Abstract
This article sets out to demonstrate and conceive political situations and configurations that appeared in Argentina before, during and after the crisis of 2001. The field of social and political experimentation to take place during this period led to operations that questioned the traditional idea of public space. Certain thinkers deemed the term “catastrophic” the best way to describe the argentinean crisis as an example of “an environment where change prevails over permanence, where shifting conditions is the rule rather than the exception.” As a result, the very idea had to be wholly reconceived due to the crisis.
Connection- Disconnection
The traditional idea of public space is an open place where opinions circulate freely and each citizen has an equal right to circulate. A place to struggle to establish an influential decision by means of transcendent reason expressed by law which guarantees equal opportunities. A game with rules to which the players have not agreed explicitly. Some of the configurations in Argentina during the crisis openly challenged this idea of public space.
In 1996, upon seeing that their possibility to protest in public space could not be made visible, public workers who had been laid off during the privatization decided to intervene in what we call “velocity systems”. By blocking traffic and delaying indefinitely the logistical system, the “piquetes” became an alternative to the strike for those for those who did not have a job, a way to affect capitalist production and marketing, a way to intervene in the “just in time” and “stock zero” systems. The “new visibility” entails effecting momentary disconnection between two or more points. Does this means the passage from the idea of public space to the idea of “public speed”? By means of public speed, we want to adress that part of the economy and politics that is called logistics, the post fordist system of global goods circulation. But at the same time, public speed describes a type of speed in which all of these different times are composed. All of these social actors are occupied to producing their own time and their “time differences” could be seen as a speed. Then, public speed it’s a composition of heterogenous social speeds.
There is no longer something continuous, homogenous and common for everyone.
Rather than speaking of public space, then, we prefer to call the appearance of these plural, non-hierarchical actions, thoughts and exchanges “public moments.” Moments because they were determined by contingencies and diffuse propagation. Indeed, Venus project experienced certain moments of intensity but, in the end, dissolved.
Each of the experiments called “economical” in Argentina before and during the crisis, were focused on how to develop a specific way of producing value or how to do assessment of things and relationships that were hard to evaluate. This could be applied to the complementary currencies delivered by the government, to the movement of bartender clubs and the Venus project too. The bartender clubs were successful because they realized that meanwhile many people were excluded form the economical circle of money and income, these networks, trough barter exchange, gave visibility to those potential human resources that were left out of the normal market. The way these experiments operated was in order to build up networks based upon the value of things exchanged with the specific way in which these connections “produced reality”. So, the membership to these societies and groups operated as “machines of symbolic connection”, like in the currency system or the religious life.
Organizations and Disorganization
The concept of public space is sustained by the idea that players are connected by a more or less conflictive social bond. The means for this connection is the law, a law equal for each actor, each citizen; it is supported by the State, which upholds the logic that coordinates the players and laws and rules. It is the State that produces citizens and the common logic that connects them; the visible side of this total logic is the law. The desire for public space is the desire for a space of widespread and equalitarian connection. But this equality of conditions for each agent was possible during the modern state thanks to the reign of the law that is a set of relations between agents, institutions and things ensured at a meta-level by what we call state.
The way that all of these agent were (and still are) educated and ordered is what we call institutions; they ensure the reproduction of the conditions in which this State support (mainly, the law) is effective and resilient, and the system stable.
This logic of the state nation is called “solid” by the argentinean historian Ignacio Leukowicz. He opposes to it the logic of fluxes of the late global capitalism. So, he says, we are entering into an age where this logic of solids is been dismantled or just been overwhelmed by a dynamic process of perpetual changes embodied by the globalization process and the media system. This not necessarily means a catastrophic change of the scenario.
Such a subtle and puzzling change generates forms of “sociality” which were highly improbable under “modern” conditions. These are forms of “sociality” which are less related to the old identification of the people with the party, the nation or the union, and more connected to smaller units or less defined and more flexible memberships. A non governmental system of institutions that are globally inscripted trough variable architectures and whose members reject those professional roles of the militant and the manager by mixing perspectives, points of views and strategies.
Connective experiments in a dispersive ecology
The argentine crisis and its actors lead us to explore a new question related to these “collective experiments”. As the sociologist Bruno Latour explains, we are all immersed in a serie of “collective experiments” which are been largely overflowing the limits of laboratories. In the new crisis, we are entangled with the undesired consequences of the decision to experiment on a real scale. We think his ideas are very useful to rethink the debate of what we still can hardly called “public space” between different “cultures” that are discussing this topic.
But, how can we think about these “risky configurations” of big scale?
We are trying to approach the matter simultaneously from two points of view. That from Latour, where he stages a challenging concept of public space as an experiment in real scale, and the idea of Ignacio Leukowicz, that claims the nowadays conditions of social bond are closer to dispersion than to cohesion. This idea addresses the “public space” under the figure of its dismantling.
M7 (Mauricio Corbalan, PioTorroja) + Florencia Alvarez.
Buenos Aires, January 2007.
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