The Institution between Precarization and Participation

Abstract

The position of the art institution today is reflected through the perspective of the relation between two notions, precarisation and participation, which are simultaneously discussed in the contemporary performance and visual art in the recent years. Art institutions are involved in the normalisation of precarity and in many cases became an example for the new modes of working and production of sociality. They are deeply embedded in the constant exposure of vulnerability as a main social capital: not only that many of them are working with a very badly paid or voluntary working force, but they also work under extremely vulnerable and unstable conditions, which demands the constant implication of measures of protection. To protect their own vulnerability they have to continuously reach out, develop themselves as social places, as the unique place of precarious experience, and therefore invent new forms for the exposure of sociality, give the form to this glittering force of human productivity. The link between precarisation of artistic experience and governmental precarisation, which finds today its most visible form in the rise of participatory events and exhibition of sociality. We are more and more surrounded with ´responsiblé institutions, which could be only exposed as social places because of the meticulous normative procedures, excellent logistical skill and top-off curatorial management.

In this text I would like to reflect about the position of the contemporary art institution, especially on the role of contemporary art institutions and institutions which are developing contemporary performance practice. I would like to reflect upon this role with the help of the relation between two notions, which even if they are describing different political and cultural phenomena have nevertheless been simultaneously discussed in contemporary performance and visual art in recent years.

Precarization describes the neo-liberal act of governance that governs through social insecurity, flexibility and continuous fear arising from the loss of stability. Precarization is also at the core of the specific production of subjectivity, where ontological aspects of subjectivity (its potentiality, vulnerability, temporality, inclination to change) are economized. Consequently, precarization as such becomes one of the main forms of social existence. Here I follow the reflections of Isabelle Lorey (2015), who writes that we can observe the normalization of precarization in the last decades.That means that precarization does not only concern the margins of society, but, rather, it appears everywhere, and its main symptom is the general sense of insecurity going together with the political and economic development in the last decades.

The other notion, participation, describes the specific turn that can be observed in visual art and performance from the middle of the 1990s onwards. Beside reawakening the emancipatory potential of arts (especially in the times of the political crisis of participation in general), participation is tightly related to the disclosure of the different notion of the audience and an un-working of the ‘traditional’ aesthetic experience of a work of art (in visual art, resistance to the single experience of art; in performance, the un-working of the organized and passive community of spectators). Through participatory projects the audience constitutes itself as the mass of dispersed, non-organized singularities, who can form temporary alliances, ephemeral communities and fragile movements, and has a constitutive role also in the precarious, dispersed, however nevertheless always shared, experience of the work of art. Participation is often defended as the contra-movement to the unified, elitist or guided artistic experience of the work of art. It is very often seen as the opening into the more affective, non-hierarchical and entangled position of the audience members in relation to the work of art, which consequently also changes the position of the institution itself.

I am aware that there are many aspects of these notions, but in this text I would like to concentrate on the strange coincidence between recent discussions of precarization and participation, where this affective, vulnerable, shared, dispossessed, dispersed experience is at the centre, either being the experience of the self, or being the experience of the work of art. My question is: what is politically and culturally at work here in this coincidence? How can we draw a line between those shifts and not fall into the trap of differentiating between good and bad participation, the political and the spectacular one, the real and the fake one? This question is particularly interesting for cultural institutions that want to be strongly involved in the rethinking of community and the development of participatory events. There exists a specific inclination, an affective tendency at work in contemporary institutionalized production of art that has, in one way or another, to prove that the audience has been reached, awoken and somehow shaken. This should happen either through social models of inclusion or working with the communities and through making art available for many different ways of experience that all go against traditional modes of observation. We can of course think about this need from many different perspectives: one reason could be the troubles with political participation in general and the deep problems with emancipatory political and cultural practices that we have today. Art institutions, therefore, become places for the exposure of forgotten political and social practices – a place for their nostalgic remembrance and musealization. Boris Buden (2009) wrote about such historization when analysing the role that art had in the production of sociality at the time when the social as we knew it in the last century actually disappeared. But can we relate between the inclination of the art institutions to become social places and the strange coincidence between precarity and participation? What has this call to the audience, the exploration of their social and affective flow and activity, this tendency to reach communities or even becoming the place of the communal itself, to do with the general feeling of instability of life that is at work in contemporary society? How does it arise that this coincidence is also defining many of the art institutions today – not only the ways in which they are organized and financed, but also how they understand themselves and how they disclose their symbolic role?

