The following is an excerpt written as a follow-up to my participation on a CollageLab competition jury:
Does our urban future lie in each becoming self-entrepreneurs, or to all share collective knowledge in forms of Open Source projects? Can we find new ways of producing and working? How will the global enterprise be able to produce sustainable levels of work through motivated workers, when nowadays humans are seen as resources and not workforces? How will the work of the future be measured, when the production of perceived, speculated value has no theoretical limits? Can work finally be released through technology? And finally: What are the possibilities for our cities? Apart from “job-sharing” and co-working spaces, what could be transformed spatially to change towards a sustainable working culture?
Remarkably enough, what become most clear while reviewing the submitted proposals were the limitations of our capacity to imagine what a post-capitalist work might entail, and most especially, how a scenario for post-capitalist work could be in any way adjacent to a significant spatial transformation. This was evident both from the proposals but also from the deliberations of the jury. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. And by no means do I want to suggest that the ideas generated within this context were at all insignificant. It is actually quite interesting to trace this out–the incapacities, the limitations–between the numerous proposals submitted to this round of the competition. Ultimately, it was the two proposals that most directly engaged with this dilemma–that of imagining a post-capitalist scenario with the tools of the capitalist imaginary–which came out as the strongest.
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Embedded within this entire CollageLab project seems to be a conviction that urban life–perhaps not as we know it, but urban life in an expanded capacity–is something desirable, something that can, and should, be sustained. That is, if we are able to locate the means by which to sustain urban life in a positively post-capitalist way.
If we were to go back to the initial set of questions for this competition on post-capitalist work, for instance, and mark out all of the references to distinctly urban life or high tech solutions, we end up with a constellation of concerns that allow us to think about post-capitalism in general–and this opens up a possibility for us to consider distinctly rural or provincial ways of life as the antidote. But that is not the drive here. The whole premise here is to attempt thinking about post-capitalism within and completely subjected to the urban logic. And there's the rub.
Almost paradoxically, what this largely produced in this setting is something I would characterize as a certain neo-provincialism. In order to arrive at a semblance of a post-capitalist scenario, a majority of the proposals maneuvered in such a way so as to ameliorate the supposed problems of urban life by way of implementing something of a pre-industrial provincialism within the urban pysche and/or urban fabric
On an individual level, we might be able to use this term "neo-provincialism" to characterize the exhibition of the urban-dweller's particular (often, though not necessarily, naive or nostalgic) sensibility for pre-neoliberal or even pre/post capitalist ways of living in "community" and in relation to nature. Whatever the case is–whether it is urban landscape design, an international biennial, or a set of municipal regulations in accordance with the Transition Town movement–neo-provinicialism has become increasingly apparent as a means of coping, a means of perforating the logic of rural occupation into the logic of urban life with the hope of exiting from both scenarios and into something more resilient, sustainable, and viable.
A friend recently shared with me her reactions to this observed tendency:
Neo-provincialism is a concept that deserves a space in our lexicon. To an extent, it is the elephant in the room because it is a reaction to power structures and the status-quo. Neo-provincialism intrigues me in relation to how we define survival and our needs.
We tend to identify ourselves, especially in an urban context, in terms of a stark distinction between the activities that consume humans in contrast to animals. Cities are romanticized because physical survival is easy for those who can afford it. In a rural setting, when we are truly self-reliant, life is not easy, and social/gender inequity is inevitable. The necessary labor is distributed and the marginalized are burdened with providing the resources necessary for survival. Yet, worldwide, the dominant activity associated with cities is monotonous factory/sweatshop labor, which makes one feel like an animal, because one's time is completely devoted to a cycle of economic survival where one does not have freedom: life is sleep, work, repeat. And the mind decays without stimulation.
So, my question is, how does art and intellectual enlightenment (which can only prosper after basic physical survival needs are met) fit into neo-provincialism?
Reflecting on recent biennials, exhibitions, grant cycles, institutional adjustments, and curricular "innovations," it seems we have arrived at a point where "art and intellectual enlightenment"–processed through the more aptly named engine of "cultural production"–have become major proponents of neo-provincialism. Having possibly exhausted those tactics that celebrated distinctly urban ways of life, there has emerged a tendency to constitute oneself within and through this dilemma of mapping the provincial onto the urban.
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Referring specifically to the proposals under question, we saw recommendations to enter into modes of development where economies were based entirely off of "locally-sourced materials"; gift, slow-growth, and no-growth economies; barter networks and community "inter-price" systems of assigning "real value" to goods and services; and so on. The derogatory aspects of the assignation "provincial" were reworked into a situation where the participants were decidedly restricting (or playing at the restriction of) their interests, outlooks, and ways of being in order to positively address the negative aspects of urban life.
We can find the genesis of many of these proposals very much alive and functioning maturely in rural or provincial settings across the world. Well-known are projects like LETS, or local exchange trading systems; BerkShares, the local currency of the Berkshire region of Massachusetts; as well as numerous eco-village, permaculture projects, and volunteer communities that practice ethics such as non-violence, nondiscrimination, and low-impact living. But in the process of reviewing these proposals, we regularly came across attempts at reconfiguring select components–and this fragmentary characteristic is important–of these preexisting and well-functioning systems into the urban scenario. But still, this tension over reconfiguring these two distinct logics into one another was never addressed directly.
Simply, there was a tendency to encourage the idea that urban dwellers might solve their problems if they pretended as though they lived in the countryside in the city. That is, the countryside without all of the problems of the countryside. This is not an expanded provincialism, or one that desires the physical encounter with the logic of rural occupation within the city center. Rather, it is a provincialism advanced and accompanied by a distinctly urban sensibility and refinement. A post-production scenario whereby provincial life is rendered through a distinctly urban semantic and aesthetic vocabulary and then enacted as a means of actualizing new forms of urban life. "Eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor" has been replaced by "we don't actually produce the food people eat, but we give them an experience of what it means to produce food," or "gardening is an attitude that we can transfer to the question of city planning," or "the countryside itself becomes an instrument to produce new forms of urban life."
So, we end up in a situation where the ripe ideas for urban life seem to be coming from the rural space and what it makes possible (and not the other way around). But at the same time, the impulse to abandon the city is never on the table. By way of contrast, the impulse is to confiscate these ways of being–especially the ideas of being in relation to one another, in relation to nature, and so on–into the urban space with the deliriously optimistic attitude that they will remain unscathed and still properly functioning.
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In this particular context–that of a cycle of competitions asking for a vision, in the form of a proposal, of post-capitalist work–the proposals that were characterized by a certain neo-provincialism were equally characterized by a lack of significant engagement with the complexities of this dilemma. There was an impulse to appropriate distinctly rural attitudes and implement them into city life by was of reduction and fragmentation. I do not want to suggest that any of this is lacking in significance in and of itself. On the contrary, this is something that merits much more attention.
