INSTITUTION AS PUBLIC SPACE
for Thinking through Institutions, NUI Galway FIONA WOODS FEB 2013
The theme of my paper takes two social forms, the Institution and Public Space, and proposes a relationship between them, at a moment when these forms and the kinds of relations and spaces that they represent, are mutating at an accelerated pace. At stake in this theme is a question about the kinds of social relations that we are capable of instituting or imagining at this moment in time. One problem that arises in discussion about this is that the terms themselves are used so broadly as to generate a lot of slippage in meaning. So for my contribution I want to reflect on certain meanings associated with the terms, and how those meanings are shifting, as a way to think about this proposed relationship and the implications for cultural practice. Institutions are complex systems, made up of architectures and procedures. I’m going to focus on one aspect of institutions, which is the way they function as mechanisms to shape social relations. The kinds of social relations that they generate arise from the practices, the representations and the discourses that they produce, which is to say from their ways of instituting. Irish Water is a semi-state body, newly instituted to manage a common resource and to develop a vital infrastructure. Privatisation of water is a global drive, with organisations like the World Bank actively pushing for private-public delivery of water in developing countries. However, Water is a basic human need, understood by many to be a basic human right. Matters of governance and of common interest are involved, which makes it a very relevant site for a consideration of institution as public space in this moment. The kind of mechanism that this institution Irish Water is, in terms of a shaping of social processes and relations, is wonderfully apparent in a short ad that they produced in 2013, as part of their awareness campaign. The purpose of this 50 second film, as you will see, is to take a set of ideas about water, about the concept of natural resources, about community and citizenship, about commodification and publicness – and to rework those ideas through a particular frame of value. The value-laden form of those ideas is then re-presented as though they were depoliticised matters of common-sense, which is of course exactly how ideology works. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mlis3r07g]
A lot of ideological material is packed into that short film, using visual codes/ audio textures / and the packaging of ideas as narrative and spoken text. The two primary visual codes that I have found are transparency and a kind of general whiteness. There are two non-white people but they are mostly hidden by white things. The underlying suggestion of the visual and audio narrative in the opening section seems to be that nature cannot be relied upon to provide, that water is part of a scarcity economy. The slight sense of anxiety, instability and threat is underscored by the descending notes of the opening music which begins to ascend once the water enters the sphere of technology. The spoken text presents two sets of ideas that are particularly relevant to my argument. The first is the obvious attempt to naturalise the process of commodification, of subjecting a commons like water to market rules. The other important ideological statement comes at the end, when water is described as ‘Ireland’s most valuable resource, after its people’. The Irish people are not defined as citizens or as a public, but as a resource. That’s a fairly significant rewriting of ideas about publicness and democracy. The other social form I’m addressing here is public space, which broadly speaking refers to a mesh of interwoven political and economic interests, relations and cultures of the everyday. As a concept public space is pretty complex, shading off into related concepts like the public realm and the public sphere, which are neither especially distinct as phenomena nor identical or interchangeable. Matters of power, matters of discourse and matters of space are entangled together in different ratios in each of those terms. In general public is a value term, used to refer broadly to ideals associated with democracy, including the matter of common interest. It is a term that crops up regularly in political and media discourse, suggesting that it is somehow integral to the way that our society functions. However, as Simon Sheikh has pointed out, public is a historical term based on 19th C ideas of citizenship and subjectivity that do not necessarily correspond to the type of social formation in which we find ourselves right now (Sheikh 2008).
