A European Cultural Movement must open the way for new modes of life in Europe and act as an alternative to the market.

Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and Vice President of the College International de Philosophie, Paris

First Thesis:

The cultural movement or, rather, the movement of culture, is neither the reproduction of types nor a performance of forms of exchange. It’s neither conservation or preservation nor a performance: it is resistance, or, better, per-sistance.

The cultural movement thus has to resist the fixation of culture in mythical figures and also the liquid flows of contemporary market. But most of all, it has to resist the dangerous fusion of the two.

Second Thesis:

European cultural movement has to be polemic.

When speaking of (European) culture, we should first of all speak of the politics of the contemporary use of the notion of culture: politics of use which are to a large extent European. These politics of use are paradoxical because their main task appears as – it seems at least – the task to depoliticise the notion of culture. The “culturalist” discourse is the typical discourse of depolitisation. This discourse is based on clichés like: culture is good, politics is bad; culture unites people, politics divides etc. But in itself, the notion of culture doesn’t have any positive content or value. This notion could very well transmit mechanisms of domination, of exclusion, of injustice. In other words, the depoliticised notion of culture tends to create an ideological blind spot: the ideological, conflictual dimension of the notion is reduced.

At the same time the cultural movement has to oppose the conversion of the notion of culture into an uncritical, mythical figure, which allows its dangerous political instrumentalisation. We have often seen the notion of culture becoming the bellicose machinery of the identiterian myths: it is turned into a pseudo-mythic figure promoting homogeneous, immanent communities, closed identities. All this comes to suggest that there is an urgent need, in the European context in particular, to take a strong position against the apolitical or rather depoliticising use of the notion of culture. Because – is it still a secret for somebody? – the discourse of depolitisation serves only one cause: that of the market. The discourse that presents culture as the opposite of the political practice is inherently related to the discourse of the universal value of market.

In contrast, we have to affirm that:

Third Thesis:

Culture is what is essentially different from the market. Culture has to be alternative to the market.

Today the market is our culture: culture has to become our market, that is to say a place of exchange and of subjectivation, of the emergence of new types of subjectivity.

Fourth Thesis:

Cultural movement needs cultural institutions.

We need cultural institutions in Europe, based on a progressive cultural politics. This demand is more then urgent in the former “Eastern Europe” (which at some point was turned, for a while, into a “New Europe”), where in many countries culture is in fact in a state of institutional collapse and where only the enthusiastic and somewhat clandestine, somewhat modestly heroic efforts of people who face incredible daily needs and failure, keep what we call culture, going. Of course, the institutional representatives of many of those countries would give us extremely positive statistic data in order to prove their support for culture – but how much of this money is spent in fact for subventions of nationalistic propaganda, sport and the most vulgar type of pop-culture (to the extent that the typified caricatured idea of culture is the promotion of the image that state propaganda produces of itself)? The new nationalistic populisms are rapidly integrating and applying a liberal market idea to the culture – because populist phantasms are an extremely promising form of investment and merchandised production.

Yes indeed: in the time of bio-capitalism culture is matter of production. Therefore what demands urgent critical reflection today are the new forms of production and consumption, which I designate in the line of André Gorz with the term bio-capitalism: the merchandisation of forms of life.

Fifth Thesis:

Cultural institutions, as public institutions, have first of all the role to resist not only private interest but the standardisation of forms of life, which reduces them to merchandise.

We know that Europe is unique with its institutional network of support for culture. We can only applaud it, of course. We have to recognise the pioneer role of Europe in the domain of cultural politics, which could be a dream for the rest of the world. But is it really enough?

Today we have to resist of necessity the attempts of neo-liberal reduction of the European cultural politics. In other words, to resist the application of the market rules to culture according to which what is to be supported is what corresponds to demand. This liberal strategy of “support” is based upon a corrupted fundament. This strategy is profoundly vicious – because the market itself creates the offer: the first thing which contemporary capitalism creates is indeed the demand.

Sixth Thesis:

European cultural movement has to be able to oppose anti-cultural pressure – or the impulse of bestialisation.

I come from a European country where the former minister of culture, most likely inspired by his colleague, the minister of finances, wanted to sell the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia to a Turkish company who wanted to “transform” it in an “art hotel”. This didn’t happen because a massive public resistance took place but in the meantime, in less than four years, a huge percentage of the Bulgarian cultural and natural heritage was erased by construction and savage tourism development. And this tendency is only increasing, often not without the support of the “old Europe’s” financial capital. The unleashed anti-cultural violence was in fact one of the dominant characteristics of the glorious transition to a free market economy and to what some people use to call “democracy” (in fact parliamentary oligarchy). So this is Europe too.

