*This text is an introduction to the book PERMUI, Uqui and RUIDO, María (eds.): Corpos de producciónMiradas críticas e relatos feministas en torno ós suxeitos sexuados nos espacios públicos. Santiago de Compostela, 2005.
Bodies of Production
Some notes on bodies, gazes, words and actions in times of (ins)urgency and precariousness.
María Ruido
"Do not bend, do not dis-label, hold this tension together, push the limits, wait-demand the courage and commitment of those who capitulate falling into the usual game of law and order (we already know that lesson, how will you explain/pay this desertion then?). Search the “natural” alteration of everyday (that social strike!), get lost in commonness to question it (as we do with sexism and homophobia, which mark quite a few of the slogans that are being shouted these days), short-circuit vanguardism that despises our physique and intelligence, establish a historical thread with those who know and acknowledge what we risk(ed). Loving is in your body. "
Ranma, "What you have in the body," Sunday March 23, 2003
Thank’s Ranma, manga heroine, for your words.
This text is dedicated to all those who, in these days, are writing our own story(ies) with our own body(ies).
It's been now more than one year ago, since January 2002, when we began working in Cuerpos de producción (Bodies of Production), a project that was defined as an interdisciplinary space for collaboration between artists, activists and theoreticians from different fields (from architecture to literature) and which aimed to produce written and visual texts on / in the public space of the city of Santiago de Compostela.
Starting from the confluence with some alternative discourses (or openly discrepant) to those elaborated by the accredited institutions, Cuerpos de producción (Bodies of Production) wanted to think about the mechanisms of knowledge generation, about the possibility of constructing critical images of our bodies in public spaces, about new forms of implicated visibility and about the confluence of some artistic and political practices in this last decade.
Our starting position was clearly influenced by our background (fundamentally by our feminist militancy) and by the experiences we learned from those artists and collectives that, from the 70s, but especially during the 80s and 90s, had created new forms of producing art heirs to the conceptual rupture and political struggles of '68 that contradicted, or at least resisted, traditional manners (fetishable objetcs, unique and auratic commodities based on the mastery of the artist - 'genius' ...). Our references, on the contrary, were (and still are) discourses, images or actions that conform what has been called a "new public art genre"[1], implicated representations, necessarily contextualized, that will require an active attitude from the spectators and users of such proposals. They were (and still are) what in the museistic reification process and in the (sometimes well-intentioned) (neutralizing) normalization has been called "political art", directly produced or inspired by some critical discourses (such as feminism, re-readings of Marxism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, several contributions of queer theory...) that were sustaining our project.
This "new public art genre ", these situated and implicated forms that, ultimately, will seek to activate the space of “relative autonomy”[2] that art provides to construct it as a possible territory of political action, were opposed to what Rosalyn Deutsche[3] in her compelling text Agoraphobia defined as “official public art”, civic beautification, collaborative utilitarianism of urban design, images and logos conniving with evictions and speculative restructurings, institutionally used to hide the conflictive nature of public space. A "new public art genre " that, as pointed out by Deutsche in a well-articulated critique from feminism towards traditional leftist positions, also had to question the hegemonic gaze and to highlight the issue of subjectivity in representation as a political priority.
"The visual separation between subject and object and its corollary, the autonomous art object, emerged as a relationship of constructed, instead of given, exteriority, a relationship that produces instead of being produced by – autonomous objects on the one hand and complete subjects on the other. Such subjects are not harmless fictions but constitute power relations and fantasies of totality, achieved through the repression of the different subjectivities, the transformation of difference into altered or subordinating the others to the authority of a single universal viewpoint, supposedly devoid of sex, race, unconscious or history. "[4]
In opposition to the critiques of Rosalyn Deutsche's and other authors and artists, it stands a nostalgic and reductionist position of new appeal to consensus (as exemplified in its text by Thomas Crow’s economicist Marxism, but relatively valid in this and other variables), which accuses feminism and the specific demands of certain groups of balkanizing the struggles of the left and confusing the "public potential of political art" with its diverse units of conflict.
