Maybe we’re trying catch a moment, maybe an earlier moment, maybe it’s a Volvo moment, June 17, 1974, when the view from the factory was of the trees and the way to work together was as a team, and we know that the future is going to work out, that everything is a trajectory as long as we can keep it this way and Ford don’t buy the company.
The discursive is wedded to the notion of postwar social democracy. It is both a product of its education systems and subject to its critical potentials and collapses. The European context has surrounded itself with experiment machines in the culture. The discursive framework’s success and failure is connected to various postwar phenomena connected to identity politics and postcolonial theory. At the same time, the discursive is suspicious and resistant to the idea of a key protagonist. Without key protagonists, however, it’s very hard to know what to do, when to occupy, and when to function. However, the lack of leading voices does permit the discursive to evolve and include.
For those who grew up in postwar Europe, notions of group work were embedded in educational systems. From preschool playgroups through the organizing structures of management, with group discussion and teamwork, we find a set of social models that carry complex implications for people who think they can create something using a related if semiautonomous methodology.
One of the reasons why I think the factory needs to be looked at again is that the factory—as a system—allows you to look at relationships in a totalizing way. To create a continual map of productive potential, and one of the great struggles of the twentieth century in industrial terms, has been the struggle between speculation and planning. We can say that speculation won and that the rhetoric of planning has become something we do for the people we don’t know what to do with. We plan for them, but everyone else should speculate. The factory model is of structural use, in the sense of the planned quality of a factory, despite the fact that the factory is always the playing field of the speculative. The myth is that speculation lures production, it lures industry, it lures investment, and is always caught, psychologically and philosophically, in a dilemma. To activate speculation effectively, you have to plan.
The discursive is a production cycle rather than a fixed performative moment in time. Instead of a permanent association of free(d) time, it uses certain production analogies in relation to what could be useful.
1 It occupies the increasing gap between the trajectory of modernity (understood here as a flow of technologies and demographic developments) and the somewhat melancholic imploded self-conscious trajectory of modernism. It is within this zone that we can explain the idea of no surprise, sudden returns, and the acceptance of gains and losses as symptoms and catalysts simultaneously. It is here that we can build contingent critical structures that critique both modernity and its critical double.
I have worked on the “Volvo Question” for a few years. Most of my research on Volvo was via Brazilian academic papers concerning the legacy of 1970s production techniques in Scandinavia and the emergence of models of flexibility, collaboration, and the idea of a better working environment in an ideally productive post-Fordist situation. There has been a synchronization of desire and structure. In the last ten or fifteen years, discursive, fragmented, atomized, content-heavy art projects have somehow freed themselves from classical ideas of the problem of commodity culture and taken on the deep structure of work and life. In the Volvo factory you can see trees while you are making the cars. But you are still making cars, never taking a walk in the woods. Where are the models for contemporary art production in the recent past? Is it Volvo, is it the collective, or is it the infinite display of the supersubjective? And do these factors share similar cultural DNA? The idea of collective action and the idea of being able to determine the speed with which you produce a car, whether you produce it in a group, or individually, or at night, or very slowly, seems close to the question of how to make art over the last fifty years. What happened at Volvo was that people ended up creating more and more free time, and during that free time they talked about ways to work faster. The trauma and attractiveness of infinite flexibility leads to the logic of redundancy, both in the cultural sphere and the traditional productive sphere. Ford bought the company and reintroduced the standard production line not because it was more efficient in pure capitalist terms but because it reclarified relations of production.
The discursive framework works in sync with theories of immaterial labor.
2 The idea that prior to being manufactured a product must be sold is a dominant visible feature of certain developed late-modern art practices. The discursive is a negotiation and demonstration of immaterial labor for other ends. The study of immaterial labor accounts for the blurred factors that surround and produce commodity value. Immaterial labor is the set of factors that produce the informational and cultural content of a commodity. The discursive makes use of theories of immaterial labor in order to escape simplistic understandings of production within a cultural context. It is at the heart of developments in post-Duchampian art.
The experimental factory is a dynamic paradox—in the Soviet Union every large city had an experimental factory; at Magdeburg today, they have an experimental factory—a model for the experimental, but with no experiments. The idea of the experimental factory or workshop remains a dynamic legacy within the notion of productive cultural work. The postwar social project activated compromised forms of earlier idealized modernisms and created a mesh of alleviated working circumstances that left behind the experimental factory as an attractive model of potential. The factory that exists but does not produce. You can draw a parallel between the rise of the experimental factory as a functional promise and the way critical cultural exhibition structures developed alongside this—without even considering the common phenomenon of occupying abandoned plants of the recent past as the site of art within a program of regeneration in the mainstream contemporary art context. The discursive is packed with projections and traces of postwar social desire. The decentered quality of critical art practices meets an anxiety about the combination of the localized and the internationalized. This contradictory quality is exemplified in the discursive frame’s displays of the local to the international within the context of globalized cultural journeys, and vice versa. The discursive offers the potential for art to operate within smallish groupings out of sync with contemporary circumstances yet deeply embedded within its values and flows. This has a lot to do with coalescing smallish groupings that then play out a suspension of aims and results within a context of indifference and projected future meetings. If we accept the postwar period as a closed period, we have to think harder about whether the discursive is merely a gesture toward the recuperation of ideas, places, and values. The discursive frame may merely be playing out various recuperative projects that are tacitly encouraged within a terrain of closure and globalization simultaneously.
Again, the potential of the discursive framework is a combination of the out of reach and the too close simultaneously. Art functions as a structural parallel to the dilemmas of contemporary work.