Brian Holmes is undoubtedly one of the most important advocates of a genuine political practice within the realms of artistic and cultural work. Holmes completed a PhD in literature at the University of Berkeley, lives & works in Paris, and is active as art critic, essayist, and translator. His writings are situated at the junction of political activism and critical theory, direct commentary and theoretical reflection, “the artistic” (or “the aesthetic”) and “the political-economic”. Holmes is a prolific writer, witness his many articles on the website Université Tangente (www.u-tangente.org), which he established in collaboration with the conceptual art group Bureau d’Etudes. Besides more miscellaneous work, the site offers the digital version of Holmes’ previous essay collection Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era (2003) as well as of his upcoming book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms.

Holmes is a member of the editorial collective that animates the French magazine and website Multitudes (see http://multitudes.samizdat.net/), which acts as the leading platform of autonomist & post-Marxist critical thinking, notably developing the concept of ‘cognitive capitalism”. With his fellow travellers within the orbit of Multitudes, such as Toni Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato, Holmes shares a profound knowledge of, and respect for, the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. In their writings, he finds the conceptual tools and theoretical inspiration for his interpretations of the various forms of cultural resistance and immanent politics within and outside the art world. Yet, Holmes is everything but a fashionable ‘Deleuzian’ and regularly digs into less canonized sources, such as the sociological writings of Karl Polanyi, Richard Sennett or Karin Knorr-Cetina.

The talk took place in Brian Holmes’ apartment in Paris in the beginning of May 2006. With the notable exception of the first paragraphs on Holmes’ reflections on his practice as writer-critic and cultural activist, which were actually developed at the end of our talk, the edited version follows the taped conversation. – Rudi Laermans

RL (Rudi Laermans): How would you describe your own practice?

BH (Brian Holmes): Well, I perceive it as a form of resistance, one that I’ve developed somewhat self-reflexively. I actually didn’t intend to become a cultural critic, it just happened because of the possibility to publish or to make one’s thoughts public via the Internet. That possibility rapidly opened up avenues for collaborating with both artists and social movements, and therefore making the critique immediately usable. This marks a different kind of cultural critique than the Olympian one that has become associated with the Adornian melancholic, sees all but can do nothing. Cultural critique can now be directly productive of forms; it can be included in the range of formal production which then serves to catalyse further explorations of social transformation. This kind of critique has been around at least since the 1960’s, and it clearly took on a new vitality in the late 1990’s with the massification of the Internet. In both cases, in the sixties and the nineties, there was a question of access to media that allowed cultural critique to become directly experimental and directly involved in social experiments. And that’s exactly what I experienced in the series of events that lead me to become a writer. I have consciously tried to keep up that position and thus have been able to maintain an in-and-out movement with respect to institutions. I would never be able to do the things that I do, if I hadn’t gone through a PhD programme and produced a PhD. That gave me access to all the specialised sociology and economics that I later got into as a self-taught social theorist. I learnt the codes of that kind of material and how to use it, while at the same time participating in social movements and in underground or autonomous culture that opens you up to a different kind of sensorium, a different kind of habitus, a different way of living in your body with others and of expressing your experience, one that allows you to shake up the disciplines and their functions. I like that kind of cultural critique.

RL: Would you eventually take up Foucault’s specific intellectual as a conceptual model for that practice?

BH: No, because I couldn’t claim to have the kind of expertise that Foucault was asking for. In a way Foucault was suggesting that the professional intellectual engaged in the service of the state could autonomize him- or herself, and play a role in different kinds of critical endeavours that would emanate from civil society. But he didn’t take on board the difficulty for non-academics and non-professionals of manipulating the technical languages that the professional civil servant develops. And that’s something that cultural critics do now. I am quite conscious of being an interface between highly elaborate discourses and much more diffuse realms of practice and experience; and this very capacity to negotiate the interface between the technical and the everyday is probably the most important thing one can communicate through cultural critique. That’s where you have to be versed both in abstract analysis and in the expressive forms of social unrest, turmoil, fear, desire, enthusiasm…

