occupy a specific position – people are incapacitated simply because they occupy those positions in the first place. “The point” argues Rancière “is that those who have the occupation of workers are supposed to be equipped for that occupation and for activities related to it. They are supposed to be equipped for working, not for peripheral activities such as looking around and investigating how society at large works”. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.275)  

The acceptance of inequality, or the schematic organisation of occupations, is resolved for Rancière through the “egalitarian mode of the story” that simultaneously ties empirical fact to “belief” and enables this belief to be addressed through the common sense rhetorical mechanism of “as if”. Rancière uses the example of the two reasons Plato gives for workers to remain in their place. First comes the temporal and material argument whereby workers should remain in their place because they have no time to go elsewhere - their time is taken up by work. Second comes a mythological reason – the gods mixed iron in the makeup of workers and gold in the makeup of those others whose job it is to deal with the common good. By combining mythos and logos, fiction and fact, a particular distribution of the sensible is established and maintained. For Rancière, the worker in Gauny’s text starts reversing the logic of his allotted place, not through the revolutionary rupture caused by a sudden understanding or knowledge of his position, but by becoming “less aware of exploitation and pushing aside, thereby, its sensory grip”: (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277 italics).  

It is a subversion of a given distribution of the sensible. What is overturned is the relationship between what is done by one’s arms, what is looked at by one’s eyes, what is felt as a sensory pleasure, and what is thought of as an intellectual concern. It is the relationship between an occupation, the space-tie where it is fulfilled, and the sensory equipment for doing it. This subversion implies the reframing of a common sense. A common sense does not mean a consensus but, on the contrary, a polemical place, a confrontation between opposite common senses or opposite ways of framing what is common. (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277) 

This reframing of common sense as a space where conflicting common senses collide, allows Rancière to do two things. First, it allows him to map out what he sees as the key relationship between aesthetics and politics - if politics is about polemical reframings of common sense then it is, above all, an aesthetic affair. Second, it allows him to remind us that the widespread idea of the worker’s voice is derived from a continual and complex aggregate of multiple reframing operations taking place within and across the distribution of the sensible at a given historical period. As with the example of Gauny’s letter, these activities are predominantly accomplished through common forms of reading and writing.  For Rancière, reading is not simply a passive activity whereby pleasure and knowledge can be gained from a fixed text, it is a form of the redistribution of the sensible which is activated through writing. In turn, writing is an activity where words or signs are continually released from narratives of mastery, from fixed social structures that would seek to impose consensual forms of meanings upon them, and become available to anybody. And here, I would argue, we can see clear correspondences between Ranciere’s insistence that words or signs are ‘released’ from the fixed conditions of mastery, an insistence on the emancipatory potential of language as a material and productive force, and Marx’s notion that use value that – as a bodily, political and moral imperative – is predicated upon the ongoing social production of work or labour. This is important to keep in mind, since what Gauny does in a further letter to his friend Ponty, is to recommend the activity of reading as a means to secure freedom. “Plunge into terrible readings. That will awaken passions in your wretched existence, and the labourer needs them to stand tall in the face of that which is ready to devour him.” (Rancière, J. 2009, p.277).  

For Rancière, reading in this sense becomes an active means by which the labourer can steal some of the symbolic gold, formerly fused only in the souls of his masters, and thus contribute to a redistribution of power. The reading and writing activity does not only make messages or representations available to the passive subject; it makes passions available that can be used as forces of change. In turn, Rancière argues that the triggering or arousing of these passions, not simply the messages imbued in literature by particular authors, makes the activities of reading and writing political. By “breaking the rules that made definite forms of feeling and expression fit definite characters or subject matters”, (Rancière, J. 2009, p.279), Literature was able to contribute to the production of the aesthetic as a new form of experience. For Rancière, this shift in aesthetics was made possible by a historically-specific redistribution of the sensible that occurred during the rise of the bourgeois epoch.  As emblems of power and religious iconography started to lose their original purpose due to their relocation within the new symbolic forms of museums and art histories, they became available to all as a new recombinant resource. 

What Rancière offers us, though his readings of Gauny, is a means by which it becomes possible to conceive a dialectical micro-politics of resistance as relay - one that is continually worked out and worked through a myriad of redeployments, or repositionings, within the structural fabric of political consensus. In this model, Gauny’s 1848 article acts as an example of the emancipatory potential held within new modes of art that, through a historical reimaging and reactivation of their relationship to use vale and the work or labour of art, can provide us with the means to recapture and redistribute the previously fixed positions and modalities of autonomy and heteronomy. In this sense, the political content of art would no longer be identical with – or reducible to – its aesthetic content. Nor would its potential or impact depend on identifying and uncovering false-truths that belie the real conditions of subsistence and exploitation. Instead, Gauny’s writings point towards new ways of recapturing the common fabric of enunciation, and towards a new common language of previously fixed signs and symbols that can be recombined and re-distributed to form new meanings, precepts and possibilities. Also, it makes it possible to think how this process, this simultaneous working of and ongoing contribution to the use value of art, can happen within an uneven and unequal distribution of power and control under the conditions of neoliberal occupation. Gauny’s floor layer is all too painfully aware of the true conditions of his own historical exploitation whilst, at the same time, being able to wilfully carve out the space within which he can truly begin to imagine the condition of his freedom. This delusory state that offers the real possibility for material change does not arise with the sudden realization of ideological misrepresentation. Nor is it prompted by art which reveals a state of inequality that would otherwise remain incomprehensible to those caught in its grip. Instead, it is brought about inside a lived experience of inequality and by a shift in the aesthetic enabling the possibility for altering the spatial relations of power and control through the use value of art.  

