Freelancers are aware of their replacement

Every week, Look At Me publishes an excerpt from the new non-fictor-book, which goes out in Russian. This time we present the book by Pascal Gilen, The Mumble of the Artistic set, which is published as part of the joint publishing program Ad Marginem and the Garage Museum of Modern Art.

Situational ethics: ethics of art

External trauma and global hysteria

Today's interest in ethics is not surprising. Political leaders - mainly from conservative and/or neoliberal circles - complain about the decline of values and talk about the need for new morality, faced with meaningless vandalism and violence. When young people in the suburbs of Paris and London in blind rage give a way out adrenaline, mass media and politicians immediately pronounce beautiful words about morality. These politicians themselves often are responsible for the destruction of the structures of public solidarity, for the “deditude” of education, for the depreciation of employment and labor protection conditions, and at the same time, without a shadow of doubt, indicate the “antisocial” behavior of today's youths and the lack of patriotic feelings among some newly -member members of our society. Governments systematically cut civil rights and undermine traditional institutional guarantees, recalling citizens about their obligations. It is assumed that citizens should know their duties, independently be responsible for their fate, demonstrate independence and entrepreneurial dexterity. Citizens must, of their own free will, learn all their lives in order to remain modern. In the end, they are responsible for preserving their workplace themselves, not a paternalistic state. Knowing very well that citizens should more and more rely solely on their own body, politicians and mass media urge them to lead a healthy lifestyle, impose prohibitions on smoking, declare the war obesity and encourage sports. During inspections and inspections, a struggle with the free market generated by the free market in the food chain, citizens from all sides are surrounded by instructions on a healthy lifestyle and bioethics, dictating the importance of maintaining the body and spirit of citizens in the proper form. In the end, in the disappearing state of universal well -being, this body is increasingly dependent on itself in order to ensure its own quality of life, now in the future. While the rigid ecological ethics is still striving to get rid of the side effects of the industrial revolution, there was an urgent need to fight with the methods of biofilament with the new consequences of the post-industrial era. Stress, emotional burnout, depression, overeating and drunkenness are treated by doctors, come out with later in gyms and criticized by glossy photographs of ideal athletic bodies. Here, environmental ecology, social and mental ecology are built here.

However, according to the sociologist, Felix Gvattari, there is one indisputable statement: today nature, society and soul are exposed to the same principle - all three are completely “determirritorialized”. In post -industrial capitalism - or “ubiquitous world capitalism,” as Guattari calls it, not only individuals and society, but entire ecosystems are supplanted from their former places. In relation to the Agamben emergency, we can really say that the separation of individuals and civil rights, as well as the erosion of the legal sphere, gives rise to non -sorceress. The depreciation of citizenship entails existence, which has neither a spiritual nor socio-political basis. Therefore, the inhabitants of the camp under construction are only responsible for themselves and their own survival. When, in order to survive, a person has to constantly move - in thoughts or in space, then responsibility for the environmental and social environment fails. Those who come out of the structures of solidarity are given to the power of the principle of "here and now." They have to resort to short -term thinking, since they are obliged to rapidly, flexibly and with benefit for themselves to anticipate constantly changing and unpredictable opportunities. For illegal migrants, but also for freelancers, a long -term perspective becomes hard -to -use. Their feeling of time practically becomes a feeling of “instant time” if we quote the sociologist John Urry.

Citizens must, of their own free will, learn all their lives in order to remain modern .

The first pathology of instant bottomlessness, or bottomless instantry, is that it flourishes in the hyperseet world equipped with high -tech digital information systems. In this world, such "timeless time" is separated from the previous "time time", which we know from the era of the industrial revolution. This means that time for the first time goes beyond the limits of the "possibility of human consciousness." One of the signs of computer networks is large amounts of memory. In addition, from our experience with a personal computer, we know that it contains inconsistent traces of all our actions, all requests for search engines and all ever transferred files. In itself, this property is fundamentally changing our attitude to time. If you add here methods that allow you to quickly find and restore files, it turns out that the worldwide network remembers almost everything. Saved archives, past events, including documented damage, can be transferred to the present for a few nanoseconds. In other words, memory can be continuously updated, and the past can easily penetrate the present. Thus, the story itself becomes "instantaneous." The same applies to personal stories. Thanks to digital memory, forgetting is only half. That is, people can delete from their memory and forget some events, but their digital biography can always be restored than others can be happy to do.