RL: What I like a lot in your writing is the reactivity vis-à-vis of what is happening ‘outside’: Seattle and the movement against global neo-liberalism, 9/11, or more recently the turmoil in the French banlieues. The writing is punctuated by the rhythm of a geo-political environment, but at the same time there is the rhythm of your readings. One can see new books coming in, like for instance Polanyi. You work some time with an author and then somebody else comes in. Notwithstanding the overall anchoring of your writings in, for instance, Foucault or Deleuze & Guattari, your central authors and conceptual tools tend to shift over time. I like that play of ‘difference and repetition’.

BH: Yes, I try to do that… I don’t always read the same authors, even though Foucault and Guattari seem to be a more long-term presence. I like to take a specific body of work, particularly by sociologists or economists, and see what can be done in a situation that seems to require their way of thinking. These situations are indeed events, they are relationships transformed by acts and gestures, which the media tend to portray as violent, meaningless accidents, crimes or destinies where you have no imaginable role. Cultural critique can also be thought of a slower and deeper journalism: it is made to be public, it is made to contain a vitality of the present, but at the same time it should reveal the technical underpinnings, the stakes as seen from very different perspectives. It should open up a longer and broader vista within the rhythm of actuality, which is very much a rhythm of control. The modulation of mediated experience is the way we are guided and channelled today, so that’s another way of describing what cultural critique can be: creating a temporality where one is able to embrace the event and yet go beyond it, both towards the past and the future. This is where cultural critique is different from academic analysis, which generally doesn’t take the future on board, or see the past as a reservoir of transformatory potentials.

RL: I like to think of your writing as an embodied link, an interface between on the one hand events that are happening now and opening up new possibilities of action and non-action, and on the other hand a much slower time of the archive, of a tradition of critical thinking. But what I particularly like is that one can feel that it is an embodied interface, not just a neutral connection of two regimes coming into contact with each other… A singular text is this moment connecting with this kind of memory and this kind of archive…

BH: If one maintains a dialogue with people operating in a resistant way outside of career positions and institutions, those people will continually draw you back to who you are, and where you are, because you only speak from the place of your own possibilities and potentials. There is an ethic to that kind of reminder, and it’s extremely useful. I am continually radicalised by people around me, because the ones who make critique into experimentation and action have my first interest. This ethic of embodiment is really a way of collectively helping one another against the constant pressure to simply affirm the status quo, which is there as an invitation and an injunction all the time. Affirm and you will be rewarded.

RL: In your recent writings, there is the idea that artistic or cultural practices can be coupled to struggles for collective expression, for the articulation of devices for collective speech or the creation of new social machines. In this way, art could become something like a social laboratory…