However, if Rancière’s reactivation of Gabriel Gauny starts offering us an overall strategy for the work or labour of art as a form of immanent resistance through micropolitical acts of recapture and redistribution (which, I would argue, is also the use value of art as a qualitative and bodily recuperation of non-alienated social labour), we might also start thinking more tactically: what really happens to the role and function of art when the hallmarks of modernist avant-garde resistance have long since been co-opted by the rhetoric of financial capitalism, and, more specifically, by the economically-driven model of the culture industries? And if this is the case, if artists – or for that matter art institutions – seeing themselves as progressive progenitors of artistic possibility can no longer simply reach out to the well-rehearsed mantras of artistic autonomy and cultural alterity, how might this activation of recapture within the conditions of neoliberal occupation begin or be affected? Whilst today, both left and right increasingly occupy the same territory of rhetorical discourse surrounding freedom and community, the implications for our traditional understandings of the work or labour of art would appear to be stark. 

For me, another way of beginning to think and act our way through and out of this impasse was offered during the Autonomy Symposium by Franco Berardi, who began to rehearse some of the arguments that would subsequently form the basis of his  book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012a). For Berardi, the radical deregulation of neoliberal capital is predicated upon the increasing abstraction of language from the body. He suggests that deregulatory logic relies on the possibility of endlessly connecting and reconfiguring language into regulated, recombinable and meaningless components. This, he argues, runs counter to the open, porous, and poetic use of language as a fluid form of conjunction—as an endlessly-open means of understanding ourselves and each other through evolving forms of communication and growth. In this light, Berardi proposes that the new job of the artist or poet is to return non-alienated forms of porous, mutable, and productive language to the physical and social body. By recombining language, autonomy and production in this manner, Berardi – like Rancière – also  allows us to go back to the future: we can begin rethinking the potential of radical alternatives while simultaneously returning to the social and historical bifurcation of use value and exchange value. More specifically, Berardi insists on the distinction between abstract and connective forms of language from material and conjunctive uses of language. Doing so, he consciously replays Marx’s struggle with the co-dependency of use value and exchange value and its development through the imposition of capitalism and of abstracted forms of use value as an ideological means of measurement and calibration.  

Thus, we can again see clear parallels beginning to emerge. On the one hand, between connective forms of language and the quantitative abstraction of exchange value. On the other, between conjunctive and productive uses of language with the bodily, political and ethical necessity of use-value. Here, the use of language  provides a material means to challenge the established status quo of economic predicates and determinates through the material production of new social meanings and autonomies. The latter are capable of escaping the gravity of power and its reliance on increasingly interchangeable, centralised, and regulated forms of connectivity. In this scenario, the job of the artist or poet becomes the work or labour of keeping language alive when there are no longer any simple distinctions between autonomy and heteronomy. If this is the case, then it also emerges that the work or labour of art is no longer to unite, bridge, or combine the seemingly irreconcilable—but rather, consists in operating a form of social possibility, or use value, within an already networked and saturated world of deregulatory and delusory logic. 

Here, Berardi starts to provide us a useful resource  for strategically rethinking what kind of work, or labour, the work of art has now become within a globalised and networked neoliberal economy; that of returning an instrumentalised and abstracted language, reconfigured as a porous and mutable form of poetry, to the physical and social body. But how, we might then ask, is it possible to imagine (let alone effect) such a strategy within a dispersed, networked and asymmetrical  society that is already predicated upon forms of alienation, instrumentalisation, and abstraction on every level? How can we even begin to imagine forms of resistance and organisation based on the use value of art, when all forms of traditional organisation and resistance (class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, party affiliation) seem to collapse into each other under the weight of flexibilisation and the exploitation of precarious labour? How, we might ask, does one radicalise – either collectively or individually – when all trust in the mechanisms of inherited political affiliation seem to be lost? As we have already seen, the stakes are high.  When Berardi started discussing these ideas at the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011, the ground-up activism of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements seemed to offer examples of spontaneous and collective resistance. However, their subsequent (and often violent) re-appropriation into more vicious forms of networked and centralised governmental suppression has once again brought me back to rethinking opposition on a tactical, micro and rhizomatic level - not simply because the institutions of power appear to be impregnable, but precisely because their occupation depends on forms of day-to-day complicity that are best disrupted through the recapture, and viral re-distribution, of non-alienated social labour.  