However, psychoanalysis teaches us that displacement from consciousness and selective amnesia are functional mechanisms for protecting against traumatic experiences. The ability to instantly restore the digital "I" blocks this functionality. Moreover, events that were not experienced in the past as traumatic in the past can still be perceived painfully if they suddenly pop up on the computer screen in the present. Our individual life path-in the case of the memory of GPS navigators or mobile phones, this expression can be understood quite literally-it is even easier to register, track, take into account and restore. And in combination with the disappearance of the border between the private and public in the aforementioned working and digital environment, this leads to the emergence of the so -called external injury. This is not a social trauma, like indelible memories that haunt a group of people. Also, there are no psychopathological features when a traumatic incident constantly threatens to invade the consciousness of the individual. In this case, traumatic memory is an opportunity, the likelihood that it can be registered with the help of external, digital, funds and is reinstated in the present by the individual or anyone else. In short, not only our private lives become public, but also our digital biographies are deployed into the open track record. As a result, the past of each person turns into a potentially unbridled present. This probability requires new ethics that would streamline both technical and intellectual control over our personal biography. We will call this the need for technological ecology.

Perhaps they found someone better than me ? Design employees are constantly tormented by doubts .

The second pathology refers to the aforementioned depreciation of labor protection and cutting state guarantees. Therefore, workers are more dependent on real and virtual acquaintances. In the post -phorudist economy of temporary labor contracts, rapidly replacing each other short -term tasks and projects, employees must be in touch all the time in order to survive. This hypercity strengthens the chronotope of bottomless instantry. Creative workers of mental labor - especially freelancers - should always rely on their environment in order to receive new projects. After each email sent, they are nervously waiting for an answer. If it does not come within two days, they begin to worry. Is my letter read? Did something go wrong? Did I say something wrong? They speak badly about me or dug up compromising on me in social networks? Maybe among acquaintances they circulate completely unreasonable rumors? Probably the last work that I passed was worse than I thought? And what is the worst of all: perhaps they found someone better than me? Design employees are constantly tormented by doubts. The delay in the answer may mean that the next task can not be expected. In this situation, they always depend on others and on their own guesses what others think of them. Such working conditions serve as nutrient soil for pathology, which almost completely disappeared from the medical vocabulary, hysteria.

In professional networks of international level, this pathology also switches to a macroeconomic level. Design employees are far from the only ones who fall into a state of hysteria when they do not receive a task and find that they are not indispensable. Companies, educational institutions, research groups, hospitals or art organizations are also prone to hysteria when they do not get an order, when the applications for a grant are deviated or when investors, if conveniently, invest funds into something else. Even national states, faced with transnational corporations that threaten to transfer production to a country with cheaper labor, often begin to hysterically tighten control and restore order. Therefore, as noted above, they prefer measures, not laws. In addition, as you know, in the protracted financial crisis of 2008, it is partly to blame the hysterically reasoning many, which were impossible to reassure. In global professional networks, people and organizations, as well as national states, are more often dependent on an unclear and obscure environment. We systematically allow the disappearance of plant species, animals and minerals, brutally mistaken that they can be somehow replaced, while all people are united by a sense of fear that tomorrow someone else will replace them. Perhaps this is one of the most significant consequences of market competition, which is represented as a universal social model and even life philosophy. In such a concept of society, each person replace, which causes constant fear of potential uselessness and worthlessness. As a result, hysterical subjects appear around the world that suffer from their own limitation, short -term planning and act at random. The answer of ethics can be a modern addiction to leisurely - to a slow kitchen, a slow lifestyle and slow art. Slowing the rhythm of life itself can only bring down a feverish heat slightly, but does not treat the cause of the disease. In the hyperseet world where market competition is a model of social interaction, a fear of replacement comes together with hysteria. Therefore, it will be possible to strengthen the resistance only if it is released from the networks - in whole or in part - but this is another story.

How ethics can save the world from hysteria