ISBN-10: 3-9501762-4-1, ISBN-13: 978-3-9501762-4-7

Publisher: Iaspis - International Artists Studio Programme in Sweden, www.iaspis.com

eipcp - European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
A-1060 Wiedeń, Gumpendorfer Straße 63b
A-4040 Linz, Harruckerstraße 7
www.eipcp.net

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GOLDEX POLDEX MADAFAKA, OR A REPORT FROM THE (BESIEGED) PI SECTOR 

Forms of Capital

In the 1970s, American sociologist Robert Putnam conducted research that can safely be called a tour de force of empirical sociology. Following the tracks of anthropologist Edward Banfield who, two decades earlier, studied the south of Italy, Putnam decided to solve the riddle of the Apennine Peninsula’s cultural, social and economic divide – between the developed North and the backward South – and to find out why the regions south of Naples resemble Africa rather than the rest of the state they belong to. Putnam quickly noticed that on the level of social praxis, the underdeveloped South’s main problem was the inefficiency of the local administration, which was simply unable to perform its basic duties (in every respect, be it education, culture, health care, law enforcement, and so on). Importantly and interestingly, Italy had just introduced a thorough reform of its administration, which had created in the whole country uniform structures of local and regional government. In the North, the reform created an efficient and well-functioning administration; in the South, the results were virtually nil: corruption, poverty, and permanent underdevelopment continued – and still do – in almost the same form as before, which should give something to think about to those who believe that the world can be made better by transforming, top-down, the administrative structures and mechanisms. 

Putnam’s research proved irrefutably Italy’s radical divide between two incompatible regions. But the author of Making Democracy Work did more than that: through laborious and scrupulous statistical analyses he proved what de Tocqueville had claimed a century before him and what Pierre Bourdieu articulated at roughly the same time in his theory of the forms of capital – namely that the power of nations does not stem from their material wealth, natural resources or administrative efficiency, but from the spontaneous, grassroots activity of individuals combined with an ability to act collectively. The strongest and most important correlate of socio-econo-political development was, Putnam found out, the number and activity of associations, clubs, hobby groups, and so on. And this means not only organisations of a social or political profile, but absolutely all groups created spontaneously and at grassroots level and focused around a common purpose, be it brass orchestras, bridge clubs, volunteer fire brigades, or Sunday schools. Putnam presented the conclusion in the form of a jocular maxim that if you want to strength democracy, you should organise Sunday picnics. 

Thanks to Putnam (and the aforementioned Bourdieu), we are able today to describe theoretically the mechanism responsible for this state of affairs. Civil-society organisations are incubators of social capital that is, of ties, contacts, trust and collaboration, which are the basis of collective action. And it is the latter – rather than individual action, as the neo-liberals try to convince us today – that is the foundation of social, economic and political development. Top-down administrative reforms hardly produced any results in the south of Italy, because social capital is not something you can decree with bureaucratic decisions. Rather, it is a side effect of activity geared towards purposes other than social development or economic welfare itself, it is, in a way, society par excellence, that is, repeated, favourable for all parties involved, interaction between more than three individuals. 

Grant Art

It would seem that the conclusion stemming from Putnam’s studies and Bourdieu’s theories for progressive policies – including cultural policy – is obvious: let us support the third sector! But things are not as simple as that. An attentive reader has noticed perhaps that in discussing Putnam’s research and theory, I never used the term ‘third sector.’ Not without reason, and certainly not only because Putnam himself does not use. Otherwise, I see no reason why we should not be translating into the contemporary languages theories that had been formulated before certain useful terms came into use. What I mean is that, contrary to what it would instantly seem, the third sector is not identical at all with the kind of groups and initiatives that Putnam describes. In fact, ‘third sector’ is the name of the problem rather than the solution. Its development coincided with the degradation of social capital that we have witnessed for several decades now in the developed West. Neoliberalism, stressing always and in every context the primacy of the individual over the group and affirming only one of the possible human motivations – egoistic greed – has slowly but surely undermined the ties and structures that are the basis of collective action, which in turn generates social capital. 