For example, in an interview with Berardi that I conducted shortly after the Autonomy Symposium (which appears in the ‘The Autonomy Project - Newspaper 3: At Work as “Autonomy and Use Value: Connection and Conjunction”), our conversation turned once again to the question of the physical body. More specifically, Berardi argued that, on a micro level, the overcode of digital semiocapital is invalidating the ethical sensibilities of a generation, while “conscious organism” is forced to become “compatible with the connective machine”. For Berardi: 

This mutation is provoking a sort of dulling of conjunctive ability of human cognition, partially of sensibility, the essential conjunctive faculty in the first connective generation, the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the mother. […] This mutation is actually provoking painful effects on the conscious organism, and these effects can be interpreted with the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic and depression. (Berardi, F. 2012b, p. 55) 

Considering this, Berardi reminds us of Guattari’s use of the ‘Ritornello’ or refrain. For Guattari, the refrain is an obsessive form of ritual that enables individuals to find points of identification, to territorialise and represent themselves in relation with the surrounding world. As such, Berardi reminds us that the refrain is also the semiotisation mechanism that enables individuals, groups, a people, a subculture or movement to receive, process and re-project the world according to reproducible and communicable formats. For Berardi, the societal transformations brought about by capitalism have been dependent upon the physical refrains of the factory, the production line, and the salary. However, digital economies have caused the emergence of new refrains of “electronic fragmentation, information overload, acceleration [and] acceleration of the semiotic exchange.” (Berardi, F. 2012, p. 55) As such, Berardi argues that the process of cognitive reformatting of the individual and social body is underway. Doing so, Berardi also reminds us that under the asymmetrical conditions of neoliberal occupation, the forms of recapture and resistance that we can best effect are through and across the continually-shifting borders of connective semiocapital. And if this is the case, then the job or work of the artist that consists in returning poetry to the body must be played-out through and between the fault lines of connective semiocapital as forms of micro-resistance.  

Furthermore, I would also argue that the lines of micro resistance can no longer be played out exclusively in public spaces – the asymmetrical occupation of neoliberal logic is such that, as Berardi points out, the occupation of our very bodies is also underway. And if this is the case, then I would argue that the work or labour of art now resides in the recapture and reactivation of non-alienated and social forms of labour: it depends upon the taking back of those forms of social making and doing, on a bodily and human scale, that would allow us to reoccupy and reformat the abstract and quantitative mechanisms of neoliberal logic.  

However, if Rancière’s reactivation of Gabriel Gauny starts offering us an overall strategy for the work or labour of art as a form of immanent resistance through micropolitical acts of recapture and redistribution (which, I would argue, is also the use value of art as a qualitative and bodily recuperation of non-alienated social labour), we might also start thinking more tactically: what really happens to the role and function of art when the hallmarks of modernist avant-garde resistance have long since been co-opted by the rhetoric of financial capitalism, and, more specifically, by the economically-driven model of the culture industries? And if this is the case, if artists – or for that matter art institutions – seeing themselves as progressive progenitors of artistic possibility can no longer simply reach out to the well-rehearsed mantras of artistic autonomy and cultural alterity, how might this activation of recapture within the conditions of neoliberal occupation begin or be affected? Whilst today, both left and right increasingly occupy the same territory of rhetorical discourse surrounding freedom and community, the implications for our traditional understandings of the work or labour of art would appear to be stark. 

For me, another way of beginning to think and act our way through and out of this impasse was offered during the Autonomy Symposium by Franco Berardi, who began to rehearse some of the arguments that would subsequently form the basis of his  book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012a). For Berardi, the radical deregulation of neoliberal capital is predicated upon the increasing abstraction of language from the body. He suggests that deregulatory logic relies on the possibility of endlessly connecting and reconfiguring language into regulated, recombinable and meaningless components. This, he argues, runs counter to the open, porous, and poetic use of language as a fluid form of conjunction—as an endlessly-open means of understanding ourselves and each other through evolving forms of communication and growth. In this light, Berardi proposes that the new job of the artist or poet is to return non-alienated forms of porous, mutable, and productive language to the physical and social body. By recombining language, autonomy and production in this manner, Berardi – like Rancière – also  allows us to go back to the future: we can begin rethinking the potential of radical alternatives while simultaneously returning to the social and historical bifurcation of use value and exchange value. More specifically, Berardi insists on the distinction between abstract and connective forms of language from material and conjunctive uses of language. Doing so, he consciously replays Marx’s struggle with the co-dependency of use value and exchange value and its development through the imposition of capitalism and of abstracted forms of use value as an ideological means of measurement and calibration.  

Thus, we can again see clear parallels beginning to emerge. On the one hand, between connective forms of language and the quantitative abstraction of exchange value. On the other, between conjunctive and productive uses of language with the bodily, political and ethical necessity of use-value. Here, the use of language  provides a material means to challenge the established status quo of economic predicates and determinates through the material production of new social meanings and autonomies. The latter are capable of escaping the gravity of power and its reliance on increasingly interchangeable, centralised, and regulated forms of connectivity. In this scenario, the job of the artist or poet becomes the work or labour of keeping language alive when there are no longer any simple distinctions between autonomy and heteronomy. If this is the case, then it also emerges that the work or labour of art is no longer to unite, bridge, or combine the seemingly irreconcilable—but rather, consists in operating a form of social possibility, or use value, within an already networked and saturated world of deregulatory and delusory logic. 