BH: Basically I am interested in how groups of people can create tension, conflict and sheer experimentation within the general organisation of the devices that articulate collective speech. We are linked to other people in society through various kinds of organisational devices, which are not just limited to networks or to classical institutions. The forms of linkage and the general conditions that structure our relations within each of these devices has great influence on what we actually say and do. Quite characteristic of contemporary capitalism is the linkage between artistic production and the advanced forms of reflexivity carried out in universities. Together they make up a kind of theater for the codification of innovations in subjectivity. This is a gigantic device that has become one of the central features of what can be termed “cognitive capitalism”. To keep from simply reiterating the basic proposals of this device is the challenge of politically engaged artistic practice. It’s actually quite difficult because cognitive capitalism has reached a very high level of sophistication, which allows it to integrate the desires and aspirations of the most well educated and therefore the most capable people, among the populations of practically all the countries on this earth. This particular kind of normalisation does not involve standardisation, but rather a controlled and guided differentiation of the individual’s productivity. Under the basic managerial paradigms of neo-liberalism, this leads to the production of forms of intellectual property. Art is very important in this general productive device of cognitive capitalism, because it’s a kind of model of innovation in the absolute sense, and also because it’s a quite ancient technique for the orientation of desire and aspiration, for the configuration of the sensorium, which is what allows us to communicate with each other and to have the feeling that we are sharing something. Sharing a process of becoming, of evolving, of changing in time. Our society needs all these sorts of dynamics to continue reproducing itself just the way it is – a way which I think is increasingly disastrous. We are at a pinnacle of sophistication which is accompanied by a sort of dramatic blindness to the consequences of exactly what we are producing; and art production, cultural production of all kinds, is just one aspect of this sophisticated blindness. Since what we know as the beginning of post-modernism, it has been very difficult for intellectuals and artists to regain a critical position in which they can be confident that their production is not simply adding to and perfecting the very system that they feel it urgent to critique and reorient. So this is where the work becomes something more than just the happy theorising of a nomadic Dionysian war machine – to abuse a Deleuzo-Guattarian term – because in fact, we live in a crosshatch of such machinic processes, and our possible movements are initially very small, and eminently susceptible of being analyzed from above, modeled into computer simulations and integrated into a predictable pattern, which can then be altered by a little intervention on any one of its component elements. I think the real difficulty is to find ways in which the experimentation can become de-normalised and effectsome kind of break with what can now be recognised as the institutions of cognitive capitalism.

RL: You use the notion of ‘devices for collective speech’ but also of ‘a machine of affectivity’.It seems to me that you want to avoid a former way of thinking in terms of dominant discourses. What you are aiming at is not just an anti-hegemonic politics, or a practice of re-signification and the production of counter-representations. Or is it possible to link such a practice with your stress on the necessity of a kind of a productive breaking up, of a becoming that produces new lines of sociality, speech, communication… - of a genuinely active social practice?

BH: Well, yes, the point is not to struggle for dominance, or to replace one hegemony with another. But I do think that the notion of domination, and therefore the corresponding notion that there could be anti-hegemonic formations, is really important. The difficult thing is regaining a way to say such things so that they have an effective meaning. I have recently been reading some work which takes up the problematic of a transnational capitalist class. If this were successfully analysed, we would be in a much better position to see what kinds of transformations we are involved in, in terms of practice, in terms of institutionalisation, in terms of the relationship to markets, and therefore ultimately in terms of the way that subjectivity and intersubjectivity are configured. If we had a better understanding of how to describe the mechanisms of domination by a transnational capitalist class, we would have much better ideas of how to reshape our practices, of how to use what we produce. The whole issue of domination has effectively been lost since post-modernism shifted all attention to the infinity of individual difference. So the question is: how to make it an issue again, without falling back into a simplistic language that doesn’t pertain to any specific relationship in society?

RL: We have indeed to think in terms of dominance, but at the same time to rethink the practice of domination: we cannot just think it in terms of a simple antagonism between rulers and ruled. Yet, what seems also implied by your recent writings on art as a device for collective speech or a social laboratory, is that collective speech is not just synonymous with communication or discourse in the ongoing sense, but is immanently linked to desire and the sensible.

BH: Of course! This has been the great thing that marked the switch between the disciplinary form of capitalist production, or the Fordist social organisation that we knew in the mid-twentieth century, and the conditions that have been developing over the past twenty years. There is a clear recognition all throughout the contemporary western societies of the importance of the aesthetic and the affective in organising people, in the way that people’s everyday lives unfold. Artists and critics ofen think they are discovering this, but it is the very condition under which the hyper-differentiated social world has been evolving since the 1980s. So one must be conscious that all complex forms of cooperation contain an aesthetic and affective dimension which decisively orients how those projects are going to unfold. That’s why I think the interesting art or aesthetic projects are somewhere between a theatre and a laboratory. A theatre, because this evokes both an aesthetic side and the intersubjective side, with the reflexivity that the processes of staging bring about. A laboratory, because that evokes the technoscientific side that is determinant for all the conditions in everyday life, which is now so highly artificialised. Everyday life always unfolds in relation to complex machines, and these machines are always evolving though the capitalist process of technoscience, that is, through the production and dissemination of technical objects in the workplace, in government and on the consumer markets. We should be much more conscious of this double relation between the ethical-aesthetic forms of our intersubjective worlds, and their connection to the specific toolkits of contemporary technoscience. That’s where some quite fascinating experimentation can take place, which potentially gives rise to the creation of a new critical distance, even to a new political antagonism, with respect to the more-or-less regular process of increasingly disastrous social development that we are all embroiled in…

RL: What would you consider to be a good example or a practice illustrating these ideas?

