Well, it's good to see so many people here. I've got quite a long paper, so I'll begin straight away. There's a couple of quotations. The first begins as follows. So politics as a learning process is about how you live with pessimism and how you work on yourself in relation to that pessimism, forcing yourself to read bad news every day and then liberating the possibilities of liberation,
elaborating the possibilities of liberation, demanding an invigoration and a sense of determination from film. That's from Mark Carlin from 1981. and then the second quotation is come contemplate these frightful ruins this wreckage, these shreds these shreds, these unfortunate cinders and that's Voltaire, poem on the Lisbon disaster from 1756 the presentation is called Orphan Black which is a television show I've never seen I just like the two words So when we come to discuss the question of the small-scale organization, perhaps one way to begin is to distinguish between the question of smallness and the question of
scale. Smallness refers to the carrying capacity of the organization, to its material parameters, but it does not refer to its capacities for artistic invention or for experimentation. The term small-scale translates all too easily into a presupposition of minority status on one hand and the status of a child on the other, as if the institution has not yet quite entered into adulthood, as if it operates in a perpetual eternal childhood, a permanent minoritarian existence to which large-scale organizations periodically stoop to notice. But the question of scale is not predetermined by the physical limits or the financial budget of the organization. The question of scale hinges upon the question of the small.
These are capacities and incapacities linked by a hyphen, a hyphen that articulates them together in an unguaranteed manner that operates through the invention of what is possible, through a stress testing of what is actually feasible. Perhaps the question of scale exceeds the presupposition of smallness, because it is a matter of experimenting with the capacities of the organization each time. one knows what an institution can do, just as nobody knows what a body can do. Only the practice of exhibition making gives the organization a sense of what it is capable of inventing, of its range, of its reach, its core, its expertise, its strengths, its focus, its sense
of what is possible, feasible, imaginable, inventable. In this sense, scale is not a question of smallness or of largeness. It is not a matter of size, nor is it a question of extension. It is a matter of nested capacities. To put it another way, it's a matter of platforming, of platforms. As the critic Benedict Singleton points out, we tend to think of platforms in terms of digital technology. Google, Facebook, Weibo, these industrial commercial operations that function as both more and less than products or resources or services. But the word platform comes from plot form, from stage, from theatre, and this suggests that it is a structure that can host other behaviours.
Its exterior allows possible behaviours, while its interior stays relatively fixed and predictable. A platform solicits contingency in the form of appropriation, while it simultaneously manufactures reliance and reliability as a type of control. A platform works through the logic of what William K. Winsat calls generative entrenchment. Platforms generate reasons to be through adoption and through use. For an imagination that aligns itself with platform dynamics, with the dynamics of platforms, politics merges with technical infrastructure and both are transformed. platforms are ways to get out of the present they are not plans that aim to lock down the future
the platform, the plot form arrives in the ruins of the plan let's take an example let's take the relationship between the showroom the organisation that I know best of the organisations here and the Otolith Collective the small scale organisation that I am part of that I co-direct with Angelica Saga and let's take the first project that the showroom and the otolith collective have co-curated and co-produced that project is called on vanishing land from 2013 by mark fisher and by justin barton now i was also going to mention a project which is just forthcoming in the next week a project
called It Took Forever Getting Ready to Exist, UIQ'd the Unmaking Of by Sylvia Maglioni and Graham Thompson. And there'll be a third collaboration in November with the Cape Town-based magazine and journal Chimarenga. And what links these three very different projects is critically that none of them are by artists. None of them are artistic productions in that sense. So what are they and why is it important? So let's take Fisher and Barton's On Vanishing Land first. Perhaps some of you saw it, maybe you didn't. That's not so important. What is important is that, first of all, none of these projects are by artists, but then they are not exactly research-based projects either.
