Chapter 4 Section 2- Local responses to global power: At the cusp of boundaries

Chris Salter argues in his paper"THE KULTURSTAAT IN THE TIME OF EMPIRE Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"(1) that

"capitalism “produces producers.” In short, in bioproduction, capitalism is the ultimate autopoietic machine. It not only produces commodities, it produces new forms of subjectivities and social relations to consume and reproduce these commodities, constructing and catalyzing economic, social, and cultural life in an endless self- reproducing cycle.(Salter p.2)"

His discussion centers on the decline of state support for culture— he focuses on both 'prestige ' institutions and more challenging organisations in the realm of performance, such as the Deautsche opera and the Frankfurt ballet—and how this is an aesthetic response to global capitalism. While allowing that this has challenged German cultural practices, heavily dependent on state sponsorship, Salter argues that a new generation of german artist is now embracing  "DIY" artistic practices(Salter p. 13). To be sure he also presents resistances from the kulturstat which both rejects 21st century artistic practice and defends a 19th century sensibility that suggests these new practices and the economic milieu out of which it arises as "American"(Salter p.9-10).

This critic of new artistic practices is not essentially supported by Salter's analysis. He suggests that these resistances are both restrictive, as they ignore the current social environment, and counterproductive to artistic goals that challenge and supersede the concept of Empire as a monolithic structure that endlessly encompasses what various discussions, including his, Hart and Negri's and seminally, Michel Foucault's, as biopower. Salter asserts that biopower can indeed turn and rupture the apparently all-encompassing force of Empire  and that examples of that  demonstrate how. The scope of his paper, however does not give detailed analysis of how such ruptures are achieved.

His specific examples include works by German director/artist Christoph Schlingensief, such as Church of Fear, presented at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Functioning both in (experimental) theatre, political theater(Schlingensief ran for Chancellor in 2000) and experimenting with 'low culture'(does that include mass market video game?) this German artist presents a specific example of art work that moves beyond early modern models of artistic production into more contemporary situations. As salter puts it "Schlingensief’s blend of political/aesthetic action combined with popular entertainment and trash culture embodies much of what is common across the Berlin performance and visual art worlds. Soap operas, TV talk shows and the like provide the content and context for many “off theatre” and performance troupes who exist outside of the stadttheater scene as well as for the less established visual arts scene."(Salter p. 12)
Looking closely at Schlingensief's body of work, we see similarities in his concerns between regional interpretations of state power, with Schlingensief's work rooted in German concerns as Bilal's are in Iraq, but both addressing American expressions of power in an age of global capital.


including avoiding the triumphalism of what is often characterised as American capitalism that seems to arise within the critique of that economic system when we look at writings about Empire.










__________________________
(1)Salter, Chris. "The Kulturstaat in the Time of Empire: Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"
 in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 77 (Volume 26, Number 2), May 2004, pp. 1-15

Chapter1 Section 5 Spaces of Conflict within Empire

Bilal describes his reaction to a 2007 TV interview with a young soldier who operated a robotic drone from her base in Colorado(1). She trusted the information and orders that she received causing her to launch missile attacks or guide other aircraft to attacks the targets she had acquired. This in turn filled Bilal with feelings of hatred and rage, as a similar remotely guided attack had killed his brother Haji. Yet, Bilal was able to reflect that these were "mostly just kids caught up in a cycle of greed and power they don't understand"(2)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer an analysis of this when the assert "the passage to  post-modernity  and Empire prohibits any such compartmentalization of the life world and immediately presents communication, production and life as one complex whole, an open site of conflict"(3) Hardt and Negri see this conflict as a creative militancy linked to biopower and as such inevitably functions within a world that knows no outside(4). Thus this attachment to the means of production means that the resistance of Bilal's 'virtual human shield' is analogous to the deployment of young cyber soldiers, as with the young drone pilot just mentioned. 

Empire is greatly predicated on production becoming the result of communication and on the absorption of  all spaces into Empire(5). In contrast to traditional Marxist analysis, Hardt and Negri assert there are no exterior spaces for capitalism to exploit; rather it must create new spaces within itself. However, the possibility of these spaces also offer a place for the "uncontainable rhizomes" through which the Multitude reappropriates fresh spaces that realise the desire of the multitude to construct concurrent freedoms(6). Hardt and Negri present the movement of workers from Mexico into the USA as an example of the contradictions of Empire, in that it requires the labour to function, but can only attempt to control it by rendering it illegal(7). At the same time they characterise the free circulation of biopower, of the proletariat, of people as a fundamental freedom desired by the multitude. Thus the networks of biopower serves both Empire and the Multitude that resists it.
 





