Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom - Softcover

Doujak, Ines; Ressler, Oliver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745335969 ISBN 13: 9780745335964

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2015

Synopsis

The politics of Utopia have already produced a rich and varied literature - St. Simon, Buber, Bloch, and many others. Utopian Pulse explores this tradition from the perspective of art practice and asks how we can engage with and contribute to it. This book will be published alongside an exhibition of the same name and will include artwork from the exhibition itself.

The work's contributors invoke Utopia as an always incomplete alternative and a recognition of something missing, which opens up the possibility of asserting something which is not yet but will be. International artistic researchers, artists and artist-curators contribute different modes of engagement which they are already constituting through their own practice. More than just a theoretical treatise, this book is an overview of a series of works and projects that are brought to life and which the book seeks to document.

This book will serve not only as a contribution to the existing literature on Utopia and Utopian politics, but also as an inspiration to artists seeking to realise these ideas through their work.

About this title

About the Authors

Ines Doujak is a feminist artist whose work has been widely exhibited, including at the Biennial in Sao Paulo (2014) and the documenta 12 in Kassel (2007). She is the co-author of Utopian Pulse (Pluto, 2015).

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. His work has been exhibited across the world including at the Berkeley Art Museum, USA, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul and the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt. He is the editor of It's the Political Economy, Stupid (Pluto, 2013) and the author of Utopian Pulse (Pluto, 2015).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Utopian Pulse

Flares in the darkroom

By Ines Doujak, Oliver Ressler

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2017 Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3596-4

Contents

Foreword Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler, 10, 
Urgent Alternatives: Utopian Moments, 16, 
Fluchthilfe & Du? Katarzyna Winiecka, 18, 
Driven into Conflict by Utopia Antke Engel, 22, 
Salon Fluchthilfe / Unthinking Utopia – Borderlessness as Method Zanny Begg, 32, 
The World is Flooding Oreet Ashery, 50, 
Out of the Salon – Female counter-spaces, anti-colonial struggles and transversal politics Sophie Schasiepen, 54, 
Salon Public Happiness Christoph Schafer, 62, 
Please Take Generously Wealth of Negations, 74, 
Self-Insufficiency Matthew Hyland, 78, 
Salon Orrizonti Occupati / Occupied Horizons Bert Theis, 94, 
Known Nowheres: Some Short Thoughts on Going Beyond Marina Vishmidt, 110, 
MogokNasional Nobodycorp. Internationale Unlimited, 126, 
A Preview of the Future: Workers' Control in the Context of a Global Systemic Crisis Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 130, 
Salons, the Utopian Salon and Substantial Shops Alice Creischer, 146, 
B.A.N.G. Etcétera, 152, 
Salon DADADA AND AND AND, 156, 
Salon-e-Girdbad/ Salon of the Whirlwind Mariam Ghani, 172, 
Taksim Square, June 2013 Halil Altindere, 184, 
Queering utopia in the darkroom Fernanda Nogueira, 190, 
Cuartos de Utopía / Wittgenstein and the Gypsies Pedro G. Romero / Maquina P.H., 196, 
El Espacio del Inmigrante Daniela Ortiz, 214, 
Salón de Belleza Miguel A. López, 218, 
A Mask is Always Active Ines Doujak and John Barker, 234, 
Salon Klimbim Ines Doujak and Fahim Amir, 250, 
Biographies, 275, 
Imprint, 283, 

CHAPTER 1

Urgent Alternatives

Utopian Moments

Between February and September 2014 a series of seven large-scale banners (9 x 3.4 metres) were presented on the façade of the Secession, the exhibition hall for contemporary art in Vienna. They related to the uprisings, occupations and social movements that have emerged in recent years. The artists were invited to focus on the utopian pulse in these actions and movements. This is most clearly manifested in the integration of how and what was being fought for. During the period when Syntagma Square in Athens was occupied in active opposition to the self-defeating austerity policies, the principles of true democracy were evident throughout. Debates as to actions, methods and alternatives were open and respectful, and decisions were made on this basis. They included who would speak and what would be spoken about to a wider public. In Tahrir Square, Cairo in 2011 a determination that the machinery of state violence could be overcome by surrounding tanks was crucial in the early victories of the movement. This should not be forgotten in its defeat by rival forms of authoritarian politics. Part of the failure by the initial movement was its incapacity to build durable democratic structures. In Istanbul the determination was to hold the common property of a park that made life bearable in the city, an action with a global resonance of defending the commons against the many forms of predatory enclosure. All the artists in the Urgent Alternatives: Utopian Moments had in common that they were directly involved in the protests which they had focused on in their banner, or that they talked from a clear, unequivocal position of solidarity with the protests. This series of banners can be seen as symptomatic of how utopian thinking, which seemed to have been buried for years, has revived with a sense of urgency. It is the idea that things can carry on as they are which is really just wishful thinking.

