Process & Product: Isn’t dissociation a terminal state of individualism?

Process & Product

Isn’t dissociation a terminal state of individualism?

10-26-2024

Now, Victoria has chosen a subject for the next TINYisPOWERFUL NewsLetter. It suits me fine. Since that exchange with Rayn where they wrote that, as a collective, we were more concerned with process than product … process and product are constantly in my mind! I just do not see how it is possible, as artists, to separate one from the other. The choice of words is crucial here, though. Wouldn’t it be better to talk about a multiform, non-linear relationship among processes, products and their corollaries?  This may prevent artists from routine, keep them at the cusp of change, save art practice from predictability. For example, Gwylène and I turned the expected process-product cycle on its head, when, for example, “the Future is on the Table #3” started with a product, an art product, i.e. an introductory present to potential artist partners. Their accepting it initiated imaginings, different for each, and which we had no control over. The experiment culminated when we invited all participants, from al over the world, to Charleston for a one month art in/with community art works and reflections.

Either way, we are talking about the human experience of learning, absorbing and practicing. From this open-ended adventure our sense of oneness and belonging grows. Cynically, it is one of productivist capitalism unique talents to hyper-specialize workers into niches of production and call ‘assembly lines’ the places where multiple niches become one product! But here is the irony: those who produced the product may never have a chance to enjoy its wholeness and/or to purchase it, thus experiencing a major accumulation of  frustrations. A dissociation really: made of the realization that, although I possibly was the product maker here, others will enjoy the fruit of this labor, and, in parallel, opening to the deep and gagged understanding of an unredeemable denial of freedom. It is not marxist or ‘communist’, anti-American, woke, to deplore this mental and material reality and gauge its injustice.

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Also, it is the responsibility of higher education to direct students into narrow disciplines where they can contribute to the economy of the times. Higher education, however, frustrates the  students who may never have an  opportunity to exercise all their talents, seek the frontiers of their abilities. This systematic parsing of knowledge into specialties, this niche education, is no education at all. More precisely it is an instrumentalized education which turns future workers into tools of production. Where the experience of a continuum from process to product should affirm agency, its instrumentalization is a dissociation, material and psychological, individual and collective. As a matter of fact, it has become a daily argument to stress that individualism is the fruit born from the parsing of all life experiences imposed by systemic capitalism. On the other hand, if, as I believe, collective intelligence is the force that may make the difference in these times of possibly terminal turmoil, dissociation is its nemesis.

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At TINYisPOWERFUL, we are not ‘artists’ or ‘activists’ or ‘educators’. No! We are in/with

community artists/activists/educators. The choice we have made to partner with others – to practice art and/or the spirit of the arts – is a political choice: we belong together and look forward to destinies tied by our common dedication to social causes of equity and access. We have chosen not to be ‘studio artists’, whose dedication is mostly to self-expression and whose production is based on repetition. We open our studios to others for collaborative work and our pieces usually go back to our partners or are auctioned off to their benefit. This is an other aspect of the process-product integrity and indivisibility. The parsing of one from the other can only be for analytical purposes. But, to practice parsing in the socio-economic realm is as severe as, for example, separating a mother from her child at birth as a form of punishment. Prisons do this. But aren’t prisons a prime tool for dissociation? And to be sure, the punishment of separating mother from child affects the collective as much as the individual, although with less visibility.

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In fact, I am using the opportunity offered by the process-product topic to bring back the notion of dissociation into this diary. I wrote a piece about it for the TINYisPOWERFUL Reservoir of our webapp, some three years ago. At the time I had just encountered the work of Roswitha Scholz.