posted on 26.08.08
Victor Misiano: The institutionalization of friendship (S23M remix)
There would be no communities if there were no events, jointly lived through from the beginning to the end, which lose the possibility of existing in each of us.
Maurice Blanchot
“La communauté inavouable”
Sociology shows us that the only type of a social link not determined by some regional or family relationship, professional cooperation, ideological solidarity, or erotic attraxtion, is friendship. The aim of this text is to develop a theory of the relationship between the people around Piratbyrån as a history of friendship, while S23M (and some other projects) is nothing but a conscious attempt to launch a friendship formation project. As one of the S23M discussion participants said: “recent internet history is the history of friendships”.
A story of meetings. People in love feel the necessity of being together; colleagues are linked to each other by the production conveyer, and comrades-in-arms are connected by ideological discipline (like Piratbyrån when taking the shape of a lobby organization.) The specific character of friendship as a form of social relationship is that it does not presume a permanent interaction. Friendships are a type of serial solidarity. The story of friendship is a story of meetings.
The story of the kopimist community starts in 2003 when, in the framework of the #discobbedienti chat room, the Piratbyrån website was established. It was the legendary epoch after the collapse of the IT bubble, and as always, when anold system of relations comes apart, new contacts — and therefore new friends — emerged. It was during the discussions initiated by Piratbyrån, that these kopimists started to perceive themselves as a new generation, as an integrated body. Friendship is always a discovery: discovery of the Other and at the same time of the Self.
S23M is the next stage in the life of the Piratbyrån community, after the euphoria of discovering each other (and discovering internet freedom), and after the shock of the conflict with the outside world (the attacks against The Pirate Bay). At such a stage internal contradictions are inevitable exposed. Self-reflection and doubts starts to appear. One has doubts about one’s self, and about the Other. Crisis is always a moment when you need somebody else, when the solidity of a friendship is tested. Thus, is 2007, the Indian kopimists of the Raqs Collective invited Piratbyrån to Italy.
The confidential project. The friendship between the kopimists around Piratbyrån is not only a story of relationships between people. Very soon, if not at once, the kopimists started to percieve friendship as a strategic value, having the value of a project with an artistic character. The Walpurgis ritual, Oil of the 21st century, 0wnage — all these projects had one common feature: they employed the resources of friendly relationships as part of the program. These projects may be called confidential projects. The strategy employed in the framework of these projects can be called the institutionalization of friendship.
The structure of the confidential project. The main feature is that the human aspect dominates the professional. Because friendship is not creative cooperation, but the “ethical form of Eros”.
The confidential project excludes the possibility of a representative selection of participants. The choice is immanent in relation to the friendships. Friendship is a product of choice, although this is the only case of unmotivated social choice. Friendship is a choice within yourself. That’s why the usual curator’s routine — such as gender, national, generational, and regional balance — is impossible in such a project.
The confidential project is equally indifferent to external representation: to the artifact and to spectacular effects. The substance of S23M is the concealed emotional, psychic, and intellectual experience, which cannot be exhibited or shown. The main issue lies in the internal, not external, communication. Friendship does not require a promotion. It cannot be for others, only for yourself. The secret essence of confidential projects is that such projects can generally ignore the public. Friendly communication cannot be maintained on-stage.
The confidential project is also characterized by a freedom from hierarchy and functional specialiation. Friendship is not a hierarchical form of social relationship: it presumes a complete equality between all parties. Friendship does not know the Father. That’s why the confidential project tries to ignore the role of the curator as power-source, which is inevitable in traditional exhibitions. Even if the function of the curator as an ideologue or manager is preserved, it should be carries out in such a way that it should create a regime of collective responsibility for every moment in the project, and for the ultimate result. There can be no successful or unsuccessful project in friendship. There can only be disappointment.
The most evident feature of the confidential project is the absence of any thematic program. Such projects do not serve the reigning discourses and intellectual fashions. Slogans like “Eyeball the media” demonstrate the absence of any discoursive, thematic, or investigative pre-condition. they simply refer to the event of communication and its context. Is it possible for friendly communication to have a theme? The value of friendly communication is the very event of communication. The theme emerges spontaneously out of the communication itself. The discourse is crystallized in the process of its formation. That’s why the most adequate manner of documenting such a project is a detailed description of the process. Concrete work and concrete photos cannot describe the entire experience. Such a project is valuable as lived experience.