At the same time, the emergence of the ‘third sector’ has been accompanied by another trend – the professionalization and managerization of civil-society organisations. They used to be driven by sheer personal enthusiasm and their strength came from a synergic combination of eagerness, effort, and determination of groups of individuals united by a common task. Today, associations, foundations and the like increasingly resemble corporations run using the so called New Management Techniques (project management, team work, SWOT analyses, and so on). Professionalisation, hailed by the prophets of managerism as a development opportunity for the third sector, is in fact a means of transforming the spontaneous activity of enthusiasts, which has always been the basis of NGO work, into a crypto-capitalist enterprise. The copulation between the first and second sectors has bred a mutant: quasi-corporate entities doing, in a commercialised and banalised way, what well-organised public institutions should or profit-oriented private firms could do.  

A mutant like this can exist only by dint of an artificial life sustaining system. This system consists of programmes of subsidies and grants for non-governmental organisations. I don’t think, of course, that they are evil in themselves. The idea of common access to public funds is sound. The problem is how the system of their distribution functions. Today, it ‘corrupts’ (in the sense of provoking moral decay) the NGOs by making them dependent on grants. Instead of operating autonomously, diversifying their income sources and searching for creative ways of financing their activities (and there are plenty of options here, from membership fees, through innovative forms of business activity, investing on the stock market and speculating in real estate, to smuggling drugs, selling alcohol illicitly or seducing rich widows), the third sector has been increasingly addicted to grants. In practice, this means that rather than being able to pursue their own policies, third-sector organisations do what the authorities want them to do. That is why we should stop talking about non-governmental organisations and start talking about ‘quasi-governmental’ ones, in the sense that they are but a different means of achieving objectives defined by politicians and bureaucrats. 

Today this disease has entered a new phase. From a passive one – controlling the third sector by manipulating the priorities of grant programmes – the government has moved on to an active phase: a system of incentives stimulates and encourages the creation of third-sector projects and organisations serving purposes defined by the government itself. Culture is, unfortunately, particularly susceptible to this kind of corruption. We have therefore seen dozens of fly-by-night foundations that, having been in existence for months – or even weeks – only, run in competitions for subsidies worth hundreds of thousands or even millions – and win them. It sometimes looks as if the public servants deliberately sought out organisations that are intellectually and structurally weak, with not much of a success record of any kind, of a poorly defined identity and a mission muddied into typical liberal pap: ‘conducting analyses and studies in the field of contemporary and recent art; collecting works from the field of the visual arts for the purpose of their public presentation; collaborating with domestic and foreign cultural institutions pursuing like goals and with persons supporting the Foundation’s goals; documenting the Foundation’s collections and events in print and digitally; organising meetings and symposiums in the field of contemporary art.’ Institutions like this are perfectly suited to carrying out nice, pleasant and non-controversial projects and achieving goals that bureaucrats believe culture should serve: sweetening a city’s image, attracting investors, decorating public space with anodyne installations referred to loftily as ‘art in public space,’ stimulating tourism, and so on. An example? Take the Cracow-based Fundacja Wschód Sztuki and its ArtBoom festival – 1.5 million zlotys channelled through a ‘non-governmental organisation’ that is in fact an annex to a third-league commercial gallery and spent on an event whose main purpose was marketing: to attract tourists to Cracow, only this time to consume art rather than beer. No wonder, then, that an advertising campaign accounted for a lion’s share of the project’s budget. 

The foolishness of this strategy is that instead of instrumentalizing art to serve ad-hoc purposes, the government could use the funds to finance projects more experimental, and therefore more risky and less spectacular, but in the longer-term definitely more culture-producing (in the sense of generating new meanings and values). They would improve the city’s image more surely and meaningfully than events like ArtBoom. The problem is that this would probably take twenty or thirty years, and the politicians distributing funds for the ‘culture’ slot want effects now – or at least before the next local elections. 

