Maybe it’s possible to explain the discursive cultural framework within a context of difference and collectivity, “difference” being the key word that defines our time and “collectivity” being the thing that is so hard to achieve while frequently being so longed for. We have to negotiate and recognize difference and collectivity simultaneously. It is an aspect of social consciousness that is exemplified in the art context. Difference and collectivity as social definitions and processes of recognition feed from the examples of modern and contemporary art. Art is nurtured and encouraged in return via cultural permission to be the space for what cannot be tolerated but can be accommodated under the conditions of neoliberal globalization.
Difference and collectivity are semiautonomous concepts in an art context. The logic of their pursuit leads us to the conclusion that we should destroy all traditional relations of production in order to encourage a constant recognition of disagreement and profoundly different aims within a context of desire. The focus of the discursive is more on the aims and structural efficacy of the cultural exercise than on what is produced. In turn, what is produced operates in parallel, unfettered by the requirement to be the total story.
So all of this is problematized by the idea of nostalgia for the group. Art provides a reflection of values, yet within the discursive this is inextricably related to role playing as part of an educational legacy of cooperation. We are sometimes in thrall to structures from the recent past that were not supposed to be a model for anything. Some of the structures that we use, as cultural producers, echo a past that was part of a contingent set of accommodations and dynamic stresses within the postwar social project. And around this there remain old relationships of production that still exist outside complex theories of the postindustrial that are at the heart of postwar developed societies. The discursive thrives when we are increasingly alienated from sites of traditional production owing to the displacing effects of globalization and the increasing tendency toward infinite subcontracting. Struggles over ideas at the site of production still exist, but they are constantly displaced and projected—the struggles are reported but are sometimes resistant to identification across borders within a context that offers an excessive assertion of specificities and tense arguments on the left about how to accept difference and protect the local.
We can see how this developed and left traces in the culture. Consider the history of the French Groupe Medvedkin, who made films between 1967 and 1974 in the context of factories and other sites of production. They worked, filmed, and agitated at the Lipp watch factory in France and subsequently in the Peugeot factory in Sochaux. What you see very clearly in these films is a shift that is mirrored in the dominant art context. From today’s perspective, when looking at one of their films shot in 1967 you cannot see any superficial or linguistic set of differences between the people who are running the factory, the people who are working in the factory, and the people who are criticizing the factory from the outside. They are from the same culture. Physically, they look the same as one another. There are detailed differences that can be determined, but these are nuanced and require acute class consciousness from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. The effects of postcolonialism have not yet shifted the source of cheap labor from the various colonies to the neighborhood of the consumer. But by 1974, the film
With the Blood of Others opens with a group of longhaired activists wearing old military jackets standing outside the factory gates. They are attempting to play as a brass band to a group of silent, clearly embarrassed, primarily North African immigrant car workers. Through this series of films you see a clarification and separation of aesthetics in terms of identification, language, and techniques of protest. Simultaneously, you see a clear drop in easy communication. Modes of address have separated. You have different groupings talking, but only within each group. Each group has developed a sophisticated role-playing function in relation to the others. They demonstrate “positions” to the others. This shift toward the notion of a public faced by a complex display of self-conscious role playing is familiar within an art context. It does not lack insincerity; it does not lack genuine political engagement; it is a functional parallel.
The question is how to develop a discursive project without becoming an experimental factory and without slipping into a set of conditions that lead to certain redundancy. It is the attempt to hold the collective on this brink that energizes the discursive context. We have created the conditions for the experimental, but no actual experiments. Or vice versa. The discursive is peopled by artists who increasingly accept a large number of permanently redundant citizens and who have come to terms with the notion of the permanently part-time worker in the face of the permanently educated artist. Microcommunities of redundancy have joined together to play with the difference between art time and work time.
The discursive is linked to the question of who is managing time. We have to address the reduction of leisure as a promise and a marker in the postwar period. My grandfather’s questions always concerned what I would do with all the leisure I would have in the future. And the question now is: how do you know how much leisure you are having? The museum and the art center are connected to the leisure-promise legacy and connected to a democratization of style. Control of time was traditionally the dominant managerial tool and rightly challenged. Self-management has subsequently become generalized in a postindustrial environment. It’s the way even mundane jobs are advertised now. The idea has been put forth that it is essentially better to manage your own time within a framework that involves limitless amounts of work, with no concrete barrier between working and nonworking. This is something that underscores the discursive frame. It is the potentially neurotic, anxiety-provoking situation we find cultural producers operating within. This is something that has superficial advantages and clear disadvantages. The notion of permanent soft pressure, which finds form via the computer and digital media—a soft pressure to manage your own time in relationship to broader networks.
The discursive demonstrates a neurotic relationship to the management of time as a negatively activated excess of discussion, discourse, and hanging around. So maybe we have to think about revised languages of production within the context of self-management. The rise of teamwork and networks is linked to the denial of the location of complex and disturbing old-school production relationships that still exist as a phantom for progressive thinkers. Discursive art contexts are intended to go beyond an echo or mirroring of simple relations of production via small, multiple, flexible groupings, but they are subject to the same complexities that afflict any self-managed environment, even when they refuse to create a timetable.
The shift is away from common ground between people to common ground between what is produced and toward the idea that if we ignore things and follow an ideology instead then something will happen. One of the great potentials of art in the culture is that it attends to structural factors. At some level it reinvents or reconfigures structure. The discursive field attempts to escape by providing the potential to identify critical positions in a structural or general way rather than reproduce commodity anecdotes within the artwork itself. But, as I just said above, it is peopled by those who increasingly accept a large number of permanently redundant citizens and who have come to terms with the notion of the permanently part-time worker in the face of the permanently educated artist. Within the discursive, the notion of self-improvement is ideologically specific; it comes with a philosophy connected to postwar power structures. The notion of continual and permanent education is used in different cultures in order to escape what are actually clear political differences to do with class, situation, and power. It is the promise to the poor child as a way to get out of bad conditions. Working situations are not changed; the idea is that
you have to change. The notion of flexibility within the workplace is a way to encourage people to rationalize their own disappearance or redundancy when necessary.