Reverse Imagineering – Toward the New Urban Struggles

What are the steps in the creation of a Disney attraction?

According to literature sent out by WDW [Walt Disney World], the steps are: storyboard, script, concept, show models, sculpture, show set design, graphics, interiors, architectural design, molds and casting, wardrobe and figure finishing, electronic and mechanical design and manufacture, show sets and prop construction, animation, audio, special effects and lighting, and engineering."

The Unofficial Walt Disney Imagineering Page

(www.imagineering.org)

On October 17, 2003, seven groups of some 20 to 30 persons descended into the Paris underground, with paint pots, glue, rollers, brushes, spray cans, sheets of paper and marking pens in their hands. Their aim? To overwrite, cover up, deface, subvert, recompose or simply rip to shreds as many advertisements as possible, without violence to any individual or to any piece of property other than the images which impinge on our most intimate desires. Arising against a background of aggressive cuts in public programs which had originally been designed to withdraw specific activities and times of life from market pressures – cuts which affect teachers, the unemployed, retirees, researchers and performing artists, among others – the movement declared its intention to "attack the driving force of this commodification: advertising. It invades our public space, the streets, the metros, the television. It is everywhere, on our clothes, our walls, our screens. Let's resist it, with creative, peaceful and legitimate means." And resist it they did, organizing three more major actions in the underground before the end of the year, defacing over 9,000 advertisements and causing almost a million euros of "damage" – at least from the viewpoint of the organization charged with selling the display space, or more precisely, the psychic space of millions of people who ride the metro every day.^[1]

The "stop publicity" campaigns of fall 2003 would have been unimaginable without a previous event: the cancellation of the most important summer culture festivals just a few months before, in the face of strikes by performing-arts and audiovisual workers. This movement includes actors, stage directors, set designers, decorators, dancers, choreographers, tightrope-walkers, fire-breathers, clowns and jugglers, sound and lighting technicians, costume makers, film directors and editors, gaffers, cameramen and women, best boys (and girls?), location managers, dubbers, special effects creators, animation designers and innumerable other professionals: the people whose job it is to create imaginary worlds. Since 1969, all these "intermittents du spectacle" had gained the right to a specific form of unemployment insurance which recognized the inherent discontinuity of artistic practice, and provided a supplemental income to cover the periods when paid labor gives way to volunteer productions, rehearsals, training periods, the quest for inspiration or, more prosaically, the search for another job. But in June of 2003, the agreement governing this form of unemployment insurance was modified by the French employers' organization and three minority unions, with a change in eligibility requirements that is predicted to eliminate roughly 30% of the beneficiaries.^[2] The cancellation of the festivals had the effect of dramatizing resistance to a generalized attack on social programs. But it also revealed another surprising fact: the vast economic benefits generated by cultural activities, primarily in the form of tourist revenues (estimates ranged as high as 40 million euros for the city of Avignon alone). Never before had the functional relations between socially subsidized creativity and entrepreneurial profit appeared so clearly before the public eye.

What kind of imaginary world do we want to live in? And how shall we pay for it? At the outset of the twenty-first century, on a planet at war, one of the primary social conflicts in the overdeveloped countries revolves around what some call culture, and others, entertainment. The free use or "pirating" of music distributed without cost through the Internet offers another example of this struggle within what the Situationists termed "the spectacle."^[3] At stake are the human creations which make up our everyday environment: the fictional narratives and perceptual stimulations which, like other forms of knowledge, can be conceived either as common goods or as commodities. The essential theater of this conflict is the productive terrain of the globalized metropolis, or the so-called "creative city." But not only corporations strive to "create worlds" for their producers and consumers, as Maurizio Lazzarato has written.^[4] City and state governments do so as well, using the techniques of network planning and complexity management, in extensive collaborations with the private sector. The stars they are installing above our heads – with the help of transnational corporations – deserve to be met with an alternative vision, an antagonistic cosmology. It is a matter of bringing the stars back down to human level, of dissolving the commercial mythologies. It is a matter of assembling what Deleuze and Guattari call a "war machine," to subversively deconstruct the imaginary environment that transnational state capitalism is constructing.^[5] At the outset of the twenty-first century, we re-enter the struggle over the right to create the world-city.

