<div>A couple of thoughts here related to the questions you have posed. First, the rhetoric of purity (is there an outside of capitalism?) can be, I think, an endgame producing the sort of corporate artists Stallabras describes and those who are overly concerned that they may make a mistake with their art (or their theory)--no one wants to be called a hypocrite.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The problem of artists, intellectuals, and capitalism is a real one. Should I refuse to teach at the Georgia Institute of Technology because of its ties to the military industrial complex? If I had refused, when I was just out of graduate school, I would have had little opportunity to critique the system in anything resembling a full-time way--I wouldn't have had those impressionable students either. But then, if I had gone too far in my critiques, I would have been fired. Artists, it strikes me, are in a similar position. How to survive in an organism long enough to destroy or recreate it?
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Rather than attempting to start from a position of purity, perhaps we should recognize that people will find themselves starting out from various positions of impurity within the system. And, there will be many ways of working against this system, of speaking to it in ways that I call, borrowing one of Derrida's metaphors, "Tympanic Politics":
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"In his elucidation of marginalia as a discipline unto itself, Derrida gives a poetic anatomy of the tympanic membrane and its surroundings. The ear is swirling, labyrinthine, and cavelike. Penetrating its depths presents a difficult, frightening prospect. In addition to traversing a maze of passages, one must confront the wall of the tympanum which has the capability to muffle the loudest of noises. If normative discourse/art does not reach the inner ear with the proper sense of volume or urgency, then how is one to suggest the political or historical importance of a particular issue? For the alternative would be to shock the system in such a way as to puncture the tympanum altogether, effectively dismantling the apparatus so that nothing can be heard at all. It would be as if Constantin Brancusi, on the verge of rejecting Rodin's method of clay modeling with taille directe, had shattered The Craiova Kiss with the first hammer strike into formless stone. Derrida's answer to such questions, of course, is always a more specific anatomy of the situation at hand. He suggests that since the tympanum is oblique with respect to the ear canal, its subversion requires an oblique approach as well (taille indirecte?), some form of rhetorical ambush. How does one 'unhinge' something that cannot be shattered?"
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Alan Clinton<br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/28/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</a></b> <<a href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</a>> wrote:
</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"> Dear IDCs,<br><br> I have been enjoying the recent discussion sparked off by the passing of Baudrillard and would like to move the debate at a tangent to this, but continuing with ideas surrounding forms of social control, power and politics. I am concerned with the domination of the corporate within the cultural and wonder at the position I find myself placed in as an artist and academic working in an educational instituion.
<br><br>> Digital media and new technology is reconfiguring our relationship with the world and is also affecting how artists relate with their public. Now, new locative technology can position art in the everyday of people's lives and activities outside the gallery space. Although psychogeography and mobile media enable the 'interactive city' for artists to key into, they also promote ideas of corporatised play in an urban space and tend to be interventionist and intrusive. 'Big brother' media and cctv surveillance allows for few informal, ungoverned social meeting places. This means that artists are having to find interstices between the formal constructed and observed social spaces where unorthodox art can happen to engage with its audience. Just how is such practice being supported within the neo-liberal economic structures of globalistation? Julian Stallabrass suggests that this only produces artists (in Brit Art particularly) who posture as edgy, risky individuals but who are in real terms busy establishing market positions for themselves. The answer lies somewhere in the inter-related issues of art, lifestyle and globalisation.
<br>><br>> In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan predicted a technologically enabled 'global village' and issued the warning -<br>> "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence."
<br>><br>> I would be extremely interested in your thoughts on the extent to which we are 'aware of this dynamic' and offer some questions which might help probe the territory -<br>><br>> Corporations are rebranding themselves around lifestyle, is this influencing creative practice or vice-versa?
<br>> How do the principals and aesthetics of open source and democratic media sit alongside corporate products (iPod etc)?<br>> How should arts organisations and institutions respond to open networking and ideas exchange, what is a node and a network in cultural terms?
<br>> Are artists the software for the corporation hardware, or the activists in sheeps clothing?<br>> Where does government funding for the arts sit in the global cultural mix, or is corporate money driving the cultural agenda?
<br>><br> With thanks and kind regards,<br><br> Dew Harrison.<br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (<a href="http://distributedcreativity.org">
distributedcreativity.org</a>)<br><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br><a href="http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc">http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc</a>
<br><br>List Archive:<br><a href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a><br><br>iDC Photo Stream:<br><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
</a><br></blockquote></div><br>