To understand that we must delve deeper into the processes of precarization, and here we will help ourselves with distinctions drawn by the political philosopher Isabell Lorey. In her recent book, State of Insecurity: Government of the precarious, Isabell Lorey differentiates between three dimensions of precarious in order to show the new structural position of precarity in contemporary neo-liberal society. First comes the term ‘precariousness’, which mainly denotes the socio-ontological dimension. We can say that life is always precarious; there is always vulnerability, and someone's life is never completely autonomous but always demands another's life for protection. Such understanding is very close to the notion of precariousness as developed by Judith Butler, writing about existential vulnerability as a condition of human life, which is always there with our birth. Initial survival always depends on the other; life does not exist autonomously but requires social support.

The second dimension of precarious according to Lorey can be subsumed under the notion of precarity. Precarity actually denotes ‘structural inequalities – uncertainties that result from relations of domination along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality’ (2011). In this sense, some lives are more precarious than others, because precarity comes from certain structures of dominations, and here we are already talking about precarity as a political and not ontological concept.

To that, Lorey adds the third level of precarity, which she names ‘governmental precarisation’. Governmental precarisation refers ‘to governmentality in democratic– capitalist societies and the governable biopolitical subjectivizations emerging with it’ (Lorey 2015). Here precarity is intertwined with what governing means today: governing through continuous precarization establishes social links, structures, relations and dynamics in society precisely with the production of a pertinent feeling of insecurity, which is always combined with the fear of the insecurity itself. Lorey namely writes that governmental precarization does not only mean ‘destabilization through wage labour, but also a destabilization of ways of living and hence of bodies’ (Lorey 2015). The production of instability that comes from governmental precarization is internally related to the continuous production of measures to protect and survey. This is, according to Lorey, deeply related to the bio-political governance, or if we speak with the words of Lazzarato, to the production of subjectivity in contemporary society, which is at the centre of contemporary economic and political processes. Lazzarato's production of subjectivity hints at the standardization of the social, affective and common aspects of the contemporary human being. These are at the core of production and essentially contribute to the creation of value. They result in a radical individualization as well as a homogenization of subjectivity; the production of the models of subjectivity is at the centre of capitalism (Lazzarato n.d.).

We are experiencing deep changes in the political understanding of precarity – not only that the differences between ontological and political precarity are blurred and precarity is not anymore only related to the margins, but, as Lorey is writing, precarity is normalized as a general political and economic condition. Vulnerability enters the political production and becomes one of the main modes of governing life: like producing subjectivity through the existential fears of insecurity, indebted future, worthless existence, loss of potentiality, constant demand for transformation and flexibility, accelerated time of the self and abstraction of the sensuous matter. Even if it looks at first sight that contemporary subjectivity is independent and always intentional (pure entrepreneurial self, which is managing herself or himself through projects into perfection), this subjectivity is actually governed through strong mechanisms of dependence and subjugation to the structural power of governing. However – and this is a very important point to make – this is a particular sort of dependence that shifted from the ontological condition of dependence enabling us to be with others, from the very fact that lives are inter-dependent to the mode of governing through the vulnerability that constantly protects the subjectivity from the other/ another one. Or, to put it differently: the only possible way to sustain the heavy burden of the normalization of precarity seems to be today the utter protection of the self: the protection from the others who are actually ontologically constitutive for our very being. We can then talk about a kind of ontological disintegration of our very being, destroying the common at the core of our existence – not only the common dependence on others, but the common of land, water, natural surroundings, common modes of expression, and so forth.

From that perspective, the experience of life of contemporary subjectivity can be described as the peculiar experience of a socialized isolation,¹ with pertinent improvement of the communicative, social and affective skills, continuously formulating proposals for the future. At the same time, this subjectivity is being increasingly isolated from production of the common solidarity, with no embodied and haptic co-presence and potentiality of imagination of different political forms than the ones we already know.

