8/3/2019 GrljaVesic Neoliberal Institution of Culture

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The activities of Prelom kolektiv involvethe making and editing of Prelom journal,organizing exhibitions, conferences anddiscussions, and participating in other artisticand cultural projects and events [1]. In aterminology often used today, this makes uscultural workers or even so-called content providers for the expanding culturalindustries within the neo-liberal capitalist

system. Although we oppose this kind of positioning and the whole constellation thatproduces it, this is precisely the starting pointfor an objective, i.e. materialist understandingof what the institution of culture is today.

The term culture has expanded boundlesslyover the last 30 years. This hypertrophystems out of the abolition of high/low, elitist/ popular, ofcial/marginal or mainstream/alternative oppositions, which representeddichotomies functional for the maintenanceof the political arrangements after WorldWar Two. What is nowadays known as theprocess of democratization of culture is onlysupercially about the participation of all the people in activities previously reserved forelites, by claiming that it seeks to promote andrealize the vaunted values of equity, access,and participation. But in fact, the incorporationof the third sector non-governmental and

non-prot organizations in the distribution ofshrunken welfare-state services is a trend thathas been underway for some time. This non-prot sector currently represents a prospectivemarket for the so-called creators of culture.It is supposed to play the role of a catalyst forthe process of replacing the retreating secondsector (the state) and fostering the growth ofthe still insufciently developed rst sector(market).

This process has its own denite economic and, therefore, political logic. The lastdecades have witnessed an obvious neo-liberal effort to culturalize the economyor, conversely, to economize culture. The principles of free-market competition havebeen introduced to the once privileged sphereof artistic and intellectual production. Thisdoes not simply mean the massive introductionof market-relations into the sphere of

culture, but is more about establishing the practices of entrepreneurship on the level ofsubject. Todays cultural producer is supposedto deploy her/his cultural capital as a funky businessman in contemporary karaokecapitalism.

The neo-liberal strategy of culturalization of politics [2] operates according to a verysimilar logic. The articulations of politicalstruggles and social antagonisms have movedfrom their classical domain of the state

apparatuses to the dispersed eld of competingcultural options. But, culturalization is morethan just a translation of political issues tocultural ones. Culturalization is also a schoolof subjectivity, a moment in the ideologicaleducation or, better yet, formation (Bildung) ofthe masses properly speaking, ofsubjects(in both senses of this term) of the capitalistorder. In this sense, the culture of tolerance,

the culture of communication, environmentalculture, digital culture, etc. provide neo-liberal forms of a new social literacy whichAlthusser termed assavoir-faire (know-how-to-do) [3]. This notion is what grounds our basic premise on the nature of institutions a materialist thesis on what the institutionis. An institution is less a particular buildingpopulated with administration and upheld by ahierarchy of positions with a top-down structureof decisions, but more an institutionalized, power-structured code of conduct, a materialreality created and re-created by individualsin their everyday practice. It is precisely thiskind of material practice, constitutive of thecontemporary neo-liberal institution, thatPrelom kolektiv is trying to criticize, opposeand change.

Culture under contemporary post-Yugoslavconditions certainly shares the aforementioned

general traits of neo-liberal capitalism, butit also displays some specic qualities. Inthe post-conictual region of the WesternBalkans, art and culture are supposed to play the role of reconciling antagonists.They culturalize us in order to renounce thenon-civic or, simply, un-civilized waysof solving conicts by adopting the non-violent, symbolical mechanisms that thecultural eld supposedly offers. In short,culture has to insure that tolerance for theOther is respected, while the pressing problemsremain hidden behind this screen of folklore ormulticulturalism.

In this sense,Prelom can be seen as an effortforde-culturalization of those political issuesout of their culturalized form. What we arecollectively striving for is a re-politization inthe sense of a certain and denite partisanshipin theory and in practice that aims for an

effective materialist critique. It also representsa struggle to debunk, expose and opposethe dominant anti-Communist consensus.Words and images like Yugoslavia, partisans,Socialism, Marxism, Communism are tabooedfor specic reasons, and their usage is generallyunderstood as little more than a prank. But,their articulation that is, the articulation ofthe tendency they represent introduces anactive practice of rethinking and reinventingrevolutionary politics something that isexactly foreclosed by todays neo-liberal

rationality as a relic of those rebellious,nave and digressive times.

However, all this is manifesto-like discourse,which functions well in theory, but what is theactual material practice ofPrelom?

Prelom operates in a specic context of thecultural production in the Western Balkans,

with all the contradictions, ambiguities andshortcomings that accompany it. Establishedin 2001 as the Journal of School for Historyand Theory of Images of Belgrades Center forContemporary Art,Prelom was functioning asa peripheral project of this institution, whichgave the editorial board a relative independenceand autonomy. Like many other projects, theschool was something rather subsidiary to theart programs. It paralleled the usual form ofdiscursive events that accompany main artprograms with the task to provide a space forreection and criticism, but those are actually becoming places where critique is fostered,institutionalized and, nally, neutralized orappropriated.