"Their claims are nothing but a lament for the decline of the male ego and an attempt to restore what Homi Bhaha calls, in another context, 'masculinism as a position of social authority', a position historically occupied by men but with which women may also identified with”[5]
Taking these references into account and assuming our dual condition as active political subjects and our specific role as image constructors (at least), resistant and possible transmitters of experiences, on the basis of our initiative three lines of political action and underlying interests that drew clearly our workframe appeared delimited:
-the reference to the extension of the concept of work to all orders of life in relation to what Michel Foucault called biopower and the subsequent generation of surplus value of our bodies in all areas and times, that is, our consciousness of bodies of production;
-the need to rethink the terms of representative democracy, the concept of egalitarian citizenship, restrictive and linked, to a large extent, to the visibility provided by a regular salaried job and, ultimately, the need to act as sexed political subjects and the opportunity to think some of the contemporary forms of political action as debtors of various contributions of feminist thought, poorly recognized and that we would like to highlight;
-and consequently, the deconstruction of the forms of representation of our bodies within the mass media universe that inundates us and the questioning of visibility as a political goal itself, being aware of the domain structure that, to a greater or lesser extent, implies all representation. And ultimately, thinking about the possibility of a non-reproductive representation, using words of Peggy Phelan.[6]
Cuerpos de producción (Bodies of Production), then, was proposed as a reflection project on the generation of surplus value from our bodies in public spaces instituted by the post-Fordist capitalism, on the fetishization of desire and canonical models of sexual identity subverted from the consciousness of the parodic masquerade and from the politics of re-significative identification beyond the essentialist dichotomy of what is "naturally" masculine or feminine: at the moment of confluence of the objects- commodities and the gazes of the desiring machines that we all are, the cycle of consumption and passivity that paralyzes us and hides antagonisms and many diversities dormant beneath the apparent homogeneity of the stereotype of beauty, the family canon, the standard of leisure… is reified and retro-alimented.
Public spaces, the places of construction of collective experiences and of displacement of our own embodied subjectivities, are gradually privatized and suspend their coordinates; in the new totalizing narratives, they turn into dystopic territories devoid of location and context, level crossings with barriers (often invisible) changeable for the immaterial production of our bodies.
All of them, from airports, ATMs or motorways, to squares and streets of our cities occupied by cafe's tables, shop windows and billboards, have the sign of non-places, transit spaces where our identities (and often our most basic rights) are restricted and even suspended, territories where the concept of public space is impossible, where any heterogeneity or diversity is assimilated and deactivated in its dissolution as an object / subject of production.
Class antagonisms, sexual differences, ethnic, culture, religion or nationality diversities... otherness, dissents, heteroglossias: immaterial production dissolves in the gratifying and omnivorous imperative of consumption the diffuse domain of network companies, of the states-franchise of liberal democracies, and transforms the memory in a present continuous, paralyzes the consciousness of work colonization in our lives.
The empire of production extends to our bodies from disciplinary societies to self-surveilled, self-imposed societies, generators, not only of subtle control and subjection devices, but also of a biopolitical regime that reaches our subjectivities, our dreams.
We are subjects-flow in non- places -trajectories of libidinal, more than physical distances- subjects in transit, we know it, influenced by the hegemonic pleasant gaze. Assuming these constraints and from differing and nonl-inear discursive positions, through this project we will like to rethink our mass media representations, to put sex to their interested neutrality reaffirming our gaze and our desires, to show the class interests that shape them, their universalizing cultural imperialism, to investigate the possibility of visibility of our bodies beyond the reification and the permanent hierarchic (im)position of otherness with regard to a reference model: (re)signification starting from different fragments, disperse micronarratives, texts from always contextual (re)readings, representations that interrupt, or at least difficult, (re)production.
Now, here, in the time of the displacement of the laws of value, of work-consumption, in the time of diffuse production, immaterial, sustained by our bodies: making clear the possibility of strategies of resistance and occupation of collective territories beyond the forms of mobilization of the traditional working class and its concept of work as a catalyst / agglutinator.
In order to carry out our proposal and in a line already widely transited of use and critique of visual culture and media language, Uqui Permui and I invited Xoán Anleo, Manuel Olveira, Carmen Nogueira and Antonio Doñate, the collective intrépidas&sucias, Marta de Gonzalo y Publio Pérez Prieto, LSD, Virginia Villaplana and Erreakzioa-Reacción to a constructive process that involved a reflection (remunerated, this is a job, let’s not forget!) over a period of about 7 months on the basis of a series of fundamental writings (later extended), and subsequently the elaboration of a series of images in a poster format that will coexist and challenge the surrounding advertising campaigns during their presence in the public space of the city of Santiago de Compostela, merging, occluding and, ultimately, generating an interpretative difficulty and a suspicion that contradicted, for some moments, the intelligently Pavlovian logic of advertising.
In a tacit rejection of the sterile and fallacious oppositions theory vs. praxis or direct action vs. reflection, and being conscious of the responsibility for in the production of a public debate in such a peripheral and institutionally isolated country as Galicia, the seminar held at CGAC (Galician Centre for Contemporary Art) between 6th and 8th of March 2003 (and which speeches and documents are contained in this publication) acted as an area of confluence between the different positions and forms of visibility found there.