That's too general a term. But nor are they educationally engaged projects, as is usually understood, nor are they local projects nor are they community oriented projects in the way that Sarah Thelwell describes local based projects in her 2011 paper Size Matters so Thelwell says if we look at the activities of organisations such as Gasworks, Chisholm and the showroom we see that they have not only a strong international reputation within the art world but also a highly localised reputation as a connected element within and positive contributor to the communities in which they operate. The integration of educational activities as a key element in the main program rather than a parallel or minor activity can be seen in commissioning structures.
So let's start with On Vanishing Land, and let's start with the two theorists who worked on that work. So Mark Fisher, who I'm sure many of you know, is a theorist who writes on the, we could say, the political valencies of film, of music, of theory, of art, whose book Capitalist Realism is then an alternative, has been translated into Spanish, into German, into French, into Czechoslovakian, who is a blogger responsible for K-punk, who's a lecturer and who is a journalist, and who's a teacher, along with myself, in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. His colleague, Justin Barton, is not an academic. He works in a school. He's a receptionist in a school, and he travels, and he's just published his first novel, Vanishing Hills.
But what is important about Fisher and Barton is their role in the formation of what I call interpretive communities. So what is important for this project is Fisher's role in the formation of the discourse of ontology within dance music of the noughties, let's say from about 2005 to 2010, from the formation of the producer Burial and his first album from 2005 to records by The Caretaker to releases by Ghostbox and then the leveraging of this notion of hauntology to a kind of diagnosis of music as the inability to produce new modernisms and then finally to a diagnosis of culture as such British culture as such
for its inability to produce new futures. And then, secondly, his participation in the key speculative realist conferences at Goldsmiths from 2007 onwards. And then his convening of the symposium that announced the accelerationism movement at Goldsmiths in 2011, which still is functioning very strongly today, as many of you might know who've read this accelerationist reader. And before all of those, there's the position of Barton and Fisher within the Continental Philosophy Department of Warwick University with the theorists Sadie Plant and Nick Land. all of them went on to form the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and who worked on the virtual futures conferences of 95 to 96
in which the overlapping fields of the cyber gothic as formulated by Nick Land the cyber feminism as formulated by Sadie Plant and Afrofuturism formulated by myself by John O'Confora, Mark Sinker and Greg Tate all overlapped so all of this makes Mark and which makes Justin together key figures in what Antonia Friedman calls interpretive communities Antonia Friedman is based at Goldsmiths and now she's in Berlin two days ago I was in Berlin and she was telling me about an essay she's working on a group, I think they're called Common Methods it's a Soviet conceptual art group from the late 60s and 70s that included Boris
She was telling me how common methods would go out into the Russian countryside, as a very small and kind of exasperatingly minuscule action would take place. Somebody would go behind a tree and then emerge. That would be it. And then they would all take the train back to Moscow. And on the way back, an interpretive community would gather around the interpretation of what it is they've seen or not seen. A community would grow around the event. So here what I want to do is adapt that notion of an interpretive community to gather around a concept. and to understand Fisher and Barton as figures
who have played a consistent role over the last 20 years in building concepts into subcultures that bond through a certain theoretical consistency, through a struggle to develop a vocabulary, through a commitment to inventing neologisms, to differentiate that project, to metabolise an idea until it becomes lived as an attitude that is shared by anybody that wants to commit to the project of building that attitude. Such a project tends to attract students who belong to, but who tend to be at odds with their subject, who are in a struggle with the capacity of the discipline to discipline them. It appeals to graduates who are unable to reconcile themselves to their postgraduate existence. It appeals to freelance intellectuals, autodidacts, disaffected people.