Earth

The ground of the new urban struggles began to take form some three decades ago, in the wake of changes in class composition that first became apparent in the overdeveloped countries in the late 1960s. Mass education was one aspect of these changes, as important fractions of the former working classes gained access to socialized universities. Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt point out that research and education form a major contradiction in the planned economy: because innovation is centrally necessary, but rare and largely unpredictable, requiring investments vastly in excess of functional production.^[6] Thus, all kinds of autonomous investigations could proliferate in state-subsidized educational institutions, independently of any market regulation. Experiments with pure use values – participatory cultural activities withdrawn from the rules of monetary exchange – ran parallel to calls for even greater state entitlements, and theorizations of a post-capitalist society. To this must be added what the Italian autonomists have termed "the refusal of work": a widespread rejection of the alienating conditions of factory labor, ultimately resulting in the relative decline of large-scale, labor-intensive manufacturing processes (delocalization, automation), and the exodus of workers from the direct control of managerial hierarchies.^[7] After the deep recessions and prolonged social conflicts of the 1970s, the shift toward a territorialized productive network was first noticed in the so-called industrial "districts" of Northern Italy in the early 1980s, with the resurgence of relatively small-scale, semi-artisanal modes of manufacture, depending on interconnections between specialty operators within a closely knit fabric of neighboring towns.^[8] Yet the productive networks of the "knowledge economy" that emerged as the motor of capitalist growth in the 1990s were located on urban or even metropolitan territories^[9] – where autonomist studies, pursuing the inspirations of the 1960s, pointed to the subversive dimensions of cooperative labor, whose motivations are at least partially independent of money.^[10]

The conception, and even more, the practice of the city are altered through this double dynamic of mass intellectuality and the refusal of hierarchical structures. Consider a characteristic formulation of 1960s counter-urbanism: Henri Lefebvre's The Right to the City, written with the explicit aim to "break up systems," to overcome rationalized specialization and class segregation. Lefebvre no longer sees the city as a production machine, a market or a decision-making center, but as an enduring artwork to be freely appropriated: "The city is itself 'oeuvre,' a feature which contrasts with the irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed, the oeuvre is use value and the product is exchange value. The eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, edifices and monuments, is la FÍte (a celebration which consumes unproductively...)."^[11] Lefebvre envisioned an urban theater of mobile centers, constituted and dissolved at will by the city-dwellers' appropriation of their environment. The aesthete will recognize the links to Huizinga's figure of homo ludens, to the nomadic designs of Constant or Archigram, to the playful, labyrinthine architecture of Aldo van Eyck – while the activist thinks of the Situationist derive and the antagonistic quest for "higher games," or of the disruptive theater of the Provos in Holland and the Yippies in America. Of course, this aesthetic politics culminated in the world-wide outbursts of 1968. But to understand how this conflictive play combined with a changing class composition to produce long-term transformations of urban culture, we need another reference: Andy Warhol's "Factory" in New York. Against a background of industrial decay, an artist-impresario opened the doors of a now-archaic manufacturing building to a gallery of marginal figures – drifters, drug users, transvestites, gays and lesbians, bohemians escaping their class origins – who would experiment with photography, film, television, musical styles (The Velvet Underground), but also with transgressive parties, open to hedonistic excess. From this voluntary blurring of the social classes emerged two key things: a new model of subcultural production, freely translating the energies of transversal social mobility and conflict into hybrid media commodities; and a new aesthetic of urban inhabitation, based on the attraction of "transitional neighborhoods." Subcultural production would become an integral part of the postmodern economy identified by Frederic Jameson;^[12] while the aesthetics of the fringe would play a leading role in the speculative revaluation of the former industrial areas of modern cities (gentrification).^[13] These two dynamics, unfolding in Europe since the early 1980s,^[14] have laid the ambiguous ground for the urban struggles beginning today.