CHAPTER 2

Fluchthilfe & Du?

Katarzyna Winiecka

Fluchthilfe & Du addresses the critique of the EU border regime and its migration policies expressed by the self-organised refugee protest movement in Vienna. The design of the banner, titled Fluchthilfe & Du? (Escape Aid & You?), echoes a current campaign by Caritas, an organisation which collects donations with an appeal to charity while distancing itself from those it denounces as 'human smugglers': people whose assistance to refugees made it possible for them to come to Austria and apply for asylum in the first place. Fluchthilfe & Du envisions aid to refugees as a service and publicly solicits support for their struggle for freedom of movement.

The work was created as an act of solidarity with those eight activists of the refugee movement who were held in custody from July 2013 to January-March 2014 and accused of being members of an international human smuggling organisation. The charges – they supposedly made millions and endangered the lives of refugees in transit – were rebutted immediately, but the Austrian state continued to criminalise them.

On 4 December 2014, after 43 days of trial in Wiener Neustadt, under media attention as well as being monitoring by civil society, seven of the eight defendants were found guilty under paragraph 114 FPG 'human smuggling – within a criminal association'. The judgement is not final; the decision was appealed by all the accused. Paragraph 114 FPG, which is in dire need of reform, criminalises help (food, shelter, information, buying a ticket) given to undocumented refugees/to be asylum seekers, who try to come to, pass, or leave Austria, with the aim of arriving to ask for protection in a destination of choice within the alleged border-free European Union – as is clearly shown in this so called Fluchthilfeprozess.

www.fluchthilfe.at

CHAPTER 3

DRIVEN INTO CONFLICT BY UTOPIA

Antke Engel

Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom offered a programme of confrontation with utopian pleasure, pain, handicraft and brain, a variety show of utopian visions. Yet, what if utopia prefers to unfold in the untimely 'Not Now! Now!'. The not-moment of midnights, which is neither today nor tomorrow, may activate the conflicts that are implied by the different, contradictory and competing visions. What is utopia in a geo-historical-political constellation that presumably strives to acknowledge the interplay of a complexity of relations of power and domination – not in order to affirm, but to transform the asymmetries, injustices and violences that organise it?

'Utopia is ... the assertion of the unrealized in and against the real,' declares the announcement of Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom, 'the invocation within the given world of something incompatible with, and hostile to, given conditions.' While philosophers like Ernst Bloch or Michel Foucault, and feminist theoreticians like Barbara Holland-Cunz, María do Mar Castro Varela or Karin Schonpflug point out the impact of utopia as a form of critique, the above formulations signal something like an open conflict between the utopian and the existing, a conflict, which is by no means virtual, but unfolds within the existing, the real or reality. It produces what Helga Haberler calls a lived dissent with the hegemonic order. For her, the utopian vision lies in learning to enjoy and gain pleasure from experiences of disintegration, thus overcoming the longing for recognition and integration.

Yet, a couple of questions are left open by pushing utopia into an antagonistic relationship with reality: Can one still speak about a conflict between utopia and reality, once utopia appears as part of or is interpolated by reality? What are the modes and means conflict takes on, when it is expected to articulate itself in a heterotopian space like an exhibition? Instead of looking for conflict in the relationship between utopia and reality my suggestion is to search for a utopian moment in conflict itself, namely a moment that derives from utopias as machines producing conflicts. Utopia drives into conflict! Utopia is conflict! At least potentially- then and there.

What seems interesting to me are two moments. One where utopia effects changes in the existing power relations through pushing well-known antagonisms into paradoxes, ambiguities and new, unexpected constellations. For example, when Dagmar Fink introduces to her readers a whole range of femme genders or femmeninities, which undermine simultaneously the male/female binary as well as sexual differences within homosexualities. The other, those moments when one understands why the utopian potential of a certain conflict cannot realize itself due to desire, power or habit.

