April 8, 2006
"Utopia Station" at Princeton, Pamela M. Lee on the World Social Forum, and Slavoj Zizek in the LRB
On Thursday, March 30, I ventured down to Princeton’s campus for the latter half of “Utopia Station,” a two-day seminar devoted to the concept of free speech. As the press release had it: “We meet to examine this question and to move it.” I was interested in how this program of “talks, screenings, messages and images” would function in two ways. First, as part of a larger, two-year project at Princeton focusing on the study of utopia and dystopia in history, and second, as part of the larger “Utopia Station” project, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and which has manifested itself variously since then.
Molly Nesbit, who is the ostensible ringleader of the project (despite the fact that it was conceived with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a host of other artists, curators, and critics), emceed the affair. Her first words were aimed at disarming potential critics, specifically the capital-H Historians in the house who have been treated to eighteen months’ worth of serious academic papers on the topics at hand, and emphasized the experimental (if not quite provisional) nature of the mixed-media presentations on that day’s docket. The program itself was impressive, but almost from the start technical difficulties plagued the presenters and unexpected absences shortened the proceedings. Princeton’s computers did not play some of the artists’ DVDs properly: We saw only half of a video by Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno, and what footage we did see was punctuated by glitches and moments without sound. Obrist had left after Wednesday’s presentation, and neither Immanuel Wallerstein nor Martha Rosler could attend; Nesbit read short notes from all three. The dwindling audience murmured.
And yet there were rousing presentations. Liam Gillick, who was on stage with Carolee Schneeman and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the outset of the afternoon, outlined in eleven succinct points many problems with using the words “free” and “speech” in this context. (Unfortunately he read too quickly and there was no opportunity to discuss what he said.) A twenty-minute phone call to Michael Hardt, in Seattle, was illuminating, as the critic and theorist outlined his collaborative working process with Antonio Negri as well as the contours of the project now holding the duo’s attention. (A subsequent, pre-planned call to Negri was met with an answering machine.) Edouard Glissant delivered a rather poetic paper envisioning one particular type of utopia, translated on the fly from the French by a young woman who would have benefited from having more time to prepare her words. At the end of the evening, and with the help of an audience member’s laptop, we were treated to two short videos by Thomas Bayrle and a preview of the third part of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest film cycle.
If judged on the terms it set out for itself, the second day of “Utopia Station” was not a success. Several speakers referred to the marathon discussions sparked by the first day’s presentations; Thursday was marked by its lack of interaction. Although I did not talk to any Princeton historians in attendance, it seemed to me that the attempt to shoehorn this presentation into the wider seminar mostly served to point out the deficiencies in “Utopia Station.” Having not attended the opening of “Utopia Station” in Venice three years ago, I was unable to ascertain fully the relationship of Thursday’s presentation to the original, though being at Princeton was certainly more intriguing—despite the imperfections—than my encounter with the rather inert remnants of the original on site in Venice two months after the Biennale opened.
Three years on from its initial viewing, there’s little more to be milked from the same cast of characters discussing (more or less) the same topics. But the connections that can be fostered by its drawing power are many. Despite my disappointment with the outcome of this “Utopia Station” event, the day trip was salvaged by an encounter with Bayrle and his wife on the train ride back to New York. He offered further thoughts on the films we saw, and on the works now on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and clearly warmed to having four young interlocuters—teaching for twenty-odd years at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt has not dimmed his passion for pedagogical discourse. It was a great conversation . . . one that I wish would have taken place in the auditorium at Princeton.
At one point Molly Nesbit mentioned hearing Michael Hardt speak at Porto Alegre, which was a reference to a presentation he gave at the World Social Forum when it was held in that Brazilian town. Pamela M. Lee has an article on the WSF in the current Artforum. From that article:
Arguably, the relative merit of the WSF's activities is measured less by the concrete implementation of policy than by the kinds of relationships the gatherings produce—a proposition that would seem to raise the question, How might this other world look? What role, in other words, would the visual in general (and art more conditionally) play in the WSF's production and facilitation of a "world process"?
And later:
Indeed, what drew the greatest share of attention at the opening rally and elsewhere were not so much the classic signifiers of revolutionary politics, which fell just this side of perfunctory or routinized, but the circulation of media itself. In countless occasions that mimed something of the feedback-loop logic of the old Sony Porta-Pak, one saw participants videotaping, filming, or photographing other participants who, in turn, were doing exactly the same thing. This was a kind of global mirroring process in which capturing the act of mediation—whether the ad hoc TV stations scattered around the forum's dispersed sites or the live projections in the more heavily subscribed sessions—seemed the most vital form of representation of all. What was at stake seemed not so much a clearly consolidated image of this media (that would be CNN territory, after all), but rather a sense of its potential mobility.
Slavoj Zizek has an article on a related topic, though his is not refracted through the lens of art. "Nobody has to be vile," excoriates the "liberal communists" who have imported values championed at the World Social Forum (held this year in Caracas, Venezuela) to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, specifically Bill Gates and George Soros. To wit:
Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.
And later:
According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today.