Part One.

The hypothesis that Reinaldo Laddaga displays in "Estética de la emergencia," a book recently published in Buenos Aires by Adriana Hidalgo, is ambitious and crucial. In his view, we are in the presence of a new "regime of the arts" --the concept belongs to Jacques Ranciere--, that would, on the one hand, bring to a close the esthetic age of art --a period extending from the end of the XVIIIth C. to the decades of the 60s and 70s in the last century--, and, on the other hand, open a new era about which we know little but which would involve fundamentally new forms of production, conceptualization and visibility of artistic practices. A whole constellation of the arts, Laddaga points out, is taking shape while intersecting with modes of eminently immaterial and communicative production, taking place in the work sphere, in political practice, the sciences and in the ways that people and information circulate within a highly fluid globalized economy that is post-national and post-state oriented.

The concrete cases providing a foundation to the hypothesis of a new regime in the arts --that Laddaga will call practical, and which in this interview he will, all the same, question-- are: Peter Watkins' La Commune, Paris 1871; Christian Schaefer's Park Fiction; Roberto Jacoby's Proyecto Venus; Lisa Robert's What's the Time in Vyborg; the Wu Ming group's La Ballata di Corazza; and Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks' Translation Map. Of course, here, personal names do not refer so much to an author as to the person who designs the initial architecture of a project and puts it forward to a community in the making with which s/he finds a sphere of potentially common interests. Each of these projects brings into existence a sphere of collective input that is sizable both in time and in the number of participants required; a space that is neither strictly private nor totally public, in quite the same fashion as the modern concept of the public domain implied a universal and undifferentiated receptor. This individual related to the work within a situation of intimacy and isolation.

On the other hand, it is possible that these projects will involve the production of a work of art, except that what is going to be involved is an entity that has been left open ajar. To a certain extent controlled by its "advancer" but to a certain point not so controlled: the object will acquire relevance thanks to what each individual or group brings to it pending each one's possibilities for collaboration, but above all it will be the medium through which the implicated subjects will find it possible to shape themselves into an autonomous community. From all of which follows a new idea of the public domain, implying at once a necessary closeness and a propensity for communicating at a distance as well as for unexpected encounters: which is what the new technological networks and the very fluidity of contemporary subjectivity are bound to facilitate.

What is involved is a set of post-disciplinary tactics that include artists equally as much as non-artists, whose evolution runs parallel to the weakening of the disciplinary regime theorized upon by Foucault and which involves, among other things, the running aground of that characteristically modern way of grouping art around a sphere of production, and perfectly separating it from everything else.

One of the questions one asks while reading Estética de la emergencia deals with how art might contribute to the shaping of new political trends. If community today is not something that is established a priori, but is in constant need of assembling, we might say that an act of creation would be involved whenever a community is brought into being. Nonetheless, nothing prevents these communities from establishing simple mechanisms for exercising control that, at the micro level, reproduce global marketing strategies for modulating subjectivity.

In this sense, some of the cases that Laddaga observes might be defined as communities of resistance, and others, as forms of exchange that in no way can be set apart from the vast inventiveness of the marketplace. It is not, hence, a militant lecture that the philosopher advances but rather a theorizing on new kinds of associations from the point of view of its morphology. The following interview intends to follow these new and complex aesthetic social structures to some extent, taking as a point of departure a fundamental question: the question as to what, in a post-Marxist world, the left would be inclined to support.