AGENTUR - Notes on Problems and Forms of Work

One problem that is central to the current work of Agentur – an independent, multidisciplinary research group which was formally founded in Stockholm in the winter of 2019 – is how we should attend to apparent analogies in history.

During the present year and until late spring 2021, the group works on a research project titled “The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts”. It is a widely framed project, which studies a range of artistic practices, cultural organizations, and policy initiatives that relate to the different “popular front” endeavors in Europe and beyond in the late 1930s. Endeavors, that is, to set up broad, left-wing coalitions between communist, socialist, and liberal parties and organizations in order to establish a united front against the rise of fascism.

The project proceeds from a general analogy between the social and political conditions today and the situation that the popular front coalitions faced in the 1930s when a long-term economic crisis, a sense of political disorientation and disenfranchisement, and a seemingly insurmountable polarization on the left combined to set the stage for the surge to power of the extreme right. At a quick glance, the global maps of authoritarian regimes then and now look fairly similar. The popular fronts rejected polarization and defeatism in favor of coalitions uniting in resistance, forming the bases for comprehensive socialist reform projects.

Of course, as soon as you look closer, the superficial similarities unravel. Social, political, cultural, and technical conditions are fundamentally different. Things resemble each other only in name. We are today at a distance of three decades from the disasters of “actually existing socialism” and in the midst of a historical crisis for European social democracy. Our age is not the “return of the 1930s” – a notion that is doubly problematic in that it can induce at once a false sense of comfort, a vaguely nostalgic notion that all will be well in the end, and a fatalistic sense that history is destined to repeat itself, and that the order of events is therefore out of our reach as thinking and acting beings.

But this analogy between two separate historical contexts has nevertheless been productive for our work. It has permitted us, at a pre-critical, pre-political level, to recognize historically distant problems, struggles, and forms of action as relevant to our own conditions. It has made it possible for us to identify with the past, if by “identify” we mean simply being able to relate the decisions and actions of others to our own experiences, to an “us” rather than a remote “them” – which also means that the definition of “we” is called into question. The problem is what to do with such identification. It can only be a preliminary, something that gives meaning to the critical work that must follow.

Agentur’s core participants work in different fields. The group consists of poets, artists, researchers, critics, activists, designers, and public servants. External participants are also associated with the group on a case-by-case basis. This wide range of knowledges and interests is reflected in the variety of specific research topics that participants of the group are pursuing, individually and collectively. They stretch from theoretical, meta-historical questions of historiography and mythologization, canonization and exclusion, to practical issues of social and political organization, institution-building and technological experimentation.

For example, one of the reports the group is producing (I will return to the notion of “reports” soon) centers on a relatively little known text by the French author Marc Bernard, a first-hand documentary account of the anti-fascist demonstrations that took place in Paris in February 1934, and that were instrumental for the deployment of the popular front strategy in France and internationally. Bernard’s text is, in a sense, doubly inaugural: it registers a decisive event in the history of anti-fascist and socialist organization, and it initiates the minor genre of popular front literature. Drawing on this text, which will be published in Swedish translation in Agentur’s publication series, the report will discuss the theme of unity as a political and aesthetic principle, as well as questions of the historical emergence of social, cultural, and political formations, their disruptions of previous configurations, and what continuities can be traced toward present conditions.

Another report centers on an article or prose poem, written by the North American author Tillie Lerner (later Olsen), about the large wildcat strikes among longshoremen in the San Francisco harbor in 1934, which were violently suppressed by the police, and which became a pivotal event for the development of the North American Popular Front. Here, the group’s report will discuss the strike as a mode of political organization and an artistic and literary motif, as well as the question of poetic writing’s contemporary and delayed political efficiency.

Yet other reports will center on the institutional history of the Maisons de la Culture in France, an extensive network of popular, left-wing cultural centers that were developed rapidly in the mid-1930s, and that came to serve an important function in popular front social organization, establishing a model that a later generation of cultural policy officials would seek to emulate; and on the factory journals of Simone Weil, her minute descriptions of everyday working routines at a car factory, where she took up employment, unrooting herself from her normal teaching job and social context in order to “philosophize with labor”, resulting in a literary work that belongs to the burgeoning 1930s genre of “documentary” and “report” literature, and that anticipates the political “establishing” literature of the 1960s and 1970s.