BH: Well I think there are many… One could start with something that’s obviously a social machine, which is the EuroMayday project. It’s quite a complex device for the articulation of public speech, and it’s now being carried out at the level of the European Union, with projects unfolding in twenty cities at once. Projects which are at once discursive, aesthetic, organisational… and which engage the sensibility of everyone involved, on the basis of an antagonism that does all that it can to not become sterile, univocal or ideological. So you have carnavalesque parades which are conceived as vehicles of an analysis of flexible labour conditions, and more broadly, of the precariousness of social life under the current form of transnational capitalism that confronts us everyday both as consumers and as producers, as reproducers of our selves, whenever we try to unfold the consequences of living beyond the next short-term contract. The EuroMayday activists try to analyse that situation, but they also try to create forms of sociability that will allow this sort of analysis to have a deeper currency in everyday life than can be gained from just simply reading an article in a newspaper or a book. This analysis might somehow resemble an intellectual’s former idea of a policy paper, but policy papers don’t seem to have any effect anymore, not if they come from the Left anyway… The way to operate as a critical intellectual now seems to be through the stimulation of, and participation in, social movements, where as an intellectual your discursive contribution is neither more or less important than aesthetic contributions which can come from the domains of music, of dance, or of the staging of events in urban space. All these things come together in what I think is a very complex machine because of the number of people that cooperate on it, and also because of the relatively subtle nature of what is being dealt with. We are talking about trying to analyse something like the human ecology of this ultra-fast, rapidly mutating manifold of productive relations that usually keep people preoccupied with just keeping abreast of the changes which are happening every day. And that’s the hardest thing to analyse, the hardest situation to transform. So that’s why I prefer to start with an example like that.

RL: As you often stress yourself in your writings, from the point of view of the dominant art discourse a street parade wouldn’t be considered art. So it makes indeed sense to name it an aesthetic practice. At the same time, it may be interesting to name these kinds of happenings genuine artistic events, not the least because of their evident link with the kind of activities that were organized within the by-now canonised avant-garde of the 1920’s, or within the neo-avant-garde of the 1960’s.

BH: This is basically what I have done in all of the essays that I’ve gathered into a forthcoming book, called Unleashing the Collective Phantoms. It’s the basic proposal of the book: to see how the avant-garde experiments at bringing concentrated aesthetic forms over into everyday life have actually functioned in our time, when people use them as catalysts of social processes rather than just contemplating them as heroic culminations of a singular creative adventure. In this respect, we live in a time of post-vanguard experiments, because this capacity to use aesthetic resources, to catalyse and qualify social processes, is now something very widespread and no longer the specialised contribution of artists. We see these sorts of processes happening around free software, for example, with quite important results. But we still don’t have a very strong way of lending value to these processes, despite the extraordinary work of people from Cage to Guattari. If you are coming from an art perspective, you can compare that to conceptual art, to performance art, video art, mail art and so forth, as I’ve tried to do, in hopes of finally dissolving the distinctions and arriving at socially active forms of processual creativity. Now I’d like to consider that territory to have been gained, and move on to some more complex problems within the field of post-vanguard social experimentation.

RL: Okay, but you also stress again and again that these social laboratories should have a clear political edge and are not just a feast or a neo-dadaist happening. So it seems as if you take up a line which is Deleuzian, but supplement it with a line that is overtly political.