Here, Berardi starts to provide us a useful resource  for strategically rethinking what kind of work, or labour, the work of art has now become within a globalised and networked neoliberal economy; that of returning an instrumentalised and abstracted language, reconfigured as a porous and mutable form of poetry, to the physical and social body. But how, we might then ask, is it possible to imagine (let alone effect) such a strategy within a dispersed, networked and asymmetrical society that is already predicated upon forms of alienation, instrumentalization, and abstraction on every level? How can we even begin to imagine forms of resistance and organization based on the use value of art, when all forms of traditional organisation and resistance (class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, party affiliation) seem to collapse into each other under the weight of flexibilization and the exploitation of precarious labour? How, we might ask, does one radicalise – either collectively or individually – when all trust in the mechanisms of inherited political affiliation seem to be lost? As we have already seen, the stakes are high.  When Berardi started discussing these ideas at the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011, the ground-up activism of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements seemed to offer examples of spontaneous and collective resistance. However, their subsequent (and often violent) re-appropriation into more vicious forms of networked and centralised governmental suppression has once again brought me back to rethinking opposition on a tactical, micro and rhizomatic level - not simply because the institutions of power appear to be impregnable, but precisely because their occupation depends on forms of day-to-day complicity that are best disrupted through the recapture, and viral re-distribution, of non-alienated social labour.  

For example, in an interview with Berardi that I conducted shortly after the Autonomy Symposium (which appears in the ‘The Autonomy Project - Newspaper 3: At Work as “Autonomy and Use Value: Connection and Conjunction”), our conversation turned once again to the question of the physical body. More specifically, Berardi argued that, on a micro level, the overcode of digital semiocapital is invalidating the ethical sensibilities of a generation, while “conscious organism” is forced to become “compatible with the connective machine”. For Berardi: 

This mutation is provoking a sort of dulling of conjunctive ability of human cognition, partially of sensibility, the essential conjunctive faculty in the first connective generation, the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the mother. […] This mutation is actually provoking painful effects on the conscious organism, and these effects can be interpreted with the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic and depression. (Berardi, F. 2012b, p. 55) 

Considering this, Berardi reminds us of Guattari’s use of the ‘Ritornello’ or refrain. For Guattari, the refrain is an obsessive form of ritual that enables individuals to find points of identification, to territorialise and represent themselves in relation with the surrounding world. As such, Berardi reminds us that the refrain is also the semiotization mechanism that enables individuals, groups, a people, a subculture or movement to receive, process and re-project the world according to reproducible and communicable formats. For Berardi, the societal transformations brought about by capitalism have been dependent upon the physical refrains of the factory, the production line, and the salary. However, digital economies have caused the emergence of new refrains of “electronic fragmentation, information overload, acceleration [and] acceleration of the semiotic exchange.” (Berardi, F. 2012, p. 55) As such, Berardi argues that the process of cognitive reformatting of the individual and social body is underway. Doing so, Berardi also reminds us that under the asymmetrical conditions of neoliberal occupation, the forms of recapture and resistance that we can best effect are through and across the continually-shifting borders of connective semiocapital. And if this is the case, then the job or work of the artist that consists in returning poetry to the body must be played-out through and between the fault lines of connective semiocapital as forms of micro-resistance.  

Furthermore, I would also argue that the lines of micro resistance can no longer be played out exclusively in public spaces – the asymmetrical occupation of neoliberal logic is such that, as Berardi points out, the occupation of our very bodies is also underway. And if this is the case, then I would argue that the work or labour of art now resides in the recapture and reactivation of non-alienated and social forms of labour: it depends upon the taking back of those forms of social making and doing, on a bodily and human scale, that would allow us to reoccupy and reformat the abstract and quantitative mechanisms of neoliberal logic.  

However, if Rancière’s reactivation of Gabriel Gauny starts offering us an overall strategy for the work or labour of art as a form of immanent resistance through micropolitical acts of recapture and redistribution (which, I would argue, is also the use value of art as a qualitative and bodily recuperation of non-alienated social labour), we might also start thinking more tactically: what really happens to the role and function of art when the hallmarks of modernist avant-garde resistance have long since been co-opted by the rhetoric of financial capitalism, and, more specifically, by the economically-driven model of the culture industries? And if this is the case, if artists – or for that matter art institutions – seeing themselves as progressive progenitors of artistic possibility can no longer simply reach out to the well-rehearsed mantras of artistic autonomy and cultural alterity, how might this activation of recapture within the conditions of neoliberal occupation begin or be affected? Whilst today, both left and right increasingly occupy the same territory of rhetorical discourse surrounding freedom and community, the implications for our traditional understandings of the work or labour of art would appear to be stark. 

For me, another way of beginning to think and act our way through and out of this impasse was offered during the Autonomy Symposium by Franco Berardi, who began to rehearse some of the arguments that would subsequently form the basis of his  book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012a). For Berardi, the radical deregulation of neoliberal capital is predicated upon the increasing abstraction of language from the body. He suggests that deregulatory logic relies on the possibility of endlessly connecting and reconfiguring language into regulated, recombinable and meaningless components. This, he argues, runs counter to the open, porous, and poetic use of language as a fluid form of conjunction—as an endlessly-open means of understanding ourselves and each other through evolving forms of communication and growth. In this light, Berardi proposes that the new job of the artist or poet is to return non-alienated forms of porous, mutable, and productive language to the physical and social body. By recombining language, autonomy and production in this manner, Berardi – like Rancière – also  allows us to go back to the future: we can begin rethinking the potential of radical alternatives while simultaneously returning to the social and historical bifurcation of use value and exchange value. More specifically, Berardi insists on the distinction between abstract and connective forms of language from material and conjunctive uses of language. Doing so, he consciously replays Marx’s struggle with the co-dependency of use value and exchange value and its development through the imposition of capitalism and of abstracted forms of use value as an ideological means of measurement and calibration.  