All of these people self-elect themselves to become part of these movements. And these scenes exist somewhere between subcultures, elites, but they are defined by a cultural dissatisfaction, which has a vocabulary, a yearning, and a target. They are not floating, they are not polysemous, but they are not fully fixed yet. They are open to interpretation. There is a polemical imperative around these neologisms. The neologisms of hauntology, of speculative realism, of accelerationism, of the cyber-gothic, of cyber-feminism, of Afrofuturism, these are acts of primal pop poetics, and they are simultaneously the names of aesthetic and political positions. They operate by disagreements, which open up a field of meaning that must be argued over
by people that affiliate themselves within it. They are not so much terms as they are wars of interpretation whose aim is to intervene in culture. They are new forms of cultural politics fashioned in order to articulate discontent and to foment theories to live by. Theories that are inhabited, theories that are embodied, theories that are rigorous and delirious. To put it another way, Mark Fisher is a midwife. His role in these movements or these scenes or these subcultures is not only to write, to polemicise and to formulate, it is to incubate, to nurture, to mother, to care, to support these movements. And what gives these a force is that this nurturing capacity takes place in a culture and in a country in which pretension is punished
and imagination is disciplined, in which things like Sood's Corner agree to arraign theorists so that their words are ridiculed with the satisfaction of latter-day witchfinders. So Fisher has been in Sood's Corner twice. You'll be surprised to hear that I have also been in Sood's Corner twice. which suggests that this is a badge of honour to be worn proudly. And so what gives the project of nurturing a culture an edge, a force, an imperative, and a project is that the act of mobilising a term, of libidinising it, of incubating it, of living theory as an adventure among friends is still frowned upon in mainstream culture. I recall a press release by a showroom which was quoted in Private Eye, in Sue's Corner,
in which some anonymous person reported the showroom for daring to theorise their particular exhibition. In other words, somebody tried to shame the showroom for daring to invent a term. So this is not just a question of international art speak diagnosed by Nina Power and by Hito Style. It is more that new theoretical terms, especially terms that are practised and lived, that carry a charge, are in themselves anathema to mainstream media. They are the nemesis of newspaper journalism. And this antipathy should be encouraged. That is to say, the critical reflex of hostility and indifference that greets new terms, and the communities around them,
should be heightened and should be insisted upon. It's this insistence upon new terms which are painful to the British empirical ear, which is capable of creating a negative publicity hostile enough to generate its own forms of enthusiasm. We can see this in Jonathan Jones' reviews of Mark Leckie at Serpentine, his review of Duncan Campbell at Turner Prize. We can see that such reviews are more than capable of creating a discourse fever all of their own. In the 1960s, Che Guevara said we must create two, three, many Vietnams. Surely 40 years later, we should be able to create two, three, many Jonathan Joneses. If we cannot do so, then we are not submitting everything to the discipline of present reality, to our understanding of the forces which are really shaping and changing our world.
We must first attend violently to things as they are, without illusions or false hopes. That's Stuart Hall. As soon as neologisms leave their force fields, their zones of incubation, spaces like this, spaces of conversation, essays, small conferences, arguments, magazines, articles, as soon as they leave these worlds they attain a negative crossover effect they meet a hostility and an antipathy they do not end up on television or radio or the Guardian Saturday Review or the London Review books or the Times Literary Supplement or the New Statesman or the New Humanist or Prospect they are not commodified they are not recuperated they do not become water cooler conversations far from it they are subjected to the loud silence of active indifference to the labour of ignoring the new
that is produced all the time in the UK. And this active indifference is a good thing because it suggests that contrary to all accounts, there are underground scenes. There are subcultures, that interpretive communities thrive in and around the tributes that travel out of colleges to blogs and back again. Certain terms, then, do not function as forms and deliveries of communicative capitalism. They function in terms of incommunication. They are where communication falters and breakdown and stammers. Now, what happens when these interpretive communities enter into the envelope of the small-scale organisations? What happens when these communities find their way into the capacities for platforming, for plot-forming,
such as the showroom? What happens when On Vanishing Land takes shape within the showroom? So two nights ago, I was at Forum Expanded, which is the artist moving image section of the Berlinale. And every curator had to talk for five minutes about Form Expanded. And one of them said something that really stuck with me. She said, she was quoting James Benning. And James Benning said this, In the exhibition space, the contract with the screen is broken. In the exhibition space, the contract with the screen is broken. Which is to say this, the expectations that spectators bring to industrial cinema, which are integrated into Hollywood film, these presuppositions will be displaced within the exhibition space.
