..Standing on a corner, wanting to help carry people’s bags across the street for an art project ,this come-and-get-it smile is also one of social practices’ most common affects.
Body (continued): The problem of Social Practice.
So despite the very effective down-sourcing of power that results from the collective project of Fallen Fruit, Future Farmers and a thousand other projects on 127 Prince or the Groundswell Blog or the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, neoliberal markets have the capacity to ideologically re-appropriate these down-sourced potentialities back up into the market. In that both neoliberalism and our social practices are both facilitated by that smile, neoliberalism’s come-and-get-it smile is reinforced almost every time a social practitioner strikes that pose. :)
That smile, that shit eating, come have fun with me smile. It’ll be OK, we’ll have fun! Come have fun while we imagine how we imagine how we might live in a post-oil world!
That smile of the open network that opens up public space to social space is the same smile that neoliberalism likes within its creative cities, its self-realized contract workers, its glad to be hear immigrant labor, its virally-marketed, crowd-sourced production capacitors. :)
Marc J. Leger’s outlines this with delightful percussion in his essay “Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle” for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #7.
This affected smile is the cruel tool of capitalist discipline that maintains this extended cultural moment.
Social Practice has (often unwittingly) facilitated this exploitation and is also uniquely positioned to end it.
Climax: Where the peasant throws off the overlord
For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it just has to stop smiling.
There are so many emotions we need to work through together besides “happy!”
For starters, how about dominated and dominator?
Or how about sadness?
Anchoring group explorations in clearly productive projects creates a safe and extremely meaningful way to collectively process the discipline we encounter as capitalist subjects.
For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it must stop using the affective communication tools which normalize interpersonal exchanges in order to create seemingly conflict-free social contracts.
Working through social conflict is a part of a movement. At least on the movement’s onset.
The radical social practitioner can also use an autonomous position from their audience to provocatively challenger audience-participants to build critical distance from their own collectivity.
This is key. Social practice must learn how to socialize an engaged criticality of how institutions and movements constitute and utilize social power. Neoliberal abuse of social practice is study case #1 of this utilization.
A radical social practice must facilitate the potential for its own critical deconstruction by its participants. Though this should smack of 90′s style institutional critique (see Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray editors) it isn’t. This criticality intends to model a critical practice outside of established institutions, and within the expanded field.
A critical social practice is aware of the enthusiasm and interest it builds in relationship to its own success. Yet instead of avoiding representation, it artistically moves to problematize its own performance and use this problematization as further medium between itself and its audience.
This project would then work in a two-fold manner. Within the traditional mode of social practice, it organizes people through desires to produce collective experiences or resources. Concurrently, the more critical element works to create a dialogical distance between participants and organizers so that the collective experience is not normalized as the result of smoothing affect. Instead the work becomes an act of negotiation and dialog while autonomous power (in the form of food gathering, protest/performance, or healing) is produced.
Socially anti-social practice. Psychedelic Social Practice. Dialogically Autonomous Social Practice.
Creating a movement in exchange with broader society is an occupation.
A Socially Anti-Social, Dialogically Autonomous, Psychedelic Social Practice « OCCUPY EVERYTHING
Body (continued): The problem of Social Practice.
So despite the very effective down-sourcing of power that results from the collective project of Fallen Fruit, Future Farmers and a thousand other projects on 127 Prince or the Groundswell Blog or the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, neoliberal markets have the capacity to ideologically re-appropriate these down-sourced potentialities back up into the market. In that both neoliberalism and our social practices are both facilitated by that smile, neoliberalism’s come-and-get-it smile is reinforced almost every time a social practitioner strikes that pose. :)
That smile, that shit eating, come have fun with me smile. It’ll be OK, we’ll have fun! Come have fun while we imagine how we imagine how we might live in a post-oil world!
That smile of the open network that opens up public space to social space is the same smile that neoliberalism likes within its creative cities, its self-realized contract workers, its glad to be hear immigrant labor, its virally-marketed, crowd-sourced production capacitors. :)
Marc J. Leger’s outlines this with delightful percussion in his essay “Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle” for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #7.
This affected smile is the cruel tool of capitalist discipline that maintains this extended cultural moment.
Social Practice has (often unwittingly) facilitated this exploitation and is also uniquely positioned to end it.
Climax: Where the peasant throws off the overlord
For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it just has to stop smiling.
There are so many emotions we need to work through together besides “happy!”
For starters, how about dominated and dominator?
Or how about sadness?
Anchoring group explorations in clearly productive projects creates a safe and extremely meaningful way to collectively process the discipline we encounter as capitalist subjects.
For social practice to fulfill its radical potential, it must stop using the affective communication tools which normalize interpersonal exchanges in order to create seemingly conflict-free social contracts.
Working through social conflict is a part of a movement. At least on the movement’s onset.
The radical social practitioner can also use an autonomous position from their audience to provocatively challenger audience-participants to build critical distance from their own collectivity.
This is key. Social practice must learn how to socialize an engaged criticality of how institutions and movements constitute and utilize social power. Neoliberal abuse of social practice is study case #1 of this utilization.
A radical social practice must facilitate the potential for its own critical deconstruction by its participants. Though this should smack of 90′s style institutional critique (see Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Reinventing Institutional Critique, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray editors) it isn’t. This criticality intends to model a critical practice outside of established institutions, and within the expanded field.
A critical social practice is aware of the enthusiasm and interest it builds in relationship to its own success. Yet instead of avoiding representation, it artistically moves to problematize its own performance and use this problematization as further medium between itself and its audience.
This project would then work in a two-fold manner. Within the traditional mode of social practice, it organizes people through desires to produce collective experiences or resources. Concurrently, the more critical element works to create a dialogical distance between participants and organizers so that the collective experience is not normalized as the result of smoothing affect. Instead the work becomes an act of negotiation and dialog while autonomous power (in the form of food gathering, protest/performance, or healing) is produced.
Socially anti-social practice. Psychedelic Social Practice. Dialogically Autonomous Social Practice.
Creating a movement in exchange with broader society is an occupation.
A Socially Anti-Social, Dialogically Autonomous, Psychedelic Social Practice « OCCUPY EVERYTHING
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