Thus, we can again see clear parallels beginning to emerge. On the one hand, between connective forms of language and the quantitative abstraction of exchange value. On the other, between conjunctive and productive uses of language with the bodily, political and ethical necessity of use-value. Here, the use of language  provides a material means to challenge the established status quo of economic predicates and determinates through the material production of new social meanings and autonomies. The latter are capable of escaping the gravity of power and its reliance on increasingly interchangeable, centralised, and regulated forms of connectivity. In this scenario, the job of the artist or poet becomes the work or labour of keeping language alive when there are no longer any simple distinctions between autonomy and heteronomy. If this is the case, then it also emerges that the work or labour of art is no longer to unite, bridge, or combine the seemingly irreconcilable—but rather, consists in operating a form of social possibility, or use value, within an already networked and saturated world of deregulatory and delusory logic. 

Here, Berardi starts to provide us a useful resource  for strategically rethinking what kind of work, or labour, the work of art has now become within a globalised and networked neoliberal economy; that of returning an instrumentalised and abstracted language, reconfigured as a porous and mutable form of poetry, to the physical and social body. But how, we might then ask, is it possible to imagine (let alone effect) such a strategy within a dispersed, networked and asymmetrical society that is already predicated upon forms of alienation, instrumentalization, and abstraction on every level? How can we even begin to imagine forms of resistance and organization based on the use value of art, when all forms of traditional organisation and resistance (class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, party affiliation) seem to collapse into each other under the weight of flexibilization and the exploitation of precarious labour? How, we might ask, does one radicalise – either collectively or individually – when all trust in the mechanisms of inherited political affiliation seem to be lost? As we have already seen, the stakes are high.  When Berardi started discussing these ideas at the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011, the ground-up activism of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements seemed to offer examples of spontaneous and collective resistance. However, their subsequent (and often violent) re-appropriation into more vicious forms of networked and centralised governmental suppression has once again brought me back to rethinking opposition on a tactical, micro and rhizomatic level - not simply because the institutions of power appear to be impregnable, but precisely because their occupation depends on forms of day-to-day complicity that are best disrupted through the recapture, and viral re-distribution, of non-alienated social labour.  

For example, in an interview with Berardi that I conducted shortly after the Autonomy Symposium (which appears in the ‘The Autonomy Project - Newspaper 3: At Work as “Autonomy and Use Value: Connection and Conjunction”), our conversation turned once again to the question of the physical body. More specifically, Berardi argued that, on a micro level, the overcode of digital semiocapital is invalidating the ethical sensibilities of a generation, while “conscious organism” is forced to become “compatible with the connective machine”. For Berardi: 

This mutation is provoking a sort of dulling of conjunctive ability of human cognition, partially of sensibility, the essential conjunctive faculty in the first connective generation, the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the mother. […] This mutation is actually provoking painful effects on the conscious organism, and these effects can be interpreted with the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic and depression. (Berardi, F. 2012b, p. 55) 

Considering this, Berardi reminds us of Guattari’s use of the ‘Ritornello’ or refrain. For Guattari, the refrain is an obsessive form of ritual that enables individuals to find points of identification, to territorialise and represent themselves in relation with the surrounding world. As such, Berardi reminds us that the refrain is also the semiotization mechanism that enables individuals, groups, a people, a subculture or movement to receive, process and re-project the world according to reproducible and communicable formats. For Berardi, the societal transformations brought about by capitalism have been dependent upon the physical refrains of the factory, the production line, and the salary. However, digital economies have caused the emergence of new refrains of “electronic fragmentation, information overload, acceleration [and] acceleration of the semiotic exchange.” (Berardi, F. 2012, p. 55) As such, Berardi argues that the process of cognitive reformatting of the individual and social body is underway. Doing so, Berardi also reminds us that under the asymmetrical conditions of neoliberal occupation, the forms of recapture and resistance that we can best effect are through and across the continually-shifting borders of connective semiocapital. And if this is the case, then the job or work of the artist that consists in returning poetry to the body must be played-out through and between the fault lines of connective semiocapital as forms of micro-resistance.  

Furthermore, I would also argue that the lines of micro resistance can no longer be played out exclusively in public spaces – the asymmetrical occupation of neoliberal logic is such that, as Berardi points out, the occupation of our very bodies is also underway. And if this is the case, then I would argue that the work or labour of art now resides in the recapture and reactivation of non-alienated and social forms of labour: it depends upon the taking back of those forms of social making and doing, on a bodily and human scale, that would allow us to reoccupy and reformat the abstract and quantitative mechanisms of neoliberal logic.  