In the summer of 2004, the Centre forContemporary Art collapsed andPrelom lost itsformer institutional background. The editorial board entered a long period of discussion on

how to proceed. The analyses of the situationshowed that the format of the publication we produced was usually connected to eitherartistic or academic institutions or to temporaryart projects (exhibitions, manifestations,events, etc.) that provide the basis for production. The alternative was a kind ofseparation strategy, resting upon what istoday called an alternative economy eitherthrough the model of subscription, or throughthe transformation into a fanzine, leaet orinternet-publishing project. The majority ofeditorial board nally agreed that this woulddeprive us of the possibilities for interveningwithin already existing cultural or art projects.Therefore, we were forced to start up a non-government organization as the necessary toolto continue publishing. Actually, we decidedto take the challenge head-on and to confrontthe perils succumbing what we called NGOlogic in the course of our discussions.

After being registered as NGO and as soon asdonated money appeared on the bank accountit becomes equivalent to running a private bussines. This means to hire professionalaccountant for dealing with taxes and otherscal obligations, and requires, at leastformally, a legally stupulated hierarchy. Allthis is quite at odds with the principles of thenon-hierarchical structure that we had from thevery beginning. It also means that we had toget involved in the business of fundraising,

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t h e n e o - l b e r a l i s u o o f c u l u r e a h e c r q u e o f c u l u r a l z a o

which in turn requires a substantial amountof administrative work, called networkingnowadays. This NGO economy likethe so-called new knowledge economyof media, fashion and art in the creativeindustries relies heavily on US-style internship systems to perform thenecessary but routine gofer roles that holdit all together. It is effectively a system of

bourgeois apprenticeships or putting itmore bluntly an elaborated and up-datedsystem of capitalist exploitation.

Foundations and the institutions of culturefocus on supporting programs or exchanges something that actualizes in an evident formof the immediate product such as artwork,exhibition, symposium or publication but rarely or never on providing for theorganizational maintenance. Associations,collectives or working groups are in thisway forced to overproduce in order tosurvive that is, to have as many subsidized programs as they can get. As the processof overproduction increases administrativetasks, it leaves less and less space forthe proper conceptualization of actualprograms, as well as their critical reection.Thereby what was meant at the beginningto be a critical production is replaced

with an aesthetics of administration to use Benjamin Buchlohs term whichrepresents the neo-liberal institutionalizationof critique.

How is it, then, possible to produce a criticalstance within this context? Moreover, howis it possible to develop emancipatorystrategies in the eld of art and cultural production? Well, there is no simpleanswer to this question. The contemporaryinstitution of culture is a battleeld, and toparaphrase Foucault since there is no powerwithout the resistance(s), each position is anoutcome of struggle. What we can do andwhat we are trying to do is to arti culate those points of resistance by intervening withinthe existing constellation. But, criticism asthe discursive form of an intervention in thepublic sphere can only be a starting point.Critique a veritable materialist critique in

order to be efcient, i.e. to produce effects inthe material reality of the social exchange,must be practical it must intervene withinand strive to tackle the existing and ongoingsocial practices [4]. This kind of criticismentails a self-criticism whereby one reectshis/hers own role as well as the effects andrepercussions of ones own actions.

Therefore, our position is strictly speaking a non-existing impossibility [5]. Byevoking the Marxisms and Communismsthat supposedly no longer exist today,we are invoking the possibility of a deniteimpossibility a radical alternative tothe prevailing material practices of socialexchange. At least, this is almost a naturalposition for anyone opposing the omnipresentneo-liberal anti-Communist consensus of both the pro-European democratic forcesof civil society and the likewise obligatory

pro-European nation-building forces of theex-Yugoslav governments.Prelom (meaningrupture, break,Bruch) is an attempt to breakwith this given constellation and in thelast instance, with the capitalism itself. It isa synonym a makeshift word for whattoday appears quite impossible revolution.

Footnotes:1. More info on www.prelomkolektiv.org,with all the previous issues ofPrelom freelydownloadable in PDF formats.2. cf. Boris Buden, The Pit of Babel or TheSociety that Mistook Culture for Politicsand Translation is Impossible. Lets Do It!available on www.eipcp.net; also in BorisBuden: Vavilonska jama: O (ne)prevodivostikulture, Fabrika knjiga, Beograd, 20073. cf. Louis Althusser, Philosophie etphilosophie spontane des savants4. By intervention we mean producing an

effect that enables the present positionsand divisions to become evident. To usea metaphor, intervention is like a signal-gun shot over the battleeld that lights thetrenches5. cf. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli andUs, Verso, London and New York, 1999;especially on theoretical dispositive, etc.

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