The philosopher Jason Read (2010) has described this process from a Marxist point of view as a consequence of a materialization of our collective intelligence in machines (computers, communication networks, and so on), which produces new effects of isolation (there is, of course, no collectivity when different cars are driving on the same highway, or when people are watching the same television programme or clicking the same link, even if there is the same goal at work). This socialized isolation is, I would say, very much an intrinsic affective dynamic of many participatory art projects today: we are social as long as we can constitute ourself not as a social being, but as the emotional and communicative self, which is in its communicability freed of the unpleasant antagonisms and dilemmas of political positioning. Participation is actually disclosed as specific social logistics, where we actually participate as individuals, producing the sociality that is at the same time radically divided from its public articulation.² It could be that some decades ago it was believed that participatory art could awaken the body and the subjectivity from its isolation and disclose art as a place of sociality: this was very often antagonistic sociality, where social connections had to be negotiated and symbolic exchange re-evaluated. But today the problem is that actually the isolation is at the very core of how contemporary subjectivity is social. Many participatory art projects are exactly perpetuating this paradox and giving it a visible (aesthetic) form – a form of a community of the ones who are not dependent on the others, a form that allows people to be together without any consequences for the lives of the involved ones, in a form of a fleeting and dispersed social experience of synchronicity, simultaneity, chaotic dispersal of individualities that nevertheless create a tangible aesthetic and experiential togetherness. This is not so much a critique of participation as it wants to be an observation of the production of sociality that is at work in contemporary art institutions: a sociality that goes perfectly well with contemporary socialized isolation, where being with the other is possible only with a thorough protection of the self.

Apart from socialized isolation, the normalisation of precarity as a model of governance is producing subjectivities constituted through a permanent existential fear. It is then always necessary to secure and care about the protection of the self, subjugating yourself to the multiple procedures of self-immunization to survive (eat properly, manage yourself properly, subjugate the self to the temporality of the project, manage time properly, equip yourself with the proper identity and belonging, exercise properly, institutionalize yourself well, and so forth).

There is a deep contradiction at work in the contemporary production of subjectivity: under the constant demand (necessity) to transform and change the subjectivity, there is also an existential fear from the change at the same time at work; every loss of a job, every change of a job, every economic crisis has deep effects not only on how it is possible to live, but also on who is defined as being worthy of still having a life and whose life becomes worthless. The worthlessness of life is being measured by example with the economic principles of austerity and continuous growth and it is deeply connected to the speculation processes. Accordingly, the entrepreneurial self, which has to transform and adjust itself constantly, is also at the same time immunizing himself or herself, trying to protect the self from possible de-evaluation of his or her very life.

How such self-immunization works today can be very well explained with the help of Foucault's text Self Writing (1997), where he writes about the stoic philosophy of taking care of the self (by, for example, the role of the ancient collections of hypomnemata). One of the basic characteristics of the self was not namely to maintain and protect the self, to self-immunize from the intrusion of dependence from the other or to self-immunize to endure all the social demands put on the subject through the contemporary production modes, but to take care of the self so that the self can become public, that it practices the self through its dependency on the other. This rehearsing of the public self, showed Foucault, demanded a dedicated work, many times in solitude, which again shows how paradoxical is our social and public existence.

The ontological dispossession is today used as a means of domination, which on various levels constitutes a deep feeling of the unworthiness of a human being: our life is disclosed as absolutely vulnerable in a political and economic sense, a life at one's disposal. But when life is at one's disposal, the deep ontological dependence on others is disappearing – or, to say it differently, the existential awareness of our dependence on social structures and modes of sociality to survive. It is crucial here to stress that one of the most important outcomes of the recognition of ontological vulnerability is not that we are vulnerable as human beings, but that we in our vulnerability are actually not alone; we are together with others because life generally is vulnerable, always being-with. Exactly this dimension is lost with the normalization of precarity: life must now remain precarious but at the same time isolated from dependence in the sense that it can be subjugated to the economic mechanisms of protection. The subjectivity must exploit his or her vulnerability in order to economically survive, but this is only possible if contemporary subjectivity constantly immunizes itself. This change can be then described as a kind of ‘self-immunization against all possible forms of precarity’, which instead of opening the vulnerable life towards the other and towards the social, rehearses constant protection of one's own life toward other competing vulnerable and individual monads.

Isabell Lorey also describes the main difference between precarity in liberal capitalism in the twentieth century and precarity in neo-liberal society. In liberal capitalism precarity was forced on the ones who were constructed as threatening others. Precarity could be then still recognized as a structure of a very specific domination and in that sense the target of resistance against it was also clearer. Precarity in neo-liberal society means normalization and that is why, ‘from everyone now, regardless of class, gender or origin, an individualized risk management is required’ (Lorey 2011). As the possible answer to the governmental precarization Lorey proposes a subversive figure of the immune, which she describes as ‘constituent immunisation’. Here, instead of the safeguarding of the political body, the constituent immunization is turning to ‘others who were formerly constructed as a threat’. (Lorey, 2015) As a result, the constituent immunization goes beyond the juridical logic of the sovereignty, a process of radical disobedience, which is also an instituent act.