Reflecting these historically distant practices and problems back onto the present, we are at the most general level conceptualizing and organizing Agentur’s work in response to three processes that determine the conditions of cultural and political action today. First, the violent, far-reaching transformation of the structures and institutions of the public sphere through the process euphemistically known as “digitization” – in fact a vast realignment of means of production and social relations on a global scale, which confers enormous resources and powers onto a limited number of multinational, digital platform companies, historically unparallelled in scope and influence. This process has, of course, been further exacerbated by the enforced shift to a paradigm of online, atomized labor during the pandemic.

Second, the current surge to power of the new far right, locally and globally – a process that, as a condition of possibility, presupposes the persistence of deep structures of racism and prejudice, institutionalized differently in different national contexts, but whose efficiency and modes of organization today would not be thinkable without the new media structures that “digitization” is setting into place. The polarization of public discourse and of social relations on which the contemporary far right feeds, is not an unfortunate by-product of the technical structure of contemporary “social media” but integral to the business models of the corporations that control them.

These processes, in turn, are inconceivable without the continued hegemony of the neoliberal political and economic program – a program that is not called into question by the protectionist and anti-globalist rhetoric of the contemporary far right but is merely shifting shape into a more authoritarian configuration, where nationalist and ultraconservative social and cultural policies go hand in hand with economic policies designed to further the interests of global capital. As many prominent social theorists have shown, such a configuration is commensurate with basic tendencies of the neoliberal program, as that program was first outlined at the Walter Lippman colloquium in Paris in 1938, at the moment of the conservative reaction that brought about the fall of the French Popular Front, paving the way for the pro-fascist Vichy Regime.

The problems created by these converging processes are of an eminently political order and can therefore only be addressed at the most general political level. The area that Agentur seeks to study is an area where what we might call culture’s spheres of political action have intersected with those processes. One central theme for the group’s work is consequently the pioneering role of the popular front movements in the modern tradition of progressive cultural policy experimentation. Here, the policy and institutional initiatives of the Front Populaire government in France were perhaps the most significant example, although the Spanish Frente Popular experiments before Franco’s revolt in 1936 and the extensive network of cultural groups and organizations associated with the Popular Front movement in the US during the same period also established models with far-reaching progressive implications – as proved via negativa by the violence with which they were suppressed by the right.

For Leon Blum’s French coalition government, in power during a brief and conflicted period between 1936 and 1938, a radical program of cultural democratization was a core element of their political project. On the one hand, they launched a wide-ranging set of measures for facilitating public access to culture so as to dissociate the cultural field from its historical dependency to structures of social and economic privilege – measures that, for their implementation, depended on an infrastructure of popular and grassroots organizations and institutions. On the other hand, such measures of cultural democratization served as the guiding principle for and were interlinked with a wider program of social, political, and economic democratization, ultimately aiming for egalitarian reform at the scale of society as a whole.

In these respects, the projects of cultural democratization of the popular fronts became important models for the “new cultural policy” debates and experiments in several European countries in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as the “action culturelle” debates in post-1968 France, and the far-reaching Swedish experiments with egalitarian modes of cultural production and distribution in the early seventies – initiatives that belonged to a period of social, cultural, and political radicalization, which in turn provoked the neoliberal counteroffensive of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on these histories, Agentur wants to raise again the questions of what a progressive cultural policy could be today, how it would relate to a renewed program of radical democratization at a comprehensive social scale, and how different cultural actors could contribute to the realization of such a program at the levels of individual and collective practice.

What would it mean to transform a pre-critical, pre-political identification with the struggles and actions of the past into a critical and political expression of solidarity with those struggles and actions? It would mean to try and regain a “we” across historical distance. In other words: to try and regain a tradition, critically asserting the continued validity of the project that animated it – the project of radical democratization at the heart of the endeavors of the popular fronts, for example. It would mean to claim that history is not over, to use an expression that serves as a motto of sorts for Agentur’s work. The connotations of the phrase are intentional; it is specifically supposed to assert the continuity of a progressive tradition against the fatalist proclamations of the “end of history”, announced at the height of the neoliberal restoration.

