In this present text, I am on the one hand, interested in conceptually, politically and ideologically rethinking the conditions of the production of the journal and platform Reartikulacija, and questioning how to theoretically rearticulate Reartikulacija as a specific organizational form, on the other. Whoever mistrusts the organizational model, saying that it disregards the class struggle against exploitation, is wrong. But whoever believes that networking, affect and “respect” may put aside categories such as “over-exploitation” and “the class struggle” is wrong, too.

The question of rethinking the conditions of production that I can retranslate into a clearly disturbing question concerning where the money/funds for the publishing of such an activist newspaper – obviously lacking any institutional background – come from, must be posed after the three editions have been published, and the number of logos of our supporters increases. This question is connected to a much wider situation, which is becoming disturbingly obvious within Europe and is increasingly normalized elsewhere, that of the accelerated privatization of each and every sector of the artistic, cultural and social fields by neoliberal global capitalism. All around us – not only in Slovenia – the possibility for realizing substantial artistic and cultural projects, which are not made for the measuring up of major institutions of art is becoming vitally, and therefore terminally, dependent on the funding (money!) from multinational bank conglomerates and insurance companies, multinational market businesses, oil and construction companies, etc. These multinationals support, to an increasing extent, the official institutions of art and culture (which were abundantly supported by their respective national states in the past), and currently even include the institutions of education. This process of linking the whole program and vision of a certain social and political “emancipatory“ practice within a specific context, by means of private capital, funding, help, an infrastructural “kick” – or just be my guest – while adding a new moniker to it, is becoming on a one side a disturbingly obvious and on the other a normalized fact! Therefore, the capitalist states (as well as the once socialist ones) invest less and less into art and cultural projects that are not connected to the art market, thus leaving the whole sector to what is termed as raw, direct privatization. The state and its apparatuses, ministries of science, education, culture etc. are abandoning the function they had in the past as founders of, not only educational, but also non-commercial art and cultural independent institutions. The same can be said about the supranational EU legislation. In the past, they had to work at least programmatically for public interest, and for the benefit of promoting important programs for social diversification, as well as legislative policies required in order to fight discriminatory populist policies and open the social and political space for equal opportunities for sexual, racial, migrant differences, etc. Today, this is not even the case on a normative level. As reported by Tatjana Greif, the European Commission suddenly dropped the horizontal directive from its annual program – a legislative policy against discrimination on the grounds of age, disability, sexual orientation and religion, as stated in Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty. Instead, it is supposed to protect the disabled only, whereas other categories are to be regulated with the help of non-binding recommendations. The state only supports selected, and through this selection a very ideological set of projects, which empower only and solely the neoliberal ideology of capitalism and the “national” state’s Blut und Boden ideology, on a daily basis. In order to develop non-market-orientated and critical art and cultural projects, we have to ask private companies for help and make recourse to private money and funding. As we know, capital has only one specific goal, the drive for surplus value. Every investment is never merely and purely about the exchange and development of understanding and mutual cooperation. The fact that our self-organizational platform is forced to depend heavily (as the capitalist state is not even interested in financing registered independent organizations) on private money and private funding in order to survive, forces us to raise the question as to what is going to happen with our politics in the future? The neoliberal capitalist state and its apparatuses, which put constant pressure on not only independent (but as well selected national) art, cultural and educational institutions towards relying more and more on private funding, enforce a terrain of dependency that is similar to drug addiction. It presents on the one side the concept of forced addiction to private funding of public programs, and on the other allows the neoliberal state to abandon (strategically serving capital) its funding of programs and projects of social and public importance. This is a twofold mechanism. It slowly but steadily imposes hierarchies, extending control over public content on the one side, while implementing behavioral, neoliberal-managerial patterns of mere empty expediency in relation to public and social programs on the other. Reartikulacija has been trying to co-opt funds from possible public (Slovenian state and European Union supra-state cultural, educational as well as research foundations), semi-public and fully private organizations (mostly banks and insurance companies, known throughout the European context), in order to cover the basic costs providing the fundamental conditions for the production of the journal (the translation of texts, language editing of the texts in English, in Slovenian, layout and corrections, printing, promotion and distribution), and the development of the platform. It seems that the willingness to publish a journal, and a clear concept of what is to be published within it (a vision of what I can term as a theoretical, ideological, political point-of-view), is only the first step. The second one, which involves the realization of it, cannot be accomplished without the funds necessary in paying for the process of translation and editing. I want to put very clearly that this organization of production is not in any way a simple managerial redistribution of certain power structures, but the foundation of conditions that allow for the publishing of the journal. With Reartikulacija, we started with a straightforward analysis of global capitalism, the disintegration of the social state, and privatization of the public sphere; these processes are seen as “naturally” going along with an intensive process of the normalization of fascist, chauvinist, racist and anti-Semitic tendencies within Slovenia and Europe.

