[Reader-list] The institutionalization of friendship (S23M remix)

[Jeebesh]

Victor Misiano: The institutionalization of friendship (S23M remix)

There would be no communities if there were no events, jointly lived  
through from the beginning to the end, which lose the possibility of  
existing in each of us.

Maurice Blanchot
“La communauté inavouable”

Sociology shows us that the only type of a social link not determined  
by some regional or family relationship, professional cooperation,  
ideological solidarity, or erotic attraxtion, is friendship. The aim  
of this text is to develop a theory of the relationship between the  
people around Piratbyrån as a history of friendship, while S23M (and  
some other projects) is nothing but a conscious attempt to launch a  
friendship formation project. As one of the S23M discussion  
participants said: “recent internet history is the history of  
friendships”.

A story of meetings. People in love feel the necessity of being  
together; colleagues are linked to each other by the production  
conveyer, and comrades-in-arms are connected by ideological discipline  
(like Piratbyrån when taking the shape of a lobby organization.) The  
specific character of friendship as a form of social relationship is  
that it does not presume a permanent interaction. Friendships are a  
type of serial solidarity. The story of friendship is a story of  
meetings.

The story of the kopimist community starts in 2003 when, in the  
framework of the #discobbedienti chat room, the Piratbyrån website was  
established. It was the legendary epoch after the collapse of the IT  
bubble, and as always, when anold system of relations comes apart, new  
contacts — and therefore new friends — emerged. It was during the  
discussions initiated by Piratbyrån, that these kopimists started to  
perceive themselves as a new generation, as an integrated body.  
Friendship is always a discovery: discovery of the Other and at the  
same time of the Self.

S23M is the next stage in the life of the Piratbyrån community, after  
the euphoria of discovering each other (and discovering internet  
freedom), and after the shock of the conflict with the outside world  
(the attacks against The Pirate Bay). At such a stage internal  
contradictions are inevitable exposed. Self-reflection and doubts  
starts to appear. One has doubts about one’s self, and about the  
Other. Crisis is always a moment when you need somebody else, when the  
solidity of a friendship is tested. Thus, is 2007, the Indian  
kopimists of the Raqs Collective invited Piratbyrån to Italy.

The confidential project. The friendship between the kopimists around  
Piratbyrån is not only a story of relationships between people. Very  
soon, if not at once, the kopimists started to percieve friendship as  
a strategic value, having the value of a project with an artistic  
character. The Walpurgis ritual, Oil of the 21st century, 0wnage — all  
these projects had one common feature: they employed the resources of  
friendly relationships as part of the program. These projects may be  
called confidential projects. The strategy employed in the framework  
of these projects can be called the institutionalization of friendship.

The structure of the confidential project. The main feature is that  
the human aspect dominates the professional. Because friendship is not  
creative cooperation, but the “ethical form of Eros”.

The confidential project excludes the possibility of a representative  
selection of participants. The choice is immanent in relation to the  
friendships. Friendship is a product of choice, although this is the  
only case of unmotivated social choice. Friendship is a choice within  
yourself. That’s why the usual curator’s routine — such as gender,  
national, generational, and regional balance — is impossible in such a  
project.

The confidential project is equally indifferent to external  
representation: to the artifact and to spectacular effects. The  
substance of S23M is the concealed emotional, psychic, and  
intellectual experience, which cannot be exhibited or shown. The main  
issue lies in the internal, not external, communication. Friendship  
does not require a promotion. It cannot be for others, only for  
yourself. The secret essence of confidential projects is that such  
projects can generally ignore the public. Friendly communication  
cannot be maintained on-stage.

The confidential project is also characterized by a freedom from  
hierarchy and functional specialiation. Friendship is not a  
hierarchical form of social relationship: it presumes a complete  
equality between all parties. Friendship does not know the Father.  
That’s why theconfidential project tries to ignore the role of the  
curator as power-source, which is inevitable in traditional  
exhibitions. Even if the function of the curator as an ideologue or  
manager is preserved, it should be carries out in such a way that it  
should create a regime of collective responsibility for every moment  
in the project, and for the ultimate result. There can be no  
successful or unsuccessful project in friendship. There can only be  
disappointment.

The most evident feature of the confidential project is the absence of  
any thematic program. Such projects do not serve the reigning  
discourses and intellectual fashions. Slogans like “Eyeball the media”  
demonstrate the absence of any discoursive, thematic, or investigative  
pre-condition. they simply refer to the event of communication and its  
context. Is it possible for friendly communication to have a theme?  
The value of friendly communication is the very event of  
communication. The theme emerges spontaneously out of the  
communication itself. The discourse is crystallized in the process of  
its formation. That’s why the most adequate manner of documenting such  
a project is a detailed description of the process. Concrete work and  
concrete photos cannot describe the entire experience. Such a project  
is valuable as lived experience.

