Here Comes

Everybody
Noura Al-Salem | Li Li Chung | Natalia
Cifuentes Friedman | Charlotte Cirillo |
Marianna Hovhannisyan | Suzie Jones
| Vivi Kallinikou | Emma Massoud |
K. C. Messina | Ximena Moreno |
Edward Sanderson | Urok Shirhan
| Benjamin W. Tippin | Franziska
Wildfrster | Yuqiong Xu |
Tutor | Louis Moreno |

Geographies Collaborative Project

2013-2014

Table of Contents

912

Foreword

1520

Gatherings
Edward Sanderson

2329

On Squatting
Othering Spaces

K.C. Messina
3135

An Alternate World
Photography in Time of Domination

Natalia Cifuentes Friedman

3745

Producing a Radical Everybody

Against the Temptation of Populism

Benjamin W. Tippin
4750

The Hobo Code

Fieldwork in an Alternative Market Guide for the London Property Buyer

Noura Al-Salem
5

5361

Here Comes the Liquid Body

Charlotte Cirillo and Suzie Jones

6373

[Il]legal Bodies
A Personal Genealogy of Citizenship

Urok Shirhan
7585

Our Vocabulary

8795

Dog Ta(i)les
Marianna Hovhannisyan

97102

Referendum
Rethinking the Rules

Ximena Moreno
105114 Here comes everybody...
...from the f*@*ing plane

Emma Massoud and Li Li Chung

117123 Aint no body
What Amazon Turk Teaches Us About Politics of the Body and Digitalisation

Franziska Wildfrster
125135 Action, Intervention and Daily Deployment
Reflection on a research project on protest practices and their visual representation

Vivi Kallinikou and AIDD Collective

137146 Bishan Project
Here Comes Everybody

Yuqiong Xu
149150 Acknowledgements
6

Foreword

Here Comes Everybody is a collection of critical studies and

responses composed by the 2014 Geographies group of the Visual
Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Our wideranging concerns converge upon our contemporary moment. This
moment, characterised by a feeling of perpetual crisis and state
of emergency, exists post 2008, after the Global Financial Crisis,
the presence of which was felt throughout the fabric and ordinary
experience of daily life. Stemming from recent, globally dispersed
irruptions of collective struggle, we aim to articulate the pressing
demand for a reconsideration of body-potentiality that might
challenge and overcome the social and spatial contradictions of
and within global capitalism. We adopt a complex interdisciplinary
approach to address the emerging set of textures and gestures
within the urban landscape (the site at which many of these
contradictions emerge).
9

Now, we position ourselves amongst the residue of these

things; a disarticulated body that seeks to find itself. This position
offers new critical perspectives from which weas artists, curators,
cultural practitioners, and academicsmight engage, in order to
reveal and politicize the social field. We are no longer able to work
solely within our disciplines. Indeed, singular disciplines are ceasing
to be effective, without engaging laterally. Our research, across
specializations and concerns, within the fields of globalization and
visual culture, must be informed by our entanglements. For, at a time
when to be thin on the ground is no longer a temporary state of
emergency, but rather a constant state of being, we must reassess
what it means for our bodies to form.
Taking our cue from the political and social possibilities
propositioned by the idiom coined by James Joyce, Here Comes
Everybody, the works in this anthology seek to understand what
constitutes the body (as an individual or socio-political entity), and
its capabilities, in this way evoking Gilles Deleuzes reading of
Spinozas philosophy as posing the question what can a body do?1.
We ask ourselves: what is the nature of the body? How do we form
bodies? And what can our myriad bodies do?
For the political theorist Andy Merrifield (2013), this phrase
describes the ontology of collectivity: a constituency which is, as
Joyce says, a pattern mind (2012, p.70), more mob than man
(2012, p.266) and an imposing everybodyand magnificently well
worthy of any and all such universalisation (2012, p.32).
As the urban, globalized citizen has been transformed into
one of new global resistance, we ask what it means to resist now?
Understanding infrastructure as something that is omnipresent and
inevitable, our works hope to offer new positions and actions which
we might take in relation to them. We explore diverse tacticsfrom
Giorgio Agambens potentiality to not-be, to infiltrating liquids and
strayingto consider how the body can be a catalyst for change
within the status quo; a collective change that does not necessitate
a tent and an activist aesthetic.
10

Many of the works in this project take on a distinctly urban

spin. Henri Lefebvre and David Harveys influence on our early
thoughts asked that we continue to examine ourselves as citizens,
and consider the ways in which urban infrastructures constitute,
and are constituted by, social relations. Our research areas have
included architecture, urbanism, literature, film and the visual arts.
Through reading Michel Foucault and Agamben, our work
also seeks to develop an understanding of the apparatus in which
the body is enfolded; Foucaults heterogeneous ensemble presents
itself in these works via the London housing market, the immigration
system and the implementation of the online labourer in the
expanding global economy, to name but a few.
This collection of works attempts to stimulate criticality around
those apparatus that are a part of everyday lived experience, but
that have become increasingly de-socialised. As neoliberalism
renders these apparatus increasingly invisible, yet supra-global,
how do we grapple with loss of agency? Our thoughts seek to
uncover and understand these apparatus, and posit strategies
through which we may re-socialise it. Each of these studies allude
to the recent problems of globalization that are disseminated
through social and cultural landscapes. Our concerns emerge from
the contradictions of global space that materialize in the social; we
access these problems through an analysis of the varying degrees
of spatial composition, from a molecular to a global level.
We attempt this through a collection that might be considered
a thought experiment, a speculative assemblage, or a theoretical
mapping. This project encompasses a close examination of
what every body can dopolitically, aesthetically, actually and
hypotheticallyin order to tap into the potential of contemporary
everybodyness.
We feel the use of Here Comes Everybody points to the
confidence we have developed, as a group, in the essential role of
sociality in recognising and constructing realities that serve needs
rather than interests.
11

Notes
1. As drawn by Gilles Deleuze in his essay What Can a Body Do? (1990), in
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, New York: Zone Books.
Works Cited
Agamben, G. (2009) What is an apparatus?. 1st ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
197277. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books. (See in particular The Confession of
the Flesh [interview, 1977]).
Joyce J. (2012[1939]) Finnegans Wake. London: Oxford University Press
Lefebvre, H. and Nicholson-Smith, D. (1991) The Production of Space. 1st ed.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Merrifield A. (2013) Here Comes Everybody: Joyces Urban Chaosmos
http://antipodefoundation.org/2013/12/18/here-comes-everybody/ [Accessed
May 16 2014].

12

13

Gatherings
Edward Sanderson

[Lets imagine that this text has been written by someone living
and working in China. This text is destined to be emailed through
a network, and printed by a printer, located in that country. In that
situation certain restrictions must apply.]
There is a popular pedestrianized shopping street in the
capital city of this country. The pedestrian street is full of people.
People are in police uniforms. People are in plain clothes. People
are journalists, camera operators and presenters, recording pieces
for news programmes. People are workers performing street
maintenance. One or two other people have flowers. Some others
order a particular set meal in an American fast-food restaurant on
one side of the road. There may or may not be some other people.
Today, the workers have hastily dug up the street outside the
restaurant such that people cannot easily walk through the area.
Small cleaning trucks are traveling up and down the other side of
the street spraying water on the road. It is too wet for people to
walk there. Another set of people is comprised of what appear to
be tourists and shoppers. The street is close to the centre of the
15

city. The centre of city is the location of the centre of government.

The city plan is designed around this centre, although the plan
predates this particular government. The centre holds the highest
religious and secular significance. Prior registration of organised
gatherings of people must be submitted and approved by the
local public security bureau. Informal gatherings of people will
be broken up if such an action is deemed necessary. A few days
earlier, an anonymous call was published on a website hosted in
another country calling for people to go for a walk in various places
in various cities. Websites hosted on servers in other countries
load more slowly for people inside the country than those hosted
internally. Some websites are inaccessible. Social media is popular,
however not all messages can be posted to social media. It might
appear to the writer that their message has been posted to social
media, yet they are the only people for whom it is visible. This can
be predictable. And unpredictable. There is a ritual to access
inaccessible websites. Rituals must be renewed periodically.
Slowness, indirection, and rituals are subtle mechanisms. These
subtle mechanisms affect the choices that are made and present
them as if they are natural. Companies are responsible to the state.
Relevant companies hold near real-time GPS information from
mobile phones. The people hold mobile phones. People in the street
are mapped by GPS signals.
In one of the short texts published in his book The Coming
Community, Giorgio Agamben responds to events that took place
in China in 1989. This is one a series of expositions that Agamben
has made on the nature of potentiality, or (as he refers to it in this
text) the potentiality to not-be. He suggests that potentiality still
expects an object for an act, or a determinate activity, and so
must be distinguished from this potentiality to not-be. Such a
problematizing of the place of an object for an act is also raised
in Agambens notion of the means without an end (addressed in
the titular book) as a way to approach politics from the place of a
pre-political activity. Agamben suggests that this focus on the prepolitical of an activity (characterised as the gest, or gesture by
Agamben) leads to these actions being unable to be subsumed into
16

the state apparatus, where they would lose any possibility of being
transformative. It is possible to see this potentiality to not-be as still
evident in events 25 years later. Agamben sees the State struggling
against the non-State, the latter being labelled as humanity or the
whatever singularity which is made much of in this context.
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its
own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition
of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these
singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will
be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (Agamben,
1993, p. 87)

Well, there were no tanks this time, only water trucks (society
has progressed). If, as Henri Lefebvre says, social space is
socially constructed what space is the space of this not-be? If,
as Agamben says, this is radically non-identifiable, what kind of
community is this, and how can a social space be constructed by it?
Is social space even necessary?
It is not certain that people appeared. It might be said that the
visible reaction of the state apparatus to the threat of appearance
made it difficult for the appearance to manifest itself. This was,
perhaps, intentional and in itself significant. What does this mean?
What kind of spanner is being thrown into the works, and what
kind of result is expected? Maybe none at all, and it is merely the
potential for the action to take place that is important. This would
seem to fit with Agambens argument but begs the same question,
what then?
Is this the utopia that Fredric Jameson sees as a systemic
otherness that clearly does not lead to a new and effective
practical politics for the era of globalization, as a result of
the obligation for Utopia to remain an unrealizable fantasy?
Nevertheless without such a utopian impulse there will never be
such a politics at all and it is the disruption these possible futures
insinuate that provides the possibility for the present. (Jameson,
2004)
17

Credits and captions redacted at the authors request.

18

While I am hesitant to make any claims that art can step in and
provide a solution to the impasse between visibility and effectivity,
I will note that Jacques Rancire sees a certain political art as
holding a possibility:
Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the
production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification
and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny,
by that which resists signification. (Rancire, 2004, p. 63)

I believe this is not a nave political art, in the sense of a

practice that comes from outside and tries to engage with an issue
or situation, but is a practice that is engendered by the situation
itself and acts in concert with the given circumstances; it becomes
political by virtue of what it does.1 These particular aspects are
the ways in which political effectivity takes place. Or, as artist Hito
Steyerl puts it,
19

A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents

political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more
interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work.
Simply look at what it doesnot what it shows. (Steyerl, 2010)

Perhaps it is this that is important: that the practice (not the

work) is produced as if by the situation. There is then only a (nonspecific) potentiality that there will be a (non-specific) effect, a
radically open and relevant effectivity that must bide its time and
await its moment. This strolling serves as a form of maintenance of
that state of expectation that looks forward to a resolution as futurepossible.
Notes
1. Thanks to Elaine W. Ho for this insight.
Works Cited
Agamben, G. (1993). Tiananmen. In The Coming Community (M. Hardt, Trans.,
pp. 8587). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jameson, F. (2004). The Politics of Utopia. New Left Review (25), 3554.
Rancire, J. (2004). The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancire in
Interview with Gabriel Rockhill. In The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans., pp. 4966). London: Continuum.
Steyerl, H. (2010). Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to PostDemocracy. e-flux Journal.

20

21

On Squatting
Othering Spaces
K.C. Messina

Asses, swine, have litter spread

And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!1
Although the home should serve to fulfill basic human needs,
the commodification of housing has denied us of this human
right. Most of my early experiences involved an unbroken sense
of stability that remained sealed within the rooms and secured
behind the doors of a house. Unfortunately, this perspective is
considered one of privilege. Anything beyond those walls could not
guarantee the same element of certainty, for better or for worse.
In that sense, the roof over my head established a foundation for
my entire concept of reality. In more recent years, doors no longer
seem to offer the same sense of security; now, buildings confront
23

the urban bodyour urban bodieswith opposition. The following

article begins an attempt to better understand the precariousness
of urbanity when the physical and social landscapes increasingly
create disseminated spaces of exclusion. As doors come into
existence to keep us out, how and where do we begin to form
inclusive communities that sterilize and reverse the production of
greater inequality?
S144 LAPSO Dishonorable criminal!
Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment
of Offenders Bill (2012) made squatting in residential buildings a
criminal offense throughout England and Wales. Enacted to tip
the scales in favor of property rights, the law effectively renders
squatters rights null-and-void. Where squatters rights2 signs
previously deterred authorities from using force against property or
individuals within a property, S144 carves visible and violent lines
into the borders of private ownership.
In response to the 2012 law, Squatters Action for Secure
Homes (SQUASH) launched an investigation and subsequent
campaign to repeal S144 on the grounds of its exploitative nature.3
Vulnerable social groups, including the homeless, have felt the most
substantial effects of the law. Not only does S144 reinforce and
increase social inequity by dispossessing the rights of subordinate
social groups, but the law also encourages real estate speculators
and landlords to leave buildings vacant. Beyond the logic of real
estate markets, within the socio-political climate that leans evermore
in favor of dominant social groups, the squat presents itself as a
heterotopic space. As such, a reconsideration of the squats political
relevance is crucial.
The history of the twentieth century is indissolubly linked to the epic
struggle against capitalismwe are now certain, to the extent that such
presumption is admissible in the study of history, that the revolutionthe
revolution against capitalfailed.4
We need, then, to posit a peculiar suspension of the political in order
24

to describe the utopian moment: it is this suspension, this separation of

the politicalin all of its unchangeable immobilityfrom daily lifethis
externality that serves as the calm before the stormthat allows us to
take hitherto unimaginable mental liberties with structures whose actual
modification or abolition scarcely seem on the cards.5

Creating other places:

The political relevance of heterotopic space
Utopian thought entails an experimental break with the
totalizing structures of capital. Whilst utopian experiments exist
in conceptual thought, heterotopias hold a substantive material
role in what Jameson observed as the peculiar suspension of the
political. Heterotopic space breathes life into the notion of utopia
and so propels the embryonic stages of an equalizing force. Michel
Foucault and Henri Lefebvre elaborate on the concept of heterotopia
in two distinct ways that underscore the value of movements such
as squatting. In the essay Of Other Spaces, Foucault defined
heterotopias as:
counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real
sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are
simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind
are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their
location in reality.6

These lived utopias exist as the other spaces within

everyday life, unlike utopian non-spaces that occupy an entirely
transposed reality. Not only does the heterotopia generate
spatial difference in a given reality, but it also retains a distinctive
temporality, thereby opening various heterochronies.7 As such,
a heterotopia remains suspended at an intersection between
traditional experiences of space and time. In this sense, squatting
transforms an accepted, linear conducti.e. the succession of legal
and moral grounds leading to the 2012 law protecting real estate
into a questioned logic through the creation of heterotopic space.
Differing from Foucaults notion of heterotopia, Lefebvres
theory adopted a vital revolutionary tone. David Harvey
25

encapsulates Lefebvres theoretical formulation of a radical political

moment as the instance when disparate heterotopic groups
suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of
collective action to create something radically different.8 According
to this notion, the capacity for the heterotopia to produce radical
change relies on two conditions: a transformation from militancy to
logic, and connecting the autonomous senses of reality between
the disparate marginalized groups. Opportunities for liberation
occur when the self-contained spaces realize a potential to
collectively break the conditions which initially forced our bodies into
heterotopic peripheries.
We do not want to leave your house
We do not want to smash the stove
We want to put the pot on the stove
House, stove and pot can stay9

Romek A Z K Griffiths Do it yourself electricity 13/03/2012 Deptford, London. Image: Courtesy of R. Griffiths.

26

Squatting not only provides a practical solution for immediate

human needs, but the re-use of vacant and abandoned properties
also opens the possibility of transforming urban social relations.
When Housing is a Luxury, Squatting is a Necessity. This motto,
embraced by the squatters network Squattastic, calls into question
the ways that heterotopic squatting communities resolve themselves
as politic.10 One the one hand, the occupation of empty residential
and non-residential sites exposes an element of spatial contradiction
produced in contemporary capitalism, alluding to the housing crisis
that is symptomatic of its failure. Many organized movements aim
to prioritize housing as a human right. In these cases, the act of
squatting provides a material critique of individual property claims
that result in dispossession of common land. On the other hand, the
act of squatting manifests ulterior systemic desires, which inherently
pose challenges to the logic of private real estate mentioned above.
Within these urban heterotopias, squatters deny the restraints of
institutional decision-making and so create the ability to plant radical
seeds of social, political, and economic transformation through the
establishment and practice of counter-logic.
On the margins of real social space, squatters refuse to
accept and comply with acts of reform. This is evident in the
continued pursuit of alternative inhabitation through squatting
despite the recent laws that criminalize trespassing, but that do little
to alleviate the conditions that lead one to squat in the first place.
Social and political norms claim to work in favor of fairness and
equality through democracy; however, these policies operate under
the guise of a diluted interest in human welfare that re-enforces
and re-produces the neoliberal logic of privatization, or loosely
what Harvey termed accumulation by dispossession. Disruptive
strategies that generate fluid heterotopic configurations i.e.
mutable physical spaces that adapt according to particular cultural
and/or historical necessities provide a tangible break from the
centralizing principles supported and reinforced by dominant social
groups in the hegemonic order.

