The evening yesterday with cultural critic Brian Holmes culminated his series of talks and workshops called "Drift." A previous entry addressed an earlier lecture in this series. It felt like an event had happened. There was definitely a lot of energy in the room and the group of mostly 20-somethings was charged up for activist action (i.e. "Let's plot to alter society globally."). Analysis of "hyper capitalism" (Holmes' lectures and a presentation by Michael Hardt) was paired with reflections on interventionist art activist practices. Discourse was offered as an invitation that leads to production. This model is interesting as it goes away from the academic lecture model and understands the importance of even-levelled hierarchies for discursive exchanges.

The evening started with a video showing protests in Vilnius that were aimed at stopping the closure of the biggest cinema in the Lithuanian capital. There were pro-test labs, boot-strap labs, and a lab to model situations. The fun of protest was evident and the event language included the slogan "we exercise our desires." Participants "cooked up" discussions and threw in their own flavor. There was an insistence to base actions on "our" desires, on what we want to do. The director Kustorica in his interview as part of the video pointed out that we are not going to have anything we love if we don't fight against the establishment of a consumer society that takes over civil society. This aspect of love as the enemy of neoliberalism sounds a bit like in a love-in fairytale but was also brought up at a recent lecture by Michael Hardt.

The thoughts pondered were inspiring in part but the evening became emotionally exhausting. Holme's central ideas, as summed up by workshop participants, centered around the idea that 'our' human relationships are turned into consumer relations. 'We' define ourselves based on our professional lives, Holmes argued. In neoliberalism everybody is an entrepreneur of themselves. How can we create new agencies that go beyond that of the buyer and seller? How do we live creative, socially active lives? How do we finance our lives? The search throughout his 20 minute lecture (click for video that I recorded) but also in the hours of debate afterwards focused on new tactics of intervention into the infrastructures of neoliberalism. How can we spread our ideas like viruses and propagate collective speech-- fostering a civil rather than a consumer society-- working for a public that we would be a part of? How can we make plans for the future (and get out of the response mode)? This reminded me much of Ernesto Laclau's project of a social imaginary for the left. Holmes proposed a slow revolt through a series of interruptions that contribute to the general societal crisis mode of neoliberalism. He emphasized the importance of crisis and suggested culture as tool in the process of contributing to its climax. But also on a personal level: "Crisis is important to constantly give new birth to ourselves."

For us as cultural producers (and this term was used all throughout the evening) our tool is culture, our oppositional device (Holmes' term). Through cultural work we can germinate our ideas, we can play games of imagination, make our agency visible in the socialization of our research, and celebrate deviance. Brian Holmes warned of the normalization of a neoliberal agenda today, especially in universities. He stressed the importance of politicizing students based on their demographics but was highly skeptical of that possibility within academia as he believes that true education can only take place on "neutral ground," ground that is not overshadowed by business interests. I disagree. To suggest that all universities are taken over by consumer relationships is incorrect and misleading. The university in the U.S. is one of the few places in which independent voices can speak and be heard and have an impact on future generations. Participants brought up questions of class struggle and responses were interesting. Rather than suggesting an unbridgeable oppositionality, Holmes claimed that the space between us and them is far smoother than we commonly think. We are them, and neoliberalism is more like an alien that you have to get out of your own system. I was reminded of Slavoj Zizek's book "Iraq" in which he makes a bizarre historical reference. Zizek talks about the American GIs that moved into a Vietnamese village and immediately started to vaccinate children to protect them from the spread of disease. When the "Viet Cong" took over that village they cut off the arms of the vaccinated children. Zizek shockingly argues that we have to deal with capitalism in this manner. We need to rip out the inner neoliberal alien in all of us. If we are them, Holmes argues, the space for possible deviance gets bigger. He argued that difference is our problem and said that we are the same as everyone else (I think he took that from Negri). He called for the pursuit of normality as alterity.

The evening felt surprisingly like a graduate seminar at a university. There was little to no talk about specific art projects. And I was overwhelmed by a sense of moralistic argumentation in the room. It is important to allow for critique and not to "shut these people up" whose questions we do not like. I saw that happening before in East Germany. Rosa Luxemburg was right to say that freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently. What would an approach look like that admits flexible, multi-layered approaches to the creation of oppositional modules? Oppositionality needs to be open to find its collaborators wherever they may be. Is not that what Laclau and Mouffe argued for? Is not that what the idea of the multitude asks of us? It is does not make sense to portray institutions as zones that do not allow for autonomous action because there are simply too many examples that proof the opposite. Intentional research networks and boot strap institutes can exist within and outside of brick and mortar institutions. Such networks allow for coalition and the socialization of research- they allow participants to plug in and un-plug whenever they wish.