Paula Cobo Guevara is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles.
autonomy
we have an inheritance of the historical vanguards in the synthethis of aesthetics and politics: the Italian 77, and may 68; which opened a space of possibility outside any hegemonic representative politics, creating a space of autonomy. From those spheres of social creativity we can learn the necessity for those of us working within the post-fordist institution and in a knowledge based economy to maintain a radical autonomy within the institution (and outside, of course).
as workers/artists/activist working within the institution, we can refuse to work in the *post -assembly line* of this large subjectifiying machine of neoliberal subjects: the captured University. we, as active agents, can constantly work in creating fields of desire via radical pedagogy, via negating the a priory academic mode of production.
has she stopped to think on how she writes, on how she articulates research, how she loves, how she fucks, how she shares common knowledge, how she articulates resistance?
film still from “Bambule” by Ulrike Meinhof [girls planning their escape from the reform school]
politics of desire and not representation
it seems that when -we- working with the humanist landscape of the university are only entitled to analyze or comment of that which is ‘outside.’ Lately, I’ve seen a number of papers, lectures, and so forth which not only use social movements as a way of “illustrating” certain theories surrounding them, but also putting them into a symbolic value within the academic system, undermining a personal appropriation of social processes which have their own intelligence and logic. Maintaining autonomy within the institutional system, as workers/artists/activists means destroying the fucking bourgeois kantian aesthetic judgment (yes, the spirt of kant, still fucking hunting !!!). This means that we are not a fucking pseudo “illustrated” commentator affected by the effects of social movements.
we ARE the movement, because the movement articulates itself in singular and collective processes of desubjectification from the larger dispositive. we need to enable a politics of affect that operates at a molecular level and in the field of creativity, of political and aesthetic praxis.
on our material composition of radical subjectivity which is contaminative and expressive. not representational.
related readings:
The dynamics of the political event
Process of subjectivation and micropolitics
Maurizio Lazzarato
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/lazzarato/en
Autonomy addressing Institutions, questioning the undercurrent of one’s own projected state within and seemingly by it – participating / hustling or not, especially when the prospect of money, disguised by the indentured cloak of Scholar ship to be, has been manipulated as a means to an end in that specific ideological apparatus of our Education Capitol. Apart from this abstraction, the lot of our State seems like a load of existential-anorexia to me; Ideological apparatus theories are foolish understatements within the confines of art in an age of militant superficiality. However, what to do after a ‘qualified’ person projects their own law & order (personal boundaries as sake and sense of control) over the pretenses of another’s future actions, intentions, and obligations; how to act within a [alternative, creative] system where money is indefinitely participated and exchanged through binary positions of contradiction and resolution, as former persons finds it appropriate and Right, by justice of the BlahBlah, formally known as Art World, to reject most provocation/angst regarding it’s invalidity because of History. — as if every rally, personal production in that sector, wasn’t a rally against that very thing: history.