(Hot) Air

How should youth energies be captured, transgressive desires satisfied, egalitarian claims laid to rest despite the ongoing progress of segregation and homogenization? The integrative functions of the postmodern economy's "cultural turn" should not be minimized. The compromise-formation of subcultural production acts to absorb the energies of class mobility, stabilizing them in multimedia proximity to the hard data of the financial sector.^[15] Spatially you see similar outcomes: the computer-assisted service industries scattered throughout the renovated manufacturing zones, the edge-city clubs and bar scenes located within prowling range of the glittering business districts. Cultural and subcultural production – of media, fashion, live performance and urban space itself – become important assets in metropolitan rivalry, as cities with global pretensions compete to attract businesses, tourists and talent. Today, the "creative city," and even the "creative class," are the buzzwords of urban development.^[16] Against this background, it is hard to disagree with Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski's contention that the "artistic critique" of the 1960s has furnished, if not a blueprint, at least a productive rhetoric for networked business strategies.^[17] And these in turn become the coveted object of urban governance: the ten-year strategic plan for Barcelona's cultural sector explicitly aims to "strengthen Barcelona as a factory that produces cultural contents," to "make culture a key element of social cohesion," to "incorporate Barcelona into the flows of digital culture" and to "project Barcelona as a platform of international promotion." ^[18] Recognizing the specific characteristics of networked social structure as described, among others, by native son Manuel Castells – ironically enough, since Castells was, with Lefebvre, the prophet of urban struggles in 1970s^[19] – the strategic plan of the Catalan capital outlines "a new management model for culture," based on contractual agreements or "pacts" rather than strictly hierarchical relations between actors, acknowledging the need for autonomy in the development and progressive adaptation of projects to changing situations, and proposing evaluation techniques for the "follow-up" (or control) "of the cultural pulse of a specific territory (the evolution of cultural practices, the economic dimension of cultural activity, the analysis of the impact of culture in the economic and social context, the analysis of creation, etc.)." This cultural/economic planning appears as the public-sector equivalent of what is known in business circles as "complexity management." But can the creative class or "cognitariat" be successfully controlled? And what happens to the subversive dynamics of transgressive mobility and social cooperation?

In Europe, the British government has most deliberately developed the planning of pop-cultural production, with an explicit concern for the destinies of the new labor force that is reflected in the culture ministry's publication of the "Creative Industries Mapping Document" in 2001. It attempts to delineate a bewildering range of new professions: Arts Promoter, Incubator, Consultancy for Inventor, Cultural Strategist, Multimedia Artist, Visual Support Consultant, Media Initiatives and Relations, Digital Design Consultant, Branding and Communications, New Media Agent, Bio-Entrepreneur (!), etc.^[20] This official document proves Felix Guattari's claims about the deliberately programmed, even serialized production of contemporary subjectivity. It emerges against the background of the "Young British Art" in the mid-nineties (driven by the advertising magnate Saatchi), accompanied by the media froth generated around the slogan "Cool Britannia" in the years 1996-98, the publication of the book Creative Britain by Culture Minister Chris Smith in 1998, and Tony Blair's early flirts with the pop-star milieus – all concurrent with the massification of the Internet and the emergence of so-called "new media." But it also follows a long period of high unemployment and casualization of the labor market brought on by two decades of neoliberal policy, as well as a serious recession in the early 1990s which saw a fresh influx of marginal cultural producers to London, to occupy spaces temporarily abandoned by capital.^[21] The dream of integrating a whole wave of new arrivals to the labor market via highly individualized career-paths articulated around the promise of creative autonomy and the productive tools of the latest technology may now sound rather unlikely, after the krach of the "new economy" and the dramatic rise in social tensions all across the planet in the wake of September 11. Yet this is the solution being sold by high-level consultancies^[22] to municipal planning departments across the overdeveloped world, with the eager approbation of local and transnational corporations – perpetually obsessed with the rebranding of everything, even the city itself, for global consumption.

Fire

In the artistic and design fields, as in research and education, the emphasis falls invariably on immediately marketable skills and products – continually augmenting the levels of frustration, even at the heart of the well-paid cognitariat. Freelance work, offered as an emancipation from hierarchy, reveals its price in subtle or blatant forms of surveillance and control through mobile communications devices, introjecting professional responsibilities into every hour of the day, every space and interpersonal relation.^[23] Meanwhile, relentless increases in ground rent restrict access to the city, while rising police pressure (modeled on New York Mayor Giuliani's "zero tolerance") is applied to any kind of deviant behavior. The danger of "slipping through the cracks" in societies which have abandoned their welfare safety nets can now be felt throughout the casualized labor force. Yet even the most basic jobs increasingly call for "facework," spontaneity, affective presence, intelligence, creativity. Ours is the age of what the German labor ministry has called the Ich-AG, the "I-corp.," the self as a business. The subjective consequence of the knowledge economy is a new blurring of the personal/the economic/the political, pushing the counter-culture to experiment with free cooperation and temporary autonomous zones in response. "When self-exploitation acquires a central function in the process of valorization, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of central conflict," remarks labor specialist and leftist philosopher AndrÈ Gorz. "Social relations withdrawn from the grip of value, from competitive individualism and market exchange, make the latter appear by contrast in their political dimension, as extensions of the power of capital. A front of total resistance opens up. It necessarily overflows the domain of knowledge production toward new ways of living, of consuming, of collectively appropriating public space and everyday culture. Reclaim the Streets is one of its most successful expressions."^[24]