Within this context, perhaps the most decisive contribution to the Autonomy Symposium resided in Tania Bruguera’s call for an international Association of Arte Útil. What would it be like, Bruguera asked, if artists became less concerned with offering hypothetical solutions to global problems and, instead, began to act as instigators in the production of local solutions to matters of urgency? As an example, Bruguera pointed to her own role in the initiation of the ‘Immigrant Movement International’ project; a multipurpose community space, hosted by Queens Museum New York, aiming to develop “an international think tank that recognises (im)migrants role in the advancement of society at large”. (IMI Mission Statement n.d.)  After the Autonomy Symposium (and in collaboration with Queens Museum, The Van Abbemuseum, and Grizedale Arts) Bruguera continued to expand the idea of an Asociación de Arte Útil (or AAÚ) as an ongoing, rhizomatic and propositional network of artists, activists, critics, thinkers, makers and doers committed to the use of art as a social change tool. In 2013, this resulted in the exhibition ‘The Museum of Arte Útil’, where The Van Abbemuseum challenged its own terms and conditions of display by becoming an active and user-led space, or ‘Social Power Plant’, where ‘art’s use value and social function’ would be analysed. (Van Abbemuseum n.d.)  At the core of The Museum of Arte Útil, and providing ‘fuel’ for the ‘Social Power Plant’, was the archive of the Association of Arte Útil - a growing online resource of contemporary and historical projects in which art has been used as a tool for direct social, political and economic action. Key to the Archive of the AAÚ, and fundamental to the concept of the Museum of Arte Útil, is the insistence that both can only be activated through their use as open-source tools for social change. The idea is that the Museum and archive of Arte Útil will continue to provide an ongoing toolkit for activism - one that can be used by constituencies around the world as a means to re-address and change their urgencies and current conditions. Held within the idea of The Museum and Association of Arte Útil - or, more specifically, within the commitment to use art as a tool for the shared production of 1:1 scale/real time social, political and economic alternative - lies the possibility for the constituent production and exchange of shared knowledge as active forms of commoning. Moreover, underpinning this commitment to the uses of art as a social tool for affecting real change -  or ‘artivism’ to coin one of Bruguera’s own terms - resides the further potential for the constituent production and subsequent social extraction of use value from within the proposed frameworks of The Museum of Arte Útil.  

However, if this potential is to be achieved, it will necessitate a seismic shift in our own responses and physical relationships to culture from our current role as passive spectators and toward our active participation as users. This will also necessitate a concomitant shift away from the traditional notion that individual bodies contemplate autonomous and disinterested aesthetic  objects, and to a history, theory and practice of art predicated on the idea that the use value of art – as a bodily, political and ethical imperative – is socially produced. After all, it is only by actively sharing, shaping, rethinking and reforming our culture together as a growing and fluid social body of producers, that we will retain any hope of providing real, material and emancipatory change as a society. It is also here that the ongoing act of negotiating jeopardy, of recapturing and repurposing the very possibility on non-alienated and productive social labour becomes visible in the production of local, albeit networked, bodies of rhizomatic knowledge. Concurrently, and as Rancière, Berardi and Bruguera demonstrate, this activist knowledge is something that can now only be taken from within a shifting condition of asymmetry; by reoccupying language, by stealing gold from the gods, by using one’s arms and hands to transgress the borders that would fix types of labour in their place. However, if this form of recapture from within is to be the new work or labour of art, we must also accept that there are no longer any clear, defined or fixed borders: the asymmetrical network of neoliberal occupation now appears as complex and ineffable flows of semiocapital continually blurring the boundaries of public and private space - and increasingly capable of financialising and capitalising every form of online and offline exchange. It is here, at the very juncture where bodies are lacerated and homogenised by the constant biorhythms of neoliberal occupation, that the use value of art could provide us with a material, qualitative and bodily tool for effecting and negotiating real social change (across micro as well as macro political levels). It provides a tool for redistributing the sensible, for keeping open forms of social process and change that would allow us to resist the instrumentalising and dehumanising impositions of the neoliberal overcode. 

Accordingly, such a seismic shift in our uses of art would come with the responsibility to accept that the fundamental terms or conditions of a primarily Western and Modernist engagement with art as we know it or knew it to be, are abandoned. This process will mean more than the simple repurposing of terms such as ‘autonomy’. It will infer the wholesale decolonialisation and  demodernisation of our current institutions of embodied knowledge through processes of active archiving and the open source co-production of new possibility and shared, negotiable meaning. In turn, this will depend upon a shift away from making sense of or evaluating art in terms of its aesthetic or autonomous role and function.  Instead, it will demand that we start rethinking and re-evaluating the role and function of art in terms of its social use and use value. Currently, I would argue that the available tools for repurposing our evaluation of art in terms of its use value reside outside the common purview of a western epistemology of art. Instead, they reside in ground-up oppositional forms of activist re-imagings and re-makings of the social and political body - such as those offered by the Democratic  Confederalism of Abdullah Ocalan and epitomised by Zapatismo’s slow and decentralised non-representational politics. However, if we are not prepared to accept the challenge of actively using art as a tool participating in the production of new bodies of knowledge, preferring instead to cling on to the cherished assumption (or ideological comfort blanket) that art as we know it or knew it be somehow offers a alterity beyond our current conditions of asymmetrical struggle, then we run the risk of standing on the side-lines while the pressing concerns of alt-right dictatorship and environmental catastrophe engulf us. 