Finally, the confidential project is not a Platonic dialogue, not an  
intellectual laboratory, and not a scientific workshop or panel  
discussion. Participants in confidential communities are not searching  
for truth. Nobody is trying to argue against something or convert  
somebody to his own beliefs. Confidence is the condition of friendly  
communication. The truth precedes it — it does not emerge in  
discussion. A friend does not give you good advice, but helps you find  
your own truth. That’s the way friendship differes from professional  
cooperation. In the latter, an individual builds a complicated balance  
of relationships between the Self and the Other. It also differs from  
love, which presumes self-denial. Lovers see themselves through the  
eyes of the Other. In friendship, we perceive our ideal self in the  
way we are perceived by the Other. That’s why the S23M participants  
can be found declaring their own ideas without making any effort to  
start moving towards each other.

The confidential project as a project of the transitional epoch. It’s  
clear that the structure of the confidential project is nothing but an  
attempt to create a strucutre for a collective artistic practice in  
the situation of the absence of an art system. Thus, the confidential  
project and the community around Piratbyrån (let’s call it  
theconfidential community) is exactly the type of transitional society  
characteristic for a time of digitalization. In an institutional,  
ideological, and moral vacuum, friendship becomes the last shelter for  
culture.

The direct result of the institutional and symbolic collapse in  
digitalization is the crisis of any objective justification for  
artistic practice. The old aesthetic ideology not only provided an  
objective foundation for official art, it also gave birth to an  
alternative. Avoiding official institutions and taking root in the  
sphere of the everyday, this alternative culture was also controlled  
by strict ideological principles. Acting as an opposition to the  
official institutional culture, alternative culture required the  
ideals and principles of “comrades-in-arms” and “the common affair”.  
Piratbyrån’s progress from the website and the book Copy Me via the  
Walpurgis book burning (which represented alternative experience in a  
new context and a new form) to S23M is essentially the evolution of  
the creative consolidation from the ideological to the post- 
ideological epoch. Friendship is the most non-institutional and  
personalized type of social communication.

In the situation where not only the normative ethics of the authority  
collapse, but the “comrade-in-arms” and “common affair” ethics of  
opposition collapse as well, it is friendship, “the ethical form of  
Eros”, which remains the most invulnerable. It is also invulnerable to  
the cult of immorality, now associated with the liberating ethos of  
digitalization. Finally, the ethic of friendship does not accept any  
relativization of moral feelings, which (especially under the old  
aesthetic regime) was the most efficient opposition to official  
morality. Links between friends can’t avoid morality, that’s what  
takes them beyond simple acquaintance and relations between  
colleagues. While accepting any forms of human expression (including  
transgression and excess), friendship denies only one — irony. The  
confidential project is a characteristic symptom of the new situation,  
in which ironic strategies are left in the past. It is based in a deep  
earnestness, almost an obsession (transgression and excess). In this  
sense theconfidential community is the only possible form in which to  
preserve ethics in the period of the transition from the ideological  
ethics of the analog age to a kopimist ethics of the post-analog  
society.

The confidential community’s denial of irony is an acknowledgement  
that deconstruction has exhausted itself as a strategy, and that  
what’s needed is a strategy of reconstruction. The constructive  
character of the confidential community is the utopian element that  
exists in any real friendship. The confidential project is the project  
of an ideal community or an ideal art system. In this sense, the idea  
of the institutionalization of friendship is mobilizing the major  
advantage of any transition epoch, when the old order has collapsed  
and the new one has not yet been built. The confidential community  
ascribes value to a pure potentiality.

The S23M discussions. Three poles. Even a cursory familiarization with  
the S23M material shows that the discussions were determined by three  
clashing positions. All the S23M participants unanimously acknowledged  
that this project is a product of the collapse of the traditional  
ontological order, and that all of them are essentialy “frustrated”  
subjects. However, their differentiation starts immediately beyond  
this statement. It is evident that from the perspective of Piratbyrån,  
the prospect of a new ontology is lost somewhere beyond the horizon,  
but that does not keep the subject from moving towards it. For  
Ollibolli, ontology is impossible, but the structure of that  
impossibility has its own ontological sense. For Altemark, finally,  
the symptom of the crisis do not mean the end of an ontology.  
According to him, the same ontology is now stronger than ever, while  
his main task is to defeat it. In other words, while the Piratbyrån  
members are trying to appropriate their frustration, to make it a  
source of some new positive matter, Ollibolli and Altemark are trying  
to withdraw from frustration by offering two negative strategies. So  
while Altemark and Ollibolli are happily taking part in the  
confidential project, it is only the Piratbyrån group which could  
initiate it.

