OurGoods

Repressive Ambiance Implodes

Andrea Liu opened the class by addressing the pedagogical structure and context of Trade School itself: “What conditions make this container possible?” From there, she presented four diagrams: her knowledge of the relationship between post-structuralist thinkers, a “Blueprint for Baudrillard,” an “implosion map” for modern and post-modern concepts (on sticky cards) to get placed into, and “the arbitrary nature of the sign.” The class speculated about simulacra and a desire for “the real.” A discussion followed about Budrillard as a nihilist, cynic, or romantic and one student said “everything is already corrupted” for Baudrillard and quoted his dictate to “defeat the system with hyperlogic.”

Contextualizing Baudrillard against the backdrop of a post-structuralist destabilization of meaning, Andrea describes the simulacra as a “Brave New World” colonization of reality—not by an entity, a state, or a discrete act, but by a ubiquitous repressive ambience created by the media, cyberspace, cybernetic models, computers, information processing, entertainment and knowledge industries, city planning, shopping malls, eugenics, reproductive technology, the cyborgization of humans, etc. Even food (genetic engineering of food) and money (speculation, derivatives) are simulacra now. Agency, nihilism, the designation of exchange value vs. use value in the context of a barter system (Trade School), and how psychoanalysis fits with Baudrillard were questions asked by the students.

Me: Why are you interested in Trade School?
Andrea: I taught at the University of Trash at the Sculpture Center last summer and then was one of 25 core participants at Nightschool at the New Museum, so temporary schools as a site of alternative pedagogy interest me.  Specifically with Trade School, it has the potential to be a self-organized, (relatively) autonomous experimental space not beholden to a Board of Directors, the art market,  and other ossified structures and “strings attached” of institutionality, much like Black Mountain College. In a nutshell, I am interested because it is not ossified yet, and it hasn’t been glazed over yet into a “package.”

Me: Why do you think OurGoods (barter for creative projects) can make the world better?
Andrea: Let’s just take the word “OurGoods.” (actually i meant to say this at the beginning of the lecture when i was talking about OurGoods, but completely forgot). You have the word “goods,” which for me immediately conjures up a private property capitalist individualist-oriented ethos. Like the Saturday Night Live Sketch years ago where a girls says,”Hey I look around me and I see everybody has all this STUFF. And I ask, “WHERE’S MY STUFF?” Goods=possessions=consumerism=individualist capitalist ethos. But then you have the word “Our,” which connotes a communal, sharing, collectivist ethos. It was if the word “Our” (placed without a space in front of “Goods”) punctures and pierces the word “Goods,” infusing the individualist possessions-oriented ethos of the larger society with a communal collectivist prefix.

Me: How do you think OurGoods might fail?Andrea: Oooh…hard question…I have no idea what its goals are, so I have no idea what would constitute “failure” for it, or if that word even makes sense in the context of Our Goods. It is so binary a word, a word I associate with the win/loss either/or mentality of sports (or people trying to open a business). Probably the only way I can see it failing is if it ceases to be exactly what it is now. Projecting my own hopes onto it, then according to that measure, it could fail by “selling out.” But were it to ever sell out, then presumably it would be doing that voluntarily, so for it it would not constitute failure. So how could our goods fail? by opening a storefront in chelsea!