After the conversation with Ronaldo Lemos, mostly dedicated to the questioning of relationships between self-organization and alternative business models, I thought it was interesting to re-formulate the question in the field of cultural production, particularly in the filed of publishing and contemporary art. Recently I had an inspiring conversation with Nat Muller, who works together with me as a blogging-columnist for labforculture and who publishes her texts at Passing in proximity. Nat is, to put it briefly, interested in the examination of the position of curator/intellectual worker within the specific cultural, geo-political and economical conditions. She proposed me to write short essay about publishing, reflecting my own position in the field of content production as the editor of Prelom journal, art critic, writer and curator. Together with Alessandro Lodovico, Nat Muller is editing Mag.net 3 Reader, and the upcoming issue will be dedicated to the ACTUAL GESTURES of the PROCESSUAL PUBLISHING. Nat and Lodovico wrote about the topic in the following way: "Processual Publishing. Actual Gestures looks at the ACT of publishing as GESTURE that is political, public and in some instances artistic, or radical as well. We have chosen the word *gesture* because it entails a particular type of agency, as well as a idiosyncrasy that is specific to what it suggest; less stronger than an ACTION, a gesture implies an indication, a sign. It does not per se signify change but it motions and signals something. We have chosen the word *processual* to describe contemporary publishing as a critical practice that is always unfinished, in process.

I answered to the topic No 2, entitled "Publishing the Public". Here the editors wanted to examine the concept of publishing as a public platform, which function is the creation of public/audience, and whose voice is (the) public. They wanted to reflect publishing from the perspective of a common. I approached the topic from the opposite side, through the examination of the positions of publishing as a professional. My scope of analysis was the intellectual work and communication within the international art scene [however vageuly this term is defined today].

I'll mirror here the major part of my contribution.

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I would like to share some impressions about the organisation of work and material-social effects of the so-called ‘production of content’ through the ‘gesture of publishing’. What is the role of content, and how does it function in the broader social and economical sphere? What are the material conditions of circulation of printed matter? What is the ‘destiny’ of content production within the economically regulated field of culture? In other words, how does this ‘content’, produced by individual or collective subjects, operate within the hegemonous logic of communication and exchange of the international art scene?

The international art scene is definitely not an institution in the narrow sense of the word: its main characteristic is heterogeneity of all kinds. But, the symbolic activity of production and dissemination of aesthetic objects and ideas, which is at work here, clearly reproduces the economical structures of global society with all the heterogeneity, mobility and flexibility embedded in the latter. The formal presence and functioning of the international scene is regulated through grandiose artistic, media, music and performance manifestations, conceived to demarcate safe territories of representation of ‘global(ised) friendship’. Being part of this scene requires continuous self-education, self-promotion and networking, that is, the entrepreneurial-managerial activities of the independent intellectuals who are self-employed, and who are obliged to produce content as their proper work, but at the same time are forced to ‘creatively organise’ their working environment.

All this points to the dual processes of culturalisation of the economy and the economisation of culture, which is the characteristic for contemporary neo-liberal capitalist conditions. Today, ‘Intellectual production’, or the ‘need to know’, or ‘the love for beauty’, are becoming the main outlets open to economic development. Discussing the concept of ‘immaterial labour’, Maurizio Lazzarato underlines the new subjective-political composition of the working class, and the informational-cultural content of the commodity. Besides participating in the production of cultural content, the so-called ‘creative workers’, ‘content producers’ or ‘content providers’ are involved in “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashion, taste, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion”. According to Lazzarato, immaterial labour constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and that exist only in the form of networks and flows. The organisation of the cycle of production is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of the factory, but rather operates in society at large, at the territorial level that he calls the “basin of immaterial labour”. This definition of the territorial level – of the ‘factory without the walls’ – fits very much in the institutional modus operandi of the international art scene. Instead of being subjected to the production on a simple command, workers are today ‘the active subjects’. The role of contemporary ‘content producers’ is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication. The new ‘creative industries’ teach us that “we should all become subjects”, which sounds like an unambiguous requirement for the subjectivities that are rich in knowledge, that is, involved in management, decision-making and handling the information.

I made an ad hoc-artwork, or – to be fully precise – one household installation, spontaneously created as an emergency solution for the lack of storage space, since all the bookshelves have been overloaded for quite some time. This artificial storage technique spontaneously, or less spontaneously, depicts the processes of accumulation of content, circulation of information, and the creation of networks, as the syndromes of contemporary cultural production. A short statement in the conceptualist style may sound like:

“This is a tower of printed matter, a piece of ‘administrative aesthetics’, which shows material evidence of my working and networking at the international art scene during the year 2007.”