BH: There are unfortunately a lot of really virtuoso uses of Deleuze, which I think fit very well into the general semiotic mill of cognitive capitalism. But the most interesting forms of process art have always left open this relation to the political. It’s maybe something essential, because it’s hard to abstract the transformation of one’s aesthetic relations from the transformation of one’s relations with other human beings, and therefore, it’s hard to abstract artistic experience from actual social conditions. In our society, those conditions are marked by unstated, covered-up class hierarchies and also by ecological problems, problems of our mental ecology. How tightly we are hemmed in by the forms of normalisation that Guattaricalled overcoding, by the ways of integrating our sensible and expressive capacities back into a very tightly articulated production machine... So the political is always inherent to process art, as opposed to framed artworks which do achieve some degree of abstraction from society. If you look at an artist like John Cage, who did his best to avoid ideology of any stripe, you will see that all of his work was quite political, because it brought out the limitations of contemporary social relations. Of course, the things I’m involved with are much more explicitly political, because I think there is a received good taste in the art world that is always going to prefer the deliberately non-ideological character of the work of somebody like Cage, to the point where that preference or judgement of taste becomes a new way of recreating the separation of art and life. Museum catalogues are full of clean formalised interpretations of process art, insisting on the criteria that make for a specifically artistic work. I don’t think that’s really the point…

RL: Let me go back to the notion of the post-vanguard and its relation to politics… If I would play a little bit the devil’s advocate, I would say that you as a critic takes up for instance the EuroMaydays and other forms of collective activities in terms of a possible articulation of collective speech, thus putting them in a vanguard role.

BH: What I’m trying to get at by talking about post-vanguard art is the real meaning of the ambition for art to go beyond itself, with which the word vanguard is historically associated. I see this self-overcoming, not in the usual anarchist way as the abolition of representation, but instead as a kind of rhythmically recurrent process. I don’t think that representation as such is durably overcome, but rather it points beyond itself, or outside the limits that it creates between the representation and the person or thing that is represented. And so you have a process-work, which is able to catalyse or stimulate the unfolding of experiences by interjecting certain kinds of self-overcoming representations. If you like, this is the very process of representation: the way in which the interaction of people’s diverse expressions continually changes the coordinates, and even the logic, on which their initial dynamic was predicated. And so when I talk about the articulation of “speech” I really mean expression, which is broader than semantics or discourse and which involves the body, the direct expression of bodily intensities, as well as all the complex and concentrated works of which we are capable. Now, when such processes of expression are political, then they engage another meaning of the word vanguard, which has to do with the leading edge of a struggle. In the word, it is presumed that the “van” has an army behind it; and this is not exactly always the case, perhaps it is only a virtual army… The two meanings were conflated in the 1920’s and have left quite a durable mark on our vocabulary. And yet they often seem to confuse the issue.

RL: I’ll try another phrasing of the question... If we speak of a vanguard, certainly in the political sense, there is a kind of utopian dimension implied. There may be a real army or network behind you, but the decisive point of a vanguard is that it is referring to structural possibilities opened up within capitalism at a very precise historical moment that point towards a new future. Your previous book is called Hieroglyphs of the Future, an expression inspired by Jacques Rancière which seems to imply that certain critical aesthetic practices do have this kind of finger-pointing ‘futuristic’ or utopian function.

BH: Yes, I do think that is true, I just resist the word vanguard because it is exactly what is specialisable by the status quo of the artistic institutions. Art is celebrated, in retrospect, as the finger that pointed ahead. But what’s interesting is both to point the finger and follow where it leads. And where it leads is never to the future but always towards an unfolding of the present that tends to dissolve the unity of the pointing finger into the more complex process of the realisation and concurrent transformation of a representation functioning as a catalyst. Just think of the effect of a gesture in the crowd. A gesture often has no effect whatsoever, but if it is perceived and taken up by people, its effect is then transformed and actually taken away from the person who made it. It becomes appropriated by the crowd in a complex way that has also to do with the sum