The cycle of antiglobalization protests, launched in the overdeveloped countries by the European wing of the People's Global Action network in 1998, constituted the first eruption of this "front of total resistance" on the networked urban territory of the world-cities. Marked by a confluence of traditional social movements, single-issue activist groups, disaffected urban youth and rebellious cultural producers – visual and performance artists, musicians, open-air DJs, media freaks and computer hackers – these demonstrations often take the form of politically oriented techno-parties, no longer simply eluding police repression, but using all the resources of cooperative cultural production to actively target the sites and symbols of corporate control over intimate consciousness and public expression.^[25] If Seattle brought this front of resistance to a higher level, it was not only because of the greater complexity of the social movements involved, nor only because of the direct influence that the movement could now claim over decision-making at the summit. It was also because of the intensity of the urban battle, sparked off by disciplined affinity groups using sophisticated techniques of civil disobedience, and pursued by anarchist "Black Blocs" and untold numbers of city-dwellers revolted by the violence of what one analyst called a "police riot."^[26] A "Niketown," epitomizing the exploitation of distant labor, the cooptation of subcultural creativity and the transformation of the city into a corporate theme-park, was deliberately attacked and destroyed, giving rise in the process both to a transnational urban legend and to a complex form of solidarity between the social classes – whose public disavowal, all but obligatory for the middle-class activists, could be negotiated through the (quite plausible) attribution of the violence to undercover agents.^[27] Similar demonstrations took place in Washington D.C., Sydney, Prague, Nice, Seoul, Quebec City, Barcelona, Gˆteburg and other metropolitan centers, accompanied by the development of the Indymedia network and a process of intensive translocal exchange. For many in Europe, the movement came to a head in July of 2001 in Genoa, with a police riot on the scale of the one in Seattle and the murder of a protestor, Carlo Giuliani, followed soon after by the paralyzing shock of September 11. But a giant step further was taken in the highly developed but peripheral country of Argentina, where a currency crisis brought about an alliance between unemployed workers and the middle class, toppling the government with massive demonstrations on December 19 and 20, 2001, and opening a year-long period of radical social experimentation.

Water

Today, the Argentine movement has at least temporarily fallen, and the counterglobalization demonstrations, while as powerful as ever – with a major victory at the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun – have been pushed by terror and imperial warfare into the background of mediated consciousness. But the knowledge engendered during this cycle of struggles has given rise to a vast network of subversive potential, which permeates the breadth and depth of the world-cities. The autonomous marxist Harry Cleaver likens contemporary rhizomatic or meshworked social movements to the flux of what he calls the hydrosphere: "oceans with their ever restless currents and eddies, now moving faster, now slower, now warmer, now colder, now deeper, now on the surface."^[28] The intermingling currents which have begun to change class composition on a planetary scale^[29] convey both an intense awareness of the ways in which intimate desire can be manipulated, and a willingness to intervene in the creation of imaginary worlds. In this context, artists have regained a political protagonism. An example is the project "Nike Ground – Rethinking Space," by 0100101110101101.org. Expanding on the corporate-chameleon strategies of Æ™ark,^[30] this group collaborated with the alternative cultural center Public Netbase to illegally set up a 13-ton "infobox" on the Karlsplatz in Vienna. The imposing, glass-walled container distributed an enthusiastic and bizarrely serious proposal to rename the historic square "Nikeplatz" and to install a gigantic red "swoosh" sculpture at its center. One of the texts reads: "Picture this: rethinking space. Having the chance to redesign the city where you live... It's Nike Ground! This revolutionary project is transforming and updating your urban space. Nike is introducing its legendary brand into squares, streets, parks and boulevards: Nikesquare, Nikestreet, Piazzanike, Plazanike or Nikestrasse will appear in major world capitals over the coming years..."^[31] Residents were outraged at the project, and a furor arose in the press; Nike threatened legal action, then finally withdrew all charges. As a 01001 spokeswoman explained: "For this work, we wanted to use the entire city as a stage for a huge urban performance, a sort of theatre show for an unaware audience/cast. We wanted to produce a collective hallucination capable of altering people's perception of the city in this total, immersive way."^[32]