1. Bilal p.10
2. ibid
3. Hardt, Michael &Antonio Negri.  Empire, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass & London, 2000. p. 404
4. ibid p. 413 
5. ibid p. 404
6. ibid p. 397
7. ibid p. 399

My proposed thesis

Domestic Tensions: The Politics of Sense in Gamic Space.
A thesis proposal by Adam van Sertima, July 2010

    In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière has argued that we need to rethink aesthetics as “the invention of new forms of life”. The notion of life is necessarily informed by an embodied and hence a spatial element. However, spatiality, the experience of embodiment in space occurs at a subjective level. One’s sense of space has now been expanded to include digital spaces. Contemporary artist Wafaa Bilal’s performance work, Domestic Tension(2007), and his subsequent digital work Virtual Jihadi(2008)  explore the mediated space by referencing digital games and recontextualising the experience in reference to the banality of violence that wracked his native Iraq through three wars and ongoing internecine conflict.

    Wafaa Bilal was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966. He pursued his artistic career from his youth in Iraq, often critiquing the Baathist regime of Saddaam Hussein in his paintings. After enduring the home front effects of the Iran/Iraq war, and the two Gulf wars, he fled Iraq and eventually settled in the United States. He continued both his studies and artistic practice there, eventually teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

    Domestic Tension was a thirty one day performance installed at FlatFile Galleries in Chicago in 2007. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal essentially confined himself to the gallery space. During the performance, people had 24-hour virtual access to Bilal via the Internet. They had the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Viewers also had the option to shoot at Bilal with a remote controlled paintball gun. Thus in many ways this performance is similar to First Person Shooter (FPS)digital games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009) where the audience wields a gun visible on the other side of a screen and can interact with each other by VOIP and chat technologies. This game, like Domestic Tension, also features the experience of shooting at an unarmed non-combatant, in its controversial opening game play sequence. A similar dissonance was visible in Bilal’s relationship to his performance piece, sometimes considering it as a “fun game”(Bilal & Lyderson 2008. p21) and other times as a work of art with the goal of making a point(ibid p.75).

    Bilal personally documented his work, especially Domestic Tension, by video blogging daily from the performance space. He also expanded on his personal history and artistic biography with the publication of his memoir Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun(2009). As a digital art work, existing both in “meat space” and cyber space, Domestic Tension provided an unusual perspective on its audience, as it offered the chance to interact directly with the artist via chat room, as the performance unfolded. Moreover, it reached a much broader audience than contemporary performance art might. By publicising the performance on websites such as Paint Ball Nation(www.pbnation.com) Bilal attracted an audience otherwise disconnected from contemporary art practices. Moreover, he compiled a large array of responses that ranged from “I hope you die in the next 9/11” to “...I can learn a bit from you and maybe we made you think a bit, too”(ibid p.128-130). In this respect, Domestic Tension was extremely successful in achieving one of Bilal’s stated goals of reaching and engaging with an audience “beyond the normal art world... who would never step into a gallery or go to an anti-war protest”(ibid p.11)

    In Games of Empire Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue that digital games serve as one method of controlling what Michel Foucault describes as biopower(Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009.p.). Briefly, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter make the case that as a project of late capitalism, digital games function as training and harnessing systems.
     I see this thesis as addressing three overarching questions, each suggesting a chapter with a concluding chapter examining how Domestic Tension exhibits a resistance to the social force of “Empire”.
The three questions are:

1. What is the relationship of art work to video game as mediated by Domestic Tension?

2. How do spaciality and linear perspective relate to domestic tension? How do linear perspective and spaciality contribute to an Imperial visuality and spaciality?

 3. How do the formal aspects of virtual games negotiate deployment by and resistance to the concept Empire that is discussed by Dyer-Witheford and de Peuyter?


One element of the subjective experience of mediated or digital life is what has been called immersion. As in a paper I will be presenting in August, I will attempt to show a connection between attic theatre, as conceived of by Friedrich Nietszche, and the experience of playing digital music games such as RockBand(Harmonix 2007). Then I will attempt to argue for a similar connections between Domestic Tension and digital games such as Modern Warfare2.

Does art constitute a space of play- and how does this answer relate to Domestic Tension? How successfully does Domestic Tension and Bilal's subsequent work, Virtual Jihadi resist or reify empire?

Bibliography:

Bilal, Wafaa and Kari Lydersen. Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun. San Francisco. City Lights. 2008.

Dyer- Witheford, Nick and Greig de Peuter Games Of Empire: Global Capitalism And Video Games. Minneapolis, London. University of Minnesota Press. 2009