Fran Meana

This chapter will focus on investigating the recent changes in the ways power structures operate. Analysing the shift from early power formations, based on the use of discipline as the force modelling the bodies, to ones relying on a process of gradual internalization of command. The struggle against the Fordist model has been resolved within the social cycle of production through the progressive incorporation of living labour and personal sphere within production. The old dichotomies between “mental and manual labour”, intellectuality and workforce, between labour and creativity have been transcended within the labour process and reimposed as political command. In this way productive activity is no longer confined in the four walls of a factory, operates as a “diffuse factory” and generates almost no resistance.

The incorporation of living labour and the personal sphere within production requires the progressive investment of subjectivity and therefore the field of production is right where social relationships are produced: society at large. This ongoing colonization of all the realms of existence has its consequences, first and foremost: new relationships between production and consumption. Leisure time and work time are becoming indistinguishable and precariousness, hyper exploitation, mobility and yet hierarchy are the final outputs of this mode of production. Tertiarization is not limited to highly skilled workers any longer, this becomes particularly evident in the creative sector, specially in the arts field, where the increasing demand to deliver individually branded, yet readily recognizable products, has established the solitary performer as the professional norm. The imperative for all to “become subjects” is a symptom of a broader transformation of the social sphere that forces us to question the classic definition of labour and think of alternative strategies to develop work.

From Appropriation to Invocation (Working title).

Building on previous research I will continue exploring the relationship between the archive and memory. If no act of documentation is unintentional, the archive is never a mere collection of accidents producing traces that need to be preserved. Disregarding the innocence of archiving means not only pointing out the nosological gaze behind any preservation of traces but also requires the development of strategies to activate the archive. In order to do so one has to be aware of collective dimension of the archive while considering the role individual objects, events and stories play in it.

In an intuitive way I was already developing collaborative structures through my work, not only as practical choice but also as a way to point out the social dimension of the production of knowledge. As opposed to the supposedly stable archive, my practise is not concerned with the factual accuracy of documents. It does not matter if documents are a blueprint of something already existing in the world, on the contrary they are rather the result of a “creative” activity understood as a process capable of rendering something else present. The inherited theoretical primacy of facts must be challenged. A way of doing this is by letting objects and stories to set their own parameters, discarding their examination through the binary opposition fiction and non fiction. If we want to do justice to the rich and complex stories already circulating, those that are able to capture our imagination, facts should be treated as a processes. This is especially relevant if we intend to investigate the capacity of some objects to crystallize concrete social arrangements and how they mediate social relationships.

I propose to see the archive as a shared place that enables one to maintain the past as well as to exercise the capacity to aspire. As in earlier work, my emphasis will be on how to make visible the set of relationships and social conditions that underly the production of “things”. Proceeding from the consideration that this distinction between fiction and elaborating a repertoire that increasingly requires presence, just in the same way people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Knowledge only exists in the social realm and consequently any work aspiring to reflect on this collective dimension of knowledge has always to start with exercising a certain agency.

As we have seen the production mode of today is directly related to the ability to create and navigate social relations, where the “raw material” is at the same time subjectivity and collectivity. But under the growing imperative for all to “become subjects” and the progressive incorporation of living labour within production, any subject faces the risk of becoming a simple relayer in the process of information. In the past decades, this and other effects of Immaterial Labour affecting subjectivity have become increasingly evident:

-the incorporation of living labour and personal sphere within production. -the colonization of all the realms of existence and the transformation of every domain of social life into a economic space. -leisure time and work time becoming indistinguishable. -precariousness, hyper exploitation, mobility and yet hierarchy. are the final outputs of this mode of production. -the privatization and the growing fragmentation of the social sphere.

For the final stage of the course I would like to develop a core of work that tries, both in a theoretical and practical way, to reappropriate these symptoms using them as source material. Opening new possibilities aside from the exhaustion created by the continual capitalization of the recent past and the near future.