Can the sophisticated programs of corporate and municipal imagineering be challenged or even undone by a "long wave" of subversive projects, operating at different scales and temporalities, intersecting with the sudden outbursts of generalized urban struggles? Reverse engineering, as a hackers' manual explains, "is simply the act of figuring out what software that you have no source code for does in a particular feature or function, to the degree that you can either modify this code, or reproduce it in another independent work."^[33] The conceptual group Bureau d'Etudes extends the principle: "The deconstruction of complex machines and their 'decolonized' reconstruction can be carried out on all kinds of objects, not just computational ones. In the same way as you deconstruct a program, you can also deconstruct the internal functioning of a government or an administration, a firm or an industrial or financial group. On the basis of such a deconstruction, involving a precise identification of the operating principles of a given administration, or the links or networks between administrations, lobbies, businesses etc., you can define modes of action or intervention."^[34] Beyond virtuoso stunts like "Nike Ground," one can see the tactics of the emerging social movements – such as the "stop publicity" campaign or the intermittents du spectacle in France – as attempts to precisely deconstruct the neoliberal program of total social mobilization for the needs of a flexible economy. These tactics receive widespread support from the cultural/educational sectors, where there is an increasing awareness of the way that all "free time" is subordinated to market calculations. An expanding range of professionals and self-taught experts are turning their autonomous energies – their "off hours," if you prefer – to urban subversion. But can such efforts avoid the social and economic capture-devices which tend to isolate a relatively privileged "cognitariat" from the rest of the casualized labor force, or indeed, from the rest of the population? The "Chainworkers" movement in Italy has raised exactly that question – and partially answered it with a reinvention of the Mayday labor demonstration to match the new social conditions.^[35] The intermittents, uncomfortably conscious of the relative privilege afforded by their unique form of unemployment insurance, often conclude their texts and speeches with the phrase: "What we defend, we defend for everyone."

The struggle over the definition of social services, scientific research, cultural production and the natural and built environments either as private commodities or as common goods under some form of collective stewardship has become the central conflict of our time, disputed on a territory that extends from intimate subjectivities to the networked spaces of politics.^[36] Given the manipulability of public opinion in the contemporary media democracies, the destinies of this struggle will depend crucially on people's ability to recognize and resist the new techniques of social management. In this regard, some interesting news has arrived from one of the premier "creative cities," Barcelona. Spurred on by the successful instrumentalization of the Olympic Games in 1992, construction and real-estate interests have again joined hands with the city government to produce an urban infotainment project: "Forum 2004," also known as the "Universal Forum of Cultures." Held in a vast new seaside facility built right next to the poorest district in the metropolitan region (but without any particular benefit for that district), this 3 billion-euro project will act not only as a tourist magnet and an immense source of revenue for construction companies, but also as a simulacrum of the contemporary Social Forum movement, conducted under the sponsorship and direct control of the municipality and its corporate backers. In this cultural extravaganza, the manufacture of consensus is revealed as the primary postmodern industry: "The Forum does not claim to maintain an equal distance between Davos and Puerto Alegre, but to be the meeting place of the two poles, an exercise of dialogue between opposites," wrote the director of the event.^[37] A few days before this declaration was published in a national newspaper, a conference was convened in a public meeting hall, the Ateneu BarcelonÈs, under the title "FÚrum 2004: la gran impostura." The keynote speakers claimed that the forum is "something more than a lie and an imposture" – it is "an expression of the new political management of life," designed to "promote the trademark of Barcelona."^[38] The hall was packed to overflowing, and hundreds of people had been turned away for fear the structure might collapse! As though the "stop publicity" campaigns were welling up from underground, onto the urban stage...

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Brian Holmes