Echology — 1st Manifesto
June 2018
“Art as Community”
1.0 The artist has become a brand, enslaved to the exigencies of the business card and its absurdly singular nominations, codified in the incessant stream of Instagram stories and self-affirming status updates, swept along by the “me” mentality of free cultural agents striving to pin their personas on a slender résumé of selfies and specialized skills conferred by educational institutions designed to produce nothing but good neoliberal subjects brimming with social capital and bound by debt. “We already have amongst us too many artistically old men who have missed out on their own nineteenth century,” says Guy Debord, himself already a bit un-artistically old. WE, on the other hand, already have amongst us too many pop culture rock-stars, social media “influencers” and “content creators” who have missed out on their own aughts of MTV stardom. The Real World is not real anymore. It is more real than the real. Portlandia precedes Portland. Platforms prescribe desires. BEWARE: the container is not merely a container. It’s an encoder, an epistemic ego factory shaped by economic interests. We need revolutionary form creators, not more content creators. Infused as our content may be with any variety of subcultural, even anti-capitalist aesthetics, the collapse of art into the sweet embrace of the brand remains the defining style of today’s cultural production.
1.1 How to intentionally suck at branding and still survive in platform capitalism? PLAY. We will make “sucking-at-branding” into a deadly serious play-brand. This is not the refusal of branding as in “normcore,” the deliberately generic uncool which is only the province and reaffirmation of whiteness, AKA those who can afford to be basic, for whom normal ever existed and for whom hardcore was only ever a fashion choice and not a necessity for life. This is an oblique pivot, a slant rhyme, an identity scramble inspired by Echo’s détournement, her deft play with the codes of language, the words she echoes back transformed. Echology encourages the playfully performative usage of a repertoire of personae, pseudonyms, social media handles, masks, costumes, etc. A theater of deadly serious play. The artist sticks to one mask only long enough for its cachet to become exploitable—its hype—at which point they disappear under a new moniker, genre, style, persona, dispersing the accrued cultural capital while retaining for themselves a field of possibility unhindered by expectations related to repetition and brand recognition.
2.0 Individualism is not simply an idea, but a political and economic weapon used to govern and police our everyday lives. Solidarity has given way to the smooth flow of global capital, while precarious working conditions lead to increasing competition, isolation and depression. Individuals flock to identity-based communities in search of belonging and security. Yet the politics of belonging plays right into the hands of a capitalist social atomism by pitting identities against each other in a metrics of oppression. Meanwhile our identities are captured, monetized and fed back to us as advertising. Queerness is taken up by non-queer pop-stars vying to remain relevant. American Apparel features female armpit hair to cash in on #feminism. Pepsi stages protests to sell more soda. Oppression pays. And it comes full circle to its absurd conclusion: Boston approves a permit for a Straight Pride Parade, the new “oppressed majority” led by Milo Yiannopoulos. While identity has catalyzed important interventions into the disparities of representation, a politics of identity can only lead to a reification of the individual and its economic instruments.
2.1 How to create a community of people with nothing in common? Choose an arbitrary attractor: FOOD. Everybody wants a sandwich. Echology will operate a café, strictly as a front, a commercial facade for anti-capitalist experimentations in the exchange of non-monetary value, the building of non-hierarchical collectivity, the creation of worlds, of play. Unlikely people can come together for no specific reason. Just to sit. To eat. To read. To discuss. The location must take into account the urban politics of gentrification and its implications for diversity and accessibility. As much as possible, we will try to locate the space at the intersection of a wide range of communities. Integrate a wide variety of attractors. The menu must be accessible, and delicious. BUT NO MEAT!!!
3.0 Echology rejects the notion of creative practices as separate domains for the purview of specialists. This model of creative production mirrors the specialization of knowledge fostered by our educational institutions, and the division of labor required in entrepreneurial culture.
3.1 At Echology, anyone can propose a project in any domain regardless of their résumé, training or credentials. There are no official Artists, but only Amateurs, from the Latin amator, meaning “lover.” Echology is a collective of professional amateurs, amateur lovers, self-published poets, karaoke masters, DIY inventors, fake-it-till-you-make-it baristas and self-taught chefs. Professional artists looking to add lines to their CVs and bolster burgeoning art careers can look elsewhere. Likewise, The Death Of The Author was not a metaphor, but a slogan: every reader is also a writer (every reading is also a writing); and a tactic: the library books will be defaced with marginalia, displacing authority from authorship, fostering instead an active engagement with knowledge production. We will build a zine library and host zine-making workshops to encourage independent, non-professional publication. All books and zines are free for the public.
4.0 The Professional Amateur is not just a romantic figure, but an inherently political one. The specialization of knowledge and labor provides the material foundation for the myth of the private individual on which the persona-brand is built, a social atomism of individual lives shaped by privation. Private property is a colonialist myth. In fact we own nothing, but we are privatized, deprived of meaningful social contact as our cloistered existence contracts upon itself. The more it shrinks, the more it appears to be “mine.” Becoming crass and complacent, the individual settles down amidst his [sic] belongings, to which he [sic] in effect belongs as a function of their market value. Thought, feeling and experience are all reduced to the status of property on par with furniture.