But if we say the decade from the mid-90s to the mid-noughties, let's say the decade from Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitken, Tracy Moffat, Candice Bright, Isaac Julien, Zarina Bimji, let's say if that breaking of the contract became familiar from too many overproduced exhibitions of Victorian Miro, then when a work made by a theorist enters the exhibition, When the interpretative communities mobilised by those theories, nurtured by that theorist, is invited into the exhibition, then we could say that the breaking of the contract between screen and spectator is renewed. Something is at stake in that breaking. To answer that, we first, to answer and to understand what is at stake in the breaking of that contract.
we would first have to reconstruct how a figure such as Mark Fisher or Justin Barton even comes to work with the showroom at all. And of course the reason why is that a figure that can link Barton, Fisher, the showroom, Emily Pethick has to articulate the link between a series of interpretive communities and a space that operates as a platform, that plots form, that forms plots in itself and in common with others, that practices ways of forming plots with others. And that figures the Otolith Collective, which is to say the public-facing aspect of the Otolith group. So let's say the collective does not so much work with institutions
as it operates as a connective tissue between organisations it is already affiliated with and works with figures it is already connected with. In other words, it links interpretive communities that it already participates in with platforms whose plots it helps to form. What it does is engage in conversations with figures that take place over years, conversations which have no thought of an exhibition. It is the same conversation that extends over decades with circles around concepts, obsessions, questions and preoccupations. So here the question is not exactly or only a matter of what Sarah Thelwald calls deferred value, in which the value created by an initiating organisation is realised long after a commission has moved beyond its jurisdiction,
and where value stands for a kind of indivisible combination of artistic, social, societal and fiscal value. Rather, it is a matter of understanding that the value of the project preceded the organisation, in the form of the interpretive community that organizes around the formation of vocabulary, an attitude, an in-joke, a neologism, and which exists in the understanding that its labor is separated from its value. And it's only on the basis of this pre-existing interpretive community that theorists can be invited into the organization in the first place in order to make public a way of thinking that was never intended or destined for exhibition making. Here lies the work of a small-scale organisation, in this case the showroom,
who enters into a process on a case-by-case basis, an exhibition that is made by a theorist that works in sound, together with an artist group. The project of the showroom is how to make public, how to make sensible, how to aestheticise, how to work with theorists to make work that makes visible an interpretive community. to a community which is not only old people, young people, migrants, but theoretical subcultures. They too are communities. In order to understand, as Thelwell writes, how and in which ways, quote, value accrues over the lifetime of an object or an idea in order to investigate who the beneficiaries of those processes might be. So this is to say that we have to grasp the way in which value has already existed until then,
but in negative, so to speak. Part of the value of a theory is its vocabulary, its attitude, its ways of going about, to use the vocabulary of Green Gartside as criticity, is actively resisted or negated by large parts of the mainstream media. Part of the value of a theory that is lived and enjoyed, part of that comes from the antipathy, the indifference, the hostility and the incomprehension that that theory excites and provokes. as the embodied practice of a group whose presence far exceeds its numbers, the entry of the work into the public does not necessarily convert that theory into a social good. What if making public that theorization does not entail displays in vitrines or entering into processual work?
It can instead amplify the theoretical into a force field that seems inhospitable to all those not sufficiently initiated into its vocabulary. This is perhaps one reason why sound is favoured by theorists like Barton or Fisher, like Maglioni and Thompson, like Chimarenga, because sound, music, seems to suggest an intangible asset in its most literal form. Sound seems to flaunt its difficulty and its inaccessibility to monetise itself. Okay, so I'll try to cut down and summarise what I'm going to say. So there was a continual conversation which focuses initially around the question of hyperstition in the 90s, which becomes in the noughties the question of the weird, and which becomes the question of the eerie.