But critically asserting such continuity would demand precisely this, to be rigorously critical of its different aspects – not only taking into account its progressive heritage but also the legacy of failures and crimes that it passes on. That is, it would demand taking into account the other histories that are not over: histories of patriarchal dominance (never challenged at a structural political level within any of the popular front movements); of institutionalized racism (where the relationship between the internationalist, anti-colonial ideals to which the popular fronts nominally subscribed and the historical reality of continued colonial rule was complex at best, dishonest at worst); of an extractive ideal, defining nature primarily as a resource for human industry (an ideal to which movements across the political spectrum remained uncritically committed).

In this sense, Agentur seeks to learn from the modern tradition of critical montage techniques, in cinema, literature, art, and historiography. Critically mediated, the analogy between then and now could perhaps be seen precisely as a montage of two images that show two historical moments with the aim of denaturalizing them both, rendering them alien – ultimately aspiring to a properly historical understanding of the present: as open to change. Such a montage would seek both to hold the present responsible in the face of the ideals and struggles of the past, and to hold the past responsible for the contemporary fate of its ideals. It would imply that any assertion of continuity, of tradition, must also be an assertion of discontinuity and rupture, of rejection and renewal. To be responsible toward the struggles of the past would have to mean to work for the realization of their ideals, sometimes beyond the forms in which the past itself could realize them.

Agentur is set up as an experiment with new forms and methods for critical cultural work in a post-digital public sphere and an increasingly precarious labor market. The group’s research project on the aesthetics of the popular fronts is financed with a substantial one-year grant from Kulturbryggan, an independent public foundation sorting under the Swedish Department of Culture’s Arts Grants Committee. The simple, basic principle for Agentur’s economic organization is that money pays for work. That is, Agentur uses an absolute minimum of its economic means to cover costs for production and distribution and a maximum of its means for labor costs.

The idea behind this is simply to invert a standard that is all too familiar to many cultural workers, according to which the main part of project budgets are used to cover institutional, production, and distribution costs, while levels of remuneration for artistic or critical work remain vanishingly low (or “symbolic”, as it is sometimes called. “Symbolic of what?” one might ask). The decision to invert this standard and only cover costs for labor, not for production, has wide-ranging consequences for our work. It means, simply, that every production must be a co-production. No publications or arrangements can be realized without the resources held available by the institutions, platforms, or publishing structures that accept to collaborate with us. No reports can be circulated without the distribution channels and networks of our different hosting partners. Agentur’s own web page serves mainly as a site for announcements and information, and as a directory, pointing users toward material published elsewhere.

In this respect, Agentur functions as an agency or a bureau for the mediation of work opportunities to its participants. It proposes reports to potential co-operating partners, who, if they choose to enter into collaboration, are invited to engage with the work to the extent that they wish – details are negotiated on an individual basis. It is important, however, that Agentur’s remuneration of the research that its participants are conducting within the framework of its general research projects does not replace normal fees from collaborating platforms, publications, or institutions to which Agentur’s participants contribute. Such an arrangement would risk merely setting up a zero-sum game, where public funds are shifted between underfinanced cultural actors, and absurdly inadequate levels of remuneration are sustained, if not suppressed further.

Agentur’s reports are the public manifestations of its research. We have chosen to call them “reports” for two reasons. First, because it suggests the idea of a “research report” – that is, a provisional account of the problems and findings of an ongoing research project. Such a connotation is adequate to Agentur’s work in general, and to “The Aesthetics of the Popular Front” in particular, due to the inherently experimental, open-ended nature of that work and the relatively short-term nature of the project in question.

Second, the notion of “report” can bring to mind the literary and journalistic genre of “report literature” – that is, the genre of documentary writings, often based on first-hand experiences of different social or labor contexts and sometimes drawing on montage techniques that were important for the reinvention of literary realism during the 1930s, not least in the US of the New Deal and the Farm Security Administration. That genre then enjoyed a resurgence during the 1960s and 1970s as an explicitly political mode of writing, sometimes connected to the practice where intellectuals “established” themselves at different workplaces in order to be able to report properly on current working conditions. Agentur wants to draw on both of these aspects of the “report” concept while projecting them into a different media technological context where printed media is not the only, or even the primary, conveyor of critical research.