After some very imaginative and exciting actions against the LOU (Organic Law of Universities) implemented between winter 2001 and spring 2002, particularly in Santiago, the state general strike called in June 2002 in response to the latest labour reform of the Government and in a growing climate of rejection and widespread opposition to various executive decisions of the Popular Party/ Partido Popular (from the Law on Foreigners to the recent illegalization of HB (Herri Batasuna), as well as their insulting action during the persistent oil slick caused by the petrol tanker Prestige in the Galician coasts in November 2002), the support of president Aznar and his party to the Anglo-American attack against Iraq started on 20th of March 2003 provokes a massive gathering of civil society on the streets and gives rise to a series of protests led by citizen platforms, student movements and affinity groups more or less constituted that open a clear crisis of legitimacy in a system, the representative democracy, which seems not to represent anyone anymore. Ultimately, the citizens of this and other states are proving, with our bodies on the streets, with our actions and defections, with our silences, boycotts and saucepan-banging demonstrations, that other forms of democracy beyond parliamentarism and the powerless vicariousness of the vote are possible.
At this time of (ins)urgency, precarity and embodied experience of a generation that has learned, in the midst of an apparent indolence, that citizenship (as well as identities, links and strategies of resistance) is a process and an always contingent struggle and not a formal goal, the following pages are written on productive bodies, sexed political subjects and participatory representations.
Words necessarily influenced by the events of these days, full of energy and faith even in the midst of indignation and anger.
Productive bodies: the time of biopolitics and the cognitive proletariat
"Immaterial work, massified intellectual work, the work of 'general intellect', will be enough to understand the dynamics and creative relationship between material production and social reproduction. When the production is reinserted in biopolitical context it is presented almost exclusively in the horizon of language and communication. In this sense, one of the biggest mistakes of these authors was the tendency to treat the new labour practices of biopolitical society attending only to their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. However, in this context, the productivity of bodies and the value of affection are absolutely essential. "
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire, 2000
In the transition from Fordist production cycle, which scenario was the factory, to the post-Fordist production, without any predetermined space, immaterial, reticular, devoid of stock, informational and communicative, the order of biopower in postmodern societies of control is fulfilled in opposition to the modern disciplinary societies that Michel Foucault already mentioned in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, published in 1976.[7]
As noted in the introductory quotation extracted from Empire by M. Hardt and A. Negri, in the time of immaterial commodities, bodies do not cease to produce, but they produce totally and permanently: we are, as the title of our project indicates, bodies of production and in constant production.
The somatic, the corporeal, turns into the territory of surplus value, converging now the previously separated spaces and times of production and reproduction: work and life are the same thing, leisure and business coincide in strategies and referents, in an externality to impossible capital. Together with an informatized and communicated material production appears a massified intellectual production and a workforce whose primary task will be the transmission and manipulation of previously generated codes. If Fordist production integrated consumption in its cycle, post-Fordist production integrates the communication and the affective exchange that configure it: consumption is a new form of social relation, the form that gives us existence and privileged visibility within the economy of global capital.
Immaterial work is an interface between production and consumption, a corporal link between the subjectivity produced by social/ business relations and the immaterial commodities, which is not destroyed in the consumption, but it is transformed and it retro-aliments the cycle of its generation: the first product of immaterial work is not information but social relation and its raw material, subjectivity.[8]
Flexibility, precariousness(es) of various types, emotional capitalization: from the repetitive and monotonous chain work we have moved into the profitability of the imagination, the exploitation of affects and communication.
The very forms of political action, its imaginative contingency and tactics have been absorbed and put into production: in opposition to a more or less homogeneous class composition, structured around salaried work and its conditions, in the late global capitalism we face a new definition of class and work, where the limits of salaried work appear as scarcely significant for its articulation and where the proletariat is not composed only, as in the classical hierarchy, of workers non-owners of the means of production but, increasingly, of intellectual workers characterized by a highly precarious and changing conditions: the cognitariat.
Alongside the traditional and non-traditional working classes, a new widening group appears, consisting of a transnational workforce, extremely fragile and susceptible to the deepest exploitation due to their aberrant condition of "without papers", that is, people evicted from their fundamental rights in the name of preserving a highly questionable definition of citizenship.
Although, as stated above, the borders of work clearly cross the salaried work and go far beyond searching for a new concept of total work (we should speak here about the invisible work, such as domestic work; about volunteering; about care and emotional work carried out for love, which helps sustaining capitalist order and patriarchy[9]; about the invisibilized works -not invisible- such as sex work ... which are almost always carried out by women) and of full-time production, the regular salaried work, which was traditionally held by the men-providers of the patriarchal family, still appears as a guarantee of social legitimacy and, consequently, as the way to obtain full citizenship and social visibility.
Unemployed women, underemployed women, the new components of cognitariat, some old proletarians, workers (men and women) of residual economies (peasants, for example) and, even seriously, people without papers, we/they have came to occupy a subordinate position in the forms of social representation or we/they are almost completely invisible.
Of the more or less defined life and production times, we find ourselves in the era of total work, of the constant generation of surplus value. Perhaps because of this, of this lack of limits and because of the constancy of the exploitation we talk about feminization of labour.