The question is how to differentiate between the notion of the eerie and the notion of the weird. And this is a question that becomes important to Barton and to Fisher in the late 90s, in the late noughties. This discussion becomes public in 2009 at Gasworks. It becomes public again at a conversation at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. And then it goes public once more in 2011 for the actual exhibition. So the duration of this conversation, a conversation that extends back to the 90s, suggests that friendship itself functions as a form of reliance and reliability. Friendship itself acts as a platform that entrenches reliability.
It is friendship, durational conversation that forms a plot that entrenches itself over time. While simultaneously soliciting generativity and contingency, it is what allows for forms to be plotted in whatever forms they might take. And so On Vanishing Land in 2013 emerges as a project which is at once polemical, how to counter the maudlin influence of W.G. Sable's Rings of Saturn, and philosophical, how to evoke the question of an agency without subjectivity. So to invite interpretive communities of hauntology, of the eerie, of the new weird, into the space of exhibition is to invite their sub-lunar thinking into the exhibition.
It is to invite them to break the contract with the screen, and to invite Fisher and Barton is to recognise that their commitment is to their interpretive communities more than it is to the exhibitionary context. That is to say Fisher and Barton are making a work that emerges from and speaks to a community that now finds itself in an exhibitionary context. Something is at stake. The interests of a community, an interpretive community, committed to concepts is being exposed in a way that it hasn't been before, which implies that in speaking to a set of communities that might or might not overlap with showroom's own audience the contact of the exhibition will be broken in a new way. To put it slightly differently, two sets of communities will be disappointed in two new and unfamiliar ways.
The audiences that attend the showroom and the interpretive communities that make up Fisher and Barton's circle of subculture. the unspoken hope is that both of them will be disappointed by what will be produced that this new disappointment will provide its own vocabulary of dissatisfaction and that the encounter with these dissatisfactions the encounter with these dissatisfactions will yield specific kinds of satisfactions in their own turn in constructing on vanishing land in fact Fisher and Barton did not provide a new set of disappointments
In fact, anybody who attended some of their early talks would realise that Fisher had been speaking extensively about the need to develop audio essays that operated in a zone that was neither a musical composition nor a radio drama, neither a radio lecture nor a fictional narrative, but was something that precisely sought to operate within and between each of these expectations. within the audio essay is an invitation an invitation to set up the conditions for a collective listening in which spectators gather in the dark to be alone together what is missing in contemporary life according to Barton and Fisher is not so much dance clubs nor galleries nor music stores nor museums so much as times and spaces in which to listen together without images
I'm just concluding now So as they are seated for the duration of on vanishing land, do these communities then begin gradually to assume the outline of a social entity? Do they operate as a kind of temporary social body brought together precisely through the novelty of listening? If listening functions as a type of attention and a type of recognition, then it operates as a type of care. To curate comes from Latin curere, which means to care, to take care. In the groups that gather to listen, there is a rest from a collective body forced, as Nila Power writes, to see itself as a series of competing and self-interested atomic mini-bodies. And to describe this work of listening to On Vanishing Land
as an intangible asset or as an immaterial labour is to downplay the communication of affect or emotion, which is anything other than immaterial. Reproduction, in the broader sense, suggested by Silvia Federici in Revolution of Point Zero, housework, reproduction and feminist struggle, can be understood as, quote, the complex of activities and relations by which our life and labour are daily reconstituted. That is to say, everything that makes life possible in the first place and everything that continues to sustain it. It's clear and it is evident where the commitment of the showroom, of Gasworks, of Chisholm, to care, operates in their embedding of childcare and motherhood,
of community projects and educational projects within and through their programme? Can we learn to hear care at work in a project such as On Vanishing Land, a project which at first glance seems to have little to do with questions of care, but in the expanded sense indicated by Federici, in its devotion to forms of attention, to the nurturing of ideas in the building of interpretive communities, to the forming of plots and the plotting of forms, to new forms of disappointment, which are inseparable from new forms of satisfaction, I would argue that they are and that they should be understood as such. Thank you.