The first two editions of Reartikulacija were only and solely in Slovenian, all of the texts by authors from the Balkans, Europe and the rest of the world were translated into Slovenian, receiving the opportunity to be part of a common space that has always had high critical potential, but had not been seen as such. In the first two editions, we aimed to form a double platform, an alliance of interventions of theoretically and politically conceived forces, which previously had no chance to work together in the common Slovenian space. For the first time, so to speak, those involved in theory of contemporary art and culture, and queer and lesbian positions – that articulate continously one of the most important critical analyses of the European Union policies in Slovenia – gathered together and became part of the platform. From the third edition on, we have internationalized our position. We changed from an exclusively Slovenian platform to a Slovenian and English bilingual one, in order to internationalize the internal Slovenian positions as well as the other positions from our closest Balkan collaborators (from Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb), who contributed up to that point with texts in their respective Slavic languages; on the other hand, we wanted to acquire positions from abroad that had not been published before, but were conceived as a contribution to as an “original” discursive and textual space. With the third edition, we also started to repay our contributors by investing in English translation, as well as English language editing, which is being done by professionals. Each writer ends up with a proper text, which can be used and republished freely, on a creative commons basis. Today, in a world hegemonized by the English language, translation and editing mean: money. A whole set of hierarchy is established, based and nurtured through the forms of English language expressions. The good and skillful usage of the English language is becoming the border to the possibility of entering the space of the Empire. On the basis of the translation and modification of what is termed as a certain “standard” of quality of English language texts, many concepts are lost in the process of “understanding” through editing and standardization. Being purified and customized, they lose their power. The process also takes place in the reverse situation, instead of the 1990s multicultural “understanding” of others’, the new generation of theoreticians today, well-educated, young middle class, mostly white that come from Great Britain, the USA, Canada, etc. are not making an effort in being understood outside of the First Capitalist world anymore. They travel around and seem to talk more and more only to each other, as being in other geographical spaces and contexts, they are not at all preoccupied with asking if we understand them when they, with their fast mumbling and bumbling English, arrogantly present their “new” theories. I can state that a very clear self-organizational ideological and political activist position is at the base of Reartikulacija, but if we take into consideration the described conditions of production, and the open questions regarding the processes of the privatization of art, culture and educational levels of neoliberal capitalist societies, we can state that Reartikulacija functions within an extreme (self)-organizational condition. I suggest that we not only put the prefix “self” in brackets, but even more so, that we get rid of it!

