Brian Holmes on Thu, 25 Feb 2016 07:48:07 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> notes from the DIEM25 launch |
On 02/24/2016 09:20 PM, Research Unit in Public Cultures wrote:
Transversal Cultural Spheres and the Future of Europe -- Nikos Papastergiadis
This text is interesting but it's not getting to the heart of things. What's missing are the core questions: racialized class, generational time, and professionalized culture (i.e. art). Europe 1.0 staked a lot on the existing forms of professionalized culture (from classical music to contemporary art) while ignoring the racialization of class altogether. Professionalized culture was somehow supposed to overcome an almost absolute color line that confined non-white people to low paid jobs and zero political representation. At the same time, the same culture was supposed to magically "open the minds" of racist whites who were stuck in dead-end jobs or outright unemployment while opportunistic people around them caught the escalator of the cognitive economy and moved upward where all the high-end art was. Meanwhile, the kinds of colloquial cultural practices that come out of deep generational time - childhood and childrearing, rootedness or long wandering, lingering dialects and cross-language experience, aging and inter-generational caregiving, and don't forget religion - were basically abandoned by professionalized culture in favor of packaged mono-heritage or ultramodern hybrid transnationalism. There were exceptions to this abandonment - in the communist cultural centers of the Parisian banlieue, for example, or in the Black Arts movements in the UK, and surely many others - but they were grassroots exceptions on scant resources. Billions of cultural euros were spent for the upwardly mobile middle classes and the already-rich. The deep time of communities all across the color spectrum and the geographical map was not elaborated into complex art. How could that situation be transformed? I would love to hear some ideas. It has to start by admitting that there is no cultural/ artistic solution when people are trapped in poverty and isolated by racism. Cross-cultural art needs the explicit demand for social justice. There's also a big question about what kind of professionalized culture to make and to promote. Is it possible to interest people in the pleasures of each other's problems? Comedy does that, hip hop does that, activist art does it when it's community oriented. How to support experimental practices that aim for popular audiences and interactions, rather than producing vanguard artefacts for cosmopolitan neoliberals? I don't see how to do it except in the context of a real struggle against the bankers and the bureaucrats, so maybe DIEM25 is a good place to talk about it. But there's no use talking if the table is all white, and it's no use attacking racism if you don't propose to change some very basic things about the society that creates it. What does equality mean in a society of radical difference, where some people's stake is based on the centuries their family lived there, and other's is based on the need to migrate because the economic and military system of those long-rooted societies has sown war and desperation all across the earth? It's gonna take a tremendous political-philosophical shift for white people in Europe to say: Everyone in the EU has a right to be here, and everyone on the EU borders has a right not to be exploited to the point of societal breakdown. Culture and its concentrated artistic expressions can be part of that shift, but they can't bring it about on their own. We need an egalitarian ideal that's willing to build a thousand cultural bridges to a society where everyone has a job and some respect just for existing. The whole concept of what art is, and what it's good for, will have to change on the way down that path. so here's to another world! Brian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: