EXHAUSTED SUBJECT, IMPOSSIBLE COMMUNITY (2009-2011)

What are the organizational and political consequences of our “mental ecology”? The aim of this project has been to study the difficulties of cooperation of precarious workers and to create tools for the “impossible community” of immaterial labour and its performers. Taking the “discreet charm” of the precariat or call it the “dark side” of the multitude, the depression, panic, impotence, continuous micro-catastrophes of cooperation and the easiness of turning all the potential in cooperation into vicious violence between friends as its starting point, the project has tried to think and develop a basis for a positive organization of cooperation.

How to connect with others without the preconditions of a community, the spatial proximity and temporal continuity of existence? How to connect with others when the pathos of distance, cynicism and opportunism, have become essential parts of our survival? How can art work with that which cannot be said, and perhaps create compassionate spaces of connection and copoiesis? What kind of tools do philosophy, political theory and artworking offer for escaping the self-evidencies and patterns of behaviour through which the preemptive controls work in us – for co-creating mutation of subjectivity, resistance at the “molecular level”?

What is a community of the depressed? How do opportunists and cynics cooperate? The traditional organizational and political thought has always considered these states of mind dangerous, because it is impossible to control people who are not interested in anything, who do not commit to common task, who don’t keep their promises, have no clear direction, purpose, or consistency in their action or who just pretend to participate. It is precisely here where the classical methods of politics and organization face today their limit: they face the pathos of distance, human subjectivity without any particular direction or task, apathetic, indifferent and possessing a paradoxical immunity to any meaningful attempts of organization. But perhaps it is this very instability, ambivalence, a kind of distance or indifference on which any serious thinking of organization of cooperation should today start. Or as Nietzsche says (Genealogy of Morals, I §2): “From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values”. Could we think that Guattari’s “pathic foyer” of subjectivity is also a-pathic? That is, interpreted positively as restlessness or indifference to what is calculated to move feelings, to excite interest and action and that perhaps it is in this autonomy, untouchability or indifference (to all attempts to direct and organize behavior and thinking), that we should start looking for the possibility of creation and cooperation – not chaos but the essence of becoming that gives us consistency and that is necessary for creation.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

The Ueinzz Theatre Company: Finnegans Ueinzz performance, Baltic Circle Theatre Festival 18-22.11.2009.

Kafkamachine, a film by Kafka. Organizational and cinematrographic experiment based on Franz Kafka’s novel America, on the Trans-Atlantic ship from Lisbon to Sao Paulo 23.11-13.12.2011.

Peter Pál Pelbart: “Cartography of Exhaustion” audio book, available at www.mollecular.org

Virtanen Akseli (2011) The Discreet Charm of the Precariat. In Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine. Future Art Base, Series edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. n-1 edições, São Paulo.

Virtanen Akseli (2011): Matriisinen subjektiviteetti [Matrixial Subjectivity]. Special Issue on Bracha Ettinger. Essays by Bracha Ettinger, Judith Butler, Juhani Ihanus, Akseli Virtanen. Psykoterapia 2/2011.

Virtanen Akseli (2011) Todellinen ongelma. Yhdessätuotanto ja Bracha Ettingerin käsitteet [A Real Problem. Copoiesis and Bracha Ettinger’s Concepts]. Psykoterapia 2/2011:116-136.

Ettinger Bracha & Akseli Virtanen (2011), Mikä antaa meille elämää? [What Gives us Life?] Psykoterapia 2/2011:169-187.

Félix Guattari (2011) Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka. Edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. Future Art Base Series, n-1 Edições, São Paulo. 134 p.