4.1 Contrarily, we will elevate FURNITURE to the level of the exuberant production of collective desire. THE EXUBERANT COUCH is the new model for the autonomous artist collective. Private space will be minimized. Bedroom walls will be torn down. Interior layouts will be modular.
5.0 Artists today must become their own small business proprietor, for whom administration, marketing and self-promotion will comprise 90% of their time, while the remaining 10% is devoted to the work itself, leaving little or no time for the fulfillment of basic needs.
5.1 Echology will aim to relieve this burden by facilitating collaboration, skill-sharing, grant-writing and networking. Equipment will be shared and the studio space will be accessible. Echology is not a label, a gallery or a presenter. Echology aims to cultivate an ambience of care and support in which the artist can take control over their means of expression. This involves providing time, space, equipment and resources, BUT ALSO MEANS PROVIDING inspiration, play, leisure, laughter, literature, a homemade meal, GOOD COFFEE, a little fresh air… those very luxuries necessary for creative living. Hence the café, the library and the garden: these initiatives aim to nurture the creative process and the relationships that sustain it.
6.0 In rethinking economic value, Echology seeks to de-center space and un-privatize time, which includes both the circular time of wages/rent, as well as the linear time of capital accumulation and investment. We want play-time, a temporality in which creative play is a dominant fact, where a web of initiatives and propositions can proliferate untethered to the stresses of monthly bills and uninterested in the deferred pleasure of future speculations. In place of the circle or the line, we want the SQUIGGLE.
6.1 In pursuit of play-time, the café must offer more than a “living wage” to workers, and must maintain affordable pricing for customers. Additionally, Echology will operate as often as possible on the basis of an exchange or gift economy. A monthly potluck / gift market will be held where neighbors can bring items and food, as well as skills and services such as performance, massage, arts and crafts, language lessons, haircuts, yoga, dance class, etc.
6.2 When the gift economy is not practicable, for example, a lot of the time (Echology is a pragmatic, not utopian project), the café will provide an economic interface and cash flow. As a non-profit organization, the proceeds from the café, after expenses, will go directly back into the projects being developed at Echology.
7.0 Concerning wages, it is arbitrary and absurd to put a numerical value on our hours. At the end of one hour, we are supposed to ask: “What do I have to show for it? Have I produced a profit? If not, wasn’t it wasted time?” In a play-time economy, wasted time is an impossibility. What if during that hour I have simply derived pleasure from being still, creating, thinking, talking, experimenting, breathing, playing chess, reading a book? Of course, we still have to pay the bills, and someone still has to make the tart. But what if we thought of compensation as an enabler? a creative capacity booster? rather than as a recompense for time spent working. So, the wages in the cafe must be determined with a view of balancing the need for sustainability with the desire to redefine “value” and the “productive” use of time.
7.1 We propose a fluctuating wage based on need. Each member decides their own wage. This will require not only radical trust, but a reconsideration of the very notion of “need” outside any moralizing framework.
7.2 Alternatively, everyone will have the same wage in a profit-sharing structure, which will fluctuate depending on how much revenue the café makes.
8.0 Narcissus is the primordial Selfie-King Brand-Master who buys Instagram followers in bulk and sends out friendly automated email blasts to simulate social solidarity. Enter Echo, cursed by Juno to repeat only the words of others, rejected by her beloved Narcissus, her body withers away until she is just a voice, untethered by the branded imaginary of today’s neoliberal spectacle. Echo takes our words, saturates them with emotion, desire, energy, passion, and returns them in a voice whose tone and timbre tamper with their original meaning. She taps the material resources of language, gives force to form, returns the difference latent in “our own” speech. Our proper names tremble, vibrating in the resonance of the encounter, de-centered and transformed by relation.
This echo is the return of a new value that is not reducible to the revenue (revenir) of pumpkin spice latte or banana bread sales. It is the rapport of relation. In place of the individualist brand factory, Echo builds an ecology of resonance: an Echo-logy. Not a platform for the amelioration of the conditions under which we produce art-as-commodity, but a malleable space for the production of art-as-community, the Echology itself as the art-i-fact, its collectivity a continuous making, a creative work enacting itself through its resonant relations.
To attempt utopia is inherently to fail. Just as Echo, cursed by Juno, can only repeat the words of others, forced to play within the given forms of the other’s speech, so we too can only play within the given neoliberal forms of wealth, privilege, inheritance, rent, wages, etc. The inherent contradictions in a nonhierarchical queer-feminist collective being initiated by a cis-white-male-property-owning-anarchist with an Amazon Prime account cannot be overstated. These imperfect starting points are not fatal flaws leading to inevitable failure. Failure must be rethought as the very force of the collective process. Failure requires care, patience, laughter and attentiveness. Contradictions must be seriously laughingly and collectively untangled as a central part of the work, never considered antithetical to it, never partitioned off as the private faults of one individual. This partitioning can only lead to self-pity, guilt and shame (quintessential neoliberal affects), which only brings it back to the self, makes it about me, again. Rather, failure and the creativity it spawns will be fostered and held within an Echology of collective resonance.