RE-HALLUCINATING CONTEXTS #3:
report from the session by Bojana Cvejic
What are we talking about when we say “independent scene”?
The attribute “independent” is inappropriate for two reasons:
1) independence suggests a fantasy about being “outside” institutions, isolation and self-sufficiency, as in autarchy (economic independence)
2) the latter is related to the historical usage “independent artist” – the artist who produces her work through her own company, as opposed to the artist who is employed by a state institution. It’s associated today with the much contested status of the self-employed “free entrepreneur”, hence, has a liberal capitalist sense
Instead, I propose to replace “independence” with “relative autonomy”, and thus claim that in every context of the global world there are semi-autonomous artists, possibly also forming a relatively autonomous scene: relatively autonomous or semi-autonomous individual artists, groups and collectives, projects, initiatives, organizations, movements, spaces etc.
“Autonomy” is neither a problem-free term: like “independence”, it also begs for careful deliberation.
The idea and popular notion of “autonomy” dates back to the establishing of the aesthetic regime of art, to use Rancière’s scheme of division of mega-cultural and art epochs. Autonomy is the historical condition (ca. 1800) of separating art from the function of social service and establishing its function of not having a function (Adorno, Sociology of Music), purported in Kantian aesthetic judgment as disinterested pleasure. This notion of autonomy, which casts art in the extremes, either dedicated to self-perfection for its own sake and thus free from engagement with social reality, or accused for precisely the same reason of not engaging with realities outside of its medium.
However, I hereby mean entirely other set of issues. From the term “autonomy” I’d like to draw first its etymological meaning: “auto” (by oneself, on one’s own) + “nomos” (law). Semi-autonomous artsts, projects, spaces etc. seek to establish their own conditions and terms of labor, representation, distribution of work, and even reception. Instead of refusing or complying with, they clearly enter a dialectical struggle and negotiation with/against institutional laws and mechanisms. They aren’t independent, capable of existing “on their own”, as they partly depend on the means and structures of production. In addition, they reversely make institutions dependent on their own work. This rationale is similar to “workerism” or “autonomia” – the movement of workers claiming their workplace in factories.
This autonomy is “relative” as it implies an incomplete reciprocity of relations. It can be compared with Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”). Althusser observes that in Marx’s spatial metaphor of an edifice Base (infrastructure=economic relations) + Superstructure (law, religion, family, education, culture&arts, media), the social whole is divided between the “state power” that functions by repressive mechanisms (police, army etc.) and ideological state apparatuses (ISA: church, school, academy, theater, etc = institutions) which function by ideology. The base of the economic relations determine the functioning of ISA, but only to a certain degree. ISA can develop an ideology which differs from the one of the ruling class. In that sense they aren’t only determined but can also be “determinant” – except that we cannot say how, to what extent, in which visible and measurable ways, they determine, and can have effect upon the base (i.e. economic relations.
I would like to draw out the semi-autonomous scene from the overall scene of performing arts by the same logic: it’s constituted by this overal scene (mainstream or whatever occupies the function of representing the field), by the state or capital power to determine it economically (and politically), but it’s also constituting itself, and hence, constitutive of others. Its main trait is the power of constituting, rather than only being constituted – so, its power lies in the process and struggle of becoming.
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