One may say that these are the specific problems of the lumpen-capitalism (according to Regina Bittner’s term) of the former East; but I refuse to think this tendency of “bestialisation” according to a logic of exception. It has to be read according to the logic of symptom. What happens “there” is a symptom of what happened of what might happen “here”.

Seventh Thesis:

European cultural movement has to resist by all means the institutionalisation of stupidity.

The metaphor of “bestialisation”, which I just introduced, belongs to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. He is not the first to oppose two models, the American culture as a bestial-Roman one and the European as Greek, the one of culture and civilitas or humanitas. But it is very important to state that the “bestialisation” in question is not at all a kind of regression to primitive anthropological strata. It is produced by the new technologies of production. I would then correct Sloterdijk by saying that the market produces a globalized stupidity. In the former Eastern Europe we witnessed the progressive institutionalisation of stupidity. The stupidity was established, institutionalised with the argument “people do not want this “elite” stuff”. (The new economy arrived with extremely powerful anti-intellectual tendency, especially in Bulgaria. With the arrival of the market many private libraries, which each average family possessed, went to the cellars or to the rubbish bins, even before those countries introduced separate waste collection; not to speak of bookshops.) Of course, the “wish” of the people in question – the non-questionable populist argument of capitalism engaged in culture – is being cultivated. It is a matter of production. So what market produces first, what it promotes, is the idea of a kind of virgin, natural substance, we could say wild substance, of “cultural” desire. At the origin of cultural desire there is nothing but primary natural, hobbesian impulses. There are primitive cultural needs which demand a sort of primitive if not bestial food – primary passions, naked bodies, and at the same time luxurious ambiances, fetishist images of goods. Culture as nature.

Eighth Thesis:

There is no libidinal substance of cultural desire. Culture doesn’t have substance.

But the contrary is not true either. Culture is not a super-ego which has to cultivate, to domesticate the wild “it”, the libido.

Culture’s only substance is the infinite number of tekhnai, its tekhno-aesthetical potential (in the Greek sense of tekhnè and aisthesis – sensible experience). Culture is the formation of (the) sensible tekhnai of modes of life, or better – of the sensible tekhnai through which the forms of life form themselves. Culture is the process of articulation of the space needed for these tekhnai or modes of life to emerge.

What Movement?

For Culture as a Movement of Emergence of New Forms

It is crucial in this context to make a statement against the somewhat easy rhetoric of the creation and the invention, which is entirely appropriated by the “creative capitalism”. In fact, the new model of production is entirely dominated by the radicalisation of the demand to produce the new. Therefore the crucial question for a European cultural movement is how to differentiate between the produced new and the emerging new – the standardised new and the “authentic” new? Is there such a possibility at all? How to dissociate the absorbed forms of life from the potential of new forms of life to appear?

Ninth Thesis:

The new (cultural) form can be identified as one which does not incite a demand at all because it cannot be identified as such in the regime of the market.

This should be affirmed in opposition to the neo-liberal rule according to which institutions have to support the production of cultural products which are demanded.

(Of course, the singularity of the new form is rapidly absorbed by the economical exchange: the omnipresent tendency of labelisation or brandicisation of culture. So there is a new imperative of the artistic production – to create forms which resist to the appropriation in the circuit of the exchange.)

Tenth Thesis:

The European cultural movement has to lead beyond the surface of the endless diversification of market (offers) and to start operating on a surface of a “pure” diversity. The cultural field has no other choice – and chance – but to experiment with alternative economies in order not to get suffocated in the grip of the market. We could call these new economies “economies of gift”, or economies of confidence.

Nevertheless, the critical imperative has its requirements, so we have to ask here: isn’t this a conservative, regressive claim? Isn’t the opposition between art/culture as a space of liberty and market/institution as a space of restriction, of reduction of the primary condition, as functional slavery, just a structural repetition of the old modern opposition between virgin (organic) substance and corrupted mechanism – “bare” life against technologised, functionalised life? Do we have to resist by the virtue of a “conservative” resistance – that is to say by trying to preserve the old world? Wouldn’t we do better to take the risk and be courageous enough to jump into the troubled waters of the new super-Heraclitean flux?

And in fact, hasn't art always been the name of that flexible force which has had the capacity to inscribe itself in transformed societal, political and economical conditions? Hasn't culture always been the very name of this flexibility or plasticity? Yes, art or culture is this flexible force, this plasticity, but plasticity not in the sense of the Plato’s definition of matter as it is exposed in Timaeus: a passive plastic mass expecting to be modelled, to be figured by the active form, by the plasticist potential of the eidos. No, culture is precisely the potential to form the forms, the potential of emergence of forms. It is an active forming force. That is why the dilemma of resistance is not a real dilemma and in order to « sublate » it, it is worth introducing a new concept and speaking of per-sistence. The question of culture does not consist in the conservation in the sense of conservative resistance but in the per-sistence- of cultural forms.