27

Enclosure is a temporary political means to pursue a

common political end.11
How can the local principles of squatting jump scales
for integration into wider socio-political goals? As much as the
logic of squatting is predicated on an opening of common land
to supplement human rights, heterotopias only exist in a localized
enclosure. Squatted enclaves function as semi-autonomous units
with a strength in constructing intelligible systems of equality on
two levels. Firstly, the squat magnifies a local utopian impulse that
illuminates the consequences stemming from concentrations of
wealth and power, regardless of geographical location. Squatter
communities in Brazil, for example, reflect unequal economic
conditions on a different scale than in the UK, yet both geographic
examples find the creation of urban centers and peripheries that
position squatter communities against mainstream modes of
inhabitation.
On another level, the enclosure provides a platform for the
conception of wider, more enduring goals. Although squatted
spaces allude to a potential for greater social equality, they remain
contained within the hegemonic structure; therefore, despite finding
unique expression through a suspension of the political, squats and
squatters remain in an antagonistic dialogue with the legitimate
order. To collectively extract from the mechanisms of the market
entails a solution that does not lead to reintegration. Thus, as it
stands, the relationship between suspended spaces of disruption
and spaces of capital reveals a weakness in the autonomous politic
of the squat that, in its very principle of existence, seeks to shatter
reform and produce substantial change.
Additional Information:
Advisory Service for Squatters: http://www.squatter.org.uk
People Before Profit: http://peoplebeforeprofit.org.uk/what-we-are-doing/housing
Spatial Agency: http://www.spatialagency.net
28

Notes
1. Excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelleys The Mask of Anarchy (1819).
2. First established in Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
3. A full summary of the report can be found on www.squashcampaign.org.
4. Sassoon, D. (1996) One Hundred Years of Socialism. London: Harper Collins.
p.756.
5. Jameson, F. (2004) The Politics of Utopia. In New Left Review, 25 (Jan/Feb).
p.45.
6. Foucault, M. (1984) Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Translated
by Miskowiec, J. In Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite (October). pp.34.
7. Ibid., p.6.
8. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban
Revolution. London: Verso. p.xvii.
9. Excerpt from Berthold Brechts Ten Poems from a Reader from Those who Live
in Cities (19261927).
10. For more information on Squattastic and squat-related links, visit
http://squattastic.blogspot.co.uk
11. Harvey, op.cit., p.79.
Works Cited
Foucault, M. (1984) Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Translated by
Miskowiec, J. In Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite (October).
Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban
Revolution. London: Verso.
Jameson, F. (2004) The Politics of Utopia. In New Left Review, 25 (Jan/Feb).
Sassoon, D. (1996) One Hundred Years of Socialism. London: Harper Collins.

29

An Alternate World
Photography in
Time of Domination
Natalia Cifuentes Friedman

It seems that the inhabitants of the world cannot escape

time. Time gives us a structure and a measurement system. All of
our daily activities are marked with a number that enounces an
activity. So what is time today? Does the apparatus control all our
movements? Are there other possibilities?
Jacques Rancire stresses, in In What Time Do We Live?,
that there is a time of domination. This time is established through
the institutions that we unavoidably have to be part of in order to be
a citizen of the estate. The time of domination determines what
is possible and what is not.1 Work, education, wealth fare, social
security, leisure, traveling and personal relationships all work for
global capital and for a distribution of capacities.
However, we can escape the established time. Rancire
posits that there is a diversion of the global and dominate time, a
time that creates a new world inside the apparatus. This new times
separates people and their capacities. Work is not only from 9am
to 5pm. In this new time there are strikes, immigrants, refugees,
unemployment, and war.
31

Source: Oscar Lpez

Source: Shabestan

32

Source: Unknown

Source: Shabestan

Source: David A. Smith

33

Source: Baher Kamal

Source: Baher Kamal

Thereafter, I want to create an exercise exploring how far can

we can go beyond the dominate time using machines that store
instants of the time of domination and transform these instants into
secondary possible times. Rancire considers little machines or
dispositifs that construct other possibilities of looking at the present,
at a remove from both the unanimist convergence of times and the
critical construction of their divergence.2 Hence, photography is a
machine that can produce a different time, and thus, my instrument
to create this exercise.
I want to recreate a daily life in images. I am aware that
daily activities are controlled by this domination; nevertheless
the reflection of static images does not form part of the global
mechanism.
34

It is something that stands out of time and creates a new

awareness of our own freedom within time. With the help of my
images and images from the media, I will create a state that
questions time and our relationship with it. As Rancire postulates,
global time has created a world of individualism. Thus we can only
outflow the domination in our capacity of individuals.
The images demonstrate a different time by shooting the
global and reflecting how can it be changed. There is the possibility
of altering our current, individual states and constructing an
alternate time through public events that question the system
(strikes, immigration, etc.). The contrast between them will engage
the viewers doubts and mentally exercise their current relation with
time, today and throughout their life.
Notes
1. Rancire, J. (2012) In What Time Do We Live?, in The State of Things, eds.
Marta Kuzma, Pablo Lafuente, Peter Osborne, Cologne: Walther Koening, p.20.
2. Ibid., p.34.
All images courtesy of the author, except where stated otherwise.

35

Producing a
Radical Everybody
Against the Temptation of
Populism
Benjamin W. Tippin

The production and exercise of radical political subjectivity is

necessary for the further development of humanity, for the further
development of our current stage of capitalism, or the possibility of
moving beyond it. Capitalismall social production, reallyrequires
challenges and competition in order for it to change and synthesize
new modes of its existence. The lack of a radical challenge to the
liberal mode of productioncapital, social, or otherwiseis the
most pressing urgency of contemporary capitalism. The inherent
tendencies of Capitalism toward decay and inherent contradictions
necessitate constant movement in order to prevent absolute
collapse. Without it, the crises produced by the innate structure of
Capitalism overwhelm and consume society. What does it mean to
be revolutionary in our era of extensive and entrenched capital that
dominates systems that examine and produce political will? Can art
exercise of revolutionary politic within these systems?
How Does One Produce of Radical Agency?
In order to answer these questions, we must explore what
revolutionary is. The revolutionary desire is the desire for radical
37

change to the social order and the sociopolitical structure. It is the

production of a radical program that reproduces new structures
that overthrow old systems of production. This is not simply limited
to economic production, such as that of goods or currency, but,
following the legacy of Marx, the political and the production of
social relations as well. Thus, the revolutionary and radical act must
abolish or assault the extant structures that produce the social,
the self, and public space to replace them with radically different
modalities. To be a radical expression, to be an act that strikes
against the central discourse, it must destabilize, confront, and
acknowledge the contradictions built into our contemporary mode
and generate a coinciding agency that exemplifies revolutionary
potential.
Agency is the manifested product of the political self, the
engagement of a will with the external world, and to function it
must manifest within or against systems that produce the social. Its
production creates a relation to systems of power and engagement;
agency is the voice with social contract and hegemony. Radical
agency must challenge these foundations of power relations without
performing the roles set out by them. Following from Marx, real
agency must be produced by collective political engagement.
The individual, the autonomous self, must ally with others in order
to maximize the product of its action. Political alliances, such as
collective movements and collective action, are necessary for the
production of radical agency.
It is not enough to collectivise and produce an action, though.
In order to truly be radical, the agency must produce a collective will
that confronts and challenges the system that produces alienation
and contradiction. Thus, drawing from Lenins critique of Left
Communism, acts of retreat, such as squatting or the commune
strategies of Anarchists and Left Communists, or exclusion, such
as the production of heterotopias, cannot produce an agency that
operates against the structures of society.1 The retreat into the
production of hermetic spaces is the retreat into the imaginary
space; it is, in Lenins words, an infantile disorder of radical politics.
38

The spaces that these actions inhabit are, by definition, outside

of society and non-hegemonic. These actions merely reproduce
society and generate an illusion of agency that only exists within
these spaces. This agency is completely disconnected from
an ability to effect actual social change. In keeping with these
criteria, to generate a radical subjectivity, in order to establish a
radical collective will that acts upon social production, the act or
engagement must be visible and exert itself in an overt manner.
It is through visibility and opposition that hegemonic agency is
developed. This enchains radical desire to radical engagement.
The desire to affect the structure of hegemony by the dissolution of
hierarchy or demanding concessions is thus necessarily entangled
with conversations of power.
Separating Populism and the Radical
While the production of collective and engaged will is the first
step toward challenging and affecting Capital, collective, populist
will is simply not enough. It must be radical. Populism, according
to Ernesto Laclau, is the most distilled kernel of politic. For Laclau,
populism is not a movement; it is the generation of a political entity,
the people, through democratic demands.2 These demands
produce a people as agent and voice and reduce all global
tensionsthe struggles and antagonisms on the Right, Left and
Centerto centralized iterations of a global struggle characterized
of us against them whose membership is not prescribed in
advance but is, precisely, the stake of the struggle of hegemony.3
Laclau utilizes this definition to insist on a neutrality of popular
struggle; he wishes to distinguish popular struggle and hegemony
from historical class struggles. While he feels that class struggle
presupposes a privileged political agent/group, the contents of his
populist struggles are couched in the contingencies developed in
particular political struggles for hegemony.4
Slavoj iek, on the other hand, points out problems that
arise from Laclaus designations. Laclaus people cannot be a
preexisting group. It, by definition, arises from the act of demanding
and therefore does not continue to exist without active demands.
39

The people have no real ties holding them together and must
create external definitions and outsiders that define it. The working
class, on the other hand, is a preexisting social group, and the
proletariat is the revolutionary class consolidated by its collective
awareness of its history and class-consciousness which empowers
a collective radical subjectivity. The proletariat is the expression of
an empowered subjectivity, while the people is an arbitrary set of
demands.
Laclaus examination of populism seeks to explain both the
revolutionary and destructive potentials of mass politic. He creates
a theory of social political action in order to adequately describe
the civil rights movements, fascism, and communism, all with
the same system. The issues with this become apparent, iek
points out, as populism requires both a reified antagonism and a
constructed enemy for it to functionThe enemy is externalized
or reified into a positive ontological enemy (even if the enemy is
spectral), whose annihilation would restore balance and justice.5
This enemy is an intruder who corrupts the system and is crucial
to the establishment and unification of the political subject into a
people.6 This subverts the revolutionary potential of populist action
because the system itself is never culpable. For Marx, crises are the
natural functions of Capitalismas iek puts it, the pathological
is the symptom of the normaland the totalizing structure itself
becomes the problem.7 The driving agent for change is not an
external enemy, the rectification of the wrongs inflicted upon the
system from the outside, but the fundamental systemic violence
of capitalism itself.8 Thus, populism displaces the antagonisms
inherent to the flaws of the structure in favor of an antagonism
between the people and the other. This actively suppresses the
production of radical social change; the democratic demands
become couched within the structure itself. Laclaus democratic
demands trap themselves. According to iek, the term demand
automatically creates a dynamic between the demander and a
constructed Other presupposed to be able to meet [them].9
This populist subject, while possessing political agency, cannot
be radical or revolutionary; the revolutionary position opposes the
40

structures of power, and its subjectivity is couched in its intention to

destroy them.
Thus a distinction between populism and radical politic must
be created. The former is stuck within the system. While constituting
hegemonic agency through a people established by their demands
on the system and able to affect some change, the people
are ultimately stuck within the prevailing sociopolitical structure
demanding concessions from it instead of effecting systemic
change. Revolutionary or radical mass politic on the other hand is
led by ideology; its enemy is systemic; and, its goals are nothing
less than a new social ordering. From this distinction, it becomes
clear that a distinction must be drawn between the Occupy
Movement that sprung up (mainly in the West) in late 2011 and the
collective events comprising the Arab Spring which started in late
2010.
The intricacies of the Arab Spring are beyond the scope of this
article, but the political changes that emerged from the uprisings in
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria stand in evidence of their
radical natures. These were not Left-wing uprisings by any stretch
of the imagination, but the emergent mass politic challenged the
systems of power in place in these countries. The people attacked
the structures of political power and the capacity of the system to
reproduce this power.
Standing in contrast to these events, the framework of Occupy
centered on demands addressed to the extant systems of power:
full employment, greater equality in the distribution of wealth, and
the establishment of Robin Hood taxes (taxes targeting financial
transactions). These demands established a clear, non-radical
populism at the foundation of the movement. Occupys now famous
slogan, We are the 99%, sets Occupy up in opposition against
an implied, or sometimes explicit, 1% which controls vastly
disproportionate access to capital. Occupy established the 99%
as the defining universal political subject of their movement while
establishing the 1% as interloper corrupting the system. This
41

implies that the corruption destroying the economic and political

systems is a product from outside of the system, not the system
itself. Occupy is a bourgeois populist movement whose goals and
methods, far from being anti-capitalist, sought to preserve the
system and structures of Capitalism against incursions by predatory
venture and financial capitalists. The anger at the excesses of
Capital were turned against a perceived parasitic enemy with
protesters demanding those responsible be held accountable
instead of the inequity built into the economic system itself; crisis
and collapse are intrinsic fatal flaws in Capitalism that are inscribed
into the reproductive processes of the system. The failure of Occupy
was that it asked Capitalism to fix the problems with Capitalism.
Through Occupys failure to produce a radical act, it failed to be the
radical challenge needed to shift the course of history.
Art and Radicality
We have finally come to the question, Can art be revolutionary
politic within these systems? To answer this, we must ask: can an
art act be a political act, and if so, is it capable of being radical?
The political emerges from social engagement. If the political can
be considered a structure of social relations, the production of
the social generates its structure; it generates politic. Art, then,
is politic. The act of the art production is an act of social relation;
the creation of artobject, image, performance, composition, or
otherwiseis at the same time: a product and producer of political
agency; a producer and product of libidinal political engagement;
and, an exercising or expression of voice through both concrete
and abstract discursive social dynamics. Art manifests biopolitical
agency through artist-audience relations and through actions that
challenge and render the space of relations. The twin roles of
spectator and spectated exercise complex sociopolitical hierarchies
that produce political exchange. The artworkthe art act made
discreteis, then, a political act, and the art producer is both a
social role and the individual that enacts it.
As we have explored earlier, the radical act must produce
radical agency; it must engage and assault the normalizing
42

structures of society, the mechanisms of social totality. A radical act

cannot merely demand concessions from the system in the form of
reparation or conciliation. It must challenge the reproduction of the
system itself. Graffiti is possibly one such practice. The authentic
graffer10, as opposed to the street artists who produce work for
the gallery, challenges the conventional production of space and
produces political statements and alternatives to the norms. The
act of incising, carving, and writing on walls, especially the walls of
others, is a wildly political act that inscribes space and generates
new perceptions of ownership and perceptions of materiality and
public space. The sharing of this art through visibility in public
space and unmediated generation of its audience extends the
act and transforms the graffers engagement with the wall into the
expression of the libidinal drive to mark or create and the expression
of radical desire. Graffiti enchains this desire to spatial alternatives.
As more mechanisms of social awareness and interaction
migrate onto internet-based platforms, the spaces of political
generation migrate as well. Cyberspace has adopted interactional
qualities that public space traditionally generates, and artists like
Tammam Azzam have taken advantage of this. Azzams Freedom
Graffiti is a digital media piece, a manipulated photograph,
depicting Gustav Klimts The Kiss superimposed over a bombed
out, devastated building in Syria. It is part of a larger series,
Syrian Museum that exposes the devastation of the Syrian Civil
War upon the urban landscape, especially upon Syrias cultural
history. His work, especially Freedom Graffiti, made an impact
online in early 2013 and led to the work being shown in London
in December of 2013.11 Azzam claims that its a different effect
when you see any artwork face to face. For me, I prefer [the work
in real life] because there are many details that you cant see when
you see it on a computer. The real problem is not its presentation
on screen. The need for the gallery to grant this work a real life
presence exclusivises it. The work, which previously existed as a
kernel of protest shared from person to person and broadcast into
cyberspace, now exists in a gallery, a mediated space that controls
the context of the work.
43