Finally, the confidential project is not a Platonic dialogue, not an intellectual laboratory, and not a scientific workshop or panel discussion. Participants in confidential communities are not searching for truth. Nobody is trying to argue against something or convert somebody to his own beliefs. Confidence is the condition of friendly communication. The truth precedes it — it does not emerge in discussion. A friend does not give you good advice, but helps you find your own truth. That’s the way friendship differes from professional cooperation. In the latter, an individual builds a complicated balance of relationships between the Self and the Other. It also differs from love, which presumes self-denial. Lovers see themselves through the eyes of the Other. In friendship, we perceive our ideal self in the way we are perceived by the Other. That’s why the S23M participants can be found declaring their own ideas without making any effort to start moving towards each other.
The confidential project as a project of the transitional epoch. It’s clear that the structure of the confidential project is nothing but an attempt to create a strucutre for a collective artistic practice in the situation of the absence of an art system. Thus, the confidential project and the community around Piratbyrån (let’s call it the confidential community) is exactly the type of transitional society characteristic for a time of digitalization. In an institutional, ideological, and moral vacuum, friendship becomes the last shelter for culture.
The direct result of the institutional and symbolic collapse in digitalization is the crisis of any objective justification for artistic practice. The old aesthetic ideology not only provided an objective foundation for official art, it also gave birth to an alternative. Avoiding official institutions and taking root in the sphere of the everyday, this alternative culture was also controlled by strict ideological principles. Acting as an opposition to the official institutional culture, alternative culture required the ideals and principles of “comrades-in-arms” and “the common affair”. Piratbyrån’s progress from the website and the book Copy Me via the Walpurgis book burning (which represented alternative experience in a new context and a new form) to S23M is essentially the evolution of the creative consolidation from the ideological to the post-ideological epoch. Friendship is the most non-institutional and personalized type of social communication.
In the situation where not only the normative ethics of the authority collapse, but the “comrade-in-arms” and “common affair” ethics of opposition collapse as well, it is friendship, “the ethical form of Eros”, which remains the most invulnerable. It is also invulnerable to the cult of immorality, now associated with the liberating ethos of digitalization. Finally, the ethic of friendship does not accept any relativization of moral feelings, which (especially under the old aesthetic regime) was the most efficient opposition to official morality. Links between friends can’t avoid morality, that’s what takes them beyond simple acquaintance and relations between colleagues. While accepting any forms of human expression (including transgression and excess), friendship denies only one — irony. The confidential project is a characteristic symptom of the new situation, in which ironic strategies are left in the past. It is based in a deep earnestness, almost an obsession (transgression and excess). In this sense the confidential community is the only possible form in which to preserve ethics in the period of the transition from the ideological ethics of the analog age to a kopimist ethics of the post-analog society.
The confidential community’s denial of irony is an acknowledgement that deconstruction has exhausted itself as a strategy, and that what’s needed is a strategy of reconstruction. The constructive character of the confidential community is the utopian element that exists in any real friendship. The confidential project is the project of an ideal community or an ideal art system. In this sense, the idea of the institutionalization of friendship is mobilizing the major advantage of any transition epoch, when the old order has collapsed and the new one has not yet been built. The confidential community ascribes value to a pure potentiality.
The S23M discussions. Three poles. Even a cursory familiarization with the S23M material shows that the discussions were determined by three clashing positions. All the S23M participants unanimously acknowledged that this project is a product of the collapse of the traditional ontological order, and that all of them are essentialy “frustrated” subjects. However, their differentiation starts immediately beyond this statement. It is evident that from the perspective of Piratbyrån, the prospect of a new ontology is lost somewhere beyond the horizon, but that does not keep the subject from moving towards it. For Ollibolli, ontology is impossible, but the structure of that impossibility has its own ontological sense. For Altemark, finally, the symptom of the crisis do not mean the end of an ontology. According to him, the same ontology is now stronger than ever, while his main task is to defeat it. In other words, while the Piratbyrån members are trying to appropriate their frustration, to make it a source of some new positive matter, Ollibolli and Altemark are trying to withdraw from frustration by offering two negative strategies. So while Altemark and Ollibolli are happily taking part in the confidential project, it is only the Piratbyrån group which could initiate it.