S23M discussions. Analog-digital. The nature of analog-digital  
relations was the main nerve and the hidden leitmotif of all of the  
S23M discussions. Each of the supporters of the opposite points of  
view could not refrain from acknowledging that the analog-digital  
division is essentially the most painful trauma for the analog  
consciousness.

The members of Piratbyrån are trying simply to understand the nature  
of the difference between analog and digital, not to define it. The  
ethos of their efforts is, instead of making statements, to understand  
digital reality — to study its structure and its dimensions, and to  
reveal its links with analog reality. In other words, the members of  
Piratbyrån are trying to look at the internet not as a solid body, but  
as something fragmented. Therefor, from the perspective of aesthetics  
they are not artists, but hackers.

The idea of greyzones is basic to Piratbyrån’s identity. The S23M  
project — the residue was represented at Manifesta 7 — is nothing but  
the experience of a real border crossings, a study of greyzones, and a  
personal reflection on their conventional character. The members of  
Piratbyrån raise the issue of analog and digital — of infrastructural,  
artistic and legal borders — in conversation with both artists and  
hackers.

S23M discussions. Analog-digital. The system of art. For the S23M  
participants, as for kopimists in general, the analog is the only art  
system, while the digital is an everyday artistic reality which is not  
included into that system (is so, only partially and not on a fair  
basis).

As before, it was the Piratbyrån participants who initiated this  
discussion. They asked whether kopimists should blindly accept the  
laws of the art system, or mobilize the resources of critical thought  
with respect to the internet. For Ollibolli, this is not an issue.  
Because the phenomenon of contemporary art is a product of  
institutions, and almost all of these institutions are based on  
authorship, it follows that there is no other art than the authorship- 
based model. Therefore no critical distance is possible in relation to  
it, just as there can be no critical distance in relation to sunrise  
and sunset. In other words, the more you are an artist, the more you  
are an author.

In his turn, Altemark, who turns Ollibolli’s position upside down once  
again, assumes that the system of art is so powerful that true freedom  
only exists beyond it, and true identity only exists beyond copyright.  
Having started a terrorist struggle with the contemporary art world,  
he declares a “Black Tape Day”.

For Piratbyrån, the total acceptance or non-acceptance of the system  
is, if not a mistake, then at least a tactically short-sighted  
approach. It’s important to investigate and understand the inner  
mechanics of the system if only because the system can “deceive” you.  
Thus, it is important to keep in mind that the dynamics of the system  
have been maintained due to its ability to reflect upon itself  
critically. Therefore, the more critically you alienate yourself from  
the system, the more you’re an artist. The more you reveal that  
contemporary institutions are not relevant to your experience (even if  
your experience is the experience of art), the more you become a  
bearer of aesthetic values. Moreover, the more you build your identity  
upon the logic of negating the system, the less space — the less  
autonomy from the system — you leave for your identity. Finally,  
nothing helps a system to demonstrate its force as much as attempts to  
struggle against it. At the same time, nothing helps an artist to  
appropriate the might of a system better than an attempt to destroy it.

The confidential project. One last note instead of a conclusion.Upon  
looking through the S23M materials, one could rightly ask: what made  
this friendship possible? What made all of these people get together?  
Their intellectual positions are so different! They can agree on  
almost nothing!

It appears that the confidential project has another function  
characteristic of the transitional period: prophylaxis. Compared to a  
traditional exhibition (works delivered by trucks, assistants, the  
opening, and dinner with sponsors) the confidential project is  
extremely uncomfortable. Its experience can be justified by only one  
thing: its therapeutic impact. These projects are nothing but  
voluntary group therapy! These endless discussions are nothing but  
wholesome public acts of speaking out in order to eliminate depression  
and neuroses! Is it not social therapy that the institution of  
friendship serves?

The therapeutic impact of the confidential project is effective  
because it plunges the participants into extreme situations; it  
provides them with some kind of a threshold experience. The lack of  
comfort and the hardships of the confidential project are compensated  
for by the intensity of experience. Unlike an ordinary exhibition,  
taking part in such a project means taking a step into the unknown.  
That’s where the difference between friendship and other social forms  
lies. Friendship cannot be routine, it’s always an adventure. I am  
ready to bear witness that the participants in the confidential  
project think of it as one of the most important moments in their  
kopimist lives, similar to how worn-out veterans recall the years  
spent on the battlefield as the happiest period of their lives.

Finally, as I said before, friendship is a serial solidarity.  
Therefore, theconfidential project never degrades into a monotonous  
conveyer, because when they meet, friends always know that later  
they’ll have to part.