The gallery, in the contemporary art context, acts as an

entity that exposes and validates art. The gallery system, along
with the museum, is an entrenched system of commodity that
reinforces its own position to sell and define art through its ability to
validate. Mirroring the expansionary capitalist practices, galleries
must constantly seek out new work, new artists, and new political
agendas that they can trade upon in order to increase market
share and customer draw. To this end, the system must attempt to
engage, lead, or create the political discourse in art rendering the
radical act totemic, draining it of agency, and transforming it into an
image of the radical. The gallery becomes the space that fetishizes
agency while alienating the agent through reification. In this way, the
agency of art is reduced to commodity, and the gallery reproduces
its own power. This position as gatekeeper of validation actively
opposes the revolutionary artwork. Just as the radical act is an act
that, by its very nature, does not require validation from the system
it opposes, the radical artwork does not seek validation; it seeks
change.
By entering into the gallery system and passing into
commodity, Freedom Graffiti has become yet another fetish
object locked away from public space. The object in the gallery
is rendered non-hegemonic and non-revolutionary; it cannot
change the structure of dialogue or exchange. The agency Azzam
constructed is now cycling within systems of exchange demanding
recognition, validation, and concession from patrons, not the
totality whose contradictions we can see in Syria. Not just Azzams
style of work is enchained this way. Famous street artists, such
as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, have traded radical productions
of space for the production of abstract commodity. Once traded,
the commodification of an artists work denudes it of radical or
revolutionary action no matter how political the piece or vocabulary.
Instead, these works merely reproduce the mechanisms of capital.
Extrapolating ieks critique of populism, artworks benefiting from
these systems, even those that criticize the institutions, inhibit their
own radical potential. Galleries are spaces that maintain the illusion,
the image, of radicality. Galleries and the artists and artworks
44

that strive to exploit their resources are stuck within the system of
Capitalism, unable to affect the totality, and henceforth operate
within the systems inclination to grant concessions. They are stuck
within the limits that we see in Laclaus populism. Art, then, is a
powerful political tool that can generate revolutionary subjectivity,
but like all revolutionary subjectivity, art is susceptible to bourgeois
opportunism that enchains it to Capital and aborts revolutionary
acts. The artist is stuck performing the cultural role of subversive
artist without subversive capacity.
Notes
1. See Lenin, V.I. (1940) Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder: a popular
essay in Marxian strategy and tactics. New translation. New York: International
Publishers.
2. iek, S. (2007) A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation,
in Budgen, S., Kouvlakis, S., and iek, S. (eds.) Lenin Reloaded: Toward a
Politics of Truth. Durham: Duke University Press. p.79.
3. Ibid., p.79.
4. Ibid., p.7980.
5. Ibid., p.82.
6. Ibid., p.81.
7. Ibid., p.81.
8. Ibid., p.91.
9. Ibid., p.83.
10. Graffer is the colloquial term, the street term, for a tagger or graffiti artist. It is
a term that I was taught by taggers in Los Angeles.
11. Azzam, T. via Nagesh, A. (2014) Syrian Artist Behind Viral Kiss Image To
Show In London. Blouin Art Info. Available at: http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/
story/982068/syrian-artist-behind-viral-kiss-image-to-show-in-london (Accessed
May 5, 2014).
Works Cited
Azzam, T. via Nagesh, A. (2014) Syrian Artist Behind Viral Kiss Image To
Show In London. Blouin Art Info. Available at: http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/
story/982068/syrian-artist-behind-viral-kiss-image-to-show-in-london (Accessed
May 5, 2014).
Lenin, V.I. (1940) Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder: a popular essay in
Marxian strategy and tactics. New translation. New York: International Publishers.
iek, S. (2007) A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation, in
Budgen, S., Kouvlakis, S., and iek, S. (eds.) Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics
of Truth. Durham: Duke University Press.
45

The Hobo Code

Fieldwork in an Alternative
Market Guide for the London
Property Buyer
Noura Al-Salem

April, 2014 London, UK

THE QUESTION What is the value of an apparatus? And
perhaps more vitally, what value can be found in providing a
counter measure to that apparatus? Giorgio Agamben posits that
Indeed, every apparatus implies a process of subjectification,
without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance,
but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence.1 According
to Agamben, the supposed value of this subjectification is that the
apparatus allows living beings to function as a society to keep
them a step removed from their primal desires in order for them to
live and work together according to some sort of order. But what is
to be done if the remove goes too far? If the apparatus is applied
beyond its original purview? His assertion is that without rationalizing
the apparatus as a mode of governance, it becomes instead
an exercise of violence.2 Those that are charged with building
apparatus must wholly understand the responsibility inherent in this
act, so as to use it as an enabling force rather than one of violent
repression. However, in the case of misuse, it is often in fact within
47

the apparatus itself that one can determine its antidote. Within every
measure there lies the indication of a counter-measure. It is with
the action of this counter apparatus that one can attempt to change
the status quo, and if change is not possible, then at least render it
transparent.
THE PROBLEMATIC One such problematic to consider could
be the ever-inflating housing market in the capital where land
has become commodity stock and prices inflate as indicators of
market security rather than of actual value. Where much of the new
building developments are sold off-market in foreign economies,
and sizeable swaths of central London stand empty houses being
second, third, or even fourth homes for wealthy families. In many
cases, property even remains unoccupied a stable, physical asset
in the manner of gold bullion or government bonds. In considering
the determined refusal of the UK governing bodies to address
this rapidly escalating issue, we once again turn to Agamben:
capitalism and other modern forms of power seem to generalize
and push to the extreme the processes of separation that define
religion.3 In this case, the religion he alludes to can be seen in
the governments unshakeable faith in the virtue of ever-increasing
property values.

Graffiti: Property is theft. Source: Flickr, CC 2.0

Hobo Code. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0

COUNTER-MEASURE Considering the structuring of an anti

or counter apparatus is to understand it as what Giorgio Agamben
designates a process of profanation. He states: Profanation is
the counter-apparatus that restores to common use what sacrifice
had separated and divided.4 In other words, a re-appropriation
48

(or perhaps reorientation) of the power afforded by the imposition

of an apparatus. In fact, there are apparatuses that have only ever
existed as a counter-measure, already operating as a mechanism of
rupture. An example of just such an apparatus is the American Hobo
Code a series of predetermined symbols dating back to the 1880s
that were inscribed by transients on various buildings, posts, fences,
railway lines and so on throughout towns, informing other itinerant
travellers of what they could expect of the area. A cat symbolizes,
a kind-hearted lady lives here; a cross means, talk religion, get
food; crossed shovels indicate, work available. These symbols
are radical in their usage as they represent a visual language not
only for subversive communication outside the realm of concretized
language, but also a language for those who were unable to read
or write. In considering this counter-measure, I began to think
how a similar system could be applied as a solution to a pressing
contemporary issue.
FIELDWORK Using the pre-existing structure of the Hobo
Code, I begin by creating my own scheme of symbols. These
symbols are then disseminated both by extensive flyering and via a
website www.londonhousingcode.co.uk, which displays a key to
the different symbols:

Image: Courtesy of the author.

49

I then inscribe these physical marks directly onto various

buildings all over London. My aim is that by indicating various
aspects of the citys housing market, the market itself loses its
mystique. It becomes transparent and readable an overlay of
strategic information akin to Google Glass: the Londoners guide
to the market that has disenfranchised them. In attempting to build
a readable topography, I propose this question: Will the act of
physically inscribing the condition of the London property market on
the walls of this commodity perhaps stir those who are victims of
Agambens mere exercise of violence to action??

Images: Courtesy of the author.

Notes
1. Agamben, G. (2009) What is an Apparatus? In What is an Apparatus? and
Other Essays, Kishik, D. and Pedatella, S. (trans). Stanford: Stanford University
Press. p.19.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
50

51

Here Comes
the Liquid Body
Charlotte Cirillo
& Suzie Jones

Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory

Deleuze and Guattari (2013:581)
In this globally networked world of capitalist flows which
subsume and submerge all encountered opposition, how might we
form a politic? In this text we are trying to understand the spatial
and infrastructural expressions of late capitalist, neoliberal ideology,
how we might subvert these to develop a conscious politic, and
how might we resocialise processes and infrastructures and regain
collective and individual agency? As the quote by Deleuze and
Guattari above asserts, the smooth interface of neoliberal ideology,
expressed immeasurably through government and corporate law,
institutions, technologies, and architectures is not liberatory; rather,
it is a channel for containment.
In our social condition of dependability, relations are
articulated through constantly fluctuating states of unity and
opposition. These states of unity and opposition are descriptions
of the energetic relationships that determine the organisation of
53

the liquid body; when in opposition, and maybe especially so,

we are all active participants in a seemingly ungraspable, liquid
infrastructure. This is the subsuming nature of capitalism. If the
nature of capital is abstract, amorphous and enveloping, then what
is the nature of the liquid body with which it is entangled and seeks
to contain? The liquid body is, of course our liquid body fluid
and unruly yet profitable, exploitable, and necessary. The liquid
body appears to be as abstract as capitalism, yet this very form
could offer strategies against its exploitation and containment. As
capitalism functions through abstraction, so too the leaky body can
employ abstract, subterfugal tactics in order to insist on a conscious
politic, resocialise the apparatus through recognition of our shared
liquid body, subvert the exploitation of our liquid body through
inefficiency and spillage, and permeate rather than be permeated.
I live in the parametricity: an urban sprawl designed by
architectural algorithms that allow sinuous, curved forms to
be created from concrete and steel; where blocks of flats
are more like blobs; and Haussmanns boulevards have
been replaced by watercourse-like walkways. Husssh,
whisper the streets, do not protest. The citys architecture
transformed and swelled hand in hand with neoliberal
politics; through the smooth interfaces of the corporate
offices, leisure centres and universities, a neoliberal ideal
was cemented: an ideal which strived for depoliticisation
of the people, whereby messy government outsourcing,
privatisation and inequity could be hidden like the scripts of
a CPU. The city dwellers became end users; the experience
of the city, rather than its functioning, became the priority;
the government shirks accountability; and capitalism
appears as a self-sustaining automaton, a slippery slime
mold that evades taxonomy. Feel fluid, feel free, shouts
a spectacular Zaha Hadid museum. I read that in her
early years she was influenced by Bolshevism; now, she
designs free schools with dinner halls that mimic trading
floors where kids study 8-5 in order to ready themselves for
working life, and classes are retitled conferences.
54

Cities are our social relations manifest, physical declarations

of our political and social rights and history. The global city is
then capitalisms abstract, liquid nature writ large; the propulsion
of privatisation, expansion and individualisation is reflected in
its architecture, from overt, shiny new buildings to the private
management of once public squares and walkways. With the
advance of this urban space, citizen rights are diminished. Reading
this more broadly, we may contemplate the lack of agency that
accompanies less tangible neoliberal macrostructures.
Lewis Mumford and Henri Lefebvre were among those
who warned of the dangers of building cities to which citizens
have no right. Still, the ground was seized from beneath our feet;
the city became desocialised; no longer a place constituted by
social activity, it became the global city constituted by its ability
to capture and release finance, act as hub for global media
and communications and to attract multinational corporations,
academics, skilled professionals, real estate investment and, of
course, further capital.
In 1961, Mumford described the beginnings of the
dematerialisation (or desocialisation) of the city that is in itself an
expression of the fact that the new world in which we have begun
to live is not merely open on the surface, far beyond the visible
horizon, but also open internally, penetrated by invisible rays and
emanations, responding to stimuli and forces beyond the threshold
of ordinary observation. Like Marshal McLuhan, Mumford alludes
to the electrical network of telecommunications and systems of data
transmission which, in the 60s, started to pervade cities to the point
of constituting them, rendering them invisible. He was also referring
to the cities transformation into megalopolises, or continuous
cities, beyond the minds eye; to the way that the global city logic
permeates and manifests itself in our imaginary. For Keller Easterling
this is expressed as a retinal afterglow, of a soupy matrix of details
and repeatable formulas that make up most of the space in the
world (2013).
55

We noticed it happening around the docks at first, then

the warehouses and factories followed; some places were
raised to the ground; hoardings constructed around others.
The builders came in, then the landscapers and then the
interiors team. The artists were commissioned to provide
finishing touches by way of bronze sculpture, and thus our
industrial sites emerged from their transformations tasteful
shopping villages, bright and funky office spaces for the
burgeoning media industry.
What are the affects of this insidious apparatus? We still live
and play out our social relations in these spaces, but we no longer
feel that we should be the constructors. Neoliberal ideology, which
thrives in and organises the city, instructs that the citizen must not
take part. The citizen is persuaded to act as an individual rather than
as an active social being that might affect change in the architecture
and rhythms of the apparatus. Assuaged, seduced even, by the
apparent freedoms of the smooth space, we trade in our rights; the
flow of the stream carrying our agency like pebbles.
My body has become permeable, punctured; news
feeds drip into me, out of me Huffpost, Facebook,
the Guardian; the paper pamphlets shoved through my
letterbox announce new takeaway places and changes
to my boroughs recycling service. My zoe just about kept
intact by the state. I can visit my GP for free, and theres
always the dole I can claim if I get the sack from my job,
but my bios is offered up in a free for all; my cultural, social,
thinking self becomes a free market where commodities
and cultural capital are exchanged in the blink of an eye.
So long as my physical body is kept functioning at a basic
level, my bios may be pawned for its sum of education,
intellect, sociability and happiness. In a neoliberal agenda
I am worth my bios and must fulfill that founding idiom of
western philosophy, cogito ergo sum I think, therefore I
am.
56

Within myself, infinitesimal splinters of countless networks

are layered. Each of these play a role in my subjectivity;
each member of each network, whether participating or
not, plays a role in the nature of each network and therefore
myself. Like water molecules, cohesion with others is a
necessity to exist; electrons are shared, and movement is
incessant. Stability is an illusion; if I were stable, I would be
ice, at 0 Kelvin, lifeless.
Our liquid body, then, is organised by the forces that shape
desires and create tendencies. In 1992, on the eve of World Wide
Web becoming an extensively used social resource, a study
suggested that there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals
with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships: this
number, known as the Dunbar number, is 150. Therefore, through
the seductive technologies that expand and abstract our capacity
for social relations, the immeasurable networks of neoliberal
apparatus will, by definition, prevent inclusivity and participation and
prevent collective action by consequence.
We were too busy on Facebook to care, too busy primping
our avatars and building our websites to look out the
window. Occasionally wed glance. Some of us liked it;
some of us lamented at the gentrification, but it was so
nicely packaged up the pictures on the hoardings sold
us the lifestyle, pictures of people like us benefiting from a
boost in the local economy, eating brunch at the nice little
cafes, strolling along the wide pavements...it seemed so
idyllic.
Tracing again the beginnings of this shift towards fluidity to
the 1960s, the advent of electronic and the subsequent desertion of
the analogic led to a broader shift from centralised and geometric
modernist logic to todays fluid circuits of network. Such a paradigm
shift promised an increase in connection and collaboration and,
therefore, inclusivity. Yet in order for such macro-networks to flow, a
standardisation of means of exchange, such as language, currency,
57

and cultural rituals what is agreed upon as knowledge must

occur, a process of cultural short-circuiting that excludes locality
and promotes globality. Now we find ourselves in a condition
whereby fluidity and transparency are not only prioritised and
promoted over friction and opacity but also directly employed as
the orators of the neoliberal ideology; they speak with a language of
convincing clarity, ever giving answers and minimising questions.
From within this illusion of transparency, this place of global
cartographers, networks are mapped out and flows monitored. The
density and viscosity of the liquid body will determine its character
within a channel, but if the flow is filtered and divided into myriad
interconnecting ducts, not impeding free movement but slowing
down and weakening the liquids force in unity, flows can be
monitored and managed. The internet links our online selves directly
to robot analytics, allowing our machinic traces to be taken apart
and mapped out in any way desired, the strategic style chosen to
dissect the our clicks determines how our desires, attentions, fears,
and ideologies are interpreted. The data is organised, packaged,
sold, reorganised and materalised into ever-increasing sales,
ever-increasing investment, and ever-increasingly intertwined
intimate preferences, corporate automation, virtual desire, speed,
gratification, knowledge creation, surveillance, collection and
piloting. The immediate future is paved before us algorithmically
corresponding to and affecting our desires and ensuring that we
develop compatibly with the existing flows and networks; innovation,
even when apparently controversial, is eventually incorporated into
the flow.
In this subsuming apparatus, a binary opposition will merely
charge the same subject with positive and negative connotation,
a bipolarity that may invert opinion and perception but ultimately
does not subvert tendencies towards the evolution of a collective
or paradigmatic shift (e.g. institutional critique internalised by
institutions). So, given that binary opposition is bound to be
subsumed and mobilised in order to flow within a hegemonic
apparatus, and that the machinery of power criminalises with little
58

distinction both violent and non-violent opposition (Fisher 2002:64),

how might we enact our rights to participate in and resocialise our
conditions?
Strategies for this must be non-oppositional; thought of in
terms of a third force a queer, subterfugal, divergent action
through which we may be able to build complexities that disallow
the short-circuiting inherent in this efficient flow. This third element of
disturbance is enacted by the liquid body, utilising fluidity as a tool
for its own undoing. Easterling proposes a similar strategy when she
suggests that an architects spatial training may give insights into
how to deal with the immeasurable apparatus: What if we even can
tinker with the operating system, not just with object form, but with
form making thats almost more like making software?
To enact subterfuge, or a third force, we must recognise the
strength of our liquid body as an entity which may unite, pool, or
trickle and diverge. As Jameson argues for a utopian vision that
takes the form of disruption (2007:211-233), and Glissant argues
for an opacity that disallows a free flowing, dominant ideology
(1997:189-194), our aspirations for resocialising the apparatus will
be of a tangible, corporeal and sensible nature.
Tactics like this are described by Michel De Certeau as acts
of la perruque. La perruque, whilst being assertive, is nonoppositional, prioritising the strengthening of social relations over
the efficiency of a production line.
The workers own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs
from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from
absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. ...The worker who
indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses
only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely
not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must
serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way
to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own
capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other
workers or his family through spending his time in this way. (1988:25-26)
59