Goldex Poldex, or Why It Isn’t Enough to Count to Four

In a reaction to, among other things, the third sector’s corruption, there has been emerging something that is sometimes referred to as the ‘fourth sector.’ It is comprised by non-formalised (in the legal sense) and non-commercial socio-cultural initiatives (sometimes also of a political dimension). The best example of this are squats and, similar to them, semi-amateur galleries, youth centres or ‘culture clubs’ that can be found in big cities all over the world: Poznań’s Rozbrat, Warsaw’s Elba, Paris’s Electron Libre and Les Frigos, collectives such as Pachamama or Lavaca in Buenos Aires, post-industrial spaces in New York’s DUMBO, and so on. Unlike the often banalised and opportunistic activities of the third sector, such initiatives offer refreshing honesty and freshness. But they also have numerous weaknesses. I don’t even mean the ‘artistic quality discourse,’ from the viewpoint of which much of ‘independent’ (does the term mean anything anymore?) culture is virtually worthless. It wouldn’t be difficult to demonstrate that the discourse serves chiefly to affirm social distinctions and that it is not about artistic value, but about emphasising class divisions, only this time on the basis of an allegedly uneven distribution of symbolic capital rather than material status. A greater problem is that the fourth sector has a tendency to define its identity through purely negative and exclusive procedures, serving above all to cement its own sense of moral superiority: we don’t participate in this, we aren’t present there, we don’t collaborate with those, we don’t want to see these here, and so on. As a result, ‘independence’ means that a group of a dozen or several dozen people turns into a mutual admiration society and goes on organising events whose main purpose, contrary to their radical slogans, is to confirm group identity. 

Do there exist alternative models of cultural activism that would enable us to avoid the trap of the four sectors? There is only one way to find out: empirically. It is necessary to design various modes of action and test them in practice. In this vein, together with two friends – designer Kuba de Barbaro and visual artist Janek Simon – we founded in Cracow something we called a ‘pi-sector institution’: Goldex Poldex. It is an intermediate product of a gold fever consuming our planet at a time of political instability, neo-colonial wars, and rising oil prices. Thanks to a little bit of help from Jah and Haile Selassie, in the morphogenetic field in which there had originally surfaced the idea of setting up a Polish gold mine in the Madagascar, there budded further ideas, including a local civic initiative called Goldex Poldex with its seat at Józefińska Street 21/12 in Cracow. This voluntary association of an unlimited number of members – ‘not following any models, open towards the future, and manically innovative,’ as Jürgen Habermas would say – is a cross between an illegal bar, a neighbourhood day centre, an amateur restaurant, and an art gallery. It is a ‘pi sector’ institution because it exists in a fractional, unexplored dimension of cultural production, interested neither in collaboration with public institutions nor in profit making. It seeks no sponsorships and no patronages. It  collaborates with neither the European Cultural Foundation nor with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. It survives on alms and proceeds from illicit liquor retailing. Its only purpose is fighting dead time, of whose flow reminds us the cat’s rhythmically wagging tail. 

We currently run Goldex as a four-member team (Aga Klepacka having joined us in June 2009). During the couple of months of our activity we have organised a dozen or so events, such as a sling shooting contest, a Nato anti-summit, exhibitions of Radzio Puciłowski, Malwina Rzonca, and Romek Dziadkiewicz, a New Age weekend with sage smoking during which Bartek Materka experienced ‘one of the most beautiful moments in his life,’ a weekend dayroom for children, and a couple of panel debates. We have also issued our own currency, the thalerex, which is the only legal tender on the Goldex premises (though by now, in keeping with the well-known economic formula, bad money – the Polish zloty – has driven out the good and you can only pay in illegal tender, zlotys). We are financing all this with our own money. You can say it is a kind of luxury potlatch that we can afford because each one of us earns money elsewhere. On the other hand, is culture not created as exactly a kind of potlatch? Construed literally as the wasting of money on something that produces vague benefits at best or none at all, or metaphorically, as the spending of time and energy on something that generates no profit? The pragmatism of the bureaucrats who earmark public finds on projects such as ArtBoom only reflects the pragmatism of the dominant class – the bourgeoisie. And that is precisely the kind of art that is being made – bourgeois, dignified, banal and boring. If we want art to communicate something, we need, in the first place, to invent new forms because ideology, as Lacan argued, is in form rather than content. 

Playing the Old Class Game

Of course, the Goldex model has various limitations. There is, for instance, a certain limit to the size of the projects we are able to carry out. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of debate. It is doubtful whether a ‘more is better’ philosophy produces good results in culture and whether it wouldn’t be better to use instead the enlightened junkie’s philosophy, i.e. ‘less is more.’ It is also so that our limitations in this regard are a mirror in which society’s dominant forms of thinking and acting are reflected. There are four of us so there is little we can do, but if there were fifteen, we could do much more. And that is not impossible at all. All it would take would be for ten people to start thinking differently and instead of begging for scraps from the councillors’ lordly table or hanging around in the anteroom of art, give up two or three of their restaurant outings a month and tax themselves voluntarily on behalf of this kind of cooperative – the potential would increase dramatically. And now let’s imagine that it wouldn’t be ten people but fifty. That is in fact what the ‘independence’ of the genuine ‘third sector’ has always been about: together we can do more. Unfortunately, the hegemony of the neoliberal ideology of individualism combined with the government’s practice of corrupting NGOs with a system of subsidies and grants have done a great deal to weaken the will and ability to act collectively. 

