Monday, August 30, 2010

SI vs WK

I previously used this citation in my last blog for Social Relations where Raunig quotes and expands Guattari. It reverberates with this centralized idea of the term 'revolutionary' and placed against the context of contemporary art practice that embraces 'socialpolitical activism/intervention' for beneficial change. Here it is again -

"The problem that Guattari deals with in his first machine text, written briefly after the experience of 1968, is the problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices:" "The revolutionary project as the machinization of an institutional subversion would have to uncover these kinds of subjective possibilities and ensure them ahead of time in every stage of struggle against being being 'structuralized.' Yet this kind of permanent check of the machine effects that affect the structures could never be satisfied with a 'theoretical practice.' It requires the development of a specific analytical practice, which immediately applies to every step of organizing the struggle."

(Raunig, Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations [Chapter - Excursus On Machines] in 'Art & Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century,' 2007. p.147)

Yes, I know it's a long quote but it's relevant if we look and contrast the two different approaches from two different socialpolitical periods and spheres - and how a contemporary collective practice system navigates their way through a system of state apparatus bureaucracy to 'revolutionize' a process that instigates an effective process for socialpolitical effective alteration (which is that of WochenKlausur). In juxtaposition we can place SI on the opposing end in its mechanism for change highlights this 'problem of a lasting revolutionary organization' while WK embodies and through a systematized approach weaving into the many institutions of power/control ie art-machine, government, etc remains as a somewhat (possibly) lasting and ongoing 'revolutionary' approach. We would normally signify the term revolutionary with direct confrontation that ends in a significant way, hypothetically though and even though not as directly oppositional the term revolutionary could be applied to a concept that is subtle and uses institutional mechanisms to assist in creating an art-object which is conceptually patterned on a type of 'activism'. The machine that WockenKlausur is, doesn't necessarily transform itself into a state or party structure it howevers uses or appropriates the vehicle of the state or party structure to apprehend areas of concern - framed by this idea of 'socialpolitical intervention/activist art'. A subtle yet highly effective 'instituent [collective] pracitce' that may circumvent the notion of a temporary revolutionary organization? A lasting 'step of organizing the struggle'? Lasting 'institutional subversion'?

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