Estética y antiglobalización / Aesthetics and anti-globalisation

Political liberation considered as the liberation of art and by subjecting the worlds of life and work to the logics of capital was also included in the work of Jacques Rancière, who in his output resorted to metaphors to get to the very bottom of all the possibilities implicitly contained in the movement of the Ne pas plier group , and, particularly, in their motto: "We're not surplus, we're a plus." For Rancière, the difference between politics and the police lies in the fact that the latter ensures the distribution of words and things -to set it out à la Foucault-, whilst politics disarrange that distribution, creating the possibility of a new one. Yet political action is anticipated or represented by the metaphor , which unhinges the agreed linguistic order displacing or transferring the meanings usually assigned to the terms that compose it to another place. "The displacement caused by the metaphor -says Brian Holmes in one of his statements on Rancière's ideas- is what allows the creation or expansion of a community of speaking beings; this potential expansion of a community is what is needed for a debate on equality. Thus, modern forms of political association -or subjectivation- are historically linked to the emergence of an autonomous aesthetical dimension removed from any practical manipulation of useful things: an unpredictable sphere, which can spread out to infinity, that defines "the world of a virtual community -a demand for community- that dominates the world of orders and the partitions that impose a single use for each thing." "Metaphors -concludes Holmes- are the hieroglyphics of an unknown language, the demand for an unprecedented community." [ 10 ] This metaphorical activity was illustrated avant la lettre with gestures such as the identification of a whole left-wing generation with the demonstrators in favour of the liberation of Algeria who were thrown into the Seine by the police in 1961. "To identify oneself with the murdered did not mean speaking up for them (...) it meant furthering their fight, their opposition to a national institution that excluded certain citizens (those from the former colonies) whilst it included others (those from the metropolis)," as Holmes puts it smartly. It was also illustrated by the famous motto of May 68: "We are all German Jews." Yet it currently finds a cartload of opportunities to display its effectiveness in the linguistic and entrepreneurial machine built by the structure of transnational capitalism, vastly depending on the resources offered by the Internet. In this field, Rancière's metaphor is divided, metaphorising itself in pastiches and parodies to encourage the effectiveness of subversive activities even more. In this sense, rtm ark stands out. They are an anonymous group that appeared in the early nineties in order to finance activities involving "aesthetic or activist" sabotage which, given their emergence in an area that was bordering between legality and illegality, could not be easily sanctioned by the judges. One of the actions this group carried out consisted in supporting a group of war veterans who objected to war toys and proposed they exchanged the voices on Barbies and gi Joes -the stunning soldier perversely promoted as the famous doll's boyfriend. Consequently, whenever anyone bought one of the toys, they would be surprised to find they had exchanged their roles: Barbies stated they had been born to kill and Rambos said they wanted to have lots of children. rtm ark have a website, www.rtmark.com , where they inform of their activities and continue admitting projects that are in line with their strategy.

Perhaps the main difference between the politisation of art promoted in the past by communism and the one practiced by the anti-globalisation activists today lies in their radically different expectations. Whilst the communists, who via Engels (Angels...) had inherited the Christian perspective with the end of days and the final and decisive judgement, were willing to sacrifice the present and sacrifice themselves in the present in favour of a luminous future, the anti-globalisers tend to grant privilege to the hic et nunc , the here and now, both in terms of their activities and their achievements. By keeping up this attitude, they certainly have precedents in Situationism, a movement that did not want to wait for anything or anyone to do what it had to do, but even more directly in the trend controlled by Mikhail Bakhtin in the heart of that prolific conflict of trends called the Russian revolution... until it stopped being one. In his Rabelais ..., Bakhtin, cult figure amongst those who undertake literary studies from a polyphonic and multicultural perspective, vindicated the carnival and what it means as the maximum expression of a popular tradition that wisely combines episodes of liberation in the normality of a regime based on oppression and exclusion. In this tradition, Heaven is not beyond or after, it is here and now, available for those who, by transgressing, decide to reach it. Hence the unmistakably festival aspect of anti-globalisation demonstrations, whose joy, colourfulness and cheerfulness and happy irreverence move even its most determined adversaries. In the outburst of creativity and spontaneity, fancy dress, masks and caricatures, the Italian " tutti bianchi" have up until now acted as angels. Does this mean that the " Black Bloc" act as birds of ill omen?