The character of the la perruque performing character is

developed by Jean Fisher into the character of the trickster, a
carnivalesque figure whose spirit arises with the demand for
ethical, renewing, and re-empowering practices (2002:69) in
other words, resocialisation. For Fisher the trickster challenges the
proper codes of civilized conduct and the hierarchies that attempt
to ensure that everything stays strictly in its proper place. Indeed,
trickster is concerned with neither the proper nor the place;
he or she is always on the move, simultaneously grounded and
ungrounded, the artful master of liminal space-time, irony, parody
and dissimulation (p.68).
The nomadic nature of Fishers trickster character offers an
answer to how we might utilise the abstraction of our liquid body
to its best advantage. Rather than viewing our collective body
as scattered, abstract and de-politicised, why dont we instead
view ourselves as pervasive, entrenched and tricky? De Certeaus
worker, whose inefficiency and spillage outside of the production
line shows we have an agency in our liquidity, and it is an agency
that we share. We are all the liquid body.
That agency, again, through its liquid nature, may be
employed subterfugally: the trickster is anyone and anywhere, a
third force to be reckoned with. Through the act of subterfuge, we
can insist on a more complex, leaking discourse. No longer allowing
for the efficient monitoring and managing our data - for our online
clicks to be used to be used to strengthen a dominant, hegemonic
flow - through subterfuge, we might realise a resocialised apparatus
where social relations are prioritised over capitalist production lines,
and the pervasion of the global city into our subconscious is not a
given.
Through the act of resocialising, we endeavour to reconcile
the chasm between body and mind. The transparent and efficient
flow of neoliberal apparatus, which negates the needs of the body
and the complexity of both body and mind, will be disrupted. No
longer accepting the maxim I think, therefore I am, our leaky
60

bodies, in all their complex forms, will be acknowledged. Through

the act of resocialising, we strive to remap those cultures that have
been short-circuited. Bodies will not be excluded.
Lets group together and bust the dams, drench the
sidewalks and flood the banks. Lets write the obsolete
technologies and technologisers back into history along
with the outcasts and repressed. Narrativise and revere
the cranks and tinkers, the sort who file for a hundred
patents in lifetime and never make a penny for their labours
(Johnson 1997:206). Lets dismantle the interface and
reprogramme the software; lets slip upstream, swim against
the current and see what we might find at the root of it all.
Works Cited
Appadurai, A. In conversation with Marianne Franklin, during UK book launch of
Digital Dilemmas (Franklin, M. OUP 2013) at Goldsmiths University of London, 26
March 2014.
Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013). A Thousand Plateaus. 10th ed. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Easterling, K. (2013). The Space in Which Were Swimming: Keller Easterling at
TEDxYale City.
Fisher, J. (2014). Toward a Metaphysics of Shit. In: Documenta 11_Platform 5:
Exhibition Catalogue, 1st ed. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 63-70.
Glissant, Edouard. (1997) For Opacity. Poetics of Relation, University of
Michigan Press
Mumford, Lewis. (1961) The City In History. Harcourt Brace International. p. 567
Jameson, F. (2007). The Future as Disruption Archaeologies of the Future. 1st
ed. London: Verso. pp. 211-233
Johnson, S. (1997). Interface culture. 1st ed. [San Francisco]: HarperEdge.
Stiegler, Bernard. In conversation with Irit Rogoff about Transindividuation,
during Pharmaconomics lecture series at Goldsmiths University of London in
February, March 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/

61

[Il]legal Bodies
A Personal Genealogy
of Citizenship
Urok Shirhan

Only in a world . . . in which the citizen

has been able to recognise the refugee
that he or she is, only in such a world is
the political survival of humankind today
thinkable.
Giorgio Agamben

63

My grandparents, Hatem Shamki Alshabibi and Melia Hamadi Ginaibar. Baghdad, 1975.

1906
My grandfather, Hatem Shamki Alshabibi, is born Ottoman.

1917
Britain seizes Baghdad.

1920
Britain creates state of Iraq with League of Nations approval.

64

1920
Great Iraqi Revolution, rebellion against British rule.

1924
My grandmother, Melia Hamadi Ginaibar, is born Ottoman.

1924
First Iraqi Nationality Law no. 42 is implemented:
The person bearing an Ottoman Nationality, who has attained
his majority, and habitually living in Iraq, shall lose his Ottoman
Nationality, and shall be deemed to be an Iraq National from the
sixth day of August, 1924. His son shall also be deemed an Iraqi
national in succession.

My grandmother Melias Certificate of Iraqi Nationality.

65

1932
Iraq becomes an independent state.

1949
My father, Qassim Shirhan Alsaedy, is born Iraqi.

1952
My mother, Nebal Hatem Shamki, is born Iraqi.

1958
The monarchy is overthrown in a military coup, and Iraq is declared
a republic.

1963
The Prime Minister of Iraq is ousted in a coup led by the Arab
Socialist Baath Party.

1963
Nationality Law No. (46) of 1963:
Article 11: Every Iraqi national who has acquired a foreign
nationality in a foreign country by his own choice, shall lose his
Iraqi nationality

66

1963
The Baathist government is overthrown.

1968
A Baathist-led coup overthrows government. The Revolutionary
Command Council takes charge.

1975
Nationality Law reform allows any Arab to be granted Iraqi
nationality, a first in the region.

1976
My brother is born Iraqi.

1979
Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq.

1979
My parents are forced to flee Iraq.

67

1979
In Lebanon, my parents status is illegal. They are not allowed to
work or study. They are able to obtain work with solidary foreign
organisations in Beirut.

1980
Nationality Law reform is implemented to allow the withdrawal of
Iraqi nationality from dissidents (particularly Iraqi communists):
The Revolutionary Command Council have decided in their
session held on 07.05.1980 the following:
The Iraqi nationality shall be dropped from any Iraqi if it is
appeared that he is not loyal to the homeland, people, higher
national and social objectives of the Revolution.
Saddam Hussein
Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council

1980
In the former South-Yemen, my parents status is legal because of
agreements between the communist party of Iraq and South-Yemen.

1984
In Syria, my parents can enter and work legally, but as there is
no Iraqi embassy, they cannot officially leave the country without
passing through the Syrian secret service.

68

1984
I am born Iraqi in Damascus.

1987
In Libya, our status is legal, and my father has a one-year work
permit that can be extended each year.

1990
My father is forced to quit his job because he refuses to change the
red colour in a mural for supposedly being too communist.

1990
After Saddams invasion of Kuwait and the sanctions, Iraqi nationals
cannot obtain any visas to anywhere in the world.

1990
Kaddafi temporarily suspends residency laws for all Arabs, allowing
them to freely live and work in Libya.

1993
My family applies for political asylum in the Netherlands.

69

Information folder of Dutch refugee camp (front view).

Information folder of Dutch refugee camp (rear view).

1993
We are acknowledged as political refugees and are placed in a
Dutch refugee camp.

1994
We are granted a positive refugee status.

1998
We are granted Dutch nationality and citizenship.

2006
Amendments to Iraqi Nationality Law:
Article 10: I- An Iraqi who acquires a foreign nationality shall
retain his Iraqi nationality, unless he has declared in writing
renunciation of his Iraqi nationality.
Article 17: Decision No. 666 of 1980 issued by the (defunct)
Revolutionary Command Council shall be repealed and Iraqi
nationality shall be restored to all Iraqis deprived of their Iraqi
nationality under the said as well as all other unfair decisions
issued by the (defunct) Revolutionary Command Council in this
respect.
Article 18: I- Any Iraqi, who was denaturalized on political,
religious, racist or sectarian grounds, shall have the right
to restore his Iraqi nationality, subject to submission of an
application to this effect. In the case of his death, his children,
who have lost their Iraqi nationality consequent to his fathers
loss of nationality, shall have the right to submit an application to
restore Iraqi nationality.
71

Official letter notifying that Dutch nationality has been granted to my mother and I.

Works Cited
Agamben, G. (2000) Beyond Human Rights in Means Without Ends: Notes on
Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p 26.
Iraq profile, BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14546763
Law No. (46) of 1963 - Iraqi Nationality 1963, available at: http://www.refworld.
org/docid/3ae6b4ec38.html [accessed 1 May 2014]
Law No. 5 of 1975 Granting the Iraqi Nationality to the Arab, 18 January 1975,
available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4e31c.html [accessed 1 May
2014]
National Authorities, Iraq: Resolution No. 666 of 1980 (nationality), 26 May
1980, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b51d28.html [accessed 1
May 2014]
All images courtesy of the author. All rights reserved. The author retains all
copyrights in any text, graphic images and photos. No part of this contribution
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

73

Our Vocabulary

ACTIVIST ART PRACTICE

noun

In activist art practice the function of the artist seems to shift

from the role of a producer of objects or surfaces to the role
of a critique of the neo-liberal condition. In this role s/he
takes over the responsibilities of governmental authorities,
non-governmental agencies, administrations, economical
or cultural institutions. Following the Foucauldian notion of
power structure and relation, everyone can exercise power,
by shaping culture, by making choices within a system.
Art is therefore not only a place where thinking can be
practiced, and theories can be tested; it is also a place
where basic civilian tasks can be executed, where the
desire for art or arts creative potential can be used and put
to work to improve existing socio-political circumstances.
75

ALTERNATIVE TIME
noun

The alternative time is the possibility to create new worlds

within the time of domination. To escape physically or
psychologically the time of the institutions by creating an
alternative method of belonging.

AGONISM
noun

Agonism is a we/them relation where opponents are not

enemies. This means that opposing groups acknowledge
each other and share a common space. In agonism
the goal is not to reach a consensus, but rather to be in
dialogue.1

ANTAGONISM
noun

Antagonism is a we/them relation in which there is no

shared ground between opponents.

BODY
noun

A unit of potential that acts as a catalyst for changing the

status quo of an environment. This body can manifest in
physical form as a physical body (of one or a multitude) or
as a concept or ideology.

76

CODE
noun

A predetermined set of logistical indicators, that when

understood through shared knowledge, form the
basic language through which alternative modes of
communication are rendered possible.

COLLECTIVITY
noun

Collectivity is often misunderstood. There is a general

tendency to associate collectivity with a lack of space for
the individual and individual expression. As if collectivity
meant that we should all be in constant agreement, and
painstakingly reach a consensus. But this does not have to
be the case. Collectivity may exist despite, and one might
even say thanks to, disagreement. Collectivity may simply
entail a fluid multiplicity of different individual voices and
expressions in dialogue. Collectivity means to cooperate
and exchange thanks to dissensus. It means committing
to an ideal precisely because of our inevitable doubts and
skepticism. It means taking responsibility for the society we
live in, for after all, it is our society.

CONTAINER
noun

The urban space seems a container confronting two

ontological questions of the body passing through it:
being and becoming. If becoming is processual and
relational, this might re-shape and redefine both human and
non-human, the way they should live, share and claim the
space and, thus, to become. To be a body indicates the
77

need for a normative act to be named, to be exposed to

social [and political] crafting and form.2

DOZE
noun

An aggressively insular occupation of space.

EVERYDAY PROTEST
noun

Can we think of a different kind or representation of protest?

One that focuses on the statements and commitments
that are executed at the intersection between the privacy
of our own homes and the public sphere? Considering
the actions of boycott campaigns, Buy-Nothing-Day, or
urban gardening as social practices, can the results of
these interventions be regarded as more sustainable? Can
we think of protest in an everyday manner? Acted upon in
everyday life? Change would therefore be evoked not only
by voicing disapproval, but equally by offering alternative
ways to make it sustainable, by performing and living the
difference.

FREEDOM
noun

Freedom is not freedom if it is granted by an authority, from

the top-down. Freedom is not something fixed or static.
Freedom only exists inasmuch as it is constantly enacted,
and activated. Freedom is not for sale.

78

INFRASTRUCTURE
noun

A set of parts that together make the body or the structure

of an organisational unit which can operate in a tangible or
abstract sense.

INTERVENTION
noun

Localized between social work and politics, between media

work and management. Concerned with questions of space,
political subjectivity, performative and symbolic actions.
Interventions seek to identify a specific problem, propose
an effective concept to improve a local socio-political
deficiency and eventually translate the proposal into action
while implementing it into a community. The intervention as
a protest to specific historical and geographical situations
and constellations is not repeatable, but in fact the method
is. It asks of the practitioner to constantly reframe questions,
and rethink concepts or structures for a more dignified
cohabitation of different social groups. Protest movements
around the world have been met with brutal resistance by
governments, police and/or military. Can we think of a future
political action than will not fail? Or to be more precise, can
we think of art activism in the form of intervention as the
political action that will not fail?

FLOATSPACE
noun

. . . a space that cannot be defined as relational or

historical or concerned with identity, as Marc Aug wrote.
79

Floatspace is a territory, an ephemeral moment and space

in time, known to an air traveller on his walk towards the
immigration desk. His final destination is not yet accessible
to him whether he is a citizen or foreigner (re-entering or
attempting to enter for the first time, respectively) he is just
an arrive, one of everybody as well as just an every-body
like every-body else walking and queuing.

OCCUPATION
noun

To take up space as defined in physical terms a

physical entity, either as a singular unit or an accumulated
grouping inhabiting physical space. Alternatively,
occupation can be an overtaking of space, (physical or
figurative, i.e. political, ideological, media) either by force or
through peaceful means.

OPACITY

noun

A state of impenetrability which constitutes a constructive

difference, which one should view not simply as the
limit of ones knowledge, but the potential to build
further, unanticipated and unimagined understandings;
by recognising irreducibility, one may mobilise ones
subjectivity to inhabit local realities and untranslatable
subtleties, experiencing them not as observer but as
participant. A tangible, experiential form of knowledge
production.

80

RADICAL
adjective

The radical desire is that which challenges the foundation

of society. It is that will which drives new utopias. Radical
politic seeks to uproot the hedgerow to plant trees. The
radical is a pig that roots in the earth for food, digging up
new nourishment as well as bringing the foundations into
the light of day. Through this digging action, contradiction
becomes apparent. The framework of society must yield to
the radical pig.

REFORM
verb

To change a thing so it remains the same while looking

different. Reforming the system asks those in the position of
power to include you within it. This is the act of Occupy.
Take, for instance, a poodle. You can reform him in a lot of
ways. You can shave his whole body and leave a tassel at
the tip of his tail; you may bore a hole through each ear, and
tie a blue bow on one and a red bow on the other; you may
put a brass collar around his neck with your initials on, and
a trim little blanket on his back; yet, throughout, a poodle
he was and a poodle he remains. Each of these changes
probably wrought a corresponding change in the poodles
life. When shorn of all his hair except a tassel at the tails
tip he was owned by a wag who probably cared only for
the fun he could get out of his pet; when he appears gaily
decked in bows, probably his young mistress attachment
is of tenderer sort; when later we see him in the fanciers
outfit, the treatment he receives and the uses he is put to
may be yet again and probably are, different. Each of these
81

transformations or stages may mark a veritable epoch in the

poodles existence. And yet, essentially, a poodle he was, a
poodle he is and a poodle he will remain.3

RESISTANCE
noun

Ability of a person or object to maintain their qualities and

keep strong against the threat of the other.

SELF-CENSORSHIP

noun

An environment in which one says only what one thinks

one can say. Applies to topics thatunder certain
circumstancescannot be addressed directly, but must be
approached with dissimulation. This is not directly affected
by directives from above, but by speculations as to the
allowable within society that in turn affect ones conduct.

SOLIDARITY
noun

Solidarity has nothing to do with altruistic self-denial. In

materialistic terms, solidarity is not about you, its about
me. Like love, solidarity is not about altruism. It is about
the pleasure of sharing the breath and space of the other.
Love is the ability to enjoy myself thanks to your presence,
to your eyes. This is solidarity. Because solidarity is based
on the territorial proximity of social bodies, you cannot build
solidarity throughout fragments of time.4
82

SPATIAL PROPERTY
noun

A manipulated boundary of ownership that is established

through the seizure and commodification of land and
housing. The state protects the right of a vacant private
property to remain as such.

SPECULATE
verb

An opportunity where one is free even if only temporarily

and mentally. To be free from a contract with the state,
where he imagines himself as one with another or with new
identity. His solitary individuality has the potential to be
community worlding such that non-places, like floatspace,
create a shared identity of being with similar others. He
has the opportunity to enact or imagine Guy Debords acts
of dtournement or culture jamming to subvert existing
apparatuses, be it imagined visually, textually or verbally in
order to manifest resistance of social, cultural and political
norms.

SQUAT
verb

To physically resist the inequalities produced by the

protection of spatial property at the expense of human life;
occupying a spatial property with the possibility of one
day re-claiming and re-opening the land to serve greater
common interests; to begin the formation of a collective
subject with the potential for effectuating systemic change.
83

SQUAT
noun

An enclave within the urban lived reality; a space for

conceiving alternative political strategies and/or forms of
living; a heterotopia.

STRAYING
adjective

Straying is the change of the social contract, which

makes the animal the animal, and the human the human.
It develops a new transgressive space in the street, that of
straying.

STROLL

noun

Directed wandering. A naive understanding might think of

it as a leisure activity, with no purpose except relaxation.
In certain societies such an act can express political
motivations, leading to a reaction by the state apparatus.