Technically the definition of public realm is a territory in which the public is sovereign, but common usage of the term now refers to areas to which the public has access. That shift from the principle of sovereignty to one of mere access reflects a more general erosion of the public functions of the State through the political-economic processes that are grouped under the term neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism is effectively a concrete restructuring of the world of social interaction and experience: neoliberal ways of instituting prioritise efficiency over other values, like equality or publicness. The ideological production of that short film is not only about preparing the population to accept Irish Water; it’s part of a broader programme to define the conditions of how we might think about the common, to naturalise a private-public paradigm in the place of the public realm. The process of subjecting matters of common interest to market rules, which I touched in relation the phenomenon of water, is also very visible in the educational institutions. Contemporary education is being reshaped as a strategy to accumulate economic, social and cultural capital which enables individuals to position themselves in a competitive international market. The self is being refashioned as an enterprise which must retain a competitive edge, that’s the real meaning of life-long learning. Education is becoming a major site in the formation of neoliberal subjectivities, far removed from an idea of education as an emancipatory tool, or as the passing of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next, which has long been understood as a common good. The Book Bloc protests grasped exactly the need to give a representational form to the state’s attacks on education in the production of these shields. The gradual saturation of social and common life with the logic of the market has implications for the public sphere, which in theory is supposed to function as a kind of buffer zone between private interests, the market and the state, a free space in which to debate matters of common interest with a view to speaking back to power. The very idea of THE public sphere as a coherent, inclusive or transparent unity has always been a utopian fiction however. From its inception in the Ancient Greek agora, the public sphere was based on mechanisms of exclusion. Throughout the modern era, substantial social groups including women and workers were excluded from the space of public opinion formation, as were vital social issues like the material conditions of production, reproduction and sexuality. Nancy Fraser theorised a multiplicity of public and counterpublic spheres co-existing and interacting (Fraser 1990). There are conflicting views on whether the internet constitutes a public space or a public sphere, whether its inclusive and participatory character creates a democratic forum or whether the clamour of
The Book Bloc, demonstration against cuts in education, London 2010
circulating opinion masks the difficulty of speaking back to power, functioning as a kind of repressive tolerance that Paulo Virno calls publicness without a public sphere (Virno 2004: 40). In 1972 the German theorists Negt and Kluge argued that Habermas' reflections on the bourgeois public sphere needed to be supplemented with reflections on what they called the public spheres of production and the proletarian public spheres (Negt and Kluge 1993). The latter was conceived by Negt and Kluge not necessarily as spheres of the proletariat, but as the leftovers from the dominant public sphere, the excluded, vague, unarticulated impulses of resistance or resentment that arise from a discontent with official public narrative. There are some great examples of this to be seen in anti-water charges protest materials, I’ve put together an ad hoc collection of some of these. There are a number of interesting things going on here in relation to the idea of talking back to power. I’m sure that some of you are familiar with the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the medieval carnival, the function of which was to temporarily invert the social order, permitting subjects to mock and denigrate authority for a limited time. His study included a chapter about laughter, in which he argued that in resisting hypocrisy "laughing truth... degraded power" (Bakhtin 1963). Bakhtin described this as an unleashing of the people’s power, which was not merely intended to mock but to regenerate the entire social system. Another idea of Bakhtin’s that seems relevant here is that of Grotesque Realism, the principle of which is also degradation. The grotesque body is a comic figure of profound ambivalence, associated with primal needs like eating, drinking, defecating and sex. What we are seeing in these communications is a form of speaking-back-topower in terms contrary to institutional narratives. People know that language is vulnerable to distortion and appropriation by powerful interests, and that the terms of public debate are often framed within unacknowledged ideologies. These protests use a degraded language of the grotesque that refuses those narratives.