Eleventh Thesis:

The crucial question for a European cultural movement is not only the one of the conservation of culture, of protection of culture – but the question of the emergence of new cultural forms, which means broadly new forms of life.

Twelfth Thesis:

The question of European cultural movement is not only the question of cultural diversity.

The ideology of diversity could very well think the diversity of autonomous cultures based on “closed” identities: ethnic, religious, gender etc. The crucial question is the diversity itself: the movement of diversification, of tension, of contact and transformation. Culture is this force of diversification, which transgresses every frozen type or identity. The question of the European cultural movement is then the question of the forming of cultural forms, of their heterogenesis.

Thirteenth Thesis:

The European cultural movement has to be a movement for a new urban culture.

The city is the laboratory of culture: it is the place of diversification and heterogenesis of new cultural forms, or of new forms of life. Culture happens as urban culture – the city is the place of the world today.

European cultural movement – the movement as European culture demands then a European urban politics. We have to transform our cities from former factories of social segregation to workshops of collective subjectivation, of the emergence and growing of forms of life, the inspiring scene of living together, of the happening of common life.

Fourteenth Thesis:

European cultural movement is impossible without the creation of a European public space.

Unification process could not lead by itself to a cultural movement. Something which Europe should support and develop is a European public sphere: it is crucial to have European media – journals, radios, televisions, as well as development of urban culture as European cosmopolitan culture. But what is even more important is the characteristic of this public sphere: the European public sphere has to be governed by a critical imperative.

Fifteenth Thesis:

European culture would be impossible without new modes of technical and sensible experience.

European cultural movement has to be a movement of creation of new aisthetical and tekhnical modes, which are the proper modes of the new collective subjectivation.

To elaborate cultural politics means then before all to elaborate a new politics of tekhnai, or, better, ecopolitics of tekhnai. Without a politics of the new tekhnai, of the new modes of the becoming sensible of the sensible, of the modes of life, there is no chance for Europe.

Will the Cultural movement happen as a new collective subjectivation?

Sixteenth Thesis:

European cultural movement is only possible as the re-invention of the world as the place of the irreducible multiplicity of forms of life – or of cultural forms.

European cultural movement has to be a movement for the sake of the world.

Seventeenth Thesis:

European cultural movement has to be eccentric. It has to destabilise not only the idea of Europe as the centre of the world but the very possibility of a self-centred world. European cultural movement is a movement for an eccentric world.

On which side?

On which side will be Europe then? On the side of the totalisation of market culture or on the side of the emergence of new forms of life? This is the crucial question Europe has to ask itself. After demolishing the wall which was built in its very heart, in Berlin, isn’t Europe running the risk of erecting a new wall: the wall which divides the visible from the invisible? Aren’t we facing a risk of new segregationist politics of visibility resulting from the economical appropriation of the public sphere, which would condemn the new forms of life to a clandestine existence in the margins of the totalised space of merchandised symbolic exchange and of institutional production-consumption?… If we speak of Europe as of a subject, we could only mean of course for the time being European cultural institutions. The question which EU institutions then have to answer for themselves is: how could they, European institutions, guarantee the persistence of modes of life (and also the presence to collective memory of disappeared cultural forms) and at the same time to open the space for the emergence of new forms of life? This is the crucial question not only for European institutions. It is crucial for Europe – for us, for the world. Because only the emergence of new cultural forms – of new forms of life – can guarantee the emergence of new political forms, of forms of living together, that is, of a new world. The question of culture (or I would prefer to say finally, the question of general aesthesis, of the experience of the sensible matter, and its creation–transformation) is at the core of the political question. So the claim for a European cultural movement can only be a claim to follow the movement of the persistence and the emergence of new cultural forms: to be on the side of the movement of culture and not of its fixation in a standardised product. And at the same time, precisely for that reason, the question of European cultural movement is by necessity also the question of the emergence, the construction and the invention of the European demos, of the European people – the space of articulation of unimaginable justice.

All this means that Europe has crucial choices to make. If European cultural institutions do not make the choice to support a European cultural movement as the emergence of unpredictable forms, then the name Europe will be simply dissociated from the movement which will necessarily find its way. This means that new cultural forms would happen without coinciding with the name of Europe and without Europe taking part in the movement of their emergence – because these forms will take place anyway. Let’s hope that Europe will have the collective critical intelligence and the power of imagination to become the welcoming place where those new forms will take place – will happen to us.

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