SWARM
noun

When the Social Body is techno-linguistic automatisms it

acts like a swarm: a collective organism whose behavior
is automatically directed by connective interfaces. (. . .)
Techno-linguistic procedures, financial obligations, social
84

needs, and psycho-media invasion all this capillaric

machinery is framing the field of the possible and
incorporating common cognitive patterns in the behavior of
social actors. So we may say that social life in the semiocapital sphere is becoming a swarm.

TIME OF DOMINATION
noun

The time that is structured and given by the state. Being

part of this time makes you a citizen.
It is also a time that functions by and for the institutions.

TRANSPARENCY
noun

An artificial construct of significance that traverses myriad

realities, formed by knowing the other through ones
accepted references; assigning meaning to the unknown
without encountering it relationally, denying the negotiation
of ones subjectivity; divulging knowledge whilst refusing
to inhabit challenging relations, in order to avoid disrupting
ones discursive coherence. A form of understanding
difference as a definable entity.
Notes

1. Mouffe, C. (2008) Public Spaces and Democratic Politics. In High-Rise &

Common Ground, Boomgaard, J. (ed.). Amsterdam: Valiz. pp.146147.
2. Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. p.3.
3. DeLeon, D. (1896) Reform or Revolution? [Online]. [Accessed 12 May 2014].
Available from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1896/960126.html
4. Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. p.54.

85

Dog Ta(i)les
Marianna Hovhannisyan

Introduction
Urban theorist Andy Merrifield considers everybody to be
manifested through a process of becoming within the urban fabric
(2013). Merrifield analyses James Joyces concept Here Comes
Everybody as us being an urban existence in two conceptual
relations: Joyces proposition as synonymous with the urban
process [...], the social, political and economic environment to which
everybody is coming or shaping, if always unevenly, and Henri
Lefebvres complete urbanization of society (2013).
Dog Ta(i)les is a speculative writing rendering a specific nonhuman perspective by taking hold of an artefact, a stray dogs tail,
that designates belonging to a non-human state. It views the subject
of everybody by its component form, every-body, set in an urban
condition. Dog Ta(i)les questions whether the universal assumed
everybody within Merrifields revolutionary vision and critique
87

of neoliberal citizenship limits the framework and excludes the

potential outsider other of whom the urban condition also relates.
As Judith Butler states when we claim to know and to present
ourselves, we will fail in some ways [] (2005, p. 42).
The body-text is created as body-less writing, by mapping
tails from different bodies of research encounters with theoretical
texts and arguments that acknowledge the straying points of the
other in the discourse of everybody.

Tale One
Scholar Boria Sax states that what all animals have in
common [...], is that they are not one of us (2008, p.1). Derrida
calls this the absolute alterity of the neighbour, especially in the
moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of the cat
(2002, p. 380).
What separates humans from non-human animals from a
physiological perspective is the tail (Adams et al, 2008). In everyday
life we often encounter this difference in the domesticated case of
the dogs tail. What kind of -body might a non-humans tail expose
and possess? Does it reveal something about humans, as well,
when confronted with non-humans, not in the domestic space the
way Derrida has been naked in front of his cat, but in the streets and
in urban space meant for everybody to come together?

Tale Two
The tail of a stray dog in Armenia is a context-sensitive object.
It is an incomplete artefact constantly seeking the absented body,
a production of human intentions (Thomasson, 2007, p.52) that
exposes the management and power of a state apparatus.
88

89

Since 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and

Armenian Independence, Armenia has faced the challenge of
modernising infrastructures, inventing and proposing various
programmes and state strategies in social, political and cultural
domains. In the early 2000s, the Yerevan State Municipality began
to address the stray dog problem. Annually, the Trade and Services
Department of the Yerevan Municipality announces an open call
for an institutional body to implement stray dog sterilisation and
euthanasia programmes. The only winning vendor since 2006
is Unigraph X LLC (Media Center, 2013), which the municipality
allocated an annual amount of 180 million AMD (approximately
500,000 USD) from the state budget for these sterilisation
programmes (Muradyan, 2011). In reality, this well-designed
system physically exposes the tail of the stray dog as a remainder
of the process, and whose presence is evidence of a corrupt
apparatus operating through monopoly and illegal actions.
Unigraph X, in partnership with the municipality, has an
extermination strategy for stray dogs. They annually register
40- 50,000 stray dogs in Yerevan alone, which scientists and
professionals argue is an impossible number for a city that size
(Muradyan, 2012). These stray dogs are mainly shot with guns and
rarely sterilised (Dingo Team, no date). In order for Unigraph X
workers to receive payment from the state (approximately 8 USD),
they have to file a report1 with proof of completing the task. The
severed tail from the dead body of each neutralised stray dog is
provided as this evidence2 (Muradyan, 2012).

Tale Three
For Giorgio Agamben, the conception of subject is located
between living beings and apparatus, and in the contemporary
capitalist period it becomes through constant desubjectification
processes enacted by apparatus (2009, pp.19-20).
Straying suggests a threshold between two becomings:
that of the domestic, civilised and controlled by norms, rules and
rights being inside at home and of the violent, unacceptable
90

and transgressed being outside in the street. A stray dog is

desubjectified, the other (the straying one) among others (nonhumans), which is the other of the human ones. Outside of any
institutional logic identifying its validity, the stray dog cannot be
institutionalised but exists exclusively in the public/urban space.
It cannot be included in the normative frame through which we
apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or
injured (Butler, p.1, 2009).
The tail of the dead stray dog becomes the politicised
code left from the disposed body of the stray other. It is also a
marker of the transgression of the social contract and exposition
of the act of killing that other, the moment when power relations
become concrete (Agamben, 2005, p.6) and apparatus profoundly
structured via strictly juridical, technological and military senses
(Agamben, 2005, pp.7-8). The tail in a way turns into another
threshold, conveying strategies of two realities of cities and politics;
one inclined to the liberal, to let live and make die, the other
inclined to the neoliberal to make die and to let live (EGS).
The urban constitutes the space in which straying involves a
sense of transgression, a movement in areas across and outside the
borders and rules. At the same time, straying also forms a strategy
to create stray communities of interest against the apparatus of
power.

Tale Four
A conception of a stray body as an urban collective existence
is exemplified in the history of the Ottoman Empire, particularly
in relation to the Young Turks regime in the beginning of the 20th
century because the capital city, Istanbul, was in the process of
westernization (Pearson, 2012). This process went through a
process of modernisation with technological growth, development
and construction of urban infrastructures meant for newly formed
Francophone and Anglophone Turkish citizen-flneurs (Sesim
Rzgara: Modern Bir Srgn Hikayesi, 2010).
91

Dogs of Constantinople, 1880-90. Image: Abdullah Freres Studio, http://lusadaran.org/artists/abdullah-freres.

At that particular moment in Istanbuls history, the large

number of stray dogs had become a problem. Scholars claim that,
historically, the large number of stray dogs were due to religious
observation which did not allow dogs (animals) to be welcomed in
the home. However, people still cared and fed them in the streets,
such that Istanbul was known as the city with animals (ibid.).
For officials attempting to modernise in 1910, stray dogs
were representatives of disorderly and backward urban society
(Pearson, 2012), especially when compared with the Western
paradigm of modernisation which managed to deal with the other
in the streets at that time. Their solution was to exile the stray dogs
to a barren island in the Marmara sea (Whittington, 2013). 80%, or
around 80,000, of Istanbuls stray dogs died of thirst and hunger
and drowning as they tried desperately to get across the sea
(Whittington, 2013).

92

Tale Five
In 2014 guerrilla geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison launched
a proposal-project called Greater London National Park*. It calls
upon the officials of London to remember the fact that London is a
city with 8.3 million humans [...] [and] 13,000 wild species as well
as lots of cats and dogs, and it has a rich biodiversity with Greater
London 47% green area (Greater London National Park*, 2014). It is
not new for the city that wild animals migrate there which is partially
the result of the urbanisation process. Raven-Ellisons proposition
calls for London city to turn into the new urban national park that
would accommodate everyone and have more green areas.
Interestingly enough, this urban national park project
demonstrates an upcoming paradigm change of the straying
subject. It changes the threshold of straying from its original relation,
the movement from domesticated space onto the urban street, to a
contemporary notion where the straying refers to leaving the space
of the wild for an urban park.

Greater London National Park project-proposal. Source: http://www. greaterlondonnationalpark.org.uk

93

Conclusion
For Andy Merrifield, [Joyces] Here Comes Everybody is what
global citizenship ought to be about when it forms an intersection,
coexistence against the neoliberal condition, a planetary urban
(2013). Myra Hird, agreeing with Donna Haraway, suggests that the
one (body) is constituted because of the other residents of the world
(2009, pp. 134-135). Could these two positions, global citizenship
and other residents in the world, placed within relation to each
other allow for recognition at the threshold, an other straying body
collected in the framework of Dog Ta(i)les?

In this case the the urban becoming remains processual as

Merrifield proposes, but it now requires a differentiation of straying
others. The significance of the dogs tail as something more than a
body segment is that it allows differentiation (contextually different
articulations of the straying others) in terms of becoming which
draws nearer to the question of who is everybody still to come?
Notes
1. Since 2009 there has not be any inspection by the Financial Supervision,
therefore, perhaps there has not been any need to dock a tail, but just directly to
kill.
2. It is said that the sterilised sex organs of a sterilised dog are also a part of the
report. But in regard to the conceptual focus of this paper, it means a dog stays
somehow alive and body is not disposed from it.
Works Cited
Adams,J.and Shaw,K.(2008)Atavism: embryology, development and
evolution,Nature Education,1(1):131.
Agamben, G. (2009)What is an Apparatus?: and Other Essays. Trans. by David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. California: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. London: Verso.
Derrida, J. (2002) The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) Trans. David
Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28(2), pp.369-418.
94

Dingo Team (no date) Stray Animal Problem Solution. Available at:
http://www.dingo.am/index.php [Accessed: 2 May 2014].
EGS (no date) Available at: http://www.egs.edu/library/michel-foucault/biography/
[Accessed: 04 May 2014].
Greater London National Park*(2014) Available at:
http://www.greaterlondonnationalpark.org.uk/ [Accessed: 4 May 2014].
Hird, M. (2009) Eating Well, Surviving Humanism in The Origins of Sociable Life:
Evolution After Science Studies, Palgrave, pp.133-143.
Lefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]) The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Media Center (2013) Issue of Stray Dogs in Yerevan. 4 October 2013. Available
at: http://www.media-center.am/en/1381130851 [Accessed: 2 May 2014].
Merrifield, A. (2013) Here Comes Everybody: Joyces Urban Chaosmos
Intervention Section, Antipode Foundation-Journal. 18 December 2013. Available
at: http://wp.me/p16RPC-Sp [Accessed: 3 May 2014].
Muradyan, A. (2012) Do not kill me, you have no right to it! Ankakh. 25
February 2011. Available at: http://archive.ankakh.com/2011/02/96891/ [Accessed:
2 May 2014].
Pearson, Ch. (2012) Stray Dogs in Istanbul, Sniffing the Past ~ Dogs and
History. Available at: http://sniffingthepast.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/stray-dogsin-istanbul/ [Accessed: 02 May 2014].
Sax, B. (2008) Do You Believe in the Animal? H-Nilas, H-Net Reviews in the
Humanities & Social Sciences, July. Available at: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/
showrev.php?id=14720 [Accessed: 2 May 2014].
Sesim Rzgara: Modern Bir Srgn Hikayesi (2010) Directed by Emre Sarku
[Film]. Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival Catalogue 47.
Thomasson, A. (2007) Artifacts and Human Concepts. In: Stephen, L.
and Margolis, E., eds. Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and their
Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.52-73.
Whittington, E. and T. (2013) Street Dog Genocide: The Sad History of Turkish
Street Dogs, A street dogs story, 16 September. Available at: http://streetdogstory.
com/2013/09/16/street-dog-genocide/ [Accessed: 2 May 2014].
Front image: The Illustrated Book of the Dog, 1881. Available at: https://archive.
org/details/illustratedbooko00shawrich [Accessed: 2 May 2014].

95

Referendum
Rethinking the Rules
Ximena Moreno

If they somehow did come together, what should they

demand? () greater democratic control over the
production and utilization of surplus. Since the urban
process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing
democratic management over its urban deployment
constitutes the right to the city.
David Harvey

The version of the steam engine created by James Watt

was one of the most transgressive inventions of the eighteenth
century, which catalysed the growth of the Industrial Revolution in
London and then the world. The well-known history of the Industrial
Revolution not only consisted of a process of expansion into other
97

regions of Europe and the world, but also involved the movement
of people from rural areas to cities, which was emblematic of this
historical period. The migration of individuals from rural to urban
areas, occurred in response to the economic expectation brought
by a life of an industrialised and urban nature, introduced by
new mechanisms of production and commercialisation. Thus, the
speculation of finding better opportunities incited the transit of
people encouraged by individual and collective desires.
The expression the right to the city, explored by Henri
Lefebvre (1968) and David Harvey, speaks of the need to install
a discussion on the right to the city, in the sense of an alerting to
the need for human dignity in urban space, as the city comprises
all contemporary social, economic and political practices. Today,
the common desire of citizens who populate cities calls for the
compliance with norms that protect peoples rights and a demand
of the review of those that (in their eyes) are insufficient. Besides
being the centre of many social events and social debates against
the practices of the sub- infrastructures that form the city, as a
large apparatus it is at the same time a provocative matrix that in its
defects promotes social rupture and disruptions of various kinds.
The collective motivation to go and start a life in the city
has led to a series of manifestations and uprisings, which protest
against multiple deficiencies in urban dynamics and promote
various social issues. Among the recurring problems in the city,
in terms of violations of human rights, are labour exploitation,
racism, discrimination, inequality, violence, to name but a few. In
the context of contemporary society, contemporary artists have
been tireless receptors of these signs or problems, leading to the
execution of artistic works as instruments for reflection. As David
Harvey explained, establishing democratic management over its
urban deployment constitutes the right to the city. Then, we are
left thinking, is the right to the city subordinated to the right to
democracy? If so, what role do democratic states play in defending
or guaranteeing peoples rights? Can globalization promote human
rights? (Howard-Hassman, 2010).
98

Taking into account the democratic stateson the basis that

democracy has been the great political model of globalisationit
is worth putting aside the social conflicts that emerge in them and
focus on the basis of democracy: the moment of reflection and
creation of the democratic constitution. Many of the conflicts that
have arisen in some democratic statesmainly in the city, as a large
containment spaceare recurring conflicts that respond to social
patterns of behaviour in situations where peoples rights are being
threatened. The instability and contradictions threaten the behaviour
and functioning of every part of the infrastructure, including the parts
that are the motor of the infrastructure itself which for democratic
states is the democratic constitution. Following this line of thought,
and assuming the existence of a wide spectrum of social conflicts
that occur in democratic governments, it is interesting to reflect on
the contradictions that exist in certain democratic motors, that is
to say, in certain constitutions, and identify how citizens organise
themselves in order to denounce them. Considering this, it is worth
asking, what is the importance of the process of thinking and
designing the basis of a democratic society? Which democratic
societies are accused of instability or failure in their constitutions?

What Everybody Can Do

Icelands constitution was founded in 1944, with minor
modifications made thereafter. Over the past few years, the
Icelandic people have expressed a desire to rethink its structure
and create a new constitution. Since the economic crisis of 2008
social uprisings began demanding a significant change in the
constitution. Without wanting to delve into what has been a complex
political process, phases of which included: the calling of early
elections; the emergence of the figure of Social Democratic Prime
Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir as the driving force behind the
reform; the establishment of a Constitutional Council; the calling of a
Constitutional Assembly; the drafting of a new constitution; and the
obstacles for it to be instituted, it is worth noting how the Icelandic
99

document has symbolised a storyline where the desires of citizens

converge, where the value of collective participation, in terms of
clamouring for an opportunity to rethink civil rights, has prevailed.
In Chile on the other hand, together with the great social
demonstrations that began in 2009 against for-profit education, the
demand for the establishment of a new constitution emerged with
the same force. The current Chilean constitution, established in 1980
under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, is the current heritage
of the regime responsible for a disastrous era in the history of Chile,
which left thousands of political victims and disappeared detainees.
Despite the efforts that have been made by Chile since
the restoration of democracy after the plebiscite in 1990, and in
spite of the visible progress in matters of social inequality and
with the economy, Chilean society still demands that the current
constitution be changed, as it was made during the dictatorship
and runs counter to the core principles of any democratic state.
The contradictions and instabilities that are part of the process
put in place in order to change it, obstacles that the constitution
itself carries, have made this subject a national issue that marked
the most recent presidential election (December 2013) and the
campaign of Michelle Bachelet, who came into power last March.
The AC movement (Asamblea Constituyente, or Consituent
Assembly), through use of the media and demonstrations, quickly
established an urgency to rebuild the basis of Chilean democracy,
suggesting a Constituent Assembly as a method to accomplish
such a purpose. Meanwhile, due to the national debate regarding
this issue, which led to demonstrations across Chile, participatory
mechanisms, methods without traps, that once and for all end
the abuse of power still present in the ironically named Chilean
democracy left behind by the Pinochet dictatorship, are now being
sought.