Within this context, perhaps the most decisive contribution to the Autonomy Symposium resided in Tania Bruguera’s call for an international Association of Arte Útil. What would it be like, Bruguera asked, if artists became less concerned with offering hypothetical solutions to global problems and, instead, began to act as instigators in the production of local solutions to matters of urgency? As an example, Bruguera pointed to her own role in the initiation of the ‘Immigrant Movement International’ project; a multipurpose community space, hosted by Queens Museum New York, aiming to develop “an international think tank that recognises (im)migrants role in the advancement of society at large”. (IMI Mission Statement n.d.)  After the Autonomy Symposium (and in collaboration with Queens Museum, The Van Abbemuseum, and Grizedale Arts) Bruguera continued to expand the idea of an Asociación de Arte Útil (or AAÚ) as an ongoing, rhizomatic and propositional network of artists, activists, critics, thinkers, makers and doers committed to the use of art as a social change tool. In 2013, this resulted in the exhibition ‘The Museum of Arte Útil’, where The Van Abbemuseum challenged its own terms and conditions of display by becoming an active and user-led space, or ‘Social Power Plant’, where ‘art’s use value and social function’ would be analysed. (Van Abbemuseum n.d.)  At the core of The Museum of Arte Útil, and providing ‘fuel’ for the ‘Social Power Plant’, was the archive of the Association of Arte Útil - a growing online resource of contemporary and historical projects in which art has been used as a tool for direct social, political and economic action. Key to the Archive of the AAÚ, and fundamental to the concept of the Museum of Arte Útil, is the insistence that both can only be activated through their use as open-source tools for social change. The idea is that the Museum and archive of Arte Útil will continue to provide an ongoing toolkit for activism - one that can be used by constituencies around the world as a means to re-address and change their urgencies and current conditions. Held within the idea of The Museum and Association of Arte Útil - or, more specifically, within the commitment to use art as a tool for the shared production of 1:1 scale/real time social, political and economic alternative - lies the possibility for the constituent production and exchange of shared knowledge as active forms of commoning. Moreover, underpinning this commitment to the uses of art as a social tool for affecting real change -  or ‘artivism’ to coin one of Bruguera’s own terms - resides the further potential for the constituent production and subsequent social extraction of use value from within the proposed frameworks of The Museum of Arte Útil.  

However, if this potential is to be achieved, it will necessitate a seismic shift in our own responses and physical relationships to culture from our current role as passive spectators and toward our active participation as users. This will also necessitate a concomitant shift away from the traditional notion that individual bodies contemplate autonomous and disinterested aesthetic objects, and to a history, theory and practice of art predicated on the idea that the use value of art – as a bodily, political and ethical imperative – is socially produced. After all, it is only by actively sharing, shaping, rethinking and reforming our culture together as a growing and fluid social body of producers, that we will retain any hope of providing real, material and emancipatory change as a society. It is also here that the ongoing act of negotiating jeopardy, of recapturing and repurposing the very possibility on non-alienated and productive social labour becomes visible in the production of local, albeit networked, bodies of rhizomatic knowledge. Concurrently, and as Rancière, Berardi and Bruguera demonstrate, this activist knowledge is something that can now only be taken from within a shifting condition of asymmetry; by reoccupying language, by stealing gold from the gods, by using one’s arms and hands to transgress the borders that would fix types of labour in their place. However, if this form of recapture from within is to be the new work or labour of art, we must also accept that there are no longer any clear, defined or fixed borders: the asymmetrical network of neoliberal occupation now appears as complex and ineffable flows of semiocapital continually blurring the boundaries of public and private space - and increasingly capable of financializing and capitalizing every form of online and offline exchange. It is here, at the very juncture where bodies are lacerated and homogenised by the constant biorhythms of neoliberal occupation, that the use value of art could provide us with a material, qualitative and bodily tool for effecting and negotiating real social change (across micro as well as macro political levels). It provides a tool for redistributing the sensible, for keeping open forms of social process and change that would allow us to resist the instrumentalizing and dehumanizing impositions of the neoliberal overcode. 

Accordingly, such a seismic shift in our uses of art would come with the responsibility to accept that the fundamental terms or conditions of a primarily Western and Modernist engagement with art as we know it or knew it to be, are abandoned. This process will mean more than the simple repurposing of terms such as ‘autonomy’. It will infer the wholesale decolonialisation and demodernisation of our current institutions of embodied knowledge through processes of active archiving and the open source co-production of new possibility and shared, negotiable meaning. In turn, this will depend upon a shift away from making sense of or evaluating art in terms of its aesthetic or autonomous role and function.  Instead, it will demand that we start rethinking and re-evaluating the role and function of art in terms of its social use and use value. Currently, I would argue that the available tools for repurposing our evaluation of art in terms of its use value reside outside the common purview of a western epistemology of art. Instead, they reside in ground-up oppositional forms of activist re-imagings and re-makings of the social and political body - such as those offered by the Democratic Confederalism of Abdullah Ocalan and epitomised by Zapatismo’s slow and decentralised non-representational politics. However, if we are not prepared to accept the challenge of actively using art as a tool participating in the production of new bodies of knowledge, preferring instead to cling on to the cherished assumption (or ideological comfort blanket) that art as we know it or knew it be somehow offers a alterity beyond our current conditions of asymmetrical struggle, then we run the risk of standing on the side-lines while the pressing concerns of alt-right dictatorship and environmental catastrophe engulf us. 