But it is not its limited scale that is Goldex’s main problem. I have never been a fan of spectacularity. In itself, spectacularity is a problem rather than a solution. What is most negative, though, and strongly manifested in Goldex, is a kind of class ghettoization and isolation of culture. Our activities attract a certain type of audience. At first, of course, those were chiefly our friends, but now get many people we have never seen before. A vast majority of them, however, belong to same class or social group: bo-bo, or bourgeois-bohemian.  

It is not that I don’t believe in the utopia of ‘working for the local community’ and regret we have been unable to fulfil it. We have never even tried to work this way. The objective truth is that Goldex is situated in a rather poor part of downtown Cracow (Stare Podgórze), inhabited chiefly by the proletariat, and we are an avant-garde of gentrification. In this regard, we are a victim of the economic base, which everywhere determines a similar mechanism of social and urban transformation: we opened Goldex where it was cheap and at the same time close to the city centre. We would not be able to operate elsewhere because we cannot afford prime rent and non-central locations such as Nowa Huta are out of bounds for most people. It is true we have done nothing in particular to attract our neighbours, but nor have we tried to exclude them in any way. In practice, it looks so that the posters advertising our events that we put up on the walls of the tenement in which Goldex is located are torn off almost immediately by the house’s very inhabitants. This way, both us and them simply continue to play the old class game. 

What to Do?

I have done different things in my life: I have a PhD in sociology, teach at the university and have written a couple of books, but I also worked black as a sandwich delivery man and a grocery shop assistant,, I was a bike dispatch rider, a radio journalist, and have had to do with various cultural institutions: for 10 years  now I have co-run the Ha!art publishing house with Piotr Marecki, I co-founded the Stowarzyszenie Commbo association, collaborated with Fundacja 36,6, and for two years worked as curator at Cracow’s Bunkier Sztuki. I mention all this not to present myself as a veteran, but because this biographical-institutional macro-psycho-geography, this existential macro-drift – a passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées – has taught me one thing that seems important to me with respect to the shaping of a progressive cultural policy: that the basic societal problems of culture – the issues of production, distribution, and availability – do not stem from the world of culture itself and cannot be solved within it. Goldex’s problems are a symptom, and cultural institutions and their modes of functioning focus like in a lens the class mechanisms and divisions of the societies we live in. In other areas of life – entertainment, education, consumption, work, sport – we usually encounter a greater or lesser diversity of social types and identities, whereas in high-brow culture (for I am not talking here about the culture of multiplex cinemas) participates only one segment of society – the bourgeoisie. That is why, irrespective of how many more wise men write how many reports and how many bureaucrats invent how many new ways of financing cultural production, no real change will occur, just like in Putnam’s south of Italy, because the problem sits elsewhere. It sits in the capitalist economics of time, or, speaking in Jacques Rancière’s terms, in its oppressive nature, that is, the fact that it forces most individuals to occupy a strictly defined position and play a rigidly defined set of roles: to perform stupefying work and then to consume equally stupefying entertainment during the so called ‘spare time.’ This, in turn, fuels the mechanism of the uneven distribution of cultural capital. Those who lack it – because they have no time to accumulate it – are unable not only to ‘understand art’ but even to decipher its communication code, that is, to recognise a work of art as such. This won’t be changed by any bureaucratic reform of the functioning of public institutions of culture, because it is not them that determine how symbolic capital is distributed (or if they do, it is to a very small extent). Instead, they largely adapt themselves to the existing inequalities and divisions. They cannot be counted on to carry out a revolution. In fact, as Guy Debord argued, and which could serve as a fine motto for a progressive cultural policy – the point is not for poetry to serve the revolution, but for the revolution to serve poetry. 

Jan Sowa / www.goldexpoldex.pl 

[Translation: Marcin Wawrzyńczak]