Staying with the idea of protest as a form of speaking back to power, this is The Standing Man, as it became known, which took place about two weeks into the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013, after three days of particularly brutal police repression of demonstrations. This was the night of June 17th and the normally busy Taksim Square was strangely quiet and empty, following waves of mass arrests that had cleared the streets. Erdem Gßndßz entered the square, put his hands in his pockets, and stood still and silent, staring pointedly towards a representation of Kemal Ataturk. Within hours he had been joined by hundreds of others. This spontaneous choreography of vulnerable, precarious agency by visibly weak subjects was a form of speaking back to power that refused speech altogether, a counter public rendered mute by the ideological capture of language in the dominant public sphere. The demand for recognition as citizens was based on nothing but the raw, undefended presence of bodies in public space. Theorists like Ranciere and Zizek have used the term post-political to describe the foreclosure of radical and active equality that results from neoliberal enclosures, whether linguistic, spatial or otherwise. In the post-political context, the term public becomes a term under erasure; we can’t do without the term, but what it signifies is somehow inadequate for the circumstances. Simon Sheikh has used the arguably more practical term post-public, not in the sense of being after public, but as a critical re-examination of the leitmotifs and basic modalities of publicness (Sheikh 2008: 35). To review the points that I have been making so far, first of all I am putting forward a widely held view that the dominant social institutions, in their ways of instituting, are becoming or have already become, mechanisms to shape social relations primarily in the terms of the market. The second point that I have been making is that under neoliberalism, democracy is effectively decoupled from the principle of equality and it has become increasingly difficult to speak back to power in these conditions. To continue to use the term public in the context of these changes may blind us to the challenged and possibilities of the emerging conditions captured by the term post-publicness, I said at the outset that the subtext of this theme was the kinds of social relations that we are capable of instituting or imagining at this time, which brings me to my final point. Informal ways of instituting in the field of cultural practice are often synonymous with a search for forms of agency that can withstand or refuse the onslaught of marketization. I want to look at some of the
ways that cultural practices raise or address questions about this kind of agency through the exploitation or the creation of gaps or cracks in conditions of post-publicness. If we take the space in public space literally, we have to understand that space is not an empty container but something that is both productive of and produced through social relations. A lot of urban development is characterised by what Steven Flusty called Paranoid Space, which is made jittery and prickly and slippery by design according to Flusty (1994). These constructions of paranoid space work against the gathering and mingling of bodies necessary for publicness. In opposition to this, many spatial practitioners worldwide are working to produce hybrid, porous and flexible spaces that function as urban commons, producing ‘publics’ and sustained processes of collective agency. The Park Fiction project began in 1994, evolving out of a campaign by a resident's association against the development of a site in the harbour area of Hamburg. Through an incredibly lengthy collective planning process the association managed to have a public park put in place of the proposed private residential development. One of the most successful strategies was to act as if a park already existed. To this end, the group organised a series of public events in the site, including exhibitions, open-air screenings, concerts and talks about what a park could be. The continual use of the space as a 'park' by residents and visitors made the park a social reality; equally the space in question produced that public. Park Fiction was not aiming for an orderly process of alternative urban planning, but the opening of ‘a wild process of desire production’, at the intersection of the everyday and the imaginary, to quote the artist Christoph Schafer (in Raunig 2007). Drawing on the idea of Desire as a productive, revolutionary force, following Deleuze and Guattari (1972), the Collective Production of Desires was a key concept of the Park Fiction process (Park Fiction 2006). The desire in this case is envisaged as a force that lies between people rather than in individuals. That Desiring-Production can lead to a kind of excess, intruding into the ontologically or politically stable order of things; hence its revolutionary character.
Park Fiction, 1994 – present, Hamburg, Germany.