It is built of different books, catalogues, magazines, journals, newspapers, brochures and leaflets; semi-read, quickly-read or not-read-at-all. Its singular-contents came to be thought over mostly through postponing – like ‘one day I will read all this’. It is, in a way, an ethnographic piece about the art world, which provides information about one year of curatorial travels, and the average amount of ‘objects of communication’ that one member of the art community gathers while encountering other people during various exhibitions, conferences, residency programmes, etc. The conceptual gesture of accumulation of books produces a tautological overlap of the objects and subjects of communication. It creates a literary reified, non-usable archive of all the content [re]produced through the communication and exchange with different cultural actors over a one-year period of time. I mentioned the term ‘aesthetics of administration’, proposed by Benjamin Buchloh and its connection to the questioning of art institutions and their bureaucratic apparatuses, since it is closely related to works with paper, documents and publishing.

This little archive does not represent any subjective memory of its owner, nor is there a hierarchy conditioned in any way by the logic of the attention economy. It is rather a ‘neutral’ volume of printed matter, assembled according to a certain principle. This communication piece also cannot be taken as the analogue representation of networks, because networks do not imply a one and singular sink-channel, but are administrated through numerous nodes, [repeating the mechanism of participatory management on a smaller scale]. For Geert Lovnik, the process of networking is fine “as far as it integrates the plurality of forces [...] as well as the persistence of dispute or disagreement [...] But the primary questions remain: where does it go? how long does it last?[ ... ] but also: who is speaking? and: why bother?” [...] “Networks will never be rewarded and ‘embedded’ in well-functioned structures. Just as the modernist avant-garde saw itself punctuating the fringes of society, so to have tactical media taken comfort in the idea of targeted micro-interventions”. This is, of course, not the case with all the networks, especially with those that stem from the logic of ‘free cooperation’, and are conducted by the current interests of various cultural subjects. The tower of prints as the personal embodiment of the process of networking poses the question about the “outside” of networks, that is, about the economic models behind all this performance of communication.

In the classic art historical framework, the content of this “sculpture” reflects the position of speech, as established in the modernist environment by Gustave Courbet and his painting The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory, and quite often quoted in conceptual art theory as the model for questioning the art institution. But, while in the case of Courbet this position is framed by an atelier and artistic figure of lonesome genius, here it is ultimately public, social and even impossible without the elements of ‘public socialising’. The modernist institution of culture, examined and criticised by Courbet as well as the conceptualists, and represented through the national museum or private market-oriented gallery, is replaced nowadays by the different organisation of intellectual labour, change of economical discourse, and by the less formal structure of the global art scene.

Therefore, my household installation, archival experiment, or conceptual joke, points to the feverish networking of people and ideas as the basic function of the ‘gesture of publishing’, no matter what its original intentions and particular aims are. How much of this volume of heavy material can be consumed as ‘content’? How much of it can be carefully read and critically observed? Or does it only serve as a sign of good relations between the donor and the receiver, in order to maintain the ‘language of politeness’ in the contemporary art world? Here, we can also ask what actually constitutes the content, because the content is framed, not only by the written texts and critical thought, but also by its circulation and institutionalisation.

We can claim that there is definitely something like ‘the language of politeness’, which establishes itself as the inevitable tool for communication in contemporary art. The literacy of cultural politeness implies a savoir-faire about how to summarise your current projects, how to express your interest when hearing about the undertakings of your interlocutors, and how to be prepared for the exchange of business cards, leaflets and publications with other colleagues from the art scene. This institutionalised language actually serves to administrate the process of global networking in the field of culture: it reproduces a state of a friendship within ‘the institution of art’, and offers a form to communicate and negotiate with all the members of the art community. It is normative and hierarchical, but open for improvisation and demonstration of individual virtuosity. I would compare it to the court communication of the 16th-18th centuries, and the birth of the social role of ‘educated gentlemen’. Today, this role is succeeded by the role of members of the international art community. On the one hand, it requires a so-called openness, and politeness towards artists, cultural workers, art institutions and sponsors. It implies unquestionable support for the current production, whatever it is and however it is organised. It maintains a status quo of the existing order. On the other hand, it appears to be the consequence of compelling requests for a ‘collective debate’, ‘exchange of opinions’ and ‘creation of networks’. This is typical for all the cultural environments aspiring towards critical thinking, and re-examination of the existing state of affairs, but also within this specific circumstances they are forced to overproduce, and therefore compelled to join to the all-pervasive ‘market of ideas’.
Contemporary neo-liberal capitalism demands the worker’s personality and subjectivity to be involved in the production of value, which means the independent cultural worker is responsible not only for his/her own enthusiasm and motivation, but also for his/her own self-presentation as a unique ‘cultural personae’. Continual innovation is one of the imperatives of this demand, but the kind of innovation which is conceived as an institutional and economic project.