100

Alfredo Jaar, Venezia, Venezia, 2013. Photo: Agostino Osio

In the case of Egypt, the constitutional referendum held in

January 2014 was a major impulse to change the 2012 constitution
established under President Mohamed Morsis government. An
overwhelming 98.13% of the people confirmed the desire of
Egyptian society to give more power to the army, banning religious
parties (although Islam still is the states religion), in the hope of
making advances in matters of human rights through the recognition
of gender equality and allowing women access to judicial posts,
criminalising torture, and changes to the attribution of powers to the
President, amongst other changes.
In summary, the transition from Here Comes Everybody
(HCE) to What Everybody can do (WECD) in the context of civil
rights and democratic societies, can be analysed by identifying
HCE as the collective desire of individuals to settle in the city
and WECD as a question in order to analyse the problems of the
city, and hence, the social right to be manifest with the intention
of taking action against said problems. While many of the social
problems that are explored repeatedly in contemporary cities are
101

present among the themes of contemporary art (which is natural as

they correspond to artists reactions to global practices), they are
generally analysed as specific problems.
This work intends to look at the social conflicts that coexist
in the city in a primary state, considering the regulation of the
apparatus as a whole, which in the case of cities, is the democratic
constitution as the basis of the democratic system (applicable to
the cases of democratic states). Beyond the difficulty of changing
democratic constitutions that are not supported by the desires of its
citizens, this paper aims to focus on the moment of reflection of the
rules and foundations of a democratic system as a human exercise.
To change a constitution is always unconstitutional. To bring
something about is always, in principle, difficult. (Docherty, p.157).
In a poetic attempt to question the model of the Biennial
(Alfredo Jaar, 2013), the work of the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar
Venezia, Venezia was presented at the last Venice Biennale in
2013, consisting of a model of the Biennales Giardini that sinks
24,860 times. In this way, this work questions the Biennale, home
to 28 important countries such as England, France, and Germany,
challenging an outdated cartography that reveals the concept of
nations that existed at the origin of this mother of biennials. Just
as referendums offer an opportunity to rethink the foundations of a
system, Venezia, Venezia sinks 24,860 times in order to imagine a
different order, a kind of cultural democracy open to all.
Works Cited
Docherty, T. (2006) Aesthetic Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel Cities. London: Verso.
Howard-Hassman, R. (2010) Can Globalization Promote Human Rights?.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
Lefebvre, H. (1996) Writing On Cities. London: Blackwell Publishers.
M. Hill, D. (1994) Citizens and Cities. London: Harverster Wheatsheaf.
Zolo, D. (1997) Cosmopolis Prospects for World Government. Cambridge: Polity
Press.

102

103

Here
comes everybody...
...from the f*@*ing plane
Emma Massoud
& Li Li Chung

In the concrete reality of todays world, places and

spaces, places and non-places intertwine and tangle
together. The possibility of non-place is never absent
from any place. Place becomes a refuge to the habitu
of non-places (who may dream, for example, of owning a
second home rooted in the depths of the countryside).1
Marc Aug

105

The Floatspace
We coin a new word, floatspace, which is the walk that
international travellers immigrants make heading for the immigration
desk after getting off the plane.
He would have flown into and landed inside the legal
boundaries of a country but has not yet been processed by
the countrys border control to enter the country. Only through
immigration is his identity acknowledged and approved for entry
and mobility, proceeding to his reality of availability. Floatspace
is territory known to the travellers but the final destination is not yet
accessible to the citizen nor the foreigner he is just an arrive one
of everybody as well as just an every-body like every-body else
walking and queuing.
Facing the immigration officers is the view of here comes
everybody, a group of individuals looking to enter the country.
Our idea originates from investigating an exhibit at Londons
Parasol Unit in 2009 entitled Here Comes Everybody that showed
artworks on parades and processions.2 Floatspace therefore
visualizes an enactment, that of walking, by everybody. It involves
everybodys body, specifically using ones legs i.e. walking,
standing. Therefore, the arrive is an artist, a geographer who uses
his legs to locate his being however ephemeral. In Walking and
Mapping, Karen ORourke called walking an art form, necessary
in speculative mapping e.g. by contemporary artists such as
Guy Debord who walked to trace Paris urban flows and explain
its psychogeography, or British photographer Richard Long who
trampled a path in the grass to make A Line Made by Walking in
1967.

106

107

The Floatspace a Non-Place

To the air traveller, floatspace is a zone of ambiguity, a
place in limbo existing only temporarily. It is liminal space akin to a
transitional or initial stage of a process. The arrive can be thought
to occupy a spot at a boundary or threshold, neither here nor there.
He has landed but is not free to roam, not mobile as he
intended until he exits immigration clearance. He knows who he is,
he is not stateless, he has his passport and sometimes landing card,
but no one judges his identity (except his traveling companions if he
has any), although his movements are monitored by CCTV cameras.
Yet, he is part of a group, a community, all walking towards an
immigration desk.
The realm of the floatspace undoubtedly poses feelings of
inconclusiveness, apprehension and fear of the unknown, regarding
the arrives continuation of his/her travels and immigration or
rejection, deportation the confirmation of not belonging.
Within these ephemeral moments of uncertainty, the possibility
of desires and reimagining of the rules or given reality is an avenue
in which one can attempt to highlight alternate forms of the given
apparatuses in place, biometrics, document checks, questioning,
signage, the physical presence of border control and customs
officers, in which our infrastructure is implemented in order to sieve
through those the State deems as belonging and those who do not.
108

Visualising Apparatus
While queuing before the Immigration Desk, the arrive is
incognito and innocent such that the passenger accedes to his
anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity; when he has
countersigned (so to speak) the contract.3 Augs translator has an
interesting footnote: The expression non-lieu, which in the present
text usually means non-place, is more commonly used in French in
the technical juridical sense of no case to answer or no grounds for
prosecution: a recognition that the accused is innocent.4
Despite the apparatus and its binding contract, floatspace
can be entered only by the innocent. [such that] a person
entering this non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He
becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of
passenger. Perhaps hes weighed down by personal thoughts but
he is distanced from them temporarily by the environment of the
moment. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he
surrenders himself he tastes for a whilelike anyone who is
possessedthe passive joys of identity-loss, and the more
active pleasure of role playing.5

109

What can the Floating Body do?

French anthropologist Marc Aug differentiates a place and
non-place: [if] a place can be defined as relational, historical
and concerned with identity, then a space that cannot be defined
as relational or historical or concerned with identity will be a nonplace. Aug argues his hypothesis:
that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are
not themselves anthropological places6 and which do not integrate the
earlier places: instead they are listed, classified, promoted to the status of
place of memory and assigned to circumscribed and specific positions
[e.g. hospitals, retail checkout counters] and transit points and temporary
abodes (hotels, holiday clubs, refugee camps) where a dense network
of means of transport which are also inhabited space is developing; where
the habitu of supermarkets, slot machines, credit cards communicate
wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract unmediated commerce; a
world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary
and ephemeral.7

This solitary individuality is interesting such that non-places

like floatspace create a shared identity of [being] passengers,
customers or Sunday drivers. No doubt the relative anonymity that
goes with this temporary identity can even be felt as liberation, by
people who, for a time, have only to keep in line, go where they
are told, check their appearance8. Yet, the arrive is a face and
voice of solitude, made more strange and baffling by the fact that
it echoes millions of others.9 Additionally, though not visible or
acknowledged, he has relations with his fellow travellers as an
every-body in that floatspace.
Speculating a New Everybody
Therein lies an opportunity to speculate on this peripatetic
way of life: non-place is one that can be quantified so peculiar
that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of
himself.10 Could he imagine himself or a fellow arrive as a tourist,
nomad, migrant, vagabond, vagrant, fugitive, asylum seeker? He
can only do this while walking and queuing before he retrieves his
identity at the immigration desk.
110

111

Meanwhile, he obeys the same code as others, receives the

same messages, responds to the same instructions. The space of
non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; there is
only solitude and similitude.11
Thus, the arrive has to negotiate at least two possible
territories: on the one hand, this personal, singular sovereignty
is possible as he is part of everybody and shares the indivisible
sovereignty of the human species as Michel Foucault wrote. It
reminds us of Foucaults heterotopia, seemingly a nowhere, a
space that functions in non-hegemonic conditions, a space of
otherness that is neither here nor there but importantly, in the
present and a moment of being free.13
On the other hand, or perhaps simultaneously, despite being
alone, the arrive is in contractual relations with the powers
that govern it. He is reminded, when necessary, that the contract
exist, as floatspace is a non-place in a space formed in relation
to certain ends13 (i.e. border clearance). That contract is mediated
by words/text such as on signboards. Therein lies one signifier
of floatspaces controlling apparatus, the destination countrys
immigration bureaucracy and staff.
To be free from this contract, speculative reimagining of the
given floatspace needs to happen. Wherever one might be, the
common in the temporal space allows citizen and immigrant alike
to retain a momentary status of everybodyness in that neither has
either been processed or declined, and in this sense, as Aug
highlights, there would be no individualization without identity
checks.14
Forms/acts of detournment or culture jamming, derive from
Guy Debord and the Situationists (e.g. The Yes Men and Adbusting)
in which given structures and formats are subverted, be it visually,
textually, or verbally in order to raise awareness concerning varying
social, cultural and political areas and issues.
112

The arrive knows that for him to be processed, he is likely

to be finger-printed, asked many questions including Why are you
here? How long do you intend to stay? How much money do you
have? How do you intend to support yourself? Do you have a return
airticket? Where is your father from/how many brothers does he
have? Is this stay for leisure or business? Will you be working/Do you
intend to work?
What can he really do? He imagines the new everybody

113

Notes
1. Aug, M. (2008) Non-Places. Brooklyn, London: Verso. p.107.
2. Parades and Processions: Here Comes Everybody exhibit at Parasol Unit,
London, 28 May 24 July 2009. Catalog edited by Ziba de Weck Ardalan. London,
Koenig Books, 2009. http://parasol-unit.org/parades-and-processions-here-comeseverybody. In James Joyces Finnegans Wake one of the main protagonists, HCE
is both Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Here Comes Everybody, that is
simultaneously an individual and a universal representations of humanity.
3. Aug, op.cit., p.82.
4. Ibid., p.823.
5. Ibid., p.82.
6. anthropological place is formed by individual identities, through complicities
of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how. Ibid.,
p.82.
7. Ibid., p.63.
8. Ibid., p.82.
9. Ibid., p.83.
10. Ibid., p.64.
11. Ibid., p.83.
12. Foucault, M. (1987) La Ville Inquiete. In Le Temps de la Reflexion.
pp.2045. Foucault, M. (1984) Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. In Architecture,
Mouvement, Continuit 5. pp.4649.
13. Aug, op.cit., p.82.
14. Ibid., p.102.
Works Cited
Aug, M. (2008) Non-Places, Brooklyn, London: Verso
Foucault, M. (1987) La Ville Inquiete in Le Temps de la Reflexion, pp. 204-5
Foucault, M. (1984) Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. In Architecture,
Mouvement Continu 5. pp.46-49
Illustrations by Emma Massoud. All images courtesy of the authors.
114

115

Aint no body

What Amazon Turk

Teaches Us About Politics of
the Body and Digitalisation
Franziska Wildfrster

To reclaim a real political agency means first of all

accepting our ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our
own complicity in planetary networks of oppression.
What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a
hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be
nothing without our co-operation.1
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
The observation that we live in an age of hyper-connectivity is
not a particularly new one. This naturalness, this self-evident manner
with which we take in digital streams of data and information via
email, Facebook and Twitter before having digested our breakfast,
though, is possibly more striking than those acts themselves. As
more and more people (admit to) wake in the middle of the night
to somnolently reach out to their smartphone devices on the
117

bedside table, forced by an inner pressure not to not miss out on

something during these few hours that we are, literally, off-line. The
adjustment of our internal clocks to the production protocols of 24/7
cycles reaches nearly unpredictable levels. While the possibilities
of managing our social, cultural, political, working and leisure life
conveniently and comfortably via digital services, hyperlinks and
apps seemingly exponentiate themselves, the ranges of behaviours
and varieties of perceptions ceaselessly shrink. Fostering our
friendships demands the same clicks and patterns as managing our
bank accounts. Most fatally, we are increasingly adapting, perfectly
merging with devices, digital services and seemingly abstract
processes and as late-stage capitalism extracts value from every
single waking moment, the real involvement of bodies on multiple
levels, of our own and others, is rendered invisible.
Non-stop
In line with an ethos that, according to Jonathan Crary,
defends the idea that when people have nothing further that can
be taken from them, whether resources or labour power, they are
quite simply disposable2, the Amazon Mechanical Turk seems like
the next logical step in the expanding processes of global economy.
An internet marketplace for crowdsourcing, this new website by
mega-corporation Amazon brings businesses and individuals,
known as Requesters, together with workers, or Turkers, who
complete the tasks almost exclusively from their own computers.
These fun little tasks called HITS usually do not take longer
than a couple of seconds, minutes at the most, and, surprisingly,
cannot be accomplished by computer programs, or at least
they are accomplished much better by human beings: describe
pictures simply so that they can be catalogued; categorise tweets;
categorise Google search keys; get paid to rate funny stuff; tag
5 images; and categorize these products from Amazon.com3.
The minor tasks offered are indeed crucial for keeping the digital
economy running, systematising and categorising our incidental
traces throughout digital networks, and increasing the comfort
and convenience with which we move through virtual paths supertailored for us.
118

Harry Sanderson, Human Resolutions 2012

This marketplace system splits globally distributed workers

into groups of up to 100 in order to produce a new form of cloud
work, or micro labour services. These Turkers are paid only the
value of the task they have completed (or less) and thus become a
resource whose only value is its direct use-value within the greater
system the average wage of a mechanical Turker, if they work
quickly, is about one American Dollar per hour, with most tasks
paying only a few cents. In other words, Amazons Mechanical Turk
program generates every neoliberals dream working conditions,
extracting surplus value from endlessly exchangeable subjects
globally on any day, hour, minute, or second. A convenient side
effect of the digitally and globally dispersed fragmentation of work
is the fact that no labour laws act upon it; this marketplace moves
within a global grey-zone where they are literally out of governmental
control. The individuated working process that mediates Mechanical
Turks status identifies no employers and has limited and onesided visibility. As the work is extracted directly from the source,
the workers, it never risks unproductivity, causing ruptures in the
stream of efficiency, complaints or demanded rights!
119

Hidden bodies
Quite audaciously, the Amazon Turk plays on our perceptions
and consciousness; it is self-reflectively plays the trick implied
in the name itself. The name Mechanical Turk stems from the
chess-set trick conducted by a Hungarian nobleman, Wolfgang
von Kempelen, who convinced people that he had built a machine
that made decisions using artificial intelligence, when in fact it
contained a chess master a human body. Amazon therefore
seems to know quite well what it is doing: making people believe
that digital technology and digital economy runs itself and that there
is no human work required to keep these systems operational (this is
also true for the Turkers themselves because their labour does not
appear to be distinguishable from online leisure time). If no one has
to see the people involved, the system appears to be autonomous.
This avoids the responsibility on Amazons part, but it also stands for
a larger development that increasingly dematerialises personhood
and renders bodies invisible on multiple levels. As harmless as
this case may seem, the creeping, non-stop extraction of labour
coincides with an intensifying desensitisation of our faculties and
makes the Amazon Turker a striking case arguing for an altering
human condition, undisturbed and seamlessly adopting protocols of
exploitation, control and surveillance.

In no way should violence that workers in mines and factories
be compared to Amazons millions of Prosumers (the designation
for consumers such as you and me) who merge with the 24/7 cycle
of consumption, distribution and production, or even Amazon
Turkers (who are very likely, also, you and me). The violent work
is destructive and physical exploitation of workers in locations
such as raw earth mines in Congo and e-waste dumps of Ghana;
these locales are necessary for the production or disposing of our
digital devices, and their labour is embodied in the surfaces and
technologies. However, it is very important to understand that the
workers in Congo and Ghana , the Turker and Prosumer stand in
relation to each other, not just by the fact that they are all bodies
necessary for the maintenance of digital economies but also when it
120

comes to asking why, despite exploitation, unemployment, growing

inequalities and income disparities, a global (network) uprising is so
very unlikely?
Self-liquidation
The Cartesian separation of cogito and body is rooted deep
within our ontological heritage; it lays ground for the desire to control
the messiness of the body and the physical world and the growing
desensitisation and alienation of the body in relation to 24/7 digital
technology and economy. As, all facets of individual experience
as continuous and compatible with the requirements of accelerated
24/7 consumerism4, we the subjects, our consciousness and our
senses, are posed as a site of non-stop regulation and dominance
within a system that re-enacts the global socio-political structure and
the liquidation of our very selves.
For Friedrich Kittler, everything [within digitalization] becomes
a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice. This means
that digital information technology destroys the image of man
as the subject of knowledge and of its synthetic production. The
optoelectronic channels and patterns of sounds, image, voice
and text, are mere effects on the surface, which is the interface
of the consumer, externalised and is always directed outwards.
The fluctuating textures of human affect and emotion adapt to
efficiency and seemingly frictionless handling, a transition that
entails a reformatting of the conscious organism in order to make it
compatible with the connective environment. Diminishing perceptual
capabilities combined with routinised, habitual or trance-like
behaviour produce an impossible experience.
Political body / Distribution of the insensible
In order to add more to the category were screwed, Franco
Berardi agues governance produces pure functionality without
meaning, the automation of thought and of will. It embeds abstract
connections in the relation between living organisms, technologically
subjecting choices to logical concatenation.5 Slavery wears the
mask of freedom; it intensifies the integration of our time and activity
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into the parameters of electronic exchange and depoliticisation and,

according to Agamben, generates the most cowardly of all social
bodies; Hyper-connectivity leads to a growing separation and
isolation within a state of unbearable proximity lacking sociability.