Athi-Patra Ruga, The Future White Woman of Azania left 2012 (South Africa) /right 2013 (Venice Biennale)
The second mode of practice that I want to talk about is different from the first in many ways. By way of an introduction, I want to read you a quote from The Queer Art of Failure, by Judith Halberstam; ‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well’ (Halberstam 2011: 2). Queer activists have always had to put their bodies on the line in the production and performance of contrary desires. This work by the South African artist, Athi Patra-Ruga, combines that embodied interrogation of issues of gender and sexuality with a postcolonial sensibility in his articulation of the first world/ third world dynamic that operates in South Africa. Hidden transcripts of domination and subordination overlap in this work, to do with race, with gender and with geopolitics. When this work was restaged for the Venice Biennale, it seemed strangely deflated to me, in spite of being more elaborate and extravagant. I thought about it quite a bit. I looked at it from the point of view of aesthetics; in terms of the spectacle/art market and in relation to colonial re-appropriation, but none of those explanations satisfied me. It wasn’t until I examined what was going on in a quite different work that I began to understand what I was seeing here. That work was Silence of the Sheep by the Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. She led a group of people, mostly men, volunteers and hired workers, crawling on their hands and knees across one of the main intersections in Cairo. Kenawy’s intention was partly to address the complaisance of the Egyptian populace in the face of corruption and dictatorship; this was well before the Tehrir Square protests. It is reported that the performance was badly received by the people of Cairo (Wilson-Goldie 2011). The procession was followed by a jostling, heckling crowd who challenged the artist and the performers in fairly hostile language, leading to a bit of a fracas and the arrest of the artist and many of the performers. What made this act socially unacceptable had to do with specific local conditions, which are interesting, but they are not the focus of my argument. I am interested more generally in the way that the raw presence of these bodies in space activated the
Amal Kenawy, 2009, Silence of the Sheep Video, 8:51 min (loop), colour, sound
police order, not necessarily the police-as-such, but what Ranciere describes as the order which determines what can be seen and what can be said through a classification of bodies that allocates ways of doing, ways of saying and ways of being, maintaining patterns of inclusion and exclusion (Ranciere 2004) . Looking again at the restaging of Patra-Ruga’s work in Venice, I realised that what made the work so flat, for me, was that the police order which it might aggravate in other contexts was put on hold. In the institutional space of art, of which the Venice Biennale is a prime example, the police order is in a state of relative suspension, and while that has benefits in terms of creating a space for experimentation, it also insulates the work of art from the systemic violence that operates elsewhere, including the systemic violence implied by public under erasure. The risks associated with provoking the police order can be very high, but the risks of not provoking the police order start to look like acquiescence. Post-public is a condition of diminishing equality but it is not a uniform condition. There are points where the police order is more benign and points where it is more vicious. There are points where negotiation with power is possible, and points where hidden transcripts can be brought to the surface. Political ways of instituting seem more likely, in current conditions, to emerge from friction than from consensus. In cultural discourse there is a lot of talk about dissent and even playing-at-dissent, which is made possible by the suspension of the police order that I referred to. However, practices of dissent, cultural and otherwise, are bringing their desiring-productions out from the relative shelter of institutions, risking confrontation with all that we understand by the term police. REFERENCE LIST Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1965, Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 1972, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London and New York: Continuum.
Flusty, S. 1994, Building paranoia: the proliferation of interdictory space and the erosion of spatial justice, West Hollywood, CA.: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Fraser, Nancy, 1990, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80, Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack /Judith 2011, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press. Irish Water/ Uisce Eireann, 2013, TV Advert, [Online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mlis3r07g Negt, Oskar and Kluge, Alexander, 1993, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, with a foreword by Miriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff, London: University of Minnesota Press. Park Fiction, 2006, Productions of Desires [online], http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/parkfiction/desires/index.html Ranciere, Jacques, 2004, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Contiuum. Raunig, G. 2007, Institutent Practices No. 2, Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting, trans. Aileen Derieg, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/raunig/en Ray, Gene, 2011, Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror, in Raunig, G. Ray, G, and Ulf Wuggenig (eds), 2011, Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’, London: May Fly Books. Scott, James C. 1990, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New York: Yale University Press. Sheikh, Simon, 2008, Publics and Post-Publics; The Production of the Social in Open 2008, No. 14: Art as a Public Issue. How Art and Its Institutions Can Reinvent the Public Dimension http://www.skor.nl/eng/site/item/open-14-art-as-a-public-issue-how-artand-its-institutions-can-reinvent-the-public-dimension?single=1#sthash.xhHGHHmg.dpuf Virno, Paulo, 2004, A Grammar of the Multitude; For an analysis of contemporary forms of life, trans. Bertoletti, I. Cascaito, J. Casson, A. New York: Semiotext(e).
Wolff, G. (Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security), 2004, The risks and benefits of globalization and privatisation of fresh water in Cabrera and Cobacho (eds), 2005, Challenges of the New Water Policies for the XXI Century, Taylor and Francis e-library. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, 2011, To the Streets, Frieze Issue 139, May 2011, [Online] http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/to-thestreets/