This fact, that precarity is deeply structuring the modes of domination today, is in my opinion deeply changing also how it is possible to think about contemporary art institutions today and especially about their inclination to become new places for the production of sociality. The confusion around the notion of participation and a participatory turn in arts today is deeply related to the social and ethical values that are assigned to it – as something good or bad, as something helping the participants to be with others or arranging them in even more superficial relationships. That is why the reactions to this discussion are always inflicting emotional responses, causing strange feelings of resentment – from whatever point (being active or being passive) we are disclosed in our social incapacity or capacity, valued actually according to the capacity to participate in the social logistics of participatory situations.

Claire Bishop was criticizing this ethical approach to participation and proposed an aesthetic analysis of the works of participation; however, in performance, it is impossible to get away from such an ethical dimension, because of the common co-presence that is always at the core of the performance event. There is no performance without attendance (and participation is maybe its mirror sister with the restless leg). Contemporary discussions and problems with participation in art could be reflected exactly from the perspective of precarity; they are namely appearing in the middle of the contradictions between vulnerability and protection on the one side, and vulnerability and dependence on the other. The inclination to open more affective, active, immersive, communal and visibly shared experiences of art, where many of the artworks are working more as political and social proposals for different modes of sociality, could be on first sight approached as a particular reaction to the contemporary political problems in the sense that art becomes a place where sociality can be again rehearsed and the public again addressed in its political dimension. The way in which institutions are expanding today and reaching out (to their audience, in public spaces and so on) could be read also as a reaction to the overall precarization in the last decades.

This would then be a more positive approach to the recent participatory projects, which would understand the art institutions as the temporal and spatial articulations through which various structures of dominations could be challenged, the differences between communities tackled and different people could be included, public spaces re-appropriated, and so forth. Many contemporary art institutions understand themselves like that today: theatres are becoming community places, visual art institutions alternative spaces for different democratic processes. But there is a problem with that approach, because it does not consider that the art institutions are not exceptions from governmental precarization. Instead, they are so deeply involved in the normalization of precarity that in many cases they became an utter example for the new modes of working and the production of sociality. The normalization of precarity does namely not enable any position of social exemption or stability anymore, through which modes of domination could be addressed; there is no safe position from which to start and also – and what is even more important – from which to end the processes they started. The art institutions themselves are deeply embedded in the constant exposure of vulnerability as a main social capital today: not only that many of them are working with a very badly paid or voluntary working force (and paradoxically this especially goes for the ones who are the most stable and can use their symbolic value for even greater exploitation), but they also work under extremely vulnerable and unstable conditions, which demand the constant implication of measures of protection. To protect their own vulnerability they have to continuously reach out, develop themselves as social places, as the unique place of precarious experience, and therefore must invent new forms for the exposure of sociality – give the form to this glittering force of human productivity, which, at the same time, has to be captured as smooth and as dispersed, without any liminal, antagonistic or negative character. They are for most of the time functioning as logistical knots, communication centres for many simultaneous projects with the added social value, which have to continuously compete in cleverness, cunningness and tactical strength, but at the same time also nourish the values of collaboration and friendship among cultural agents and the surrounding society. They can only persist if they are at the same time, while being the most open for the audience, also carrying about social isolation: positioning themselves more and more as agencies for socialization that are at the same time not transformed by the experience of inclusion and exposing to the other. They should be somehow protected from their own political consequences, from their own production of sociality in the sense that they should not endanger their status as receivers of public or private money. In the end they should be somehow protected by the consequences of their own events, and maybe that is why there is such a stress on immaterial experience in the many participatory projects today.