S23M discussions. Analog-digital. The nature of analog-digital relations was the main nerve and the hidden leitmotif of all of the S23M discussions. Each of the supporters of the opposite points of view could not refrain from acknowledging that the analog-digital division is essentially the most painful trauma for the analog consciousness.
The members of Piratbyrån are trying simply to understand the nature of the difference between analog and digital, not to define it. The ethos of their efforts is, instead of making statements, to understand digital reality — to study its structure and its dimensions, and to reveal its links with analog reality. In other words, the members of Piratbyrån are trying to look at the internet not as a solid body, but as something fragmented. Therefor, from the perspective of aesthetics they are not artists, but hackers.
The idea of greyzones is basic to Piratbyrån’s identity. The S23M project — the residue was represented at Manifesta 7 — is nothing but the experience of a real border crossings, a study of greyzones, and a personal reflection on their conventional character. The members of Piratbyrån raise the issue of analog and digital — of infrastructural, artistic and legal borders — in conversation with both artists and hackers.
S23M discussions. Analog-digital. The system of art. For the S23M participants, as for kopimists in general, the analog is the only art system, while the digital is an everyday artistic reality which is not included into that system (is so, only partially and not on a fair basis).
As before, it was the Piratbyrån participants who initiated this discussion. They asked whether kopimists should blindly accept the laws of the art system, or mobilize the resources of critical thought with respect to the internet. For Ollibolli, this is not an issue. Because the phenomenon of contemporary art is a product of institutions, and almost all of these institutions are based on authorship, it follows that there is no other art than the authorship-based model. Therefore no critical distance is possible in relation to it, just as there can be no critical distance in relation to sunrise and sunset. In other words, the more you are an artist, the more you are an author.
In his turn, Altemark, who turns Ollibolli’s position upside down once again, assumes that the system of art is so powerful that true freedom only exists beyond it, and true identity only exists beyond copyright. Having started a terrorist struggle with the contemporary art world, he declares a “Black Tape Day”.
For Piratbyrån, the total acceptance or non-acceptance of the system is, if not a mistake, then at least a tactically short-sighted approach. It’s important to investigate and understand the inner mechanics of the system if only because the system can “deceive” you. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that the dynamics of the system have been maintained due to its ability to reflect upon itself critically. Therefore, the more critically you alienate yourself from the system, the more you’re an artist. The more you reveal that contemporary institutions are not relevant to your experience (even if your experience is the experience of art), the more you become a bearer of aesthetic values. Moreover, the more you build your identity upon the logic of negating the system, the less space — the less autonomy from the system — you leave for your identity. Finally, nothing helps a system to demonstrate its force as much as attempts to struggle against it. At the same time, nothing helps an artist to appropriate the might of a system better than an attempt to destroy it.
The confidential project. One last note instead of a conclusion. Upon looking through the S23M materials, one could rightly ask: what made this friendship possible? What made all of these people get together? Their intellectual positions are so different! They can agree on almost nothing!
It appears that the confidential project has another function characteristic of the transitional period: prophylaxis. Compared to a traditional exhibition (works delivered by trucks, assistants, the opening, and dinner with sponsors) the confidential project is extremely uncomfortable. Its experience can be justified by only one thing: its therapeutic impact. These projects are nothing but voluntary group therapy! These endless discussions are nothing but wholesome public acts of speaking out in order to eliminate depression and neuroses! Is it not social therapy that the institution of friendship serves?
The therapeutic impact of the confidential project is effective because it plunges the participants into extreme situations; it provides them with some kind of a threshold experience. The lack of comfort and the hardships of the confidential project are compensated for by the intensity of experience. Unlike an ordinary exhibition, taking part in such a project means taking a step into the unknown. That’s where the difference between friendship and other social forms lies. Friendship cannot be routine, it’s always an adventure. I am ready to bear witness that the participants in the confidential project think of it as one of the most important moments in their kopimist lives, similar to how worn-out veterans recall the years spent on the battlefield as the happiest period of their lives.
Finally, as I said before, friendship is a serial solidarity. Therefore, the confidential project never degrades into a monotonous conveyer, because when they meet, friends always know that later they’ll have to part.