In their essay, “Past Futures: Extreme Subjectification. The Engineering of the Future and the Instrumentalization of Life,” published in the Romanian magazine Vector in 2005, Rozalinda Borcilă and Cristian Nae showed that the globalization of capitalism is not only a diffuse articulation of power, but a configuration that constitutes the very medium for the production of human relations; corporate economy produces a new process of the formatting of subjectivity. This process of subjectivization is termed as extreme and attacks and conquers the normalized Western individual self. It is necessary to state that contemporary neoliberal capitalism functions on two levels: one is the domination of territories and the accumulation of goods and services, and the other is an intensified process of passivity, that is the literal re-appropriation of the subject that becomes a part of planetary governmentality. This situation asks for an extreme form of organization and forming of counter-strategies. With extreme forms of (self-)organization, we may be able to counter-attack forms of neoliberal global capitalist forces that act with the intensification of the gap between those small technocratically- and managerially-orientated groups in power that control capital allocation, and all the others who live below the existential minimum. The proposed extreme conditions of production, and its extreme organizational form, which can also be applied to Reartikulacija, do not just want to present the “beauty and luxury” of the Western self – and it also cannot – as it is the outcome of a complete dedication of artists, theoreticians and translators in extremely precarious conditions of life and work. Reartikulacija is the outcome of two junctions, one is political and the other is economical. Both levels work together in neoliberal global capitalism and affect the possibility of any production. Therefore, in insisting on the naming of its form as being conceptually an extreme form of organization, Reartikulacija points to the emergence of the new possible politico-economical form of a proper agency. The vision of Reartikulacija, regarding politics, is not simply making politics part of the agenda of the journal, but asking what the concept of the political is, in light of the neoliberal processes of governmentality within capitalism that regulate, subjugate and systematically control us.

At present, the processes of necropolitics show that a completely new class of extreme subjectivities that have no possibility of any autonomous decisions and activities are being produced. Reartikulacija proposes a form of extreme reification with which to contest and rearticulate the extreme situation in which the social space, along with art, culture and education find themselves, more and more subtly regulated, not as bios (life), but as death (necro), as a necropolitical measure of the regulation of our lives from the perspective of death within the global capitalist world. It is important to expose that the extreme position of reification pushed by Reartikulacija, insists on a line of division or a distance towards alienation as well. The alienation of human relations, which was a situation that motivated generations of critical thinking (The Frankfurt School), is just a part of the conditions of spectacle within neoliberal global capitalism today that presents alienation as a sensualized, fancy, luxurious, “sexy” form of subjectivity in the Western realm (that is backed up with the technologization of communication and the aesthetization of private life). The sensualized alienation is the trademark of neoliberal global capitalism. Rozalinda Borcilă & Cristian Nae explained that the “self is a definition of an agency of free will in the frame of a teleological project and it is the figure through which subjectivity emerges in Western philosophy, locating, in the modern age, the concept of freedom within the control of a governing instance. Responsible for the rational determination of mankind, this instance functions both as an agent and as a form by means of which one could frame, understand and dominate human existence outside the purely biological regime” (Borcilă & Nae, p. 145). The questionable part is that this humanity is reconfigured daily, and that only some are seen as humans, the others (SIC!) will never emancipate themselves enough to be viewed as human enough by the neoliberal capitalist machine. The self, according to Borcilă & Nae, simply crosses the private/public duality, and clearly cements the production of subjectivity into the network of human relations and social practices that uses normalized neoliberal procedures of subject production. The self is problematic, and it has to be seen in its co-dependence on the long history of capitalism. “The subject is just the modern name for the human being... Defining the subject as self reflexivity, modernity creates the notion of Subject as a substantialization of human being, conceived in close connection to the concept of property. Even the manners of reclaiming subjectivity are conceived by such thinking as appropriation” (Borcilă & Nae, p. 145).

It is necessary to de-link (as used by Walter Mignolo as a concept and process of articulation) the self of self-organization from the natural cohabitation with the neoliberal capitalist system. Therefore, the most appropriate way of defining the organizational form of Reartikulacija is to claim that this is an extreme, organized, theoretical and artistic platform that intervenes in the social and political spheres. Reartikulacija is not the free outcome of the rationalized self that “would prefer to act.” It is a brutally forced form of organization in the extreme situation of being without money, space, public and the possibility of visibility. Only in such a way, is it possible to reconnect Reartikulacija to the extreme forms of engineering subjectivity, and reclaim them for the counter-policy against neoliberal capitalism.

References:
Rozalinda Borcilă & Cristian Nae. “Past Futures: Extreme Subjectification. The Engineering of the Future and the Instrumentalization of Life.” in Vector, no. 1, Iaşi, Romania 2005 (pp. 144-153).

Marina Gržinić is philosopher and artist. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at SRC of SASA in Ljubljana. She is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

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