At a primary stage, the politics of the popular fronts was a politics of unity in resistance. The reality of impending crisis made it necessary to proclaim “unity of action” – this was the slogan around which social democrats and communists spontaneously assembled during the anti-fascist demonstrations in Paris on February 12, 1934 – across political differences, in spite of irreducible heterogeneity among parties and organizations. Agentur seeks to import this notion as an experimental principle for the intellectual, aesthetic, and editorial composition of its output. Agentur’s reports are not thematically organized, as collections of partial explications gathering in a hermeneutic concert around an unknown core. Instead, they are each organized around one historical document, to which the separate contributions respond in different ways, departing in different directions, using different means of analysis and expression. There is unity between the histories they recount, the contemporary experiences that they register, and the different political positions that they propose, because they proclaim it.

Agentur’s reports are collaborative and therefore, by necessity, multidisciplinary. Their format is an aggregate one, combining different formal techniques, material supports, and media. They can include visual artworks, texts, films, or other kinds of presentation. They seek to draw new aesthetic, intellectual, and pedagogical values from the collaboration and the friction between distinct artforms and modes of discourse. One and the same report can combine didactic presentations and theatrical performances, sculptural works and documentary films, poetry and essays. Generally, each report will have one spatial, event-based component, one audiovisual component, and one printed component, all with their own temporalities, modes of public manifestation, and modes of circulation. None of these components are of secondary importance. Instead, their combination is intended to forge an aggregate mode of public presentation that to some extent might remain refractory to prevalent, reductive modes of communication and interaction.

The components are aggregated and sequenced through a simple protocol of production. First, contributions are prepared for a public event, with reference to one historical document. That event, which should be relatively limited in duration, is recorded on video, forming the material for a simple, documenting program, edited and completed in post-production, and then published online via the channels of collaborating partners, linking to Agentur’s own site. The contributions to the event, in turn, form the material for a printed publication, which will be produced according to the timetable demanded of editorial routines. An important idea here is that this protocol should facilitate simple and relatively light production, reducing the number of formal and structural decisions that have to be made in each case so that focus can instead be placed on the critical work itself. We could call it an experiment in standardization within the context of a necessarily fragmented, nomadic production method.

To the degree possible, Agentur also strives to allow the choice of its media of public presentation and distribution to be dictated by utility, by the demands of the critical work, rather than the other way around. Another important aspect of the group’s work is consequently the attention to and the experimentation with the “apparatuses” or “dispositives” of intellectual and aesthetic presentation. Drawing on histories of mobile display systems, documentary theater scenography, and experimental pedagogical visualization tools, Agentur seeks to develop what we might call an “endogenous” support structure for the mediation of its reports, so as not to be consigned to the “exogeneous” structures provided by the major platforms and networks of contemporary media.

In this respect, Agentur invokes a tradition of experiments with the progressive functions of different media systems – systems of display, communication, distribution, interaction – under shifting regimes of cultural production and reproduction. For example, the French Popular Front experiments with setting up “photographic museums” in libraries, schools, or social centers around the country, where reproductions of historical artworks would be exhibited for new audiences using light and advanced display techniques – explicitly devised as a decentralized, institutional version of the musée imaginaire, a notion first outlined by André Malraux in 1935 – were designed precisely as measures of democratization, aiming to extend the domain of the public, rather than contracting it, through measures of privatization. Agentur seeks to defend the tradition of such attempts to employ new media technologies for extending the realms of social and cultural self-determination as against the predominant tendency of using them for opening up further dimensions of social existence for exploitation and control.

Of course, we have been forced to revise our plans and ambitions because of the pandemic. During lockdown, the regular research seminar, which has been our main framework for internal discussion and organization, was moved online, to mixed results – although we count on being able to resume physical meetings in the fall. The series of public arrangements we had planned to launch in late spring was evidently postponed but will now proceed starting early fall. The events will not be public in the strict sense of the term, however, but rather a sort of studio event for limited audiences. Emphasis will be placed on the publications and the documenting programs – where the aesthetic and intellectual polyvalence of the notion of “document” will be fully embraced – rather than on the live events. But we are prepared to revise our plans again if conditions change.