To stick with the same example, femme is often not acknowledged as a transgression of heteronormative gender, because, according to Fink, it is habitually misconceived as escaping a proper oppositional performance. To say that utopia is conflict does not mean that utopian visions consist of representations of conflict, but that an experience of conflict is invoked in between the recipient, the utopian work and a wider social world.

Feminist utopia and science fiction – Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, originally 1405), Joanna Russ' Female Man, Marge Piercy's He, She and It, Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness – not only shift attention to such conflicts and their socio-historical origin, but also develop complex nets of future genealogies not in order to provide solutions, but to lay out the impossibilities of various alternatives. These authors make clear that any conflict is complex, and also always holds psychic, communal and external dimensions simultaneously. There is not simply 'the enemy', and it is not always 'over there'. Rather, the enemy might be a lover, a friend; it might dwell in the heart, and resist being pinned down to the position of perpetrator – or victim; and named war, or capitalism, or patriarchy which one might like to fight over there, while enjoying its profits right here. Cutting out one of these (psychic, communal, external) dimensions, which are obviously also contradictory in themselves, would simplify the complexity of a conflict and undermine the chance of activating its utopian potential. Yet, my point here is a different one. Instead of looking for analytical-diagnostic or speculative-utopian representations of conflicts, I would like to shift the focus to the moment where the social existence of a utopia drives its recipients into conflict.

Take, for example, Tejal Shah's five-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012). The different episodes do not depict any conflict at all. On the contrary, the bare-breasted, harnessed unicorns who inhabit a fictional world that merges ancient excavations and mythological sites with futuristic design, natural landscapes and urban metropolitan settlements, are engaged in caring and erotic practices, in cleaning up, caressing, and healing, as well as with forms of symbolising and knowledge production. What is going on appears to be significant, but remains cryptic to the viewer. Intimate procedures signify an embodied knowledge that draws connections between those involved, while keeping their meaning opaque.

Conflicts may arise, because traditional hierarchies of perception and articulation are undermined: touch seems to be more important than vision; cosmic sounds or the loud smack of pomegranates smashed to pieces supplement composed music and spoken language; a trash heap is not an environmental problem, but the site for a collective dance; and pleasures are not defined by the phallus when unicorns have sex and species meet. Between the Waves knows about racist, sexist, heteronormative, geopolitical and neocolonial hierarchies. Yet, it does not operate through antagonising, but through creating possibilities for accepting a not-knowing and learning to listen.

Learning to listen in itself, may also activate inner conflicts, repulsions or ambiguities in the beholder. It may, for example, draw attention to the traces of global environmental pollution and the circuit of capitalist industrial production; exploitative production in the global South for consumption in the global North returning as trash from the North to the beaches and dumps of the South. Plastic netting, shiny DVDs, foil, bags, bottles inhabit the fantastic world. They could be read as signs of pollution, global exploitation and colonial heritage. Yet, this relies on the labour of the recipient. The film, in contrast, depicts these objects as curious and colourful, sometimes dangerous, sometimes as astonishing instances of new assemblages. In the film they function as inspirations and accessories of erotic, caring and creative practices, whereas for the beholder they may strengthen feelings of displacement or dispossession in the face of a 'tribe of aliens' who seem to know and to act as an integral part of a cosmic whole and post-human sociality.

In a very different way, yet with similar effect, queer theoretician Elizabeth Povinelli invites Ursula K. Le Guin's short story 'The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas' to do the work of deconstructing the liberal, occidental subject. In her book Economies of Abandonment, Povinelli lays bare the ethical dilemma that haunts late liberalism: that the happiness and freedom of those enjoying the liberal regime depend on the continuous suffering of some others, on 'forms of suffering and dying, enduring and expiring that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis laden, and sublime.' Those who profit from the system know about this dilemma, know about 'the child in the broom closet' as figured in Le Guin's story, and the cheap attempts at justification, like seeing the child as a degraded being, less than human, or hopelessly lost, of calling its fate a necessary sacrifice, or soothing the effects through social technologies.