Within this context, perhaps the most decisive contribution to the Autonomy Symposium resided in Tania Bruguera’s call for an international Association of Arte Útil. What would it be like, Bruguera asked, if artists became less concerned with offering hypothetical solutions to global problems and, instead, began to act as instigators in the production of local solutions to matters of urgency? As an example, Bruguera pointed to her own role in the initiation of the ‘Immigrant Movement International’ project; a multipurpose community space, hosted by Queens Museum New York, aiming to develop “an international think tank that recognises (im)migrants role in the advancement of society at large”. (IMI Mission Statement n.d.)  After the Autonomy Symposium (and in collaboration with Queens Museum, The Van Abbemuseum, and Grizedale Arts) Bruguera continued to expand the idea of an Asociación de Arte Útil (or AAÚ) as an ongoing, rhizomatic and propositional network of artists, activists, critics, thinkers, makers and doers committed to the use of art as a social change tool. In 2013, this resulted in the exhibition ‘The Museum of Arte Útil’, where The Van Abbemuseum challenged its own terms and conditions of display by becoming an active and user-led space, or ‘Social Power Plant’, where ‘art’s use value and social function’ would be analysed. (Van Abbemuseum n.d.)  At the core of The Museum of Arte Útil, and providing ‘fuel’ for the ‘Social Power Plant’, was the archive of the Association of Arte Útil - a growing online resource of contemporary and historical projects in which art has been used as a tool for direct social, political and economic action. Key to the Archive of the AAÚ, and fundamental to the concept of the Museum of Arte Útil, is the insistence that both can only be activated through their use as open-source tools for social change. The idea is that the Museum and archive of Arte Útil will continue to provide an ongoing toolkit for activism - one that can be used by constituencies around the world as a means to re-address and change their urgencies and current conditions. Held within the idea of The Museum and Association of Arte Útil - or, more specifically, within the commitment to use art as a tool for the shared production of 1:1 scale/real time social, political and economic alternative - lies the possibility for the constituent production and exchange of shared knowledge as active forms of commoning. Moreover, underpinning this commitment to the uses of art as a social tool for affecting real change -  or ‘artivism’ to coin one of Bruguera’s own terms - resides the further potential for the constituent production and subsequent social extraction of use value from within the proposed frameworks of The Museum of Arte Útil.  

However, if this potential is to be achieved, it will necessitate a seismic shift in our own responses and physical relationships to culture from our current role as passive spectators and toward our active participation as users. This will also necessitate a concomitant shift away from the traditional notion that individual bodies contemplate autonomous and disinterested aesthetic objects, and to a history, theory and practice of art predicated on the idea that the use value of art – as a bodily, political and ethical imperative – is socially produced. After all, it is only by actively sharing, shaping, rethinking and reforming our culture together as a growing and fluid social body of producers, that we will retain any hope of providing real, material and emancipatory change as a society. It is also here that the ongoing act of negotiating jeopardy, of recapturing and repurposing the very possibility on non-alienated and productive social labour becomes visible in the production of local, albeit networked, bodies of rhizomatic knowledge. Concurrently, and as Rancière, Berardi and Bruguera demonstrate, this activist knowledge is something that can now only be taken from within a shifting condition of asymmetry; by reoccupying language, by stealing gold from the gods, by using one’s arms and hands to transgress the borders that would fix types of labour in their place. However, if this form of recapture from within is to be the new work or labour of art, we must also accept that there are no longer any clear, defined or fixed borders: the asymmetrical network of neoliberal occupation now appears as complex and ineffable flows of semiocapital continually blurring the boundaries of public and private space - and increasingly capable of financializing and capitalizing every form of online and offline exchange. It is here, at the very juncture where bodies are lacerated and homogenised by the constant biorhythms of neoliberal occupation, that the use value of art could provide us with a material, qualitative and bodily tool for effecting and negotiating real social change (across micro as well as macro political levels). It provides a tool for redistributing the sensible, for keeping open forms of social process and change that would allow us to resist the instrumentalizing and dehumanizing impositions of the neoliberal overcode. 

Accordingly, such a seismic shift in our uses of art would come with the responsibility to accept that the fundamental terms or conditions of a primarily Western and Modernist engagement with art as we know it or knew it to be, are abandoned. This process will mean more than the simple repurposing of terms such as ‘autonomy’. It will infer the wholesale decolonialisation and demodernisation of our current institutions of embodied knowledge through processes of active archiving and the open source co-production of new possibility and shared, negotiable meaning. In turn, this will depend upon a shift away from making sense of or evaluating art in terms of its aesthetic or autonomous role and function.  Instead, it will demand that we start rethinking and re-evaluating the role and function of art in terms of its social use and use value. Currently, I would argue that the available tools for repurposing our evaluation of art in terms of its use value reside outside the common purview of a western epistemology of art. Instead, they reside in ground-up oppositional forms of activist re-imagings and re-makings of the social and political body - such as those offered by the Democratic Confederalism of Abdullah Ocalan and epitomised by Zapatismo’s slow and decentralised non-representational politics. However, if we are not prepared to accept the challenge of actively using art as a tool participating in the production of new bodies of knowledge, preferring instead to cling on to the cherished assumption (or ideological comfort blanket) that art as we know it or knew it be somehow offers a alterity beyond our current conditions of asymmetrical struggle, then we run the risk of standing on the side-lines while the pressing concerns of alt-right dictatorship and environmental catastrophe engulf us.