Is there a way to reclaim our bodies, our will, and our
senses, that generate[s] cognitarian awareness with regard to
an erotic, social body of the general intellect; () to speak in a
way that sensibly enacts a paradigm shift, a resemiotization of the
social field, a change in social expectations and self-perception?
Berardi claims that in this dreadful situation, we are forced to
acknowledge that we do have a body, a social and a physical
body, a socioeconomic body.6 In this regard, the play on our
perceptual apparatuses, engagement of art in the process of
increased de-materialisation, frictionless merging and permeation
might hold some promise in the potentiation of relation between
political economy and aesthetics. If we retake Rancieres infamous
account of the distribution of the sensible and focus our attention
upon the distribution of the insensible encompassing new forms
of fluidity, the movement of capital, the abstraction of the self and
the social body the value of criticality within the arts on a structural
level gains new currency. Take Hito Steyerls Liquidity, Harry
Sandersons Human Resolution or Nicolas Baiers Vanitas; works
such as these may just be the starting point for a new awareness of
the sensuality of our bodies and the necessity to collectively reclaim
it. While we know from Frederic Jameson that it is easier to imagine
the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, it is
the imaginaries that are the soil for the growth of possible change.
Notes
1. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. Ropley: O Books, p.15.
2. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso
Books.
3. Examples of HITS taken from the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace.
4. Crary, p.98.
5. Berardi, F. (2010). Cognitarian Subjectivation. e-flux [Online] no. 20, p 5.
6. Ibid., pp.4-5.
122

Works Cited
Amazon. (2014). Amazon Mechanical Turk: Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
[Online]. Available at: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?State=K2tj
dGhoekdVd0VJ VTRzY1oyVithR01zQ3Q0PTIwMTQwNTE0MTYyMVVzZXIudHVya1N
lY3VyZX50cnVlJQ--&match=false [Accessed: 14 May 2014]
Berardi, F. (2010). Cognitarian Subjectivation. e-flux [Online] no. 20. Available
at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/cognitarian-subjectivation/ [Accessed: 10 May
2014]
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso
Books.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. Ropley: O Books.

123

Action, Intervention
and Daily Deployment
Reflection on a research project
on protest practices and their
visual representation
Vivi Kallinikou
& AIDD Collective

We are not protesting what we dont want, we are

performing what we want.
Emily Roysdon

Introduction
In the Spring Term of the 2014 academic year, I got involved
with a group of people in Goldsmiths MA Lab who were interested
in the broad notion of everyday protest. Initially our understanding
of possibilities through both content and practice varied, and it was
difficult to grasp the concept of what we already had termed this
everyday protest at that early stage, even more so what it was that
we could do about it. With time and in relation to our other courses
125

at college, our understanding slowly began to take form. As a result

we founded the AIDD Collective, a research collective concerned
with alternative protest practices and their visual representations.
Each member of our group brought different ways of thinking and
relations to the table: from an interest in socio-political influences
on artistic production; participatory and collaborative art making;
the relationship between space, practitioner and audience;
the multidimensionality of experiences between physical and
psychological space; current or recent protest events and their
potential failures. All these led to an attempt to produce a rather
informal body of knowledge concerned with questions of space,
location and subjectivity, that we could circulate beyond the borders
of the university infrastructure.
As a student of Visual Cultures/Global Arts, my personal
interest in both Geographies and the Lab was driven by the question
of what is arts relevance in todays society? What can an artist do
to push the limits, to challenge socio-political urgencies, to question
living conditions? Are there rules for an engagement for a better
world? Are there rules for the practice of political agency? If so, what
are they? I was interested in practices that confronted, challenged
and entered contemporary urgencies conceptually rather than only
comment on them or take them up as a subject matter, practices
that offer alternatives, rather than only disapproval. T.J. Demos
states that today, what is needed more than ever are powerful and
creative artistic expressions and interventions that join other social
movements for positive change, social justice and equality, working
together toward the progressive re-creation of our common world.1
It is exactly this link of art and activism that I wanted to
implicate in my work that led to my participation in AIDD. My
analysis of ruling economic and political power structures,
everybodys disapproval with those structures exposed in recent
protests movements around the world, have since paired with
questions about aesthetic forms, representative and symbolic
gestures. So far they have resulted in the appreciation of an
individual acts power becoming a collective and collaborative
126

act, and this collective act in turn having the power to mobilise
energy that will help rethink the production of the world and reinvent
possibilities.
When we established AIDD we answered the question of Who
is everybody? quite literally. To us everybody was everybody as
in every single individual that acts in relation to other individuals and
in relation to the world. Every individual that reframes questions,
second-guesses mainstream ideals and develops strategies and
innovations to confront and challenge contemporary urgencies
by performing the difference in his or her everyday life. Our thesis
understands an individuals protest act as a habitual act, founded on
firm believe in something, and acted upon consciously in everyday
life. The leading question was how sustainable this way of political
agency was. Agency not organised by a protesting apparatus
against something but out of the individual need for something.
I have decided to reflect on AIDD Collectives work within
the context of this publication, as it is no longer only speculative
thought, but experience a collection of practiced political agency
within systems. My individual research and practice during the
AIDD project has been shaped and inspired by my encounters
with political, philosophical and social writing presented within
the context of my courses in Geographies and Global Arts. The
questions that have emerged out of these encounters were a driving
force behind my participation.
The following writing is a reflective piece on the work around
the notion of everyday protest. It is collectively written by AIDD and
is based on both individual research and the collective experience
of establishing an archive, of producing and circulating knowledge.
It consequently continues in the plural form.

127

Action, Intervention and Daily Deployment

In the wake of recent protests across the world, the immediate
association of protest is to a mass of people coming together to
voice their disapproval. Many of such actions have been confronted
with violence, arrest and opposition. Have you ever taken part in
such actions? Were you frustrated or disappointed when what you
were claiming for was not realised? Was it possibly too short-lived to
make a difference?
We asked ourselves: can we think of a different kind or
representation of protest? If we shift away from this general idea
of protest and rather focus on the statements and commitments
that are executed at the intersection between the privacy of
our own homes and the public sphere, is there any difference?
Consider actions of boycott campaigns, Buy-Nothing-Day or urban
gardening as social practices, can the results of these interventions
be regarded as more sustainable? Does it matter whether it is an
individual act or a movement, and how can we grasp such a shift?
Are such actions temporary? Consciously acted upon? Do they
have an end goal? With these questions in mind, we are ultimately
trying to investigate different practices for socio-political change
and examining how we can detect it. We believe that change can
be evoked not only by voicing disapproval, but equally by offering
alternative ways to make it sustainable and living by example.
Who is everybody? I am everybody, we are everybody
We are a research collective formed at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, in January 2014, dedicated to the collection
and investigation of everyday protest practices and their visual
representation. We encounter protest practices in an on-going
conversation which we document on a website we set up called
aestheticsofprotest.org. The website consists of an accessible
online archive, a playful encyclopaedia and a growing collection of
writing.
128

AIDD Collective was established out of the need to tackle

issues surrounding the notion of everyday protest, actions and
interventions that individuals undertake on a daily basis with
the hope of making change. As opposed to mass protests that
are frequently being shown on the media being confronted with
violence, arrest and opposition, AIDD is interested in examining
alternative practices that individuals take through everyday
means that may prove to be more sustainable. In this manner,
we are observing the shift from the public to the private, or vice
versa, and examining how we can detect that shift in individual
everyday practice and what it means in a social context. We believe
that by collecting this information we can create an alternative
representation of protest, open debates, raise awareness,
and display different conditions of entering and challenging
contemporary urgencies.
What can everybody do?
In order to find out what everybody could/can do, we
decided to publish an open-call for submissions. The open-call
allowed anyone interested in this field to share with us their own
understandings and practices of everyday protest through various
submissions to be included in our homepage. In a short period of
about three months, we exchanged our work and thoughts with
artists, activists, practitioners and researcher around the world.
The work was mostly concerned with collaborative, participatory
projects, designed to exchange ideas with a wider, and mostly nonacademic public, and primarily designed to make a difference.
We were introduced to Zero-Waste, a philosophy, strategy,
and practice devoted to the redesign of resources so that less waste
is produced and sent to landfills. It is goal and message at the same
time. The social movement growing out of this ideology is concerned
with learning to resist some of our socially ingrained impulses to
constantly buy and then throw away. It is not one single organisation
that preaches the importance of less waste; its countless
individuals, groups, institutions, or governmental agencies around
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the world driven by a disapproval of excessive waste, consumption,

and exploitation of resources, who promote the idea of reducing,
refusing, reusing, recycling and rotting.2 Bea Johnson is one of
Britains leading figures in the Zero-Waste-Movement. The blogger
and author of Zero-Waste Home generates less than a small jar (!)
of rubbish in an entire year.3 To her, wasting less and being more
sustainable is a matter of habits. Question your habits in everyday
life, get to the bottom of what you actually need, and you will realise
that you can forgo many things.
According to WRAP, a government agency assigned with
reducing household waste, people in the UK are still producing
27.7 mega tonnes of garbage each year. So, there is still work to
do. Making visible the amount of unnecessary waste and common
unsustainable strategies to make it disappear (landfills and
incinerators) is thus not enough to make a change. Zero Waste
therefore starts in ones everyday life and continues to develop in
education. Only by practicing the ideology in everyday life to the
best of ones abilities and knowledge will there be a difference in
dealing with waste.
We were introduced to the art practice of Alexandra Baybutt,
Mira Loew, Jane Frances Dunlop4 and their implementation of
generosity in their performative work. The notion of holding dear,
the title of their most recent performance series, as the motor for
change, the motivation for sharing, volunteering, contributing and
collaborating, as a way of protesting against the individual, egoistic
accumulation of stuff is not only an important contribution to both
art practice and daily life practice but long overdue.
We were introduced to guerrilla gardening, a term first
introduced in 1973 in New York. At that time, the city could count
only five community gardens in all five boroughs, since all the money
was spent on constructing residential complexes and commercial
and industrial buildings only.5 Many residents complained about
the neglect of their neighbourhood and the accumulation of waste,
but the city itself never intervened. Finally, artist Liz Christy, who
130

lived in the citys Lower East Side, assembled her friends and
neighbours to clean out the district. Naming themselves the Green
Guerrillas they planted food crops, flowers and trees within the
neighbourhood and threw seed bombs in empty sites. Furthermore,
they took back an abandoned space on the corner of Bowery and
Houston by removing the rubbish and revitalizing the soil, planting
flowers, trees and edibles, while offering gardening workshops.
Liz Christy negotiated with the citys Housing and Preservation
Department a way to make their newly created garden an official
community garden. In the end, the administration approved the site
for rental as the Bowery Houston Farm and Garden for one Dollar
a month (In 1986 the Garden was dedicated as the Liz Christys
Bowery-Houston Garden, in memory of its founder). Surrounding
neighbourhoods got inspired and participated in the initiative.6
Since then, guerrilla gardening was also considered and used
as a tool to show dissatisfaction and disagreement in the public
sphere by secretly seeing plants and food crops on land, which
does not legally belong to the gardener. One attempt was staged
by Reclaim the Streets, a London-based group behind the mass
guerrilla gardening action, at Parliaments Square on May Day
2000. They were claiming for a global and local social-ecological
revolution.7 The protest was partly filmed and can be watched on
YouTube.8
What can we do?
Once we had developed our thesis we asked ourselves what
could we do about it? How could we research this field? The most
exciting and overwhelming experience was to find ways to organise
ourselves, and the people we brought together, without being an
organisation. We were students, researchers, with limited funds
and no infrastructure. So it became clear it was up to us to facilitate
an infrastructure. Communication tools such as social networks
or online tools such as Wordpress, Google Drive and Mail Chimp
generated one. They helped us work in a professional manner
while being flexible enough to coordinate action without financial
131

pressure. This is where questions of physical institutions, a constant

debate in art practice, became interesting. Online institutions
in many ways are replacing physical ones because of their
convenience, flexibility and ability to bring more people together
than would be possible in an actual, real-world setting. Realising this
made us more convinced about the idea of developing, distributing
and sharing everything with everyone online, from our open call and
invitations to our online archive tool itself.
But, what did we do? We set up an online-archive. The
AIDD online-archive is a resource comprising of a collection of
documents, writings, videos, interviews, art works, and other entries
related to socio-political practices and engagement of what we call
everyday protest. We collected information and media reflecting
on the different perspectives and characteristics of such perceived
protest practices. The entries are not only based on our own
research but also on submitted works by artists, writers, activists
and other parties. It is an open resource created to inform and
inspire practitioners, researchers, scholars, or any other interested
parties concerned with different kinds of actions and interventions
practiced through daily life.
Since the twentieth century, the traditional concept of the
archive has been examined, contested, and reinvented by different
scholars concerning what constitutes an archive, the condition of
its existence, its partiality and its exclusions.9 In its basic meaning
an archive is understood as a collection of historical documents or
records providing information about a place, institution, or group of
people.10 Today, in the age of technology the Internet has opened
up the context of the archive. Rene Sentilles considers the World
Wide Web as one big archive and the Internet as the transportation
device for research. As a result, the Internet democratises the
principle of archives and archive stories can now also be found
in domains outside the academy. The value of what is stored
lies in how it can be used in the present, and in its operationality
rather than in its meaning. Therefore, the relationship with sources
changes as they become better accessible, more abundant and
less tangible and the questions about exclusion and between fact
132

and fiction become even more essential.11

By creating this website that we understood as an online
archive, we were examining and pointing out different protest
practices, actions and interventions at the intersection between the
private and the public. Foucault considers the archive as a []
general system of the formation and transformation of statements
[] and a construct of exclusion.12 By including academic texts,
field works, arts practices and interviews not only produced by us
but also by submitters from various backgrounds we were trying to
ensure a wide range for our purview.
Following Jacques Derrida, we are captured by an archival
impulse, a phenomenon today for what he established the term
archive fever. Derrida argues for an archival desire that seeks to
assure a future always threatened by finitude.13 We are very aware
that by creating this archive we are jumping on this archival wave.
But within the scope of our research, we have discovered a lack of
a comprehensive online body of knowledge, where an overview for
everybody who is interested in that topic is provided.
Outlook
Our work on this project results from an understanding that
the every-body relies on the every-one in the every-day. Following
the Foucauldian notion of power structure and relation, everyone
can exercise power, by shaping culture, by making choices within
a system. The everyday is not only a place where thinking can be
practiced, and theories can be tested; it is also a place where basic
civilian tasks can be executed, where every-one and every-body
can take over responsibilities of governmental authorities, nongovernmental agencies, administrations, economical or cultural
institutions.
Realising the enthusiasm, interest and peoples engagement
with AIDD and its archive over the past couple of months, knowing
that it is recognised as worthy and meaningful by others, we feel
confident about the research we have started and look forward to
its development. Arjun Appadurai states in the foreword to his essay
133

collection The future as cultural fact, The future is ours to design,

if we are attuned to the right risks, the right speculations, and the
right understanding of the material of the world we both inhabit and
shape [] and since, following Marx, we cannot design the world
as we please, it is vital to build a picture of the historical present that
can help us find the right balance between utopia and despair.14
In this sense, we hope to be able to picture a historical present by
providing the information collected on our pages, and inspire future
innovations and strategies to challenge contemporary issues in
everyday life.
Remarks
More details on the work and writing referenced in this piece can be found
on aestheticsofprotest.org. This essay was written and published in consultation
with AIDD Collective (namely Wei-Hsin Chen, Wiebke Hahn, Aline Khoury, Karina
Hanney Marrero, and Vivi Kallinikou).
Notes
1. Demos, T.J. (2013). The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary
during Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. p. XXIII.
2. http://zerowastehome.blogspot.co.uk/ [Accessed: 8 May 2014].
3. Ibid.
4. http://aestheticsofprotest.org/holding-dear/ [Accessed: 8 May 2014].
5. http://www.evidero.de/veraendern/die-ur-geschichte-des-urban-gardenings
[Accessed: 19 February 2014].
6. http://www.pps.org/great_public_spaces/one?public_place_id=45 [Accessed:
19 February 2014].
7. Tracey, D. (2007). Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto. Gabriola Island: New
Society Publishers. p.25.
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4HUbeyGnOs [Accessed: 8 May 2014].
9. Merewether, C. (2006). Introduction//Art and the Archive, in Merewether, C.
(ed.). The Archive. Cambridge: The MIT Press. pp.1017.
10. Online Oxford Dictionary [Accessed: 17 January 2014).
11. Sentilles, R. (2005). Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace, in Burton, A.
Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions, and Writing of History. Durham: Duke University
Press. p.142.
12. Foucault, M. (1969). The Historical a priori and the Archive, in Merewether,
C. (ed.) (2006). The Archive. Cambridge: The MIT Press. p.26.
13. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. p.13.
14. Appadurai, A. (2013). The Future as Cultural Fact. London: Verso Books. p.3.
134

Works Cited
Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Fact. London: Verso Books.
Demos, T.J. (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary
during Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1969) The Historical a priori and the Archive. In Merewether, C.
(ed.) (2006). The Archive. Cambridge: The MIT Press. pp.2631.
Merewether, C. (2006) Introduction//Art and the Archive. In Merewether, C.
(ed.). The Archive. Cambridge: The MIT Press. pp.1017.
Sentilles, R. (2005) Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace. In Burton, A. Archive
Stories. Facts, Fictions, and Writing of History. Durham: Duke University Press.
pp.136156.
Tracey, D. (2007) Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto. Gabriola Island: New
Society Publishers.

