Friday 29th Jan 2009 Jeremy Gilbert and Richard Day

Well attended meeting with lots of new people downstairs in the hall at rampART (rampART tech team's new lighting means we can actually see in there). We discussed selected chapters from Jeremy Gilbert's Anticapitalism & Culture and Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead dealing with activism and theory, their antagonisms and mutual dependence. Because members of the group know the authors personally, it seems weird to use family names so hereafter 'Jeremy' and 'Richard'.

Jeremy's elaboration of the social character of creativity and its appropriation by capital
provoked a great deal of discussion which was focused by a member of the group relating the story of an event in France where a group of people entered a supermarket and set up a picnic in the aisles, taking food from the shelves and inviting shoppers to join them. Was this an example of spontaneous creativity that, because it was a singular event, could have more effect than concerted activism? What was its purpose? We talked about symbolic action and introduced the events of 9/11 as a similar example. This, inevitably, led us to talk about the relationship between art and politics with one member of the group referring to the practice of art therapy, which often exceeds its boundaries and the expectations of institutions which expect it to function in a well defined space and to perform in terms of neoliberal readjustment. This we understood as an attempt to appropriate creativity which fails because, under the right circumstances, it cannot be contained by institutional mechanisms. This brought us to consider the importance of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and its relationship to creativity with one member of the group pointing out that we need to understand the arboreal and rhizomatic as co-present and in constant tension and that it is this tension that is the condition for creativity. From this, we found ourselves returning to the French supermarket event and asking whether the intention to subvert consumerism is self-defeating in that shoppers might not respond in the 'right' way but we questioned whether this was necessarily important, particularly in light of Richard's reflections on 'groundless solidarity' and 'infinite responsibility' which we understood to operate as an ethical corrective to the tendency of groups in movement to identify as outside the norm and thus in possession of superior knowledge or ethical practices. W found that this provoked us to consider the different relationships of group members to theory and our different responses to the readings with some feeling that they were excluded from certain kinds of knowledge which others had been trained to understand. It was suggested that this, in itself, was an effect of power/knowledge where the institutionalisation of cognitive labour positions certain individuals as 'experts'. On the other hand, we were aware of the dangers of anti-intellectualism and recognised that all political activity which is not reactionary is necessarily informed by theory. We briefly discussed the usefulness of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection to an understanding of the relationship between diverse subjectivities and their antagonisms but then found ourselves having to consider the fluidity of postmodern identities against the stable, modern subject assumed by eg., Marx. We decided that both Richard and Jeremy, despite their differences, are really concerned with articulation (in the sense that Laclau and Mouffe use it). This led one member of the group to suggest that the difficulties of articulating diverse interests arise because, althought 'the social' still exists, 'society' no longer has the same meaning. We found ourselves discussing the meaning of friendship and the creative possibilities of playful interactions which led us to consider the role of technology in defining 'the social' in contemporary life. With this in mind, Angus suggested that our next reading should be Hubert Dreyfus' 'Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics'. This will be our reading for the March meeting. February meeting is timed to coincide with the next London Freeschool weekend (February 21st) when we will be reading Paolo Do's 'No Future'