In the face of this dilemma in Le Guin's story some citizens decide to leave 'the city of happiness', and while the author would not say where they were going, one could read Povinelli's book as an attempt to open up similar passages into unknown worlds. What's important about these worlds, which Povinelli calls 'spaces of otherwise' and which she finds in certain social projects and forms of embodied sociality, is that they are neither positioned in the future nor dependent on the past perfect of the former regime, but instead acknowledge the enduring present tense of histories of violence. Reflecting on twenty years of friendship with Ruby Yarrowin, an elder indigenous women and her kin from the Northern Territory in Australia, Povinelli develops the term 'queer socialities'. It names a loving and laughing and caring relationship built on jouissance, a simultaneity of pleasure and pain; painful, because it is again and again ruptured by the asymmetric positioning defined by the regime of settler colonialism.

Queer sociality carries a utopian potential exactly because of its shared jouissance. It suggests understanding jouissance not as a paradoxical experiences that drives the one who experiences into asocial isolation, but insists that it is possible to share the inseparable pleasure-pain, though one will never overcome the limits of understanding that are due to an unbridgeable difference in the way both friends are implicated in late liberalism. In the text, the limits of understanding are demonstrated quite literally in presenting the joy and the agony of learning and teaching Emmiyengal, Ruby's native language. The reader follows conversations between Ruby and Liz in Emmiyengal, which is transferred into English, yet in a quite surprising way, since certain idioms and grammar are upheld, and their meaning is discussed in the exchange. Conflict between Ruby and Liz lures on the threshold between limits of understanding, lack of understanding, and misunderstanding, but is sustained by practices of friendship. For me as a reader my pleasure-pain arises thanks to the aesthetic form of the text. The poetics help one to endure the experience of not-knowing and the limits of understanding, but are simultaneously pushing me into conflict. Am I going to hold on to the privileges and resources of my Occidentalist self and my late liberal resources? Or am I opening up to queer sociality?

Povinelli's 'spaces of otherwise' remind one of Michel Foucault's 'heterotopias' – spaces within the given order that do not follow the rules of this order. While enacting diverging norms and relationships, heterotopias are not automatically critical or resistant. They may sustain the undis critical or resistant. They may sustain the undisturbed functioning of the dominant order as well as they may inspire the questioning of truth claims and historical power relations. María do Mar Castro Varela activates Foucault's notion of heterotopia together with Ernst Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) in order to underline the concreteness and present tense of utopia as a form of political critique. Bloch distinguishes between abstract and concrete utopia, where the latter is a form of critique which translates hope into an intervention into given social relations. He understands utopia as a mode of historical practice (geschichtliches Handeln). As such it is neither illusionary nor teleological, but driven by a wishing that takes place here and now.

This is why Castro Varela calls utopia a discourse of longing (Sehnsuchtsdiskurs), and carves out similarities between utopia and migration. She reflects and deflects utopias through the lens of migration, but makes sure that longing is understood as neither nostalgic nor escapist. Migrating for her means living an ambiguous simultaneity of longing for belonging and longing for emigration. It may carry a wish for Heimat, yet this Heimat is deferred and always to come, built on the pleasures and dangers of giving in to one's curiosity and one's hope of building a better future. As a form of lived critique, this simultaneity undermines historical and epistemic regimes of truth, and as such it is utopian vision which helps to make sense of the concrete here and now, and answer to concrete experiences of social conflict.

Castro Varela presents utopian visions as a form of virtual migration – a form of escape deployed by those who do not dare or lack capacities and resources to actually get on the move. Furthermore, those who in fact have migrated might need and do cultivate utopian thinking artfully as a collective practice of coping with the hardships of migrant everyday life. Castro Varela has developed her contribution to theories of utopia in exchange with migrant women, who during group interviews reveal their capacity for and the potentials of utopian thinking. They invite Castro Varela to listen to their communication and laughter, and thus let her understand how utopian thinking allows for analysing, criticising and politicising, for enduring and overcoming racist, sexist and classist experiences. I would argue that it is at this untimely moment when conflicts – diverging opinions, values, wishes or interests organised along unequal relations of power and desire – shift the current layout of space-time, that historically concrete critique is moved by a utopian pulse.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Utopian Pulse by Ines Doujak, Oliver Ressler. Copyright © 2017 Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745335969
• ISBN 13: 9780745335964
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288