135

Bishan Project
Here Comes Everybody
Yuqiong Xu

. . . we could say that today there is not even a single

instant in which the life of individuals is not modelled,
contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus. In what
way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy
must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle
with apparatuses? What we are looking for is neither
simply to destroy them nor, as some naively suggest, to
use them in the correct way.
Giorgio Agamben
Introduction
In the process of Chinas urbanization, one of the most
significant phenomena is that millions of rural populations are
flooding into cities. The Chinese government has ambitious plans
to migrate another 250 million people into towns over the next 12
years in a bid to drive growth and boost consumption. However, the
curator Ou Ning deems that Chinas massive urbanization has been
137

a destructive social force and its benefits unfairly distributed. For

instance, Ou Ning realizes that the problem of the urban village is
closely associated with the countryside. Therefore, Ou Ning hopes
to encourage not only intellectuals but everybody to go back to the
country and balance the relationship between urban and rural areas
through his Bishan Project. The Bishan Project mainly focuses on
artistic and cultural events. Moreover, Ou attempts to use art and
culture as the starting point of entry and influence or reshape politics
and economics with their work in rural areas.
Part One
The Bishan Project is not only an art project but a conception
and practice on the rural reconstruction movement. Ou Ning (2003),
the initiator of the project, elucidates that his starting point is the
anxiety over the manifested and grim Chinas social realities, such
as the imbalance between cities and countryside, deterioration
of agricultural industries and loss of rights of agricultural labour,
which are the direct result of excessive urbanization (Ou, 2003).
Consequently, Ou attempts to advocate that intellectuals and artists
return the country from cities, establish the relationship between
urban and rural areas based on mutual sustenance and dedicate
their intellect to influence culture, economy and politics in rural
areas. This project based on the historical experience of the rural
reconstruction movement led by Chinese intellectuals since the
Republican Era (ibid.) and the cultural practices of diverse rural
regions across the world. Being inspired by Chinese traditional
rural philosophies and utopian spirit, the Bishan Project expects to
achieve a restarting of rural vitality, fulfilling Mutual Aid (ibid.), and
exploring an approach to rural revival.
Bishan, located in Yi Country of Anhui Province, is well-known
as its well-preserved Hui-style architectures in the historical Huizhou
Region and belongs to a part of Mount Huangshan and Yi Country
tourist areas. However, Ou Ning (2011) deems that the existing
monotonous tourism development mode is neither concerned with
the protection natural eco-environment and rural development,
nor committed to the revival and inheritance of traditional farming
138

heritage and culture. Especially, this pattern can only provide

superficial visits and lifeless specimens to more tourists, yet more
widespread and active participation in rural reconstruction cannot
be inspired. Meanwhile, an unsophisticated imagination about rural
areas has been broken. Based on the consideration for depressed
rural situations and the critical standpoint on over-urbanization, Ou
Ning and his partnerthe artist Zuo Jingchose the Bishan village
as their site for Bishan Commune and began the exploration and
experiment on co-housing and rural reconstruction in 2011.
Part Two
Since the end of the Cold War, China has actively embraced
globalization. As Ou (2013) states, the urbanization movement
which is guided by GDP has reallocated social resources even
more intensely than under revolutions. Xiang (2008) summarizes
that the process of urbanization is, in short, a natural historical
transformation process from rural society and civilization to
modern urban society and civilization. Meanwhile, the World Bank
report (1997), China 2020, states that one of the two significant
transformations which are happening in China is the shift from
countryside and an agricultural society to cities and an industrial
society. Based on the data that is provided by Xiang (2008), if China
will be able to achieve modernization in 2050, the urbanization rate
must be more than 70%. On the other hand, every year the number
of rural population flooding into the cities will be more than 10
million in China. However, it should be noted that the transformation
from peasants to citizens has happened without sufficient
preparation. Under the condition of a serious shortage in the social
security system, peasants have completed the transformation of
identities and roles; they have to face with a terrible dilemma the
contradiction between institutional identity and their self-perceived
identity. Furthermore, the dilemma has brought various troubles
and inconveniences. Ou Ning has realized the grim status quo as
well. He (2013) deems that peasants contributed both land and
labour force over the course of Chinas urbanization, yet they are
not be able to get equal opportunities to share benefits brought by
urbanization and modernization.
139

Fig. 2

Fig.1

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 6
All images from Ou Nings blog
Fig. 1 The logo of Bishan Commune, Designed by Xiao Ma and Cheng Zi, 2010
Fig. 2 The project called Craftsmanship in Yi County 2011
Fig. 3 Designers Xiao Ma and Cheng Zi are visiting the Yu Ting Gao Workshop, 2011
Fig. 4 Fashion designer Ma ke is investigating the process of making flax, 2011
Fig. 5 Chu Di Fang: Harvest Ceremony, performed by villagers of Bishan, 2011
Fig. 6 The design of Bishan Hours in Ou Nings second Moleskine notebook on Bishan
Project, 2014
Fig. 7 Bishan Hours (back side), 2014
Fig. 8 Bishan Hours (front side), 2014

140

In 2005, Ou investigated the urban villages around San Yuan

Li area of Guangzhou and the slums in Da Shi La region of Beijing
in order to achieve his two urban study projects: the San Yuan Li
Project and Meishi Street. Through these investigations he found the
majority of residents who live in urban villages or slums are landless
peasants and migrant farmer labourers who have not finished
the transformation of citizen. These people can be described as
landless, without guarantee, with no stable position, and unskilled;
they cannot find a foothold except in humble and cheap residences
in cities. Additionally, the Hukou system (household registry systems
in China) objectively has caused that the landless peasants and
migrant farm labourers who hold the agricultural Hukou cannot
conveniently access public service facilities, acquire stable
occupations, participate in politics and guarantee due entitlements.
Xiang (2008) deems, as well, that they still suffer from the identity
crisis and complex mentality of marginal people. Even if they have
lived in cities for several years, they cannot establish self-confidence
and fully integrate in urban mainstream lifestyle yet. Therefore, Ou
(2011) insists that the problems that seemingly only exist in urban
city are, in fact, the reflection of sick realities in rural areas.
Fei (1992) argues that traditional Chinese society, in both
countryside and cities, is a unified rural society that is based on
the notion of ones native soil (Ou, 2013). Fei (op.cit.) further
states that with respect to familial relationships, social organization
followed a differential mode of association, and with respect to
politics, started at the top with politically centralized power and
moved down to power at the county level. From the county level
down, social organization and stability relied on the autonomy of
landowners in small villages. However, Fei (ibid.) points out that
the traditional social structure has been continually criticized and
transformed leading to chronic disorder, since the May Fourth
Movement (1919). According to Feis argument, Ou (2013) insists
that in China, the large-scale urbanization movement is a disruptive
social force. Taking Bishan village for example, Bishan is one of the
oldest villages in Anhui province China. It is rich in natural resources
and traditional Chinese culture. A kind of Chinese rural patriarchal
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clan tradition is still kept in these villages like Bishan. Since Ming
dynasty (14th century AD), Anhui province started to be one of the
richest regions in China. Businessmen born from Anhui made a
huge amount of money in big cities like Shanghai and Yangzhou.
They often organized association of hometown fellows. Furthermore,
they kept sending the money back to their relatives living in villages.
Therefore, owing to the fortune from the cities there were many so
called Hui style architecture being built in the villages (Hui is the
abbreviation of Anhui province). It can be found that there is a very
harmonious relationship between the urban city and rural area. The
urban-rural interactions mean that the village supplies business
elites to cities, and then gets fortune from these talented people,
earned in cities. However, the current reality of this village gives
a quite different picture compared with its past. Although it is not
extremely poverty-stricken, most of the houses are abandoned. The
ordinary residents living in the village are children and the elderly.
The tradition of filial piety is becoming weaker and weaker, and
the majority of old people lose the care of their children. It should
be emphasized that the situation of Bishan village is very typical in
modern China. A huge gap exists between villages and urban cities.
New generation farmers who are able to find jobs in cities no longer
wish to return the country again. Through this way, the rural area is
grabbed by the city, and both of them are standing in each others
opposite position.
The purpose of the Bishan project is to restore the selfconfidence of the villagers. Taking art as the starting point, the
history of the local region is reviewed, and the villagers are wishing
to be inspired by their glorious history and outstanding ancestors.
Based on the above achievements, Ou Ning attempted to make
a practice to help the famers express their demands. Ou (2013)
deems that no matter at the political or economic level, there is only
the stage of the political party and the wealthy. The famers as the
lowest stratum of this system can never be the subjects of history.
Ou (ibid.) states that the subject of farmers should manifest as their
reactive capabilities, negotiation abilities, and initiative when they
have to face practical issues. Additionally, developing the strength
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and knowledge of the people is still an important talking point in

todays China. Meanwhile, Ou wishes to rebuild the relationship
between rural area and urban city. His project aims to make the
village more attractive for the youth and integrate more human
resources and financial support in this process. The intellectuals,
or so-called rural intellectuals, become the leaders in this rural
construction movement. Through this method, it is hoped that the
interactive relationship between rural areas and urban cities could
be revived as well, as before.
Part Three
Different from numerous rural study think-tanks in China which
are more willing to start their works from building rural community
college and farmers cooperative, Ou Ning and his partners chose
to organize artistic and cultural events as the main starting point
of Bishan Project. As a curator and artist, Ou Ning believed that
the fascinating and diverse local rural art resources are the crucial
parts of rural life that should be recommended and developed.
In addition, Ou Ning acquired the further financial support as this
project was involved in 2011 Chengdu China Biannual Exhibition at
its early stages.
In 2011, Bishan Commune was founded in Bishan village.
Ou invited artists, architects, designers, musician, film directors,
writers and student volunteers from Mainland China, Hong Kong
and Taiwan to visit the Bishan area and investigate local society.
Based on extensive fieldwork, they planned and held the first
Bishan Harvestival in cooperation with the villagers. In this festival,
Ou and his partners focused on the presentation of village history,
protection and revitalization of housing, design of traditional crafts,
staging of traditional regional opera and music performances,
production and screening of documentaries about the villages, and
conducting forums where rural reconstruction workers who advocate
different schools of thought and practice in various areas can share
their experiences. (Ou, 2013)
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A significant project, Craftsmanship in Yi County, should be

introduced. In this project, artists, architects and designers from
modern urban cities were invited to work with local craftsmen and
folk artists to create modern versions for traditional objects. One
of the cases that was an extension of this craftsmanship project
was that a team of graphic designers and product designers takes
part in the excavating and redesigning a kind of local food, the
Yuting Cake. It is expected that this traditional food could be
taken into market in the near future to bring economic benefits for
local villagers. Another case is about the preservation of traditional
domestic architecture, led by the local people with architecture
graduate students in their summer camp. Ou (2013) states that it
will be a significant approach to protect and spread the culture of
Hui-style architectures, if the architects can be inspired by these
elements of Hui-style architectures and use them in their designs.
In 2012 the second Bishan Harvestival was held, with the
organization of the International Photo Festival. The festival centred
on a much more wider range of issues, such as environmental
protection, community-supported agriculture, rural economic
cooperatives and community colleges. Through the development
of these projects, Ou Ning and his partners attempted to push their
rural practice to touch and influence the economic and political
realms in rural life. Ou Ning, was more ambitious, and attempted
to achieve a social experiment on the concept of anarchism and
autonomy. For instant, farmers were engaged in the exchange of
labour and mutual aid so that the dependency between people and
public services will be lowered. Finally, Ou summarizes three key
concepts, Permaculture, Co-housing, and Consensus decisionmaking as the ultimate goals of the Bishan Project.
Part Four
For the purpose of designing the Bishan Project, Ou Ning and
his partners studied worldwide rural projects, such as the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale in Japan and the Land Project in Chiang Mai,
Thailand. The one which inspired Ou very much were the intentional
communities in New Zealand. These started from a so-called Back
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to the land movement in the 1970s. Even now, there are still 2030
people living together and they make their public decisions by
consensus.
Looking back on the history of China, Chinese intellectuals
have never stopped their efforts of rural study and practice since
the early twentieth century. For a very long time, there have bee
two schools in this realm: the so-called classical school took
Confucianism as the philosophy of rural construction; while the
modern school had Y. C. James Yen as its major figure, and put
effort into literacy programs and hygiene education. Y. C. James
Yen contributed his work experience in 1950s as nine rules of rural
construction:
1. Go to the People;
2. Living Among the People;
3. Learn from the People;
4. Plan With the People;
5. Start With What They Know;
6. Build on What They Have;
7. Not to Conform but to Transform;
8. Not Piecemeal but Integrated Approach;
9. Not Relief but Release.

During the study of these rural construction cases, Ou focused

on the social movement happening in Taiwan because it is ongoing and this society has the same traditional culture as China
mainland. A concept called the organic intellectual has been
created by Taiwans intellectuals. It represents a group of people
with high professional and educational background; they are not
only the model citizens who participate in public life, but also the
society builders through the approaches of community educations,
environmental protections etc. The characteristics of this movement
should be emphasized, they are based on the new generation
of public space social media. It is referred as a peaceful
revolution (Xu, 2009, p.36) as people do not need to express their
dissatisfaction on the street any more. The only thing they need to
do is to share information through the Internet.
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Conclusion
For Ou Ning, the Bishan Commune is a kind of Utopia and
experiment based on mutual sustenance. However, it should be
recognized that the country in todays China is in a grim situation
rather than a romantic fantasy. Ou (2003) insists that the most
crucial mission of rural reconstruction is to give assistance to
establishing the subject of the country. In the practice of the
Bishan Project, its three strategies come from Yens nine rules:
start with what they know, not to conform but to transform, and
not relief but release these are considered the most essential
principles. Furthermore, the rural reconstruction movement initiated
by intellectuals is not the coercive entrance of alien cultures, yet it
does not unlimitedly conform with every aspect of rural areas either.
It should be an in-depth action toward the reality, which pertains not
only to scholars but everybody.
Works Cited
Agamben, G. (2009) What is an apparatus?: and other essays. Trans. by David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. California: Stanford University Press.
Fei, X. (1992) From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Ou, N. (2012) Rural Reconstruction in China. Alternativearchive. http://www.
alternativearchive.com/ouning/article.asp?id=877 [Accessed 13 April 2014]
Ou, N. (2013) Bishan Project: Restarting the Rural Reconstruction Movement.
Alternativearchive. http://www.alternativearchive.com/ouning/article.asp?id=897
[Accessed 10 April 2014]
Xiang, B. (2008) The Transformation from Peasants to Urban Residents during
the Process of Urbanization - Taking the Guangzhou Development District as
Example. Wanfangdata. http://d.g.wanfangdata.com.cn/Thesis_Y9042935.aspx
(Accessed 15 April 2014)
Xu, Y. (2009) Yong Xu Sheng Tai De Wen Hua Shi Jian---Lai Zi Taiwan Tu Di De
Shen Yin [the Cultural Practice of Sustainability---the Sound From Taiwans Land]
[China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House] 19942012. pp.3436.

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147

Acknowledgements

Goldsmiths, University of London

Department of Visual Cultures MA in Global Arts
Geographies Course 20132014.
Contributors

Noura Al-Salem, Li Li Chung, Natalia Cifuentes Friedman,

Charlotte Cirillo, Marianna Hovhannisyan, Suzie Jones,
Vivi Kallinikou, Emma Massoud, K.C. Messina, Ximena Moreno,
Edward Sanderson, Urok Shirhan, Benjamin W. Tippin,
Franziska Wildfrster, Yuqiong Xu
Tutor
Louis Moreno

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The contributors wish to express special thanks to the staff,

advisors and visiting professors of the Department of Visual Cultures,
particularly Louis Moreno and Prof. Irit Rogoff for their meetings
and important contributions to the group, as well as to Dr. Astrid
Schmetterling and Dr. Ayesha Hameed for their engagement in the
MA in Global Arts.
Our gratitude goes out to Isaac Julien and Dr. Michel Feher
for their valuable time and thoughts, which have influenced us at
an early stage of the project, as well as to Dr. Andrew Harris for an
insightful meeting. Final thanks to Joanne Dodd for her support,
and to Goldsmiths, Department of Arts for hosting the launch event.
This publication is an integral part of the final project for the
Geographies 20132014 course. It accompanies the event Here
Comes Everybody, the collective project launch taking place at
Goldsmiths, University of London on 30 May 2014.
Postgraduate Art and Curatorial Studios
Laurie Grove Baths
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, SE14 GNW, LONDON
Publication supported by:
Goldsmiths, University of London
Printed at:
Goldsmiths Print Services
Print run:
100 copies
Printed in the UK, 2014
Available online for free download in PDF format on
http://herecomeseverybodyepub.wordpress.com/
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 2014 The authors and Goldsmiths, University of London

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this publication

may be reproduced without the written permission of the authors.

Department of Visual Cultures

Geographies 2014