This can be very clearly observed with the help of one well-known example of participatory event. In 1971, Robert Morris showed an interactive exhibition with the title Bodyspacemotionthings in what was at that time the Tate Gallery. The same exhibition, which presents one of the earliest works where people were asked to interact with the exhibited artworks on a really grand scale, was later in 2009 reconstructed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Morris in this exhibition exposed huge props, including beams, weights, platforms, rollers, tunnels and ramps built from materials such as plywood, stone, steel plate, and rope. The audience was invited to interact with the props, use them, play with them and be handy with them. Now, being a classical work of interactive and participatory art was, when it was done for the first time, producing a huge scandal. The audience crowd and their enthusiasm were totally unexpected and there were so many accidents that the exhibition had to be closed after four days. In 2009 there was another repetition of this exhibition, this time filling up the grand Turbine Hall. However, again, the exhibition did not take place without small accidents, as we can also read from the title of the article about the exhibition published in The Guardian: ‘The Tate Modern perfects the art of Living Dangerously, with the subtitle Revived 70s show leaves 23 with minor injuries despite health and safety makeover of Bodyspacemotionthings’. The article goes on to say:

According to records released under the Freedom of Information Act, the injured included a two-year-old girl who was taken to hospital after banging her head, and two boys aged 11 and seven who were taken to hospital with a crushed finger and grazed forehead in separate incidents involving the installation. Other injuries included a cut leg, a rope burn to the hand, bruised ribs, and a bruised shoulder. The injuries occurred despite a stringent application of 21st century health and safety procedures by the Tate. Records show that the gallery's health and safety officer ordered a series of measures to reduce risks associated with the installation, such as installing stop blocks to prevent participants getting their feet trapped on see-saws and restricting moving cylinders with sandbags. (Quinn 2009)

This interesting description I would like for the end to link with the core of the philosophical discussion about precarity. What we can observe in this example is the fear of vulnerability of the audience and the care of the institution to protect the participants and enable safe participation in the exhibition, in the sense that the institution is not endangered by its own event. The high standards of safety in the twenty-first century enabled a situation where there were only minor injuries and succeeded in diminishing vulnerability on the lowest possible level, almost entirely immunizing the participants against the damage that could be caused by objects to be played with or by incautious interaction with other members of the audience.In this sense, artwork here has to comply with a complex series of measures for safety – a series of normative regulations – that would enable undisturbed play and participation of the audience and would immunize them against dangers, especially when they are most vulnerable: exposed in their play with the others who are also playing.

Now let us allow ourselves to speculate a bit and ask for the end: would the so-called participatory turn in art today be possible at all if the regulations for safety and measures taken for protection were not so highly developed? This story about injuries helps a lot in our understanding of the paradoxical qualities of time of the individualized risk management that is deeply related to the normalization of precarity about which Isabell Lorey is writing. Many of the social experiences in the contemporary participatory events are actually only possible because the normalization of precarity is tightly related to the security and continuous development of measures of protection; only in that way is the production of sociality possible. What if there exists a perverse relationship between the accumulation of participatory events and the perfection of risk management procedures – a social life is continuously protected, procedures in the public space re-evaluated, so that the social life can be life without the contamination, without the sensuous and haptic aspect, stickiness, without any consequence springing from establishing a relation with others? The invitation to participation is actually a political and economic phantasm of a clean society of individuals who are doing things in common, however, and at the same time, protecting their own interests in all of that. The flexible, immaterial, affective experience of the audience, forming a fleeting and temporary community with tangible alliances, actually creates an aesthetic exposure of our subjectivity: a social capacity without consequence or material imprint. In that way social life is exhibited, exposed, but unfortunately it is not there as an inventive act, which is deeply changing the place and the time of its own happening.

The question of the institution should then be linked to the changes in precarity; only in this way are we able to understand the paradoxical dynamic of their political and social position. There is a link between precarization of artistic experience and governmental precarization that finds today its most visible form in the rise of participatory events and exhibition of sociality. We are more and more surrounded with ‘responsible’ institutions, which could be only exposed as social places because of the meticulous normative procedures, excellent logistical skills and top-off curatorial management. What is then urgently needed is to instil disobedience in this perfection, where vulnerability is not exposed to be protected, but where in vulnerability we are actually not alone: the institution that comes out of this being and depending at the same time on others, on this need for temporary and sticky spatial condensation of being together. What is needed are stubborn institutions, which would behave more like a plant, a weed, stuck in the ground but nevertheless connected with the surrounding habitat, an earthly infrastructure, which would not create clouds of experiences that can be easily whipped away and replaced with the new ones, but that would spread the practices and materialize the actions. The institution of such a kind would not work towards continuous immunization, but actually deeply disturb the smooth operations of social logistics today and intervene with their material strength, because they would also be able to be changed and influenced by what they create, organize and put into practice.

Notes

¹ See further Read (2010).

² I write more extensively about this in Kunst (2015).